THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN (SIRI HUSTVEDT) AND THE FUNCTION OF CORPUS CALLOSUM

In 1906, the anatomist Robert Bennett Bean claimed that the corpus callosum—the neural fibers that bind the two halves of the brain together—were bigger in men than in women and hypothesized that the “exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity.” Big thoughts = Big CC.

The corpus callosum is a controversial topic, not only from a feminist point of view. Back in those days, some scientists also tried to find differences between the corpus callosum of several races. Nowadays nobody thinks this is true. For me, it is not only diffcult to believe those differences exist, but also that this disgusting cauliflower is, as some claim, able to do anything except getting to know itself. This last thing would be, according to David Hubel, “like getting up from the floor by pulling up your own shoelaces”

JENIGAN (DAVID GATES) AND THE SPACE-TIME PERSPECTIVE

One of those disgraces best dealt with by putting off thinking about it. Once you’d moved on in time a little bit—making an analogy here between time and distance, though I’m not sure you can—it would be back in the past and therefore smaller. The law of perspective, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book. Like an A-bomb blast, which seared you less the farther away you stood, in a featureless Jon Nagy landscape. I’m not explaining this right.

At the end he doesn´t explain it properly, like he admits, but I like the analogy. If in Modern Physics you can talk about the continuous spacetime, you can also talk about the spacetime perspective. When you do something embarrasing you don´t need to run away, it is enough to stay motionless and think (like in The King´s Ring tale): “this too shall pass”. The people who are able to discern how they will laugh in the future at the failure occured in the present, can be very happy

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS (WILLIAM MAXWELL) AND THE PROPAGATION OF ESPHERIC WAVES

Once started, the music swept along of its own momentum, carrying Bunny with it. He was helpless. So was Robert and so was his mother. The only opposition came from the room itself. What the green walls threw back, the fire caught at and sent up the chimney. What the fire could not reach, the ringed candelabrum turned nervously into light, ring upon ring.

Sonic waves are tridimensional waves that propagate from their source. Its area would be the area of a sphere with radius R, where R is the distance to the sonic source. According to Huygens Principle, each obstacle that the waves face should become a secondary source of spheric waves, similar to the ones described by William Maxwell in this room. With the candelabrum, there is a more complicated interaction between light and sonic waves.