JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004, Cloud Atlas is already complicated enough: telling the story of six interlocking lives and hopping back and forth across centuries and genres. But differences between the US and UK editions highlighted by Eve in a journal article published on Wednesday on the Open Library of Humanities run to 30 pages of examples.

In the UK text, for example, Mitchell writes at one point that: “Historians still unborn will appreciate your cooperation in the future, Sonmi ~451. We archivists thank you in the present. […] Once we’re finished, the orison will be archived at the Ministry of Testaments. […] Your version of the truth is what matters.”

In the US edition, the lines are: “On behalf of my ministry, thank you for agreeing to this final interview. Please remember, this isn’t an interrogation, or a trial. Your version of the truth is the only one that matters.”

Read it.

Hmmm. I read the British (Sceptre) paperback, gave it away, and got the American (Random House) trade edition. Now I have to get the British edition back.

To avoid confusion, print different versions in different fonts or colors.

The palace is just one of a dozen structures that ground penetrating radar surveys picked up on the Tintagel peninsula, some of which likely housed workman, soldiers and artists. Whoever lived in the main structure, however, lived a pretty glamorous lifestyle considering it was the dark ages. The researchers have evidence that they drank wine from the geographic area known as Turkey today, and used olive oil from the Greek Isles and Tunisia. They drank from painted glass cups from France and ate off plates from North Africa.

Read it.

If I remember my T.H. White (and Thomas Malory and Mary Stewart) correctly, Tintagel was the castle of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, whose wife Igraine was coveted by Uther Pendragon. The obsessed King Uther Pendragon besieged the castle without success, so he resorted to magic. Merlin cast a spell that caused Uther to take on the form of Gorlois. Gorlois was lured out of the castle, whereupon Uther rode in and convinced Igraine he was her husband. Nine months later, Arthur was born and given to Sir Hector to raise as the boy “Wart”. No one but Merlin knew Wart’s real parentage until Wart came upon a sword stuck in a stone. . .

Later, Gorlois and Igraine’s daughter Morgause seduced Arthur and gave birth to the horrible Mordred, who would rebel against his father/uncle.

I try to read The Once and Future King every other year. My sister and I have memorized most of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so we can ward off boredom with phony French accents and the Camelot song.

The first sentence will describe your lovelife.

I had just bought these two books so they were in my bag.

“Now we’re trying to figure out why the fundamental fabric of reality is one way rather than some other way.”

“…axioms, in the dust of outsiders and mistrust of insiders, in wanderers’ totes and Judas’s totals, in the movement from and the standing over, in the lies of the cheated and in the truth of the deceived, in war and peace, in tinted glasses and tall grasses, in studios and studies, in shame and suffering, in darkness and light, in hate and compassion, in life and beyond it—we need to make good sense out of all these and other things—there’s something in it, perhaps not much, but something.”

Hmmm, the two readings agree.

(Thanks to Tina.)

Einstein once described his friend Michele Besso as “the best sounding board in Europe” for scientific ideas. They attended university together in Zurich; later they were colleagues at the patent office in Bern. When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein—knowing that his own time was also running out—wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s family. “Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote of his friend’s passing. “That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Einstein’s statement was not merely an attempt at consolation. Many physicists argue that Einstein’s position is implied by the two pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The laws that underlie these theories are time-symmetric—that is, the physics they describe is the same, regardless of whether the variable called “time” increases or decreases. Moreover, they say nothing at all about the point we call “now”—a special moment (or so it appears) for us, but seemingly undefined when we talk about the universe at large. The resulting timeless cosmos is sometimes called a “block universe”—a static block of space-time in which any flow of time, or passage through it, must presumably be a mental construct or other illusion.

Read The Debate Over Time’s Place in the Universe.

Crimean Tom, also known as Sevastopol Tom, saved British and French troops from starvation during the Crimean war in 1854.The regiments were occupying the Russian town of Sevastopol and could not find food. Tom could. He led them to hidden caches of food stored by Russian soldiers and civilians.Tom was taken back to England with the soldiers when the war was over. After his death in 1856, he was stuffed and preserved and is a permanent part of the National Army Museum in London.

Missy, a tabby from Newcastle, has something of a medical bent. When she sensed there was something amiss with her owner – if cats can ever said to be “owned” – Missy alerted her by refusing to stop pawing at her chest. Angela Tinning says it first happened in 2013. “Her behaviour was so unusual I got checked out and it was found I had pre-cancerous cells. Three years later it happened again. “I felt fine and I honestly don’t think I would have bothered if she hadn’t drawn my attention to it. If it weren’t for her, my story could be very different today. “She is my little hero.”

Read Cats to the rescue: When felines turn hero

A fast acting feline who alerted her owners to a house fire has been named Cat of the Year by an animal charity. Tink jumped on top of Claire Hopkinson who was asleep in bed when an electrical fault sparked a fire at a neighbouring property in Shrewsbury. Her family managed to get out of the house safely but Tink was overcome by the smoke and had to be revived by firefighters using a tiny oxygen mask. “Without Tink we wouldn’t be here today,” said Mrs Hopkinson.

Fire rescue Tink named Cat of the Year

Drogon alerts his human to boring passages in her drafts by falling asleep on the page.

Saffy does a quadruple-take whenever she encounters a hackneyed phrase in her human’s notebooks. And in 2003, she alerted us when the building next door was on fire.

It’s hilarious!

Lady Susan: The fees at Frederica’s school are too high to even think of paying. So, in a sense, it’s an economy!

Later,

Lady Susan: She says she must think of her school’s reputation.

Reginald de Courcy: Preposterous. I’ve never heard of her school.

I think Tita Jane Austen would love it. It’s made me realize how Austenian The Last Days of Disco is.