Vfp15

About me

About my grandmother

Musings

Pictures

Sundry

Links

Wikipedia links

• Muhammad Yunus, I created the page in 2004, waaaay before he got the Nobel Prize. Am I proud? Am I smug? And then some!

External links

• My Amazon reviews
• About me

Countries I've visited, in chronological order

• Canada
• United States
• Japan
• South Korea
• Hong Kong (before and after it reverted to China)
• Macao (before it reverted to China)
• Egypt
• Israel
• United Kingdom
• Saipan
• France
• Singapore
• Thailand
• Germany
• Ireland
• China (Hong Kong only)
• Russia,

Kamchatka

• Norway

Svaalbard

• Malaysia
• Sierra_Leone
• Spain
• Indonesia
  • Bali
• The Bahamas

Things to follow up on

Maths

• Gaussian integrals
  • Risch algorithm
• Lambert W function
• Integral transforms
  • Laplace transforms
  • Fourier transforms
• Fourier series
• Ordinary differential equations
• Continued fractions

Business

• Supply chain security
• Belbin Team Inventory
• Operational risk management
• SEPA, Single Euro Payments Area
• Corporate governance
  • IT Governance
• VIX
• 5 Whys
• Six Sygma
• Project Management Professional
• Baltic Dry Index
• Special Drawing Rights

IT & Security

• BS_25999
• ISO/IEC_27002
• ISO_27001
• BS_7799
• COBIT
• Sarbanes–Oxley Act
• AAA_protocol
• Kerberos (protocol)
• Spoofing attack
• Common Criteria
• Block cipher modes of operation
• Diffie–Hellman key exchange
• Daniel J. Solove (I started this article.)
• Jon Postel
• Wang Xiaoyun, who cracked MD5
• Digital rights management
• SHA-1

Legal

• Dewey, Cheatem & Howe

Paintings in which the scene is lit from a hidden candle

• An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright

I know of three other such paintings but I'm sure there are more. The one that got me interested is was at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I've also seen two such paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

At New York's Metropolitan Museum I know of one painting where the scene lit by a prominent candle and by its reflection.

Fitness

• Body fat percentage, 骨格筋率

Other

• Power law
• Indar Jit Rikhye
• Charles Drew
• Drug-eluting stent
• S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897
• Yes, Minister quotes
• Stéphane Breitwieser
• Ketosis

Trivia, eternal questions, solving world hunger, and other table talk

A convenient truth

$\exists \mathbf {I} \,(\emptyset \in \mathbf {I} \,\land \,\forall x\in \mathbf {I} \,(\,(x\cup \{x\})\in \mathbf {I} ))$

An inevitable truth

$\forall \{x_{n}\}_{n\in \mathbf {N} ,x_{n}\in \mathbf {R} },\exists$ $\epsilon >0$ such that $\forall$ $k,m\in \mathbf {N} ,|x_{k}-x_{m}|<\epsilon$.

Joke's on me! That statement is NOT a tautology. I should have been more careful and it should have been:

$\forall \{x_{n}\}_{n\in \mathbf {N} ,x_{n}\in \mathbf {R} },\forall k,m\in \mathbf {N}$, $\exists \epsilon >0$ such that $|x_{k}-x_{m}|<\epsilon$.

There, that's much better. 18 March 2019

Conrad Black: Give him back his citizenship ASAP

Black had dual UK and Canadian citizenship but gave up his Canadian citizenship after Prime Minister Jean Chrétien made a fuss about his getting a peerage in the British House of Lords. Canadian citizens cannot accept foreign entitlements but Black was accepting as a UK citizen, not as a Canadian citizen. Chrétien fussed because he didn't like Black, or at least what Black's papers wrote about him. The PM, whom I otherwise admire, went too far in this case.

I don't feel sad or sorry for Conrad Black, but this is a civil rights test case. In the Milos Forman biopic of his life, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flint famously says "If the constitution protects a scumbag like me, it'll protect you!" The same reasoning applies to Conrad Black's case.

No one should be manoeuvred out of their citizenship because of the civil rights that are so profoundly made concrete by citizenship. Just look at what the US can do to non-citizen in Guantanamo. Citizenship increases the level of civil rights protection and should be held sacrosanct. Black may very well have broken the law, but he is being punished for that with a jail sentence.

Even if Black harmed himself by giving up his citizenship the fact is he was manipulated into it. Allowing a man, even a Prime Minister, to trample on Black's rights is implicitly to allow one man to trample on your rights. Let's think twice about that.

A very short glossary for Canadian politics (newly revised!)

Americans and Canadians mean different things by "Liberal" and "Conservative" because in Canada the words are used as the proper names of our main political parties. Now keep the following straight.

• A Liberal is in fact a conservative.
• A New Democrat is in fact a liberal.
• A Conservative is many things because, being the latest Canadian political party, the pickings are slim when it comes to available ideologies a Republican.
• A Progressive Conservative was a pro big business, socialist, libertarian party. (Was? Well, are you surprised?)
• A Bloquist is a nationalist socialist... ahhh--scratch that. Bloquists (pronounced "blah-keessed, as in keess my ... (boy will I get in trouble here)) are socialists and it so happens they advocate autonomy for the province of Québec, and so are nationalists. It's just a coincidence that putting the two together gives them an unfortunate label, but that's Canadian politics for you. Means nothing at all.

The difference between numerical analysis and real analysis, or practice vs. theory

Contrary to what you may have learned in basic calculus, the series

$\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty }\sum _{i=1}^{n}{\frac {1}{i}}$

converges whenever you work it out numerically. In fact,

$\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty }\sum _{i=1}^{n}{\frac {1}{i}}=f(c)$

where c represents the computer used to evaluate the series numerically. (Think about it...)

The Catholic Church

• According to the Catholic Church, there is a catholic church and this church is the Catholic Church.

• According to many Christian denominations, there is a catholic church but the Catholic Church isn't it. Presumably, each of these churches considers itself to be the catholic church but prefers using a different name than the Catholic Church.

• According to many other Christian denominations, the Church of God admits many differing views and therefore none of the churches are catholic in the strict sense. Confusingly, many Catholics agree with this.

• According to some non-Catholic denominations (or at least to some members thereof) there is a catholic church, it is the Catholic Church, and they are trying to mend the schism between their denomination and the catholic church called the Catholic Church so that the Catholic Church and their churches might actually be catholic. This adds still further to the confusion.

• According to many other religions that have little to do with Christianity, this is all wrong.

• According to many other religions that have nothing at all to do with Christianity this is hopelessly confusing and must be wrong.

• According to Richard Dawkins this is all wrong, and dangerous.

• Personally, I find it entertaining.

Oh myyyy type stuff

Some people aren't glad to see me back in Quebec. Ironic that I'm the one now working for the Quebec government!

Memo

Add this to the article on toast.