Mason & Dixon vs Gravity's Rainbow (plus book-lengths)
Jorn Barger
in megabytes (corrections welcome; list skewed by a public
domain classics-CD I had handy):
220: current Britannica
27: Story of Civilization (Durant)
14: Mahabharata
??: Aubrey-Maturin (O'Brian)
9: Aquinas's Summa
8: Gibbon's Decline and Fall
7: Proust's Remembrance
4: King James Bible
3.5: War and Peace; Harry Potter 1-5
3.0: Les Miserables
2.7: Lord of the Rings
2.6: His Dark Materials (Pullman)
2.4: Gone with the Wind
2.2: Gravity's Rainbow; Don Quixote
2.1: Ellmann's James Joyce
2.0: Das Kapital
1.6: Mason & Dixon
1.5: Ulysses
1.4: Three Musketeers (Dumas)
1.3: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
1.2: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
1.1: Moby Dick; Origin of Species
0.9: Great Expectations
0.8: Koran; Iliad; Torah
0.7: Aeneid; Mrs Bovary
0.65: Pride and Prejudice; Byron's Don Juan
0.6: Lolita; Plato's Republic; Augustine's Confessions
0.5: Odyssey; Gulliver's Travels; Spinoza's Ethics
0.45: Faust; Paradise Lost; Joyce's Portrait
0.4: Tom Sawyer; synoptic Gospels
0.35: Wind in the Willows; Imitation of Christ
0.3: Hound of the Baskervilles; complete Emily Dickinson
0.25: Dante's Inferno; Crying of Lot 49
0.2: Howl; Machiavelli's Prince
0.14-0.17: King Lear; Hamlet; Alice in Wonderland; Ibsen's Doll's House
0.1: Wittgenstein's Tractatus
80k: Shakespeare's Sonnets; Song of Myself (Whitman); Gospel of Mark
70k: Communist Manifesto; Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
60k: Code of Hammurabi; Trojan Women; Revelation
50k: Civil Disobedience (Thoreau); Joyce's Dead
40k: Rip van Winkle; UN Charter; Tao-te Ching
30k: Diamond Sutra; Pit and the Pendulum; Leibnitz's Monadology
25k: US Constitution; Magna Carta; Hunting of the Snark
15-20k: Sermon on the Mount; Song of Solomon; Swift's Modest Proposal;
Eliot's Waste Land; Omar's Rubaiyat; Coleridge's Rime
8k: Declaration of Independence
4k: American Pie; Casey at the Bat
2.5k: US Bill of Rights
1.8k: Positively 4th Street
1.3k: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
1k: Cat in the Hat
Vaguely relevant to my main topic:
2.2: Gravity's Rainbow
1.6: Mason & Dixon
1.5: Ulysses
I finally slogged thru M&D, out of loyalty to TRP, mainly.
After 200 pages I was saying, there might be some good stuff
here on _second_ reading. By the end I was saying, I'm not
gonna try that again for a long while.
I went back thru GR, noting images that had stuck in my head
for 30 years-- I counted about 100 including funny names and
snatches of song lyrics. It was interesting to notice which
ones had faded over the decades (Byron the Bulb, the giant
Adenoid), and I got a sort of pang wondering how much I'd
missed in the long sections where nothing much had stuck.
But 100 images is 100 more than stuck with me from 99% of the
other novels I've ever read, so GR is really something special.
I can't say more than one or two stuck from the first reading
of M&D-- the Jesuits' fancy technologies, mainly.
The antique style seemed to me to dull the beauty of Pynchon's
prose, as well. But given his topic I can see how he felt
obliged to go that route.
