[HN Gopher] Scottish Cafe
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Scottish Cafe
Author : benbreen
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-05-29 23:24 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| armSixtyFour wrote:
| It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find a pdf of the "The
| Scottish book", it looks as though any copy of it is over 150
| USD.
| miles wrote:
| There are a number of PDF versions (and much more) linked from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book :
|
| English version of Scottish book
| http://kielich.amu.edu.pl/Stefan_Banach/pdf/ks-szkocka/ks-sz...
|
| Manuscript of Scottish book
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180428090844/http://kielich.am...
|
| The New Scottish Book PDFs
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170703172619/http://www.wmi.un...
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Great metaphor for how to create an innovative, collaborative
| culture.
| jl6 wrote:
| I could find no explanation of why it was called the Scottish
| cafe or what the link to Scotland might have been. Any ideas?
| malcolmstill wrote:
| It could be related to historic Scotland -> Poland immigration:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_diaspora#Poland
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| It's a rich historic connection, especially in academia. More
| detail here - https://www.scotland.org/features/scotland-and-
| poland
| chewz wrote:
| Just the name of the cafe.
|
| Actually they have started in Cafe Roma but it has been too
| crowded and noisy and Banach decided to move to the other side
| of the street to Szkocka (Scottish) Cafe instead. Another
| reason Roma's owner wasn't keen to put on a tab. The Szkocka
| owner - Mr. Brettschneider was more friendly to mathematicians.
|
| https://histmag.org/Matematycy-z-kawiarni-Szkockiej-10433
|
| The food in Szkocka wan't particularly good in Banach's opinion
| and some older mathematicians (Hugo Steinhaus) preferred bakery
| of Ludwik Zalewski at Akademicka 22 which was famous for
| excellent cakes delivered even to Warsaw by plane.
|
| Szkocka Cafe had been also frequented by journalists from Radio
| Lwow and cattle traders. The Cattle Market had been long time
| moved further from the city center but traders have liked
| Szkocka for closing trades.
|
| Szkocka was also the home of Klub Konstrukcjonalistow - a
| discussion and literary club focused on aesthetics.
|
| https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klub_Konstrukcjonalist%C3%B3w
|
| Lwow had its share of coffee houses - "Cariton" (dawna "Muzeum"
| obok Muzeum Przemyslowego), "Centralna" (obecnie na rogu ul.
| Jagiellonskiej i Trzeciego Maja), "Europejska" (rog ul.
| Czarnieckiego i placu Bernardynskiego), "Grand" (dawna
| "Teatralna"), "George", "Imperial" (ul. Legionow 5), "Louvre",
| "Palermo" (ul. Rutkowskiego, rog ul. Kaminskiego), "De la
| Paix", "Roma", "Rouge" (ul. Mikolaja), "Sewilla" (pl.
| Bernardynski, rog ul. Piekarskiej), "Union" ("Hostynnycia"),
| "Victoria" (ul. Rejtana), "Warszawa", "Wiedenska"
|
| https://www.lwow.home.pl/rocznik/kawiarnie.html
|
| Google Translated > I also do not know where the idea of
| christening one of the cafes came from, according to the
| frescoes inside it, "Szkocka". Personally, this name reminds me
| of the famous jokes about skimpy Scotsmen and has always
| appealed - probably against the intentions of the host - to my
| savings, and maybe that is why it was partially closed for the
| time being.
|
| Google Translated > "Szkocka": it has always been the place
| with the most heterogeneous audience among all Lviv cafes.
| University professors and couples in love, old gossipers and
| lonely newspaper readers, bibliophiles and billiards, Jewish
| intelligentsia and students from the nearby Academic House, all
| states and spheres, classes and races, religions and
| preferences lived here in harmony, not with each other, but
| next to each other, filling an average of half of the room. So
| "Scotch" was always especially nice thanks to the fact that it
| was never too full and never too empty. Somehow its capacity
| was happily measured. Various secessionists from the
| neighboring "Roma" were a large part of its audience; those who
| for one reason or another - sometimes because of oppositionism
| itself, and sometimes as a result of overpopulation - left
| their home tables in "Roma" and emigrated to "Szkocka", trying
| to establish a new, independent existence here.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I don't know about that particular history, but naming things
| is hard and naming cafes and hotels based on foreign places was
| kind of customary. "Cafe Wien" (obviously nod to Viennas Coffee
| house culture), etc. In Germany at least the Country + Hof
| combination is still fairly common for established hotels
| ("Englischer Hof", literally "English Yard/court").
