RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE BLOG-WITH A VENGEANCE............

Well, this hasn’t worked out like I planned it to.

What else is new………….?

Nearly 5 years have passed since began this blog. Much has changed and not for the better.

I’ve barely posted at this blog since its founding. The last post dates to November, 2010, as depressing as that is. The proof lies in the rather maudlin reaction to the 2010-midterm US elections.

  Good thing I wasn’t posting during the 2012 midterms-my drunken rants might be grounds for Homeland to put me in Gitmo. After waterboarding my fat ass for kicks, of course………

 By now, if I’d been posting regularly and daringly, I might have become a runaway juggernaut blogger sensation in both academic and liberal political blogging. Yes, that sounds so smug and arrogant of me, I know. In the vast ocean of cyberspace, any of us are but a passionately screaming droplet in a roaring riptide-riddled, complex virtual electroliquid n-dimensional manifold medium spanning the whole of the human technologically embedded psychosocial ID reality. It takes a truly potent, original and dynamically and diversely informed presence to make more than a nanosecond impression on the hummingbird-like attention span of the average web surfer and the search engines they traverse.      

That and some good SEO know-how.

I think I can be one such voice and I should have tried harder to be it. I wanted to be that voice. But once again, I ended up tripping on my life.

What happened?

None of your fucking business.  

Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Like I was demonically possessed by Chris Christie for a second…………LOL 

All kidding aside, it’s a long depressing story best told in a biography for dozens of pages to those curious enough to expend the energy and cost getting and reading such a tome. There’ll be plenty of time for self-pity later, when I can suitably manifest it for interesting reading. So I’ll table the Tale of Woe for now.  But while I won’t get into the details here and now- I will have to go into the broad brushstrokes of the picture in order to explain the new mission of this blog and its’ companion website. Ironically, if all goes as planned, it’ll be the last openly political post at this blog for several weeks.

(Of course, if an unexpected disaster of global political or economic implications occurs, I can’t promise I won’t crack and explode about it. I also make not promises not to link the articles and blog posts of other flaming liberals whose opinions I agree with. So you’ve been warned.)

Suffice to say the Great Economic Heist of 2008 finally claimed me as a victim and it’s taken me this long to climb back from suicidal despair to ambition in a new phase of my life. I realized several important things during that most recent personal Dark Age-most of which I’ll be getting to in one form or another at this blog over the next few months.

One of the most important things I finally fully realized was that America as it’s currently organized-socially, culturally, economically and politically-is a country for and by the wealthy. Sure, occasionally they throw us a crumb to prevent an annoying rebellion which would force them to spend extra money on the politicians they already own so they have the courage to send out the militia police to crush it-like the Affordable Care Act or gay marriage. But those crumbs are never done in compassion and they’re getting smaller and less frequent as our capitalist system slowly reverts to an oligarchic, feudalist ensemble of  increasingly disparate nation-states.  The rest of us are merely pungently perfumed livestock to them. Livestock they can slowly starve and torture to death before carving up to stock their pantries because they can.

They enjoy making the cow squeal in agony for the longest possible time before slitting its throat. If they’re really in a playful mood-they’ll carve the bovine up while it’s still alive and make it’s calves watch.

Worst of all-they love making the cows blame each other for it while they drink their blood in front of them-and a large number of the cows thank them for it.   

Animal Farm On Derivative Steroids.

This kind of ruthless cannibalism of the classes is nothing new in Western culture, of course. But what made America different for 2 generations in the mid to late 20^th century was that we were trying to do it differently and we were succeeding. Unions protected poor and middle class workers, the government provided a floor of social safety net programs beneath which people couldn’t fall and there was a strong and effective education system that was available in principle to all. We had all but eliminated childhood hunger in this country until 20 years ago. And the wealthy was doing just fine- indeed, they made more income from the end of World War II until the early 1990’s then at any other time in our history. The only things we demanded in return was 1) a true democracy where our vote counted-hell, we even let them lobby with their wealth so they had more influence in matters that mattered to them as long as we got what little we wanted (which in retrospect, may have been a tragic error) and 2) they pay a little more so that the rest of us don’t live as medieval serfs and our children had a fighting chance at what they have. That’s all we wanted in return for not cutting their throats in a communist, Russian style revolution. And make no mistake- this country came very close to such a revolution in the 1930’s at the height of the Great Depression.

