Ex Libris

[Joe McCarthy] was not known to have any unusual mandate from the voters of Wisconsin, and in any case Wisconsin, though an ornament of the republic, is not quite a first-rate power in politics.
- Senator Joe McCarthy, by Richard Rovere (1959, p 23)

Eau Claire paper 02/24/2014, story here

Scott Walker is quite talented in his own way and has been successful in Wisconsin. He's a good match for the state or, better put, part of the state, a master of right wing backlash politics, and this is the key to his success here and elsewhere. Busting the public unions in 2011 and then withstanding the demonstrations and recall have made him, just about literally, a right wing rock star. To get a sense of his appeal, you have to understand the seething, visceral hatred of unions felt by these right wingers, all too obvious to us on the recall trail a couple years ago.

Marx opens the 18th Brumaire with the memorable statement, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." He gives some examples, the main one of course being the subject of the work - the dolt Louis Napoleon recapitulating his momentous uncle. We are now in a position to point out that a single personage, once the dreaded scourge of his enemies, can, by overstaying his time on the stage, become his own farcical doppelganger.

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The Keep Away game was the last assignment in my Flash class and this is the port to HTML5 canvas, programmed in Javascript. Flash is declining for a number of reasons, including its proprietary nature and that it's not supported by the iPhone. Too bad, because Flash's ActionScript 3.0 is a thoroughgoing object oriented approach to graphics programming similar to Javascript. For the programmer, a circle or rectangle or any other figure suitable to be part of a display list is just an object with properties and methods. Many artists know Flash through the sophisticated Flash Pro environment, where they can create and store images efficiently with "symbols". Think Adobe Photoshop, apt in a couple ways considering that Adobe acquired Flash and developed ActionScript 3.0. Even animations are possible with "tweens". It's a nice in-between technology, where artists can experience Flash as as they always do, but be gently introduced to programming those objects in the code window. My approach is to forgo the environment entirely, except as a medium to execute ActionScript. The environment can be skipped entirely with Abobe's free compiler which turns ActionScript into .swf, which executes in the (free) Flash Player.

The image of the Old Glory below was created with HTML5 canvas and there are a few tricks involved in getting it to work with Drupal 7. The first step is to get the HTML5 doctype at the top of all your Drupal pages. You can modify html.tpl.php, the template determining this, but careful if you do, and maybe the simplest approach is to install the Elements and HTML5 Tools modules. Before enabling those modules, viewing the page source shows doctype references to xhtml, afterwards it does not. Don't forget to clear the cache after enabling the modules and before viewing the source if you want to check (Configuration > Performance > Clear all caches). Then this HTML/CSS puts the rectangle at the upper right:

 <div id="canvasContainer" style="float:right; border:1px solid black; margin:0 0 15px 15px">
  <canvas id="flag" width="296" height="156"></canvas>
 </div>

After driving truck for eleven years, it was time for a change. Education was important in my household coming up. I have a Latin book from a great-great-grandfather on Mom's side. Half of Mom's family were teachers, including her parents for brief stints as young people in Iowa - two of my first cousins became Math and Computer Science professors in Canada. Mom did her entire high school through correspondence on the plains of Saskatchewan; she said trig just about sunk her. Dad too, where education was seen as a deliverance from poverty. He was an engineering student at the University of Manitoba and struggled through school for many years, having to support himself from a very young age. Struggled academically too, but was in awe of mathematics. I told him once as a kid I wanted to be an engineer like him; he said, oh no, shoot higher - go for mathematics. I still have his calculus book and gave his rebound copy of Men of Mathematics to my daughter Lydia when she graduated with a major in mathematics. On occasion I'd get some recognition at school, the honor roll or something, and would throw it aside as of little interest. Later it would appear framed and on the wall in Dad's home office. I essentially ended up teaching software engineering, that was typically my job title when working in the field; I think he would've been Ok with that.

