Remembering diagramming sentences in school? Yeah, me neither.
But some people do. They remember it pretty well.
A poster on Metafilter asked for some help diagramming a 94-word sentence that "won the bad writing contest in 1998." (He or she doesn't say anything more about this contest. Do tell.)
Well, I took a go at it.. Came up with a generic syntactic tree based on a few different versions of generative grammar all mashed up in my head..
posted by greatgefilte at 7:57 PM on April 25 [8 favorites]
Now, if you actually want a proper version of it, with binary branching and X-bar and everything, that'll take a little bit more than ten minutes and a sheet of scrap paper. :)
I missed this when it was published a couple of weeks ago, but I think it's worth a post now for those who didn't see it. The Washington Post devised a little experiment: plant one of the world's most famous classical musicians, the violinist Joshua Bell, in a Metro station in D.C. during the morning rush hour. Wearing a baseball cap and long-sleeved tee-shirt, he stands against a wall, opens the case in front of him for donations, and plays for 43 minutes. Hidden camera. How many people will stop and listen? How many will throw him some money, and how much? How many will recognize him? "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"
The WaPo must have had a number of undercover operatives running around L'Enfant Plaza because the paper contacted 40 people who came through the station. The article, by Gene Weingarten, says 1,097 people passed by while Bell played. (1,100 wasn't good enough.) A number of the listeners or non-listeners get little portraits and interviews in the piece, which is very long. Some fumble out explanations for buzzing right by, or just 'fess up: "'I didn't think nothing of it,' Tillman says, 'just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.'" There's a shoeshine woman who gets annoyed by buskers and says this was the first time she didn't call the police.
The piece makes you wait a good while before giving the results. They aren't pretty. He nets $32.17, not including a twenty from the one person who recognized Bell ("tainted by recognition").
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run.... That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
Bell, known as a showman and something of a lady's man, comes across as very likable:
"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah..."
The word doesn't come easily.
"... ignoring me."
Bell is laughing. It's at himself.
I think this is my favorite bit, though:
A couple of minutes into [the video], something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.
"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."
Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.
"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look.
I had never tried Gender Genie, but Chris's* reminder was timely, since I recently got one of the periodic inquiries I receive from readers who wonder (given my somewhat unisex name) whether I'm male or female.
The answer is female, but is my writing somehow telegraphing testosterone? I asked Gender Genie, feeding it four Word columns. Sure enough, it says I sound like a guy: The columns scored, on average, male 1346, female 964.
As a blogger, I'm more girly: The item I tested was rated female, 840 to 521. But looking at the keywords the Genie scores, I suspect this was because of my quotes from The Economist's stylebook, along the lines of "Aggravate means make worse, not irritate"; those nots, for some reason, count as strongly feminine words.
But is it the writer or the topic that's being measured? Just for fun, I plugged in Barbara Wallraff's latest Word Court column. That scored masculine too, 1005 to 768.
So did Ruth Walker's last Verbal Energy column on the Christian Science Monitor website: male 1168, female 530. And linguist Heidi Harley's recent post on Language Log: male 713, female 495.
Turns out this is just what happened when a columnist at The Guardian put the Genie through its paces a few years ago: Only one of the newspaper's female columnists was identified (and just barely) as woman.
This does make me wonder: Is journalistic prose typically more "masculine" by the Genie's yardstick? And if so, what sort of prose was used to develop the algorithm for nonfiction? Some corpus, apparently, in which women use with, if, not, where, and be a lot more than men do.
*Corrected 4/29: I originally credited the Genie post to Josh. Sorry, Chris!
The popularity of the Web-based Gender Genie ebbs and flows; for some reason it's caught theattention of major-league bloggers again this week.
Men, you may have heard, tend to assert, challenge, and pontificate more than women do -- rhetorical fingerprints the Genie can identify even in short chunks of text. Wondering if six years of marriage, and a few sessions of spousal coaching, had mellowed the opinionated beast within (don't blame me, blame Darwin), I fed some of my recent posts into the Genie's maw.
