The identity of the colors was always fertile territory for teenage philosophers. "What if my green is different from your green?" thousands of miniature Platos have mused to each other over the years, gazing at lava lamps, asking for another dose of PHILOSOPHER FUEL.
Until we can stick cameras into our consciousness, we simply don't know whether the qualia of color differs from person to person. What we do know is that about eight percent of the male population is colorblind.
So what is color blindness anyway? Our eyes are made up of rods and cones. Rods give us black and white. Cones give us color. People with 'normal' color vision have three different kinds of cones. The color blind suffer by with only two.
Most mammals have only two kinds of cones. And most birds have an astonishing four kinds of cones--which means that they can see into the ultraviolet range and can write poetry about flowers and sunsets just that smidge more expressively.
It is one of those enduring mysteries--what does it actually mean to see a color that you hadn't before? What does it actually mean that I can see a color that my colorblind colleagues could not even imagine?
I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's the Colour of Magic, a book I marinated my brain in when I was a little me. In it, the presence of magic can be detected by the presence of color otherwise non-existant. Except, I guess, by birds.
Inspired by the legendary Cecil Adams' Straight Dope.
Whatever the songs about lost love say--forgetting's easy. You can forget things simply by walking through a doorway.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame did an interesting experiment. They got their subjects to memorize a series of colors and shapes. Then they'd see how many of them they could remember. That's the dependent variable. The independent variable is that before they were asked to recall the colors and shapes, some of subjects walked through a real doorway, some walked through a virtual doorway and others didn't walk through a doorway at all. Those subjects who walked through a doorway--either real or virtual--had much worse memories than those subjects who stayed put.
This is the last in our series on the Four Great Inventions of China, and today we'll be looking at gunpowder--an invention that started as a miracle elixir, became a weapon, and ended as an inspiration.
Since the time of the first Qin Emperor, a single public policy goal has captured the imaginations of one Chinese head of state after the other. Take a guess at what it might be. It wasn't irrigation. It wasn't even conquest. Not parking reform. Aim a little higher.
Chinese Emperors wanted to overcome death. And unlike other morality-shy people like you or me, the Chinese Emperors could invest huge masses of manpower in order to attempt immortality. A huge industry of alchemical curiosities resulted, most of which had no effect at all on human health; some of which (like fortifying doses of mercury) actually killed you. Funnily enough, some actually ended up habving useful applications.
The Taoist alchemists' most ironic invention was gunpowder. Ironic in the Alanis Morisette usage. In the 9th Century, they discovered something interesting happened when you mixed saltpeter and charcoal. It was supposed to extend your life.
Instead it went boom.
A Bloody History
Gunpowder is the best examples of an invention that has been endlessly tinkered with. First, it was used as a medicine. Then, for fireworks. Then, as a weapon when the Chinese attatched bamboo tubes to arrows. The Mongol hordes in the 13th Century hauled cannon across the steppes to overcome the walls of Baghdad and Vienna--the first cannons Europe ever saw--cannons which made and operated by Chinese captives. Then, of course, there came the gun. The same gun which unarmored the knights, brought the great walled cities of Europe to heel, and armed the sans-coulottes who stormed the Bastille.
But That's Not What We're Talking About Today
No. It's not. In this history we've lingered far too long on the useful. It's time instead to look at the artistic, the awkward and the symbolic. For that we're going to turn our attention to one of the great books of Cold War literature, Riddley Walker. Warning in advance: minor non-book ruining spoilers follow.
Set after a nuclear holocaust that destroyed civilization, Riddley Walker is written in the dirtied, shattered argot of a bombed-out England. The word situation has become suching waytion. Alone has become loan. Revenue has become revver newit. At first, these strange words are like a screen which seperates you from the world of the book. But as you get more used to the it, the language becomes an extended metaphor for the earthy, broken post-apocalypse of semi-nomads, scroungers and farmers left behind after the bomb.
The book follows the eponymous hero as he goes in search of wisdom and the 1 Big 1--the bomb that destroyed civilization. What he finds in the end is far different. He finds gunpowder--the 1 Littl 1. For Hoban, gunpowder is the first step--but the first step where? Both forwards and back. Gunpowder represents the reclamation of ancient culture lost in the radioactive wastes. But it also portends war, death and extinction.
