To completely fubar something requires mid to upper management types and PowerPoint. I’ve sat through more than my share of mind-numbing bullet-point recitations – I tend to agree with Edward Tufte that PowerPoint has been, taken as a whole, a net loss to the sum of human knowledge. Crooked Timber’s John Holbo (he of the pony) has a great post on PowerPoint’s use and misuse in the Pentagon. It’s really quite chilling – slides as a substitute for orders. More info here.
Pink Tentacle does it again – check out this post on Japanese mermaid mummies.
While I’m on the subject of things Japanese – a couple of wonderful screens? books? depicting goshawks. Click on the initial image to zoom (via Bibliodessey)
… gives you the evil eye:
I discovered it while looking for his famous classification of animals. The number is the population of books in the Library of Babel – a universe which contains every possible 410 page book using 25 characters and with 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line. Your complete life story (including the parts that have not happened yet) is in there – the trick is finding it.
The original search – for the classification – turned up an additional connection. The title of the essay containing Borges’ list is ‘The Analytical language of John Wilkins‘. Wilkins, mathmatician, cryptographer, founder of the Royal Society, figures into Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Wilkins did in fact try to create an a-priori language.
Two thoughts… First, I really need to find a copy of Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. Second – Argentina looks better and better as a place to relocate to. Big sky, Buenos Aires, tango, horse culture, grills, and they produced Borges. Yow.
Third thought (later) – Artur C. Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God.