Week 7
Genius is fascinating, and none more so, perhaps, than that of the child prodigy. But what is it that makes some burn out, while others are stars that keep on shining? I keep returning to two individuals who perfectly exemplify the two extremes. One is William James Sidis, born in 1898. As a child, he was a guinea pig for his father’s eccentric theories about education. The other is Terence Tao, born in 1975. Both of these men were mathematical prodigies. Sidis lectured the mathematical society at Harvard about four-dimensional bodies at 11. Tao was the youngest ever winner of the International Math Olympiad, and had a Ph.D. by age 20. Yet Sidis left mathematics quickly after graduating and never again accomplished anything of note. Tao is one of the top mathematicians working today, and was awarded a Field’s Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, in 2006.
Speaking of math, I wish I understood advanced geometry, because the Banach-Tarski paradox is mind-blowing:
The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states that a solid ball in 3-dimensional space can be split into a finite number of non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. The reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them, without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are complicated: they are not usual solids but infinite scatterings of points. A stronger form of the theorem implies that given any two “reasonable” objects (such as a small ball and a huge ball), either one can be reassembled into the other. This is often stated colloquially as “a pea can be chopped up and reassembled into the Sun”.
Alfred Tarski was an amazing mathematician. Raymond Smullyan argues that much of the fascination directed at Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem should instead be directed at Tarski’s undefinability theorem. The undefinability theorem states that arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic, and in general, that for any sufficiently strong formal system, “truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system.
” The proof works by constructing a “liar sentence” S, such that S ↔ ¬True(“S”). Tarski is also known for his definition of truth: “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. Believe it or not, this seemingly obvious statement has generated tons of critical attention and debate.
Smullyan, by the way, has published a lot about recreational mathematics (think Douglas Hofstadter), including his book To Mock a Mockingbird, in which he uses birds as a metaphor to explain (but not dumb down!) combinatorics. See also: to dissect a mockingbird.
The chess world has its prodigies, too, and the most well-known is probably Bobby Fischer. Here he’s photographed by Harry Benson at a hot spring in Reykjavik, in 1972. Garry Kasparov reviews a biography of him. Fischer became world champion, only to retreat from chess entirely, and the last years of his life were spent fleeing the US government and spouting anti-semitic nonsense. Let’s hope the chess prodigy of the moment, Magnus Carlsen, who became the #1 ranked player at 19, doesn’t suffer a similar fate.
I hope this gets restored, because I’d like to see it:
The Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama was a simulated train ride, using a moving panorama, first exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition… The installation included three 70-foot-long luxury railway cars, complete with saloons, dining rooms, and bedrooms. The audience would sit in the railway cars, and view the panorama through the windows. Additional spectators could watch from rows of seats placed alongside the cars. The moving panorama was a stage-like area with multiple layers of moving objects and scrolling paintings. The nearest objects were sand, rocks, and boulders attached to a horizontal belt that moved at a speed of 1000 feet per minute. Next was a low screen painted with shrubs and brush, which moved at 400 feet per minute. Behind that, another screen with paintings of more distant scenery moved at 130 feet per minute. The final screen showed mountains, forests, and cities; it was 25 feet tall and 350 feet long, and moved just 16 feet per minute. The net result of these four layers was to produce a simulated perspective of great depth, via motion parallax.
Speaking of virtual train rides: to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of Bergensbanen, Norwegian national broadcaster NRK televised the entire railway trip between Bergen and Oslo, all seven hours of it. The broadcast was a hit, relatively speaking.
Al-Jazeera and the new Arab public, an interview with Marc Lynch from 2006.
Where’s the midpoint of Europe? Depends on what you mean by “Europe”, of course. And I wonder how, exactly, one calculates the midpoint of a highly irregular shape: the point equidistant from the eastern, western, northern and southern extremal points, perhaps? Is it even guaranteed that there will be such a point, given arbitrary irregularities? These are the things I’d think long and hard about if I knew how to think about such things.
Give Me Something to Read links to a story that this Norwegian wasn’t aware of: on the surface, Bastøy prison outside of Oslo has more in common with a communist commune than a traditional prison. The freedom granted to murderers, thieves and rapists stands in stark contrast to the boarding school for troubled boys that used to occupy Bastøy. The school was infamous for its use of corporeal punishment, and the story of a 1915 uprising among the students was made into a film that premiered in December.
The Spiegel article obscures his name, but context betrays the “one man here you don’t play around with, you don’t look in the eye and you don’t approach.
” He is Ole Nicolai Kvisler, and the crime he was convicted for shook Norway: the racially motivated murder of 15-year-old Benjamin Hermansen. There haven’t been many clear-cut racist murders in Norway, so this case was huge, provoking people to march the streets and fill the newspaper columns with discussions of racism. But this horrific crime doesn’t validate an excessively retributive justice system either on pragmatic or moral grounds.
Arteries. A series of highways flowing through the heart of Manhattan’s West Side, 1964, by Evelyn Hofer.
Antiphanes, via Plutarch, on wisdom: “Antiphanes said humorously that in a certain city words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter; it was the same way, he asserted, with what was said by Plato to men still in their youth; not until long afterwards, if ever, did most of them come to perceive the meaning, when they had become old men.
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On advice from your future self: “… if you actually took your advice from your future self, you wouldn’t really learn the lessons, and then, when you went back in time to impart them to your 20YOS, you would be arguing from received wisdom rather than bitter experience, and that 20YOS would sense that you were a phony, and ignore you and go on to make the same mistakes or worse ones, and probably the whole fabric of space and time would come undone, and, really, stay away from time travel and giving advice, it never goes well as it did when you imagined it.
