A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, August 17, 2009

The Strange Death (Maybe) of Health Care Reform

Rachel Maddow and Matt Taibbi on what went wrong:

Thoughts While Waiting for the Toast to Pop Up

Do cats count?

I mean, yes, they matter. (At least in our household.) But do they, you know, enumerate?

It occurred to me to wonder this morning which was the primary human achievement: mathematics or language? As a word person I of course give the top spot to language. But then it occurred to me that both numbers and words are abstractions from experience. The capability to do that -- to turn what we see and do into words or numbers -- was a great evolutionary leap forward.

But cats speak. They use sounds to say I'm hungry, or Get away, or That's mine, or Keep rubbing that spot, 'k? Thanks. They express themselves on issues of the quality of life. But do they concern themselves with matters of quantity?

It does occur to me that cats do some pretty sophisticated calculations -- distance, trajectory, momentum -- to enable them to leap from the back of the chair to the top of the china cabinet. (I once had a cross-eyed cat who would make those calculations and then miss the mark, often with disastrous results to the curtains but never to the cat himself. But even he eventually learned the flaws in the data and adjusted the variables accordingly.) But are there other examples of feline numeracy?