Archive for October, 2005
October 31, 2005 at 10:02 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
at Distributed Proofreaders:
…his words had gone to her heart, and she remembered how he had embraced her when she first encountered him in the church. His manners, too, were so mild, so kind, so paternal toward her; and yet he seemed but a few years older than herself.
“You have gazed upon the portrait of the old man,” he continued, “as he appeared on that memorable evening which sealed his fate!”
Agnes started wildly.
“Yes, sealed his fate, but spared him his life!” said the unknown, emphatically. “As he is represented in that picture, so was he sitting mournfully over the sorry fire, for the morrow’s renewal of which there was no wood! At that hour a man appeared — appeared in the midst of the dreadful storm which burst over the Black Forest. This man’s countenance is now known to thee; it is perpetuated in the other portrait to which I directed thine attention.”"There is something of a wild and fearful interest in the aspect of that man.” said Agnes, casting a shuddering glance behind her, and trembling lest the canvas had burst into life, and the countenance whose lineaments were depicted thereon was peering over her shoulder.
“Yes, and there was much of wild and fearful interest in his history,” was the reply; “but of that I cannot speak—no, I dare not. Suffice it to say that he was a being possessed of superhuman powers, and that he proffered his services to the wretched—the abandoned—the deserted Wagner. He proposed to endow him with a new existence—to restore him to youth and manly beauty—to make him rich—to embellish his mind with wondrous attainments—to enable him to cast off the wrinkles of age—-”"Holy Virgin! now I comprehend it all!” shrieked Agnes, throwing herself at the feet of her companion: “and you—you—-”"I am Fernand Wagner!” he exclaimed, folding her in his embrace.
“And can you pardon me, can you forgive my deep—deep ingratitude?” cried Agnes.
“Let us forgive each other!” said Wagner. “You can now understand the meaning of the inscription beneath my portrait. ‘His last day thus’ signifies that it was the last day on which I wore that aged, decrepit, and sinking form.”"But wherefore do you say, ‘Let us forgive each other?’” demanded Agnes, scarcely knowing whether to rejoice or weep at the marvelous transformation of her grandsire.
“Did I not ere now inform thee that thou wast forgotten until accident threw thee in my way to-night?” exclaimed Fernand. “I have wandered about the earth and beheld all the scenes which are represented in those pictures—ay, and many others equally remarkable. For eighteen months I was the servant—and slave of him who conferred upon me this fatal
boon—-”
“At what price, then, have you purchased it?” asked Agnes, with a cold shudder.
…
From the scans of our copy of Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf by George W. M. Reynolds, c. 1875 — an edition substantially different from that produced by Dover.
October 31, 2005 at 12:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I met my wife Barbara a bit more than 22½ years ago (though she doesn’t remember it; she stood out more in my memory than I did in hers, what with the big metal prongs sticking out of her broken leg). We would have been sitting next to one another taking a midterm exam in Darwin Stapleton’s “History of Science Fiction” class about 22 years ago today. We were at a Halloween party on Murray Hill Road 21 years ago, after I finally got a clue and asked her out. And we were married 18 years ago today.
In all the places where our plans and expectations and reactions to the world’s uncertain offerings have taken us since then, it has been my honor and pleasure to have her at my side. So many do not learn what it is to have a real helpmeet in their lives. I am blessed to say I have.
I don’t have the customary blogger’s wedding photograph scan to paste here. Maybe that’s for the best. We should wait and trot it out in the year when those fashions finally come back into style. On which anniversary we will surely still be smiling knowingly at the follies and foibles of the young, together, just as we are now.
Happy Anniversary, Barbara.
October 31, 2005 at 7:24 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Advice to… somebody: Watch Your Back:
“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality,” says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. “The potential for brand damage is really high,” says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft’s main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. “There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it’s juicy.”
See the point, in context even, at The Reading Experience.
October 29, 2005 at 10:14 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It was disclosed that [a resurrectionist gang] had a regular contract with the firm of A. H. Jones and Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that they operated in different parts of the state, remaining at one point for only a short time. Evidence was found to show that they were then attempting to fill an order for seventy bodies, two of which, that of an old lady and a boy, had been recently exhumed at Toledo, and that sixty bodies had been shipped to the Ann Arbor firm while the gang was operating at Columbus.
From Odd Ends.
October 28, 2005 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Do you say, “Friend did something once [Friend, 2000], and I want to talk about it with you now…”? Or, “As was shown with elegance and poise in [Friend, 1998], it is clear…”? Or do you go for the telegraphic faint praise approach, with “Friend [1988] published a number of papers touching on this topic, but several important questions have arisen since…”?
I ask, because a colleague asked me to read his draft NSF grant proposal today, and he decided to simply use numbers in brackets. As nouns, some proper. No names, no nuthin’ — to save space. I realized it’s not that far from the standards mentioned above, but far enough to raise an eyebrow or two.
update: The tone of the comments makes me realize that perhaps I was unclear. Here’s an example of the sort of sentence my colleague was using:
[14] has done a great deal of work on this subject, and hangs out with [5] at [6] all the time, so maybe we should ask them both to explain [7].
