iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jared @mathbook.cafe · 21/09/2026

I mean both views correct IMO and from different angles. Systemic racism and selfish familial neglect support — these two social phenomenon support each other

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 05/09/2026

it takes one to know one

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 17/07/2026

I like the improvements in threading. this allows me to keep a more sustained conversation over a longer time frame, even if it’s just with myself. a useful social media ”hack” involves sustaining attention outside the medium so that you can come back with a solid orientation. keeps away nonsense

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 05/10/2025

open.spotify.com/track/6eIfC6...

Coltrane adds: "I don't try to set standards of perfection for anyone else. I do feel everyone does try to reach his better self, his full potential, and what that consists of depends on each individual. Whatever that goal is, moving toward it does require vigilance." And as the performance shows, that vigilance is not without its tensions. Listening to Coltrane work through his own challenge may well stimulate self-confrontation in the rest of us. Each listener, of course, will himself be challenged in a different way. For many, the basic beginning will be that described by Don DeMichael in a Down Beat review of Coltrane: "This music... opens up a part of myself that normally is tightly closed, and seldom-recognized feelings, emotions, thoughts well up from the opened door and sear my consciousness.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 22/08/2025

I like the prosody in Felix Klien’s explanation of Bürgi logarithms. He’s writing with purpose and with pride of his students and country in a time of (relative) peace in Europe ca. 1904

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 16/08/2025

I hadn’t thought of the visual and cultural connections between Basquiat artistic style and the signatures of Haitian loa until I saw this inset in Zora Neale Hurston “Tell My Horse” really obvious in retrospect

making the signature of Agoue’ta-Royo “Master of Waters”

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 08/08/2025

A retired mathematician brought a couple bags of her books into the shop today. The Coxeter was a good find— first edition good condition. I price it around $50 while bookfinder says there’s listings of very good copies in the hundreds

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 01/08/2025

One Ocean: vis.social/@infobeautif...

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 29/07/2025

one lesson an anti-capitalist technologist can draw from the story is that the product ("data") can be used to turn against the same culture that abuses its consumption. Kadallah seems to recognize this possibility

In this era of violence, when the sword has been augmented by the pen, which has been augmented by the keyboard, it is particularly important to understand the double edged nature of our words to protect ourselves from violence of all varieties, but also to make sure we’re wielding our own weapons effectively (in this case, demanding data autonomy). By lifting the veil and understanding the nature of invisible violences, we can finally begin to halt and heal from it enough to ask the important questions: How am I both a victim and perpetrator of harm? How can we avoid recreating old violences in new systems? When are intentional violence, non-violence, and anti-violence necessary in the design of technologies?

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 29/07/2025

Papa LaBas is the main protagonist of Mumbo Jumbo. He works towards reviving Afro American culture through teaching HooDoo. He’s an imperfect example of author Ishmael Reed’s NeoHooDoo — Reed shows why in this scene following where his assistant Earline has been exorcised if a loa

Well it's like this, PaPa. You always go around speaking as if you were a charlatan and putting yourself down when you are 1 of the most technical dudes with The Work. Abdul was right that night. .. I didn't want to say. You ought to relax. That's our genius here in America. We were dumped here on our own without the Book to tell us who the loas are, what we call spirits were. We made up our own. The theories of Julia Jackson. I think we've done all right. The Blues, Ragtime, The Work that we do is just as good. I'll bet later on in the 50s and 60s and 70s we will have some artists and creators who will teach Africa and South America some new twists. It's already happening. What it boils down to, LaBas, is intent. If your heart's there, man, that's ½ the thing about The Work. Even the European Occultists say that. Doing The Work is not like taking inventory. Improvise some. Open up, PaPa. Stretch on out with It.
Maybe I'm a bit too rigid. 1 of Berbelang's friends, Jose Fuentes, called me a repressed Negro.
There was silence for a moment.
Don't you think we ought to check with Earline to see if the other 1 has completely left.
O pop, I don't believe that a little Erzulie ever did anybody any harm.
The sisters smile. T Malice smiles too.

