“Today’s Work, Today’s Finish”

Chinese proverbs:

  • Enough feathers can sink a boat.
  • Laziness in youth spells regret in old age.
  • The dog that bites won’t bare his teeth.
  • Full of courtesy, full of craft.
  • Suspicions create imaginary fears.
  • No clouds, no rain; no rules, no gain.
  • One fight sullies two persons; one compromise benefits two persons.
  • Walk a road and it becomes familiar; do a job and it becomes easy.
  • Worry doesn’t seek out people — people find worry on their own.
  • Three people of a common mind can conquer the world.
  • The going is toughest toward the end of a journey.
  • The guilty party is the first to sue.
  • If you fall down by yourself, get up by yourself.
  • Thieves in the dark hate the moonlight.
  • Every drama requires a fool.
  • Perseverance is worth more than a vast estate.
  • Prolonged illness makes a doctor of a patient.
  • Smart people also do stupid things.
  • The masses decide what is right and wrong.
  • Gossip won’t harm a good person as stirring won’t spoil good wine.

And “Learning is like paddling a canoe against the current — you will regress if you don’t advance.”

| Quotations · Society

Head Start

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flash_lag.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Does the green dot above flash before, as, or after the red dot reaches it? Most people say after, but in fact the flash occurs before the red dot arrives (below). This anomaly is known as the flash-lag effect, and its cause is unclear. Possibly it’s a sign that the visual system extrapolates the position of a moving object more readily than that of an unpredictably flashing one.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flash_lag_Frame073.gif
Image: Wikimedia Commons
| Oddities · Science & Math

Stops and Starts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_James_by_John_Singer_Sargent_cleaned.jpg

Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle is written in his famously tortured syntax:

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly.

James Thurber parodied this with “The Beast in the Dingle”:

He had brought himself so fully in the end, poor Grantham, to accept his old friend’s invitation to accompany her to an ‘afternoon’ at ‘Cornerbright’ that now, on the very porch of the so evident house, he could have, for his companion, in all surrender, a high, fine — there was no other word for it — twinkle.

Thurber originally called this “The Return of the Screw.” See Homage and A Prose Maze.

| Humor · Language · Literature

Art Appreciation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_(1775-1851)_-_Seascape_with_Distant_Coast_-_N05516_-_National_Gallery.jpg

James McNeill Whistler hated the work of J.M.W. Turner.

A lady once asked him, “Oh, Mr. Whistler, my husband has discovered in a secondhand shop what he thinks are two real Turners. Will you come and tell us whether they are real Turners or imitation Turners?”

“Well, ma’am,” Whistler said, “now that’s really a fine distinction.”

| Art

The Spool Paradox

When a thread is pulled horizontally from the underside of a wound spool, the spool rolls in the direction of the pulling force, counter to intuition. When the thread is pulled upward vertically, the spool rolls in the opposite direction.

Why the difference? The spool must rotate about its point of contact with the table, but the direction of torque, clockwise or counterclockwise, varies with the angle of the thread. Interestingly there’s a critical angle at which the spool does not roll but slides.

| Science & Math

Trompe L’Oeil

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Juno_and_her_handmaidens_seated_before_the_painter_Zeuxis,_a_Wellcome_V0049678.jpg

[Parrhasius], it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage-buildings; whereupon Parrhasius himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn and the picture displayed; and when he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honour he yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.

From Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia. See Demo.

| Art

The Chapel Oak

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In 1696 lightning struck an oak in Normandy, and the resulting fire hollowed out the tree. Villagers filled the space with two chapels, reached by a spiral staircase that circles the trunk. Now perhaps a thousand years old, the Chêne chapelle is still in use today.

See Al Fresco.

| Oddities

Asked and Answered

Tennyson was plagued by autograph hunters.

As a pretext, one wrote to him asking which was the better dictionary, Webster’s or Ogilvie’s.

He replied by cutting the word Ogilvie’s from the letter, pasting it to a blank sheet of paper, and mailing it back.

See Pen Fatigue.

| Literature · Society