Wiki Friday: "one and the same" or holidays and numbers

December 25th

My favourite suggestion for how the date of Christmas was decided: nine months after Annunciation, i.e. God knocking up Mary, we'll celebrate a child being born. Conveniently coinciding with winter solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia.

Saint Nicholas

Early Christian bishop of Greek descent from Patara in Turkiye (I've been to the beach!). He evidently rescued three girls from lives of prostitution by... dropping off presents! Specifically sacks of gold coins through their windows so their fathers could afford their dowries. Ho ho ho. 

Lesser known feats include chopping down a tree possessed by a demon and resurrecting three children murdered and pickled in brine. A painting of Saint Nicholas with the barreled children seems to have been misinterpreted, and has led to Saint Nicholas being adopted as the patron saint of brewers. 

Illustration of Saint Nicolas from the French book "Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne" (Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany in English)

Numbers

Numbers! I'm so interested in numbers! Do numbers exist without humans? What is the deal with representing numbers? Where did words for numbers ("three") come from?

My Wikipedia reading did not exactly answer the questions, but did provide more fodder for thought:

Numerals or symbols are the written or visual representation of numbers. "Number words" came first. We spoke before we wrote. Right.

A raised finger for "one" seems to elemental. "Just one," I say to Maya. "Take one." "Only one". Of course this becomes a tally, become a symbolic slash. The original line. There is some evidence we are neurologically wired to think in numbers with our hands.

Base 8 systems use the spaces between our fingers. Base 12 systems count the segments of our four fingers. There have been base 4 systems, base 5, base 60. Egyptians brought us base 10. 

Did you know that the near-universal system we accept as the norm is called the Hindu-Arabic numeral system?

The mathematician Aryabhata had a system of Sanskrit consonants for small numbers (1-9) and vowels for powers of 10 (10, 100, 1,000). It was discontinued because it made unpronounceable phrases. Just remember we once had such a multiplicity in systems.

The assumed naturalness of math, its neutrality, bothers me. Re-historicize math! How did we get here? To counting to 10? To using a zero? "How can nothing be a thing," was a legitimate debate.

Finally, let us not lose the historical linkages of spirituality and numbers. Numerology influenced Greek mathematical questions. "Medieval computists" had the job of calculating when to celebrate Easter. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system that you and I probably both use has roots in Hindu cosmology, specifically calculating the lifetime of the universe.

Oh, and "one and the same" is a funny phrase when we know that "same" comes from the Proto-Indo European root *sem- meaning "one". We see the root in assemble and assimilate. "One" and "the same" are truly one and the same.

Wiki Friday: criminalized colour schemes, bonsai kittens, and more

Where to even begin. I guess with hello. It's nice to be back. Nice to be writing a Wiki Friday.

Today is the first day my daughter is in daycare. She's barely there for a few hours, but wow, the spaciousness I feel in this toddler-free home. Even with a head cold I can imagine, for the first time in a while, completing the writing process involved in a Wiki Friday. 

Composing Wiki Fridays is, believe it or not, one of my great joys. I haven't read Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, but I think I get the gist. Most day to day activities, these days anyway, ask us to think quickly, to give opinions quickly, to react quickly. Thinking slowly, deliberately, while living with a smart phone strapped to one's hand, seems nigh impossible. Pausing from reacting, to pursue my own line of inquiry, is a true refreshment to my mind and spirit. Let us begin.

Red, yellow, green – a criminalized colour scheme

The book Gardens of Water, by Alan Drew, had been sitting on my shelf for years. I knew the novel was set near Istanbul after the devastating 1999 earthquake, but I guess I hadn't read it through to the end. It's quite gripping, and really goes deep with the perspectives of different characters, from a Kurdish teenage girl to an American father who can't resist proselytization. In one plot point, a Kurdish boy in Eastern Turkey is shot by the Turkish military because he appears to be wearing red, yellow, and green, which make up the colours of the Kurdish flag, above. 

