10 things your barista should want you to know.

This post has been removed.

It was really bad... It was mostly a place for me to complain about something that really grates me (the "ghetto latte"), and to talk about something that people don't seem to think about: unseen costs. The biggest cost for a business is operating costs, not the cost of the product itself. "Doing it yourself" costs a lot more than it may seem at first. Sometime soon(tm), I'll write something about the idea of unseen costs directly. In a less obnoxious and boring way.

Cheers.

Hungarian math education

Since going to Hungary, I've been wondering why exactly the math education in Hungary is so great; there hasn't been a concerted effort to "improve curriculum" or any formal attempt to make the system so great, but Hungarian math education is fantastic, at least from high school on. The Hungarian math circle got started as something of a spontaneous cultural phenomenon, but I think there are some deeper cultural reasons that it sprouted.

Today I was thinking about Hungary. The things I miss, as well as the things I found annoying. One of the annoying things is the Hungarian mentality. In part because of 800 years of sidelining and oppression from almost all of their neighbors, and in part because of the depression which came from Soviet influence, Hungarians are very reserved, and wear a facade of depression. Along with this, the Hungarians picked up from the Habsburgs a German practicality. As a result of culturally enforced depression, and culturally enforced practicality, open display of excitement and passion for something are frowned upon. If you don't believe me, spend a week or two in Budapest, and watch for how easy foreigners are to spot (hint: they're the loud people who laugh in public), and watch how silent and serious children are.

Hungarian mathematicians, as opposed to most other Hungarians I met, are very excited, passionate people. I think a small group of young students who were interested in math, and couldn't have given a damn what other people thought of them were very public about their passion for math, and this became a sort of counter-culture movement in post-war Hungary. Youth who wanted to open up found this community as a natural place to revolt against the sullen Hungarian attitude. As with most "revolutionary" cultural movements, this group pushed the boundaries. A lot of modern methods and ideas in combinatorics and set theory came out of this group when they were still pretty young.

The math culture in Hungary has perpetuated itself quite well. Partly, this is the natural result of passion being imparted to the students by the instructors, but I think it's largely a continuation of the revolt against the Hungarian mentality: math remains culturally acceptable, but at the same time disillusioned youth can express themselves freely in a culture which continues to uphold an image of stoic depression.

(Or maybe I'm being too hard on Hungarians... Bocsanat, Magyar!)

Structuralist philosophy and methodology in mathematics

There is a philosophy of mathematics (or rather a collection of related philosophies) called structuralism. In brief, a structuralist believes that mathematical "objects" are positions in a structure, rather than existent objects. This is a rather incohesive and shallow ramble about structuralist methodology and philosophy in mathematics.

Since I hold a rather formalist, and somewhat classical platonic view of mathematics-- which is to say, I do not believe mathematical notions exist in the real world in any real capacity, but rather in some external abstract universe-- I intend to talk about brands of structuralism which do not in any way invoke "reality". Perhaps mostly because of my biases against "the real world", I cannot rightly fathom philosophies of mathematics which invoke the real world in any way.

Anyway, it seems that structuralism as a methodology pre-dates structuralism as a philosophy. What is a "structuralist methodology"? It is the approach which emphasises structures over systems. To use some language from logic, a structural methodology approaches theories, instead of models. A simple example is the tacit tendency to forget the difference between isomorphic groups: $\mathbb{Z}/3\mathbb{Z}$ is "the same group" as $\mathbb{Z}_3$. From a purely set-theoretic or material point of view, this is not correct: the first group has cosets of $3\mathbb{Z}$ in $\mathbb{Z}$ as group elements, and the second has $\{1,2,3\}$ as its underlying set. But the two groups are isomorphic, which means that they act the same as groups The tendency to forget the (quite irrelevant) difference between the two groups is the heart of structuralist methodology.

The Bourbaki group was one of the first to emphasize "high abstraction". Their methods are truly similar in spirit to the modern category-centric structural approach. While I have never read Bourbaki, all the information I can find leads me to believe that the set-theoretic foundation is a result of 2 things: when Bourbaki started, set theory was the only thing to work with (categories had not yet been invented), and "Bourbaki is relentlessly linear in its exposition". With this linearity in mind, changing to a categorical perspective late in the game was out of the question.

The structural approach permeates mathematics, particularly in algebraic areas, and in almost all contemporary approaches to foundations. Isomorphic structures are taken as identical; in category theory (and especially in higher category theory), there is a real push to eliminate notions which do not interact sensibly with equivalence-- equivalence is a weaker notion than isomorphism, but it is still considered a "good enough" notion of equality.

