Halfway down the Danube

Yes but... one of your posts has disappeared. I swear I didn't touch it.

Sigh.

I think you ought to take a course in MT so I'm not the only one messing around with this data. Obviously I'm not smart enough for this.

That was the my post on how comments were out. I didn't want it to give anyone skimming the page the wrong idea, so I deleted it.

Carlos

PS I will look into MT maintenance, promise. And I want to mess with the blogroll somewhat.

And a grateful "Thank you!" to all those people who replied to me confirming the malfunction. Halfway Down the Danube has some very loyal (and in one case, exceedingly prompt) readers indeed.

Open thread, eh? Ok, what are the thoughts of our favorite Danubians on this?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=aqSCFgEeCxos&refer=europe

How about the rest of the EU? Y'think it'll get through the gauntlet?

From here it looks like it's still up for grabs.

The very high level of publicity given to the polls suggests a country having a conversation with itself -- apparently the vote has been on the front pages there pretty much without a break for a couple of weeks now.

So, now comes "on the other hand". Or so ISTM.

Doug M.

This European (from the Netherlands) is very unhappy with this referendum forced upon him. The European constitution is quite a complicated document, which can only be understood by looking at its even more complicated context. I believe I am relatively well-versed in EU-matters, but even I feel grossly unequipped to make the binary yes-no decision that is now put before me. It seems that my compatriots will vote on the current government, on immigration, on our national economy, on the entry of Turkey into the EU, but definitely not on the European constitution. Had there been a referendum on this referendum I would certainly have voted 'no'.

Politics are boring me tonight. How about recreational mathematics? Dover recently re-released a real cheap edition of Vinogradov's Trigonometrical Sums in Number Theory; anyone read it? If so, what's the word? I've heard only Vinogradov was able to use his methods successfully (making big stabs at the Goldbach conjecture, among other things).

Recreational math, eh? Have you heard anything about "Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis : The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers"? Too pop?

There have been three popular books on the Riemann hypothesis released in the past year, one by John "Buggery" Derbyshire, of all people. I am mildly ashamed to say I've read none of them. On the other hand, I can heartily recommend Harold Edwards' Riemann's Zeta Function, especially if you have some math (and I know you do, Bernard). Dover, bless their hearts, has it in a nice inexpensive edition.

Danke. A quick look on Amazon gave me the feeling that the volume I mentioned was nice but a little light.

Hardy and Wright, _An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers_, mentions Vinogradov's method briefly, in the course of an extended discussion of Waring's Problem, but doesn't outline it in any detail.

"In his later work Vinogradov made very important improvements, based primarily on a new and powerful method for the estimation of certain trigonometrical sums, and obtained results which were, for large k, far better than any known before ...[there follows a number of rather technical results obtained using these methods]" It does look like a rather specialized technique

Vinogradov's contribution to the Goldbach problem was proving that every sufficiently large odd number is the sum of three primes.

I decided, what the hell, and ordered it from my local independent bookstore. It's ten bucks with a discount, and I do like seeing how the pros do it.

Wikipedia also suggested Sieve Methods, which the NYPL's Science, Industry, and Business Library (aka my home away from home) has. I'll let you all know.

Found poetry in the Recent Entries list:

Now, Muse, let's sing of
The Combover
After Easter

Who knew the Pierian spring was actually hair restorer?