Girl A: So have you been to the biggest Santiago here?

Girl B: The biggest what?!

Girl A: Santiago. You know, like a Jewish church?

(a few moments)

Girl B: Oh! You mean a synagogue!!

it is comforting to know that life goes on as usual, despite resisting all efforts at factorization in .

We ask for unconditional love, we ask for acceptance, we ask for grace. And yet, such is the human psyche, the human sickness, the human sin, that when we are given what we demand, given what we do not and never will deserve, we fail to comprehend that such love exists, let alone that it has been accorded us.

In our smallness and wretchedness, incapable of understanding a lover, a giver so large, who gives expecting nothing in return, in our narrowmindedness, instead of giving thanks for such a wondrous gift bestowed, instead of accepting it with no strings attached, buoyant, free and soaring, we attach our own strings and tie to them our own feeble attempts at reciprocation, our own little sacrifices and observances, our own imagined prerequisites to accept such a love given, to weigh it down, and bring the heavenly down to our lowly earth, down to the only level our base minds can comprehend.

We demean the gift, and insult the giver, who expects nothing in return, in our attempts at repaying the gift with our deluded, misguided sacrifices, our self-imposed chains and fetters, our self-inflicted sufferances which we dare call our love.

Unless we accept love, we cannot love.

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time.

An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

- G.K.C.

Which explains why Erik Demaine and Robert Lang are here in Singapore!

Erik Demaine gave a talk today at NUS, and among the many amazing things he displayed, he demonstrated a “trick” that makes use of something called monotonous Boolean functions.

Before proceeding, I shall state the problem.

First, suppose we have a picture frame hanging from a nail by a piece of string like so:

If we remove the nail, the frame will fall.

Now suppose we have two nails instead of one. We can hang the frame from both nails in a few ways:

In the leftmost example, the frame will still remain suspended if we remove either nail; only by removing both nails can we cause it to fall. In the middle example, removing the red peg will cause the frame to remain suspended, while removing the green one will cause it to fall. The problem is this:

Is it possible to loop our string around the two pegs in such a way that removing either nail will cause the frame to fall?

This should be relatively simple to solve. (A version of the answer is here. There is no picture frame in the answer, so you have to imagine it hanging from the bottom of the loop, and convince yourself that removing either nail will cause the frame to fall)

Erik demonstrated the above in his talk today. He then asked: can we generalize this to more nails? Can we hang a picture from n nails such that removing any nail causes the picture to fall?

I’ll post about the solution, and its relation to monotone Boolean functions, in subsequent posts.

.

(Picture Credits:

Pictures of curved origami sculptures in glass

Picture frame)

…

“Grandma! What big feet you have!”

“All the better to cover you with, my child!”

And with that, the Big Bad Weather jumped out of his grandma-clothes and consumed Big Red Riding Hood with the largest foot of snow she’d ever seen!

But a huntsman in the woods nearby heard Big Red Riding Hood’s cries for help, and rushed up the hill. There lay the Big Bad Weather, fast asleep. Hastily, he took his shovel, and began to shovel the snow off Big Red Riding Hood.

All through the night he shoveled, but the snow was so thick that when day came, it seemed he’d only dusted some snow off her head.

But Big Red Riding Hood knew that being devoured by the Big Bad Weather was no excuse to skip school. And so, after hibernating in the snow for an additional hour in the morning just for good measure, she thanked the huntsman, mustered all her strength, and dragged her reluctant student body to class.

And they all lived happily ever after. The End.

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

-e e cummings

salut /saly/ masculine noun

1. greeting;
~! hello!, hi!;
bye!;
~ de la tête nod;

2. salute;

3. salvation.

- from wordreference.com

Thus, salut d’amour: not just love’s greeting, but the salvation that comes from love.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

- A Shropshire Lad: XIII, A.E. Housman