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blog-stress


What would you do if 80% of your blog is owned by the
_companies_ of your Ph.D. students? First, try to talk them into
selling some of their blogshares back to the public. If this fails,
threaten never to post on your blog again until the share-price has sunk
deep enough to force them into selling. If this fails also and if you
see that the price only goes up no matter how long you remain silent, it
is time for more drastic measures. Luckily, blogshares allows the owner of a
blog to issue new shares, thereby flooding the market and stabilizing
the price. I was forced into this twice this week (the two horizontal
lines in the diagram) : on monday I issued another 5000 shares dropping
their 80% to 40% but today they acquired again 50.1% forcing me into
issuing another 1000 shares… Clearly it would be fun if more of
you out there would be buying shares of this blog (I will stick to the
1000 shares I got by claiming the blog) but I will keep on issuing new
shares whenever one player acquires more than 50%. All of this
blogshares-stuff is a bit surrealistic. In less than one week the
share-value went from 0.76 to 62.73 and the total value of all public
owned shares from 0.00 to 377383.00 and at best I wrote one reasonable
post in the same period. Oh, the stress of having to maintain an
acceptable level of postings in order to preserve the property of the
shareholders of your blog…
As if this is not enough, some
bloggers start feeling guilty because they cannot maintain their rhytm
of updates in times that they feel sick or tired. Here's what Bitch Ph.D. wrote yesterday

I think I need a break from blogging. Well,
actually I need a break from a lot of things, but blogging is optional.
Plus, I really just have nothing of substance to say right now. I hate
to be all drama-queeny, and fuck, maybe I'll change my mind if the
meds kick in tomorrow. Though actually I think they're working in
that I still feel shitty and anxious but
it's—just—manageable enough for me to function at a sort
of minimal level. Or maybe that's a placebo effect. Who the hell
knows.

Anyway , the point of this post other than to just
say I feel incredibly shitty is to be giving myself public permission to
be a shitty blogger for however long it takes until I actually want to
talk again.

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versions e and pi


Once again, it may take a while before you know why there is a
[spooks]-logo next to this message… Thanks so much for the
abundant support I received when I mentioned that I might rewrite my
'forgotten' book! There was one (1) comment

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Scottish solids

John McKay
pointed me to a few interesting links on ‘Platonic’ solids and monstrous
moonshine. If you thought that the ancient Greek discovered the five
Platonic solids, think again! They may have been the first to give a
correct proof of the classification but the regular solids were already
known in 2000BC as some
neolithic stone artifacts
discovered in Scotland show. These
Scottish solids can be visited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. McKay
also points to the paper Polyhedra in physics,
chemistry and geometry
by Michael Atiyah and Paul Sutcliffe. He also
found my posts on a talk I gave on monstrous moonshine for 2nd year students earlier this year and
mentionted a few errors and updates. As these posts are on my old weblog
I’ll repost and update them here soon. For now you can already hear and
see a talk given by John McKay himself 196884=1+196883, a monstrous tale at the Fields Institute.

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