Posts Tagged ‘Maskelyne’
“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”*…
Your correspondent is heading into his annual Holiday hiatus (regular service will resume on January 2), so by way of being sure that readers have something to occupy them in the meantime…
We’ve spent time before with Hans Rosling (“By the Numbers…” and “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell“*…), the man who reasons that experts cannot solve major challenges if they do not operate on facts. “But first you need to erase preconceived ideas,” he says, “and that is the difficult thing.” Nature has done us all the service of collecting a wide variety of his amazing, mind-changing presentations…
Hans Rosling knew never to flee from men wielding machetes. “The risk is higher if you run than if you face them,” he says. So, in 1989, when an angry mob confronted him at the field laboratory he had set up in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rosling tried to appear calm. “I thought, ‘I need to use the resources I have, and I am good at talking’.”
Rosling, a physician and epidemiologist, pulled from his knapsack a handful of photographs of people from different parts of Africa who had been crippled by konzo, an incurable disease that was affecting many in this community, too. Through an interpreter, he explained that he believed he knew the cause, and he wanted to test local people’s blood to be sure. A few minutes into his demonstration, an old woman stepped forward and addressed the crowd in support of the research. After the more aggressive members of the mob stopped waving their machetes, she rolled up her sleeve. Most followed her lead. “You can do anything as long as you talk with people and listen to people and talk with the intelligentsia of the community,” says Rosling.
He is still trying to arm influential people with facts. He has become a trusted counsellor and speaker of plain truth to United Nations leaders, billionaire executives such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and politicians including Al Gore. Even Fidel Castro called on the slim, bespectacled Swede for advice. Rosling’s video lectures on global health and economics have elevated him to viral celebrity status, and he has been listed among the 100 most influential people in the world by the magazines Time and Foreign Policy. Melinda Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says, “To have Hans Rosling as a teacher is one of the biggest honors in the world.”…
More of Rosling’s story– and lots of his short-but-world-view-changing presentations– at “Three minutes with Hans Rosling will change your mind about the world.”
* Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”
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As we celebrate facts, we might send amazing birthday greetings to John Nevil Maskelyne; he was born on this date in 1839. An accomplished stage magician, he was also an inventor, perhaps most notably, of the first pay toilet (the “penny toilet,” origin of the phrase “spend a penny”).
His son, Nevil Maskelyne, was also a magician and inventor– and the perpetrator of the first instance of electronic hacking.
John Nevil Maskelyne
Happy Holidays! See you in the New Year…
“This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.”*…
From Paul Scheerbart’s Perpetual Motion Machine
Sam Lavigne has created the ultimate tool for this, the Age of Intellectual Property: a program that transforms literary and philosophical texts into patent applications…
In short, it reframes texts as inventions or machines. You can view the code on github.
I was partially inspired by Paul Scheerbart’s Perpetual Motion Machine, a sort of technical/literary diary in which Scheerbart documents and reflects on various failed attempts to create a perpetual motion machine. Scheerbart frequently refers to his machines as “stories” – I wanted to reverse the concept and transform stories into machines…
Here’s some sample output, listed by invention title and source text:
“A method and device for comprehending theoretically the historical movement” (The Communist Manifesto)
“An apparatus and device for staring into vacancy” (“The Hunger Artist” by Kafka)
“A device and system for belonging to bringing-forth” (The Question Concerning Technology by Heidegger)
One can read the details– and try it for oneself– at “Transform any text into a patent application.”
* Lord Byron
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As we ponder the protection of “property” that isn’t even ours, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that what was likely the first instance of electronic hacking took place. During a demonstration by Marconi of his wireless communications system at the Royal Institution in London, one of Marconi’s rivals, the magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne intervened. As physicist John Ambrose Fleming was preparing to give the public their first demonstration of “radio,” Marconi was at his clifftop radio station in Poldhu, Cornwall, 300 miles away, preparing to send a Morse code signal. Though the audience was unaware of it, the assistant tending the receiving apparatus found it was already tapping out the word “rats,” repeatedly. Then it mocked, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily…” and more. Maskelyne was attempting– rather successfully– to make Marconi’s claims of “secure and private communication” appear foolish.
Maskelyne with one of his more famous inventions/illusions: “Zoe, the drawing automaton”
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