The End of An Era

 It is now almost impossible to buy incandescent light bulbs. We have a dwindling stock in the basement, which we know we cannot replenish. On the whole, I'm happy that LEDs have superseded them. The great advantage of LEDs, of course, is the huge savings in electricity. And though the light can be a bit blue, I prefer it to the dead light of fluorescents. Some we have bought recently have a warm color nearer that of incandescents.

 On the other hand, what about 25-watt bulbs for sconces or chandeliers? What if these are on a rheostat? I gather from a recent visit to the store that the manufacturers have largely taken care of that. Yet I hear that some LEDs behave better than others.

My parents didn't know a time before incandescent light bulbs. I grew up with them. But the toddlers in my neighborhood may be the last generation to know them, if their parents haven't already switched to LEDs.

Authors' Names

 I have been looking at the websites of a couple of local bookstores, for there are still a few presents to buy. At least three of the authors I looked for were pushed well down the list by more prolific or more popular authors.

The historian of late antiquity Peter Brown shares a name with an illustrator. The latter Peter Brown is wholly or partly responsible for a couple of series, "A Creepy Pair of Underwear" and "Killer Robots" that apparently became very popular with the young. It is not impossible to find the historian's memoirs, or his biography of St. Augustine, but depending on the bookstore it can take some clicking. The first time I tried this, I had reached a Spanish translation of one of the killer robot series before I found a history.

Gordon Craig, who wrote excellent books on aspects of German history, suffers from the popularity of Edward Gordon Craig, an English actor and director. There is also a novel, Gordon Craig, Soldier of Fortune that you might encounter before you find any histories of Germany. It is fair to say that the search would have gone better had I supplied Craig's middle initial and searched for Gordon A. Craig.

If you are looking for a novel or work of criticism by W.M. Spackman, you will discover quite a few books, I suppose novels, by one Anne Spackman. At the store I last checked, I never found the Spackman I had in mind, the search trailing off to books with multiple authors, one having a given name starting with W, the other surnamed Spackman.

 One store efficiently offered several titles by the author I had in mind when I searched for Stuart Hampshire. The eight by the philosopher were unfortunately "not in stock at your store". The ninth title offered was lagniappe, thrown in to remind me of the chances of search, Filthy Hampshire Limericks; the Hampshire here was a county, not a surname. As I recall that also was not in stock at my store.

Thinking About the Roman Empire

 A piece in the business section of Sunday's New York Times mentioned in passing that social media had shown this year that men spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. I had no idea what this meant. Our son, home for Christmas, explained that there was a Tik-Tok meme or fad in which women would ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. I must have looked puzzled, for he then asked me how often I do.

Quite a bit, it seems. He is in part to blame, for he gave me a copy of Adrian Goldsworthy's Rome and Persia for my birthday this fall: the Rome of the title is almost entirely the empire, for the republic had only a few years left when Rome and the Parthians first confronted each other. And then I did pick up a volume of Tacitus to look something up the other week. Also I have been reading Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which intermittently involves emperors pagan and Christian, Gothic invasions, and so on.

 I wonder whether this is simply an unusual stretch of preoccupation. But I can't observe myself not thinking of the Roman Empire, can I? And I wonder how many men, who hadn't thought about the Roman Empire since high school history class, found it impossible to avoid such thoughts after they were asked.

Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

 The website of at least one bookstore I know lists some books with the status "usually ships in 1 to 5 days". I long ago lost confidence in the assertion, and have recently been reminded why: it has been about three weeks since I ordered a book said to be in that status, and I have heard nothing back. My suggested emendation:

It is not impossible that we shall be able to find you this book before you forget its name, or why you wished to buy it.

J.G.A. Pocock, RIP

 Today's New York Times carries an obituary of the historian J.G.A. Pocock. The writer considers the most notable among Pocock's work to be the six-volume Barbarism and Religion, a study of the life and times of Edward Gibbon. The last volume of this work came out in 2015, when Pocock was ninety or ninety-one.

Of Pocock's works, I have read only The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. This was recommended by a friend who I think took a class from Pocock at Washington University. The Machiavellian Moment made interesting reading in the 2008 election season, when questions of virtù and prudence, ottimati and popolo came to one's attention. (That may be why I remember the Italian chapters better than the Atlantic chapters.)

I don't think that I will be reading the six volumes of Barbarism and History. For one thing, this would require sitting down and reading all of Gibbon with close attention before I started. But perhaps I will track down a copy of Political Thought and History.

COVID

COVID--in whatever variant is out now, after the initial vaccinations of 2021 and repeated boosters--is not enjoyable, but in my perception not that different from the sort of wintertime crud that one often gets in the US--a night or two of fever, runny nose followed by a deep cough, general lack of energy. Over the years, I have a number of times gone to see a physician with just these symptoms, to be told, Well, it's probably viral, but here's some Keflex just in case. It would not have occurred to me that I had COVID, but my wife was feeling rotten also, and our son bought some tests. He does not have COVID, we do or did. A fortnight after the initial symptoms, I don't feel bad, but I am not energetic and do have a cough.

Book Recommendations

 In leaving an airplane at Schiphol a couple of weeks ago, I left behind the book I had brought to read while on vacation. It was certainly my own fault, though it did occur to me that KLM a) certainly knew that I had been riding in the seat where the book was, and b) knew the next flight I was booked on, ergo c) could have managed to get the book to me at the departure gate.

