“Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent.”
These words, as I am told,
Were spoken by Laozi.
If we are to believe that Laozi
Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
Of five thousand words?
— Bai Juyi
A Closer Look
Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength consists essentially of an extraordinarily slow 45-minute zoom on a photograph on the wall of a room. William C. Wees of McGill University points out that this raises a philosophical question: What visual event does this zoom create? In a tracking shot, the camera moves physically forward, and its viewpoint changes as a person’s would as she advanced toward the photo. In Wavelength (or any zoom) the camera doesn’t move, and yet something is taking place, something with no analogue in ordinary experience.
“If I actually walk toward a photograph pinned on a wall, I find that the photograph does, indeed, get larger in my visual field, and that things around it slip out of view at the peripheries of my vision. The zoom produces equivalent effects, hence the tendency to describe it as ‘moving forward.’ But I am really imitating a tracking shot, not a zoom. … I think it is safe to say that no perceptual experience in the every-day world can prepare us for the kind of vision produced by the zoom.”
“What, in a word, happens during a viewing of that forty-five minute zoom? And what does it mean?”
(From Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever, 2018.)
In a Word
hyetal
adj. of or belonging to rain
Podcast Episode 263: Memories of Proust
Confined in a Soviet prison camp in 1941, Polish painter Józef Czapski chose a unique way to cope: He lectured to the other prisoners on Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Czapski’s ambitious project and the surprising importance of literature to the prisoners of oppressive regimes.
We’ll also race some lemons and puzzle over a woman’s birthdays.
Unquote
“Most people consider a glass as half empty or half full. I look at it as too big.” — George Carlin
“The Oldest Written Will”
William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the famous English Egyptologist, unearthed not many years ago at Kahun a will which was forty-five hundred years old. There seems no reason to question either the authenticity or antiquity of the document. The will therefore antedates all other known written wills by nearly two thousand years. That excellent authority, the Irish Law Times, speaks of the will so entertainingly that its comments are here reproduced:
‘The document is so curiously modern in form that it might almost be granted probate today. But, in any case, it may be assumed that it marks one of the earliest epochs of legal history, and curiously illustrates the continuity of legal methods. The value, socially, legally and historically, of a will that dates back to patriarchal times is evident.
‘It consists of a settlement made by one Sekhenren in the year 44, second month of Pert, day 19 — that is, it is estimated, the 44th of Amenemhat III, or 2550 B. C. — in favor of his brother, a priest of Osiris, of all his property and goods; and of another document, which bears date from the time of Amenemhat IV, or 2548 B. C. This latter instrument is, in form, nothing more nor less than a will, by which, in phraseology that might well be used today, the testator settles upon his wife, Teta, all the property given him by his brother, for life, but forbids in categorical terms to pull down the houses “which my brother built for me,” although it empowers her to give them to any of her children that she pleases. A “lieutenant” Siou is to act as guardian of the infant children.
‘This remarkable instrument is Witnessed by two scribes, with an attestation clause that might almost have been drafted yesterday. The papyrus is a valuable contribution to the study of ancient law, and shows, with a graphic realism, what a pitch of civilization the ancient Egyptians had reached — at least from a lawyer’s point of view. It has hitherto been believed that, in the infancy of the human race, wills were practically unknown.’
— Ohio Law Reporter, Nov. 13, 1911
Bonus Flinders Petrie oddity:
Mr. Flinders Petrie, a contributor of interesting experiments on kindred subjects to Nature, informs me that he habitually works out sums by aid of an imaginary sliding rule, which he sets in the desired way and reads off mentally.
He does not usually visualise the whole rule, but only that part of it with which he is at the moment concerned.
I think this is one of the most striking cases of accurate visualising power it is possible to imagine.
— Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883
Motivation
Rev. A. B. Fuller, of Boston, very energetically opposed the idea that a teacher should not aid a pupil. Otherwise they might as well not have a teacher. The first assistance should be to inspire an interest in the study pursued, so that it shall be loved. He thought some subjects, as presented by teachers and authors, were so dry that no one could be interested in them, and no one scarcely could have patience to go through with the text-books used. He referred to a book which was studied while he was at Cambridge as an illustration. On its fly leaf some student had written —
If there should be another flood,
To this book for refuge fly;
For if all else should be o’erwhelmed,
This book would still be dry.
— The Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, 1857
Pinpointing
Suppose that on some occasion the chiming of a bell (that is, its ringing) shattered a glass located half a mile from the bell. There was an event that was the bell’s chiming and one that was the glass’s shattering; and their locations are straightforward. But what of the location of the bell’s shattering of the glass?
— Lawrence Brian Lombard, Events: A Metaphysical Study, 2019
The Founder Effect
The population on the left has equal numbers of blue and red individuals. But if it colonized a new area using a very small number of individuals, one color or the other might predominate, with sometimes dramatic effects.
The Afrikaner population of South Africa is descended primarily from one shipload of immigrants that landed in 1652. One of these colonists carried the gene for Huntington’s disease, an autosomal dominant disease that causes a fatal breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. Most cases of the disease in the modern Afrikaner population can be traced to that individual.
Another condition, lipoid proteinosis, has been traced to Jacob Cloete, a German immigrant to the Cape in 1652. His great-grandson, Gerrit Cloete, migrated to Namaqualand in 1742. The area is somewhat isolated, so intermarriages were relatively common, compounding the effect.
(Thanks, Matt.)
“Atomyriades”
Nature, it seems, is the popular name
For milliards and milliards and milliards
Of particles playing their infinite game
Of billiards and billiards and billiards.
— Piet Hein