Noted in passing

James O'Donnell is one of the presenters in the BBC's 4-part series on St Augustine, and here's a website devoted to the life and work of Page Smith, biographer of John Adams and others. His biography of Adams ($8.00 many years ago at the Old Book Barn, where I also picked up the complete works of Edmund Burke, the 1880s Boston edition, for a pittance) is among my current reading, as is Laura Ingalls Wilder's cracking good Little House series - an Epiphany gift from our 9-year-old daughter. It's not just for kids!

The old neighborhood

We lived in Rantoul, Illinois, in apartment 6 at 1100 Falcon Drive for a few years before moving to Small Town, IL. After a few years of us paying our initial rent rate, the management, Champaign-based Westgate Apartments, cited non-discrimination laws and moved a young pharmaceutical entrepreneur next door. After many middle-of-the-night knocks on the door from his customers, the last straw was cast (hi Biff!) when clouds of cannabis smoke invaded our kitchen through some shared HVAC during our daughter's birthday party. Perhaps the young Mr. Lee mentioned in this article is our former enterprising neighbor:

A Rantoul man who had about 87 pounds of cannabis delivered to his cousin's house in Rantoul was charged Friday with cannabis trafficking, a Class X felony.

Lincoln Lee, 26, who listed an address in the 1200 block of Falcon Drive, is accused of having the cannabis delivered to his cousin Marcia Holliday's home in the 1000 block of Eastview Drive from Phoenix on Thursday.

Annotated Code of Justinian

Vide, edited by Timothy Kearley of the University of Wyoming's College of Law.

Adding pairs of numbers: programming styles in Mathematica

Via Lunchtime Playground: given a list of pairs of numbers, return a list consisting of the sum of each pair.

pairs = {{58, 96}, {85, 22}, {100, 69}, {5, 37}, {32, 64}, {41, 86}, {14, 0}, {79, 22}, {55, 36}, {86, 39}, {11, 15}};

Six ways to add the numbers in Mathematica:

• Style 1:

result = Table[Null, {Length[pairs]}];
Do[result[[k]] = pairs[[k, 1]] + pairs[[k, 2]], {k, 1, Length[pairs]}]
result

• Style 2:

Table[pairs[[k, 1]] + pairs[[k, 2]], {k, Length[pairs]}]

• Style 3:

Apply[Plus, pairs, {1}]

• Style 4:

Map[Total, pairs]

• Style 5:

pairs /. {p_, q_} -> p + q

• Style 6:

pairs[[All, 1]] + pairs[[All, 2]]

movemail

The sysadmins at work did some work on the machine that hosts my homedir, and after that movemail up and quit on me. After a day and a night of traipsing through man pages, O'Reilly books and websites tracking dowm imap arcana and toying with the idea of an entirely new email system, I found the problem.

It seems that there are two different versions of movemail: one in the GNU mailutils package and one in emacs' cvs sources. I was using the latter. When I rejiggered my PATH environment variable to point to an old movemail that shipped with Fedora Core 4 (that's what my work machine is running), all was well again. Back to work.

Busy days

No time for coffee or other blogging.

The Daily Grind

• 61 years of coffee and the Packers: a fun article on an old coffee club in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
• A guy named Winter ("My name is Winter. Only Winter.") has made it his personal mission in life to visit every Starbuck's franchise. (Hey UPI - you mispelled "programmer" in the 4th paragraph.)
• Cartoonist Jef Mallett is such a fan of The Water Street Coffee Joint in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that he put the place in his comic strip.
• Consider the sounds of Indian coffee shops.
• Coffee and crime: a coffee shop in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, sells more than coffee.
• A coffee-fueled meeting with local politicians at the Catawba County library in Newton, North Carolina. Note the use of the word "coffee" to suggest a sort of heart-to-heart talk. Newton is just a few counties away from our 2002 vacation site, Tsali campground in the Nantahala National Forest.
• Another coffee-fueled meeting with policians in North Carolina.
• "Coffee" as a bare synonym for "meeting" in the Redding, Connecticut, Pilot.
• Someone needs to send Sreekumar Raghavan a copy of Strunk & White:

It is black like the devil, hot like hell, and sweet like a kiss, and it is spreading its aroma cross the world now. The finest organic suspension ever devised in the world COFFEE is steadily conquering the taste buds of millions of people irrespective of caste creed or colour. The case in India is not different. The concoction made from the coffee beans is minting money for several coffee bar chains in India.

