history

The mystery of the Voynich mss

commonplace book, cool stuff, history, language & literature, security / /

From John Baez:

A page from the Voynich mssThe Voynich manuscript is by far the most mysterious of all texts. It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out. Though the manuscript was found in Italy, statistical analyses show the text is completely different in character from any European language.

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Early winter morning with my father

commonplace book, history / /

An image of my father that enter my mind at odd times:

I’m in high school in the early 80s, it’s the dead of winter and early in the morning, so it’s still dark out, and very cold. My Dad always got up at 6 a.m. and was at his gas station by 6:30. I’m sleeping on the couch in the front room of his small house, and it’s a school morning … my mother must have been out of town. At 7:15, I’m awoken by the sound of my father coming in the front door to wake me up and take me to school. I look up bleary-eyed from the couch to see his face in the small window at the top of his front door, never locked. When I remember this event, I think of my father’s love for me, often hard for him to express, but obvious to me here.

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The spirit of the real Texas Rangers

commonplace book, history, overheard, true stories / /

I rather like this, even if it’s probably not true:

The story goes that Captain Jack Hayes and his men, the fabled Texas Rangers, were surrounded and vastly outnumbered during one of the many skirmishes of the Mexican War. He made the following prayer, certainly one of the most colorful ever made before battle: “Oh Lord, we are about to join battle with vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and, Heavenly Father, we would like for you to be on our side and help us; but if you can’t do it, for Christ’s sake don’t go over to the enemy, but just lie low and keep dark, and you’ll see one of the damndest fights you ever saw in all your born days. Amen.”

As I said, probably apocryphal, but a great story nonetheless.

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Love those pamphlet titles

commonplace book, history / /

From “American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante“, a review of a biography of Anne Hutchinson, in Salon:

If [Anne] Hutchinson had been born a man, some historians argue, she might have found a place in her society as a minister. She might have carved out a life like that of John Cotton, the unorthodox founder of Congregationalism, Hutchinson’s teacher and the man her family had followed to Boston when he was forced to leave England. On the other hand, she might have turned out like the renegade Rev. Roger Williams, another early settler of Rhode Island, who was driven out of Boston for voicing a variety of objectionable views, most notably the belief that the English had no right to claim Indian lands or subject Native Americans to forced conversions. Williams conducted a pamphlet feud with Cotton, set off when he published ‘The Bloody Tenet of Persecution,’ a tract in support of religious freedom. Cotton then put out ‘The Bloody Tenet Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb.’ Williams responded with ‘The Bloody Tenet Made Yet More Bloody by Mr. Cotton’s Endeavor to Wash It White in the Blood of the Lamb.

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Famous domain name sales

business, history, technology / /

From Michael Tchong’s “GreatDomains.com” in ICONOCAST (24 February 2000):

In 1997, idNames.com sold “business.com” for $150,000 … That same domain recently sold for $7.5 million. Here are some of the more notable domain-name sales:

+------+---------------------+------------+
|  Rnk | Domain              | Sale Price |
+------+---------------------+------------+
|   1. | Business.com        |   $7.5M    |
|   2. | AltaVista.com       |    3.3     |
|   3. | Loans.com           |    3.0     |
|   4. | Autos.com           |    2.2     |
|   5. | Express.com         |    2.0     |
|   6. | Fly.com             |    1.5     |
|   7. | Bingo.com           |    1.1     |
|   8. | WallStreet.com      |    1.0     |
|   9. | ForSalebyOwner.com  |    0.8     |
|  10. | Drugs.com           |    0.8     |
+------+---------------------+------------+

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Movie studios and their genres

commonplace book / /

From Neither the Power Nor the Glory: Why Hollywood leaves originality to the indies, on Slate:

Back in the old days of the studio system, the brand of a Hollywood studio meant something to the moviegoing public. Each studio, with its roster of stars under contract, came to be identified with a particular genre of movies: MGM (musicals and romantic comedies); Paramount (historical epics); Warner Bros. (gangster stories); 20th Century Fox (social dramas); Universal (horror movies); Disney (cartoons).

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Drunken sailors

history / /

From "Peter Smalley – HMS Expedient", at Books and Writing:

Peter Smalley: … In the 18th century, each seaman was given half a pint of rum a day…in our terms (because of the strength of the rum), a pint of rum a day. So they were permanently drunk, more or less. Well, they led terribly rigorous lives, and that was the way the navy kept them happy.

Tony Barrell: And when Captain Rennie, who’s one of the main protagonists of HMS Expedient, its captain, threatens to withdraw the rum ration; that’s worse than threatening them with the lash.

Peter Smalley: I think in most ships it was regarded as the ultimate punishment because these guys were alcohol-dependent. If you took away their grog they suffered withdrawal, it was as simple as that, and they hated that more than anything. They’d rather take a dozen lashes than have their grog withdrawn. That’s absolutely true.