October 27, 2005 at 4:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The Project Gutenberg version of W.A. Clouston’s Flowers from a Persian Garden has been posted by Barbara.
Please enjoy. Unlike the copy presented by Google Print, this new HTML edition is 100% copyright-free.
We’re working on a number of Clouston’s other works, as I write this. Patience brings many rewards.
October 27, 2005 at 7:51 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I don’t link to the New York Times these days, but my wife just showed me a picture from an article entitled “Hungry Goats Atop a Tree, Doing Their Bit for Gourmands”, By CRAIG S. SMITH, Published: October 27, 2005. The accompanying photo shows a number of odd black animal silhouettes, perched high in a tree in an arid clime somewhere. I thought they were baboons until she told me: goats. Goats in a tree.
Why they’re in a tree is the subject of the story. As is the economic import of their poop.
But I care not a whit for that. What came to mind, immediately. was an old picture present in many biology text-books, and which I suspect is engrained in the engrams of many a scientist raised in the 60s: On the left pane, a sad little short-necked primordial giraffe ancestor, standing beside a tree tentatively nibbling the lowest leaves, looking longingly up into the higher branches. On the right pane, a robust, spotted modern long-necked giraffe gracefully defoliating the tender shoots with a self-satisfied gleam in its eye — or is that a sly glance over to its sickly neighbor?
I suspect that this one image, with its accompanying rhetoric of directed adaptation, informs many people’s (professionals and laymen) understanding of selection pressure.
They ought to have a picture of those goats, snacking comfortably 20+ feet high in the flimsy branches of a tree, sitting right next to it.
October 26, 2005 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
at Distributed Proofreaders tonight:
[just the one page, as I'm given it to work on]
…spoke of principles as old as his toilet. He was reading, too, a loyal paper, loyal, at least, in those days,—the Journal des Debats. Bowing, as we passed, he consigned us, with a graceful wave of the hand, to the care of Pierre, the frotteur. I took him for some fragment of a duc et pair of the old school; but, on putting the question to the frotteur, who himself might have passed for a figurante at the opera, he informed us that he was ‘Notre bourgeois,’ the master of the hotel.” It is quite wonderful to us how Miladi could have survived to relate so shocking a metamorphosis. Ovid has nothing half so strange and heart-rending.
The instances we have mentioned are far from being the only ones in which her Ladyship was “put out of sorts” by the Anglomania, which, she would make us believe, is operating at present as great a revolution in the social, as was effected in ‘98 in the political condition of France. All along the road from Calais to Paris, she sees nothing but “youths galloping their horses in the cavalry costume of Hyde Park,” “smart gigs and natty dennets,” “cottages of gentility, with white walls and green shutters, and neat offices, rivalling the diversified orders of the Wyatvilles of Islington and Highgate,” in short, nothing but “English neatness and propriety on every side,” with one terrible exception, however, “an Irish jaunting car!” of which she chanced, to her infinite dismay, to catch a glimpse. The second appearance that she makes in the streets of Paris, is for the purpose of buying some “bonbons, diablotins en papillotes, Pastilles de Nantes, and other sugared prettinesses,” for which Parisian confectioners are so renowned. Accordingly, she goes into a shop where she supposes that “fanciful idealities, sweet nothings, candied epics and eclogues in spun sugar, so light, and so perfumed as to resemble (was there ever such nonsense) congealed odours, or a crystallization of the essence of sweet flowers,” are to be sold, but on inquiry she is told by a “demoiselle behind the counter, as neat as English muslin and French (what a wonder it wasn’t English) tournure could make her,” that ‘we sell no such a ting,’ but that she might have ‘de cracker, be bun, de plom-cake, de spice gingerbread, de mutton and de mince pye, de crompet and de muffin, de gelée of de calves foot, and de apple dumplin.’ Reader, Lady Morgan “was struck dumb!” She purchased a bundle of crackers, “hard enough to crack the teeth of an elephant,” and hurried from the shop. But misfortunes never come single, and her ladyship, though an exception to most other general rules, was not destined to prove the correctness of that one in this instance, for just as she was escaping from the place where she had experienced the serious inconvenience of being “struck dumb,” she was struck in another way—viz. on the left cheek, by the explosion…
October 26, 2005 at 8:27 pm · Filed under Project
I’ve downloaded and installed the Wordpress theme “Thirteen”. I’m not so sure about the flowery butterfly thing that’s happening, and some sidebar material has been inadvertently rearranged. Thoughts?
I find it a bit more legible. Do you?
October 26, 2005 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
So I brought up my previous comments just now, in class. Specifically the point that there is no valid situation in which one should program, ab initio, under pressure. Response, from the class as well as the instructor?
“Well, you’re asked to do mathematics under pressure in all the other class! Why shouldn’t we write software that way too? It’s only fair.”
Because software, as it happens, is an artifact, created by the application of skills. Mathematics, at least as it is tested on exams, is the execution of an algorithm.
Tell me how those are not different?
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