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.
23:11 | link | | |
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.
10:51 | link | | |
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.
10:38 | link | | |
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.
16:49 | link | | |
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.
11:26 | link | | |
You never know what you'll find around the corner:
11:15 | link | | |
01:37 | link | | |
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.
13:17 | link | | |
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:
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.
11:53 | link | | |
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.
21:15 | link | | |
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):
19:26 | link | | |
Current reading:
21:02 | link | | |
This is a close second - The Rabbit of Seville:
15:53 | link | | |
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
Left column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
Right column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.