Gil Scott-Heron has died at 62. I could mention how his spoken-word recordings were a noted precursor of hip-hop, but then the Onion would make fun of me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b2F-XX0Ol0
Wayne Knight, who played Newman on Seinfeld, also appeared in Space Jam, surely one of the top ten movies about cartoon characters and basketball ever made. When asked what it was like to work with Michael Jordan, he diplomatically replied: “Acting with Michael Jordan is like bowling with Picasso.” Just because you’re the best in the world at one thing doesn’t mean you will excel at something else.
Which brings me to Michelangelo’s poems. I am sufficiently uncultured that I always thought of Michelangelo as basically a sculptor, perhaps a bit of a painter. But then I reviewed a book for Princeton University Press, and they offered as recompense to let me choose a few volumes from their back catalogue; that’s where I came upon his Complete Poems. Who knew?
Michelangelo was not exactly writing Hallmark cards. Think early Leonard Cohen. He specialized in sonnets and madrigals, and while there are a number of love poems, usually he ranges from grumpy and forlorn to deep existential despair. Here’s a sunny little ditty you can reach for whenever you feel your own artistic endeavors are falling short. (Translation by Creighton Gilbert.)
I keep a hornet in a water jar,
Inside a leather sack some strings and bones,
And in a canister three balls of tar.My pale blue eyes are powdered into grounds,
My teeth are like keys on an instrument,
So, when they move, my voice is still or sounds.My face has the shape that causes fright;
In wind when there’s no rain my clothes would scare
Crows from the seed, without another dart.A spider web is nestled in one ear,
All night a cricket in the other buzzes;
With spitting breath I do not sleep, but snore.Love, and the flowered grottoes, and the muse,
My scrawls for tambourines or dunces’ caps,
Go to innkeepers, toilets, bawdy houses.What use to want to make so many puppets,
If they have made me in the end like him
Who crossed the water, and then drowned in slops?My honored art, wherein I was for a time
In such esteem, has brought me down to this:
Poor and old, under another’s thumb,I am undone if I do not die fast.
Cheerful Renaissance Thought of the Day Read More »
I’m participating in a fun program at the L.A. Central Library tonight — a conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield. It’s part of the ALOUD program, a great series of lectures, discussions and performances. Times are tough for libraries, but I do hope that they find away to stay vibrant; a good library offers an enormous amount to the community that other institutions simply don’t.
Why physics and poetry? For purposes of this discussion they’ve been united under the banner of “The Nature of Observation.” That’s not just a saucy provocation — there’s something substantive underneath. We observe the world all the time, in ways both automatic and reflective. Both physics and poetry have as a primary motivation the attempt to improve upon our superficial observations of the world. In physics we simplify and quantify, looking for formal patterns underlying how reality works; in poetry we illuminate and suggest, using the power of metaphor and imagery to draw connections that aren’t immediately obvious. In both cases, we’re trying to deepen our understanding by subjecting the world to closer scrutiny than it ordinarily gets.
That’s my line, anyway. Jane Hirshfield is a wonderful poet, and the discussion should be a lot of fun. I wanted to include one of her poems, but I couldn’t decide which one, so here are two. If you like them, there are more where those came from.
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An untitled poem by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Here is Rukeyser’s FBI file.
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.I lived in the first century of these wars.
The First Century of These Wars Read More »
This year’s edition of the Edge World Question Center asks: “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?” There’s quite a collection of contributions, many from scientists but also from writers and an assortment of unclassifiable big thinkers.
I haven’t carefully perused all of the entries. As you do, please chime in with any that you think we should all be paying attention to. At a brief glance, here are some that caught my eye:
I have a contribution of my own, The Pointless Universe, after Steven Weinberg’s quote. Need to come up with better branding if this idea is really going to take off.
Edge World Question Center: Your Cognitive Toolkit Read More »
Kudos to Physics World for trying out an interesting experiment — publishing a work of fiction. No, I’m not being snarky about some science article I think is woefully misguided; they really did publish a short story rather than a more conventional feature. It’s by Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer I’ve never met, but she looks really cute. (Maybe I should shoot her an email?)
The story is about Ibn al-Haytham (sometimes Latinized to Alhazen), a pioneering Muslim scientist from around the year 1000. A story is appropriate because we just don’t know too many details of al-Haytham’s life. What we do know is that he was placed under house arrest in Cairo after disappointing the Caliph by failing to control the floods of the Nile.
There was an unanticipated advantage to house arrest, at least in Jennifer’s retelling — al-Haytham was denied his precious books, so he couldn’t engage in the usual work of scholars, which was taken to be commenting on classic texts. Instead, he hit upon the idea of doing experiments on his own. The amazing result was a seven-volume Book of Optics. Long story short, this was the work that really established the idea that sight relies on rays of light stretching from objects to the eye, as well as introducing the camera obscura and discussing the physical mechanism of sight.
