ISSUE 33 | OCT 2013

NO NUMBER IN NATURE

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Illustration by Antonia Stringer

Abram Kaplan

Directions for Mathematical Nature

« ever greater in proportion » - Ptolemy’s Almagest - The parallel circles of the visible fixed stars - simplicity and self-sameness - by constant attention, the perfect prince could stave off all surprise - its errors don’t add up - the tiny corpuscles out of which everything was made - the solar system no more stable than the city - the limit of an ellipse - a wider range of curves

Megan Stockton

Triangulation

my throat and my sternum - another place to put our bodies - triangles, I tell J - “ships” became code for giving up - Dewey Decimal System - that a is not b - we institutionalized our metaphors - écriture feminine - depends heavily on erotic geometry

Anna Aizman

Crowd Theory

mass punishment for public disorder - when it releases (« discharges ») people - encyclopedia of crowd horrors - a network of horizontal stings - If the people are the leaders body - they realize they have committed mass suicide - the theater is building events

Ethan Linck

The Enduring Appeal of Counting Birds

because of the whale - articulated musculature and weightless skeletons and piping song - 670 species seen in North America (that’s good) - « biological species concept » - the « tips » of a phylogenetic tree - Ernst Mayr - ego-driven jaunts by unscrupulous private collectors - Malaria, dried orchids - 426 taxa - your garden-variety twitcher - the limits of ourselves

Matt Nestor

iAlone

I am happy with the phone I have now. - sneering at the technological sheep - I buy the 3GB plan. - iRuler, for measuring stuff. - Equinox, if you’re wondering. - revocable, Tamagotchi-style death - growing old while women text - the smartphone Rubicon - What is so sacred about mental solitude?

Michael Kinnucan

On Maieutic Machines

mix water and dirt, you’ve got mud - a question which has never quite snapped shut - this way of ceasing to read Plato - words are our servants - naming their sharing - that wasn’t quite the word - Socrates’ innocent smile - the troubled movement of thought - proud fathers are angry - Theatetus-Socrates is the thinking-machine - we cannot see the light by which we see

Leland Grigoli

Homo Homini Lupus

the monastic theologian Hugh of St-Victor (d.1143) - Bernard of Clairvaux - sacked and razed by the Turks - poverty, hard work, and prayer in the wilderness - ‘Ecumenical’ and ‘universal’ - the war was accompanied by an indulgence - the pagan territories of the Baltic - the conquest of Lisbon by a crusader fleet - those perpetrating such deeds thought themselves just.

Ova Gray

What Building Wants

that there is a chorus of voices - has existed in craftsmanship for hundreds of years - As if there's this highly elusive animal - though no longer alive in the sense that it was when it was a tree - wooden joinery (mortises, tenons and pegs) - This structure will not last forever