the past is another country
Thursday, July 25, 2002
Proposition bets? Con men? Randomness? Post-modernism? Air conditioning? If you've detected a theme over the last few weeks, you're right (though it was only half intentional, I swear!). Red and I are taking a vacaton starting tomorrow, and on our way out to California I'll be spending two nights at the Bellagio, home of the world's nicest buffet. It has its own museum, a restaurant studded with Picassos owned by the man who may be the best chef in the Southwest. A circus troupe you may have heard of performs there, in, on, and with a 1.5 million gallon pool; the hotel also features a 9-acre manmade lake (aping the Italian village along the shores of Lake Como that gave the hotel its name), and some giant fountains, all sensibly placed in the Nevada desert. Casino mogul Steve Wynn, the man who created modern Las Vegas when he started the Mirage, built it at a cost $1.9 billion (including a nine-figure sum for modern art; Wynn, now nearly blind, is a major art collector) and basically destroyed his company. The Bellagio didn't exactly sink Mirage Resorts, but it was so lavishly expensive that it wasn't a profit center in the best of times, and whe the Asian high rollers it was meant to attract didn't arrive, Wynn and Mirage were crippled, eventually selling out to rival company MGM Grand. The Bellagio remains the most ridiculously opulent hotel in a city that prides itself on ridiculous opulence. Posts will be sparse for a week or so; I'll try to check in once or twice, here or at Notlost. If you're bored, why not visit one of the fine sites I've bookmarked? If you're really bored, close your eyes and think of me down to my last chip and trying to remember if I'm supposed to split sixes when the dealer shows a three, and wish me well, dear reader.
11:48 pm 
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
The seventeenth century mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal invented the world's first digital calculator, experimented with creating an artificial vacuum, and was an early student of projective geometry (which is concerned with such projections as a globe onto a flat plane), but he is mostly remembered today for his triangle (an immensely pattern-laiden representation of binomial coefficients) pioneering work on gambling. Among other things, Pascal is often credited with inventing the game of roulette. The origins of roulette are murky, but it's at least possible; Pascal's final work as a mathematician was on the cycloid, the curve formed by a point on the rim of a circle as it rolls, and he was one of the first modern mathematicians to seriously study probability. (more...)
11:24 pm
Sunday, July 21, 2002
Last Friday, it was 90 degrees in Washington, and I gave my thanks once more for Willis Carrier's good idea. The air conditioner celebrated it's hundredth anniversary last week; Carrier designed the first air conditioner in 1902 to improve the consistancy of a the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company's work during the humid Brooklyn summer; the temperature and humidity fluctuations had made quality control at the printing plant nigh impossible. Carrier's invention has had a huge impact on America and the world, but was really just the end result of millenia spent trying to cool homes; Susan Roaf's history of climate control dates the icehouse (where blocks of ice were stored) back to 1800 B.C. (more...)
10:43 pm
Thursday, July 18, 2002
Novelist and short story writer Dale Peck doesn't make it entirely clear what he dislikes about the modern novel, but he really, really dislikes "the worst writer of his generation," Rick Moody (essay first observed at Calamondin; discussed at Making Light). I'm not terribly familiar with Moody's work; I believe I've read one (so-so) short story and part of a book in the store. Moody may well deserve the vitriol being heaped upon him. It's very enjoyable vitriol, too, in the way that H.L. Mencken or Dorothy Parker can be delightful in their self-delighted meanness; you get a sense that Peck, who once wrote that "sometimes a bad novel is like a gift", has been storing this up for years. (more...)
11:52 pm
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
The Culture Wars were supposed to be over years ago; the culture warriors in battleground disciplines such as history have picked out what elements of academic theory they find useful and the vast majority of those few people who were wrapped up in the battles over the Western canon and radical deconstruction and post-colonial theory have moved on. Or not. New York Times "critic-at-large" Edward Rothstein had called postmodernism's moral relativism "perverse" in the wake of the September 11 attacks; noted theorist Stanley Fish has popped up to defend himself and his field, and the Culture War battle lines begin to be redrawn. (more...)
8:17 pm
Thursday, July 11, 2002
Alvin Clarence Thomas might have been one of the great American golfers of the 1920s, but it's hard to tell; he refused to turn pro, he always said, because he didn't want to take the cut in pay. Thomas, better known as "Titanic Thompson" ("Titanic" not, as some stories have it, thanks to an escape in drag from the doomed ocean liner, but from the way he kept sinking 'em at pool; "Thompson" from a reporter's error that he was fond of), could play golf right- as well left-handed. He was a poker shark, a pool hustler, a crack shot. The basis for Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, he never found a gimmick he didn't like. (more...)
11:37 pm
Sunday, July 7, 2002
How many ways are there for an enterprising confidence man to separate a mark from his money? Confidence games can be divided into two categories, the big con and the short con. Big cons sent the mark home to get more money; short cons are designed to empty the mark's wallet and send him on his way. The big con had three main variations: the wire (in which the mark was convinced that con men were delaying the telegraph reports of horse races, allowing them to make sure-fire wagers; this is the method used in The Sting), the rag (a similar setup, only involving stocks; this shows up in The Grifters), and the pay-off (in which the mark believes he is putting his money on a fixed race). But the small con flourished in a thousand tiny variations. (more...)
11:23 pm
Tuesday, July 2, 2002
Over at Graham's, talk has turned to randomness. I got remarkably long-winded, but I get so excited when I get to show off my rapidly fading math chops, and it was a chance to talk about Claude Shannon, a man who in his own way did as much to revolutionize twentieth century science as Einstein. Shannon worked at MIT with hypertext pioneer Vannevar Bush. His master's thesis was a landmark piece of engineering theory (on circuit switching); his doctoral thesis was on theoretical genetics. During World War II, he worked on anti-aircraft detection; after the war, his publication of "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", marked the beginning of modern cryptography (in the civilian world, at least). His house was filled with toys: chess-playing computers, a Roman number calculator, juggling machines (while he was at it, Shannon had formulated a science of juggling), a machine whose sole purpose was to reach out with a skeletal arm to turn itself off. And as a Bell Labs researcher working on the question of noisy telephone lines, he had two insights that made him the father of information theory: communication is transmitting a message from one place to another, and information is how much needs to be transmitted. (more...)
9:34 am