Folks on the internet debate whether this colour scheme, or the flag itself, is technically illegal or banned in Turkey, but suffice it to say, the colours have been dangerous for many. I am personally drawn toward red, yellow, and green, in art and nature, and as a result have been thinking about these colours together a lot. As we go into fall in the northern hemisphere, we will see them everywhere, in berries, leaves, dried grasses, and vegetation made lush by rain. Perhaps more on this another time.

Grapes

This search was generated by the fact that I couldn't picture grapes vines having flowers. But as with all fruits, they do flower. The flowers are just small.

While scanning the Wikipedia pages, I learned that Concord grapes are named so because they come from the city in Massachusetts. They were cultivated from wild grapes there by farmer Ephraim Wales Bull. I only tried Concord grapes as an adult, and my first response was, "Oh, this is 'grape flavour'". And indeed it is! Concord grapes spawned an entire industry of grape-flavoured products, from candy to soft drinks.

Bonsai kittens

I tentatively brought up 'kittens in jars' to David. Did he remember this urban legend that was floating around when we were kids? It was an urban legend, right? No one was actually growing kittens in jars to stunt their growth, surely. David looked at me with bemusement. He had never heard of such a thing.

Wikipedia confirms that this was a big hoax around the year 2000. An MIT student created a website that described the "lost art" of bonsai kittens, and the internet, particularly animal rights people on the internet, went nuts. Somehow the hoax even reached me.

Tolkien

Good old J.R.R.

We're watching the news Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series, or, as I call it, 'Ring TV'.

Maya will be home soon, so I'm just going to share some quick little zingers:

Tolkien worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, on Germanic words starting with W.

We have his mother, Mabel, to thank somewhat, for she homeschooled him, including in botany and Latin.

He was bitten by a large baboon spider as a child.

He served in World War I and it is understood that Mordor is based on scenes from the trenches.

He was very into Beowulf.

In a letter, he said that the purpose of life is to know God and be moved to thanks.

He may have been the first to use the term 'phonoaesthetics', regarding the relative beauty and pleasantness of certain words or sounds within words.

Until next time.

WikiFriday: Hippos, cortisol

 

Hippos

Are most related to... 

whales and dolphins! 

They all share a semiaquatic ancestor, and diverged 55 million years ago. Hippos and whales and dolphins. Something in me feels that everyone should learn this.

Cortisol

Is extremely connected to our blood sugar level, which I learned is tightly regulated in the human body. Side rabbit hole: Apparently the average adult human only has about 4 teaspoons of sugar in all of their blood at a given moment.

Contrary to what social media influencers say, cortisol does not cause inflammation. To the contrary, it prevents inflammation. 

It does, however, lead to osteoporosis.

I learned that you cannot say that cortisol suppresses the immune system. It actually triggers a specific immune response.

That's all I've got for now. As always, thanks, Wikipedia.

Wiki Friday: books, science, trends

Author of The Salt Path

I was trying to remember it, after enjoying the book so much. Raynor Winn – a memorable name. Her partner goes by Moth. Winn relays the story of walking the coast of England, after the couple have lost all their money and learned that Moth has a degenerative terminal disease. 

How happy I was that the book had been written. I don’t often see travel memoirs from people who are not just trying to save money, but who are truly poor. How is homelessness perceived when people are on a touristic trail, versus in a city? What role does age play?

I was curious if Winn had written another book. Indeed she has — The Wild Silence. From summaries I see it is about life after trauma and rewilding a property. 

More recently, and on that note, I read Wilding by Isabella Tree, which captures the challenges of attempting to return land to a previous state. It makes me think of neo-paganism and the challenges of reconstruction. Looking forward to reading this second book by Winn.

