tingilinde

lines vs dots

A history of reading and the blind - a fascinating 99% Invisible show.  audio and transcript.

 

 

reference elvish

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his fantasies to create a world where the type of language he liked might seem real.  Here he reads the poem Namárië from The Lord of the Rings in Quenya. 

 

zaphod

Somehow Douglas Adams seems to have managed a reasonable portrait of Donald Trump with Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy   Zaphod is 

an adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

His flaws qualify him for the position of Galactic President largely because of what the President is for

The President in particular is very much a figurehead . . . the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.

This sounds exactly what the Republicans wanted ..  distract the masses while transferring money to the wealthy and cutting government. Even though he lacks a second head and third arm, Trump appears to be as gifted as Zaphod is carrying out the task. 

I wonder what Douglas would say now?

 

 

a quasicrystal thriller

A book review in Nature suggests an interesting non-technical science book.

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The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter Paul J. Steinhardt Simon & Schuster (2018)

Picture this. In Russia’s far east, a motley crew of conspirators races against time to solve a mystery hidden for billions of years. The enigma could link a speck of rock found in the dusty basement of an Italian museum to the evolution of the Solar System. To solve it, a brilliant theoretical physicist must overcome impossible odds, Kremlin agents, a vanished package, secret diaries and a trek across a volcanic peninsula.

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emily's space book list

Emily Lakdawalla has been recommending space science books for kids for a few years and tends to find the good ones.  

Here's her 2018 list.

We've already given My Heart is a Compass to a 4.5 yr old.

 

the worst alphabet book ever

This looks very promising for kids...  seriously 

the book of cheese

seriously - a book of cheese

 

 

the clueless and insane trump transition

An excerpt from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

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The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

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thar be a map

Maps in literature 

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In the beginning was the map. Robert Louis Stevenson drew it in the summer of 1881 to entertain his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, while on a rainy family holiday in Scotland. It depicts a rough-coasted island of woods, peaks, swamps and coves. A few place names are marked, which speak of adventure and disaster: Spyeglass Hill, Graves, Skeleton Island. The penmanship is deft, confident – at the island’s southern end is an intricate compass rose, and the sketch of a galleon at full sail. Figures signal the depth in fathoms of the surrounding sea, and there are warnings to mariners: “Strong tide here”, “Foul ground”. In the heart of the island is a blood-red cross, by which is scrawled the legend “Bulk of treasure here

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on tom lehrer

From a book review in Nature 

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The rousing ballad ‘Wernher von Braun’ undermines the former Nazi — who designed the V-2 ballistic missile in the Second World War and later became a key engineer in the US Apollo space programme. In Lehrer’s view, it was acceptable for NASA to hire von Braun, but making him into an American hero was grotesque. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?’/‘That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun” — lines that still resonate in today’s big-tech ethical jungle. ‘New Math’, meanwhile, skewers the education system through the lens of a misfired revolution in mathematics, with its telling refrain: “It’s so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it

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