Prospero's Books

Road trip

Good Magazine has published a wonderful interactive map of twenty-three of the world's great journeys, from the Silk Road to Kerouac's On the Road.

A daily reading fix

With all the books I read, I rarely discipline myself to dip into the same book every day, and to enjoy the continuity that can result.

So I was delighted today to learn about DailyLit, a free service that will send you the full text of a book in daily e-mail messages. Dante's Inferno, for example, arrives in 38 parts, while Darwin's On the Origin of Species takes 205 messages, a well-spent seven months.

Because I love science fiction (and haven't read any for a long time) and because I love Walt Disney World, I'm starting with Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in 65 installments. I'm going to try to make it the first thing I read each morning for the next couple of months.

Many 19th-century novels, some of Dickens's for example, were first published in installments, and readers waited eagerly for each new piece. I'll see if it works for me.

(Thanks to 43 Folders for letting me know.)

God found I wasn't there

Religious fundamentalists are often guilty of lifting text out of its context--such as quoting the ban on homosexuality in Leviticus without noting that it's surrounded by many obsolete, and mostly unobserved, laws.

Atheist fundamentalists are often guilty of the same wrong. Two recently published collections of "atheist" quotations--and quite a few Web sites--reproduce the first four lines of Robert Frost's eight-line poem "Not All There":

I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair;
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.

What's left out is the remaining four-line stanza:

God turned to speak to me
(Don't anybody laugh)
God found I wasn't there--
At least not over half.

The poem as a whole makes a complex statement, reflecting the complexity, nuance, and ambiguity of Frost's religious thought. Quoting only the first stanza is intellectually dishonest, doing great disservice to Frost--and, more importantly, to the reader. 

Rome Reborn

If you're interested in the "big picture" viewpoint of this blog, and in dialogue between science and the humanities, you should visit the site of Rome Reborn 1.0, a digital 3D model of Rome as it existed on June 21, 320 A.D. The site currently includes still pictures, video and audio clips, and papers. Coming is interactive online exploration of the model.

Rome Reborn was created at the University of Virginia. I have to think that Thomas Jefferson would be delighted!

(Thanks to Seed Magazine for the link.)

Fractal fundamentals

Several times on this blog, among my posts on fractals, I've linked you to Chaotic Utopia, and Karmen's amazing Friday Fractals, both recent and less recent. This week, she has published the clearest explanation of fractal geometry I've ever read.

It's a hands-on explanation, requiring a sheet of paper and a few minutes of your time. Please have a look.

The interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions

Another clipping in my Prospero's Books idea folder is from the Summer 2004 issue of Parabola: "An Interactive Dialogue: Talmud and the Net," by Max [sorry] Mel Alexenberg. The article makes the often-expressed point that the Talmud was perhaps the world's first hypertext, and it points us toward a fascinating Web page, by Professor Eliezer Segal, that demonstrates this point by interactively annotating a Talmud page.

But Alexenberg goes beyond this observation to discuss the "spiritual dimension" of the Web. He quotes Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson:

The divine purpose of the present information revolution . . . which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge--spiritual knowledge--with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use today's interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people--to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions (32).

Comprehension of the universe

A reader of this blog, Vox Anon of The Unicorn Man, has sent a note:

Comprehension of the universe seems more possible using your site as a point of departure.

Many thanks, Vox. You've understood the purpose of Prospero's Books better than I have. I'm grateful for your words.

A mathematical sun

Last October, at Chaotic Utopia, Karmen posted as one of her "Friday Fractals" a stunning mathematically generated (and Karmen-generated) moon. Last month, she did the same for the sun. What I wrote in October can be recycled, with one change, here:

The real sun is a miracle. But equally miraculous is the human mind, able to discover the numbers behind the fractionally dimensioned geometry of the sun's face.

(A larger image, along with a comparative photograph of nature's sun, is available at Chaotic Utopia.)

Our own limits transgressed

Today, at God's Politics, the "voice of the day" is Henry David Thoreau's, from Walden:

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

The little pieces of this grand puzzle

Reading Karmen's Chaotic Utopia blog the past few weeks has been like drinking from a geyser. She has posted way too much good writing to even read carefully, let alone blog about. So I have about a dozen of her postings on hold in my feed reader, and I really need to start telling you about them.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Chaotic Utopia, Karmen has posted a retrospective. Here's how she prefaces it:

We live in a world rich in complex patterns... where most everything we see is hovering in a harmonic balance, torn between a dull, static order, and a chaotic end. Adaptation to the constant changes requires a certain amount of diversity, uniqueness... risk-taking. Now seems like a good time to learn what it means to adapt. While we humans are facing changes of global size, we're also building information-processing systems of global size. It isn't a coincidence, it is survival. Our survival. Our future. I've spent the past year, looking at the little pieces of this grand puzzle, with this blog. Each post, whether a serious scientific paper, complete with references, or a poem on the fly, is, in some way, an example of what of it means to "Adapt".

Now run, don't walk, to Chaotic Utopia, and look at Karmen's best-of list. You'll thank me.