http://plus.maths.org/content/writing-un...w-notation

EXCERPT: We recently published an article about one of our very favourite numbers: Graham's number. One of the reasons we love it is that this number is big. So big in fact that the observable Universe is not big enough to write the number out in full. But it isn't just big, it's also precisely defined. And in order to define such mind-bendingly huge numbers you need a new way to write them down.

Graham's number can be exactly expressed thanks to an ingenious notation developed by the mathematician and computer scientist Donald Knuth. Knuth's up-arrow notation continues the compounding nature of the better-known arithmetic operations. Multiplication is simply repeated addition...

http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/bl...runkenness

EXCERPT: During an evening of carousing and drinking at a Salisbury tavern, a soldier and his comrades were drinking to one another’s health. Then the soldier did the unthinkable: he drank to the health of the Devil. Boldly daring the Devil to appear, the soldier claimed that if the Devil did not, it was proof that neither the Devil, nor God, existed. The soldier’s drinking companions quickly fled the room out of fear, but they returned “after hearing a hideous noise, and smelling a stinking savour.” After returning to the room, the soldier had vanished, and all they found was a broken window, the iron bar within it bowed and covered in blood. The soldier was never heard from again.

This peculiar tale, told in 1682 by the Anglican minister Samuel Clarke, made up a part of his warning to all regarding the treacherous fates that awaited drunkards. The soldier made the fatal error of losing his wits and drinking to the health of the Devil, inviting the evil being into his world. This story, however, was only one of the terrifying possibilities outlined by Clarke. Illness, madness, bodily and spiritual destruction, and–ultimately–death comprised the tragic fates that awaited every drunkard.

Such critiques and warnings initially did little to sway daily drinking practices, but over time, the cries of those who stood in opposition to alcohol steadily grew louder. Murmurs in the mid-seventeenth century–shocked at the sudden increase of cheaply available spirituous liquors–increased to a roar of condemnation throughout the decades of the following century. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the damnations against alcohol had become a deafening clamor that came in the form of speeches, books, medical inquiries, and artwork. One aspect often featured in such anti-liquor declarations were the drunkards themselves–more specifically, the drunkard’s unsteady, untrustworthy body. Spiritual and medical inquiries about the effect of alcohol on a person’s body remained a constant source of concern, long before nineteenth-century movements for temperance. Published inquiries often emphasized the personal manner in which alcohol, after entering the body, initiated a process of deterioration and a literal process of physical transformation....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/s...20638.html

EXCERPT: Norman Mailer entered Harvard in the fall of 1939, just as World War II began. His famous novel about part of that war, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948, and at age 25, like Lord Byron, he awoke to find himself famous. Sixty years later, looking back on the book’s immense success—it topped the New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list for 11 consecutive weeks and remained on that list for 62 more—he commented on the experience of sudden fame: “I knew I’d be a celebrity when I came back to America [he and his wife were living in Paris] and I felt very funny towards it, totally unprepared. .  .  . I’ve always seen myself as an observer. And now I knew, realized, that I was going to be an actor on the American stage, so to speak.”

From that time until his death in 2007, Mailer’s career both as observer and actor—manifested in the 40 or so books he would write—gave us, in the words of Warner Berthoff, “a uniquely substantial record of what it had meant to be alive” in that long era.

Although Mailer has been capably biographed before and was the subject of a large oral history by Peter Manso, J. Michael Lennon’s 960-page account of him won’t be improved upon. Not satisfied with producing this herculean biography, Lennon has followed it with a comparably thick selection of Mailer’s letters. Lennon knew Mailer for decades, talked extensively with him, and recorded what he heard. Unlike many biographers, Lennon feels the need to say something in judgment, however brief, of every one of Mailer’s books. To do this, while keeping the “life” narrative moving along, is a feat he performs with care and without pomposity.

Lennon is especially attentive to Mailer’s undergraduate life, where he compiled a lopsided academic record, with a major in engineering sciences and six courses in creative writing. [...] Some of Lennon’s most fascinating pages are about Mailer’s service as an infantryman in the war and, after the war’s end, as a cook in Japan.

[...] As the positive force of Mailer’s journalism added up, with reports on everything from prizefights to Marilyn Monroe, one began to think of him less as a novelist who wrote books with a beginning, middle, and end than as a performer, with himself invariably at the center of things, entertaining ideas to see how long they interested him and his readers.

