Die Schwester, die Freundin, die Mutter.

But it was hot too. Last week I visited Oftersheim, Germany in order to see meine Mutter. It’s a small town just a bit south of Mannheim and Heidelberg. My lady came with me, and as luck would have it, my sister was able to travel over from Boston the same time we did. As you can see in the picture of the three of them, there’s quite a bit of construction going on at my mother’s abode; but we had beds and air conditioning, so we were all set.

I was hoping to be present for a German victory in the World Cup finals. I was eager to compare the scene with that of being in Boston in 2004, when the curse was broken most emphatically. But alas, they lost their semifinal to Spain as we were crossing the Atlantic; too bad they had to play that one without Thomas Müller. At least we still got to enjoy the victory over Uruguay for third place, and it was just a nice all-around week with family.

Oftersheim Bahnhof

Speaking of sports, I want to just take a moment to say how impressed I am with my Braves. I was pretty confident coming into this season that they could get back to the playoffs, hoping for the NL wild-card berth. And here they sit, leading their division, with the fourth best record in the majors, and an upcoming series against the Padres that could put them back atop the NL. Not too shabby.

Anyway, now that I’m back in Pittsburgh, I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. (Which is why I just wrote this post instead of course.) So it’s back to working on my dissertation, interspersed with myriad thoughts about 19th century mathematics. When did I become such a thrill-seeker?

Gino Severini, Suburban Train Arriving in Paris (1915)

Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics hosted a conference last month on a topic which is very much at the intersection of physics and philosophy: the nature of laws of nature. Carnegie Mellon Philosophy’s own Kevin Kelly was there to give a talk related to one of his favorite pet subjects, Ockham’s razor.

Scientific American’s Observations blog has a very nice write-up of the conference as a whole. Interesting stuff, even if – like me – you don’t often concern yourself with the philosophy of science.

I don’t know if these videos “should” be on YouTube, but they’re there for now, and there’s plenty of interesting material.

Cover from Logicomix

Papadimitriou might be best known to logicians from his textbook with Harry Lewis on the theory of computation. But he already has an earlier foray into fiction. In 2003, his Turing: A Novel about Computation was published. Yes, it really is a novel, complete with a love triangle and digressions about, well, computation. (Note: the title refers to a character that is not the Alan you know.) I actually own a copy of that book; my mother the computer scientist gave it to me one birthday. At the risk of her seeing this, I only read the first little bit of that book. But that reflects more on my general relationship with novels than it does on the readability of that particular tome.

In any case, while I have never been one for comics or graphic novels, I’m sufficiently curious about Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth to give it a shot. For one thing, all of the art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna looks very nice. I won’t say anything about the contents of the book, having not had my hands on it. A preview is available at the Logicomix site, and Richard Zach gives his largely favorable take in the post linked to above.