http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/ en-us 2006-09-06T20:37:38-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2006_09.html#000245 Inkwerk Jim 2006-09-06T20:37:38-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_08.html#000220 Pablo Neruda's later poems are spare creations that do not turn on lush words or startling ideas, but subtle patterns of nuance and sound. Their pace is slow, and their rhythm therefor essential. I picked up an excellent new translation of his poems that is wonderful to read, but gets heavy-handed at times. I made this retranslation by hewing very close to the original, choosing vivid words only when they're called for, and letting the sounds of the words and the structure do most of the work.... Inkwerk Jim 2005-08-28T17:47:37-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_08.html#000218 The checkout line at the grocery store has evolved over time from its earliest role as a mere supplier of last-minute candy. It still serves that original purpose, but it now does double duty as a magazine rack and miniature library, perhaps on the theory that standing in line is the only place where customers linger long enough to read. For the most part the titles here are candy, too, of the literary sort, and the psychological tone of the checkout line has held steady at the level of quick thrills.... Ideawerk Jim 2005-08-20T21:40:35-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_04.html#000192 Infowerk Jim 2005-04-17T21:17:57-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_03.html#000180 We're rarely reminded that everyday matter is made of atoms bound tightly to one another by their charged electrons. Slicing bread doesn't feel like splitting atoms, or driving a wedge between the electric forces of molecules. Slicing bread isn't, in fact, splitting atoms; though the drag on the knife as it moves is the ghostly grip of displaced electrons as they redistribute themselves among molecules parting from one another under the blade. But crack ice or bite a wintergreen Lifesaver, and they will flash with light visible in a darkened room. These are fluorescent lights in miniature, activated by electrons... Infowerk Jim 2005-03-12T21:13:29-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_01.html#000179 Last night I was watching a Japanese movie, which meant that I was reading it, too, since it was subtitled and I don't have the faintest grasp of the language. In one tense scene two crime bosses confront each other. One is alone; one has his cronies with him. The two have been enemies in the past, but also have a lot in common. Both are speaking for themselves and for their organizations. You can cut the ambiguity with a knife. The two men stand a little aside, exchange courtesies with an undercurrent of hostility, and then one of them... Ideawerk Jim 2005-01-23T16:47:28-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2005_01.html#000177 It was Bronowski, many a year ago now, who said that the scientist in his earthly lab rarely pauses to adjust for the influence of the stars on his experiments. And yet we have only to look up at night to see Sirius shining to realize that photons from that star, 8 light-years away, have very much of an effect on the cells and chemistry of the eye. The lesson is that we are connected to the furthest fabric of the universe, not just conceptually but practically, as a matter of everyday fact.... Infowerk Jim 2005-01-09T16:19:27-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_12.html#000175 I've sustained a steadily increasing interest in mapmaking, chiefly because it's one of the few great pursuits based on impossibility: making a faithful copy of a solid object on the flat plane. It's like attempting to translate between two very distant languages. Dealing with the impossibility of perfection is where all the interest lies. Wendy Carlos, known mostly for music, seems to have a diverse range of interests besides. One of them is maps, and one of those maps is one I've always wanted to create: a way to see one's personal antipode, the exact point on the opposite side... Infowerk Jim 2004-12-11T12:15:14-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_12.html#000174 The alphabet as we know it is several millennia old, an inherited cultural tradition with no particular moment of invention. The alphabet and the way we use it have remained unchanged for centuries, despite talk of spelling reform that comes up every hundred years or so. In China they do things differently. Chinese literature managed quite well without an alphabet for three thousand years, and when it took a mind to change things, it invented one essentially overnight. In 1958 the government introduced its own version of the Roman alphabet adapted to the sounds of northern Chinese. No slow evolution... Ideawerk Jim 2004-12-05T13:55:06-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_11.html#000173 I just noticed that New Scientist had an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot last week. Not since Einstein and relativity, perhaps, has an obscure mathematical concept like fractals become a popular byword. Maybe that's because it's the first engaging piece of math to come out in decades that you can visualize: Einstein had the enduring look, but Mandelbrot has the unforgettable graphics. Interview, theory, and practice. And, of course, the book.... Infowerk Jim 2004-11-14T07:40:29-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_11.html#000172 It was a big shift in my music listening when I went from symphonies to solos. I was, for the longest, a deeply-entrenched Tchaikovsky listener (everyone should be once), with a good measure of Beethoven thrown in. Mozart's great 40th symphony was in the mix, gaining a foothold since it was on the flip side of Beethoven's Fifth. This was a matter of chance, not choice, since I had inherited an old console record player from an aunt, along with exactly one record. Eugene Ormandy: symphony on one side, symphony on the other. To my mind, I had ascended the... Ideawerk Jim 2004-11-06T13:31:28-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_10.html#000171 Six months ago, as the SpaceShipOne project began to look more and more promising, renewed space exploration was the topic of every conversation, and the subject of every article and headline. Even before the successful vessel touched down, though, "exploration" had dropped from the collective vocabulary of the media. Instead, SpaceShipOne is now heralding the dawn of space tourism.... Ideawerk Jim 2004-10-24T17:10:09-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_09.html#000158 At the turn of the 20th century, the presiding mind of the mathematical world, David Hilbert, drew up a list of the 23 major unsolved problems and unanswered questions to which his colleagues might best devote their efforts and their hopes. It was a list born of idealism; for dissimilar as they were on the surface, a thematic undercurrent ran through many of them: that mathematics could escape from its processes of intuition, insight, and guesses of genius to arrive at definite, methodical techniques to solve problems and prove theorems. Inspiration, always unreliable, would be replaced by mechanics, freeing mathematicians... Infowerk Jim 2004-09-15T20:20:53-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_09.html#000157 Infowerk Jim 2004-09-05T09:58:54-06:00 http://www.inkwerk.com/Inkwerk/MT/Archives/2004_09.html#000156 Word Count is a web program I came across that visually displays the words of English in order of frequency. As such, it's a graph of language, and by implication a sort of map of the peaks in our mental landscape. The list is a stable and familiar one. The stands alone at the top; of and and are close behind, words nearly indispensable for a sentence (for this one, at least). A chart of the familiar seems, by definition, to contain no surprises, but I decided to browse down this list to find what it was that we talk... Infowerk Jim 2004-09-01T21:29:07-06:00