“Just as a museum is a place for the muses who inspire art, so an athenaeum is a place for Athena, the goddess of wisdom who inspires intellectual pursuits.”
The Triptych showing the three domains of creativity which shade into each other without sharp boundaries. (From The Act of Creation)
“The stars would love nothing more than to reveal your future this week, but unfortunately, they’re just large luminous balls of plasma held together by gravity in space.”
Horoscope from The Onion
Circles: Friend or Foe?
“To be sure, when the pioneer in science sends forth the groping feelers of his thoughts, he must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.”
Gravitational Force of an Obstetrician
In the episode entitled “The Harmony of the Worlds” of Cosmos, Carl Sagan seeks to debunk Astrology as a fraud. He states:
It turns out that astrologers can’t even agree among themselves what a given horoscope means. In careful tests, they are unable to predict the character and future of people they know nothing else about except the time and place of birth. Also, how could it possibly work? How could the rising of Mars at the moment of my birth affect me, then or now? I was born in a closed room. Light from Mars couldn’t get in. The only influence of Mars which could affect me is its gravity, but the gravitational influence of the obstetrician was much larger than the gravitational influence of Mars. Mars is a lot more massive but the obstetrician was a lot closer.
So that got me thinking about the gravitational influence of Mars versus the influence of my Obstetrician on the date of my birth.
Right now Mars is 86.53 million miles away from Earth. On January 11th, 1988 in Princeton, NJ it was 191.4 million miles away or 1.393 x 10^8 km.
I’ll calculate the force by using Newton’s law of universal gravitation.
The equation is setup as so:
I don’t know the weight of the doctor when I was born and I am not going to call him up and ask. I’ll guess around 75kg. I weighed just under 10 lbs at birth.
Results
Gravitational Force Between Mars & Jeff
Gravitational Force Between Obstetrician & Jeff
Conclusion
It would seem that at 0.3 meters away the Obstetrician is exerting a higher gravitational force beween us than myself and Mars. Only when the doctor is about 3.333 meters away does Mars start to have a greater gravitational force. It would seem Carl was right.
Originality, Emphasis, Economy
An art dealer (this story is authentic) bought a canvas signed ‘Picasso’ and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look at the canvas and said: ‘It’s a fake’.
A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed Pícasso. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single glance, grunted: ‘lt’s a fake’.
’But cher maître’ expostulated the dealer, ‘it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago.’
Picasso shrugged: ‘I often paint fakes.’
(From The Act of Creation)
Rhyming Slang
This slang first started in Elizabethan times when street merchants used rhyming slang as a means to communicate with each other without the customers understanding them.
So they would come up with rhyming phrases to replace words then in sentence usage drop the rhyming word. For instances, the slang for stairs isapples and pears, but when you say, “I’m going up the stairs.” you would instead say, “I’m going up the apples.”
Take for instance the sentence, “Half aminute, I need to wash my hands.”
minute = cock linnet. wash = lemon squash. hands = German bands.
So replace the words. “Half a cocklinnet, I need to lemon squash myGerman bands.”
Then drop the rhymes. “Half a cock, I need to lemon my Germans.”
(via (via sarahjessicamarmaladeakamarmie) Hitchcock Interview)
The Intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts.
