I am back in New Haven, laptop-less and dealing with a university that is not yet recovered from its summer slumber.

From Ada:

Van revisited Ardis Hall in 1888. He arrived on a cloudy June afternoon, unexpected, unbidden, unneeded; with a diamond necklace coiled loose in his pocket. As he approached from a side lawn, he saw a scene out of some new life being rehearsed for an unknown picture, without him, not for him

[T]he touch of her skin and silk was all the magic of life, but why does everybody greet me with tears? ...

"We can collect your tears later," he said, "I can't wait."

Forbes has a rather appalling discussion: "whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career."
The article provides a rather breezy recitation of a few demographic studies, then ends with the amusing note, "A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation."

While, from what I can tell, not every part of Forbes's reading of the studies makes this mistake, a great deal of what they call "common sense" seems like a rather implausible confusion of the two.

Dr. Grigory Perelman, whose solution of the Poincare Conjecture (which I mis-spelled) I mentioned some time ago, has refused the Fields Medal, which is basically the big-deal Nobel-level award in math.

“He was very polite and cordial, and open and direct,” Dr. Ball said in an interview.

But he was also adamant. “The reasons center around his feeling of isolation from the mathematical community,” Dr. Ball said of Dr. Perelman’s refusal, “and in consequence his not wanting to be a figurehead for it or wanting to represent it.”