A note to newspapers with websites: somewhere on your website, please indicate where the heck you're located.

A source for O'Brian's "Master and Commander"

From the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica (and perhaps other editions?), v.17 pt.1 S, page 202, in the entry for "SEAMANSHIP":

Encyclopædia Britannica: Or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and ... By Colin MacFarquhar, George Gleig

The Daily Grind

• Here and there:
  • Oh dang - sugar cookies dipped in coffee syrup.
  • Blood for coffee: you can buy a pound of coffee for a pint of blood in Lancaster, Massachusetts, next Tuesday. The coffee is provided by Dunkin' Donuts.
  • Mary Jacobs, a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas, is tempted to give up caffeine after hearing some anti-coffee claptrap from Laura Juliano, assistant professor in American University's Department of Psychology. She also relates her near-caffeineless experience at a Puritan spa.
  • Dr Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno is working on making biodiesel fuel from coffee grounds.
• Coffee business:
  • Independent coffee at Perked Up! in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
  • The Coffee N Cream coffee house in McKinney, Texas is sending 60 pounds of coffee beans to an American Army unit stationed in Iraq.
  • Ebenezer's Coffee House, run by the National Community Church in Washington DC, estimates they served up 106,000 cups of coffee since they opened in March 2006.
• Coffee economics:
  • Coffee prices are up.

The Civil War in 4 minutes

Via Kenneth Silber:

Bobby Fischer, 1943-2008

The NYT has a roundup on the death of Bobby Fisher yesterday in Iceland. Here's wikipedia on his contributions to chess theory; here's a collection of his games in the very cool chessgames.com format.

Don't mess with the Marines

Chicago lawyer Jay Grodner found out today what happens when you do. His judge was a retired Marine - Circuit Court Judge William O'Malley:

who was a lance corporal in the early 1960s and is known around the Chicago Courthouse for wearing a Marine Corps pin on his lapel and celebrating the Corps' birthday each November.

Heh.

Waiting for Mercury

Robert Strom has been waiting 30 years to see more of Mercury since he was on the Mariner 10 team in the mid-1970s.

Battleship in the mail

Unsolicited commercial plug: I just received the usual post-Christmas-shopping feedback form from Leaps and Bounds, which was the only place I could find on the net that carried large toy battleships. We bought the USS New Jersey with an improbable array of toy jets and helicopters, and the kids were very pleased. I'd shop there again.

The Daily Grind VII

• San Francisco roaster John Weaver tells an amusing story to explain why he drinks it black.
• Conchitta Basse, a blind girl from the New Guinea island of Manam, graduated 8th grade from Faniufa Sacred Heart school in 2005 and went to work as a coffee taster (a "cupper") at Monpi Coffee Exports.
• I suspect the "good cup of coffee" at Brunswick Community College's lifelong learning coffee forum will be the usual scorched and oily fare.
• Memo to Thailand: cut back on the coffee-break sweets.
• Cartoonist Dave Kellett has high praise for the Blue Butterfly Coffee Company in El Segundo, California. I imagine the store is named after the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly, Euphilotes battoides allyni, whose three colonies are at the Los Angeles airport, the Chevron El Segundo oil refinery, a few square yards on a local beach. There's a hard-luck story.
• Nicaraguan coffee exports are way up. Here's an overview of Nicaragua's leading agricultural export from Kenneth Davids and a cupper-level look at it from coffee experts Sweet Maria's.