They grumbled and bitched at first. As I said, we let them get their way most of the time, so what they were complaining about is beyond most of us. But we all shared in the prosperity of the decades that followed. And most of us-regardless of class and personal wealth-were proud to be Americans.

No sane American wanted to go back to the world of Hoovervilles, soup kitchens, tommy-gun gangs  and child slave labor the climax of 160 years of the self-absorbed greed of the aristocrats had brought us-where organized crime or being a sex slave by marriage to an aristocrat was the only way for the peasants to avoid that fate.

 It was far, far, far from perfect. Ask any black, Latino or gay person over the age of 60 or any working woman of any ethnicity over the age of 50. I’m sure they have very different perceptions of those generations.

But for the most part, it was working. There was a bare minimum standard of living most of us could count on, our children had a chance at an upper class life with a little luck and a lot of work and best of all, they didn’t have to live in fear of a slow death by starvation, rape, murder or disease as their ancestors did before the New Deal.

And somewhere along the way-that changed. It changed for too many reasons to sum up in a few sentences.

 But basically what happened was that the upper class decided at some point that wasn’t good enough anymore. Why should they share?

They looked at the third world nations with slavery, poisoned food and water where only the wealthy ate without illness, where the elite bought the children of the workers as sex slaves in exchange for 5 bucks and a television, 10 cent wages and elderly poor working to death-with terrible, vicious envy.

Why couldn’t they have such power and control? Why did they have to treat the peasants as human beings? In fact, most of them were offended by the idea of the lower classes getting an  education, being protected at work, actually having a future to look forward to. “They didn’t deserve these things! They weren’t born to them! They aren’t special, like we are!”  They decided a prospering middle class was morally offensive and downright unnatural-like cats and dogs having sex.

So they decided to restore what they perceived as the natural order and make America like the Third World.

They decided they didn’t want to pay taxes anymore.

They decided national loyality is a game for the peasants to play, a good tool for encouraging servile behavior in the face of abuse.

Worst of all, they realized that for this to work, they had to ensure the lower classes had as few choices as possible. The new middles class was created primarily through providing choices that didn’t exist before to working people. They realized that had to be completely eliminated and the working class once again prisoners of circumstance for their dreams to be fulfilled.

    So they moved all our jobs overseas and began a 30 year campaign to create an American oligarchy with globally outsourced wealth. They incrementally over 40 years destroyed organized labor, public education and limited funding of elections-and then turned the same people who were suffering without these essential elements of a middle class against them. It’s an amazingly effective and tragic brainwashing campaign whose complex history and sadistic genius I’ll be discussing in detail in the future.  They created a media machine to brainwash the lower classes with the American dream, the ideas of “making it big” and “every man for himself” They took to demonizing labor and how great people take and suckers give. How personal responsibility applies to selfish teachers and union workers-and only the wealthy have the Divine Right to avoid responsibility or ethics.

 The result is a country on the verge of a 2 class system where working poor replaces the middle class and the children of adults without wealth can no longer expect to read, let alone get a quality education. The non-wealthy students of my generation are now debt vassals to the federal government which renders their educations worthless.  Despite the vast improvement of the American health care system of the Affordable Care Act-and it is a vast improvement over the sadistic Wild West of Healthcare we had before it-we still live in fear of illness bankruptsy and we likely will remain the only developed nation where this is true.

And don’t get me started on the environment and the slow death of the Earth.

All this and more I’ve seen, lived and watched. I myself was forced to abandon my graduate studies in mathematics near the finish line due to the depletion of my resources and my chronic illnesses.

And you know what?

I’ve decided I’m done just watching them strangle this world quietly.

They still may succeed in enslaving our children for centuries and leaving us here to devour our own children and die by age 30 while they live in isolated hi-tech castles above the sewers and prisons the rabble live in. It may be beyond any human power to stop that future from coming to fruition at this point.

