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Comment away or I will start reviewing obscure Dylan songs!!!

Ain't No Good

Every other Wednesday there is a seminar that lasts about an hour at most by a grad student in our department. The only people that come are other grad students because faculty have better things to do than listen to us talk about research or often just definitions of stuff that they probably know better/don't work with, and who else would come to a talk about math?

Anyway, I haven't given a talk and don't really plan on it, at least not any time soon, despite the girl who is in charge of it asking me multiple times to present just to avoid some of the less...enjoyable...people from talking more than once. I've only recently actually considered doing it at all since I've produced exactly sin(0) work until now, and the idea of presenting old problems or just introducing people to some area they aren't familiar with seems somehow more pointless than category theory (get it, because we generally want to move away from thinking of objects like sets, etc. by what "points" they contain and move towards thinking about the maps between such objects...?). But this quarter I am taking an independent study with a professor, pending official approval from the department head and whatnot on a form I had to fill out (for the question about how my grade would be evaluated, he said to write "by professor." haha).

Forgive my abuse of punctuation.

Anyway, it isn't research, at least not yet, but it's sort of close in a way, and may get there if I can master the small object argument (don't ask), so it seems more worthy of presenting. The main allure of it, though, is that if I talk about what I am doing to any other student, literally no one knows what I am talking about. Here's an example:

If a functor from a model category to a category with a class of weak equivalences that is closed under the 2-of-3 axiom takes trivial cofibrations between cofibrant objects to weak equivalences, then it preserves all weak equivalences between cofibrant objects.

That's called Ken Brown's Lemma, apparently. The wonderful thing about it is that it simultaneously says so much and so little. So, I may tell her that I'll do it, but I have to consider it more and make a bit more progress first. Also, I'm always wary of her invitations; she'll pull out your feathers for her brand new hat, and when she's done that, she'll feed you to her cat.

I've Been Listening To This Song Obsessively Lately

In keeping with my obsession with Dylan and his seeming obsession with adverbs, I thought I'd title this post something like the above. I keep listening to "Buckets of Rain" over and over again. It's the closing track to "Blood on the Tracks," for those of you less versed in Dylan's repertoire, and one of Eric's favorites, if I recall correctly. There's something quiet and brilliant about it, like the sermon of a broken-hearted Minnesotan Buddha. Here's a gem:

I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear
If you want me, honey baby
I’ll be here

Cool.