Новости за 13.01.2016

Written when the Powerball jackpot had a cash value of $930 million. In the Powerball draw, five white balls are drawn from a drum of 69 balls, and one red ball is drawn from a drum of 26 balls. That makes 11,238,513 possible outcomes for the white balls; multiply by 26 red balls and you get 292,201,338 possible Powerball tickets. At $2 per ticket, you could buy every possible ticket for $584,402,676. So: Spend $585 million, get $930 million. What’s the catch?

Recipe with digressions. “Ideally you will trap a possum and keep it alive for a week, feeding it a steady diet of roughage to clean out its system. They’re not easy to trap. They like trees, and have the habit of changing dens every few days to foil predators. Before we begin preparing the possum for baking, I’d like to relate two highly personal stories about possums. One is quite sentimental and the second has a squeamish element, so I will lead with the sweet and kind”

This ought to be terrible. It’s a listicle, and so self-referential that it disappears up its own Embarcadero. And yet it manages to be honest and funny and all kinds of wonderful. The later sections are the best. Note in particular those on the popularity of dogs in San Francisco, on the claim to hate Facebook, and on the relative merits of iOS and Android. Also a useful coinage: “nonversation”

Clive James “has been on a vivifying late-career tear”, publishing six books since he received a diagnosis of terminal leukemia in 2010. He is “burning out, not fading away”. His latest volume of poems, Sentenced To Life, is “a harrowing collection, gravid with meaning, unflinching in its appraisal of the author’s mistakes, including infidelity, and plain-spoken in its reckoning with his life’s terminus” (Metered paywall)

History is not individual events, but the interplay of events. “I might know that Copernicus began writing On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in the early 1510s. Around that same time Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. While both of these things were happening, Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England. The 1510s suddenly begin to take on a distinct personality”

Jamie Gambrell talks about translating the surrealist Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. “Crouper doesn’t seem disturbed. He’s very protective of his miniature horses (the size of birds — I missed that on my first read!). It would have caused all kinds of problems for the novel if the zombies had materialized. You’ve got the little horses, tiny people, giants. Other than that, the story doesn’t go beyond the bounds of the normal”

Adorno and Schoenberg led music astray by arguing that musical organisation was arbitrary, and could be remade according to other rules – permutational, aleatoric, serial, and so on – while engaging the perceptions and interests that have emerged over centuries in the concert hall. “That cliché commits the paradigm error of philosophy, which is to oppose an empirical truth with an a priori falsehood”