Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, November 14, 2016

Standing On The Shoulders of Gottfried!: G W Leibniz After 300 Years

Today November 14 2016 is 300th death anniversary of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a father of Calculus

Michael Brooks, ‘Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science’, 2011:

“...Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had achieved his great breakthroughs by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Liebniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work. Though his reputation has been polished for centuries – he is the ‘scientist’s scientist’ – Newton was not someone you would want to put in charge of science today; in later life he suffered episodes of madness and became obsessed with the Old Testament Book of Daniel, writing a commentary on it that he considered his greatest work. Hardly the model of scientific level-headedness...”

Matthew Stewart, ‘The courtier and the heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the fate of God in the modern world’, 2006:

"...The alarming fact about Leibniz is not that he did not always tell the truth, but that he was, in a certain sense, constitutionally—or perhaps metaphysically—incapable of telling the truth. In his handling of his first contact with Spinoza, to cite the most pressing example, what we observe is not straightforward duplicity, but a much more complex phenomenon that deserves the name “multiplicity”—that is, showing a variety of related but mutually incompatible faces, none of which seems to enjoy the privilege of being entirely “true” or entirely “false.” From Leibniz’s multidirectional correspondence on the subject of Spinoza, we may conclude neither that he was an anti-Spinozist intending to lure the sage of The Hague into a trap, nor that he was a crypto-Spinozist who concealed his true identity from his orthodox colleagues. Rather, he was—always to some degree, depending on the listener, the context, and the particular purposes in play—a subtle and indeterminate mixture of both. As Lewis White Beck has said, he was “all things to all men” but the price paid for such omnidexterity was that he was no one thing to everybody..."

Jason Socrates Bardi, ‘The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time’, 2006:

“...Leibniz and Newton both had a claim of ownership on calculus, and today they are generally regarded as twin independent inventors, both credited with giving mathematics its greatest push forward since the time of the Greeks.

While the glory of the invention may be great enough for today’s scholars to share, it was not enough for Leibniz and Newton, and by the end of the seventeenth century accusations of impropriety were being raised by the backers of both men. The first two decades of the eighteenth century would see the eruption of the calculus wars...”