 

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The history of =

commonplace book, history, science / /

From "The History of the Equals Sign", at The Science Show:

In 1543, [Robert] Record published The Ground of Arts, the first ever maths book in English, which ran through over fifty editions … Until 1557, mathematicians had finished off a calculation by laboriously writing out the words, is equal to, which was sometimes abbreviated to AE or OE from the Latin word for equal, aequalis. But Record had a better idea, why not use a symbol, he said, to avoid, as he put it, the tedious repetition of these words he proposed the use of a pair of parallel lines. Using this simple device that we now call the equals sign released an enormous logjam in the efficient handling of numbers and the implications extended far beyond pure maths.

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The printed book results in more handwritten mss

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “William Caxton“, at The Science Show:

More than 500 years later a copy of Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer became the most expensive book ever sold, knocked down at auction in the 1990s for 4.6 million pounds. But in the 15th Century, the obvious appeal of the newly printed books lay in their value for money. Books became so commonplace indeed, that some snobs employed scribes to copy Caxton’s printed editions back into manuscript, while both church and government became alarmed at the access to new ideas that the printing press offered to a widening public. [Emphasis added]

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The first printed English books

commonplace book, history, technology / /

From “William Caxton“, at The Science Show:

In 1474, his History of Troy, his own book, became the first book to be printed in English and two years later he brought his press to England setting up shop near the Chapter House in the precinct of Westminster Abbey, where parliament met. Caxton had an eye for a good location. Along the route between the palace of Westminster and the Chapter House shuffled lawyers, churchmen, courtiers, MPs – the book buying elite of England. The former cloth trader also had an eye for a best seller. The second book he printed was about chess, the game and play of the chess. Then came in fairly quick succession, a French-English dictionary, a translation of Aesop’s fables, several popular romances, Mallory’s tale of Camelot in Le Mort d’Arthur, some school text books, a history of England, an encyclopaedia entitled The Mirror of the World and Chaucer’s bawdy evergreen collection, The Canterbury Tales.

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Self-sacrifice in plague time

commonplace book, history, security / /

From The Plague in Britain, on The Science Show:

Outside London, the disease spread wherever the plague flea travelled, and it is thought to have reached the village of Eyam in Derbyshire that September of 1665 in a box of tailor’s samples and old clothing sent to Edward Cooper, a village trader. … by mid-summer 1666 over seventy of the village’s 360 inhabitants had succumbed.

It was [Rev. William] Mompesson, a married man with two children, who took the step that made Eyam famous – he urged his congregation to follow Jesus’s words in the Gospel of St John: ‘Greater love hath no man that this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. Rather than fleeing the village and spreading the infection around the Peak District, argued the young rector, the community should stick together and help their fellow-men. This, clearly, was to risk their own lives in an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice. The congregation agreed, and for more than a year Eyam became effectively a huge plague house, shut off from the world. Their neighbours, meanwhile, who included the Earl of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth House, responded to their gesture by leaving food and other provisions at the outskirts of the village. Derbyshire was spared further plague, and Eyam paid the price, losing more than 260 inhabitants, some three-quarters of the population. Among the last to die was Mompesson’s wife Catherine, who had gone from house to house during the outbreak, ministering to the sick.

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BSD vs. Linux

history, technology / /

As a Linux user, I don’t have a lot of daily experience using BSD. Oh sure, I use it on a couple of servers that I rent, but I certainly have never used it on the desktop. And while I certainly understand the concepts, history, and ideas behind Linux very well (although there’s always more to learn), I don’t really know that much about BSD. So it was a delight to read BSD vs. Linux.

“It’s been my impression that the BSD communit{y,ies}, in general, understand Linux far better than the Linux communit{y,ies} understand BSD. I have a few theories on why that is, but that’s not really relevant. I think a lot of Linux people get turned off BSD because they don’t really understand how and why it’s put together. Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.”

In particular, I thought the contrast between the non-unified nature of Linux and the unified nature of BSD was pretty darn fascinating. As the author points out, this is not to criticize Linux – it’s just the way it is. It’s not a value judgment. Here’s the author on BSD:

“By contrast, BSD has always had a centralized development model. There’s always been an entity that’s “in charge” of the system. BSD doesn’t use GNU ls or GNU libc, it uses BSD’s ls and BSD’s libc, which are direct descendents of the ls and libc that where in the CSRG-distributed BSD releases. They’ve never been developed or packaged independently. You can’t go ‘download BSD libc’ somewhere, because in the BSD world, libc by itself is meaningless. ls by itself is meaningless. The kernel by itself is meaningless. The system as a whole is one piece, not a bunch of little pieces.”

11 pages of really interesting, well-explained analysis. If you’re a Linux user, go read it. You’ll learn about the other great open source OS.

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