And it all started with a Chinese alchemist, yearning for impossible immortality, playing with saltpeter and charcoal--until it went boom.
And that's it for this series. I hope you've enjoyed it!
In the early days of Los Alamos the mesa town was full of science--but not fun. Though there was a twice-weekly movie night (at fifteen cents a head) besides that, the only other form of recreation was the single woman's dormitory--a small number of the residents of which started to charge single men for the privilege of female company. That and horse riding. The many young male scientists at the base had a critical case of boredom.
So those single scientists, blasting their brains on physics and fizzling away their youthful energies--they did what any pre-thirty year old would do. They partied like freshman girls at a state school. And now you can, too--with this authentic recipe for Los Alamos hooch.
Fill a 32-gallon G.I. can half with grapefruit juice, half with lab alcohol.
Add dry ice.
Serve.
????
Profit!
All the taste of the nuclear arms race, none of the hassle!
This is according to Martin Sherwin's biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus.
At one time the Buddha was staying in the Jeta Grove, near the city of Sravasti.
With him there was a community of 1,250 venerable monks and devoted disciples.
One day before dawn, the Buddha clothed himself, and along with his disciples took up his alms bowl and entered the city to beg for food door to door, as was his custom.
After he had returned and eaten, he put away his bowl and cloak, bathed his feet, and then sat with his legs crossed and body upright upon the seat arranged for him.
He began mindfully fixing his attention in front of himself, while many monks approached the Buddha, and showing great reverence, seated themselves around him.
So begins the Diamond Sutra, an ancient buddhist text illuminating the nature of reality.
And so begins the earliest printed text to which we can fix a date--868 A.D. The woodblock-printed scroll is five meters long, and beautifully illustrated. The text's finely wrought letters and detailed drawings is proof that at the time they were made in ancient China, woodblock printing was already a mature art, seven centuries or so before Mr. Gutenberg made his famous bible.
The sutra was discovered in a cave in the Chinese desert, where--along with about a thousand other books--it was sealed up at about the turn of the last millennia.
Why Does Gutenberg Get All The Credit?
It is not mere Western chauvinism--though surely that played a part. There was a deeper, more technical problem that prevented Chinese printing from assuming the world-historical importance of Gutenberg's printing press.
Despite this setback. the Chinese still developed a sophisticated method of printing called moveable type, in which individual characters can be moved around and reused to print different documents. But printing didn't catch on as explosively in the East as it did in the West.
The West has a huge advantage over China on this point, but it has nothing to do with how we usually imagine what distinguishes societies. It wasn't a difference in racial ability, or moral fortitude. It wasn't that the West was hard-working, and the East was decadent.
It was luck. European languages have a character count languishing in the mid-twenties--so any woodcutter with some degree of technical sophistication could cut his own type and start printing. Thus, the printing press led to a flourishing of printed material in the West, and only slightly cheaper buddhist texts in the East.
The Next Dimension
And now let's fast forward--to now. Printing is undergoing a new revolution, one which (depending on who you talk to) will create a new world of manufacturing, superabundance, and ease; will let us print our own action figures; or both; or--neither.
Welcome to the era of 3D printing.
3D printing is exactly how it sounds. A printer makes something. Like a 3D something. It sounds a bit science-fictiony, and in a world inured to miracles, I find that we really need to be beaten over the head with how amazing it actually is. Take a look at what now, in the first stuttering steps of the medium, 3-D printing is doing.
With woodblock printing, a 3D object--raised letters on a block of wood--was used to impress words on a 2D surface. With 3D printing, a 4D process is used to create a 3D object. Surely, 3D printing is simply the next step in a long process that started thousands of years ago with the Diamond Sutra. History, that capricious arbiter, is the only thing that will tell whether 3D printing will change the world, or remain a mere novelty.
Let's start by thinking about an element of household mystery--the kitchen magnet. Like every inquisitive toddler, your humble writer as a younger human spent hours sticking magnets to the fridge and pulling them off again.
Lodestone
The Chinese were also interested in the magic of magnets--specifically lodestone, one of only two naturally magnetized rocks on earth. While lodestone was described in about the fifth century, it took another five hundred years before we get a description of the first compass. It looked a lot different from what we'd include in our Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Kits. Step 1: Make a fish out of lodestone. Step 2: Float fish in a bowl of water. The fish's head will point north. Step 3: ???? Step 4: Profit.