With the ubiquity of structural methodologies in mind, it should be no surprise that a closely related philosophy should spring up. I'm only surprised that it took so long (at least 40 years from the start of Bourbaki) to really pin down "structuralism". A structuralist philosophy takes this methodology as a philosophical starting point: it is not simply productive to study mathematical ideas from a structural viewpoint, but mathematical objects are structures. 3, for example, is not a specific set (e.g. {{}.{{}}.{{}.{{}}}} or {{{{}}}}), but rather a convenient short-hand for any object satisfying a "3-like" position in a structure. This seems "obvious" to me, since any structure which satisfies the Peano axioms will have natural number arithmetic. My formalist tendencies are at work here; the notion of an intended model seems somewhat foreign to me. There are many, many ways to construct the reals within ZFC; if they all act like reals, then what is the "correct" model? All statements true in a specifc model, but not in others are not part of real analysis; the "correct interpretation" is one where real numbers are taken as sui generis objects.

Finally, a change of topic. There seems to be a deep relationship between structuralism and phenomenology, which seems under-explored. Levinas, for one, makes a big deal of "existence without existents"; that is, being without thing-ness. This is exactly the idea of structuralism: we are studying mathematical notions without reference to a specific object to which the notion applies.

A few thoughts on the officiating in the 2010 World Cup...

Edit: Sorry about the lack of linkage... I'm too lazy to dig back up all my sources

I'll try not to bore you too much with sports, but I'm super-stoked for the World Cup, and as always, I have some skepticism about some of the officiating.

I was excited last week when the officials were completely, always right. There were a number of times (in each game) when I said "are you kidding?" and then when watching the replay, I realized that the referee had made the correct call, and in a hard-to-see play. My hat's off to them.

Unfortunately, this hasn't kept up. A few days ago (I've forgotten which game), a goal was scored by a clearly off-sides striker. Why wasn't it called? The assistant referee was 3 or 4 yards up-field from the last defender. This is possibly pardonable in a club match, but not at the international level; especially in the World Cup finals.

Then today, we see an inconsistent, booking-happy referee in the Serbia vs Germany game. I'm really skeptical about most of the cautions he made. Regardless, he was inconsistent the whole match, and clearly was approaching his role with a very different mentality in the second half.

And of course, it'll be a while until people shut up about the USA-Slovenia draw... From the first moment I was questioning the referee-- he was inconsistent, missed some clear infringements, and called some spurious "fouls" where there was little contact, and a clean challenge. There were a number of nearly identical little pushes from behind throughout the match. One earned a caution, 2 (I think) earned the proper free kick they deserve, and at least 2 earned an absent-minded turn of the head.

The first booking had me laughing. Findley's yellow for a "handball" (clearly unintentional and off of a hand in a natural position-- viz, clearly not an infringement according to the Laws of the Game) had me groaning. The third booking was fair. The late-game caution near midfield was ever-so-slightly iffy. Had the referee not lost the benefit of the doubt with sub-par decision, I would hardly even bring it up, but his performance all game was questionable enough that I don't feel bad questioning it.

The booking on Josy's break-away was hardly cautionable-- the only reason I see for a booking was stopping a "clear goal-scoring opportunity", so if there's a booking, the guilty player should be sent off.

Finally, we get to the decision that Americans will be moaning about for months to come-- the spurious infringement during Donovan's (would-be goal-scoring) free-kick. Firstly: the announcers were wrong, it was not off-sides, the referee explicitly said it was for a foul. He did, however refuse to say what sort of foul, and who committed it.* Pictures of the play show what appears to be no less than 4 Slovenian defenders fouling American players, and I've seen only one picture which shows what may be an American foul-- Bocanegra appears to have his arms around a defender (Pecnik). In that picture, it looks to me like Bocanegra is falling, and (instinctively) lifting his arms to grab something. Watching the replay only confirms that pictures can never capture what's going on before set-pieces-- a pair of the apparent Slovenian infringements clearly were not, and I can only find 2 certain infringements: Radosavljevic bear-hugging Bradley and Cesar holding back DeMerit. Also, Bocanegra (as I suspected) is laid out at the beginning of the play (He's the guy rolling around when Edu shoots). I can't tell how legitimate his fall is, but considering Pecnik doesn't come down with him, he is clearly not holding Pecnik.

In any case, no less than 2 fouls in the action of the play are missed by the referee, and we have no idea what it was he did see.

