The film has won several awards, so I really want to see it eventually.

The views of Asgard shown in the clip don't really do justice to just how dramatic the mountain can appear. It looks like something you imagine could only be located in Mordor.

Mt. Asgard, Baffin Island, 1994

I set up my camp in a snow storm and didn't have any real idea where Asgard was when I settled in. In the morning the skies had mostly cleared and this is the sight before me when I opened my tent. Awesome.

It has been receiving some great press, but this comment from the head buyer at City Lights Books in San Francisco captures the book as well as anything else I've read:

“This is a book about whales, in much the same way that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book about a travel guide. It riffs on the Norse sagas while creating more of its own, myths so convincing I even wikipediad them. It subverts the shared histories of the peoples of the American northeast and of northern Europe in exactly the same way a William Vollmann book wouldn’t. It is a masterpiece of the comic novel: sarcastic, self- deprecating, Candide-esque, with an absolute love of the English language, especially its poor American cousin. If you’ve ever hoped there would be just one more Douglas Adams novel….”

Cory is the guest blogger at Powell's Books this week. You can get a feel for his style in this tale of his bare-assed abutter.

I've seen a few early drafts, but am looking forward to reading it again in its final form. Good luck Cory!

Orbital Dynamics of the Moon (via Wikipedia)

This however is only the maximum southern limit of the lunar Arctic Circle; it does not account for the procession of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth itself. The points where the moon crosses the elliptic process counterclockwise around the Earth every 18.6 years. (See the points labelled "ascending node" and "descending node" in the diagram above.) This means that the lunar Arctic Circle oscillates ±5° 8′ relative the solar Arctic Circle over that period. Once every period the point of maximum deflection of the Moon’s orbit above the elliptic is in line with the Earth's axis; 9.3 years later it is out of phase and thus, 5° 8′ below the elliptic making the latitude at which it would be visible due north that much higher.

So, while the limit of the lunar Arctic Circle is 61° 28′, it only reaches that latitude once every 18.6 years.

¹ This is in fact one piece of evidence that the Moon was formed by an impact of Earth by a Mars-sized planetoid early in the formation of the Solar System. If the Earth and Moon were formed at the same time, the Moon’s orbit would most likely be along the axis of the Earth’s rotation, while a planetoid, orbiting on the elliptic with the Earth would have ejected material into the elliptical plane upon impact.

An anecdote from David Graeber's new book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"

It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. I put something together here based on JQuery and the JavaScript InfoViz Toolkit. It makes use of the HTML5 <canvas> element, so support for Internet Explorer is provided by the Google excanvas package.

I still have a lot of tweaking to do but the results so far are pretty nice.

Multiple titles can be added using a comma-separated list. JSONP requests are made to Wikipedia asynchronously, so more terms can be added while it is accumulating results.

There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain. This is relatively rare. If it finds that it moves to the next link in the chain. One good example is "Telecommunication".

¹ See the tooltip by hovering over the cartoon at xkcd which is said to be the source of this observation. Though this posting on reddit.com appears to predate that by about a month.

While the title of this book focuses on the evolution of the head, it is much more than that. The first half lays the groundwork with discussions of embryonic development, descriptions of the inter-related systems that make up the head and methods of comparative biology.

This initial survey has a lot of interesting material itself; for example, studies of the teeth and jaw have revealed that most orthodontic problems such as teeth crowding and over-bites, etc., appear to be due to the softer foods of the modern diet. Several hundred years ago impacted wisdom teeth were relatively rare. Softer foods result in less bone mass in the jaw and subsequently less room for the full set of adult teeth.

A description of the deeply interrelated workings of the inner ear and the visual system leads to a discussion of how balance and visual acuity is maintained during movement, especially running. The author, Daniel Lieberman is in fact a proponent of the relatively recent barefoot running phenomenon in large part due what the evolution of the head reveals about the body as a complete system.

It's a dense book, which even the author says is not meant to be a best seller, but still rewarding.

BANKER'S DAUGHTER FLEES IN OVERALLS

Fisherman Says She Cut Hair

BOSTON, Sept. 10.—Miss Louisa A. Fletcher, the 17-year-old daughter and heiress of Stoughton A. Fletcher, a banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, has vanished from the Summer home recently occupied by her parents at East Gloucester. She is said to have been seen just before she disappeared clad in a pair of overalls and with her hair clipped short.

HEIRESS CLIPS HAIR, DONS MALE GARB AND FLEES

Gloucester. Sept. 11. - Clad in a pair of carpenter's overalls and with her hair cut short like a man's, 17-year-0ld Louisa Fletcher, daughter of Stoughton A. Fletcher, millionaire banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, rowed away from Rocky Neck shore shortly after noon Thursday and no trace of her has been discovered despite constant searching since.

