Wed, 31 Oct 2007

Tue, 30 Oct 2007

Webber Borchers

Everyone who met Webber Borchers had a story about him, and nearly everyone in the area had at least met him; more likely, had heard a bunch of stories from him. When I worked as a stockboy at a lumber yard in Decatur IL during high school, Mr Borchers would come in once in a while, settle in a porch swing facing the sales & checkout counter and shoot the breeze with the salesmen, customers, stockboys, whoever walked by. He had a million stories to tell - he was the second Chief Illiniwek in 1930, he had a house full of looted Nazi memorabilia from his WW2 days, he was a long-serving Republican in the Illinois House; that's just off the top of my head after 25 years.

Mon, 29 Oct 2007

Minigreet

Read Diogenes on the infernal Minigreet. Like Orwell's Minitruth, the "Ministry of Truth" devoted to propagating the state's lies, a Christian church's "ministry of greeting" also belies its name - the grip-n-grin Minigreet ordeal at the front door can easily drive people away.

A long time ago Lisa and I went to a little Stone-Campbell church in Champaign. Their times were listed wrong in the yellow pages and we arrived halfway through the Sunday morning service, missing whatever gauntlet visitors usually run. We sat in the back corner of course, as normal people do when in a new place, and after things were finished we were mobbed by these people - they were magnetically drawn to us like pale vampires looking for fresh blood. Being normal people, we escaped and never returned.

A commenter at Diogenes' place wrote:

A little off the point, there is a fourth group - the crazy people. Some of them are homeless, some of them think they are Kaiser Wilhelm. Some will stand up through mass, mirroring the gestures of the priest. Most are very harmless. I love them there, and I think they are dearly loved by God. In New York, everyone just lets them be, and I think it's great that in a non-interfering way, they are "welcomed."

Indeed - that goes for normal people, too. Respect visitors enough to let them be alone with God. Soon enough, they'll find who they need to talk to.

vmware server under ubuntu 7.10

At the moment you need to install it by hand; here's what worked for me.

Brian Lamb groupies, rejoice!

He'll receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom November 5 at the White House:

Brian P. Lamb has elevated America's public debate and helped open up our government to citizens across the Nation. His dedication to a transparent political system and the free flow of ideas has enriched and strengthened our democracy.

Off to the store

I confess... I don't drink my Guinness all that often, so I've found another use for it: surpassingly beautiful Irish-Italian roast beef. I went to start a roast for supper tonight and found that I'd used the last of my Guinness and Maker's Mark in the last batch. Off to the store. Something a bit cheaper than Maker's Mark will do, I think.

The zeal of the converted

I've gone and done it. After adding a dozen more blogs and sites to my blogroll, I gave up and put them all in Google Reader. I'll still link to them from here but for daily browsing & reading, it's Google Reader.

What's the Latin word for haggis?

A second-century Roman tombstone has been discovered near Carberry in Musselburgh, East Lothian, east of Edinburgh. (Is that the right way to specify a town? Here in the States we'd just give Town Name, State.)

Coverage in The Scotsman here and here; there's a small picture of the tombstone in the BBC report. Here's a website devoted to Romans in Scotland.


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Curley on fatherhood

Mr Curley over at Bethune Catholic has started an occasional series of posts on fatherhood; today's is very good. Here's the excerpt that struck me:

I am sure some of us are quick to praise. My Dad was. I knew when he was proud of me - and so did everyone around. If he met someone he knew while we were grocery shopping, (yes, my Dad did the grocery shopping - I think it had to do with loving his wife a lot) he made a point to tell that person how proud he was of me or whichever of his children were with him. We always knew Dad would notice our goodness.

I tell them at lot at home that I'm proud of them, but I'd never thought of doing it in public - letting them see me telling other people that I'm proud of them. Might have to do that, too.

Sun, 28 Oct 2007

The Medieval Bestiary

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages - an excellent collection of lore, electronic texts and medieval illustrations.

The Hai Mary

Yes, it's the Lolcat Bible. "O rly, i iz a virgn remembr."

