Saturday 28 September 2024
in the beginning
Saturday 17 June 2023
Infuriating pigeons
In its simplest form, the pigeon repeats a three syllable phrase which could be “I love you. I love you…”
When the pigeon extends its call to five syllables it should be “I really love you. I really love you …”
But listen carefully, the infuriating bird clearly thinks of the phrase differently it finishes on the “I“ so it’s more like “Really love you - I. Really love you - I …”
Nature is wonderful.
Friday 20 May 2022
Lists
Lists
Here’s two wonderful examples of apparently random lists - the first is from ‘The Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges:
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.
And the second is from Bob Dylan’s ‘A hard rain’s gonna fall’:
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all biroken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.
Thursday 19 May 2022
Orientation
When I was in hospital recently I spent a few days lying on my side. When I finally opened my eyes everything had rotated though 90 degrees. People were walking on the wall. Panicking, I moved my head to an upright position and the scene slid through 90 degrees back to ‘normal’. This happened more than once.
It reminded me of a psychology experiment I saw on TV. The experimentee was fitted with some glasses which inverted everything in his field of vision. He found movement very difficult for a few days but then he adjusted to the device and was able to go about the world as normal. His vision did not seem to him to be upside down. Of coarse the image on our retina is inverted anyway so we all compensate for this all the time.
When the glasses were removed, he saw the world upside down once more, until his brain made the adjustment and his vision returned to ‘normal’.
It is disturbing to see a map like this even though we know it is an arbitrary convention which puts North at the top.
Now here’s a question: a mirror inverts things laterally (from left to right). Why doesn’t it do the same vertically (from top to bottom)?
Thursday 28 May 2020
Zeno’s paradox
Is space granular?
Is time granular?
Thursday 9 April 2020
Creativity?
We imagine we can choose between 2 alternatives easily. Apolonius’s ass is said to have starved to death because it could not decide between 2 equally attractive piles of hay. How do we decide? ‘We just pick one’ you say but what does this process of just piking involve?
Tuesday 31 January 2017
Pity Poor Bradford
- Low self-confidence and self-esteem
- A sense of unreality
- A feeling of no pleasure in life - turning to alcohol and other drugs for solace.
- That “A New Era of Prosperity’ is just around the corner.
- That hope lies in imitating successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) schemes often promoted by sharks from other towns.