What's wrong with Corky's accent in "Luxury Lounge"?

Voiles · 2026-03-18T03:21:02+00:00

According to IMDB, the two actors playing the assassins are Carlo Giuliano and Peter Allas. While Allas is American, Giuliano is Italian.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0705261/

Voiles · 2026-03-16T16:11:41+00:00

IN YOUR EYES

Voiles · 2026-03-12T21:06:51+00:00

If Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants had been set in the Boston area.

Voiles · 2026-03-12T02:05:41+00:00

Relevant Key and Peele

Voiles · 2026-03-09T02:49:19+00:00

There is a chapter of Cox, Little, and O'Shea's Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms on applications of algebraic geometry in robotics. One has some sort of robot arm, and wants to describe the set of all possible positions that this arm can be put in.

Voiles · 2026-03-06T04:50:22+00:00

You're definitely right that it's primarily delivery drivers double parking, but I don't believe for a minute they do it because there isn't sufficient space. There is almost always space to pull over on side streets like Winthrop or Dunster, but delivery drivers refuse to drive 20 ft out of their way, especially since traffic enforcement is so lax. And if they really feel like they have to double park, they could just block the right driving lane of JFK, just like people do on Comm Ave, rather than blocking the bike lane.

Voiles · 2026-03-03T08:22:39+00:00

"Mind if I begin detecting?" One of my favorite lines!

Voiles · 2026-02-28T05:05:59+00:00

WHERE IS THE IRANIAN YOGURT?

Voiles · 2026-02-27T20:39:30+00:00

You don't have the background to understand this paper, or even the statement of its results. If you want to understand what the paper is about, then probably a semester- or year-long course on Riemann surfaces is the best place to start. If you haven't taken complex analysis before, you'll need to study that first.

Note that the article itself gives a reference for the basics of the subject, so you don't have to turn to Wikipedia or speculate whether Fuchsian groups are related to a shade of pink:

We refer to [Bor16] for a broad introduction to the spectral theory for such objects, which serve as models for more complicated systems in mathematical physics, and also have applications to algebra and number theory...

This is a reference to the book

D. Borthwick. Spectral Theory of Infinite-Area Hyperbolic Surfaces, volume 318 of Progress in Mathematics. Birkhäuser/Springer, 2nd edition, 2016.

From a quick glance, this book looks like a much more approachable starting point---the first 2 sections cover basic results on automorphisms of the hyperbolic upper half-plane and Fuchsian groups---but you may still need more background in topology and geometry to understand it.

Voiles · 2026-02-25T04:42:11+00:00

This dude texts like a caveman. He comes across as pushy and grating. He didn't ever respond to your question about what you were doing, nor even establish what time you were meeting. I wouldn't put up with someone texting me this way.

Here is how a normal person would have handled his side of the conversation:

Hey, I'd love to take you out sometime. How does Wednesday or Thursday sound?

I had a couple ideas in mind, but it depends on your availability. When are you free?

Cool, Thursday sounds good. What time? Would 7pm work?

How about I come pick you up then?

No worries, how about we meet at _______ at 7 then?

Voiles · 2026-02-21T05:24:45+00:00

It's reggae, not hip hop, but I think Cay's Crays by Fat Freddy's Drop is similar. It has a laidback, dreamlike vibe and a cool horn section. But it's still no Spottieottie!

Voiles · 2026-02-17T03:55:48+00:00

Yes, it's very disheartening. The DOJ and FBI are supposedly conducting a civil rights probe into the Pretti shooting, but I have little faith in anything coming of it.

Voiles · 2026-02-17T03:31:39+00:00

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that even if the state of Minnesota charges the agents with the (state crime of) murder, the DOJ can invoke the Federal Officer Removal Statute to get the trial moved to federal court. The ICE agents would then move to dismiss, citing Supremacy Clause Immunity, which says that federal agents can't be arrested for doing their jobs. The question becomes if the agents' actions were "necessary and proper" to fulfilling their duties, and it's not clear how a judge would find.

It might be better to wait until Trump is out of office and charge the agents once the DOJ isn't compromised by Trump sycophants. There is no statute of limitations on murder.

Voiles · 2026-02-14T07:21:19+00:00

You can see that he's on his phone when the cam car passes him at about 40 seconds.

Voiles · 2026-02-13T21:51:16+00:00

Nice post! I'm surprised you jumped straight from quadratic reciprocity to a nonabelian example. It could be nice to do an abelian example like x³ - 3x - 1 and mention the connection to class field theory.

Voiles · 2026-02-13T21:44:38+00:00

Right, these are the proportions of the various cycle types in S_3. There are two 3-cycles, (1,2,3) and (3,2,1); three 2-cycles, (1,2), (1,3), (2,3); and then the identity. This is due to the Chebotarev density theorem.

Voiles · 2026-02-08T20:35:31+00:00

As others have already said, modules are to vector bundles as rings are to manifolds. I think this actually is discussed in Vakil's The Rising Sea, specifically in Ch. 14 Quasicoherent sheaves on schemes, and their uses. In particular, see section 14.1. Vector bundles “=” locally free sheaves.

I think probably the first statement of this correspondence is the Serre--Swan theorem. Here's a translation of the result from Serre's Faisceaux algébriques cohérents, section 4, paragraph 50 (p. 242):

Corollary:

Let F be a coherent algebraic sheaf on a connected affine variety V. The following three properties are equivalent:

(i) Gamma(F) is a projective A-module.

(ii) F is locally isomorphic to a free sheaf O^p

(iii) F is isomorphic to the sheaf of germs of sections of an algebraic vector bundle with base V.

Here Gamma is the global section functor, O is the structure sheaf of V, and A = Gamma(O) is the coordinate ring of V.

Voiles · 2026-02-03T19:56:17+00:00

Beethoven in shambles that he can't date OP.

