I like this little episode in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. In Chapter 53, one of the main characters Casaubon, a scholar of European history, unexpectedly ran into Inspector De Angelis in a library. He was surprised that the policeman checked out the same book that he was looking for. Why are you reading such an esoteric book? The policeman answered: “… when I’m off duty, I like to browse in libraries. It keeps me from turning into a robot, a mechanical cop”.

In V., Chapter 14, Pynchon made passing references to the Dreyfus Affair - a social controversy that divided France near the end of the 19th century. Just by coincidence, I read something about it earlier this year. The Father Brown story “The Duel of Dr Hirsch” by G.K. Chesterton is a very odd detective story, because it’s really a commentary on the Dreyfus Affairs.

The other historical figure that plays a more significant role in V. is Charles Gordon - the British military officer who was killed in the Siege of Khartoum in 1885. Some of the characters in the novel might have encountered Sherlock Holmes because according to The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes visited Khartoum after The Final Problem (1891)! In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, it was revealed that Dr. Watson had a portrait of Charles Gordon in his house.

Idea: a Python dialect called Pynchon (after Thomas Pynchon). A pynchonic code is probably not very pythonic. Brevity is highly discouraged. Variable names should be all puns. In fact, Pynchon should be a concatenative language like Forth. This way, statements can be chained together into a longer and longer statement… until the entire program is one single statement.

As a PhD student, I took a class in animal behaviour. I didn’t work very hard and have forgotten most of it. However, since I became a father, I have been thinking more about this class. One of the papers I read was the classic “The social function of the intellect” by Nicholas Humphrey, first published in 1976. The paper is packed with insightful analogies. For example, Humphrey offered an interesting interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. According to him, Crusoe’s life on the island was a relatively simple and easy one, which he managed without too much trouble. His life only became challenging after the arrival of Friday. What he meant was that it’s the complexity of society, rather than the challenges of survival that drive the evolution of intelligence. I can see this in my daughter. Her life before 4yo was quite easy and carefree. When she started to have friends and social relationships in the childcare, that’s when things became complicated.

An obscure historical note from Thomas Pyhcon’s novel V.: there is a Chopin museum in the Spanish island of Mallorca, where you can see a cast of Frédéric Chopin’s hand. Chopin spent a winter there in 1838.

I know that overgeneralisation is a controversial topic in the study of language acquisition, but here is an example: Zoe (4yo) used to say “even better”, but recently she started to say “even gooder”.

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.

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.📚

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

Idea for a short story: linguists have been puzzled by a mysterious ancient manuscript written in a unknown language. It was deciphered after a computer scientist realized that the manuscript is a definition of the language that it’s written in.

An Infinite Universe of Number Systems - The p-adics seem to be a fanciful formalism of numbers. What’s interesting about it is that it provides a way to study an entire university of number systems.

Anticipating the next release of macOS (10.16; Big Sur), I started to read the novel Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. It’s very interesting to me that in Chapter 12, Kerouac went to visit Neal Cassady, who was living in the Santa Clara Valley (more precisely, 1047 E. Santa Clara Street). So, in the late 50’s, Neal Cassady was practically living in today’s Silicon Valley. I had never associated with Silicon Valley with the counterculture movement. I found a couple of articles about Beat figures in the Silicon Valley. Al Hinkle, for example, lived in San Jose. Jack Kerouac’s early introduction to Buddhism was apparently from a book that he stoled from San Jose’s public library.