|
| So I could very well imagine that someone founding a Cafe
| looked at which names were already used in town and settled on
| "Scottish", maybe also due to 'underdog' sympathies perhaps
| with Scotland (?) but that is pure speculation on my part.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| In one of his books, Richard Feynman told of staying in the
| "Hotel City" (in Switzerland, I believe), observing that in
| America they would have called it the "Hotel Cite", because
| using a foreign name makes it sound fancier.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I had Hof as a cognate to "hall", but that's not correct, it
| primary cognate is "hovel".
|
| But there's a modern meaning of "pub" -- _via Korean_!
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-
| Germanic...
| wirrbel wrote:
| hall is cognate to Halle I think. The proper standard
| German translation for hall might be Gutshof. But
| primarily, Hof refers to a yard, and then derived from
| that, are related meanings. It can refer to a farm (in many
| German regions a farm consists of several houses /stables
| arranged in a way that the buildings form the enclosure of
| a yard, "der Hof", see also David Hasselhof: Hassel-Hof,
| the Farm of Hassel).
|
| A rural hotel/Restaurant is sometimes referred to as a
| Gasthof (Gast=Guest).
|
| court of justice = Gerichtshof
|
| royal court = Konigshof
|
| atrium = Vorhof
|
| The Korean word your referencing seems to stem from
| Hofbrau, which refers to the royal court, Hofbrau is the
| Brau (= brew) with the royal warrant (from the Konigs-Hof).
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Think "Pizza Hut", "Radio Shack", etc.
| the_local_host wrote:
| People back then knew that "hanging out" in a public place was
| worthwhile.
|
| I wish there was a model of public place where you and your pals
| could buy breakfast+lunch, or lunch+dinner, and occupy the table
| for the whole time in-between.
|
| Bars let you stay for long periods, but after three or four hours
| everyone ends up hammered, which is a different thing.
| gregoriol wrote:
| You would have to look for places in quieter parts of a city,
| smaller streets, not high-traffic or touristy. It's actually
| not that difficult to find these in Paris, place where you can
| know the owner and hang out (you still pay of course). You have
| to start slowly, you don't come in the first day, drink a
| coffee and stay 4 hours with friends, you have to build the
| relationship with the place: come a few times, begin to know
| the place, the waiter, the owner, ... and after some time you
| might be recognised as friend and the place will be a nice
| spot.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I lived for close to four years in South Korea, working mostly
| from inside cafes and often spending an entire work day inside
| them. There were plenty that were set up for this - they often
| catered a student crowd that would hang out there for long
| durations studying (quite a few had open for 24 hours, too). It
| meant the drink prices were quite high since it was basically
| rent for a seat.
|
| Alternatively some dedicated study cafes would require a flat
| fee for a time duration and make drinks cheap instead.
|
| It was also fairly common to leave laptops plugged in and leave
| for half an hour to grab a meal elsewhere and come back.
| stordoff wrote:
| It's one of the reasons I was glad for the Union Society at my
| university. You had to be a member of the university, and then
| pay to join, so not exactly a public place, but it was great
| for this sort of thing. There were many occasions where we'd
| grab a light lunch there, spend a good 4 or 5 hours working on
| things together, then grab a pizza from a place just down the
| road to bring back[1]. It then had a bar that opened at 6, so
| you could have a few drinks before heading home.
|
| You could do much the same in the local Starbucks, but the
| noise and how busy it was made it a bad place to work. The
| Union was generally quiet (and had an on-site library if you
| needed it), which was ideal. We also had a few supervisions in
| local pubs, but they'd generally only last an hour which
| sidestepped the drinking/taking up a table without buying
| drinks issues.
|
| There were of course study spaces we could have used in
| college, but not having to worry about disturbing people as you
| were discussing things (as most people there weren't working)
| and having drinks/hot food available made it a much nicer place
| to work.
|
| [1] Which you weren't really meant to do given they were
| selling food, but the staff let us get away with it.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| You have the wrong associations. What are you looking for is a
| place where drinking alcohol and smoking is not frowned upon.