We arrived in Florence with no book for me to read. Fortunately, we were staying about a five minute walk from the Paperback Exchange. We stopped by, and I spotted After Virtue by Alasdair McIntyre. When I told my wife that I would be buying the book later in the day, when I wouldn't have to carry it about, a woman sitting on the floor looked up and said that she loved the book. So far, I can see why.

Some days later in Montecatini Terme, we looked into a Mondadori bookstore while killing time before dinner. There were some children of about ten in the store wearing red hats. One such boy walked up and addressed me in English hardly superior to my Italian. He let me know that the students were there to request that books be purchased for their school library. I agreed to buy one, and he pointed out the table from which one might choose. I was not impressed by the choices, and thought there were better ones on the shelves--stories by Joseph Conrad that probably could be read as straight adventure, Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, no doubt others. But I picked what looked most promising on the table, and bought the school a hardback adventure story for sixteen Euros. In return, we got a couple of small scrolls of paper with quotations about reading, one of them from Umberto Eco.

Words Reclaimed

 For about fifteen years centered on 2003, I often encountered the word "emblematic" in newspapers. The first time it appeared to mean "exemplary". Other times it might have meant "symbolic". I came to think that there must be a tool called "an emblematic" to provide a filler for tired journalists. The OED acknowledges the word, but I hadn't encountered a case I thought it suited.

Last weekend, in Morality and Conflict by Stuart Hampshire, I read

Certain minutiae of behaviour, as they strike a stranger, may be emblematic and have the right or wrong emotional significance for those who understand the behaviour, 'understand' in the sense that one understands an idiom in a spoken language.

That use of "emblematic" strikes me as just right.

More recently, one encounters the term "iconic" everywhere. Usually it means "famous", I think. I would be happy to restrict it to a form of ecclesiastical art, to researches into the ancient city of Iconium, or to code written in the Icon programming language. But those who write for the public are more liberal with it.

 Also last weekend, I encountered a case where "iconic" seemed to fit. In the chapter "Early Latin Trinitarian Theology" of Augustine and Nicene Theology, Michel Barnes classifies Faustinus's "Nicene" Trinitarian theology as having a

logic that is neither power-based nor substance based but iconic.

That is to say, Faustinus relies on

Scriptural descriptions of the Son's iconic or visual relationship to the Father

 

Split Infinitives

 In section 6 of the essay "Morality and Convention" of Morality and Conflict by Stuart Hampshire, there appears the sentence

The kind of 'must not' that arises within this [local] area of morality can be compared with a linguistic prohibition, for example that you must not split an infinitive: a particular rule of a particular language, which is not made less binding by the fact that it is not a general rule in language.

Morality and Conflict was published in 1983. In Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs, published in 1984, an American professor reflects on the conversation of a man who says that he "[used] to really enjoy baseball" with

A person without inner resources who splits infinitives ...

The first edition of H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1927, gives almost three pages to the question of split infinitives, and sorts writers by attitude into five divisions. Clearly Fowler is with the fifth:

5. The attitude of those who know and distinguish is something like this: We admit that the separation of to from its infinitive .. is not in itself desirable ... We maintain however that a real [split infinitive], though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, & to patent artificiality.

 Presumably Lurie's character belonged to Fowler's division 1, "those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is".

Arbiters

 A footnote late in the chapter "My Station and Its Duties" of F.H. Bradley's Ethical Studies runs

It is worth while in this connexion to refer to the custom some persons have (and find useful) of calling before the mind, when in doubt, a known person of high character and quick judgment, and thinking what they would have done. This no doubt both delivers the mind from private considerations and also is to act in the spirit of the other person (so far as we know it), i. e. from the general basis of his acts (certainly not the mere memory of his particular acts, or such memory plus inference.

 The footnote attaches to a sentence beginning "Precept is good, but example is better".

 The note reminded me of one in Sydney Smith's "Letters to Archdeacon Singleton", a work more playfully written but serious even so:

Mr. Fox very often used to say, "I wonder what Lord B. will think of this!" Lord B. happened to be a very stupid person, and the curiosity of Mr. Fox's friends was naturally excited to know why he attached such importance to the opinion of such an ordinary common-place person. "His opinion," said Mr. Fox, "is of much more importance than you are aware. He is an exact representative of all common-pace English prejudices, and what Lord B. thinks of any measure, the great majority of of English people will think of it." It would be a good thing if every Cabinet of philosophers had a Lord B. among them.

This is attached to a passage likewise explicit:

I am astonished that these Ministers neglect the common precaution of a foolometer, with which no public man should be unprovided: I mean, the acquaintance and society of three or four regular British fools as a test of public opinion. Every Cabinet minister should judge of all his measures by his foolometer, as a navigator crowds or shortens sail by the barometer in his cabin. I have a very valuable instrument of that kind myself, which I have used for many years; and I would be bound to predict, with the utmost nicety, the precise effect which any measure would produce on public opinion.

 Would or did Bradley think of Smith's application of "example is better" as frivolous? Smith wrote about 40 years before Bradley.

