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Bookworm
Bookworm
12:34 AM
0
Q: What book involved forging one of the United States' founding documents?

AnonymousAskerA few details of this book that I remember include: A specific type of parchment was purchased to forge either the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. This parchment was old enough to fool carbon dating. A man urgently needed money for a bus ticket and traded his expensive watch for tha...

story-identification
 
 
5 hours later…
user185131
5:47 AM
Another one of my idle curiosity questions: is there a need for locking this old question on Meta calling for nominations for the pro tempore election, even after it's closed as duplicate?
 
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
9:21 AM
@Brahadeesh As far as I know, keeping that question locked also prevents voting, while marking it as a duplicate doesn't.
Two and a half weeks before the end of the Tale of Genji topic challenge and I'm still waiting for my copy of the book to arrive. It's been seven weeks now since I ordered it.
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: What manuscript or manuscripts was the first printed edition of the Tale of Genji based on?

TsundokuThe original manuscript of the 11th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji has been lost. According to the Wikipedia article Textual tradition of The Tale of Genji, "the number of manuscript copies of it is very large". Already by the 13th century there were many variations between the manuscri...

editions japanese-literature murasaki-shikibu the-tale-of-genji
 
 
1 hour later…
user185131
10:26 AM
@Tsundoku Ah, okay. So it’s like preserving a snapshot of the post and the nominations, as well as the votes on them.
 
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
@Brahadeesh That's how I see it. It's a bit unfortunate that you can't have a historical lock without adding the statement that the question is "off-topic", which is not the case there.
 
 
2 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
12:19 PM
0
Q: Short story : angels show their animal creations to God

LeaGI've already post this question on the Sci.Fi / Fantasy S.E but no one can give me an answer. I am looking for a short story I studied in high school (6 to 8 years ago), but the story itself would be way older. It was the story of God, creating the world with his angels. They showed him a lot of ...

story-identification short-stories
 
 
2 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
2:24 PM
0
Q: What does this sentence from Carrie mean?

TomDot ComIn the Part I of Carrie, Stephen King writes: And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal. Other than an understanding of the relation between the locations stated, real or otherwise, and the...

stephen-king carrie
 
 
1 hour later…
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
3:38 PM
"I make terrible science puns, but only periodically." (someone in their high school yearbook)
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
I'd like to set aside some time for literature puns, but I'm all booked up.
 
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
4:01 PM
Literature puns are not exactly a novel idea.
 
 
3 hours later…
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
6:40 PM
I'm currently re-reading The Phantom Tollbooth, and keep chuckling at puns that I'd never noticed before.
 
user185131
Have to resist the temptation to star all of these messages :P
 
user185131
@Randal'Thor I had to read each quote some five times before I got the puns. Too clever!
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
I linked to the illustrations just in case the context would help :-)
 
user185131
Oh they were illustrations? I didn't click them yet, hang on
 
user185131
Hehe, the dog one becomes clear with the image, but the carrying one is still subtle. :D
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
6:53 PM
:-D
It's a great little book.
Somewhere in the "flight of fancy" genre with Alice in Wonderland.
 
user185131
Regarding the Jules Verne question, if the OP doesn't edit to improve in a week or so, would it be alright if I post their second question as a new one, and edit the original to keep only "What are all the works of Jules Verne etc."? Since there's a nice answer that would be a shame to lose...
 
user185131
@Randal'Thor I love Alice in Wonderland. I'll put The Phantom Tollbooth on my reading list :)
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@Brahadeesh Oh, I just now saw it's been closed. Yeah, that seems reasonable to me.
 
user185131
Super
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Alice in Wonderland is outdone, IMO, by its less famous sequel.
 
user185131
6:57 PM
Through the Looking Glass!
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Yep!
Come to think of it, those stories could be a great source of questions for this site, many of them answerable with the help of Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice.
So much of the wackiness can actually be analysed in one way or another.
 
user185131
Wait, the same Martin Gardner who had the column in Scientific American?
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
 
user185131
And wrote popular math books, puzzles, popularized math for the layperson
 
user185131
:O
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
6:59 PM
I assume you also know that Lewis Carroll was actually a mathematician called Charles Dodgson.
 
user185131
Today is a good day :D
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
So the areas of interest overlap.
 
user185131
@Randal'Thor Yes, that I knew :) Ludwig was his middlename, if I remember my trivia correctly.
 
user185131
Although, I was too young to note any mathematics in the Alice books, if any were there... I should probably read them again now to find out!
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@Brahadeesh Lutwidge, I think. Close enough :-)
Hence Lutwidge -> Lewis and Charles -> Carroll.
 
user185131
7:04 PM
Oh! :O
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
My favourite mathematical fact about him is that he devised a beautifully symmetric way of calculating the determinant of a 3x3 matrix, which I also discovered independently when I first learned about matrices and determinants.
 
