I found this 2019 New York Times article about the fascinating work of French writer Georges Perec. Note that Donald Kunth called his Life: A User’s Manual “perhaps the greatest 20th century novel”.
I want to see writers use GitHub for literary experimentation. It can be a new form of ergodic literature. Imagine a novel released as a GitHub repo. Readers can read it. They can check out all the branches to explore parallel universes of alternative plots. They can read the revision history as a meta-novel, to learn about the writing process. And of course, they can make new versions of the novel by merging branches. It’s like Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths taken to the next level.
About a month ago, I rewrote my Emacs config script in the style of literate programming. Emacs has a markup language (org-mode) that makes it easy to mix rich text with code. I did it mostly out of curiosity. At that time, I didn’t know if writing something as trivial as a config file this way was a good idea in terms of practicality. After a month of tweaking, I am now convinced that It was helpful. Literate programs are meant to be read. Do I care about reading my config file? The answer is yes. Emacs config can be pretty long and arcane. Since I am not well-versed in the Emacs deep secrets, it’s very useful to make it enjoyable to read. Given this very positive experience, I am looking into writing more literate code with Emacs.
We were watching a gun fight scene on TV. Zoe (4yo) asked “Why are there so many pew-ers?” Me: “what’s a pew-er?” She answered: “The thing that goes pew pew”.
In Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V., there is a subplot involving rhinoplasty. A surgeon in the story (“being a conservative”) refers to his own profession as the “Art of Tagliacozzi”. This is reference to the 16th century surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi, who pioneered surgical techniques for nasal reconstruction. He was a professor of anatomy at the Archiginnasio of Bologna, whose famous anatomical theatre houses a statue of Tagliacozzi holding a nose. I visited Bologna in 2015. I noticed a statue of Galen in the theatre, but at that time, didn’t know about Tagliacozzi.📚
Zoe is at an age (4yo) where she can randomly pick up really strange expressions. After biting into her lunch, she declared “it tastes like freedom! America!”. Apparently she learned it from a children’s cooking video on YouTube.
Bright Earth by Philip Ball is a remarkably multidisciplinary book about color. In a chapter about renaissance art, he described the technique of cangiantismo, which is most famously associated with the work of Michangelo. Wikipedia’s entry explains: “Cangiante is characterized by a change in color necessitated by an original color’s darkness or lightness limitation”. The effect is unnatural but it’s what fascinates me most about Michangelo’s paintings.
This article explains how the technique was used in contemporary art such as Monster Inc.
Richard Feynman’s Integral Trick: I remember that in Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman, Feynman talked about an obscure trick for doing integrals. What was he talking about? This article explains it.
It’s interesting that two favourite writers of mine had worked for big tech companies. Kurt Vonnegut worked for the PR department of GE. His portrayal of the genius scientist in Cat’s Cradle was based on his interview of Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir of GE Research. Thomas Pynchon was a tech writer for Boeing. Yoyodyne, a defence contractor in The Crying of Lot 49, is a caricature of Boeing.
Dec 4th 2020 update: I also learned that William Gaddis worked for Kodak and IBM.
In other parts of Africa, you are aware of the earth beneath your feet, of the vegetation and the animals; all power seems concentrated in the earth. In North Africa the earth becomes the less important part of the landscape because you find yourself constantly raising your eyes to look at the sky. In the arid landscape the sky is the final arbiter. - Paul Bowles