The Chucksphere

Here’s a list of Mayday Mystery connected crap I’ve run accross lately.
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers:
Dick, Philip K. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. VALIS and Later Novels. Pgs 615-819. New York: Literary Classics of the United Sates, Inc, 2009. pg 731.

Fourier series and hybrid images:
“That’s not different wavelengths of light; that’s different wavelengths of the variation across the image. And it could be done fairly easily by anyone with knowledge of Fourier series and access to decent image manipulation software. But I think the images to be merged would have to be fairly similar to each other: Converting one block of text to another block of text is probably outside the range of possibility.” (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=419079)

Barthes: “Roland Barthes wrote a book in called ‘S/Z’ in which he put forward multiple readings of one short story. Later he published ‘The Pleasure of the Text’ – I think the title is telling.” (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/gwy4e/gary_paulsen_on_what_the_author_thinks_versus/)

Algae, light, mice, mind control (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_optigenetics/all/1) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88TVQZUfYGw)

Similar: (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091015123552.htm) (http://singularityhub.com/2011/01/26/harvard-controls-the-minds-of-worms-with-lasers-video/)

Optogenetics and cyborgs (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/mf_optigenetics/3/)

Cracked article (http://www.cracked.com/article_19191_7-bizarre-advances-in-animal-cyborg-technology.html)

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking With Einstein. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.
“And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.” (pg 209)
“Thomas Bradwardine…described a means of memoria sillabarum, or ‘memory by syllables,’ which could be used to memorize words that were hard to visualize. Bradwardine’s system involved breaking the word into its constituant syllables and then creating an image for each syllable based on another word that begins with that syllable…In order to memorize a word by sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed.” (pgs 131-2)

“Classified data has been digitally encoded since before computers were invented. Spies have used book ciphers for centuries to send numeric correspondence that can only be read when paired with the proper text. Bibles make good code books because of the varience between printed editions and the numbering of chapter and verse.” (Burn Notice, Season 4, episode 9. “Center of the Storm”) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher)

“‘Amour peut moult, argent peut tot’ (love may do much, but money more). These are some of the sayings by which peasants characterized marriage in sixteenth-century France.” (Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. pg 1)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper on the Verbiest Map. A few days ago, I tried to find a picture of it to post to /r/mapporn, but couldn’t find a clear enough picture. But I did find some nifty links.

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Also, I came across three useful posts about the business side of being an author.

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Alright, this is the second time that I’ve gotten a strange server error when attempting to post/update a page, and this is really pissing me off. Luckily, I can get it to let me post the update as a post, so. My Projects page should have this appended to the bottom:

Michigan Journal of History (January 2011 — Present) – I’m the webmaster of this. It’s not much work, and I didn’t do any of the design, but I did format the pdf’s. Also, it comes with a nifty title: Senior Editor. Bow before me!

• Michigan Journal of History – http://www.umich.edu/~historyj/

Got my article copies today!

That job sucked. A lot. Getting showered with molten-hot plastic is no joke. Neither is being fired, though.

On a bright spot, my article has been published! The article can be found online here. 10 Ideas: Defense and Diplomacy can be found here. The entire 10 Ideas series is here. The Roosevelt Institute is, for completeness’ sake, here.

This spawned the Publications section of my blog.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading these days about our Founding Fathers and the ideological origins of this country. Rather than take it on the words of political blowhards, read about it yourselves in:

Edmund Morgan. The Birth of the Republic.

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

Pauline Maier. From Resistance to Revolution.

Michael Kammen. The Origins of the American Constitution.

Gordon Wood. Creation of the American Rupublic.

I had to read these for my class on the American Revolution. I’m reading them “lately” because I didn’t actually finish all of them when they were assigned.