Testing 20090208

Testing incremental static rendering.

test

DateListPlot[
  WeatherData[
    "KCMI",
    "Temperature",
    {{2009, 1, 15}, {2009, 1, 16}},
    "DateNonMetricValue"
  ],
  Joined -> True,
  DateTicksFormat -> {"Hour12Short", "AMPMLowerCase"}
]

Let's try blogspot

I'll try blogging over there at http://summa.blogspot.com for a while and see how it goes. I have 564 posts here, all done with emacs' muse-mode and pyblosxom. The problem is that pyblosxom rebuilds the entire blog every time I publish a post, which takes about 10 minutes and eats up an entire cpu's horsepower for the whole time. blogspot is quirky and often slow to respond, but it's faster than waiting 10 minutes to edit an already-published post. I may try moving my archives over there if I can find a tool to automate it.

National Review recommends...

a top-100 list of non-fiction books via TSO.

The discourses of Master Foo

Unix koans, via Eric S Raymond.

Frontpaged

Holy crap - I now have my own category at Ann Althouse's blog!

Beauty and the best

Another enjoyable Dalrymple jeremiad on art. Here's an excerpt:

Let me take the second point first. One often hears of 'cutting-edge' art; indeed, the much older term, avant garde, is of the same ilk. This suggests that there is progress in the arts, as there is in science, and that what comes after must, in some sense, be better than what came before. Art has some kind of destination, with later artists further along the road to it than earlier.

In science, progress is a fact (except for the most extreme of epistemological sceptics, none of whom, nevertheless, would be entirely indifferent as to whether their surgeon used the surgical techniques of, say, the 1830s, rather than those of this century). The most mediocre bacteriologist alive today knows incomparably more that did Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch, for example; the most mediocre physics graduate knows incomparably more than Sir Isaac Newton ever did. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative. But no one would suggest that the paintings of Rothko were better than those, say, of Chardin because he lived a long time after Chardin, and that Chardin's were better than those of Velasquez for the same reason.

St Benedict Biscop

Here's a very good writeup on St Benedict Biscop, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine who founded the abbeys of Wearmouth and Jarrow in 674 A. D.

The Beeb

The local NPR station likes to broadcast the BBC news at noon. Thanks to them, I know that when I hear a journalist with an English accent I'm being lied to.

CESG interface

Here's an interface, or perhaps a table of contents, for St Gall's collection of ancient and medieval manuscripts. For example, here's the preface to Bede's history: St Gall manuscript on the right and a transcription on the left.

The rambling old internet

You never know what you'll find around the corner:

• Wolfdietrich Hollaender
• Hartwig Kopp
• Bodo Hurrle
• Theobald Kirn
• David Holte
• Arnulf Brutscher
• Ruprecht Vetter
• Derk Broennte
• Andreas Graetz
• Rudolf Stuedemann

Best emacs blog post ever

Astounding! C-u 999 M-x all-hail steveyegge. I've used the latest emacs nearly every day for 13 years and never picked up on this \# and \, business in replace-regexp. Why wasn't this hailed in the newspapers and plastered on billboards along the interstate?!

Glorious old England

A remarkable sense of Anglophilia is produced when your current reading consists of Robert Louis Stevenson's Puck of Pook's Hill and James Herriot's books.

Teach yourself programming in ten years

Here's Peter Norvig's good old essay about the time and effort it takes to learn a craft. One of his points is to learn a lot of languages; here's a list of the ones I've dabbled in since 1977:

• BASIC
• FORTRAN
• C
• TeX/LaTeX
• TCL
• PostScript
• emacs lisp
• perl
• Mathematica

and I'm probably leaving some out. I'm not an expert in any of them, though I did write some very cool stuff in TeX and PostScript lo! these many years ago. I've found it takes some effort to switch from my current language to one of the older ones - like traveling to France with only your high-school French to get by on for a few days.

My wayback machine

This evening I helped Lisa move her blog to blogspot and found that things are easier there than they used to be, so I'm playing with my ancient archives over here. The only drawback to blogging from emacs via pyblosxom is that pyblosxom rebuilds the whole danged blog every time I publish - it eats an entire cpu for ten minutes or so.

Kirk's recommendations

Here's a list of authors and books recommended by Russell Kirk in his The Politics of Prudence (to be expanded as I read more):

• Edmund Burke
• Sir Henry Maine
• John Randolph of Roanoke
• Orestes Brownson
  • The American Republic
• Benjamin Disraeli
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• John Paul II
• Ronald Reagan
• Sir Walter Scott
  • Waverley novels
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Blithedale Romance
  • Earth's Holocaust
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Joseph Conrad
  • Under Western Eyes
  • The Secret Agent
  • Nostromo
  • The Informer
• Bolingbroke
• Samuel Coleridge
• Robert A. Nisbet
• Francis Graham Wilson
• Quintin Hogg
• John Adams
• Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Democracy in America
• James Fenimore Cooper
  • The American Democrat
• John C. Calhoun
  • Disquisition on Government
  • Discourse on the Constitution
• James Fitzjames Stephen
  • Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
• W. E. H. Leckey
• W. H. Mallock
• Paul Elmer More
• Irving Babbitt
  • Democracy and Leadership
  • Literature and the American College
• Donald Davidson
  • The Attack on Leviathan
• Wilhelm Roepke
  • The Social Crisis of our Time
• T. S. Eliot
  • To Criticize the Critic
  • Notes towards the Definition of Culture
  • The Idea of a Christian Society
  • "The Criterion" magazine
• Marcus Tullius Cicero
• Phyllis Bentley
  • Freedom, Farewell
• Plutarch
• Marcus Aurelius Antonius
• Albert Jay Nock
  • The Value of Useless Knowledge
  • some unnamed essays on conservatism
• Samuel Johnson
  • Rasselas
• Russell Kirk
  • The Portable Conservative Reader
  • Randolph of Roanoke - A Study in Conservative Thought
• Theodore Roosevelt
  • Hero Tales from American History
• Richard Weaver
  • Ideas have Consequences
  • The Ethics of Rhetoric
• Freya Stark
  • Perseus in the Wind
  • Rome on the Euphrates

Freud's cigars

A good article from Cigar Aficionado via Maggie's Farm.

The periodic bookbag

Current reading:

• Christopher Derrick's gloomy little The Rule of Peace: St Benedict and the European Future. Much to agree with and much to quibble with. When he went on about the ugliness of contemporary American cities I immediately thought of the dismal East Pershing Road in Decatur, Illinois, which is lacking only a truckload of bishops' skulls in its bid to be the road to Hell.
• Russell Kirk's valedictory The Politics of Prudence, which is yielding a boatload of recommended authors and books from Marcus Tullius Cicero to Paul Elmer More.
• WFB's Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought - so far I've found some very good stuff, and some nasty neo-Confederate theory (from Richard Weaver, I think) that was impressively demolished in the very next essay by Harry V Jaffa.
• Eagerly awaiting the Cistercian Studies edition of Smaragdus of St Mihiel's commentary on the Rule of St Benedict, due Monday from amazon.

My favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon

Long-Haired Hare:

This is a close second - The Rabbit of Seville:

The Daily Pope

Here's a webpage that lists all the works of Benedict XVI from the Vatican website, sorted by date. Anyone with a head for web design is welcome to make it look prettier. More details later after I recover from what the kids have.

Update: here's how it works.