October 2010
47 posts
6 tags
6 tags
High court hang-ups →
Brilliantly funny piece from Miles Kington in The Independent, Oct 15th 2002. A man on trial for stealing 40,000 coat hangers uses his dazzling wit to the full.
7 tags
5 tags
Dutch words for liquorice →
Some languages reputedly have lots of words for snow. Dutch, however …
8 tags
10 tags
6 tags
5 tags
5 tags
Ordinary (unpleasant) →
A particularly wonderful evaluation questionnaire for orchestra conductors, including options like “meandering but not interfering” and “destructive” for stick technique. Posted on the Minnesota Orchestra website.
4 tags
6 tags
7 tags
Search terms
night snow
understand violin fingering twitter is confusing twitter is so confusing
vienna skyline
6 tags
procrastinophany
The glorious moment of realisation that the task you’ve been putting off for ages need not, in fact, ever be done.
8 tags
Why Night Owls Are More Intelligent than Morning... →
Research which found that more-intelligent people tend to wake up later, and stay up later, than less-intelligent people. Article on Psychology Today site, May 9th, 2010.
6 tags
4 tags
“Maybe print is dead, but at least when you finish reading a book, there...”
– @hopelarson on Twitter
11 tags
“[These thought experiments] are admittedly inconclusive. As a solvent of...”
– 2010 reissue of Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge University Press, 1958, p.34.
5 tags
“Note that it is often impossible to give an English translation for a given...”
– Louis Janus, Norwegian Verbs & Essentials of Grammar: A practical guide to the mastery of Norwegian, McGraw-Hill, 1998, p. 111. Probably true of all languages.
8 tags
A loosely related word pair
The pair:
In Welsh, gennom ni = with us
In Norwegian, gjennom = through
Comments:
In Welsh, gennom is one of the forms of gan “with”, which varies according to the pronoun following it.
“With” and “through” are rather different concepts, but it seems typical for the meanings of similar prepositions in different languages to vary quite widely, and for the...
11 tags
4 tags
Scientists produce illusion of body swapping →
From Sciencedaily, Dec. 2008. A series of experiments in which subjects were made to perceive the bodies of mannequins and of other people as their own. For example, when their own body was touched, they perceived the sensation as meaning that a mannequin’s body was being touched.
6 tags
Conceptual physics costumes for Halloween →
Instructions on how to behave at parties in accordance with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, etc. Very funny if you know the physics; probably still funny if you don’t. Mostly not about fancy dress costumes despite the title.
5 tags
3 tags
Blog post: How to abolish Mondays →
I present a simple way to eliminate Mondays (or any other unwanted day) from your week.
Wordpress blog post for Oct 11th, 2010.
5 tags
4 tags
5 tags
4 tags
7 tags
Tiny Brained Bees Solve a Complex Mathematical... →
Experimental work showing that bees can solve the Travelling Salesman Problem, of determining the shortest route through a number of destinations.
7 tags
Impossible sculptures →
Mathematically-inspired sculptures by Bathsheba Grossman, often in shapes impossible to make by traditional techniques. Very beautiful.
5 tags
10 tags
Hyperbolic Crochet →
Blog of Daina Taimina, which she started after her book Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes won the 2008 Diagram Prize “for the book with the oddest title of the year”. The blog is largely about mathematics, art, and the links between them, and is a warm and friendly (though often mathematical) read.
6 tags
How To Write a Scientific Paper →
Brilliantly funny paper by E Robert Schulman about how to write a paper, at improbable.com, home of the Ignobel Prizes.
5 tags
8 tags
18 Cool Inventions From the Past →
On boredpanda.com. Follow the link above. Photos, including:
one-wheel motorcycle, 1931 (one very large wheel)
all-terrain car, 1936 (lots of wheels)
piano for the bedridden, 1935
glasses for reading in bed, 1836 (they appear to have either mirrors or prisms; you can read lying on your back)
car with shovel for pedestrians, 1924 (a kind of cow-catcher, but for humans).
4 tags
Observation: typing and memory
When typing, my fingers know where to go to type the letters, and I have no need to look down at them. Ask me which finger types a particular letter, and I can tell you by imagining typing it.
On the other hand, if I rest my fingers on the keyboard and ask myself what letter a particular finger will type, I have no idea unless I consciously think “qwertyuiop” or...
5 tags
“I WILL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK, said Death, after a while.
‘Thank you. Now...”
– Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, Corgi Books, 1996, pp. 421–422. The conversation takes place between Death and his (adopted) granddaughter Susan after she has saved the Hogfather, who is the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas.
4 tags
5 tags
Real-life invisible man →
Photos of camouflage artist Liu Bolin disappearing into various surroundings.
4 tags
“Time is a human imposition. Time is a lie.”
– @mollydotcom on Twitter
4 tags
8 tags
“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the...”
– Freya Stark, quoted on Twitter by @mollydotcom
6 tags
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, quoted on Twitter by @mollydotcom
4 tags
6 tags
“At last we have a philosopher of science who is in fact writing about science...”
– Hilary Putman, quoted in Matthew Lund’s preface to 2010 paperback reissue of Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge University Press, 1958. 