5x5

pachyderm: Icelandic cliff-face looks like an elephant

hello – you have found my shop of rare and wonderful things: Super Mario style map of Twin Peaks

glyph-list: latest issue of emojis to supplement your vocabulary, via Kottke’s quicklinks 

det var helt texas: in Norwegian vernacular, the state’s name signifies being unbalanced

hot or not: Canadian prime-ministers ranked

temporal excursions

Though perhaps not presented in the most rigorous format, Neatoramanaut Rob Manuel does offer a rather compelling and intuitive argument regarding the strictures of time-travel—wherein a back- to-the-future scenario plays out more like being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past with one being unable to interact or change history in any way.

Scientific minds, worried about paradox and the space-time continuum collapsing due to an essential violation, believe that the fabric of the Universe already enforces a sort of chronological censorship in so far as travelling backwards in time would only admit of self-consistent ventures. In other words, time-travelers could not take a trip to the past and attempt to change any outcome without the Universe conspiring to preserve the time-line, likelihoods going out the window as probability bends to favour more and more improbable events in order to stop an impossible one for occurring. Actually succeeding with the assassination attempt or any number of interventions, despite all the inherent good behind it, would after all have negated the motivation to create a time-machine in the first place.  What do you think?  Are there ways to get around clumsy paradoxes? 

5x5: halloween edition

monster parade: ghoulish GIFs for thirty-one days of horror

tidings: collection of vintage Hallowe’en postcards

psychopomp: high-fidelity hardware that aided mediums during séances

a costume, not a culture: just because one can append the word sexy does not mean it’s a good idea for dress-up

revue: from Atlas Obscura’s crypt, an archived celebration of the season

the hunting of the snark

First sighted and described through second- or third-hand accounts in the third century BC, the unicorn—or monoceros was for centuries embellished with the rich lore of mythology, though this legendary creature had no truck with myths and heroes as it was believed to be very much part of the animal kingdom, though cryptic and elusive. The creature even figured, in its classic form, in the ancient iconography of India, whence the original came. Being unable to observe the shy creature in its natural habitat and unable to produce a specimen, big-fish stories circulated of the fierce and violent steed, who might only be tamed in the presence of a virgin—apparently also a a rare beast that couldn’t just be left in some forest as bait, what with dragons to be appeased.

Received Arabic advanced pharmacology further articulated the healing, anti-venom potency of its horn—the ivory and medicine derived from it is called alicorn, but most medieval had to settle for the horn in powdered form—for which they’d pay handsomely. The possibility of being drugged while wined and dined by potential rivals was a very real fear for the nobility—which such murderous intent not relegated to the underclasses until modern times. And up until the time artist Albrech Dürer was able to issue thousands of copies of his prints, people in Europe seemed willing to accept the traditional accounts of encounters with what to modern ears becomes instantly a rhinoceros and not some lithesome horse with a horn. Whether the public grew sceptical, especially with the increasing conflation with Christianity as an excuse for the inability to deliver evidence of an actual unicorn, or whether it had already been poached to extinction, I cannot say, but some enterprising Dane saw an opportunity and went whaling off the coasts of distant Greenland, hunting an even more unlikely creature, the narwal, and passing of its spiral tusk as the genuine article. Those with means paid even greater amounts for prized exemplars of horn. Eventually this ruse was revealed by a Danish physician after having been allowed to continue for decades, however, the public fascination was not diminished but rather encouraged by this confirmation. There was a strong belief among natural scientists that all terrestrial and aquatic animals had counterparts, like the behemoth and the leviathan or landlubbing people and merfolk. Acknowledging that there was such an incredible fish to be found only made people more convinced that the unicorn was still out there to be found.

bug bounty

Boing Boing, via Ars Technicia, has an interesting primer for the zero-day market, which the industry and regime-appointed czars are reluctant to address or even acknowledge.
A “zero-day” is a software vulnerability, identified by hackers but not publicly disclosed nor yet exploited, which is sold to the highest bidder—which is often a competitor but increasing includes zealous or repressive governments hoping to shore up a munitions’ dump that’s basically a kill-switch (or back-door) for the internet—on the tenuous promise that the discoverers won’t reveal the security weakness or act on it for their own benefit, and hence the name because communications platforms and companies that manage the underlying architecture of the internet would have no time to react or patch the fault, the bugs once it comes to light. This brisk, underground market represents a huge, welling threat with more than speculation becoming a commodity but the actual means of offense and defense. In their naïvety, governments are fueling this trafficking by hoping to preserve a systemic integrity but end up diluting everything in the process.

mathmagicland or word-problem

Could the oral tradition of story-telling and the development of maths be related expressions of one and the same human need? Stories of course can be formulaic and numbers can be characters in an archetypal tale themselves, but I wonder if the divergence and convergence is something more fundamental.

There are rich mnemonic and coded traditions that are substrates that pass from anecdote, to generational lore, to a body of literature that engineer the structure of a story, and of course mathematical remains a very rarefied thing until couched in a real application (however unpalatable, two passengers on trains travelling in opposite directions...)—and even the discovery of a new idea in complex, higher level arithmetic has a narrative that reads like an author’s arc, not to mention the conventions of poetry. Literacy is a strange thing indeed. Wittgenstein, whom said nothing that I can pretend to comprehend, remained hot and bothered about the imprecision of language but was forever equally enthralled how the lexicon of maths—uncovered by the same frail organ—proved itself independent and reliable again and again. One cannot force the rigour of logic on creative writing but I wonder if reporting (and the themes of the oldest stories circulated that are re-told in contemporary ways) might have not become more and more elaborate with the sophistication of counting, substitution, extension, geometry and probability. Those articles that are perennially dusted off, citing statistics to scare seem to reinforce, negatively, the connection, taking advance of the functional illiterate and the break between figures and what they say. What do you think? Does a bit of lore, no matter what the format and presentation, have the same underlying progression as something quantifiable, a roll-call, a marshaling, a parcelling-out or a likelihood?