Three Loas (Ézulie Congo, Erzulie Freda, Erzulie Petro), by Andre Pierre, Haiti, c. 1962

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 26/07/2025

- Garner, Bryan A., The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation - Garner, Bryan A., Garner’s Modern English Usage - The Chicago Manual of Style are the three best resources an editor can have in the office, in my opinion

in my opinion. You needn't use this phrase, normally, unless it's a ferociously debated point with lots of contradictory evidence. Only an immature thinker writes, In my opinion, My Fair Lady is the best musical ever.
Without the in my opinion qualifier, it's entirely clear that you're stating an opinion. —Garner’s Modern English Usage

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 25/07/2025

Here’s John T Frederick introducing a collection edited by Sylvestre C Watkins for The Modern Library in 1943. This’ contemporaneous with the beginning of the March on Washington Movement — discussed by A Phillip Randolph in this volume — a generation before MLK famous “I have a dream” speech

I do not know the specific ways in which the Negro's place in American life is to be made better. I do know that it will be made better in one way or another. And I know that it can be made better by all of us, working together. The problem of the Negro's place in American life is not a local problem alone or primarily, or a state problem, or a regional problem. It is a national problem, because on the Negro's place in the American nation depends our future relation to other nations, the rising nations of that great majority of the peoples of the earth whose skins are colored. It is a national problem because on its solution depend our national consistency, integrity and self-respect.
That the Negro's place in American life is a national problem means that it is the individual problem of every citizen of the nation.
It is a problem that cannot be ignored, evaded or postponed. It must be faced and dealt with now, while millions of American Negroes are fighting side by side with other millions of Americans against fascism and for the Four Freedoms.
In our individual responsibility, most of us greatly need knowl. edge and understanding: knowledge of what the Negro's place in American life today really is; understanding of what the Negro thinks and how he feels about it. To give us such knowledge and such understanding, Mr. Watkins' anthology is of the highest and most timely value.
Chicago, December, 1943.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 24/07/2025

I’ve taken care for the science and mathematics sections at Bryn Mawr Bookstore, Cambridge, MA. Hence recent posts about various books. Here’s an item #retrocomputing folks might like: Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis by John A Rice — includes an IBM PC floppy disk!

Data Disk for Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis for use with IBM PC or compatible

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 24/07/2025

two copies of Roger’s’ Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, 1967. Still advertised at a decent value online. I may borrow this copy for a couple weeks

Ex Libris: Brandeis University Library. In memory of Dora and Samuel Leavitt. Given by Judy Morss, Brandeis University National Women’s Committee, Boston Chapter, 1975

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 24/07/2025

Milnor, John, Introduction to Algebraic K-Theory, Annals of Mathematical Studies, Princeton University Press, 1971. This copy printed in Japan by Tokyo University Press

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 24/07/2025

Toomer, Wright, Ellison, Little (better known as “X”) all had very similar experiences. It’s largely the result of a rapidly industrializing yet socially repressive environment. They all had inconsistent outbursts of genius, then, well, various troubles…

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 23/07/2025

in other words, our national sins still pay dividends

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scapegoating-the-algorithm

After the Democratic Party embraced civil rights and the Republican Party pursued a “Southern Strategy” to appeal to white voters opposed to racial integration, American politics entered a period of political realignment that has created more internally consistent and differentiated political coalitions. As political scientist Lilliana Mason and others have documented, this process of realignment and social sorting has increasingly transformed partisanship into a “mega-identity” that encompasses a wide range of other identities and characteristics, including race, religion, geography, and even personality traits.

The emergence of a thriving partisan media ecosystem exacerbated this trend of increasing polarization. But this, too, predates the internet and social media: it’s typically traced to the Reagan administration’s 1987 termination of the “fairness doctrine,” which had required broadcasters to discuss controversial topics in an unbiased manner.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 18/07/2025

I feel this’ a good representation of Richard Wright’s key influences. Margaret Walker’s literary biography may be a bit uneven, somewhat strange in some places, but she does a monumental job pulling together a huge library and showing how it worked in his imagination to help produce his own writing

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 18/07/2025

Annette LePique for Newcity

There is a dearth of good translators in the Anglophone world who recognize and respect language's creatureliness; language is like desire, like the act of wanting it changes us, it transforms us, it constantly makes and reshapes us.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 17/07/2025

Does anyone else think of Cher when they think about Reagan’s Navy?