The Chinese compass evolved. The fish turned into a ladle, and it was placed in the middle of a square plate representing the cosmos. Very useful if you wanted to practice geomancy. Not terribly useful for taking on a camping trip.
Today, with compasses being so common-place that they're included as consolation prizes at Skee-Ball rinks, we might take pause to see the compass ranked as a great invention. But do not pause! No! Resist the pausing! Be assured the humble compass changed the world by opening up the map to exploration.
The true power of the compass couldn'tbe realized however until two other inventions came on the scene. The first was the sextant, a tool used to accurately measure the distance between two points in the sky. The second was the marine chronometer, nothing more than a really really solid, accurate clock.
Latitude
This is what the ancients thought the world looked like. And why they needed better navigation.
Think of how easy it is to get lost, even these days with iPads equipped with Google Maps. Antiquity did not have iPods or Google, and because of this they suffered from an almost chronic case of disorientation. Maps were bad and often centuries out of date. Roads were treacherous when they existed, rife with tolls both official and unofficial and ruffian-enforced. And--unless you risked the moods of the sea or were rich enough to afford a horse--you had to make all your wrong turns on foot. The heroic historian Fernand Braudel estimated that in the 16th Century it took news roughly thirty days at top speed to get from the center of Europe to the edge.
Here's where the compass comes in. With a compass, you can orient yourself north. This is useful enough. But knowing where magnetic north becomes almost magical if you can get an accurate measurement of the sky.
No sextant jokes today.
To do this we have to wait until the sixteenth century for the invention of the sextant. The sextant is a majestic work of technology elegantly combining no less than three genius inventions. It consists of a telescope (necessary inventions: glass grinding; optics), a mirror, and a frame. If you know how to use a sextant, you can use it to find the distance between any two points in the sky.
Big whoop, boy scout, I can hear you snickering. But wait. If you know which way's north, and you can measure the position of the starts accurately, then you can fix you latitude with astonishing accuracy. This is convenient when your caravan gets stuck in the winding streets of Istanbul and you want to know how long it will take to make it to the Black Sea, but it can be downright life-saving if you are a booty-laden ship drifting across the Atlantic Ocean, wondering whether you took a wrong turn at Ireland.
Once people were able to get a handle of how far up or down the earth they were, the distance of the seas essentially shrunk. Ocean travel was less dangerous. The world was a little freer for commerce and freedom.
Longitude
But not, you know, completely free. Because while seamen could figure how much they'd moved up or down the earth, they were still could only guess how far East or West they were. The problem of longitude was a great concern for sailors.
The problem was that to figure out your longitude by looking at the stars, you needed to know exactly what time it was. Well, the haters are already saying to themselves, why don't they just use a watch?
Didn't you hear me say exactly? I mean exactly. The earth moves about fifteen degrees every hour, so an inaccuracy of a minute or two on the clock can mean a difference of hundreds of miles on land--that's the difference between landing your sloop in Manhattan or landing it in Maine. Added to this was the fact that the high seas were not very kind to clocks. On a long ocean voyage, clocks would heaved up and down by the crashing waves, they would stop, they would run fast or slow, their parts would expanded by the heat, and corroded by the humidity.
The solution was there for everyone to see. You just needed a really awesome clock. But while the solution was obvious, actually building an awesome clock without a pendulum was dreadfully difficult, and the intellectual giants of the 18th Century (I'm looking at you, Newton) didn't even think it was possible.
In the 18th Century, the British Government, knowing both the necessity of discovering longitude and that impossible things could indeed be achieved if you threw money at it, introduced the Longitude Prize to spur those dastardly inventors to invent a clock that could be used on the high seas. John Harrison, a British clockmaker, devoted his life to making this clock of all clocks in a story stuffed with so much event that it merited a book so wonderful to merit a TV series based on the book.
Once Harrison made the awesomest clock ever (officially called a marine chronometer, but whatevs) navigation became less guesswork, and more science. We came a long way from a lodestone fish floating in a pool of water. But remember--that's where it started, with Chinese geomancers playing with rocks.
Thanks for sticking around for this fact! I promise the next one won't be so involved! Please check back tomorrow, when we'll be looking at the third great Chinese invention--the printing press.
