Про Перельмана и миллион

(Grigoriy Perel’man, known amongst the mathematicians as “The Dude”)

Стихи. По-моему гениально. И грустно.

[For those who don’t speak Russian: background azoy.]

Ah, war, war...

Эх война, война, война...

Дурная тетка, стерва она.

А война, война идет,

А пацана девченка ждет.

— Любэ

Interesting clip about everyday realities of WWII. Also, a nice song. (Here is an English version with the translated lyrics on the right in the info section. For ladies only, here is a version with a woman singing. As a rule, Russian sounds 10 times more beautiful when it’s sang or spoken by a woman.)

Technology

“Back in the day, the technology was less advanced but more charming.”

That’s what people like me (backward, old-fashioned romantics) like to think. I don’t know if it’s true or not. Reading this and this posts, I am thinking there might just be a chance that people took their jobs more responsibly. But who knows?

Who is to blame? I think PETA.

Roads everywhere

In what other language do you have an adjective from "forced labor"?


(full version here)

One of my favorite poems. A different and fuller version (I prefer Karachentzev above):



By Marina Tzvetayeva (Марина Цветаева)

Всюду бегут дороги,
По лесу, по пустыне,
В ранний и поздний час.

Люди по ним ходят,
Ходят по ним дроги,
В ранний и поздний час.

Топчут песок и глину
Страннические ноги,
Топчут кремень и грязь...

Кто на ветру — убогий?
Всяк на большой дороге —
Переодетый князь!

Треплются их отрепья
Всюду, где небо — сине,
Всюду, где Б-г — судья.

Сталкивает их цепи,
Смешивает отрепья
Па́рная колея.

Так по земной пустыне,
Кинув земную пажить
И сторонясь жилья,

Нищенствуют и кня́жат —
Каторжные княгини,
Каторжные князья.

Вот и сошлись дороги,
Вот мы и сшиблись клином.
Тёмен, ох, тёмен час.

Это не я с тобою, —
Это беда с бедою
Каторжная — сошлась.

Что же! Целуй в губы,
Коли тебя, любый,
Б-г от меня не спас.

Всех по одной дороге
Поволокут дроги —
В ранний ли, поздний час.

5 апреля 1916

So many cases, so little time

Russian grammar is fun. Besides having word formation akin to a lego puzzle (a few prefixes, one-to-three suffixes and one or two endings to form a regular word), it has cases. Cases are always fun for students of Russian. Both the students who are native speakers and those who are not.

If you don’t know what cases are, they are instances of inflection, the process of changing the word such that its meaning and functional role in the sentence changes. In English, only four cases exist and only regarding (some) pronouns. Otherwise, the function of a word is determined by its position. Borrrring. (Blame the French. As usual.)

I gave you a book. — Nominative case
You gave me a book. — Dative/Accusative case
This is my book. — Possessive case.
This book is mine. — Forgot its name, but you get the idea.

Well, in Russian there are six cases, and they apply to all nouns, pronouns and adjectives that take them as antecedents. (In case of adjective–antecedent relationship, both have to be of the same case, number and gender — yes, I said “gender”; in Russian even non-living things have gender: for instance, a table is “he”, while a bottle is “she”. The window is “it”.)

Russian is not unique about this. In other manly languages the same thing is going on (both about cases and genders). For instance, in German and Latin.

Well, did I mention that numbers can also be deflected? Yep. Even long ones, like “three thousand eight hundred ninety two”. Each of the six words has to be deflected, and unlike in the case of nouns, where rules are relatively simple (you need to know the gender and grammatical type of the noun — of course, native speakers know how to deflect naturally; but, they don’t know the cases naturally, which means they still need to memorize the proper endings for writing), for numerals the correct endings can be tricky. Think of it as juggling six balls while dancing a tango. The balls need to be flying up, but also in the direction one is dancing.

Ilya Birman gives a few examples. (Sorry, at this point one needs to speak Russian.)

Так вышло, что мне нужно сделать небольшой тест по русскому языку и отправить его по почте на соответствующую кафедру в универе. Склоняю числительные. Чтобы не было сильно скучно, придумываю всякие предложения.

8. Просклоняйте количественное числительное 1245 (книг).

1. Тысяча двести сорок пять книг стоят на полке.
2. Тысячи двухсот сорока пяти книг недосчитался библиотекарь.
3. И тысяче двумстам сорока пяти книгам не рассказать всех несмешных анекдотов!
4. Уж тысячу двести сорок пять книг прочёл, а всё бестолку.
5. Тысячью двумястами сорока пятью книгами можно натопить небольшую баню.
6. О тысяче двухстах сорока пяти книгах мне надоело придумывать дурацкие предложения.

