#holding Out Hope The New Documentary Confirms My Theory That 'died In September' Refers To The Suicide

This idea for an SCP article came to me in a dream, so it’s not necessarily good, but I have to get it out there. My subconscious was clearly influenced by memories of mathematical SCPs (like SCP-033 and SCP-1313) and semiotic SCPs (like SCP-4703, though I hadn’t actually read that one before, and another one I can’t for the life of me find right now but I’ll add it if I do).

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I got the Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage for free from Thriftbooks (after much fussing about getting the book rewards points spent for the best value) and it's like YES, SOMEONE WHO LIKES FOOTNOTING THEIR COMICS AS MUCH AS ME.

Also it's an amazing set of 4 panels

i think about this post a lot

Some doodles to mark 5 years of The Owl House, because I may be at work but I've gotta commemorate it somehow

"A Lying Witch and a Warden" premiered 5 years ago, on January 10, 2020. The episode was scripted by Dana Terrace (Tiny Nose):

directed by Stephen Sandoval (Mr. Sandoval):

with story by Dana Terrace, Rachel Vine (Viney), John Bailey Owen (Jerbo), and Zach Marcus (Barcus), and teleplay by Dana Terrace and Rachel Vine:

and storyboarded by Bosook Coburn (Bo), Catherine Harman-Mitchell (Cat), Stephen Sandoval, and Dana Terrace:

Yes, if you hadn't caught on yet, they all have self-inserts in the show.

Thanks for creating this universe!

AU where the odyssey takes place entirely in ikea

Wisdom of the creative arts and its significance in life

People sometimes look at me thinking that I’m simply ‘obsessed’ over the creative arts such as stories, characters, art, music, poetry, movies, games (yes I consider them an art form but that’s a story for another time) etc.. I understand why it’s easy to believe that I have characters on my wallpaper ‘just because’ I like them. There is nothing wrong with admiring characters simply because they’re cool or enjoy stories because they bring you joy. However, what frustrates me is how often people overlook WHY people like me care about the creative arts, and how easy it is that others undermine the deeper value and insights we gain from these stories, these characters, and the more abstract arts.

Creative art forms are often a microcosm of the world filled with the creator(s)’s own soul(s), coloured with the reflections of humanity - a beautiful, yet sometimes horrifying mosaic of our dreams, our nightmares, and our nature. It expresses what cannot be easily conveyed or rationalised. It is a form of wisdom meant to be felt viscerally and experienced, a unique form of communication that transcends time, diversity and logic. Just like other forms of knowledge and wisdom, this too, requires practice and learning to fully appreciate and grasp. However, unlike other disciplines, the creative arts is perhaps the most versatile due to its nature, with some of the greatest pieces bearing the capability of creating waves amongst people by touching their hearts and by caressing what makes us human.

For those of us who lack guidance and support in life, the creative art forms such as books, art, music and even games can help enlighten and educate us when others can’t. Yes, fiction is fiction, and non-fiction may be filled with biases or flawed views, but it can still be a lighthouse for those who seek light, and an anchor to those who are lost wandering about. There is much to gain, be it empathy, open mindedness, soft knowledge, resilience, discipline etc. from these creative art forms. It can encourage others to learn how to develop critical thinking skills, and to develop their own opinions and perspectives after digesting various truths and angles of the world. Of course, it is important to separate fiction from reality, and understand what can be applied in the real world, and what cannot. But the protection and guidance it brings cannot be undermined. As someone who sought solace in literature, music, art, dance, poetry etc. they have each formed a big part of who I am, and in shaping the values, principles, priorities, choices and ideals I hold in life. I have also gained numerous advice, mindsets and encouragement from them as I tackle the challenges of life. I found comfort in the creator’s message - in their embrace, in their message to me, in their experiences. I also found companionship in their arms, in knowing that I wasn’t alone in thinking certain ways, in feeling certain emotions, in hoping for certain ideals, in fearing various demons. It also inspired me to see how much effort creators put in their works to accurately convey their insightful thoughts, feelings and messages. How could I go through books, listen to music, look at art, without allowing myself the privilege and honour to thoroughly go through these works that are soaked in the blood, sweat and tears of the creators? Call people like us obsessed for spending time to dismantle these works, but it is through effort in understanding these arts, in creating these arts, that we can slowly gain wisdom from them.

There is nothing wrong in enjoying the creative arts as they are, without breaking them down into pieces to digest its value and wisdom, and applying it to your life. I often find myself using the creative arts as an outlet to escape reality and to express myself, but the wisdom of the arts is too often overlooked for the other disciplines. It saddens and frustrates me to see people think of art as a simple thing, that there is nothing to be gained out of art. But tell me, if there really is nothing to be gained in the creative arts - why has it lasted this long? Why can people still shed tears, or laugh in joy, when faced with these beautiful art forms? Why should there be this rigid hierarchy in disciplines where certain knowledge rank higher than others? Isn’t life too complex to be held onto such a strict standard where certain ‘skills’ and ‘knowledge’ are said to be ‘closer to truth’, and ‘closer to wisdom’ than others?