26 Ceiling Cat sended Gabriel, a hovr d00d, to Nazareth (dat is a citi in Galilee)27 to a virgn naemd Mary. She wuz engajded to a d00d naemd Joseph.28 Gabriel wuz liek "O hai Mary, u iz realli nice. Ceiling Cat iz wif u."29 Mary wuz kiend of worrid about dat.30 But teh hovr d00d wuz all "Doant be afraid. Ceiling Cat iz happi wif u.31 U iz gonna hav a kittn. Naem him Jesus.32 He wil be graet. He wil be teh kittn of Ceiling Cat an his daddi will give him David's chaer.33 He wil r00l Jacob's house forevr."

34 Mary wuz liek "O rly, i iz a virgn remembr."35 Gabriel wuz all "Ceiling Cat wil take caer of it."36 Elizabeth iz goin to hav a kittn n evribodi seded it wuz imposubl."37 Nothin iz imposubl for Ceiling Cat."

38 Mary sed "I is happi to do Ceiling Cat's work. Liek u sai." N Gabriel lefted.

Sat, 27 Oct 2007

Calling Jeff Foxworthy

If you repair your broken gun mufflers with a bent curtain rod and a yard of camoflage duct tape, you might be a redneck.

Thu, 25 Oct 2007

Word counts

My current pleasant little project in between the cracks of my other larger project: word counts for translations. First, there's lots of good old-fashioned electronic archaeology to find the specific English Mathematica notebooks used for a partial translation way back when, followed by customization of my notebook word count routines to account for archaic data formats in the old files.

You don't have to be a math whiz to work at Wolfram Research.

ssh without a password

Sometimes you need to be able to ssh to a server without giving it a password; say, if you have an automated process that writes files and copies them to a server. I had to set this up quite a few times recently - here's the recipe I followed (this assumes that the permissions on your various ~/.ssh directories are correct)

You'll need:

  • a client: a computer from which you'll ssh to another
  • a server: the computer to which you'll ssh from a client

Then,

  • on the client, run 'ssh-keygen -t rsa' to generate ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and associated files. When asked for a password, just hit Enter. You need to generate id_rsa.pub only once per client - you can reuse it for each of the servers.
  • scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub server:~/.ssh/client.pub
  • ssh server
  • supply your password to get in
  • cd ~/.ssh
  • cat client.pub >> authorized_keys
  • if this creates a new authorized_keys file, change its permissions to 600: chmod 600 authorized_keys
  • log out of the server & try to ssh to it - you should get in without having to specify a password
  • of course this is less secure than ssh with a password, so use it wisely and sparingly
  • your mileage may vary - some installations may require a file named authorized_keys2; the above recipe works for me in my environment.

Video editing in emacs

Looks very cool - announcement here, homepage here. Thanks, Mike!

UPDATE: from Arnold Matyasi's comment, there's a blog with some demonstrations and handy links:

The video used in the demonstration was taken at Tihany, Hungary, hometown of St Martin of Tours and, since 996, home of the Benedictine Pannonhalma Archabbey, whose charter is the oldest surviving document in the Hungarian language.

Bobby Calvan unites the blogosphere

For a brief moment last night, America united behind the Sacramento Bee's Bobby Calvan to give him a swift kick in the *ss. After a couple of hundred unanimous comments, Mr Calvan took down his website rather than explain, apologize or dig the hole deeper, but the original post and the first 197 comments are available at docweaselblog.

Sun, 21 Oct 2007

Galaxie Twelve

Coutesy of a local freecycler, Sarah now has a blue Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve (which it's an old-fashioned manual typewriter!) - google it.

Sat, 20 Oct 2007

Dang!

The Mahomet Public Library was giving away books today. I'm resting my back between hauls into the house; counting the children's books there's somewhere around seventy. First up for me: A Canticle for Leibowitz!

Fri, 19 Oct 2007

Making the jump to hyperspace

I'm about to upgrade my computer from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 using their upgrade tool. Oremus.

Later: Dang, that was a mess. The upgrade tool just disappeared after issuing hundreds of warnings and error messages, then it rebooted into a kernel panic. Now I've wiped the disk and installed 7.10 from scratch; I had backed up all the important stuff before upgrading so most things are working now.

