Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur

"Whatever is said in Latin, sounds important"

X-URL: http://fh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/20/3/354?rss=1

* French History Volume 20, Number 3 * Pp. 354

French History Advance Access originally published online on August 4,
2006
French History 2006 20(3):354; doi:10.1093/fh/crl014

Latin or the Empire of a Sign

Latin or the Empire of a Sign. By Fran?oise Waquet (trans. John Howe).
London: Verso. 2003. 400 pp. ?13.00 ISBN 1 85984 402 2.

`He'll never make captain' comments a US serviceman^ in `South
Pacific' about a junior officer who cannot^ translate verses of
Horace. Fran?oise Waquet's^ book studies and illustrates the uses to
which Latin has been^ put from the fifteenth century to the 1960s, for
certain careers,^ as an essential part of a gentleman's education, an
attribute^ of social class, as a vehicle (or filter) for the
dissemination^ of religion and learning, and thereby as an emblem,
badge, sign^ or standard. When curricula that included Latin were
classified^ as fee-paying in early-nineteenth-century France, the
position,^ and certainly the perception, of `having Latin'^ as a
reinforcement of social class could be seen clearly. Although,^ over
the centuries, the standard of Latinity achieved seldom^ rose very
high, its inclusion in schooling was always energetically^ advocated;
the author highlights the national controversy (not^ all of it
cerebral) resulting from the edict issued in the 1960s^ by the then
Minister of National Education in France, Edgar^ Faure, setting a
sixth-grade curriculum that excluded Latin.^

She maps the move to vernacular languages in the western churches^ and
in learned writings. The reader is reminded that it is never^ too late
for a schism to develop, as the organization Una Voce^ was formed in
France in the 1960s `for the safeguard of^ Latin, Gregorian chant, and
sacred polyphony in the public prayer^ of the Church'. The active
development of the use of Latin^ to fortify professional mystique in
medicine, law and religion^ is well illustrated, as is the obsolete
fashion of leaving (conspicuously!)^ in the `obscurity of a learned
language' texts which^ might corrupt the vulnerable.^

In John Howe's translation, this work is likely to be^ a remarkably
easy read for the non-specialist and a useful overview^ for others.
Now and again, this reviewer found some of the bon^ mots (there are
lots of subsection titles and lots of inverted^ commas in this book)
arresting but not catchy--a translation^ matter or a symptom of
cultural difference? The concentration^ (far from exclusively) on
examples from France should not detract^ from this work's value, still
less its interest (to, say,^ British readers).^

The title does not do this work justice: it is neither arcane^ nor
evangelical--erudite and entertaining, rather. The^ author leaves the
reader to consider the case for fostering^ Latin and its study as a
specialism, lest records (in Latin)^ of history, law, religion and
culture cease to be accessible^ to us all.^

John M. Taylor University of Stirling

Handwriting and subjectivity, and its form over the day

Same here. Why does the handwriting
change over the day? From neat uncial
to a scrawl, to just readable and sweeping
Pitman lines.
Are our motor skills in that way affected
by so much key-pressing?

X-URL: http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2006/10/29/3373
Memex 1.1 John Naughton's online diary
_________________________________________________________________
Handwriting and subjectivity

I've had some interesting conversations recently with friends and
colleagues about handwriting. I'm perpetually annoyed and puzzled by
my own. Some days it seems legible and orderly, but usually I find it
intensely irritating. And I wonder why it varies so much from day to
day. Is it to do with mood, or hassle or tiredness? Or something else?
In many cases (e.g. the pages of my notebook shown in the photograph)
my scribbling seems -- to me -- to be illegible and hopelessly untidy.
Other people's handwriting, in contrast, always seems to me to be
orderly and consistent -- even when it's illegible. But then I
discover -- from talking to them -- that they think my handwriting is
neat, orderly, legible and consistent, which it manifestly is not! So
is it the case that other people's handwriting always seems better
than one's own?

Another interesting observation. I spend a lot of my working day with
techies. Yet -- with only two exceptions -- they all carry and use
paper notebooks. (The two exceptions carry and make notes on tablet
PCs.) It's clear that the paper notebook has a lot of life left in it
yet.
....

Fishing for the last fish: The war on the oceans

Science Show - 21 October 2006 - Depletion of world fish stocks
X-URL: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2006/1766715.htm

Science Show on ABC Radio National

21 October 2006

Depletion of world fish stocks

Terry Hughes discusses reaction to a paper published in Science 17th
March 2006 which highlighted the issue of depletion of fish stocks in
the world's oceans.

Transcript
....Daniel Pauly talked of declaring war on fish.

Daniel Pauly: The figure that emerges is that we have about 10% of
the biomass of large fish left...or less in most cases. And that
means where we had ten tonnes per square kilometre of large fish we
have now one tonne or less, and for some of these large predators
such as sharks, it is one in a hundred that is left, not one in ten.

Robyn Williams: 90% have disappeared in what sort of time?

Daniel Pauly: Well, people who have looked at this in more detail can
show that it usually takes about 20 years for an industrial fishery
to reduce the stock to one-tenth of what it was before.

