“A Time-Series Analysis of My Girlfriend’s Mood Swings”
“Behavioral Conditioning Methods to Stop My Boyfriend From Playing The Witcher 3”
“Sub-Nyquist Sampling While Listening to My Girlfriend”
“Who Should Do the Dishes? A Transportation Problem Solution”
“Freudian Psychoanalysis of My Boyfriend’s Gun Collection”
“The Future of Romance: Novel Techniques for Replacing Your Boyfriend With Generative AI”
“Winning Tiffany Back: How to Defeat an AI Boyfriend”
Via r/ImmaterialScience.
“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” — Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby
“At any gathering I always feel as though I am the youngest person in the room.” — W.H. Auden
“The difference between what is commonly called ordinary company and good company, is only hearing the same things said in a little room or in a large saloon, at small tables or at great tables, before two candles or twenty sconces.” — Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1727
In this 1515 painting, The Adoration of the Christ Child, the angel immediately to Mary’s left appears to bear the characteristic facial features of Down syndrome (click to enlarge). This would make the painting one of the earliest representations of the syndrome in Western art.
Unfortunately, little is known about it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns it, has identified the painter only as a “follower of Jan Joest of Kalkar.” Researchers Andrew Levitas and Cheryl Reid have suggested that the painting may indicate that individuals with Down syndrome were not regarded as disabled in medieval society. But so little is known about the work or its creator that it’s hard to establish a reliable conclusion.
“After all the speculations, we are left with a haunting late-medieval image of a person with apparent Down syndrome with all the accouterments of divinity. It is impossible to know whether any disability had been recognized or whether it simply was not relevant in that time and place.”
(Andrew S. Levitas and Cheryl S. Reid, “An Angel With Down Syndrome in a Sixteenth Century Flemish Nativity Painting,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 116:4 [2003], 399-405.) (Thanks, Serge.)
Sign outside the public library at West Pittston, Pa., October 2016:
Having obtained an audience of the King an Ingenious Patriot pulled a paper from his pocket, saying:
‘May it please your Majesty, I have here a formula for constructing armor plating that no gun can pierce. If these plates are adopted in the Royal Navy our warships will be invulnerable and therefore invincible. Here, also, are reports of your Majesty’s Ministers, attesting the value of the invention. I will part with my right in it for a million tumtums.’
After examining the papers, the King put them away and promised him an order on the Lord High Treasurer of the Extortion Department for a million tumtums.
‘And here,’ said the Ingenious Patriot, pulling another paper from another pocket, ‘are the working plans of a gun that I have invented, which will pierce that armor. Your Majesty’s royal brother, the Emperor of Bang, is eager to purchase it, but loyalty to your Majesty’s throne and person constrains me to offer it first to your Majesty. The price is one million tumtums.’
Having received the promise of another check, he thrust his hand into still another pocket, remarking:
‘The price of the irresistible gun would have been much greater, your Majesty, but for the fact that its missiles can be so effectively averted by my peculiar method of treating the armor plates with a new –‘
The King signed to the Great Head Factotum to approach.
‘Search this man,’ he said, ‘and report how many pockets he has.’
‘Forty-three, Sire,’ said the Great Head Factotum, completing the scrutiny.
‘May it please your Majesty,’ cried the Ingenious Patriot, in terror, ‘one of them contains tobacco.’
‘Hold him up by the ankles and shake him,’ said the King; ‘then give him a check for forty-two million tumtums and put him to death. Let a decree issue making ingenuity a capital offence.’
— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899
“One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money most, are the very ones that never have it.” — Finley Peter Dunne
“Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.” — Shaw
A remarkable number of apparently intelligent people are baffled by the fact that a different group of apparently intelligent people profess to a knowledge of God when common sense tells them — the first group of apparently intelligent people — that knowledge is only a possibility in matters that can be demonstrated to be true or false, such as that the Bristol train leaves from Paddington. And yet these same apparently intelligent people, who in extreme cases will not even admit that the Bristol train left from Paddington yesterday — which might be a malicious report or a collective trick of memory — nor that it will leave from there tomorrow — for nothing is certain — and will only agree that it did so today if they were actually there when it left — and even then only on the understanding that all the observable phenomena associated with the train leaving Paddington could equally well be accounted for by Paddington leaving the train — these same people will, nevertheless, and without any sense of inconsistency, claim to know that life is better than death, that love is better than hate, and that the light shining through the east window of their bloody gymnasium is more beautiful than a rotting corpse!
— Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 1972
From an appreciation of Ernest Rutherford by C.P. Snow in the November 1958 issue of The Atlantic:
Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world. He said in a speech: ‘As I was standing in the drawing room at Trinity, a clergyman came in. And I said to him: “I’m Lord Rutherford.” And he said to me: “I’m the Archbishop of York.” And I don’t suppose either of us believed the other.’
Jones had been greatly depressed; he declared himself a murderer, and would not be comforted. Suddenly he asked me a question. ‘Are not the parents the cause of the birth of their children?’ said he. ‘I suppose so,’ said I. ‘Are not all men mortal?’ ‘That also may be admitted.’ ‘Then are not the parents the cause of the death of their children, since they know that they are mortal? And am I not a murderer?’ I was, I own, puzzled. At last I thought of something soothing. I pointed out to Jones that to cause the death of another was not necessarily murder. It might be manslaughter or justifiable homicide. ‘Of which of these then am I guilty?’ he queried. I could not say because I had never seen the Jones family, but I hear Jones has become a great bore in the asylum by his unceasing appeals to every one to tell him whether he has committed murder, manslaughter, or justifiable homicide!
— Rueben Abel, ed., Humanistic Pragmatism: The Philosophy of F.C.S. Schiller, 1966