Everything is Interesting
An egg of Columbus refers to a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact. The expression refers to a popular story of how Christopher Columbus, having been told that discovering the Americas was no great accomplishment, challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip.
After his challengers gave up, Columbus did it himself by tapping the egg on the table so as to flatten its tip. The story is often alluded to when discussing creativity.
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Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re-inhabitation. It originated as a practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages. The custom of purifying or consecrating a destroyed city with salt and cursing anyone who dared to rebuild it was widespread in the ancient Near East, but historical accounts are unclear as to what the sowing of salt meant in that process. Various Hittite and Assyrian texts speak of ceremonially strewing salt, minerals, or plants over destroyed cities.
The Book of Judges says that Abimelech, the judge of the Israelites, sowed his own capital, Shechem, with salt, ca. 1050 BCE, after quelling a revolt against him. Starting in the 19th century, various texts claim that the Roman general Scipio Africanus plowed over and sowed the city of Carthage with salt after defeating it in the Third Punic War (146 BCE), sacking it, and forcing the survivors into slavery. However, no ancient sources exist documenting this. The Carthage story is a later invention, probably modelled on the story of Shechem (a city now residing in Israel’s West Bank).
The role of salt in the Bible is relevant to understanding Hebrew society during the Old Testament and New Testament periods. Salt is a necessity of life and was a mineral that was used since ancient times in many cultures as a seasoning, a preservative, a disinfectant, a component of ceremonial offerings, and as a unit of exchange.
The Bible contains numerous references to salt. In various contexts, it is used metaphorically to signify permanence, loyalty, durability, fidelity, usefulness, value, and purification. The main source of salt in the region was the area of the Dead Sea, especially the massive six mile long salt cliffs of Jebel Usdum. The face of the ridge is constantly changing as weather interacts with the rock salt. The Hebrew people harvested salt by pouring sea water into pits and letting the water evaporate until only salt was left. They used the mineral for seasoning and as a preservative. In addition, salt was used to disinfect wounds.
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Dietrich Varez (b. 1939) is an iconoclastic printmaker-painter. His work is among the most widely-recognized of any artist in Hawaii. A long-time resident of the Big Island, he is known primarily for scenes of Hawaiian mythology and of traditional Hawaiian life and stylized designs from nature. The studio where Varez works and lives is in a rural forested area near the small town of Volcano, Hawaii a few miles from the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
He built the house himself after many years of living in tents or cabins on the land or in the Park. For most of his life there, he and his family have lived a self-sufficient pioneering life. They capture rainwater for their needs, and had no electricity for thirty years. The road to his home has been described as ‘barely passable.’ Varez and his wife rarely leave their homestead, virtually never travelling off-island.
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Prehistoric music (previously called primitive music) is a term in the history of music for all music produced in preliterate cultures (prehistory), beginning somewhere in very late geological history. Prehistoric music is followed by ancient music in different parts of the world, but still exists in isolated areas.
Prehistoric music thus technically includes all of the world’s music that has existed before the advent of any currently-extant historical sources concerning that music, for example, traditional Native American music of preliterate tribes and Australian Aboriginal music. However, it is more common to refer to the ‘prehistoric’ music which still survives as folk, indigenous or traditional music. Prehistoric music is studied alongside other periods within Music Archaeology.
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The pregap on a Red Book audio CD is the portion of the audio track that precedes ‘index 01’ for a given track in the table of contents (TOC). The pregap (‘index 00’) is typically two seconds long and usually, but not always, contains silence. Popular uses for having the pregap contain audio are live CDs, track interludes, and hidden songs in the pregap of the first track. On certain CDs, such as ‘Think Tank’ by Blur, the pregap contains a hidden track. The track is truly hidden in the sense that most conventional standalone players and software CD players will not see it. Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and ‘rewinding’ (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track. Not all CD drives can properly extract such hidden tracks. Some drives will report errors when reading these tracks, and some will seem to extract them properly, but the extracted file will contain only silence.
