Race and Germany II

WOOOOHOOOO!!!!!!!! MY FIRST IMAGE POSTED TO MY BLOG. I just figured out how to do this.

OK. So, on Xmas day, I had dinner with a friend and some of her friends. One of her friends was an Asian Canadian woman. In a general conversation about what it means to be German (and whether any of us present would ever be considered German), the Asian woman mentioned that she has experienced an inordinate degree of racism in Germany. Must say, this surprised me somewhat, given both my own experiences and those that I cited previously resulting from conversations from other Asian German people. It was amazing the statements she's said people have brazenly made to her. Similarly amazing was the seemingly blame-the-victim response that she's received when addressing this issue with other Germans (ones not calling her the bone-chillingly racist terms). Later that evening, I was addressing this issue with, yet another, Asian-German guy who, again, assured me that he had experienced next to no racism of any serious kind over the past 20+ years living in Germany.

Fast forward to this evening, at the end of a long ping-pong evening, there were just four persons left, including the Asian German guy. One of the guys, Joe, who has made numerous subtle and not-to-subtle jabs against my German. This guy first started speaking this mock Viatnemese. I was really mortified. I took great pains to try to explain to him exactly why this was offensive. He just didn't get it. He then asked this Vietnamese guy, who is of small stature, "so, Taowan, how tall are you?" I had enough. I railed at him in German for about a minute. Then he did something he's often done, and acted as if he didn't understand what I'd said to him in German. Funny how after speaking with billions of Germans everyday with no dissatisfied customers, he, in the context of my being livid at his blatant racial insensitivity (to say the least), feigned difficulty understanding me. So I moved to English (he's about 20% as good at English as I am at German) to make the point more clearly (at least to me). He then feigned (though this time it was not a feignt) less understanding. After this tete-a-tete, I left, feeling like a martian amongst earthlings. Since then, I've noted Joe and Taowan playing chess and arriving at Dr. Pong together quite frequently. So, whatever my American racial sensitivities, it's obvious Taowan does not share them. Oh well. For his children's sake, I hope he finds a voice, eventually.

A Beautiful...............Group of Minds??

I just read this post on the NYT site:

Massively Collaborative Mathematics

In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math's highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.

In two blog posts — one titled "Is Massively Collaborative Mathematics Possible?" — he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett Theorem. He encouraged the thousands of readers of his blog to jump in and start proving. Mathematics is a process of generating vast quantities of ideas and rejecting the majority that don't work; maybe, Gowers reasoned, the participation of so many people would speed the sifting.

The resulting comment thread spanned hundreds of thousands of words and drew in dozens of contributors, including Terry Tao, a fellow Fields Medalist, and Jason Dyer, a high-school teacher.

It makes fascinating, if forbiddingly technical, reading. Gowers's goals for the so-called Polymath Project were modest. "I will regard the experiment as a success," he wrote, "if it leads to anything that could count as genuine progress toward an understanding of the problem." Six weeks later, the theorem was proved. The plan is to submit the resulting paper to a top journal, attributed to one D.H.J. Polymath.

By now we're used to the idea that gigantic aggregates of human brains — especially when allowed to communicate nearly instantaneously via the Internet — can carry out fantastically difficult cognitive tasks, like writing an encyclopedia or mapping a social network. But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds: writing a novel, choosing a spouse, creating a new mathematical theorem. The Polymath experiment suggests this prejudice may need to be rethought. In the near future, we might talk not only about the wisdom of crowds but also of their genius.

JORDAN ELLENBER

So, is it me, or does this result seem sort of obvious. Did the author (or, rather, the researchers) really believe that there was a sphere in which the proverb, "two heads are better than one" was somehow inapposite? In a land that so adulates the individual and their achievements, perhaps this result unsettles some. However, your average girl scout could have demonstrated this result. The real question that is not addressed here is in what areas we would not expect massive groups of people working in concert to deliver a faster and superior result?