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Don\u2019t forget, if you\u2019re in the Bay Area, that I\u2019ll be speaking at St. Dominic\u2019s this Monday night \u2014 tell your friends!<\/a> \u00a0And for those of you not near San Francisco, you can catch me on the radio at 5pm on Saturday or 1pm on Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I was really pleased to find, in the\u00a0NYT<\/em> artists imitating life (my life specifically). \u00a0The paper interviewed Emma Stone and Eddie Redmayne in tandem<\/a>, and, when asked how she persuaded her parents to let her try to be an actress, Stone said this:<\/p>\n ES: I made a PowerPoint presentation for my parents when I was 14. I asked them to let me move to L.A.<\/p>\n ER: On a computer?<\/p>\n ES: Yeah, all about why I should be an actor. I never wanted to do anything else, from 7 on. It wasn\u2019t a flight of fancy. I asked to be home-schooled in a different presentation when I was 12. That was on a clipboard. I\u2019m not kidding. I make presentations because when I feel strongly about something, I cry.<\/p>\n ER: You cry?<\/p>\n ES: When I feel really passionate, I get overwhelmed, and it makes me cry. I learned early on to be more logical and make presentations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When I wanted to go to sleepaway summer camp, I polled my classmates about whether\u00a0they<\/em> were allowed to, made paper charts, and sat my parents down for a lecture. \u00a0This wasn\u2019t because I felt strongly enough to cry, but because I felt it would be\u00a0wrong<\/em> to ask if I didn\u2019t have data of some kind to back me up. \u00a0(I hadn\u2019t previously asked and been turned down \u2014 I\u2019m pretty sure the lecture was my first salvo, and they would have said yes without it).<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n I should add, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I showed my parents\u00a0misleading<\/em> graphs. \u00a0They were misleading in every way I knew how to make them so. \u00a0The sample was not random, but was chosen from the most popular kids, who I figured were allowed to do\u00a0anything<\/em>. \u00a0The pie chart had vivid colors for \u201cYes, allowed\u201d and dull ones for \u201cNo\u201d to make the \u201cYes\u201d pop. \u00a0And the Y-axis on the accompanying bar chart was truncated.<\/p>\n Which gives me the excuse to share my favorite truncated-axis graph with you \u2014 read it carefully!<\/p>\n And don\u2019t fear for my parents. \u00a0I was either scrupulously honest or counterproductively pleased with my own cunning \u2014 I walked them through both the graphs and\u00a0why<\/em> they were misleading.<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Sticking with the theme of artful constructions (related to differing heights), I realized, when reading this article in the\u00a0NYT\u00a0<\/em>Science section<\/a>, that I\u2019d never paused to wonder how fountains worked before electric pumps existed. \u00a0Luckily someone else asked, and the\u00a0NYT\u00a0<\/em>answered:<\/p>\n Beginning in ancient times, fountain designers relied on gravity, channeling water from a higher source in a closed system to provide pressure.<\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/p>\n Just a few feet of elevation could provide enough water pressure for a satisfactory fountain spurt. Even comparatively primitive societies enjoyed such fountains, and recent research suggests the Maya may have done so.<\/p>\n At Versailles, the fountain complex ordered by King Louis XIV used a vast, complicated and highly expensive system of 14 huge wheels, each more than 30 feet in diameter, powered by the current of a branch of the river Seine. A river current is just another manifestation of the power of gravity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Another neat construction project \u2014 the NYC medical examiner\u2019s officer is having sculptors lay down (clay) flesh on casts of the skulls of unidentified murder victims<\/a>, in the hopes of approximating their likenesses well enough to spark recognition. \u00a0Think of them as 3D sketch artists. The article mentions a lot of interesting considerations, including:<\/p>\n Since relatives might remember the man through photographs, Mr. Palli said he sculpted the face with a slight smile, \u201cbecause people usually smile in pictures.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Speaking of making (necessarily limited) portraits of the dead, Kate Havard reviewed Diane Middlebrook\u2019s\u00a0Young Ovid<\/em> for the\u00a0Washington Free Beacon<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n The\u00a0Metamorphasis<\/em>\u00a0is full of stories of abrupt and violent change, and Middlebrook\u2019s book \u00a0itself is an example of life\u2019s sudden and painful transformations. When she began the book, it was meant to be a full biography of the poet, but Middlebrook unexpectedly became\u00a0ill and died before it could be completed. The resulting volume does not merely tell us about Ovid\u2019s life: We also get, in a foreword by Middlebrook\u2019s daughter and an afterward by her husband, a brief life of Middlebrook.<\/em><\/p>\n We read about Middlebrook teaching Ovid\u2019s poetry for 30 years at Stanford, planning to make his biography her life\u2019s achievement. When she discovers she is ill, her first response is to throw herself into the work, but she realizes that time will not allow her to finish it.\u00a0 At first, she despairs, but then her husband convinces her that what she has already written could be reworked into a book on the poet\u2019s early life\u2013his childhood, education, and the love affairs that inspired the\u00a0Amores<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Ars Amatoria<\/em>, love poems so explicit that they helped get Ovid exiled for immorality in 8 A.D., at the height of his fame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Middlebrook winds up trying to intuit the experiences that underlaid Ovid\u2019s art, and, as Calah Alexander makes clear in a recent post<\/a>, it can be a big challenge to catch the pattern of someone else\u2019s thoughts, even if that person is here to be interacted with:<\/p>\n Lincoln\u2019s at that stage where communication is extremely important \u2013 not just saying words, but making himself understood. Unfortunately he\u2019s still pretty difficult to understand, so reading is a great way to work on it, since I can usually figure out what he\u2019s saying based on what he\u2019s pointing at. But when we got to the \u201cgoodnight bears\u201d page of Goodnight Moon, he started repeating something that I could not decipher.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t seem to have any relationship to the picture of the bears. He certainly wasn\u2019t saying \u201cbears\u201d, \u201cchairs,\u201d or \u201cgoodnight\u201d. I thought that maybe he was saying \u201cmommy\u201d because he was making an \u201cm\u201d sound, but when I pointed at the bear he was pointing at and said \u201cmommy bear?\u201d he said, \u201cnope!\u201d and kept repeating the same thing. At this point, I figured he was just trying to say a sentence or something, and tried the old \u201csmile-and-nod-while-turning-the-page\u201d trick.<\/p>\n That did not go over well. He insisted on turning the page back, then he started making a baffling motion with his fingers \u2013 a sort of tiny wiggling motion with his thumb and forefinger around the bears\u2019 feet. The phrase he had been repeating seemed to get longer and increase in complexity, but it was still being repeated, because the same patterns of sounds were recurring.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can discover what Lincoln turned out to be saying, and the lesson that Calah drew, over at her blog<\/a>. \u00a0(It\u2019s charming)<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And finally, also on communication, I\u2019m\u00a0sure<\/em> I\u2019ve mentioned before how much I like the song \u201cDie Vampire Die\u201d from\u00a0[Title of Show<\/em>]. \u00a0Here it is again:<\/p>\n<\/a>