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Genius: Ideas. The Times bites off and chews a big chunk of theory, but the theorist takes the cake. Here's how it starts (Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery):

Grisha Perelman, where are you?

Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.

After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right. ...

You can grapple with what Perelman made of Poincaré in that story, but the foreign press actually found him:

Maths genius living in poverty, in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Interviewed in St Petersburg last week, Dr Perelman insisted he was unworthy of all the attention, and was uninterested in his windfall. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he said.

"I am not saying that because I value my privacy, or that I am doing anything I want to hide. There are no top-secret projects going on here. I just believe the public has no interest in me."

Dr Perelman also said he had no interest in self promotion. "I do not regard it as a positive thing. I realised this a long time ago and nobody is going to change my mind," he said.

"Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste. As far as I am concerned I can't offer anything for their readers."

Genius: Values. Right after this, I read Shelley Powers' post (My Window) answering a question about why she abandoned the well-known Burningbird blog, only to reappear a few months later at Einstein's Lock. (Einstein quote: "If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.")

Shelley quote:

I couldn’t continue trying to find the next great topic; the next Parable; the next Men Don’t Link, and so on. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

But that's just the kernel of it. "Feeding the monster" is something every journalist understands. Deeper in,

...what really bothered me the most was that I couldn’t influence issues I thought were important: specifically visibility of women.

Rather than having been improved by weblogging, I think things are worse for women now, and I watched my ability to make any significant difference slip away like so many sands in an hourglass....

The popular women now, she saw, write about their careers, to boost their careers. Men do too, of course. But the Web seems more calculated and less interesting than when I started blogging. (Mention Jonbenet and watch your blog traffic spike!)

In acknowledging an environment whose interests don't overlap with what she values, Shelley could be Perelman's sister.

Meanwhile, her latest tech book is out.

Goldburger To Go!: A smart and unusual online game at Don Pixel, in English from Spain, which seems to have some smarter-than-average games.

This is a marble-go-througher lunch machine: You have to fix it -- your cursor turns into a wrench when you can change something -- at 13 steps along the way to get the hamburger machine to work.

I know the 9-year-old will be better at this than I am.

Reports from those not there:Pitchfork: The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s. (Skip to the Top 10.)

It's an odd collection, with no links, not even brief audio clips.

Okay, it's lame. The Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" came in at number two. I couldn't even remember the song. (I kept confusing it with the far more memorable Staple Singers' 1972 hit "I'll Take You There" until I saw this video of little Michael singing it on The Ed Sullivan Show in December of 1969. If you were listening to rock then, it was Joplin and Hendrix and Dylan, and you sure weren't watching Ed Sullivan. Indeed, the reviewer notes, "It hit the Hot 100 two months and a day after my birth."

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3 Comments

Paul Ciampanelli said:

If you were listening to rock then, it was Joplin and Hendrix and Dylan, and you sure weren't watching Ed Sullivan.

Perhaps, but the list is not The 200 Greatest Rock Songs of the 1960s, so your point is moot. Joplin and Hendrix are great and all, but you're thinking about the last three years of the whole decade, and you're thinking about one genre of pop music, which is a fairly narrow view. Don't know "I Want You Back??" It's the Jackson 5's first and greatest single, the song with which they first cold rocked the scene; it's undeniably a classic.

Link | August 22, 2006 10:06 AM
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Sheila said:

I'm not "thinking about the last three years of the whole decade" -- I'm thinking about contemporaries of that song.

If you started with Buddy Holly and Elvis, moved through Motown, Beach Boys, the Beatles and Stones and Dylan in the mid-60s, The Jackson 5 was like the equally commercial Shirley Temple -- overly cute stage kids dancing. Sullivan embraced it as a cute, safe musical act, unlike The Doors.

Link | August 22, 2006 10:31 AM
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duder said:

Joplin and Hendrix are NOT great. Let's get over all this baby boomer nostalgia and list music that actually sounds good today. Sorry, old people, but don't complain. You'll get to retire soon!

My generation won't because the Republicans will have killed Social Security by then.

Link | August 23, 2006 9:17 AM
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