![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.conversiondiary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/7_quick_takes_sm1.jpg\" "\\"7_quick_takes_sm\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\u2014 1 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The most delightful thing I read this week is probably this post from The Toast<\/em>: \u201cSherlock Reviews Musicals He Was Forced To Attend With His Parents.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 In the most recent season of\u00a0Sherlock<\/em> (no important spoilers, I promise) we meet Sherlock and Mycroft\u2019s parents and learn that the boys are none to eager to accompany them to the theatre. \u00a0I was pleased to find that, in the opinion of this essayist, the Holmes parents liked to drag the boys to Sondheim shows and other musicals, prompting this sort of reaction:<\/p>\n Sunday In The Park With George<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This play began with some promise. I liked the part about the genius doing brilliant work based on scientific principles that nobody around him has the capacity to understand. But then everybody started bothering him about his emotions and singing about loving him all the time and I lost interest.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A Chorus Line<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a logic problem.\u00a0Most things are.\u00a0Good god, any fool could have figured it out in the first act. There are seventeen dancers called back, eight \u201cboys\u201d and nine \u201cgirls,\u201d as they say.\u00a0So which nine are on the chopping block?\u00a0Well, Zach lets Diana sing about her drama school experiences uninterrupted, and\u00a0nobody\u00a0<\/em>wants to hear\u00a0anybody\u00a0<\/em>talk about drama school unless they want to sleep with them on at\u00a0least<\/em>\u00a0a subconscious level.\u00a0Safe.\u00a0She\u2019s in.\u00a0Good.\u00a0Now, look at Don.\u00a0The actor\u2019s shoes look almost new, they show the least wear-and-tear of anyone on the stage.\u00a0He\u2019s clearly not going to be doing any choreographic heavy lifting later in the show.\u00a0Doomed.\u00a0At first I thought Kristine was a red herring, making such a big show of her inability to sing, but one look at that atrociously sickled foot and you can tell her dancing won\u2019t compensate for her vocal incompetence.\u00a0Goodbye, Kristine.\u00a0Maggie studies ballet because she used to pretend her father was an Indian chief who would dance with her, which is nonsensical.\u00a0Her mind is weak.\u00a0She will fail.\u00a0I can\u2019t remember the name of the other girl in the song so she\u2019s probably not important.\u00a0Look, have I really got to spell it out for you?\u00a0I\u2019ll tell you the final eight, and you can give\u00a0me<\/em>\u00a0forty-eight quid to tell you easy riddles for two hours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a>\u2014 2 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n But the curmudgeonly Sherlock might still appreciate this film-related article from Narratively. \u00a0In \u201cMaster of the Macabre\u201d<\/a> Maria Smilios explains how horror (or historic, but horrible) effects are achieved. \u00a0In order to replicate the victims of the Rwandan genocide\u2026<\/p>\n In his Toronto studio, Hamilton embarked on the lengthy and arduous procedure of making the bodies, a skill that brings together elements of science, art, storytelling and technology. He decided that all thirty-five bodies would come from three real people serving as models: a man, a woman and a child who would be laid out in different postures. Each individual needed to have a three-dimensional mold made of their body by applying petroleum jelly and then wrapping them in plaster, a process known as \u201clifecasting.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2026From each lifecast, Hamilton made two more molds, finally arriving at what is called the \u201cproduction mold,\u201d crafted from a combination of silicone rubber and a hard plastic shell. \u201cYou can use this mold to make as many bodies as you want by filling it with rubber and painting it the color of the person. The rubber then gets filled with a kind of soft foam, and in some cases, we put in bones,\u201d Hamilton explains. The final result is a pliable, lifelike corpse made from a synthetic rubber compound.<\/p>\n With the cadavers finished, Hamilton began the final phase of what he calls \u201cshredding the bodies,\u201d an exacting job with no margin for error. \u201cAn axe wound will split the skin very differently than a machete wound,\u201d he says. \u201cMachetes create big effing oval wounds\u2014wounds where the skin pops open in a way that says one thing: big, fat, curved blade. If you get the shape wrong, it doesn\u2019t look like a machete wound and your body becomes historically inaccurate.\u201d The wounds themselves were not made from a machete; instead, he hand-sculpted them using an X-Acto knife. With the precision of a surgeon, Hamilton traced the lines of the wound over and over, until the cadaver popped open, revealing a hollow inside that he filled with simulated bones, tendons, muscles, internal organs, meat and fat. \u201cThen,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a body.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 3 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And for a case that\u2019s all about attention to detail and observation, he might want to walk alongside polar geophysicist\u00a0Kirsty Tinto<\/a> as the\u00a0NYT<\/em> did, in order to learn about everything that can be deduced by looking at the snow:<\/p>\n Along the park\u2019s wooded trail, Ms. Tinto crouched and peeled up a fallen oak leaf.<\/p>\n Beneath it was an oddly deep and perfectly leaf-shaped impression in the snow \u2014 a little reminiscent of the dent Norman Bates\u2019s mother leaves when he lifts her skeletal corpse off the bed in \u201cPsycho.\u201d<\/p>\n How could something as light as a dead leaf make such a heavy print?<\/p>\n Simple, Ms. Tinto explained. Snow is white; the leaf is brown.<\/p>\n \u201cThe darker material absorbs more sunlight, so there\u2019s more melt beneath it.\u201d<\/p>\n She knelt closer to examine the patch where the snow had thawed and refrozen under the leaf.<\/p>\n \u201cSee the air bubbles trapped underneath the surface?