Starlings

These birds have some odd relevances to my academic life. First, their presence in America has been attributed to an obsessive Shakespeare fan, though the Shakespeare connection may be nothing but a legend. Second, they may be capable of recognizing recursion in sound sequences, an ability generally considered unique to humans and essential to language.

Wonderland logic

I am doing that last proposition just mentioned (metalinguistic comment: Alice swift- answered) (With hesitation, weak certainty, hesitation) I am the saying-desirer of the desired-to-be said thing of me. I know culturally that the referent of the last utterance is the same thing.

Literal English re-translation of a passage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland translated into Lojban, a constructed language based on logic and designed to be free of ambiguity. The corresponding original text is:

`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'

Lewis Carroll might have appreciated this exercise. He did enjoy writing logical syllogisms with perfect form but rather strange content:

(a) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
(b) No modern poetry is free from affectation.
(c) All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles.
(d) No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste.
(e) No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.

"...Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God)..."

Volume I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World

The 102 "Great Ideas" of Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, index to the Great Books of the Western World set. This index, along with the whole Great Books project, received a fierce critique from Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker:

[Footnote:] Inevitably, the choice was more than a little arbitrary: to the naked eye, such rejected ideas as Fact, Faith, Sex, Thought, Value, and Woman seem as "great" as some of those included. However, the Doctor has appended to his Syntopicon those sixteen hundred small ideas, running from A Priori to Zoology via such way stations as Gluttony (see Sin), Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God), and Daydreaming (see Desire). This inventory relates each of these small ideas to the Great Ideas (or Great Idea) under which references pertinent to the small ideas can be found, and all one needs to find one's way around in the Syntopicon is some sort of idea, Great or small (plus, naturally, plenty of time and determination).
...we have a fantastically elaborate index whose fatal defect is just what Dr. Adler thinks is its chief virtue: its systematic all-inclusive- ness.... This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler's 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader's mental compartmentation doesn't correspond to Dr. Adler's, either.

Galileo and the collapse of Dante's Inferno

The young Galileo took part in a curious controversy which raged among Italian Renaissance intellectuals, and his participation would lead him to some vital insights about structure:

Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn’t understand how real-world structures worked.
Debating the mechanics of the Inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay, the 16th-century equivalent of MIT cafeteria debates about the viability of “Star Trek” teleporters. But there was more to the lectures than this. The insights Galileo gleaned from analyzing Dante’s measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle of structural engineering.

Galileo defended the Infernal design of Antonio Manetti against that of Alessandro Vellutello:

The various levels of Manetti’s Inferno are regularly spaced, for the most part, with 1/8 the radius of the earth between each level and the next. In particular the first level, Limbo, is at a depth of 1/8 the radius of the earth below the surface, and the shell of material down to this depth forms a cap of this thickness over the whole of Hell. Vellutello’s Inferno, by contrast, is much smaller, located near the center of the earth, and only about 1/10 the radius of the earth in height, making it, as Galileo is quick to say, ridiculously small, only 1/1000 the volume of Manetti’s.
[Galileo describes] a scale model of the roof of the Inferno, including a certain anteroom hollowed out of it, at a scale of about 1 braccia [about 26 inches] to 100 miles. A normal man is 3 braccias tall, so the model suggests a large domed roof, somewhat smaller than the famous Brunelleschi dome of the Florentine cathedral which, as Galileo says, is less than 4 braccias thick and supports itself beautifully. This is a convincing argument that Manetti’s model can support itself – but only until you realize that the argument assumes scale invariance! Could you really scale it up by a factor of 100,000? Absolutely not! The scaled up version is effectively weaker by that enormous factor and would immediately collapse of its own weight.

The poet's mistress

The ideal of feminine beauty in the 17th century demanded that women have the characteristics that are literally depicted in this illustration from Charles Sorel's The Extravagant Sheperd (London, 1654): teeth like pearls, eyes that sparkle like the sun, eyebrows arched like Cupid's bow, cheeks a-bloom with roses, and breasts like little globes or, as one writer put it, "little worlds of beauty."

A colored version can be found here.

Dante Illustrations and Notes

Once I found a small, fragile-looking volume on the shelves of my college library which consisted of intricately detailed charts (with some details and text almost too small to read) depicting the cosmology and action of Dante's Divine Comedy. Turns out it's entirely available online in a somewhat larger and less fragile form.Below are a few screenshots; click for larger version.

More after the jump: