We all have roommate horror stories. Here are some particularly bad ones I’ve heard from my friends.

• The roommate who filmed a porno of herself and her boyfriend on your bed.
• The roommate whose friends smoked pot and vomited in your dormitory floor’s communal male showers. This roommate stayed out late reenacting Fight Club scenes with his wrestling team, played video games all night during final exams with the volume on high, and one day began storing his urine in bottles and leaving them in his room indefinitely.

The most beautiful mathematics had no applications in the real world, according to the prominent British mathematician G. H. Hardy. He called them “pure mathematics,” and for him the purest of the pure was number theory, a branch of math that studies the properties of numbers.

Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology is a layman-accessible personal essay on theoretical mathematics. It’s hardly an “apology” in the traditional sense of the word. Hardy’s essay is a justification of his life and work.

During my sophomore year at Columbia, my friend Peter and I decided to take the student-run Columbia Bartending Agency’s mixology course. We paid $200 for the opportunity to get drunk by 7PM on Thursdays as well as learn to make some drinks. In preparation for the agency’s final exam for certification, Peter and I decided to throw a bar tending party in my room. My roommate was worried about my hosting a loud party in a alcohol-free dorm building and selling alcohol to minors, but I persuaded him by assuring that I would enforce his list of regulations below (which I drew up):

1. These are not Matt’s rules.
2. Matt doesn’t know about this event.
3. Don’t go through Matt’s shit.
4. Don’t steal Matt’s shit.
5. Don’t pour drinks on Matt’s shit.
6. Don’t attract the attention of public safety.
7. No orgies, “but if one will inevitable arise, you must call me [Matt].”

What do algebra and Castro have in common? What are Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization class discussions really like? And what’s the secret weapon of white male Republicans? Here’s some more hilarious quotes I dug up.

• God created the integers; all else is the work of man. – Richard Dedekind
  So maybe God lives in Arabia. – Professor Walter Neumann on Hindu-Arabic numerals
• Professor Patrick Gallagher: [writing a math proof on blackboard, suddenly stops] It’s like Fidel Castro once said, ”History will absolve me.“ And likewise we get a homomorphism.

Patrick Zimmerli was a lecturer for my beginning music theory course. In addition to being upbeat and nice, he was eccentric and hilarious. He encouraged students to dress up on Wednesdays, which he declared “snazzy-Wednesday.” He playfully embarrassed by making us sing chords, which he said helped him relax after a long day. And he told us to call him “PZ.”

• PZ to female student Susan who’s wearing a wimple, on a Wednesday at that: Wow, you’re really hot and on. [The class laughs nervously.] Oh, was that not appropriate for me to say?
• The New York Philharmonic used to be the New York Philharmonic Society – lovers of music. Now they just get paid to be yuppies.
• I am inclined to let this discussion go on, but I’m just going to end it. We will discuss this at 2AM while ingesting hallucinogenics. – PZ interrupting a pre-class discussion on whether glasses makes one’s vision worse.
• Is that “merch”? – PZ asking about the shirt of a female student who’s a member of Columbia’s Bhangra student group
• The brain is not for thinking. Remember that. – PZ
• For those of you who find this unbelievably boring just sit there eand think about whether we should countinue the human species in its current condition. – PZ after some students have trouble with 4-part reduction.

Columbia’s philosophy classes are the paragon of intellectual discourse.

• What do you have against happiness! - an indignant student on Kant’s Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals during Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course
• I don’t think it’s fair to assume they were women. – Contemporary Civilization Professor DEL after Nick makes a comment about Adam Smith’s pin factory and refers to the factory workers as “pin ladies”
• Sorry, I was totally channelling Rosie the Riveter that whole time. – Nick
• Okay, Chris. You are not allowed to bring up eunuchs for the rest of the section. – teaching assistant Buyun during a Chinese history class discussion section

Chinese language class cracked me up.

• Big girl have big dream. Tell me your dreams and aspirations. You can say whatever. This is Chinese class so just say them even though they probably won’t come true. – first-year Chinese language class lecturer Jia Liu
• Although she’s very beautiful, no one likes her. - Chinese language class exercise
  Why is that? – Jia Liu asks class
  Because she’s bitch. – female student Ruoxi out of left-field

Who else brought a pillow to Columbia’s Frontiers of Science lectures?

• I think if you’re teaching climate change it’s counter-productive to give everyone a copy of the worksheets. – Sharmila Kamat on saving the Earth one handout at a time

Sometimes I wish I were still M.K.’s roommate.

• I’m not wearing a diaper because I don’t want gay people to rape me. – M.K. on why he’s not dressing up as a baby to the Village Halloween parade
• I can’t wait to see James and Rachel hook up. – M.K. on James’ newfound intensity
• I’m gonna fuck your mom in the ear. – M.K.’s retort to Eric’s “yo mama” jokes
• I know that shit is real because they film it in my stomach. – M.K. about Pinky and the Brain
• The things I do for my mom…she really appreciates me. – M.K. about his mother
• I read somewhere that the chances of your vote counting is one out of five billion. – M.K. on the futility of voting

Keep some people in your life for their entertainment value.

• Obama has won the election. Attn: all white people report to the cotton fields tomorrow morning. – Phillip H. text message to Joseph Y.
• If you’re interested in someone as more than a friend, even if it’s somewhere down the line, you should want to bone them. – Mishi C.
• Have you gone off every exit in New Hampshire? – Margaret W. I have actually explored the surrounding countryside, motherfuckers! – Seth D.

Do you realize you’re speaking to reporters on tape?

• Misfortune is a spectator sport nowadays…Even white male republicans are using it. – former Barnard College President Judith Shapiro
  It’s the only way they can get elected. – former Barnard Dean Dorothy Denburg

Who said philosophy was boring?

• Unfettered by that, they proceeded to indulge themselves in sensual pleasures like sheep. – Al-Ghazali, The Rescuer From Error
• More confusion – more nonsense, – and the nonsense, as usual, dangerous nonsense. – Jeremy Bentham in Anarchical Fallacies about the French Declaration of Rights
• Marriage is the grave of confidence and love. – Olympe de Gouges in The Rights of Woman on the contemporary sad state of marriage
• Christian troops, we are told, are excellent. I deny this. Is someone going to show me some? – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (Book IV, Ch VIII)
• Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t. – Margaret Thatcher

J.O. was an eccentric and benign person to all who knew him during their time as undergraduates at Columbia University. He would drop by your dormitory room at the most inopportune times without calling, clean out your refrigerator, and ignore basic social cues, but without him the world wouldn’t have the quotations recorded here for posterity.

Here’s an audio clip of J.O. ranting about an unconsummated college crush:

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“Multivariable, that really brings me back.”

“J.O. is done for the weekend. Back to the problem sets that are his life.”

While enrolled at Columbia, I took several semesters of Chinese language classes. My teacher was man whose name literally meant Dragon King of the Sea. How badass is that? King Sea Dragon has been teaching at Columbia University since 1996. This post is a tribute to his eccentric class commentary because even I can’t be this funny.

• [while drawing a map of China on blackboard] “Oh, I won’t forget Taiwan.”
• [talking about the time “Little Bush” visited Columbia University] “也许有恐怖分子每天想杀他。 如果他被杀死了，那美国人就 (Terrorists may want to kill him everyday. If he gets killed, then Americans) get in big trouble. 我们要保护他, 就像我们要保护 (We have to protect him, just like we have to protect) panda.”
• “Some people have six fingers. They want to trim it off. But some people might want to keep it. They say ‘Look when you scratch an itch you only use four fingers. I use five.’”
• [while looking for volunteers to a question] “I’m going to ask some freshmen or freshgirl. How about you? She’s very fresh…not even one month.” “I still need a freshgirl, very fresh…”
• [speaking about how Confucius was so studious and read the same book over and over again that the leather strap binding broke three times] ”特别是如果你能把词典读烂 (Especially if you can read the dictionary so much that it becomes mush), you’re coolest guy on this Earth.“ [sic]

Sea Dragon has authored many textbooks used to teach “advanced beginners” of Chinese. Students who can speak at a high level but whose writing sucks. He even published some of his books in mainland China, but not before China’s Central Propaganda Department censored the chapter on topics like Tiananmen Square.

This is an ongoing story. For part 1, go here. For part 2, here.

Nearly a week after Dealbreaker published the laminated card of “top 10 things” “women do to sabotage their careers,” the blogosphere is still chatting about it, and traffic to my blog is still surprisingly strong. Being linked by the below sites probably helped a tad bit.

• CNBC
• The Village Voice
• Even the author of the book that inspired Citi’s 10 points

Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” This is wonderfully exemplified in last week’s radio program from This American Life. The show described how the New York Police Department’s 81st Precinct distorted crime statistics. So what did police officer Adrian Schoolcraft do when his supervisors told him to downgrade real crimes into lesser ones? He began secretly recording his commanding and fellow officers on the job – for 17 months. Ever since Schoolcraft blew the whistle on these abuses (helped by this five-part series in the Village Voice), the NYPD’s 81st has been hit with four investigations and numerous class action lawsuits.

But this is more than just a story of unscrupulous police and careerist commanding officers. It’s a story of how workplace statistics and performance metrics can create pervasive organizational dysfunction. CompStat is the name of the NYPD’s accountability process. According to the Police Chief Magazine, CompStat’s purpose is to