Baikal omul aka Coregonus migratorius

Answering persistent questions from my friends: this is omul (омуль), Coregonus migratorius,  the most famous fish of Lake Baikal.

A photo from Wikimedia Commons. I can make an educated guess that it shows hot smoked omul (there is an alternative smoking process, cold smoking). A delicacy.

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The first sign of madness

Impossible world

Rene Magritte. Carte Blanche. 1965

AHA Moments , the Three Rs and Dyslexia

I am moving here my old post from a discontinued blog, mostly in response to comments from Adrienne to Dyslexia, dyscalculia, tone deafness.

***

My  most important AHA moment of my life happened when I was six years old and was caused by this book.

This was my first book. The transition from а non-reading illiterate state to fluent reading happened in me in one click. I took the book, looked at the picture on the cover and suddenly realised that the title could mean only Под грибом, Under the mushroom, and nothing else. I was surprised; I looked again, and, since I knew letters of the alphabet, I managed to check that, indeed, it was Под грибом because the letters were П, О, Д, Г, Р, И, Б, O, M. Quite excited by my discovery, I opened the book and red it from the beginning to the end, in one go. Then I came to my mother and informed her that I had just read a book. “Really?” asked my mother without much surprise. I opened the book and red it to my mother. Prior to this incident, I knew the letters but could not decipher a single word.

Next day, I went to the local library, registered as a user and borrowed a few books. I do not remember their titles. But I remember the first book. I found its text on the internet:

Poetic subculture of Live Journal

Occasionally I hunt on Russian language pages of Live Journal for some mathematics (highest quality stuff!); interestingly, in the vicinity of mathematics, just one random click away, frequently lies some very good poetry. A random example: Чипса Эстрелла aka marishia on LJ:

Я не умею читать молитвы,
я просто чувствую боль,
я не умею ловить твои стрелы,
я просто для них мишень
Шмендра

“Я не умею читать молитвы…” Я даже не знаю слов,
с которыми можно к Тебе обратиться и попросить Тебя
не обращать Твоего внимания на мое ремесло,
а если и обращать, то, право, лишь изредка и любя.
А все потому, что моя работа требует тишины,
не переносит избытка внимания, критики и острот,
а так же глупых советов, которые слишком часто слышны
среди восхвалений (а ведь восхваления затупляют мое перо).
Послушай, ведь я не прошу так много, как могла бы просить,
хоть просьбы просятся на язык: сомнительны, но лихи.
Но мне достаточно и того, что цела путеводная нить,
Которую сам Ты мне дал когда-то: я просто пишу стихи…

It would be interesting to map connections between the mathematics cluster and the poetry cluster of LJ.

Magpies can recognise themselves in a mirror

From New Scientist, with thanks to my dear old friend Owl:

Self-recognition, once thought to be an ability enjoyed only by select primates, has now been demonstrated in a bird.

The finding has raised questions about part of the brain called the neocortex, something the self-aware magpie does not even possess.

In humans, the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror develops around the age of 18 months and coincides with the first signs of social behaviour. So-called “mirror mark tests”, where a mark is placed on the animal in such a way that it can only be observed when it looks at its reflection, have been used to sort the self-aware beasts from the rest.

Of hundreds tested, in addition to humans, only four apes, bottlenose dolphins and Asian elephants have passed muster.

Helmut Prior at Goethe University in Frankfurt and his colleagues applied a red, yellow or black spot to a place on the necks of five magpies. The stickers could only be seen using a mirror. Then he gave the birds mirrors.

Ulan-Ude

Lenin’s head in the city of Ulan-Ude. This is a burden of coming from an exotic country: I have all the time  tell my friends, colleagues, neighbours stories about Siberia.

The largest head of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin ever built is in Ulan-Ude. Source: Wikipedia

Collingwood on art (an mathematics)

From R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (with thanks to David Pierce, who recommended me the book):

This is not because (as Oscar Wilde said, with his curious talent for just missing a truth and then giving himself a prize for hitting it) ‘all art is quite useless’, for it is not; a work of art may very well amuse, instruct, puzzle, exhort, and so forth, without ceasing to be art, and in this ways it may be very useful indeed. It is because, as Oscar Wilde perhaps meant to say, what makes it art is not the same as what makes it useful.

Of course, G. H. Hardy’s famous saying immediately crosses mind:

The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless’.

Now, rephrasing of Collingwood’s maxim for mathematics is obvious:

What makes it mathematics is not the same as what makes it useful.

Writing a historic novel

A comment on technology of writing which is best read in conjunction with my other post. Many-many years ago, I remember writing long and serious papers. I woke up at 6, and, after some jog, swim and shower, made very strong tea and put on a record player a vinyl disk with Bulat Okudzhava’a song “I write a historic novel”, which defines a unit of time in serious writing as a lifespan of a rose in an emptied beer bottle with water. In slightly edited (but still horrible) Google’s translation, the first stanza reads

In a dark glass bottle
from imported beer
Red rose flowered
slowly and proudly.
A historical novel
I composed slowly,
struggling in the fog
from the prologue to epilogue.

In serious writing, days and hours do not matter, only in a week you can produce a noticeable piece of text.

And here is the text of the song in Russian:

Булат Окуджава

Я ПИШУ ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ РОМАН

В.Аксенову

В склянке темного стекла
из-под импортного пива
роза красная цвела
гордо и неторопливо.
Исторический роман
сочинял я понемногу,
пробиваясь как в туман
от пролога к эпилогу.

Были дали голубы,
было вымысла в избытке,
и из собственной судьбы
я выдергивал по нитке.
В путь героев снаряжал,
наводил о прошлом справки
и поручиком в отставке
сам себя воображал.

Вымысел – не есть обман.
Замысел – еще не точка.
Дайте дописать роман
до последнего листочка.
И пока еще жива
роза красная в бутылке,
дайте выкрикнуть слова,
что давно лежат в копилке:

каждый пишет, как он слышит.
Каждый слышит, как он дышит.
Как он дышит,так и пишет,
не стараясь угодить…
Так природа захотела.
Почему?
Не наше дело.
Для чего?
Не нам судить.

1975

Булат Окуджава.
Избранное. Стихотворения.
“Московский Рабочий”, 1989.

Two quotes

Обращали ли вы внимание на то, […] что человека окружают маленькие надписи, разбредшийся муравейник маленьких надписей: на вилках, ложках, тарелках, оправе пенсне, пуговицах, карандашах? Никто не замечает их. Они ведут борьбу за существование.

Translation:

Have you ever noticed that man is surrounded by tiny signs, a crawling ants’ nest of tiny inscriptions: on forks, on spoons, on plates, on a pince-nez frame, on buttons, on pencils? No-one notices them. They are fighting for their existence.

Yuri Olesha, Envy.

Мы люди бедные и по бедности своей мелкоскопа не имеем, а у нас так глаз пристрелявши.

Левша