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Mr Mee
Mr Mee (Picador, 2000; Dedalus Books, 2014) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (following '' Pfitz'' and ''D'Alembert's Principle''). It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie. The lecturer's strand is serious in tone. Dissatisfied with his marriage and suffering ill health, he muses on French literature and becomes infatuated with a student. The other two strands are comic. The copyists become guardians of an esoteric encyclopaedia, and Mr Mee wishes to find it. He turns to the World Wide Web (still fairly new at the time of the novel) and discovers pornography and drugs, with farcical consequences. The copyists, Ferrand and Minard, are based on two men mentioned briefly in Rousseau's Confessions. Their fictional versions – described by one critic as "something of an ei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Crumey
Andrew Crumey (born 1961) is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper ''Scotland on Sunday''. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years." Life and career Crumey was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Kirkintilloch. He graduated with First Class Honours from the University of St Andrews and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London. His thesis was on integrable systems and Kac-Moody algebras, supervised by David Olive. Crumey's first novel, '' Music, in a Foreign Language'', won the Saltire Society First Book Award in 1994. Its theme of alternate history was inspired by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. His second novel '' Pfitz' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monty Hall Problem
The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, based nominally on the American television game show ''Let's Make a Deal'' and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the ''The American Statistician, American Statistician'' in 1975. It became famous as a question from reader Craig F. Whitaker's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column in ''Parade (magazine), Parade'' magazine in 1990: Savant's response was that the contestant should switch to the other door. By the standard assumptions, the switching strategy has a probability of winning the car, while the strategy of keeping the initial choice has only a probability. When the player first makes their choice, there is a chance that the car is behind one of the doors not chosen. This probability does not change after the host reveals a goat behind one of the unchosen doors. When the host provides i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Statesman
''The New Statesman'' (known from 1931 to 1964 as the ''New Statesman and Nation'') is a British political and cultural news magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney Webb, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, such as George Bernard Shaw, who was a founding director. The longest-serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930–1960), and the most recent editor was Jason Cowley (journalist), Jason Cowley, who assumed the post in 2008 and left in 2024. Today, the magazine is a print–digital hybrid. According to its present self-description, it has a modern Liberalism in the United Kingdom, liberal and Independent progressive, progressive political position. Jason Cowley (journalist), Jason Cowley, the magazine's editor, has described the ''New Statesman'' as a publication "of the left, for the left" but also as "a political and literary magaz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miranda Seymour
Miranda Jane Seymour (born 8 August 1948) is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer of Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and Jean Rhys among others. Seymour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She elected to resign from the Royal Society of Literature in December 2023. She was formerly married to Andrew Sinclair, and Anthony Gottlieb and is now married to Ted Lynch. Early life and education Miranda Seymour was two years old when her parents moved into Thrumpton Hall, the family ancestral home. She detailed her unconventional upbringing in her 2008 memoir ''In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love'' (Simon & Schuster, UK), which appeared in the US as '' Thrumpton Hall'' (HarperCollins) and won the 2008 Pen Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year. She studied at Bedford College, London, now part of Royal Holloway, University of London, earning a BA in English in 1981. Career Seymour began her literary career in 1975 with an historical novel, ''The Stones ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LexisNexis
LexisNexis is an American data analytics company headquartered in New York, New York. Its products are various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information. During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information. The company is a subsidiary of RELX. History LexisNexis is owned by RELX (formerly known as Reed Elsevier). According to Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Charles P. Bourne, LexisNexis (originally founded as LEXIS) is historically significant because it was the first of the early information services to both envision and actually bring about a future in which large populations of end users would directly interact with computer databases, rather than going through professional intermediaries like librari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deadpan
Deadpan, dry humour, or dry-wit humour is the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of Comedy, comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness or absurdity of the subject matter. The delivery is meant to be blunt, ironic, Laconic phrase, laconic, or apparently unintentional. Etymology The term ''deadpan'' first emerged early in the 20th century, as a compound word (sometimes spelled as two words) combining "dead" and "pan" (a slang term for the face). It appeared in print as early as 1915, in an article about a former baseball player named Gene Woodburn written by his former manager Roger Bresnahan. Bresnahan described how Woodburn used his skill as a ventriloquist to make his manager and others think they were being heckled from the stands. Woodburn, wrote Bresnahan, "had a trick of what the actors call 'the dead pan.' He never cracked a smile and would be the last man you would suspect was working a trick." George M. Cohan, in a 1908 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Blind Assassin
''The Blind Assassin'' is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in Toronto. It is narrated from the present day, referring to previous events that span the twentieth century but mostly the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop, for example, the On-to-Ottawa Trek and a 1934 Communist rally at Maple Leaf Gardens. Greater verisimilitude is given by a series of newspaper articles commenting on events and on the novel's characters from a distance. The work was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 and the Hammett Prize in 2001 and also received a number of other nominations. Plot summary The novel's protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationshi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and an inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, two graphic novels, and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work is the 1985 dystopian novel ''The Handmaid's Tale.'' Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television. Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics". Many of her poems are inspired by myth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Times
The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nikkei, Inc., Nikkei, with core editorial offices across Britain, the United States and continental Europe. In July 2015, Pearson plc, Pearson sold the publication to Nikkei for Pound sterling, £844 million (US$1.32 billion) after owning it since 1957. In 2019, it reported one million paying subscriptions, three-quarters of which were digital subscriptions. In 2023, it was reported to have 1.3 million subscribers of which 1.2 million were digital. The newspaper has a prominent focus on Business journalism, financial journalism and economic analysis rather than News media, generalist reporting, drawing both criticism and acclaim. It sponsors an Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, annual book ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Booker Prize
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives , as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish and South African (and later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial. A five-person panel consisting of authors, publishers and journalists, as well as politicians, actors, artists and musicians, is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation each year to choose the winning book. Gaby Wood has been the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation since 2015. A high-profile liter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Mee
Arthur Henry Mee (21 July 187527 May 1943) was an English writer, journalist and educator. He is best known for ''The Harmsworth Self-Educator'', ''The Children's Encyclopædia'', ''The Children's Newspaper'', and ''The King's England''. Early life He was born on 21 July 1875 at Stapleford, Nottinghamshire, Stapleford near Nottingham, England, the second of the ten children of Henry Mee (b. 1852), railway fireman, and his wife, Mary (née Fletcher). As a boy he earned money from reading the Hansard, reports of Parliament to a local blind man. Career Mee left school at 14 to join a local newspaper, where he became an editor by age 20. He contributed many non-fiction articles to magazines and joined the staff of ''The Daily Mail'' in 1898. He was made literary editor five years later. In 1903 he began working for publisher Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth's Fleetway, Amalgamated Press. He was appointed general editor of ''The Harmsworth Self-Ed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Measurement Problem
In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the ''problem of definite outcomes:'' quantum systems have superpositions but quantum measurements only give one definite result. The wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as a linear superposition of different states. However, actual measurements always find the physical system in a definite state. Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement "did something" to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution. The measurement problem is describing what that "something" is, how a superposition of many possible values becomes a single measured value. To express matters differently (paraphrasing Steven Weinberg), the Schrödinger equation determines the wave function at any later time. If observers and their measuring apparatus are t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
