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Dr. Seuss does Star Wars.
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Obsessed With the Unreal
We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.
Paul Bloom on the pleasures of the imagination.
Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television … or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing.
He argues that the connection you feel to the unreal is due to emotion:
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series led to similar tears.
An old gem found via Ben Fry.
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iPads replete with this app would transform a school music lesson.
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Mapperisms
A great find by Richard Weston over at Ace Jet 170, a Faber Atlas from 1964.
I remember as a child being amazed by the sheer volume of information you could fit into a single book. Both dictionaries and atlases were almost overwhelming, books filled with cold fact that were as enthralling as one filled with story.
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“Nature is more complex than anything humans could imagine, but nature is precisely as complex as it needs to be and not one bit more, which makes it simple.”
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Relearning How To Concentrate
Alain de Botton suggests we reign in our obsession with current events:
We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
The danger of constant distraction is is that we lose our ability to concentrate:
One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.
[via]
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God’s Number
There are 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (a little over 43 quintillion) potential positions Rubik’s Cube can hold. Each of those can be solved with an algorithm.
There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves.
For close to 30 years mathematicians have been working towards creating the most efficient algorithm for solving the Cube.
One may suppose God would use … [an] efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number.
In July a team comprising a mathematician, a programmer, a maths teacher, and an engineer at Google cracked the 36 year puzzle.
With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube™, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.
God’s Number, as it turns out, is 20. [via]
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![More beautiful book cover designs from Carolie Bickford-Smith. [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6pbu25u7c1qctjico1_500.jpg)
More beautiful book cover designs from Carolie Bickford-Smith. [via]
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I’m beginning to think that reading everything through a feed reader is a bad idea. Grain & Gram is stunning.