But it’s not beyond my power to comment, criticize, inform and provide the scientific education to the masses that they dread us having. It’s not beyond my power to fight the future with knowledge, conscience and honesty.  

With the reinvigoration and renewed commitment of myself to this blog, I think it’s appropriate to reintroduce myself, the blog and its general purpose-as well as its new role as part of my larger website: T.U.L.O.O.MATH.  Allow me to introduce myself, as I’ve said

Who is.....The Mathemagician?

A man with no plan, but a freight car full of ideas and a heart of flame and frost,  fire and ice. (With apologies to George R.R. Martin for the last part, of course……….)

He is a superb tutor in mathematics and the hard sciences with over 15 years of tutoring experience at all levels from high school to beginning graduate studies.

After dabbling as a premed, then majoring in chemistry, physical chemistry and biochemistry, he was seduced into pure and applied mathematics and never looked back. He was a graduate student in pure mathematics when personal tragedy and financial ruin struck -and stopped his studies just before his oral exams for the M.S. degree. He plans to return triumphantly to complete his MS and to ultimately obtain a PHD before dying. He has 3 bachelors’ degrees, in philosophy, physical chemistry and mathematics as well as minors in biochemistry and psychology. He also has opinions on everything, both mathematical and otherwise.

He is a superb researcher and paper author who authors an online blog and more recently, is a regular poster/contributor to both The Math Stack Exchange and Math Overflow . He is also a past online reviewer of textbooks for the Mathematical Association Of America and hopes to return to this labor of love when time permits.

He is a diverse scholar and lecturer who has studied with such experts as Saul Kripke , Melvyn Nathanson and Dennis Sullivan.

He is a professional research paper/ essay/fiction writer and tutor who prides himself on a nearly perfect record of A grades as an undergraduate in written work and specializes in both paper writing for hire and tutoring students in the fine arts of academic research and paper drafting.

His personal statement: Mathematicians are sorcerers. But instead of tea leaves, toadstools, phoenix feathers, polyjuice potions and eye of newt, we conjure with Lebesgue measures, noncommutative rings, differentiable manifolds, Fourier transforms, deformation algebras and power series. We read the Book of Nature and if we ask it the right questions.

He currently is hoping to change the world with his finally completed website, TULOOMATH. This is A Free Complete Online Self Study Library And Advisory Center of Pre-University/ University Level Mathematics Lecture Notes, Inexpensive In-Print And Online Texts And Other Resources, Textbook Reviews, Student Advice, Affordable Tutoring, Counseling Services, Blog Commentary on Matters Both Mathematical and Otherwise and Much, Much More! His hope is that will become a major online resource for students of mathematics and others.

This blog was originally a Google Blog. I’m still learning Wordpress, so to be honest, I still haven’t found the best way to design the blog at the website. I originally had imported the blog to the website-but I hated the way it looked and could never get it to look perfect. So here I am, back where I started. Sometimes, less truly is more.   

 I recently began a major new enterprise-the major website T.U.L.O.O.MATH. I plan for this blog to become the beating heart of the website, so I really should begin the blog’s rebirth by describing exactly what the associated website is and why I hope it’ll become a major force online for higher education.  

 This website began 2 years ago on a rainy January night. Depressed beyond finite measure by the bleak future I can now see too well, my chronic illnesses that had frustrated me both  academically and for job prospects and the financial ruin without health insurance had that all but prevented my completing my much-delayed masters’ degree,  I wanted badly to change my world in a tangible way. I wanted to make a difference, as hackneyed and clichéd as that sounds-before I grew old and died of whatever fate awaited me.

I surfed the web to try and raise my spirits. After pouring over blogs, The Huffington Post, my Facebook page and some scantily clad goddesses (hey, I’m human, sue me)-I began searching for online lecture notes in higher mathematics, physics or chemistry from universities I’d never visited. I’d been fascinated by the growth of online lecture notes for some time. Not only where they of increasing quality and originality in the subject matter they portrayed, they were free in most cases. With the rising tide of textbook prices-they’ve become a great source of self-education for poor students. I wasn’t the first to notice them, of course. There were already some sites dedicated to popularizing their owners’ favorite notes or the authors of the notes themselves pushing them. An enormous diversity of lecture notes, from grade school to PHD level, from all manner of authors, from lowly community college adjuncts to Distinguished Professors at the top Ivy League schools. And all available to anyone who wants them if one’s willing to put the time in to look for them.

