The Kraken
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Because of its reputed large size and tendency to turn the sea murky with ink (according to the 18th century Natural History of Norway), the Kraken was believed to be a kind of giant octopus. We know now that the giant squid Architeuthis could be responsible for sightings of giant tetacular beasts in the open sea. Seafarers are notorious for their poor eyesight and wild imagination: the mermaid legends are believed to have originated from sightings of sea cows or manatees -- stout, unattractive beasts as their names suggest, far from the beautiful sylphs of nautical legend. The Latin name of the group, Sirenia, also commemorates the Sirens of Odysseus's journey, whose beguiling song he protected his crewmen from by plugging their ears with wax.
As for the giant squid, their washed up remains on Scandinavian shores sans tentacles probably were responsible for cryptic pictures in old natural history books showing giant bishops' hats found on beaches. If you look at a squid's body without tentacles and turn it the right way around, it's not too difficult to see how it might be described in that way, given a length of time and embellishment of detail after a sighting. Stranded giant squid bodies are not uncommon. Bodies up to 16 m long have been recorded, and even greater records claimed, though as Clyde Roper of the Smithsonian Institution put it, molluscan flesh and tentacles being as rubbery as they are, it's possible that some of these records were stretched into the record books. He also described the dissection of a beached whale -- a big messy job -- and the finding of many squid beaks in the gut of the whale: squids appear to be a major component of whale diets. It is not impossible, therefore, that whales should also prey upon giant squid, and whale bodies have been found with giant sucker marks on their skin, demonstrating that in the deep dark ocean depths, mammal and mollusc do battle in the struggle for survival. It is also interesting because sperm whales from time to time cough up congealed, waxy masses from their gut, which float to the surface of the sea and are gradually cured by the combined action of seawater and sunlight, being eventually found by humans on coastlines as the prized perfume ambergris, quite literally worth its weight in gold because of its rarity. It is believed that at least some of this material has an origin in the undigested or partly digested food of the whale, that is, some of it might derive from squid, even giant squid.
Real life is so much stranger than fiction. Giant octopuses terrorising ships seems rather predictable and passe (how many B films by now have shown giant creatures terrorising poor defenceless humans out at sea?) compared to the fact that one of our most expensive and prized perfumes is actually whale vomit, possibly formed partly from the remains of giant squid. Beat that, Davy Jones!
29 July 2006
27 July 2006
Advertisement
Singapore Theatre Festival '06 Event:
12 August
LIFE: New Country, Old Constraints?
ART: The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ
Could the Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ in fact become a reality in today's Singapore? How do we view the Opposition, or alternative views? How do we value or acknowledge them? Can we?
Moderator: Alfian Sa'at
Points of View: Sylvia Lim (Worker's Party Chairman, NCMP), Gayle Goh (Citizen Commentator), Eleanor Wong (Playwright, Lawyer), Tan Tarn How (Playwright, Social Commentator)
Time: 5.30 pm
Venue: Function Rooms at the Drama Centre @ National Library
Free Admission
The play "The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ" by Eleanor Wong also plays at the Drama Centre Theatre at 3pm and 8pm on the same day.
12 August
LIFE: New Country, Old Constraints?
ART: The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ
Could the Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ in fact become a reality in today's Singapore? How do we view the Opposition, or alternative views? How do we value or acknowledge them? Can we?
Moderator: Alfian Sa'at
Points of View: Sylvia Lim (Worker's Party Chairman, NCMP), Gayle Goh (Citizen Commentator), Eleanor Wong (Playwright, Lawyer), Tan Tarn How (Playwright, Social Commentator)
Time: 5.30 pm
Venue: Function Rooms at the Drama Centre @ National Library
Free Admission
The play "The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ" by Eleanor Wong also plays at the Drama Centre Theatre at 3pm and 8pm on the same day.
23 July 2006
Bloody Colourful World
An Indian man in Bangalore has turned his wedding reception into a blood donation drive, according to a report from the BBC. Despite opposition from his parents, who consider 'blood-shed' during a wedding as inauspicious, he and his wife, she a first time donor while he is well-known as a campaigner for blood donation, led the way for blood donations from most of the guests at the party. It isn't for nothing that he's known as Blood Kumar in Bangalore.
If you're inspired by his story and want to donate blood, you can check out the Singapore Red Cross website for more information. Don't worry, it's virtually painless! Just try not to think too much about the large-bore canula stuck in your vein.
***
The Library of Congress has a wealth of websites and materials online of digitised library collections, including its well known and well stocked American Memory website. Among the treasures they have put online in their online exhibitions is a remarkable set of photographs, the Prokudin-Gorskii photographic record. Taken between 1900 and 1915, they document the landscape, architecture, and people of the Russian Empire before it fell to the Bolsheviks. The photographer himself, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, was commissioned by the Tsar to take these photographs. What is unique about them is not just that they record a Russia that has since disappeared, but they do so in colour. Colour? In 1915? Prokudin-Gorskii used the ingenious method of exposing three negatives of each picture he wanted to take using three different filters of red, green, and blue. After developing the glass negatives, he would then project the slides in a lantern with the same colour filters, and the three overlapping images would form a colour image, in the same way that modern colour photography is also based on simulating real colour with three pigments.
