[Hey, That’s Her] The Riemann Sphere Is Her Mirror On The Wall
[Hey, That’s Her] The Riemann Sphere is Her Mirror on the Wall
MBC 드라마 《신입사관 구해령》 (2019)
There may be such a woman.
For at least eleven hours a day, her analytical, artistic, emotional and ethical minds are collectively locked up in a Taylorist cell block where the mantra is familiarly simple: Don’t question, don’t tell. Every reasonable client is aware that this is a dog-eat-dog world, so it is up to him or her to look out for personal interests not yet covered by contract law or even fiduciary law. If you value your principles and dreams over your corporation’s needs, you are a selfish hypocrite. Oh, and complain all you want at the water cooler; just remember to put back your angel mask and keep your head low at meetings.
That much is not really astonishing. No one in this place is a one-day-old. What stuns more is the utterly dim calaboose she toils away at her daytime lockup to return her body to every night, where broken bottles and suspicious pools of liquids bedeck the streets, literal rock concerts never cease, homeless druggies openly spread their limp bodies on pavements, and drunken Cinderellas and Cinderfellas bang on random doors when the clock strikes twelve.
Change might come with time but, given a burgeoning workload and an increasingly creepy cardiac rhythm, it must come soon. So, one night, she decides that if all jobs are this suffocating, she might as well take the best-paid one. It’s time to head back to graduate school, except that, this time, economic logic shall prevail over passion and intrigue.
As part of her research on Wealth and Investment Management MScs, she hunts down sample class videos from different business schools. Nestled among the suggested clips accompanying one search result, though, is a familiarly curious title that hypnotizingly whispers to her, Shopaholic Louis-style. It is the name an adviser, frowning over yet another overloaded course plan from her, pressed her into canceling out all those years ago right when meeting times for the semester did not conflict with those of her core classes. And soon, before her eyes, is an entire playlist for her narrowly missed destiny.
What harm could playing the introductory video at 2x do? Business schools’ admissions websites would not vanish in 30 minutes’ time. Ah, that was a collegiate equivalent of a soulful tearjerker but covered mostly basics she learnt in other classes. Application deadlines are half a year away, so there is ample room for a second lecture. Cool! The plot thickened pretty fast. Her college and graduate school debts are still badly in arrears. Can she be certain that she truly understands everything without attempting an unseen problem? Fetch homework sets from the official homepage tomorrow. Had she been bolder in imagination, she would have gotten question 7 right. Try harder for lecture three’s assignments. She has run out of eligible guarantors for a third loan. Lecture 11. Course completed. What a satisfying visual feast! Hey, the blurb of the follow-up course sounds fascinating too. It is not that she does not love investment banking. How about challenging herself at that course while the material of this course is still fresh in her mind? It is that she loathes investment banking. Mathematical logic has trumped economic logic.
How do you hold every number up to infinity in the palm of your hand without a poetic soul? Scoop out a round piece of dough and fancy being able to spread it so thin that it stretches to infinity. But instead of actually spreading it, roll up the edge to form a sphere. Let the bottom tip represent zero and the top tip represent infinity. As a point on the surface moves up from the bottom, it can have components that are each positive or negative, real or imaginary, depending on which pairs of opposite longitudes you assign the real number line and imaginary number line (recall: e.g. …, -10i, -9.99i, … , 0, … , 9.99i, 10i, …, where i is the square root of -1) to. The rise in value of each component accelerates with height, such that the physical gap representing any given numerical difference shrinks infinitely on the surface of the sphere as infinity approaches, making it harder and harder to advance and actually reach infinity. You are now cradling a physical version of the Riemann sphere.
© Jean-Christophe BENOIST, modified under the permission of CC BY-SA 3.0. P(A), around 1.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to A on the grid, which represents the same numerical system in a typical boundless, regularly spaced 2D format. Similarly, P(B), around -0.5 in value, on the sphere corresponds to B on the grid.
The macrocosm of universal random structures, infinite products, manifolds and many more is a dearly missed oracle that reveals her inadequacies for what they are, without miserliness, patronizing sugar-coating, or, ironically, calculation: her inflexibility, her inattentiveness, her impatience and her indolence. “Shortcuts and cookie-cutter approaches cannot be your default,” it states plainly. So long as they do not cross a certain line, tactful hypocrites, on the whole, seem to be treated better by their surrounding adult peers than sharp-tongued, straight-talking observers with pure intentions in her circle. Yet the more she experiences of the grown-up world, with the heightened stakes and heightened awareness of interpersonal dangers that deter verbalization of contrarian opinions on the one hand and massive clots of intractable ills on the other, the more she wishes to cherish many of those straight talkers. The ideal living beings are, of course, the severely scarce breed who efficiently marry the circumspection, civility and altruistic strategizing that come with tact with the determination to convey, where necessary, uncomfortable truths.