Why is the sky blue

Frequency
Vibration
Oscillation
Scattered light
Blue scatters the most
A reminder that rainbow colours together are white
Why clouds are white
Droplets
Sunsets 
Our chance to see the other colours coming from the sun

Earthworms

I have been walking around and amazing people with the factoid that earthworms were introduced to North America. 

Is this actually true? No. 

Apparently some earthworms are native here. Others have been introduced, and indeed some are considered invasive, especially in forests where they consume fallen leaves which would normally decompose. Species who live all over the world are called peregrine or cosmopolitan earthworms, which is a bit funny.

Honey bees

Honey bees defending their hive by swarming two hornets; the heat they generate can kill

Okay, this factoid really is accurate:

No honey bees lived in North America during human times until introduced by Europeans. 

I learned that of the 20,000 bee species alive today, only 8 are honey bees. 

Slow Food 

McDonalds resistance
Bra (the town)
Carlo Petrini, now 72, contributing culinary articles to communist newspapers
Turin/Torino
Terra Madre Salone del Gusto
Should I learn Italian?
Critiques of elitism
Alice Waters
Turkey

Wiki Friday: Corvids, car engines, and Oregon grape

 A little Wiki Friday for you this Sunday morning.

Corvids

Crows and ravens are probably the most identifiable corvids, but the group includes jays and magpies, too. I was curious about their range: everywhere, except the southern tip of South America and the poles. Apparently they are a kind of bird called passerines, meaning that their toes are arranged such that they can perch. I have never thought about birds even having toes.

This is the best:

Young corvids have been known to play and take part in elaborate social games. Documented group games follow "king of the mountain", or "follow the leader", patterns. Other play involves the manipulation, passing, and balancing of sticks. Corvids also take part in other activities, such as sliding down smooth surfaces. 

But also this:

Magpies have been observed taking part in elaborate grieving rituals, which have been likened to human funerals, including laying grass wreaths.

Playing and grieving. Their brain-to-body ratios are like those of whales, not far from those of humans.

Car engines

You know when you just get tired of not knowing something?

Well, I watched a couple of videos, and I get the basics. I get what the four strokes refer to:

1) Intake (open, pull stuff in)

2) Compression (close, squish it all together)

3) Power stroke (a tiny explosion, creating power, opening back up)

4) Exhaust (closing again, to push stuff out)

I can also tell you that the difference between a gas and diesel engine is about compression being sufficient for that tiny explosion to happen without an external ignition source. So, there. Leave me alone.

Oregon grape

A.k.a. Mahonia aquifolium (the last part refers to its pointy leaves)

I knew that it was native to the Pacific Northwest and that the dark berries produced a dye, because I squeezed one the other day and told myself to try painting with the juice.

I did not know that the roots yield a yellow dye. That it is the state flower of Oregon. Or that indigenous people have used the berries for indigestion. Apparently you can make a wine from the berries, but it will take a lot of sugar. You can eat the berries raw after the season's first frosts. Delightful.

Wiki Friday: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

Or, Why I spent the morning watching UFC videos on YouTube

Yesterday a friend showed me some Jiu-Jitsu moves on the grass at Douglas Park. She told me about the history of Japanese Judo masters passing knowledge on to Brazilians,  the Gracie family in particular, who then adapted the practice to focus more on the a defensive ground game.

Wikipedia:

Brazilian jiu-jitsu emphasizes getting an opponent to the ground in order to use ground fighting techniques and submission holds involving joint-locks and chokeholds.

Apparently competitions often ban certain joint-locks­, namely the ones that can permanently damage knees and spines.

And about those chokeholds:

In BJJ, the chokes that are used put pressure on the carotid arteries, and may also apply pressure to the nerve baroreceptors in the neck. This kind of choke is very fast acting (if done properly) with victims typically losing consciousness in around 3–5 seconds. In contrast, an air choke (involving constriction of the windpipe) can take up to two minutes, depending on how long the person can hold their breath, and may cause serious damage to the throat.

