Fri Feb 11 2011 08:57 The Last Workshop on Theoretical Physics in the Soviet Union:
Can Beatriz Gato-Rivera's paper "The Last Workshop on
Theoretical Physics in the Soviet Union" live up to its awesome
title? On the whole, I think it doesn't—relatively little of the
narrative takes place at said workshop— but it's worth reading for the many good bits, some of which I'll extract for you:
I was allowed to keep the original key of the back door of Einstein’s
house, that I saved in its way to the garbage truck... In the garden I
noticed that the old door had been replaced but was still there lying
on the wall with the key inside, so.....Back in Boston, Cumrun Vafa
(my extra-official supervisor) was not amused when I showed him the
Einstein’s key: 'Look, what you have done is, precisely, what
Einstein didn’t want people to do!'
The last day of the workshop I was supposed to give a
talk. Then someone told me: 'we are sorry, you cannot give your talk
because the mathematicians have finished their workshop ahead of
schedule and they have brought the blackboard along, we borrowed it
from them'.
We took a night train and we were hosted by a female
friend of his mother: the renowed mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya who
was the leader of the 'Leningrad School of Partial Differential
Equations'. When we arrived to her flat Olga received us with very low
voice saying: 'Look, my niece is here in the living room. She works
for the government and she is not allowed to have any contact with
foreign people. So, please, rush through the living room, enter the
corridor, and take the two rooms at the end'. So, we followed the
instructions and ran stealthily while the niece was looking through
the window giving us the back.
Natalia looked at me and said: 'You know, you are the second foreign
person to enter in this flat. The first was Niels Bohr'. The surprise
was enormous for me: I was the second after Niels Bohr in something!
In BS3 you could choose to convert incoming entities into Unicode characters, or to leave them alone. You could also choose to convert Microsoft smart quotes into Unicode characters, XML entities, or HTML entities. In BS4 this will depend on the parser. Both lxml and html5lib convert everything to Unicode. I think this makes more sense--convert absolutely everything to Unicode, use Unicode internally, and optionally convert back to entities when writing the document out. (I'll probably have to write the "convert back to entities" part.) Fri Feb 11 2011 09:20 Beautiful Soup 4 Status Report:
Yesterday I ported some more tests and added basic doctype handling to the parser plugins. The work is slowing down a little because I'm porting tests where html5lib and lxml handle the same markup differently, such as incorrectly nested tables. I'm not going to find and test every such difference, but I want to have all the old tests working, and it'll give you an idea of what the differences are in common situations.
