Musings
Today the gods and saints and dustmotes smiled upon me and, some lyrical writing by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes pointed me to the fine text-generation program Scrivener. [Download it here for a 30-day free trial. Sorry you poor PC people, this is a Mac-only program….]
For years I’ve sought to escape the tyranny of Word, just like Heffernan. JCB got me to try Pages, but two things sent me back to The Evil Microsoft Product:
- 1) I love being able to type in something simple like “sp” and have the autocorrect function do the heavy lifting of making those two simple letters into a Big Word I type perhaps too often: “sociopolitical” (and a long list of other examples—“nv” becomes Nochixtlán Valley complete with accent, and “bofm” becomes Basin of Mexico—it’s particularly useful for place names!), and
- 2) Endnote. I use this program to keep track of references and store all my notes; it easily links to PDFs, too. From special entries you make in the [Word] text, it makes a bibliography that needs highly irritating but relatively minor editing (it is annoying, but still better than other software I’ve tried) to standardize into the proper format.
Then JCB figured out some way to make Pages do the autocorrect thing and I had to rethink (again) my Endnote addiction. But I still found myself in its grip.
Now in one simple sunny Sunday I’m a Scrivener convert. It’s superior for generating text while keeping assorted supporting materials in my visual field—if I want them! After the text is generated (late this spring, I hope; keep your fingers crossed!) I anticipate returning to Word to flex Endnote’s power, and then using Word or using Pages for the final layout, but I think Scrivener helps significantly with generating the kind of document I’m working on. I love Scrivener’s interactive outline & superoutline functions, which the program calls Outliner and Corkboard. In short, the program effectively uses the power of Cocoa to display multiple editable views simultaneously.
For now, I’m going to use Scrivener on this chapter that’s been confounding me, inserting Endnote-renderable asides when necessary, and utilizing the creative support of my New Friend to avoid the straight jacket effects of the other W.
BTW…
…wasn’t that a supremely special moment last night when all the Presidential candidates were on the stage together at Saint Anselm College between the two debates, mixing and chatting (picture or NYT story); I even saw a few hugs!
Posted at 2:26 PM |
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Mexican field turned over with moldboard plow (rather 16th C in design), probably pulled by an ox.
The Byzantine plow was, technically, not a plow at all, but a sole ard.
Boy, there’s a term you don’t see every day. “Sole ard.” Kinda makes your knees weak, doesn’t it?
FYI, apparently a sole ard scratches the surface rather than turning it over like the plows we see today. The tool is suitable for shallow tilling, as in arid areas, and requires less effort to use than moldboard plows (less force is needed than to overturn the soil).
Bryer, Anthony. 2002. “The Means of Agricultural Production: Muscle and Tools,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, Studies, vol. 39. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, pp. 101–13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Page 107.
Posted at 6:13 PM |
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The Botanist keeps up with the modern world mostly through reading the NYT daily. So he guesses at pronunciation. Example: C D roam (for CD-ROM). And: blodging (for blogging, commonly recorded as blahging here, which adds to the confusion, I guess).
The WashPost reports that the Japanese make more blog entries than any other nationality, at least according to Technorati data (and how accurate is that, the Scientist in me asks). They apparently do it via texting on their mobile phones.
Pfffffffft. If I had to do it that way, well, you’d be reading something else every day! Like about some lady’s weekday lunch, or other “chatty postings”….
Posted at 12:08 PM |
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Even when the library’s computer tells me I’m at the top of the list of people requesting a book, it can take as much as two months for the volume to arrive at my branch, for me to pick up. This adds an additional layer of mystery to what books I will have to read simultaneously.
I just finished Ha Jin’s new book, A Free Life, about a Chinese man and his family who emigrated to the US before the Tiananmen Square massacre. Circumstance then led them to a northern Atlanta suburb, where they owned and operated a restaurant (the author taught here at Emory for a time), and the years passed. Ha Jin crafted a good tale, but the epilogue and appended poems (authored by the hero at the end of the tale) make the volume truly special.