For me, part of the charm of old photographs is their sharpness of focus. It's quite amazing how the old glass negatives could achieve even better resolution than today's film, and how the old photographers could stand lugging around cases of heavy and fragile equipment all around the countryside. Even more amazing is how they could persuade their subjects to hold still for long enough. Photography used to be an adventure: photographs of faraway exotic lands were highly sought after, and public screenings of lantern slides could attract large, paying audiences. The information explosion of the 20th century has resulted in people being able to get whatever information they want whenever they want it and in whatever quantity, no matter how specialised or obscure, if they are persistent enough. Sadly it has probably caused us to lose some of our sense of wonder and enthusiasm for exploration. With a veritable buffet of diversions available, the singleminded devotion to a particular hobby or passion, in the tradition of the Victorian amateur expert, might either be strengthened or diminished.
If you're inspired by his story and want to donate blood, you can check out the Singapore Red Cross website for more information. Don't worry, it's virtually painless! Just try not to think too much about the large-bore canula stuck in your vein.
The Library of Congress has a wealth of websites and materials online of digitised library collections, including its well known and well stocked American Memory website. Among the treasures they have put online in their online exhibitions is a remarkable set of photographs, the Prokudin-Gorskii photographic record. Taken between 1900 and 1915, they document the landscape, architecture, and people of the Russian Empire before it fell to the Bolsheviks. The photographer himself, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, was commissioned by the Tsar to take these photographs. What is unique about them is not just that they record a Russia that has since disappeared, but they do so in colour. Colour? In 1915? Prokudin-Gorskii used the ingenious method of exposing three negatives of each picture he wanted to take using three different filters of red, green, and blue. After developing the glass negatives, he would then project the slides in a lantern with the same colour filters, and the three overlapping images would form a colour image, in the same way that modern colour photography is also based on simulating real colour with three pigments.
For me, part of the charm of old photographs is their sharpness of focus. It's quite amazing how the old glass negatives could achieve even better resolution than today's film, and how the old photographers could stand lugging around cases of heavy and fragile equipment all around the countryside. Even more amazing is how they could persuade their subjects to hold still for long enough. Photography used to be an adventure: photographs of faraway exotic lands were highly sought after, and public screenings of lantern slides could attract large, paying audiences. The information explosion of the 20th century has resulted in people being able to get whatever information they want whenever they want it and in whatever quantity, no matter how specialised or obscure, if they are persistent enough. Sadly it has probably caused us to lose some of our sense of wonder and enthusiasm for exploration. With a veritable buffet of diversions available, the singleminded devotion to a particular hobby or passion, in the tradition of the Victorian amateur expert, might either be strengthened or diminished.
20 July 2006
The Limits of Poetry
Poetry is a craft of words (the 'word-craft' of the Anglo-Saxons) and words are limited in what they can portray or evoke, even though the range of what they can do is still very very wide indeed. Aside from the form of the text and the (optional) use of rhyme or meter, what distinguishes poetry from prose is the poetic mood: the understanding between the poet and the reader that there is a deeper meaning to the text, that it is not meant to be read merely literally.
There are several well-established devices for a poet to express the prosaically inexpressible: metaphor, metonymy, and so on. A poet may try to capture or express a mood by relating the circumstances which led to it, or by describing the kinds of feelings which it brings up in his mind or body, or by comparing it to something concrete with (hopefully) meaningful points of comparison. All these methods hinge on the necessity that for a mood or feeling to be accurately conveyed from a poet to a reader, it must be to some extent at least be based upon or start off from a shared experience, i.e. an experience not entirely unique to the poet, but something which suitably artful description and hint-dropping will enable the reader to recognise that same feeling and from there appreciate the poet's intent and perhaps how his feeling is different from our own. But there must be at least some recognition, otherwise the meaning is entirely lost.
This relates to how some poetry is untranslateable into other languages, because they depend on cultural assumptions and mindsets that would simply spoil the poem if they had to be explained at length (for instance if the 'point' of the poem is to allude to that particular aspect of the poet's cultural milieu). Likewise, if one has a unique emotion, or at least which one thinks is unique, how does one express oneself poetically, especially if that emotion is strong and yearns for expression? It is like trying to explain pain to a doctor: how painful is it? Perhaps the doctor could pinch you and ask you if it is 'as painful as that'? But the pain of a pinch is a different sort from the pain of a tummyache. What kind of pain, then, is it? A throbbing kind? or a sharp kind? And sharpness can be sharp like daggers or sharp like pin-pricks, but to some people a pin-prick hurts like a dagger, while to others daggers are merely pin-pricks. While we struggle to make the doctor understand, the pain overwhelms us.
