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Der genüßliche Kiebitz, der in wenigen Worten Weltanschauungen zerschlägt, Lehren erteilt, Wahrheiten aufdeckt, gestaltet, konsolidiert, formiert, demaskiert, konstruiert, lanciert, orientiert… Sogar mit Gott pfeffert er sein Feuilleton, aber bei Gott, es geht ihm gar nicht um Gott, sondern allein darum, jemandem eine Nadel in den ... zu stecken.

Denn die Literatur ist eine Dame von strengen Sitten, und es geht nicht an, sie mal eben so zu zwacken, wenn niemand guckt. Kennzeichen der Literatur ist Schärfe. Selbst wenn sie dem Leser gutmütig zulächelt, ist Literatur das Ergebnis einer scharfen, harten Entwicklung ihres Schöpfers. Und der Literatur muß an der Verschärfung des Geisteslebens gelegen sein, nicht an einer derartigen Winkeltoleranz.

You take my hand, / I'll take your hand / Together we may get away / This much madness / is too much sorrow / It's impossible / to make it today.

Margaret Atwood to Receive the 2017 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade
Congratulations!

I was chopping down a palm tree when a friend dropped by to ask, if I would feel less lonely if he helped me swing the axe. I said: No, it’s not a case of being lonely we have here. I’ve been working on this palm tree for eighty seven years. He said: Go get lost! And walked towards his Cadillac. I chopped down the palm tree. And it landed on his back.

The logician Simon Kochen beautifully described Gödel’s proof to me as bearing a marked similarity to Kafka’s work (which Gödel happened to admire). In both Kafka and Gödel, there is a certain Alice-in-Wonderland quality, a sense that one has entered a strange universe where things morph into others, including meanings themselves. Yet everything proceeds stepwise according to the most rigorous rule-bound logic.

Gödel’s and Wittgenstein’s views on the foundations of mathematics were, as we will see, at loggerheads, and neither could acknowledge the work of the other without renouncing what was most central in his own view. Each, I believe, was a thorn deep in the other’s metamathematics.

Some thinkers have seen in Gödel’s theorems high-grade grist for the postmodern mill, pulverizing the old absolutist ways of thinking about truth and certainty, objectivity and rationality.

Happy Towel Day!

Suppose the letter-string aabc were changed to aabd; how would you change the letter-string ijkk in “the same way”?

Meanwhile at the Henderson Island (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

[It is predicted] that the subset relation among categories should be transitive: if horses are a kind of mammal, and mammals are a kind of animal, then horses are a kind of animal. [However] human cognition does not always work in a mathematically describable way. One experiment, for instance, found that subjects regarded chairs as furniture, and car seats as chairs, but usually denied that car seats are furniture.

Researchers would typically select a microdomain, not in order to investigate the foundations of cognition, but to be able to claim that the microdomain is “solved”, or “automated” by their approach, while offering no overall perspective on how to generalize from their particular case.

xI > xIU
Mx > Mxx
III > U
UU >

MI -> MU ?

Some companies scan every series of sixteen digits in all outgoing email traffic and look for Luhn’s pattern. If any match, they are flagged up and sent off to be double-checked to see if it was a random match or if someone really was emailing a bank card number when they shouldn’t be. All because of Luhn’s one weird trick. Nigerian princes hate him.

Discussions about the Riemann Hypothesis and the zeta function are often guilty of a bait-and-switch. You’re promised a deep insight into how many prime numbers there are and their distribution, and suddenly you’re adding reciprocals of powers. Where did the prime numbers go? There is, however, a bizarre link between the two. And, once more, it comes down to Euler.

Despite the limited computing power available in the 1970s, [Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken] were successful, and the four-colour theorem became the first major theorem to be proved by computer. People were not happy.
This was the first-ever maths proof in which some of the steps had been completed automatically by computer, unseen by human eyes. To this day, not all mathematicians are totally convinced.

A loop without a knot is known as an ‘unknot’[…]

With the scientists happily distracted by playing with their atoms, mathematicians took over knot theory and set about trying to find a way to calculate what is a knot and what is not.*

* Technically, the unknot is not not a knot, it’s a trivial knot. Glad I could clear that up.

Of the Platonic solids, only the cube can fill a 3D space. People often claim that the tetrahedron is also space-filling (including Aristotle, in his work On the Heavens) but, despite the fact that this, er, ‘fact’, is repeated again and again, it isn’t, in fact, a fact: it isn’t true. If feels like it should work but, if you stack tetrahedrons, there will always be some small gaps between them.

So you can count up to 1,073,741,824 with your fingers ... if you're flexible enough.

Wir haben Momente in uns selbst, die kennenzulernen kaum Freude macht. Man kann also seinen Mozart spielen – zwar mangelhaft – und seinen Hegel lesen – vielleicht mir mehr Verständnis –, aber hinter dem Ganzen, auf dem Boden von allem, zeigt sich ein anderes Gesicht, das tierische Gesicht des Gewaltverbrechers und Mörders, das wir wahrscheinlich alle – auf den Fall aber ich selber – im Innersten des Herzens tragen.

Ich nähte jede Öffnung mit ein paar Stichen, desinfizierte und verpflasterte die Wunden und überließ den Rest Gott und der Natur, die beide ihre Pflicht zu tun schienen.