The other book I’m reading is non-fiction and a couple of years old, but still pretty recent. It is River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler, about Hessler and a pal who teach English in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze near the Three Gorges Dam. I haven’t gotten far in this volume, so I don’t know where Hessler gets with it….
Together, the two provide interesting insights into modern China, and the concerns of individual citizens. I still can’t imagine living in modern Chinese mega-cities, with those high population densities and pollution levels….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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On our most recent treks (to the West and Midwest) we stayed several times at Hampton Inns, in part because they have b’fast, wifi, great beds and bedding, and discounts at some out-of-the-way locations that fit with our itinerary. Feeling like the good consumer he is, when we returned home, The Guru wrote an email To-Whom-It-May-Concern about the pros and cons of what we saw/experienced at so many of their locations in a narrow time frame. And received a responsive non-form-email in reply.
AND, in today’s mail, two (count ’em, two!) coupons for overnight stays at any Hampton Inn location!!!!!! Expiring at the end of 2008!
Score!
Today’s vocabulary:
edentulous
toothless
Use in a sentence: The Guru is not an edentulous consumer! (Or maybe you’d best come up with your own example….)
Posted at 6:16 PM |
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Multiple realities seem to be easier to contemplate if they are not personal and are part of the world at large. The other day I recorded a quote from the Dalai Lama about two realities—the deep-thinking Buddhist one of the DL and a few others, and that of the rest of us. Today I’ll note a comment from Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1998; English translation 2000). Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926, and caused a bit of a flurry when the (il?)literati realized that the narrator of the mystery story was the guy who-dun-it (this is widely known, so this can hardly be considered a spoiler).
Most lit-crit types go on about how unheard of this was, and are both pro and con on the merits of this twist. Of course, in conventional Chinese “detective” stories, the evil-doer is known from almost the beginning, and the accent in the stories is on how s/he is trapped and what the punishment is (e.g., Robert Van Gulik’s Judge Dee series, translations), so how innovative Christie was is questionable.
Back to Bayard. He writes about what he calls the delusion of interpretation, that Christie’s Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, was delusional when he pronounced his conclusions about the story’s murder to those involved, at a typical Christie gathering of involved characters. Bayard notes:
Constructing a delusion at least offers one advantage: It allows us an alternative way of reflecting on a true reading. Often one poses the question in the most traditional manner, by wondering how to approach the true. It may be of interest, however, to post the question from another angle and to wonder, rather, how to approach the false by exploring it from within, thus rendering it familiar.
One assumes that honest exam questions where the testee is asked to answer either true or false includes only statements that are unequivocally true or false. In the real world, what we far more frequently encounter is something in the middle, perhaps either mostly true or mostly false*. Or, sometimes, situationally true or situationally false.
Certainly, Bayard’s point that you can understand the nuances of any situation better by teasing out the fine points of both the apparent truths and apparent falsehoods, and multiple realities in general, is, I think, fine advice.
* One of the most memorable uses of the qualifier “mostly” must be in the movie The Princess Bride (1987), when Miracle Max (Billy Crystal), a sort of healer, pronounces the hero, Westley (Carey Elwes) to be “mostly dead” when he is apparently dead, and after treatment becomes mostly paralyzed. This is a truly fine movie, even without considering some of the monsters the hero and heroine must overcome are ROUS (Rodents Of Unusual Size).
Posted at 8:06 PM |
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Central detail, Window with Hudson River Landscape from Rochroane by Louis Comfort Tiffany/Tiffany Studios, 1905; commissioned by Melchior S. Beltzhoover for the music room of his mansion (apparently demolished in 1978 after much of the artwork etc. had been removed) in Irvington-On-Hudson, New York. [Full view, but tiny image, although this one’s a bit larger.] I guess the music room had been relegated to a side of the house with an inferior view, of the driveway or stables….
One Laptop Per Child—OLPC. Here’s the link.
Today’s my day for a disquisition on this. We ordered ours today.