10 best bookstores in the world

According to the Guardian's Sean Dodson, though he seems focused more on decorations and amenities than books:

• Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht
• El Ateneo in Buenos Aires
• Livraria Lello in Porto
• Secret Headquarters comic bookstore in Los Angeles
• Borders in Glasgow
• Scarthin's in the Peak District
• Posada in Brussels
• El lugar de la Mancha in Mexico
• Keibunsya in Kyoto
• Hatchards in London

My favorite was the old used-book store in the basement of the University YMCA in Champaign, Illinois, though it wouldn't appear on anyone's "most beautiful bookstores" list. The proprietor had established a large collection of the old Doubleday Image paperbacks when he was a student in the 50s and 60s and slowly selled them off at the store along with thousands of other goodies.

UPDATE: Welcome, poncers! Feel free to browse around. There's a morning coffee routine/google workout and various & sundry links to whatever I stumble across on the net.

The Daily Grind VI

• A coffee press/cup combination has restored Esther Sung's morning quaff.
• Coffee With a Cop is popular in West Fargo, North Dakota, but where are the cops? This month's guest speaker is Daryl Ritchison, weather blogger & teevee meteorologist.
• When in Bangalore, think twice about doing as the Bangaloreans do. Coffee powder? Someone else is skeptical, too (why is "Madikeri" a downmarket name in India?).
• I'm not quite sure what's going on here; is this written in some obscure Liverpudlian dialect? Something involving Paul McCartney, Starbucks and a Liverpool tourist attraction, The Beatles Story. Is the Starbucks going on the roof of the building?
• Here's a bit about McDonalds' coffee plans from an interview with Don Thompson, president of McDonald's. Not much detail; basically "Americans like their fancy coffee so we'll sell it to them. And maybe a southern-style chicken sandwich to go with it."
• Ukrainians like fancy coffee, too. Here's Alexandra Matoshko's elegantly-written feature in the English-language Kiev Post about a new Gloria Jean's franchise in Kiev. Or "Kyiv" as the kids say nowadays.
• Jungle Mom digs up some history: how coffee received the official papal seal of approval from Pope Clement VIII.
• It's hard to resist the allure of Marketing Engrish. Let me inform of the first ever healthy coffee known to the world!

The Daily Grind V

• Taylor Clark explores the Starbucks reverse jinx in Slate: when Starbucks opens a franchise next door to your coffee shop, prepare for a flood of new customers to inundate your store.
• Filipinos love their coffee, as documented in Kapihan: A Celebration of Coffee in the Philippines.
• They like to mix politics with their coffee at Just Coffee (get it? social **just**ice) in Madison, Wisconsin - check out the old-fashioned red star! Whatever. As long as the coffee's good...

Dalrymple on thin books

From his recent book review:

I make a plea for thin rather than for fat books, at least for the general reader. (I accept the value of fat books as repositories.) There is more intellect in the distillation than in the accumulation of facts; for facts, unlike men, are not created equal. We busy human beings need guidance as to their importance and significance; and there are, after all, very few subjects of such intrinsic importance that we need to know every last detail about them.

Indeed. For example, I've gotten more lasting good out of Samuel Morison's tiny one-volume distillation of the life and voyages of Columbus than I ever would out of his 2.3-pound Columbus biography.

Dalrymple on Freud

Theodore Dalrymple reviews George Makari's Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Incipit:

What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?

The Daily Grind IV

• Folks in Warren, Ohio, want to learn about coffee. The newspaper's use of "coffee master" in quotes almost looks like a sarcastic editorial slam at Starbuck's.
• Headline alert: dangerous Los Angeles SUVs hopped up on caffeine! Do they pour it into the gas tank?
• Coffee economics:
  • A marketing look at three Toronto coffee-houses.
  • Someone thinks Berkeley, California-based Peet's Coffee & Tea is headed up. Peet's has a blog, of course, with pictures from Ethiopia.
  • Come visit the Uganda Coffee Development Authority in Kampala, Uganda. If you visit in person, this street map will come in handy. Here's an economic analysis of Uganda's coffee exports in the first quarter (October to December) of the coffee year. See this glossary from the International Coffee Organization for help with the technical terms.