Given my backups, I've been able to do this in about 2 hours:

  • install 7.10 from scratch
  • install essential build libraries for cvs, texinfo and emacs, then download and compile them
  • install kasteroids :-)
  • copy emacs setup files from backups
  • download and install LAMP (linux-based apache, mysql, php)
  • download and install mediawiki
  • import my home wiki backups into the new mediawiki installation
  • install & configure nfs packages and mount nfs dirs from our various computers
  • install mplayer (mp3 player)
  • install codecs for the totem video player
  • install debian's pyblosxom package, then install from the latest distro at sourceforge
  • generate a new ssh key and install it on the various machines at work

UPDATE: the problems may have been that texinfo's /usr/local/bin/install-info was shadowing the distro's /usr/sbin/install-info. If I were to do this again, I'd move texinfo's install-info out of the way first, as in this kludge.

Thu, 18 Oct 2007

Rawhide!

We just heard 2-year-old Caroline singing Rawhide:

lo-lee lo-lee lo-lee (rollin' rollin' rollin')
lo-lee lo-lee lo-lee Yehigh
Yah! Yehigh.

Some guides to old books

Memory dump before the power goes out with this advancing thunderstorm. Christopher is monitoring the weather websites.

Tex Hill and Robin Olds

Two great American aviators died recently: David Lee "Tex" Hill and Robin Olds. Here's a half-hour of story-telling from General Hill, and another from General Olds.

Wed, 17 Oct 2007

A modern Cannonball Run

Wow! If you've ever been tempted to ease over the speed limit and see what your new car can do, read Charles Graeber's "The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory" in Wired 15.11.

Encyclopedist detection kit

To determine whether any of your kids are natural-born encyclopedists, install Mediawiki and turn them loose. This morning Sarah asked whether we could have a wikipedia about our family, a "Whitopedia". Knowing it would be fairly easy with Ubuntu, I said yes and spent a few minutes here and there running through the steps between other tasks. Now it's set up and Sarah and Christopher are both clacking away writing initial biographical entries on their computers (old castaways that handle Ubuntu just fine).

I set up mediawiki on my heavy-duty high-horsepower work computer and poked holes in its firewall for theirs. They can get to it by using my computer's name as a web address: http://ubuntu-home/wiki.

For googlers, that's MediaWiki 1.11.0 running under Ubuntu 7.04.

A dozen late antiquities

From Peter Brown's lecture:

It was soon apparent to me that each country had its own classical tradition, its own late antiquity and, very much, its own conflict of Christianity and paganism. To pick up the unmistakable tone of a laïc Frenchman in the Empire chrétien of André Piganiol, of a conservative Catholic in an Italian journal or of a Lutheran contributor to the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte was much more than to discover the "bias" of a particular article. It was to add alternative layers to one’s own heart and mind, by seeing one’s own preoccupations with Christianity in the last centuries of the Roman Empire from the standpoint of European cultures very different from one’s own.

That explains Europe

Just between you and me, Europe seems a little off lately, doesn't it, the last hundred years or so? The elevator doesn't quite go to the top floor anymore, if you get my drift. Now I'm not a doctor, but maybe Europe's self-lobotomization has something to do with it.

Who knew?

So it turns out that James Lileks and Bill Quick are really one 1950s-obsessed interior decorator. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

On saving space junk

A neat interview with Alice Gorman (aka Dr Space Junk) of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, about the junk orbiting the earth.

Tue, 16 Oct 2007

ppbuh

Pardon the redundancy in the tags up there. Here are some good little jokes at Al Gore's expense.

Late Antique man

Here's Peter Brown's recent inaugural address (pdf) at the opening of the Oxford Center for Late Antiquity. A random bibliophilic quote:

Only recently, I experienced a feeling of strangeness as I sat at home, reading Morin's edition of newly discovered sermons of Augustine, printed in the 1930 centenary collection of Miscellanea Agostiniana. There was good reason for this sense of unease. This massive tome with its generous print and wide margins had its allotted place in the Theology section of the Lower Bodleian. To be precise, it was near to the window overlooking the inner courtyard, to the left as you entered from Classics. To think of removing it from that place was as inconceivable as to think of removing a feature from a well-known landscape - like stealing the Rock of Gibraltar or removing the head of Washington from Mount Rushmore. A few hours later, to place pages of this volume across a xerox machine, so as to make copies of Sermon Denis 24 for the use of a seminar, awoke in me an Oedipal thrill which (in the 1950s) would have kept the Freudian analysts of that distant age in business.

