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September 2nd, 2006

pozorvlak: (Default)
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 09:38 pm
I see that a few new people (mostly Light Entertainers) have added me to their friends lists. Hello, and welcome to Beware of the Train! House rules are simple: aces are high, jacks are wild, no passing Go if you're in seki, and the lifts are, as usual, all broken on the Picadilly line. Other than that, it's standard '76 Moscow rules with the Jubilee and DLR extensions. Oh, and please don't use my real name online, I get rather touchy about that.

In the belief that my external life would be even duller to you than it is to me, I mostly eschew the "angsty confessional" style for which LiveJournal is notorious: instead, I write a bit about maths, a bit about books and films, and a surprising amount about computers. OK, not that surprising now I come to look at it. I also post the odd interesting link, but the majority of those get posted to Hypothetical, which is my other online community (well, that and MoblogUK, where pictures from my cameraphone go). I have an occasional series of posts about ideas and concepts that I think everyone should know about - why don't you tell me some of yours? And sometimes I post daft flights of fancy, like Jeeves versus Predator, or the Expressionist Thoughts of Edvard Munchton.

Go wild. Write me interesting comments, or merely vituperative ones. But please don't use my real name online.
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pozorvlak: (Default)
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 10:03 pm
Probably only [livejournal.com profile] michiexile and [livejournal.com profile] half_of_monty will be interested by this, but what the hell...

I thought that the totally awesome John Baez (quantum gravity bloke and cousin of Joan) had answered my prayers, and written an introduction to cohomology from the perspective of n-categories. But he's actually done something more interesting than that - I'm not exactly sure what yet, but it involves (-1)-categories and (-2)-categories, and relates a big wodge of homotopy theory to the idea of essential surjectivity in different dimensions. It's also pretty readable. Highly recommended, and I'd love to hear what some actual homo(log|top)ists think!