For my October 2009 diary, go here.

Diary - November 2009

John Baez

November 1, 2009



Lisa dressed up for Halloween, since we were visiting some friends for dinner: Teresa Toscano and John Laursen. Lisa looked quite spooky in her Pierrot mask and a veil, so I took some pictures. We walked over to our friends' house — and when we arrived, Teresa let out a gasp of shock as she opened the door and saw Lisa's masked face.

Much to our delight, our old friends Gene and Barbara Anderson were also there. In 2005 Lisa and I travelled to Turkey with them, visiting Istanbul and Konya. Gene is an anthropologist with prodigious erudition when it comes to recognizing plant and animal species, cooking medieval dishes, and much more. Barbara is a public health specialist whose idea of good time is taking students on public health tours in the poorest parts of Ethiopia or Cambodia. They'd moved up Seattle after Gene retired from the anthropology department here at UCR and Barbara left Loma Linda to become a associate dean at the the College of Nursing at Washington State University. Now she's retired too, and they're back.

We had dinner as kids came by trick-or-treating... but Lisa did not answer the door and scare the wits out of them.



November 7, 2009

We had an AMS conference at UC Riverside this weekend. On Friday: dinner with Scott Carter and also Scott Morrison and his girlfriend and baby. On Saturday: tons of talks, including my talk on the icosahedron. Then dinner at Tio's, with a huge crowd: I ate with Lou Kauffman, David Radford, Scott Carter, Masahico Saito and Seeichi Kamada. Then some of us went on to the Cigar Bar (smoking not allowed!) and Worthington's. At this point the crowd had shrunk to grad students and postdocs (apart from me) such as Aaron Lauda, David Spivak, Alex Hoffnung and John Huerta. I wisely quit at midnight, while some carried on eating pizza and playing pool at Worthington's. Sunday: lots more talks. At lunch I finally met Kevin Walker, and we talked with Justin Roberts, Yael Fregier, Chris Rogers, and also a bit with Vasily Dolgushev.

Categorification is getting really popular.

November 11, 2009

Long hidden in a Swiss bank vault, Carl Jung's Red Book is now available:

Quoting the latter:
He later would compare this period of his life — this "confrontation with the unconscious," as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an "incessant stream". He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. "I often had to cling to the table," he recalled, "so as not to fall apart".

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called "active imaginations." "In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me 'underground,'" Jung wrote later in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, "I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them". He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

November 15, 2009

Jim Stasheff pointed out some really cool images of Mars taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, like these sawtooth patterns in the carbon dioxide ice near its south pole.

November 19, 2009

Remember the Uighur uprising in northwest China? One reason: the old town in Kashgar is being levelled. Kashgar has been an important Silk Road city for at least 2000 years, thanks to its location at an oasis at the western end of the Taklamakan Desert, where the northern and southern routes around this incredibly harsh desert meet.


Map of the Tarim River and Taklamakan Desert.
"Kashi" is another name for Kashgar.



Satellite photo of Taklamakan Desert,
bordered by the Tien Shan range in the north, Kunlun Shan in the south, and Pamir Mountains at west.



Taklamakan Desert



Yak in Kashgar market, photo taken in 1987 by Bernard Gagnon

For more photos of Kashgar, go here, here, and here.

I fell in love with the Silk Route and cities in the Taklamakan Desert, like Kashgar, Khotan and Turfan when I read this book, which you simply must read if you enjoy history, archaeology or adventure stories:

I would like to visit Kashgar before it's completely modernized!

November 21, 2009

For my December 2009 diary, go here.


What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime and I think of the present, of the world in which I am ending my days, as this world that I do not love - Claude Levi-Strauss

© 2009 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu

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