Sehnsucht

TSO suggested in an email that sehnsucht was the word I was looking for yesterday. The Germans come through again in the word department - here's an essay on CS Lewis, joy and sehnsucht.

Treppenwitz, schadenfreude, sehnsecht - soemtimes I wish I'd learned German.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007

Today's trek

Lotsa driving today. When Lisa returns from her physical therapy appointment, Sarah and I will head out across the wide flat prairie to Rantoul to make some deposits and open her first savings account. Then west over the northern reaches of the Sangamon River to the county clerk's office in downtown Decatur to get a copy of my birth certificate, which will be used on the north side of town to get a replacement Social Security card. Then Sam's Club for a few cheap bulk items and Aldi's for some other cheap stuff, then home.

Meanwhile I'll leave a large Mathematica program running at home, hoping that it will finally work. Programmers are professional optimists - "Surely it'll work this time!"

Also, I set up Haloscan comments and left a couple of test comments on the Rush in Manchester post, but the comment count is still zero. Grr.

Later. That was a long day! There were a few screwups along the way, either because we left in a rush without thinking through every detail or because I'm getting old and foggy.

There were two highlights of the trip. First was a visit to our old apartment in Rantoul (1100 Falcon Drive, Apt. 6). We lived there "in the Rantoul days", as the kids say: from July 1998, two months before Sarah was born, til January 2004 when she was about 5-1/2. She was deeply moved as she recalled how she and her brothers played in the back yard and under the tree in the front, and as we left she took some mementos: a wildflower from the yard, a stick and a brown autumnal leaf from the old tree out front, and in a last-minute impulse in the front yard she bent down and picked some blades of grass. She has a good heart.

On our way out of town we passed the Papa John's pizza joint from which we ordered many a meal in the Rantoul days. I promised her we'd look for one in Decatur and there it was on Route 51 - the second highlight of the trip! After a successful visit to the county clerk and Sam's (the SS office was already closed, the slackers) we stopped at Papa John's and ordered our old usuals. Their warm aroma filling the car brought back even more happy memories from the Rantoul days.

For the word mavens: is there a word for that quiet happy/sad reflection on personal history that hits when you visit "the old homestead" or somesuch?

Note to self: Aldi's margarine is about half the price per unit of Sam's.

Rush in Manchester

Here's a great review of Rush's recent concert in Manchester. The money quote:

It's a happy irony that, in this era obsessed with youth, celebrity and fame, it is a trio of unfashionable veterans who can still show the young 'uns how to put on a rock show.

It's what's for breakfast

When I make our usual huge batch of oatmeal for breakfast I like to add stuff to it: maple syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, peanut butter, jelly, whatever's handy. I can't figure out why I never thought of applesauce. Today I think I'll do applesauce, cinnamon, butter, brown sugar and maple syrup - mapple-cinnamon oatmeal.

Sun, 14 Oct 2007

Yellow-rumped warbler

Christoper spotted a Yellow-Rumped Warbler, probably a myrtle-form male, this morning on the A/C unit on the north side of the house. It was a subfusc little thing til we saw its flash of yellow.

The secret, revealed

I have a lot of fun refining my tomato sauce recipe, and I've recently found a simple trick that moves it another step toward "world-class" status: let the diced tomatoes cook down to bring out their vegetably sweetness.

Dice these:

  • 1/2 an onion
  • 3 or 4 baby carrots, or maybe half a regular carrot
  • a celery stalk
  • a couple of top-to-bottom strips of a green pepper

and simmer in oil til they're soft.

Add a teaspoon of minced garlic and a can of diced tomatoes, cover the saucepan and let it simmer and bubble over low-to-medium heat for an hour or so. Keep an eye on the moisture and add bay-leaf tea as needed to keep everything hydrated. Add herbs, spices and a very little bit of sugar a few minutes before serving.

The Via Vitae of St Benedict

Here's something in the "pious reflections" line I turned up at Google Books: The Via Vitae of St. Benedict: The Holy Rule Arranged for Mental Prayer, Bernard Hayes, 1908 Benziger Brothers

Sat, 13 Oct 2007

Opera omnia, St Bernard of Clairvaux

Not quite omnia - just volume two of his stuff in Migne's Patrologia Latina.

