Inherent Vice is Approachable Pynchon, cos it’s a detective novel. His last one about virtual reality and that is easygoing as well. He’s definitely mellowed with age.
I liked the film…
I made it through Gravity’s Rainbow last year but I don’t think I got a great deal out of it (read: I rapidly didn’t understand it at all). Unlike, say Infinite Jest, which was hard work, but I did enjoy.
That’s what working at Boeing will do to you… I really need to pick up a copy of that and read it.
I always go to astrophysicists to get my history and sociology of religion, just like I get my cosmology from Aristotle.
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I had subsumed foreign interference in population shifts.
We do owe a great deal of our culture, even today, to India and in ways many of us don’t expect. And many cultures had numbering systems long before the Arabs did.
However, I do believe Arabic numerals are thus named due to their invention of the number zero which was transformative to the world of mathematics.
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Actually the invention of zero seems to have been independent in Egypt (Ptolemaus used it) and in Soiuth-East Asia. The concept evolved over time, so you can argue about its status in Babylonian mathematics.
The Arabs had considerable achievements, including preserving a lot of knowledge lost in the European dark ages, and independent work on mechanisms and optics, but they don’t seem to have been the actual originators of modern number systems.
When I was a young starving theater tech, I worked with group that was staging a play - a musical, mind you - about an imagined meeting between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, based on the historical coincidence of the two of them having been in Vienna simultaneously.
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I think there’s a movie with a hypothetical meeting between Einstein & Marilyn Monroe (or maybe that did happen and the movie was about the speculated conversation).
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History nerd here: We know them as Arabic numerals because we got them from the Arabs. They adopted it before Europeans and we just kinda assumed that the Arabs invented them.
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A play, later made into a movie.
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I was confused when I visited the region, because while we call them “Arabic numerals” (for reasons you’ve just explained) they use something else. I remember the 1 looks like our 1 or 7 and a 5 looks like a 0.
You’re not wrong, but how those ancient cultures used zero was not the way we understand it today. Zero as its own number still wasn’t invented, though placeholders for a blank value in a base 10 slot was. It was thanks to Persian mathematicians who combined the concepts of zero between the east and west and applied this new number to their astronomy calculations where it really came into its own.
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Have you been to to the Questions thread?
Well, we know it’s a misprint because there’s no way his short vulgarian thumb would be able to cover the T.
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Stalin and Trotsky were in Vienna at the time, too. It was the cultural center of Europe, for a little while.
Was reading something about that the other day.
Ahh, Here tis.
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The evidence for her being a sell-out before she was in office?
I mean, she campaigned for Barry Goldwater and went to ivy league colleges where she fraternized with a host of Nixon-era Young Republicans.
This is part of why she’s good at what she does: she’s a convert. She gets the other side.
But it also makes her compromised: she’s been born and bred as an economic conservative, and while the Republicans are too racist for her, there’s little sign that they’re too capitalist for her.
I do think that if the Senate and House had a few more people skeptical of her brand of center-right policy, we’d see her shift a bit, or at least allow a bit of a shift.
But you know, expect the TPP.
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