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The enormous mouth of hell

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 19:41:13 | [standalone]

To sharks, the surface of the sea is the enormous mouth of hell¹. An immense overhead vortex filled to bursting with sunlight.

I’ve lived most of my life with a deep sense of terror, the mental state of a deer walking back and forth forever across a busy highway at night. Or I guess, a shark bobbing along the shallows, staring into the blinding white holocaust of its own tartarus. Hell throws pale caustics along the seafloor, dancing and burning and shivering.

I thought this was abnormal and spent a lot of time thinking about how this fear and dread might be unique to me, especially as I saw the people around me go about their daily lives utterly unfazed. If you have alarm bells constantly clamoring inside of you, it’s no wonder you become a selfish and solipsistic person. You can’t really spare an ounce of attention on anything else if there is an unbearable, endless scream coming from inside of you, every second of every day. Unlike you, it never runs out of breath.

A month ago I wrote about idiots but never made it clear that I was one of those private people in question. Not that it required any mental gymnastics to conclude; it only makes sense that the definition terrified me because I saw so much of myself in its dull history.

I was wrong, though, and not even all that deep down, I knew I was wrong. This sort of anxiety is nothing new, or unique. Cue that beautiful, if a little overused James Baldwin quote:

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.

This effect only compounds the further the author is from you, whether temporally or geographically (and therefore culturally). Here I am in 2024 sitting in the belly of the convalescent American empire, reading Heraclitus, a man who believed that everything in the world came from fire, and to fire all things would eventually return. His most famous aphorism must be the observation that you never step in the same river twice. In the 5th century BC he wrote that the sun we saw rising with every morning was in fact new, a fresh incarnation appearing every twenty-four hours.

Two thousand years later, the French astronomer, mathematician, and engineer Laplace would try and produce a formal answer to the so-called “sunrise problem”, which asks, “what is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?”, using Bayesian statistical methods which are now a standard part of high-school stats curricula everywhere—what was once cutting-edge research mathematics is now accessible to precocious twelve-year-olds.

And of course, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which is far older than Heraclitus and Laplace both, says,

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new is under the sun.

But not every object of study must be something as old and fundamental as the sun. So much has accumulated and been packed into dense strata of information. Some of this is conveyed to newer generations and much more of it is lost forever. Every day the world must produce exabytes of data while just as much is rendered inaccessible or just annihilated. Some people say that the last scholar to have read everything ever published in his time was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he died in the 1800s. I don’t know what would happen if someone could theoretically compress and embed mankind’s collective textual output into his brain now; maybe it would be like those ridiculously large numbers that pop up in Ramsey theory which would literally cause a black hole to form in your brain, if you could physically comprehend them in their whole.

All of this to say that there’s been enough written about the sad, wet, spiritual discharge that I started with. Many people produce it almost involuntarily, dribbling out of you all mucosal. So why do I choose to continue writing this anyway?

But of course, once you yourself experience it, you get the feeling that it must be the first manifestation of its kind in the world. “It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”² Nothing really assuages this terror. Though I have to believe that, like grief, or other sadnesses, it somehow ends up taking up less and less measure as time goes on, until one day you realise you’ve gone twenty-four hours without having noticed that internal scream.

I’m a long way from that day, though.

Proving the existence of God in Lean 4

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:58:41 | [standalone]

A few weeks ago, I talked about creating types for basic algebraic objects in the proof assistant Lean. But how exactly to go about writing proofs? That’s a post for later, but for now, here is an unorthodox (and un-Orthodox, lol) example of a Lean proof: a rendition in Lean of Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s proof that God exists, written by Cha Bulhwi.

The link (Git).

A code excerpt:

class Anselm (Being : Type u) extends PartialOrder Being where
  Conceivable : Being → Prop
  InUnderstanding : Being → Prop
  InReality : Being → Prop
  lt_of_inUnderstanding_not_inReality_inReality {x y : Being} : InUnderstanding x → ¬InReality x →
    InReality y → x < y
  inUnderstanding_of_isGreatest_conceivable {x : Being} : IsGreatest Conceivable x → InUnderstanding x
  exists_conceivable_and_inReality : ∃ (x : Being), Conceivable x ∧ InReality x

Idiot

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 19:49:33 | [standalone]

An idiot is someone who either refuses—or is unable—to participate in a world larger than himself. His line of sight ends exactly where it ends (about three miles out, if you were to draw a line tangent to the Earth’s curvature and then take the projection of it). He is solitary, though whether this lifestyle is out of necessity or out of his own volition, he is no longer able to discern. His isolation is not one borne out of contemplation (like a monk’s) or in service of creation (like Glenn Gould, who once said “cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing” for an “artist who wants to do creative work”). His isolation is uniquely pointless.