After ten years of arrest, the Caliph died and al-Haytham was released. But he didn’t slow down, producing “scores” (according to Wikipedia) of other works on physics, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Kind of makes my own C.V. seem pretty puny by comparison; better get back to work.
The Scholar and the Caliph Read More »
Bit of a skirmish in the culture wars this week, as word spread that the publisher NewSouth Books is coming out with a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The notable feature of this expurgated edition is that they have removed all 219 appearances of the word “nigger,” replacing them with the word “slave.” (They’ve also removed “Injun,” although this doesn’t push people’s buttons quite as directly.)
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Count me with those who think this is an incredibly dumb move. The motivation is clear, and quite sensible — high-school teachers who have assigned the book have found that many young black students react viscerally to the word, and have trouble putting it into a harmless historical box. I can believe that’s true. But if, in the judgment of the teachers, this creates such a barrier that it does more harm than good to assign the book, the answer is extremely obvious — don’t assign the book. Maybe you can encourage your students to read the book on their own, with appropriate warnings about the content and explanations of its historical context. I think it’s a good book for everyone to read, but that’s different from insisting that the reading be mandatory.
What you absolutely don’t do is change the book to fit your idea of what is appropriate. It’s cowardly, untrue to history, and massively unfair to Mark Twain. Personally I suspect that students have a better ability to appreciate historical context than their teachers give them credit for. But there are many good books that have been written over the centuries, and there’s no excuse for bowlderizing a classic to make your life a little more comfortable.
Sorry for the radio silence — Thanksgiving really took it out of me. (The food was excellent — may have eaten too much.) Just got back from a workshop at Stanford, where we had a mini Cosmic Variance gathering, since I saw both Daniel and Risa. Had JoAnne not been delayed on her flight back to California, we might have been able to get four co-bloggers in the same room for probably the first time ever.
Since today is Casual Friday, I’d like to put science aside and do a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom: A Novel. I am hampered in that goal by the fact that I haven’t read the book, and don’t plan to any time soon. (I think Franzen is a great writer, but I’m very behind in my reading list.)
So instead I’ll outsource this one to Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles, who delivers his critique in video format. It gives me some ideas. (Hat tip to Ariel Kalil.)
Book Review: Jonathan’s Franzen’s Freedom Read More »
I am in love with this comment and want to have its babies:
pi appears as a constant in many formula of physics. General relativity says that it isn’t constant. Is it the origin of the pi particle, aka pion?
A curmudgeonly literalist might, when faced with a question such as this, harrumph a simple “No.” A more loquacious sort might explain that general relativity does not say that π is not a contstant. Pi is not a parameter of physics like the fine-structure constant, which could conceivably be different or even variable from place to place. It’s a universal answer to a fixed question, to wit: what is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, as measured in Euclidean geometry? The answer is of course 3.141592653589793…, or any number of representations in terms of infinite series.
But the point of the question is that GR says we don’t live in Euclidean space; we move through a curved spacetime manifold. That’s okay. In a curved space, we could imagine defining the “diameter” of a circle as the maximum geodesic distance connecting two of its points, and taking the ratio of the circumference with that diameter, and indeed it would typically not give us 3.14159… But that doesn’t mean π is changing from place to place; it just means that the ratio of circumference to diameter (defined this way) in a curved space doesn’t equal π. If the circumference/diameter ratio is less than π, you are in a positively curved space, such as a sphere; if it is greater than π, you are in a negatively curved space, such as a saddle. Geometry can also be much more complicated than that, with different ratios depending on how the circle is oriented in space, which is why curvature is properly measured by tensors rather than by a simple number.
(Parenthetically, one of the dumbest mathematical arguments ever given was put forward by the world’s smartest person, Marilyn Vos Savant. The columnist wrote an entire book criticizing Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Her argument: Wyles made use of non-Euclidean geometry, but what if geometry is really Euclidean? Touche!)
However … despite the fact that π doesn’t really change from place to place in general relativity, the geometry does change from place to place, and there is a particle associated with those dynamics — the graviton. Although the formulation of the original question isn’t accurate, the spirit is very much in the right place. And I, for one, will henceforth be perpetually sad that the physics community missed a chance by attaching the word pion to the lightest quark-antiquark bound state, rather than to the particle associated with deviations from Euclidean geometry. That would have been awesome.
Via 3 Quarks Daily, an Economist review of what looks like a fun book: Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.
It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit.
I have a special fondness for these guys, having taught a course about them. As much as I am a forward-thinking person, the modern mode of expression by freethinkers (pounding out passionate diatribes on our keyboards) isn’t quite as much fun as gathering in a salon among good food and drink to denounce hypocrisy and spread the Enlightenment message.
Apparently Blom’s historical account has a contemporary message:
Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine. For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.
This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.
Sounds pretty darn accurate. Let’s order some bottles of wine and get this job finished!