Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Hello, world!

Hello! Welcome to Lila Prime. I’m your host, Lila, an American computer science graduate student in Canada. That is my context. This is my text:

My blag is not normal. I am reticent and generally unfriendly towards strangers. I am also suspicious of releasing personal information online. And, finally, I feel pity for future historians: present historians spend hours poring over a single page of a manuscript preserved from the past. Imagine the enormous task that the internet presents to future historians!

So, why write a blog at all? I intend this to be a way for me to disseminate recent news about my life to my friends and familiy without having to notify them individually. This is a pull- rather than push-content method of delivery: those who are interested have access, and everyone else is spared the spam. (If you are an interested stranger, I obviously cannot prevent you from reading this content. But I can express my disgust: yeeeuch! Please go away.)

The title “Lila Prime” is intentionally rife with meaning. Primarily, of course, “Lila, prime.” should connote in the reader’s mind the idea that Lila is of superior grade, the first in rank, at the best stage. “Prime” is, of course, the mathematical notation for something derivative, so “Lila’” has similar meaning to “Lila 2.0.” For me, both of these connote “Lila is an adult now,” which is another possible reading of “prime” – a period of maturity. Here among graduate students, I can no longer realistically call myself a “kid.” This “prime” of my life will also hopefully be my most productive and prosperous period. And finally, “Lila: prime!” is an exclamation of my indivisibility by anything other than one and myself.


This post's featured song: "Positive-Definite Non-Degenerate Symmetric Bilinear Forms". Can you correctly cite this song?