A turn of phrase which is idiomatic is latched onto its language of origin, like a remora on a shark; the usual rules can’t explain it, and without its shark it is little more than an inconvenience. (But to write “idiomatically” in a programming language is a good thing! it is to use it fully—see “Pythonic”, which describes code that was written with the conventions of Python instead of against them, suggesting a lockstep between philosophy and design.) An idiosyncrasy, the loneliest trait, is defined by belonging to exactly one person.

The Ancient Greek “idio-”: pertaining to one’s own, personal, distinct, private. The German “eigen-”. (An eigenvector is a vector which maintains its direction under a linear transformation, preserving its “own-ness”, the idiot element.) The Middle English fossils of owe, ought, own. The Latin “sōlus”. Isola, island (the latter being unrelated, coming from a root meaning “in salt”).

When I first stumbled upon it, something about the etymology above paralysed me with fear. The farther back I went, the more dreadful the connotation of the word became, like looking at the gnarled ancestors of (what are now) mundane fruit, a thousand years ago when they were skeletal, full of venom, encased in spines and tough shells—though they have since become vestigial, declawed, and genetically engineered to never harm us ever again.

It’s incredible how the modern meaning is so much easier to digest. Someone stupid and uneducated—alright, I can handle being called that. But the urtext of it all—“private person”—feels like a death knell. When I think about it, it’s like a tickle to the limbic system. In prehistoric times, wouldn’t the idiot be the first to die, trapped inside his own-ness? Scratch that, you don’t even need to look back to prehistory to see idiots dying. Does it say something about me as a person when the fear of failing to assimilate dwarfs the fear of failing to understand?

Like looking at the geneaology of a word, a foreign language can rupture the thick, rusty skin which grows around our native one, briefly exposing the pure denotations to the world until it inevitably oxidizes inside speech. Words over-familiar to us, especially names, lose their power by virtue of their familiarity. Today in my Russian class we mentioned how strange it was that the Pacific Ocean in Russian is called Тихий океан, literally “quiet ocean”. Then it struck us, pacific, to be pacific, to be pacified, to be quiet. For a brief moment I envisioned that ocean, and I could imagine how calm it would’ve had to have been for Magellan to call it the quiet ocean, a perfectly flat, blue-on-blue bifurcation of the world, the place where all sounds go to die.

Seeing a word as it was used in another civilization, or in the context of a different language entirely, lets us simulate coming into brief contact with its core. Experiencing this brings me one tiny step closer to understanding the universal fascination with the Logos, which spans continents and millenia. The Stoics referred to the Logos Spermatikos: at once the generator and annihilator of the world, or in other words, the divine lattice which keeps it all from coming apart. There might be one solace. Even idiots, as full of their own-ness as they are, must be in thrall to this natural order.

Summer in Seoul

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 21:40:46 | [standalone]

This summer was the first time I stepped foot in my birth country without my parents. I wasn’t there alone; my boyfriend sat beside me, sleeping through most of the nine-hour flight. We hadn’t seen each other in just over a year. All the people I’m closest to are scattered across the world, which is part and parcel of being an international student. My boyfriend, who I’ll call Sam, goes to college in China, and the time difference between us is a literal twelve hours off, thirteen after Daylight Savings kicks in. When my day is just getting started, his is winding down. Sometimes finding the right time to have a conversation feels like I’m a dog chasing its own tail.

When we arrived, Sam got held up in Immigrations while I coasted in through an automated fingerprint scan. As I waited for him—and it took nearly an hour—I considered the passport in my hand. It was the first time that it had a meaningful impact on me, apart from my family, not just via apocryphal paperwork and vague notions of patriotic identity. It had let me skip a line.

On the taxi ride to our hotel (Incheon International Airport is on an island, about an hour’s drive away from Seoul), the taxi driver remarked to me, “you speak Korean like a foreigner”. I had said a sum total of like ten words, so it couldn’t have just been my pronunciation—I know for sure that I don’t have much of an accent, and that the biggest giveaway is that all my sentences tend to die prematurely, tapering off into mumbling. What he must have meant was that I didn’t seem Korean, which is true. Every time I land in Korea—and this sounds so silly and superficial but it’s the truth—I’m struck by how pale everyone is, and how everyone dresses in more or less the same general style, excepting the more artistic and avant-garde creatives of Hongdae and the like. I’m very obviously not cut from the same cloth, but hundreds of thousands of words have been poured into gyopo-centred solipsism, and I’m going to try not to contribute to it here.