Update: I'd forgotten about Marco Binneti's collection of the works of St Bernard of Clairvaux. It seems to be copied from the Chadwyck Patrologia (correct me if I'm wrong).

Submission or war, your choice

Well, I made my way through "A Common Word", the letter from Muslims to Christians that's been in the news lately. What I get out of it is that they're "inviting" us to deny the Trinity or face open warfare. To quote General McAuliffe, "NUTS!" - the Trinity is worth fighting for.1

Speaking of the Trinity, this site seems to be less than helpful. The Trinity isn't an arithmetic problem2. Frank Sheed explained it best in his Theology and Sanity.

Footnotes:

1.: A nominee for the 2008 Understatement of the Year Award.

2.: "So you see, one and three are the same - it's a matter of faith!"

Now there's a name!

Ůmläut Ťïldëqvist, Chairman, The Nobel Peace Player's Club Selection Committee.

How to bake a whole chicken

Lisa's in Indiana this weekend helping her Mom recover from a knee replacement. While she's there she's feasting on baked beans and cornbread (the food I hate most) and the kids and I will have baked chicken (the food she hates most). I'll need to refer to this webpage: How to Bake Chicken.

Fri, 12 Oct 2007

Chilling praise

Glenn Reynolds congratulates global-warming fraud Al Gore on winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize:

I think he makes a fitting addition to the pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize holders.

Ouch. Some previous winners: Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, the UN Child Molester Forces, er, Peace-Keeping Forces, &c., &c.

Wolfram Research roundup

Why is my online bookbag so danged heavy?

Another haul from Google Books, from a search for the hymns of St Hilary of Poitiers:

Wed, 10 Oct 2007

More home sysadmin

The Windows box finally wonked out. I've booted it from an Ubuntu 7.04 install disk to read the Windows NTFS disk and I'm rsync'ing important files from there over the LAN to my new Ubuntu box. After lifeboat operations are complete, I dunno - wipe & install Ubuntu? My old copy of Windows? Both? We'll see.

Tue, 09 Oct 2007

The decline and fall of the moustache

A fun article in the Telegraph, via the Irish Elk. An excerpt:

Strict etiquette was enforced regarding the care of the fashionable accessory. In the 1880s, Rudyard Kipling wrote of a woman who complained that being kissed by a man who did not wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt.

When the First World War began, it was compulsory for all British officers to have a moustache. Poignantly, that edict was revoked in October 1916, because the new recruits were so young that some could not rustle up more than a thin, mousey streak.

Testing a new version of an old blog

A few years ago I started a blog devoted to writings about the mysteries of the Rosary, but like many of my ever-welling monomanias it didn't last all that long. Here's a new version, done in emacs and pyblosxom like this one. Pardon the dust in the corners.

Mary Foreshadowed

Ah, Google Books! Mary Foreshadowed; or, Considerations on the Types and Figures of Our Blessed Lady in the Old Testament. Rev. F. Thaddeus, O.S.F.

It really works!

After a recent last-minute crazed cleaning session in advance of a guest's arrival, we instituted the "after-meal cleanup": when the last person walks out of the dining room at the end of each meal I call out "After-meal cleanup!" and we spend a couple of minutes restoring the family room and the library to guest-ready condition. I'm utterly astounded at the effectiveness of this - we've maintained the family room this way for a week and just today we achieved guest-readiness in the library. After a week or so of keeping both at the ready, we'll add another room.

Lives of the English Martyrs

Via Google Books: Lives of the English Martyrs Declared Blessed by Pope Leo XIII. in 1886 and 1895:

The Fathers on the mysteries of the Rosary

When titles were titles: The Book of the Holy Rosary: A Popular Doctrinal Exposition of its Fifteen Mysteries, Mainly Conveyed in Select Extracts From the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. With an Explanation of Their Corresponding Types in the Old Testament. A Preservative Against Unbelief. Rev. Henry Formby, of the Third Order of St Dominic.

New books for my library

My Google Books library, that is.

Mon, 08 Oct 2007

Too busy to blog

I've had about half an hour of work time so far today - I sit down at the computer, think a thought, and poof, it's gone: someone falls off a pile of pillows on a bed (?!), someone wakes up screaming, someone who should know better comes downstairs with an apology and a load of poop, &c., &c.