There is definitely something about understanding a sport that makes it more enjoyable to watch. I would never expect to be enthralled by a 13-minute YouTube video about the role of Jiu-Jitsu inthe first Ultimate Fighting Championship, November 12, 1993 in Denver Colorado. But I was.

Ken Shamrock, who fights in an amazing red Speedo, describes his first fight in the ring with an undefeated bare-knuckle boxer:

“I crank his heel. I break his leg. He taps out.”

“They [the audience] were mad. No one understood what submission was.”

But Shamrock’s submission moves failed to match those of Royce Gracie, the smallest of the famous family, who beat Shamrock in the final round of that first UFC.

“There’s the tap. There’s the tap.”

Seeing Shamrock tap the mat, with pretty intense urgency, is meaningful when I know that he may well be 3 seconds away from unconsciousness, because of these crazy chokeholds.

“I’m sitting there on the ground, wondering ‘How in the world did he do that?’”

Cool.

Wiki Friday: Akkadian sense of time

In 2008 I rode a train to eastern Turkey in a backward-facing seat.

I had read somewhere about a people in history thinking of time this way–that we go backward into the future. It makes sense: We can face the past. We can see all that has happened. The future is what we cannot see.

This moment on the train had a lot of juice. I was simultaneously traveling into my own unknown future and into known human past–the origin land of Mesopotamia–with my physical body in a position that encapsulated an ancient sense of time.

Anyway, I mentioned this event to Jordan in 2012. With her memory for all things poetic, she held onto it, and pulled it back out this week. She found this academic article that identifies the Akkadians as the backward-time-thinkers.

Basically, all their words for “earlier” and “past” are related to “front” or “face” (the words are pana, panu, pani, etc.), and all their words for “later” and “future” are related to “behind” (arka, arki, arku, etc.)

The Turkish word for “back” or “behind” is arka, which obviously thrills me.

My heard hurts when I verbally pair the ideas of “later” and “behind.”

As the article author writes, “the mental world of our own modern society” is exactly the opposite that of the Akkadians. “When we look ‘into the future,’ we firmly believe that our gaze is fixed straight ahead. Nothing can shake our conviction that the past is at our back, that it lies behind us.”

Look ahead

Look into the future

Foresee

Look at the week ahead

Forward-looking

Future-facing

Look back at the past

Return to a point in history

Fittingly, that train in 2008 was carrying me toward the land controlled by the Akkadians, in their height around 2200 BC, land which is now Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Thanks for the reminder, dear Jordan.

Wiki "Friday": astrology / The Luminaries / neutron stars

Theme = stars

Astrology

Wikipedia is a real downer sometimes:

Astrology has not demonstrated its effectiveness in controlled studies and has no scientific validity.

There are several hyperlinks to pseudoscience.

“Wikipedia!” I want to say, “I was just looking for cultural associations to better understand a novel that I’m reading. Chill out. For a forecast of the day or to better understand my romantic partner, I’m obviously already going to cafeastrology.com.”

[That said, my allegience to this horoscope site took a blow this week.]

The Luminaries

Maybe you heard about this novel when it won the Man Booker Prize or when it won the Governor General’s Award.

Walter Moody in search of gold–the year is 1866–takes a ship to the South Island of New Zealand. Upon arrival he enters the smoking room of a hotel and discovers 12 men. The novel proceeds to chart the actions and observations of these 12 men as they investigate a series of mysterious events.

The novel is organized “according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens” (Thank you Justine Jordan, writing for The Guardian).

Pretty sweet, right?

The characters are heavenly bodies moving in accordance with the actual star charts from 1866!

Eleanor Catton, the author, was born on September 24th, 1985, which makes her a Libra.

Catton currently lives in Auckland with her author and poet partner, and teaches creative writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology. That sounds like a nice life.

Neutron stars

This is for Liam, who says, “Mary, one day we are going to have a serious discussion about astrology… and it’s not going to go well (for you).”