Booting

 Last weekend, I walked up to the first stand in the self-checkout area of store nearby, and found that the screen displayed not a menu but a console window showing the output of a startup sequence:

A friend noted the "Clonezilla" line, fourth from the bottom, and said that this might be a re-installation of the software. We agreed that frequent reinstallation of software on a machine that a) handles money, and b) is open to the touch of any and all, might be a good idea, and that the machine might be set to reinstall its software on every power cycle.

The screen shortly scrolled off all lines but one, which indicated that the machine was waiting on something. By then I had checked out at the next station.

Reflection

I happened to pull Ethical Studies by F.H. Bradley from the shelves today. A few pages in, I noticed

It is not so easy to say what the people mean by their ordinary words, for this reason, that the question is not answered until it is asked; that asking is reflection, and that we reflect in general not to find the facts, but to prove our theories at the expense of them.

Are we then necessarily asking leading questions? I suppose that reflection must require a high degree of scrupulousness to avoid that.

Fiction and Philosophy

 In reading Innocence and Experience by Stuart Hampshire, I noticed this passage early on:

I have difficulty in imagining that purity of intention and undivided purposes can be the normal case in politics. I believe that very many people feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience; and, outside politics, they often find themselves divided between love and hatred of their own homes and of their own habits. The evidence for this belief of mine comes rather from fiction than from moral philosophy, which always presents a tidier picture in the interest of some prevailing epistemology.

 Of course, Innocence and Experience is precisely a work of moral philosophy. It does aim to acknowledge the breadth of the available evidence.

The Australian Embassy

 Shortly before we all went home for the pandemic, I noticed that the Australian Embassy had rented space in the National Geographic Society building at the corner of M and 17th Streets NW. I had already seen the demolition, or the beginnings of demolition of the old embassy building at Scott Circle, a couple of blocks away. After that, it was a while before I was downtown much.

I did see work going on the new building, but observed it with half an eye. Then, a month or so ago, I noticed backups on Massachusetts Avenue, as construction equipment was loaded onto trucks for removal. I supposed that the construction was mostly done. The other week, I saw the flag in front of the building, and understood that it was completed.

The new building is modernist, as the old one had been, but modernist of the 2020s rather than the 1960s. No doubt it is more efficient in its heating, cooling, and lighting. It will not require soon require draping with heavy fabric to prevent bits from falling on pedestrians, as the old one did for a while.

Meanwhile, the National Geographic building is now closed for renovations, which should be completed by 2026. It seems to be only partially closed, for I saw persons with building badges leaving it the other day. It could be that only the public areas, not the offices, will be renovated.

Dry

 In the early 1980s, when I ran a lot, I knew all the water fountains along Rock Creek from Peirce Mill to above Knowles Avenue in Kensington. During the months that they were working, I suppose May through September, I often stopped to drink.

By the time we moved into the District in 2004, and I started to run often in Rock Creek Park again, I no longer ran distances that called for water stops. I did see a fair number of runners with water supplies--"camelbacks" or belts with half-pint bottles. This amused me, for I thought that at least in the warm months they could have spared the weight, and drunk from the public fountains.

Then this past weekend, I found myself very thirsty while running. On Saturday, I stopped at the water fountains at picnic groves 10 and 6, and found that they produced just a little dribble of water. One can, given time, fill up a water bottle from the fountain, for I saw some young women doing so. But one can't conveniently drink. I may look into the status of other fountains, but if so I will wait until the weather is cooler and I am not very thirsty.

You Rock, Alfred!

 One afternoon last week, I was sitting in one of my preferred seats on the S2 bus, facing across the aisle in the back. I was reading Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality with a pen in my right hand, and probably jotting more question marks than brackets or underlines. The book makes for very slow reading, for me.

About Irving Street, a man who had been sitting on far back seat stood up to leave. He asked me what I was reading, and I turned the book over so that he could see the cover. He smiled in approval, and held out a fist, which after a second's confusion I bumped with my own.

 I have been riding the 16th Street buses regularly for seventeen years now, and in that time probably fewer than ten persons have remarked on anything I was reading. A few have expressed approval, but this is the first who offered a fist bump.

Still Another Giddy Measure

 Still another giddy measure came before the House in the course of the session [the first of the Sixth Congress], the Ross Election Bill for a "Grand Committee" of House and Senate to pass upon the validity of electoral votes from the several states in the coming presidential election. [John] Marshall moved against this too, this time with success. But although he thereby helped save his Federalist colleagues from more short-wittedness, they were hardly  disposed to thank him for it. The joint committee envisioned by the Ross bill was to have the final determination on any question concerning the election; any "irregularity" would be whatever the committee said it was; and so it would rest with this body of thirteen men, chosen by a Federalist-dominated Congress, to decide who should be the next President of the United States. Nor was it any secret that the bill had been especially shaped to deal with what the state of Pennsylvania was likely to do in the election, that state's government having just turned Republican, or that such a committee would be peculiarly receptive to any plausible ground for counting out Thomas Jefferson. Marshall had as little use for Jefferson as any Federalist in the House. But this scheme as he saw it was not only unconstitutional, it was disreputable, and politically demented. What he then did with his influence, on the floor and in committee, was to get the bill altered to a form in which it could no longer carry out the function its originators had designed it for, whereupon the Senate would have no more to do with it.

