Archive for the ‘old dead white guys’ Category
George Plimpton’s Video Falconry
December 10th, 2011
You know George Plimpton, right? Founder of The Paris Review, deputy ambassador to the UN, noted sportswriter, all-around polymath. He was a pretty cool cat.
Anyway, one of John Hodgman’s offhand quips has come to life in the form of George Plimpton’s Video Falconry, an self-explanatory imitation ColecoVision game rendered in Flash.
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 »
Keynes-Hayek Rap Battle, Part II
November 2nd, 2010
Awww, yeah. What could be more appropriate on election day than a sequel to the original Keynes-Hayek rap battle?
economics, music, old dead white guys, video | No Comments »
The Original Gilgamesh
October 1st, 2010
The Epic of Gilgamesh, as read aloud in the original Akkadian by Antoine Cavigneaux.
For more voices from the beginning of the world, see also part of the epilogue of the Codex Hammurabi and an incantation to ward off rabies. And there’s a lot more. Thanks, Cambridge!
It seems that there’s some scholarly debate over the specifics of cadence and pronunciation, but based on what we know this is about as good as it gets.
(via Open Culture)
books, history, language, old dead white guys | No Comments »
L’elephant triomphal
September 14th, 2010
History has forgotten French architect Charles Ribart, and with good reason. Here’s his wikipedia article, essentially in full:
In 1758, he planned an addition to the Champs-Élysées in Paris, to be constructed where the Arc de Triomphe now stands. It consisted of three levels, to be built in the shape of an elephant, with entry via a spiral staircase in the underbelly. The building was to have a form of air conditioning, and furniture that folded into the walls. A drainage system was to be incorporated into the elephant’s trunk. The French Government, however, was not amused and turned him down.
Little of his work now survives.
animals, architecture, cranks, history, ill-conceived plans, old dead white guys | No Comments »
A Mathematician’s Apology
August 11th, 2010
I finally read A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy’s classic defense of a lifetime dedicated to the study of pure (“impractical”) mathematics. It’s a remarkably sad book, in which Hardy, near the end of his life, famously describes mathematics as a “young man’s pursuit”1 in which the elderly have little to contribute. However, it also contains some really well-composed thoughts:
A man who is always asking, “Is what I do worth while?” and “Am I the right person to do it?” will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve.
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. … It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.
1 The usual formulation of Hardy’s rule is that, “if a mathematician’s going to do any significant work, it’ll be done before they’re thirty.” This is true so long as we ignore the later work of Archimedes, Cauchy, Descartes, Euler, Fermat, Frege, Gauss, Hilbert, Newton, Peano, Poincare, Russell, von Neumann, Weierstrass, and most recently Andrew Wiles. I would guess that Hardy’s opinion on the matter was influenced by his relationship with the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan, who died at 33.
Socrates and Glaucon on the HSN
May 20th, 2010
GLAUCON: Then yes, I agree that one could add such technology to an ordinary mop. But would it still be an ordinary mop, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Very astute, Glaucon. It would not. For convenience’s sake, let’s call it the EZ-Klean Mop™. Now answer me this: would the EZ-Klean Mop ™, given that it has the Dirt-Fighting Technology™ I’ve just described, be able to more effectively rid spaces of dirt or plague?
GLAUCON: Yes.
SOCRATES: So you agree that it can clean better than an ordinary mop?
GLAUCON: I believe so.
Another fine article from McSweeney’s: Socrates and Glaucon on the Home Shopping Network
Rachmaninoff on Mars
May 7th, 2010
Apparently David Bowie based the theme of Life on Mars? on the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. My head exploded.
Compare for yourself: