what's the name of the website you read chinese poetry on? the formatting is so nice
Read Chinese classics in original version and western language translations. / Lire les classiques chinois en version originale et traduc
not only is the formatting wonderful but every single hanzi is actually linked to a dictionary lookup for the character that shows you its meaning and all the compounds it's used in (apart from a few traditional characters that aren't possible to type, like an antiquated way of writing a certain type of grain in the three-character classic)
the poems i've posted are from the tangshi but the most valuable resource for me so far was confucius' analects because it has multiple translations for every entry
this is the most obvious example - in this case "seat facing south" is the literal translation and "the place of a prince" is what is implied by it
a syllabus of orbits, loops, repetitions, and returns
loops, the limits of language, the paradoxical loneliness of "i love you," and what keeps love alive by maria popova
an installment of popova's newsletter the marganialian that draws on the writing of roland barthes. popova begins by describing her repeated daily walking routes, drawing a connection between the repetition of movement and the repetition of speech and feeling-- the recurrent declaration of "i love you."
why did our universe begin? with roger penrose
video with nobel prizewinning physicist roger penrose that explains his theory of "conformal cyclic cosmology": that our universe's deep past bears a similarity to its deep future, giving evidence for an infinitely cycling timeline. see the essay "time after time" by paul halpern for more on physics and cyclical time.
time, space, and the eclipse of the earth (part i: abstraction) by david abram
from ecologist and philosopher david abram's book the spell of the sensuous. in this section, he distinguishes broadly between how space and time are viewed in oral cultures and literate cultures. he focuses on the alignment between oral cultures and a cyclical model of time, discussing why alphabets and writing might affect the way space-time manifests in a cultural imagination.
the hero with a thousand faces by joseph campbell
book by mythologist and literature professor joseph campbell describing his archetypical "hero's journey" cycle, a basic multi-step plot shared by myths and stories across many centuries and cultures (also called a "monomyth"). for a condensed version of the hero's journey, see this diagram by lisa paltz spindler designed for the gunn center for the study of science fiction.
"on small seasons and long calendars" by ross zurowski
essay by designer ross zurowski on how we divide and mark time, arguing that we should begin to divide our lives into more organic and useful phases. the essay is inspired in part by the sekki, short descriptive seasons used by farmers in ancient china and japan-- you can see a list of sekki (along with twitter and ical notifications) at zurowski's a guide to understanding small seasons.
wintering by katherine may
book by british writer katherine may on literal and metaphorical winters. may writes about the necessity to periodically experience darkness throughout life, meditating on the winter solstice, cold water swimming, the northern lights, hibernation and fairy tales to illustrate how wintering can catalyze self-renewal.
"ouroboricisms" by alice lesperance
medium essay about trauma that uses the ouroboros as a metaphor for the circular reconstruction of memory. lesperance draws from mystics and writers julian of norwich, anne carson, margery kempe, and flannery o'connor and their engagement with the repetition and recreation of wounds.
"on reset" by brian blanchfield
a meditation by poet brian blanchfield from his essay collection proxies about discovering a series of audition tapes in which the same scene is repeatedly recast with different actresses. he draws a comparison between the audition scene and poetic repetition, not only in the structure of poems but in our engagement with poetry itself.
The word game has gone from dozens of players to hundreds of thousands in a few months. It was created by a software engineer in Brooklyn fo
Full article under the cut
Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, knew his partner loved word games, so he created a guessing game for just the two of them. As a play on his last name, he named it Wordle.
But after the couple played for months, and after it rapidly became an obsession in his family’s WhatsApp group once he introduced it to relatives, Mr. Wardle thought he might be on to something and released it to the rest of the world in October.
On Nov. 1, 90 people played.
On Sunday, just over two months later, more than 300,000 people played.
It’s been a meteoric rise for the once-a-day game, which invites players to guess a five-letter word in a similar manner as the guess-the-color game Mastermind. After guessing a five-letter word, the game tells you whether any of your letters are in the secret word and whether they are in the correct place. You have six tries to get it right.
Few such popular corners of the internet are as low-frills as the website, which Mr. Wardle built himself as a side project. There are no ads or flashing banners; no windows pop up or ask for money. There is merely the game on a black background.
“I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Mr. Wardle said in an interview on Monday. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”
This is not Mr. Wardle’s first brush with suddenly capturing widespread attention. Formerly a software engineer for Reddit, he created two collaborative social experiments on the site, called The Button and Place, that each were phenomena in their moment.
But Wordle was built without a team of engineers. It was just him and his partner, Palak Shah, killing time during a pandemic.
Mr. Wardle said he first created a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends were unimpressed and he scrapped the idea. In 2020, he and Ms. Shah “got really into” the New York Times Spelling Bee and the daily crossword, “so I wanted to come up with a game that she would enjoy,” he said.
The breakthrough, he said, was limiting players to one game per day. That enforced a sense of scarcity, which he said was partially inspired by the Spelling Bee, which leaves people wanting more, he said.
Word games have proved immensely popular for The Times and other companies in recent years, and many such as the Spelling Bee have developed devoted fan followings.
But since Wordle was built originally for just Mr. Wardle and Ms. Shah, the initial design ignored a lot of the growth-hacking features that are virtually expected of games in the current era. While other games send notifications to your phone hoping you’ll come back throughout the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship.
“It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day,” he said. “And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”
Wordle lacked the ability to share results until mid-December. Mr. Wardle noticed players sharing their results by typing out a grid of green, yellow and black emojis, so he built an automated way for players to brag about their successes in a spoiler-free way.
If he were optimizing the game to gain as many players as possible, he would have included a link at the end of the tweet that the tool generates, he said. But after looking into it, he said it would have looked “trashy” and not as visually compelling, and he liked the grid’s mysterious air, which he felt piqued people’s interest.
While Ms. Shah was the lucky recipient of the first game, she has played a key role in getting it ready for the public, Mr. Wardle said. An initial list of all of the five-letter words in the English language — about 12,000 — contained a lot of obscure words that would have been near impossible to guess.
So he created another game for Ms. Shah: This time, she would sort through those 12,000 or so words, designating whether or not she knew them. That narrowed down the list of Wordle words to about 2,500, which should last for a few years. (Already, a few words have riled up the fans: Some were upset by REBUS and TAPIR, saying they were not familiar enough.)
Ms. Shah says she wakes up every day with a new routine: She warms up with the Spelling Bee, which gets her mind right for Wordle. She also loves the New York Times Crossword and cryptic crosswords.
Though Wordle is now shared with the world, she said she appreciated that Mr. Wardle originally created it for her.
“It’s really sweet,” she said. “This is definitely how Josh shows his love.”
« I learned recently that humans glow faintly, even during the day. All living creatures do, apparently. In recent years, scientists have been trying to discern if and, if so, why our bodies emit a varying visible light. In a study published in 2009, five healthy, bare-chested young Japanese men were placed in dark rooms sealed to keep light out, for twenty-minute intervals every three hours for three days. They were only allowed to sleep from midnight to 7am. A highly sensitive imaging system found that all of the men glowed, most strongly from the face, at levels that dropped and climbed during the day. Yes, it’s a small sample size, and the study does not seem to have been repeated, but it’s a delicious thought. The authors of the study, Masaki Kobayashi, Daisuke Kikuchi and Hitoshi Okamura, concluded that we all ‘directly and rhythmically’ emit light: ‘The human body literally glimmers. The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.’ »
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