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I was recently doing some Wikipedia research and learned that when Kurt Gödel left Vienna for the last time in late 1939, he travelled to Princeton the long way, because World War II was already making an Atlantic transit infeasible. He took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, then sailed to San Francisco, and then crossed the US by train!
Fortuitously, I found a new Gödel biography shortly after, although this saga doesn't get much more elaboration. There are, however, too many funny asides about math/philosophy/history to quote. I'll go with this one:
( Spoilers for the entire saga )
Fortuitously, I found a new Gödel biography shortly after, although this saga doesn't get much more elaboration. There are, however, too many funny asides about math/philosophy/history to quote. I'll go with this one:
During the Circle's discussions, Neurath would constantly try to enforce discipline by banging his fist furiously on the table and interrupting if anyone dared utter one of the words on his long list of proscribed terms, such as "idea," "ideal," even "reality." He ultimately tried the patience even of the ever-patient Schlick, who would plead, "Dear Neurath, please permit us!" Neurath responded by making a small card with the letter "M" on it which he would silently hold up whenever the discussions strayed into the forbidden area of metaphysics. After several weeks of this he announced, "I can abbreviate the procedure still further if I instead hold up a card with 'non-M' on it when you don't speak metaphysics."
And then I happened across "The Last Shadow," the culmination of the Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow series. I hadn't known that this was published this year, possibly because people in my circles aren't keeping up with new Orson Scott Card releases, possibly because I'm lazy about getting new physical books. Anyway, the last two Ender/Bean books, "Ender in Exile" and "Shadows in Flight," were released in 2008 and 2012 respectively (and "Exile" comes well before "Speaker of the Dead" in IC time), so this has been in the works for a while. (There was also "Children of the Fleet" in 2017 which was "what happened to Battle School after the war," and was...not that great.)( Spoilers for the entire saga )