9. Просклоняйте порядковое числительное 3892 (преподавателя).

Если числительное порядковое, то почему «преподавателя»? Видимо, ошибка в тесте. Пришлось склонять сразу и так, и эдак.

1. Три тысячи восемьсот девяносто два преподавателя пинают плохого студента три тысячи восемьсот девяносто второй раз.
2. Трёх тысяч восьмисот девяноста двух преподавателей достаточно, чтобы вкрутить лампочку с три тысячи восемьсот девяносто второго раза.
3. Трём тысячам восьмистам девяноста двум преподавателям пришлось ещё раз дать по башке три тысячи восемьсот девяносто второму (в рейтинге успеваемости) студенту.
4. Три тысячи восемьсот девяносто двух преподавателей наказали за избиение три тысячи восемьсот девяносто второго (в рейтинге успеваемости) студента.
5. Тремя тысячами восьмьюстами девяноста двумя преподавателями (в смысле, таким большим составом) можно доехать на работу три тысячи восемьсот девяносто вторым троллейбусом (ПКиО — Юпитер)
6. О трёх тысячах восьмистах девяноста двух преподавателях можно составить в три тысячи восемьсот девяносто два раза больше бессмысленных предложений, чем о три тысячи восемьсот девяносто втором кабинете главного корпуса (тем более, что такого нет).
   

Which is not to say I don’t love English. I do. It just has other strengths. All of them derived from Latin and German, obviously.

“Every year, before the New Year, we go to bath”

A funny story by Mrakobez, a Jewish variation of a famous Russian movie. About jealousy, mikveh, New Year and hippies.

Well, a somewhat sad story actually. One woman in my family was never jealous of her husband. Why? It was said that you could leave him in a dark room alone with three women and nothing would happen.

Lodgers of an Old House

In order to produce something like this in the US, one has to be on drugs or clinically depressed. And still, one won’t make it…

In Russia, stuff like this is in the air (or used to be):



I mean, what the hell is this?..



Or this…

A story about capital investment

One more scene from Treasure Island. Very apropos current events.

Russian commercial

…of anti-stress drugs in a form of a stressometer. Very apropos.

Life in the Soviet Union

This is how Soviet people lived (I assume people know this, but 1 ruble = 100 kopeyek; I am using Russian plural endings, because this is the proper way to do it):

1 kopeyka — a box of matches
2 kopeiki — call a girlfriend
3 kopeiki — a glass of soda water with syrup, or a trip on a street car
4 kopeiki — call a girlfriend twice and get a wrong number once, or a trip on a trolley bus
5 kopeyek — a small glass of sunflower seeds (to go)
9 kopeyek — milk ice cream
13 kopeyek — butter ice cream
14 kopeyek — a piece of “block” bread
22 kopeiki — chocolate ice cream “Leningrad”
56 kopeyek — 1 dollar
1 ruble 12 kopeyek — 2 dollars
2.87, 3.62, 4.12 rubles — three bottles of vodka
8.80 rubles — a night trip by taxi to the railroad station and back. On the way there, buy flowers for a girl, give the cab driver a tip and lose 3 rubles
44 rubles — a University student’s stipend. Crazy money.
160 rubles — the goal of life. Dirty money if necessary.
5000 rubles — Zhiguli
10,000 rubles — Volga (in theory. In reality, due to deficit, you had to be in a line to buy a car, and after that, it cost a lot more.)
15,000 rubles — 1o years of prison with confiscation of property
1 million — no such number
300 million — the number of people living in the USSR

But hey, people had free education, free medicine and free service in the army.

* * *

An amazing post by Artemiy Lebedev on Russian food. You really have to understand Russian to get the context; my favorites were:

• being able to pick the bread by poking it with fingers to check for freshness
• being able to cut bread in halves or quarters
• milk brand was called Milk — levels of fat were labeled by cap color
• butter was cut with metal wire and weighed
• eggs were bought in numbers — if you bought at least 30, you could get the container, otherwise, you’d put them all in a bag
• you paid first, got a receipt, brought it to the “cashier” who put all the receipts on a metal spike, calculated in hear head and using the abacus that the sum was correct and then gave you the produce
• if you wanted to insult the cashier, you could buy a single egg
• a produce store, liquor store, paper store, toy store, butcher store “director” could be sure his children would get into a University
• no plastic bags — you brought your own bag or carried things in hands
  

I lived the total of seven years of my life under Communism, but I remember almost all of this. Aah, the nostalgia!..

