Consumer banking as Hawking radiation

After finishing an expository note on Penrose diagrams for my magazine, I realised that the logo of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (a.k.a. HSBC) is nothing but the diagram of a Schwarzshild black hole. This will not surprise anyone familiar with the short story "The Fridman Space" by V. Pelevin, where it is argued that the conventional wisdom "money attracts money" can be interpreted as a physical theory where money plays the role of mass and the attraction of capital is described by the Einstein equations. In particular, there should be financial black holes and it is only natural that a big bank should be one of them. This does not mean that the money deposited with the bank is irretrievably lost: thanks to the Hawking quantum evaporation effect one can withdraw money from an ATM or use a debit card for purchases. Another comforting circumstance is that an external observer does not actually see how matter disappears inside the black hole forever; therefore, we maintain the illusion that the money in our accounts actually exists and is ours.

Anyway, all this is to remind everyone that we are celebrating 100 years of Einstein's general relativity this year!

The hand of Obregón

Nowadays magic is discredited to such extent that people with natural propensity to believe in it prefer to entertain themselves with conspiracy theories. Which is a shame, since paranoia is a harmful condition, both for the sufferer and for those who are secretly trying to kill him.

I insist that magic is good for us. An idiot who believes in magic is hardly more dangerous than an idiot who does not. At least, he (or she) is easier to spot. And, let us be honest, only by taking magic into the account we get coherent explanations for many events.

In the middle of the Bombilla Park in the south of Mexico City there stands an imposing monument. The entrance is guarded by two enormous statues holding a hammer and a sickle, the rear by an eagle compared to which the eagles of the Third Reich look like underfed sparrows. This is the mausoleum of the right hand of General Álvaro Obregón.

Álvaro Obregón was murdered in the name of Christ on July 17, 1928 and his body was buried in Huatabampo, Sonora. However, it was not buried complete. Obregón lost his right arm 1915 in an ambush by the forces of another national hero, Francisco Villa, and his hand was preserved in formaline. In 1935 it was placed into the basement of the Obregón Monument, in a niche behind steel bars.

The right hand of Álvaro Obregón

There it stayed until 1989 when President Carlos Salinas ordered it to be incinerated. Two years later the empty niche was filled with a bronze model of Obregón's arm. It didn't fit the niche well as it represented the whole limb and not just the hand, and it is still there to be observed. It looks ridiculous.

The bronze arm on display

Now, why did Carlos Salinas destroy the hand of Obregón? He certainly did not mind shooting his nanny when he was three years old. “I killed her with one shot,” he bragged, “I’m a hero.” Nor he seemed to be especially perturbed by the epidemic of violent deaths that hit the journalists during his presidency. People did not come out to the streets asking to burn the hand of Obregón (though they did ask for other things).

You have probably guessed the answer already. A relic of a saint or a hero has great magic powers. Salinas could not set the evil roam free in Mexico while Obregón's fist was on guard. Without it, he did what he did. (Yes, I know this is called economic development.)

Actually, I have seen a different explanation, which does not involve bestowing on Salinas the title of a black magician. Some well-meaning people conjecture that Salinas wanted to transform Mexico into a modern society and this implied getting rid of dead body parts that only serve to scare children and adults alike and make Mexicans look like savages.

Well, if thas was his intention he would have started with the Mummies of Guanajuato. And then, of course, this argument implies that a citizen of a modern society should be appalled by the sight of a dead body unless the latter is mounted on a bicycle, and, in general, should not be reminded of death. Needless to say, a person who manages to forget about his own imminent death must have severely impaired memory, and is even more likely to disregard whatever harm he or she inflicts on the outside world. While this makes him a perfect consumer, in other respects he is just as good as a zombie. I do not think that appealing to this kind of crowd is any better than practicing black magic.

And, in any case, death in Mexico is not going to be forgotten any time soon.

Whenever I have a stopover in my trip I lose something. This last trip from St Petersburg to Mexico had too many stops: in Moscow I left a wool jumper, in Bonn two pink umbrellas. In New York I left an unread issue of New Yorker a pair of Tommy Hilfiger sunglassess that I bought in Manhattan. Actually, the sunglasses turned up in my luggage later but, meanwhile, I convinced myself that they were quite ugly so they also qualify as a loss.

There is nothing new under the sun, of course; especially, if you are an idiot. In particular, my plight has been described in the classical Russian literature. Here is an attempt to a translate the relevant piece: "Losses" by Daniil Harms.

Andrey Andreevich Myasov bought a wick at the market and set off with it for home.