The history of the world can be written in many different ways. We can mark the centuries by the passing of kings, by the empires' ebbs and flows, or by the progress of science and invention. Each focus will make a different kind of history, with its own heroes, tragedies, and triumphs.
If we look at the history of civilization as the history of invention, the West crouches perilously on the fringes of world history, a minor player with only a few moments of greatness. Who dominates the story instead? China.
The most conspicuous evidence of classical Chinese technical superiority are the Four Great Inventions. Paper-making. The compass. Printing. Gunpowder. These, undoubtably, paved the way for the modern world.
Tinkering
We think of invention the same way we think of magic. A single person--lab coatted and wise--huddles in a dark room and creates this new thing. He emerges after months of invention, an iPod or a pulley in his hand, waiting for the thronging crowds of people to use the creation of his inventive genius.
In Malcom Gladwell's recent article on Steve Jobs, Gladwell suggests that real invention doesn't happen like this at all. Instead, it happens by tinkering. One person has a great idea--a washing machine or a printing press--and then other people take that idea and fool around with it until it becomes perfect. The first iteration of a great idea is like first tries everywhere. Kinda incomplete and crap.
These next few days we will be looking at the Four Great Inventions of China--not just the history of their invention, but also the genius that came when they were tinkered with. We will start with paper.
Paper
Before paper, if you wanted to write something down, you were in trouble. What could you use? Leather, which was expensive--or papyrus, which was expensive. Writing, literacy, the whole great life of the mind was relegated only to the rich who could afford the luxury of paper. (This also led to people actually having to remember stuff--using their brain!--and a number of mnemonic systems, including the Memory Palace, which perhaps is a topic for another post.)
But the course of the world was changed when Cai Lun appeared in the pages of history, because it's Cai Lun who assured that the pages of history would be paper, and not the skin of a stillborn calf. Cai Lun was a eunuch in China's Han dynasty. In the turn of the first century AD, he created the first modern-looking paper from mulberry bark and trash.
In the centuries to come this paper would be used for everything we use paper for and more. Armor, clothing, toilet paper, tea bags--and yes, good old fashioned writing material.
And so how was paper tinkered with? For that let's jump ahead a couple hundred years to the turn of the millennia. Because paper is not only simple writing material. Paper can become power. Dear reader, it was also in China that paper assumed its most potent transformation, from simple writing material--to money, the store of value, the root of all evil, step one in Tony Montana's simple rules for success.
The Chinese state issued the first paper currency. Again, it was made from mulberry bark. Printed with a picture of the amount in cash that the bank note could be exchanged for, these little scraps of paper greased the wheels trade for hundreds of years before the whole system crashed in an inflationary cataclysm.
Check back next time. Hopefully we'll have time for a double-header--we'll be tackling the invention of the compass and the printing press.
Every generation knows that it is in decline. The imperial Romans looked over their shoulders at the frugality of their fallen Republic and felt themselves unworthy. Now we all hem and haw about the existence of porn and reality TV. We wonder how it got this bad. How can a species survive when 4chan exists?
Well we have nothing on the animals.
Just take the humble Adactylidium mite, a matryoshka doll of indecency and horror. A little family of about eight or so sisters and one brother scurries around in mamma mite. The brother proceeds to impregnate his sisters while still inside the mother. Once the deed is done, the ungrateful bugs eat their way out of their mother, killing her. The brother mite, like so many males before it, just sits around mom's corpse; the sister mites make their horrible little ways to feed and grow, their awful issue already scurrying in their bellies, having sex, the next generation ready to emerge on an unsuspecting world.
What record of sin and venality these mites commit in their four-day long lives? Let's make an account. Incest--of the fetalphilic variety. Cannibalistic matricide. Polygamy. All this in four days. In four days I can barely commit a sin. It makes the worst of what human beings can come up with seem comparatively tame.
Next time someone tells you of the collapse in morals, just tell remind them to be thankful that we are not mites.
So--who would've predicted that holding down a full-time job teaching little tiny children, tending to a loving girlfriend, and writing fiction every morning would leave me so little time to blog about facts, real and imagined?
Nevermind. I know that I have been an awful curator of this bloglet, and I will heartily try to add more scribbles soon. I promise. All I need is more coffee. And about forty-five minutes more to every single day.
