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From the Symphony of Science website: “The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”
“We Are All Connected” compiles clips of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye to create a lovely and lyrical music video.
I just learned a new word from a piece of spam: sintering, to heat a powdery material (like ceramics or metal) below its melting point until the particles adhere into a whole.
Why did I open the spam? Because my Gmail’s gone wonky and won’t let me “mark as spam” from my inbox, only from the email itself.
Why did I continue reading it?
A) They didn’t actually indicate any way for me to throw large fistsful of money at them, and I wondered where the hook was buried;
B) sintering, dude. Strange words catch my eye.
Just a heads-up: H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Giger may have been less spinners of cosmic fantasy phantasy, and more prescient marine biologists.
Behold its awesome form.
And, uh-oh, elbows.
via.
As a reasonably bright child raised by people who valued intelligence, perhaps to a fault, I spent much of my early life thinking I was smart. The most valuable revelation of my adulthood was the simple idea that I don’t know everything… or, indeed, very much at all.
Some little things I learned this week which overturn what I thought I knew:
- It’s Sir Walter Ralegh, not Sir Walter Raleigh. Oh, I see. I learned to spell it from a children’s book at age 8 or so, and never investigated further, apparently assuming (without much thought) that all those historians and art historians were, what, making typos?
- baleful means menacing or hostile, not sorrowful or miserable. Apparently, I’ve been using its obsolete meaning my entire life.
- Christopher Marlowe wrote The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, not John Donne. I suspect that, somewhere around age 12 or so, I confounded one poem with another, and never bothered to straighten it out.
In the words of The Fella, “Yay! You’re smarter now!” And he’s right… but the exposure of little-but-big lifelong misapprehensions fills me with a healthy mistrust of other things I think I’ve learned.
Which is all to the good, I think. It’s wise to be skeptical of one’s own knowledge. That much I have learned.
I had a nice moment in my Renaissance lit class this week.
Our professor spares his voice by asking students to read the longer passages. Sometimes it’s painful: students stumble over the unfamiliar language and the syllables accented or elided unexpectedly, or make it clear they’ve never read the assigned passage before, or simply flush at the attention.
Or maybe they don’t see that the language is the play. The words are more than information conveyed; they pack power and rich hidden meaning.
This week, the professor asked me to read a passage.
And I read it.
Silence dropped over the class, and when I finished, I looked up from the page to see eyes turned toward my corner. One girl clapped silently. Another breathed “Wow.”
I’m not pretending any dramatic gift, oh no. I think it’s simpler. I think when you hear Shakespeare read without stumbling and stammering, without embarrassed hesitation and by someone who understands the content and the context, you hear the words.
And such words:
from Antony and Cleopatra
Cleopatra: His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course,
And lighted the little O o’ the earth.
…
His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tunéd spheres — and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket….
…
Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dream’d of?
Dolabella: Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra: You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be, or ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming: Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with Fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony were Nature’s piece ‘gainst Fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
According to our class custom, my reading skipped the incidental lines interrupting the speech; in their place, I have put ellipses. I include here Dolabella’s “Gentle madam, no” only because, to my surprise, the prof uttered it, prompting me to read another section.
Finally, our long transnational nightmare comes to an end: researchers at Leeds University have perfected the bacon butty.
Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty. [...]
Four researchers at the Department of Food Science spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variations on the traditional bacon sandwich. [...]
The formula is: N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.
Just a little something to get you revved up for this weekend’s Sandwich Party.
Last night, I stayed up until 3 a.m. whacking away at an essay on Antony and Cleopatra, and woke up not enough hours later with a notion of how I could rip it apart and restructure it. My brain then crossed its little symbolic arms, snooted its little symbolic nose up to the sky, and refused to do anything until I bent to its will.
Stupid brain. Why can’t you shut up and leave me be?