Is it not a form of wisdom itself to express one’s complex emotions with such clarity? To convey a message so powerful that these pieces would get banned? To spark a flame that would move a society? To become a mirror that reflects humanity better than any logic or science can convey? How can we easily overlook the effort, the time, and the skills it took, to create such complex and beautiful pieces that can move us in ways others can’t?

Of course, perhaps like the others, I sound ‘obsessed’, but I believe that as long as these creative art forms don’t interfere with the quality of one’s life, as long as your own unique balance is formed in enjoying the arts and in gaining the right wisdom for your real life, I think that’s the best gift the creative arts can offer someone.

Perhaps there are others that rely too much on the creative arts, those who become addicted, who make it their whole life - but in those cases, what are the chances that it is the creative arts that are their last thread to life? Their last anchor, their last hope, their last salvation amongst the chaos of this world? (Cough *Kim Dokja*) Is it so wrong to hold on to something that will help you take another breath, to be brave enough to live through another day, to give you hope when you see none? (Okay, that’s another tangent and gray area of discussion for another time) Of course, art is not salvation, but perhaps it may be enough to prolong someone’s sanity or life, before they can seek the help they need. Then, there are those few geniuses, those ‘lunatics’ as called by others - perhaps to them, they are willing to pay the price of becoming one with their art, compared to sacrificing their overwhelming love for the arts for a life in reality. But I can’t say much about that, as I’m not them. Then there’s also this notion of ‘balance’ that everyone preaches, to balance time in your dreams, in your clouds, in your stories vs. Reality. But that’s a tough discussion to navigate, as everyone has a different balance that suits their life, temperament, values, priorities and circumstances. 

I’d like to end with this quote from Honkai Star Rail

‘When it comes to gaming, things like race, lineage, allegiance, destiny, beliefs… they’re all insignificant. It’s good to remember that.’

Of course, the reality is more nuanced than that. Our race, lineage, allegiance, beliefs and environment influences us and hence, shapes the things we create. However, the result of these works, be it games, literature, music etc. can affect anyone, regardless of these things that separate us. It is often used to unite us, and enable us to communicate with one another in spite of these differences. It can even transcend time! Why do you think certain books have either been promoted or banned in the past? Why have certain artworks been criticised so heavily or enjoyed? Why have certain music been roughly casted away in shadows or promoted?

Anyways, I’m running out of steam. But coming back to the beginning, when I say that I have characters on my wallpapers, or carry stickers or keychains of them, I carry them with me because they remind me of values and principles I wish to uphold in life, they remind me of my ideals and encourage me by giving me strength. They remind me of our hopes, our despair, and most importantly - our resilience and strength. Yes I like them, but in much deeper ways than most people assume. I carry reminders of how I’d like to live my life, and of wisdom I’ve gained through these stories and arts. I take what I can apply to real life, and I take reality to see what influenced creators to create what they’ve created. 

Perhaps one day I’ll make a post about why I have certain characters on my wallpaper (my phone is on photo shuffle - it makes me happy to see different characters on my wallpaper). I also have certain music I hold dear to me, lyrics I have analysed, plays I love, poetry I enjoy, all for various reasons, and all of which I’ve put in energy to understand and apply in my life.

Anyways, thanks for reading my ramblings. I did not expect to write this much. I was explaining to someone recently about why I have wallpapers on my phone and it led me to yap to them about this topic, and I thought, why not write about it? This, alongside the issues with AI art influenced me to talk about this. I might post another one like this later that’s better written and thoroughly read through, since this was written in one sitting within the span of ~1 hour right before I go to sleep. I’m currently sleep deprived and exhausted from running certain errands and work today. Not sure if this will make sense to everyone, but I hope my sentiments come across, and I truly do wish others feel the same way I do. I cradle the arts with such intensity and warmth every day, and it is an important fuel that sparks the flame within me and gives me light in the form of wisdom and hope.

Edit: Just wanted to add, some people might say characters and art is all about perception and subjective. While that is a good point as there are definitely people who don’t see the value in other art forms or have the same perspective on them as I do + the fact that there are many valid and rational reasons why it is overlooked, but it still is true that the creative art forms we take in and learn influence the way we express ourselves and ideas. It is also all around us in photographs, news articles, blogs, YouTube, posts, TikTok, social media, or opinion articles (language can be loaded and biased), or in the music we listen to the daily, religious music, cultural music, Ads, memes, shows etc. There is perception, and how we ‘view’ the creative arts, and there is also a certain amount of truth that art can impact reality and people no matter how much we ‘value’ or ‘perceive’ it. I just feel like there’s a big gap between how we view art vs. how much it actually impacts us and our reality.