For all its uninhibited criticism, mathematics gives credit where it is due and those who converse with it are frequently safe in the knowledge that it means its flattery. It reassures this corporate internee who feels increasingly stuck in her ways that she still has what it takes to master new grammars and vocabularies. It rewards her finesse at plugging gaps in background knowledge by improvising from scratch techniques taught only in later, simpler courses. What if these skills could let her pivot directly to some sector slightly less lucrative but also less odious to her than investment banking, never mind exactly how competitively relevant her prior higher education and corporate experience are?
Far more certain is that her deliciously madcap approach to this discipline with a matchingly rebellious streak has magically quietened the rock concerts and the intoxicated fairy tales and almost erased the jail bars. Nonetheless, as the faded bars unveil more and more vistas stretching beyond the horizons, she starts to wonder if she will live long enough to look a little further, if she will ever squirrel away enough bucks—after all those deductions for debt payments, taxes, food, rent, basic maintenance and transport—to hike a little closer, and if her wrinkled, financially secure self will continue to have the visual and cognitive acuities to deconstruct or even remember the sights a little longer. The jail bars resolidify to some degree.
Still, if positive infinity and negative infinity have been rendezvousing in a dimension invisible until intrepid mind adventurers outed them, and if functions as diverse as trigonometric functions, inverse polynomials and logarithmic functions share the same class of undercover identities, i.e. infinite sums of terms with increasing powers, maybe, she thinks, escape hatches exist somewhere nearby after all.
There may be such a woman. There may be such a snowless ending by a grilled window.
Note: This work of fiction commemorating Pi Day was inspired by an old Dramabeans guest post campaign, a few heartfelt entries of which have appeared in the admin’s Twitter feed. There is no intention, however, to establish any kind of association with the site. Interested readers can find slightly similar math-life themes in the book versions of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (82년생 김지영) and The Devotion of Suspect X (容疑者Xの献身).
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Strange Waters
Strange Waters
“The Sixth Dragon – Joseon’s Top Swordsman, Moo-hyul” Hong Kong fiction and its Korean counterpart, heroism and escapism, the corporeal and the illusory—entities in these pairs nestle within each other in symbioses at times wondrous and at times sobering. Hong Kong martial arts fiction has made an impact on the South Korean popular culture scene since the 1960s. In 1967, the Hong Kong film Come…
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Ghibli Geometry Homework
Merch Bubble: A petition for Studio Ghibli to best OpenAI by channeling the 2025 trend of cheery citrus-juiced images into an endeavor with more lasting impact — revamping the image of math and captivating young learners through geometry problem sets jazzed up with visuals and story contexts from its films.
Picture the following in their relevant aesthetic backdrops:
Estimate the height Spirited Away's Chihiro successfully descends despite her fear as she speeds down a rickety stairway section with 20 horizontal steps. Each gap between the steps is 5 units in slope and 4 units in width.
Spirited Away's No-Face tries out a circular mask 3 units in radius. Its holes for his eyes are 0.3 units in radius. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?
He next tries out a fancy circular mask which outline circumscribes tightly-packed, non-overlapping circles each 0.3 units in radius. The circles are made up of k rings of six circles surrounding one circle. Two of those hexagonally packed circles form holes for his eyes. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?
Witch Kiki in Kiki's Delivery Service is on a 10-unit long broomstick tilted at 45 degrees as she takes freshly baked cinnamon rolls to a customer. As she passes by a tall structure, she notices its tip is labeled 10, 000 units. The rolls are in a 2-unit long satchel hanging halfway on the broom. Since the temperature of the air affects how fast pastries go stale, she wonders: How far are the rolls from the ground?
A bunch of kids are squeezing onto the ginormous, fluffy tummy of the furry creature Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro. Predict how many kids can stay on the tummy given the relevant simplifications, assumptions and information. (You already got the drift.)
Make no mistake. There's much virtue in the uncluttered designs of typical math worksheets: faster concept rendering, faster information perception, lower workloads, lower technical requirements and lower production costs. One might sum them up as higher time, resource and cost efficiencies. Add to those pros a potential cultivation of academic asceticism on the learners' part. That would be efficiency as well, in the sense that we meet two student developmental goals (math and discipline) in one shot.
