The precipitous decline of RSVP---discuss

Rand Richards Cooper has a piece in the NYT in which he laments the decline of RSVP. He sends an e-mail invitation to 45 friends with the customary RSVP request, for an evening of food, drink, and literature, with readings by himself and two other writers, one month out, and he provides a follow-up email message, two weeks later. His initial message brings in a dozen responses, and the follow-up a few more, but days before the event, he has a paltry 23 replies in total. Not 23 who plan to come, but 23 who had bothered to respond. He is upset.

We are reporting this because we had a similar experience last year. We issued an RSVP request by email and, yes, not everybody replied (our response record was better than Cooper's, of course, but then we promised a poolside orgy to celebrate my birthday in the company of sexual slaves). We blamed the non-response on the bad French of our English neighbors, as Cooper blames it on the bad French of his friends, but our new affiliation with the University of Metaphysical Sciences necessitates a more in-depth historical study.

Sexual slave #1

The first know source to lament the decline of civilization in general was Socrates, in whose days RSVP had an unspeakable Greek meaning (what with those pederasts). In Roman times, Romanum Saeculum Veritatis Protestas meant roughly (we improvise here) in vino veritas, but with more emphasis on the wine and less emphasis on the veritas.

Sexual slave #2

The Gauls, in turn, who inherited the torch of civilization from the Romans, spoke Gaulois in those days, not French, and their meaning of RSVP translates into F@@K, or, more politely, F---. That changed when Charlemagne took over and united France and Germany under his leadership. No sexual undertones with prudish Charly, who proclaimed, famously: "Vorsicht ist die Mutter der Porzellankiste," which is a nicer way of saying "breakable." He used only the P, but he had a tight disposition, and did not want to squander any alphabet soup. (Saddam Hussein later did a riff on Charlemagne with his "Mother Of All Wars," but MOAW is a different story all-together.)

Sexual slave #3

Then, civilization moved eastward with the Vikings, who founded the Kingdom of Rus, and established a dynasty for Ivan the Terrible. Ivan used it a lot, RSVP, because in Russian it means "When it flies, floats, or f@@ks, rent it." Yes, I know, we repeat ourselves, but that's Ivan's fault.

etc.

One day, Ivan got a visit from the Roi Soleil, Louis XiV, and Ivan explained his concept to Louis. Louis immediately thought to himself: "Come to think of it." But Louis was a good husband (he always spent the nights with his official wife while his mistresses had a chance to recover from his daytime routines, so this was really a win-win-win triangle situation---I am not making this up, folks), and he sought a way to make RSVP palatable to his squeamish court. Whence the modern meaning of RSVP.

What did we learn? Well, RSVP had its ups and downs, but it is perhaps too early to blame it for the general decline of civilization, or to blame the general decline of civilization for RSVP's recent troubles.

Cooper suggests to replace RSVP by RVOM ("répondez vite, ou mourir") but the French are increasingly moving away from the formal "vous" toward the informal "tu", which brings us to RTOM, or ATOM, for simplicity, which was discovered by Democrit, a predecessor of Socrates. Plus ça change....

They won, they won---notice the trailer

A friend adds helpfully: "I'm not sure what they have won but who gives a shit."

Leave comments!

More Marx Brothers

Darty, live bloggin

Repairman has arrived (see previous post). Postwoman (Muriel) has arrived, delayed, with the International Herald Tribune. Maureen Dowd, the fervent columnist, has interviewed Prince Saud, the foreign minister of Saudi-Arabia. "Asked about the possibility that Israel could attack Iran with its new drones, the Prince says dryly 'Talk about changing lifestyle. I think this would change lifestyles at once, forcibly.'"

Electricity is now cut, but we are still online, thanks to our Belkin surge protector. Live bloggin.

Some electronics inside the new hob went pouff. A piece needs to be ordered, then somebody will come to repair the thing. 7 days. We still had the old hob, which we kept in the garage. Old hob has taken the place of the new hob. Nice repairman. Handshake.

Off for a walk in the Esterel now. Live bloggin. Over. Out.

The meaning of π (3)

Recall the last episode. π is an irrational number? Irrational number are infinitely long? How do you know? How do we get to the end of the rainbow?