And that’s when the idea hit me like Godzilla on a rampage.

Since higher education is again becoming beyond the reach of all but the aristocracy’s children in America, we can look to previous generations of peasants for alternatives to formal education.

What did they do if they really wanted an education?

 They educated themselves in the sciences and arts.

They read second hand textbooks, they took time in libraries, both personal and public, they

attended lectures where they were allowed to without getting tossed out on their ass as non-

gentry filth. History is filled with self-educated men and women who changed the world,

something they never would have had a chance to do if they followed the available

academic paths of their elitist societies. Just to name some of the more famous ones: Abraham

Lincoln , Ernest Hemingway, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Howard Lovecraft, Leonardo

Da Vinci, James Watt and Malcom X. 

The language of nature is mathematics and I’m convinced that without it, even the best scientists lack the capacity for truly original breakthroughs in conceptual theory. As difficult as it is to believe, there have actually been autodidacts in mathematics in history: Nathaniel
Bowditch, George Green, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Oliver
Heaviside. 

In the 21^st century, the post-democratic corporatocracy autodidact peasant has a tool of

undreamt of power by previous generations for the purpose of a university-level self-

education-the Internet.  The internet is a constantly morphing treasure trove of free or

inexpensive materials, particularly online lecture notes and textbooks by mathematicians and mathematics teachers who refuse to put them behind firewalls.

There’s also a relatively large number of “old fashioned” paper textbooks  on advanced mathematics that are available extremely cheaply, particularly in used copies.  Dover Books famously was the major publisher that printed such poor man’s textbooks. Relative to the exorbitant cost of the major publishers of the “standard” university textbooks, such as Springer-Verlag, CRC Press and Cambridge University Press, brand new Dover paperbacks are indeed cheap. But they’ve risen alarmingly in price over the last 20 years and the publisher has taken recently to publishing some   texts as expensive “Phoenix” hardcover editions-whicb is rather distressing to those of us who, as students, came to identify Dover as a source of textbooks that could be had for less then the cost of an express bus trip from Queens to Manhattan. There also are now a handful of self- published textbooks and small publishing houses, which are making either new editions or reprints available very cheaply. 

  

My goal with this site is to create a single comprehensive online guide dedicated to effectively leading all aspiring students of mathematics and the sciences to all available free and/or inexpensive resources, both on the internet and in print in the new Gilded Age who want an education, but can’t afford the joke we now call higher education in our Hunger

Games-lite 1 % world. The goal is an oasis for self-education in the mathematical sciences on the web.

As I said earlier, websites with lists of links to free lecture notes or online textbooks are

nothing new of course-neither are websites with mathematicians or mathematics students

listing their favorite textbooks with commentary to guide future students looking to either self

learn or for self-help with their classes. There are plenty of such sites, a number of which I’ll be

listing in the links section. So what makes my site different?

My site is different from the others in at least 5 ways.

 First of all, I’ve systematically-over the last 2 years-searched, read, and evaluated
both the Internet and published sources. That’s right, a large percentage of the linked sources here have been read and reviewed by Yours Truly. How qualified I was to really evaluate the
more advanced source material, I can’t say for certain. What I can say is that I can-and did-evaluate how useful the materials were to me as a graduate student in mathematics looking to continue my own studies without access to formal coursework-which, of course, are exactly the kinds of students this website is designed to help! I sincerely hope my Herculean efforts pay off for the users of the site. I hope to eventually have reviews posted for ALL the source material-including reviews from other regular users of the site! More on that momentarily.

  A second difference from my website to many of the other “booklist/noteslist” sites from
across the Web is that all the sources-regardless of whether or not detailed reviews yet
exist for them-have been rated for difficulty level so that users can easily determine if they have the background to benefit from them before downloading or buying them. To my knowledge, there’s no other site that does this. My rating system is based on the one in Guillemin and Pollack’s classic textbook Differential Topology, with some minor adjustments for mere mortal students who aren’t at MIT like their students were! I’m very proud of this rating system-I hope it spares the users a lot of hassle finding what they need and at the correct level given their backgrounds.