A neutron star, explained Liam, is about the size of Richmond, with a nucleus the size of Stanley Park.

“Neutron stars are the densest and tiniest stars known to exist in the universe;” (That’s Wikipedia, not Liam) although having only the radius of about 10 km, they may have a mass of a few times that of the Sun.”

One final analogy:

“This density is approximately equivalent to the mass of a Boeing 747 compressed to the size of a small grain of sand.”

Also, they can spin up to 700 times a second, and can emit beams of electromagnetic energy called pulsars.

For Halloween next year, you can dress all in white. Apparently that is how neutron stars would appear to the naked eye. Just be sure to spin around really fast, refer to yourself as dense, and maybe carry an old degraded microwave (the kind that would emit dangerous radiation). Ta-da!

I wanted to talk about Stephen Hawking, but we can do that next week.

Wiki "Friday": "Desiderata"

Small note: I am starting a regular job in two weeks. I will have better awareness of what day it is and Wiki Fridays may well come on Fridays.

Today, Sunday, we discuss a particular set of aphorisms.

"Desiderata"

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. 

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. 

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. 

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. 

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. 

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. 

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. 

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

This prose poem was written by Max Ehrmann in 1927.

I first saw it in New Zealand, on the wall of my cousin Blair's house. I assumed it was much older.

There has been widespread confusion about the origin date, actually, all because a reverend in Maryland included the poem in a package of devotional materials that mentioned the church's foundation date of 1692.

Wikipedia says that Pierre Trudeau, when the Liberal Party lost its majority in the 1972 federal election, quoted the poem by reassuring the nation that, "the universe is unfolding as it should."

Wonderful.

What about Max Ehrmann, you ask. The internet proffers little on him. He was a lawyer and later worked in his family's meatpacking business and in the manufacture of overalls.

At 40 he devoted himself to writing, and apparently worked at that each day, which I like a lot.

Other poems can be found, mostly spiritual. I find some dense, but some delightful, like this one, about enduring rainy days, endeavouring to be gentle, and, bizarrely, shooting at the archery range.

"Desiderata" came back into my life via Hisao, a Japanese Canadian man who lives in my neighbourhood and grows his own strawberries, grapes, and daikon. He spends very little money. Until last week, he collected sweet chestnuts from the back lane and roasted them for breakfast. His kitchen wall is covered with aphorisms for inspiring kindness in himself and others, including the complete "Desiderata."

The title in Latin means desired things, a phrase that inevitably reminds me of Jordan Karnes, my friend who is a poet.

Wiki "Friday": wasp / chestnut / Skills for Jobs Blueprint

This week we are talking about trees. And sex and death and education.

Fig wasp

70-90 million years ago, fig trees and certain wasps started needing each other to reproduce.

Dinosaurs were alive at that time.

Most fig trees still rely on wasps for pollination.

Here is how it works for at least one kind of fig wasp:

The baby insects are born inside a fig. "The males' only tasks are to mate with the females while still within the fig syconium and to chew a hole for the females to escape."

Later, when the females are ready to deposit their own eggs, they wriggle into a new fig, incidentally pollinating it, and scraping off their wings and most of their antennae. They lay their eggs in the internal flowers of the fig and die.

"Female fig wasps can reach the ovaries of short female flowers with their ovipositors, but not long female flowers. Thus, the short flowers grow wasps, whereas the long flowers become seeds."

The short flowers grow wasps

(The poetry of Wikipedia)

Finally, "In figs of this sort, the crunchy bits in the fruit contain both seeds and wasps."

Yep. I'm still unclear about whether these wasps that we eat are dead adults or dead babies. Meh. I love figs regardless. Let's talk about another tree.

American chestnut

Maciej told me that American chestnut trees used to cover massive swathes of eastern North America and grew to be a hundred feet tall.

Wikipedia confirms this.

100 feet fall. 10 feet in diameter. From Ontario to Mississippi. From the Atlantic to the Ohio Valley. As Maciej said, "they rained chestnuts."

