John Venn is the mathematician and philosopher most remembered for inventing the diagrams that bear his name. (Okay okay, he didn’t invent them. But he standardized them. And ‘Leibniz Diagrams’ don’t have a good ring to them anyway.)
His diagrams are, by all accounts, perhaps the best way to visually illustrate shared characteristics. I’m a big fan; I even created one for a post in week 207. They’ve also enjoyed a boost in popularity in the internet age. This is probably because they can deliver a punchline in a way that is quick and simple, but also somehow makes you feel smart for understanding it.
Want to know which US states are also chemical elements? Bingo. Wondering what’s the missing link between Gary Coleman, Kermit, and the Hulk? Happy to help. Classical music fan? You’re welcome.
But for all the usefulness and hilarity of his diagrams, there was much more to John Venn than overlapping circles.
For starters, he was a true independent thinker. Despite being from a strict evangelical family, and a long line of clergymen, and despite following that tradition and becoming an Anglican priest himself, he eventually resigned from the clergy, because he found that the church’s ideas ran counter to everything that his study of philosophy had led him to believe. Abandoning an institution that was so deeply ingrained in his society and his own family can’t have been easy.
This wasn’t the only aspect to Venn’s progressive streak; he also supported votes for women at a time when few men (especially in the upper classes) would have.
But maybe the coolest Venn fact was that he was an avid designer of machines. My favourite is his ‘cricket-bowling machine.’ I haven’t managed to track down an image of this machine, but I imagine that it looked something like a miniature catapult. It was apparently pretty good; when the Australian cricket team visited Cambridge, where Venn was a professor, his cricket machine reportedly bowled out the team’s best batsman several times consecutively.
Today, nearly a century after his death, there are plenty of tributes to him. A street in London. A stained-glass window in Cambridge . A university building.
All of this brings us to this week’s song, by awesome Australian Dustin Tebbutt. He is a frequent collaborator, and talks on his website about the challenge of finding the sweet spot between his world and that of his collaborators. I featured a track that he did guest vocals on back in week 266, and I noted then how soothing his voice is. His own work, as it turns out, is equally beautiful.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The official lyric video features two circles, overlapping and orbiting each other. A simple and effective relationship metaphor that John Venn would have been proud of.
2. The guitars are panned slightly left and right in the mix, with just a bit of overlap down the middle. Again, precisely to Venn’s specifications.
3. I wouldn’t normally cite a song’s release date as a reason for its beauty, but this song was released on an auspicious day: August 3rd; the day before John Venn’s birthday.
Recommended listening activity:
Holding someone’s hand such that only the tips of your fingers overlap.