maybe they're really mad at that evil person in the mirror.

:-)

dang I told a dude anime profile pictures where forbidden and he changed it

now I feel bad :'/

maybe it's true that people respect high rep users for some weird reason

i wonder if some guys use a girl's profile pic in the hope such activity might increase the chances of answering.

Oh that definitely happens

or maybe it reduces. i will never understand people.

most of my rep comes from when I used a profile picture of a kpop idol

:-). my snow camping shot on mt shasta has not brought much rep :-)

@HereToRelax I've had the same (or seasonally related) avatar since 2011

i derive most of my reputation from a geometric representation of who knows what. a hash of my IP address when i created the account or something.

its symmetries are pleasing to the eye.

My current avatar is a work of art by the incredibly talented Jorge Fernández Hidalgo

Who also happens to be me

And consists of me using a fancy brush in gimp

the renowned artist.

i always think of mexico city when i hear hidalgo

U don't think of Don Quijote?

only when in the netherlands

Hey guys, why do math journals sell articles

as opposed to the nether regions

not why

@copper.hat only because of the windmills?

En un lugar de la Mancha2, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme3, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero

Hidalgo is kind of a scuffed last name

Hidalgo used to mean "son of somebody"

more like how does the journal economy make sense \ work

many people, at least in the US and europe, have institutional access, so the 'sales price' is just an imaginary number quoted for nobody.

I mean whos buying the articles

And it was used to talk about someone who was the son of someone rich but then messed up

yeh and theres illegal site

sites*

@robjohn my first engineering internship was in delft, and have many fond memories. for a naive irish lad, amsterdam was more than an eye opener

i work in legal services. sometimes we do actually buy articles from journals when we do not want to make it obvious that we stole them from scihub or elsewhere.

but the amount of purchases per year is very small. those pricing numbers are imaginary.

My thesis advisor asks me to get him his papers

I have never told him I get them from sci hub

But he obviously knows

@HereToRelax unfortunately my language skills are non existent, i cannot even speak my native language.

so reading about Quixano in Spanish is waaaay outside my reach, much as i would like to me able

it would be like if i offered access to my papers for $100 a copy. although nobody is buying, i can still quote the price. so many journal sites are like that.

i only want to pay for the value i get from papers, which may be nothing.

i meant $1000 a copy.

i will personally sign them.

i was so proud of my first published paper. the copies are languishing on my shelves below. so sad.

I think my first paper is going to get a ton of citations

Even though nothing hard happened

some heavy writing?

that's old school, when the journal gives you printed copies for distribution. i have some left from one of mine.

$10,000 is necessary. my daughter and cat will also sign them.

but it introduces a concept that my advisor is going to make a ton of articles on

prediction is always fraught

to be irish means i never have to finish a sentence

it's on a connectcity index

i now need one hundred thousand dollars to part with copies of a paper i coauthored.

thanks james joyce

people churn out papers on connectivity indices

my first paper, my mom printed out a bunch of copies and sent to her friends lol. so all demand was killed there

you may have a claim for copyright infringement. how long ago was this? was this in the US?

do you have money? answer the last question first

lol i wish it was the arxiv version anyway

i am a sentimental cynic

oscar wilde was so brilliant.

i am sure he was fun at parties.

He was?

He has like 100 great quotes

he was truly brilliant.

he's up there with emerson & clemens in my mind.

Someone should read Oscar Wild and make movies

even though they would be ripoffs

there's a pretty good film version of picture of dorian gray. with hurd hatfield.

god, and angela lansbury, who is somehow still alive.

it's a good film. they erase some but not all of the subtext.

i think you have to take context into account as well. 19th century ireland was an odd place of contradictions.

all of his stuff should be in the US public domain now, i don't know why people aren't out monetizing it.

too busy giving us superheroes. i find all of it very exhausting.

Art cinema is better than normal cinema

It's so sad

I didn't want to have to fall into that meme

i like mindless stuff, but it has degenerated into sensationalism devoid of anything other than prurient catering to the lowest level. throwing spices on old leather does not chez panisse make

wow, did i just write that. ffs

faithfully following sentimentalism

bob odenkirk's "nobody" is a good film. it's an 80s action movie that somehow came out this year, with comically evil russians, like they used to have in rambo iii. gunplay, fistfights. what more does anybody need.

i cannot escape that which bothers me

i like the following albeit it falls into the category i just blasted: atomic blond.

there's nothing wrong with catering to the lowest level, it just needs to be done in the right way. no laziness.