Success! My post yesterday, on whether brain teasers can stave off mental decline, was tagged as decisively female. The ratio of female-to-male elements was 294 to 231. I take that to mean it was persuasive but not in-your-face. If I read it aloud at a dinner party, my wife wouldn't kick me under the table.
But, alas, not total success. Threeotherrecent posts skewed male by ratios of 436/366, 202/103, and 223/86. (For each analysis, I omitted block quotes of text by other authors.)
So it's back to the drawing board. Or is it? The post I've just finished typing is just barely on the distaff side.
The main reason I liked websites, when they first were invented -- and later, blogs -- and before that, zines and Princeton Architectural Press -- is the opportunity to peek over the shoulder of a cultural obsessive as he or she does his or her thing: exhuming, poring over, cataloging, and celebrating the fragments of everyday life that reveal some occluded truth about the social totality. Or something.
So thanks, Patrick Cates, who once upon a time invented and obsessively chronicled "doing a Lynddie," for directing me to the website Throttling, which is dedicated to comic book images of people (often superheroes) being, well, throttled. One such image is distasteful, but gather several together and they become... sociology, psychology, maybe even art!
Remember those graphics that got emailed around in '04, the ones comparing the pro-Confederacy states with the 2004 election map? You don't? Here's a reminder:
Well, in 2003, the historian and public intellectual Caleb Crain had a similar brainstorm. On his blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, he wondered whether the order in which states abolished slavery in the late 18th and early 19th centuries would predict the order in which they instituted gay marriages or civil unions in the late 20th and early 21st. At the time, Crain recalled in an update yesterday, he had only two data points, Vermont and Massachusetts. But the first four states to abolish slavery were: Vermont (1777), Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts (1783), and New Hampshire (1783). So Crain made a bold prediction: "If the pattern holds, don't hold your breath for same-sex marriage in New York, despite its ultraliberal reputation. Look for it next in Pennsylvania ... or in crusty, Republican New Hampshire." Seemed far-fetched at the time, but yesterday, the New Hampshire legislature passed a bill authorizing same-sex unions, which the governor is expected to sign.
Returning to his research, Crain says: "My new prediction, then: gay marriage in Pennsylvania, which looks overdue." (I would add: or Rhode Island.) See Crain's table, below.
Advent of gay marriage or civil unions
1999 Vermont
2004 Massachusetts
2005 Connecticut
2006 New Jersey
Jan wrote here a couple of weeks ago about misheard lyrics, or "mondegreens," and a site that collects and publishes them, kissthisguy.com. I chipped in about the origin of that domain name.
Last night I was listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain's 1985 song "Just Like Honey," which was used in the closing scene of the movie "Lost in Translation." There's a line in the song that's pretty bizarre, so I did some Googling to make sure I was hearing it right. And lo, I have a mondegreen on my hands.
According to the dubious unanimity of six different Web lyrics archives that are probably copying one another, the real lyrics are: "I'll be your plastic toy."
A reader has written in in after coming across a very, very old element -- like 16th Century -- of publishing: "Lorem Ipsum," specific Latin passages used as dummy text while working on a layout of a page or, now, a Web site. Readers become distracted by the legible content of a page when going over its layout. So typographers -- and now, page layout software programs -- insert a bunch of Latin words that will be gibberish to most.
But in fact -- I hadn't known this -- the Latin passages commonly used are not random words but excerpts from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. One bit:
But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted.
You mean annoyances like loose lines, false endings, and widows?
That question has been everywhere recently, fueled by stories like this one, in which it's suggested that fiddling with brain teasers on the hand-held Nintendo DS -- or doing crossword puzzles -- just might keep you mentally limber into your nineties.
The artful Slate article throws in some notes of skepticism. But last year, in the debut issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, published by the Association for Psychological Science, Timothy Salthouse, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, was even more dubious. After a thorough review of dozens of studies, Salthouse concluded:
Despite frequent assertions of the mental-exercise hypothesis, its intuitive plausibility, and an understandably strong desire to believe that it is true ... there is currently little scientific evidence that differential engagement in mentally stimulating activities alters the rate of mental aging.
