Cortically Magnified

This is a review of an interesting book:Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, about thought experiments in science.

This is a good article about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

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”.

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.