Well, we hit 450 episodes at a lucky time, seeing as how we are going to be at APE all weekend.

If you happen to be in San Francisco, stop by and say hello.

--Geoff

Well, there you have it, 450 continuity episodes in the can, and so much to talk about!

First of all, the poor tapestry that Frederick has improved with the Baby of Poetry painting. My personal knowledge of sixth centuryish Byzantine tapestry practice is a sad, sad thing, so I got in touch with Shirin Fozi, the way official art history professor out of Northwestern who specializes in more or less everything I suck at, for advice, and she pointed me to this lovely piece. Now, she didn't know that her efforts to educate me would end in me nailing a horrendous Baby of Poetry painting through the middle of the tapestry, but having known me since high school, she probably had an inkling of its fate.

On the pudgy babies front, one of the most charmingly creepy things about eighteenth century pageantry was its love of dressing up people as instantiations of The Arts, or The Avenues of Human Achievement, or what have you, giving them a few lines of representative poetry to declaim at regular intervals, and dragging them about on pedestals to general applause. Babies featured prominently in these events, though many of the great pageant designers left them out because of the difficulty newborns tend to have with iambic pentameter. From there, it was just a short step to collected sets of People As Arts portraiture, and thence to the niche market of Babies As Arts representations which, I sincerely hope, never actually existed.

The EIGENPOWER!! Geoff will reveal more about this new power in the episodes to come, but the math teacher in me can't resist this adorable Teachable Moment. For those of you who remember your high school algebra, you might recall those boxes of numbers called Matrices. Devilishly handy things, though your typical high school curriculum generally just has you learn to add them, multiply them by scalars and each other, take determinants, learn Cramer's Rule, and then stop before you actually do anything particularly useful with them. It's heartening to see that some classes now are starting to teach a bit about Gaussian Elimination and using technology to rref an augmented matrix so that students get at least a feel for the raw analytic POWER of these mathematical beasts. They can solve systems of millions of variables in millions of unknowns, move objects around in space, and deform space itself.

Let's take a pleasant 2 x 2 matrix, and call him A:

1 3
4 2

For this matrix, there exist some vectors (think a single columned matrix, or the coordinates of a point in n-dimensional space. Here, since A is two by two, our vector can be thought of as the x and y coordinate of a point in the normal Cartesian plane) that, when you multiply A by that vector, the result is an exact multiple of the original vector. For our matrix A, the vectors are

1
-1

and

3
4

If you multiply A by the first vector, you get

-2
2

which is exactly -2 times the original vector. If you multiply A by the second vector, you get a vector exactly 5 times the original. If you try multiplying any other vector by A, you won't get this multiple result. For example, if you multiply A by

1
2

you get

7
8

which is not a multiple of the original 1 2 vector.

For a given matrix, the vectors that multiply to a multiple of the vector are called EIGENVECTORS (such a cool word) and the multiple of the original vector they result in are called EIGENVALUES. There are some beautiful things you can do with these involving the diagonalizability of linear operators, but that's probably going too far afield here. If you want to get more into Linear Algebra (and, really, who doesn't?), Friedberg-Insel-Spence's Linear Algebra is a thorough, though not particularly jovial, place to start!

AND to say it again - COME VISIT US AT APE!! Table 422, in San Francisco, this Saturday and Sunday! We'll have copies of Light Opera and Heavy Consequences, Vocate bumper stickers, free historical sketches, and Emily Dickinson refrigerator magnets that our printer totally botched and so we'll basically be giving 'em away! It'll be A Time!

- Count Dolby von Luckner