Thane Plambeck

The Literary Engine [1726]

The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted Thought never sprung in any other Man's Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were fourty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down.

Plate V: The Literary Engine

Six Hours a-day the young Students were employed in this Labour, and the Professor shewed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences; which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the Publick would raise a Fund for making and employing five hundred such Frames in Lagado, and oblige the Managers to contribute in common their several Collections.

He assured me, that this Invention had employed all his Thoughts from his Youth, that he had emptyed the whole Vocabulary into his Frame, and made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.

I made my humblest Acknowledgments to this illustrious Person for his great Communicativeness, and promised if ever I had the good Fortune to return to my Native Country, that I would do him Justice, as the sole Inventer of this wonderful Machine; the Form and Contrivance of which I desired Leave to delineate upon Paper, as in the Figure here annexed. I told him, although it were the Custom of our Learned in Europe to steal Inventions from each other, who had thereby at least this Advantage, that it became a Controversy which was the right Owner, yet I would take such Caution, that he should have the Honour entire without a Rival.

We next went to the School of Languages, where three Professors sate in Consultation upon improving that of their own country.

The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.

The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.

But for short Conversations a Man may carry Implements in his Pockets and under his Arms, enough to supply him, and in his House he cannot be at a loss: Therefore the Room where Company meet who practise this Art, is full of all Things ready at Hand, requisite to furnish Matter for this kind of artificial Converse.

Another great Advantage proposed by this Invention, was that it would serve as a Universal Language to be understood in all civilized Nations, whose Goods and Utensils are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their Uses might easily be comprehended. And thus Embassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign Princes or Ministers of State to whose Tongues they were utter Strangers.

I was at the Mathematical School, where the Master taught his Pupils after a Method scarce imaginable to us in Europe. The Proposition and Demonstration were fairly written on a thin Wafer, with ink composed of a Cephalick Tincture. This the Student was to swallow upon a fasting Stomach, and for three Days following eat nothing but Bread and Water. As the Wafer digested, the Tincture mounted to his Brain, bearing the Proposition along with it. But the Success hath not hitherto been answerable, partly by some Error in the Quantum or Composition, and partly by the Perverseness of Lads, to whom this Bolus is so nauseous, that they generally steal aside, and discharge it upwards before it can operate, neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an Abstinence as the Prescription required.

* * *
From Gulliver's Travels, PART III: A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB AND JAPAN

Life of crime dept

1) Opening up the September Harper's magazine I found this on pg 6

SUBSCRIBER ALERT: Dear Harper's Magazine Readers, It has come to our attention that several of our subscribers have received renewal notifications from an independent magazine clearinghouse doing business under the names Magazine Billing Services, Publishers Processing Services Inc., and American Consumer Publish Assoc. These companies have not been authorized to sell subscriptions on behalf of Harper's Magazine...

Oof—I knew had just sent in some kind of renewal a couple of weeks ago. But I called the magazine and they had received it. I've got a grudging admiration for this scam, though, since I get this kind of notice all of the time and pay the bill without really thinking whether the soliciting agency is legitimate. I subscribe to quite a few magazines but do keep track of when their renewal dates occur. If I've fallen for it, it's probably a New Yorker subscription solicitation, not a Harper's one, that victimized me. I stopped getting the magazine and had to call—they said they hadn't received the renewal. But I'm certain I sent it in.

2) Later, a call from a robot. It informed me that my credit card number had been "stolen" and that it would be 5 to 6 days before I got a new one. I managed to interrupt the robot and get connected to a person. "Some kind of Internet break-in," was all the person would say. I wanted to know which merchant. "The investigation is continuing." It's inconvenient because I have lots of automatic charges on that card. Since the calling robot and customer service person both knew the issuing bank and branding on the card I don't think the robot call was a scam, and in any case they didn't ask for the number, and they knew the most recent charge on the card.

I need to resurrect dormant credit cards for my trip to Canada coming up next week.