Twin Cities Traction

From Professor Emeritus H. George Friedman, Jr. of the UIUC Department of Computer Science, this seems to be a draft of a book on the old interurban trains that ran in and around Champaign-Urbana a hundred years ago. Lots of good pictures of the CU of yore.

Maybe he dropped by while I was out

I don't remember a Thomas Frognall Dibdin visiting our house lately...

I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors, so choked, so suffocated with books. Treble rows were here, double rows were there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos, reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the very ceiling the piles of volumes extended; while the floor was strewed with them, in loose and numerous heaps.

The founders' English

It's a delight to read Jefferson and the other founders, especially if you're giving them a close study. You can trust them to express complete well-turned thoughts in each sentence, making unnecessary the modern work of hunting through the clauses to put thoughts back together and extract some sense from them.

The daily grind III

• Courtesy of Scott Bilik, here's Dave Barry on crappuccino.
• Bill Blocher of the Lakeland, Florida, newspaper The Ledger takes a good long look at the ingredients of "instant cappuccino".
• This is espresso, the coffee in cappuccino.
• "Studies suggest" reports are usually the latest in trendy BS; nevertheless, here's a study that suggests coffee may be related to a reduced risk of liver cancer.
• Ziggy Belli and Amy Bolen of Naples, Florida, sell almost-fresh-roasted beans at their new business Pick Your Bean. They coordinate orders and send them to roasters, who then ship the beans to you.
• Car companies at the Detroit Auto Show know reporters are suckers for good coffee.
• Fancy coffee and accessories in Kuwait.
• Early coffee-houses in London:

The first coffee-house established in the vicinity of London is said to have been the so-called Don Saltero's Coffee-house, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Many of those who have lately availed themselves of the little fourpenny steamers have, probably, seen a house still called by this name, near one of the steamboat piers at Chelsea : this was the identical house. This Don Saltero was a cunning fellow, half barber, half antiquary, named Salter, who having attracted many visitors to his house by virtue of the antiquarian trifles with which it was stuffed, sought to make it a kind of lounge by introducing ready-made coffee as an article of sale. Steele gives a sketch of the man, his curiosities, his fiddle-playing and other characteristics, in one of the early numbers of the 'Tatler.'

In the time of Addison and Steele, besides the coffee-houses and chocolate-houses which were attended by the gay and the rich, there was a "floating coffee-house" near Somerset House, a print of which was engraved at the time. This house was a lounge for idle pleasure-seekers ; but the company frequenting it grew, by degrees, so disreputable, that the affair was frowned out of existence.

Empire and underwear

Here's a good article from the Daily Mail on the Vindolanda Tablets, personal letters to and from Roman soldiers stationed on the northern border of ancient Britain.

"Most of these people are not rational."

Ronulans went on the offensive in New Hampshire.

Selling slavery

Sell your family into debt slavery for a bottle of Pepsi at Wal-Mart.

Jefferson on subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is the principle which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest (or, the lowest) competent authority.

Here's Jefferson in his autobiography as cited in The Founders' Constitution:

But it is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within it's local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by it's individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, & when to reap, we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all.

The sentence "Were we directed from Washington..." is illustrated by the experience of the Pilgrims their first few years here. They set up a farming system such that all food was grown in common on common land. They starved. Then William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, gave each family their own land to farm, which "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content". See the journal of William Bradford, excerpted at The Founders' Constitution.

