From Halley Suitt’s blog: check out Thoughtless Acts, a site/book concerning human-oriented design. Leaving aside the fact that it’s a Flash site (bleah, accessibility-wise), looks interesting.
Printing presses and movable types
Did you know that Gutenberg invented neither the printing press nor (surprising to me) movable type?
I’m reading a pretty interesting article about the life cycles of texts. In an offhanded way, the author states at one point: “A great leap in the development of the text cycle was Gutenberg’s invention of loose type and his improved use of the printing press.” That presses had existed before, and that Gutenberg’s huge innovation was movable type itself, didn’t surprise me much (although I hadn’t thought about it before). What did surprise me was that he re-invented movable type.
Here’s a small part of what Britannica says on the topic: (please do not keel me Mr. Copyright, I’m a mere excited researcher sharing the goodness that is knowledge)
About 1041–48 a Chinese alchemist named Pi Sheng appears to have conceived of movable type made of an amalgam of clay and glue hardened by baking. He composed texts by placing the types side by side on an iron plate coated with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash. Gently heating this plate and then letting the plate cool solidified the type. Once the impression had been made, the type could be detached by reheating the plate. It would thus appear that Pi Sheng had found an overall solution to the many problems of typography: the manufacture, the assembling, and the recovery of indefinitely reusable type.
In about 1313 a magistrate named Wang Chen seems to have had a craftsman carve more than 60,000 characters on movable wooden blocks so that a treatise on the history of technology could be published. To him is also attributed the invention of horizontal compartmented cases that revolved about a vertical axis to permit easier handling of the type. But Wang Chen’s innovation, like that of Pi Sheng, was not followed up in China.
In Korea, on the contrary, typography, which had appeared by the first half of the 13th century, was extensively developed under the stimulus of King Htai Tjong, who, in 1403, ordered the first set of 100,000 pieces of type to be cast in bronze. Nine other fonts followed from then to 1516; two of them were made in 1420 and 1434, before Europe in its turn discovered typography.
Nifty!
Patriotism, Superstar-Jesus-style.
Oh my goodness gracious. What the hell is this?!
Warning: you may have to wash out your eyes afterwards. This isn’t for the faint of banality tolerance.
*wide eyes*
OMG.
Entire text of the New Testament, Aramaic/English interlinear (literal English translation under every Aramaic word), free, online, gorgeous. Oh.
fe.male
Just spent a few minutes in the car listening to today’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. The topic is, why are there so few female voices in political journalism? The answers are, of course, complex, and the issue extends far beyond political journalism.
And a thought occurred to me, as I’m writing a paper to present this weekend at a conference: I tend to quote men. It’s true. Like most other people, I have an implicit bias towards men when it comes to giving automatic credibility to expressed opinions or published research.
Not getting into the whys and hows of this issue, nor indeed into whether it’s a problem (after all, there is more writing authored by men in the first place). But I’m going to make a conscious effort to cite more women over the next few conference papers, and see what happens. I’m curious as to whether I can actually find enough such citations to get to a 50-50 ratio.
Goodness, but time flies.
I’ll come back to the blog someday. Hopefully someday soon. For the moment, life is full of life!
I leave you with this poem. Safe for work, natch. I wish I knew who wrote it.
Edit: Fixed URL. It works now.
Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.
Now that’s happiness.
Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.
Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.
And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?
And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?
Question for Seattleites.
I’m going to this conference in June. Thanks to the grant, travel is reimbursable, but only to a point; and it seems much less expensive to fly into Seattle and take the clipper ferry than to fly all the way to Victoria. However, the scheduling exigencies of flying to Seattle mean that I’d probably have to stay there overnight on 6/14 (Tuesday, and I’d be taking the 7:30am ferry on Wednesday) and 6/18 (a Saturday). At this point I don’t know how late things will run on Saturday the 18th, as the full program hasn’t been posted yet; I may have to stay in Victoria and go straight home on 6/19.
So, hypothetically: if I do this, would any of y’all reading this and residing in the Seattle area have crash space? Reward possibilities for hosting me include chocolate, a homecooked meal (you’d have to allow me the run of your kitchen for that), a low-maintenance guest of sunny disposition, my undying gratitude, and/or negotiable.
I want to be Grafton when I grow up.
Anthony Grafton, author of The Footnote: A Curious History, has also written Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800. I’m reading the latter as part of some research into the history of knowledge.
As an aside: there is no article on the history of knowledge in the Britannica, nor is it a Library of Congress category. Wild! The LoC has “Learning and Scholarship — History of,” but that’s different somehow. I can’t put my finger on how, though. Anyone?
Back to Grafton. Here’s the beginning paragraph of one of the chapters in Defenders:
Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man was no headline to excite the Renaissance public; but Amphibian Creates Culture was out of the ordinary even in the sixteenth century.
Well, that’s a good way to get the reader’s attention. Grafton writes so engagingly! You almost forget that he’s a rigorous scholar.
So, arts + sciences = culture, huh? That’s an interesting implicit assertion.
Edit: Holy s**t! Okay, I was too excited about that paragraph above to read any further, otherwise this beginning of the second paragraph would’ve struck me as well: “The fish who gave us civilization appeared at the beginning of the account of Babylonian mythology and history written by Berosus, a priest of Bel, early in the third century B.C.” Oh, so now arts + sciences = civilization! I wonder if Grafton is just being cavalier, or subtly making an actual claim. Given that he’s brilliant, I’d have a hard time believing that this wording was unintentional.
Seattle.
You know, this article makes me a bit sad. If what it describes is true, I’d be miserable in Seattle.
The only time I visited it, I fell in love with the city. I even decided, right away, that it would be great to live there for a while. This was unusual enough to be surprising; the feeling of “this could be home” is generally reserved for non-North-American cities. Seattle’s been calling me back ever since that first visit.
And I still want to go back… to visit. But it would be frightening to move to a city where people actively rebuff attempts at meaningful communication often enough to warrant a Seattle Times article.
