Archive for August 2008
How prosaic can one be?…
See how many of the 100 most common words in the English language you can guess in 5 minutes… here.
As we return to the rudiments, we might spare a moment to recall that it was on this date in 30 BCE that Cleopatra VII (the Cleopatra) committed suicide. Ancient sources agree that she did herself in by inducing an asp to bite her. But it was Shakespeare who introduced the racy notion that she poisoned herself by clasping the snake to her bosom; Strabo, Florus, Velleius, Plutarch, and Suetonius all suggest that she was nipped in the arm.
The Long Ow…
Go, the ancient board-game, is an exercise in strategy, and (in the words of an enthusiast site) “an analogy with life, an intense meditation, a mirror of one’s personality, an exercise in abstract reasoning, or, when played well, a beautiful art in which Black and White dance across the board in delicate balance.”
Go is also seen as the last bastion of human superiority over computers in the realm of board games… or was until last Thursday, when the Go program MoGo, running on an 800-core supercomputer, beat 8-dan professional Go player Myungwan Kim at the U.S. Go Congress.
The game generated a great deal of interest and discussion of the game’s tactical and philosophical implications– and of it portents for the competitiveness of humanity. At a rare loss for words after the game, David Doshay, the programmer who suggested the match, wondered “How much time do we have left?”
More at the American Go Association.
As we pack for the singularity, we might send bright and cheerful birthday greetings to Enid Blyton, the creator of such children’s favorites as The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and Noddy.
By one measure– UNESCO’s Index Translationum, a ranking of most-translated authors– Blyton is the sixth most popular author of all time… almost tied with Shakespeare. The television show based on Noddy is the longest running show on British television since 1955, and continues to air to this day.
Answering the really big questions about the really small…
Under the Franco-Swiss border, near Geneva, there’s a new tunnel, seven miles long– home to The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Its first full test is scheduled for later this month; it’s “official” debut, for September 20, with full operation before the end of the year.
Among the hopes for the LHC, the production of “the Higgs boson”– a hypothetical particle whose observation would help confirm some of the predictions in the Standard Model of physics (and the inspiration for a nifty throw pillow that readers will recall was the subject of an earlier missive). The LHC may also produce other currently theoretical particles– perhaps most notably, microscopic black holes… a prospect that some observers have theorized could threaten the earth (as in “could swallow it up”), a fear that CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which manages the LHC) has categorically and repeatedly denied.
But on top of everything else, the LHC is an extraordinary sight:
See more of this remarkable facility here.
And lest it be said that physicists have no rhythm, check out the “Large Hadron Rap” here.
(Thanks, MH-H, for the pointers to the pix and the video.)
As we unpack our microscopes, we might wish a careful happy birthday to Phoolan Devi, an Indian “dacoit” (armed robber), who was popularly known as “The Bandit Queen” and “The Robin Hood of India,” and who was born on this date in 1963. After years of imprisonment for her crimes, Phoolan ran for and was elected to India’s Parliament in 1993, a seat she held when she was assassinated (ostensibly by a grievant seeking revenge for one of her earlier exploits) in 1996.
Ahoy there!…
One never knows when one will be called upon to decode a semaphore message or identify the flag of a newly-hatched nation… so, just in time for the Olympics: The Flag Identifier.
As we wave our pennants, we might might wish a skeptical birthday to Charles Hoy Fort, the prolific chronicler of paranormal phenomena, born this date in 1874. He collected accounts of frogs and other strange objects raining from the sky, UFOs, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, stigmata, psychic abilities, and the like, publishing four collections of weird tales and anomalies during his lifetime: Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). So influential was Fort among fellow-questers that his name has become an adjective, “Fortean,” often applied to unexplained events… The Truth is Out There…
Books do furnish a room…
Working with a data set provided by Aaron Swartz, who runs theinfo.org, and who had built a list of 735,323 books by crawling Amazon, Chris Harrison built a spatial layout– a huge mosaic of books. Items that were noted as being similar were grouped and color-coded. The result, a “map” of the scope of Amazon’s offerings. Readers can scroll down to see the detail of the mosaic (book covers)… and will see, in the summary graph toward the bottom of the page, that the results conform pretty precisely to power curve dimensions– that’s to say, like “the Long Tail” (which describes purchasing behavior).
(See other nifty visualizations by Chris here.)
As we diagram our own desires, we might recall that it was on this date in 1509 that the Indian emperor Krishnadeva Raya was crowned, beginning a reign that marked the zenith of the Vijayanagara Empire.
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