The Sunday Supplement
Quiz Of The Week
In the words of Douglas Adams, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” This map allows you to start with the local neighbourhood and zoom out; a helpful and rather sobering orientation. Before you take a look, can you guess how many stars there are thought to be...
(i) within 12.5 light years of the sun?
(ii) within 250 light years of the sun?
(iii) within 5,000 light years of the sun?
(iv) within 50,000 light years of the sun?
Answers below, after the crossword.
Question Of The Week
This week we shared Point/Counterpoint: Monkeys Typing Shakespeare, in which Kathryn Xu and Barry Petchesky debate the famous claim that “Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.” Who persuaded Browser readers?
(a) Xu: “Not true!! Not true!! Everyone has lied!!”
(b) Petchesky: “I have faith in the monkeys to write a nice play.”
Last week’s question
The Browser Book Club returns for the July edition. Your reads for May and June were a delight. What did you read last month?
An excellent selection as always: memoirs, political analysis, and novels of all shapes and sizes. Thank you!
From The Browser 6 years ago:
Mapping The Earth Beneath Us
Bradley Garrett | Guardian | 10th August 2018
Dig now. Private property rights that used to extend to the centre of the Earth are getting drastically curtailed. The ground deep beneath major cities is getting so congested with tunnels, cables, fallout shelters and mega-basements that it will need to be mapped as closely as the surface. “Governments and criminals who wish to keep their underground infrastructure under wraps may find it difficult to do so. We have little virtual privacy left; within decades, all spatial privacy may evaporate, too” (2,080 words)
From The Browser 9 Years Ago:
Canon Of Taste
Jill Neimark | Aeon | 11th August 2015
Is cooking an art on the level of music or painting? If so, what is the tongue’s equivalent of the four-note phrase which opens Beethoven’s Fifth? Perhaps it was something served in the 18th century and then forgotten. But great art is timeless. Let us profit from modern science to recover the ingredients and flavours and techniques of past ages, and reconstruct a canon of great dishes in terms of which all others can be understood (2,700 words)
Performance Of The Week
Footage of Lutosławski himself conducting — although, in practice, for long stretches he is not conducting this extraordinarily tight ensemble. Not an easy listen, but one that keeps surprising on you. The programme notes from the first performance in Northern Ireland are a useful guide; if you read music, it’s also interesting to listen alongside the unusual score.
Book Of The Week
Recommended by Sophie Roell at Five Books:
“It’s often a challenge to make economics books entertaining, which is a pity as it’s such an important subject. Financial disasters are an exception. Default by Gregory Makoff takes on Argentina’s 2001 default, and the battle over the restructuring of $100 billion in debt. On the face of it, it seems like a niche subject, but it’s one way of getting insight into how capitalism works—the billions at stake and what some players do to get their hands on that money”
Image Of The Week
Untitled picture of Norma Jean Dougherty | David Conover
A familiar face, unfamiliar: Norma Jean Dougherty before she was reinvented as Marilyn Monroe, photographed here for Yank, the Army Weekly by U.S. army photographer David Conover. The photograph was never used, but Conover went on to coach her for a modelling career.
Poem Of The Week
Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse | Franz Wright
A poem about death that, with its vital imagery, feels more like a clarion call to life.
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded— . . .
Read Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse and more by Franz Wright at Poetry Foundation
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Thrilled to welcome first-time contributor Neville Fogarty, who’s published hundreds of crosswords of all varieties. Neville lives in Newport News, Virginia, where he teaches college students about mathematics (and occasionally crosswords). He started solving cryptics during chamber choir rehearsals in college, and yes, he recognizes the poetic justice every time he sees a distracted student –Dan Feyer
Quiz Answers
(i) within 12.5 light years of the sun? 33
(ii) within 250 light years of the sun? 260 thousand
(iii) within 5,000 light years of the sun? 600 million
(iv) within 50,000 light years of the sun? 200 billion