The taxi driver asked me where Sam was from. “Morocco”, I replied, dazed and tired out of my mind. “Morocco! Morocco is a great country!” I glanced over at Sam, cocking my head—though I knew he didn’t understand. “Oh, is it really?” Morocco had made international news last year after being the first African nation to advance to the semi-finals of the World Cup, so I suppose there are a lot of eyes on it lately, at least where football is concerned. And Koreans love their football.

I met my grandparents the day after I arrived. They live at the northernmost district of Seoul, a place called 동봉구 (Dobong-gu), where I spent the first five or so years of my life, and about ten of my summers after that. It is situated next to a ridge of mountains so green that they look blue, and it is a world apart from the bustling nucleus of Seoul. During the winter, the mountains shed their green coats and don caps of snow. I only have a single memory of those white-capped mountains. We stayed in 명동 (Myeongdong), which is Seoul’s beating heart. The last time I had been in Myeongdong, more than four years ago, it had been an atrophied shell of itself due to the bleak and lean Covid years, but at some point after I left, it had undergone a miraculous defibrillation, a total resurrection.

In Myeongdong, there seems to be more Japanese tourists than anyone else. Sure, there are plenty of people from all around the world; as we walked through the narrow streets and squeezed past crowds in cramped pop-up stores, we would hear smatterings of French, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, and of course the ubiquitous English. But at least seven out of ten times, if you saw an Asian tourist, it was almost certain that they were Japanese. This happened in Busan, too, where there somehow seemed to be more Japanese tourists than in Seoul. Statistically, I’d never been in a situation like this before. It was to the point where when I ever stumbled over a word in Korean, or didn’t catch what the cashier or hotel clerk or waiter had asked me the first time, they would lean in and then repeat their request in imploring Japanese: Pa-supo-to, kudasai.

Somehow I’m almost never assumed to be Korean while I’m walking around in Korea, and once upon a time that would’ve been a source of a lot of angst. At this point in my life, though, it’s just a mild inconvenience at best and genuinely humiliating at worst (though it rarely gets that bad). My mom constantly gets mistaken as a citizen of whatever country she happens to be travelling in at the moment: in Russia, people on the street would ask her for directions (in Russian!), assuming she had Kazakh or Uzbek ancestry. The same thing happened to her in Japan. These are all amusing anecdotes, but being instantly clocked as a not-quite citizen while walking around in my natal city left me feeling like I was failing a test I wasn’t even aware I was enrolled in. I envisioned myself walking around with a name tag on my chest: “Hi, I’m Imya, and I swear to god I’m Korean, so just speak to me in Korean, OK?”

Sam talked to me a lot about landing in China for the first time, and then later on about his trips to Shanghai. Little things, like food delivery, the metro and the trains, WeChat (he’s the only reason I have a WeChat account), and how basically everything, from GPS to banking, is mediated through it. How he had to memorize his and his family members’ passport numbers, how he still has them in his brain to this day. How hard it is to find cold beverages. At one point on the flight to Incheon, we watched the informational video provided by the airline on what to do when landing in China for the first time. To me it was an impossibly distant nation governed by a set of rules like no other, and not as infiltrated by, what was in my mind, a nebulous but powerful “Western world”. Even what might feel like a petty example, like the existence of Douyin and Baidu, was walled off from the prying eyes of the English-speaking internet by an impenetrable fortress: the Chinese language. Where he lives, he says he’s constantly stared at for being visibly foreign; sometimes strangers will even take pictures of him without asking, which only strengthens the idea of China in my head as a sort of hermit kingdom, a world unto itself.

In Korea, we still sometimes use Chinese characters (한자, hanja) for names of cities, and to abbreviate countries or major political figures. Myeongdong is 明洞, which means "bright neighborhood" or "bright cave". And China is often referred to in the news simply by 中, as in 中國 (중국, jung-guk): the center of the world, the axis around which we all revolve, the lodestone to turn towards.

Augmented nonfiction

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 20:41:21 | [standalone]

These three books, in order, run the spectrum from historical fiction to dramatized nonfiction.

• Pafko At The Wall/Underworld by Don DeLillo

There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires, things even the Director cannot guess—a man whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western world —because these plots are only now evolving. This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert—for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.

• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.

• Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli

At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that I had gone beyond the surface of things and was beginning to see a strangely beautiful interior, and felt dizzy at the thought that now I had to investigate this wealth of mathematical structures that Nature had so generously spread out before me.

Nothing is like the emotion of seeing a mathematical law behind the disorder of appearances.

I’ve become really interested in what I foolishly call “augmented nonfiction”. I think this interest stems from my fascination with medical thrillers from two-three years ago, but I’ve generalized it since. I loved the way these narratives wavered between “this happened, but I’m writing it in a more exciting way” and “this happened exactly as I wrote it, and it’s more exciting than anything I could ever come up with”.

When We Cease To Understand The World also has a story which features Alexander Grothendieck. I’m convinced that reading it, in some obscure way, nudged me towards my life today. Labatut wrote that Grothendieck and Mochizuki glimpsed “the heart of the heart”, and what they saw forever changed them. It creeped me out a little; one of my mutuals on Neocities calls himself holyheart, and his tribulations regarding Hartshorne’s Algebraic Geometry form the crown jewel of his website. Grothendieck was a pioneer of algebraic geometry. What a weird coincidence, unless I’m missing something.

Every six months or so I will make an account on Reddit to ask a question, linger for a week, and then delete it right after. This time I created an account to ask about this not-genre. What other books are there that weave together fiction and nonfiction in such a seamless way? I could only think of Sebald and his walks through Europe, his every step treading through a stratum of history.

Excerpts from Why Johnny Can't Add

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 15:44:29 -0400

Knowing is doing. In mathematics, knowledge of any value is never possession of information, but “know-how”. To know mathematics means to be able to do mathematics; to use mathematical language with some fluency, to do problems, to criticize arguments, to find proofs and, what may be the most important activity, to recognize a mathematical concept in, or to extract it from, a given concrete situation.

The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there was never any other object for it.

These two quotes are some of many that lingered in my brain after reading Professor Morris Kline’s Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of New Math. I can’t offer much commentary on his pedagogical criticisms because I have no experience teaching math and was definitely not alive around when New Math was being implemented in American curriculums.

The first quote seems to warn against premature generalizations and abstractions. The vagaries of theory should follow after one is accustomed to the concrete and the algorithmic—not the other way around. Also, one shouldn’t expect that the passive intake of information, whether it is reading textbooks, or listening to lectures, can lead to any substantial understanding, much less mastery of any given concept.

As for the second quote, I just liked it. It’s a strong statement: mathematics somehow acting as both the schoolmarm and handmaiden of intuition.

Traveling to Korea

Sat, 25 May 2024 18:10:10 -0400

After some hemming and hawwing about what I’m going to do for the rest of my summer after my research program, I’ve decided that I’m going to Korea for two weeks with my boyfriend. (Interestingly enough, there is a “Little Russia” in the city, so I might be able to practice some Russian speaking after all…? In Korea, of all places.) It’s strange to have been born in a country, to officially be a citizen of it, and yet to look at it through a tourist’s eyes – I haven’t actually lived there for almost a decade now. It’s only now, making this itinerary, that I have bothered to properly learn the topology of my hometown, which is funny-sad. I’m going to make for an awful tour guide.

Before traveling I always rewatch at least a part of Sans Soleil, the movie-essay directed by Chris Marker. It’s one of my favorite movies ever; I remember watching it during the 2020 quarantine, transfixed by the droning narration, the gentle persistence of its pacing, and the somnolent vignettes of countries and their inhabitants, of lives long gone. And most of all, the commutes. Subways, cars, buses, boats, etc. It’s the kind of movie that makes you think it’s raining outside, even though you live in the desert.

I remember on the front page of my website, I used to have a quote from one of Marker’s writings in Le Depays:

No one knows exactly what to do with this in-between, this twilight zone, this nameless realm shared between the eight hundred and eight gods who watch over the flock of dreams, no one knows how to address it, but at least one can be polite.

I often read Neocities blogs written by expatriates, saddleblasters being one of them. And Vashti, from time to time, who writes about her planned travels. Their depictions of where they live and how they interact with their cities, whether it is disparaging or reverent, whether it is attending an experimental music performance or scans of a well-loved and -used sticker book are all of interest to me in a geotemporal context, because I honestly don’t think I’ve ever known a place or been comfortable inhabiting it. I went to an international school, so all my high school friends are scattered around the world. Even the friends I’ve made in college are flying to the other side of the country to grind out internships. Transience is ironically the only constant. In fact, it feels disingenuous to say I even have a hometown. It amounts to a GPS coordinate placed exactly over the hospital room in which I was born. Then, the ambient people and environment of my middle- and high-school years are mainly just that – ambient. In two years, I’ll be done with my undergraduate degree, and I’ll probably have to move someplace else… again.

