Now here’s an idea

Boy, do I feel stupid for having written close to 500 blog-posts hoping (in vain) they might eventually converge into a book project…

Gil Kalai is infinitely smarter. Get a fake gmail account, invent a fictitious character and start COMMENTING and provoking responses. That’s how “Gina” appeared on the scene, cut and pasted her comments (and the replies to them) and turned all of this into a book : “Gina says”, Adventures in the Blogsphere String War.

So, who’s Gina? On page 40 : “35 years of age, Gina is of Greek and Polish descent. Born in the quaint island of Crete, she currently resides in the USA, in quiet and somewhat uneventful Wichita, Kansas. Gina has a B.Sc in Mathematics (from the University of Athens, with Honors), and a Master’s Degree in Psychology (from the University of Florence, with Honors).
Currently in-between jobs (her last job was working with underprivileged children), she has a lot of free time on her hands, which gives her ample opportunities to roam the blogosphere.”

So far, the first 94 pages are there to download, the part of the book consisting of comments left at Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong. Judging from the table of contents, Gina left further traces at the n-category cafe and Asymptotia.

Having read the first 20 odd pages in full and skimmed the rest, two remarks : (1) it shouldn’t be too difficult to borrow this idea and make a much better book out of it and (2) it raises the question about copyrights on blog-comments…

If the noncommutative geometry blog could be persuaded to awake from its present dormant state, I’d love to get some discussions started, masquerading as AG. Or, given the fact that I’ll use the summer-break to re-educate myself as an n-categorist, the guys running the cafe are hereby warned…