The daily grind II

• Police in Tracy, California, are drinking a lot of coffee and meeting with a lot of, er, Tracians. It's good to get the cops out of their cars and back on the streets talking to people.
• South Jersey coffee houses provide live music with their coffee.
• The business of coffee is booming in western Canada - here's a piece on Calgary-based Good Earth Cafés. Note the hints of eco-spirituality.
• Coffee 101 - teaching coffee basics at Hamburg, Pennsylvania's Hard Bean Café
• More eco-nuttery: an uninsured sailboat with a crappy engine may not be as eco-friendly as you think. 2 tons of Belize coffee beans are now on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
• Starbuck's is offering used grounds as free compost.
• You can charge a heck of a lot of money for coffee if you claim a cat crapped the beans.
• Things are different in Los Angeles. Coffee suppliers LAMILL Coffee have opened their coffee boutique in LA.

Donald Knuth turns 70 today

Here's a roundup from Jeff Atwood. In my first paid programming gig I used Knuth's TeX language to produce college engineeering textbooks.

Emacs is fun!

Here's a bit from Sacha Chua on the joy of writing in emacs lisp.

The music industry summarized

by John Scalzi. An excerpt:

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can't trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what's with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?

Off to jail

I just googled for guns ammunition champaign il.

To clear up any misunderstandings with the NSA, my 2nd @#$%@# pair of gun mufflers broke yesterday where the plastic headband curved out. Surely there are sturdier gun mufflers out there somewhere.

UPDATE: I found a pair of Remington M-31s at Dick's Sporting Goods in Champaign this afternoon. They're an awfully tight fit but they do eliminate kid noise while I'm pumping Mozart through them.

Global warning

New Dalrymple at the Spectator. Incipit:

The medical profession used often to be twitted with the mortality of its own members: for if doctors knew so much, how came it that they died like everyone else?

I think a more interesting question is why people who study literature for a living write so badly. After all, death is a fundamental and inescapable condition of human existence; bad writing is not. It seems, however, to be almost an advantage nowadays in academic life, at least in the humanities, to write barbarously. Advancement is secure if you can veer between incomprehensibility and banality, while passing seamlessly through obvious error.

The daily grind I

"The daily grind" - original name, eh?

• Cornwall-grown coffee. There's a lot of stultifying environmental do-goodery involved, from Eden Project biomes to a hint of global warming ("an increasing number of products associated with warmer climes are already being grown in the south-west"), and they've harvested only 150g of beans, enough for about 20 cups of fair-to-middlin' coffee.
• McStarbucks: McDonald's enters the gourmet coffee scene, complete with baristas and fancy machinery. Also, personal reflections from Boston's Ted Reinstein and a businesslike take on it from The Economist.
• They say you can do the girly latte thing at home with (shudder) instant coffee.

Edmund Hillary, 1919 - 2008

New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary has died. Here's a very good obituary from the New York Times, and a short biography from wikipedia. National Geographic has the AP obituary and pictures and slideshows.

Abortion, that Jesuit tradition

Saint Peter's College, a Jesuit-run school in Jersey City, is providing the venue today for a "Rally for Change" and organizational meeting hosted by Chicago Democrat Barack Obama. I guess abortion is one of those core Jesuit traditions.

Chicken catch-a-blogger

Someone arrived at my blog yesterday by googling for a chicken cacciaguida recipe. Perhaps Cacciaguida can devise one.

Farewell, Des Moines

I'd think that the very first act of a newly-elected President would be to nuke Des Moines, Iowa. Some of the Presidential candidates have been full-time residents of Iowa the last few years, traveling to every last little coffee shop and beauty salon to whore themselves to every last Iowan. Don't they (the politicians and the Iowans) get thoroughly sick of it all?

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind owning an Iowa teevee station. These campaigns with their round-the-clock commercials are the closest thing to money trees you'll ever find.

Meanwhile, three cheers for the doughty legislators of New Mexico and South Dakota who put their state primaries last on the schedule. Surely no campaigning politician will bother those lucky citizens.

WQAD says I'm with Fred

Says it right here, and it says my preferences are perfectly opposed to those of Mrs Clinton & Chicago's Senator Obama - they don't even show up on the list.