I used to feel dissatisfied about this, but now I don’t think it’s really a good or bad thing, just a side-effect of modernity. I’ve been in the in-between for all my life, and I’ve never learned how to address it either, but it’s alright. I turned out alright, I should think.

Maybe after the trip I will have nice pictures to share with you all, and it won’t just be my rambling, which goes nowhere.

Mainly what comes to mind now when I think of Korea is a memory from when I must’ve been about 10 years old, or a bit younger. Maybe exactly a decade ago. I remember looking out the window of my grandmother’s house (we used to stay at her place for a few days when we visited Korea). It was twilight and cloudy, I think it was approaching winter. From the view of the window, the Hyundai Department Store was visible, its huge facade a glowering golden square against the encroaching dimness. I remember I was excited about Christmas, I remember thinking that the department store was an entire world to me, a sort of castle, a sort of temple. I never meant to let it into my long-term memory, but it happened anyway.

Quick April update

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 19:25:33 -0400

Where have I been for the past two months?

I don’t have a good answer to this. Instead, let me talk about my second year of college.

I admit that it could’ve gone a lot better. I’m still very withdrawn and whenever I’m not in classes or talking to my few friends (which must be at least 3/4ths of an average day) I’m spending time with myself. Midway through freshman year, I met a Master’s student who kept insisting that I shouldn’t “procrastinate on life”.

And I nodded and took it to heart… and then I spent the next year doing just that. At least, that’s what I feel like has happened.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m still “doing things”, i.e. passing all my classes, studying, doing just enough socially so that I’m not a total shut-in (though I’m precariously close), doing like one extracurricular activity consistently.

But sometimes I get sick of skimming the surface all the time. I want to actively participate in life instead of sitting there, doing the bare minimum.

The midpoint of your college tenure seems to be the point at which you have to start taking shit seriously. At least, more and more people expect me to know what I want to do with my life. And I do know: I want to learn, I want to write, I want to create things.

But I need a real answer, and quick. Something that makes more sense, like “becoming a teacher” or “web developer” (can’t complain), or even “going to grad school”.

On paper my life looks just fine, but in reality I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, and this is far more terrifying than exciting to a person like me. I feel unable to do anything about it.

"...the desire to be dead rather than to live"

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:04:02 -0500

Excerpt from Herodotus, The Histories

[7.44] When Xerxes had come to Abydus, he had a desire to see all the army; and there had been made purposely for him beforehand upon a hill in this place a raised seat of white stone, which the people of Abydus had built at the command of the king given beforehand. There he took his seat, and looking down upon the shore he gazed both upon the land-army and the ships; and gazing upon them he had a longing to see a contest take place between the ships; and when it had taken place and the Phoenicians of Sidon were victorious, he was delighted both with the contest and with the whole armament.

[7.45] And seeing all the Hellespont covered over with the ships, and all the shores and the plains of Abydus full of men, then Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping.

[7.46] Artabanus his uncle therefore perceiving him […] having observed that Xerxes wept, asked as follows: “O king, how far different from one another are the things which thou hast done now and a short while before now! for having pronounced thyself a happy man, thou art now shedding tears.”

He said: “Yea, for after I had reckoned up, it came into my mind to feel pity at the thought how brief was the whole life of man, seeing that of these multitudes not one will be alive when a hundred years have gone by.”

Artabanus then made answer and said: “To another evil more pitiful than this we are made subject in the course of our life; for in the period of life, short as it is, no man, either of these here or of others, is made by nature so happy, that there will not come to him many times, and not once only, the desire to be dead rather than to live.”

I want to do math

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:59:16 -0500

I haven’t made you all privy to what I think is one of the biggest revelations I’ve ever had in my life, in large part because it just seems so absurd and even a little embarassing. Said revelation:

I want to do math.

“Okay,” you might be thinking. “She’s gone truly insane after all.” Which is a fair thing to think, honestly. I also am struck by how silly it sounds. It’s made even sillier by a few facts:

1. I, currently, am not good at math (whatever that means).
2. I’ve never been good at math/it’s never come really intuitively to me. I did terribly in Calculus I and Calculus II was better, but still a slog.
3. A lot of it isn’t really applicable to the practical things that I need to do in life.

