Meridian Hill and Meridians West

While looking idly at Parkman's A Half-Century of Conflict, chapter "France in the Far West", I noticed

This meeting [of a French expedition with the Comanches] took place a little north of the Arkansas, apparently where the river makes a northward bend, near the 22d degree of west longitude.

(Footnote 1, p.. 577 in the Library of America edition.) That would the 22d degree using Washington, D.C., as the prime meridian: using Greenwich, it is about the 99th meridian. I have long known that Meridian Hill has its name from the period when Americans drew the prime meridian through the White House. But I hadn't before noticed any figures of longitude using the Washington meridian.

The footnote interested me, and I dipped here and there into the two volumes of France and England in North America looking for figures of longitude, without much luck. The map in the Library of America edition of Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac uses the Greenwich meridian. I'm not sure why Parkman would have used the Greenwich prime meridian for his earlier book and Washington for his later.

On the other hand, a map of 1837 reproduced in The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier 17834-1846 does use the Washington meridian. Perhaps Parkman's source for the location of the meeting used the reckoning by Washington, and Parkman copied it without adjusting. Judging from the atlas, the meeting was pretty close to where Fort Dodge, Kansas, now is.

Teaching and Coaching

The former chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools has just achieved former status. He did this by arranging that his daughter, unhappy at the arts magnet high school, should transfer into Wilson, a good high school, rather than into Dunbar, not a particularly good one. This was bound to become known, for even if an organization that large could keep secrets, still one cannot be chancellor of a large school system without making enemies. Once out, it was bound to create resentment. Wilson High School has a waiting list of six hundred students who do not live within its boundaries but would like--whose parents would like them--to attend.

It strikes me that being head of many school districts is much like being the football coach at a lower tier school in a power conference. Not all the good will and all the plans in the world will give Directional State  much of a chance to beat Alabama or Auburn. Not all the good will and mission statements in the world will anytime soon turn Desperate High into Boston Latin School or the Bronx High School of Science. Pretty much everyone knows this, but boosters and parents are impatient.

And in both cases, it largely comes down to recruiting. I think that it was Bum Phillips who spoke of Bear Bryant as a coach who "could take his'n and beat your'n or take your'n and beat his'n". There may be some such out there. But Alabama and Ohio State take all measures in their power to have the best their'n to put on the field. And when highly educated professionals move to Fairfax County or Potomac for the school district, that district's success builds on itself.

Still, there are compensations for the coach who goes 3-7 in the Big Ten or the school superintendent who isn't getting the job done. The university or the school board may become impatient and buy out the contract. A co-worker knew a school superintendent who had been bought out a couple of times--not for any particular fault of his own--and  had at times enjoyed the salary from his current job along with the salary from his previous one.

A Curious Couple

Today, February 14, 2018 is both St. Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday. I did not recall the two falling on the same day, and my lack of recall was correct. It has not happened since 1945, before I was born, and well before I paid attention to St. Valentine's Day. The coincidence will recur in 2024 and 2029, then not again until 2070. All this is according to the  "Anonymous Gregorian" or "Meeus/Jones/Butcher" algorithm offered in the Wikipedia entry Computus. (The Easter dates this yields check out against those in an old St. Andrew Daily Missal, though that missal's years cover a much shorter range, which overlaps with none of the years of coincidence.)

Found in Fowler

For years I have noticed and disliked the journalistic use of "exponential" to mean "rapid". Without knowing the exponent, one does not know how rapid the growth is, for one thing--if the exponent is 0, the growth is linear. For another, articles using the term often enough give just two numbers, one small and one large. Innumerable curves could be fitted through those two numbers, all with different leading exponents.

So having found a copy of the first edition of Modern English Usage on the shelves, I was pleased to notice the article 

progression. Arithmetical p. & geometrical p. There are in constant demand to express a rapid rate of increase, which is not involved in either of them, & is not even suggested by a. p. Those who use the expressions should bear in mind (1) that you cannot determine the nature of the progression from two terms whose relative place in the series is unknown, (2) that ever rate of increase that could be named is slower than some rates of a. p. & g .p., & faster than some others & consequently (3) that the phrases 'better than a. p., than g. p.', 'almost in a. p., g. p.', are wholly meaningless.
 In 1903 there were ten thousand 'paying guests', last year [1906] fifty thousand. The rate of increase is better, it will be observed than arithmetical progression. Better, certainly, than a. p. with increment 1, of which the fourth annual term would have been 10,003; but as certainly worse than a. p. with increment a million, of which the fourth term would have been 3,010,000; neither better nor worse than, but a case of, a. p. with increment 13333 1/3. The writer meant a. p. with annual increment 10,000; but as soon as we see what he meant to say we see also that it was not wortth saying, since it tells us no more than that, as we knew before, fifty thousand is greater than forty thousand.
Even g. p. may be so slow that to raise 210,000 in three years to as little as the 10,003 mentioned above is merely a matter of fixing the increment ratio low enough. Neither a. p. nor g. p. necessarily implies rapid progress. The point of the contrast between them is that one involves growth or decline at a constant pace, & the other at an increasing  pace. Hence the famous sentence in Malthus about population & subsistence, the first increasing in a g. & the second in an a. ratio, which perhaps started the phrases on their career as POPULARIZED TECHNICALITIES.

Books Not Stolen

This week an item appeared on the neighborhood email list. Someone had stolen a package with Crocs and vitamins from a neighbor's porch, leaving behind a box with a copy of Manhattan Beach. The intended recipient of Manhattan Beach responded, and then collected it. Nobody has so far reported finding a box of Crocs and vitamins on his porch, and a box with electronics missing. I infer that Crocs and vitamins are more easily sold than books.

My wife remarks that the the thief must have known that the first package was a book. I guess so, but I can't think what book would be better to steal for resale than Manhattan Beach. Perhaps if it had been a true crime book, he could have kept it to read for tips. We suppose that he carried it to another porch instead of discarding it because that way he went up the steps with a box and came back with one, making the theft less obvious.

Jennifer Egan is not the only author whose books are not attractive to local thieves. A few years ago we left a car door open, and came out in the morning to find the trunk open. Nothing that we could see had been stolen, and there in the trunk was a collection of essays by Matthew Arnold. A bit after that, a man across the street found  resting on his car an old family Bible, and in his garbage can a case looking like a purse, in which the Bible had been when stole. The owner, a woman who lived around the corner, was very grateful to have it back.