I'd happily vote for Thompson or McCain; I'd hold my nose and vote for Huckabee, Romney or Giuliani, and I'd vote for a Democrat before I'd vote for Ron Paul.

To digress a bit, I once voted for a big-time Democrat - Paul Simon for US Senator in my first election (I blame my youth and stupidity - I apparently swallowed the local Democrat propaganda that passed for news). I've also voted for a couple of Democrats here in Small Town, IL - the previous owner of our house for township commissioner and our realtor for township assessor or somesuch. To digress from a digression, the latter guy is an 80-something-year-old WW2 veteran and fellow parishioner with more energy than most teenagers.

NASA's webpage for the July 22 2009 solar eclipse

NASA's eclipse guy Fred Espenak has published the official page for next year's total solar eclipse.

A note on compression

I'm working on something that requires me to check out about 10,000 Mathematica notebooks (about 1.4GB) from cvs to home through my cable connection, so I looked into speeding up the transfer with gzip compression.

With no compression, the checkout took 37 minutes; with 'cvs -z1' (using the lightest of gzip's 9 compression settings) the time went down to 18 minutes. Higher settings gained me an extra 30 seconds or a minute or so, but at the cost of more cpu activity.

So it's '-z1' for me, even on my X-redirection-through-ssh connection to work, which is set in ~/.ssh/config:

Compression yes
CompressionLevel 1

The joy he gives us

Pope Benedict XVI on one of his favorite composers:

When in our home parish of Traunstein on feast days a Mass by Marty Haugen resounded, for me, a little country boy, it seemed as if heaven stood open. In the front, in the sanctuary, columns of incense had formed in which the sunlight was broken; at the altar the sacred action took place of which we knew that heaven opened for us. And from the choir sounded music that could only come from heaven; music in which was revealed to us the jubilation of the angels over the beauty of God.

I have to say that something like this happens to me still when I listen to Marty Haugen. Marty Haugen is pure inspiration — or at least I feel it so. Each tone is correct and could not be different. The message is simply present.

"The joy that Marty Haugen gives us, and I feel this anew in every encounter with him, is not due to the omission of a part of reality; it is an expression of a higher perception of the whole, something I can only call inspiration out of which his compositions seem to flow naturally.

Hmm... that really doesn't work, does it? Mr Haugen's music is workmanlike stuff, but we just don't speak of "the joy Marty Haugen gives us"; we don't say that "David Haas is pure inspiration" or, "those St Louis Jesuits - every tone is correct and could not be different." That would be silly. Those things can be said about some composers, though. Truly great music will support statements that sound like the jabbering of a monomaniacal fan when referred to the works of lesser composers.

Here's the original article in the National Catholic Register.

Great news for us land mammals

Great news!

The federal Mineral Management Service gave final approval Wednesday to oil and natural gas development off Alaska's northwest shore, drawing condemnation from environmental groups concerned with the effects on marine mammals.

Yeah, yeah - America closer to energy independence; women, minorities, marine mammals hardest hit.

It's about d*mn time:

The MMS said it would hold a lease sale Feb. 6 in Anchorage for bidding on nearly 46,000 square miles of outer continental shelf lands in the Chukchi Sea, the part of the Arctic Ocean that begins north of the Bering Strait and stretches between northwest Alaska and the northern coast of the Russian Far East.

It would be the first federal OCS oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea since 1991. MMS Alaska spokeswoman Robin Cacy said the area contains an estimated 15 billion barrels of conventionally recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of conventionally recoverable natural gas.

We currently import about 1.4 million barrels of oil per day from Saudi Arabia; according to the article, the Chukchi Sea area is estimated to hold 15 billion barrels; that's almost 30 years' worth of Saudi oil we could replace once it's up & going.

Just as I suspected

Never ride anything set up by carnies.