Still, he ended on a chipper note. Even if the hypothesis is false, why not act as if it were true? Crosswords and similar games are fun -- and, at the very least, "if you can still do it, then you know that you have not yet lost it."
You've read a lot of articles about climate change. You will read many, many more. And with reason. Most of the idea-driven pieces you read attempt to advance proposals that balance the needs of economic development with the pressing need to protect the environment and stop warming. Again, we need these articles.
But it's also thought-provoking to read the occasional piece that just goes out there and doesn't try to please all comers. In fact, it's meant to aggravate you. Writing in Orion Magazine, in the second of a two-part series (here's the first), Curtis White argues that the pill we have to swallow to protect life on the planet is a horse pill. It's not just a matter of technological innovation and some sacrifices here and there, he believes. We have to change the way we live and work:
we are so frightened by the prospect of stepping outside of the market system on which we depend for our national wealth, our jobs, and our sense of normalcy that we will let the logic of that system try to correct its own excesses even when we know we’re just kidding ourselves.... Kyoto is just a form of whistling past the graveyard.
It's a wide-eyed, radical, and idealistic essay. You might want to respond, "OK, but what proposal do you have that could possibly pass muster politically?" But perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss White as naive, since his point is that it is more naive to think we will rescue ourselves from this massive problem without altering our baseline assumptions about society.
Back in 2005, Josh wrote in Ideas about the Hipster PDA and DIY Planner, for people who prefer organization by paper rather than bits and bytes.
If you have the fetish for dead-tree, analog devices, you probably also have the fetish for the classic Moleskine notebooks. (I keep buying them, despite having ones at home that still have some hard drive space.)
Now, by following some simple instructions -- OK, it's not that simple -- you can have the best of both worlds: an external hard drive housed inside a little Moleskine.
Part of the problem is that the mirrors have to be curved, and that's a bear. But if you took a bowl of liquid and rotated it rapidly and smoothly, the surface of the liquid would be parabolic at any given moment. And guess what? A parabola is just what you need. Shine some moonlight on a spinning parabola of mercury and you get some images you're going to like.
But then you have the difficulty of taking pictures of moving objects. Most things move in space, see. You can't point the liquid telescope this way and that because of, uh, gravity. It has to be exactly vertical. This part is a little more of a stretch for my powers of astro-imaging understanding, but it seems that the answer is to take your image-sensing chip, much like the key ingredient of your digital camera, and manipulate it on the fly such that it shifts its electronic eye, in a sense, to track a flying object, always at the correct exposure:
[Image-sensing chips] can, however, be operated... by manipulating the applied voltages so as to shift the electronic image to the side of the chip during the exposure. By aligning the direction of shift with the direction in which the projected starlight is moving and by applying voltages to the CCD electrodes at the appropriate rate, one can coax electrons along at the same speed as the drifting image. If that shifting is done properly, there is no blurring, because the electrons keep pace with the photons that are producing them.
You got that, right? Turns out the space-watchers have been doing this for a while now, making telescopes as wide as three meters or so -- but there's more. Now the project is to put a liquid scope as wide as 100 meters on the Moon.
The Moon is an ideal location because of its dark sky, stable gravity and the absence of any atmosphere that might disturb the liquid and distort the images obtained. Located near the Moon's north or south pole, a zenith-pointing telescope could observe the same area of sky for months on end, detecting and studying the most distant and faintest objects in the visible universe.
San Francisco-based Adam Rogers, of the urban-planning blog Planetizen Interchange posted a great item yesterday.
He'd been puzzling over the new San Francisco Federal Building, designed by "starchitect" Thom Mayne, ever since it opened earlier this year. The building's odd shape looked familiar, but he couldn't figure out what, exactly, it reminded him of. Can you figure it out? Here's the building:
Give up? OK, here's the answer:
That's right. It's the Sandcrawler from "Star Wars 4" (formerly known as "Star Wars"). Uncanny resemblance, isn't it? Nice going, Adam.
completed their comprehensive 12-year survey of life as a modern upper-middle-class American.
