Boojum, a spacefaring Cthulhu Mythos story run through the filter of Lewis Carroll by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (
Interview). A sequel in the same universe,
Mongoose, Appeared in the
Ellen Datlow edited anthology
Lovecraft Unbound. An audio of Mongoose is available at the Drabblecast (
part 1,
part 2), as well as a further sequel,
The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward (
part 1,
part 2)
posted by Artw
on Sep 21, 2012 -
31 comments
Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved "Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
posted by dhruva
on Dec 16, 2009 -
30 comments
The
Marquis de Condorcet and Admiral
Jean-Charles de Borda were two men of the French Enlightenment who struggled with how to design voting systems that accurately reflected voters' preferences. Condorcet favored a
method that required the winner in a multiparty election to win a series of head-to-head contests, but he also discovered that his method easily led to a
paradoxes that produced no clear winners. The
Borda method avoids the Condorcet paradox by requiring voters to rank choices numerically in order of preference, but this method is flawed because the withdrawal of a last-place candidate can reverse the
election results. Mathematicians in the 19th century attempted to design better voting systems, including
Lewis Carroll, who favored an early form of
proportional representation. Economist Kenneth Arrow argued that designing a perfect voting system was futile, because his
"impossibility theorem" proved that it's impossible to design a non-dictatorial voting system that fulfills
five basic criteria of fairness. (more inside)
posted by jonp72
on Aug 27, 2007 -
43 comments
A Good Day for Video Games. Turns out that video games are protected by the First Amendment, at least according to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which today overturned a St. Louis ruling that video games do not constitue protected speech.
A good quote from the opinion:
"If the first amendment is versatile enough to 'shield [the] painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll,' we see no reason why the pictures, graphic design, concept art, sounds, music, stories, and narrative present in video games are not entitled to a similar protection. The mere fact that they appear in a novel medium is of no legal consequence."
posted by jscalzi
on Jun 3, 2003 -
7 comments
You've probably seen those
photo mosaics where a large image is made up of many smaller images acting as pixels. Kelly Houle has taken the idea a mile further by creating a photo collage that is also
anamorphic -- a collage of illustrations and related material from Alice in Wonderland that, when a curved mirror is placed in the correct position, forms
a portrait of Lewis Carroll. Absolutely amazing stuff.
posted by ewagoner
on Jan 23, 2003 -
19 comments
TextArc is an interactive program that reproduces the text of more than 2,000 books as works of art.
The software converts the text into an interactive map that allows viewers to quickly see relationships between words and characters at a glance, even without having read the book. Try it with
Alice in Wonderland. (Links opens a full-screen window.)
posted by Mwongozi
on Nov 30, 2002 -
9 comments