Of course, art is often more of a luxury, and with the state of the world and various circumstances, it is understandable it is overlooked. I’m just a little frustrated at this ‘gap’ in how we perceive art as a society vs. How much it ACTUALLY impacts us and influences us without us knowing. Our own perspective of how important something is and how much we ‘think’ it impacts us doesn’t always correlate to the truth of how significant something is, and how much the creative arts are actually involved in our lives. They influence a lot of things that we don’t perceive. They’re just not in a typical ‘creative’ or ‘abstract’ ‘art form’ that we think they exist in.

Wisdom and truth remains, even if we don’t ‘perceive’ it or ‘value’ it, no matter what form it comes in.

What would Michelle look like if she was an opinicus instead of a Grecian sphinx?

I normally only take reader questions from patreon or the comments of the website because it's easier for me to keep track of them there, but this one was cute and I wanted to answer it! So it's today's reader question!

Tentative Timeline for the Jeeves Stories

Note: This is almost impossible to get exactly accurate and should be viewed as hypothetical. Wodehouse himself seemed to pay little attention to chronology and consistency of cultural references, so the best I can do is guess. The novels in particular are difficult to arrange, since they are supposed to take place in such a short time period, yet seem to require more time if they are to occur as described.

According to this hypothetical timeline, Bertie Wooster was born around 1901. If so, he would have been seventeen when World War I ended and so could not have participated. If we suppose Jeeves to be ten to twenty years older, he would have been born around 1881-1891, making him between twenty-three and thirty-three when WWI began and ensuring that he would definitely have “dabbled in it to a certain extent,” as he tells Lord Rowcester in Ring for Jeeves.

“Jeeves Takes Charge” – Summer 1925 (Bertie is twenty-four, and the narration is taking place six years in the future, presumably 1931.)

“Extricating Young Gussie” – September 1925 (This story isn’t usually included in the series, but its events are referred to in later stories and so it’s clearly part of the timeline.)

“The Artistic Career of Corky”- Autumn 1925-sometime in 1926 (Necessarily takes place over a long period of time, possibly the entire New York trip.)

“Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg” – Autumn 1925 (A few months into the NY stay.)

“Jeeves and the Chump Cyril” – 1925 or 1926

 “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest” – Autumn 1926 (Set during Coolidge’s presidency (1923-1929), about a year into the stay in NY, “about the time of the year when New York is at its best.”)

“The Aunt and the Sluggard” – Spring 1927

“Jeeves in the Springtime” – April/May 1927

“Scoring off Jeeves” – Summer 1927

“Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch” – Summer 1927

“Aunt Agatha Takes the Count” – Summer 1927

 “Comrade Bingo” – Late July or early August 1927 (Around the time of the Goodwood Cup.)

“The Great Sermon Handicap” – August 1927

“The Purity of the Turf” – August or September 1927 (Three weeks into the stay at Twing.)

“Bertie Changes His Mind” –

“The Metropolitan Touch” – November-December 1927 (A Friday, December 23 is mentioned, making the only possible years in the right range 1921, 1927, or 1932. In light of information in later stories, 1927 seemed the most plausible option.)

“The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace” – Probably early in 1928 (Set during the time of an unspecified Oxford term. Bertie’s age is given as around twenty-five or –six.)

“Bingo and the Little Woman” – Between October 1927 and February 1928 (Invitation received to go shooting in Norfolk indicates that it’s sometime during the hunting season.)

“Without the Option” – March or April 1928 (Boat Race Night is usually the last weekend in March or the first weekend in April.)

 “Clustering Round Young Bingo” – Sometime in 1928

“Jeeves and the Impending Doom” – Spring[?] 1928

“The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy” – Spring[?] 1928 (Takes place sometime before June 1.)

[“The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy” – The mention of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley would set it around April-October 1924 or 1925. However, this does not fit the timeline as I’ve guessed at it, because it’s clearly set after Bertie’s brief engagement to Honoria Glossop. Adjusting the timeline to fit around this date would cause other problems, so I’ll call this an anomaly.]

“Fixing It for Freddie” – Summer[?] 1928

 “Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit” – December 1928

“Jeeves and the Song of Songs” – Sometime in 1929

“Episode of the Dog McIntosh” – Spring[?] 1929

“The Spot of Art” – Summer[?] 1929

“Jeeves and the Kid Clementina” – Summer[?] 1929

“The Love that Purifies” – August 1929

“Jeeves and the Old School Chum” – Autumn 1929

“Indian Summer of an Uncle” – Sometime in 1929

“The Ordeal of Young Tuppy” – November 1929

“Jeeves Makes an Omelette” – Winter 1929 or 1930

Thank You, Jeeves – July 1930

Right Ho, Jeeves – July 29-31, 1931 (Cannot take place the same year as Thank You, Jeeves, because TYJ begins around July 15 after a three-month trip to America, while RHJ opens around July 25 after a trip to Cannes that started at the beginning of June.)