In what cultural anthropologists are calling a "colossal achievement" in the study of white-collar professionals, the popular radio show has successfully isolated all 7,442 known characteristics of college graduates who earn between $62,500 and $125,000 per year and feel strongly that something should be done about global warming.
I'd say the appeal dips way below $62,500 a year. All my friends started listening to it on melancholy Sundays immediately after college, when we were holding or trying to hold jobs in interesting fields that paid more like $30,000. But anyway. Presiding host Ira Glass, the article also notes, "began work on the project in 1995 in Chicago, where he found himself inspired by and catering to an audience of professionals who dine out frequently and have a hard time getting angry."
Longtime right-hand Julie Snyder also chimes in: "There is not a single existential crisis or self-congratulatory epiphany that has been or could be experienced by a left-leaning agnostic that we have not exhaustively documented and grouped by theme."
This is all almost uncomfortably good. I'm a great fan of the show, and will remain one, but the Onion item does put its finger on a critique I'd been toying with of the show's more personal pieces: they're all about "us," and they can be like one big solipsistic lovefest.
David Halberstam, who died on the scene Monday morning in a car crash in Menlo Park, Ca., became justly famous for winning the Pulitzer Prize at 30 for his reporting for the New York Times from South Vietnam, when the war was in its nascent stages. In 1972, Halberstam continued to wrestle with the subject in "The Best and the Brightest," which chronicled, better than any book so far written about Iraq, what had gone wrong in Vietnam.
Halberstam went on to write a dizzying array of books both weighty and delightful, and developed a pattern of filling in the gaps between major efforts with sportswriting. Really good sportswriting. Bob Ryan: "In his spare time, he embarrassed those of us who have nothing better to do than follow sports by writing informative and insightful books about our chosen field."
Halberstam's last book was about Bill Belichick, but I want to highlight, naturally, his baseball efforts. If you have a baseball fan for a son, and he doesn't see the point of history, buy him "Summer of '49," "October 1964," or "The Teammates." The man knew how to make the past feel like the present.
Best. Beam Column. Ever. (Maybe I just think that because I was raised an Episcopalian?)
Anti-schismatic Episcopalian Alex Beam comments on the trend in which dozens of American Episcopalian congregations are defecting to Anglican bishops... in Africa. Why? Beam explains:
Because the Americans objected to the ordination of gay clergy, and especially to the elevation of an openly gay man, Gene Robinson, to be the bishop of New Hampshire. The schismatics invoke endless biblical argle-bargle to defend their un-Christian bigotry, but in the end it boils down to this: They are unwilling to love and accept their neighbors as themselves.
Check out Alex's latest hate-mail podcast. (Does the podcast's Sonny & Cher theme song indicate over-the-top homophilia on Beam's part? No... I found it for him!)
On Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee points out some nice new developments for fans of George Scialabba, a veteran of the literary left circuit. Scialabba was unknown to me until he wrote an absolutely superb piece for n+1 on the change of heart / betrayal by Christopher Hitchens -- depends on whom you ask -- at the expense of the American and British left.
Scialabba has set up a Web site that reveals what he looks like (not at all what I pictured), but, more relevantly, archives his work. This is a boon to us fans, especially us Johnny-come-latelys.
McLemee also points out that Scialabba, something of an unlikely tech innovator, has proposed that Web browsers add a feature to allow one's home page on launching the browser to rotate, such that all your favorite sites would pop up unbidden in the course of, say, a week. Hey, one of you Firefox volunteer programmers, get on that!
McLemee also slips in a knock on Scialabba's current chosen home page, Arts and Letters Daily: "Just how many 'those crazy environmentalists/feminists/PCers/structuralists/ poststructuralists/postmodernists/post-postmodernists sure are crazy!' articles do you really need to read in a given month?" INtellectual Webheads picking fights with each other... again.
