Update: Let this post be a witness to the inadvisability of blogging whilst consuming the first caffeine of the day. Much better to suck down dose 1 and probably 2 as well — else the rain (sic!) of (thankfully minor) error below. Yup, Mr. Pollack’s name is actually Pollock — a fact available even to this blogger directly in the block-quoted text; Doha is the capital of Qatar, not the fictious metropolis, Qatar City; and the alien consuming the souls of Republicans is a Tomato Hornworm lookalike, not a “hookworm.”
I need a nap. In other news: I kind of expected a “Pollock was a drunken fraud” theme to develop in the comments — no discussion of the man escapes that tired old trope, and it certainly gives the title of the post a bit more juice. But that several folks could get into it arguing over whether the Mays catch was or was not routine — that’s an example of what I love about the BJ crowd. For the record: that it was a no fuss and bother catch for Mays is the point, at least in the context of a discussion of high art and deep science. Routine for him ain’t exactly chopped liver for the rest of us; the very expected nature of that kind of outcome (after all, he caught the ball in stride, with no need to lay out or crash to the turf) is an element in our appreciation of the artistry Mays brought to the outfield.
With that, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
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Man, I so need a break from politics now. Given that the Party of Lincoln has decisively transformed itself into that of — oh who the hell knows…say Tomato Hookworm-Space Aliens, and we can’t seem to build asylums fast enough to cage the crazy, I just hit the wall.
I know that I haven’t been posting much lately — the consequence of a summer deconstructed by the there-and-back-again frenzy of trips to surreal cities (Shanghai, Qatar Doha) and the blessed internet-free cloister of the mountains. But truly, my (unaccustomed) silence is born of the sense that the fools and knaves really have managed to gut the American, and perhaps the human experiment for good and all — or at least for that foreseeable future that includes my son’s maturity.
I don’t actually think that’s necessarily true, for a lot of reasons, including this one. But still and all, it is good to read some stuff that had nothing to do with dominion and the amount of creativity some people can bring to bear on screwing the most vulnerable among us.
Like this, for example:
At a glance, a painting by Jackson Pollock can look deceptively accidental: just a quick flick of color on a canvas.
A quantitative analysis of Pollock’s streams, drips, and coils by Harvard mathematician L. Mahadevan and collaborators at Boston College reveals, however, that the artist had to be slow — he had to be deliberate — to exploit fluid dynamics in the way that he did.
The linked article at the Harvard Gazette is a bit of bait and switch. Pollock wasn’t a physicist, of course, except in the sense that one of the qualities that distinguishes a great center fielder, for example, is the ability to solve the equation describing the curve traveled by a batted ball swiftly (and subconsciously) enough to make the most astounding catches seem …routine (almost).
But even if there is a difference between living physics and thinking about it, there is a crucial overlap as well:
My Kindergartener Could Solve Differential Equations Better Than ThatPost + Comments (156)