Under the rubric of a plan for "rearming America," he advocated a profound shift in national priorities in the allocation and distribution of national treasure and resources. The Pentagon was named the beneficiary of an enormous infusion of funds, the domestic ledger the target for deep cuts in programs and spending. So munificent was the defense buildup plan Reagan endorsed that as part of attaining a six hundred combat ship navy, he even sought to bring back into active service from "mothballs" that old symbol of American military prowess the battleship, at a cost of additional billions. Many military strategists thought the notion foolish. In their view, battleships were dinosaurs of the seas, obsolete in the missile and nuclear age, when atomic-powered submarines carrying enough power to destroy the world patrolled the depths virtually undetected and when intelligence earth-orbiting satellites continuously circling the oceans left no place for battleships to hide. They were, besides, hopelessly limited in their capacity for modern warfare, their sixteen-inch guns woefully out of range and no match for missiles against which they would be forced to defend.

Cher mounted on the big gun of the USS Missouri, a WW2 battleship retrofitted for continued service in the 1980s

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 17/07/2025

Walker uses Gritting’s critique of Southey’s biography of Horatio Nelson to critique Fabre’s biography of Richard Wright talk about literary history! using books about books to critique books about books to frame writing a book about books! I love it

Then, in 1973, the literary critics in the white press hailed the long-awaited biography by Michel Fabre as the scholarly, authorized, and definitive study of Richard Wright that had eluded Constance Webb and that Saul Maloff had longed to see. Fabre had everything he needed in the way of research material-primary and secondary sources-but neither the true personality nor the creative genius and achievement of Wright emerges, to say nothing of his political significance. In The Nature of Biography, Robert Git-tings criticizes Southey's biography of Horatio Nelson and Forster's biography of Dickens—these criticisms underscore the restraint with which Fabre apparently approached his subject:
Biography became, in part, the art of concealment. Illegitimate children do not exist; so Emma Hamilton's own feelings for Nelson in Southey's words, "did not, in reality, pass the bounds of ardent and romantic admiration." This type of biography, written not to reveal but to conceal human nature, persisted throughout the century. Forster's life of Dickens not only conceals the novelist's estrangement from his wife and his shifts to meet his mistress, Ellen Terman; it blankets Dickens' manic-depressive character, his half-mad outbursts of insult and anger, anything that deviates from the popular picture of a great, spiritually inspiring, and above all Christian writer. Besides, biographers often had their eye on the great man's widow-or even worse, were the widow.

Richard Wright DAEMONIC GENIUS A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, by Margaret Walker

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 17/07/2025

Mark Tomczak gave a nice reinterpretation of Gilgamesh on Mastodon. I need more (1) epic poetry reinterpretations and (2) cross-sharing between alt platforms

I kind of want somebody to do a modern take on Epic of Gilgamesh. Specifically, I would love for an unboxing of what I perceive to be one potential subtext read on the story:

So Gilgamesh finally finds the secret of immortality, but he discovers that the one immortal person is immortal because they survived a genocidal flood, and the gods took pity on them and granted them immortality as a result. Gilgamesh then returns to his kingdom and is just a a great king.

The first time I heard the story, I interpreted the conclusion to be that Gilgamesh realized that the circumstances of immortality were singular and he simply couldn't replicate them, he was born in the wrong time. But I think it's actually a more interesting tale if the notion is interpreted to be that immortality is within reach... If you are willing to sacrifice almost everyone else to gain it. And Gilgamesh, comprehending that those are the stakes... Voluntarily ends his quest for immortality to go home and better the lives of other people instead of sacrificing their lives to prolong his own indefinitely.

I don't know that's what the original storytellers intended. But I think that would be kind of neat.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 16/07/2025

why don’t people “do something” you might ask?