So the limits of poetry are the limits that language places on our poetic intention. It is a limit on what we are able to share, and what we are able to evoke. Perhaps accuracy in pin-pointing a certain frame of mind or internal state is not the intention of all poetry, but a limited poetics means a limited human condition. We cannot share everything even with a lover; we are shut off from the internal intimate workings of others around us; we are individuals in the literal sense of the word. And so we come to the sad conclusion:
There are always things too private to tell, because we have no means to tell of them.
There are several well-established devices for a poet to express the prosaically inexpressible: metaphor, metonymy, and so on. A poet may try to capture or express a mood by relating the circumstances which led to it, or by describing the kinds of feelings which it brings up in his mind or body, or by comparing it to something concrete with (hopefully) meaningful points of comparison. All these methods hinge on the necessity that for a mood or feeling to be accurately conveyed from a poet to a reader, it must be to some extent at least be based upon or start off from a shared experience, i.e. an experience not entirely unique to the poet, but something which suitably artful description and hint-dropping will enable the reader to recognise that same feeling and from there appreciate the poet's intent and perhaps how his feeling is different from our own. But there must be at least some recognition, otherwise the meaning is entirely lost.
This relates to how some poetry is untranslateable into other languages, because they depend on cultural assumptions and mindsets that would simply spoil the poem if they had to be explained at length (for instance if the 'point' of the poem is to allude to that particular aspect of the poet's cultural milieu). Likewise, if one has a unique emotion, or at least which one thinks is unique, how does one express oneself poetically, especially if that emotion is strong and yearns for expression? It is like trying to explain pain to a doctor: how painful is it? Perhaps the doctor could pinch you and ask you if it is 'as painful as that'? But the pain of a pinch is a different sort from the pain of a tummyache. What kind of pain, then, is it? A throbbing kind? or a sharp kind? And sharpness can be sharp like daggers or sharp like pin-pricks, but to some people a pin-prick hurts like a dagger, while to others daggers are merely pin-pricks. While we struggle to make the doctor understand, the pain overwhelms us.
So the limits of poetry are the limits that language places on our poetic intention. It is a limit on what we are able to share, and what we are able to evoke. Perhaps accuracy in pin-pointing a certain frame of mind or internal state is not the intention of all poetry, but a limited poetics means a limited human condition. We cannot share everything even with a lover; we are shut off from the internal intimate workings of others around us; we are individuals in the literal sense of the word. And so we come to the sad conclusion:
There are always things too private to tell, because we have no means to tell of them.
16 July 2006
Things
Things / Jorge Luis Borges
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
(Trans. Stephen Kessler)
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.
(Trans. Stephen Kessler)
09 July 2006
Cool Curves with Graphmatica
Graphmatica is a freeware mathematical graphing program that's popular in schools for teaching curve sketching and the properties of mathematical curves. One reason why it's so popular is that it's really easy to play around with different equations to produce all sorts of cool shapes. The Mactutor History of Mathematics Archive has a webpage featuring famous curves: not Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich, but more abstract classic beauties like the Hyperbola, Ellipse, and rather more obscure exotics like the Lemniscate of Bernoulli and the Quadratrix of Hippias.
So while playing with Graphmatica I found a way to construct the Yin-Yang symbol using only two simple polar equations: it is quite striking to see how the ancients concocted a symbol whose shape is so purely mathematical. Simply graph both r = tanh t and r = -tanh t and the two 'tadpoles' which form the picture will fit into each other. For the little circles, x^2 + (y + 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 and x^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 seem to fit the dimensions best.
In my opinion, though, the cutest one I've found so far is the 'egg in egg' equation, r = t sin t, which really does look like an egg nestled in another egg! There are also a whole lot of equations to draw heart-shaped curves. The cardioid family of curves is perhaps best known, but they don't have the tapered bottom of the classic valentines heart. Math World has an encyclopaedia entry on the topic.
So while playing with Graphmatica I found a way to construct the Yin-Yang symbol using only two simple polar equations: it is quite striking to see how the ancients concocted a symbol whose shape is so purely mathematical. Simply graph both r = tanh t and r = -tanh t and the two 'tadpoles' which form the picture will fit into each other. For the little circles, x^2 + (y + 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 and x^2 + (y - 0.5)^2 = 0.0525 seem to fit the dimensions best.
In my opinion, though, the cutest one I've found so far is the 'egg in egg' equation, r = t sin t, which really does look like an egg nestled in another egg! There are also a whole lot of equations to draw heart-shaped curves. The cardioid family of curves is perhaps best known, but they don't have the tapered bottom of the classic valentines heart. Math World has an encyclopaedia entry on the topic.
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