Monthly Archive

I finally found some cards of the famous Cat-Dog Test [1]:

The test consists of 13 line drawings. The first of these is clearly a cat which through successive small modifications gradually becomes a dog. In [figure above] are shown the first, seventh, and
thirteenth of the drawings, i. e . the clearest cat, the most ambiguous picture and the clearest dog. The subject is told:

I am going to show you some pictures that can be either a dog or a cat. Please tell me whether each picture is more like a cat or more like a dog. Take as much or as little time to respond as you wish This is not a test. There are no right or wrong answers Before I expose a card, I will say the word “ready ” Keep your eyes on the screen at all times. [1]

Judging from the literature [4], there is a strong correlation between a subject’s persistence on dog being cat and his/her authoritarian inclinations. When (as a student) I first read about the test, I thought: “How much should one despise the humankind to invent such a test?”. Unfortunately, in my later life I met a lot of people who would reach number 13 with flying colours.

Source:

[1] S. J. Korghin and H. Basowitz, The Judgment of Ambiguous Stimuli as an Index of Cognitive Functioning in Aging, Journal of Personality 25 n0. 1(1956), 81–95; doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1956.tb01290.x

They refer to

[2] E. Frenkel-Brunswick, Intolerance of ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable, Journal of Personality, 18 (1949), 108-143.

[3] I. Krasno, Authoritarian and egalitarian personality syndromes and intolerance of perceptual ambiguity. Unpublished doctor s dissertation, Univer. of Pennsylvania, 1952.

as developers of the Test. A general discussion of authoritarianism scales can be found in

[4] Review of: Emotional Flexibility-Rigidity as a Comprehensive Dimension of Mind by Sigvard Rubenowitz. O. J. Harvey, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 71, No. 5. (Mar., 1966), pp. 590-591. Stable URL.

From Vladimir Nabokov’s interview to NYT, 1969:

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?

Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

[See a commentary in Language Log on that quote and on attempts to patent emoticon-entry methods; see also the patent application itself.]

This was one of the silliest things that Nabokov ever said. However, he did a lot of clever things, too. I experienced catharsis when I red in his Reply to My Critics the defence of the use of the (archaic even by standards of Shorter Oxford Dictionary) wordform “dit” instead of “ditty” in his translation of “Eugene Onegin”:

I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by “dit” (Five: VIII: 13) which I chose instead of “ditty” to parallel “kit” instead of “kitty” in the next line, and which will now, I hope, enter or re-enter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya–”song”).

I was always surprised that Nabokov entered into a protracted argument with Wilson about the use of “dit” instead of “ditty”; perhaps Nabokov’s motivation was just sadistic joy at the discovery of his colleague’s ignorance. Indeed, Wilson’s attack on Nabokov is a precise parallel of scorn heaped on Pushkin by contemporary critics who disapproved his use of “топ” instead of “топот”. Pushkin’s response (in his article ОТВЕТ НА СТАТЬЮ В ЖУРНАЛЕ «АТЕНЕЙ») is famous:

Людская молвь и конский топ — выражение сказочное (Бова Королевич).

Читайте простонародные сказки, молодые писатели, чтоб видеть свойства русского языка.

«Как приятно будет читать роп вм. ропот, топ вм. топот» и проч. На сие замечу моему критику, что роп, топ и проч. употребляются простолюдимами во многих русских губерниях — NB мне случалось также слышать стукот вместо стук.

[Part of this post appeared first as my comment to a post in House of Mirth, 26 Sent 2007.]

My interest to mathematical intuition and subconscious mental work in mathematics leads me to discuss, in my main blog, method acting (or Stanislavski System as it is known in Russia). Here, I place only a brief comment that method acting is possible in animated film; the animation artist plays her character, and the degree of immersion in the character could go beyond what can be achieved in conventional cinema. However, so far this happened only in Overcoat, still unfinished film by Yuri Norstein and Franceska Yarbusova. Here is Yarbusova’s sketch for the film:

Norstein’s Tale of Tales has to be included in any list of 10 best films of world cinema ever:

The character of Little Wolfy was created by Yarbusova.

This is an overflow blog for more trivial or personal posts not suitable for my principal blog, Mathematics under the Microscope. I doubt that I will write here regularly. The title, of course, is borrowed from my favorite book.