Thursday I learned that radio soap-opera exists, and sounds just like the tv kind, except that the latter has silences.
I also learned that learning an arbitrary sequence of tasks by rote, in a room where a radio is playing soap-opera as loud as any three normal people can talk, is not among my aptitudes.
I recently re-read some comicbooks that I bought in 1984. They were published in the Seventies and the only place I found them was a shop that happened to be adjacent to the laundromat I used then. Tandra is part Barsoom and part Atlas Shrugged (though the ‘strikers’ of Tandra are not above using force against ‘scabs’ like our hero), told in Prince Valiant format.
Steven den Beste discusses dragon metabolism and how to fight them. Sunday; Monday; Tuesday. I love this sort of thing, don’t you?
Psst, Steven:
Brendan O’Neill, a professional writer who has been blogging for two months, offers we amateur writers some paternalistic pointers on how to turn our blogs into credible professional journals. (As if.)
Brendan offers we? Tsk. The apposition does not change the case.
Milton Mintz has struggled since 1963 to do the impossible: to trisect the angle, square the circle and double the cube using “only” a compass and straightedge. He shows procedures for the first two, which I have not attempted to verify because they look like a cheat: a key step is to take a tip of the compass in each hand and move them with equal speed. If one can control one’s hands with such precision, I say, one may as well dispense with the straightedge.
At least he’s not angry like the Time Cube guy.
Later: one George Byrd passes along this mechanical trisector.
New Book Uses Statistical Methods to Analyze Avant-Garde Art
The patterns emerging from Mr. Galenson’s crunched numbers suggested that the careers of avant-garde artists tended to fall into two categories, embodying distinct kinds of innovation.
Some painters developed new techniques over a long period of experimentation, often through painstaking trial and error. Prime examples are Paul Cézanne and Mark Rothko. By contrast, Mr. Galenson found that other artists tended to have one or more creative breakthroughs that he calls “conceptual”: a sudden, radical retooling of what or how they paint. The most dramatic example would be Pablo Picasso, who ran through a series of radically distinct and original visual idioms – each of which seemed to emerge full-blown, as though the idea had taken shape in his head and simply needed to be executed. . . .
With experimentalists, says Mr. Galenson, the later canvases tend to be the most valuable, both on the art market and in the judgment of artists and historians. In contrast, conceptual breakthroughs usually came early in artists’ careers. The reputation of their later work tends to fall off drastically over time. . . .
(Link from John Hull on the Armchair Economists mailing list.)
Today is of course the 33d anniversary of Apollo XI. Have there been any soft landings on the Moon since Apollo?
Update: One Russian landing in 1976. I’ve misplaced the link to the list where I found it.