For those who have been interested in various posts of mine about 9/11 and military defense and comparisons to various trolley problems (see this one and this one): it's worth pointing out that Elaine Scarry, a Harvard literature professor but also sometimecriticalcommentator on matters of aviation, wrote a short and sharp book about the military failures on 9/11, seemingly based on a talk, called "Who Defended the Country?"
The book has been overshadowed somewhat by the final report of the 9/11 Commission, which obviously had more and more sensitive information at its disposal -- it had subpoena power, too -- but she not only prefigured some of the Commission's criticisms but also asked some questions they never answered.
For a much smaller subset of 9/11 wonderers, there's also a book by French muckraker Thierry Meyssan called "L'Effroyable Imposture," controversially published also in the US, under the title "9/11: The Big Lie." To many people the book is downright crazy. It focuses on the Pentagon plane, Flight 77, and says, uh, that it never hit the Pentagon. A US missile instead did the damage, part of a plan to foment war. And what of the plane and its passengers? Taken somewhere secret and destroyed, I think -- something like that. But it has some disturbing analysis by people who ought to know and who were not hired by Meyssan of the explosion at the Pentagon, and even, I think, at the World Trade Center, which suggests a detonation rather than a jet fuel conflagration. Conspiracy observers, take note. This hard-left-leaner has done some homework.
Reader J.H.M., who has written in before about matters philosophical, sent me a note after becoming "consternated" over my use of the term Q.E.D.
Immediately after identifying myself as an ex-philosophy major, I used the common logical term Q.E.D. unusually -- okay, quite incorrectly -- so thanks to J.H.M. for pointing that out. Q.E.D., or quod erat demonstrandum, is correctly used at the end of a logical proof to indicate, with a conclusiveness I've always found pleasing, that a proposition has been definitively proven.
Its most famous recent use was probably at the end of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In 1993, Andrew Wiles announced his success in this longstanding goal of scientists and mathematicians over the course of three lectures delivered at Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences on June 21, 22, and 23. The kind of place to get excited about these things.
I used Q.E.D. to indicate that the Economist had spoken the truth with unassailable authority about the correct use of the term "beg the question." Again, it properly means "neither raise the question, invite the question nor evade the answer. To beg the question is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce." I agree that this should be the last word, but the Economist didn't actually demonstrate (demostrandum, remember) it so much as state it, in that way they do.
I'm a fan of Penguin's 60th anniversary "Graphic Classics" series -- editions of, for example, D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," and Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" with cover illustrations by today's top graphic artists, like (respectively) Chester Brown, Frank Miller, and Jason. I like Chris Ware's cover for "Candide" so much that I framed the poster and hung it over my desk.
If you feel the same way I do, then you'll be pleased to hear that Dan "Ghost World" Clowes has done the cover illustration for Penguin's new edition of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein." Check it out:
Techgnosis: Erik Davis blogs about "myth, magic, and mysticism in the age of information." Also about: Led Zeppelin and post-apocalyptic fiction.
BLDGBLOG: Geoff Manaugh blogs about "architectural conjecture, urban speculation, landscape futures." He also publishes excellent Q&As.
Areas of My Expertise: Brookline-born author and humorist John Hodgman blogs about... these days, mostly about hobo stuff, actually.
Spurgeonworld: Sometime Globe contributor Chris Spurgeon blogs about "design, science, art, and the places where they all meet."
The Frontal Cortex: Neuroscience and literature expert Jonah Lehrer, author of the forthcoming "Proust Was A Neuroscientist," blogs about... where culture and brain science meet, I'd say.
This weekend, I was visiting Universal Hub, currently one of my favorite blogs about Boston, when I spotted an entry about opening day for youth baseball in Jamaica Plain; the entry linked to a Flickr photoset dedicated to Saturday's youth baseball parade through JP.