Every few years I'd check to see if there was a good system for putting mathematical notation in a web page and always disappointed until now. Eureka, as Archimedes would say - MathJax is the solution. It is open source, extraordinarily easy to use, works in all browsers, and is text based, hence scalable on the page as text. A single line of setup in the header of an html document enables you to include LaTeX right in the html and have it render beautifully. Here's Cauchy-Schwarz, for example:

\[ \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k b_k \right)^2 \leq \left( \sum_{k=1}^n a_k^2 \right) \left( \sum_{k=1}^n b_k^2 \right) \]

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, people always asked if my Dad was in the army. No, he was a construction superintendent for S S Kresge, later to become Kmart. He was born in Winnipeg in 1914. The family was large and poor, a poverty that sat heavily on an unhappy family and was close to an obsession for all of them. Aunt Sonya's stories at 75 sounded like they had happened the day before and it was like that with Dad. Grandma was a strait-laced Irish lady, grandpa an illerate elevator operator at the train station. I remember visiting her in Los Angeles when I was thirteen or so. I'm named after her revered brother, who died young, and she sat me down and told me never to forget that I'm Irish (I'm 25% Irish). They say the Nazis are bad, but they're nothing compared to the British, who oppressed us for hundreds of years. Brash even at that age, I wasn't so stupid as to utter a word of opposition. The girls were to start in show business in order to meet wealthy men and find one to marry; the boys' path was education. The girls left home in their teens and became show girls (I've got pictures!). Uncle Wally got a PhD, but Dad was on the ten year plan for an engineering degree at the University of Manitoba. Grandpa beat the boys and Dad knocked him down once when he was starting in on Uncle Ed, said I'll kill you next time. So that was the end of life at home and up to the gold mines at 14, the Rio Grande Mine in northern Manitoba.

I always laugh when people deprecate Catholicism as mindless superstition, because I know better from direct experience as a product of four years of Catholic high school. I started out at Jesuit High in Dallas in 1961. Mr. Joubert was my home room, religion, and English teacher. A lot of French names - it was the New Orleans Province after all, not missionaries from Chicago (like my grade school, St. Luke's in Irving). So a tip of the hat to Mr. Vavasseur, my sophomore geometry teacher, a tall, skinny, kind and intelligent man who knew and valued his subject and also knew how to transmit intellectual excitement. He was an important milestone in my mathematical education, especially considering that geometry is where students first encounter the axiomatic method and proofs, the cornerstones of modern mathematics. Between proofs, Mr Vavasseur regaled us with stories of how geometry had been the canonical science for two thousand years, even people like Spinoza modeling their philosophical speculations on Euclid. He quite rightly mentioned Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, S. J., who foreshadowed non-Euclidean geometry. He was hell on wheels when crossed though; I remember him thundering more than once, "I'll be in Room 214 after school, Jones, be there" (emphasis on the last two words).

My original calendar program was on the Casio fx-3600p calculator in 1980 or so - my first programming venue and exercised partly in spare moments when driving truck out on the route; a precursor mobile device you could say. My buddy Dave got me started. I might have scarred myself permanently though. The transition from math to software engineering is always tricky, considering that there are many commonalities, but just as important differences to snag the self-taught and perhaps obstinate and all-too-confident mathematician (perish the thought). The 3600 had this bizarre little macro language providing for a trade-off between memory and program size. You could have (say) fifty memory locations and 400 instructions or twenty locations and 600 instructions. They're really variables of course, but the memory locations were designated K0 through K19 or something.

Flying back to Pittsburgh with an old Elmore Leonard in hand (The Big Bounce, 1969) jogged some memories. Our man Jack Ryan, someone pulled his chain, the same phrase an upperclassman used on me the first day on campus in August 1969 and the first time I'd heard it. You're in the big leagues now, boy.

What a great English teacher the first semester and after a string of them in high school; the reading list as much as anything - he was a part-timer and probably wanted an excuse to read or reread some favorites. He had Swann's Way under his arm one day. For us it was Iris Murdoch (The Severed Head), Hard Times (Gradgrind!), and Middlemarch, the last my all-time favorite after many re-readings. I remarked in class one day that among the main characters in The Severed Head, almost every possible romantic combination had been consummated or at least entertained. He liked that and rejoined that two female characters were always touching each other, seemingly casually or mistakenly, he thought it was pretty funny. He was making the point with us one day that people can walk through their own lives as zombies without even noticing their remarkable surroundings, most appropriate in the immediate environment of Pitt with the amazing buildings. He said, consider the Civil War Museum, how many columns are there in front of it? Eight, I said (Math Department reporting). He was a little miffed, as if I'd interfered with his lesson.