Speaking of Matter: Review of Q.E.D.
Feynman, Richard P, Q.E.D.: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton, 1985 I loved many things about this book, but above all the moments when Feynman let own joy, unabashed wonder at...
Category: translation
A name for something impossible, an “equivalence” that can never really be.
Borges on Writing [book review]
Like many other Anglophone readers, I assumed for a long time that Borges wrote primarily fiction, which meant that I had been overlooking roughly half of his writing. This book of essays (Jorge Luis Borges...
Needing a Translator
We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...
Arcana: Musicians on Music
There are ten of these books — same title, volumes I – X — published at irregular intervals between 2000 and last year. I don’t own them all (about half are in my nearby...
A Serving of Casual Insults
Most mornings, often before breakfast, I find myself in a righteous fury about having been forced to do some stupid thing to meet the incomprehensible demands some huge global server, presumably for the convenience...
The Measurement Problem
Is there a problem? There is. It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured. Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...