The Code of the Woosters – Autumn 1931

“Jeeves and the Greasy Bird” – December 1931 (It’s said to be more than a year after Sir Roderick’s engagement in Thank You, Jeeves, and Bertie’s awareness of the Junior Ganymede Club suggests that it’s after The Code of the Woosters.)

The Mating Season – April 1932 (The events of Right Ho, Jeeves occurred the previous summer, while the mention of Boat Race Night and Bertie’s cousin Thomas returning to school—presumably for the summer term—suggest an early April date.)

Joy in the Morning – Summer 1932

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit – July 1932 (Aunt Dahlia is said to have been running Milady’s Boudoir, first mentioned in “Clustering Round Young Bingo,” for three years.)

How Right You Are, Jeeves – Summer 1933 (Jeeves goes on holiday, not the same one mentioned in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. Bertie’s moustache from the previous book is mentioned as having occurred a year ago. Aunt Dahlia is said to have run her journal for four years. The one thing I can’t account for is the claim that the events of Right Ho, Jeeves occurred the previous summer, so for purposes of expediency I will consider it an error.)

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves – Fall[?] 1933

Jeeves and the Tie That Binds – Fall[?] 1933 (Tuppy and Angela have been engaged for two years.)

Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen – Spring or summer 1934

Ring for Jeeves – June, sometime between 1946-1953 (Set explicitly post-World War II, with an emphasis on societal changes in the UK. Television is mentioned.)

Just stumbled upon a great philosophical debate while listening to a playlist on shuffle.

The esteemed philosopher Bill Joel puts forward that "It's still rock and roll to me" confidently declaring that rock and roll remains to some extent constant in how much it rocks.

However, his point is immediately challenged by philosopher Bob Seger who posits that "Todays music ain't got the same soul" and that he "Likes that old time rock and roll". Confidently declaring that rock and roll has declined in its rockness.

This is truly one of the most important debates facing philosophy today.

Explaining math jokes

So yeah I said I was gonna do it and now is the time I think (if I wait any longer I'm gonna have too much jokes to explain) IMPORTANT: I had a lot of trouble writing this because I don't really know what background to assume the reader has. So at each new explanation, assumed background changes. Difficulty of the concepts explained is in no particular order. So if there is something you don't understand, that's fine, just go read something else. Dually, if there is something you already know well, don't throw away the whole post. Though it is very possible you already know everything I'm gonna rant about lol Anyways let's get to it

geometric group theory talk but on the speaker’s slide instead of the Cayley graph of the free group on two generators there’s just loss

(link) Geometric group theory is a subfield of math that studies groups using geometry. A particular geometric thing that is often interesting to study for a given group is its Cayley graph, which roughly speaking is a graph that reflects in a way the structure of the group. My neurodivergent brain thought the Calyey graph of the free group on two generators lowkey looks like the abstracted loss meme in the original post:

sooo, turns out the #latex tag is not for typography enthusiasts

(link) LaTeX is a typesetting engine and the industry standard for math. It's the thing almost everyone uses to typeset beautiful math equations and stuff on computers. If you're seriously interested in math I'd recommend you learn it. A good place to start would be Overleaf which is a free online LaTeX editor and has some tutorials on how to get started, though eventually you may want to switch to doing LaTeX on your computer directly

so a homological algebraist goes to see their therapist and says “doc, i’ve got complexes”

(link) Homological algebra is a branch of algebra that was born from algebraic topology. It has become widely used in many parts of math because of the computational power it brings. The gist of it is that people define a thing called a chain complex, that is a sequence of abelian groups (or modules, or maybe something even more general, look up abelian categories), with homomorphisms from one abelian group to the next called differentials, such that doing one differential then the next always gives you zero:

If you're more comfortable with linear algebra, you can replace "abelian group" with "vector space" and "homomorphism" by "linear map". The fact that doing one differential then the next gives you zero means that the image of one differential is contained in the kernel of the next. Homological algebra is about finding ways to calculate exactly how far away we are from the image of a differential being exactly the kernel of the next. This is made precise when one defines homology groups, which are the quotient Ker(d_n)/Im(d_{n+1}). What happens in practice when we apply homological algebra is that we try to define an interesting chain complex related to what we are doing, so that the homology groups tell us something interesting about what's going on with whatever math thing interests us, and then we apply methods from homological algebra to calculate them. Any serious example of homological algebra being used is going to require a bit of math background, but two examples I can give are singular homology, from algebraic topology, and de Rham cohomology, from differential geometry (don't worry about the co-, it just means the indices go up instead of down). So yeah a homological algebraist would have complexes

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in Hilbert’s Hotel

(link) Hilbert's Hotel is an imaginary hotel with infinitely many rooms, that is one room labeled zero, one room labeled one, one room labeled two, and so on. One room for every natural number. It reminds me of the backrooms, hence the joke. Hilbert's hotel is commonly used as a metaphor to think about how infinity behaves and how bijections work. For instance, if the hotel was full, but one new guest showed up, you could still get them a room: simply tell the person occupying room number n to move to room number n+1. Then room 0 will be empty and the new guest can stay in it. However, quite interestingly, it is possible for too many guests to show up and the hotel to be unable to give a room to all of them.

