i stopped worrying about it long time ago precisely for this reason :)

but it still feels like ages must pass before i'll be able to do research

too much catching up to do

@AlexeiAverchenko If it is of any consolation to you, I'd say that way more than half the questions on MO elude me.

Hmm, I think that you are probably closer than you think. No way you're going to understand all of the stuff on MO. But you could be quite good at a particular subject.

I can tell you guys a wonderful story about How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb...

if only i could pick one :)

@AsafKaragila Please do!

@AsafKaragila let me guess, it was not difficult, was it? :)

@AsafKaragila Peter Sellers was a genius. His mimicking of von Neumann is plain unbelievable.

Yee-haw!

The MSE servers are in the United States, aren't they? Telling stories about loving bombs may not be a politic thing to do.

One would think that the Homeland security guys have a sense of humor to appreciate the reference to the movie, but you may be right on that.

@AlexeiAverchenko: thanks for mentioning the picture hanging thing, it is very intuitive, but i had never seen it before (even having took 3 semesters of alg top beyond the basic pi1 semester).

I will be back soon. I think.

@tb I hope Zev deleted the thoughts of everyone who was thinking was I wrote...

Asaf, the part between "one would think" and "to appreciate" doesn't parse.

@JackSchmidt you're welcome, it's a great puzzle :)

@AsafKaragila Seen this?

we must not allow the mineshaft gap!

Let's see.

Wow. I keep expecting him to stand up and shout "MEIN FURHER!"

the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of highly stimulating nature

@AsafKaragila nitpick: Führer

Right :-)

strangely spell checker says 'furher'

fur her?

could be :)

Venus in furs?

Well, I'm off to work. For any who were offended, I apologize for being a monkey's ass.

@TheChaz see you!

@TheChaz See you, The Chaz.

By the way, I wanted to ask you for sometime. How do I pronounce your handle, @TheChaz? Like champagne or like champion?

Wow there are so many people here now....

@BenjaminLim You missed when we had 24 in here.

wowowowow.....

I just woke up.

It's 8.15am here in Canberra, Australia

I missed it too :/

how many hours ago was this?

I think it was a server glitch and some of the people were ghosts, but it looked really full.

No wonder I can't load to my last message

@BenjaminLim This was weeks ago.

Oh ok.

@AsafKaragila Who, Hilbert?

@HenningMakholm von Neumann, in the recording tb linked.

All right, time to start on some rings, revising for exams now....

I shall acquire some food and drink.

Animals could be bred and SLAUGHTERED

^ ?

?

@AsafKaragila But why?

@HenningMakholm Because it sounds a lot like Dr. Strangelove...

Okay, that's just me lacking a reference, then.

Oh man, you have not seen Dr. Strangelove??

Nope.

@HenningMakholm This can be easily rectified :)

What the heck have you been doing the past n years?

Not watching movies, almost always.

For shame.

That's a good film

Anyway, I will be back later.

@QED I am surprised many people here seem to have watched it. I thought it was a little too old.

It's a classic

@Srivatsan No Kubrick movie is too old. One of them is too new!

I have seen that movie, and even liked it. I know couple of friends who didn't like it too much.

Well, one of them hates Kubrick movies almost on principle =). Too much hype, he says.

it's not worth paying attention to hype

@tb Which other movies would you recommend?

of Kubrick, I mean

@Srivatsan FMJ

@tb Of course, I could ask IMDB instead of asking here. Just ignore that question =)

I recommend these: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick#Filmography

@Srivatsan I only recommend not to watch the last one... The book's much better.

Thanks guys for the recommendations...

:2390454: Schnitzler, Die Traumnovelle. Dream Story in English.

I liked it but I haven't read the book

Commutative algebra, a.k.a. the theory of affine schemes, is really annoying me right now...

Apparently Kubrick was Razzie-nominated for The Shining. That's new to me...

Affine schemes are just rings sleep-walking

I think part of the problem is that I have no idea what flat modules or projective modules etc. "really" are...

For projective modules this is easy: think vector bundles, but you know that, certainly.

Well, I proved that projective modules over a Noetherian ring are the same thing as locally free modules, but I certainly don't understand what I proved!

I wonder why there are three votes to close this question as, of all things, not constructive?

@HenningMakholm see here

@Srivatsan You should watch A Clockwork Orange

terrible intuitionist mods

@robjohn I was reading you answer (didn't know it's you) and thinking how nice someone could be spending lots of time to write this answer, when I read it till the end and I saw your .. avatar .. I thought, Uh oh nice and a little angry =)

@Gigili which answer were you reading?