In eyeing these efficiencies, however, teachers and allied industry players may be neglecting their numerator terms, most of which concern learner progress. That is ironically where pure quantitative logic breaks down. We are all emotional creatures. That is all the more so, all things equal, in young people whose brains are still underdeveloped. Looking around, we can see many school leavers who have not matured in time to take full advantage of educational resources temporally and financially accessible only in early life stages. Nor have they met adult figures sufficiently skilled in the elusive art of mathematical motivation. By the time such school leavers gain an appetite for delayed gratification, austere thinking as well as for the inherent beauty in quantitative subjects, adulthood commitments and sociocultural barriers like ageist biases often deter or delay their reentry into the educational system, threatening their scholastic journey and any STEM career trajectory. There is therefore a case to be made for deep yet down-to-earth arts-based engagement of apathetic young learners, many of whom struggle to perceive the relevance of abstract fields like geometry and find math problems in general mundane, through instructor-independent means. The emotional resonance and relatability of Studio Ghibli's works — evinced through their box office successes and the controversial generative art trend applying a warm, effusive and rustic Ghibli style to personal images — would make them powerful helpmates in battles against math hate viruses, which feel as far-reaching as influenza bugs.
Even engagement of kids who will become non-STEM high-fliers can make a huge difference. Ever heard of the phrase "The medium is the message"? Our communication approaches communicate values and signals beyond what our content says. In denying all exuberant expressions of emotion and wonder a place in mathematical materials, even in the face of learners impaired by hopelessness despite their best efforts, adults are reinforcing perceptions of mathematics experts as inflexible, unfeeling and boring nerds. The persistence of those stereotypes in spite of genial, approachable educators painstakingly passing down the magical field's legacy of ingenious problem-solving tactics to students is unfair. And the few pops of color in worksheets that do try to inject fun are not enough to make a strong counter-statement. In the end, non-STEM high-fliers inherit the math as well as the stereotypes, perpetuating the latter in everyday life interactions and media portrayals. Reversal of such perpetuated negativity may spur more kids, especially counterparts who struggle in non-STEM careers and could have flourished in STEM careers, to persevere in the subject and widen their career options.
Ghibli geometry should not distract attention from school-based or educational ecosystem solutions like sharing of best pedagogical practices since they involve different chief solution architects. Content drafting may be accomplished by Studio Ghibli through the blending of its imagery and story contexts with licensed, existing geometry problem sets, leaving only an ideally quick task of expert review to math educators. Moreover, pedagogy discussions and Ghibli-related visuals occupy different influential niches. One speaks to educators, from whom successful translation of advice into action is not guaranteed. The other speaks directly to students.
The existence of entertaining math video clips and games does not obliterate the potential value of Studio Ghibli's math creations either. Unlike graphics that can be transferred onto printouts, video engagement prolongs device usage, already a hot issue of concern in today's youth climate. Moreover, no math clip or game to date has matched the cultural reach and memeability of Ghibli works. The maker of a long string of fantasy films has big shoes no mortal teacher, Tiktoker, YouTuber or software developer can readily fill.
A formidable rival to pop culture, on the other hand, is pop culture itself. This proposal can be generalized to cover a wide array of quantitative subjects and popular screen brands, except that it can be problematic to bring investigations of real-world physics into universes governed by supernatural forces.
By and by, we may even wean captivated students off fancy elements after the relevant aesthetics and narrative structures coax them to develop a fondness for the subjects' intermingling of order and surprises. The capacity for such standalone devotion can stand them in good stead in professional lives dotted all over with mundane but vital to-dos. But first, we need that captivation.
If you wouldn't go to someone for advice, don't take their criticism either.
Ghosts Feeling the Economic Squeeze
The economy is tough for everyone, but it's especially tough for ghosts. With so many people out of work, ghosts are finding it hard to find jobs that they're qualified for.
"It's a ghost town out there," said Casper, a ghost who has been looking for work for months. "There just aren't enough jobs for everyone."
"It's been really competitive," said Bryan Wilson, another ghost, who was laid off from his job as a night watchman. "So many other ghosts are also looking for work."
Miss Frizzle, a ghost who was a former teacher, said that she's been struggling to find a new job. "I'm qualified and I have experience, but no one seems to want to hire a ghost," she said.