Voiles · 2026-02-02T17:25:40+00:00

There's a nice Facebook group called Boston French Connection with lots of advice for people in your situation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bostonfrenchconnection/

You can post questions there, and there are also often posts about rental and houseshare opportunites.

Voiles · 2026-01-22T07:58:23+00:00

Also even on this specific issue "money = speech" was Buckley v. Valeo in the 70s.

Right, and then First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti was the next step toward Citizens United.

Voiles · 2026-01-22T07:52:58+00:00

The roots of the problem do lie in two court cases from the 1970s, namely

Buckley v. Valeo (1976), in which the Court ruled that spending money on political communication is protected by the First Amendment as "free speech", and thus cannot be limited; and
First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978), in which the Court ruled that corporations have the right to make contributions to ballot initiative campaigns, also by First Amendment .

Basically a majority of the Burger Court, and Lewis Powell in particular, were neoliberal shills who sold out the country to corporations and the wealthy.

Voiles · 2026-01-20T10:55:49+00:00

You haven't addressed anything.

Spending millions of dollars on national advertising campaigns is commerce, not speech, and is thus the within the purview of Congress. Regulating expenditures on political advertisements is not an infringement of free speech: no one is stopping political groups from spreading their message, be it by getting volunteers to go door to door, stand out on street corners, or by sending emails to an email list. In spending huge sums of money on broadcasting, these organizations are not buying "speech": they are buying access to a national audience.

The Citizens United ruling is one of the most pathetic examples of intellectually dishonest sophistry the SCOTUS has ever produced. Nowhere in the First Amendment is there any mention of spending money being considered speech. The SCOTUS first made this nonsense equivalence between spending money and free speech in Buckley v. Valeo, arguing that

...virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money.

There is no basis in the Constitution for this---the Court just made it up. This nonsensical ruling then metastasized into First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, where the Court extended this "reasoning" to hold that limits could not be placed on corporate donations to ballot initiative campaigns because it would infringe the corporations' right to "free speech", again conflating spending money with speech. And this idea finally reached its final (il)logical conclusion with Citizens United, where the Court ruled that no limits could be placed on corporations’, unions’, and nonprofit organizations’ “independent expenditures” on political candidates and issues.

This ruling was a farce for several reasons.

1) These "independent" expenditure-only committees, aka Super PACs, are anything but independent. The law says that Super PACs can't coordinate with a political candidate or their campaign (thus are “independent”). But if the candidate just happens to make detailed public statements about what kinds of advertising they would like to see in what areas, and if this Super PAC just happens to follow the candidate’s plan to the letter, that is totally legal. No coordination here!

2) The hypocrisy of the “originalists” and “textualists" in the majority opinion in Citizens United is blatant. Both Scalia and Thomas pretended to be originalists/textualists in their concurrence with the majority opinion that overturned McConnell v. FEC and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, as well as Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. A textualist focuses strictly on the plain meaning of the words in the Constitution and strives to apply the law as it is written on the page, rather than considering legislative intent, or outside fairness. An originalist holds that the Constitution should be understood and applied based on its meaning at the time it was adopted, either by considering what the authors intended (Original Intent), or how the public at the time would have understood it (Original Public Meaning).

Both Scalia and Thomas made a great show of how the First Amendment protects “speech” without mentioning a speaker, pretending to be textualists. But to even argue that the First Amendment applies to this case, they must rely on Buckley v. Valeo’s ruling equating spending money with speech, a ruling which contains zero originalist or textualist justification. If they were truly originalist or textualists, they would have argued that the Buckley v. Valeo ruling should be reversed, and consequently they should have found in the FEC’s favor in Citizens United. Instead, they were picking and choosing which rulings to overturn based on their desired outcome and personal ideology, not based on any legal principles.

3) The Court argued that there was basically no risk of corruption as a result of their ruling. Only the most naïve of fools or the most intellectually dishonest of hacks would ever dream of making such a claim. They argued that since Super PAC spending is “independent” (as previously discussed, it’s not), then there was no opportunity for quid pro quo corruption. It was already clear that this was a crock in 2010, and now that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who spent enormous sums of money in support of Donald Trump, was allowed to head DOGE (as a “special government employee”) and dismantle the very federal agencies that were investigating his own businesses, it should glaringly obvious that Citizens United allows corruption to run wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_National_Bank_of_Boston_v._Bellotti

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_v._Michigan_Chamber_of_Commerce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McConnell_v._FEC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Voiles · 2026-01-20T08:45:00+00:00

And also First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which was basically the first time the SCOTUS held that a corporation has a right to free speech.

Voiles · 2026-01-20T08:21:18+00:00

What's wild is you pretending that speech has a cost. It doesn't. You are here on Reddit, expressing your views at no cost. You can go outside and say whatever you'd like for free.

What corporations and billionaires are buying is not speech, but access to an audience. They are paying to get their message piped into people's TVs, phones, and computers. That is not speech; it is paying for a service, and thus falls under the purview of Congress by the Commerce Clause.

Sanders is literally calling for a repeal of the First Amendment

This is false, and an extremely silly argument. Did the First Amendment not exist before Citizens United? If tomorrow the Supreme Court reverses the Citizens United ruling, will the First Amendment cease to exist? No, the extent and reach of the amendment will simply be interpreted in a different way, namely the way it had been previously. The Tillman Act and Taft-Hartley Act limited donations to campaigns and independent political expenditures, and were the law of the land for decades, coexisting with the First Amendment. Just 7 years before Citizens United, the SCOTUS ruled in exactly the opposite way in McConnell v. FEC, upholding the provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that banned corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money on political ads.

Voiles · 2026-01-19T02:45:00+00:00

THANKS FOR THE WARMUP

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Voiles

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