The L'Hopital solution ...

@ZhenLin Does this help? (don't miss the Serre-Swan theorem)

Sri: Chaz like Charles (which is like champion, cheese, and crunch. )

@tb: Well, I do understand the connection between locally free sheaves and vector bundles - that's quite clear and intuitive. But the connection with projectiveness is not...

@robjohn Great answer by the way, well done.

perhaps the trouble is that I understand projectiveness in terms of the universal property, rather than something more internal.

@ZhenLin I see. I'm certainly not the right person to ask since you seem to have understood about as much as I do. Maybe this would make a good question: Intuitive understanding of projective and flat modules in algebraic geometry. Another option: Have you tried to read FAC?

No, I haven't tried to read FAC. I might try when I have lots more time (since I don't read French).

@Srivatsan Wow! 16 to go :)

@robjohn No, I didn't fix the estimate yet! :-).

@tb I swear, I don't edit them so often. =)

It was 20 in the morning...

Is anyone doing the continous->continuous edits parallelly? @tb

@Srivatsan psst...

@tb This is not too much of a distraction for others, is it?

I like Jonas Meyer habit of posting "answer comments" as CW.

@AsafKaragila Why not post it as an answer?

Huh?

Er, sorry. As a non-CW answer...

Never mind.

I think I would have done the same too =)

Because it's one of these things that you feel as though a single comment referencing another website of which you have no affiliation would answer.

For example, Wikipedia.

From the tags it may well be that this page is way above OPs head.

Indeed. It's probably some analysis lecturer using notation rather than actually saying something about l_p spaces.

If you want to understand more, you need to study more.

With that been said, I am going to sleep.

@Asaf: Goodnight!

@ZhenLin The notation L_0 usually refers to the space of all measurable functions modulo a.e. null-functions equipped with the topology of (local) convergence in measure. So \ell_0 = R^N with...

@ZhenLin Thanks. Let me know if you want me to tutor you in FM models :-)

@Asaf: Thanks for the offer, but I still haven't decided if I will do the essay. I will have to speak with the examiners/essay-setters first...

@tb: Ah. Interesting. Is it a Banach space like the others? I guess probably not...

@ZhenLin Of course. This is why I said "let me know..." :-)

@ZhenLin No, of course not, in general. It's a Fréchet space if the measure is finite. I've seen the notation \ell_0 used sometimes, but not that often.

I don't like it when maple gives me "∞".

@tb Oh, about the \sigma-finiteness. My advisor was a little bit mistaken. He was mumbling something about the supports of integrable functions being sigma-finite so everything is nice.

@JonasTeuwen So, you didn't trust me? /me offended :)

@tb No, I did trust you. I just went to tell him and then he said that it was not an error but something I had to verify.

It would be nice if he wrote more than "sigma-finite?" on the paper.

@JonasTeuwen I see...

I have calculated stuff for 7 hours to know that it works for sufficiently small values of 1 :-/.

@tb: Just trying my luck here, but would you happen to know if there's anyone in Europe doing ordinary (i.e. 1-dimensional) topos theory research other than in Cambridge?

@Zhen: well, there's Moerdijk and his group in Utrecht, and the group around Borceux in Louvain, for example.

(just the first two that came to mind)

One of the new arrivals from Utrecht informs me that Moerdijk seems to have left ordinary topos theory for higher-dimensional category theory. I'm not sure what Borceux is doing though, but not speaking French seems like an obstacle if I want to do a Ph.D. there...

Well, it is close to the Dutch speaking part where they will speak English but it probably is an obstacle, yes.

My lecturer did a postdoc in Louvain. Maybe I'll ask her about it.

@ZhenLin Yes, speaking French would certainly help. I know that Borceux speaks English quite well, but French is certainly preferable. I haven't followed the recent developments in topos theory, but yes, asking your lecturer or Johnstone is certainly a good idea.

I think the real problem will be at stores and so on :-).

(if we're talking about languages)

Hah, yes, I was more thinking about actually living there.

Although I imagine there will be academic difficulties as well if they insist on doing everything in French.

I don't think they will insist on you doing everything in French. Maybe the foreword.

But you can always ask someone to translate that for you.

@Zhen: Oh, Anders Kock in Denmark, of course.

Even in France many PhD theses are written in English.

@JonasTeuwen Well, don't tell that L. Lafforgue!

Ah, that's interesting. There was a visitor from France the other day telling us about the Ph.D. process in France and he mentioned that he planned to do his thesis in French.

:-).