Around 1900, some Asian chestnut trees were imported, containing a bark fungus.

"The airborne bark fungus spread 50 mi (80 km) a year and in a few decades girdled and killed up to three billion American chestnut trees."

Now there are fewer than 100 large survivors in the original range.

The American chestnut, "may have ultimately become vulnerable to disease because of a near-monoculture in some locations."

Diversity. Diversity. Diversity. Or eventual death.

On that note, let's take a quick look at Christy Clark's new plan for post-secondary education in this province.

"B.C.'s Skills for Jobs Blueprint"

Released in April, this document explains how the provincial government will "re-engineer" B.C.'s colleges and universities to favour the LNG sector. Yes, seriously.

LNG is mentioned in 25 of the 40 pages.

LNG is actually the bright blue heading for pages 24-40.

Maybe you saw the news about VCC laying off 150 of its 190 ESL teachers. That's connected.

I can't stop thinking of the clichéd phrase, putting all your eggs in one basket.

Let's do a little math.

100,000

That's how many jobs might be created by the LNG sector, says the provincial government newsroom. ("58,700 direct and indirect construction jobs, 23,800 permanent direct and indirect jobs for operations, and thousands more of induced jobs as a result of households having more income." So that's a hopeful number.)

2,500,000

That's about how many people are in the labour market in B.C., according to Statistics Canada.

100,000 divided by 2,500,000 = .04

4%

That seems like a small percentage of potential jobs.

The metaphor I am kind of going for with the trees: we need diversity in our education, so that we have different types of thinkers and skilled people, for adapting to different environments.

Over and out.

(image one source / image two source)

Correction 10/26/2014: I did some more reading this last week, and the layoffs at VCC are not directly related to "B.C.'s Skills for Jobs Blueprint." They are there result of a federal funding cut. Same zeitgeist, different levels of government.

Wiki Friday: Carmen / Apples / Synesthesia

Today’s themes are interconnectedness and the unimagined later lives of experiences and ideas.

Carmen

I saw my first opera last Saturday. It was four acts and set in Seville around 1820. The French composer Bizet had never visited Spain.

The character Carmen, perhaps “a realization of the composer’s own unconscious longing for a freedom denied to him by his stifling marriage,” has reappeared in cultural productions ever since her birth on stage in 1875.

I suspect the reincarnation you will appreciate most is this one featuring Beyoncé–

Carmen: A Hip Hopera

I know.

Bizet never saw great success in his lifetime. I doubt he envisioned his work being brought to life in 2001 by Wyclef Jean. If you haven’t read Cloud Atlas yet, by the way, go do so now.

Apples

Sustain me with flagons, refresh me with apples: for I am sick with love.

“Feed me apples, for I am sick with love,” is what I thought the line was. I thought it had been written by Walt Whitman or Robert Frost. Swing and a miss.

The line is from the Song of Solomon. Who knows how I heard it first.

The Song of Solomon, also known as The Song of Songs (swoon), is a section of the Bible with no mention of law, covenant, Yahweh, or wisdom. Instead, “it celebrates sexual love.” 

Some translations of the Bible, including one for young adults, talk of raisins or raisin cakes, but I prefer “flagons.” Weak with love? Open the wine. Biblical translation is suddenly very engaging.

Anyway, there is a poem about apples by Robert Frost, specifically about picking them. It is a fitting poem for the season. My housemate Delayne collected the last of our apple’s trees this week.

I gave five to Leah yesterday, at the same meeting in which she told me about visiting a First Nations community in Nimmo Bay and hearing that a traditional way of understanding wealth is not to tabulate the amount amassed but rather the amount given away.

Oh, it’s good.

Synesthesia

This is when one sensory experience cues a different sensory experience.

The condition is not in the DSM, be cause psychological conditions in the DSM have to interfere with life, and this is more like a bonus pleasure on top of life.

