Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Two great people passed away recently. The frivolous mass media did not widely report on them, as they prefer to fawn on “celebrities”, but each of them had a more significant and fundamental influence on our world than any two-bit actor or airhead princess ever will.

Laurent Schwartz, a French mathematician, did rate an obituary in Le Monde, mostly because of his courageous struggle against France’s colonial war of oppression in Algeria. He is the inventor of the theory of distributions, which extends ordinary functions to cope with things such as the Dirac delta “function”. It is a cornerstone of modern mathematical analysis and is used in signal analysis, itself the cornerstone of the technologies used to transmit data over analog media such as DSL.

Edsger Dijkstra, best known as the curmudgeonly Dutchman who advocated banning the goto statement, was a pioneering computer scientist who invented, among his many contributions, the algorithm which bears his name to find the shortest path in a graph and which is the basis for routing in the Internet.

You wouldn’t be able to read this page without these mens’ work.

In his A History of Eternity, Borges rightfully attacked Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights as being sensationalist and emphasizing the savage and brutal (not to mention sensual) nature of the Orient to pander to his thrill-seeking British audience.

One of the great virtues of Burton’s text, however, is the wealth of footnotes he supplies. Many are very witty, and collected, they are sometimes more interesting than the original text itself.

A case in point, this footnote on the colloquial word for “police”: “Arab. Al-Zalamah lit. = tyrants, oppressors, applied to the police and generally to employés of Government. It is a word which tells a history”. It seems little has changed since…

Researchers have found that chocolate (the drinkable form) was produced by ancient Mayans 2600 years ago, over a millennium earlier than previously thought.

This is far earlier than coffee, or any other hot drink. Only beer and wine have been devised earlier.

Source: The Economist (subscribers only) reporting on an article in Nature.

Now if only chocolate drinking places were as commonplace as they are in Spain or Vienna, serving that divine nectar rather than the insipid caffeinated swill people inexplicably seem to favor…

In my opinion, the best drinking cocoa is Scharffen-Berger, because it is not processed with harsh alkali like Dutch-style cocoa. The Dutch brands Droste and Van Houten nevertheless produce quite acceptable cocoa, specially in Europe where Scharffen-Berger is not commonly available. And if you want the ultimate liquid chocolate indulgence, try either Viennese-style Rumpelmayer “Angelina” hot chocolate from Paris or the drinking chocolate available in bottles from La Maison du Chocolat or Valrhona.

Update (2002-09-19): A funny quote about the (recently failed) takeover battle for Hershey “Chocolates” (sic), from The Economist:

In the end, the resistance of the people of Hershey may not be enough to stop their company being snatched from under their noses. After all, if the taste of Hershey’s chocolate—which, legend has it, is made with sour milk—is not enough to put off the bidders, what is?

Update (2007-11-23):

The earliest known date for cocoa cultivation has been pushed back another half millennium, to 1100 BC.

Update (2013-04-21):

Hersheey’s took over Sharffen-Berger and ruined it. If you want good drinking chocolate, get the Guittard “Grand Cacao”.

The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown

NESFA (New England SF Association), ISBN: 1886778183 Publisher, Buy online

Fredric Brown is arguably the finest writer of science-fiction short stories ever, just as Jorge Luis Borges is the master of the metaphysical fantastic stories.

Curiously, his SF work is more easily available abroad, notably the French translations by Denoël, than in his native US, and most of his books still in print are his mystery novels. This is why I applaud the NESFA’s decision to collect and reprint all the short stories.

Many of these are masterpieces of the genre, with surprising endings that pack a wallop. If you like the TV series “The Twilight Zone”, you know what I mean. Many of them are technically not SF, like the bawdy “The ring of Hans Carvel” in which a medieval man sells his soul for a way to keep his young wife faithful, but they are all extremely enjoyable.

Salon.com has an interesting article on how digital photography is used by police departments to document cases of domestic violence. Interestingly, even humble 1 megapixel cameras can show details like bruises that eluded the Polaroids the police used before.

Update (2002-09-02): An article in the New York Times (free registration required) on the same subject.