Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard - Lapham’s Quarterly:
But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
This one’s worth a read: contains the best synopsis of Hamet I’ve ever read. (I’ve read a few, too.)
I like the Guardian (and other newspapers) because they don’t censor swear words. Check out how great that makes the quote in a quote from the article “Tampon-makers can’t mention the V-word. Period. | Richard Adams”:
For years, advertising for tampons and “sanitary products” have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina.
Even when the company substituted “down there” for vagina, two of the networks still wouldn’t run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: “Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes.”
Thanks to Mykala for noticing the original article in the New York Times. Thanks to Apple for making an amazing computer on which I can write (great keyboard!). Thanks to my eyes for reading the article. And thanks to my local coal-fired power station (with some contribution from nuclear, Dan) for providing the electricity necessary to make this post happen.
Thank you! Thank you!
*confetti from the ceiling*
I appreciate Thomas Friedman’s optimistic outlook after he attended the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search:
“If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.”
I ended up growing out my hair for about nine months between June of 2009 and March of 2010. I’ve only a picture of my hair 8 months into the growth… it shows my hair just before it got so long that I couldn’t do much of anything useful (including see through it):
I said that I would cut my hair when I passed boards… and then I just… didn’t cut it. Just kept having things come up, like sleep and homework and life. Finally, FINALLY, I got an appointment to get it cut. The results:
So that’s my haircut! Additionally, here is my haircut with Mykala’s bra on top of it:
And that’s the story of my first haircut as a married man.
8:52 and George eats at 9:00. His plaintive hunger meows echo through the hallway. “You are not forgotten”, I say. This does not seem to satisfy him. Me neither: seems a bit melodramatic. Next strategy: try to teach him to tell time. We’ll start with digital clocks first.
You know you’re growing up when you’re much more interested in the decorating and appliance choices made in the kitchens of Facebook pictures than you are in the people in the pictures. Also under development: maturity.
Words (phases) I really really hate for reasons not worth elaborating:
See also: shitty portmanteaux.
Coralie Bickford-Smith designs covers for Penguin Books. A few years ago, she did an amazing series for Penguin Classics.
I want to buy the collection, just because the covers look so great. I hope the typographic choices on the interior of the books are as good as the design of the covers.
A bit from Bickford-Smith in a 2008 interview about the book covers:
I wanted to create sumptuous books for people to enjoy, cherish and pass on.
I think she succeeded brilliantly; indeed, my first thought when I saw these was they have a timeless, heirloom feel.
Katy sent along this really seriously great rendition Gershwin’s “Summertime” by Billy Stewart. As tends to be the case with these things… the video doesn’t add a whole heck of a lot to the music. So queue up the music on this beautiful 60° Wednesday (while you are trying to do some work and avoid thinking about the outdoors) and enjoy the sweet stylings of Billy Stewart.
In the New Yorker article Time Bandits lies the best plain English description of special relativity that I have ever run across (you owe it to yourself to read this carefully — it’s worth it):
Since light is an electromagnetic wave (this had been known since the nineteenth century), its speed is fixed by the laws of electromagnetism; those laws ought to be the same for all observers; and therefore everyone should see light moving at the same speed, regardless of the frame of reference. Still, it was bold of Einstein to embrace the light principle, for its consequences seemed downright absurd.
Suppose—to make things vivid—that the speed of light is a hundred miles an hour. Now suppose I am standing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed. Then I see you chasing after it in a car at sixty miles an hour. To me, it appears that the light beam is outpacing you by forty miles an hour. But you, from inside your car, must see the beam escaping you at a hundred miles an hour, just as you would if you were standing still: that is what the light principle demands. What if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour? Now I see the beam of light outpacing you by just one mile an hour. Yet to you, inside the car, the beam is still racing ahead at a hundred miles an hour, despite your increased speed. How can this be? Speed, of course, equals distance divided by time. Evidently, the faster you go in your car, the shorter your ruler must become and the slower your clock must tick relative to mine; that is the only way we can continue to agree on the speed of light. (If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative.
That’s one great explanation. The “shorter ruler, slower clock” phrase is particularly helpful. Another critical thing to remember is that this all occurs relative to the observer.
So, the slow speed of motion within the vehicle is only seen by the stationary person with binoculars… it is not experienced by the person within the vehicle traveling close to the speed of light.
Special relativity actually was illustrated quite wonderfully in the 1970s. Scientists used cesium-atomic clocks; these extremely accurate clocks base their resonant frequency on the decay of a cesium isotope, instead of the wildly inaccurate (by comparison) resonance of quartz. Current iterations of these clocks lose about 1 second every 17 to 30 million years. These clocks were put on jets which were flown around the world twice, in opposite directions. The idea was that the cesium clocks aboard the planes would record less time passing than the stationary clocks on the ground, which were used as a reference. To reference back to the New Yorker article: it would be as though you, sitting there, were watching these clocks tick slower because they were in the car chasing the light beam. This is, indeed, EXACTLY what happened. When the clocks were compared after the flights, the clocks aboard the planes recorded less time passing than did the clocks on the ground.
This type of almost incomprehensibly small difference in recorded time doesn’t seem that important, until you link together a global network of satellites designed to closely track your movements on the ground. You know… GPS. So, get this: if you just toss satellites up into orbit, they start seeing time passing differently than your computers on the ground, and the system gets all screwed up because all the computers can’t agree on time. So, scientists set the clock speed of the processors on the satellites to be 10.22999999543 MHz, and the speed of the earth-bound computers to be 10.23 MHz. If they hadn’t done this, along with a few other seemingly esoteric tweaks… your GPS in your car, the one that is supposed to make life so simple, wouldn’t work worth beans.
Science, even the crazy out-there relativistic science, matters in our daily lives.
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