Happy St. Paddy's Day

Happy belated St. Patrick's Day. Here are some pictures and videos from the real deal. Sorry for the large size of the files.

Here's the very beginning of the parade. I was standing on a side street, to get a better view. The main thoroughfare was pretty crowded.

The parade started out fine until a horse decided to add some excitement to the mix.

This made the rest of the parade smell pretty bad where I was standing.

Here's some dude pretending to be a 'cool' St. Patrick I suppose.


They had some weird entries in the parade.


The Austrians had an entry:


As did an India group:

Some Spaniards playing bagpipe:

There was a lot of other really weird new-age crap, along with a few really cool entries. Strangely there were three bagpipe entries but no Uilleann pipes. Maybe they're harder to play while walking.
A few giant mechanical bugs:

Afterwards I headed to Henry street, a main pedestrian shopping area for Dubs. The street below was completely packed from where I was to the tall spire at the end of the street:


I eventually made my way to O'Donoghue's, a pub well-known for their Irish music.

After the blurry start, you can clearly see Uncle E.'s doppelgänger.

While I did get a Guinness glass, no Guinness was in it ;-)

Algebra in Wonderland

Here's another installment of Linus' irregular series on interesting articles. I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland recently, and overall I thought the 3D graphics were great and the rest of it fine. I should warn you if you haven't seen it that there is some awful popping to hip-hop music in the film.

I came across an interesting discussion of the books, in light of Carroll's (=Dodgson's) mathematical experiences upon writing them.

Here's an excerpt:

The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan Hamilton, one of the great innovators in Victorian algebra. Hamilton decided that manipulations of numbers like adding and subtracting should be thought of as steps in what he called “pure time.” This was a Kantian notion that had more to do with sequence than with real time, and it seems to have captivated Dodgson [=Carroll]. In the title of Chapter 7, “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time.

Dodgson has the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse stuck going round and round the tea table to reflect the way in which Hamilton used what he called quaternions — a number system based on four terms. In the 1860s, quaternions were hailed as the last great step in calculating motion. Even Dodgson may have considered them an ingenious tool for advanced mathematicians, though he would have thought them maddeningly confusing for the likes of Alice (and perhaps for many of his math students).

At the mad tea party, time is the absent fourth presence at the table. The Hatter tells Alice that he quarreled with Time last March, and now “he won’t do a thing I ask.” So the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse (the third “term”) are forced to rotate forever in a plane around the tea table.

As with any critical analysis, the author's ideas are debatable, of course. Your thoughts are welcome.
Here's a longer version of the same article, for the interested reader.