*Two notes: first, it is officially (according to something I read on the internet...) a foul against Edu. Considering he hardly touches the only defender who's near him, the only possible call is offsides. Which the referee denied. And which he clearly wasn't.

Second, apparently this is coyness is within the referee's rights. Even in the post-game report, referees are not required to say (i)who committed an infringement, or (ii)what the infringement was, unless the player is booked.
During the game, fine, but in the post-game report? That is unacceptable, precisely for situations just like this. No one knows what the call was, and apparently, this includes the esteemed Mister Coulibaly. Fans need to know what it was that he saw.

Unlike many (American) fans, I won't say that Coulibaly should be investigated for any sort of gross misconduct-- he was hardly fair to the Slovenians, and this is not the first match where his decisions have been loudly questioned-- and I won't say that FIFA should rectify anything. I also (unlike many fans the world over) won't say that new technology should be used in-game to rectify wrong decisions-- part of the beauty of soccer is the pace, and I'd prefer FIFA avoid bad decisions by being more vigilant about using referees with a history of very controversial decisions (3 of the 5 Africa Cups he's refereed in!), than by slowing the game down. But I will say this:

• FIFA needs to force referees to say who committed an infringement, and what it was, at least in a post-game report-- allowing the referee to archive these after re-watching the game, so as not to slow down the game.
  
• FIFA needs to make public statements whenever a referee consistently makes controversial calls, and whenever a referee makes a highly controversial call. Either defending the referee by saying something along the lines of "You may not agree with his interpretation of the Laws, but we consider them acceptable", or admitting that the referee was wrong. A clear procedure for such situations (for petitioning for a statement, and for the subsequent review.)
  
• In the case that the referee is wrong, FIFA needs to administer punative actions. If a player acts in an unacceptable manner, they are typically fined, and often suspended for longer than the one-game suspension that comes with a send-off. Similar measures should be instituted for referees whose decisions are not within acceptable interpretation of the Laws.
  

Edit (About 20 minutes after posting): It seems FIFA is in fact reviewing Coulibaly's performance, and will likely be unassigned from future matches in the tournament. This is a good first step, but I'll be waiting for a statement from the tournament organizers... I'm also interested in hearing from FIFA regarding the censorship claims

Categories of paths; functors and natural transformations...

Somehow blogger screwed up, and a post I started (but never finished) a long time ago is "older" than another post of mine. It's about path categories, and higher categories... Hopefully worth a read?

Mu/Wu...

Mu is a Japanese word. I'll let you look it up there, since it's easier.

Programmers tend to like to re-imagine koans and Buddhist stories; so here's a classic question re-envisioned.

Prelude> Does the dog have the Haskell nature?

Couldn't match expected type `Human' against inferred type `Dog'.
In the first argument of `Haskell nature?', namely `dog'
In the expression "Does the dog have the Haskell nature?"

Cheers.

A few words on Balaam's Error

I'm not sure why I'm writing this down now, but: I don't agree that "Balaam's error" has anything to do with money. Based on his actions, monetary reward seems to be a small concern for him. His error comes from this: He is afraid to contradict the Moabites. He is too polite, too unwilling to offend.
Sometimes things need to be said which are offensive-- causing offense is rarely good in its own right, but offensive things are important. Balaam was too afraid (either socially, or for his life) to tell the Moabites something offense, "God says 'no!'"

We should learn from this.

Nuclear energy

is safe and clean. Ask anyone who knows anything about it.

The size of the list of things to learn...

$\displaystyle 2^{2^{.^{.^{.^{2^{\aleph_\omega}}}}}}$

Cruel Irony.

Worth watching. I won't say you should never buy Monster again, or anything... actually I will, but mostly because Monster is awful-- if the sugar is over-saturated, there is too much.

Also in the Cease and Desist letter, the following quote' "VERMONSTER in connection with beer will undoubtedly create a likelihood and/or dilute the distinctive quality of Hansen's MONSTER marks." Self-fulfilling prophecy, much?

Art

I've finally found a definition of art that I think I agree with... Came to me as I woke up this morning.

****
Art (as a verb) is a creative or transformative process undertaken primarily as an appeal to some aesthetic, in order to induce a sense of "aesthetic euphoria" in those who experience the resulting object.

An object created (or transformed) in this way (this is, with this aesthetic goal as a primary objective) is a work of art.

The broad category of all artistic processes is art-- Everything which is done primarily as an appeal to an aesthetic. Any category of process which is primarily undertaken for aesthetic appeal is an artistic discipline.