\u201d she asked. \u201cThe same thing\u2019s happening in the ice sheet in Greenland, and they hold the chemistry of the air at the moment \u2014 little bubbles of air from 10,000 years ago are still there.\u201d<\/p>\n The bubbles, she explained, are artifacts of the air between snowflakes, preserved as the snow melts and recrystallizes into ice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 4 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Now, to switch sciences, I only recently learned the word\u00a0calque<\/a><\/em> (a loan word from another language, adopted without alteration) and I\u2019ve just run across it again in a linguistics article<\/a>. \u00a0The article is about (in part) how stories written in one language communicate the foreignness of some of the characters. \u00a0American movies tend to do this by giving everyone English accents, books sometimes just go bilingual (as in\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>), but, when that\u2019s not an option, you might see something like this:<\/p>\n As part of the comedy, and generally to get over a sense ofEnglishness<\/em>\u00a0in a film where all characters speak fluent French, the British characters all speak in a particular way. At one point Jolitorax, the Briton sent to Gaul to seek help in resisting the Romans, asks Asterix for a barrel of \u2018magique potion\u2019. Anyone who has studied French at school will get the joke. In French, of course, most adjectives get\u00a0postposed<\/strong>: that is, they come after the noun. Jolitorax, however,\u00a0preposes\u00a0<\/strong>the adjective as would happen in English. Obelix, can\u2019t believe it. He asks his English cousin:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u2018Pourquoi tu parles \u00e1 l\u2019envers!?\u2019<\/em> Other features of English are exploited too. All the British characters speak French with an English accent; as well as using English phonology, they speak sentences using\u00a0stress timing<\/strong>, rather than\u00a0syllable timing<\/a><\/strong>. And English idioms, which don\u2019t exist in French, are directly\u00a0calqued<\/a><\/strong>. As in the comic, Jolitorax says things like \u2018je dis!\u2019 (\u2018I say!\u2019), \u2018secouons-nous les mains\u2019 (\u2018let\u2019s shake hands\u2019), and \u2018et toute cette sorte de choses\u2019 (\u2018and all that sort of thing\u2019), which don\u2019t exist in French.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 5 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Meanwhile, one sociolinguist is singing the praises of \u201clike\u201d in spoken conversation<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u201cIn writing, there\u2019s a huge range of verbs that you can use and each of those evoke a different mood,\u201d D\u2019Arcy explains. \u201cYou can say: \u2018she whispered,\u2019 \u2018she yelled,\u2019 \u2018she murmured.\u2019 In speech, when you look at what people have been doing historically, really all you quoted was speech \u2014 \u2018she said\u2019 \u2014 and every once in a while you got a \u2018think.\u2019 What\u2019s happened over the past 150 years is that we can quote so much more now. We can quote thought, or something that looks more like attitude. We can quote writing. We can quote sound. We can quote gesture. There\u2019s a huge panoply of things we can quote and incorporate into our storytelling\u2026.<\/p>\n \u201cThere used to be a time when my story might have been: \u2018I saw her enter the room and I was terrified that she would recognize me and so I crouched down.\u2019 Which is actually sort of boring. But now you can tell that as: \u2018I saw her, and I was like, oh my god! I was like, what if she sees me? I was like, oh my god, I\u2019ve gotta hide. I was like, what am I supposed to say to her?\u2019 And it can go on. I\u2019ve seen it where you have eight quotes in a row of strictly first-person internal monologue where that monologue becomes action. That\u2019s new.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 6 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And this next link also makes new uses of old words. \u00a0It\u2019s a bot that mashes up lines from the King James Bible with excerpts from\u00a0Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0The results turn out to be like this:<\/p>\n Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it were so, why should not my spirit be troubled?<\/p>\n Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be carried out by an iterative process<\/p>\n Correspondingly,\u00a0 It appears in the Szu-yuen Y\u00fc-chien (\u201cThe Precious Mirror of the Four Elements\u201d), published by the Chinese mathematician Chu Shih-chieh in 1303, in the works of the twelfth-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I felt compelled to look up that last one, and it\u2019s originally:<\/p>\n The elements of Pascal\u2019s triangle are called the\u00a0binomial coefficients<\/em>, because the\u00a0n<\/em>th row consists of\u00a0the coefficients of the terms in the expansion of (x<\/em>\u00a0+\u00a0y<\/em>)n<\/em><\/sup>. This pattern for computing the coefficients\u00a0appeared in Blaise Pascal\u2019s 1653 seminal work on probability theory,\u00a0Trait\u00e9 du triangle arithm\u00e9tique<\/em>. According to\u00a0Knuth (1973), the same pattern appears in the\u00a0Szu-yuen Y\u00fc-chien<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cThe Precious Mirror of the Four Elements\u201d), published\u00a0by the Chinese mathematician Chu Shih-chieh in 1303, in the works of the twelfth-century Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam, and in the works of the twelfth-century Hindu mathematician Bh\u00e1scara \u00c1ch\u00e1rya.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a>\u2014 7 \u2014<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n And, finally, if you\u2019d like to enjoy the fruits of programming work, the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em> has a nice feature on what Facebook data scientists saw, when they crunched the numbers on romantic relationships<\/a>. \u00a0For example, here\u2019s the graph of how often two lovebirds post on each others walls in the run-up to a relationship and following going Facebook-official.<\/p>\n\n
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 [\u2018Why are you speaking back-to-front!?\u2019]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n(car z)<\/code>\u00a0is defined to be the Saviour of the world.<\/p>\n