I see Pynchon as the greatest philosopher of science going, so
the Mason-Dixon line seems like a reasonable jumping-off point,
and I wouldn't be surprised if his next novel stepped back
another few centuries.
marko_...@hotmail.com
Jorn Barger wrote:
> For starters, here's some approximate lengths of
> various books, in megabytes (corrections welcome;
> list skewed by a public domain classics-CD I had handy):
>
> 220: current Britannica
> 27: Story of Civilization (Durant)
> 14: Mahabharata
> ??: Aubrey-Maturin (O'Brian)
why the question marks? because you're unsure just how long "The Final
Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey" (#21) is?
i had a look at this today in a bookshop. nice.
they've included the old guy's manuscript, a facsimile
of his handwriting on the left, with a typescript on
the right.
the Robot Vegetable
> I see Pynchon as the greatest philosopher of science going, so
> the Mason-Dixon line seems like a reasonable jumping-off point,
> and I wouldn't be surprised if his next novel stepped back
> another few centuries.
The current buzz is a novel about a woman mathetician,
a student of Hilbert. I'm waiting for the Godzilla in the sunken
submarine novel.
francis muir
1105632297....@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com, "Jorn Barger"
<jo...@enteract.com> wrote:
> For starters, here's some approximate lengths of various books,
> in megabytes (corrections welcome; list skewed by a public
> domain classics-CD I had handy):
>
> [...]
> 0.35: Wind in the Willows; Imitation of Christ
> [...]
Jorn, you're da man.
JimC
"the Robot Vegetable" <v...@dvandva.org> wrote in message
news:FtmdnQIabeT...@megapath.net...
Hmm. Based on a real character? What was her name?
francis muir
bCQFd.10378$wZ2....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com, "JimC"
<j...@jim-collier.com> wrote:
Emmy Amalie Noether, whom I have discussed previously on RAB several times.
A pupil of Hilbert's and herself one of the few mathematical stars of the
20th century. Her work linking Symmetry and Conservation is a cornerstone of
modern physical theory.
A good URL is:
http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/biograph/199899/BIONOETH.HTM
And the book probably referred to above is:
Lederman, Leon M. *Symmetry and the beautiful universe* / Leon M. Lederman,
Christopher T. Hill. Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 2004
Which I shall read when it is out of process here at the Green.
jimc...@pacbell.net
Yes, I know who you mean now. But I think I know of her
from Constance Reid's biography of Hilbert. For some lascivious
reason, I thought the original post imputed some sort of
affair between them.
francis muir
1105729709.4...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
"jimc...@pacbell.net" <jimc...@pacbell.net> wrote:
I doubt. When the Great David was asked whether Noether was a
great woman mathematician he answered (more or less) "Certainly
a great mathematician, but I don't know whether a woman". He had
allowed her to lecture under his name. Too much has been made of
her plain features and not enough of her extraaordinary talent.
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed her visits
but never sought to offer her a fellowship.
Her Bryn Mawr students were "Noether's Boys".
jff
jimc...@pacbell.net
You can see a collection of her pictures at
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Noether_Emmy.html.
Click on the thumbnail.
Jim Ward
<fra...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>I doubt. When the Great David was asked whether Noether was a
>great woman mathematician he answered (more or less) "Certainly
>a great mathematician, but I don't know whether a woman". He had
>allowed her to lecture under his name. Too much has been made of
>her plain features and not enough of her extraaordinary talent.
>Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed her visits
>but never sought to offer her a fellowship.
That sounds right. Hilbert (I hear) was quite the ladies man
(may we say the Feynman of his time?), and wouldn't have bedded a
mathematrix for the reason that there were comelier flowers to pluck.
Jim Ward
<fra...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Emmy Amalie Noether, whom I have discussed previously on RAB several times.
>A pupil of Hilbert's and herself one of the few mathematical stars of the
>20th century. Her work linking Symmetry and Conservation is a cornerstone of
>modern physical theory.
