[Image: T-shirt available from the Skreened store. Of all the images of this moment which I found online, the original Tenniel still seemed best. Disclaimer: I have no interest (vested or, ha, shirted) in the store other than this photo of this T-shirt.]
From whiskey river:
Brotherhood
Homage to Octavius PtolemyI am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.
(Octavio Paz [source])
…and:
To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.
I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed…
They never shut up.
(Kurt Vonnegut [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Questions In The Mind Of A Poet While She Washes Her Floors
Will obedience leave me unknown to myself, stranded?
Is it enough for me to know where I’m from?
If I do more truth-telling will I be happier with what I say?
If I had three days to live would I still be sensible?
Is the break between my feelings and my memory
the reason I’m unable to sustain rage?Am I a peninsula slowly turning into an island?
If I grew up gazing at the ocean would I think
life came in waves?If I were a nomad would I measure time
by the length of a footstep?If I can see a cup drop to the floor and shatter
why can’t I see it gather itself back together?If a surgeon cut out my mistakes
would the scar be under my heart?How much time will I spend protecting myself
from what the people I love call love?Would my desires feel different if I lived forever?
Will my desires destroy my politics?
Is taboo sex the ultimate aphrodisiac?
If I fall in love with the wrong person
How do I learn to un-in love myself?Can I make my intuition into a divining rod?
Is music the closest I can get to God?
How many of these questions will remain
when I kneel to wash my floors again?
(Elena Georgiou [source])
…and:
One side of the planet is draped in eternal freezing darkness, the other side is bathed in permanent starlight.
Fields of “stinger fans” — animals that look like tall plants — cover the floodplains. Other strange species abound, from giraffe-like predators called gulphogs to tiny flesh-dissolving tadpoles known as hysteria
Welcome to the planet Aurelia….
Alien life is not just possible but probable, according to many scientists. And thanks to new technology, we may not be too far from finding it.
The question is: What can we expect to find?
Perhaps something like Aurelia. Or maybe the Blue Moon… The fictional moon has a 240-hour day and orbits a huge planet in a solar system with two suns. With an atmosphere three times denser than Earth’s, the Blue Moon has giant whales gliding through its sky.
(Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News [source])
…and:
Dear Marilyn:
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say number 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say number 3, which has a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to pick door number 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?
Craig F. Whitaker
Columbia, MarylandDear Craig:
Yes, you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance. Here’s a good way to visualize what happened: Suppose there are a million doors, and you pick door number 1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door number 777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?
(Marilyn vos Savant, Parade Magazine, “Ask Marilyn” (Sept. 9, 1990); quoted in vos Savant, The Power of Logical Thinking [source; also see Wikipedia, on the “Monty Hall problem”])
I have great difficulty thinking of the Dormouse — my favorite Alice character — without being reminded, at least subliminally, of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. Here’s a video to accompany their hit, “White Rabbit,” interleaving images of the Airplane themselves, performing the song, and clips from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010):
Lyrics:
White Rabbit
(by Grace Slick; performance by Jefferson Airplane)One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tallAnd if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just smallWhen men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll knowWhen logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “Off with her head!”
Remember what the dormouse said:
Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head
As for the question posed in this post’s title: one kind soul seems to have done all the legwork for everyone else, having compiled a list of everything the Dormouse said. (None of it, maybe predictably, was “Feed your head.”)
Froog says
I am in the ranks of the irritated ‘sceptics’ about Ms vos Sant’s analysis of the ‘Monty Hall problem’.
It is patent poppycock that the door ‘not chosen’ has a higher probability of being the prize door than the door already chosen.
By eliminating one of the ‘wrong answers’, the host is reducing the odds of any of the other doors being the ‘right answer’, hiding the prize – both the door already picked and its alternative.
The contestant is being given a chance to chose again, except that it is now a 1-in-2 choice for both doors: the one he chose originally, and the one he didn’t.
Jayne says
To answer Ms. Georgiou’s first question: Yes. Further, you will be left with the rest of your burning questions standing on the burning deck , reciting Love’s a burning question.
Back to Vonnegut and Rudy–they never do shut up. How do we close up the peephole? Or how do make sure the peephole has the proper lens?
Sometimes I feel like I’m already living in an alien world. But it still has a rabbit hole (thank goodness) into which I shall now jump…
(Maybe I need some different pills? )
marta says
Now I am thinking of Burton’s “Alice” which I quite liked even if it was on many worst movie lists.
And I’m thinking of star whales too.
So, the Dormouse said to the Star Whale as they headed down the rabbit hole…
John says
Froog: I have gone back and forth on the question in the years since I first saw vos Savant tackle it in the Sunday-supplement magazine. When she published the follow-up column a little while later, I said to The Missus, Boy, Marilyn vos Savant really stepped in it this time…
Part of my reason for disagreeing with her, I’m afraid, is petty and un-thought-through: the capsule bio included with her column always noted that the Guinness Book of records had declared her something like “the most intelligent person in the world.” (No idea how they determined that, but that’s what they claimed.) So I wanted her to be wrong, and got a great deal of satisfaction from seeing all the smart people lined up against her. Like I said, petty.
