Archive for January, 2010
Well quipped, Dr. Bohr
January 14th, 2010
Neils Bohr was once visited at his country house by a friend of his, another scientist. The friend was astonished to see that Bohr had a horseshoe nailed up above his front door. He asked, “Do you really believe that that brings you luck?”
Bohr said, “No, of course not… but I’m told that they work even if you don’t believe in them.”
Rocio Romero
January 13th, 2010
Rocio Romero makes these great modular home kits. Clean lines, huge open spaces, energy-efficient, and apparently very inexpensive for DIY’ers.
One day, one day.
Take-Away Shows
January 11th, 2010
Did you see this collection of bands playing impromptu public performances? Quite a few good indie bands make appearances: Phoenix, Yo La Tengo, Fleet Foxes, Sigur Rós, The Walkmen, and so on. Produced/organized by la Blogotheque.
On the subject of Lisztomania:
After 1842 “Lisztomania” swept across Europe. The reception Liszt enjoyed as a result can only be described as hysterical. Women fought over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they ripped to shreds as souvenirs. Helping fuel this atmosphere was the artist’s mesmeric personality and stage presence. Many witnesses later testified that Liszt’s playing raised the mood of audiences to a level of mystical ecstasy.
Nomograms
January 10th, 2010
Nomograms (or sometimes nomographs) are graphical single-purpose analog computing devices. They range from the very simple – like the above BMI calculator – to the (often beautifully) complex. Once upon a time they were commonly used for navigation, astronomy, surveying, and countless other things. Now, what with cheap omnipresent digital computers, they’ve fallen into disuse.
Like beautiful math? Need a calendar for 2010? Download a copy of Ron Doerfler’s Graphical Computing Calendar.
Keith Jenkins
January 9th, 2010
I think people in the past were very different to us in the meanings they gave to the world, and that any reading on to them of a constancy of human nature type, of whatever kind, is without foundation. I mean, which sort of human nature do you want to pick? I don’t think this need lead to scepticism about knowing “history” because, to repeat, when we study history we are not studying the past but what historians have constructed about the past. In that sense, whether or not people in the past had the same or different natures to us is not only undecidable but also not at issue. In that sense, the past doesn’t enter into it. Our real need is to establish the presuppositions that historians take to the past. It would therefore be more constructive (though again ultimately impossible) to try to get into the minds of historians rather than the minds of the people who lived in the past and who only emerge, strictly speaking, through the minds of historians anyway, a task this whole book is encouraging. Not so much “all history as the history of past people’s minds” then, but “all history as the history of historians’ minds.”
Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History
Pre-Columbian Geoglyphs
January 9th, 2010
In general, the geometric figures are formed by a ditch approximately 11m wide, currently 1-3m deep, with adjacent 0.5-1m high earthen banks, formed by deposition of the excavated soil. Ring ditches have diameters that vary from 90 to 300m. The circular structures are more common in the south, while composite and rectangular structures become more frequent as one moves north (see Figure 2). When there are two or more structures, they are usually connected by embanked roads. Some of the single rectangular structures may have short roads coming out of their mid-sides or corners. Composite figures include a rectangle inside a circle or vice versa.
Pretty cool paper; they used Google Earth to find geoglyphs! Read the full article here (pdf).
Cowboy & The Cowntess
January 9th, 2010
A talking cow teaches Morpheus and Pee-wee Herman how to behave on a date. Bizarre.