But! I've come to you today to tell you something important! I want your money! No seriously. But you get words in return!
I write a lot. Mostly fiction. I think I'm good enough to actually merit a real paper and binding book, but what with the moribund economy and some predictable eccentricities re: my book's actual genre, I remain unpublished. No publisher nor agent wants to take a risk on me.
So tonight I tossed caution to the wind and decided to make an eBook.
The book is called Three Rare Views of the Great Dictator. It's about a dictator of an imaginary country. It's more fun than it sounds.
Leave a comment. Like the book on Facebook. And read it! Enjoy it on your ereaders! Tell your friends! Write a review! Even tiny acts of recognition can give my manuscript the little boost that it needs.
The practice of stamping shapes on biscuits is actually practical--it helps the crackers achieve even puffiness in the baking process. It's called 'docking'. Bakers have used a wide variety of tools for this task--before factories, bakers used “a dangerous-looking utensil consisting of sharp heavy spikes driven into a bun-shaped piece of wood.” Find out more at this fascinating story on the blog Edible Geography. via The Browser.
A day didn't used to be 24 hours. In fact, the rotation of the earth is slowing down. So back in the time of the dinosaurs, a day was only 22 and 1/4 hours.
So if you ever complain about there not being enough hours in a day, your solution is simple: travel back in time.
Paris. If all you ever knew about Paris came from watching Hollywood films, you'd assume that as soon as you alighted from your plane at Charles De Gaulle your journey would consist of nothing but falling in love, eating scrumptious food, and marveling at the wealth of beauty and culture that Paris affords.
People who've been to the City of Love can tell you that despite the city's charms, the streets smell like piss. It's a great city--but it's still a city, inhabited by humans in all their sweaty variety.
Travelers need to inure themselves against disappointment. Those who don't might have some problems.
One of those problems is Paris Syndrome. Sometimes, when Japanese tourists visit Paris, they are so disappointed by the tawdry reality of the city that they can suffer from a mental breakdown. The problems with the language barrier, the informality of the French, and the horror of international travel all compound to make the victim of Paris Syndrome so disappointed that they crack. The Japanese Embassy in Paris reportedly sends home about 20 people suffering from Paris Syndrome each year.
The incredible podcaster Dan Carlin (creator of one of my favorite podcasts Hardcore History) is now on Reddit doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything.) Check it out.
Captain Kidd's name occupies the highest strata of pirate fame--the strata that's festooned with eye patches, peg legs and parrots, the strata that's immortalized in millions of seven year olds' Halloween costumes. But recent research has shown that Captain Kidd might not have actually been a pirate after all. The poor man was probably framed.
There's an important distinction to make between piracy and privateering. Being a pirate is relatively easy. You outfit a ship (with lots of cannons and stuff), go out on the ocean, and every other ship you see--you try to steal their stuff. Privateering is another matter entirely. To be a privateer you get a fancy piece of paper from your government called a letter of marque and then you prey on other country's ships and it's all legal.
This was the distinction which Captain Kidd hoped would save his life. See, Captain Kidd was hanged for being a pirate. But he claimed that he had a letter of marque. He was a privateer.
The only problem was that Kidd's letter of marque had been issued in pretty dubious circumstances by a cabal of powerful men who wanted to personally profit from Kidd's privateering. The cabal which gave Kidd his letter of marque were all high-ranking members of the current government, and when Kidd was captured and tried, none of them would jump to the poor man's defense for fear of, you know, being disgraced for outfitting a pirate.
When Kidd was hanged the noose broke, leaving Kidd squirming, in pain, hanging from the scaffold--but not dead. At the time this kind of thing was considered a gentle divine suggestion that a miscarriage of justice was being committed, but people wanted Kidd eliminated, and so he was strung up again and sent to Pirate Heaven. Or Privateer Heaven, if you prefer.
In the Second World War, the Soviets suffered more casualties in Stalingrad than the total combined causalities suffered by the Americans and the British for the entire war.
Over the course of the war the Soviet Union lost about 15% of its population.
When we think about the Second World War we think of the battle in France, of troops marching through Berlin, of the atom bomb exploding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the real story of the Second World War happened along the Eastern Front--a brutal destructive stalemate where two dictators threw countless human lives against each other without regard for the death or carnage that ensued.
