Big news today. There will soon be a new addition to my discography, bringing total of my recordings to 1, breaking my previous record of 0.
Rhys Chatham by -s-, ccontill, hrvoje_goluza (Flickr)
In August 2009 I was part of performance of “A Crimson Grail” (myself and 199 other guitarists) at Lincoln Center, and this morning I got an email from the composer, Rhys Chatham, announcing that the live recording will be released by Nonesuch September 14.
I don’t want to be taken for a curmudgeon. I love things that seem magical, I love to be amazed by illusions, but I’m annoyed by magical thinking. After the Plato Code, I’m more than usually primed to pull back the curtains. The “magic trick” attributed to Albertus Magnus by William Kalush, founder of the Conjuring Arts Research Center, is an interesting bit of the history of magic and magicians, but don’t you wonder how it works? Isn’t it also a kind of experiment—part of the history of science?
By fotogranina
The trick was this: if you hold a fly under water it will drown, but if you then bury it in ashes, it will come back to life. Nice trick if you want to handle a fly, plus it has a little Christological twist. How does it work, though?
There’s quite a bit of discussion going on about Jay Kennedy’s claim to have “cracked”—not just “discovered”—but cracked a hidden code in Plato’s writings. I’m amazed that he’s knocked surfer-rebel-physicist Garret Lisi’s new paper out of the #1 spot on Scientific Blogging!
On Saturday’s “Weekend Edition” (6/26/2010), Scott Simon interviewed William Kalush, founder of the Conjuring Arts Research Center. Kalush gave Simon a tour of his library of books about magic tricks including some very ancient ones (via Magic Tricks Amuse Even In Extraordinary Times : NPR):
Detail of page from Albertus Magnus, De mirabilibus mundi
Mr. KALUSH: …the earliest complete book we have, originally it was written in about 1280.
SIMON: Mm-hmm.
Mr. KALUSH: The first time it was printed was in the 1470s. This example is about from 1480 and it was printed in Rome and it’s in Latin. And this particular book is attributed to Albertus Magnus. He’s now a saint but he wrote about a lot of interesting things, and in this book he writes about secrets and one of which is how to take a dead fly and resuscitate it, bring it back to life. And here it is, written in the 13th century and printed in the 15th century.
SIMON: Now, if I asked you how do you resuscitate a dead fly, would it be against the code for you to tell me?
Mr. KALUSH: I wouldnt tell you. No. I might tell you the path you might take to go find that method yourself. For example, I’ve already told you that it’s somewhere in this book in Medieval Latin. You might be able to find a copy of this book someplace and find somebody who can translate it…
I’m a little familiar with Albertus, since Felix Fabri draws on his De animalibus (On Animals) quite a bit for interesting facts, for instance, about crocodiles (2.120b) or the phoenix (2.139b). For those who need to know, in De mirabilibus mundi, or Wonders of the World, Albertus twice describes how to revive a dead fly or at least make it appear that you can. I haven’t been able to find a Latin text, but here it is in an Elizabethan translation:
…if drowned flies be put in warm ashes, they will recover their life after a little space. (8)
And Philosophers saith, if thou drown Flies in the water, they seem dead, and if they be buried in ashes, they rise up again. (37)
So there’s the trick. Drown a fly, then roll it ashes until it wakes up. Abracadabra! I hope no one tries this because it seems cruel to the fly.
If you’re looking at this, you’re thinking how ugly it is right now, it’s because I’m in reboot purgatory.
By pietroizzo
I’ve left my website fallow for quite a while but with a book coming out this fall, I need to get it into shape. So now I’m redesigning and rewriting a web site as well as this new WordPress blog (because I’m sick of hosting my own WordPress installation and sweating through upgrade or the lack of upgrades).
I learned this lesson a long time ago: nihil formae sine substantia. Don’t design without content. But that’s exactly what I’ve started to do and now I’m in that purgatory where nothing looks good, so nothing sounds good. I can’t create the content because I don’t have the design right and vice versa. It’s time to breathe, let it be ugly, write, and do things in the right order
Update (7/3): Looking better.
As familiar as the outlines of the Industrial Revolution are, no one will be surprised to learn that every steam-powered invention has a murky history of rivalries, precedents, and counterclaims. However unsurprising it may be, it is still fun to learn that a century before Edison had his Tesla, Watt had his Trevithick. The more gripping tale that Gavin Weightman has to tell in Industrial Revolutionaries, though, is of the commercial cold war waged especially by England and France through and over iron and steam, with many sidewise glances toward America.
Read the rest at Barnes & Noble Review.
Even to those who know Roman poetry, Martial is more often known than read. This may be attributed, as you like, to the lightness of his over 1,500 epigrams, their sheerly daunting number, their honest filthiness, or the dependence for their effect on knowledge of the minute details of Roman culture. Trying to cut through this, Garry Wills presents Martial as the master formalist, honing the attack of his chosen genre the way a fencer perfects his pris de fer.
Read the rest at Barnes & Noble Review.
The hominid fossil record begins some seven million years ago with species that are like humans but not human. But on what basis do we identify members of our own family and say that they are not merely humanlike but human? Ian Tattersall makes it clear that we haven’t figured it out, and that this is what makes paleo-anthropology an interesting—and very human—endeavor.
Read the rest at Barnes & Noble Review.
Ok, you’re a security conscious Mac user so you’ve enabled the Open Firmware password. Now you want to boot from a CD and just holding down the “C” key while the computer starts up won’t work. What do you do?
You boot into Open Firmware (hold down command-option-O-F while the computer starts up), hit return and, when prompted, enter your Open Firmware password. Then at the prompt type
boot cd:,\\tbxi
47DN8DWPETEH
It’s happened a few times—I’m transfering data from one database to another and the old one has a few accented characters in it, but came from the days before Unicode. So if you’re using Perl to pull data from the first database and you have a string with a a word like “façade”, when you try to insert it into the second database you get an error like DBD::Pg::db selectrow_array failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UNICODE”: 0xe76164.
Fortunately, Unicode::MapUTF8 makes it easy with its to_utf8 function. For instance, if the source data is in iso-8859-1:
use Unicode::MapUTF8 qw(to_utf);
#
# ... snip
#
# query $source for the value, and put a converted version
# into $dest
my $value = $source->selectrow_array('get my_val from my_table');
$dest->do('insert into my_new_table (my_val) values (?)', {},
to_utf8( { -string => $value, -charset => 'ISO-8859-1' });
Based on information found here: Problem with LATIN1 characters from Perl-DBI
