Witterings: Stuff that strikes me, interesting quotes and so on.
This is basically my personal scrap book. An offline version of this lead to some of my big projects, such as Fictional Left-handers and the Archives of Recluce, so anything here could potentially reappear as a separate page. I've added some basic navigation aids for the casual browser.

Irregular Verbs (vi/2005)
The Rules of Sci-fi (ix/2005-xii/2005)
Quotes (ix/2005-vi/2006)
Mathematical Methods (x/2005)
Euphemisms (xii/2005)
Character Concepts (ii/2006)
On Love and Tensor Algebra (ii/2006)

On Love and Tensor Algebra
"Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus". (Poem and quote taken from a translation of Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad )

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space,
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a² cos2Φ!




Character Concepts
I'm a gamer, and as such I think this is moderately amusing.  I doubt if a non-gamer would understand it.
In DnD, a multi-class Rogue/Cleric with Evasion called Jesus, the Lord of Light.  Then when he gets fireballed, you get to say 'Jesus Saves', and when introducing him, you get to say in all seriousness 'It's Jesus, LoL'.  Yes, both jokes are blatant stealing.  So?
Incidentally, the way to seriously break a DnD character is to play a Modern character in normal DnD. The combat system isn't what anyone would call realistic, but if my 5th level character can get an easy 25AC in a non-magical chain shirt (+2 AC, +2 DR) and Mage Armour, and boost it as high as 33 by taking the Total Defense action, and spending a few fate points, there is something serious breakage going on (don't I love it!) - "I can be surrounded by  zombies for a week, and not die"

Euphemisms
Wealth Relocation Specialist = Thief (a commentator on IWC - http://www.livejournal.com/users/irregular_comic/243274.html)
Premptive Salvage Engineering Company = Pirates. (RecluceMage)
We won't go into the whole 'Watching Star Trek' issue

Mathematical Methods
Like the thirty-one methods of mathematical proof (I'll link it eventually...), I know a few foolproof ways of solving mathematical problems:
The Raine Method: Named after one of my A-level teachers, this involves looking up the answer, and working the question backwards - it can be surprisingly useful in real life, as well.
Axiom X: Originally formulated by Jon as 'If anything would fuck up your proof, it does not exist'.  I have yet to try it in practise. The validity of the related axiom 'Your Face' (explicitly: "saying 'Your Face' is sufficient to win any argument") is still under consideration (and Jon, if you read this and want to argue: Your Face).

Quotes
Here we have all the bizarre, or just cool things that I've read or had said to me that I want to remember. The ICSF quotes list overshadows this, naturally.

"Gotta have pride in your premptive salvage engineering company!" - Recluce Mage, on her piratical allies.

"Wikipedia is like a librarian. Google is like asking an oracle. Librarians are professional information agents. Oracles are… freaky but cool. You can have a certain level of trust in the former but must constantly question the latter." - The Paranoid Agnostic http://paranoidagnostic.net/

"What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not fooling a soul." - Richie Hinzelmann, in Neil Gaiman's American Gods

Fear not the flame of my love's candle / Let it be that light in your world of darkness. - Mr. Titanic's sig on the IBDoF.  dunno the source.
 

The Rules of Sci-fi
Science Fiction, like any other literary genre has its own foibles and conventions. I've decided to start listing them as they occur to me. The Evil Overlord list effectively lists many of them, so I'll forgo mentioning the requirement that all evil dictators have really strange pets, and so on, and restrict myself to the more abstruse (right word?) ideas.

rom the webcomic A Miracle of Science:
BENJAMIN PRESTER: I sometimes listen to music. The classics like Bach and Prokofiev and the Beatles.
Mark Sachs, artist: I note that Benjamin's taste in music essentially obeys the Science Fiction Law of Threes. (As in, "For lunch we're serving chicken, mashed potatoes, and Betelgeusean laser squash" or "I'm familiar with all the great philosophers -- Socrates, Descartes, Xaxxix'x of Denobulon IV.")
[And you can google the cite. It's not going anywhere, and I *do* have other things to do]
And its true, so that is one law summarised

The Reciprocal Law of Ninjas:
The hardness of a group of ninja is inversely proportional to the number of members of the group.
i.e. a large group of ninja can be taken out by an old granny, but a single ninja will be a trusted lieutenant to the evil dark lord at the very least.
(ICSF were the first people to make *me* aware of this rule. I doubt if it is original though)


Irregular Verbs
After the Yes Minister sit com, and here, and various other sources, as well as my own coinages.
They should be self-explanatory, so I present you with some of the better ones I've found. I take no responsibility for offence caused:

I have an independent mind,
You are an eccentric,
He is round the twist.

I give confidential briefings,
You leak,
He is being prosecuted under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.

I am meticulous,
You are fussy,
He is a pedant.

I draw upon a rich variety of sources,
You plagiarise,
They are thieving scum.

I use creative accounting,
You massage the figures,
He is as bent as a nine bob note.

I am economical with the truth,
You are a lying b*****d,
Hi, I'm Richard Nixon.

I take pride in my handwriting,
You shouldn't write in such a hurry,
He is a doctor.

I  free associate
You daydream
They snore

I am a freedom fighter,
You are a terrorist,
They are Americans [rimshot]

and the simply fiendish:

I am a solipsist.