Nice article in the Guardian today about Frank L. Baum and his Wizard of Oz stories. It’s written by Gregory Maguire, who knows a thing or two himself about taking the traditional motifs from fairytales and writing his own idiosyncratic take on them (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror Mirror). The excuse for the article is the fact that a brand new print of the Wizard of Oz is winging its way into British cinemas next week. And of course, the Judy Garland film remains one of the classics of cinema. Even today, it stands up well.
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Dividing By Zero
Sometimes I feel thankful that I managed to be educated in school without being exposed to either too many crackpot ideas on how children should be educated or too many crackpot ideas, period. It would seem that there’s a rise in the latter in particular (the former will probably always be with us). For example, the attempt, now spreading to the UK, on trying to teach Intelligent Design as though it were a science. But here comes another, a real beauty. I’ll hand you over to Dr. Ben Goldacre to take up the story. I note that Dr. Anderson is from the University of Reading’s Computer Science department. I am now also thankful that I went to the University of Liverpool’s Computer Science department all those years ago…Leave a comment
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Gifts To Avoid
In the spirit of trying to be helpful this Christmas, here is a gift that I most certainly would not like to receive, nor will I be inflicting it on others.Leave a comment
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Peake and Dickens
Giornale Nuovo has a marvellous entry celebrating the art of Mervyn Peake. It uses the illustrations that Peake did for a projected edition of Dicken’s Bleak House, which, alas, never came to be.Leave a comment
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The Antikythera Mechanism – Part II
Further to my mention of the Antikythera Mechanism, here’s a link to the article in Nature about it.One response to “The Antikythera Mechanism – Part II”
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[…] I have mentioned the astounding Antikythera mechanism before, but here’s something really brilliant: it’s been reconstructed using Lego. What I like about the video is that it demonstrates how the various component parts work together and end up as a machine for predicting solar eclipses. Quite wonderful. […]
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Something on the Brain
Carl Zimmer, over at The Loom, reminds us of his fascination with parasites. In this case, the Cordyceps fungus, which takes over the brain of an ant. David Attenborough narrates. I was particularly struck by the fact that other ants, on discovering one of their fellows suffering from the onset of symptoms of Cordyceps infection will carry away bodily the unfortunate victim to a safe distance beyond the colony, so that the spores will not infect the rest of the colony.Leave a comment
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The War On Christmas
No, not the rather tiresome complaints by cultural conservatives in the US complaining about the secularisation of Christmas, or indeed the Archbishop of York complaining about the systematic erosion of Christianity from public life.Nope, here in The Netherlands we have our own particular war on Christmas. To be exact, it’s a war between two versions of St. Nicholas. Ladies and gennelmen, I give you, in the red corner: Sinterklaas; and in the other red corner, the non-Dutch challenger: Santa Claus.Sinterklaas is celebrated on the 5th December. But recent years have seen a blurring with the non-traditional usurper figure of Santa Claus. This year, the town of Noordwijk, instead of holding a traditional parade of Sinterklaas with his retinue of Zwarte Pieten (Black Peters), had a parade with Santa Claus. Cue 1,400 protest mails, and the disapproval of the Vereniging tot Behoud van Sinterklaas (the Association for the Preservation of Sinterklaas).Actually, I have a sneaking support for Sinterklaas over Santa Claus. It is something unique to The Netherlands and Belgium, and it will be a pity to see it being pushed aside by something that is just the same as everywhere else. That’s just boring. And I admit I take a gleeful pleasure in the political incorrectness of the Zwarte Pieten.Leave a comment
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Starsky & Hutch by J. G. Ballard
Ballardian has posted the winning entries of the competition for the best pastiche of the writing style of J. G. Ballard. The task was to write a 500 word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky & Hutch as Ballard would write it.There is something about Ballard’s prose that makes it unmistakeable, and the winner and runner-up of the competition have delivered the true essence of the style.I’ve started Ballard’s latest – Kingdom Come – and while I’m only on page 43 at the moment, I’ve found it a rattling good read, although the reviews have been mixed. From my point of view, all his usual motifs are there, of course, but he has lovingly burnished his prose on the whetstone of his preceding novels, and the result (so far, and to me) is numinous. Ballard strikes me as a novelist analogue of Mahler, who really (it seems to me) wrote only one giant symphony, but in ten parts.My problem at the moment is a question of so many books, so little time. I have too many books on the go at the moment (Kingdom Come, Breaking the Spell, Genetic Destinies, Unspeak, Don’t Tell Mum, Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, and The Year of Magical Thinking). Then there’s a whole pile of books building up that are clamouring to be read: Evil in Modern Thought (An Alternative History of Philosophy), The Kite Runner, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, Be Near Me, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, A Game of Thrones, White Mughals, The Vanquished Gods and Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation – to name but a few… Help!Leave a comment
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Putting The Boot In