In short, Nicholas Negroponte has put together a team that has invented a versatile, easy-to-use, smallish laptop intended to improve and extend learning possibilities for kids (and teachers, parents, and families) around the globe. When you click the purchase button, you get one for you (which, perhaps, can be donated in this country) and pay for one for “a child in need” for $400 plus shipping (just under $425 total). And the OLPC Foundation is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Cha-ching: tax deduction.
We all, as members of humanity, need to find ways to give to our fellow human beings. Giving can take many forms (EG, food, money, a listening ear). And the fellow human beings may be known to you, or be strangers you will never meet.
JCB and I try and spread our giving around, and vary it year by year, as well as philosophically.
I wanted to do the OLPC ’cause I think putting possibility in the hands of others is a wonderful thing, and possibility can take many forms.
We had already sealed the deal when I watched this one-hour video (highly recommended) presentation made to Google people—although I’m a bit squeamish that the identifiable individuals in the first three/four rows are all male…. I now understand better how the laptop works (using so little power, so efficiently, with an open system, so users can use it to invent and create and dream, to not need updates, armed with an anti-theft system, etc.) [link to text on this].
I was really sold that we had done a good thing when I listened to the opening section of the Google video when the presenter, Ivan Krstic, discussed how people learn (I know, that’s the anthropologist in me). OLPC’s goal is to change how kids learn, improve it and take it beyond the normal formal learning system (teacher in front of students directing the learning experience in classroom in building), in which learning is no longer mostly curiosity-driven (Krstic’s term), but mostly conducted by the teacher.
OLPC’s idea is to open up opportunity. Now. By reinforcing peer learning, allowing kids to follow their own curiosity. Laptops might help, assisted by the conventional classroom learning experience.
Then I became REALLY CONVINCED that this was a wise allocation of our giving resources.
’Nuff preaching. Your move.
After all, this is T-giving week….
Posted at 1:22 PM |
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We learned many new vocabulary words at the Corning Museum of Glass, which I should have expected but didn’t.
Some words describe the glass objects, or parts of them. Others derive from the manufacturing process. All of them are not in the vocabularies of most of us. Take these two words: goblet and prunt. You are most likely familiar with the first and probably not with the second.
Technically, a goblet is a bowl on a stem supported by a foot.
Prunts are dabs or blobs of glass attached to the stem. They are both decorative, and sometimes embellished with a stamp, and can help improve the drinker’s grip.
This goblet (sorry, I didn’t photo the identification tag, but I suspect, hmm, maybe German?) has green prunts that have been stamped with a knobbly texture.
These goblets are fairly large, would have been relatively costly for most households, held alcoholic beverages, and may have been passed among diners—all the more reason for increasing the likelihood of safe passage by enhancing the grip.
Posted at 4:56 PM |
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It is impossible to pick an iconic image from the Corning Museum of Glass (we took almost 300 pictures during about four hours of wandering the place). I, of course, was most entranced by the historical collection of glass, from vessels to anthropomorphic figures, and more! Instead of any iconic image, I offer this glass basilisk, about 6 inches tall, in a terrible setting for photography (crammed on a shelf with other objects, with an unattractive backdrop).
I suppose many people encountered the word basilisk first in the Harry Potter books (although it’s also mentioned by Shakespeare), but the word has quite a history. In the real world, a basilisk is a mythical creature, a reptile hatched from a cock’s egg. Lots of impossibility there!
For reasons I can’t quite figure out, I keep thinking this little guy, if alive, would be grumpy and curmudgeonly, and perhaps a bit vague like an armadillo.
Posted at 11:22 PM |
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Today we cruised through an area in Ohio where Amish farmers continue the old labor-intensive ways. I had to search my memory for the name of these harvest constructions of corn stalks bound together to dry in the field. First I could only think of shucks, but that’s the name of the dried husks, sometimes used to wrap tamales. The word is similar, hence my confusion. It’s shocks.
Posted at 11:22 PM |
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