If you speak French, excellent math youtuber El jj (I heavily recommend you subscribe to his channel!) has a very good video on Hilbert's Hotel.

If you don't speak French but still speak English, here's a Veritasium video on Hilbert's hotel, and a Ted-Ed video on it.

“cats are liquid” factoid actually formalized by mathematicians as saying a cat is only truly defined up to homeomorphism

(link) Topological spaces are mathematical objects that abstract away the concept of nearness. What do I mean? Well, a topological space is a set X, together with a collection of subsets called "a topology", that in way specifies which points are "near" each other. This allows us to generalize a lot of concepts from real analysis, for instance limits: if you have a sequence of points (x_n), and they get "nearer" and "nearer" to some point x, well that point can be called the limit of the sequence. But topology also turns out to be massively useful to geometry: if I only gave you the set of points of a sphere, you wouldn't know they make up a sphere because you wouldn't know how to assemble them. But if I give you the set of points of a sphere and the correct topology on it, then you can actually know it is a sphere and do stuff with it. But as always, in math, we only consider things up to some notion of being "the same". This notion of "the same" for topological spaces is called "homeomorphism", and two things being homeomorphic corresponds to the more intuitive geometric intuition of "I can continuously deform one thing into the other without cutting or gluing stuff". For instance, a cube is homeomorphic to a sphere:

Or more famously, a mug is homeomorphic to a donut:

So cats only truly being defined up to homeomorphism kinda works to say they're liquid. Not math, but physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin did actual physics on cats being liquid and was award the 2017 IgNobel prize in physics for it.

i would describe my body type as only defined up to homotopy equivalence

(link) Homotopy equivalence is a weaker notion of two topological spaces "being the same". I won't go into details but I have seen it being describe as kind of like a homeomorphism, but you are also allowed to inflate/deflate objects. For instance, a filled cube is a "3d object" in a way (when you are inside the cube, you can move in 3 directions). This means it will never be homeomorphic to a 2d square because a property of homeomorphisms is that they preserve dimensions. But, the cube is homotopy equivalent to the square, because you can "deflate" the cube and squish it to make it a square. In fact, it is even homotopy equivalent to a point (you can just deflate it completely). Homotopy equivalence is weaker (more permissive) than homeomorphism, that is if two things are homeomorphic, then they must be homotopy equivalent, but not the other way around. You may ask yourself why we would care about a notion weaker than homeomorphisms that can't even tell apart points and cubes, and that's a fair question. I will provide one answer but there are definitely many more I haven't even learned yet. In algebraic topology, we are concerned with studying spaces by attaching algebraic thingies to them. Why do we do that? Because telling apart spaces is hard. Think about it: how do you prove a donut is not homeomorphic to a sphere? You'd have to consider all possible deformations of a donut and show none of them is a sphere. This is mathematically hopeless. Algebraic topology solves this by attaching algebraic invariants to spaces. What do I mean? Well we have a way of saying that a donut has "one hole" and a sphere has "zero holes", and we have a theorem saying that if two things are homeorphic they must have the same number of holes (the number of holes is an invariant). Therefore we know that a donut cannot be homeomorphic to a sphere. Usually we have more sophisticated invariants (homotopy groups, homology groups, the cohomology ring, and other stuff) that are not just numbers but algebraic structures, but the same principle remains. It turns out a lot of these invariants are actually invariants for homotopy equivalence, that is, they will not be able to tell apart homotopy equivalent spaces. This is useful to know: for instance, a band and a Möbius band are both homotopic to a circle, so you know that if you want to tell them apart, you're going to need more than the classical algebraic invariants (if you know a bit of algebraic topology and you're curious about that, this can be done by thinking of them as vector bundles, but also through more elementary methods, see this stackexchange post). Also, if you want to calculate some invariants for a complicated space, a good place to start can be to try to find a less complicated space that is homotopy equivalent to the original space (and this is often doable since homotopy equivalence is a kind of weak notion).

in ‘Murica land of the free every module is born with a basis

(link) In 1st-year linear algebra, we study vector spaces over fields. But in more advanced linear algebra, we study modules over rings, which are basically vector spaces, but over rings instead of fields. It turns out dropping the condition that every non-zero scalar must be invertible makes the algebra much more complicated (and interesting!). When a module has a basis, we say it is free, hence the joke. If this basis is finite, we say that the module has finite rank, and the length of the basis is the rank of the module (exactly like dimension for vector spaces!), hence the tag "not every module ranks the same though".

