In 1610, Ludolph van Ceulen died of exhaustion after deriving 35 decimal digits of pi.
They’re engraved on his tombstone.
Error Message Generator
Create your own Windows error messages with Atom Smasher’s new utility.
Holyoke Rules
Rules, Mt. Holyoke College, 1837:
- 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.
- Every member of the school shall walk a mile a day unless a freshet, earthquake, or some other calamity prevent.
- No young lady shall devote more than an hour a day to miscellaneous reading.
- No young lady is expected to have gentlemen acquaintances unless they are returned missionaries or agents of benevolent societies.
The Glass Bead Game
If there’s a master’s cup for science-fiction visionaries, it might actually belong to Hermann 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.
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The This Page Intentionally Left Blank Project “offers Internet wanderers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web.”
A Girl’s Best Fiend
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.”
Photon Finish
I’ve been sleeping badly this winter. I’m dead tired in the evening, but I wake up unaccountably at 3 a.m. I’m not positive what the reason is, but I’m going to blame daylight saving time.
I had to do some research even to understand why we follow this barbaric practice. Some people think farmers are somehow to blame, but farmers actually hate DST, because farm animals, pretty sensibly, don’t observe it.
The real point is supposed to be that when the days are long we shift an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. That way, there’s still plenty of daylight after work, so everyone uses less light, TVs, VCRs, etc., which together use 25 percent of our energy. In the winter, pitch-black mornings start to take their own toll, so we shift the clocks back again.
That’s the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. I may use less light if the sun’s up, but I’ll still be watching Scrubs. And now I’ll have my A/C on. I guess they figure I might go out and play football instead, but is that really happening? Two-thirds of this country is overweight.
Worse, the time change zonks people out. This country loses $56 billion a year to sleepiness, plus 24,000 deaths, 2.5 million disabling injuries and 52 million work days. Sleep deficits contributed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. We’re actually sleeping 2 hours less each night because of Edison’s light bulb.
So what’s the answer? Just drop it. Arizona, Hawaii, and most of Indiana stay on standard time year round. And having lived in Indiana, I can tell you it’s wonderful.
In 1947, the magnificently crotchety Robertson Davies wrote: “I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.” Hear, hear.
Ow!
St. Ambrose is the patron saint of beekeepers.
Unquote
“I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys; I think that’s a record.” — Dylan Thomas’ last words
Well Suited
Bryan Berg builds houses of cards — mansions of cards — and his Cardstacker Gallery has some astounding photos, including a record-breaking 25-foot tower.
When the Christian Science Monitor asked whether he could build a 100-foot tower, he said, “Sure. But it’s going to take a while.”
“I have to look twice before I move,” he says. “I basically go into slow motion.”
(A 100-foot tower could actually be dangerous. The 25-footer took more than 1,500 decks — about 250 pounds — of cards. “With something that big,” Berg says, “if it fell and you were near it, you’d run the risk of being buried.”)
Berg teaches architecture at Iowa State University, but he says his training didn’t help with the cards. Vice versa, actually: “I would even say that the majority of what I know about the structural behavior of real buildings and building materials came from my experiences building with cards.”