I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ERASE ERRATA-“Tax Dollars” (2006).

I admit to looking up a song by this band specifically for this post.  I’ve known of them for a long time, but never really heard them.  So I tracked down this song/video.  I have no idea if it represents the band or not.

This is an angular punk song that starts out with lots of sharp chords but is quickly taken over by a funky bass line and all kinds of percussion.  The bridge is a single guitar section (quite catchy) played over and over.  The fourth section (!) of the song is a kind of sinister spy movie soundtrack sounding riff with all kinds of horns (just how many people are in this band?)

The song is about: murder, slaughter, funded by my tax dollar. It’s sung/shouted by a woman who comes from the Poly Styrene camp of singers, and it’s all quite good.  Initially impression was of a song full of  chaos, but after repeated listens, there’s some really interesting interplay of sounds here.

I’ll have to investigate them more.  Check out the video here.

[READ: March 23, 2011] Mathematical Errata

I had toyed with the idea of making all four posts this week be DFW-related.  Then I realized that I didn’t really have anything else to write about (since I’d been doing about one a week for several weeks now).  So, I found this little, tiny, barely much of anything piece online at the howling fantods and figured I’d mention it as well.

This three page PDF is, as the heading suggests, all of the mathematical errata for the hardcover edition of Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. Now, I read the paperback edition, so technically I didn’t need this errata.  Of course, I read it almost a year ago and I can’t say that I retained an awful lot of it when I did read it.  So, really these errata aren’t terribly useful to me.  They probably aren’t very useful to anyone unless you are really intense about math.

Nevertheless, it sure seems like DFW wrote them and he seems to be having fun at his own expense.  UPDATE: According to Brooks (see note below), these errata were compiled by  Prabhakar Ragde and Jordan Ellenberg.  Everything I said is of course still true, I just gave the wrong folks credit.

So for each entry he includes the page number and whether or not it was in a FN.  He corrects the error and often gives a comment as to why the correction is included.

• The first one notes p. 14, gives the correction and then says “Not actually wrong but misleading.”
• The next one, p. 18, ends: “Typo, probably.”
• I rather enjoyed this entry for p. 72: “the book keeps trying to define ‘next instant’, which is unnecessary (and doomed to failure).”
• The FN on p. 98 is also amusing: “If you integrate area properly, you get volume, but no one knew that at this point in history.”
• I’m including this one in full because how many errata actually make you laugh:  “p. 191 From here to halfway through page 195, the attempt to give us an epsilon-delta answer to Zeno’s Dichotomy, is pretty much completely horizontally-mamboed. Details provided below, on page 3.”
• Well, more than one in fact.  For p. 241 “Also, FN 27 is pretty much nonsense.”

Page 3 of the PDF is as mentioned above the full on explanation for pp. 191-195.  It’s pretty heady, intense math and I admit I didn’t get very much out of it.

So, that’s the errata.  Not essential reading, unless you’re using DFW as a resource for your math paper.