Does the term "mathematical" bug you?

Here is my response to Andrew Gelman's post on his blog. I am posting it here since that comment is not yet up.

The word mathematics(or mathematical) means different things depending on whether you are a mathematician, a physicist, a computer scientist, a statistician, an economist, a social scientist a journalist, a businessman or belong to any other species. In my part of the world there is a phrase for scheming or cunning manipulation which literally translates into English as "playing mathematics".

But going by what "good" mathematicians mean by mathematical I would consider it a great compliment if a piece of interesting statistical work or anything else for that matter is called mathematical in that sense.

Al Gore did it -- you can too!

This is not to say that Al Gore doesn't deserve the most famous peace prize in the world. On the contrary he is among the worthier ones to win the Nobel if you take a look at the past winners. But here is an interesting refresher course on How to win a Nobel Peace prize

An article on John Gins

LookSmart's FindArticles - NCR and Yahoo! Data Mining Experts Join Torrent to Guide Development of Analytic CRM Applications
Business Wire, Nov 8, 2000

I have been working with John for the past 2 years.

Browning Decides to Be a Poet

In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words--
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin--
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.

Jorge Luis Borges

Now that my ladders gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
---W B Yeats

Alain Connes' advice to the beginner

In this brief essay he comes out with several gems. For example, he compares mathematicians to fermions and physicists to bosons. Here is what he says:
...and in general mathematicians tend to behave like fermions
i.e. avoid working in areas which are too trendy whereas
physicists behave a lot more like bosons which coalesce
in large packs and are often "overselling" their doings,
an attitude which mathematicians despise.

Elsewhere he emphasizes the importance of long walks and lying down. Here is his take on lying down:
Mathematicians usually have a hard time explaining to their
partner that the times when they work with most intensity
is when they are lying down in the dark on a sofa.

Such a Loser

Achebe: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

Achebe: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

This is Chinua Achebe's critique of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1977 in the Massachusettes Review 18.

The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman: Ismail Kadare

The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman: The New Yorker