Isn't that the one that states that every symmetry implies a
conservation law? Dunno how that would work out for particle physics,
which is all about symmetry.
francis muir
"Jim Ward" <tomca...@NyOaShPoAoM.com> wrote:
I liked the tale about Hilbert where he attended a formal investituture in
Paris in street clothes and his wife sent him home to change into evening
dress. When he did not return for a couple of hours some colleagues went to
his house to investigate. They found him fast asleep in bed. Apparently he
was of absolutely regular behavior and when he began undressing that
triggered his getting into his jammies and ...
... so to bed.
jff, who has done much the same thing hisself.
marko_...@hotmail.com
Emmy may have been a good math head, but she wasn't
much of a looker. Edmund Landau was once asked if Noether
was an instance of a great female mathematician.
Landau replied: "I can testify that Emmy is a great
mathematician, but that she is female, I cannot swear."
francis muir
1105806828.4...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
"marko_...@hotmail.com" <marko_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
To persevere in discussing Noether's
looks is the mark of a shallow mind.
just ffoulkes
marko_...@hotmail.com
francis muir wrote:
> > Emmy may have been a good math head, but she wasn't
> > much of a looker. Edmund Landau was once asked if Noether
> > was an instance of a great female mathematician.
> > Landau replied: "I can testify that Emmy is a great
> > mathematician, but that she is female, I cannot swear."
>
> To persevere in discussing Noether's
> looks is the mark of a shallow mind.
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances"
-- Oscar Wilde
Anyway, I was only correcting your attribution.
It was Landau, not Hilbert, who made that remark
about Emmy Noether.
As an aside, the only female Ph.D. in math at Helsinki
University is a Polish/Finnish lady who is quite attractive.
Her doctoral dissertation is on fractals.
marko_...@hotmail.com
marko_amn...@hotmail.com wrote:
> As an aside, the only female Ph.D. in math at Helsinki
> University is a Polish/Finnish lady who is quite attractive.
> Her doctoral dissertation is on fractals.
David
> For starters, here's some approximate lengths of various books,
> in megabytes (corrections welcome; list skewed by a public
> domain classics-CD I had handy):
>
> 27: Story of Civilization (Durant)
> 7: Proust's Remembrance
> 3.5: War and Peace; Harry Potter 1-5
> 2.7: Lord of the Rings
> 2.2: Gravity's Rainbow
> 2.1: Ellmann's James Joyce
> 1.6: Mason & Dixon
> 0.25: Crying of Lot 49
> 0.2: Howl
> 50k: Joyce's Dead
> 15-20k: Eliot's Waste Land
> 1.8k: Positively 4th Street
> 1.3k: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
> 1k: Cat in the Hat
Obvious question: were those old things on the CD in text or plain html
format, and what format were the above commercial things in?
D.
--
"Winter is i-cumin in, Lhude sing goddamn!"
...................................................................
(C) 2004 TheDavid^TM | David, P.O. Box 21403, Louisville, KY 40221
Jorn Barger
my calculator batteries had died. say 12.6Mb.
David wrote:
> Obvious question: were those old things on the CD in text or plain
html
> format,
something proprietary-- i did cut and paste into ms word and used
"properties' for character-count.
> and what format were the above commercial things in?
books, mostly, whose pagecount i multiplied by the linecount,
then by an estimate of characters per line. a few were on the
Web and allowed more precise measures.
Jorn Barger
my calculator batteries had died. say 12.6Mb.
francis muir
1105811705.1...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
"marko_...@hotmail.com" <marko_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
I suspect you said what you meant; the usual Marko sexist stuff.
marko_...@hotmail.com
Jorn Barger wrote:
> marko_...@hotmail.com wrote:
> > > ??: Aubrey-Maturin (O'Brian)
> > why the question marks?