Pennies for your thoughts

Joshua lent me the excellent Unknown Soldiers: The story of the missing of the first world war, by Neil Hanson, increasing my holdings of his books loaned, perhaps never to be returned. He also confessed to purchasing a Dead Man's penny at auction on a UK web site, for 16 pounds.

I was reminded that I had recently bought some somewhat rare US pennies for Cole in order to complete his collection of 20th century pennies. The rarest ones, each with about 2.5 million minted, were in the 1920s and 1930s (I've forgotten which years, exactly). In any case, I paid about $12.50 for each penny from the rare years. Comparing that to the roughly 900,000 GB dead in WWI, the numbers gibe, Dead Man Penny vs US Penny—the Dead Man's Penny is dearer.

Added later: From the deep archives: German WWI grave design competition

dramatic playground footage

This video of Cole on the monkey bars is almost six years old, but it's as thrilling now as it was when first filmed.

With a special cameo by Owen, working his way up the curving ladder.

Another look at the magic dragon

It's a little too dark in the video, but I got closer to it.

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Mauna Loa vs Mauna Kea

Mauna Loa may be Earth's largest volcano, but nearby Mauna Kea is taller (13796 ft vs 13677 ft) and has the cool telescopes.

[map]

Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984. I guess Kilauea (which is erupting now, and has been, more or less, for the last ten years, at least, I think), isn't counted as part of Mauna Loa?

Nature magazine (25 May 2006) says that Mauna Loa isn't dead, just sleeping, and that "its 1877 underwater eruption, which made the waters of a nearby bay boil, was much larger than was thought [...] contradicting the theory that this volcano is dying."

I still like Mauna Kea the best, even though I started gasping from the thin air up there.

Neotony

In a classic experiment by Vilem Laufberger in Germany, hormone injections persuaded an axolotl to grow into a fully adult salamander of a species that no one had ever seen. More famously in the English-speaking world, Julian Huxley later repeated the experiment, not knowing it had already been done. In the evolution of axolotl, the adult stage had been chopped off the end of the life cycle. Under the influence of experimentally injected hormone, the axolotl finally grew up, and an adult salamander was recreated, persumably never before seen.

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, p98

axolotl huxley [google search]

Magic dragon

[ binary arts / gathering for gardner ]

Spinning Rainbow

Naoaki Takashima (google search)

Found in the home office stacks

Five minutes ago I opened my copy of NJAS's and FJ MacWilliams's 1977 book The Theory of Error Correcting Codes to read what it had to say about Golay codes. It had been sitting undisturbed in my home office for, oh, I don't know, maybe 12 years. Probably longer.

Maybe twenty years.

Out dropped a printout of email from Don Knuth, dated 17 May 1987 that I had thought I had lost forever. Here's the story behind it.

About 20 years ago, I was about to be kicked out of the Stanford Computer Science department's PhD program for failing to pass the comprehensive exams. There were six parts to the exam. You had to pass all of them to pass the exam. I'd failed three times already, failing the "Systems" part each time. If I failed the exam again, they would kick me out of the program.

It was suggested that I meet with Don Knuth to discuss the situation. I had never met him before.

I went into his office and he told me a story about hating astronomy as an undergraduate. He failed his first astronomy exam. So he decided he would be the best astronomy student that there ever was. He forced himself to learn stupid things that he detested.

He became the world's greatest astronomy student. He passed all his Astronomy examinations after that, with the highest grades. Despite that, he never had an interest in the subject again (I doubted that, even then).

That was it. The meeting was over. I left his office. I considered the meeting to have been a big failure, although it was interesting to meet Knuth. I took the exam maybe one month later.

I passed the exam miraculously and then got this email from Knuth (click it to read it)

Added later: It's scary to think where I might have ended up had I not passed this exam. The way technology and computer science have gone, I'd probably be sitting in some lonely office, typing obscure blog entries for a vanishingly small readership—oh, uh, wait...

Rockbag marketing

Here's an increasingly popular way to deliver messages to our house:

1) Put communication in a plastic bag.

2) Add a couple of rocks.

3) Throw the ensemble into our front yard as you drive by.

Added later: So far, this Google search on "rockbag marketing" returns zero results. Yet that's got to be the best name for it, right?

G4G7 Proceedings

I received galley copies of the Gathering for Gardner (G4G7) Exchange Book today from Tom Rodgers.

It's got to be at least 700 pages of the coolest stuff on magic, puzzles, recreational math, and games. People really outdid themselves on their contributions. At the beginning of the book, there was exactly what I'd hope to find, somewhere, in it—Scott Kim's renderings of many of the participants' names as ambigrams.

I'm still amazed at how easily he dispatched my name

From the introduction by Jeremiah Farrell:

Are you a completist? Or perhaps you prefer to be a preservationist. If a completist you will cut, bend, fold, and generally mutilate these exchanges from the Seventh Gathering for Gardner by trying to solve every last puzzle or problem contained therein. Completists preserve nothing.

On the other hand complete, pristine sets from earlier Gatherings have become very, very collectible and apparently very expensive. I have heard that one copy of the spiral bound first exchange was sold recently for several thousand dollars. It was assembled by Scott Kim on January 16, 1993 with help from Tom Rodgers and Dana Richards. I don't know the details of the sale.

[...]

Shortly after G4G7 Karen and I decided to visit Mr Gardner in Norman, OK. We found him in good health and, although he rarely travels, very active. He has just completed a new book on wordplay and has sent it to a publisher. A long review of E. Brian Davies' Science in the Looking Glass: What do Scientists Really Know? occurred in the AMS Notices (Vol 52, No. 11) [another link to an article by Davies in the same issue].Also the MAA has contracted with Cambridge University Press to reissue all the columns of "Mathematical Games" in hardbound editions at the rate of two per year. "These will be reset so I am able to update all of them," Gardner excitedly exclaimed. He was working on the updates when we visited.

Feared aerial visitor alights on Tasso St

phoneguy0003
Originally uploaded by thane.

I'm always scared when I see the telephone or Internet vans on our street, because it usually means someone is having trouble and all hell may break loose (read: temporary loss of Internet connectivity for me).

The worst omen is when the guy arrives and starts climbing the pole in our driveway, as he is here.

* * *OLD STORY* * *
ANIL: Check it out! There's an owl on that roof over there!

CHINESE ROOMMATE: What?

ANIL: An owl, on that roof, right there!

CHINESE ROOMMATE: [ moaning sound ] Oh—very bad luck! Just answer this, have you ever seen an owl land on our roof? Is it possible that it has landed on our roof?

ANIL: Uh, sure, I suppose it's possible.

CHINESE ROOMMATE: OOOO!

Cockburn in Counterpunch

Beyond raising money swiftly handed over to the gratified veterans of the election industry, both MoveOn and Daily Kos have had zero political effect, except as a demobilizing force. The effect on writers is horrifying. Talented people feel they have [to] produce 400 words of commentary every day, and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which rapidly turn to slush. They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray, and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.

* * *

drifting zeppelins of inanity [google search]

808080808, reprise

From the Seattle Times, inside an article titled "Microsoft presentation goes from bad to worse":

Those digits should be familiar to Microsoft historians. The Intel 8080 was the chip inside the Altair 8800, the PC introduced in 1975. The Altair BASIC programming language, built by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is the product on which Microsoft was founded, and 8080 is honored in Microsoft's main corporate number: 425-882-8080.

More from that article:
* * *
In a roomful of analysts and reporters, Boettcher tried to write a letter to his mother on Vista, using only his voice. The result was one of the worst Microsoft product demonstrations in recent memory.

Boettcher began by saying, "Dear Mom," but Vista couldn't understand. Repeated attempts to correct it failed. Eventually, the letter to Mom went like this: "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all."

808080808

Another number in the news, this time in the financial pages.

Who's the wiseacre in the Redmond CFO office?

Mathematical headline of the day

100 CHEESE WORKERS WIN $208M LOTTERY

link

bobby fischer / etruscan sculpture

Misere Nim in Last Year At Marienbad

Dan Hoey sent me this interesting page he's put together on the game of Nim in the screenplay of the movie Last Year at Marienbad.