Save our CBC Radio Orchestra

Just recently my very good friend (Eugene) has brought to my attention the CBC radio station. The radio station has a very interesting repertoire, raging from the classical music to some pleasant blues.

To make a long story short, CBC is trying to cut classical music on air by some 10 times. The details are in this facebook goup.

Update: Here’s a video of Eugene speaking at the strike against this disastrous closure: here.

Convergence of an Interesting Sequence

Let

be a sequence of finite binary fraction in which each successive fraction is obtained by adjoining a 0 or a 1 to its predecessor. It may sound strange, but the sequence converges. Always.

Let . Then:

Therefore, is Cauchy and hence converges.

Would you have guessed?

Excuse me…

Driving home the other day, I heard an advertisement on the radio, that said “Tired of taking a square root of an isosceles triangle?”

Are we diseased? Is it this hard to look up and say at least something that has meaning?..

Well, that said, the new movie, titled 21, has also quite irritated my already twisted convolutions of the brain. I first saw the trailer sitting in a movie theatre, which started by showing a young man, who is extremely good with simple arithmetics. And I thought “Oh, nice, good fella”. But then the voice over frame said that this young man “was the brightest and most successful mathematics student at [some] university”…

And not that that can’t be true (it of course can… it’s a movie anyway…), but the idea that “the greatest mathematician” is always associated with “he who counts fastest” just bugs bujizas out of me.

I know many very clever people who are not generally fluent with numbers. In fact, doctor Bar-Natan (~) is surely one of the most clever and bright people I know; he has “no experience in computation whatsoever”…

So… ?

End of Year (Party?)

So the academic year is finally over. Exams are finished (5), assignments are submitted (3) and papers are handed in (0). This has been the toughest one for me for various unpleasant reasons. I’m just really glad that it is now in the past, even though I yet do not know what my final marks are like (but certainly a pass (hopefully)…).

Now I am just going to focus on how to recharge my batteries and start the new year from a clean sheet. The people who say that the New Year’s resolution must come on the New Years Eve are all nuts: it should come after you finish your finals!

The summer is promising to be quite eventful, exciting and relaxing. Much work has to be done, though. But so it will.

Science Rendezvous Part 1: Invitation

As one of the organisers, I invite all, who lives in Toronto, the Greater Toronto Area or near, or just happens to be at Toronto for a moment, to the first annual Toronto’s science and technology festival: the Science Rendezvous!

This is an all-day, free event! Everyone will find something to raise and feed their interest!

Time: 10 of May. All day, from early morning or so to sunset or so.

Location: Toronto Downtown, University of Toronto St. George campus, St. George street, near Willcocks and College (map).

Specifically, I invite you to our physics part of the Science Rendezvous, which is located in the department of Physics, 80 St. George Street (map).

We will have lots of very cool demonstrations, which I shall not reveal here yet. It is going to be very-very exciting! You’ll have a chance to see real laboratories and what we do there (well, not really “we” — theorists are usually repelled by the labs…)

Further information: official website, UofT Bulletin article, Globe and Mail article.

Please, come by. You’re all very welcome!