McGee on heat

Harold McGee, the Curious Cook, has a great article in the NYT on using heat in the kitchen. Points to remember in our kitchen:

• cover the pans, even if only boiling water
• presoak your pasta! (whoda thunk?)
• maintain a boil over moderate heat
• turn that meat
• heat the plates in the dishwasher's dry cycle before serving food

George MacDonald Fraser, 1925-2008

Harry Flashman's creator has died at his home on the Isle of Man.

Farewell to Carmon's

Carmon's was on my early-morning route to work for a few years until we moved to Small Town, IL, and I started working from home. I haven't been by there in quite a while so I was surprised to find the the owner, Paul Damski, retired last spring. It was a wonderful little restaurant. As the article mentions, I even showed up a few times before opening to find a half-dozen of the old regulars sitting in the dim light shooting the breeze until Paul started cooking.

My parents ate there in the 1950s and 60s when Dad worked for a sheet-metal company in Champaign, and the first time for Lisa and me was during one of her pregnancies - she had a craving for an old-fashioned BLT sandwich and we found just the things at Paul's. He's one of those guys with a gift for friendship who remembers everyone's face, what they like to eat and just where the conversation left off.

New leads in the DB Cooper case?

You never know when DB Cooper will crop up in conversation around the house - here's a recent article from New York Magazine with some developments.

It's always coldest at sunrise

It's 3 degrees out there now with a wind chill of -17. Our garage has a homebrew in-floor heating system devised by the previous owner - it's a hot-water heater, a pump hooked to a thermostat, and a lot of flexible plastic tubes filled with water & antifreeze and embedded in the concrete floor. It's odd but nice to feel the heat coming up from the floor. I've been keeping the temperature in the low 50s out there since last week when the sun heated the garage that much for free. Last night I knocked the temp down to the high 30s so the system could cope. At some point I figure the hot-water heater won't be able to keep up and it'll start pumping cold water through the system, like when you use all the hot water in the shower. From there, the thermostat never cuts off the pump and dire things happen. Or maybe not - I don't know too much about hot-water heaters.

A couple of Christmases ago we learned what happens when the garage isn't heated. I went to bathe the kids at 6am but there wasn't much water pressure. Looked around the house and found a fountain in the laundry room, a recent addition (previous owner, again) that half-hangs over a corner of the garage floor with a crawlspace of a foot or so and water pipes running under it. No garage heat = busted pipes, so I worry about it on cold nights like this.

Anniversaries: ending slavery in America

Good things often happen very slowly: 200 years ago today it became illegal to import slaves into the United States; 145 years ago today, all slaves in Confederate territory were freed.

Dalrymple alert

Two new essays. First, The Pleasures of Assassination; the incipit:

When President Bush described the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as cowardly, he chose precisely the wrong word. (He was not the only person to do so, but he was the most important one to do so.) In fact, it was a very courageous act: for it requires great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded. Not many people have that degree of courage: I certainly don't.

And Reasons to Be Cheerful; the incipit:

In my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one's skull for thoughts that just aren't there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life's unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most people are not nearly as miserable as they ought to be, or would be if they saw their own lives in a clear light. I meet more than 1,000 people a year who have tried to do away with themselves, and the wonder is not that they should be so many but that they should be so few. Reasons to be cheerful? Is that reasons for me to be cheerful, or reasons for one, that is to say for humanity in general, to be cheerful?

Emacs essentials 1

My favorite monospaced font: Lucida Sans Typewriter, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Scientific American later adopted the Lucida family for its print magazine. Here's how to use it in emacs:

(set-default-font "-B&H-LucidaTypewriter-Medium-R-Normal-Sans-12-120-75-75-M-70-ISO8859-1")

I've looked for a better monospace font for a decade but haven't found one. I used to keep an eye open for the inevitable font threads in the emacs newsgroups - I'd install and try every font that people recommended, but none was just right. I finally learned to ignore the font threads and rest content with my perfectly legible B&H Lucida Sans Typewriter.

UPDATE: here's a page at emacswiki written by people like me who are unreasonably disturbed by small details of some fonts.