Wednesday evening vegetarian experiment

Ms Heel-Filcher requested vegetarian tonight. Well, not actually, but she said something this morning about wanting to try to make more meals meatless, and simultaneously asked me to make dinner tonight. You do the math.

Anyways, I decided to wing something. It ended up OK, but I have no idea what to call it. Suggestions welcome.

TODO

This is to remind myself that I have two posts in my mental pipe, coming out of Scalzi's excellent piece about difficulty settings. The first is about "why should I feel guilty about my privilege" and the second is about mechanized infantry.

Caught a beer ad during Cubs-Brewers

... and realized that I'm not sure I ever picked up on the the Clydesdale-draught horse-draught beer double entendre before.

Evidently this means I need to both drink more beer and deconstruct said drinking of beer more thoroughly with all my friends.

An elementary exercise in group actions

Let \(G\) be a group, \(T\) a normal subgroup, and suppose that \(G\) acts transitively on a set \(X\). Then the induced action of \(T\) on \(X\) may not be transitive; let \(T \setminus X\) denote the orbit space. Show that the quotient group \(G/T\) acts well-definedly and transitively on \(T \setminus X\).

 I plan to do this somewhat regularly... I know that I'm terrible about keeping up a store of problems and examples, which is a key component of mathematical pedagogy.

Finally standing upright on two legs

"...at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

President Barack Obama

Real journalism is a threat to Politico

Politico is concern-trolling again (EDIT: that would have implied they'd ever stopped) with this story about a new biography of Obama. The takeaway?

The success of “Dreams” has given Obama nearly complete control of his own life narrative, an appealing tale that has been the foundation of his political success. But Maraniss’s biography threatens that narrative by questioning it: Was Obama’s journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?

Look, Glenn: I realize that working for Internetpravda on the Potomac has dulled your instincts about what your job is, but out here in the reality-based community, 08's enthusiasm and 12's grudging support for Obama isn't based upon uncritical swallowing of his self-crafted backstory. It's based on a perception that Obama's values mirror in many ways our own, and the knowledge that the coalition he heads is much less bad for the vast majority of Americans than the Republican opposition. (Also: the "grudging" part of "grudging support" is frequently the result of us seeing that the president's values aren't always in line with where we think they ought to be.) It's the beltway media, with Politico in the lead, that spends every day running copypasta from the White House and the party offices, and I think that Politico might just feel a little threatened by the effrontery of a journalist like Maraniss writing a mostly-positive book which seeks "real insight" into a story that, I think everyone can agree, is not your everyday son-of-robber-baron-buys-senate-seat Horatio Alger political novel. Meanwhile, the rest of us out here paying attention are effronted by this drive-by insinuation that Obama's success is just a fraying sweater waiting for the Smashing Pumpkins to give it a good pull.

Favorite problem

from yesterday's exam (2nd semester calculus, targeted at students going into engineering and sciences:

For which \(x\) does \[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \left( \arctan (1 + \frac{x}{n}) \right)^n\]converge?

(If it wasn't obvious before, I'm done grading. It may as well be officially summer.)