Random knowledge

Why you should stay at hotels that overcharge for drinks and Wi-Fi access.

By Tim Harford

Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality (the third (!) time he wins this award, after winning in in 1994 with Operation Shylock, and in 2001 with The Human Stain).

“It’s such a slim volume,” PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling said Monday in a statement, “and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivialises, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self.”

Via

Update : the PEN/Faulkner web site is not yet updated…

Despite all the copyright hoohah surrounding it, there’s no doubt that Youtube has some unbelievably good stuff on it. And if that wasn’t enough, they’ve made their jazz content much easier to find…say hello to Jazztube!

Via

LaTeX is a typesetting system particularly well suited for documents with mathematics. It’s used almost exclusively by many technical, scientific and mathematical disciplines both in academia and industry. It also looks really good:

As you can notice (those that know LaTeX already) the equation is in typesetting style and not in display style. I prefer the latter, but WordPress only allows for the former. Still a neat feature. If you want to know more about LaTeX, have a look here:

• A simple introduction at Wikipedia
• LaTeX Project Site : probably the best place to start
• LaTeX wikibook
• TeX Users Group web site
• The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network

Update 1: I would really love to be able to put complete LaTeX documents on a blog. WordPress allows the use of some of the LaTeX typesetting commands, but a lot more would be possible if we could use e.g. displaymath (use of a double $, what won’t work here), equation, etc.

Update 2: perhaps I should put some tutorials on this blog ?

In meteorology, virga is precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground.

Holton’s First Law

The turning points in individual and national life are most probably guided by probabilism. (Examples: You are one of about a billion possible yous, since only one spermatozoon [or sometimes two] make it to the ovum, out of about a billion different competitors, none the same. Or on the national/ international scale, the availability of a Churchill in 1940.)

Holton’s Second Law

The probability of a right answer or a beneficent outcome is usually much smaller than that of the wrong or malignant ones. ( This is not pessimism, but realism—an amplified analogue of the Law of Entropy.)

Holton’s Third Law

In the limit of small numbers, the previous two Laws may not rigorously apply. Therefore if you need only one parking place when driving your car, look for one first right where you want to go.

Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

From The American Photochrom Archive Gallery :

First of all, is it “photochrome” or “photochrom”? The process was initially developed in Switzerland and was spelled without an “e”, so the correct original spelling was actually “photochrom”. Once the process was introduced in America, the “e” was added to aid pronunciation.

A Photochrom is a color photo lithograph, produced from a black-and-white negative. The final prints were created using different color impressions from multiple lithographic stones. The stones used by the Detroit Photographic Company were imported from Bavaria and coated with a special Syrian ‘asphaltum’ substance that would be chemically sensitized to light, put in contact with a photographic negative, exposed to the sun for up to several hours, then “developed” in oils of turpentine.

The areas of the very thin asphalt gel most exposed to light would harden, becoming insoluble; the less exposed residue would be washed away. Tonal values of the remaining positive image could be manipulated by varying the chemistry and development times. Technicians could do the equivalent of burning and dodging by retouching the brush and polishing with fine pumice powder. The final steps in preparing the stone were an acid etch to bond the remaining image with its very fine grain, and a glycerin bath.

A separate stone would be made for each color to be used. A minimum of four stones and as many as fourteen stones might be used for a given image. A transparent ink would be applied to the stone, then transferred to high-quality paper whose texture resembled the smooth photographic printing paper of the day.

The final steps was a varnish which gave each print added depth and richness. Because the process involved a number of crafts people and because the stones had to be re-ground occassionally substantial variations may be noted between different editions of the same image over the years.

The American Photochrom Archive Gallery features a splendid collection of Photochroms made by William Henry Jackson (April 4, 1843 - June 30, 1942).

Other references

• William Henry Jackson Collection
• WHJ at the Library of Congress
• And yet another collection of photochroms

Ketchup and Art, your path to glory…

Always be drunk.
That’s it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time’s horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness
of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
“Time to get drunk!
Don’t be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!”

Poem by Charles Baudelaire

The Jules Verne Collecting Resource. If you’re a Verne fan or a book collector at all, this site is an absolute treasure. There are pictures of almost every single edition of his works, major and minor, as well as everything even slightly Verne-related, including: movie posters, matchbooks, autographs, playing cards, cards for stereoscopes, postcards he sent, board games, Jules Hetzel’s excellent covers and posters for his work (more here, and this one is amazing), the man himself, and god knows what else - pretty much everything.
If it’s not here, it’s somewhere else, like the extraordinary maps which adorned some editions, or the virtual library with links to all of his works, the many, many incredible illustrations therein, and even one scanned manuscript (in French, obviously). Hope this makes somebody’s day as much as it made mine.

Via MeFi

Anomalocaris (”unusual shrimp”) is an extinct genus of anomalocarids, which are, in turn, thought to be closely related to the Arthropoda.

Anomalocaris was a swimming creature which possibly used flexible lobes on the sides of its body to propel itself through the water. Its large head had big eyes with multiple lenses and a round mouth. Two large ‘arms’ with barb-like spikes were positioned in front of the mouth; Anomalocaris probably used these to grab prey and bring it to its mouth.

For the time in which it lived Anomalocaris was a truly gigantic creature, reaching lengths from an already large 60 cm (2 ft) to a staggering 2 m (6 ft 8 in).

Patience comes to those who wait.

Great article about truffles at 3quarksdaily

The All Blacks, the international rugby union team of New Zealand, perform a haka (Māori war dance) immediately prior to international matches.

The haka of the All Blacks:

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World do not exist anymore except for the Pyramid of Cheops. Time to elect the New 7 Wonders of the World. The 7 winners will be announced on 07.07.07.

The list of candidates is narrowed down to 21 finalists:

1. Acropolis, Athens, Greece
2. Alhambra, Granada, Spain
3. Angkor, Cambodia
4. Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico
5. Christ Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
6. Colosseum, Rome, Italy
7. Easter Island Statues, Chile
8. Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
9. Great Wall, China
10. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
11. Kyomizu Temple, Kyoto, Japan
12. Kremlin/St.Basil’s, Moscow, Russia
13. Machu Picchu, Peru
14. Neuschwanstein Castle, Schwangau, Germany
15. Petra, Jordan
16. Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
17. Statue of Liberty, New York, USA
18. Stonehenge, Amesbury, United Kingdom
19. Sydney Opera House, Australia
20. Taj Mahal, Agra, India
21. Timbuktu, Mali

A miner from Mexico’s Chiapas state has made the find of a lifetime—a tiny tree frog preserved in amber that could be 25 million years old, a scientist recently announced (map of Mexico).

The block of amber, or fossilized tree resin, encasing the 0.4-inch (1-centimeter) frog was unearthed in 2005 and sold to a private collector, according to the Associated Press (AP). The collector then lent the piece—seen in this photo released on February 14—to scientists.

New insights into the premises, assumptions and preconditions that underlie Einstein’s Relativity Theory, as well as the intellectual, and cultural contexts that shaped it, are the subject of a comprehensive study published this month by Springer.

The publication of The Genesis of General Relativity 1 marks the outcome of 10 years of research into the origins of Einstein’s General Relativity Theory, one of the most important physical theories of the 20th century. It provides a comprehensive study and in-depth analysis of how the work of Albert Einstein and his contemporaries changes our understanding of space, time and gravitation.

Just in : a series of images from Saudi Arabia.

This question is a tricky one because “nanotechnology” is such a broad and vague term. Four researchers wrote in to give their views regarding the meaning of nanotechnology and when we will begin to benefit from it.