She wasn't on the lam very long, discovered only two days later "working as a boy" at Upland Farms in Ipswich, Mass., where she had been hired on as a farm hand. When approached by the police she gave the name "Willie Sullivan" and at first resisted being taken into custody. A Pittsburgh paper pointed out "SHE WAS SMOKING CIGARETTES." which perhaps added to the sensation of the story at the time.

(Upland Farms is now long gone, but was off Fellows Lane, though a trace of it is left in the name of Upland Road.)

She had rowed the dory she stole from Gloucester up the Essex River to Rowley where she spent the next two nights in a barn, eating apples for food. She made her way to Ipswich and tried to sign onto a fishing boat but was turned away. She was reported to have said, "I was tired of being a 'poor little rich girl' I have had too much discipline. I wanted to make my own way in the world."

There is some hint that perhaps she was looking to earn enough money to head to New York City. The owner of the house they had rented in Gloucester was owned by Langdon Gillette who had worked on Broadway.

Louisa Fletcher and her family appeared in newspaper archives again several times over the years. Her life ended up being short and tragic:

In March, 1921, her mother (and her mother's mother) both committed suicide.

By 1924, the family empire was in ruins and her father was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Miss Louisa Fletcher, 1925

In 1925 she declared her engagement to a Count Ernst Gottfried von Schmettow of Prussia, but upon her arrival in Berlin was rejected by the Count's father and returned home in some shame to New York. The whole incident is shrouded in mystery as it seems that the Count may have been leading her on or she misinterpreted his intentions from the outset. She may have been trying to use her marriage to European nobility as a vehicle for her own career.

In January, 1927 she was arrested in Los Angeles after an altercation with a "Lady Diana Bathurst". This "Lady Diana" was apparently a fraud who was trying to use her supposed ties to nobility for her own fame. This puts Louisa Fletcher's account of her engagement to the Prussian count in to a different light.

She died July 18, 1927 in Los Angeles, reportedly of meningitis, aged 24.

Her brother, Stoughton A. "Bruz" Fletcher III, who had accompanied her to LA and became a staple on the "Pansy Craze" scene, committed suicide in 1941.

This book is an interesting artifact - I hesitate to call it an "atlas" at all, though that is very much the form it takes. In reality it is more a manifestation of the author's own love of geography, maps, history and the nature of isolation. And these subjects just so happen to be personal interests of mine...

The maps are visually attractive and all at the same scale, which provides a certain consistency. The accompanying text for each subject island though is more an attempt to convey a sense of "remoteness" through bits of historical narrative. It goes for mood rather than raw information, which is the romantisized, artistic concete behind this whole approach to an "atlas."

Out of my own desire to group more information about these places - and because it's so easy to do so - I put together a "Companion Guide to an 'Atlas of Remote Islands'" using WIkipedia's "create a book" service. I was pretty surprised at how well it actually works. There is very little that can be done to configure the book other than to rename and group sections, but the default layout is nice.

This short book by the Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken is a darkly comic novel about the interior life of an elderly couple, Edwin and Erna Mortens, trapped together by their own neuroses and physical ailments. Edwin, who has become blind, spends his days confined to a rocking chair in his bathroom, chewing gum and screaming at his wife. His body has decayed to the point of total dependence on his wife, who has become hard of hearing.

Each chapter alternates between a narration from Edwin and Erna forming a continuous point/counter-point of their obsessions. The scene never leaves their small apartment and even there mostly stays in the gum-wrapper strewn confines of the single bathroom itself. It makes for an extremely claustrophobic (and scatological) atmosphere.

When not raging at his wife, Edwin turns his wrath on himself:

Sometimes I think my brain has a brain of its own, it can't just be me who's sending myself all of these messages, who's ordering my thoughts away on these pathetic missions, who's regaling me with these idiotic impressions, stranding me in all this confusion, really, it can't all be coming from me, can it?

What do these endless speculations have to do with me? Who is it I think I am? What influence do I have over what's said? I don't know the difference between a period and a comma, a question mark or exclamation point ... I can't see whether one or the other is being used ... Maybe that little extra brain of mine also has a brain of its own? Even smaller but all the more powerful for that, a tiny little devil brain, furrowed and hard like a dried pea ... and, in reality, it's the one behind everything ...

and of course, it too has a brain of its own, the smallest and evilest of all...

This bit of black poetry, captures the self-obsession of the neurotic brilliantly. The book clearly isn't for everyone...

