If you are going to play “52-factorial” seriously… pack a lunch.
Via TwistedSifter
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
…it buggers the imagination… (aplogies to Mrs. Malaprop)
IIRC, my old HP-41CV would only return a numerical result up to about 47! due to memory limitations. When doing permutations and combinations calcs, we often had to reduce the numerator and denominator before plugging the rest into the calculator to get the final result. That was only sensible and kept us from being lazy. Good times!
I was in first grade when I first encountered the amazingly complicated math problem of 1+1=2 written by the teacher on the blackboard. Me, being an avid reader even at that age (if you count picture books as avid reading) stared at that equation and thought ‘I will NEVER understand this!’. Well, at 67 years of age, my fear of math has not abated one bit. This 52 factorial thing has just confirmed that math really isn’t my thing. And I am in awe of people who are math wizards!
Can I get the guy in that video to come over and balance my checkbook?
@Auntie
“Can I get the guy in that video to come over and balance my checkbook?”
The kids snicker: “Did you hear that? That Boomer lady still uses a checkbook.”
My dear azlibertarian, thanks for the laugh. Yet when I send them checks my kids don’t snicker. And I’ll bet that when their parents send them checks, other kids don’t snicker either – and they get real busy signing the endorsements in that supposedly obsolete cursive.
Yeah, our (adult) kids like receiving dollars from mom and dad, but their preferred method is a transfer straight into their accounts…like God Almighty Hisself had looked over their plight and dropped a benevolence into their lives. Reminds me of the soon-to-be-a-cancer-on-our-financial-lives that is what they’re calling a “Digital Dollar”. Watch out for that one.
Mrs. azlib and I pay our bills twice a month and each time we do, we reconcile and balance the checkbook to the penny. It has taken me more years than I should admit, but I have finally convinced my beautiful bride that when we run across that occasional 5 cent error, that it is perfectly ok to simply make the correction in the register rather than hunt through each entry to see exactly which transaction was entered in error. The value of your time is worth more than the correction. Dunno if my kids have ever balanced their checkbooks. They wonder why put in the effort at all…just accept the bank’s figure and move on.
At the rate at which our dollar is devaluing, they might have a point.
Dear AZ,
Once you understand that the dollar is the new dime it all follows.
Oh, I understand. I understand that this does not end well for any of us..not at all. The Federal Reserve is rapidly becoming what we used to joke about….Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R