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How to be 1990s, a memoir-essay thinly disguised as a guide for contemporary teenagers.
While we’re in the nostalgic corner, Welcome to Pine Point is all about nostalgia. I love the whole “small town as microcosm of the wider world” thing. The idea that there’s this diaspora of a town that only existed for a generation and hasn’t existed for twenty years, still keeping the memories alive, is powerful. But the doc asks us to “imagine your hometown never changed…
” This doesn’t seem to follow from the fact that it only exists in people’s memories. Memories are not static pieces of information. Memory is an active process. Every time we remember something, the memory is deleted and rewritten. Assuming this process is not error free, which seems a safe bet, over time errors will creep in, the way compression artifacts overtake a jpeg image compressed hundreds of times. This suggests that the memories we think of the most may actually be our least accurate, and that the perfect memory rests inside the mind of an amnesiac, who will never retrieve it and so never alter it.
By Hannah Starkey.
Declarative sentences, lots of them. Apathy, irony, faux-naïveté coupled with hyper-selfconsciousness, frequent meta comments, a reliance on the preposition “via”, apparent anhedonia, insincere nostalgia, flat dramatic curves. It’s Tao Lin’s style, and I think I’ve figured out why I don’t like it: Tao is too much like me in all the ways I’d like not to be. Maybe that’s also why I like it so much. I don’t know if he invented the style, exactly, but I find traces of it not only in Tao’s writing but also in the writing on HTMLGIANT, Thought Catalog, Hipster Runoff, Pitchfork Reviews Reviews and Tao’s fellow Muumuu House writers. It’s probably not a coincidence that the Muumuu website has published Norwegian poet Audun Mortensen. Mortensen proves that the Tao style is very capable of jumping languages: Mortensen’s poetry collection alle forteller meg hvor bra jeg er i tilfelle jeg blir det, which I actually liked — saying something, given that I don’t really read poetry — is basically Tao Lin in Norwegian. Other Mortensen projects: merriam-webster post pavilion and this (and people bought it?).
Somewhat related: Kenneth Goldsmith, a “conceptual poet” whose art, in his own words, is about “uncreative writing”: “a great deal of its value is in allowing people to riff on the very thought that someone actually did this stuff.
” Think Nicholas Felton’s annual reports are obsessively detailed? Goldsmith’s projects include all the words and phrases ending with “r” he heard in a 3-year period; a record of every single movement his body made during a thirteen-hour period (appropriately called Fidget); and Soliloquy, which records exactly every word Goldsmith spoke in the week of April 15-21, 1996, transcribed from tape. You only get Goldsmith’s voice, not the interlocutor’s, so it reads a little like DFW’s Brief Interviews:
You actually your body’s so good now. No, really, you’re so thin and so good. Strong, muscular, and pretty. And soft and smooth. Mmmmm, I’m getting a lick. I’m gonna get it’s even more soundtrack to Head. OK, alright, I’ll turn it off. OK. I’ll turn it off. I’ll turn it off. I can’t turn it off. We already had had one! Of me! Getting blown! That was all on tape. Sure it was. (…)
It’s so contradictory! And it’s O.K. for your art but it’s not O.K. for my art! And I in in in the one with The Bordems and your crawling under the plastic you can see your vagina! And yet… you can see the whole pussy. Of course you can when you’re crawling around but do I ever say anything? No. It’s for your art. And so this art is like our life and then you’re saying no, we can’t have it. Oh, it’s only special when it’s like like Art and when it’s like life you can’t have it. I get it. No, I’m making the most ridiculous argument because you’re because you’re like giving me a hard time about my art project. Why don’t you say that instead of saying I don’t want that on the tape?! I mean, is that a joke? These tapes, nobody will ever hear these tapes, Cheryl. How can you say you’re self conscious when you’re like the nude the nude artist of the century? It’s pretty close. And Head? So, this is simulated to. It’s it’s mediated by the tape medium. I can’t believe… look, if we had no language. I will, if there’s no language. No. There’s no language. I want to give you a demonstration. Watch this red light. See I’m talking now? Now I’m talking? See? It’s like magic. And you have the highest voice of anyone. I don’t. Speak. Do you have the highest voice ever? Call me Harpo. I’m gonna go clean up. Good night. No, fuck it. I hate sex. Especially with you. Go to bed.
Most of Goldsmith’s works are exercises in transcription. His “American Trilogy” consists of word-for-word transcriptions of weather reports, a baseball broadcast and traffic reports. It’s Duchamp meets poetry. Goldsmith calls it “a linguistic portrait of the banality of Western civilisation
”. Few will read them start to finish (and Goldsmith doesn’t expect us to) but I suppose that validates Goldsmith’s point. But that only goes so far. Putting something banal into the art context certainly underlines its banality, but if something serves its function in day-to-day life well, need it be more? What would society look like if weather reports and sports broadcasts were written so they’d seem profound when exhibited in art galleries? What if weathermen were required to study under a zen master in a remote monastery in Japan for ten years before getting the job, so they could compose their reports as haiku? What if sports commentary were required to enter into the academic discourse on the aesthetics of physical performance and the ethics of violence as entertainment? “The grace with which that left hook hit his chin inspires ecstatic emotion, and yet, as we recall from Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others…” Would our lives really be better? Would you like to live in that civilization?
The Danish Situationist Asger Jorn wrote: “There are heaps of anonymous banalities that have a topicality stretching through centuries and surpassing every ingenious accomplishment by our so-called great personalities… The great work of art is banality fully accomplished, and most banalities are lacking in that they aren’t banal enough.
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