Sylloge

Less Important Concerns Are Voiced During Investigations Intended to Right Wrongs Perpetrated in the Process of Juvenile Correction · 2058 days ago

Of the 1,100 complaints that have come in since March 6, an estimated 225 concern sexual abuse, said Capt. Bruce W. Toney of the inspector general’s office. Captain Toney described some others as trivial grievances, like complaints of ill-fitting shoes, “I don’t agree with the teaching” and “not letting me talk.”

Complaints Flood Texas Youth Hot Line, NYT, March 26, 2007

It was John Adams · 2151 days ago

About seven years ago, I remembered this thing I had read somewhere about some bloke who had to do something praxis-y so his sons could do something theoria-y so their kids could do something poesis-y, and I set out to find it using my best query formulation mojo, posting to various mailing lists, asking historian friends.

I knew it was a quotable thing and must be known to some, but I never was able to track it down after several tens of hours searching Bartlett’s, skimming through books I thought I might have seen it in, asking people, etc. So eventually I forgot about it.

Then in the bath last night, reading an old issue of the Economist (Oct 7-12th, 2006), it came up in one of the articles in the special report “The Search for Talent” (pp23-34). Hey! Wow! And it turns out it was John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. [Noted on Wikipedia though I haven’t tracked down the original source yet.]

And so, to further educate myself, I’ve just ordered The Book of Abigail and John (co-edited, by my grand-uncle), which I’ve always meant to read.

Text transcripts of spoken interviews are always funny (even when there is a translator involved) · 2246 days ago

Mr. President, thank you so much. I was interested. You wanted to be able to gesture with your hands while you spoke. What else should Americans know about you as a person, sir?

President Ahmadinejad: The transcript

I'll Keep Trying · 2249 days ago

Last books read:

Old Filth: a very, very English novel; quite perfect in its Englishness. Nine thumbs up.
Who Controls the Internet: I don’t know if this was exceptionally well written for a popularization of technology and policy issues by a pair of legal academics¹ and far beyond the normal in pure reasonableness, but it certainly seemed so.

Old friend Alex Gilly writes to forward the following email from a friend of his:

A curious sort of group, I know, but this is mildly extraordinary. Background-wise: In 1665, a group of natural philosophers in England got together and decided to publish what is arguably the first scientific journal: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

It’s still going strong today; and for the next couple of months, the Royal Society is making the entire archive all the way back to 1665 available for free².

BTW It was apparently Coleridge who, in 1833, told his mentor, one William Whewell, to think up a term for natural philosopher-types that didn’t include the term philosopher (no messing on STC’s patch) – Will came up with Scientist.

¹ Certainly it must be high in the category.
² It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how to get into the archives without a subscription. And why isn’t it always free? Only libraries and rich eccentrics get access. And if you’re a student at a university, you can have access too, but the minute you graduate it’s US$10k or nothing at all. Tsk.

Things the Internet Couldn't Help me Find Today · 2264 days ago

An ophthamologist in the Bay Area specializing in keratoconus who dispenses Rose K lenses. The only (!) ophthamologist I could find in the Bay Area who deals with keratoconus at all is all KrAzEe ‘BoUt LaSiK and “Intacs” (Lasik surgery seems to completely dominate any mention of eye care on the internet—high CPC rates for terms vaguely related to things we are interested in screw up search!)

The liner notes to the Ron Carter album Patrão Just found a passable copy.

A place to download the Archie Shepp & Horace Parlan duet album Trouble in Mind (I subscribe to YMU, but would have settled for samples somewhere so I could remember what it sounded like … I had the LP a long time ago).

Log · 2265 days ago

This may be boring for you, reader, unless you are me and it is a few years from now and I’m trying to remember what I was doing/thinking now.

(I love the ambiguity in the referents of “you,” “me’, “I” and “now”.)

Running list: need to remember to post about:

Consciousness as the remembered present (talking with Caterina and Adam G)
Cynicism, effects of. Contrasted with curiousity. A book about?

China Books, I · 2265 days ago

I got a copy of Mao: The Unknown Story to give to my father for Christmas, but then never gave it to him and so after a few months, I went and read it myself.

It’s been extremely controversial among people who care about biographies of Mao (you can watch the argument rage on the discussion pages for Mao and the book on Wikipedia).

I have no real basis for evaluating either side but it seemed to me that (i) there was a lot of genuinely new information presented, primarily from the recently-opened archives of the old U.S.S.R. and (ii) the portrait of Mao-the-person, one of pure malevolent selfishness, didn’t seem plausible (in contrast to say, Solzhenitsyn—who had plenty of reason to hate Stalin—making him understandable as a human in The First Circle.)

Since I enjoyed it and felt I had learned a lot, I decided to pick up a few other biographies to get a broader context. I got Spence’s Mao Zedong a short book in the concise Penguin Live series and Short’s much longer Mao: A life (note to self: do not name any biographies I write, _[Name]: A Life_).

Both had a similar tone and the picture of Mao that emerged from both was similar. I felt like reading all three gave me enough perspective to triangulate a little. (Spence’s book, despite his pre-eminence as an historian of China, was just too short and skipped over too many significant periods, to be particularly useful on its own).

And so these made me want to read about China more generally …

Book blogging post to get myself caught up · 2265 days ago

Let’s see … since I started reading again, I read a biography of Patrick O’Brien and then promptly (re-)read all 20 Aubrey/Maturin books. Could see myself doing it again in another decade.

1905 · 2457 days ago

Einstein Chronology for 1905

O S C A R · 2457 days ago

(The current topic of conversation around our house: the messaging and positioning of the “My baloney has a first name …” campaign.)