Summa Minutiae

Change of venue

I'm blogging over here for a while to play with an emacs/pyblosxom setup.

Civics quiz

Here's a civics quiz from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, along with some background & quiz results for various groups from USA Today. I got 56/60 - the 4 I missed were:

• 19: In The Republic, Plato points to the desirability of:
• 33: Which of the following is NOT among the official powers of Congress?
• 58: What is a major effect of a purchase of bonds by the Federal Reserve?
• 60: The Federal government’s largest pay out over the past twenty years has been for:

Where I've been

Trying to write yet another blog-from-emacs package in lisp atop the muse/planner codebase.

Vigilate

Sometimes you need some Renaissance polyphony:

Vigilate, nescitis enim quando dominus domus veniat, sero, an media nocte, an gallicantu, an mane. Vigilate ergo, ne cum venerit repente, inveniat vos dormientes. Quod autem dico vobis, omnibus dico: vigilate.

Watch ye therefore (for you know not when the lord of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing, or in the morning): Watch therefore, lest coming on a sudden, he find you sleeping. And what I say to you, I say to all: Watch. (Mark 13: 35-37)

New First Fleet material

The National Library of Australia is digitizing the last set of privately-held First Fleet papers, held for 200 years by the family & descendants of Lt. George Raper of the HMS Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet.

The George Raper Collection

Constant Peg: MiGs over Nevada

Here are some photos of the recently-declassified 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, based at Tonopah Test Range north of Las Vegas. How they got the MiGs is still classfied.

planner, remember, muse

I just got these set up & working harmoniously together in my home emacs. I've used them at work for a year or so; without them I'd be truly and totally lost.

Caelum antiquum

A roundup of sources on ancient astronomy at Bill Thayer's website. (mind the blazing yellow background)

I ain't dumb

H/t: Cacciaguida.

Am-I-Dumb.com - Are you dumb?

Dirty jobs

Difficult jobs that must really suck: garbage man, sewer worker, PBS ombudsman.

Per lineam valle

This should be quite a treat in Google Earth (after the kids get off the Windows computer later tonight): a GE-based atlas of Hadrian's Wall.

Stone Age settlement under the English Channel

under 30 feet of water off the Isle of Wight. This one's from about 8000 years ago. I like to think that folks back then had civilizations as vibrant as those of other ancient cultures, punctuated by their own dark ages and eventually erased in their darkest age by glaciers. But so little survives of a civilization across thousands of years that we really can't know theirs at all, aside from its few material remains - the faintest reflections of a civilization.

Note the article's reliance on the "melting glaciers" theory of the origin of the English Channel. A few weeks ago someone posited a sudden flood, unrelated to glacial melting, from the area of the North Sea, iirc.

Sealed for 2800 years

An ancient Greek temple unearthed a few weeks ago has been sealed since an earthquake destroyed it in the 8th century BC, and it's shedding light on the ancient Greek dark ages, which ran from the destruction of the Mycenaean civilization around 1200BC to the Homeric renaissance around 800BC. 400 years ain't bad for a dark age.

It's Explorator day, so I may have some other archaeological posts

The West's oldest cookbook

The Apulius, a 9th-century copy of a 2nd-century Roman cookbook, was in the news recently. Here's the press release from the New York Academy of Medicine, which has the cookbook in their rare books collection. The Vatican has the only other copy of the book, but theirs is a few years newer than the one in NYC.

Some of the recipes are available here at Michael Witbrock's Fabulous Sepia Home Page.

Bay leaf tea

That's my secret to quick Italian tomato sauces - I read about it on a blog somewhere a few months ago. Usually you drop some bay leaves in an all-day sauce so they can simmer and release their flavor. I don't have time for all that so I empty a jar of sauce into a pan & add basil, thyme, pepper, a bit of brown sugar, etc. I'll also fill a small pan with water, drop several bay leaves in it and let it come to a full boil, then turn it down to simmer as the bay leaf fragrance fills the house. When everything else is done, stir the bay leaf tea into your sauce to give it some of that simmered-all-day taste.

Motorola leaves, Yahoo and Qualcomm arrive

Here's the latest news on Motorola, Yahoo and Qualcomm in Champaign, Illinois. Meanwhile, the Yahoo folks are working from the Champaign Country Club - nice digs.

In other local tech news (this is central Illinois, after all) - 48 Belgian draft horses pulled 17,000 pounds across a field twice in a record-setting horse pull in Rantoul at the Half Century of Progress farm show. The organizers have a blog, of course.

Christ the Dragon

Matthew at the Shrine takes a look at liturgical dragons - astounding stuff for an anti-dragon fundamentalist like me. Who wants to be draconifer?