Sit back and don’t relax. Rational numbers can be expressed by a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers, with n non-zero. For example, 4 is a rational number (4/1 = 4), 0.25 is rational (1/4 = 0.25), and so on. Irrational numbers, then, by definition, cannot be expressed by such a fraction.
The first famous example for an irrational number was the square root of 2, and when Hippasus, a member of the Pythagorean school of mathematicians (Pythagoras, him, the author of the notorious theorem)…when Hippasus came up with the first proof, he was apparently not lauded for his efforts: according to legend, he made his discovery while out at sea, and was subsequently thrown overboard by his fellow Pythagoreans “…for having produced an element in the universe which denied the…doctrine that all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios.”
How do “we” know π is irrational? Well, “we” did not, for quite some time, although “we” had our suspicions, because all efforts to represent π by a rational number failed. So we had to wait until the 18th century, as the proof requires some serious (infinitesimal) calculus, which had to be invented first (by Newton and Leibniz).
How do we know that irrational numbers have an infinite decimal expansion? Well, because the long division of a rational number either terminates (1/4), or yields a repeating sequence (1/3, for example, or 1/81).

OK, so, π is irrational, and hence enjoys an infinite, non-repetitive decimal expansion. There we go. Equipped with the Infinite Monkey Theorem (last episode) we will be able to find any arbitrary message in the decimal expansion of π. Ellie’s efforts futile, Jodie Foster mislead, Carl Sagan misleading…(first episode)? No conspiracy?

No conspiracy? You mean that's a happy ending?

Stay tuned.

The meaning of π (2)

-"Donald Duck is the nephew of Dagobert Duck,” you may ask? Yes, we were pondering whether this sentence, when found in the decimal expansion of π (appropriately coded in decimals), would prove something---say a message from the creator built into the fabric of mathematics.

But would it? Consider another setting, this time filled with diligent monkies and typewriters (a  typewriter was a machine to create ("type") text mechanically by hand, typically on a sheet of paper, kids, pictured). The monkeys are bored and type away on their machines. The first monkey starts typing: "ane uzv awu but seiw." But, wait, there is "but"...there is already one meaningful word in this sequence.

In fact, by sheer coincidence, some meaning is apt to crop into meaningless strings. Somewhere along the line some monkey will type "srv zgftj To be or sxew vdkt." (Much) later, some monkey will create the string "ljoh To be or not to dsr cvf.." And so on. How long will it take for a given group of monkey's to churn out the complete works of Shakespeare? By sheer happenstance? Very long. But it's not impossible. The first "To be" may crop up in a year. The first "To be or" might require a decade (we could employ lot's of monkeys that work in parallel). The first "To be or not to be" may require 100,000 or 1,000,000 years...but...you get the idea. The longer the monkies churn along, the longer the take on Hamlet's soliloquy will get, and with infinite time we should eventually arrive at the bard's complete works. 

But we don't have infinite time. Wait, don't we? π is infinitely long! Computers are infinitely fast, almost.

Stay tuned, and read up on the Infinite Monkey Theorem in the meantime.

The meaning of π

In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie---Jodie Foster played Ellie in the movie adaptation (1997)---is looking for messages from God in the decimal expansion of π. As the π-page demonstrates, π is a very long number---infinitely long, in fact (we show only the first 100,000 digits). 

To find this message, Jodie writes a program that computes the digits of π to record lengths. In the novel (I don’t think it's in the movie) she does find a special pattern 10^202020 (10 to the twentieth) digits down the line. The sequence stops varying randomly and unfolds well-ordered 1s and 0s in a very long string. GOTCHA! 

Ellie’s discovery is just fiction, but Professor Sagan covered his rear by putting her finding at a place where no mathematician has treaded (yet, i.e. on 3-3-2010). Calculating the decimal expansion of π is a mathematical cottage industry, and in January this year, 2.7 trillion digits had been calculated. To reach Ellie’s soft spot, we need to go 100 million times further, roughly.

Now, what if Ellie succeeds, and some meaningful sequence of numbers eventually pops up? Wouldn’t that be something? Some coded message, which would tell us, when deciphered, that “Donald Duck is the nephew of Dagobert Duck?” That would prove the existence of God, right? 

 Stay tuned.

Senator's remarks cause outrage and destruction

Republican Senator Alexander's remarks on American television, namely that reconciliation (as voting procedure in the Senate) was in the past used only for small things and to reduced the deficit, have caused an immediate reaction by the elements of nature, especially in France (slideshow)



Professor Krugman explains: "In fact, reconciliation was used to pass the two major Bush tax cuts, which increased the deficit — by $1.8 trillion."

The Democrats are now planning to use reconciliation to pass health care reform in the face of stubborn Republican opposition.

