March 2011
33 posts
If you present subjects with two shapes, one rounded and one jagged, and ask them which of the shapes is called “bouba” and which “kiki,” you find that a majority assigns “bouba” to the rounded stimulus and “kiki” to the jagged one—as if some abstract form unites the sight and the sound. Ramachandran suggests that this is because the tongue makes different movements for the two sounds, which...
Some enterprising Japanese reporter really needs to get to the bottom of this story: “A Kagoshima town sent out a prerecorded public warning of an impending guerrilla attack Monday. It later blamed it on a worker who pushed the wrong button.” Why was there a button for this?
—Single Frame Ashtray, “Post Daydream...
Via Tyler Cowen, who has many smart thoughts on how computers have transformed the world of chess, comes this wonderful passage from Garry Kasparov:
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion...
—Sparks, “Sherlock Holmes,”...
The plot against Einstein
This, from the Guardian’s write-up of a congressional climate-science hearing yesterday, caught my eye:
[Climate deniers] invited by Republicans tried to compare their cause to that of famous dissenters—such as Galileo—who were eventually proved right. But that rationale brought ridicule from Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who noted that Einstein had almost...
Talk for yourself, Johnny
She was weakest at retaining idiomatic English but managed, right up to her death, to display a knack for turning the clichéd phrase, proverb, or platitude into an objet trouvé so entirely her own that Sabbath wouldn’t have dreamed of intervening—indeed, some (such as “it takes two to tangle”) he wound up adopting. Remembering the confidence with which she believed herself to...
Wrong, but funny: “Country music is for those old or repressed enough to care deeply about monogamy—one-on-one love in all its passion, comfort, consternation, impossibility, and routine.”
"Haro! Haro! To my aid, my Prince!"
This old article, about the still-feudal island of Sark, is easily the second- or third-most interesting thing I’ve ever read in Risk Management magazine:
In the English Channel, not far from the northern coast of France, lies the island of Sark. It is perhaps the only place that still practices Clameur de Haro, a medieval Norman law by which, if you are being transgressed upon in any...
—Casiotone for the etc., “Cold White...
For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them. Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise — perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm. In 1896, Albert Stiger, a vine rower in southeastern Austria...
“Even Rosa Parks got mugged in Detroit (her neighbors found the culprits and subjected them to harsh punishment, but others had no such protectors).”
Well folks, the major revelation of my evening was that the German Bundestag has its very own fictional politician who still cranks out press releases now and again:
Jakob Maria Mierscheid MdB (born 1 March 1933) has been a fictitious politician in the German Bundestag since 11 December 1979.
The Mierscheid hoax was said to have been originally introduced as early as in the 1920s by Weimar...
Also, this is happening: “Christchurch Hospital was inundated with people suffering from broken hearts in the hours after the earthquake, an expert says.”
Broken-heart syndrome is, it turns out, a real thing: “A sudden temporary weakening of the myocardium (the muscle of the heart)… triggered by emotional stress, such as the death of a loved one, a break-up, or constant...