I like John wick 1,2 and 3

i haven't seen any of the john wicks.

i like spy game. especially the scene when redford asks pitt how did he learn to shoot like that: boy scouts

But stuff like iron man is painful for me

i am with you there

i am exhausted by superhero stuff, it's just not interesting, the last 30 minutes is somebody whizzing around and neutralizing the premise of the movie. bored to death.

i'd rather see bob odenkirk beat people up on a bus.

there was one (i can't recall) where the protagonist is face to crotch and says its that you scoutmaster john

one moment of levity is a mish mash of improbables

what is wrong with my language today

you never even learned your native language. there was no hope for you

ta se ceart (that is correct)

For some reason in mexico city people like saying words that start like another word instead of the word

irish might be the one language that's worse than english in terms of how it's spelled vs. how it sounds.

i was really shamed growing up as a result

instead of saying si they say simon

instead of saying ok they say ocas

i want to visit mx city. my wife & kids went there but i was busy workingl

instead of saying sale they say salinas

it's an interesting clusterfuck

we also have some museums

i like salinas.

there is a museum there devoted to john steinbeck. it is empty. nobody goes there.

i am not a foodie, but what i know of mx cuisine leaves me drooling

I havent had street food in over a year and I used to have it everyday before covid

I really miss it

even though i cannot speak es, i find it easy to interact with people on the street there.

I agree for some reason

i studies french for 5 yrs but cannot put a sentence together

The easiest place I've been in interacting with people is rio de janeiro

and greece

funny, some of my closest friends are from there :-)

In RIo I just spoke spanish and it was like I was speaking fluent portugues

My French used to be as good as my English. These days, not so true.

but then I went to Manaos in the Amazon and no one understood shit

I thought it was gonna be the same

my parents lived in greece for a year. friendliest people on earth.

I have always wanted to visit Greece.

Ive only been to Athens and Tsaloniki

I went there from Bulgaria cuz I went to a Math contest my college payed for

Apparently my college is fine paying for me to travel the world

i have never been there despite having close friends there. the heat & crowds (for foreigners, many irish) are not good for me.

But I can't graduate

I've visited bureaucrat offices over 100 times now

But I finally have a defense date

a bunch of pasty red-faced bags of meat.

srr to hear it

you should be able to graduate. that sucks.

you can always tell an irishman but you can't tell him much

there's a similar joke about a harvard man

All of the teaching assistants havent been payed in over 8 months

the most boorish joke i have ever heard about harvard is "i didn't go there, i went to the vocational school." meaning i did not go to the undergraduate institution but only the graduate school of mathematics.

there's an element of truth in there, nobody in the world of BS cares where you went to grad school. they care about the undergrad only. but it is still a boorish joke.

When I went back from Greece to Bulgaria we went on a bus and there was a drunk old man with no shoes and incredibly fucked up teethe

When we wanted to cross the guard asked for our passaports

and the old drunk dude had none

why do you need to air this out in public, heretorelax?

He asked him like 3 times for the passport

i didn't have my passport.

why make an issue of it

and then he let him pass

lol

I wasn't drunk during the ride miraculously

He didn't have any passport

no i didn't. i was just vibing around europe.

now i'm feeling very self-conscious.

At least they let u pass

they probably recognised him

Yeah I guess

the joke i like is: how can you tell if someone if from harvard? they will tell you.

I had heard that one with a vegan

that's true.

also true of vegans.

the irish in me has no time for that stuff

my cousin had a vegan wedding in galway, people are still talking about it years later

my brother sncuk out to kfcs

my high school spanish teacher had a funny story, he was traveling from ecuador to peru, at this completely abandoned border outpost. the guy at the border said, "i can't let you in without a vaccination." (I don't know what disease it was for)

my teacher said, is the needle sterilized? and the border guard wiped it on his shirt.

my teacher decided not to enter peru that day.

traveling involves compromises from time to time.

have my yellow fever, typhoid, etc all done

they made me get a ton of vaccinations before they'd give me my law school ID card. i'd had them, i just couldn't prove i'd had them because my doctor had gone out of business 20 years prior with no recordkeeping.

so i am super-inoculated against scarlet fever now.

rubella? do your worst.

i had most of the mumps, measles, chicken pox, rubella,

that was the funniest one. they made me get inoculated against chicken pox. i'd had it! i just didn't have enough antibodies.

not scarlet fever though

my daughter doesn't know how easy she has it. she just got a shot for chicken pox.

a vegan wedding sounds lit ngl

it was horrible. i had it as a teenager.

for the jokes

Do some butter with rum shots

no, you don't want to provide your wedding guests with rum. that is too expensive.

give them water.

Oh, in Mexico they give u wads of cash

u want them drunk to get good returns

In civilized countried they buy the gifts ahead of time I hear

our wedding, we gave guests a taco bar. they could do chicken tacos or some kind of vegetable protein tacos. no alcohol, although some of them brought it.

you make them bring it. that way, they pay for it.

makes sense

my in-laws were against drinking (fun in general) so we had a dry wedding. not recommended.

someday i will pay for what i have written on mse

i know my daughter's friends sometimes follow me here

Treating MSE chat as a confessional is not recommended.

Forgive me MSE chat for I have sinned

say two our fathers and a rosary

Hi! @Rithaniel

Sup Ted, how goes it?

I'll move over to the agnostic room

some aspect of confession prepares you for presenting less than favoUrable data to your 'superiors'

i am a spiritual agnostic if there is such a thing

get the big stuff out of the way quickly

admit culpability

same here

But I feel like maybe you need to readjust in the deathbed regardless

like Von Neuman

seems like an optimal control problem

no loss of generality in a switch at the last moment. just depends on the distribution of expiry

I mean, it's not like you require great technical skill to switch

unless u want a mlm system like scientology

that one takes time

that requires some paperwork

a chat with tom cruise

maybe you want to be scientologist just to be sure

well I think some other ones also need proper prep-work

If you were born into one that requires that you are born into it then you should probably hold onto that one

seems like born again just before death is sort of a doublet

at present in ireland a lot of immigrants are converting because they want to get their kids into catholic school

but the religious bureaucracy there is pretty tight

i think the stereotype in the usa is a LOT different than the reality in ireland, at least when i was growing up

I am catholic, but I got no gifts in my first communion

and the priest crashed on the way to the ceremony

nothing serious

but he didn't come

a friend of mine brought me around to all the neighboUrs touting my new communion status and i made lots of cash. she didn't even ask for any of it.

where is she now...

i am sorry my kids missed out on all that cultural stuff.

i am a bad dad.

dang I got nada

At least the Pumas won the soccer tournament that year

:-)

we were all listening to the final on a truck

soccer world is up in arms

i am glad. the nfl all about the money is not appealing to me

not that the soccer leagues don't care

soccer is worse imho

the draft kinda helps I think

i generally only watch games where nephews or nieces are playing

I generally only watch games were its someone elses house

and there is beer in the kitchen

but its been two years since that happened

mostly not interested in watching pros play.

wow, i got an email from mse about my underage interaction.

?

one "ffs" has spawned all of this. i wonder what would happen to twitter if they imposed this level of scrutiny.

i don't think it was the ffs, i think it was just the interactions.

for flower's sake.

well i hope you've learned your lesson, whatever it was.

it seems that creativity is my strength not my learning ability. that would explain my difficulty with groups. however you want to interpret that...

i am going to preview all of my comments from now on with pop cultural questions that only someone my age or older will get.

i promise as a ta i will never again ask a coed for a rubber

how was i to know f*s

this is good advice.

ted koppel had a version of that story. he grew up somewhere else and didn't know.

they were called frenchies when i grew up

french letters

seriously

no wonder i had difficulty with french

i really don't like that cheek kissing thing french people do. someone tried to do that to me once and i involuntarily swatted them away.

probably didn't even make it up to my brain, just the spinal column handling it. stay out of my face.

on my first school trip to france my teacher brought us to montmarte. still not entirely sure why she did that. anyway, we got to practice our bargaining skills much to the entertainment of the local entrepreneurs.

i wonder if they got a cut of the action.

that did spark a brief interest in the language from a utility perspective, maybe she did have the right idea

i know my sister's french turned native after she had a french bf

poor guy. i suspect he lived in fear of her 4 brothers.

lovely lad.

years later he used to visit with his wife & family, and embarrassingly would call his wife by my sister's name.

