FU comics

Sometimes they are pretty quick, like this one.

Vancouver 2010 opening ceremony

Our Iranian athletes looked very happy. Cheering, waving, etc. What is wrong with the picture?

I am not sure either. But here is my message to them: F@%k you too!

Avicenna

I was reading the wikipedia article on Avicenna's Book of Healing -- which by the way has little to do with healing; it is a matter of mistranslation -- and the part about geology completely blew up my mind.

I mean, this dude knew, or at least hypothesized so accurately about geological layers and mechanisms of formation of mountains. And all this was happening in the middle of dark ages, around 1020A.D.

Later, in the physics section, it turns out this dude was the first one to make a thermometer. He was first to discovered the concept of momentum (M*V) in mechanics, which he called inclination...

You know, I have to admit I have a man-crush on Avicenna!

Representation Theory

A really nice textbook on representation theory:

http://www-math.mit.edu/~etingof/replect.pdf

Just started reading it!

Iranian Green Movement and Lessons from Feb-11-2010

From what I saw, Ahmadinejad's government had quite some time to prepare for what was coming today. No surprise freedom fighters weren't able to gather in many places in Tehran. They have guns and money, and we have the truth on our side. So we are going to succeed sooner or later, and what happened today was a hiccup! yet by no means a defeat in terms of our long term goals.

That being said, I think there were some lessons to learn:

One is to keep our routes separate, and try not to mix with pro-government demonstrators. Again, they have guns, so we can't afford being surrounded by their forces. The second lesson, which I think is more important, is that this is not a dry run. The change is going to take a while to occur, and we shouldn't set our short-term expectations too high.

More to come soon...