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"...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.