neverendingbooks – Page 219

on fundamentalism

Published November 9, 2004 by lieven

Politicians have a tendency to jump on bandwagons. After Theo Van
Gogh was murdered by a Dutch-Maroccan there has been a unanimous outcry
to tackle 'Muslim Fundamentalists' both in the Netherlands and
Belgium. The Belgian interior minister came on television assuring the
public that he will shut down all fundamentalist internet sites…
His teenage children should tell him some basic facts of life.
In
Belgium all politicians stumble over each other to convince us how tough
they will act against extremism (they mean of course Islamic
fundamentalism), well let us see what they will do now with the extreme
right party 'Vlaams Blok' which was convicted today (in appeal)
for racism! Nothing of course, we can all easily see fundamentalism in
other people but rarely in ourselves.
It is not a big secret that
I admire Jeanette Winterson, but rarely did I agree more with one of her
montly columns than her november column. Just one paragraph :

There is very little difference between Islamic Fundamentalism and
Christian Fundamentalism. Both groups will use holy text to justify
their murders and their misogyny. Both groups believe that they are
right and that everyone else is wrong. Both groups are anti-science,
both prefer faith over facts. Ironically, both are united against the
values of liberal Western culture.
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reading backlog

Published November 8, 2004 by lieven

One of the things I like most about returning from a vacation is to
have an enormous pile of fresh reading : a week's worth of
newspapers, some regular mail and much more email (three quarters junk).
Also before getting into bed after the ride I like to browse through the
arXiv in search for interesting
papers.
This time, the major surprise of my initial survey came
from the newspapers. No, not Bush again, _that_ news was headline
even in France. On the other hand, I didn't hear a word about Theo Van
Gogh being shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam. I'll come
back to this later.
I'd rather mention the two papers that
somehow stood out during my scan of this week on the arXiv. The first is
Framed quiver moduli,
cohomology, and quantum groups by Markus
Reineke. By the deframing trick, a framed quiver moduli problem is
reduced to an ordinary quiver moduli problem for a dimension vector for
which one of the entries is equal to one, hence in particular, an
indivisible dimension vector. Such quiver problems are far easier to
handle than the divisible ones where everything can at best be reduced
to the classical problem of classifying tuples of $n \\times n$ matrices
up to simultaneous conjugation. Markus deals with the case when the
quiver has no oriented cycles. An important examples of a framed moduli
quiver problem _with_ oriented cycles is the study of
Brauer-Severi varieties of smooth orders. Significant progress on the
description of the fibers in this case is achieved by Raf Bocklandt,
Stijn Symens and Geert Van de Weyer and will (hopefully) be posted soon.

The second paper is Moduli schemes of rank
one Azumaya modules by Norbert Hoffmann and Urich Stuhler which
brings back longforgotten memories of my Ph.D. thesis, 21 years
ago…