Sapphic Love‏

Sappho was a poet from the island of Lesbos who lived between 630 and 612 BCE. She wrote many love poems addressed to women and girls. The love in these poems is sometimes requited, sometimes not.

Orlai Petrics Soma’s Sappho

Sappho is thought to have written close to 12,000 lines of poetry on her love for other women. Of these poems, only about 600 lines have survived. As a result of her fame in antiquity, she and her native island have become emblematic of love between women.

The term Sapphic love‏, therefore, has become synonymous with lesbian love.

On a related note, the great philosopher Plato mentions lesbianism in his Symposium; he discusses women who “do not care for men, but have female attachments.”

Depth Perception

The human eye uses three methods to perceive and determine distance:

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
– John Lennon

The size a known object has on your retina – if you have knowledge of the size of an object from previous experience, then your brain can gauge the distance based on the size of the object on the retina.

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
– Aldous Huxley

Moving parallax – when you move your head from side to side, objects that are close to you move rapidly across your retina. However, objects that are far away move very little. In this way, your brain can tell roughly how far something is from you.

“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Stereo vision – each eye receives a different image of an object on its retina because each eye is about 2 inches apart. This is especially true when an object is close to your eyes. This is less useful when objects are far away because the images on the retina become more identical the farther they are from your eyes.

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
– C.S. Lewis, ‘The Magician’s Nephew’

Nempimania [Noun.]

Nempimania (also Nenpimania) is an obsession with getting the best fuel economy (or the best only-electric range) possible from a hybrid car.

It is derived from the Japanese words nempi, a contraction of nenryōshōhiryō, meaning fuel economy, and mania, meaning a craze of some kind.

27/xi mmxiii

Air contains about a billion trillion atoms per cubic inch.

Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia

Under US law, Alcoholics Anonymous has the status of a religion.

The air inside a house is between two and four times more polluted than the air in the street outside.

Alcohol is made of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, the same ingredients as water and diamonds, the principal exports of Lesotho.

Alice (the town in Australia’s Northern Territory also known as Alice Springs) used to be called Stuart.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

The Heads of St. Anna‏

Jesus grandmother, St. Anne had seven heads. This is known because at one point, the Church recognised seven different heads, all claiming to be that of St. Anne, as her head.

On Sculpting and Writing

“I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.”

– Will Self

Paraconsistent Logic‏

In logic, paraconsistent logic‏ is the tolerance towards inconsistencies. It is a way to reason about inconsistent information without lapsing into absurdity. In a non-paraconsistent logic, inconsistency explodes in the sense that if a contradiction obtains, then everything (everything!) else obtains, too. Someone reasoning with a paraconsistent logic can begin with inconsistent premises and still reach sensible conclusions, without completely exploding into incoherence.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
– Albert Einstein

Paraconsistency is a thesis about logical consequence: not every contradiction entails arbitrary absurdities. The contemporary logical orthodoxy has it that, from contradictory premises, anything can be inferred.

“Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking–Glass and What Alice Found There (1871)

Paraconsistent logic accommodates inconsistency in a sensible manner that treats inconsistent information as informative. The prefix ‘para’ in English has two meanings: ‘quasi’ (or ‘similar to, modelled on’) or ‘beyond’. When the term ‘paraconsistent’ was coined by Miró Quesada at the Third Latin America Conference on Mathematical Logic in 1976, he seems to have had the first meaning in mind. Many paraconsistent logicians, however, have taken it to mean the second, which provided different reasons for the development of paraconsistent logic as we will see below.

Historically speaking, paraconsistency has been a common theme in Indian logic,especially Jain and Buddhist logic. Whereas classical Western logic would see a statement as either true or false, but not both nor neither, Indian logics have traditionally been accepting of statements being both true and false simultaneously, or neither true nor false.

“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
– Ambrose Bierce

Mrs. Herod‏

King Herod (73/74 BCE – 4 BCE), founder of the Herodian Dynasty, was a Roman client king of Judea, a subordinate state of the Roman empire at the time. Funnily, Herod’s first wife was called Doris. He had ten wives in total.