🎄For the birds...

 

Saul Steinberg

🎁 Conceit precedes defeat

😳Plain Speaking

The Plain is a two-dimensional plane, inhabited by round people and square people. Because there is not much to do in the Plain, its inhabitants spend a lot of time arguing over whether the pentagon is a circular disc with five thorns on it, or a square with one corner squashed flat and its four sides pushed out slightly by that squashing.

In the three-dimensional space around the Plain, a cylindrical person called Cyril has been watching them arguing, and he decides to give them something else to think about. As he passes through the Plain, Cyril can look like a round person or a square person, because his height is the same length as the diameter of his circular cross-section, so he pauses at various places in the Plain—sometimes looking like a round person, sometimes a square one—and says, very loudly, “I am Cyril!”

The round people take the Cyrils to be a race of round and square people who can flip over to this side of the Plain from the other side.

The square people correctly assume that “Cyril” names a single person. However, they go on to conclude that Cyril is a round square person, who is somewhere impossible when he is not visiting them. They suppose that he is visiting them now in order to show them that they were all made in his image.

Should I let them know that it was me who made them all up? A square person called Martin appears and says “I made the Plain and everyone in it.”

The other square people take him to be Cyril, and they think that he is telling them that they are right, so they set out to correct the round people.

I blame myself.

Hairku

I feel like dusting
but there is no dust. There is
fluff enough though, so...

Happy New Year (again ;-)

Merry Xmas

Happy St Edmund's Day ;-)

20 November 869 AD was the day King Edmund of East Anglia was killed by Danish invaders. He became the patron saint of England.

St Edmund was replaced, as patron saint of England, by St George in the fourteenth century, mainly because Edward III wanted to be more involved with Europe (two centuries earlier, Richard I had been one of many Europeans uniting around St George as they defended Europe).

Ironically, English nationalists are fond of the flag of St George.

Mrs Fox's feelings

Basking in the warmth of Heaven, she floats weightless and naked, far far above the factory chimneys and church spires of the world, in the upper reaches of a sultry sky. It's an intoxicatingly fragrant atmosphere, surging and eddying with huge gentle waves of wind and pillowy clouds – nothing like the motionless, transparent oblivion she'd always imagined Paradise would be. It's more like a breathable ocean, and she treads the heavy air, narrowing the distance between her body and that of her man who's flying beside her. When she's close enough, she spreads her thighs, wraps her arms and legs around him, and opens her lips to receive the incarnation of his love.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, 671

Isserley's Feeling For Snow

The sensation of fresh snow crunching underfoot was deeply satisfying to Isserley. Just the idea of all that water vapour solidifying by the cloudful and fluttering to earth was miraculous. She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure. Isserley scooped a handful off the ground and ate some. It was delicious.

Michel Faber, Under the Skin, 56

"Him Who Has Understanding"

222111 is the number of The Royal Mint,
and it equals 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 666, where
666 = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 36 is The Number
Of The Beast. And of course, the love of
money is the root of all evil. Note that
36 = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 8 and that
8 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 1 x 1 x 1

Do Chairs Exist?

Yes they do:

A physicist will tell me that this armchair is made of vibrations and that
it’s not really here at all. But when Samuel Johnson was asked to prove
the material existence of reality, he just went up to a big stone and kicked
it. I’m with him.

......David Attenborough

No they don't:

Like many philosophers, I don't believe that tables and chairs are fundamental
objects. Like a much smaller number of philosophers, I like to say that I don't
think tables and chairs exist. I have good reasons for my denial. For instance,
it does not appear that there is an exact moment at which a table comes into
existence.

......Alexander Pruss

Two "proofs" that 2 + 2 = 5

The rationalist proof:

Starting with the concept of a bean, adding two beans and another two beans makes five beans because the concept of a bean is a bean (an ideal platonic bean).

The empiricist proof:

Add together two lines of length 2.36 (of our units of length) to make a line of length 4.72, and then round those lengths to the nearest whole number (of units).

Unretiring enigMan

Hi; tired of being retiring, I stretch my fingers with intermittent posts (on-going) and, as our droughtless summer (of many Painted Ladies) draws slowly to a close, I think its cultural highlights were: a sci-fi film of the good old 'new wave' kind, Precinct 9; and, more spook story than sci-fi, Iain Bank's Transition; and 60's nostalgiac Inherent Vice; and 90's nostalgiac Menage.

Enigman at the Crossroads

Tiring of blogging (not so much reading others, as posting my own), it's time for Enigman to retire. There's a local conference in a couple of months, but even if that inspires me with any interesting thoughts, they'd be hopeless for blogging purposes. It seems to take me months (if not years) to make my thoughts coherent. Incidentally, a lot of my links will stop working soon, as my web-pages are on Geocities, which is closing this summer. I may move those web-pages to this site, probably after re-writing them (most were written a few years ago). The other thing I'll be doing this summer is starting to study theology properly (and catch up on my reading). My philosophical interests (which were originally in physics and freedom) were re-ignited ten years ago, via the metaphysics of mathematics, but were nearly quenched by professional analytical philosophy (with few exceptions, e.g. Iris Murdoch). Anyway, thanks for the comments, which made trying my hand at blogging worthwhile.

Lost Souls

Martha Jones, ex-time traveller and now working as a doctor for a UN task force, has been called to CERN where they're about to activate the Large Hadron Collider. Once activated, the Collider will fire beams of protons together recreating conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang - and potentially allowing the human race a greater insight into what the Universe is made of.

But so much could go wrong - it could open a gateway to a parallel dimension, or create a black hole - and now voices from the past are calling out to people and scientists have started to disappear... Where have the missing scientists gone? What is the secret of the glowing man? What is lurking in the underground tunnel? And do the dead ever really stay dead?

Lost Souls is on Radio 4 on Wednesday 10 September at 2.15pm. A report by EONR said there was "no conceivable danger"

But there have been fears about the possibility of a mini-black hole - produced in the collider - swelling so that it gobbles up the Earth... Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter - transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump.

The vacuum around a mini-black hole is a quantum-mechanical vacuum, full of short-lived virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. So it is almost bound to swallow one of those quanta (of the lowest energy level), which amounts to the creation of an actual particle or antiparticle. And mass-energy being conserved, that means a net loss of mass-energy to the mini-black hole, making it even smaller, etc. It would be better to call it a mini-white hole.
......Still, a black-hole is a crease in space-time, so who knows about the lost souls? There is a nice sci-fi trilogy about souls flooding back into the land of the living (and space-faring), following a Reality Dysfunction (involving an alien investigating spatial distortions in an energistic vacuum)—a nice blend of zombies, gangsters and astronauts, I thought.

Where have you been?

Said the straight man, to the late man,
Where have you been?
I've been here, and I've been there,
And I've been in between.

I talk to the wind,
My words are all carried away,
I talk to the wind,
The wind does not hear,
The wind cannot hear.

That's how "I Talk To The Wind" begins, 1968

Travels = Travails

I'm Back in England for the Summer (except for Aberdeen next month) but all I'm doing is rewriting my response to Mawson and having deep thoughts... News Flash: I'll be hosting the best Carnival in the world wide web next month too (it needs doing hint hint and it's fun to play god :)

Limerick

There once was a man from Limerick
Who got, in his weakest limb, a wrick;
His eyes filled with glints
As he spied, of splints
Split from a tree's limb, a rick.

Form is the diagram of forces

                       Dark incarnate hearts
pump hard as rooks heave at dusk,
wing-beats glistening.

April is cruel

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas, 1933