Lebedev tells a joke regarding the picture above:

A Soviet and an imported chicken legs are lying in a store and having a conversation:
— Look at you: you’re all skinny, venous, blue, hairy!
— Yeah, but at least I had a natural death.

If you think this is funny, it’s not. I am not talking about the joke — the whole topic. That’s what spreading the wealth accomplishes. Americans have seen something likes this, during the Great Depression. Two to four generations of Soviets lives their lives through this.

But yeah, capitalism is evil. No question about it.

Regarding Obama

… and how some foreign powers will react to him, see (warning: normal Russian lexicon present) “Four illustrations of how a new idea strikes a person unprepared for it” by Daniil Kharms. Analogy suggested by one of Arbat’s readers.

Also, I am not sure if it’s assur to display images of idolatry (even parody on them), so I’ll just link to this one (but be warned).

* * *

Kharms used to say: “My telephon number is rather simple: 32‒08. Very easy to remember: thirty-two teeth, eight fingers.”

— Sergei Dovlatov, Solo on Underwood

Dagestani commentator reports: religion of peace

Not the religion of peace you thought about, but the other one, with idolatry and icons. A fight between Georgian and Armenian monks over the right to wash floor in front of a church:



You really need to understand Russian to fully comprehend the hilarity of the commentary — both from thick Caucasus-region accent and from the content. It is not clear if this guy is for real, or if this is a parody.

Comrade Obama

From Mrakobez.



Untranslatable. “And in the Oval Hall, commissars are sitting, and Lenin is looking from his portait.”

To get some context:



Now, aren’t you glad he was elected? Imagine how boring it would be had McCain won. The best we would get is some low-style jokes from the Garlic about his age.

By the way, you can tell the first audio was recorded in NYC by police sirens in the background (before the music starts). New Yorkers probably don’t even notice it anymore.

Some examples of how good liberals are for economic progress

An interesting article about what happened to the Great Lake states and how good Obama-styles policies (together with the labor unions) are for progress and development.

One really has to ask the obvious question: If Obama’s economic policies work so well, why isn’t Detroit a paradise?

In 1950, America produced 51% of the GNP for the entire world. Of that production, roughly 70% took place in the eight states surrounding the Great Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The productive capability of this small area of earth staggers the imagination. Virtually everything that rebuilt the industrial bases of Europe and Japan came from those eight states. Cars, planes, electronics, machine tools, consumer goods, generators, concrete — any conceivable item manufactured by industrial humanity poured out this tiny region and enriched the world. The region shone with widespread prosperity. People migrated from the South and West to work in these Herculean engines of industry.

The wealth, power and economic dominance of the region at the time cannot be overstated. Nothing like it has existed in human history.

Yet, a mere 30 years later, by 1980, we called that area the “rustbelt” and it became synonymous with joblessness, collapsing cities, high crime, failing schools and general hopelessness.

What the hell happened?

Obama happened.

Of course, not Obama personally but rather the same ideas that Obama espouses. What those ideas did to the Great Lakes states, they can do to the entire country.

Read on. He talks about how two things crippled those states’ economy: 1) labor unions, 2) invasive government. By the way, the first impressions of a famous Soviet dissident, Victor Suvorov, after coming in 1978 to the Great Britain are interesting to read, in light of the above article:

[After arriving to the UK] I was astonished by the extremely low level of life. Not as in the famished Soviet Union, of course, but impossible to compare with Switzerland, from which I escaped. London was filled with garbage, lines were snaking around the streets, stores were standing half-empty… The winter of 1978-79 was a winter of destruction.

The thing is: by that time, Britain was already long-ruled by socialists who destroyed the economy as only they know how. At that point, everybody was on strike — garbage collectors, transport workers… It was a sight to see! As soon as the railroad workers’ strike ended, the train drivers’ strike began. Then went the ticket collectors. Labor unions had huge power, and the country was inevitably rolling towards a cliff. I was just amazed — after Geneva I’d thought that all of the West was prospering. And it turned out that socialism got its hands on England too. Unbelievable! Such a great country brought to a level of some Bulgaria.

