Five things I learnt this week …

So, apart from more unwanted confirmation that we are going to hell in a handcart, what did I learn this last week?

Tom Leinster’s Basic Category Theory is in lots of ways really good. But — rather cheeringly for me! — it isn’t both so quite basic and quite so good as to make it redundant to continue trying to work on a Gentle Introduction. I had looked at much of Leinster’s book when it came out: but now a few of us are reading through it together, which concentrates the mind on its expositional successes and possible flaws. And, for one thing,  we are not that convinced by the organization of the book (I can see why Leinster wants to start talking about adjunctions very early on — that way, we get to interesting stuff fast — but it does seem to mean that some things are initially more puzzling than they need be, as their rationale can only really become clear later). Still, I’m really enjoying and learning from the reading group.
I was a bit staggered to find (having not looked at the analytics before) that the front page of the LaTeX for Logicians section here was visited over 100K times last year. Which is cheering, if only because it shows that the effort isn’t being wasted, but also made me feel a bit guilty about neglecting those pages for quite a while. Which is why I gave over a day or so to sorting things out there.
Talking of analytics, mine ceased to work for a fortnight on academia.edu, and even now are painfully slow. Well, no matter; but it does seem to be symptomatic of some trouble they are having in getting basic things to work — they now seem to have broken the ability to show a list of papers in a given research area (and we’ve never been able to do basic things like search by e.g. number of views/downloads in the last 30 days, so we can spot papers that colleagues are deeming worth looking at). Yet despite the seeming shakiness of the current offering, we find that academia.edu are now inviting us to sign up for a premium service at (would you believe!?) $9.99 a month for what seem to be trivial benefits. Their efforts at monetisation so far aren’t going to end well.
The Julliard Quartet in their present incarnation are pretty good but not stunningly so. They performed here in Cambridge last week in the often terrific Camerata Musica series, playing Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet, the Debussy quartet, and Beethoven’s last quartet.  Maybe I wasn’t initially in the right mood, but their Mozart just didn’t work for me: dully uninspired. Fortunately, things then got a lot better.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, however,  is consistently amazing. Yes, I know, how did it get this far without having read it before?