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.

Playing “A Crimson Grail” outside, at sunset, at Lincoln center for 10,000 people was one of the most incredible experiences of my life (I should write up my reminiscences of it, shouldn’t I?), and though no recording could ever do it justice, I’m excited that one is finally being released. Next time I run into David Byrne, Natalie Merchant, or Steve Reich I’ll be able to greet them with “Hey, Labelmate!”

I expect everyone I know to buy a copy and to really listen to it. Until then, here are a couple of videos of the performance. In the first, watch for the ecstasy of one of the audience members starting around 8:48. The second is a beautiful shot of some of the performers:

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?

Clearly it tells us something about how flies breathe. If you were a medieval saint-in-the-making like Albertus Magnus, and you only had the tools available in the 1200′s, I don’t think you could design a better experiment to test this hypothesis: flies breath through the surface of their bodies.

from biology-resources.com

Insects don’t breathe through their mouths. Instead they have openings in their exoskeletons, called “spiracles,” that lead to tiny “tracheal tubes” that take oxygen straight to their cells. Albertus’s “trick” might make you suspect this because, while the water suffocates the fly (as it would you), all the ashes can really do is dry it off, which allows it to breathe again and revive (you wouldn’t be so lucky). The next step might be to cover flies with finer and finer powders to see whether a fine enough powder wouldn’t also suffocate them, which would tell you something about the size of any openings through which they were getting air. You might also try submerging different parts or amounts of their bodies to see where they’re breathing.

Magic tricks and illusions should amaze us. They’re a lot of fun. But after we’re amazed we should always ask, how did that work? and try to figure it out.  In his interview Mr. Kalush was in a bind. He was showing off his library, but he couldn’t reveal to much about the knowledge it contains. In an almost Borgesian way, it is a library he can’t let anyone use because magicians need a steady supply of people who don’t know any better or their tricks will stop amazing. Kudos to Mr. Kalush, though, for his teasing presentation intended to to encourage the curious rather than just impress the lazy. He went on:

“I’ve already told you that it’s somewhere in this book in Medieval Latin,” he said, “You might be able to find a copy of this book someplace and find somebody who can translate it… I wouldn’t mind helping you find the method, but I wouldn’t want to just tell you the method, because what we’re doing here is teaching more than just exposing secrets.”

If you’re going to tell somebody something that’s already known, you might as well make it entertaining. That’s what teachers do, and if you’re entertained enough by relearning what’s already discovered, you make go on to enjoy making discoveries of your own.

Cracked – The Plato Code, Says Historian.

His claim is basically this. Plato’s writings are measured out in twelfths, analogous to the twelve intervals of a musical scale (not a common Greek musical scale but one we can’t prove Plato didn’t know). These twelfth-part of the texts are important. For instance:

• Socrates’ speech in Menexenus takes up 10/12 of the dialogue.
• In Symposium, 3 speeches are each about 1/12th of the work, Alcibiades speech is 2/12th and Socrates long speech 3/12.
• In Phaedrus, Socrates’ second speech is three times as long as his first speech, which is “somewhat longer” than 1/12, so the second is “somewhat longer” than 3/12 (though presumably three times the “somewhat” of the first) and runs from 4/12 of the way through the text to 7/12.

Perhaps. Kennedy doesn’t give much of an interpretation other than to say this emphasis on the harmonies of a musical scale is Pythagorean, that Plato was a crypto-Pythagorean and thus hiding his love of twelfths in plain sight. At any rate it’s good to check some numbers, which turns out to be somewhat interesting.

Kennedy claims that ancient texts were written in columns of consistent length of about 35 letters per line, thus making it easy to count the lines of a text, know how many there were, and know when you were 1/12 of the way through. Let’s just not argue with that for now, or worry about the fact that he quotes his source for this figure as saying “This standard line (Normalzeile) of circa 35 letters therefore … dominated book production unchanged through at least five hundred years from Dionysius’ copy of Thucydides until the time of Justinian,” that is for the 500 centuries beginning about 350 years after Plato died. Kennedy claims that at 35 characters per line, the line counts of Plato’s works would come out surprising close to multiples of 1200. Here are the figures he gives:

On these figures Kennedy says “Using a figure of thirty-five letters per hexameter line, calculations of the total number of lines in the dialogues produce, with about one or two percent accuracy, impressively round numbers involving multiples of the number twelve.”

After you said, “Where’s his data?” you probably said “total number of lines in the dialogues? This is not the dialogues. It’s some dialogues.” And you’re right, so I decided to check to see if he was cherry picking his dialogues. Unfortunately it’s harder to find digital texts of Plato in Greek than I would have thought.  At the Perseus Project, they come in chunks and reassembling the whole would be quite a task. Anyone know a way around this? But I did find some texts on a Greek website.

I didn’t check Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus, or Gorgias because I haven’t found digital copies of those texts. I didn’t check Republic or Laws because they’re very long. His number for Apology and Symposium check out within about 4% and 3% respectively. Whether this is statistically significant is a question I don’t have the expertise to ask. and which Kennedy doesn’t raise.

The first dialogue not on Kennedy’s list that I checked was Phaedrus, and I must admit that to my great surprise, it fit his pattern. Coming out to 2,400 lines it fits even more closely than the first two. Cratylus was too short but came out to 600 lines within less than 1/5 of one percent! Phaedo, however, is way of and when I saw the figure for Timaeus I thought I was beginning to smell a fallacy.

Without looking at the figures which is closer: 1,251 to 1200 or 3,486 to 3,600?

Imagine you’re an ancient Greek, reading Plato’s Timaeus—one of his most important works—all 3,486 lines of it. Are you going to be able to tell when you’ve passed the 1/12th mark? The 1/6th? the 1/4th? Maybe not as easily as you would reading Apology, if you could figure out that there were about 100 lines to each 1/12th.

About 100 lines. The funny thing is that the margins of that “about” is are narrower for the Timaeus than for either the Apology or Symposium. 3,486 is closer to 3,600 than 1,251 is to 1,200 or 2,478 to 2,400. The last two just look so similar. At least they look so similar in Arabic numerals, but not in Greek numerals where ͵γυπϛ is closer to ͵γχ than ͵ασνα is to ͵ασ (the Greeks were great at geometry but partly due to their number system not so good with arithmetic). Any number between 1,201 and 1,299 looks close to 1,200, and any number between 2,401 and 2,499 looks close to 2,400. What are the chances? If you pick a random number below 1,300, you have better than an 8% chance of it looking close to 1,200. I’d be interested to see how the figures for all Plato’s works stand up.

Thank you Greek Number Converter.

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.

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.

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

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



I couldn’t find a way to add a background (or any kind of layer at all) to an existing image, but you can add one image to another.

1. Make an all white graphic the same size as the PNGs (I don’t know what you’d do if you had images of different sizes). It seems like this is the step that you should be able to do on the fly.
2. (Enter all on one line) for i in *.png; do composite -compose Over $i background.png ${i:r}-on-white.png; done