Painting Fakes

 I can't remember where I heard about Flatland.  I suspect in more than one place.   Edwin Abbott Abbott was famous in his own time as the principal of a prestigious London school and a writer of school textbooks.  It's fascinating that almost a century after his death, the only reason he is remembered is for a a little book he published in 1884 which the editors of the British Dictionary of National Biography  didn't even feel was worth noting in their entry on him. Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions  is, at one level, an extended set of mathematical jokes.  They begin on the title page, where we learn that the tale is narrated by A. Square, a play on Abbott's own name (in mathematical notation his initials could be rendered EA 2 ).  I would not be surprised if many of the geometrical illustrations in the book began their lives as jokes to liven up dull geometry lessons for his pupils. The first part of the story describes the land of Fl...

When I published a short post about fungi last month, a friend suggested I should read a book called  Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, by a chap called Merlin Sheldrake .  So I did.  Thanks! Merlin Sheldrake is an English mycologist - a person a who studies fungi - with a PhD from Cambridge University which he earned studying fungi in the rain forests of Panama.  He is like the opposite end of the pole from me.  I know barely anything about fungi, he is a fungal tragic.  He studies fungi for a living and in his spare time he does fungus-related things for fun.   In researching this book he brewed wines and beers from all sorts of organic matter using the yeast already present on their skin and in the air (yes, yeast is a fungus).  He took LSD, an artificial hallucinogen modelled on hallucinogenic mushroom compounds, as part of a scientific experiment.  He immersed himself in a fermentati...