  

   A third difference was touched upon above- I fully intend for this website to become an online community for students and  teachers of various levels-from high school to professional
level-from all over the world to not only use and share these free resources and commentary, but to contribute to the site via email and the message board. Have a review or commentary for a source or suggestions for it’s use based on your own experience using it? Post it! Got suggestions to improve the site?  Drop me an email or post it! Want to tell me to go to hell for my communist ideas and eating into the bottom line of the American corporations you either own or worship? Go ahead and post it-although I doubt you’ll like my reply…… Anyway, you get the idea. I want to hear from all of you!

  

    A fourth and critical difference is the comprehensiveness of my website. To my knowledge,
there is no site that collects links to freely available online lecture notes and/or online textbooks and course web pages that’s anywhere near as complete in content, as detailed and up to date as mine. There are several other websites that have very extensive listings of links to online lecture notes such as mine aims to have-there are quite a few listed in the Links section below. But as far as I know, none of them-none-have the degree of evaluation and guidance that my site provides for students.  There are also quite a number of sites that have reviews of mathematics textbooks and advice for their use. Most examples of this kind of site actually have many more reviews then will even be contained in my ebooks available here. 

  

The last and most important difference-and the one that I think makes my site incredibly timely in this particular moment in American history-the site has a very specific and focused theme, namely being a one stop center online for the availability, expert recommending and
guidance to inexpensive self-education and references in mathematics, from the  high school level to graduate school. The site will also provide inexpensive personal tutoring and counseling services online. For impoverished students worldwide who cannot realistically enter college because of cost , the lecture notes and textbooks reviewed here will be of immense help. In my native America, where higher education is a)  systematically and quickly reverting to a luxury for the wealthy and b) is extorting an entire generation of former college students who are unable to complete their studies because of infinite debt that will haunt them their
entire lives, this is a necessity to avoid a life of serfdom.

From the day we're born to the day we die, we all seek to change the world in some small way. To leave a legacy, some sign we existed for future generations. For better or worse, this is mine. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture in one form or another for students worldwide to open the vast vistas of mathematics to them and future generations. 

At this blog, I hope to provide not only content related to the website-i.e. reviews of textbooks, updates and addendum to the site, mathematical observations and innuendo-but in addition, I’ll provide a wealth of other commentary and literature on other things meaningful to me. Movies, comic books, popular culture-you’ll find it all here depending on what mood I’m in. The title of the blog is very deliberately chosen. This blog will range very widely in what you find posted here on any given day, depending on my mood and thoughts. But I do particularly hope to post regularly on my liberal politics and philosophy that underlies the website and it wouldn’t be appropriate to rant on there. At first glance, these 2 aspects seem as unrelated as insects and dinosaurs. But a closer inspection shows the website was the academic child of the passions that underlie my politics and ethics-I believe education is a right to be had my all. My hope is that as education becomes increasingly inaccessible, not only will my site fill the void left by public universities, but it will inspire many more such sites on the internet.  

Many will find my views inflammatory- some will find them downright offensive. But many will agree with my bleak assessments-and I just hope some will find aspiration for solutions contained in my diatribes.

Which is why in closing, it’ll seem very counter to the call to arms I just spent pages writing to announce I plan to lay off politics for the first few weeks. At which a lot of people are probably scratching their temples.

Simply put, I want to establish my voice and personality here before beginning to tackle weighty matters. I want to establish an audience. And frankly, I’d like to lighten the mood here at first-for my benefit as much as all of you.

Think of it as Nolan Ryan in his hayday soft tossing to warm up in spring training. (I would have said Roger Clemens, but he’s effectively crapped on that image, along with all the rest of the ‘roid heads in baseball. I’ll probably bitch about that at some point, too.)

In any event, please join me in the revolution. You’ll be glad you did. At least, I hope you will.

Well, it’s nearly 4 am as I write this and my brain is shutting down. Until next time, true believers.