December 2009
“I would recommend that at any one time you have problems of two types to work...”
– Béla Bollobás. (here)
Thanks to Tristan for reminding me of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. I’ve been meaning to get it as a sort of “bestiary of mathematics”, but Wikipedia does that job decently, if not perfectly, and for free. As a bonus, it usually has both in-depth...
1 tag
2 tags
How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical... →
The dimension of the British coastline is 1.25, more than a straight line but less than the plane. Huh? Let’s back up a bit.
The coastline paradox is this: the length of a coastline depends on the scale you measure it. If you choose to measure only rough features, the measured length will be shorter than if you started measuring small variations on the scale of a few meters. Therefore, a...
1 tag
Paresthesia →
Paresthesia is a sensation of tingling, pricking, or numbness of a person’s skin with no apparent long-term physical effect. It is more generally known as the feeling of “pins and needles” or of a limb “falling asleep” (although this is not directly related to the phenomenon of sleep). The manifestation of paresthesia may be transient or chronic.
(previously)
Infallible Man Falls →
I have a hard time imagining him as anything more than a harmless old man, diabolical eyes notwithstanding. Though I don’t condone violence, it’s certainly a lot easier to feel satisfied about Berlusconi getting punched in the face (or for that matter someone narrowly missing Bush jr. with a shoe) than it is when someone’s toppling the pope. But if you think about it, that silly...
Monterroso
After I wrote about microfiction I discovered Augusto Monterroso, who just might be its uncrowned master. Unfortunately (for me, personally), he wrote in Spanish. I’ve been trying to find The Black Sheep and Other Fables, one of his books that’s actually available in English — I’m kind of impatient, don’t want to wait until long into 2010 to get it, so I was looking...
“We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an...”
– Larry Law.
Happy Winter solstice! (The exact moment when the Earth’s axial tilt is farthest away from the Sun is due in a little less than two hours.) Because although I have yet to feel Christ’s warmth fill my being, I sure as hell am looking forward to feeling the warmth of the Sun lengthening every day.
50 →
I can’t imagine any logical reason why, but somehow it feels scarier to publish fiction than nonfiction. I mean, when you write nonfiction, at least if you’re being honest and non-ironic, you’re putting your real opinions and feelings out there. Your personality is sort of on the line, even if only in a highly metaphorical way that only matters to the thin-skinned among us. Yet...
“Ted was the rebel android, operating solely by an utter refusal to dream of...”
– thaumatrope.
Everyday Tastes from High-Brow to Low-brow,... →
From Life, 1949. (via)
1 tag
WatchDimensions is a series of videos visualizing and explaining mathematics. It covers, among other things, visualizing fourth dimensional objects (as purely mathematical objects, with no pseudoscience to anchor it to the “real world”) and fibrations. This chapter visually explains the Julia and Mandelbrot sets (which produce all sorts of wonderful fractals). I haven’t seen anyone...
“She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a...”
– William Gibson on the view from a Tokyo hotel, from Pattern Recognition. (See also Gibson on how Japan became the favored default setting for so many cyberpunk writers, previously.)
1 tag
A dialogue.
-!- Euthyphro has joined #archon.
-!- Socrates has joined #archon.
Euthyphro: wtf
Euthyphro: What are you doing here, Socrates? Why’d you leave #lyceum? Surely you aren’t here to rant to the ops?
Socrates: Not rant, no. Someone’s been flaming me.
Euthyphro: Who’s that?
Socrates: Some dude on tumblr. I hardly know him. He’s called Meletus. Perhaps you’ve...
1 tag
Breaking wheel →
This horrific method of torture/execution seems to be mostly forgotten. I’d never heard of it, anyway. The reason I now know about it is that it has etymological echoes: I read about it in an explanation of the origin of the Norwegian word radbrekke, which comes from German and is found in Modern German radebrechen. (“Rad” means “wheel” and “brechen” means...
Sudanese 14-Year-Old Has Midlife Crisis →
According to Sudanese psychologist Jibal al-Muglad, Malakai’s behavior is not unusual. “Many middle-aged Sudanese males, usually around the age of 14 or so, start reverting to the behavior of their youth,” al-Muglad says. “Largely, this is done to counter oncoming signs of middle age, such as increased height or a cracking voice. Much of this behavior is harmless, but...
Re this and this: the internet made it unimaginably easier for strangers to connect and become each others’ audiences, especially across geography and social strata. It did not give you the superpower to instantly gain the awareness and respect of every admirable and influential person on the planet, even if you are the sort of person doing the sort of things these people would very much...
This strikes me as an ahistorical and overly reductive view of Wittgenstein. Ahistorical, because it refuses to place W. into a tradition which neither began nor ended with him; overly reductive, because it’s all or nothing, either you agree fully with W. or you can’t learn anything from him at all. He’s one of the greatest if not the great philosopher of the 20th century —...
3 tags
“Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I think, like Wittgenstein, that a lot of philosophy stems from misuse of and bewitchment by language. I think analytic philosophy, with its so-called “linguistic turn”, has taught us a lot about problems we failed to make progress on for thousands of years, and is...
“On Exactitude in Science”, by Borges
… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following...
Dysfunctional Metaphors
In middle school, I had a math teacher who was hopelessly inept at explaining anything. Sometimes he would turn to metaphor, usually with disastrous results. My favorite was the time he tried to explain why the sign changes when you move something from one side of an equals sign to the other in an equation, i.e., why you solve x + 7 = 9 this way:
x + 7 = 9
x = 9 - 7 (sign of 7 changes from +...
Dear Websites Whose Names Shall Be Withheld,
When I clicked on “Print”, I did not give you permission to launch my printer. It’s a forgivable mistake, but when I click on “Print”, I don’t mean “Please help me print this website out”, I mean “Please take me to a version of this article that is on a single page rather than many short pages, and that isn’t covered in ads and...
1 tag
Things I wonder about late at night, pt. 1
Why is it that rain pours down, resulting in a downpour, but thieves break in(to), resulting in a break-in? And where does my (faulty) intuition that unputdownable should be undownputtable come from? That is, are there any rules for where the verb and the preposition go in words that are formed from prepositional verbs like “put down” or “pour down” or “break...
“Perhaps we focus on false belief as the root of our problems simply because it...”
– Justin E. H. Smith.
2 tags
Birobidzhan, Stalin's Forgotten Zion →
I love historical what-ifs: what if there were a Jewish state not in Israel, but in Alaska? That possibility (it was a serious proposal) was wonderfully explored in Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. (The best part of the book is its world-building; the detective/thriller plot is average.)
Birobidzhan is another possibility that has so far escaped treatment in...
westley.c →
Quines and Y combinators, go home. This is a whole new level of meta:
This is Brian Westley’s submission to the 1989 The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The code compiles in its original form, but also if you reverse it, rot13 it, or both. In all cases, it does the same thing, with four different algorithms: depending on the number of command line arguments you feed to the...
“We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able...”
– Brian Eno. (via)
That’s certainly a romantic ideal, but is it really true? Perhaps it’s true that the materials for the creation of one’s own unique culture by “cherry-picking whatever makes sense” are more easily available now than ever before. Perhaps it’s even...
November 2009
Belonging.
Some scattered thoughts about various aspects of belonging and group identity. If I don’t manage to offend someone with this, I might as well give up.
What is it I have in common with those who share my nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference or skin color? It begs the question to say that what I have in common with them is nationality, ethnicity, and so on. That’s about...