The Death of Literature
Death in literature is an elementary metaphor, as the fear of death is one of our Id’s primal impulses, together with the sexual urge to reproduce and overcome it. The resurrection of our mind is the symbol for the cycle of life, the seasons, birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, destruction and creation, night and day, there’s probably nothing more universal, nothing more primal than death and life. The article in the Guardian In theory: the death of literature is a great short essay that analyzes the perspective of the Romantics on death in literature as an elementary original perspective that lays at the root of the birth of the modern novel. It’s a very original view with lots of references in high overview, which makes it easy to make any argument, but it’s convincing until midway when the argument becomes an old man’s lamentation on modern times. Here is where the author Andrew Gallix the other essence of the Romantics in my opinion, namely the overcoming of the fear of death in favor of a naive and blind will for creation, this resurrection of the conscious mind is what represents the true power of the Romantic era. In the face of death we are not afraid to throw ourselves in the abyss and love.
Der Zauberberg (1982)
An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).
Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature.
Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.
Solve Puzzles for Science - Fold.it
Solve puzzles for science with Fold.it. Crowd-sourcing scientific problems.
The Master and Margarita - Russia TV
The Master and Margarita – Russia TV
Russia’s first television production of The Master and Margarita, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vladimir Bortko is the director and screenwriter of the new adaptation. The mini-series of ten 52-minute episodes was first screened on the state television channel “Россия” (“Russia”) on December, 2005. The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven about the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, as well as one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a suffocatingly bureaucratic social order.
Hunting the Hidden Dimension
Hunting the Hidden Dimension Pt. 1
This film is about looking at the world around us in a completely different way. If you pay attention, you can see that fractals appear throughout nature. But until Benoit Mandelbrot came along, no one really understood what was there all along. more...
Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Eternity, Coined the Term 'Fractal'
Benoit Mandelbrot, Mathematician, Dies at 85
Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.
Comparative Democracy
Originally, I was playing with the idea that representatives should have to pass an exam to become eligable to run for political office. While listening to C-SPAN broadcasts of Congress committees, or members of Congress giving interviews to NPR, where on some shows they are allowed more speaking time than the 20 or 30 seconds, I am too often shocked by the lack of depth and the absence of fact in their statements. more...
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. The project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.
Another project that visualizes the phylogeny of life for the plants phylum is Deep Green by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group of Berkeley University.
Litarary Word Comparison
Introduction
This is one of the small research projects that I am currently conducting. I am not pretending to offer or accomplish any scientific added value to the research community in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) but humbly submit my efforts to gain further personal learning. While the research remains unfinished and until I publish it formally, I will keep this post as a mini-post. As a Universal Man, a Humanist, a Renaissance Man each individual man has an obligation to question and further his or her knowledge and understanding, as it lies within our capacities. Learning is a tool to humble our heart, and most of all we should mistrust brave hearts.
Matt Ridley in his book Nature via Nurture says (says Richard Dawkins in his The Ancestor’s Tale in The Mouse Tale chapter) that “the list of words in David Copperfield is almost the same as the list of words in The Catcher in the Rye.” Springing from this saying, I concluded that it would be an interesting project to create a plotter diagram in which the major works in literature (written, translated or edited into modern English for reasons of ease of comparison) are set out as number of total words versus the number of different words used and another network graph that displays the relative closeness of literary works by words used. The first diagram is the easiest to create of course, so I will start with this first, then moving on to the next network diagram. more...
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East coast (salty) and West coast (mild) oysters $2.50 a piece, homemade guacamole and salsa chips (best in New York so far). Another enjoyment of this well decorated location is that you are not constantly bothered by waiters asking if everything is fine or filling up your glass of water after every sip as is the horrible custom in New York restaurants (WHY? Just be ready if I wave you over otherwise: let me eat and converse!).
I had underestimated the appeal of a free show with free Bass beer from eight to nine, fixated as I was to see Parts and Labor again since their Asterisk house party two years ago. The line in front of the Knitting Factory told it all, I immediately canceled my friends, don’t come, don’t bother, only the first two hundred get in, and I think I am number two hundred and two. Luckily, I felt lucky, and I got in before the show started. 
But, as Parts and Labor, P&L set themselves and the room breathes a space of normality, where ordering a paid beer costs no bothersome effort, I get excited again. P&L is definitely one of my (many) favorite New York bands, they give a good show full of spirit, they have a sense for aesthetics, they think of themselves as icons. I know their songs, so when they started playing, I understand the sound, the atmosphere and the spirit of the moment without hesitation.