“The mathematical technique of decomposing wiggling wave forms into sine waves which can then be summed again to make the original wiggly line is called Fourier analysis, after the nineteenth-century French mathematician Joseph Fourier. It works not just for sound waves (indeed, Fourier himself developed the technique for a quite different purpose) but for any process that varies periodically, and it doesn’t have to be high-speed waves like sound, or ultra-high-speed waves like light. We can think of Fourier analysis as a mathematical technique which is convenient for unweaving ‘rainbows’ where the vibration that makes up the spec­trum is slow compared with that of light.

To go to a very slow vibration indeed, I recently saw, on a road in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, a wiggly wet line which followed the course of the road and apparently traced out some kind of complicated repeat pattern. My host and expert guide told me that it was a trail of urine from a male elephant in musth. When a bull elephant enters this curious state (perhaps the elephantine equivalent of an Australian on ‘walkabout’) he dribbles out urine more or less continuously, apparently for scent-marking purposes. The side-to-side waving of the urine trail on the road was presumably produced by the long penis acting as a pendulum (it would be a sine wave if the penis were a perfect, Newtonian pendulum, which it is not) interacting with the more complicated periodicity of the lumbering four-footed gait of the whole animal. I took photographs with the vague intention of later performing a Fourier analysis.

I am sorry to say I have never got around to doing it. But in theory it could be done. A tracing of the photographed urine line could be laid over squared paper and its coordinates digitized for feeding into a computer. The computer could then perform a modern version of Fourier’s calculations and extract the component sine waves. There are easier (though not necessarily safer) ways to measure the length of an elephant’s penis, but it would have been fun to do, and Baron Fourier himself would surely have been delighted at such an unexpected use of his mathematics. There is no reason why a urine trail might not fossilize, as footprints and wormcasts do, in which case we could in principle use Fourier analysis to measure the penis length of an extinct mastodon or woolly mammoth, from the indirect evidence of its urine trail in musth.”


—From Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, one of my favourite bits in any book ever (although I have issues with the book). We all use math every day etc. etc.

[inspired by]

“In the early 1930s, readers of science fiction magazines such as Wonder Stories, in which [Leslie F. Stone’s] “The Conquest of Gola” first appeared, would have recognized several elements of its basic plot. The early magazines functioned as a sort of discussion group or pre-Internet bulletin board for writers. One writer would publish a story; another would find an intriguing detail in that story and develop it; a third would write a story that reversed everything in the first piece; a fourth would find a way to turn the whole thing into comedy. Robots are a good example: introduced as a metaphor for oppressed workers in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921), the robot evolved into a potential threat in stories like Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!” (1941) and then into a comic foil in Henry Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot” (1943).
      Like jazz, SF is a collaborative art. Together, the pulp magazine writers and editors of the 1920s through the 1940s created not only a genre but also a consensus about what sorts of settings, objects, stories, and characters belonged in that genre. Writers still make use of that collective future, though sometimes the use they make is to contradict or critique it.”
— from “The Conquest of Gernsback: Leslie F. Stone and the Subversion of Science Fiction Tropes” by Brian Attebery, taken from Daughters of Earth by Justine Larbalestier (ed.)
“At that moment,” Iran said, “when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”
— from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick, which served as the inspiration for Blade Runner (and has nothing in common with the movie except the name of the main protagonist and the general wretchedness of humanity)