Holiday

Mostly on holiday till end August… Rock Werchter, travelling to Vienna to read in a typical Viennese café, to Venice before it disappears in the water, to Lake Garda to see some friends and to celebrate my sun’s birthday, to the French Riviera (Saint-Tropez, Antibes, Monaco, Nice,…), barbecues because we eat outside this time of the year, research for a new venture (think art, science, music), and the occasional mojito !

Grotesque Alphabet in Mythological Landscapes

All letters with detailed description at the British Museum.

Via BibliOdyssey.

20 books on popular science

The 20 books most often tagged popular science on LibraryThing:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
3. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
4. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
5. Chaos by James Gleick
6. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe… by Richard Dawkins
7. The Code Book by Simon Singh
8. Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh
9. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
10. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
11. The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
12. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
13. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
14. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
15. Blink: the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
16. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
17. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”; Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
18. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
19. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
20. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

No surpises. Every book on this list is wildly popular, but I can’t help wondering if popular also means ‘read’ or rather ‘owned’…

The Thermostat Hypothesis

The Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at a equilibrium temperature.

Several kinds of evidence are presented to establish and elucidate the Thermostat Hypothesis – historical temperature stability of the Earth, theoretical considerations, satellite photos, and a description of the equilibrium mechanism.

Interesting essay by Willis Eschenbach.

Further reading:

• The original paper about the Thermostat or Iris Hypothesis appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
• Not everybody agrees with this hypothesis…, or what did you expect ?
• And another article with the pros and the cons.

Googlenomics

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability. And Hal Varian is their chief economist! Loved his book Microeconomic Analysis, a very good introduction for the rigourous Microeconomic Theory by Andreu Mas-Colell.

Do you recognize this image ?

Concentrate on the four small dots in the middle of the picture for 30 – 40 secs. Then look at any smooth single coloured surface near you (wall, paper,…). You will see a circle of light developing. Now blink your eyes a couple of times and you will see an image emerging. Do you recognize the image ?

Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus (1919) is a painting by the German dadaist/surrealist Max Ernst.

Et in Arcadia ego

Et in Arcadia ego (also known as The Arcadian Shepherds) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (Guercino), +/- 1620.

Et in Arcadia ego (”I am in Arcadia too”) appears onto the cippus. It’s a moral reference to death. Remark also the iconography of the memento mori theme, a genre of artistic creations that vary widely from one another, but which all share the same purpose, which is to remind people of their own mortality.

Improbable research

An ongoing series from the Guardian. This week about law and the paper clip…

The Difficult Crossing

The Difficult Crossing by René Magritte, 1926.

Bulls of Bordeaux

Dibersion de España (Spanish diversion), from Los toros de Burdeos (Bulls of Bordeaux). Francisco Goya. Lithograph, 1825.

Michaël Borremans

The Preservation, Michaël Borremans, 2001, 70,0 x 60,0 cm, oil on canvas.

(yesterday I watched a documentary on Borremans; if you missed it, Canvas is broadcasting it again on 22 and 23 May – for Belgian viewers)

Water Wars ?

It’s often been said that the next resource wars will be fought not over oil but over water. Seven experts debate the past and present existence of water wars, consider the difficulty of owning a fluid resource, and examine the hot spots for future conflict.

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds was an early science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines, equipped with advanced weaponry. It is one of the most famous scifi novels.

Illustration of tripods by Warwick Goble for The War of the Worlds as published in Pearson’s Magazine, 1897)

Free text of The War of the Worlds at Project Gutenberg

Blivet

A blivet, also known as a poiuyt, is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

The Mousetrap

The non-musical Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap is the longest running show in the world with over 23,000 performances since beginning its run in the West End of London in 1952.

(does anyone have a larger image of the original poster of this play ?)

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, sacred or secular oratorio and cantata, musical, and ballet. The term “libretto” is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata. Libretto (pl. libretti) is the diminutive of the Italian word “libro” (book).

Image: Front cover of the original 1899 libretto of the Tosca opera. Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Victorien Sardou’s drama, La Tosca. The text of the Tosca libretto can be found here.

Digesting Duck

The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. The mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this – the food was collected in one inner container, and the feces being ‘produced’ from a second, so that no actual digestion took place – Vaucanson hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be designed.

Cosette

Illustration of Cosette from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Cosette is the nickname of Euphrasie Tholomyès, a character in the novel. The portrait is by Émile-Antoine Bayard (1837-1891).This image which appeared in the original edition of the novel in 1862, was also used on posters promoting the musical version of Les Misérables.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne – 111 illustrations by Riou (24, the first eleven chapters) and Alphonse de Neuville (86), engraving by Hildibrand (1871). This is the title page illustration by Edouard Riou, a pupil of Charles-François Daubigny and Gustave Doré.

See Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection for (I think) a complete overview of all illustrations.