@ZhenLin math.univ-lille1.fr/~portal/math.html well this guy wrote his thesis in English.

relief the first few pages are in French :)

If you write it in French you might have trouble finding a commission that can read it right?

I was looking at the MGP and it seems that in the last 11 years, the universities which have produced the most category theory / homological algebra Ph.D.s are Cambridge, Macquarie, Eskişehir Osmangazi, then followed by (IIRC) Louvain, VU Brussel, ETH Zürich, and Chicago.

@ZhenLin Oh, you counted me there, too :)

Of course.

@ZhenLin How do you get the MGP to display a year range?

I didn't. I copied the data into LibreOffice and did analysis there.

I see. That's probably what I'd have done, too

This is the last problem in my thesis.

(hint hint)

@Jonas: I have adjusted the L'Hopital proof to allow lim f(x)/x = g(x)/x = a.

Didn't take too much.

@robjohn Oh, nice. That is why I got the additional upvotes.

Why does this question which requires almost no effort +16 and my Mehler kernel question +2? :-).

@JonasTeuwen Ah, so OPs are not notified of updates to answers?

@tb No.

*omits bike-shedding reference*

@Jonas: Probably an indicator that the question is too localised. :p (Same thing happens to some of my more technical questions here...)

@Zhen Yes, probably.

@JonasTeuwen Good to know... Well, I mostly left a comment when I made a substantial update to my answer, but anyway, I was always unsure about that and thus somewhat hesitant because of my often quite trivial edits.

@tb Well, if it really adds something I would write a comment to notify the user.

I'll have to remember that. But I've never revised an old answer...

@JonasTeuwen I think I now see a simpler way to do it as well. I have to do some work IRL, then I will post a second answer or append the first one.

@robjohn Great!

I have tried to estimate something today. Which did not work. So I have done virtually nothing.

Well, maybe I have "examined impossible ways to solve the problem".

@JonasTeuwen Some have written papers on that :)

@tb Hah, but that is a little bit more high level than my problem. High school knowledge is enough.

captime! the downvote has been essentially eradicated :-)

Nice.

@robjohn Yesterday I was as far from cap as can be, today's not much better...

I have never reached the rep cap! :-).

@JonasTeuwen Nothing particularly great about it. Once it happened to me around noon and I got about 15 further votes that didn't count...

Oh, I don't need it.

My supervisor said that if I give my presentation using powerpoint I get deducted one point. For every effect another -1. I'm wondering how serious he is.

I have good math!

I think.

O noes, it blows up again!

yes it's not necessary to use powerpoint

LaTeX makes more sense for mathematics

Yes, of course.

But about deducting grades.

That makes me want to use powerpoint with very ugly effects.

lol

@JonasTeuwen I've yet to see a truly memorable math talk using powerpoint (or whatever else there is). Most of these talks with beamers were more than crappy.

Yes, me too.

Maybe I'll just use the blackboard!

That's waaaay better!

Not a whiteboard? :)

@JM Uh, I'm somewhat sensitive to the smells of these pens. It once happened to me that I blacked out in front of a class because of a particularly poisonous pen. *Tombé dans les pommes...*

Well, it's a Scylla-Charybdis situation. You're either allergic to chalk dust, or you're sensitive to ink solvent...

@tb Either that was one baaad pen, or you've been on the whiteboard a looong time...

@JM That is horrible.

@tb Yes, but it requires a bit more self-confidence I think.

Yeah, I'd like to get some of that dustless chalk they were talking about at MO. Too bad I know nobody in Japan.

We have the "dustless" chalk :-).

I still manage to create a lot of dust...

@JM It wasn't that long, maybe 15 minutes into the course, and yes, the pen was truly bad. I wasn't feeling that well on that day anyway, so that may have added to it. Good thing about it that I could then really argue why I absolutely had to have another room, which they denied the weeks before that incident when I complained...

Oh, it's not that "dustless"?

Well, maybe they have different "dustless" chalk.

so that's the value of those computerized boards

At ETH they have this super-greasy chalk. It doesn't produce that much dust, but it is impossible to wipe things out with a towel. So you have to use lots of water which creates quite the mess on the floor and that makes it dangerous for other reasons...

Eww. The need for water would be the turn-off for me.

Well, I wasn't used to these slippery blackboards and chalks they use at other universities. I was truly amazed how easy that stuff was to wipe off the first few times I gave talks elsewhere.

*bleeh* is there any reason why Google systematically denies access to the reference lists in books?

I think so, but I don't know why.

I noticed this relatively recently.

On a hunch, I tried looking at the Google version of one book I have, and put in a search string that only occurred in the bibliography.

"No results", it says. Bleh.