But why do ghosts need jobs? "In a story universe where the paranormal did not exist, we would be just dead. But we have a chance here. And given the customs of the fiction we live in, we need to buy things like ectoplasm and spectral silk to keep that chance. Consumers don't want to read about totally undignified and unclothed ghosts," explained a ghost named Emily.
"Just like us humans, ghosts have needs to feel comfortable and safe," said Stella C. Ai, an afterlife care expert. "They also want to have a sense of belonging in the world they live in, so they might desire their own homely, private space, which graveyards are not."
"And although they might not require food in the same way humans do, they may still have a hunger for energy, especially if they need to stay buoyant in places haunted by toxicity and apathy," she added.
Many employers are expectedly reluctant to hire ghosts, worried that ghosts would be disruptive or scare away customers.
"We just don't think ghosts are a good fit for our company culture," said one manager, who declined giving her name. "We're looking for someone who is friendly and approachable, and ghosts just don't fit that bill."
Another problem is that ghosts are not as versatile as humans. They can't do many of the jobs that humans do, such as driving, cooking, or cleaning.
"We're pretty limited in what we can do," said another ghost, Floaty. "We can't really interact with the physical world, so that rules out a lot of jobs."
The job market for ghosts is also being affected by the rise of technology. Some companies are now using robots to perform tasks that were once done by ghosts, such as scaring people in haunted houses.
"It's not fair," said Robbie, a ghost who was replaced by a robot. "I'm the real deal, and I can do the job better than any robot."
But some employers are starting to see the benefits of hiring ghosts. Ghosts are often very hard-working and dedicated employees. They're also very good at getting things done without being noticed.
"I've been very impressed with the work of our ghost employees," said Mr. Jenkins, a manager of Happy Inn. "They're always on time and they always get their work done."
Some ghosts are working as actors in ghost movies and TV shows, tour guides in haunted houses, and psychics and mediums.
"It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing," said Ghost of Christmas Past, a ghost who works as a tour guide. "At least I'm getting to see some new places."
A growing group has even started working as influencers on social media. They share their ghostly experiences and advice with their followers, and some have even managed to amass large followings.
"It's a great way to connect with other ghosts and share our stories," said one ghost influencer, who goes by the moniker ghost_with_a_plan. "And it's also a great way to make money."
So while the economic climate is definitely challenging, there are still ways for ghosts to find work. With a little creativity and determination, they can find success in the workforce.
Reported by Rylan Bard, a journalist for Nether Yammer. Additional reporting by Human, a ghost writer, ergh, human ghost writer, ergh, human writer for Nether Yammer.
Check out the rest of this Tumblr site for crucial and actual diversity-themed content.
Nuclear Wasteland
The nuclear war had been over for two years, but the world was still a very different place. The few remaining cities were overcrowded and chaotic, and resources were scarce. Soot from all the firestorms still blocked out sunlight, while enemies might strike again at any time.
In one of these cities, a man named Adam was trying to board a lorry to get necessities for his parents and children, all of them on the autism spectrum like himself. He had been finding transportation for hours, and he was starting to get frustrated.
"I'm an autistic caregiver," he said to the soldiers guarding the lorry. "I need to get on board to get food and medicine for my parents and children, who are autistic too."
The soldiers looked bored. "We have many families with autistic children in this city," one of them replied.
"Please, I mean I am also an autistic person myself. My sensory issues mean I need to stay warm more than others as I fetch necessities for my family. I cannot be trekking in this frozen wasteland for too long."
"Ah, I hear you correctly now. But what's a person with special needs doing out in the open right now? Hunker down in your bunker and tell your family to run their own errands."
"No, no, you heard me correctly. They are also autistic."
"So your kids are the ones who're autistic?"
"I am, too."
The soldiers still didn't understand. "How can an autistic person be a caregiver?"
"It is difficult but necessary," Adam said. "Autism often runs in the family."
"Poor thing. The mother didn't survive the bombings? Get the kids' grandparents to help out."
"Like I've said before, they're autistic themselves. Their symptoms have been worsening with age. They're practically deaf to vehicle horns, and their bodies feel like rumpled bags of broken bones."
The soldiers shook their heads. "Come up with a more believable multigenerational sad-sack story, dude. I don't even know autistic people have girlfriends in peacetime, let alone in war and breeding till now. At most, you're either just autistic or just a caregiver and neither would make you so special," one of them said.
"Get your facts right before you cosplay autism. Autistic guys live in their own heads. They don't run all over the place for parents or kids," another chimed in.
"You can't get on board. Period."
