Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

[via Cosmic Variance, poem] Sonnet 64 by William Shakespeare:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law by Frank L Lambert: This web page is for individuals in the humanities and the arts or business and the legal professions so that they can sense the remarkable importance of activation energies in understanding the working of our second-law world.

Two Cultures: Websites relating to the Snow-Leavis Controversy.

The Dialectic of Narrative: The Pretextual Paradigm of Discourse in the Works of Madonna

[via neatorama] The Postmodernism Generator: Written by Andrew C Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars, and modified very slightly by Josh Larios (this version, anyway. There are others out there).

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (1996): Alan Sokal's now famous parody essay that was published in Social Text.

More papers on the 'affair' here.

The Abuse of Science: An Interview with Alan Sokal:

'But our dispute is not primarily with philosophers of science. We're more worried about the gross abuses and gross exaggerations of these ideas which originated in philosophy of science but which have trickled down in vulgarised form to anthropology and cultural studies. People just talk about the incommensurability of paradigms as if it were an established fact.'

[wiki] Sokal affair.

John A. Wheeler (1911-2008)

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96: ...a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J.

Cosmic Variance: Goodbye: Tribute by Daniel Holz (where the photo above is taken from): For two years I sat at the feet of the master, and I absorbed as much as I could. I learned about science, and about life. Wheeler had broad interests. We would often discuss biology, or history, or poetry.