Danke schön Österreich

Now we can keep going for a little longer. 

Resolved

1. I am rubber, you are glue. Any nonsense coming my way will bounce off me so fast ...
2. If need be, I will be a bystander intervention ninja (although hopefully I will never need to.)
3. Even as I remain safe in my bubble (or not), I will give all aid to those who fight the good fight.
4. Knowledge is power. The battle against ignorance and bigotry starts today.
5. I've lost enough sleep and productivity. Going back to work and life now (with adjustments as necessary.)

I could sit around and wallow in despair for a while

But, well, let's not. The next time you feel like doing that (i.e., probably every hour or so for the next two weeks [years?]): take a deep breath, remember that you're not quite going to bear the brunt of it, look forward and think of what you can do to change things, look around you and listen and offer support to those who need it more, and act. And remember that in the shitstorm of rhetoric that's still flying around you, the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the hazy unarticulated middle, and that you would do well to listen carefully and discern the inside voices and subtle overtones hiding in the cacophony. (Of course, all of this will be moot if nuclear winter actually happens.)

Oh well. What the hell.

NATE SILVER 2:10 AM

Something to remember: Whatever your feelings about the state of the country right now, it’s fundamentally not that different a place whether the final call is that Clinton has narrowly won or narrowly lost. Add just 1 percent to Clinton’s vote share and take 1 percent away from Trump’s, and she would have won Florida and Pennsylvania, therefore would probably have been on her way to a narrow Electoral College victory.

Not actually the worst description of moduli spaces

"Yo dawg I heard you like geometry, so we put some geometry on your geometry, so you can geometry while you geometry."

Victory is ... nobody's?

W: Shouldn't that be true more generally?
M: I don't think so ...,
W: ... well, one of us wins.
C: Nah, it's not such a nice game. We could all lose. 

---from this week's Topology seminar

Just one more thing now ...

Not too long ago the (apparently still English) current chair of the doctoral committee informed me that "now all that's left to do is to write and defend a thesis." That seems to have sparked a little bit of a dark mood in me. Now comes the part where you fall deep into a rabbit hole, for years and years on end, and never emerge, possibly not ever again, to see the broad sweep of the plains and the distant majesty of the mountains, is what some part of me seems to have heard.
But that was not what was said, and that is not what you should do. You should remember the way down the rabbit hole, the better to climb up back out of it. You should take note all of the tunnels that go between the rabbit holes, and the intricate networks that they form, and how they transverse the broad sweep of the plain and take you, sight unseen, towards the mountains. You should never forget, as you seem dimly aware of now, that the rabbit holes, for all of their fascinating depths, are only ever part of the story, and that you should never lose sight of the whole.
It will be a constant struggle to remember this, to remain as broad as you could be even as you delve deep into your chosen rabbit hole. But it's something that you can at least try to do, that you must at least try to do---and your work and life will be the richer for it.  

We only like the semisimple stuff around here

Parabolics just make us hurl.

Fine, you can name those after me

L'un des auteurs insistant pour que l'on adopte cette terminologie, aujourd'hui généralement admise, l'autre auteur s'y résigne

Armand Borel and Jacques Tits, "Groupes réductifs", footnote explaining the origins of the term "Borel subgroup" 

Ignorance and bigotry are like cancers

And we should treat them like we treat cancers, or other diseases of the body. Not with outrage and loud denunciation, or at least not with those alone. Those might be useful for drawing attention to the problem, but they're not going to make it go away.

No, we should study them closely, and understand deeply their origins and how they grow and spread. We should use this knowledge to systematically and methodically eradicate them, the same way we have eradicated smallpox and are so close to eradicating polio. 

Calculus quiz haiku, Round Two

thin thin flimsy walls
made of donut dough ready t
o collapse, yummy  

(Theis) 

Donald Trump looks like
Burnt coffee cakes that went through
Space exploration 

(Salhaney)

(the following came in a pair)

Donald Trump will make
America great again:
Slash NASA's budget!  

No funds for spaceships---
Trump Administration buys
Lots of coffee cakes.

(Hoopingarner)