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 14/07/2025

It wasn’t a good study. Ben Recht had a good curmudgeony write up as to why: www.argmin.net/p/are-develo... At best, we learn what we already knew: developers aren’t good at estimating task completion timeliness. AI does not help; it does add extra noise to the devs’ estimation

After thinking about this for a day, the only data summary I’m happy with would be the following simple analysis: “there are 256 coding tasks, each has an intrinsic time inside of it, when we flip coins we get to see 128 of the times in Condition 1 and 128 of the times in Condition 2. Here are the means and standard deviations of these times.” We could then all move on. I mean, rather than boring us with these robustness checks, METR could just release a CSV with three columns (developer ID, task condition, time). Then the seminar guys can run whatever dumb check they want.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 13/07/2025

I was about to reply to someone saying something stupid then I decided to watch this little rabbit instead. Much better use of time!

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 11/07/2025

damn, John. I really had to catch my breath here. From J.M. Coetzee “The Glass Abattoir”

'That stranger, who has not forgotten him, now turns to his shade and asks two questions. First: What were you thinking as you rode to market that morning in your master's arms? Did you really not know where he was taking you? Could you not smell the blood? Why did you not struggle to escape?
'And the second question is: What do you think was going on in that young man's mind as he carried you to market - you whom he had known since the day you were born, who were one of the flock he led out to forage every morning and brought home every evening? Did he breathe any word of apology for what he was about to do to you?

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 11/07/2025

software engineers need to stop complaining about the job market

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 11/07/2025

show me how nobody knows WTF they're talking about at any given time in one survey...

"Percentage of CFOs Optimistic About U.S. Economy" sourced from Grant Thorton CFO Surveys:

Q3 2021: 70% Optimistic
Q1 2022: 40% Optimistic
Q1 2023: 55% Optimistic
Q4 2023: 70% Optimistic
Q1 2024: 35% Optimistic
Q4 2024: 68% Optimistic
Q1 2025: 45% Optimistic

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 10/07/2025

looking for materials engineering advice: I use these plastic crates as columnar support on my bookshelves. the plastic failed (weight + time + 90F temperature). If I use a hair dryer to shape the plastic back into place, can I expect to reuse on the top level? Or will it not form or hold?

$close up of plastic crate with stress fracture$

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 10/07/2025

Mary Jo Bang's new translation of Dante's Paradisio has been published! www.graywolfpress.org/books/paradiso She recently gave an interview to Asymptote, screen captured below

What is the act of literary translation for you? And has your view of the possibilities of translation shifted over time?

The best definition of translation I’ve encountered comes from tracing the term back to the Latin translationem (nominative translatio), which means “a carrying across.” When applied to a text, the suggestion is that you are carrying a text in one language over into a second language. The Greeks used the word for the work of metaphor, which, like the translation of a text from one language to another, is rooted in equivalency and substitution. In the Old French, translation also referred to carrying the bones of saints from one place to another, as relics. It makes sense to me that the preciousness of such bones would have gotten linguistically intertwined with the precious religious texts copied by clerical scribes. The scribes carried a text from book to book, and sometimes also from one language to another. There have been other uses of the word, from the sacred meaning of being transported (translated) to Heaven, to the secular meaning of moving plantings from one place to another.

When I began translating the Comedy, I knew little to nothing about translation. I had taken two translation workshops when I was an MFA student at Columbia in the early nineties, working on translating a French novel, but after I finished my degree and moved to St. Louis to begin teaching, the novel stayed in the cardboard box it arrived in. I don’t know that I would have ever gone back to translation except that I read Caroline Bergvall’s “Via (48 Dante Variations),” and marveled at the fact that in forty-seven translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno, no two were identical. This felt like a demonstration of the fact that there is no single “right” way to translate one language into another; that might be obvious to some but for me, it was a decisive revelation and one that has been at the forefront of my mind in all of the translations I’ve worked on since.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 10/07/2025

I never read Blood Meridian because I don’t like senseless violence. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, by contrast, uses suspense more than violence. Or, Bolaño 2666, which is more Dantean in its relentless descriptions of crimes. Genesis, of course, has purpose in its rough scenes

Blood Meridian is a profoundly spare and strange book; it occupies the same blasted landscape as the binding of Isaac. But it also complicates attempts to read it as a narrative of distinctively American violence. Despite the period details and extensive references to real historical individuals, the novel continually rises to the level of the cosmos. McCarthy’s hallucinatory landscapes (“the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning”) evoke an alien world beyond the actual settings, and even the landscapes pale beside the psychic territory mapped by his book. Humanity’s true frontier, the novel seems to say, is interior and is perpetually recreated by our inherent capacity for slaughter.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 10/07/2025

Hmmm. I’m not sure I always read the first person narrative voice this way. Whence the undistrustful voice?

