He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor was a famous man, a really famous man.

We asked, "Who was it?" And he said, "Have you ever heard of the mad monk, Rasputin?"

I knew of Rasputin. He'd lived, I'd thought, in a Russian palace with the Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and had magically healed the czar's son from a supposedly incurable disease, then gained great sway over the Romanov family, and then, in a ghastly scene, was shot, clubbed and poisoned to death by a group of noblemen just before the start of the Russian Revolution. In my mind, all this happened in a different age. The pictures I'd seen showed him with a 19^th century beard, dressed in robes.

How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7^th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn't seem possible. Yet the old guy said, "Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea."

I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.

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"Consider the perceptual challenges inherent in the robotic manipulation of unseen socks," says an engineering team at the University of California, Berkeley.

Suppose you're a robot. If you had a camera in your head, and you could watch a human doing a simple task, like bunching a pair of socks, could you, just by watching, learn to do it too?

Well, let's see...

Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.

In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put them on the post. Apparently Abbeel's robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so demonstrations.

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She'd wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper's hop, an infant's fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, a vividness.

She was a poet and she died this week. She was, the obits say, a modest woman. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she was so discombobulated by the attention, she stopped writing poetry for awhile, until the world settled down and she could be ignored again. She needed the quiet to notice the astonishing, quiet things we might see every day, if we only had her eyes.

She had eyes for modest creatures. One time, she was wandering down a path — in my imagination it's a dirt path through a field somewhere in Poland where she lived. She looks down, and there, lying on its back, sits a beetle. It is dead. Nobody notices. Which is the point:

A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death's confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.

To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren't deceased, they're dead.
They leave behind, we'd like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.

And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation —
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.

Wislawa Szymborska's passing is as precious as that beetle's. No more. No less. She taught us about weight in the world. We all have it. Every last one of us.

---

"Seen from Above" from Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 by Wisława Szymborska. English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

It's not like it hasn't been done before; it has. The problem is, it is so easy now, anyone can do it, and we'd never know because the tools are so subtle. I'm talking about doctored pictures — manipulating images, or what simpler folks call "lying." There used to be a saying on the Web: "Pictures, or it didn't happen." No more.

You can look at an ordinary image, video or filmstrip that seems just as real as the room you are in right now, but it ain't.

I recently bumped into a thesis video (hold on, it's waiting at the bottom of this page) created at the University of Illinois. It was prepared and narrated by a student-faculty team. What they did — and they did it so matter-of-factly, and so well, I was ... well, I was startled. Because when I was growing up, the folks who faked the photos got caught. Over and over.

For example, my history teacher in high school showed me Stalin's retouching of Lenin rallying the Soviet troops before they headed off to Poland. There's Lenin, up on the podium, apparently alone.

The problem, my teacher said, is "Where's Leon?" As it happens, Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev were there that day, too. Both members of the Central Committee, they were possible successors, Stalin's rivals. You can see both of them in the original photo, standing below the podium, on the right. But Stalin didn't want them there. When he became leader of the USSR, they were airbrushed out. Stalin did that all the time. But very often, somebody had the tell-tale original.

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Franky Zapata invented it. I want it. Zapata is a star in the world of French Jet Ski racing (where competitors do flips, obstacle courses and slalom, and go very, very fast). A few months ago, he came out with this thing.

He calls it a stand up device; his company calls it a "Flyboard," but it's not a board, exactly.

What is it? It's a Jet Ski motor connected by a long hose that attaches to a pair of jet boots and handheld stabilizers. Once you learn how to work it, you can fly out of the water 30 feet into the air, hang there or lean forward and do a power dive.

I'm looking at this thing and thinking it should be renamed "The Dolphinator," because this is about as close as a human is ever going to get to flying in and out of the air and sea as dolphins do. In fact, it beats the dolphins.

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A bunch of you have sent me this list. It comes from Drew Breunig, a New Yorker who apparently works in the computer business, in advertising.

It's a short history of "Frontiers" — territories that he says have challenged humans over the centuries, arranged in roughly chronological order. Drew calls it "Frontiers Through The Ages."

• Water, 1400
• Land, 1840
• Gold, 1850
• Wire, 1880
• Air, 1900
• Celluloid, 1920
• Plastic, 1950
• Space, 1960
• Silicon, 1980
• Networks, 1990
• Data, 2000

I know, I know, it's much too American and very arbitrary (Christopher Columbus didn't exactly "open" the oceans for exploration; Egyptian sailors, Minoans, Phoenicians did that, and much earlier), but still, Drew is playing a game here that's fun, if you keep at it.

