Coming and Going

Sorry to have disappointed my regular readers with a dearth of posts lately.  One last good post before I head off for spring break.

Katie came to visit the first week of March, and we had a great time exploring Budapest together.

 Budapest -- two thumbs up! (at the Ludwig Museum)

Budapest has an unusual number of bronze statues of famous Hungarians.  I think Budapest must have gone through a period of extreme fondness for producing these.

One of many.

Cool church a few blocks from my house

At the Great Market, Katie went straight for the mulled wine.  (Just kidding; it is delicious and I recommended it.)

Visiting the Castle Hill district

Enjoying a sunny afternoon on Castle Hill.

Katie was a fan of Budapest's many graffitos...

...and I was a fan of scaling the local architecture.

The Iron Curtain sculpture outside Terror Háza.

Seeing Degas to Picasso at the Fine Arts Museum

Just hangin out.

Hungary's deep-fried specialty, lángos.

Since Katie's visit, it's been back to life as usual in Budapest.  I have several observations.  First, it has come to my attention that may Budapesters are under the impression that they are dog owners, when in fact, they are owners of large wolves and other non-domesticated members of genus canis.  For an idea of the size of Budapest's average dog, see below:

The one in back.

All kidding aside, Budapest seems to have an unusually high number of dogs for a big city, and many of these dogs are quite large.

Budapest also seems to not care so much about inefficiency.  The most glaring example of this lack is the metro checking system.  You either buy a ticket or pass to ride the metro, bus, tram, or trolley (four different systems?  really?) and you have to validate your ticket in one of the self-serve ticket punchers at the beginning of your journey.  This system is enforced by checkers, who occasionally greet you as you exit the metro, and you are fined 6000 HUF if you are riding without a pass or a validated ticket.  Sounds fine?  In addition to this already semi-clumsy system, each and every metro station employs 2 to 4 individuals to look at your pass/ticket as you walk toward the escalator down to the platform.  All these guys do is stand there and glance at passes/tickets and (in theory, although I never see this) inform people without a proper ticket.  Anyhow.  I am also amused by the city's solution to a sidewalk under construction along Museum Boulevard (a fairly big-traffic street downtown).  No, don't redirect pedestrian traffic to the other side of the street, where there is a perfectly good sidewalk.  Yes, let's shut down an entire lane of traffic on this side and designate it as a sidewalk.  Brilliant.

I'll close with, first, a couple of youtube videos and then some interesting math problems.

I love this video (click the image again to watch it on youtube's website and read the story behind the fan-created video to the right).

Loving some March Madness.

And now for the math.  To respect Prof. Csirmaz's desire for his problems to remain relatively un-Google-able, I ask that if you want to discuss them with me, do so by email.  These are the coolest of the often-cool Conjecture and Proof problems from last week's set.

A) Find a function f: R->R such that f(f(x)) = -x for all real x.
Can you find such a function that is continuous at 0 and 1?
Can you find such a function continuous on R?

B) We have n+1 positive integers whose prime factors are among the first n prime numbers.  Show that you can pick some (at least one, but maybe all) of the numbers such that their product is a perfect square.

Sziasztok!

The National

Just replace LA with Berlin, and this is basically what's going down.

Hello again

I'm not sure how I'm going to return to normalcy with the blog after the ~2 week hiatus... chronological catch-up isn't so feasible, so I'll probably go for a smattering of impressions and topics.  To start, just some potpourri.

I saw a man crying in the subway as Katie and I came back from dinner on my birthday.  I saw him from the side at first and thought there was just a wire running down his cheek -- one straight line of tears down from each eye, not wiping or sniffling, just a thousand-mile stare across the tracks.

I'll have to have an eating post soon -- many delicious foods discovered here in Budapest.  Langos, gyros, Klassz, et al.

Be a philosopher, but amid all your philosophy be still a man. - David Hume

Oh, and I turned 21 on Monday.  No big deal.

Rickroll'd

I know I wasn't planning to blog again until Wednesday, but sometimes special circumstances tear us from our promises.

Case in point, tonight I walked into the local 24 hour grocery and heard the greatest song of the 80s:

They play some ridiculous American pop in Budapest, but Rick Astley is in another league.  There's nothing I wouldn't give for that denim two-piece.