Adam was starting to lose his temper. "I need to get on board!" he shouted. "My family is depending on me!"
The soldiers raised their guns. "Back off!" they ordered.
Soldiers further away, who were not even paying attention to them or Adam before, turned their heads and threw accusatory glances at him.
Adam knew that he couldn't argue with them. He turned and walked away.
Later that night, he was so worn out and frostbitten he huddled among trash bags in an alley behind a dilapidated power station, his chest heaving against the supplies. A string of fairy lights peeked out from one of the bags, its extinguished bulbs emptied of dreams.
Adam started to imagine the fairy lights powered on, glowing underwater and on the tiers of a musical fountain buttressed by statues of mythical guardians, but quickly punched himself in the head, the way his class monitor, flanked by bootlicking underlings, repeatedly did to him all those years ago. Why couldn't his identity be neat and simple? Be either the stereotypical autistic tech genius or a typical family man. Have either so-called autistic interests in some scientific or mathematical field or the skill to deceive himself and abandon his passion for interior design from the beginning. What sort of rational person would care about art and decoration when radiation was in your only meal of the day while tank guns pointed everywhere?
If he could just switch his interests and match them with economic logic as readily as nerds in old clips solved Rubik's Cube in a split second, he would be the one launching the stealth planes that must be gliding overhead right now, not a pathetic hitchhiker of a military lorry. His family would be cloistered away in one of those underground enclaves for the super wealthy, with all the aides and sitters they needed.
The red hazard sign on the drab wall opposite seemed to be glaring at Adam: We told you so. No, rewind that a second. How marvelous his aesthetic mind still had the luxury to judge the appeal of the power station, as if a red sign on some royal blue background could order food to automatically march into stomachs.
Adam's train of thoughts came to a halt. He had a brainwave.
Years later, a group of journalists felt like they were stepping into a dream as they navigated an office space filled with art and soothing music. There were little bulbs in shades of purple everywhere, glowing in the low-light conditions its creative employees preferred to work in. In the depths of the office were laboratories and showrooms with magenta lights in various stylistic arrangements. Below the lights were lettuces, cabbages, cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes and many other crops, some of which looked healthier than those grown under the sunlight of the pre-apocalypse years. The chlorophyll hungrily absorbed the different combinations of red and blue light tailored for the plants. The greatest value a design firm could bring to indoor agriculture, though, was optimization of lighting and area usage under the varying and challenging space conditions of post-apocalypse dwellings. Adam was feeding stomachs one fairy light at a time.
The old question popped up. "What's the secret to your success?"
"I don't have a convenient, pared-down identity," Adam replied simply.
Credits
Story concept: Human
Story setting: FierceOcean @ Character.ai
Text: Mostly Human + some AI input
Images: Mostly Character.ai + some Human input
References
Liang, Y., Kang, C., Kaiser, E. et al. Red/blue light ratios induce morphology and physiology alterations differently in cucumber and tomato. Sci. Hortic. 281, 109995 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.109995
Sabzalian, M.R., Heydarizadeh, P., Zahedi, M. et al. High performance of vegetables, flowers, and medicinal plants in a red-blue LED incubator for indoor plant production. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 34, 879–886 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-014-0209-6
Winstead, D.J., Jacobson, M.G. Food resilience in a dark catastrophe: A new way of looking at tropical wild edible plants. Ambio 51, 1949–1962 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01715-1
Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K. et al. Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nat Food 3, 586–596 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0
Check out how minutely detailed the alt text is. That's more admirable than any epic-scaled artwork on any platform.
Whoops next gen jumpscare
Sculptures of flamenco attacks inspired by Ban Ji-eum's moves and the show's spotlight on Min Bok-jin's sculpture.
Reminder: The point is not to demonize anyone, but to get a better look at fault lines so that we can mend them and become one. Note also that selection of "None of the above" for the above question does not always reflect stubborn discrimination. The question is after all whether the series has expanded your possibly already wide-ranging knowledge of the subject matter or made you feel more for autistic persons than you already felt.
May the wages, employment rates and mental health indicators of autistic communities around the world soar in the years to come.
Everyone else's reaction to The Acolyte: Not DEI again.
Your soapbending T-Rex: Moar, MOAR!
An energy economy intubated, intercepted and interrogated by its multiverse escape game, TikTok-addicted black holes, go-getting cerebral vampires and healing rice ball spirits. Originally an extension of The Asian Drama Philosopher (A-Philosopher)’s Chair, a site examining literature, art and ideas featured in East Asian series.
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