Robyn Williams: That's a very quick time, isn't it?

Daniel Pauly: Well, yes. Now, let's not forget it, most of the
technology we throw at fish is military technology. All the acoustic
equipment was developed, for example, in WWII by the allies in
chasing German submarines. The GPS, which is the global positioning
system developed during the Cold War to position things and to study
the Earth in great detail, and now this technology is available to
everybody to catch the last fish as if it were, I don't know, a
Soviet tank.

Robyn Williams: So it's in fact a war on fish you're describing.

Daniel Pauly: Yes, it certainly is a war on fish, and what I'm saying
is that we're winning it; we have won the war on fish.

Robyn Williams: We're going to wipe them out to the very last one.

Daniel Pauly: It's crazy but it is exactly what's happening. We have
deployed industrial military technology against the fish and we have
obviously won. The biggest fish have brains the size of peas and the
way they defend themselves against their enemies-by hiding or
swimming fast et cetera-to us they don't make much of a difference
anymore. Before they did; if a fish could hide between rocks at a
1,000 metre depth then you couldn't catch it, you couldn't see it,
obviously it was too deep, and even if you could reach that deep with
your net you couldn't catch it because it was between rocks. But now
we can see it because we have all the equipment so we see it,
ridiculously, like a soldier who has night goggles who can see
somebody who doesn't, and so we win, we win the war against fish.
.... [ 170 more lines in transcript ]
Guests

Terry Hughes
Director ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies James Cook
University Townsville Queensland 4811 Australia www.coralcoe.org.au

Daniel Pauly
Professor and Director Fisheries Centre The University of British
Columbia Vancouver, BC Canada http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/members/dpauly/

Further Information

ECOLOGY: Globalization, Roving Bandits, and Marine Resources Berkes
et al. Science 17 March 2006: 1557-1558

What is a Dobson Unit?

What is a Dobson Unit?

A dobson unit is the most basic measure used in
ozone research. The unit is named after
G.M.B. Dobson, one of the first scientists to
investigate atmospheric ozone (~1920 - 1960).
He designed the 'Dobson Spectrometer' - the
standard instrument used to measure ozone from
the ground. The Dobson spectrometer measures
the intensity of solar UV radiation at four wavelengths,
two of which are absorbed by ozone and two of
which are not.

[ http://jwocky.gsfc.nasa.gov/dobson.html [

The illustration above shows a column of air,
10 deg x 5 deg, over Labrador, Canada. The amount
of ozone in this column (i.e. covering the 10 x 5 deg
area) is conveniently measured in Dobson Units.

If all the ozone in this column were to be compres-
sed to stp (0 deg C and 1 atmosphere pressure) and
spread out evenly over the area, it would form a
slab approximately 3mm thick.

1 Dobson Unit (DU) is defined to be 0.01 mm
thickness at stp; the ozone layer over Labrador then
is ~300 DU.
NOTE: This page, including the copyrighted graphic,
is based on a page developed by Owen Garrett for the
Centre for Atmospheric Science at Cambridge University,
UK. The center has kindly given us permission to
reproduce it. (Take their excellent Multimedia Ozone
Hole Tour!)
http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/index.html

http://www.env.go.jp/en/wpaper/1990/eae190023000001.gif

http://www.env.go.jp/en/wpaper/1990/eae190024000001.gif

"Aussie Ministers push case for nuclear solution"

Or a mix of both extreme conservation and
alternative sources.

"It's a war out there" for energy, water
and land.
There was a sense of sacrifice in war for
many. Can the population return to those
days or can't they see that far ahead?

Can Oz give up the comfortable lifestyle
for a clean energy one, even one that is
tied to nuclear?

X-URL: http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/10/16/1160850872643.html

Ministers push case for nuclear solution

Date: October 17 2006A Sydney Morning Herald
Phillip Coorey, Chief Political Correspondent

THE Federal Government has ramped up its push for nuclear energy with
one minister suggesting work on the first power station could begin
within 10 years.

With crippling drought placing the focus on climate change, the Prime
Minister, John Howard, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer,
and the Industry Minister, Ian Macfarlane, all spruiked nuclear energy
yesterday as part of the solution.

A Government-appointed taskforce inquiring into the nuclear industry
is due to report by the end of this year, but it was clear yesterday
the Government had embraced the concept of nuclear power in the
context of climate change and would be pushing it in the lead-up to
next year's federal election.

.... The Finance Minister, Nick Minchin, warned recently the only way to
make nuclear energy financially competitive would be to tax the rival
coal and gas industries so heavily as to make them non-viable.

The Labor leader, Kim Beazley, restated his party's opposition to
nuclear energy yesterday because it was old and dirty technology that
created problems with waste. He has been using the drought to promote
his climate change policies which focus on clean, renewable energy
sources such as wind and solar.

"Our future is about renewables, not reactors," he said during a visit
to a wind- and solar-powered school in Canberra.

The Krill!!, the krill!!!