Anything which has an aesthetic appeal, but was not designed with the aesthetic appeal as the primary objective is craft.
****

This definition is pretty loose (yet mathematically precise; I won't apologize for who I am), but it seems to explicitly exclude "useful" objects from the category of art... This isn't entirely true. An object which is useful, but was designed with its aesthetic appeal as a primary objective is still art: Something can be both craft and art.

I also am not trying to be derogatory towards craft: many great artists are primarily craftsmen, and a lot of craft is more aesthetically appealing than a lot of art. Further, what separates a good craftsman from a great craftsman, is that a great craftsman elevates the artistic value of his creation to an equal footing with it's utility-- without sacrificing function for form.

It's also, I assume, a very modernist definition... So my poetry and my artistic ideals are 70+ years behind the times; C'est la vie.

The one thing I'm struggling with is how kitsch fits into this. I would like to say kitsch is not art, but I don't think this definition excludes it.
On the other hand, I tend to refer to kitsch as "the unart" in the same way that zombies are undead. So it makes sense that kitsch will fit the definition of art; now how does in fit the definition of non-art?

My poetry...

Is so formulaically modernist...

Random Conversation

(Laughter has been removed)

MC: hmm. I'm demoting you
CK: ?
MC: you are no longer Master Commander of Hypothetical Operations.
CK: But if you don't demote me, think about how great everything would be!
MC: Your title is now Chief Executive of Jello Affairs.
CK: But!!! I'm not jiggly enough!
MC: hmm... actually, I don't know if I like that title... Jello Executive, Fruity Faction.
CK :I do, however, know that every conditional with a false antecedent is true... and I am responsible enough to only imagine badass scenarios.
MC: mostly so it abbreviates to JEFF
CK: If I had not been demoted, you would be richer than google.
MC: a googol dollars!!!
CK: If I were currently MC of HO, then yes.
MC: hmm
CK: (Hurray vacuous truths!!!) Allowing mathematicians to make vacuous promises since 1000BC
MC: right, could have doesn't actually imply causal effect, does it?
CK: Well, it's that If x Then y is always logically true when x is false. Because the implication is only broken when x is true and y is false. I had a prof who was in the habit of using vacuously true cases for the base case of an induction. Like, a statement about edges in a graph; his base case would have no edges...
CK: Why did I get demoted, by the way?
MC: glitch in the payroll system.
CK: Ah. Well; can't be helped.
MC: actually, we introduced the glitch after the fact
CK: I can't blame anyone, can I.
MC: there was a glitch in the name placards and they came out wrong.
CK: Well, if the name placard says so, it must be so.
MC: so we demoted/promoted people accordingly. It only made sense.
CK: Of course.
MC: we didn't want to waste the money we spent printing them.
CK: A company needs principles if it's to run smoothly. Principals? I don't know which.
MC: well, it needs both; who else is going to turn the hamster-wheel-power-generator?
CK: Right. This is why you can promote, and I'm only the JEFF. Best conversation ever, by the way.
MC: no, they only let me demote. I don't have authority to promote. They only give that authority to the janitor's secretary.
CK: I see. That seems sensible.
MC: I'm not sure this conversation would make any sense were I to read through it after forgetting the fact itself.
CK: You forget that it makes no sense now.

A little rant about AC...

So. Before we get started. Math is based on logic. The most important result of this fact is that there must be some axioms-- a starting point for the logical "gears". So, there must be a few things which are accepted as true, without argument, in order to "prove" anything. The really nice thing about this is you can use different axiom sets for different purposes; for example, the Peano Axioms are the axioms for number theory; any set theory capable of producing arithmetic will have axioms that imply the Peano Axioms.

The problem with this forced reliance on axioms is that mathematical truth is based to some small extent on human intuition. And human intuition of mathematical concepts is notoriously fickle.

One point that is still a hot topic amongst foundational researchers, and amongst those who spend their time discussing the philosophy of math, is called the Axiom of Choice. The "normal" statement (which gives the axiom its name) is a bit technical, but there's a completely equivalent statement: A non-empty Cartesian product of non-empty sets is non-empty. In other words, if we have a bunch of non-empty sets, and we take the set of all tuples (ordered lists) of these sets, we have a non-empty set. An example: X={1,2}, Y={1,3} Z={3}, X×Y×Z={(1,1,3),(1,3,3),(2,1,3),(2,3,3)}. (For the more interested reader, the first statement of AC in the wikipedia article mentions a choice function. Any point in the cartesian product encodes such a choice function. If we have a non-empty cartesian product, we have a choice function.)