testicular torsion? this wouldn’t happen over a field

(link) Continuing on modules, modules can sometimes have what is called torsion. Let's take Z-modules, or as you may know them, abelian groups! Indeed, a "vector space over Z" is actually the same as an abelian group: any module has an underlying abelian group (just forget you know how to scale elements) and conversely, if you take an abelian group, you know that any element a is supposed to be 1a, so 2a must be (1+1)a = 1a + 1a = a + a. More generally, for any positive integer n, n.a = a + ... + a, n times, and if n is negative, n.a = (-a) + ... + (-a), n times. So knowing how addition works actually tells us how Z must scale elements. With that out of the way, take the Z-module formed by the integers mod n, Z/nZ. It is an abelian group, so a Z-module, but something weird happens here that doesn't happen in a vector space: n.1 = 0. You can scale something, by a non-zero scalar (in fact a non-zero-divisor scalar), and still end up with 0. This is known as torsion, and vector spaces (modules over fields) don't have that. So yeah, testicular torsion? that wouldn't happen over a field. Also, watch out: the notion of torsion for a module over a ring is not necessarily the same as the notion of torsion for the underlying abelian group. Z/4Z doesn't have torsion, when seen as a Z/4Z-module.

Mathematical band names

(link) For these posts, I'll be quickly explaining each band name, and i'll be including good additions from other peeps! (with proper credit of course, you can't expect a wannabe-academic to not cite their sources) (also plagiarism is bad) (if no one is credit that means I thought of the band name)

Algebrasmith, The Smathing Pumpkins, System of an Equations, My Mathematical Romance, I Don't Know How But They Found X, Will Wood and the Tape Measures (by @dorothytheexplorothy), DECO*3^3 (by @associativeglassdesert), The Teach Boys, Dire Straight Lines, n Directions, XYZ Top, Mathallica: I have nothing to explain here

Rage against the Module: if you've read the parts of this post about modules, you get it (partly inspired by the commutative algebra class I'm taking right now, I love it, but I've been stuck on a problem for some time)

The pRofinite Stones: a profinite space is a topological space obtained by some process involving finite, discrete spaces. They are usually called Stone spaces, hence the joke

Mariah Cayley: Arthur Cayley was a mathematician. It's the same Cayley from the Cayley graphs! (also Cayley-Hamilton, if you've heard of the theorem)

Billie Eigen: eigenvalues and eigenvectors are linear algebra concepts. For a given operator on a space, its eigenvalues are scalars that tell us a lot about the operator. This is not my field but I have heard in quantum physics physical quantities like mass, speed, etc are replaced by operators, and eigenvalues correspond to states the physical system can be in

Smash Product: in algebraic topology/homotopy theory, the smash product is an operation on pointed topological spaces that is interesting for categorical purposes (it gives a symmetric monoidal category structure to the category of compactly generated pointed topological spaces, if you know what that means) somebody once told me, the world is categories

FOIL out boy (by @mathsbian): FOIL is a way of remembering how to expand products that some people learn. It means First, Outer, Inner, Last. So if you expand (a+b)(c+d) using FOIL, you get ac + ad + bc + bd.

Sheaf in a Birdcage (by @dorothytheexplorothy): a (pre)sheaf is a way of assigning algebraic data to a topological space (or a generalized notion of space). A presheaf is a sheaf if the data respects some locality condition. (pre)sheaves were introduced by Jean Leray but really used by Grothendieck to completely transform algebraic geometry, and are now widely used in modern geometry (they show up to abstract the notion of "a geometric thing"). I can't explain much more as I am still learning about sheaf theory!

The Curry-Howard correspondents (by @dorothytheexplorothy): the Curry-Howard correspondence, in logic/theoretical computer science, essentially says that algorithms (computer programs) correspond to mathematical (constructive) proofs. I'm no computer scientist or logician so I'll avoid saying dumb stuff by not trying to explain more, but I know it can be made more precise using lambda calculus.

Le(ast com)mon Demoninator (by @dorothytheexplorothy): I don't think I have to explain anything here (let's be honest, if you're reading this, you probably already know what a least common denominator is), but I will say that the band name being spoofed here is Lemon Demon (Neil Cicierega's musical project) and I love his music go listen to it. Also I love the word demoninator thank you for that dottie

Taylor Serieswift (by @associativeglassdesert): a Taylor series is an infinite sum that approximates a nice-enough (analytic) function around a point. This is useful because the Taylor series only depends on the derivatives of the function at one point but can approximate its behavior on more that one point, and also because the Taylor series is a power series, so a more tractable kind of function. In particular if we truncate it, that is stop at some term, we get a polynomial that approximates our function well around a point, and polynomials are very nice to work with (this is where kinda cursed stuff you may have seen in physics like sin(x) = x or tan(x) = x comes from!)

mxmmatrix (by @associativeglassdesert): you may have heard a matrix is a table of numbers. Actually, it's much more than that. Matrices are secretly functions! In fact, very special kind of functions (linear maps) between very special kind of objects (finite-dimensional vector spaces). And if you've seen how to multiply matrices before but have not been told why we do it that way, be not afraid, there is actually an answer. The answer is that when we take some x, do one linear map f to get f(x), then another linear map g to get g(f(x)), we actually end up with a new linear map, gf. And if you take a matrix representing f and multiply it (left) by a matrix representing g, you get a matrix representing gf. This is why the matrix product is done like that: it's actually composition of functions! If this interests you, consider reading more about abstract linear algebra.

