Nonlinear Nabokov

Updated on Monday, April 28, 2008 by R.A. DiDio

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote most achingly of the need, for those so called, to write...

ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity;

Vladimir Nabokov - a pre-eminent author of the 20th century, Russian emigre, butterfly expert, author of Lolita - built his life according to Rilke's mandate.

But he shuffled while he wrote.

Nabokov's writing method typically included composing on index cards. Quirkily, he would shuffle these cards daily, allowing him to see different paths to take by looking at the story unfolding in different ways.

This non-linearity in structure was also matched by a non-linearity in focus: he often wrote the middle of the story last.

At several thousand index cards per book, this produces a lot of different paths.

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Football Earth and the Degree Confluence Project

Now this may be the wildest web-based community project to date: The Degree Confluence project. The project goal is amazingly audacious - to "to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted ..."

A basic calculation shows that there are 64,442 confluences . ( To see this, forget the poles for a second - they are points of only one latitude 90 of - 90, and 360 longitude-values. The raining confluences then are 179 latitude lines * 360 longitude line = 64,440 confluences. Add the poles to get to 64,442)

The project was started in 1996 by Alex Jarrett because he "liked the idea of visiting a location represented by a round number such as 43°00'00"N 72°00'00"W. What would be there? Would other people have recognized this as a unique spot? "

He also writes that he had recently purchased a GPS and was looking to"come up with something to do with it."

After posting about the confluences he marked to his web site, apparently readers marked some of their own, and the project " just snowballed from there."

Boy, did it. Currently there have been over 5,000 successful markings!

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Wolfram and the Origins of Randomness

Stephen Wolfram's short article The Origins of Randomness in Physical Systems is like a black hole, or at the very least a neutron star. Incredibly short for the ideas elaborated - only 4 pages - the manuscript is incredibly dense. Each line is a distillation of entire courses of study.

How is this possible? The endnotes: there are 28, and many of them are full paragraphs of further information, and contain their own set of references.

How did you react when reading this paper? Did you recognize any of the ideas/statements as any that we have covered this semester? Or perhaps ideas you are familiar with from past study?

And what is your personal belief of randomness in physical systems? Does randomness arise from the interaction between your system and the outside world, or does randomness arise from deterministic processes within the system? If you answer that randomness comes from outside the system, how do you explain randomness if the system is the universe?

And, if the system is the universe, does this mean that all random processes are deterministic?

Are there no random processes?

(Image drawn using the EdgeOfChaosCA Java applet.)