The most studied example seems to be people thinking of letters and numbers as associated with certain colours. As usual, academic researchers have found one minuscule thing to obsess about.

My own primary experience of synesthesia, in which touch cues visions, was not even mentioned. 

The coloured numbers and letters example may actually be understood better as ideasthesia–a cognitive input cueing a sensory experience. After all, letters and numbers are concepts more than experiences. Which leads us to something fun:

Researchers suggest that synesthesia/ideasthesia can be a cognitive tool or a coping mechanism for dealing with abstract concepts, including time. In Morocco, Alaina and I “mapped time” on hand-drawn calendars; certain weeks or months demanded to be yellow or green.

In the spring I lost my job, time was a white sheet gathered in folds to my chin, spread smooth toward the horizon.

That is from my friend Jordan’s newly published book, in an essay titled “The Ballad of John and Jon”. Later in the essay Jordan describes John Lennon’s “honeymoon Bed-Ins”,

when he and Yoko stayed in bed in various cities across Europe and even Canada. Sitting upright in long pyjamas, white sheets to their waists, they called press conferences and talked very calmly about their love and everything, eventually recording “Give Peace a Chance” on a four-track in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

It was the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver where I saw Carmen on Saturday. I wonder if Jordan’s idea of time as a white sheet came from seeing John and Yoko in bed years earlier.

Wiki Friday: Jay-Z's rapping technique

Royce de 5’9’’ and Fredo Starr of Onyx both describe Jay-Z’s emphasis on flow in the book How to Rap – Fredo says that Jay-Z is “a master of the flow—he can flow fast, he can flow slow”. The book describes how Jay-Z uses ‘rests’ to provide structure to a verse and how he uses ‘partial linking’ to add more rhymes to a verse.

So, what is “flow”?

“The rhythms and rhymes” of a hip-hop song's lyrics and how they interact. 'Flow' is also sometimes used to refer to elements of the delivery (pitch, timbre, volume) as well, though often a distinction is made between the flow and the delivery.

Staying on the beat is central to rap's flow – many MCs note the importance of staying on-beat. MCs stay on-beat by stressing syllables in time to the four beats of the musical backdrop. 

Poetry scholar Derek Attridge describes how this works in his book Poetic Rhythm – “rap lyrics are written to be performed to an accompaniment that emphasizes the metrical structure of the verse”. He says rap lyrics are made up of, “lines with four stressed beats, separated by other syllables that may vary in number and may include other stressed syllables. The strong beat of the accompaniment coincides with the stressed beats of the verse, and the rapper organizes the rhythms of the intervening syllables to provide variety and surprise”.

Wiki Friday: Prison

It's been around forever, right?

For most of history, imprisoning has not been a punishment in itself, but rather a way to confine criminals until corporal or capital was administered. Only in the 19th century, beginning in Britain, did prisons as we know them today become commonplace. The modern prisons system was born in London, as a result of the views of Jeremy Bentham. The notion of prisoners being incarcerated as part of their punishment and not simply as a holding state until trial or hanging, was at the time revolutionary.

It deters people, right?

Meta-analysis shows that prison sentences do not reduce future offenses, when compared to non-residential sanctions. This meta-analysis of one hundred separate studies found that post-release offenses were around 7% higher after imprisonment compared with non-residential sanctions, at statistically significant levels. Longer periods of time in prison make outcomes worse, not better; offending increases by around 3% as prison sentences increase in length.

It's only for pretty bad people, right?

As of 2006, it is estimated that at least 9.25 million people are currently imprisoned worldwide.

The leader in just about everything...

In absolute terms, the United States currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2½ million or more than one in a hundred adults in prison and jails. Although the United States represents less than 5% of the world's population, over 25% of the people incarcerated around the world are housed in the American prison system.

Approximately half of the U.S. jail population consists of pretrial detainees who have not been convicted or sentenced.