Edeet Ravel (2004):

Look for Me felt uneventful: whatever events there were came at you pretty quick. Sudden. Surprising. With little build up. Things happened in the span of a few words. Even the question that was lingering throughout the book–the one that provided all the suspense–was answered within a paragraph.

Here’s an example from p.51:

“How did you get into photography?” Beatrice asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m going to publish these photos,”she said. “Good thing I married a man who has not only a heart but also money! Now, what about your personal life?” she asked.
“Nothing much going on.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. You can’t live like a cloistered nun, you know.”
“Yes, yes . . .” I said vaguely.
“Don’t ‘yes yes’ me, dear. Are you having sex at all?”
“No.”
“Since when?”
“Four years, seven months. There was someone a year after Daniel left, just a one time thing, it was a disaster.”
“That’s scandalous. Someone like you! Don’t you miss it?”
“I miss Daniel.”
“You feel you have to be loyal to him.” It was a mild reprimand: she clearly didn’t think much of my approach.
“I can’t help the way I feel,” I said appologetically.
“Listen, dear. Would you feel it’s less of a betrayal if we slept together?”
I considered her question. “Yes,” I said at last. “Daniel wouldn’t mind. It wouldn’t bother him.”
She looked at me a little pityingly, as if I were slightly backward. “I’ll stay the night, then.”
“All right. But I’m not experienced with women.”
She laughed. “I’ll let you read the manual first.” She phoned her husband and told him she wasn’t coming home. “Dudu, my love, I’ll be back in the morning, I’m staying with Dana, poor sweet thing,” she said, smiling at me. “Don’t forget Hagari has her project, and there’s that pizza in the freezer … yes … yes … fine. Bye for now, honey.”
“He sends his regards,” she told me, putting her phone away. “So let’s have some fun.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that at the begining. But the style grew on me as the book went on. How like life, I thought. Life doesn’t come with a sound track. There are no violins or cellos in the background of your breakups. There is no orchestra at moments of triumph. No dancing music at moments of joy (except at weddings, I guess.) Certainly, there are moments of suspense, and periods of build up, but, all in all, life just happens. At least, that’s how it feels looking back on it: a series of apparently mundane happenings interjected–momentarily–by perceptually momentus events. Momentus in the sense of how much they shape life’s trajectory in the moment it takes for them to come into effect. Then, Life resumes its course. (There are many physics-based metaphors that come to mind, but there is no need for any, so I will simply enumerate them in my head to spare aching yours.)

Edeet Ravel (2004):

Look for Me–I understand–is the second novel in a triology (Ten Thousand Lovers, and A Wall of Light) about love stories in the shadow of the vivid struggles of the middle east. Certainly, this story is very much about the Israeli-Palastenian conflict–the human side of it–without being didactic about the politics, and without any claim to moral superiority.

I think it’s worth re-reading when I take on the triology (when I get around to it.)

p.179:

At least eighty cars were already parked at the gas station near the border of the South Lifna Hills. People were standing in small groups and talking, or buying coffee and snacks at the little convenience store, or using the washroom. The gas station was on isolated strip of the road; you couldn’t see any towns or cities in the distance, only neat, altering bands of green and taupe, and beyond them the indistinct mauve dunes of the desert. Near the station, scattered randomly as though abandoned or misplaced, were the usual mystifying objects, the exact nature of which no one could guess: some sort of steel tower; a cement cylinder; equipment and machines that appeared to have been designed for complicated engineering feats. I took a photograph of these unidentified buts of civilization; they captured the improvished feeling we all carried within us. We didn’t know where we were going and we wondered how we’d lasted this long on such flimsy foundations and muddled efforts. The myths we grew up on tried to compensate us, but myths were slippery by nature. In fact we were lost, walking on air, inside air, falling.
The organizers handed out tape and flyers in three languages: messages of peace printed in bold letters on white sheets of paper. We taped them to our cars and them we taped numbers on our fenders. Rafi’s van was tenth. Then the organizers gave instructions, explained the mission. I didn’t listen carefully. The instructions didn’t vary much from activity to activity: no violence, no getting into arguments with army or polics or anyone else we encountered. All interactions would be handeled by trained negotiators.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the winners in its 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. In the photography category, first place was awarded to An Egyptian Child Mummy by Paul Brown et. al.