Sun, 07 Oct 2007

Just doesn't work

Using creepy pervs to market consumer goods makes no sense. The commercial is objectively creepy by itself in its original context (it's a fargin' clown) but when it's filtered through our post-2002 Catholic sensibilities it reaches til-now-unplumbed depths of creepiness.

Mannahatta Island, 1609

Found in the the New Yorker, a project dedicated to reconstructing the pre-European ecology of Manhattan Island (there are a few very cool reconstructed pastoral scenes at the website):

The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted. Most history books dispense of the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages. However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.

"ever-welling monomanias": life with Asperger's syndrome

Via Scruffulans Hirsutus, a terribly well-written article from Tim Page in the October 7 New Yorker on life with Asperger's Syndrome. One thing I really like about the New Yorker is their refreshing use of the diaeresis.

Sat, 06 Oct 2007

Historical anatomy books online

Here, courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda MD. Fascinating stuff! Here's a plate from William Cheselden's 1733 Osteographia, or The anatomy of the bones:

Reason number 355468453 to homeschool

Award-winning books as required reading. The big national children's book awards are typically awarded to oppressive poorly-written crap that's completely inappropriate for children. Naturally, that's what government educators like to assign to kids. In our family they start with the usual toddler's books, move on through the decent pabulum of the Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, then on to history, well-written fiction and encyclopedias.

Nine-year-old Sarah is a wikipedia maven. She's reading about chess at the moment after spending the morning with bears, cats and kittens.

Aitutaki

Sometimes I set Google Earth to scroll slowly across the landscape and leave it running overnight just to see where I wind up. I'd forgotten that I'd done that last night and just now found it sailing through the south Pacific. After a few minutes, land ho! There was Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands. Much easier than leaving home for years in a leaky wooden boat.

On the life and death of Mark Daily

Christopher Hitchens has taken a few knocks lately in the Catholic blogosphere; here's another side of him in his latest essay for Vanity Fair, A Death in the Family. From VF's blurb:

As America struggles with losses in Iraq, one in particular has given Christopher Hitchens pause: a young soldier named Mark Daily, killed in Mosul, who cited the V.F. columnist as an inspiration to sign up.

Savonarola on Psalm 51

You never know what you'll turn up at Google Books. Here's a translation of Girolamo Savonarola's extended meditation on Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus, written during his imprisonment and torture. What do the Dominicans make of Savonarola nowadays?

I knew a priest at St Matthew's in Champaign IL back in the 90s who was working on an English translation of Savonarola's works, but I don't know what became of the project.

Fri, 05 Oct 2007

Commentaries are up

At the kind prompting of Deacon John Paul Kelly of St Bernard of Clairvaux parish in Dallas, Texas, I've finally completed my guide to the Psalm commentaries of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Update: I just found that the archdiocese of Newark links to this page from their permanent diaconate page (see the left column).

Carthusiasm

Saturday is the feast of St Bruno, founder of the Carthusians.

Another lead recall

Various bookmarks and journals made in China. Here are the CPSC's recalls for October - 8 of the 14 listed so far are for lead-contaminated products made in China.

It's always time for the Pantocrator!

For more information, see Christopher Schönborn's God's Human Face.

What Every Medievalist Should Know

Here's James Marchand's annotated bibiography of the basic subjects. A great starting point for google searches.

Gregory's Moralia in Job

part of the 1850s English edition edition at Google Books:

Mmm... more lead, please!

Yet another recall of toys contaminated with lead. Here's the official CPSC notice.

Thu, 04 Oct 2007

HillaryCare + HealthVault

equals some kinda nightmare. Imagine the combination of nationalized medical care, a Big Brother medical database (Microsoft's HealthVault) and the coercive power of government.

How to find volumes of Migne

Vide: search for "Migne" with "in hoc tomo XCIII" or whatever...

Combine that with this handy table of contents for the Patrologia Latina to get the volume you need. You're on your own with the decimal -> roman conversion.

St Bruno the Carthusian on the Psalms

Here begins his commentary on the Psalms. Wish I could read Latin...