Early twentieth century anthropologists built on the ideas of climatic determinism developed by Yale Professor Ellsworth Huntington. It remains a controversial topic having arisen during a time of eugenics and social Darwinism, but was still being concidered in the 1970s as evidenced by the graph below.

The leadership in world civilization is inseparably linked with climate. With advance in culture it has been transferred toward colder lands, and when extant culture has declined, leadership usually has retreated southward. [1]

From Lambert[1]. Click for full-sized image

The above graph is based on an earlier one by GilFillan (1923) who explicitly invoked Huntington (and which can be seen here.)

Scandinavia has in recent decades shown great cultural activity, as if preparing to lead the world next. Russia is rousing herself from a sleep of ages. In I914 the most virile architecture was that of the apartment houses of Berlin. In 2000 it will perhaps be found in Detroit and Copenhagen, in 2100 in Montreal, Christiania and Memel.

Farther we need not go. There is no necessity for civilization to be driven into Arctic snows; the law of coldward progress could be restated in such terms as would hold true for the past yet not require northward journeying indefinitely in the future. But that will require strange new houses and industries that cannot be discussed here. I see no reason to think that this 5ooo-year-old process will be altered within the 20th century.[2]

These ideas provided some, such as the controversial explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson with evidence for what he saw as a kind of northward Manifest Destiny. He attempted to supplant romanticized notions of a desolate Arctic, approachable only through heroic effort, with a resource-rich one which could flourish if approached with wisdom.

Click for full-sized image

I've always been interested in the extremes of scale, so I put together a similar graphic for the world's smallest sovereign state, Vatican City, a country of less than a square kilometer in area.

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

For years it was a given fact that humans had 24 chromosomes; e.g., as late as 1954, cytologist L. Sachs stated, "the diploid choromosome number of 48 in man can now be considered as an established fact."

But in 1956, Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan discovered that there were in fact only 23 chromosomes. They even went back to look at old photographs in books and counted 23 pairs even though the captions said there were 24.

From their paper: "For instance, we think that the excellent photomicrograph of Hsu published in Darlington's book (1953) is more in agreement with the chromosome number 46 than 48, and the same is true of many of the photomicrographs of human chromosomes previously published."

The "established fact" was making scientists blind to what was before their eyes. Perhaps part of the reason why this belief was held on to for so long is that all the other great apes have 24 chromosomes. Man being the only one with 23. That may have clouded the initial judgments, and once established, no one thought to question it.

Lake Forms on Top of West Iceland Glacier

A lake has formed in the top crater of the glacier Ok in west Iceland due to climate change, as expeditioners on behalf of the Natural History Museum of Kópavogur confirmed yesterday. The lake is a few hectares in size and 3-4.5 meters deep.

One proposal is to name the new lake Kringluvatn (“Circle Lake”) in the honor of Snorri Sturluson, who's epic Heimskringla is so-named from its opening words, "Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir, er mjök vágskorin": "The earth's circle, which the human race inhabits."

Russian Yacht Circumnavigates the North Pole

The Russian sailing yacht Peter I has wrapped up its one-season trip around the North Pole in what became the world’s first such voyage without an icebreaker.

First high-tonnage tanker through Northeast Passage

The 100,000 ton tanker “Baltica” left Murmansk on Saturday loaded with gas condensate for China.

The Northern Sea route is open for less than two months in the late summer when the ice is at its minimum. The period of possible sailing along Siberia’s northern coast is however increasing due to the rapid ongoing climate changes.

Norilsk-Nickel shipment arrived in Shanghai

The ice-classed vessel “Monchegorsk” is the first cargo vessel to sail the entire Northern Sea Route without icebreaker assistance.

This is an East (top) to West (botton) strip directly through the center of the ice cap. Notice the clamshell-like ripples through the surface. These are exposed bands of dust mixed in with the deposited snow that has been exposed over time by snow melt. Notice also the network of melt water streams.

I want to go there someday. Igloolik to Clyde River seems doable.

That's an obvious software engineering joke. "Hello World!" is what programmers often have their first program produce when they're trying to make something work for the first time.

But "lorem" is not a real Latin word. It was snipped off of "dolorem" at some point in the past. If you put in the first chunk of real Latin in the "lorem ipsum" standard, "dolorem ipsum dolor sit amet" it translates as "loves pain itself, pain is love."

While the scale is relatively small, it nevertheless proves the existence of an artifact that scientists had speculated on for years. This one appears to be a section of a collapsed lava tube.