Correction:  Astley is British.  Not sure if this is America's loss or gain.

On Hiatus

I've been away for a while -- Katie has been visiting this week, and we've had a fantastic time exploring Budapest together.  I'll be back on the blogging grind come Wednesday.  See you then.

Recommended Viewing: Joseph Beuys and the Coyote

This post isn't really related to the main themes of this blog, but you don't have to read it if you don't want to.  Okay?

 I Like America and America Likes Me, Joesph Beuys, 1974

Photo copyright Caroline Tisdall

The Joseph Beuys story is one of the most captivating and iconic artist stories of all time.  As a young man, Beuys flew for the Luftwaffe as a rear gunner in a bomber unit.  In 1943, his plane was shot down in the Crimea.  Beuys claims he was discovered in the snow by nomadic Tartars, who nursed him back to health with natural medicines.  He remained unconscious until after he was returned to a German field hospital, but he maintains that the images of the Tartars and their healing methods penetrated his subconscious.  Most notably, he recalls being packed in animal fat and wrapped in felt to help his body retain heat.  Read more about his story at the wikipedia page linked above.  Regardless of the story's truth, these images and materials featured prominently in his art for the rest of his life.

Beuys was later among the most influential art figures of the 20th century.  His first trip to America was to mark the opening of the René Block Gallery in New York with a performance art piece.  The piece, I Like America and America Likes Me, began with Bueys's ride directly from the airport to the gallery in the back of an ambulance.  At the gallery, he spent three days in a room with a coyote, interacting with the animal as the situation dictated.  After the three days, he was taken back to the airport, again directly by ambulance.  Beuys later explained his mode of transportation: "I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote."  This video clip gives more about the work and Beuys's life, well worth the 15 minutes.  If the quicktime video doesn't work for you, I believe you can select a different format.

Tidbits

One of the greatest oddities of class in Hungary:  the chalkboard erasers are giant sponges.  The building's meticulous cleaning staff washes the boards daily and stocks them every morning with a damp sponge.  It drives me nuts when my topology prof doesn't wait for the board to dry completely before he starts writing again... you end up with this smudgy, broken haze of writing rather than clean lines of chalk.   Speaking of the cleaning staff, they must mop the stairs twice a day here... it seems like they are always doing that.

Maybe a greater cultural difference still, nay, perhaps the greatest single divider of Eastern and Western culture for an entire generation:  the preference of how to demarcate the endpoints of a conversation.  While many cultures in the West, such as the US, France, and Spain, choose to indicate which is the beginning and which is the end, most Hungarians are content to simply indicate "This is one side of our conversation."

In the US, we say "hello" and "goodbye."  In France, one says "bonjour" and "adieu."  In Hungary, however, you will often hear "helló" and, indeed, "helló."  I can't tell you how many times I've had to double-take as I left a store to hear the shopkeeper yell "helló" on my way out.  Did I forget something?  Am I stealing something? Oh, wait... no.  Furthermore, one can even observe a blending-zone of these preferences in Spain.  One can specify the side, as with "buenos días" and "hasta la vista, baby" or one can simply be content with "ciao" and "ciao."  Oh, the wonders never cease.

The grossest phenomenon I've ever witnessed:  no fewer than three times have I seen someone pick a particularly long cigarette butt off the ground, presumably to finish what its original owner did not.  Big-city dwellers, I ask you:  Is this a universal hobo practice or is it limited to Eastern Europe?

Side note:  Hungarians will (sometimes vigorously) contest the point that Hungary is not in Eastern Europe, but rather in Central Europe.  They have a valid cultural and historical argument, but I suspect that the Iron Curtain will define much of the east/west division of Europe for my generation.  Eastern and Central Europe are perhaps the most poorly defined regions in the entire world, though, so maybe Hungary will wiggle its way across that line.

To continue that side note, I am boggled by how devastating WWII was to Hungary.  At the Terror House museum, I read that WWII destroyed every bridge crossing the Danube in Budapest (eight cross it today, I think maybe six or seven crossed it before WWII) and 40% or more of the entire national wealth.  That is staggering.  What's more, to think the oldest generation of Hungarians today bore witness to all of this as young adults.  Quite a silent sadness -- I suppose it is far enough removed that people don't talk about or notice it as much anymore.