DIV I BRUNONIS PRIMI CARTHUSIANORUM INSTITOTORIS SANCTISSIMI ET THEOLOGI DOCTISSIMI ICUI OPERUM TOMUS SEU PARS I EXPOSITÍO IN PSALMOS PRÓLOGOS В Psalterium cstquoddammusicum inslrumcnlum quod ex superiori cavitate rcsonat Et quia instrumento tali psalmorum melos canebatur ab instrumento suo nomen recle tolum opus istud acce pit Sicut enim psalterium a superiori resonat ita el opus hoc totum de superiori id est de Dei laude resonat Intentio autemoperis hujus multiplex esse per titulorum singulorum diversitatem oslenditur Turn enim de Incarnatione Nativitate Passione Resurrectione el cscteris actibus Christi turn de salvatione bonorumdamnationeque malorumpro phelare intendit in quibus omnibus Dei laudes at tenduutur la passions enim et cícteris ejus acti bus injustorum salvatione humilitatis ipsius et misericordia in mpiorum vero damnationejustitiae laudes esse perpenduntur Ideoque méritoliberiste apud Hebrœos Liber hymnorum dicitur id est Dei laudum Hymnivero laudes Dei metrice factae proprie dicunlur psalmi autem lyrico métro compo siti fueruut ut Arator ait Psalterium lyrici cumposuere pedes Tria vero in diviuis sicut in sœcularibus libris considcrantur Quia sicut sœculares partim adphy sicam partim adethicam partim VITO ad logicam tenduril sic et divini quidam ad physicam la tarnen quod in ipsa physica denotetur figura ut in Genesi demundi origine et in Ecclesiaste de multis

Wed, 03 Oct 2007

Untangling

When I fell into the "documentation testing" gig couple of years ago I began by modifying some of my boss's existing tests to extract a bit more information here and there. That file grew and sent out tentacles into other files and nowadays it's grown to a tangled web of functions across half a dozen files. Now my job is to reunite everything under one clean standalone Mathematica package. Finally a chance to sit back and think about all this stuff and get it organized. It will also be my third rethinking of the whole thing - I've found I should plan to throw away my first couple of implementations of anything as I learn what works in the long run and what doesn't. Frederick Brooks said you should plan to throw one away; it takes me two, at least.

Off to Curtis Orchard

John didn't remember ever visiting Curtis Orchard in Champaign (which he has visited many times as a toddler) so we added that to our stops yesterday. First a speech therapy appointment with Doctor Anna, then we plotted a new secret back-route to Sam's Club - a route that takes us under the interstate twice! - then a quick stop at Aldi's & on to the orchard. John's a lot of fun to travel with - full of questions, observations and good humor.

Tue, 02 Oct 2007

Farewell to the bookmobile

Anna Badkhen writes in the Boston Globe about the declining fortunes of the bookmobile. A guy from the Decatur Public Library drove one to Findlay every other week during the summers of the late 1970s. That's where I found my first Isaac Asimov, the sci-fi novels of the 1970s, and a lot of astronomy and cosmology - I'd carry home an armload to stack on a table in the living room and make my way through them in the following days,

Mon, 01 Oct 2007

The Findlay Bag Ladies

Here's a good article from Dave McClain on the Bag Ladies of Findlay, Illinois (my hometown) - they sew sleeping bags, stuff them with toiletries & personal items and donate them to the Northeast Community Fund Center in Decatur, Illinois to be distributed to the homeless.

That beautiful sound

It's strange that the instruments of war should be so beautiful. Here's a video of an airshow this year in Blenheim, New Zealand, that featured seven Fokker Dr I triplanes, a Fokker D VII, a SE5a, a Sopwith Camel, and a Nieuport. You can find details of the planes here.

Big Kid day

Today at luch we decreed that on this day, Monday, October 1, 2007, 5-year-old John White is a Big Kid. And there was much rejoicing: no naps required and bedtime moved from 8:30 to 9:30 with full "stay up in bed as late as you like as long as you're reading" rights.

Home sysadmin

Our Linksys WRT54Gv2.0 seemingly died last night around 10pm, and by 2am I had tried every stinkin' Linksys thing that can be tried to fix a Linksys. This morning I installed dd-wrt's open-source router firmware and all is well again.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey

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