As reported in Science; this unwrapped 2000-year-old mummy is for a 4-/5-year-old girl, who was named Sherit by the Rosicrucian museum, where it’s been hosted for the past 75 years. 60,000 two-dimensional CT scans, and clever 3D reconstruction algorithms enabled the researchers to “photograph” the interior of the mummy. Amazing. They could even tell that she didn’t die of trauma or infectious disease.

Also pretty cool from past years’ competitions: a 2005 honorable mention in the non-interactive media category: Evolutionary Morphing: Statistical Interpolation of Ancestral Morphology Along an Evolutionary Tree.

Suehp Rom over at Or Does It Explode posts about a Tunisian exile producing a Tunisian prison map:

Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile blogging from the Netherlands at Fikra, has made an important contribution to contextualizing and situating human rights abuses in Tunisia. Using “mashup” technology to match a database to Google Earth maps, he has produced an interactive online Tunisian Prison Map.

What would it take to make an Egyptian one? I mean I have no idea where to start with something like this, but we have not only one Gharbeia of our own, but two. I am guessing Mostafa and Alaa would be able (and possibly interested) too. So, boys, I’m ready when you are.

A friend sent me this quote by Jean Guitton:

“Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the other. We are all prime numbers divisible only by ourselves.”

With all due respect to Monsieur Guitton–who was a philosopher for a good part of 98 years–I beg to differ.

“We are all prime numbers divisible only by ourselves,” is a failing metaphor. Which is not so bad considering that the statement, “Originality exists in every individual because each of us differs from the other,” is a failing argument to start with.

My point is this:

We are not prime! We are not even–like–relatively prime, since we have stuff in common–common factors, if you will. Maybe, maybe, maybe, none of us is divisible by some other, but we’re definitely not prime.

Take for example the numbers 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. They’re all different, but only the 5 and 7 are prime. 6 and 8 have 2 as a common factor, and 6 and 9 have 3 as a common factor.

The metaphor fails.

Not only that, but:

“Each of us differs from the other” doesn’t imply that “originality exists in every individual.” It simply isn’t enough. We might well each be original (which I doubt) but it sure doesn’t follow from uniqueness–not in any sense I can make of “originality.”

6 is unique, but it follows 2 and 3, has a bit of 8 and a bit of 9, and is contained in 12 and 60.

Nothing original here… I might be anal; but I–surely–didn’t invent it.

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and you’re stumped by a hard problem. Your neural network is as paralyzed as Cairo traffic on a Thursday night… Finally, after going on first gear for way too long, it starts to loosen up, only for you to realize that you’ve run out of gas.

Stupid.

How do you make yourself feel a little smarter than the average zoo resident? Well, bring the level of difficulty down. Way down. And no problem is easier than one that you already know the solution to.

This brings us to tonight’s puzzle: The hunter and the monkey. It’s a classic physics puzzle about, what else, a hunter who is trying to shoot, ehem, a monkey on a tree. (Or–for the PETA card-carrying member–a coconut carried by a monkey on a palm tree. Don’t ask why the hunter/gatherer wants the particular coconut that the monkey has, or why they would even want to shoot a coconut in the first place. But I digress.) The monkey drops (the coconut) from the tree in the same instant the hunter fires his shot. The question is (assuming no air resistance) where should the hunter aim? I guess your choices are: above, at, or below the monkey. Oh, and of course we shouldn’t forget the dreadful second part of the question, and why?

I know the answer to this one. (So, I feel better already.) It goes [something] like this:

(Sorry for the tease. If you can’t wait till tomorrow for the answer, look it up.)

The hunter should aim straight at the monkey (coconut), the reason being (from wikipedia):

To answer this question, recall that according to Galileo’s Law, all objects near the Earth’s surface fall with the same constant acceleration, 9.8 meters per second per second (32 feet per second per second), regardless of the object’s weight. Furthermore, horizontal motions and vertical motions are independent: gravity acts only upon an object’s vertical velocity, not upon its velocity in the horizontal direction… The hunter’s dart, therefore, falls with the same acceleration as the monkey.

The article on wikipedia also explains other ways of looking at the problem in terms of reference frame transformations.

Or, if you’d rather see an animation, click on this image.

(h/t O)