That Gödel’s favorite movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
This was from one hell’uva interesting article [Chronicle] by Palle Yourgrau excerpted from his forthcoming A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein.
I should also recommend this SEP casual introduction to time machines.
“Perhaps instead the techniques of chemistry and biology have seemed unclean and unmanly, the products of ‘odd-ball’ scientists ensconced in laboratories, reflecting perverted scientific ingenuity rather than the bravery of cold steel” (George H. Quester, “Chemical and Biological Warfare.” American Political Science Review 68.3 [Sep. 1974]: 1285).
Via Watercooler Games, I see this notice that the South Korean government, or at least that portion of the government responsible for regulating video games, which might be rather large, considering, has decided that most certainly something obstat in the way of Ghost Recon 2.
The game is apparently set in a war-torn North Korea of 2007, which is what was found objectionable. I’m strongly opposed to most any form of censorship you can imagine, but I’m having trouble uniformly condemning their decision. Perhaps the South Korean government might be forgiven for being sensitive about American cultural products which seem to advocate the inevitability of a war with their neighbor that will be destructive beyond imagining, especially as U.S. foreign policy is seen by many Korean observers as advocating the same.
An edition of the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom is expected to fetch nearly $65K or so at auction. In the fifth act, the dictator Bolloxinion threatens “to invade heaven and bugger the gods” (Richard Elias: “Political Satire in Sodom,” Studies in English Literature. 18.3 [Summer 1978]: 434).
“People who sing create the thing that causes cowardice. And when a person spends his time in singing he loses his time.” (qtd. in William Vollmann’s “Across the Divide: What do the Afghan people think of the Taliban?” New Yorker, 5/15/2000).
I should also note that Vollmann, in his preface to Rising Up and Rising Down notes that he wrote a commissioned piece for the New Yorker datelined 9/11/02 from Yemen which “was turned down for not being political enough.”
I read with considerable pleasure James Surowecki’s essay on corporate welfare in this week’s New Yorker. His final paragraph, which refers to interburghal competition for corporate largesse as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, reminded me of how interested I am in the theological implications of that glum bit of game theory.
The Moretti and Greenstone piece he cites is available here. How hard would it be for publications such as the NY’er to add such links in their on-line editions?
I’m seriously considering asking students to create an Inform project for my “Addiction and Necessity” Introduction to Literature course next semester. I haven’t yet done much research into whether anyone else has tried this particular pedagogical gambit, but I think it could prove interesting.
A long-standing wish is to create an enter an interactive fiction into the annual contest. I missed this year’s, but I might still make the Spring Thing. My idea involves a murder mystery, which doesn’t seem to have been particularly popular in modern if, executed with considerable surrealism. I’m particularly interested in how the medium allows you to withhold information about the character that you play and how a given player’s attempts to make that character conform to their reactions can be subtly thwarted.
I stopped by Pastries a Go Go earlier today to pick up a dessert for our departmental party, and I helped myself to an extra slice of this delicacy. Now I’m the sort of person you’d have to remind that cakes normally have flour–sometimes have trouble baking brownies, etc.–but for the el supremo at the top of the stairs, this is the place.
A lot of people might offer a recipe, but I’d have no more idea how to make this than I would a virgin speculum (and I’ve read The Phoenix and the Mirror—speaking of which, we are to expect the long-forgotten The Scarlet Fig to appear soon!).
I’ve read an astonishing amount of Gene Wolfe over the last two years or so, and I just finished his most famous short story collection, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (Other than a few stories in Strange Travellers, some of Castle of Days, the Soldier books, Peace, Castleview, Operation Ares, Free Live Free, the Holly Hollander book, Wizard, and uncollected miscellany, I’ve read it all.) Wolfe’s short fiction is exceptionally cryptic and often disturbing. I’m still rattled by “And When They Appear” and “The Ziggurat” from the Strange Travellers collection, but I’m going to save my comments on those for another post. So here I present some scattered comments on the recently re-issued Island of Dr. Death collection.
That was the title of my introductory writing course this semester, and I’m now beginning to assess what worked well and what didn’t. There was an impressive amount of often insightful discussion from the students, which is hidden away behind a proprietary message board, unfortunately, but I’ll try to transfer it over before long.
I had them read in the third section a couple of semi-technical articles: “Spandrels of San Marco” and Gould’s “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” in the third section of the course, and, while I think the issues raised therein were not too difficult for the students, who had vastly different levels of preparation in biology, to follow, they might have been. Some more general overviews of the issues that I found seemed to have much less rhetorical interest, which was one of my main motivations to using primary sources (though I did forbear from using the two original punk eek articles).