oof.

we loved it. sunday entertainment at the dinner table.

oh, no quite looking down at your plate

its like, whoaaaa, you messed up big time, look at that

knock the corners off, my mum would say

i would just vanish into a black hole of cringe.

i would consolidate into a singularity.

no room for cringe in out house. weak spots get the microscope & loud hailer treatment

what, you like susie, whooa, lets tell the world

might explain something in retrospect.

oh that reminds me of something awful i did to a friend once. they were talking under their breath about a guy in the room who was a jerk. i pointed and said loudly, "who, that guy? that guy right there?"

nothing happened except the acknowledgment of the fact that he was being talked about.

i still regret it.

i can't help it, it's all i was taught.

i have done many bad things. bless me father for i have sinned...

i think it is good to have many generations in a family when kids are growing up, it adds a balance...

or imbalance in our case

old people who don't give a f--- about anything are a very welcome contribution to family gatherings..

they can see and say things that nobody else can

i generally seem to get on well with the grandmas

one used to make me pickled herring (fresh everything) and drive over to deliver it to me in her 90s.

young children can also see and say things that nobody else can.

she was awesome. and she could produce a swell of invective the like of which you have never heard

i would love some herring on a cracker about now. i had lunch but i could use a second lunch.

i have a weakness for pickled herring. must be my viking roots

chop his head off and pass the picked herring please

falls well into my gdp-culinary development tradeoff thesis

it's a good thesis.

whoa, my investments are back up tg. cancel the planned move to albany bulb.

my stock broker friend was going to move in with me.

wow, sp500 really bounced back today. i only invest in index funds because my firm is always dealing with listed companies.

generally, if i buy, you should sell and vv.

part of me is hoping for a crash in equities, i have some savings that i want to put in the market but things seem too expensive right now.

i think it will happen when interest rates ramp up. but that might take a while.

inflation is the big elephant right now.

yeah. they say you can't time the market, but you kind of can.

but we are printing money like it has gone out of fashion, (ir)regardless of political affiliation

but so is everybody else, so what do you do :-)

the race to inflate

i suspect the much anticipated covid recovery will take longer than the market has priced in.

i agree.

at least i have a hedge against my daughter's education expenses. i am a little surprised that brexit did not have a negative impact. to me that says something about the us.

please invest in the Leslie Townes Eternal Wealth fund. we use matrices and linear algebra to optimize your return. also functional analysis.

meet my friends black & sholes, we work at ltcm

we have an interesting proposition for you...

someone around here has a phd. what's the worst that could happen.

what does variance mean again?

and cdo?

no, we're not talking about that

let's stick to one subject

Eternal Wealth.

sorry, i forgot, no maths

Scrooge McDuck swimming in a vault full of gold coins. i'm not promising anything, i'm just offering that image.

gold is a good hedge :-)

thinking of starting pusecoin, with appropriate pronounciation

just need elon on board

we're also accepting "investment" in LeslieCoin. i put quotes around that because i'm being sarcastic.

i am marketing a new sort of token called the ffs

will appeal to the robinhooded crowd

life is so full of ironies

reminds me of the dotcom boom when having com in your name increased your value

ok, i should actually do some productive work today

ahh. noon. time for a drink.

Is there a way to have Wolfram show all complex answers to logarithm queries instead of just the principal answer?

why? it's not that hard to add multiples of 2pi i by hand

that is an imaginary answer

Hmm, okay, that's always how you get to the full set of answers, just a particular solution $+ 2\pi i n$ for all integers $n$?

I think it depends what you mean by answers but in general, yes, when you are defining the log, you choose a branch cut, and this defines a function on that branch. You can then use the integral formula for the log to extend this by continuity across the branch cut, but you add $2\pi i$ each time you wind around. This is slightly different than if you are using the log to define things like $z^{1/2}$ or whatever. Then winding around twice returns you to where you started, so slightly different.

Does that hold for weird bases as well, i.e., $log_{29} x$ is a particular solution +$n2\pi i$, or do you need some adjustment factor?

I gotta run, so that is an exercise left to the reader :) the relevant info is that $e^{2\pi i}=1$ and you can express, e.g. $29^y=x$ in terms of base $e$ and logs.

Okie, thanks

@user10478 starting with $e^{2\pi i}=1$ can you find the exponent of $29$ so that $29^z=1$?