On his way Andrey Andreevich lost the wick and stopped at the shop in order to buy some hundred and fifty grams of Poltava sausage. Then Andrey Andreevich stopped at the milk cooperative and bought a bottle of kefir, afterwards had a small glass of bread ale at the stall and queued for a newspaper. The queue was quite long and Andrey Andreevich spent at least twenty minutes queueing but, as he was approaching the seller, the newspapers run out just under his nose.

Andrey Andreevich hesitated for a while and went home, but on the way lost the kefir and stopped at the bakery, where he bought a french baguette but lost the Poltava sausage. 

Then Andrey Andreevich went directly home, but on the way he fell, lost the french baguette and broke his glasses. 

Andrey Andreevich came home extremely irritated and went straight to bed but could not fall asleep for a long time; when he finally fell asleep he dreamed that he had lost his toothbrush and was brushing his teeth with some kind of a candlestick.

The works of Harms are often misclassified as humour. However, he was arrested several times (at least once clearly on the account of his writings) and died in a psychiatric ward in prison. Nobody could disregard the duty to lick the dictator's boots and be safe at the same time, but Harms was a real enemy: he observed a world that could not be improved by ideology.

Feeling of ...

Google autocomplete for "feeling of" is "impending doom".

That's a relief. I thought it was delirium tremens setting in.

Японское море имени Карла Маркса

Посмотрел фильм Довженко "Аэроград". В основном, про то, как мужик дикого вида с ружьем ходит по тайге и стреляет в разных других людей дикого вида. (Мужик защищал СССР.) Самолетов почти не было. Зато было много деревьев и кустов, а еще вот что:

В детстве это море у меня, видимо, плескалось в голове. В детский сад я не ходил, а сидел с бабушкой дома и слушал советское радио. Однажды я нарисовал странную картинку. Две синих избушки на курьих ножках, на каждой избушке была наклеена синяя марка об уплате профсоюзных взносов (у родителей выпросил) и сверху было написано синими кривыми буквами: "ГОРОД МГКАКА ПОЯСЕС".  "На Москву непохоже", - отметили мама с папой. 

В другой раз я гулял по улице и заглянул в открытую дверь подвала. Из темноты раздавались душераздирающие вопли. Я выскочил на улицу, поймал первого попавшегося прохожего и дрожащим голосом ему сообщил что, по моим наблюдениям, в ближайшем подвале прячутся корреспонденты "Нью-Йорк Таймс". Он решительно спустился в подвал, и, выйдя через минуту, сообщил мне с серьезным видом, что корреспондентов нет, зато кошки делают котят.

Подозреваю, что в то же время Америке дети (не все, только такие же тупые, как я) принимали мартовских котов за агентов КГБ.

(Как мы теперь знаем, можно быть и агентом, и корреспондентом. Но это к делу не относится.)

S.Galkin: Geometry of Fano manifolds.

Here are the photos of the blackboards from the lectures on the geometry of Fano manifolds by Sergei Galkin. If the speaker manages to write his lectures neatly, I'll post all the lectures. For now, here are the links to Lecture 1:

Part 1

Part 2

I'll keep updating.

Update 1. Here is the second lecture. Figuring out the right order of the blackboards and the logical structure of each blackboard is a non-trivial exercise (left to reader, of course).

Part 1

Part 2

Update 2. The third lecture, board by board.

Board 1
Board 2
Board 3
Board 4
Board 5
Board 6
Board 7
Board 8

Final update. Lecture 4. The first three boards are missing; they were just a brief summary of the Minimal Model Program from the previous talk.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Minimally gilded Hodge star

Not sure how, I got into reading The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. It's all about sex, but somewhere in the middle of the book the following formula appears, allegedly from a paper called Minimally Gilded Hodge Star Operators and Quasi-Ordinary Handlebodies Within a Localizable 4-Manifold Whitney Invariants:

It is all quite meaningless, which, in itself, makes perfect sense. The narrator uses this formula as a special magic which helps to undress women. Real mathematics is useless for this purpose, to say the least, as many a mathematician must have surely observed.

There is also an example of the oppоsite situation in the book Веселая семейка by Nikolai Nosov. It is a children's book about two kids who decide to build an incubator. One of them is the type of a person who wants everything to serve a purpose; for instance, he buys a book on higher mathematics with a ridiculous name, arguing that it must be extremely useful. He can't understand a word, of course.

I read Веселая семейка at the age of six and laughed at the hapless hero. But years later (not too many years, as I understand now), while at the university, I was dumbstruck when, for some reason, the name of that mathematics book came to my mind. It was called Inverse Trigonometric Functions and Chebychev Polynomials. This is a beautiful theory, one of my favourite parts of the mathematics course.