As Maureen O'Brien wrote a few days ago:

But if that weren’t enough, the Church Herself speaks on her holiest day. Once upon a time, it turns out, Easter candlesticks were made in medieval Europe in two favorite shapes. One, the Arundina Serpentina, had the candles sticking out of a likeness of the brass serpent, which, in healing when hung up on a pole, was an image of Christ. The other improved this image by having the flaming candles come out of the mouth of a winged bronze dragon on a pole. Yes, you got that analogy right — Christ the Dragon, Christ our fire-breathing light. (The Anti-Christ is such a copycat.) And the lucky person who bore such a candlestick had the liturgical role of “draconifer”.

Mathematica fizzbuzz

The fizzbuzz problem for weeding out new programming applicants:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".

So everyone started posting fizzbuzz in his own language. It might be worthwhile to show Mathematica's different approach to lists. Range[100] generates a list of numbers from 1 to 100. ReplaceAll (/.) applies a list of rules to each element of the original list. The replacement rules say "when i is divisible by 15, replace it with "FizzBuzz"; etc." ...

Range[100] /. {
   i_ /; Divisible[i, 15] -> "FizzBuzz", 
   i_ /; Divisible[i, 5] -> "Buzz", 
   i_ /; Divisible[i, 3] -> "Fizz"}

The permanence of parchment

Classical Bookworm: Parchment outlasts even marble - more meditations on the world to come in 2 or 3 thousand years.

The feast of Saint Bartholomew

Fr Mark Kirby has a great post on today's apostle, the enigmatic Bartholomew/Nathanael, known for being without guile, doing something under a fig tree, having his skin flayed off, and being portrayed by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Fr Mark takes the data and the lived experience of the Catholic Church and comes up with a meditation on the virtue of simplicity. I hope he publishes a book based on his blogging.

Here's more from Pope Benedict XVI, the old Catholic Encyclopedia and wikipedia. Daniel Mitsui gives us a sequence for today's feast from Adam of St Victor: Laudemus omnes inclyta, also available in The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St Victor.

A poem by Christian Rossetti:

SAINT BARTHOLOMEW

He bore an agony whereof the name
   Hath turned his fellows pale:
But what if God should call us to the same,
   Should call, and we should fail?

Nor earth nor sea could swallow up our shame,
   Nor darkness draw a veil:
For he endured that agony whose name
   Hath made his fellows quail.

Brand names

A good article on brand-name groceries vs generic & store brands. I can't think of many brand names we buy anymore. Bounty paper towels to make baby wipes (which we buy along with loads of whatever's cheapest to put on the paper towel roll in the kitchen); Jack's sausage pizza (made by Kraft) when we want to splurge on the kids' favorite sh*t on a shingle; Milano cookies for an occasional treat. For everything else it's Aldi's ahoy.

I was shocked recently when we bought some name-brand breakfast cereal and found it to be flimsy tasteless stuff compared to the ultra-cheap Aldi's "Millville" brand.

Star Names — Their Lore and Meaning

This 19th-century book by Richard Hinckley Allen is an entertaining read despite grave problems.

Allen rendered a very valuable service to those of us interested in the nomenclature and historical evolution of the constellations and their stars. His book is a mine (or maybe a minefield!) of varied information not only on its primary subject, but also here and there on ancient myth and religion, folklore, astrology both modern and ancient, the heroic age of modern astronomy, and the occasional bit of botany or zoology.

The music (and everything else) of Looney Tunes

I need to mine this to get a list of the classical music used in the Looney Tunes cartoons.

The "I, CLAVDIVS" drinking game

No, not the blogging I, Claudius - the BBC series back in the 70s. Now that we're all grown up, it's a drinking game!

O'Brien's dragons

Maureen O'Brien has an illuminating take on dragons in Christian iconography, contra Michael O'Brien.

Twenty-two

That's how many light bulbs I turned off just now in a tour around the house.

Linux, git and alpine

Here's a lengthy interview with Linus Torvalds in which he mentions git, his version control system, and a new version of pine called alpine.

(Haven't had much good computer time lately.)

Common sense on cultural suicide

Two must-reads: Theodore Dalrymple via Jeff Goldstein.

A busy day

Not much blogging time today. A trip to Champaign for an appointment, then a trip to Decatur for a first meeting about scouting and the local homeschooling group.

Southwestern denied

I had to turn away Kaspar Biglonglastname just now - he's a foreign college student going door-to-door trying to sell K12 textbooks to parents. A friendly kid with a north European accent, but very determined to get in the door - I denied him a few times, so he said it would just take a moment, bent down to pick up his large satchel and stood there bent over waiting for the door to move an inch so he could shove his head in. Sheesh.