>
> my calculator batteries had died. say 12.6Mb.
okay. thanks. i was interested in your post since i was recently
wondering how many bytes of memory my personal library would
take up. i estimate it at about 2000 volumes. i put up some new
bookshelves recently and they form a neat high "L" in the corner
of one room. though i've never counted my books i know i have
over 50 metres of shelf space ful of books. since quite a lot of my
books were expensive i was also dismayed by the realization i
may have spent as much as 40,000 euros (!) on books over the
last, say, 20 years. the question of how many bytes of memory
my books would take up came up because i also recently installed
a new 80 gigabyte hard drive on my pc. windows xp makes installing
new hard drives very easy. my conclusion was that, even if i were
to scan every image inside all my books, they would still all fit
inside the two hard drives in my pc. ignoring images for the
moment, if you assume that one book takes up, say, 3 megabytes
(a very high estimate; equal to what you gave as the size of
Les Miserables, over 1000 pages long i'd say), 2000 volumes only
takes up 6 gigabytes, less than 10 per cent of my new hard drive, which
cost only 80 euros. i'm not exactly sure how much space
all the images inside my books would take up, but i can't believe
it would be so many gigabytes they wouln't all fit inside a
single 80 gigabyte hard drive.
marko_...@hotmail.com
francis muir wrote:
> On 1/15/05 9:55 AM, in article
> 1105811705.1...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com,
> "marko_...@hotmail.com" <marko_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > marko_amn...@hotmail.com wrote:
> >> As an aside, the only female Ph.D. in math at Helsinki
> >> University is a Polish/Finnish lady who is quite
> > i meant to say only new math Ph.D. over last 10 years.
>
> I suspect you said what you meant; the usual Marko
> sexist stuff.
lol. trying to pass the buck? who brought up the
quote about her looks in the first place? anyway,
in case anyone doubts my attribution, it's from
"prime obsession", john derbyshire's book about
the riemann hypothesis. page 231.
JimC
<marko_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1105831105.1...@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
I gave a link to her pictures. She was homely, but
without doubt sexy to somebody whose day brightened
up at the sound of her voice and partially compensated
for having poor eyesight.
Jorn Barger
> if you assume that one book takes up, say, 3 megabytes
> (a very high estimate; equal to what you gave as the size of
> Les Miserables, over 1000 pages long i'd say), 2000 volumes only
> takes up 6 gigabytes, less than 10 per cent of my new hard drive,
which
> cost only 80 euros.
see: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/clocktime.html
for a calculation that all the thoughts you'd think in a
lifetime would fit in 37 gigs. multiply this by 20 billion
or so to get all the thoughts homo sapiens ever thought...
marko_...@hotmail.com
I had a look at that just now. It occurs to me, however,
that there may be more "information" in a single human
thought than that. Our thoughts and memories often have
other dimensions, visual, geometrical, etc which your
calculation doesn't seem to take into account.
Nevertheless, I have myself often reflected on the terrible
finiteness of life. Just a simple calculation gives the
result that a life has no more than 3 billion seconds.
(3600 seconds x 24 x 365 x 100) That in itself places a
limit on the number of thoughts you will ever have. Or the
number of books you can ever read.
unglued
Jorn Barger wrote:
<snip>
>
> I finally slogged thru M&D, out of loyalty to TRP, mainly.
> After 200 pages I was saying, there might be some good stuff
> here on _second_ reading. By the end I was saying, I'm not
> gonna try that again for a long while.
>
> I went back thru GR, noting images that had stuck in my head
> for 30 years-- I counted about 100 including funny names and
> snatches of song lyrics.
>It was interesting to notice which
> ones had faded over the decades (Byron the Bulb, the giant
> Adenoid), and I got a sort of pang wondering how much I'd
> missed in the long sections where nothing much had stuck.
>
> But 100 images is 100 more than stuck with me from 99% of the
> other novels I've ever read, so GR is really something special.
> I can't say more than one or two stuck from the first reading
> of M&D-- the Jesuits' fancy technologies, mainly.
Have you entertained the thought that your brain is not the same as the
one you had 30 years ago ? And that that might explain the difference
in propensity to have memory enhancing associations ?
I have to agree that M&D is not as free ranging as GR but I still found
it one of the most entertaining new books I've read for a long time.