There was actually a bit of controversy in the 1950s concerning a possible lunar land bridge. On July 29, 1953, the amateur astronomer John J. O'Neill, a writer for the New York Herald Tribute and amateur astronomer, saw what he thought was a land bridge on the western side of Mare Crisium. The dimensions of his putative bridge were absurd - 12 miles wide - but when he requested confirmation of his observation one prominent professional astronomer Hugh Percy Wilkins tentatively confirmed it, although shrinking its width to 2 miles (still a ridiculous figure.)¹

Others were not as receptive. After observing the area for several months during the period of the of the lunar day when the bridge should be visible, it became clear the the bridge that O'Neill thought he saw was simply an illusion created by the shadows of several prominences lying across the uneven terrain.

1. O'Neill's "Bridge", H. P. Wilkins 1953, August 27th. 2-4. The same lunar region, observed by members of the Lunar Section of the Czechoslovak Astronomical Society, Prague; 2. 1955 October 2nd; 3. October 3rd; 4. September 4th.²

Wilkins' reputation was damaged and he was forced to resign from his position at the British Astronomical Association.

Notes

¹"O'Neill's bridge remembered", Sky & Telescope. p. 105, January 1998.
²"The So-Called Lunar Land Bridge", Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia, vol. 8, p.33, October 1957.

Herzog's mixes contemporary assessments of Gesualdo's impact with documented evidence and dark mythologies that have sprung up around him to paint a vivid portrait of a genius in turmoil.

Given Herzog's work, it is easy to see why he would be draw to such a character:

In his madrigals, his favorite art form, he expressed his innermost being; his entire spiritual world, steeped in seclusion and madness. He seemed persecuted by Furies and Daemons.

According to the second [version of this death], he maintain a staff of about 20 servants who's task it was to subject him to continuous whippings. The injuries he suffered from these painful flagellations caused infections that finally led to his death.

The entire film is (currently) available as a playlist on YouTube here.

This recording by one of my favorite vocal groups, The Hilliard Ensemble, captures his intensity better than anything else I've heard:

Having put together a maze generator using HTML 4, I was certain an equally as aesthetically pleasing Game of Life implementation could be written in plain HTML 4. While this version isn't quite as slick nor quite as performant as the canvas element's implementation, the results are pretty decent.

This should be usable in all the latest versions of all major browsers, and so offers a way of running the automaton in a browser without the need of plug-ins or applets.

Note: IE8 has a problem with onMouseOver handling that is apparently well-known. There is no work around that I could find, so "painting" cells is very slow, but individual cells can still be clicked on. It also runs much slower than Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari, so consider switching browsers for a better experience.

Niccolò Perotti, 1471]]> tag:www.xefer.com,2010://2.244 2010-04-27T01:21:13Z 2010-04-29T17:51:33Z

I finally read War and Peace - a great book of course, but one minor bit of self-censorship on Tolstoy's part caught my eye.

The context is just before the Battle of Krasnoi as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon's Grande Armée retreating from Moscow. Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues:

"But, that said, who invited them here? It's their own doing, f... th... in the f...", he suddenly said, raising his head." (Book 4, Chapter VI, p. 1089 of this edition.)

So what could this be: "f... th... in the f..." ?

This translation by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, has been highly praised for its faithfulness to Tolstoy's original, and as well-documented as it is, there was no footnote indicating what the literal meaning might be here. I went back to some older translations to see how they handled it, but they were even more redacted:

1. (1904) "To tell the truth, who sent for them? Serves them right those ————————," he suddenly said, raising his head.

2. (1928) "But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the b... b... ! ..." he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

3. (1930) "But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody bastards!" he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

4. (2008) "But, that said, who invited them here? It's there own doing, f ... th ... in the f ...", he suddenly said, raising his head.

I looked up the original text to see if Tolstoy himself had censored it, and (as I expected) it was:

-- А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м... и... в г.... -- вдруг сказал он, подняв голову.

Clearly this had to be some standard, idiomatic phrase, so I turned to some of my Russian colleagues to see if they recognized it, but even they were stumped. After some looking around they came across a paper (in Russian) with the phrase spelled out:

" - А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м[ать] и[хъ] в г[узно], - вдруг сказал он [... и] галопом в первый раз за всю компанию поехал прочь от радостно хохотавших и ревевших ура [...] солдат" (IV, 4, VI; 1951-1953, 7: 194).

So this is the original phrase:

"мать твою в гузно"

The reason my colleagues didn't recognize it is that it is a rather old fashioned phrase, and one that would have only been used by an old man, such as Kutuzov, even back then; but the literal meaning still carries a sting:

"Mother's ass fuckers."

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