Ring Starr (by @associativeglassdesert): a ring is an algebraic structure. Take the integers. What can we do with them? We can add them together, addition is associative (when adding a bunch of stuff we don't need parentheses), commutative (a+b = b+a), we have zero that doesn't do anything when adding (a+0 = a), and we have opposites: for any integer a, we have another integer -a such that (a + (-a) = 0). But we also have multiplication: multiplication is associative (no need for parentheses again), commutative, we have 1 and multiplying by 1 doesn't do anything, and multiplication distributes over addition. Now, re-read what I just said but replace "integer" by "real number". Or "complex number". When seeing such similar behavior by different things (there are in fact many more examples that those I just gave), mathematicians are compelled to abstract away and imagine rings. A ring is a set of stuff, with some way to add the stuff and some way to multiply the stuff that satisfies the properties I talked about above. Sometimes we also drop some properties, for instance we allow multiplication to not be commutative (ab =/= ba). By allowing this, square matrices of a given dimension form a ring! Quaternions, if you know what they are, also form a ring. A lot of things are rings. Rings are cool. Learn about rings.

WLOGic (by @associativeglassdesert): WLOG is mathematician speak for "without loss of generality".

Alice and Bob Cooper: in many math problems, people are called Alice and Bob. Because A and B. Yes there is a Wikipedia page for this

The four Toposes: a topos is a kind of category meant to resemble a topological space. Grothendieck toposes are used in algebraic geometry and elementary topoi are used in logic. I can't explain more since I don't really know anything about topoises besides that they are kinda scary and that people really like to argue about what the plural of "topos" should be

Green-Tao Day: the Green-Tao theorem says that if you have a positive integer n, then you can find prime numbers p1, p2, ..., pn, such that they are evenly spaced (or equivalently, in an arithmetic progression). It's pretty neat. I have no idea how the proof goes, though. It must be pretty complicated, since it was proven in 2004.

Aut(Kast)/Inn(Kast): I'm really proud of that one. So if you have a group G, you can look at bijective group homomorphisms from G to G, or as they are more well-known, automorphisms of G. Together with composition, they form a group, called Aut(G). Now we already know of some automorphisms of G: if g is any element of G, then x ↦ gxg^{-1} is an automorphism of G (proof is left as an exercise to the tumblr). These automorphisms are called inner automorphisms of G, and they form a normal subgroup of Aut(G). The quotient group Aut(G)/Inn(G) is called the outer automorphisms of G and denoted Out(G), which is reason behind the band name.

Depeche modulo: modulo is a math word that means "up to [some notion of being the same]". For instance the integers modulo 7 are the integers but we declare that two integers a and b are the same if 7 divides a-b. From there we get modular arithmetic which you may have heard of. This kind of operation is called a quotient and is insanely useful in all branches of mathematics.

Phew! We're done with the band names. For now.

"oh you like math? what's 1975 times 7869?" well that's a great question Jimmy but to answer it first I need to construct the natural numbers. [...]

(link) So this is a post about a type of response math people get when they say they do math which is that people automatically assume this give us insane mental math power. It does not. The rest of the post is about constructing the natural numbers in the ZFC axiomatic system. I'm kinda lazy and don't want to get into all that but here's a good video by certified good math channel Another Roof about it: what IS a number? The same channel has several other videos on that same topic, go watch em if you're interested

1957 times 7869 (IF IT EVEN EXISTS) is the universal object with morphisms into 1957 and 7869

This is a joke by @dorothytheexplorothy in the notes of the previous post. The joke here comes from interpreting "times" are referring to the categorical notion of product. I'm actually not gonna explain anything here because 1) this post is taking forever to write and 2) I will probably rant about category theory in the future. Here are two videos by Oliver Lugg you can watch:

27 Unhelpful Facts About Category Theory (funni video)

A Sensible Introduction to Category Theory (serius video)

and here are two books you can use to learn more if you're interested:

Seven Sketches in Compositionality (very applied, very nice, I think easy to read)

Basic Category Theory (less applied, is a typical math book)

she overfull on my \hbox till i (5.40884pt too wide)

(link) This she on my till i joke is based on a LaTeX warning you get when it can't figure out how to typeset your document well and that leads to a margin being exceeded.