| ido wrote:
| The traditional cafe is exactly what they're looking for:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehouse
|
| At least in Austria and Germany there are lots of places like
| that.
| ido wrote:
| I'm confused...What you're asking for is a cafe? There are a
| lot of places like that.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but there is this annoying rule that you have to order
| drinks every once in an unspecified while.
| NamTaf wrote:
| Do you think the patrons of this cafe didn't? I am sure
| they were expected to provide some degree of patronage for
| their time there.
| ido wrote:
| In Vienna they will let you sit for hours on a cup of
| coffee.
| bombcar wrote:
| Rural family restaurants can handle this - or any place where
| you get outside of "heavy traffic" - just ask! As long as the
| table would have been empty anyway it doesn't cost them extra -
| or leave a generous tip.
|
| One restaurant near me even has a plaque commemorating the
| group who has been eating lunch there for twenty years.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Starbucks is pretty good. I have never seen them kick anyone
| out for not buying enough.
|
| I miss the one that was near me.
| noobermin wrote:
| It probably depends on the city. My fiance who is in
| Singapore saw this article and mentioned on one occasion she
| was trying to work in a Starbucks with a classmate and they
| were asked to leave to make room for other customers.
| Singapore feels like a pretty crowded city though, many of
| the public spaces like the library are usually fully booked.
| y2bd wrote:
| Folks can argue about the coffee quality as much as they
| want, but this why I love the Starbucks reserve roastery in
| Seattle. Decent chairs you can sit in for hours on end, and
| they blast AC in the summer. Noisy though.
| wirrbel wrote:
| It boils down to economics and custom.
|
| A few years ago, travelling in the US we, a group of European
| exchange students) I remember well how we were after lunch or
| dinner almost thrown out of restaurants by servers (i.e.
| brought the bill without having asked for it, etc.). I remember
| it so well because it really felt rude to me (we were not
| really hanging around unduly and might at times have ordered a
| round of deserts with a small break after the meal which the
| business then lost but that is another story).
|
| Of course from a business perspective its better to get 3
| parties to have lunch on a table than 2, and esp. in the US
| with the enormous tips (and lowered minimum wage) for servers,
| there are strong incentives for that kind of behaviour.
| Ultimately landlords/markets also factor this in when setting
| rent prices for restaurant spaces.
|
| So to come back to the Kaffeehause-style establishments I
| always wonder how they were economically viable back then.
| Probably a combination of cheap labor, people spending quite a
| lot potentially in the Kaffeehaus [studying math, I guess they
| just rented a room (potentially not even heated) and not an
| apartment, then socialised outside or in cafes].
|
| I think to pull off a Kaffeehaus for hanging out today it would
| probably work out more in a 'Club' model where you pay a
| membership fee which allows for stable operation.
| marton78 wrote:
| There's many things that seen to have been economically
| viable a hundred years ago, which would seem crazy today. For
| example, houses with 4m high roofs, thick, stable walls and
| stucco.
|
| Or maybe it was economically just as little viable as it is
| today, but people just didn't think that much about
| economical viability back in the old days?
| wirrbel wrote:
| My grandmother grew up in a hut, every weekend it would be
| swept out with fresh sand, because it had a stomped mud
| floor. This was in Germany. Pretty sure the local gentry
| had these stucco ceilings, but not everyone.
|
| Pretty sure a lot of what was done wasn't done with as
| tight calculations as it is done today. On the other hand,
| the markets weren't as unforgiven as today so it might have
| been easier to turn an investment into a profit.
|
| It would be interesting to see the bookwork (if it even
| existed in the first place) of the Scottish Cafe, with
| supplemental informations by economists / historians
| putting it into perspective
| nicbou wrote:
| There are lots of places where someone can show up and get work
| done. University students will know a few places, on and around
| the campus.
|
| I just can't think of a collaborative space where like-minded
| souls collide, aside from perhaps hacker spaces. Is there
| anything like those Paris cafes where seemingly all famous
| artists went and drank together?
| varispeed wrote:
| Juliusz Schauder - was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin,
| known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential
| equations and mathematical physics.
|
| > He was executed by the Gestapo, probably in October 1943.