No, not the Krell from "Forbidden Planet" (1956)
[ http://imdb.com/title/tt0049223/ ]
but krill, the maintenace of large marine life on
much the the planet.
[ http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/stories/s1722888.htm ]

Imagine an icy aquarium forever
"...we decided to build a purpose-built facility which maintains the krill at zero degrees but the researchers can live comfortably at about 15 to 18 degrees, which is much better for all the experimental equipment as well of course."

"We still don't know how big their population is. I mean estimates range but somewhere in the order of 160 million tonnes. An enormous biomass of animals, and at the moment man's fishing 100,000 tonnes a year and that makes it the biggest of the Antarctic fisheries at present."

Now all re-read Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke and stop your rivers and
sewers from discharging into the ocean.

Of course we could relate to the increasing alarm about commercial fisheries
and their reduced catch of large szied fish.

Mining really old data

Among other topics at the CINF conference
[ http://acscinf.org/dbx/mtgs/232nm/symp/S20947.asp ]
Wednesday, 9/13/2006

Rediscovery of Older Information


....Recent advances in the phlogiston theory: Mining the *really* old literature
F. Bartow Culp

The Test Pattern wins!

In this week's BBC News magazine there is a non-serious
poll on revival of early TV programs and in a vote (below)
the test pattern or test card won out.

# BBC NEWS | Magazine (p4 of 4)
Rainbow and Play for Today are returning to our screens. What other TV
shows would you revive?
Nationwide
[hbar_limegreen.gif] 16.33%
The Herbs
[hbar_firebrick.gif] 38.95%
The test card
[hbar_lightskyblue.gif] 44.72%

5351 answers so far
Results are indicative and may not reflect public opinion
---------
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/default.stm?dynamic_vot
e=ON#vote_4769982
---------

See http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/
for a series of British and overseas test cards
(or "test patterns" in North America)

A small collection of international ones is at
http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/around_world.html
But google.com/images or images.yahoo.com or alltheweb.com
for "test card" OR "test pattern" will get about 7000 images
on various pages.

The FAQ is somewhat interesting as to why the system of
patterns were chosen. http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/faq.html

Probably no new test patterns will be produced until digital
television produced wide screen TV rather than "Academy ratio"
(4 x 3) TV.

Hmm.. I feel that I should find a large pixel one as the Desktop
pattern and maybe the so-called Screen Saver. Has someone already
done it?

Why is Xu Jinglei China's most popular blog

This, http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/xujinglei ,
is China's most popular blog.

And with a click payment to read, very lucrative.

Why is she so popular with no salacious pictures as some
others post?

What happened to the angry CBC lockout blogs?

PlanetCBC [ http://peterjanes.homeip.net/cbc/ ]
attempted to collect all the English language
blogs (The French CBC west of Ottawa river was
also locked out) that were dealing with
the lockout.

So what have they become?
Domestic, self-centred mewlings.

Should be have expected anymore?

Why doesn't everyone use mouseless web browsing?

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=879&application=firefox

Quick Description

Mouseless Browsing (MLB) means id-based browsing. Major goal of this extension is to enable browsing only by using the numpad keys.

HOW DOES IT WORK...

* Mouseless browsing bases on marking all links, form elements and frames with ids. If you do not like to see all of them, you can configure this in preferences dialog of MLB. You can trigger an action (e.g. following the link) by simply entering the id and depending on the configuration confirming it by pressing Enter. When the checkbox "Execute automatically..." is checked the action is automatically triggered after the specified delay for auto-execution.
......

Almost as good as Lynx or Blynx
[URL: http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/ ]
which can read blogs without a lot of paraphenalia

Lynx is a better browser, ...

... and better in Blynx settings.
http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/

So why are so few using it?

They have time for graphics?
The pretty colours entice them?

Or was it the default browser?

Appended a view of this in Blynx.
-----------------
Blogger: AdAustralis :: Create Post (p1 of 2)

[1]AdAustralis

[2]<- Back to Dashboard [3]? Help [4]x Sign Out
* [5]Posting
* [6]Settings
* [7]Template
* [8]View Blog

* [9]Create
* [10]Edit posts
* [11]Moderate comments
* [12]Status

Title:
[13]Lynx is a better browser, ...___________________
Link:
[14]http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/____________________ [15]Help

[16]... and better in Blynx settings.______________
[17]http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/___________________
[18]_______________________________________________
[19]So why are so few using it?____________________
[20]_______________________________________________
[21]They have time for graphics? _________________
[22]The pretty colours entice them?________________
[23]_______________________________________________
[24]Or was it the default browser?_________________
[25]_______________________________________________
[26]Appended a view of this in Blynx.______________

Connotea: an idea release that may inspire?

Connotea, a "free online reference management service" from Nature magazine (supposedly the New York City office) allows the saving of links to favourite articles, references, weblogs and other online resources.

A public blog for science then.

But few are using the idea of a blog.

And why not just references to printed (pre-online?) material?

An idea for social bookmarking in fields which are notorious for weak people trying to hold all the information to themselves.

Look at the lists and see that it is a hobby for some. And is there any benefit for public display of thinking and reading? Does it lead to better publications? Are the people in the "trade" sociable?