Futility Closet

"Rx.com is no longer filling prescriptions."

The Museum of E-Failure collects the farewell pages of 900 failed dot-coms. Bring flowers.

Rules, Mt. Holyoke College, 1837:

1. No young lady shall become a member of Mt. Holyoke Seminary who cannot kindle a fire, mash potatoes, and repeat the multiplication table and at least two-thirds of the shorter catechism.
2. Every member of the school shall walk a mile a day unless a freshet, earthquake, or some other calamity prevent.
3. No young lady shall devote more than an hour a day to miscellaneous reading.
4. No young lady is expected to have gentlemen acquaintances unless they are returned missionaries or agents of benevolent societies.

If there's a master's cup for science-fiction visionaries, it might actually belong to Herman Hesse. In a late novel, the German author seemed to imagine the World Wide Web, and its kaleidoscopic hyperlinks, fifty years before it existed.

Das Glasperlenspiel, which won the Nobel Prize in 1946, centers on "the Glass Bead Game," in which players combine the symbols of world cultures into new and insightful combinations. Here's his description of the game — see if this doesn't sound like the Web:

"The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe."

Hesse never quite explains how the game is played, which has set a lot of modern designers working on playable variants. The most popular is Charles Cameron's HipBone Game (here's an example of a board game, but Cameron's working on a web-based version). This bears watching: The web is constantly evolving, and perhaps Hesse's vision is still ahead of us.

"When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion." — Abraham Lincoln

The This Page Intentionally Left Blank Project "offers Internet wanderers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web."

I think Jorge Luis Borges' fiction is growing on me. I still find the stories don't work well as stories, but the images behind them — labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, and infinity — are really compelling. Like M.C. Escher, he conveys a mathematical sensibility without ever invoking math.

One story, "The Library of Babel," flirts enough with combinatorics and topology to earn a spot in Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction database. Kasman, a math professor at South Carolina's College of Charleston, has collected 469 novels, stories, plays, and scripts touching everything from number theory to trigonometry.

Twenty-three of these works are available for free online, from Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to Cory Doctorow's "The Rapture of the Nerds." "Mathematicians should be interested in these works of 'mathematical fiction' even if we do not enjoy them," Kasman writes, "because they both affect and reflect the non-mathematician's view of this subject."

One thing I'm coming to like about Borges is that he wrote only stories, essays, and poems, no longer works. I suppose that's in keeping with their dreamlike quality, but I also appreciate it as a reader. Short is good.

The Creationist Fossil Shop: "Selling Unancient Artifacts of Life's Not Evolving"

Slovenian mathematician Andrej Bauer's Random Art program converts phrases into art — some of it stunningly good, and some even on display at a Ljubljana internet cafe.

You can submit your own phrase, if you like, though Bauer warns that there's no telling how it will turn out. Past visitors have tried "Bon Jovi", "Malignant Brain Cancer", "The Bible Is Fiction", and "Homer Simpson", with, ah, mixed results. Vote for your favorite.

The Greeks believed diamonds were tears of the gods. The Romans thought they were splinters of fallen stars. Today, "Diamonds are a con, pure and simple."

So says Cecil Adams, and as usual, he's right. Over the last 60 years South Africa's De Beers diamond cartel has manipulated emotions, markets and social conventions to make a fortune out of thin air. And you may well be one of their victims.

De Beers didn't invent the diamond engagement ring — that goes back to 1477 — but it was their 1938 marketing campaign that established it in the popular consciousness as the final symbol of true love.

The company's PR agency, N.W. Ayer, created a new form of advertising, with no brand name, just the idea of "the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." They planted romantic stories in movies and magazines; they paid fashion designers to promote the trend; they even got the English royal family to promote it.

Meanwhile, the slogan "A Diamond Is Forever" discouraged women from selling diamonds or from buying them secondhand from other women. With no secondary market, the cartel controlled the price, which explains why it varies widely, unlike gold's. De Beers focused on controlling supply, too, limiting production, cutting off competition and buying up surplus gems.

It worked. Worldwide diamond sales rose from $100,000 in 1932 to $2.1 billion in 1979, all on the strength of a manufactured emotional impulse. Japan even adopted them as a Western status symbol — today it's the second largest market for retail diamonds.

It's De Beers that tells you to spend two months' salary on an engagement ring, and it's probably De Beers who's selling it to you. "The value of diamonds rests on a number of assiduously cultivated myths," write David Pallister, Sarah Stewart and Ian Lepper in the book South Africa Inc. "One is that diamonds are special."

A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared and not a bit more.

– Leigh Mercer