|
| Stanislaw Saks (30 December 1897 - 23 November 1942) was a Polish
| mathematician and university tutor, a member of the Lwow School
| of Mathematics, known primarily for his membership in the
| Scottish Cafe circle, an extensive monograph on the theory of
| integrals, his works on measure theory and the Vitali-Hahn-Saks
| theorem.
|
| > Arrested in November 1942, he was executed on 23 November 1942
| by the German Gestapo in Warsaw.
|
| Thankfully most of them seem to have survived the war. It's a
| shame that these days people are still into these murderous
| systems like communism and national socialism. We never learn.
| yunohn wrote:
| > murderous systems like communism and national socialism
|
| To be fair, democracy is also very murderous. Western countries
| are constantly killing thousands of civilians abroad in the
| name of freedom.
|
| * "UN says more civilians killed by allies than insurgents" -
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49165676
|
| * "Costs of War" -
| https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human
| johnthescott wrote:
| years ago, i took classes from dan mauldin, the editor of the
| Birkhauser edition of the scottish book. our local scottish cafe
| was jim's diner. great hash browns.
| neiman wrote:
| Boy, this sounds awesome! As a mathematician who's gonna spend
| his next few months in Warsaw, is there anything there similar to
| this? I'd love some real, live math "arguments" over coffee!
| Tade0 wrote:
| Unfortunately this is now history.
|
| Nowadays people go hiking in the mountains instead and argue
| about math there. My algebra professor from college does a
| biannual kayaking trip.
|
| Not a mathematician, but I spent a few years during high school
| hiking with math students, talking mostly about math. We even
| went on a sort of pilgrimage to Lviv to see the grave of Stefan
| Banach and of course the Scottish Cafe.
|
| I still remember one actual conversation from that trip:
|
| -Where are we anyway?
|
| -In Ukraine.
|
| -What kind of response is that?
|
| -The most precise I could give.
| neiman wrote:
| Lol.
|
| Discussing math while hiking is great, but regular meetings
| in cafes are a whole different animal. There's something
| about the repetitivity, the short meetings, the "mundane"
| atmosphere etc, which is good for me for math discussions.
| Hiking trips are too "special" to bring the same experience.
| cpach wrote:
| It might not be possible now during the pandemic. But under
| normal times it could have worked to start a math group at
| Meetup.com and then spread that link via Twitter, Facebook,
| local universities etc. As a starting point 2-3 persons
| could hold flash talks that could spawn off into
| interesting discussions. A local sponsor could make sure
| that some food and beverages are available to the
| attendants.
|
| Just a thought.
| neiman wrote:
| Good idea, I may try that.
| sidpatil wrote:
| Not to mention the easily-available caffeine, which is
| conducive to discussion.
| bainsfather wrote:
| Stan Ulam's autobiography - Adventures of a Mathematician - talks
| a bit about this, from his early days in Lwow. It's a good book
| about interesting times and interesting people - if this
| wikipedia article interests you, then maybe the book will also.
| duxup wrote:
| I followed Wikipedia to "Scottish Book" and checked the names of
| the people involved... only to find a lot of them executed in
| WWII :(
| chewz wrote:
| Both Germans and Soviets did target Polish university
| professors as a matter of policy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Prosecution_Book-Polan...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderaktion_Krakau
|
| > Once more, the Fuhrer must point out that the Poles can only
| have one master, and that is the German; two masters cannot and
| must not exist side by side; therefore, all representatives of
| the Polish intelligentsia should be eliminated [umbringen].
| This sounds harsh, but such are the laws of life.[]
|
| [] https://archive.org/details/adolfhitlerevilm0000altm
| durnygbur wrote:
| To give an idea how these massacres wrecked Polish society,
| imagine British society (and Europe) if Germans with
| Austrians succeeded pursuing people from the Black Book [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(list)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite a lot of postwar US research lead can be attributed to
| that being where people survived. The thriving pre war
| intellectualism of Poland, Hungary and so on was largely
| obliterated.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) :
| those who escaped.
| nicbou wrote:
| We often measure the loss in dollars, or more likely in
| number of lives. We don't have a measure for the vast amount
| of human capital that was destroyed in the second world war.
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(page generated 2021-05-30 23:02 UTC)