chickenfeet

I'm not kidding! I'm rusty of course but I've studied most of the mathematical prerequisites for QM. As well as the core stuff like vector spaces, Lagrangians and Fourier transforms, I took whole courses in functional analysis and probability theory. And still I find this stuff is so weird that my brain explodes every couple of paragraphs. It's less the mathematical formalism, it's the underlying weirdness (In contrast with General Relativity where the ideas make sense but I don't have enough algebraic topology or differential geometry to fully follow the formal argument). I completely understand why people who work with this stuff every day just fall back on the formalism and refuse to get involved with 'meaning'. Trouble is, I'm an inveterate ontologist. I had the same sort of problems with the 'classical' (Fisherian) approach to probability though that's a lot easier to resolve.

My current work out audio book is a BBC Classic Serial dramatisation of Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don which I read about thirty years ago during a major Russian phase. I can't actually remember a damn thing about it but it turns out to be mostly about wife beating, rape, incest and adultery. The really odd thing about the production though is that all the Cossacks have Welsh accents (but not a sheep in sight).[1] None of the non-Cossack characters have Welsh accents though there are a suspiciously large number of Irishmen for the lower Don Valley. It's all quite disturbing.



fn1: Come to think of it the absence of sheep is probably what accounts for all the rape, incest and adultery.

Thanks to samanthalake for this story about a man dying after having sex with a horse.

Apparently bestiality is legal in 17 US states.