"Ahem"...clearing my voice..."ahem"...

OK, let's get serious.  On a regular basis, P. Krugman observes an event sequence that already must have brought Socrates to desperation. Here is Krugman's description:

"It goes like this: Person A says 'Black is white' — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, 'No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.'
 And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending."

Krugman has tons of these examples on his blog. Here is another example, closer to home: On this blog, in the post "German for beginners (3)", we associate three lines from the washed-up scriptwriter "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore"...where was I...I meant "Vom Eise befreit..." with a picture of two deer stalking through a thick cover of snow. Then we translate these lines with Google, and the result is gibberish. Subsequently, we first blame the poor scriptwriter for his poor poetry and then blame him for the mismatch between his lines and the winter-deer-picture.

And it happens all the time. And the poor scriptwriter always loses.

-"You are doing this to me all the time!"
-"No, it's YOU, you are doing this to me all the time!"
-"That's what I said."

Vom Eise befreit

Dirk Sch. sent us this charming picture, and it brings to mind the mysterious scriptwriter that we met the other day on the Croisette. You may recall that he handed us a stack of manuscripts before his unfortunate disappearance in the Bay of Cannes.


Hidden in this heap was a single sheet of paper, not attached to any of his hopeless feature scripts ("Lethal Weapon meets Dr. Strangelove"). The sheet was covered with three handwritten lines, and nothing else. Here they are:

It's hardly legible, and it's in German, but here is the Google translation:

"Are freed from ice streams and creeks,
Spring holder, invigorating look,
Springeth in the valley hope luck."

Yes, I know. Perhaps I should not have brought this up. Perhaps it isn't German after all. Plus, it's unfortunate that his "poetic" lines do not really match the beautiful winter theme of Dirk's picture. One starts to understand why the washed-up scriptwriter had to end the way he did.

Alexander Haig (1924 - 2010)

Lyn Nofziger, a White House aid to Ronald Reagan, once said that “the third paragraph of his obituary” would detail Alexander Haig's conduct in the hours after President Reagan was shot, on March 30, 1981.

And here it is:

"That day, Secretary of State Haig wrongly declared himself the acting president. “The helm is right here,” he told members of the Reagan cabinet in the White House Situation Room, “and that means right in this chair for now, constitutionally, until the vice president gets here.” His words were taped by Richard V. Allen, then the national security adviser."

Reagan was shot, but not killed, kids, and I was there. Sort of. Reagan was shot in March '81 ("Please tell me you're all Republicans" he told the doctors in the hospital---that's the spirit, President Obama), and I arrived on the scene in May '96, for a workshop at the Hilton Hotel. It was the night of the White House Press Corps dinner, and Wolf Blitzer and this woman, she who always sits in the first row in a red dress and gets the first question during a WH presser (Dr. Alzheimer will remember her name), were standing in animated conversation outside our conference room. I could have touched them. I could have asked for an autograph.
We left for dinner downtown. Outside, hunks with sunglasses and big earpieces(white, thick spiraling cables) had descended upon the scene, and were directing towing trucks with spiraling gestures. The trucks were hoisting  vehicles still parked around the hotel. Crowds had gathered. Somebody helpfully explained to me the implications of roadside bombs and the President's plan to attend the dinner. There must have been hundreds of secret service agents, all listening ostentatiously to their earpieces, all gearing up for the big event, the President's Arrival. 
We waited for the president. We waited more. Clinton was always late. Finally the motorcade arrives, hunks on bikes, ambulances, limousines, more hunks on bikes, cars, trucks, more ambulances, larger limousines, ever larger limousines. Suddenly, the motorcade stops, with the largest limousine right in front of the entrance. We would see the President!
Then, without prior warning, the president's limousine backs up into a concrete cubicle next to the entrance. A steel shutter comes down.
And that was that.
They had built a special access garage for the president right where Reagan had been shot in '81.

Learning from history.

The gold standard

Cellar door

Yesterday's language column in the NYT mentions "cellar door" as an expression of special beauty. Tolkien loves it. H.L. Mencken loves it, finds it "intrinsically musical". Shakespeare scholar C.L. Hooper includes it in the list of words he loves most, next to "dubloon", "squadron", "Sphinx" and "Jungfrau". And so on and so forth.

Cellar door. Cellar door. Cellar door.

Cellar door. Cellar door. Cellar door.

I don't get it.

I like "dubloon", though.