Sunday cat pix

LG’s turn today. First a paw.

Sound of the week

More like “sound of the month”, I admit, but here’s a new one: Whistlers (mp3, 440K, 25sec).

David Morneau committed himself to composing a 60-second piece every day for a year. The experiment ended on 30 June. You can hear the results at 60 x 365: six hours and five minutes of music. Webern’s entire output was just fifteen hours. (See Molly Sheridan, “Inescapable creativity: composing 365”, New Music Box 30 Jun 2008.)

Previous Sound: echoburble.

Script: NetNewsWire to Twitterific

I’ve done it again : a little applescript that sends information about the NetNewsWire item you’re currently reading to Twitter via Twitterific. In order to use it you need NetNewsWire, a Twitter account and Twitterific.

Download nnwtotwitter-script.zip. This is an archive; if it isn’t decompressed automatically, double-clicking should do the trick.

If that’s Greek to you, try some Ink Spots (from the Internet Archive).

In case you’ve just joined us…

You may want to memorize this “Concise history of silly Internet traditions”, courtesy of Brad Reed at Networkworld.com.

Meanwhile our “mental recession” deepens. (“Mental recession” looks good for becoming a new internet tradition.) It takes a lot to leave a newstalker speechless, but here it is: Freddie Mae’s stock dives, live. Why? Could be all those mental foreclosures in LA and elsewhere.

Scripts: Omniweb and WebKit to Twitterific

More scripts: send your current item in Omniweb or WebKit (Safari) to Twitter. In order to use it you need Omniweb or WebKit, a Twitter account and Twitterific.

Download omniweb-to-twitter.zip.

Download webkit-to-twitter.zip. This should work for Safari too. Open the script in Script Editor and change ‘WebKit’ to ‘Safari’.

Sunday cat pix

Below you see HS on the coffee table with some light reading. Elbert Hubbard was a successful businessman, so successful that he was able to retire at a young age and found Roycroft, a community influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, and in particular by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Politically he began as a socialist and ended as an ardent defender of free enterprise. The Scrapbook is a commonplace book of quotations, mostly of the uplifting sort, from a surprising variety of sources. It’s not at all rare, although it seems that copies that include the original box are not easy to find. Hubbard and his second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, a well-known suffragist, died together in 1915 when the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. The Roycrofters continued until 1938.

Among his many publications were the Little Journeys, a series of brief biographies of great men and women. The tenth volume, Great Teachers, includes a chapter on Hypatia.

Wednesday garden pix

Forget gardens! How can we obtain mutant stocks of zebrafish for our high school lab? (Via Quomodocumque.)

11 July 2008

Sunday cat pix

It’s an all-Josie Cat Pix. Here she is at the kitchen window.

Josie, 13 July 2008

Sunday cat pix

LG at the 2nd floor water bowl. I’m not sure what produced this odd depth-of-field effect.

LG, 25 July 2008

Patron saints

St. Isidore. Source:
Wikipedia Commons

What with budget-cutting, FBI snoops, and book-stealing, libraries need all the help they can get. In the US, the patron saint of libraries is St. Jerome, translator of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin; in Europe St. Lawrence (probably the first of that name) watches over them.

The patron saint of that branch of the Library of Babel known as the Internet is Saint Isidore (,,), best known for his Etymologiæ, an encyclopedia of ancient learning that became the most-used textbook of the early Middle Ages. The Hindu protector of libraries (and of learning generally) is the elephant-god Ganesh.

One thing libraries do well (when they’re not burned down, censored, or pillaged) is to preserve old books and manuscripts, and to make them available to the public. The Codex Sinaiticus, which is thought to be from the mid-4th century, is the oldest surviving complete copy of the New Testament in Greek. It also contains some apocryphal texts and a version of the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament;

Codex Boernerianus, f12 (from the Epistle to the Romans), Greek with interlinear Latin translation.
Source: Sächsischen Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB), Digitale Bibliothek.

the first part of this, from Genesis to I Chronicles, is missing. Only one other manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus, is as old; manuscripts older than these two contain only fragments of the New Testament. Four institutions now own parts of the Codex Sinaiticus:

• The British Library, UK
• Leipzig University Library, Germany
• St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai
• The National Library of Russia, St Petersburg

These four are cooperating to conserve the text and to digitize it for online distribution. Eight books so far have been processed, including Jeremiah, Psalms, and Mark.

Other early codices now online include the Codex Boreelianus at Utrecht (11th century) and the Codex Boernerianus at Dresden (9th century).

Sources:

• “Qui sont les Saints-patrons des bibliothécaires?”, Bibliobsession 25 July 2008.
• “Who’s watching over our libraries”, Warrior Librarian Weekly s.d., citing unpublished work by Robert Lee Hadden.
• “Patron Saint of Internet Shines in New Data Center at Boston College”, Chronicle of higher education 2 Dec 2006.
• Chris Reidy, “Internet saint overlooks BC data center”, Boston.com 1 Dec 2006.
• Nate Anderson, “Patron saint of the Internet smiles on Boston College data center”, Ars technica 3 Dec 2006 .
• Stefanie, “So Many Books”, Just a Few Things 23 July 2008.
• Mark Thwaite, “Codex sinaiticus”, The Book Depository 24 July 2008.
• Dave Graham, “Oldest New Testament Bible heads into cyberspace”, Reuters 21 Jul 2008.