The pregap was used to hide computer data, tricking computers into detecting a data track whereas conventional CD players would continue to see the CD as an audio CD. This method was quickly made obsolete in late 1996 when an update to Windows 95 made the pregap track inaccessible. It is unclear whether or not this change in Microsoft Windows’ behavior was intentional: for instance, it may have been intended to steer developers away from the pregap method and encourage what became the Blue Book specification ‘CD Extra’ format.
A micromort is a unit of risk measuring a one-in-a-million probability of death (from micro- and mortality). Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.
An application of micromorts is measuring the value that humans place on risk: for example, one can consider the amount of money one would have to pay a person to get him or her to accept a one-in-a-million chance of death (or conversely the amount that someone might be willing to pay to avoid a one-in-a-million chance of death).
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‘Manifold Destiny‘ is a 2006 article in ‘The New Yorker’ written by Sylvia Nasar (known for her biography of John Forbes Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’) and David Gruber. It gives a detailed account (including interviews with many mathematicians) of some of the circumstances surrounding the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most important accomplishments of 20th and 21st century mathematics, and traces the attempts by three teams of mathematicians to verify the proof given by Grigori Perelman.
Subtitled ‘A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it,’ the article concentrates on the human drama of the story, especially the discussion on who contributed how much to the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Interwoven with the article is an interview with the reclusive mathematician Grigori Perelman, whom the authors tracked down to the St. Petersburg apartment he shares with his mother. The article describes Perelman’s disillusionment and withdrawal from the mathematical community and paints an unflattering portrait of the 1982 Fields Medalist, Shing-Tung Yau.
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Grigori Perelman (b. 1966) is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to geometry and topology (the study of geometric deformation). In 1992, Perelman proved the soul conjecture. In 2002, he proved Thurston’s geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.
In 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal, but declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: ‘I’m not interested in money or fame, I don’t want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.’ In 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. He turned down the prize ($1 million), saying that he considers his contribution to proving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than that of U.S. mathematician Richard Hamilton.
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New Historicism is a school of literary theory that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. The goal of the theory is to understand information by its historical context, and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature. Michel Foucault based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a broad array of documents in order to understand a particular time. New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and to be sensitive towards different cultures.
‘Sub-literary’ texts and uninspired non-literary texts all came to be read as documents of historical discourse, side-by-side with the ‘great works of literature.’ A typical focus of New Historicist critics, led by Stephen Orgel, has been on understanding Shakespeare less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a clue to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theater—a collaborative and largely anonymous free-for-all—and the complex social politics of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare’s plays are seen as inseparable from the context in which he wrote.
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Historicism is doctrine that emphasizes the importance of history. It is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledge such as empiricism and rationalism, which often discount the role of traditions. Historicism therefore tends to be hermeneutical (investigative of interpretations), because it places great importance on cautious, rigorous and contextualized interpretation of information and/or relativist (in support of the theory that knowledge is always relative to limitations of the mind), because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental and immutable interpretations.
The term has developed different and divergent, though loosely related, meanings. Elements of historicism appear in the writings of Italian philosopher G. B. Vico and French essayist Michel de Montaigne, and became fully developed with the dialectic of G. W. F. Hegel, influential in 19th-century Europe. The writings of Karl Marx, influenced by Hegel, also contain historicism. The term is also associated with the empirical social sciences and the work of Franz Boas. Historicism may be contrasted with reductionist theories, which suppose that all developments can be explained by fundamental principles (such as in economic determinism), or theories that posit historical changes as result of random chance. The theological use of the word denotes the interpretation of biblical prophecy as being related to church history. Post-structuralism uses the term New Historicism, which has some connections to both anthropology and Hegelianism.
Butterflies are characterized by their scale-covered wings. These scales are pigmented with melanins that give them blacks and browns. Other colors like blues, greens, reds and iridescence are usually created not by pigments but the microstructure of the scales.
This structural coloration is the result of coherent scattering of light by the photonic crystal nature of the scales. The scales cling somewhat loosely to the wing and come off easily without harming the butterfly.
The Daily Omnivore 