Archive for the ‘books’ Category
Yelping with Cormac
November 7th, 2011
This lovely blog features Yelp reviews in the spirit of Cormac McCarthy.
He pulled another cold french fry from the greasestained Happy Meal box. He ate it slowly. The sun rising behind him over the limestone bluffs. The barren valley and the road winding through it still in morning’s blue shadow. He wiped his hand on his jacket and checked the breech of the big Weatherby. Bullet as long as man’s finger sitting there. He lay down on the blanket, the rifle’s barrel resting on the saddlebag, and glassed downcountry with the telescopic sight. The dusty road was empty. He waited.
The Decemberists Play Eschaton
August 22nd, 2011
The Decemberists have made a music video of “Calamity Song” based on a key scene in my Favorite Book Ever, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Not too bad, though we don’t get to see Otis P. Lord’s head go through the monitor. Also Colin Meloy’s a bit old to be Pemulis, but whatevs.
books, music, video | No Comments »
Cephalophores
March 13th, 2011
While reading about the recording of the lives of the saints, I can across this amazing paragraph:
Sometimes too the author embellished the story. St. Denis is the patron saint of France. He is supposed to have been the first bishop of Paris and to have suffered martyrdom through being beheaded. According to legend, he immediately stood up and walked a good distance, carrying his head in his hands, to the place where the church which bears his name is now situated, a little to the north of Paris. This was miraculous enough, you would have thought, but there are ways to improve on it. In later lives there are saints who do exactly the same thing, but walk even further or are accompanied by other beheaded martyrs also carrying their own heads. In fact this motif became so common that the experts have invented a special name for this kind of saint: cephalophores. This is from Greek, and of course means “headbearers.”
Janson’s “Natural History of Latin”
books, history, language, memes, old dead white guys, words | No Comments »
The Great Gatsby: NES Edition
February 15th, 2011
Apparently someone made an old NES game that’s very, very loosely based on The Great Gatsby. A flash-based version is now on the tubes. Now you too can throw hats at flappers and fight the giant floating eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.
How Did I Not Buy This
January 1st, 2011
Saw this in a grocery store. Thought everyone should probably be aware.
Mazes & Labyrinths
November 23rd, 2010
I recently finished reading William Goldbloom Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. As was the case with the Atlas of Remote Islands, most of my reading time was spent beaming at the very unlikeliness of the book’s existence. Borges’ work could be described as “literary nerd-sniping,” so the notion of a mathematician devoting a book to an analysis of one of his stories makes perfect sense — it’s just so rare to see those spheres overlapping.
The mathematics the book employs isn’t terribly difficult, since it’s written for the interested layman. Conversely, if you did your undergrad degree in math (or something else sufficiently mathly) you’ll probably find yourself skimming occasionally, but there’s still quite a lot in there to enjoy. The book is very good at communicating the pleasure of doing mathematics for its own sake, and that aspect really struck a familiar chord with me. Who doesn’t enjoy discovering that The Library would contain enough books to fill 10 ^ 1,834,013 universes?
Finally, any writer who in the preface defines his intended audience as “Umberto Eco” has won a fan for life.
Beowulf in Old English
November 7th, 2010
Benjamin Bagby performs Beowulf in the original Old English. The opening scene is above. It’s very impressive – the man’s got quite a presence.
The hidden gem in the above video, though, is the completely-open-to-interpretation audience reaction.
Nice find, Cooney!
Gödel in Single Syllables
October 27th, 2010
The logician George Boolos once published an article called Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable. In full, the article reads:
First of all, when I say “proved,” what I will mean is “proved with the aid of the whole of math.” Now then: two plus two is four, as you well know. And, of course, it can be proved that two plus two is four (proved, that is, with the aid of the whole of math, as I said, though in the case of two plus two, of course we do not need the whole of math to prove that it is four). And, as may not be quite so clear, it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four, as well. And it can be proved that it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is four. And so on. In fact, if a claim can be proved, then it can be proved that the claim can be proved. And that too can be proved.
Now, two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that two plus two is not five. And it can be proved that it can be proved that two plus two is not five, and so on.Thus: it can be proved that two plus two is not five. Can it be proved as well that two plus two is five? It would be a real blow to math, to say the least, if it could. If it could be proved that two plus two is five, then it could be proved that five is not five, and then there would be no claim that could not be proved, and math would be a lot of bunk.
So, we now want to ask, can it be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five? Here’s the shock: no, it can’t. Or, to hedge a bit: if it can be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved as well that two plus two is five, and math is a lot of bunk. In fact, if math is not a lot of bunk, then no claim of the form “claim X can’t be proved” can be proved.
So, if math is not a lot of bunk, then, though it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, it can’t be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five.
By the way, in case you’d like to know: yes, it can be proved that if it can be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five, then it can be proved that two plus two is five.
15 Authors
October 27th, 2010
I was just tagged by a meme on Facebook. You may be aware of my boundless enthusiasm for memes but less-than-boundless enthusiasm for Facebook, so here we are.
Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.
Memes like this are sort of doomed to end up as exercises in personal branding, but let’s go anyway:
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Italo Calvino
- Carl Sagan
- Bertrand Russell
- R. Buckminster Fuller
- David Foster Wallace
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Lao Tzu
- Jules Verne
- H.D. Thoreau
- Aldous Huxley
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Donald Norman