In a sense, it’s a pipe dream or a quarter-life crisis. In another, more pernicious sense, it feels like a selfish endeavor. I’ve long been fascinated by “mathematicians”—those who love math and those who do math as their profession (and of course, the generous intersection of the two), and perhaps even envious of the all-encompassing passion they have for something so abstract. But for my entire life, I’ve always thought that that could never be me, because I’ve never done competitive math, or participated in Olympiads, or even done competitive programming. For much of middle and high school, I thought I disliked math, to put it lightly, and my family and I pretty much took it for granted that I just wasn’t a “math person” (again, whatever that means).

How I wish I could go back in time, shake my 15-year old self by the shoulders, and tell her that there was no real reason that she couldn’t do it! To stop making excuses!

Of course, I harbor no delusions of grandeur. I’m not going to go into math academia, and I certainly don’t expect to. But I want to learn more of it, and I’m more sure of this than I have been of anything else in my life. Not to sound incredibly pretentious and deranged, but it really does feel as rigorous and closest to a notion of “truth” as anything I’ve ever studied (as painful as the problem sets can be).

P.S.: I’m still learning programming language theory when I can. It ties in a lot with math, as expected! I will make another post about it when I get some breaks between my assignments, because it’s incredibly cool stuff. (Or at least, I think it is).

I also went to an introductory talk on Category Theory today with a friend who is also interested in math! It was fantastic and led by an insanely knowledgeable undergrad. Now I know what functors and morphisms are and my world is just that little bit bigger for it.

Listening to music and jailbreaking a Kindle

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 23:33:34

It was raining heavily almost all day today, so I ended up staying indoors, listening to music and reading, which are the two things this entry is all about.

On David Berman

It was recently David Berman’s birthday (4th of January). Berman was the lead singer of a band called Silver Jews back in the 90s and 2000s. Berman, and Pavement members Bob Nastanovich and Stephen Malkmus were all friends, though Silver Jews never got near as famous as Pavement did. Not that Berman minded; he named his band Silver Jews on purpose so that people would be dissuaded from even bringing them up in conversation. One of the only live concerts he ever played as the Jews (and the last) was inside a cave in Tennessee, before he virtually disappeared for a decade.

Silver Jews split up in 2009 and after a long hiatus Berman started a solo project by the name of Purple Mountains, before committing suicide in August 2019. His new self-titled album had just come out July of that year. In my opinion, he wrote some of the funniest and most beautiful lyrics ever to be sung to a tune. He had always considered himself more of a poet than a songwriter or singer.

Here’s one of my favorite verses from him, from a track called The Frontier Index from the album The Natural Bridge:

Boy wants a car from his dad
Dad says, “First, you got to cut that hair”
Boy says, “Hey, Dad, Jesus had long hair”
And Dad says, “That’s right, son, Jesus walked everywhere”

I dunno, it just makes me smile every time I think about it, especially hearing it in his very monotone singing voice.

On Dostoyevsky and jailbreaking the Kindle Paperwhite

This semester, I’m going to be taking a class where we basically read The Brothers Karamazov to within an inch of its life, so I figured that I could get a head start on it. I’m 20% of the way through, on the Pevear & Volokohnsky translation (not the translation that we’re reading in class, but it’ll be interesting to compare the two).

Also, turns out it is pretty easy to jailbreak a Kindle, at least the one I have, which is the 2013 Paperwhite (abbreviated as PW or PW1).

There’s a forum full of meticulous and dedicated Kindle software/hack developers who have put up an extremely detailed guide on jailbreaking, as well as many extensions, like the ability to have a custom screensaver. The jailbreaking process itself is quick and simple: just unzip-ing and mv-ing files from your computer to your Kindle over USB.

To literally no-one’s surprise, the Kindle OS is based off the Linux kernel and the document viewer I installed, called KOReader, lets you interact with a tty.

This means you can run htop, interact with systemd, and ssh into your Kindle, which is really amusing to me for some reason.

You also have access to the entire filesystem, as well as the ability to load in custom dictionary files (like StarDict files) for many languages. Apparently there are options to have RSS readers and an FTP server? Point is, it’s quite extensible, and anyone familiar with UNIX systems will definitely feel at home.

As expected of a FOSS program, you have a lot more control over customizing various viewing/typesetting options, but I’d say the defaults are very sensible. Also, I’m fairly sure that for the original Kindle PW, there was no dark mode at all, but KOReader gives you access to it. Not really sure why you would want dark mode on e-ink, but I guess it’s nice to have as an option.