Highlights from lunch, February 2019

A fun fact about how solutions to the wave equation behaves very differently in even dimensions: in 2 dimensions, instead of a single clap, you'll hear a decaying tail of claps. Because, somehow, to do the analysis you have to imagine going up a dimension and replacing your point source with a one-dimensional source. Sound travels from all along that line towards you, with suitable delays and decay ... hence that decaying tail ...since Pac-man eats stuff on a plane, you shouldn't just hear a "piu" every time he eats something, it should be more like "PIIUUuuuu ... "

Stark as daylight, luminous and harsh in equal measure

 Truly, ignorance is bliss ... but at what price ...

Still a little too real

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable —

but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

--- Ursula K. Le Guin 

Hehehe

(from Bob Fitch Photography Archive, via PAW) 

Lest I forget

What happened on June 4th 1989 was wrong. To deny it will only let the wounds fester and the body politic rot further. 

What has been happening in the western periphery in the past decade is wrong and deeply counterproductive. They may buy you a brittle and superficial quiet, but there can be no true and lasting peace without justice.

What you have been doing in the supposedly autonomous southern territories this past year or two is wrong and similarly misguided. 

I hope you fail miserably, and I will do everything in my power to work against your misguided actions, because they are utterly abhorrent to me, and I will not have it on my conscience to be part of a nation that does such stupid and hurtful things. 

 一个健康的社会不该只有一种声音