Posts Tagged ‘Wyndham Lewis’
“Words, words, mere words”*…
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Welcome to Star Wars as you’ve never seen it before. Arst Arsw takes every English word from George Lucas’ classic movie and rearranges them alphabetically. If you can make it past the 201 “a”s that start the video, you’re in for a treat, as long sequences of words are punctuated up by oddly therapeutic and memorable words from the movie. The eighth “battlestation” is especially rewarding.
The video’s maker, Tom 7, provided some interesting facts garnered while cutting Arst Arsw manually. A total of 1695 individual English words are uttered in Star Wars, the most common of which is “the,” with 368 mentions. The word “Lightsaber” is only said aloud once (at 19:20 in Arst Arsw).
“Watch every word from ‘Star Wars’ sorted from A to Z.”
Special lingui-bonus:
Click here for background (and larger version of chart): “Graphing the distribution of English letters towards the beginning, middle or end of words”:
*William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene 3
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As we hope that the Force is with us, we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that Wyndham Lewis published the first issue of Blast, a literary magazine championing Vorticism, a movement related to Futurism and Cubism in painting and to Imagism in literature, chiefly concerned to extoll the virtues of mechanization and the machine. The inaugural number was edited and largely written by Lewis with contributions from Ezra Pound, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Spencer Gore, Edward Wadsworth, and Rebecca West, and included an extract from Ford Madox Hueffer’s novel The Saddest Story– better known by its later title The Good Soldier (published under his subsequent pseudonym, Ford Madox Ford). The second issue, which was publish a month later, had more work from Pound and two poems by T.S. Eliot. But at about the same time that issue came out, Britain entered World War I. Several of the Vorticists were called up; and machines– deployed all too lethally in the conflict– lost some of their romance. The Vorticist movement did not survive the war.; still, it is remembered as a seminal step in the evolution of 20th century Modernism.
The cover of Blast #1
That Obscure Object of Definition…
Via friend P deV, the “obscure unit of the week: Bohr magnetons per angstrom”…
In explaining their (pretty remarkable) findings that magnetism can, in some circumstances, behave like electricity— “magnetricity” if one will– scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology invoked evidence denominated in what has to one of the rarer metrics around: Bohr magnetons per angstrom.
But worth understanding, as the observation suggests that it may be possible to create units of digital storage one magnetic monopole large– that’s to say, about the size of an atom. As lead investigator Steven Bramwell said (with typical British understatement), “monopoles could one day be used as a much more compact form of memory than anything available today.”
Individual magnetic ‘charges’ – equivalent to the north and south poles of a magnet – have been observed inside a crystalline material called spin ice (Image: STFC)
See the New Scientist report here; and more on the discovery at Next Big Future, here.
As we practice our scales, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to T.S. Eliot, who undermined the need for more storage when he observed that “the most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.”
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