Random knowledge

Copyright Image from New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steinger.

More info here and here.

A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies. Here are three of history’s best. See also Edward Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. (Via)

Erik Desmazières, born in Rabat in 1948, is described as “arguably the finest French printmaker of his generation”.

Desmazières’s etchings are at once shockingly strange and profoundly realistic. Employing fine technical skill, perspectival brilliance, and idiosyncratic imagery, his work is both recognizable for its antecedents—Giovanni Batista Piranesi (1720-177 and a childhood love of science fiction—and wholly unique.

Further reading at Velly.org, at Art Aujourd’hui, but no dedicated web site found unfortunately.

Zak Smith’s illustrations for each page (760 !) of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Gravity’s Rainbow is an epic postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973. It is widely regarded as Pynchon’s magnum opus.

The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers around the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertaken by several of the characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the “Schwarzgerät,” or “00000″.

The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and won the National Book Award in 1974. Since its publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has spawned an enormous amount of literary criticism and commentary, including two reader’s guides and several online concordances.

Yesterday I intended to start reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But I decided (after a visit to the book shop…) to read first some stories by Jorge Luis Borges : Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949).

Note to myself: write an essay about Borges.

Yesterday I finished reading Life & Times of Michael K, a book written by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2003. A very fine story indeed. My next book will be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke.

The book is set in an alternate 19th-century Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars. The story is based on the premise of magic returning to England after hundreds of years of desuetude, and the tumultuous relationship between two fictional magicians of the time. The story incorporates historical events and people into its fictional alternate reality. Historical figures encountered in the novel include the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron and King George III. The novel, written in a pastiche of Jane Austen’s literary style, uses quasi-archaic spelling for several words (such as shew, chuse, connexion, sopha, scissars, headach, and surprize).

The book is interspersed with hundreds of fictional footnotes which reference a number of fictional books including magical scholarship and biographies, and which provide a detailed backstory. Many pages of the book contain more footnote text than main body text. The book features several illustrations by Portia Rosenberg.

Further references:

• Seminar with Susanna Clarke at Crooked Timber
• Susanna Clarke’s Magic Book, John Hodgman, The New York Times Magazine.

Tom Flynn discusses the ad­dictive dependence of human eco­no­mies and political systems upon growth. You should read this. Yes, you there.

How can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker’s list of Books From Our Pages?

Luckily the Edge has provided a list of 2007 science books.

Update: to access the NYT book list, you need to register. It’s for free and takes but a minute.

A miniature swimming deer seems to be the missing link between whales and land mammals. The poor deer had to spring into the water to escape being eaten 50 million years ago.

We don’t know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning. There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe? Laws of Nature, Source Unknown (Update: you need to register to read this article, but it’s for free).

Sexing the handbag. It’s time to fight Hefnerism with radicalisation not restriction, declares Dylan van Rijsbergen.

The pre-Socratic philosopher sparked an intellectual revolution that still echoes today. Yet for philosophy and science to continue to progress in the 21st century, we may need to embark on an entirely new cognitive journey

“Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.”

–Henri Cartier-Bresson

Eh… a present for Christmas I would really appreciate…

Available online here (Magnum site with info) and here or offline at a decent bookstore e.g. Thank you.

Update : Magnum selling price is 200 USD (139 EUR), Amazon USA 141.75 USD (98 EUR) Amazon UK 61.75 GBP (85 EUR) and Amazon France 133 EUR. Amazon Germany 149.80 EUR. What a huge difference at the different Amazon stores !??

With the holidays coming up, you might need some napkin folding instructions (more instructions also here and here)

Watching The Sixth Sense right now (VT4 TV station - Dutch link), a psychological horror film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan that tells the story of Cole, a troubled, isolated boy who claims to be able to see and talk to the dead (the famous line “I see dead people” is from this movie), and an equally troubled child psychologist (played by Bruce Willis) who tries to help him. The film established Shyamalan as a writer and director, and introduced the cinema public to his signatures: his appearance in Hitchcock-like cameos, his liking for twist endings, and his use of the color red as a symbol of strangeness or otherness (e.g. the shelter used by Cole, the grieving mother’s dress, a napkin, and many more).

RK sez: The Sixth Sense is probably the only film by Shyamalan worth seeing. The Village and Signs, 2 other of his movies are -to put it mildly- disappointing.

“A very damaging and a wrong one, but a love story all the same,” is how director Iciar Bollain describes Take my eyes (Te doy mis ojos), an award-winning tale of domestic abuse. Laia Marull gives a terrific performance as Pilar, a terrified housewife on the run from husband Antonio (Luis Toscar) and his regular outbursts of violent rage. Taking refuge with her sister Ana (Candela Peña), she tries to build a new life - but she’s still in love with the man who beat her. Review by Roger Ebert.

RK sez: a well told story about a difficult subject with some great acting. Domestic abuse has been portrayed on film before but never with this much complexity. Usually, we are treated to a parade of brutality, bordering on stylised cartoon violence in some cases, as oafish men hit their women for not having tea on the table. Iciar Bollain’s treatment is completely different. She keeps the rough stuff to a minimum, though the emotional abuse is continually evident.

(Tonight on DVD)

Calling Hedy Lamarr. Arte TV, 17 décembre 2007 à 23:20.

Why is it that every time you see a mobile phone or log onto the Internet, you should automatically begin to dream of the most beautiful woman in the world. And why does a certain goddess of the silver screen should make you think of something called spread spectrum technology? I can assure you that there is a simple explanation. The concept of the spread spectrum forms the basis of mobile phone and WiFi Internet technology, and its godmother was a certain Hollywood icon: Hedy Lamarr.

Google now wants to become wikipedia. Udi Manber on the Google blog. Ars Technica comments and Crooked Timber comments.

RK sez: Google’s interpretation of ‘organizing the world’s information’ is more and more driven by add income it seems. Still it’s only a test and not a real product yet. Not sure this will ever be a live product. And if it does, we are still facing the problem of information reliability which is (becoming) a problem of wikipedia and the likes and is not being addressed by knol.

Interesting e-book.

This panel, from a 1504 painting by Hieronymous Bosch called The Garden of Earthly Delight (Museo Nacional del Prado), is part of a large, 3-part piece called a triptych. The painting was probably made for the private enjoyment of a noble family. It is named for a luscious garden painted in the central panel (not shown). The portion linked here is from the outer wings, or shutters, that are seen when the triptych is closed. It depicts a stylized medieval view of the third day of the creation of the world, including a flat Earth with clouds floating in a spherical firmament, and a void surrounding the spherical bubble enclosing Earth. Although this point of view was not prevalent or widely shared among educated members of the society in the Middle Ages, who had inherited much of their astronomical knowledge from documents such as those shown above, it did hold a certain amount of sway among members of the general public.

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and.’

–Sir Arthur Eddington

A very interesting essay on Dada and Surrealist Journals

Although neither Dada nor Surrealism revolutionized society as profoundly as their proponents had hoped, they left an indelible mark on art and writing. These iconoclastic impulses of these movements remain rich sources of artistic inspiration. The remarkable journals they generated have preserved a detailed record of the revolutionary atmosphere in which they were conceived and generated. Through their journals, the Dadaists and Surrealists defined and broadcast their views of the world, and expressed their hopes to transform and liberate art and culture. For admirers of the rich and revolutionary ideas of these movements, these journals offer unique insights into the minds of their creators.

The world had changed. The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to the pruning back of the plant to its roots…[It had] become common knowledge, or at least a universal sense, that the continuance of civilization depends on this strict schooling. People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.

- H. Hesse in The Glass Bead Game