Video of Vin Diesel discussing Dungeons & Dragons and the creativity it inspires. That is all.
Category: links
Dissertation Haiku
Take years of research, countless hours of work, distill it down seventeen syllables, and you get Dissertation Haiku. Here’s an example:
light and matter flirt
years pass in femtoseconds
a bond is broken
By Adi Natan, the haiku interpretation of his dissertation about “quantum control of atoms and small molecule using intense femtosecond laser pulses”.
The Last Ringbearer
Imagine being on the losing side of the battles in The Lord of the Rings — Russian author, Kirill Yeskov did just that, and produced The Last Ringbearer. From an article about the book:
In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.”
An English translation by Yisroel Markov is available for download, although just in PDF at the moment.
Divided attention
Colm O’Regan examines the constant stream of things that demand our attention. I’m not sure if he made up divided attention disorder, but I was amused by the analogy to tabbed browsing.
It’s the equivalent of sitting on the floor of a library desperately trying to remember what I was looking for with 20 books open around me, unable to concentrate because people keep giving me a thumbs up to tell me they “Like This”.
Update: It appears that Esquire had an article about DAD in a recent issue, but the full-text isn’t online.
Dark Ages not so dark
Apparently the Dark Ages weren’t as bleak as we’ve been led to believe.
We have this idea that it was a time of superstition and ignorance when people didn’t look at the world around them and certainly didn’t look at it with a scientific eye. In fact, the Church considered mathematics the highest form of worship. Before you were allowed to study theology, you had to study the seven liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
So the concept that the Church was against learning is wrong. For five or six hundred years after the Fall of Rome, it was the Church that preserved and expanded learning. And in Gerbert’s time they were actively seeking it out among Muslims and Jews. The Crusades were a hundred years later, and the Spanish Inquisition took place two hundred years later. All of the “dark†stuff happened after the Dark Ages.
Typesetting and paste-up in 1970
Dan Wybrant has a collection of photos with descriptions of the typesetting and paste-up techniques used by a campus daily in 1970. We bitch about InDesign crashing, but we don’t have to type blind with a machine that punches holes onto paper tape. There’s also a lot of fun to be had with a wax machine if you happen to come across one.
One space after a period
Despite whatever you’ve been told in the past, you should only put one space after a period, not two.
Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It’s arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that’s how we should do it.
In my high-school typing class, we were working on ancient ICON computers which used monospace type, and were told to leave two spaces after a period for readability. I then spent years developing muscle-memory that had me double-tapping the spacebar after every full-stop. In university, I started writing for one of the newspapers and got yelled at for putting in double spaces and messing up the copy-setting — I learned quick. Fast-forward to book design, and given any sort of manuscript, getting rid of the double spaces is one of the first priorities. Remember, just one space.
Cracking scratch lottery tickets
Mohan Srivastava, a statistician from Toronto, cracked the numerical system behind a series of scratch lottery tickets.
“Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,†Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.â€
Eventually the gaming commission listened to him and removed the tickets from stores.
Live translation on a phone
The Google Translate app for Android can translate live speech and offer a translation. The Babel fish approacheth.
Online news in 1981
From an old news report — it used to take about two hours to download an electronic newspaper with connections fees of five dollars per hour. Oh, and the newspapers weren’t in it to make a profit.