Archive for the ‘old dead white guys’ Category
Visualizing Empires’ Decline
November 26th, 2009
Charles II
November 20th, 2009
A description of Charles II of Spain, according to the Durants:
“short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before thirty-five, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live.”
Of course he had problems; the guy’s family tree is a braid.
The Encyclopédie
September 3rd, 2009
French writer/philosopher Denis Diderot is probably best known for editing the Encyclopédie, a series of collaboratively-written books meant to compile all the knowledge of late-1700’s Europe. I just learned that the University of Michigan hosts a hypertext-ed translation of the whole thing. You can read a blurb about the project here. Some highlights:
Aside from some offensively dated ideas about race, I’m really impressed with how modern most of the thinking is. Compare that with, say, the Pseudodoxia, written just a century earlier. Way to go, Enlightenment.
Salvador Dalí’s Napping Tips
August 16th, 2009
From Lifehacker:
The painter Salvador Dali used to employ the following trick to have the best nap ever:
- Hold a coffee spoon (or something else—use your imagination) in your hand
- Sit and relax on a comfy couch or chair with your arm hanging
- When you go into deep sleep (after about 20-30 minutes) your hand will relax and release the spoon, and the sound of the spoon falling will wake you up
That is the perfect timing for the best nap ever.
Wilhem Reich
August 11th, 2009
Early in his career, Wilhelm Reich was a respected psychiatrist. He gradually became a crank:
Later in life, he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their “orgastic potency.” He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God, and which he called “orgone.” He built “orgone energy accumulators” that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about “sex boxes” that cured cancer.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about a crank. I love cranks.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.com
July 26th, 2009
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s masterwork, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is simultaneously the most clearly written and most incredibly dense piece of writing I’ve ever encountered outside of a Springer textbook. The book consists of Wittgenstein basically showing that most philosophical problems can be reduced to issues of linguistic analysis.
The Tractatus is incredibly structured – it’s almost like a big outline, complete with sub-sub-sub-topics – and as a result readily lends itself to online reading! So, if you’re as huge a nerd as I am, you might enjoy the hypertext version of the Tractatus.
Quines
July 21st, 2009
Named after the American philosopher and logician W.V.O. Quine, a quine is a program whose only output is its own code. Here’s a neat example in Lisp/Scheme, taken from the wikipedia article:
((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x)))
'(lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))))
computer science, language, math, old dead white guys | No Comments »
Wikirank
July 2nd, 2009
Wikirank lists the most popular articles on Wikipedia over the past 30 days. At the time of this writing, Igor Stravinsky occupies the top spot. His birthday was June 17, which I imagine accounts for his almost 1.4 million views that day. Is Stravinsky’s birthday a big deal on the internet? That would be incongruous and wonderful.
Speaking of internet holidays, did Randall Munroe ever decide on the date of Linksys Day? I need to know when to bake my router-shaped cake.
Nixon Now!
June 21st, 2009
There aren’t a lot of things that I like more than old campaign advertisements. This is one of the best.
Snakes of Hawaii
June 16th, 2009
I liked this selection from Philip K. Dick’s essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later:
In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?
We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn’t exist, and how can something that doesn’t exist have aspects? But then I realized that I’d been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to go ahead and ignore all the interesting metaphysical material that PKD deals with here and just say that I want that book.