[...] Looking back over the decades since Mailer announced he would settle for nothing less than making a revolution “in the consciousness of our time,” we might ask just what “our time” was and when it ended. Ben Jonson famously wrote about Shakespeare, “He was not for an age but for all time.” How much of what we most admire in Mailer’s writing was “for an age,” that age being the 1960s and ’70s? Considering his contemporary novelists—Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth—my judgment is that certain of their works will last for a long time, if not for all time. I would be uncertain about claiming any novel of Mailer’s to fit that category, although I would claim it for Armies of the Night (1968).

What Mailer did that his contemporaries did not do was meet head-on every sort of public, social, and political phenomenon in order to “war” on them. To an extent, he shares this combative posture with Gore Vidal, another writer who will live less as a novelist than as an all-purpose gadfly. It was Vidal who told us on television that he would never turn down the opportunity to have sex or to appear on television. Mailer might have said the same thing; perhaps he did.

[...] Mailer wrote some 45,000 letters, and this selection amounts to less than 2 percent of the whole. [...] At times I wondered just how many letters one might care to read from Mailer to Lillian Hellman and Diana Trilling about their celebrated (and rather boring) feud. Lennon’s account in the biography serves perfectly well to fill us in on the spat, and on Mailer’s awkward attempts to be a pal to both women. The volume also seems heavy, perhaps too heavy, on letters to Mailer’s chums such as Mickey Knox and Buzz Farbar, and to his longtime intellectual friend Jean Malaquis. And there are too many letters to the convict-murderer Jack Abbott, in whom Mailer invested a great deal of energy and time, to no good end.

Since it’s doubtful that many readers will sit down and read through all the correspondence, they can pick and choose a bit. Not to be missed, however, are the wonderful letters he wrote to his parents and to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, about his wartime experience in the Philippines. There is a freshness and human sympathy in these letters that he couldn’t recapture as he went on to do battle with life after the Army. There is also a subtle, indeed poetic, account of other novelists. To Diana Trilling, recipient of many of his best letters, he insists that writers become great because of, not despite, their infirmities: “Faulkner’s long breath, Hemingway’s command of the short sentence, Proust’s cocoon.” He explains:

"Faulkner writes his long sentences because he never really touches what he is about to say, and so keeps chasing it; Hemingway writes short because he strangles in a dependent clause; Proust spins his wrappings because a fag gets slapped if he says what he thinks."

But he assures her that he is not becoming the Westbrook Pegler of world letters. Except for John Updike, there was no better novelist-critic of his predecessors and contemporaries in the fiction game than Norman Mailer.

He once confided to a correspondent, “You know, I never had a monstrous ego.” If we’re tempted to respond “Really?” then the variety of other lives with whom he engages in these letters—William F. Buckley and Monica Lewinsky, Clint Eastwood and Jacqueline Kennedy—suggests that he became a major writer by putting his infirmities on display, irrepressibly so...

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/future-of-s...ploration/

EXCERPT: [...] Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng set out from China on massive naval expeditions that reached as far as Mecca and Mombasa, journeys with more than 300 vessels and 28,000 crew, excursions far bigger and longer than those of Columbus more than a half century later. Staggering in price, formidable in technical sophistication, unprecedented in level of national commitment—Zheng’s voyages remain the closest functional equivalent to the cost, effort, and risk required to travel into deep space. Trying to picture what settling other planets might entail? One place to look is 15th-century China. [...] After the last Yuan emperor fled in 1368, Zheng became part of an elite group of eunuch adventurers and troubleshooters at the Ming court in Beijing.

The Ming government backed Zheng for decades. [...] Ultimately, Zheng took the Ming banner as far as East Africa and the Middle East. These areas were poorer than China, but they were thriving and productive. Alas, traveling to Africa to buy its iron, no matter how high the quality, would be like driving a hundred miles to pick up a gallon of exceptionally good milk—not a sensible use of time, money, or effort. In 1433, the voyages abruptly ceased; Ming bureaucrats had finally convinced the elite that they didn’t make economic sense.

If we traveled to other worlds, could we avoid the Zheng He problem? Back in 1978, the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, a science fiction fan, playfully laid out the basic economics of interstellar trade. To justify the cost, Krugman pointed out, would-be starfarers must bring back something worth more than what they would have made by putting the same money in an interest-bearing account and staying on Earth. Going to distant planets, in other words, means fighting one of the greatest forces in human affairs: compound interest.