Statistics from the BBC History Magazine Podcast's story on the Eastern Front in their June 2011 edition. I also encourage everyone to listen to Dan Carlin's wonderful podcast on the Eastern Front, Ghosts Of The Ostfront. It will give you nightmares. Historically accurate nightmares.
Before the Revolution of 1848 the tiny principality of Monaco had a really good deal going for it. Monaco was allowed to tax all the orange and lemon trees in Provence. The Princes of Monaco didn't need to do much more than sit back, look out at the Mediterranean, and wait for the farmers of Provence to bring them fresh lemon-scented money. But nothing is forever. In 1848 persky Revolutionaries put an end to many aristocratic privileges--including Monaco's right to tax those tasty citrus fruits.
What's a small principality to do? Countless other once-privileged elites across France and the rest of Europe took this opportunity to curl up into a vomit-stained ball of debauchery and decadence. The Princes of Monaco had a better idea. They would give other people a place where they could curl up into vomit-stained balls of debauchery and decadence. They would open a casino.
And it worked. Today, Monaco is still a country. The Princes of Monaco are still rich. And people still come to the minuscule country to waste their money and get drunk.
And every so often, the scent of lemon and orange wafts through the air, suggesting to the Princes the simplicity of a past time.
Found in C.A. Bayley's The Birth Of The Modern World, Chapter 11, The Reconstruction of Social Hierarchies.
Smörgåsbord, the legendary tableful of tasty edibles, comes to us from the Swedish language. It means literally Butter-Goose-Table.
Today, courtesy of the Canadian Science radio show Quirks and Quarks' annual Question Roadshow, I present a veritable Butter-Goose-Tableful of facts for you, my loyal readers. I encourage you to listen to the whole program.
The show answers burning questions, such as:
Why do Canadian Geese honk when they fly? (To let other geese know where they are.)
AND
How do lakes get fish in them? (In the past, lakes were connected to each other by rivers, and the enterprising fish swam up these rivers.)
AND
Are identical twins actually identical? (Yes and no.)
My fact-loving readership will devour this, I'm sure. Save room for the Butter-Goose, though!
You can't blame him. First, he suffered from twenty years of painful cancer. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Other times it kills you.) Then, he had to escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna.
One day in his exile, he sat down, read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin (the Magic Skin) cover to cover, and then was administered an overdose of morphine. And he died.
Everything a person is--every thought, feeling, idea and memory--is little more than an instance of brain activity. This is a radical and unsettling idea. My feeling of love is correlated with a particular set of neurons firing. My appreciation of great works of art is identical with activity in a particular region of my brain. I am a meat computer, weighing about three pounds, engorged with blood.
Though it may be unpalatable, there's a lot of evidence that the mind is nothing more than the brain. For instance, brain damage can often cause profound changes in human behavior. Take the case of the 40 year old schoolteacher who suddenly became an uncontrollable pedophile. His wife discovered him downloading child porn. He visited massage parlors. He even solicited sex from children.
But he also complained of horrible headaches. He urinated on himself and didn't care. He was unable to copy writing and drawings.
A day before he was supposed to go to prison on child molestation charges, he was put into an MRI. Doctors discovered a tumor in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex. When the tumor was removed, his sex addiction vanished.
But wait! Later, the man complained of headaches again and started to secretly collect porn. A second trip to the MRI revealed that the tumor had only be incompletely removed. The doctors out the remaining tumor, and the man was better again.
I heard about this story on the Philosophy Bites interview with David Eagleman. Check out the rest of the episode--it's a fascinating look into the intersection of ethics and neuroscience.
Turns out Bill O'Reilly likes Glenn Beck and hates Sean Hannity.
Ailes also faced internal resistance to Beck’s rise. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck and can’t stand Hannity, scheduled Beck as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further.
Eg White. Al "Shux" Shuckburgh. You've heard their music in your car, hummed along to their words in the shower. Just who are they again?
These men are professional songwriters. Pop stars--it turns out--don't actually have enough time to write their own material, so they hire other people to do it for them (a lovely example of the increasing division of labor, by the way.)
No doubt it' efficient. Here's the wonderfully named Eg White on his process.
Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: 'All right, shall we write a song?' And by six, they've gone home and we've fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.