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She was the first woman ever to circumnavigate the globe, but she did it dressed as a man. For more than two years she traveled on a French naval vessel with linen bandages wrapped tightly around her upper body to flatten her chest. It was a small ship with 300 men who knew her as "Jean." But she wasn't Jean. She was Jeanne. Then one day, they found her out.

The first woman to go all the way around the world was born in France in 1740, in the Loire Valley. Her family taught her to identify plants to treat wounds and diseases and so she became "an herb woman," a peasant schooled in botanical medicine. In this she was not unusual. People didn't have to read or write to "botanize." Most of the learning was passed down orally. Jeanne Baret was, apparently, very good at it, and she was also very lucky.

It turns out, in her neighborhood, there was a young man, a nobleman, whose young wife had died in childbirth, and one day, maybe while roaming the fields collecting plants — also his obsession — he met Jeanne. They began to collect together. He then hired her as his teacher, assistant and "all-around aide," says biographer Glynis Ridley. After that, she moved in and became his lover.

Two years later, they hatched a plan. The French government announced it would send two ships around the world to discover new territories for the glory of France, and they needed a plant hunter-botanist on board. Philibert de Commerson got the job. He, in turn, needed an assistant, and though the French Navy expressly prohibited women on its ships, Philibert agreed to dress Jeanne like a man. She (or, rather "he") would show up, as if by accident, at the gangplank on the day of departure, offer "his" services, and be hired on the spot. It was a bizarre, dangerous, crazy idea, but that's what they did, and it worked.

She was allowed to share a small cabin with Philibert, but they had to be careful. The chest bandages had to go on every day, which made it hard for her to take deep breaths, and the sailors began to notice that "Jean" never relieved himself with the rest of the crew, always carried a loaded pistol, and never, ever undressed with the others.

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He was, as you can see here, a large nosed, lean, keen-eyed man whose image still hangs in Great Britain's national portrait gallery, alongside kings, writers, warriors and other great personages. Which is odd, because he was a pirate.

Not a gentleman pirate. William Dampier was a doubloon-stealing, knife-flashing, boat-nabbing outlaw who preyed on Spanish frigates, who pillaged, robbed and behaved very, very badly.

But he was also a great naturalist, one of the 17^th century's best; a man who collected plants and animals and wrote about them during short breaks between piratical adventures.

The pirate who loved plants. That's like learning Tony Soprano had a side business collecting beetles. But in the 17^th century, finding plants and animals new to Europeans was a rough, ferociously competitive business. There were fortunes to be made, money enough to attract outlaws, slavers, men who crisscrossed the world for years at a time.

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Normally, this kind of thing is done with a pen or a pencil or a crayon, not with a graphing calculator. Numbers like to multiply, divide and subtract. They don't want to be words or pictures. That's not their job.

But if you've never been good at math, and you love to draw, here's a little revenge exercise. You can torture numbers into very unmathematical contortions — contortions that will make you smile.

1. Casual Greeting

For example: This dense equation, plotted on the right computer program, resolves into a phrase that you and everybody you know uses every day. Millions of people say it. Click on the equation to see what it is.

2. Very Casual Greeting

This equation produces a short, vivid expression favored by Notorious B.I.G. and other hip-hop artists. It is especially popular when a speaker has run out of things to say, but wants to stay in charge of the conversation.

3. To Be Displayed On One's Chest

This one (which we are not quoting in full) is instantly recognizable, if you happen to be staring at the ample chest of an American billionaire playboy, industrialist and philanthropist, who keeps company with a young assistant and is something of a sports car enthusiast.

4. Something You Blow, Something You Squeeze

This one isn't numerical, though it is intensely mathematical. It is called a Crease Pattern and is used in origami to indicate how to fold a single piece of paper to create a figure or pattern. In this case, what we get is two wind instruments — one is Lisa Simpson's favorite, the other often found in dancing bear acts.

5. Something Found Sitting On Rocks

And this one, again a crease pattern (and again, I don't know if this is a partial or total formula), comes from the late and great origami master Eric Joisel. How he managed all these folds, I have no idea, but done right, this pattern will produce an aquatic creature with a tendency to primp while sitting on rocks. They also have the unfortunate habit of charming young men to homes where it is increasingly difficult to breathe. That you can make them from systematic folds on series of blank rectangles, makes them all the more desirable.

And I'm not the only one: Last week The New York Times geeked out on pasta. Quoting from George Legendre's new book, Pasta by Design, they ran a series of equations that perfectly describe ravioli, capelletti, fusilli, scialatieli and various Italian noodles. You'll find their equations (and pasta pictures) here. Just the thing for a foodie who likes to eat abstractly.