In any event, the paper is done now. I have no business writing here when there’s so much else to write before the semester is out, but I promised myself I would bang out a few words, just enough to reassure you I’m alive.*
I’m intensely sleep-deprived: I’m seeing sparkles of color, flashes of light, and dark slithering tails of what must be large scaly creatures lurking just out of the corners of my vision. It’s Jacob’s Ladder around here, my friends, and the infusion of caffeine I gave myself this afternoon guarantees I’ll be awake to make the most of it all night long.
The Fella has been my stalwart through the havoc of this week. He surprised me Saturday night by arriving home from work with a pizza and a Red Velvet cake (“because I’m so proud of you”) just around the time I blearily looked up from the keyboard and started wondering what I could throw together for dinner.
Yesterday afternoon, I started with “I was going to make —”
He cut in, “No, no, you’re not making dinner. I’ll get something, anything! What would you like?”
“Oh, uh… really I can easily make —”
“You. Are. NOT. Making. Dinner. What would you like?” Taking in my utterly blank look, he (bless him) got up, put on his coat, and said, “I’ll be back with something.”
Tonight, he made spicy-hot quesadillas heaping with vegetables, because I’ve been talking about Tex-Mex. And he bought ice cream.
Yes. Yes, I am the luckiest. Thank you, Dr. Beardface.
*Tonight, I heard a term for this, a term I love so much I promptly stole it. The phrase is “waving, not drowning.”
I am so working on my essay for my Shakespearean lit class.
This is just a break, to stretch my legs and get a snack.
And that episode of Buffy I watched a bit ago, that was just a break, too. I needed to, uh, stretch my brain a little bit. And get a snack.
And earlier, when I was reading blogs and compulsively reloading my inbox (even though it automatically reloads itself) in hopes that I’d get a distracting email? Well, it’s important to stay fresh and alert. And get a snack.
The most productive part of my day: reading all those online essays by other students writing on the same play (though not the same subject, since plagiarism is bad, y’all and I didn’t dare run the risk of butting up against a similar line of argument). Not that I found a single thing to use, nor did I hope to. No! But reading some one else’s work, uh, recalibrated my standard a good deal lower. That’s a relief.
I’m getting right back to it now. Really! Just got to get a snack first.
Against the advice of all the voices in my seething brain squealing “NOOOOOOOOO!,” I just used Word Count and discovered to my astonishment: I’m halfway there. That’s a mercy, anyhow.
Just in time for the fall term and its heavy load of papers, here are some lesser-known proofreader’s marks. Like students of The Little Professor, from whom I cribbed the link, I could benefit from the “remove permanently from your lexicon” symbol. (It occurs to me that “lexicon” tops the list of overused words in my lexicon. Whoa — how meta.)
As children, we have so little concrete information about the world, and such a random collection of experience-based learning, that we construct oddly poetic worldviews and beliefs.
Some of these misconstructions of knowledge have their origin in semantic misunderstandings. Having been told repeatedly by our parents that we could be anything when we grew up, I decided at about age 4 that I would be the Pope. (We weren’t a Catholic family, and I had not the faintest idea of the Pope’s role; I just liked the hat.) Given the same sort of encouragement, my sister N. eagerly looked forward to becoming a circus bear.
Other childhood misconstructions are simple mechanisms for coping with common fears. Like many children, I believed a) that the night was filled with horrors, looming unseen in the dark, hungry for my innocent self; b) that keeping my head under the blankets protected me from these monsters. As an extension of this logic, and based on I-know-not what previous evidence, I further hypothesized that c) if I kept my head under the covers and held my breath for exactly sixty seconds, I was safe uncovered for the rest of the night. Although I cannot claim that my hypothesis was proven, it surely gained credibility as, night after night, no monsters attacked.
Ah, childhood beliefs. Some are just plain silly, some are quite touching, and some have the strangely comforting Lynchian quality that pervaded my own childhood.
I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire. —– Dan
Naturally.
Elli
Elsa