Section 6, Federalism and the "Campaign" of 1800The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, Chapter XV, "The Mentality of Federalism in 1800", Section 6, "Federalism and the 'Campaign' of 1800".

 

Palsied and Feeble

 Recently I found in a notebook a passage from Mme. De Stael's De l'Allemagne that had caught my attention enough to be copied out:

Chaque fois qu’une nouvelle génération entre en possession de son domaine, ne croit-elle pas que tous les malheurs de ses devanciers sont venus de leur faiblesse? ne se persuade-t-elle pas qu’ils sont nés tremblants et débiles, comme on les voit maintenant?

Roughly,

Each time that a new generation comes forward, doesn't it suppose that all the misfortunes of its predecessors derived from their weakness? Doesn't it make itself believe that all the older generation were born palsied and feeble, as one now sees them?

 Well, the notion was not unfamiliar to me when I was young, and I have lived to see the expression "OK, Boomer" popularized by those considerably younger.

What Do You Mean, Undefined?

 Last week I wished to remind myself of the details of error handling for batch files that invoke a script.  I wrote a short script using Microsoft's JScript language that I thought would certainly fail, for it divided a number by zero. It did not fail.

I then spent a little time in a browser's console window. There I discovered that Javascript, as implemented in Chrome, differs not at all from JScript in its treatment of these operations, and that

• A number divided by 0 yields Infinity
• Infinity plus, minus, times, or divided by a number yields Infinity.
• A number minus Infinity yields minus Infinity.
• A number divided by Infinity yields 0
• Infinity divided by Infinity yields "NaN"--a quasi-value meaning "Not a Number".
• Infinity times 0 yields "NaN".
  

I find that the Go language runtime "panics" on integer divide by zero, as I'd expect. But Go does allow one to divide a floating-point number by a floating-point zero (1.0 / 0.0), yielding +Inf. Go's +Inf behaves just like Javascript's Infinity, except that dividing a number by Inf will yield -0 if the number and Inf have opposite signs.

Otherwise, the languages at my disposal, which include Perl, Python, and Scheme, do not allow division by zero, integer or floating-point. All of them raise an error on such an attempt

Num Questions

 When my son was of an age to study Latin, I noticed something that had escaped me in my younger days: Among the words with which one can begin a question are "num", when the expected answer is "No", and "nonne" when the expected answer is "Yes". A friend of about my age said the other week that the point had eluded him, too.

It is not unreasonable that I should have learned this later in life. What I had in my son's school years, and of course not in my own, was a spouse who exercised--to my good and the public's--some authority over my wardrobe. The question, "Is that what you're wearing?"--to the party, to work, to visit with friends--was very familiar. The answer she expected was not exactly "No", it was more  "Well, I thought so, but what's wrong with it?" Still, "Is that what you're wearing?" is definitely a "num" question.

Take Them Out of the Ball Game

 The New York Times has announced today that it will disband its Sports Department, handing coverage over to The Athletic, a sports website that it purchased last year. This does not mean that the sports pages will go away, rather that the current sportswriters will be moved to other assignments. I tend to think of sports writing as its own specialty, though I believe the George Vecsey covered Appalachia for the Times before moving to sports. I do find the notion a little odd, and can think of other sections that the Times could outsource or dispense with at least as easily.

Recently Read

 Last weekend I noticed a passage in The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys, which I don't remember reading before. though the short items on either side are quite familiar. It is headed "Urinals and Literary Practice", and begins

At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting urinoirs along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygeine and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.

It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature--and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen--are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs the authors had lovingly selected--they generally display patronizing arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve and preserve....

I wonder how I could have missed this. It appears in the chapter Detours of Part IV, Marginalia.

Once or Twice

 Recently I encountered the company name Apax. It occurred to me that this needed only a rough-breathing mark to read as "hapax", a Greek word I first encountered in "hapax legomenon", a philologist's term (or so I understand) for a word encountered once only in the known writings. By itself it means something like once, once only, once for all.

When I looked at Perseus's version of Liddell and Scott, I found that the first citation given was from the Odyssey, Book 12, line 22. In that context Circe is wondering at Odysseus's men, who have returned from Hades's home, and might be considered ultimately as subject to dying twice, when other men die once for all. According to Stanford's notes to his edition of The Odyssey, the word for dying twice, δισθανέες, appears only there: it is a "hapax legomenon."

Thomas and Kuznetsov

 Two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran an obituary of D.M. Thomas, a novelist known chiefly for his best seller The White Hotel. I read it when it came out in paperback forty-odd years ago. As the obituary remarked, it was a best seller in the United States, after doing not particularly well in Great Britain. My recollection is that Martin Amis had some snide things to say about this in some American magazine--the Atlantic or Harpers perhaps.

I think that Amis touched on a point that the Times omitted from the obituary. The obituary does remark that Thomas was inspired by Anatoli Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar. It does not remark that he quoted extensively from Kuznetov's book, in particular the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, one of the very few survivors of the mass murders at Babi Yar, and that Kuznetsov and Pronicheva, at least initially, received minimal acknowledgment in the front matter of the book.

Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature gives a few pages to this, the meat of it being

The original edition of The White Hotel acknowledges some indebtedness to Kuznetsov and Pronicheva in small print on the copyright page: "I also acknowledge gratefully the use in Part V of material from Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), particularly the testimony of Dina Pronicheva." The word "use" seems a circumlocution, especially in the context of the fulsome acknowledgment of quotation in the same paragraph that the Yeats estate required for a few lines of poetry. Two pages later, there is an elaborate "Author's Note," which explains, in much larger type, just how Thomas used Freud in constructing the theory of Lisa's hysteria and commenting on the complex relation of fact to fiction. But of the debt to Pronicheva and Kuznetsov, there is nothing more.
To put it bluntly, Thomas all but concealed that he had copied verbatim at least four or five pages, far beyond what any court has yet allowed as "fair user," from  Pronicheva and Kuznetsov. Furthermore, the pages "used" are by common agreement, the structural and emotional center of both books ...

 This all was gone over at the time in the letters section of the Times Literary Supplement, Kernan writes.

The Times's obituary quotes Thomas, speaking to People magazine in 1982, as saying

Suddenly, I saw a connection between the mass hysteria of the Holocaust and personal hysterias, and realized I had a novel.

I suspect that this sort of remark went over better in 1982 than it would now.  Freud's prestige here has diminished, I think.

Embassy Fences

 I try to walk to or from work a couple of times every week. My route consists almost entirely of 16th St., NW, and takes me past the Polish and Lithuanian embassies a bit before the halfway point. From time to time, they have exhibits on their fences worth seeing.

For a week or two, the Polish fences have been bare. The last set of placards concerned the first passage of a South American river, or of a portion of it that ran to falls and rapids. Before that, there were posters about noted Polish archaeological work

and about noted Polish scientists
 

 The most interesting exhibits, several years ago, showed Polish posters from the 1930s and on.

Last year, the Lithuanian embassy had displays showing modernist architecture in Lithuania:

 

 I am not a qualified judge of architecture, but I thought the buildings all at least handsome. Those are gone, now, though. In their place, there are posters concerning the 700th birthday of Vilnius. I wouldn't mind seeing Vilnius: still, I think the Vilnius posters less interesting than the ones about architecture.

Old Computer Books

 A co-worker retired at the end of last summer, and I assume that some of the books left out on a cabinet near his office had been his. I took Javascript: The Good Parts and Perl Best Practices fairly quickly. That was a few months ago.

Last month, I noticed the Apache Server Bible, a fat, perhaps four inch, volume from SAMS. The age is suggested by the cover note that it "Covers Windows 95 and Windows NT Platforms!" The front matter gives a copyright year of 1999. The stable version of the Apache web server was then 1.2 something; it is now 2.4. There is a fair bit of information about using Perl for scripting, but nothing at all about PHP, which shortly became far more popular than Perl. Python is mentioned in passing, but there could be no mention of WSGI, which came out in 2003.

Could one use the book? I assume that some of the directives for some of the modules, for example, mod_proxy, remain the same. Would I use the book? Probably I would not. I am used to going to the on-line documentation for that. But I am not an expert on Apache or a steady user: almost all that I have done with it lately uses either mod_proxy or mod_wsgi.

After I looked over the Apache Server Bible, I had a look on my own shelves at work, and had no trouble finding several of comparable age. Few of them have been on the desk and open lately. Apart from that, their possible relevance varies.

Programming Perl has a 1996 copyright date. I have used it until the front cover fell off. I suspect that an awful lot of my use has been to check the rules on the module Getopt::Long. Twenty years ago, I might have put in some time reviewing the rules around references, but not lately. I think that within the last fifteen years Modern Perl and Effective Perl Programming have been the books I checked first.

Oracle Design, by Ensor and Stevenson, has a 1997 copyright date. I read it thoroughly, as shown by marginal jottings. A good deal of the advice remains sound. But the Oracle database has gone through about 10 versions since then (they wrote mostly about Oracle 7), and there have been many enhancements to Oracle's SQL and PL/SQL. And databases in general have jumped several orders of magnitude in size (number of records) since those days.

Refactoring, by Martin Fowler, copyright 1999, has held up pretty well, I think. It is written for an early version of Java, and object-oriented programming is less dominant, or anyway trendy, than it was in 1999. Still, it has advice to consider.

My copy of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson is quite old, copyright 1990. There have been a number of editions since then. It was written in the early days when RISC seemed to be undergoing a Cambrian Explosion, and RAID for storage was not yet invented. (Well, Patterson et al. hadn't yet popularized the notion.) But the principles remain sound. It is a student's book, and I should hand it off to a student who doesn't need the latest thinking.

Reading Green

 The Second Story outside carts had a Penguin paperback of three novels by Henry Green, Nothing, Doting, and Blindness. At $5, I thought it worth a look. It was.

My first impression was of the high proportion of dialogue in Nothing and Doting. The last books I read in which dialogue so greatly exceeded narration and dialogue were George Higgins's crime novels The Friends of Eddy Coyle and Digger's Game.

My second impression was of the build of the characters. One of the women in Nothing has fat fingers, so-called at least twice. One of the young women in Doting has fat thighs, another has fat features. The middle-aged woman has "bulk". I assume that the men are not lean, either, for one in Doting has given up lunching on account of his weight. Given that, it seems hazardous for a man to sit on the arm of a woman's chair, then slide his way in beside her; yet that happens a couple of times. Nor can I quite see how the maneuver is actually managed.

Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, "I think nothing of Nothing." His objection was to the dialogue, which he thought wrong for characters of that class. Of course I have no way of evaluating that. Waugh also wrote poorly, but in passing, of Doting. Do the blurbs on back cover, from respected writers, have reference to these particular novels?

Blindness is a much earlier, very different novel. It reads as a first novel, and in fact it was. According to Wikipedia, it was largely written at Eton, which appears in the novel under the near-anagram "Noat".

Asquith

 Once I had read Roy Jenkins's biography Gladstone, I wished to read any other biographies he might have written. About twenty years ago, he brought out Churchill, which I read and passed along. I was aware that he had written a biography of H.H. Asquith, but didn't suppose that I was likely to encounter it. Last month, it turned up on the Second Story Books Recent Arrivals page.

Asquith makes for less astonishing, perhaps less entertaining, reading than the other two, for Asquith lacked the extravagant streak in his character. It is hard to imagine him infuriating the US and embarrassing his cabinet with a speech such as Gladstone gave in 1863. He seems to have reached maturity without the boyish streak that Churchill long retained. But by all accounts he was a very good lawyer and a sound prime minister.

Much of the history of his premiership I had read of, in George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914. The textual apparatus of Asquith is minimal, limited to end notes with title and author but not date or publisher; but the title of Chapter XVI, "Strange Ailments of Liberal England", seems to nod to Dangerfield's title. For the most part, the narrative and the evaluations are the same in both books. Dangerfield, having just those five years to cover, gives more detail.

Asquith had a thorough classical education at the City of London School and at Balliol College. He lacked the eccentricity to write long books on Homer, as Gladstone did. And clearly he did not restrict his reading to the classics, at least the ancient ones. Near the end of the book, Jenkins quotes Asquith's daughter on the return from his last (lost) election:

Groping wildly for a life-line that might draw me into the smooth waters by his side, I asked in as steady a voice as possible: "I suppose you haven't by any chance got an old P.G. Wodehouse in your bag that you could lend me?" A smile of instant response, mingled I thought with relief, lit up his face as he replied triumphantly: "Being a provident man I have got in my bag, not one, but four brand new ones."

In Larry McMurtry's memoir Books, he mentioned in passing meeting Jenkins, describing him (I recall) as "an amiable enough British pol." Not that far away, McMurtry wrote of having a fondness for British political biography. The conjunction surprised me, for at the time McMurtry wrote, Gladstone had been out for some years, Asquith (1961) for many years more. How did it not come up at their meeting that Jenkins wrote too?

Logic and Calypso

 Last week's obituaries of Harry Belafonte brought to mind a passage from the 1980 foreword to Willard Van Orman Quine's From a Logical Point of View:

I foresaw by 1952 that [the writing of Word and Object] would be a long pull and became impatient to make some of my philosophical views conveniently accessible meanwhile. Henry Aiken and I were with our wives in a Greenwich Village nightspot when I told him of the plan, and Harry Belafonte had just sung the calypso "From a logical point of view." Henry noted that this would do nicely as a title for the volume, and so it did.

I can't offhand think of another work of philosophy that takes its title from a song.

Hunting and Philosophy

Near the end of Book II, "Of the Passions" of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, there occurs a passage beginning

To illustrate all this by a similar instance, I shall observe, that there cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other, than those of hunting and philosophy, whatever disproportion my at first sight appear betwixt them. 'Tis evident, that the pleasure of hunting consists in the action of the mind and body; the motion, the attention, the difficulty, and the uncertainty. 'Tis evident likewise, that these actions must be attended with an idea of utility, in order to their having any effect upon us. A man of the greatest fortune, and the farthest remov'd from avarice, tho' he takes a pleasure in hunting after partridges and pheasants, feels no satisfaction at shooting crows and magpies; and that because he considers the first as fit for the table, and the other as entirely useless. ... To make the parallel between hunting and philosophy more compleat, we may observe, that tho' in both cases the end of our action may in itself be despis'd, yet in the heat of the action we acquire such an attention to this end, that we are very uneasy under any disappointments, and are sorry when we either miss our game, or fall into any error in our reasoning.

(Book II, Part III, Section X)

 In Plato's dialogue The Sophist, the sophist appears as hunter, but as one out for gain rather than recreation:

Str[anger]. Now up to that point the sophist and the angler proceed together from the starting-point of acquisitive art.
Theat[etus].  I think they do.
Str. But they separate at the point of animal-hunting, where the one turns to the seas and rivers and lakes to hunt the animals in those.
Theat. To be sure.
Str. But the other turns toward the land and to rivers of a different kind--rivers of wealth and youth, bounteous meadows, as it were--and he intends to coerce the creatures in them.

(Loeb Classical Library, translated by H.N. Fowler, 222A)

Colleges

 In this week's New York Times, Bret Devereaux, a (most interesting) historian at the University of North Carolina, notes and deplores the decision of Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, to eliminate majors including mathematics, English, history, and philosophy. He questions the wisdom and practicality of aiming to give colleges a more vocational direction, and the motives of those who wish to do so. In all this, I agree with him.