Time for the math battle reblog chain

(half of the posts are by @dorothytheexplorothy)

fuck you *forgets your group is a group and only remembers it's a set now*

So any group has an underlying set, and any group homomorphism is actually a map between these underlying sets. This means that the operation of "forgetting a group is a group and only remembering it's a set" is a functor. This is less useless than you might think, because of adjunctions.

two can play at that game *constructs a free group over this set, even bigger and better than the one I had*

So basically in lots of cases the functor that forgets some structure is (right) adjoint to some other functor. You do not need to know exactly what this means to read the rest, don't worry. What it means is basically that from the operation of forgetting some structure, we can get another operation, which adds structure, in a "natural" way. In the case of forgetting a group is a group and only remembering it's a set, the adjoint functor is the "free group" functor, that takes a set and constructs the free group on it. This idea of free objects works not just for groups but for a whole lotta stuff. See this part of the Wikipedia page on forgetful functors for some information.

oh don't get me started *abelianizes your free group, now it's just a big direct sum of Z's*

A non-abelian group can be turned into one through abelianization, which is quotienting out by the commutator subgroup. This makes sense: commutativity is asking ab = ba for all a, b, which is asking aba^{-1} b^{-1} = 1 for all a, b, which is precisely what we get when quotienting by the subgroup generated by words of the form aba^{-1} b^{-1}. Abelianization is also a functor, so it fits the theme. The abelianization of a free group is a free abelian group, and a free abelian group is a direct sum of a bunch of copies of Z.

big mistake, friend *moves over to the endomorphism group over that group and treating composition as multiplication, thus replacing it with a unital ring*

The endomorphism group of an abelian group is actually a ring (like in linear algebra, endomorphisms form a unital ring with composition as multiplication). I don't think this construction is functorial, though? (correct me if I'm wrong on that. correct me if I'm wrong on anything, really. if i'm wrong about stuff send me an ask and i'll fix it)

you fool, you fell right into my trap! *takes the field of fractions of your ring* have fun working in the category of fields! now you only have monomorphisms and your eyes to shed tears

So I thought I had the advantage here because fields are, categorically speaking, very bad. This is (I think) mainly because a homormorphism of fields is always injective (so is a monomorphism, that is left-cancellable). In fact, products of fields don't exist, direct sum of fields don't exist, a lot of categorical constructions we usually like don't exist in this category. We basically only have inclusions. I will elaborate on why I was wrong in my post here in a bit

fuckkk idk enough about schemes or whatever to get out of this! you've bested me X(

Schemes are the main objects of study of algebraic geometry. I won't being to try and explain what they are because it is very abstract and I don't even really understand the definition (yet). I just know they're algebraic geometer's analogue of a "geometric object", like how smooth manifolds are to a differential geometer.

wait actually I just realized the ring of endomorphisms of a free abelian group has no business being an integral domain, or even commutative. so I think taking the field of fractions makes no sense, and I actually lost the battle.

So the field of fractions construction only makes sense for integral domains. The name of this construction is really explicit: passing from an integral domain to its field of fractions is the same thing as passing from Z to Q, or from k[X] to k(X) if you know what that is. However I made a mistake, since the ring we were talking about is almost never commutative (much like matrices).

WON ON A TECHNICALITY LET'S GOOOOO

well played, dottie

yeah, uh, we oidified your boyfriend. yeah we took his core concept and horizontally categorified it. yeah he's (or they're?) a many-object version of himself now. sorry about your one-object boyfriendoid

(link) Oidification (also known as horizontal categorification but "oidification" sounds funnier) is a way of categorifying a concept, by turning it in a "many-object" version of itself. For instance, a one-object category is precisely a monoid, so the concept of category is the oidification of the concept of a monoid. A category where every morphism is invertible is called a groupoid, and a one-object groupoid is precisely a group. The name "oidification" probably comes from the fact that after being oidified, the name of the concept gets added the suffix -oid. So a category is a monoidoid. In fact, you can even have monoidal monoidoids. Category theory really is well-suited to shitposting huh

My advisor [...] stared into my soul and noticed I liked categories. It's over for me, i am going to end up a homotopy theorist, or worse, a youtuber

(link) Category theory has the reputation of being abstract nonsense. I don't disagree. I guess I have a slightly-above-average tolerance to category theory and algebra. This has led to a not-insignificant amount of people in my life telling me I'm gonna end up in one of the abstract-nonsense-related fields like homotopy theory, infinity-category theory, etc. The "or worse, a youtuber" part was stolen from the following quote

Research shows that when someone becomes personally invested in an idea, they can become very close-minded. Or worse, a youtuber.

-hbomberguy, Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response (4:12)

(this video is incredible, if you haven't seen it yet, go watch it)

PHEW.

I'm done. For now. This took multiple hours to write. I hope you enjoyed this post! If you enjoyed it, please let me know! If you have any questions or want to tell me "youre doing good lad" or want to yell at me, my asks are open! Thank you for reading this far! If there is a post I talked about here you found funny, you can click on the (link) to look at the original post. Give me those sweet sweet statistics. I crave them. I NEED that dopamine hit of knowing someone interacted with my blog. ok bye