Ambimat

It probably comes as no surprise that I’ve already placed my order for one of these. Delightfully simple idea: on those rare occasions when one feels up to receiving, one displays the mat like so..

.. and at those rather more frequent times when one would prefer not to face the world, a simple rotation through 180 degrees is all that’s required..

Germany v Greece

After suffering through the England football team’s recent pitiful displays, I think it’s time to remind ourselves just how the Beautiful Game should be played..

If it were done when ’tis done

Nice piece about Macbeth in the New York Review of Books. Enjoyed this excerpt about the author’s encounter with Bill Clinton, still the true President of the United States..

“…After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. “Mr. President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?” Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”

I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth’s anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland’s legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth’s great soliloquies:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor.

Today’s deep thought, by Jack Handey

.. tickled me, this one..

“Perhaps, if I am very lucky, the feeble efforts of my lifetime will someday be noticed, and maybe, in some small way, they will be acknowledged as the greatest works of genius ever created by Man.”

Repost – Parking: The Drewery Method

Had a few requests to put this up again. So, without further ado..

Making music with Microsoft

Haha – now this I like! Just goes to show that you can get a tune out of anything, with a little ingenuity. Strikes me as the kind of thing Hermeto would get up to..

Tilt/shift Sunday

Manhattan in miniature..

Never got round to posting..

.. due to it being PS3 Day today – I’ve been hard at work off-roading and liberating Normandy. Currently embroiled in a battle to the death with Roger Federer.. it’s definitely what one might call ‘next generation’, even if I’m most certainly not..

Amazon recommends

 ..we thought you might also Reich..

In common with, it would appear, the entire population of the UK, last weekend I somewhat lazily ordered a copy of ‘The Queen’, starring Helen Mirren, as a gift for Mother’s Day. Stunning originality, eh? My mum was very happy with it, as she was with other two copies she received from my bother and sister. Anyway, based on that purchase, here’s Amazon’s suggestion for my next gift item..

Quote of the day

 Nice one today, I thought..

“Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.”
- EH Gombrich

Studio 60

Anyone see this when it was on? We didn’t get it over here, and I’ve heard various bad reports, all of which, of course, makes me even more interested. Hey – Aaron Sorkin, Brad Whitford and Matthew Perry? Gotta be great, right?..

(by the way – thanks to all who left such heartwarming comments on the post below..)

Somewhere deep in the night

Today’s Deep Thought, by Jack Handey

“It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.”

Me, My Soul, and I

Me, My Soul, and I: “Writer Douglas Hofstadter elaborates on his more mind-bending ideas. By Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine.”

In 1979, an unknown just out of grad school published his first book, using a then-exotic computer to do his own typesetting. The work was the inimitable Gödel, Escher, Bach, and its creator, Douglas Hofstadter, stunned the world with his zany, in-depth, and utterly brilliant investigation of self-reference in art and mathematics. Gödel earned him a Pulitzer Prize and inspired legions of youth to study computer science, but Hofstadter always felt readers didn’t quite get it. So to make his point perfectly clear, he has expanded upon his original thesis in I Am a Strange Loop, due in March. Wired asked Hofstadter to elaborate on some of his more mind-bending ideas.
— Kevin Kelly

.. a few brief excerpts..

WIRED: How is your new book different from Gödel, which touched on physics, genetics, mathematics, and computer science?

HOFSTADTER: This time I’m only trying to figure out “What am I?”

Well, given the book’s title, you seem to have found out. But what is a strange loop?

One good prototype is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an “I,” or, if you don’t mind the term, a soul.

Does this insight increase your understanding of yourself?

Of course. I believe that a soul is an abstract pattern, and we can therefore internalize in our brain the souls of other people.

You have a great line: “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself?

I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model.

One of the attractions of your writing is the wordplay, a fascination with the kind of recursions that appeal to programmers and nerds.

It is ironic because my whole life I have felt uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers. I always hope my writings will resonate with people who love literature, art, and music. But instead, a large fraction of my audience seems to be those who are fascinated by technology and who assume that I am, too.

(Via Wired News.)

Tilt/shift Sunday

Tokyo Marathon finish line..

Happy St. Pat’s

The magnificent Albert Finney, in Miller’s Crossing, of course.. Oh, also, I’m reliably informed by a diminutive French person that, in addition to it being St. Patrick’s Day, over in France today is officially St. Gersende’s Day!..

Conversations with himself

Now, this is really something. Some guy channelling the heated bebop dialogue of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. One continuous shot – quite, quite spectacular..

Three basins

An excerpt from the book I’m currently reading, ‘Psychology’ by George A. Miller..

“You have three basins of water. In one the water is cold, in the second it is tepid, in the third hot. Put one hand into the cold water and the other into the hot. After you leave them immersed a minute or two you will discover that the difference in warmth disappears. When your two hands seem to be approximately the same neutral warmth, remove them both and plunge them into the remaining basin, the one containing the lukewarm water. Now the water here seems to have two temperatures at the same time, warm to one hand and cool to the other. But you know that the water must have a single temperature! It is not reasonable to say that the same water is both warm and cool simultaneously, even though it feels that way. Something has gone wrong with the usually reliable machinery for finding out about the world we live in.

The dilemma of the three basins was used by John Locke in 1690 as part of his argument that the apparent qualities of objects – warmth, for example – are not in the objects themselves, but in the minds of the persons who perceive the objects. The object is not warm, said Locke; it merely possesses the capacity of arousing the idea of warmth in us. If the warmth we perceive were truly in the object itself, as it appears to be, it would be impossible for us to perceive two different warmths in one object at the same time..”

...Concerned about appearance and reality, seeming and being, or just whether the water’s hot or cold? Worry no longer, modern science has come up with a solution – The Heat-Sensing Faucet Light! Glows blue when the water is cold and gradually turns red as it heats up..

3 Feet High and Rising

Nice EPK (that’s ‘electronic press kit’) from everybody’s favourite thinking-man’s-hiphoppers, De La Soul. Recorded ..er, back in the day. Oh, OK 1989 then..

(Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.)

I notice..

.. that there’s been a paucity of ambigrammatical material on here of late. Let’s address that right now..