the past is another country
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
English mathematician Sir Roger Penrose has written about relativity, cosmology, aritificial intelligence, and the nature of human consciousness (an anti-programmer debating society named itself after him). If one is not prepared to consider the merits of Penrose's controversial arguments about the relation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem or quantum phenomena like microtubules to the task of creating artifician intelligence, you can appreciate the creation that Penrose is perhaps best known for: Penrose tiling. Tessellation -- tiling the plane so as not to leave any gaps -- has long been of interest to artists, from the artists who created the Alhambra to M.C. Escher. Tessellations come in all shapes and sizes. When Martin Gardner published a list of eight convex pentagon tessellations, thought to be a complete list, a reader discovered a ninth type; Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife and mathematical layperson, then devised a method for investigating and found three more. (Fourteen regular tesselations using convex pentagons are now known, but this list has not been proved to be complete.) Escher's tessellations are world famous, available on everything from posters to outdoor tiles (thanks, Kathryn!). But Penrose had worked out (by hand) a quasitessellation, a system by which two shapes could be used to tile the plane without ever repeating the pattern. This aperioditc pattern, based on "kites" and "darts" could be used to make anything from decorate floors to intricate, jigsaw-like puzzles. Penrose's interest in tessellation perhaps triggered some happy memories; a teenaged Roger and his father had invented Escher's impossible shapes, the tribar and the Escher cube. And it's given rise to another distinction: Sir Roger is almost assuredly the only one of Stephen Hawking's collaborators ever to file a lawsuit over toilet paper copyright.
11:21 pm 
Monday, June 24, 2002
I spent some of my time in Pittsburgh this weekend continuing my pokey voyage through Italo Svevo's The Confessions of Zeno. which I've been reading slowly for a while now. It's reminiscent of a more poignant and less slapstick Confederacy of Dunces, both comic tales of men who can't tell what a joke their lives have become. It's not what I expected from the best-known Italian modernist, but I'm enjoying it. I doubt I'd have heard of it if it hadn't been recently been reprinted, and I might not have picked it up if it the reprent hadn't been an attractive and relatively inexpensive Everyman's Library edition. (more...)
11:54 pm
Thursday, June 20, 2002
He fought spiritualism, lobbying Congress for laws against fraudulent mediums. His name was a verb: "to release or extricate oneself from confinement, bonds, or the like, as by wiggling out". He was a pioneering aviator, a self-taught historian, a star of stage and screen, a man who quite possibly knew more about locks than any living person, but the reason that we remember Erik Weisz, an Austrian rabbi's son born in Budapest in 1874, is because he knew how to sell himself. America's "five great magicians" (Harry Kellar, Howard Thurston, Alexander Herrmann, Dante, and Tampa), even Robert-Houdin, the father of modern stage magic, are today all but forgotten. Harry Houdini stands alone. (more...)
11:51 pm
Monday, June 17, 2002
Last weekend marked the fifty-third anniversasry of the creation of Flag Day as an annual observance. Flag Day commemorates the adoption of the American flag on June 14, 1777, although the modern observance dates to 1885, when Bernard Cigrand, a Wisconsin schoolteacher, had his class celebrate "Flag Birthday". Almost simultaneously, a former socialist minister named Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance at the behest of James Upham, publisher of The Youth's Companion, a popular magazine, in a dual effort to promote an idea of nation unity and make a few bucks selling flags; until then most schools displayed states, rather than the national flag (which was largely used by the military). (more...)
11:37 pm
Friday, June 14, 2002
The most prolific author in a survey of Western lit is not Shakespeare, a piker with less than forty plays; Georges Simenon, whose 84 Maigret novels were less than half of his corpus; or Isaac Asimov, with more than 250 books to his credit. Dame Barbara Cartland, who churned out over seven hundred books (largely interchangable romance novels) in her seventy-seven-year career as an author, is a serious contender, but in the Harvard libraries, Anonymous has got her beat. (more...)
10:33 pm
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
I've said before that paper is fragile (and a throwaway line aboutthe fate of Mikhail Bakhtin's Bildungsroman manuscript made it onto a site that aspires to be the "penultimate [sic] site for Bakhtinian Smoking Research" site), but what happens if you lose an entire library -- not lose it to fire, like the Library of Alexandria, but actually misplace it? A lost Roman library, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius, may soon be unearthed; already digital imaging is helping to decipher some of the recovered manuscripts. And then there's the case of Tsarina Sofia Paleolog's fifteenth-century library (link via Boing Boing), designed by Aristotle Fiorovanti and built beneath the streets of Moscow. Sadly, nobody quite remembers where it is; neither Napoleon nor Kruschev was able to turn it up. (more...)
10:41 pm
Sunday, June 9, 2002
The first paragraph of the introduction to Fantagraphics' new volume of the 1925 and 1926 Sunday Krazy Kat comic strips does not spend time discussing the strip's legion of contemporary fans among the intelligentsia, fans like e.e. cummings and H.L. Mencken. Instead, it places Krazy Kat within a body of American vernacular art along with Chaplin and Twain, and then notes "...[T]here's a pretty good chance [this book] won't turn a buck. Krazy Kat doesn't sell well at all." (more...)
11:16 pm
Thursday, June 6, 2002
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution doesn't just protect you from being forced to give self-incriminating testimony; tacked onto the end is what's known as the "takings clause": "...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." There's a rather complex methodology for deciding if it applies to a given case, but at its most simple (say Ohio seizing property through eminent domain to build a highway), it requires property owners to be compensated for the state's taking of their property. Recently, in the sexily-named Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the Supreme Court ruled that a lengthy delay, one of thirty-two months, on development at Lake Tahoe did not constitute a taking under the Constitution. Steven Landsburg's disingenuous Slate article on the Tahoe ruling managed to not mention the word "taking" at all, instead riffing on a distortion of Justice Stevens' ruling and claiming that the Supreme Court might as well, by gum, have ruled government illegal. (more...)
10:17 pm
Tuesday, June 4, 2002
In Canada, graduating students of engineering are presented with a hammered iron ring in an induction ceremony designed by Rudyard Kipling. The engineers' rites are secret; although presumably no more menacing than Phi Beta Kappa, that most unthreatening of centuries-old secret societies, the idea of the Obligated Engineers is reminiscent of Masonic recognition symbols. Although Freemasonic mythology claims that the secret society dates back to Hiram, the apocryphal builder of Solomon's temple, the rites and rituals seem more likely to have arisen with the stonemasons who travelled Europe building cathedrals. With no easy way of providing bona fides, the skilled laborers created secret means of identification -- handshakes, words and phrases loaded with meaning -- to prove that they were trained stoneworkers and engineers, master masons who could be trusted to work on a cathedral. (more...)
10:57 pm
Sunday, June 2, 2002
The Korean War -- the "forgotten war" -- seems to have been left behind by American literature. Dozens of Vietnam or World War II or Civil War novels can be found (many of them excellent), but the Korean War's contribution to popular culture is largely limited to M*A*S*H (a half-funny satire of a book turned into a brilliant satire of a movie turned into a treacly swamp of liberal self-mythologizing of a telelvision show). Brainwashing has legs, however; from new religions to John Walker Lindh, it's still being discussed today. (more...)
11:32 pm