Fortunately, the elections were won by Margarita — Margaret Thatcher. She came to power and started breaking apart socialism and saving Britain. The most difficult thing was to defeat the miners. It was unprofitable to mine coal in England, and every ton of coal was impoverishing the country. Just like in the Soviet Union — the more meat a collective farm produced, the more losses for the country’s budget. Margarita started closing down the mines; the miners started striking, since they were accustomed to robbing their own country, being parasites on it. But the Iron Lady did not give up.

It wasn’t just the miners either! Dockers were the second major enemy. All the world by that time was already using highly-efficient container unloading of ships. But English dockers’ union was against innovations, because container unloading increased productivity, leading to firing of additional workers. Sometimes it was like a comics strip: container-carrying ships would arrive at Dutch Rotterdam; there, everything was unloaded on trains and delivered to England by railroad. While the dockers were still getting paid, since the labor union forced this out of the business owners.

Or another idiocy… Socialists decided to defend English cinematography. Before, cameras were inefficient and had to be assisted by three people. Then cameras became better and could be served only by one person. But the socialists enacted a law where three people had to work on a camera anyway! What, should we fire a worker because of some progress?! At that point English cinematography could not compete with Hollywood and lost the juice.

Socialism is a national suicide. And Margaret with her iron hand started to choke it, saving her country. She showed utmost will not to give up. And she won. After that, the country started climbing out of the nightmare. And now England is one of the world leaders. It blossomed virtually in front of my eyes. No wonder Russian oligarchs come here…

Yet, socialism is not dead everywhere. [He goes on to give some modern examples where unions or state-sponsored monopolies drive prices up and slow down the progress.]

Powerful stuff, huh? Some more links about labor unions, relevant to Jews: “The New Gangster”, “Can you say witch hunt?”

Now, let’s see what happens in the next four years.

The role of a government

An essay (перевод на русс. — здесь) by Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) about the purpose of the government (eloquently described by Thomas Jefferson before, in the Declaration of Independence) and dangers of government’s abuse of its powers — done not through obvious oppressive tyranny but through gradual, stealthy increase of its “responsibilities” and involvement in private individuals’ decision-making. An excerpt from the introduction:

Bastiat believed that all human beings possessed the G-d–given, natural rights of “individuality, liberty, property.” “This is man,” he wrote. These “three gifts from G-d precede all human legislation.” But even in his time—writing in the late 1840s—Bastiat was alarmed over how the law had been “perverted” into an instrument of what he called legal plunder. […]

The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of education by the state. Those who held “government-endowed teaching positions,” he wrote, would rarely criticize legal plunder lest their government endowments be ended. [Is it any wonder that their students are brainwashed and consider any alternative opinion evil and immoral? — A.]

The system of legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance of politics in society. That would be a most unhealthy development as it would encourage even more citizens to seek to improve their own well-being not by producing goods and services for the marketplace but by plundering their fellow citizens through politics.

Forget the introduction, however. I just read the first five pages of the essay itself, and I want to quote nearly everything (see the end of the post for a short quote). So, click the link above, skip to the beginning of the essay and start reading — the language is sweet, and the reason is clear.

* * *

The idea that governments must be actively involved in the free life of citizens is extremely pervasive. Most people believe that without the government manipulating something all the time, there would be no progress of civilization. When something goes wrong, people ask, “Why doesn’t the government do something?” The government officials themselves see a need to be constantly regulating and monitoring something — otherwise, people who have elected them will think they are slacking off. It reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Costanza who needed to look annoyed, concerned and busy all the time to make his boss think he is doing something.

Indeed, the word itself, “government”, suggests that its role is to constantly “govern”, direct progress. Yet, an intelligent and educated student of history immediately recognizes that the majority of developments leading to progress and improvement in standard of living were done through private efforts of free enterprise (≡ striving for success) and personal innovation, not through some wise Central Committee’s “governing”.

What government is necessary for is protection of one’s rights, and when a situation exists in the society when one group or individual violates another group’s or individual’s rights, the government must step in. The government is that boundary that separates freedom from chaos. Anything more leads to reduction of freedom, progress, prosperity, and all the virtuous goals that proponents of strong, big, regulationist, centralized government espouse. When the government oversteps limitations of its responsibilities (something which, according to Obama, it has not done enough), it does exactly what it was designed to prevent — violation of the rights of one group for the benefit of another. Except, it harms the other group in the process as well.

According to Pirkei Avos (3:2), “Rabbi Chanina, the deputy of the Kohanim, said: ‘Pray for the welfare of the government. If it were not for the fear of the government, each man would eat his neighbor alive!’” That’s it. He did not say: “If it were not for the government, all progress and improvement of welfare would stop”.

Nor does this refer to a free-market situation, where rich exploit the poor, but for the fear of government’s intervention. In a free market, people come to an exchange of goods and services that benefits them maximally, according to their mutual agreement. If a situation exists, in which one party does not maximize interests of another (without hurting its own), a competitor will arise that will do so, drawing business, capital and market influence from the “exploiter”.

A free-market society, then, acts as a self-regulating eco-system, where energy is drawn to the area, where its use can be maximized for everyone’s benefit. The Theory of Evolution states as much: one does not need a centralized controller for progress to happen. (Of course, somebody needs to allow the laws of Nature themselves to exist, and this “somebody” is but hidden in the ecosystem — but, that’s another story. In economics, just as in — lehavdil — Halacha, one must look at the revealed aspect.)

In the case of Torah-based theocratic society, the situation is different: a government is necessary for interpretation of Oral Law to fit the needs of the changing times — yet, the authority to do is given directly by G-d. The authority of secular government, on the other hand, is vested in the rights its people delegated to it, and no person can delegate to the government a right to rob another citizen on his behalf; he doesn’t have such a right a priori. Or, to quote Bastiat:

It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws. What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.


Nature, or rather G-d, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and that cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties, but the extension of our personality? and what is property, but an extension of our faculties?


If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together to extend, to organize a common force to provide regularly for this defense. Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness, in individual right; and the common force cannot rationally have any other end, or any other mission, than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual — for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.


For this perversion of force would be, in one case as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us, not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force, acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces?


Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense; it is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have a right to act, of doing what they have a right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all.


And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, the most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most restrained, the most just, and, consequently, the most stable Government that could be imagined, whatever its political form might be.

Exler about Beatles

From Alex Exler’s blog (in Russian):

Once, when Beatles were recording a new song of theirs, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, they were disturbed by a profusely hung-over youngster Eric Clapton, who, having lost control of his actions, grabbed George Martin’s guitar and played a solo on it. George declared that he wasn’t about to spend his own money on recording the song over again, and Beatles were forced to leave the recording as it was, with Clapton’s solo in the middle of it.

Paul McCartney then asked Clapton: when had the youngster gotten so drunk?

— Yesterday! — answered Eric Clapton.

“Yesterday…” — thought McCartney. — “Why, that’s not a bad title for a new song!”

West vs. East

From the Western point of view, the Holocaust was a crime. From Eastern — colossal waste of human resources.

(С Западной точки зрения, Холокост был преступлением. С Восточной — бесхозяйственностью.)

Political motives for not raping

The height of liberal thought: why are cases of Israeili soldiers raping Palestinian women less numerous? Hebrew U. study finds: because of dehumanization of the Palestinians in the eyes of Israelis. So, not raping your enemy’s women is a sign of racism now.

Aруц Шева пишет — учитывая, что Палестинцы всегда обвиняют Израильтян в том, что мы насилуем их женщин, как же мы теперь выстоим против двойного обвинения — в том, что мы их еще и не насилуем? И они правы. Я так думаю, можно ждать появления плакатов — «Сионисты хотят поработить нас, захватить нашу землю, и побрезговать нашими женщинами!»

[Arutz Sheva writes: considering that Palestinians always accuse Israelis that we rape their women, how will we now withstand a double accusation — that we also do not rape them? And they are right. I think we are safe to expect posters saying: “Zionists want to enslave us, capture our land and ignore our women!”]

— arbat

One of the comments said: “One cannot even joke about something like this. The article itself is the best self-parody.”

Then, when people tell me that academic environment fries your brains instead of making them better, what can I say? That it’s only among humanities and social sciences? (By the way, Dr. Harl is a conservative and a supporter of Israel.) Most people in the science departments are liberals too.

* * *

By the way, the Hebrew U. professor (the author of the study) was arrested for “suspected rape and sexual abuse of his students”. At least he is not a hypocrite (or racist) — he practiced what he believed in.

Power of makkif

Soviet video with Finnish subtitles. I’m guessing, made during the Winter War (1939). Taken from arbat.

«За бабло такое не сделать. В это надо верить.»
(“Can’t make something like this for money. Gotta believe in it.”)



Lyrics here (in Russian). “Welcome us, pretty Suomi.”

Can you imagine Americans making something like this for Vietnamese or Iraqis (not that I am comparing the two countries’ agendas)? I can’t…

Deadlines

Улыбнуло. Вспомнил, как делал точно так же (как сын scholar_vit’а). :)