WingColors

If you're going to make a quilt, pre-wash the fabrics (especially darker colors, reds, blues, purples, and blacks) before cutting them into little bits and sewing them back together again. If you don't, you could very well be sorry when you throw the quilt in the machine after putting hundreds of hours of work (or more) into it as you watch the dyes run on all the lighter fabrics. (Think red sock in the laundry with the white shirts.) Sometimes, despite pre-washing, the dyes run anyway, but at least you've a better chance of success if you pre-wash.

Go ahead, ask me how I know this, and then explain to me why there is a huge debate between quilters on whether to pre-wash or not.

From a grammar standpoint, it is not correct to say "if I was", "if he was", etc. It's subjunctive and so you must say "if I were". Just like the song.

Thanks Rich.

I've always presumed the following to be relatively well known, but each time I tell people they just look at me with a bewildered look, so I'll share it here.

The symbol of Firenze, possibly the most famous work of Michelangelo, the sculpture that summed up an entire era of artistic change in Europe* - David - is simply wrong. Anatomically, at least, anyway.

David's hands are far too big, his arms are far too long, his head is slightly dis-proportioned as is his upper body in comparison to his lower body. Oh, and his penis is unnaturally smaller than the normal. I'm not saying this is incorrect, just saying that most renaissance artists and their commissioners found the male genitalia ugly at the time, thus they were, erm, made to be more subtle.

One theory surrounding the dis-proportioned David is that the statue was meant to stand proud in a basilica facade, or some other place up high. If this was the case (and I'm guessing we will never know), it furthers the genius of Michelangelo to consider the perspective view of his work.

The other theory being that conditions were so cramped in Michelangelo's studio that the man was rarely any more than an arms length away from the marble when he sculptured the work. Thus, he couldn't see the entire work unfold as he chipped away.

Either way, it is one of the greatest works of art that is actually horrendously wrong. But it is exactly that which endears it to so many people.

*That's obviously just my poetic license flowing.

That's very interesting, dreamweaver... I can only imagine my absolute, total anger if my hours and hours of work were destroyed in the washer. And, Ollie, I honestly did not know that! I think I'll be the romantic and go with the Michelangelo-as-a-super-genius theory. :)

Ollie: That is absolutely fascinating! Seriously, I never knew that or even bothered to try and find out why. Thanks for learning me something!

We have a tendency to consider things more intelligent if we don't know how they work. A crude example is if I told you I have an artificial intelligence system at home that knows who's at home, me or my girlfriend, without us telling it. Any inclination to consider that system intelligent will break down when I tell you how it works: There's a camera outside, aimed at our parking lot, and all the system does is monitor the color of our cars: if my pink Cadillac is there, I'm at home. If my girlfriend's black Chevrolette is there, she is. At that point we simply consider the system automated, stupid, algorithmic.

This tendency, attributing less intelligence to machines (and other creatures too, even eachother) after we figure out how they work, is so common it earned its own name: The A.I. Effect.

Chess is a good real life example. 50 years ago everyone agreed that a machine that could play Chess (a feat only humans could do) would have to be really intelligent. Today the common conception is that they are merely automatic.

But the machines are becoming more capable, handling increasingly complex problems and performing a wider range of human-like tasks. Will we still consider them automatic when they can do everything we can? Probably not. They'll be such an intricately weaved series of systems that maintain and create other systems that it'll be too complex to understand without heavy analysis. Thus, most of us won't know how they work and the A.I. Effect will be harder to feel.

Great note. And I don't have a pink Cadillac, by the way.

@Ollie: Thanks for the info on David. I'm in an art history class currently, and we just had a segment on David; NONE of that was mentioned. It was portrayed as this perfect piece of art.

@dreamweaver: First of all, your username keeps making me remember nightmare problems in Dreamweaver (the WYSIWYG HTML editor).

Second - ouch. It sounds like you, er, learned that the hard way. :( I probably would have given up quilting right then and there.

@ErinR: <3 for using the word subjunctive. I don't know many native Americans who know the term, or what it means. Generally, our knowledge of grammar is woefully inadequate (which, coincidentally, is perhaps one reason why Americans have such a hard time in understanding the grammar of foreign languages).

@hthth: Cool example about the cars. (Sorry to hear you don't have a pink Cadillac, however; probably be worth a bit of money.)

That's very true about chess computers. Even the greatest chess computers aren't really intelligent, they're just using brute force to analyze millions and millions (literally) of board variations, to see which move is "the best." I don't recall the exact move, but Kasparov and his study team discovered that, when going up against (I believe) Deep Blue, if they sacrificed a pawn in a peculiar move, it threw a sort of wrench in the computer's analysis. Certainly, it was still difficult to beat, but it had serious issues in coping with the movie, simply because it was a very illogical move.

When dancing Techno, you must imagine that your body has a vertical pole running through its center. You are supposed dance around the pole with your shoulders and hips.

And I used to think that Techno didn't have form.

If the conditions on the planet Mercury were such that you could live on it, you'd struggle to remember people's birthdays.

It takes about 176 Earth days for Mercury to go once around the sun, but each day lasts nearly 59 Earth days.

So you only get 2 and a bit days each year.

That also means that there are over 1400 Earth hours each day. So if somebody asks you what time it is on Mercury, you'll definitely need a digital watch, or a magnifying glass to work out where the big hand is pointing!

@Josh: I'm surprised at that, to be honest. Even a cursory glance at a photo of David tends to show it isn't quite right. Although I should point out, that despite me seeming to slag off Michelangelo, I really do consider the work to be of monumental importance. It's a bit like listening to live music versus the album. The album version is as perfect as the artist can make it. But live, it is the tiny mistakes that make the performance. As with David, it is the little errors that really make the piece even better than an anatomically correct male. (I erased the obvious joke here.) There is also a unsubstantiated claim that Michelangelo didn't actually like sculpturing, and that he only agreed to do the work because he had bills to pay. It is unproven, but interesting none-the-less.

@publicenergy: So people age slower on Mercury? Where can I book tickets!? :D