Charlie Brookner gives vent to a fine rant about psychics in the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free section. Cartoon verbal violence, but rather understandable for people such as psychics who prey on other people’s anxieties. And as a bonus, his Ignopedia entry on Creationism is worth the price of admission.Leave a comment
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“It’s Not Fair”…
… is the refrain of the Complaints Choir of Helsinki. They celebrate those little things in life whose capacity to irritate is in inverse proportion to their size.(hat tip to Andrew Brown in today’s Guardian)Leave a comment
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The Unsynthesised Manifold
Hands up those of you who know that the unsynthesised manifold is a concept from Kantian philosophy? According to Professor Germaine Greer, if you read the Guardian, you should have had your hand in the air. Apparently, professor Greer wrote the following in a Guardian article in October:"The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold."As a result, she has been awarded a Golden Bull award by the Plain English Campaign, who clearly felt that Professor Greer’s pronouncement was, shall we say, less than crystal clear English language.However, Germaine protests:Most reasonably educated Guardian readers would, I faintly hope, have recognised the phrase "unsynthesised manifold" as an English version of a basic concept in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, first published in English in 1790 and familiarised in Britain by the work of Coleridge and just about anybody else who writes about aesthetic theory. The expression endures because in more than 200 years no one has found a better way of rendering the idea, although its content continues to evolve with changes in our understanding of brain function and the mechanics of perception.Erm, sorry Germaine, I failed the test. I am a Guardian reader, and I consider myself somewhat educated, but "manifold" to me usually carries connotations with exhausts and engines. I did science, not aesthetics, at school and university. I trust that this does not make me a bad person…Leave a comment
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Changing Seasons
Winter is fast approaching. The walk to the woods has changed from what it was in July, to now…
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Corporate Queer
A good article from Fortune on how corporate America is recognising that gay employees want the same things as their straight colleagues. That is, an environment where the full potential of people, regardless of sexual orientation, is realised and one which fosters their personal and professional development.Leave a comment
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Joining The Club
Great news that South Africa has joined the small group of other countries where same-sex marriage is recognised.And in associated news from South Africa, it appears that at long last the idiocy of the Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, with her worthless treatments for AIDS, and the denial of Prime Minister Mbeki of the link between HIV and AIDS, are being overcome. Not before time, but too late for the 2 million people in South Africa who have already died of AIDS.2 responses to “Joining The Club”
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And also, yesterday the first gay marriage in south africa took place.
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Thanks, Golf, and good luck to the happy couple…
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Women, Know Your Limits
Nina Paley reminds me of the faux-public service announcement film done by Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. I find Enfield to be an acquired taste, but I laughed like a drain at this sketch. It rings so horribly true as an insight into the male mentality of not too long ago. And, dare I say it, probably not too far removed from what some men still think now.Leave a comment
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War Photographer
Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDBLOG, has a long and interesting interview with the photographer Simon Norfolk. In a way, Norfolk is a war photopgrapher, but the conflicts that he photographs are etched in landscapes and architecture. Worth reading and looking at (and thinking about) his striking images.Leave a comment
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In A Nutshell
Richard Norman is a humanist philosopher. He is interviewed by Nigel Warburton in the Virtual Philosopher blog. Norman is asked why he rejects the idea that God exists. His reply is a paragon of clarity:I believe that the onus is on those who believe in the existence of a god to provide reasons for that belief. (This is a point which the philosopher Antony Flew has well made.) I can’t prove that there is no god, but in the absence of good reasons for believing that a god exists, I live my life without belief in a god. In particular, the success of scientific explanations of the natural world makes religious explanations redundant. It’s in that sense that there is a tension between science and religion. The two are not logically incompatible, but the more we succeed in discovering well-founded scientific explanations of the origins of the cosmos, the origins of living species, and so on, the more the explanations in terms of a divine creator become redundant. They add nothing.I could not hope to put it better myself. This is exactly my position.Leave a comment
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What The World Eats
David Ng, over at The World’s Fair blog has an entry on an interesting looking book: Hungry Planet. It’s a photo-essay of the authors’ visit to 30 families in 24 countries for a total of 600 meals. The striking thing are the photos that compare what each family eats in a week. The western obsession with packaged and processed food (and the quantities thereof) was never more tellingly conveyed. A book for the "nice-to-have" wishlist, I think.
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