Новости за 01.12.2016

Satire. “I knew something was wrong as soon as I entered the hotel. I signed in at the front desk and the clerk assumed a huge, cheerful smile. ‘Welcome to the Facebook Hotel!’ he said. ‘Your dog died six years ago today!’ After forcing me to look at four photos of my departed dog as a puppy, he handed over my room key. I stepped onto the elevator with a familiar face — a friend from high school jazz band? I couldn’t be sure. ‘I don’t normally talk about politics’, he said, as my heart sank”

A decade ago the company was nearly bankrupt. Now Lego is more popular than ever, bonding parents and children in “a space shared by childhood imagination and parental ambition”. Lego is “the vegetable your kid actually requests and then eats in heaping mounds — a toy that’s also a building block for future creativity, a mechanics lesson that doesn’t feel like schoolwork, a wholesome embodiment of Scandinavian craftsmanship, something tactile in a world that is increasingly pixelated”

Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem, talks about the inner life of a mathematician. “It’s bad to have too good a memory if you want to be a mathematician. You need to forget the way you approached a problem the previous time. It’s a bit like evolution. If you remembered all the failed attempts before, you wouldn’t try them again. Because I have a slightly bad memory I’ll probably try essentially the same thing again and then I realise I was just missing this one little thing”

If we could understand the Voynich Manuscript, we might prize it much less. It is “crudely and cheaply done”. Only one of its four sections, about bathing, is visually startling: “Some baths look like holes in the ground, others seem made of solid stone. A few have windows, while others look like wedding cakes floating in midair”. The incomprehensible text “could well have been composed as an elaborate lampoon of medieval knowledge, and it’s amusing to imagine that we’re still falling for the trick”

A young man survives a car crash in California, hospitalised in a “persistent vegetative state”. Nurses wash and feed him. He needs a name, so the hospital gives him one: “Legally, he became Sixty-Six Garage”. A few pesos in his pocket suggest that he came recently Mexico. As his story spreads, people begin to contact the hospital, asking about moles or scars. Is this their missing son, or husband, or brother? “The first year, there were dozens of these families. Eventually, there would be thousands”

And the winner is: Tuyuca, spoken in the eastern Amazon, for its classes of nouns, numbering between 50 and 140. The noun-class used for “bark that does not cling closely to a tree” is also used for baggy trousers and for wet plywood in the process of coming apart. Tuyuca requires “evidential” verb-endings to signal the source of a speaker’s knowledge: diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”

Interview. Interesting throughout. On President Trump: “There are areas where people like me could work with him: Rebuilding the infrastructure, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, re-establishing Glass-Steagall, raising the minimum wage. We’re not going back to an era of racism and sexism and discrimination. On that there will not be any compromise. But are there areas that we can perhaps work together? If he remains consistent with what he said on the campaign trail, we’ll see”

Conversation about the “sagging ratings, national controversy, horrifying head injuries and shameless greed” afflicting American football. “High-definition television has clearly been a two-edged sword for the NFL. It makes the drama of the game come alive, because we can now see the action in so much more detail. But it also means that when Luke Kuechly is writhing in pain on the ground, we can see every emotion on his face. That’s not a trivial matter”

Every one a gem. “Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish.” “A Californian company called Skinny Mirror sells mirrors that make you look thinner. When installed in the changing rooms of clothes shops, they can increase sales by 18%.” “Twitter has enough money in the bank to run for 412 years at current losses”

Fascinating and full of delights. An account of how Einstein’s ideas were shaped by conversations with his best friend from student days, Michele Besso. Einstein was “ready to give up” on what became the theory of relativity, when a comment from Besso showed him the way forward. “Within five weeks, his theory of special relativity was complete. What magic words had Besso uttered in that fateful conversation? It seems he reminded Einstein of Mach’s central idea: a measurement is always a relation”