Linkspam

A very Happy Birthday to lignota!

Via eredien: They built... well, it isn't exactly a tesseract, but it's as close as we're going to get. Very, very shiny, even if I know that I have no comprehension of the mathematics involved.

My cousin rocks! sovay got a very good review (quoted in full in post) for her collection Singing Innocence and Experience. Well-deserved.

Indirectly via kate_nepveu: Other Women's Voices, basically the definitive webpage for English translations of women writers pre-1700. Biographical info, index of available works, links to online translations and excerpts, round-up of critical essays... one-stop shopping. Astoundingly thorough-- ranges from Sumerian to Tibetan to pre-Islamic Arabian and the pre-Heian Japanese writers. There is stuff here in my own field I didn't know I didn't know (namely the astoundingly cool page on Anyte of Tegea). Amazingly useful.

Convert text into binary, or vice versa. Fun time-waster.

Roger Ebert interviews Werner Herzog in one of the most hypnotically strange conversations I've ever seen transcribed: "There is a certain quality that you sense when you move a ship over a mountain. It was 360 tons and I knew I would manage it. But I knew that it would create unsightly things that no one would expect. There were many huge steel cables that are five centimeters in diameter, I mean as thick as this table. They would break like a thin thread. When you tap them before they break, when you touch them and tap them, they sound thick, they sound different, and when they break, there’s so much tension, there's so much pressure, that the cable is red hot inside, it's glowing inside. That was one thing I didn't show in the film but I've seen it and many of the things that you see in "Fitzcarraldo" were created by the events themselves. I've always been after the deeper truth, the ecstatic truth, and I will always defend that, as long as there's breath in me."

George Eliot defines the Mary Sue: "Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress -- that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well."

Linkspam

A very Happy Birthday to lignota!

Via eredien: They built... well, it isn't exactly a tesseract, but it's as close as we're going to get. Very, very shiny, even if I know that I have no comprehension of the mathematics involved.

My cousin rocks! sovay got a very good review (quoted in full in post) for her collection Singing Innocence and Experience. Well-deserved.

Indirectly via kate_nepveu: Other Women's Voices, basically the definitive webpage for English translations of women writers pre-1700. Biographical info, index of available works, links to online translations and excerpts, round-up of critical essays... one-stop shopping. Astoundingly thorough-- ranges from Sumerian to Tibetan to pre-Islamic Arabian and the pre-Heian Japanese writers. There is stuff here in my own field I didn't know I didn't know (namely the astoundingly cool page on Anyte of Tegea). Amazingly useful.

Convert text into binary, or vice versa. Fun time-waster.

Roger Ebert interviews Werner Herzog in one of the most hypnotically strange conversations I've ever seen transcribed: "There is a certain quality that you sense when you move a ship over a mountain. It was 360 tons and I knew I would manage it. But I knew that it would create unsightly things that no one would expect. There were many huge steel cables that are five centimeters in diameter, I mean as thick as this table. They would break like a thin thread. When you tap them before they break, when you touch them and tap them, they sound thick, they sound different, and when they break, there’s so much tension, there's so much pressure, that the cable is red hot inside, it's glowing inside. That was one thing I didn't show in the film but I've seen it and many of the things that you see in "Fitzcarraldo" were created by the events themselves. I've always been after the deeper truth, the ecstatic truth, and I will always defend that, as long as there's breath in me."

George Eliot defines the Mary Sue: "Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress -- that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well."