The debate is mostly about whether or not this statement is intuitively true-- can we say it can be placed with the "obvious" axioms? It seems to make sense to do so, but it leads to a lot of counterintuitive results. The most famous such result is the Banach-Tarski "paradox", which says it is possible to take apart a sphere to create 2 spheres whose sizes are each equal to that of the first. Let's repeat that: Start with one sphere of a certain volume. Split it into 2 in a very clever way. Now you have two spheres, each with volume equal to the first. The "clever way" of splitting the sphere requires the axiom of choice (in a way I'm not sure I have the background to understand.)

The problem, of course, is that counter-intuitive starts at infinity, not at AC. We can split the set of all even numbers into two copies without choice (pull out 2,6,10,... then divide those by two and add 1, and simply divide the rest by 2), so why is a sphere less intuitive? How is it intuitive that there are as many rationals as there are integers? How is it intuitive that you have 0 probability of selecting an algebraic number from the reals, despite the fact that they are dense?

I don't mind people rejecting choice for certain work: constructive logic is incredibly useful for CS, but it explicitly contradicts choice. What I mind is people bringing up "counter-intuitive" results that are no more counter-intuitive than results that have long been taken for granted, because we're so used to seeing them.

My last sentence reminds me of another problem with the whole discussion: Human intuition is so fickle! The results I mentioned are not considered counter-intuitive to most working mathematicians, because the results are so fundamental. In addition, in the same breath that they say "AC leads to counter-intuitive results", they talk about how certain people haven't built up an intuition for these sorts of foundational results. Perhaps none of us have built up an intuition for certain results?

Copycenter

So, I guess I should point out that unless noted otherwise, or the work is not by me, everything on this blag is licensed under the CC-by license. In other words, do anything you want with it as long as you attribute me (Cory Knapp) in any distribution or modification in a way that does not imply that I endorse your use of the work, without explicit permission to do so, more here:

I'd like to get into a discussion about copyrights here, but I just don't care enough... Let me just say, I prefer copycenter to copyleft, and I prefer copyleft to copyright... I think open source (and the non-software equivalents) is the right thing to do in a "give to charity" sort of way, not in a "don't kill" sort of way...

Remind me...

To write a story about Feynman diagrams. And a poem about candles. I'll know what you mean.

War! Huh! What is it good for?

Actually... Absolutely nothing. So, I hear people bring up the economic benefits of war every so often, mostly regarding how WWII "got us out of the depression." before I talk about how little sense this makes, I'd like to point out that the US had mostly recovered from the depression before 1940. Last I checked, the US didn't get involved until December 1941, so time disagrees with this theory.

Now, let's talk about wars. Specifically, let's talk about WWII. People talk about how American industry was mobilized for the war. This is true, but there's a subtle fallacy at play here. Jobs, in and of themselves, do not add to the economic vitality of a nation. If they did, we could have everyone working rolling rocks up hills, and letting them fall down again, and we'd have a booming economy. What does add to economic vitality is the creation of capital. Capital is a good which can be used to make more goods. In other words, a booming economy is an economy which is one which is increasing its capacity to produce.

So, the construction of the factories and machinery to create the weapons of war was economically healthy because it created capital, but it ends here. All of those factories went to work building supplies for the war. What we then have is capital-- raw goods (mostly ore and oil) and processed goods (metal alloys, gasoline, rubber) -- being turned into finished products. All well and good, but these products are leaving the economy: To go be used (and destroyed) in a war.

What, then do we have? Capital that is not being used to create more capital. Capital which is being used exclusively to push products out of the economy. We were wasting capital.

And this capital waste rears its ugly head in the shortages and rationing. Capital was leaving the economy at an enormous rate. The market response is hyperinflation: If goods are rare (as they will be if all capital is leaving the economy), goods are expensive. This also happened in Europe after WWI, because all of their monetary capital was going to reparations (Germany, Austria), or repaying loans (Allied powers). (To be fair, Weimar monetary policy didn't help the hyperinflation.)
This hyperinflation can be curbed by fixing prices, but as we saw in the 70s (and every other time prices have been fixed), this leads to shortages. The rationing in the US was a response to the shortages. These shortages were caused because the capital was leaving the country.

In case you hadn't caught this, rationing is not a sign of a healthy economy. It is quite the opposite.