[...] If future space voyagers decided to exploit a barren, lifeless planet, few would be upset. But such an endeavor is unlikely. As far as we know, a world without life would be a world without oxygen, a stable climate, or the possibility of growing food. Barring the discovery of some immensely valuable substance that doesn’t exist on Earth, there would be no reason to set up shop there, let alone despoil it. A world with functioning ecosystems would be more attractive.

[...] The real jackpot, of course, would be finding a nonhuman civilization: a planetful of new ideas, techniques, and expression. Here the temptation to interact—that is, to intervene—would be enormous. China again provides an example. Travel costs today are low compared to those in the 15th century. East Africa, meanwhile, is still full of valuable resources, products, and land, so Chinese ships are again going to Africa. In the past decade, the nation has shipped in a million or more migrants. Buying and leasing swathes of land to grow food for export to the homeland, grabbing deals to extract minerals, locking up local water supplies—the newcomers have been throwing their weight around. Even though the Chinese have built many badly needed roads, bridges, and power plants, their moves have created a furor.

[...] History suggests that if anything of value is involved, contacts between distant societies are fraught. Think of Spain and the Aztecs. Cortés could have traded peacefully for Aztec gold and silver, but that would have involved the expense of ferrying over goods from Spain for barter. Conquest was more attractive [...] Stuck at the end of a trillion-mile supply chain, voyagers from Earth might be less likely to replicate the triumph of Cortés than the fates of Thomas Drummond and William Paterson. The two men were leaders of Scotland’s biggest mission to the Americas: the attempt to implant some 2,500 highlanders in Panama starting in 1698. A grandiose effort for a poor country, the expedition sucked up as much as half of the nation’s available investment capital. It was that rarest of events, an unmitigated disaster. [...] the Scots died by the hundreds [...] As the few survivors limped back to Edinburgh in 1700, Scotland’s economy collapsed, forcing it to merge with England.

Is interstellar travel too risky and economically irrational ever to happen? Turn again to Zheng He. His voyages were sponsored by the brutally ambitious emperor, who ignored his flunkies’ complaints about the cost. Key to most great leaps is at least one overconfident investor; in 15th-century Asia, the emperor played that role. Our society, vastly richer than early-modern China, has no lack of would-be successors. Look at the billionaires jumping into commercial spaceflight...

Both names start wit "S"... both gave us snow... hmmm.!!!

In a recent interview with BBC, Hawking said that the “development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/02...ef=science

At the link above is a Poll on the issue... i voted "go for it"... but the majority says "whoa".!!!

"In recent years, a growing body of evidence shows that photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. Most of this evidence comes from turning the lights off and counting the number of photons that cells produce. It turns out, much to many people’s surprise, that many cells, perhaps even most, emit light as they work.

In fact, it looks very much as if many cells use light to communicate. There’s certainly evidence that bacteria, plants and even kidney cells communicate in this way. Various groups have even shown that rats brains are literally alight thanks to the photons produced by neurons as they work.

And that raises an interesting question: what role does light play in the work of neurons? The fact that neurons emit light does not mean that they can receive it or process it.

But interesting evidence is beginning to emerge that light may well play an important role in neuronal function. For example, earlier this year, one group showed that spinal neurons in rats can actually conduct light."====http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422...the-brain/

Ahhh the unspoken ethics of linewaiting. We do it all the time, moreso during the holidays. This assumed ethics of standing single file and waiting our turn to get waited on. But there's always the tension about cutters. People who for one reason or another think that they are entitled to cut. At the airport, boarding the plane has this sort of high tension energy. Handicapped first. Then first class. Then special mileage gold club members. Then the usual group A, or B, or C, etc. People are generally huddled around the boarding gate nervous they won't get on the plane. People suspiciously eyeing one another to ensure the sacred order is not violated. The casual and humorous socializing with people next to you thrown into the same imprisoning stressful situation. Have you ever witnessed a cutter get ostracized by linewaiters? It's an ugly thing. Like how a murder of crows will violently tussle and peck on one particular crow for some bird-specific crime. But it's the right thing. It's a group effort to maintain the justice of linewaiting. Here's a brief video on the ins and outs of linewaiting:

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/line-ra...e-23480428