On the other hand, there is another story to be told. Marymount College was founded as a two-year college for women in 1950. Only in 1973 did Marymount offer four-year degrees. At some point in the 1980s, an ambitious college president worked on expansion. I first became aware of this when the Ballston metro station, not within easy walking distance of the original Marymount campus, became Ballston/Marymount University. I became more aware of this when my wife started to receive postcards from Marymount inviting her to earn a master's degree in interior design. (She did not take Marymount up, for she considered that she should be teaching the subject, not studying it.)

I suspect that the expansion of Marymount was enabled by the Washington metropolitan area's appetite for credentials. Many in the area work for government contractors, and a contractor can bill more for someone with an associate's degree than for someone with only a high school diploma, more still for someone with a bachelor's degree, and so on. The contractors get favorable treatment for money spent on courses that go to "maintain or improve" employees' skills for the jobs they hold. I don't know that this fed Marymount's expansion, but I believe that it helped many local schools thrive.

For feeding that appetite, though, there is a ratio to be considered, (dollars + hours) / credential. On-line instruction has driven down the numerator, without necessary diminishing the perceived value of the denominator. Marymount has physical plant to maintain, and for that matter full-time staff to pay, in relatively greater quantity than some of its on-line competitors. That has to have hurt it. The credential business at this level appears to be ruthlessly competitive.

 I am not happy at the news. I know at least one instructor--conscientious, intelligent--who may be affected by the decision. And I know that Marymount has served many of its students well. Still the story is not entirely one of the defeat of the liberal arts.

Switzerland and Thought

 Noticed the other day in Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937:

I spent the evening with Pellegrini, the painter, Dürr, the writer, and Oeri, the editor of the Basler Nachrichten. Dürr advanced, clearly and fascinatingly, the theory that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Jacob Burkhardt, Gottfried Keller, Jeremias Gotthelf, Nietzche, Gobineau, and all the rest of the great intellectuals active in Switzerland around the middle of the nineteenth century (Gobineau was a legation counsellor at Berne) were pushed into aversion to democracy and conversion to an aristocratic philosophy of life by the spectacle presented by the victory of Swiss democracy.  1831 saw the beginning in Switzerland of a cultural levelling process which lasted until about 1875 and produced to a varying degree detestation, fear, hate, and contempt among all these men. The lower middle class, which mistook its semi-education for culture, came to power and pushed the old, highly cultivated patrician families aside. Switzerland thus forestalled developments all over Europe. at the same time there arose in the cantons petty tyrants who pursued a harsh, ruthless rule on the lower-middle-class's behalf. Since then Switzerland has become conservative.

I was very interested by this exposure of where the roots of Nietzche's 'Superman' concept and his hostile attitude toward democracy lie, and secondly, to learn that they did not derive from purely idealistic notions but were the upshot of political experience and factional sympathies aroused by his Swiss environment.

(Entry of Thursday, 21 July 1927)

 Dürr is not further identified, that I can see. Ian Buruma provides many illuminating notes, but not on Dürr.

At the Strand

 Last weekend, we were in New York, and I had a quick look at The Strand. I'd have had a longer look, had I been clearer on the geography of Manhattan--I thought that 5th Avenue was west of Broadway at 12th Street, which is not so. In the few minutes I had, I saw nothing that I really needed.

On my way out of the store, I heard an exclamation from a young woman who had just found a book she wanted on the $3 outside carts. She was even more delighted when she discovered that the book was signed by the author. Her friend took a couple of pictures showing her holding it up. I wish that I could remember book or author: I think that the book had to do with circumstances of women, perhaps of young women, perhaps of young women of color. I'm glad it found its way to the hands of someone who so much appreciated it.

Apologies to My ISP

Yesterday at work, I was surprised to see my browser balk at the certificate for a Yahoo.com URL. This led me to take a closer look: as earlier with my webmail, the certificate was issued by OpenDNS, the certifying authority was Cisco Umbrella. I checked with the network guys, and indeed Cisco Umbrella is doing some special handling with URLs not from a set of trusted domains.

I had not seen this particular bit of handling in quite a while. The way that it works apparently is that the firewall emulates a browser with the incoming data, accepting and unencrypting it. If the data is not judged malicious, the firewall passes it back along to the PC's browser. But in order to do so it must provide its own certificates, hence OpenDNS, certified by Cisco Umbrella.

I don't know that this is better than a simple block. Google Chrome gives explicit warnings about expired or bad certificates, and can be configured to refuse a connection to servers with bad certificates. At work, it is so configured.

I was wrong, therefore, to blame my ISP for my PC's refusal to connect to webmail this weekend.

Drive Through

 Our internet provider now has a certificate that my computer will accept, and I have been able to get back to the webmail pages. I found several days' worth of email, nearly all from the listserv.

One item in particular caught my eye: the church at the end of the street offered "the drive-thru imposition of ashes for Ash Wednesday". The email explained that this was an innovation from the pandemic, i.e. Lent 2021, which I suppose made sense then. The church is a Mosaic Church, an offshoot of the Southern Baptist Church according to Wikipedia. I had not known that the Baptists had ever gone in for the imposition of ashes.

There are few enough physical needs that can't be served in drive-through fashion in the United State: alcoholic beverages, bank transactions, coffee, groceries, and fast food are among them. This was the first I heard of a religious ministry served that way.