In the background of the “autobiographical pact,” which insists on drawing a hard line between fictional and nonfictional “lives,” hovers the issue of readerly trust. The “pact” assumes the relationship between the reader and the writer rests on an expectation of truthfulness. Unless the writer explicitly alerts readers to the fact that they are reading fiction, readers will take the author’s sincerity for granted. Even in cases where such qualifications are plainly in evidence—as they are in all three of the examples listed above—most readers will identify the first-person voice of the narrator with that of the author and routinely attribute the opinions and ideas, if not the experiences, of Crusoe and Gulliver to Defoe and Swift, respectively, just as they attribute Jane Eyre’s feelings and desires to her author, even though the book itself gives them no reason to do so. In fact, the voice of Charlotte Brontë herself is dispersed among all the characters in her novel.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 09/07/2025

my bias against Columbia started with ghostbusters but no real person from Columbia ever corrected that bias for me

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 05/07/2025

two days yard sale, $2000 raised

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 05/07/2025

Sembéne Ousmane may be a genius you haven’t heard of. He’s a Senegalese writer and filmmaker. The short story “Tribal Marks” tells of maroons (escaped slaves) in a kind of perspective flipped from Melville’s Benito Cerano. Years ago, I saw his film “Black Girl” — unforgettable!

'You'll be a free man when it's all over. Are you sure you want to return to your village?'
'Yes, I am.
"You haven't got anybody left there, Momutu said and went right on before Amoo could answer. 'I too once had a village... just at the edge of a forest. In that village were my mother and my father, relatives... and the whole clan! We used to eat meat and fish. The farms were well cultivated.
But as the years passed by, the village went to ruin. Nothing but moaning and groaning. The only things I have ever heard since I was born were cries, all I ever saw was agitated flight into the bush. You enter the forest and die of illness, or stay in the savanna and get caught... What was I to do?
I have made my choice. I'd rather be with the hunters than with the hunted any day?
Amoo did not understand. He, too, knew that life was like that. One was never safe, never sure whether one would live to see another day. And something else also bothered him: to what use did they really put the men and women who were carried away? It was said that the whites made boots from their skin.
They talked for a long time, or rather Momutu rambled on without stopping. He bragged about his exploits and his nights of drunkenness. Amoo only listened. He found it increasingly difficult to understand Momutu's charac-ter. Momutu was like a petty king.

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 05/07/2025

my younger cat studies the markings on the feeder very closely for several minutes, before finally placing his paw in the correct sequence to dispense food

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 04/07/2025

YARD SALE chuffed.org/project/1192...

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 03/07/2025

the new Everyman’s Pocket Classics series is very good! Varied selection, expertly edited, cover art and printing all pristine, pleasant reading experience all around. I bought “African Stories” collection with Ben Okri from Bookends&Beginnings in Evanston bookendsandbeginnings.com/search?q=Afr...

colorful front jacket painting by Laura James

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 26/06/2025

how’s this for a book review?

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 25/06/2025

here’s a pretty complicated section: Malcolm reappraises his resentment (we’ll call it that) towards white folk. He does so without reflecting on whether that resentment was exploited by Elijah Muhammad. He does so without considering the privilege he’s received from “Lord” Azzam over other pilgrims

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 25/06/2025

in his journey to Mecca, it’s clear how isolated American culture was from the rest of the world in 1964

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 25/06/2025

I wouldn’t have gotten so much from this book when I was younger. The exclusive printing by Ballantine Books, and the extensive involvement of Alex Haley (creator of Roots), always confused me. Not to mention the man’s image has polarized many.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

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Jared @mathbook.cafe · 23/06/2025

I need to be careful. Maybe be disciplined and turn this shit off again. When I look at the feed, I’m not the only one who suspects there’s massive spin in this phase of warfare! Does Big Brother want me to believe the media landscape isn’t trustworthy? What is Truth?

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