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.

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.

The loom for making stockings is one of the most complicated and rigorously logical machines that we have… one could consider it as just one single piece of reasoning whose conclusion is the making of the stockings - Denis Diderot, quoted in Italo Calvino’s Collection of Sand.

One of the productivity tips that I have found useful is oddly from Ernest Hemingway (hardly a man of high productivity). He said that he always worked to a point where he knew how to continue, and then stopped working for the day. This way, he always had a good start the next day. I read about it in an article on creativity but didn’t know where it was from. I just discovered it’s from Hemingway’s memoir A Movable Feast, in a chapter about his interactions with Gertrude Stein (“Miss Stein Instructs).

A parody of Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “A New Refutation of Time”: “The Third Refutation of Ordinality”. Or maybe “10 Arguments Against Cardinality”.

I don’t believe you are leaving cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream - Tori Amos, Tears in Your Hands

Anthropologists discovered that islanders in South Pacific have been using blockchains for thousands of years. All transactions are recorded by carving patterns on tree trunks, whose integrity is enforced by solving hard problems such as 12/5.

I can’t be the only one who has trouble reading comic books. I have problems interpolating between the panels, and I find it hard to recognise the characters. In other words, I don’t know how one panel is related to the next, and I don’t know who’s who. Reading comic books to me is like a simulation of cortical lesions. It induces a mild form of akinetopsia(deficit in the perception of motion) and prosopagnosia (deficit in the perception of faces).

The plot of Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum involves two publishers: Garamond and Manutius. Both names refer to figures in the history of printing: Claude Garamond designed the Garamond font in the 16th century, while Aldus Manutius was a famous 15th century printer who invented italic type, a few punctuation marks, and the pocketbook format. This might be a joke because both names are relatable to Apple. The Garamond font was used in Apple’s logo, and Aldus Co. was the original developer of PageMaker (a killer app for the Macintosh) before it was acquired by Adobe.

Turing once dreamed that he was a Turing machine. When he woke up, he wondered if it was him who dreamed of being a Turing machine, or if it was a Turning machine which dreamed that it was Turing - a koan from a programming book published in Taiwan)