I don't know the Flickr photographer or the blogger, but I did march in the parade yesterday; I'm an assistant coach for one of the teams. So I clicked onto the photoset, and presto -- there I am. In the very first photo, I can be seen waving my hat (top right corner) like an idiot. My son is in front of me, my dog is to my right -- my wife was holding the leash. Coach Andy Pond, CEO of the Justice Resource Institute, marching in a far more dignified fashion, is to my left.
If Twitter is shrinking time, Flickr is shrinking space. Or at least the social world.
It's the space between the letters. In the May/June issue of Stanford Magazine, a profile of famous ur-computer scientist Donald Knuth, who has over the course of his career written but not finished a mammoth multivolume book called "The Art of Computer Programming."
What interests me most in the article is the discussion of Knuth's exacting views about typography. Knuth was getting all hot and bothered by the poor quality of the printing in scientific textbooks. They tended, for one, to feature letters so closely spaced as to form dark spots on the page, which stop the eye from scanning the page quickly and smoothly.
Knuth took it upon himself to find a solution, even though his typesetting experience was limited to a high school job at a print shop and some experiments with the offset press his father had kept in the basement. Typesetting was no longer a manual craft. "It had changed into a problem of bits, zeroes and ones," he says. "You put the one where you want ink on the page and zero where you don't want ink. So I figured, okay, I'm good at zeroes and ones."
In 1977, Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10.
...
Knuth, trying to train his programmer's brain to think like an artist's, wanted to create a program that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye. "I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design," he says. For example, how do you insert line breaks into a paragraph so there isn't too much space between words and so that most of the lines don't end in hyphens? Although this seems like an aesthetic challenge to be solved by human taste, Knuth says, computers do it well. "This is a combinatorial problem," he explains. "There might be a thousand ways to break a paragraph into lines and each way has a score."
So Knuth built computer programs to count and score those thousand ways and pick the best one. His software is used in the bulk of scientific publishing today.
Until Evan invited us to a grammar scolding last Friday, it hadn't occurred to me that reading usage rules could be a source of masochistic pleasure. But he's right about the Economist's style guide: If you want to be lectured about loose usage, the editors will tell you that "Aggravate means make worse, not irritate," that "Pristine means original or former; it does not mean clean," and similar things they wish were still true.
But for guilt-free entertainment, I prefer the entries you wouldn't find in an American style guide, like the caution on King Canute, who ordered the tide to stop coming in:
Canute's exercise on the seashore was designed to persuade his courtiers of what he knew to be true but they doubted, ie, that he was not omnipotent. Don't imply he was surprised to get his feet wet.
(That's some fancy negation, huh? "They doubted . . . that he was not omnipotent" -- that is, they flattered the king that he was omnipotent. )
Other unexpected and fascinating entries:
Garner means store, not gather.
Scotch: to scotch means to disable, not to destroy. (“We have scotched the snake, not killed it.”) The people may also be Scotch, Scots or Scottish; choose as you like.
Specific: a specific is a medicine, not a detail.
There's also a multiple-choice test and a section on Americanisms, acceptable and otherwise:
Do not write meet with or outside of: outside America, nowadays, you just meet people. Do not figure out if you can work out. To deliver on a promise means to keep it. A parking lot is a car park. Use senior rather than ranking, rumpus rather than ruckus, and rumbustious rather than rambunctious.
Cars are hired, not rented. City centres are not central cities. Cricket is a game not a sport. . . . Ex-servicemen are not necessarily veterans. In Britain, though cattle and pigs may be raised, children are (or should be) brought up.
The British, however, ignore a couple of our obsessions:
Americans tend to be fussy about making a distinction between which and that. Good writers of British English are less fastidious. ("We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.")
And they've thrown off the shackles of the subjunctive, judging by a subhead in the April 14-20 issue of the magazine. "Mitt the Moneymaker," the headline read, and under it: "If only that was all you had to do."
Cartoonist Greg Williams takes on a paradox involving two common observations: 1) A cat always lands on its feet, no matter what height you drop it from. 2) A piece of toast with butter or jam always lands spread-side down.