I’ve started to shift vos Savant-wards more recently. The clincher? Realizing that of all the rants I’d read on one side or the other, I’d never heard anyone recant their “Yes, you should switch” answer. But I’ve heard a LOT of people change their answer from “No, you should stay” to “Yes, you should switch.” That made me think I was missing something.
Here‘s one of the ones that really have helped convince me. [Note: requires Java to see the demo, although not to read the explanation or follow the links.]
John says
Jayne: I believe you have — scattered across the gods know how many posts and comments :) — invented a new genre of, I don’t know, philosophic poetry or something. Call it “The boy stood on the burning question”…
John says
marta: I got the Star Whale allusion, but what in this post made you think of it??? (I try to encourage free association around here, especially on Fridays, but sometimes visitors’ leaps soar over my head.)
…Oh, wait, duh: that description of the planet Aurelia. Never mind!
We still haven’t seen Burton’s Alice. Speaking for myself, I’m trying to summon up enough suspension of disbelief that I won’t be bothered by all the tinkerings with the source material. If I can just watch it on its own terms, as though Carroll’s original had never been written, I’ll probably be okay. Otherwise…
marta says
@John – I wish I’d said “as they headed down the rabbit hole in a blue box.”
Anyway.
I expected to dislike Burton’s “Alice.” A reviewer I like shredded the film. But. Liked it anyway.
John says
marta: “…in a blue box” would have been a brilliant touch!
(Which, hmm, makes me wonder if any of The Doctor’s exploits — before or after the 21st-century series reboot — took place in an Alice-like world…)
marta says
@John – Possibly an episode like this one…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/mindrobber/
John says
marta: Did you by any chance skim through the box which opens when you click the Details link there?
(1) That episode apparently used “a ticker tape machine from The House that Jack Built” (one of my favorite Avengers episodes).
(2) There’s a reference to the “Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway” (emphasis added).
Anyway, yes, that would be sort of the idea. But please tell me you had to look that up — that you didn’t already know of that episode!
marta says
@John – Oh, I didn’t slim over the details link (but will later!).
And I’m afraid to say that yes, I did already know that episode. I watched it a few months back. Maybe last year actually–Thank you, Netflix streaming.
:)
marta says
Skim. Skim over, I mean.
Jayne says
@John – Oh, I quite like that version!
I need to learn to sit with a rock, roll it between my hands, take note of its striations and color, before I skip it across the pond. ;-)
(Oh, and I loved Burton’s Alice.)
John says
marta: Netflix streaming — we’ve had on-again, off-again luck with it. (1) No closed captions on English-language films. Grrrr. So we use it only for foreign-language films, which come with a subtitle track actually encoded into the digital stream. (2) We’ve had bad luck — well, let’s say inconsistent luck — with the buffering. We often can play only a minute or two before it “hangs.” But the connection there is wireless, and I’m working on boosting the signal, so maybe this gripe will go away.
The amount of Doctor-ness you carry around in your head is positively scary sometimes.
John says
Jayne: Well, now, that’s two highly respectable votes cast in favor of Mr. Burton’s version. It’s getting harder to avoid the conclusion that we should watch it.
That comment about the skipping-rock makes me suspect you’ve had a lot of experience selecting them from some shoreline or other — maybe a lake in Maine???
Froog says
I think the believers are, knowingly or otherwise, wedded to a pair of related fallacies: that the host ‘knows’ where the prize door is, and that his choice thus reveals something about the door ‘not chosen’; and that there is something somehow significant about the pair of doors he considers.
The host does not know where the prize door is. He merely knows where one of the empty doors is. His revelation of an empty door doesn’t convey any information other than that. If the contestant has initially selected Door A and the host eliminates Door B, he hasn’t revealed anything other than that the prize is behind Door A or Door C.
The fact that the host is focusing on the pair of doors not selected by the contestant somehow seems more significant, because it is a subset comprising all of the remaining doors in the game. People seem to overlook the fact that there are other possible subsets – i.e., the contestant’s selected door and the door eliminated by the host can also be considered as a pair, from which one of the possible options has been eliminated, thus increasing the odds in favour of the other. When the host eliminates one possible choice from a subset of two (or whatever), he is not only changing the odds for the members of that subset, but for all other possible subsets of that size within the group as a whole. This perhaps becomes more obvious if you consider a larger group of options. If there are 10 doors, and the host focuses on doors 9 and 10, then says, “Look, it isn’t behind Door 10!” – that doesn’t make it twice as likely that it is behind Door 9 as any other door. It just makes it 10% more likely that it is behind any of the doors – including the one the contestant has initially picked.
marta says
@John – My Netflix streaming works like a dream–thank goodness because I watch almost everything I watch that way.
As for the stuff I carry around in my head… it’s baffled a number of people and probably ruined a great many dates.