Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Monday, January 11, 2010

A lesson in perspective

A wonderful image from Wikipedia that shows us how utterly insignificant we actually are.

For those of us who care about numbers, VY Canis Majoris, the very last star in that sequence, has a radius that may be 2,600 times that of our sun. The sun is approximately 109 times the radius of the earth. In other words, it would take approximately ( (2,600 x 109) ^ 3 =) 2.28 x 10^16, or 22.8 quadrillion, earths to fill this star's volume. If I remember my high school physics lessons, the earth's mean radius is around 6,400 km. This would give VY Canis Majoris a circumference of (2 * pi * 2,600 * 109 * 6,400 =) 11.4 billion km (if you ignore equatorial bulging due to rotation and whatnot). Very, very roughly put, it would take a beam of light (12 * 10^9 / 3 * 10^5 =) 40,000 seconds, or over 11 hours, to travel around the star.


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Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”