Jun
3
Little bits of Los Angeles wink on and off, as light gets in the way of other light.
—David Foster Wallace, “Little Expressionless Animals,” Paris Review (1988)
shhh, peaceful
This is my second favorite fact about dinosaurs. (Via fakescience.)
guy:
A Soyuz rocket with Expedition 36/37 launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, Wednesday, May 29, 2013. A NASA HQ PHOTO.
(via murmurandshout)
Jun
2
—Vampire Weekend, “Step,” Modern Vampires of the City (2013)
On most days I’d rather listen to the sound of yoga pants jammed into a blender on its most punitive setting than to Vampire Weekend, but this song is okay.
—Jenn Ackerman, “Parking Lot,” Angle Inlet, Minn.
There was snow on Thanksgiving and though it did not remain two days, it was followed early in December by an iron cold which locked the earth in a frozen rigidity, so that after a week or so actual dust blew from it. Smoke turned white before it left the chimney, unable to rise, becoming the same color as the misty sky itself in which all day long the sun stood pale as an uncooked biscuit and as heatless.
—William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940)
White before it even left the chimney! I’m feeling better about D.C.’s armpit weather already.
May
30
So this is how ballets get passed down from choreographer to choreographer with such precision. Or at least with some precision.
Some crucial points to consider re: Fast & Furious 6 from Anthony Lane:
There is much to ponder in “Fast & Furious 6,” beginning with the title. The first film, in 2001, was called “The Fast and the Furious,” but the going has been so rough and so raw, over the years, that at some point the definite articles dropped off. I prefer the stripped-down version, and can’t help wishing that the principle had been applied more freely in the past: “Bad & Beautiful,” “Good, Bad & Ugly,” “Remains of Day.”
Spruce though the new name be, however, is it true? Does a lifetime of road use not teach us that the fast are very rarely furious? Anyone who has tried a German Autobahn, where there is no official speed limit, merely an “advisory” one, will know that the smile on the face of the Mercedes owner, as he passes you in a whispering blur, is identical to that of the Dalai Lama. It is those of us in gridlock, waiting for red to turn green half a mile away, who know the true meaning of rage.
A fair point by Naomi Alderman on the problem with a lot of historical fiction, both novels and films:
What I’m unimpressed by is writers who fail to imagine how minds were different in different eras. … So you get horrors like the moment in Gladiator (which is in general a very good, very Roman-feeling movie) where Commodus berates Marcus Aurelius for not having loved him as a boy. What nonsense. No Roman man would have asked for this from his father, nor would a Roman father have apologized for it. A Roman man might have been justly condemned for not teaching his son the manly virtues, but love…? Irrelevant. One has to understand that people really did think differently in the past.
—Nirvana, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” MTV Unplugged in New York (1996)
Linda Holmes reviews the history of MTV and argues that the channel’s real innovation wasn’t the videos — those quickly become obsolete, after all. Rather, it was MTV Unplugged:
MTV Unplugged played a critical role in the development of authenticity policing. The idea that pop stars — entertainers — had to prove themselves in stripped-down formats went hand in hand with the suspicion that they were inauthentic in the first place, an idea that music videos didn’t invent but certainly advanced. (Milli Vanilli released Girl You Know It’s True in 1989, the same year MTV debuted Unplugged.)
Some good points in the piece, and yes, the whole notion that pop or rock songs only had “depth” if they could hold up in an acoustic arrangement is ludicrous. The Nirvana set was obviously the highlight of Unplugged but that’s mainly because the band worked insanely hard to recreate songs for the specific format rather than just lazily swapping out guitars and playing the hits.
Also this video is so much better than I remember it being.
May
27
This is in the top ten or twenty math things I wish I understood better. The abc conjecture:
The conjecture is stated in terms of three positive integers, a, b and c (hence the name), which have no common factor and satisfy a + b = c. If d denotes the product of the distinct prime factors of abc, the conjecture essentially states that d is usually not much smaller than c.
Why does it matter? Because it implies that basic addition and multiplication are related to each other in very unexpected ways:
The equation is based on addition, but the conjecture’s observation is more about multiplication. …
This is not intuitive. While mathematicians came up with addition and multiplication in the first place, based on their current knowledge of mathematics, there is no reason for them to presume that the additive properties of numbers would somehow influence or affect their multiplicative properties.
That’s from Caroline Chen’s astoundingly good article on Shinichi Mochizuki, who claimed to have proved the abc conjecture back in August. It’d be a huge deal for math if true.
Only problem? Mochizuki’s four papers, 512 pages in all, are so dense and radical that other mathematicians are too daunted to go through and verify them. (The first paper sets out to “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.” Even hardened math geeks are scared off by that.) And Mochizuki isn’t offering any guidance. Oh well.
—Edvard Munch, “Two Women on the Shore,” (1898)
—Edvard Munch, “Two Women on the Shore,” (1898)
← Older Posts
Page 1 of 48