Certificates

Our internet-service provider (ISP) gives us an email account, which we use mostly for the neighborhood listserv. Yesterday, it became inaccessible, for the web server has an invalid certificate. Chrome says

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

and curl says

curl: (60) schannel: SEC_E_UNTRUSTED_ROOT (0x80090325) - The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.

Yesterday I explained this to a support staffer at the ISP. This was not something she could diagnose or fix, and I did not suppose that it would be. Still, I wanted it brought to the attention of those who could correct the certificates. The certificates are not fixed, though I'm sure she did her best to report the error. The last one in the chain expires today, but I have no confidence that the one that replaces it will be better. It could be a week or so before I can log in to the webmail page without telling a browser to ignore errors.

 Bad certificates happen, and I've let one or two linger a day or two past expiration date. Still, it amazes me than an ISP would let this happen.

Roger Schank, RIP

 The New York Times this week carried an obituary of Roger Schank, who taught and wrote on artificial intelligence for many years. I never read his more technical work, unless an excerpt or two, but he wrote books for the general reader also. Of those, I read and enjoyed The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind and Tell Me a Story. The first, as I recall, got a favorable review from the critic Hugh Kenner.

Crows

 Yesterday I saw a crow perched on the edge of our birdbath. He was facing away from the water, looking southeast, perhaps at one of the neighborhood cats. I was surprised at how big he was.

In the early 1990s, crows were very common in the Washington area. I saw many in Wheaton, where we then lived. A stand of trees near Rockville Pike and Randolph Road, a few miles away, was said to house 500,000 of them. The number looked implausible on paper, but if you happened to be in that area about sunset, and see the dense stream of crows approaching it, you could believe it. Then about 2000 West Nile virus arrived, and devastated the crows. It was at least ten years before I started to see them again.

At some point in the late 1800s, John Hay wrote the poem "Crows at Washington", which includes the lines

 The dim, deep air, the level ray
Of dying sunlight on their plumes,
 Give them a beauty not their own;
Their hoarse notes fail and faint away;
 A rustling murmur floating down
Blends sweetly with the thickening glooms;
They touch with grace the fading day,
 Slow flying over Washington.
 

As far as I know, John Hay and John Quincy Adams were the only men ever to publish their poems and serve as U.S. Secretary of State. Of Adams's verses I have seen little, and that satirical. I was not impressed by what I have seen of Hay's Pike County Ballads, which achieved some fame. Yet the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online site quotes a story saying that George Eliot found one of them deeply moving.

The Gates of Europe

If asked to write down what I knew of the history of Ukraine, I would not have needed much paper. I remembered a few facts or situations at long intervals, running from the Scythians to the Maidan, bits of information about events separated by anything from a few decades to several hundred years. I don't think that the scantiness of my knowledge made me unusual among Americans who have not specially studied the history of Eastern Europe.

 Late last year, my wife bought and read a copy of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, who teaches Ukrainian history at Harvard University. When she had finished with it, I read it. This much improved my understanding of Ukraine, and also of its neighbors. At the moment I can give a more or less cogent account of the Kievan Rus', and of its relation with the Norse along the rivers to and from Novgorod; the origin and fortunes of the Cossacks; the career of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and so on.

The book is well organized and quickly read. The chapters run mostly to ten or a dozen pages, of which one can easily read one or two in an evening. At the front there are ten maps showing boundaries and settlements from the early Greek settlements through the post-2014. The back has suggestions for further reading, quite extensive and all in English; a timeline of events; a who's who; a glossary; and an index.

Calling on a Recorded Line

 The calls begin, "Hi, this is [Sue|Dave], I'm an [analyst|advisor] calling on a recorded line for ...". Sometimes there is what sounds like phone room chatter in the background. These are recordings, part of a fairly basic interactive voice response (IVR) system. Perhaps the "recorded line" is meant as quasi-candor; quasi since Americans have had years to get used to messages saying that their call to some company "may be recorded for quality-control purposes." In any case, the careless listener could imagine that a person is on the other end of the line.

When the recording pauses after "Can you hear me OK?", I amuse myself by replying "Who is the president of the United States?" This may get a prompt asking me to repeat what I said, in which case I may go on to "Who is the speaker of the House of Representatives?" Once, since the call was from a political action committee for veterans, I asked for the name of the Secretary of Defense. Sometimes the IVR program hangs up, sometimes it continues and I hang up.

I suppose that at some point the overhead of running natural language processing programs will be low enough that the IVR system will chirp back, "Joe Biden" or "Kevin McCarthy". But are there enough cranks out there to make this worth the expense to the operators?

To Be Avoided

 The "By the Book" page in the Book Review section of today's New York Times has Aleksandar Hemon offering the answers. I was taken by his answer to the question "And which [genres] do you avoid?"

No advice books, least of all self-help manuals, nor any of those middlebrow smartass books that explain humanity and its evolution and history in under 500 pages and a couple TED talks.

I have expressed my reservations before about attributions of brow height, but otherwise I will not complain. I will have to look up the man's novels.

Carpe Librum Is Open This Month

 Last week, I learned that Carpe Librum has a pop-up store at the southwest corner of 14th and I NW. It will remain open through the end of January. I have dropped off a couple of bags of books with them, and have purchased three or four books. Inflation shows up at Carpe Librum, too: a hardback book now costs $6, half again what it would have ten years ago.