Random knowledge

Today: BRU-MAD-BRU
Everyone has seen such codes, but few are aware of this…

Orville Wright died 60 years ago. He and his brother Wilbur are generally credited with inventing and building the world’s first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight on December 17, 1903.

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one’s own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: “What is knowledge?”, “How is knowledge acquired?”, and “What do people know?”

Introductory resources:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (source par 1)
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Both links come with links for further reading.

In this, her only appearance on film from 1929, Bessie Smith performs with orchestra, choir, piano and strings. The band includes James P. Johnson on piano, Thomas Morris and Joe Smith on cornet, as well as the Hall Johnson Choir with some thrilling harmonies at the end. The sound quality is not tremendous, but than again this is a very old recording.

Tonight La Sconosciuta (The Unknown) at the Studio Leuven (Dutch link).

Irena “the unknown” (Rappoport) is an Ukranian young woman living in the Italian city of Velarchi. Soon we discover she has an horrible past of violence and humiliations. To pursue a mysterious aim she manages, by any means, legal and illegal, to get the job as an house servant for a wealthy couple with a little girl. She grows closer and closer to the family, especially to the girl, who suffers from a rare neurological disease. But someone will come back from her past, bringing new horrors and violence.

The movie won already several awards, including 5 David di Donatello Awards and a European FIlm Award.

As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, “It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach.” The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.

To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts. A must read at Seed Magazine.

Corporate social responsibility, once a do-gooding sideshow, is now seen as mainstream. But as yet too few companies are doing it well, says Daniel Franklin.

Links for further reading on CSR.

For his first museum exhibition in the United States, artist Jan De Cock (Belgian, born 1976) will conceive a floor-to-ceiling installation mixing color and black-and-white photographs with a series of plywood sculptural modules that recall twentieth-century abstraction. Made in response to the particular site in which they are displayed, the pictures will be of specific objects and installation views of MoMA’s collection that De Cock has previously photographed from different angles and at times combined with other images culled from the history of art, architecture, and film in an encyclopedic style. The German word Denkmal, which appears in the titles of all De Cock’s works, signifies “monument.” However, in Dutch (the artist’s native language) the expression incorporates two meanings: denk (to think) and mal (mold). For De Cock, a Denkmal is a mold of thinking. The exhibition portrays the myriad photographic references and interdisciplinary links at the center of De Cock’s work.

IRL: Museum of Modern Art, January 23–April 14, 2008. View the online exhibition.

Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness) is a graphic novel composed in collage by Max Ernst, made during a three week visit in Italy around the time of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. The novel was first published in 1934, as a series of five pamphlets of less than 1,000 copies each.

The novel consists of found images from Victorian encyclopedias and novels, cut up and re-organized into 182 montages which represent a kind of dark, surreal world. One such image includes a series of bird-men fleeing an unidentified terror, a giant hand reaching out of a window above.

Other extracts of this magnificent work of surrealism:

“La donna è mobile” (”Woman is fickle”) is the cynical Duke of Mantua’s canzone from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto (1851). Its reprise in the last act is chilling, as Rigoletto realizes from the sound of the Duke’s lively voice coming from within the tavern (offstage), that the body in the sack is not that of the Duke after all (he had paid Sparafucile, an assassin, to kill him but was deceived, as he killed Gilda, Rigoletto’s daughter, instead).

The canzone is famous as a showcase for tenors. It has been recorded by Enrico Caruso (see video below), Mario Lanza, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and hundreds of others.

Libretto

La donna è mobile
Qual piuma al vento,
Muta d’accento — e di pensiero.
Sempre un amabile,
Leggiadro viso,
In pianto o in riso, — è menzognero.

Refrain
La donna è mobil
qual piuma al vento
Muta d’accento e di pensier!
e di pensier!
e di pensier!

È sempre misero
Chi a lei s’affida,
Chi le confida — mal cauto il core!
Pur mai non sentesi
Felice appieno
Chi su quel seno — non liba amore!

Refrain
La donna è mobil
qual piuma al vento,
Muta d’accento e di pensier!
e di pensier!
e di pensier!

I moved all my emails (read and not read) dated 2007 from my Inbox to a new folder Old News. Now I only have 78 emails marked not read. Ha !

It began as an urbane fable about how to brush down bristling nerves. Sometime in the summer of 1909, not long before Sigmund Freud was due to embark on his only visit to the United States, he was enjoying a cigar in the company of his inner circle in the busy Biedermeier interior of Berggasse 19, when he suddenly announced, “I am going to America to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.”

A tale about Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud and of course porcupines. See also hedgehog’s dilemma.

Authorized, booked
By my steadfast prose
The dead I ghost write
Shed shadows that shine
With hindsight, hearsay—
The last word is mine

–Samuel Menashe

Dairy bar (Polish: bar mleczny for milk bar) is a typically Polish kind of a fast food restaurant. It was invented by the communist authorities of Poland in the mid-1960s as a means to offer cheap meals to people working in companies that had no official canteen. Its name originates from the fact that until the late 1980s the meals served there were mostly dairy-made and vegetarian. (Source - wikipedia)

Seeing a documentary on Canvas (dutch link) about these milk bars.

In the last 15 years, Tom Lord has established himself as the pre-eminent jazz discographer, especially in the technological sense. He began offering his massive jazz discography as a series of expensive (and, cumulatively, weighty) printed paperback books in the early ’90s before offering the entire 34-volume series on CD-ROM about five years ago. Now, he’s made an even more important breakthrough by making the whole works available online. More at the New York Sun.

KWISATZ HADERACH: “Shortening of the Way.” This is the label applied by the Bene Gesserit to the unknown for which they sought a genetic solution: a male Bene Gesserit whose organic mental powers would bridge space and time.

We are 1965 and we come to know Arrakis, the only known source of the spice melange.

A revelation in its time, Micrographia (1664) exposed the previously hidden microscopic world. Robert Hooke, an early developer of the compound microscope, used his device to peer at the eyes of flies, the stinger on a bee, hairs, bristles, sand particles, seeds, and more, noting every detail with both words and masterful illustrations. The original book is a hefty three pounds, so the digital versions now available are more convenient, but there is something to be said for flipping through a printed copy and discovering, like a hidden treasure, each drawing in its beautiful intricacy.

The famous chess player Bobby Fisher died yesterday in Iceland aged 64. Great at playing chess, but controversial as a person.

“Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch,” explains psychologist Steven Pinker in an entertaining and enlightening article on the workings of the moral instinct. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Infinity is bigger than any number. But saying just how much bigger is not so simple. In fact, infinity comes in infinitely many different sizes—a fact discovered by Georg Cantor in the late 1800s.

Now a mathematician has come up with a new, different proof. Based on a simple game, the proof uses a strategy that might someday shed light on one of the great unsolved questions in mathematics. Continue…