Next. The Marshall Plan. Total US aid in Europe was over 1.2 Billion. A healthy economy does not need billions of dollars pumped into it. Money from the US even came after the European economy had started turn around: After a few years of mass shortages. So a few years after the war, the economy, while recovering, was still in shambles. Should war have brought about a boom?

Finally, take a look at all the poorest nations in the world. They all have one thing in common: They have been war-torn for at least 10 years. In almost all of these conflicts, the war started for socia-political reasons, and after a short time, much of the fighting became centered around mines. Why? Because the combatants ran out of money, and need a way to finance the war. But if a war is good for the economy, they shouldn't need half-working mines to fund their wars.

Summer goals

Here's a tentative list of things I want to get done this summer... As with every break, I hardly expect to get all of it done:

• Understand Grothendieck's Axiom, and why it is (or isn't) important.
  
• Write a decent Binomial Heap in Haskell.
  
• Read Type Theory and Functional Programming or Proofs and Types.
  
• Read these lecture notes on Categorical Logic.
  
• Read all the minor prophetic books (and Daniel).
  Read all of the Epistles.
  
• Get comfortable with functors, monads and arrows in Haskell.
  
• Study for GRE. Especially, read Apostal's calculus.
  
• Make headway into the graph problem Dr. Pelsmajer gave me.
  
• Work with Beckman on something interesting...
  
• Pray more!
  
• Read The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Das Faustbuch.
  

There's more, I'm sure... There's always more.
Edit: Oh, dear! I got none of those done... sigh.

laughter and cynicism

Apparently I laugh a lot. I've known this for a while, but a conversation I had today reminded me. My whole family laughs a lot... probably much more than we have any real reason or right to. This is a bit odd since I think we all consider ourselves to be rather cynical on the whole. I realized a while ago that this is perfectly natural. This is because there are two types of cynic, one of which is always laughing.

First: what is a cynic? Cynicism can be characterized by the overwhelming desire to mock everything, fueled largely by the realization that the world is absurd and quite frankly isn't worth our time. Another key feature is the inability to take the world seriously.

There are two approaches here (actually there are a lot more, but we can make a lovely false dichotomy): scorn and ridicule.

The scornful cynic sees this ridiculous world and yearns for something that is not absurd-- for something meaningful, something consequential, something more worthy. Such a thing is nowhere to be found, so the scornful cynic mocks and derides everything-- he is, of course, above these trivialities, so why should he do anything besides mock them? The world is seen as a tiring mess of painfully evident errors that the cynic can't help but notice. Such a world cannot be taken seriously, but it demands to be, so the cynic lashes back in frustration.

The ridiculous cynic on the other hand takes all this absurdity as an infinite jest. The world is a joke being told by some grand comedian for the ridiculous cynic's enjoyment. There is a discord between the demands for seriousness and the absurdity of the world making these demands, which only serves to make the world more ridiculous-- like a chimp in a suit. As such, when the world demands to be taken seriously, the ridiculous cynic simply laughs in its face-- does that really expect to be taken seriously?

The scornful cynic, it seems, takes himself too seriously (why else let something so useless get to you?), while the ridiculous cynic does not take himself seriously enough. (Why else let yourself become as absurd as the rest of the world?)

The two types of cynics actually bring out the extreme in each other. The ridiculous cynic sees the epitome of absurdity in the scornful cynic: He demands (by taking himself so seriously) to be taken seriously, while refusing to repay the world in kind. On the other hand, the ridiculous cynic has let himself become truly absurd, and is certainly doing nothing worth anyone's time, which of course is what brings on a cynic's scorn.

On kitsch

Milan Kundera brings up kitsch a lot in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He defines kitsch (incorrectly):
kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

This is not quite correct. Kundera is confusing two types of rejection: denial and exclusion. Denial seeks to forget, while exclusion makes the conscious effort to remember-- with disdain. Rather than deny shit, kitsch excludes shit from the beautiful with such vehemence that if something is not shit, it is regarded as beautiful.

"But!" you may be thinking, "kitsch rejects the truly artistic. This surely is not shit!" And you are correct; but I think Kundera offers a response: since shit is at the opposite end of the spectrum of beauty from art, they are, to use Kundera's words, "vertiginously close." And so, in order to exclude shit, kitsch rejects everything that reminds it of shit, including the artistic. The result is than kitsch accepts only the mediocre.

A pretty bathroom is an excellent example of kitsch. In order to exclude shit fully, all nonshit must be beautiful. The only way a pretty bathroom can be made ugly is for it to be covered in shit, so when there is no shit, beauty is guaranteed.