Last week, I set a little brain-teaser. Out of 12 balls, eleven are normal, and the other is either heavier or lighter than the others. Using a simple set of balances no more than three times, find out which ball is the odd one out, and whether it’s heavier or lighter than the other balls. [...]
Archive for June, 2011
25 Jun
When the awkward becomes adequate: “An Awkward Echo” by Mark Dietz
Back in the 90s, when I first became acquainted with this strange thing called the net, I became a regular contributor to the now sadly defunct discussion board on the Penguin Classics site. We soon developed a small core of regular contributors – though others came and went – and, after a while, we started, [...]
18 Jun
Literature and religion
Well, it had to be done. I have, this week, started to read Dante. Not in the original, of course – I am a very poor linguist – but in Robin Kirkpatrick’s translations, which come with detailed introductions and copious commentaries and notes, invaluable for someone like myself, shamefully ignorant as I am both of [...]
13 Jun
I’m famous!
Dear Reader, This blog you are now reading is, I gather, ranked 24,389,427th in the world. I feel so proud!
12 Jun
The finest decade: 1601-1610
Looking through the history of Western culture, has there ever, I wonder, been a decade quite as rich in achievement as the first ten years of the 17th century? Shakespeare was, in this decade, at his very peak. Exact dating is difficult, but it appears that by 1601, the start of the decade, Shakespeare already [...]
11 Jun
Is general knowledge trivial?
Back in the 1980s, a board game called “Trivial Pursuit” became all the rage. The trivia that was pursued in that game was general knowledge. What is the capital of Colombia? Which is the longest running soap on British television? Who sculpted the Medici Tombs in Florence? What is measured in units of Amperes? Which [...]
5 Jun
“Adam Bede” by George Eliot
One comes to a novel by the author of Middlemarch with the highest of expectations, even when one knows that the novel is her first, and that the author may not, so early in her career, have completely mastered her craft, or be in full or even partial possession yet of a mature artistic vision. [...]