user185131
No way, what is this, tell me more
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Turns out that if you take each 2x2 corner of a 3x3 matrix and calculate its determinant, then write those four determinants as a new 2x2 matrix and calculate its determinant, then divide by the centre number of the original matrix, you get the determinant of the original 3x3 matrix.
Dodgson condensation
In mathematics, Dodgson condensation is a method of computing the determinants of square matrices. It is named for its inventor, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his pseudonym, as Lewis Carroll, the popular author). The method in the case of an n × n matrix is to construct an (n − 1) × (n − 1) matrix, an (n − 2) × (n − 2), and so on, finishing with a 1 × 1 matrix, which has one entry, the determinant of the original matrix. == General method == This algorithm can be described in the following four steps: Let A be the given n × n matrix. Arrange A so that no zeros occur in its interior...
And I just learned now how it extends to nxn matrices. Always meant to look into that one day.
 
user185131
@Randal'Thor This is ridiculous. And so beautiful.
 
user185131
And you actually discovered it yourself, too, that must have been thrilling :D
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
7:13 PM
Yeah! The extension of the determinant concept from 2x2 to 3x3 always seemed a little weird to me - even though it is of course symmetric and doesn't depend which row or column you choose, it doesn't look symmetric - so I was trying to find a more "natural" way to extend that concept.
And I remembered an Alice question that's been on my list for a while, so went ahead and posted it.
 
user185131
That's true, the extension of the determinant to 3x3 matrices is row/column agnostic but it's not what you'd call symmetric. This is really cool!
 
user185131
@Randal'Thor Hmmm, just saw that (and upvoted). There was a time when my sister and I would challenge ourselves to recite by heart every poem in both Alice books. Of course, I was no match for her, ever. :) Seeing as I can't recall any of the Looking Glass poems, let alone the fish references, I think it's high time I revisit the books :)
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
At one point I knew Carroll's "You are old, Father William" by heart. Still got bits of it memorised now, but not the whole thing.
> You are old, Father William, the young man said,
> And your hair has become very white,
> And yet you incessantly stand on your head,
> Do you think, at your age, it is right?
>
> [one line]
> I feared it would damage the brain,
> But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
> Why, I do it again and again!
I can remember that much, and a couple of stray lines from later: "In my youth, said the sage, as he shook his grey locks" and "And argued each case with my wife".
 
user185131
Never fails to make me chortle :D
 
user185131
It ends with Father William saying "Or I'll kick you downstairs", I think
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
7:22 PM
Yes! "I have answered three questions, and that is enough - be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"
Eight verses altogether? Four questions, four replies.
 
user185131
Probably! Or there may be five, but no more.
 
user185131
The Walrus and the Carpenter was our favorite
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Like much of Carroll's nonsense poetry, this was a parody (actually a case of whatever word it is you're looking for in your terminology question!) of some existing poetry: in this case, a Victorian poem about an old priest giving serious life advice to a young man, which of course now is much less well-known than Carroll's parody of it.
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
1
Q: Why so many poems about fish in Through The Looking-Glass?

Rand al'ThorLewis Carroll's famous flight of fantasy Through the Looking-Glass, a sequel to the even more famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, contains a lot of nonsense poetry, much of which relates to fish. As I recall, the same is true of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland too, but it's in Through the L...

symbolism lewis-carroll through-the-looking-glass
 
user185131
May I include that example in my question? :)
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
7:26 PM
There's the original. A didactic poem by no less than Robert Southey!
@Brahadeesh Of course :-)
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
7:51 PM
0
Q: Is a fish "Alive with breath" or "Alive without breath"?

BrahadeeshJ. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit contains many lovely riddles, posed in-universe by Gollum and Bilbo to each other. Most of them are original compositions by Tolkien himself, as he explained in one of his letters. One of these is the "fish-riddle", asked by Gollum, which goes as follows: Alive with...

j-r-r-tolkien wording-choice
 
user185131
I apologize in advance for asking what might be the silliest wording-choice question ever to do with the master wordsmith J. R. R. Tolkien. — Brahadeesh 9 mins ago
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Hmm. Should we create a childcraft tag?
Or is it more of an encyclopedia than literature?
 
user185131
The first volume, at least, feels more like a compilation than an encyclopedia.
 
user185131
Taken as a whole (all 15 volumes or so), it's definitely an encyclopedia though.
 
user185131
I'm not sure about creating the tag... Do we keep tags for questions about individual encyclopedia?
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
8:10 PM
I'm not sure either. It's potentially more a Childcraft question than a Tolkien question, if the answer is simply that they goofed. But I guess your question is a bit broader than that, asking about reproductions of this riddle in general.
Could do with a the-hobbit tag though :-)
 
user185131
8:35 PM
@Randal'Thor Done :)
 

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