"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music." —Bertrand Russell
The Beauty of Mathematics By Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux http://vimeo.com/77330591
100 best first lines of novels (a list by the editors of American Book Review) - from "Call me Ishmael" to "Take my camel, dear..." - http://www.infoplease.com/ipea...
On 3: "A screaming came across the sky." The great Pynchon novel "Gravity's Rainbow" (and a lot of other contemporary literature - Ballard, Vonnegut, to name a couple) is available for download at the Open Library ebook lending project, accessible to anyone who registers (for free) - 14 days lending period (you will need to install adobe digital editions) - Pynchon at the lending library - http://tinyurl.com/pygtmxn
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[image: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me... - Tristram Shandy 1761 ed.]
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Blogger and antiquarian bookseller John Ptak recently dug up this table, in which the United States government tallied the total cost of civil expenditures associated with Native Americans between 1776 and 1890. The full Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska), which contains this figure, is 683 pages long.
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At a time when settlers had moved into nearly all parts of the American West, and remaining Native Americans had been moved to reservations, the government took stock of the previous century of settler-Indian interactions. This chart comes from a section near the end of the report, titled “Indian Wars and their Cost, and Civil Expenditures for Indians.”
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But if you think about the ideal form, which we approximate to some extent, capitalism is basically a system where everything is for sale, and the more money you have, the more you can get. And, in particular, that’s true of freedom. Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it. It shows up in all sorts of ways. It shows up if you get in trouble with the law, let’s say, or in any aspect of life it shows up.
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And for that reason it makes a lot of sense, if you accept capitalist system, to try to accumulate property, not just because you want material welfare, but because that guarantees your freedom, it makes it possible for you to amass that commodity. So, this means that, quite apart from just material welfare, even the need for freedom, and so on, these needs are to some extent met if you have enough wealth and power to purchase them on the sort of free market.
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And that means, I think, that what you’re going to find is that the defense of free institutions, will largely be in the hands of those who benefit from them, namely the wealthy, and the powerful. They can purchase that commodity and, therefore, they want those institutions to exist, like free press, and all that."
— Noam Chomsky, Interview by David Dobereiner, John Hess, Doug Richardson and Tom Woodhull, January 1974
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An interactive map, which plots Ulysses’s epic ten-year voyage of The Odyssey on a real-life globe, placing the sirens, the cyclops, and the lotus-eaters in a recognizable geographical context. http://esripm.maps.arcgis.com/apps...