The Robben Island Notebooks

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kathrada_coons_crop.jpg

Sentenced in 1964 to life in prison, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada got permission during his confinement to pursue a history degree through the University of South Africa. He used his access to books and writing materials to compile a series of secret notebooks in which he recorded quotations that inspired him. Together they form what used to be called a commonplace book — a series of personal memoranda that, taken together, illuminate the spirit of the compiler:

Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die. — Vittorio Alfieri

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. — Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined (1873)

One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth. — Voltaire

The triumph of wicked men is always short-lived. — Honore de Balzac, The Black Sheep

(Form of oath-taking among Shoshone Indians is:) The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?

Conrad wrote that life sometimes made him feel like a cornered rat waiting to be clubbed.

Nobody knows what kind of government it is who has never been in prison. — Leo Tolstoy

Leve fit, quod bene fertur onus. (A burden becomes lightest when it is well borne.)

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. — Sun Tzu

Verba volant, scripta manent. (The spoken word flees; the written word remains.) — Ancient Roman adage

(Peter Ustinov explains why he reads so much:) “If you’re going to be the prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is to make sure it’s well furnished.”

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell

Altogether “Kathy” compiled seven notebooks over 26 years, drawing not just on his study materials and smuggled newspapers but on 5,000 books donated to the prison library by a Cape Town bookstore. Finally released in 1989, he went on to become a member of Parliament after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and served as President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor until 1999.

One of his former warders, Christo Brand, told him, “I was supposed to be your master, but instead you became my mentor.”

(Sahm Venter, ed., Ahmed Kathrada’s Notebook From Robben Island, 2005.)

| History · Quotations · Society

Misc

  • Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe all died on July 4.
  • Australia is wider than the moon.
  • NoNRePReSeNTaTiONaLiSm can be assembled from chemical symbols.
  • 1 × 56 – 1 – 7 = 15617
  • “‘Needless to say’ is, needless to say, needless to say.” — Enoch Haga
| History · Language · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

His Image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198745
Images: PLOS One

In 2018 a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina presented 511 American Christians with randomly paired pictures of faces and asked them to identify which of the pair more closely resembled the face of God. By combining the selected faces, the psychologists could produce a composite image of the Creator as envisioned by various groups. (Here, the image on the left is God as young participants imagine him; the one on the right is how he’s seen by older participants.)

Liberals tend to imagine that God is younger, more feminine, and more loving than conservatives, and African-Americans picture a God who looks more African-American than Caucasians do, but the traditional image of the powerful older man with the flowing beard is nowhere to be seen.

“People’s tendency to believe in a God that looks like them is consistent with an egocentric bias,” said senior author Kurt Gray. “People often project their beliefs and traits onto others, and our study shows that God’s appearance is no different — people believe in a God who not only thinks like them, but also looks like them.”

One exception, though: Men and women believed in an equally masculine-looking God.

(Joshua Conrad Jackson, Neil Hester, and Kurt Gray, “The Faces of God in America: Revealing Religious Diversity Across People and Politics,” PLOS One, June 11, 2018.)

| Religion · Science & Math

The Mystery Tombstone

In Plymouth, Tobago, lies a tomb with an enigmatic inscription:

Within these walls are deposited the bodies of Mrs. Betty Stiven and her child. She was the beloved wife of Alex B Stiven to the end of his days will deplore her death which happened upon the 25th day of Nov. 1783 in the 23rd year of her age. What was remarkable of her, she was a mother without knowing it, and a wife without letting her husband know it except by her kind indulgences to him.

Theories abound, but there’s no consensus as to its meaning.

| Oddities

Reciprocity

In 2006, Math Horizons challenged its readers to pose a problem in such a way that it contained its own answer. Rheta Rubenstein of the University of Michigan-Dearborn offered a pair of questions that answer one another:

  1. What fraction of the letters in three-eighths are vowels?
  2. What fraction of the letters in one-third are vowels?

(“Self-Answering Problems,” Math Horizons 13:4 [April 2006], 19.)

| Science & Math

“Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk”

Another poem by James Clerk Maxwell:

The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.

Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.

O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes.

Through many a volt the weber flew,
And clicked this answer back to me;
I am thy farad staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.

| Poems · Technology

Ambition

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Unfinished_Obelisk,_Aswan,_AG,_EGY_(48027110231).jpg

In a quarry at Aswan lies an unfinished obelisk, the largest the ancient Egyptians ever attempted. It’s 137 feet long and weighs more than 1,000 tons, more than two jumbo jets or 200 African elephants. If it had been completed it would have weighed more than twice as much as any other obelisk that the Egyptians ever erected. Cracks appeared in the granite before workers could carve it from the bedrock, so the project was abandoned.

“The obelisk is so large that it makes a cameo appearance in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film The Ten Commandments,” writes Egyptologist Bob Brier in Cleopatra’s Needles (2021). “In one scene we see Israelites toiling under the whip of a cruel taskmaster, pulling a large block of stone up an inclined ramp. That incline is the unfinished obelisk!”

| History · Technology

Sound Sense

https://www.pexels.com/photo/musical-speaker-sound-192385/

What is sound? We’re told that it’s a wave traveling through a medium, but we don’t hear sounds as existing in the air; we hear them as located at the place where they’re generated. Is sound a quality of an object or of the surrounding medium?

“Listening to the birds outside your window, the students outside your door, the cars going down your street, in the vast majority of cases you will perceive those sounds as being located at the place where they originate,” writes St. Joseph’s University philosopher Robert Pasnau. “But if sounds are in the air, as the standard view holds, then the cries of birds and of students are all around you. This is not how it seems.”

Properly speaking, then, where should we say a sound is located? At its point of origin, or filling the air?

(Robert Pasnau, “What Is Sound?” Philosophical Quarterly 49:196 [July 1999], 309-324.)

| Oddities

Lip Service

British tongue twisters:

United States twin-screw steel cruisers.

I shot three shy thrushes. You shoot three shy thrushes.

The rain ceaseth and sufficeth us.

A wicked cricket critic.

Many an anemone sees an enemy anemone.

All I want is a proper cup of coffee,
Made in a proper copper coffee pot.
You can believe it or not —
I want a cup of coffee
In a proper coffee pot.
Tin coffee pots or
Iron coffee pots,
They’re no use to me,
If I can’t have a
Proper cup of coffee
In a proper copper coffee pot
I’ll have a cup of tea.

Ken Parkin’s 1969 Anthology of British Tongue-Twisters is arranged anatomically, so to speak, according to the part of the mouth that gets the workout. These are listed under “Two Lips”:

Bill Badger brought the bear a bit of boiled bacon in a brown bag.

Gig-whip. Gig-whip. Gig-whip.

The broom blooms when the bluebells bloom.

And “Weak writers want white ruled writing paper.”

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