Efficient, sure. But there's something dreadfully unsatisfying to know that many of the songs making up the soundtrack to our lives were made this way--like work. We want our art to be the product of pure feeling, not the product of a guy trying to get a paycheck. When the market gets involved, we feel like our art has been compromised somehow.
Tangent time. This is one of the reasons for the snobbery of modern art. There's plenty of fantastic and appealing commercial art. But since it turns a profit, we're hesitant to call it real art--'high' art. True art is the art that could not survive the market--the art that must be supported by museums and art schools, rather than by people actually buying it and hanging it on their walls.
Well I think that's an awful way of looking at art. The test of art is in our experience of art--how we hear the song, how we see the painting, how we read the novel.
So tonight when you open up iTunes, raise your celebratory beverage of choice to the invisible professional songwriters, those shadowy men who make the music we hum along with.
Well folks, today here in Turkey it's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day! Hooray! Everyone has the day off! Including me. So I'm going to slide into bed and rest enough to get over the horrible cough that's been plaguing me all week.
In the beginning, if you wanted stuff you had to give someone else stuff that they wanted. I want your goat, I have to give you twenty-five turnips. If you don't like turnips, tough cookies for me. Or tough turnips. I don't get your goat.
Slowly, and perhaps inevitably, people chose a particular good to exchange better than all other goods. It could be cowrie shells. Or barley. Or whiskey (in Revolutionary Era-America.) But the grandpappy of cool stuff to swap was gold.
Gold was nice and shiny. It didn't rust or degrade. And it was relatively light. This made trade a lot easier. If I want your goat, I don't need to bother with whether or not you want turnips. I can sell my turnips for some gold, give you that gold, and you can give someone else gold for that iPod touch you've been eyeing up.
But there was a big problem with gold: there wasn't enough of it. People wanted to trade, but they couldn't because they couldn't get the gold. People did all sorts of crazy things to get over the lack of gold. From the bill of exchange to the Ming banknote, getting over the problem of the scarcity of gold was troubling business. But what could you do?
Then paper currency came along. Paper currency was light, movable, there was (usually) enough of it. Soon people didn't really care about gold. And the world dropped thegold standard sometime during the Second World War.
We may be seeing a revolution in currency every bit as wild as paper currency. Say hello to BitCoin. The world's first electronic currency.
When you love someone, what's better than giving them a little reminder of yourself? A poem. A picture. Something that reminds your lover of you when you are gone. The male blanket octopus has found the perfect gift. He gives his mate his penis.
Well, it's not really his penis. Male octopuses have a special sperm tentacle which they use to give lady octopuses their sperm sack. Sounds lovely, I know, but it gets the job done. When Mr. Blanket Octopus hands over his bag of squiggly octopod love, Mrs. Blanket Octopus gets a little something extra. He gives her his entire love tentacle. And then he dies.
Isn't nature great?
Source: Sex Drugs and Sea Slime on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, May 14th.
Welcome to Learning Today. I come across a huge number of facts in my daily procrastinating, and I thought--why not share those facts with the world? Or at least with the tiny number of humans and web-bots that read this blog?
Our inaugural bit of wisdom comes today from China's imperial examination system. Civil servants in Imperial China were chosen on the basis of their performance on a test. Hooray meritocracy, you say! Not so fast. This wasn't a test of actual practical things. This was a test of the Chinese classics. It was horrifically difficult. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, failed his examinations over four times--despite scoring in the top one percent of applicants. People would spend their lives taking the exams. Makes GRE test prep look peachy, no?
Why were the exams so hard? For an example, look at the dreaded eight-legged essay. Not only did the eight-legged essay give strict limits on the word count, structure and expression, but it demanded that writers not mention anything that happened after the death of Mencius in 298 B.C. From Wiki:
Words, phraseology, or references to events that occurred after the death of Mencius in 298 BC were not allowed, since the essay was supposed to explain a quote from one of the Confucian classics by "speaking for the sage"; and Confucius or his disciples could not have referred to events that occurred after their deaths.[1]
Shearwater perfectly expresses a certain feeling: you're sailing with some friends and at some point a quietness comes over everyone so you look over the prow. You listen to the waves lap at the boat. You watch the proud sea. A bird flies overhead and looks lonely and beautiful. And even though you're smiling and you know that actually you are quite content, you feel a deep and bitter sadness. Then for a minute or two nobody speaks.