Here's Williams's stab at "the buttered-cat paradox":
Turns out, naturally, that others have had this same idea, with varying levels of seriousness. Here's an article in the New Scientist about the conundrum, and here's a short animated film that considers the practical application of the cat-jam composite. Weightlessness! Why not use jam-slathered cats to power monorails? It's like biodegradable fuel.
Sunday's Globe Magazine published an interview with automaking giant and ex-CEO guru Lee Iacocca, now 82, who has published a new book called "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?"
Iacocca endorsed George W. Bush in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and won't reveal what horse he's backing in 2008. But he isn't holding back from politically loaded statements. How about this, from a former head of one of the Big Three car manufacturers?
[Q:] And what's the most important new technology auto buyers don't know about yet?
[Iacocca:] Plug-in hybrids. They're being touted as the wave of the future, and I think they are. I can imagine a scene in the not too distant future when a wife will turn to her husband at bedtime and say, 'Honey, did you remember to turn off the lights, bring in the cat, and plug in the car?'
[Q:] How do you think the auto industry can and should face concerns about the environment and rising gas prices?
[Iacocca:] I have to confess that like many business people -- especially in the car industry -- I came late to enlightenment on global warming and the energy crisis. But now I'm making up for lost time. Automakers have to get aggressive about building hybrids. Why is General Motors building Hummers? That doesn't make sense. I'll go a step further: I think we should raise the gas tax and spend the money on developing alternatives to oil. Let's face it, finding more oil does not constitute an energy policy.
Whoa, no Alaskan drilling for him, huh? Bush has come around somewhat to the idea that scientific innovations, such as hydrogen fuel cell technology, are necessary to meet American energy needs, but Iacocca departs from him considerably in the argument that demanding some sacrifice from consumers and corporations has got to be part of the plan. "Hummers? That doesn't make sense."
Earlier this month, Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy reviewed Mike Daisey's comical-philosophical monologue "Invincible Summer," now playing (till April 29) at the Carr Human Rights Foundation-supportedZero Arrow Theatre, the ART's second stage in Cambridge. She loved Daisey, but was disappointed in the crowd: "the empty seats were only slightly less responsive than the full ones," she wrote, and: "Here's hoping [Daisey's other shows] get the wide-awake audiences they deserve."
Well, Daisey finally did get a responsive audience. As a number of my favorite bloggers -- including Jason Grote at Confessions of an English Jason Grote Eater, John Hodgman at Good Evening, Annalee Newitz at Table of Malcontents, Edward Champion at Return of the Reluctant -- reported over the weekend, on Thursday night Daisey's performance was interrupted when a large portion of the audience (87 people) suddenly walked out. According to theater management, or so I've heard, it was a group of (Christian) choir students and their parents and teachers. But let's let Daisey tell the story:
I am performing the show to a packed house, when suddenly the lights start coming up in the house as a flood of people start walking down the aisles -- they looked like a flock of birds who'd been startled, the way they all moved so quickly, and at the same moment... it was shocking, to see them surging down the aisles. The show halted as they fled, and at this moment a member of their group strode up to the table, stood looking down on me and poured water all over the outline, drenching everything in a kind of anti-baptism.
Here's a video of the water-pouring episode:
Newitz characterized l'affaire Daisey as "possibly the only recorded example of a Christian flash mob prank." Champion raged: "The faceless cowards who did this are no better than the ghouls who burned the Great Library of Alexandria." But Hodgman found a silver lining in the cloud: "It is inspiring to me, both as a performer and a human, to see the humor and the grace with which Mike reassures those members of his audience who did not choose to pour water on his notes and regain control of himself and the moment."
PS: I liked Daisey's "21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com," a memoir of his stint as a footsoldier in the New Economy. I served in a different unit in the same war, and Daisey does a great job of explaining how lame it was.
PPS: Bostonist interviewed Daisey on April 6, check it out.
UPDATE: Whoops! Shoulda guessed that Geoff Edgers, tireless Globe arts reporter, and another of my favorite bloggers, would have also mentioned the watering of Mike Daisey. Also: Thanks, Boing Boing, for linking to this post.
