Back to the Blossoms

In a A Time To Be Born, set in New York about 1940, Dawn Powell mentions in passing the sudden importance of Washington, previously thought of only in connection with cherry blossoms and deadly state dinners. Nobody has ever invited me to a state dinner, but I do keep an eye out for the cherry blossoms.

Every year, some of us at my office try to walk around the Tidal Basin at least once while the cherry blossoms are at their best. This year, the peak was probably about Easter. I missed the days before, for I was out of town until Thursday, and the office was closed Friday. I did run down as far as Independence Avenue on Saturday, but to run around the Tidal Basin through the dense crowds would have been rude even if possible, and would have added a mile and some to a run at about the limit of what I can do these days.

Today a couple of us took the walk. Most of the blossoms were past their peak, most branches about half in blossom and half in leaf; a decent arborist could tell you which kinds of cherry they were.  But about a fifth of the trees were in full blossom, and all were beautiful. The crowds were thinner, so that we could walk without jostling, and with less care not to intrude on photographs.

We did dodge photographs, but five or ten rather than dozens. Of the photographs I saw in progress, two caught my attention: a young woman, sitting on the slope, tossing a handful of petals to be caught by the picture; another young woman, with a floral wreath on her head and a full purple skirt, who apparently was about to dance to some recorded music.

I took some pictures to prove that I was there, and here are two:

And on Friday, they were at about their peak in Mount Pleasant:

I believe that the blossoms appeared a couple of weeks earlier this year than last.

Is That Postmodern?

Last week we sat in a rooftop bar in Los Angeles, with a good view of the crowd. What struck me was the collection of clothing styles, in many cases with elements from years past. There was the man in a black hat, denim jacket, and printed tee shirt: it was a mid-1970s look, though maybe the jeans were a bit snug at the ankles. There were a couple of men in white tee shirts, straight-legged jeans, and sneakers: they could have come from a casting call for a movie set in the 1950s.  Several had a look that was from the 1980s. At least one woman had the shape of skirt, above the knees in front, below the calf in back, that I don't remember seeing before about ten years ago. Is this arbitrary mix of styles postmodern? I don't know.

It is more striking in Los Angeles, in that there one finds very old cars in decent condition, along with the very newest. There are 1970s GTOs in which the fellow with the hat would look at home. There is what we took to be a Studebaker station wagon to suit the men in white tee shirts. Along the block where we are staying are a Ford Falcon and a Dodge Sportsman van, both right around 50 years old.

Bumper Crop

Last spring, while in Los Angeles for a visit, we were reluctant to use our son's car, which had the check-engine light on. We asked the rental agency for a mid-sized car, the agency offered us a Jeep Cherokee, and we settled on a Prius. While backing up to turn around on a dark street, I backed into the bumper of a parked car, a sports ute of some sort, and discovered how far Toyota had gone in optimizing for a low weight:

The sports ute was not scratched.

Before this visit, our son took his car to the dealership, so we did not expect any reason to rent a car. On Thursday, having picked up the car at his office, we pulled over to the curb about one door down from the place we are staying, and were about to move up, when a sports utility vehicle sideswiped us, at low speed but enough to do damage:

This sports ute was a Toyota, I suppose a Highlander [correction: 4Runner], and in its case Toyota did not optimize for weight. I did not see any damage to the car that struck ours, though admittedly I was distracted. Our son will drop his car at the body shop today, and rent something to drive until it is repaired.

Reading Pelikan

Having started in the middle of them, I have just read the first of the five volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Christian Doctrine, namely The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600). For a week or two, I will be able to distinguish Marcionites from Donatists from Nestorians.

It is a work of astonishing erudition, "based on the study of the primary sources in the original languages--Greek, Syriac, and Latin", though he had "of course, consulted the sources in translation as well." The secondary sources he lists are in English, French, German, (modern) Greek, Russian, and Swedish. One, I noticed, was by the future pope Joseph Ratzinger, on "the noninstitutional aspects of Augustine's ecclesiology."

The erudition apart, Pelikan offers a readable account of his subject, the development of Christian doctrine, "what the church believes, teaches, and confesses." I imagine that he was correct in writing in the preface that "By using the index and by working his way through the narrative, even someone who knows no church history and no theology should be able to follow the plot and watch its movement."  My own knowledge of church history and theology was not wholly lacking, but measured against this book it was and is exiguous.

At some point, I will need to go back and reread this volume. That will wait on many things, and perhaps on the fourth and fifth volumes.

Minix

The March issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Lessons Learned from 30 Years of Minix", which is well worth reading for those interested in operating systems in general or the UNIX/POSIX/Linux world in particular. Tanenbaum developed Minix, a UNIX-workalike that would run on an original IBM PC (256kB RAM and a single 360kB 5.25" floppy disk), in order to have an operating system that students could study in a course or on their own. One of those, presently, was Linus Torvalds, who decided to write his open operating system, Linux, for the x86 architecture.

Operating Systems Design and Implementation, the book that Tanenbaum wrote along the way, is excellent. Sometime in those years, I took a course on operating systems, which used two books, Tanenbaum's and another. The other book would have something like "operating systems use page to move code not currently needed off to disk." Tanenbaum's would have a diagram of the memory management unit of a widely used processor, with an explanation of how it supported paging. And then there was the full source code of Minix in the back of the book. The book is by now on its third edition.

Compatibility View

The other day, I had to change the database connection information for a reporting server. Somewhat to my surprise, the configuration programs on the server itself did not all me to change that. So I pointed Internet Explorer to the server URL, http://abc.hq.def.org. It let me log in, but when I tried to go to the administrative section of the site, I got odd Javascript errors. I tried Firefox and Chrome, which did not give me errors, but also gave me no administrative section. At that point, I remembered that Internet Explorer reverts to older behavior (Compatibility View) when the URL has no domain extension. I went into the Internet Services Manager on the server, and added the domain-less name to those that the site would serve. Then Internet Explorer logged me in automatically, I got no more Javascript errors, and was able to correct the database connection information.

I believe that it was a consultant who set up this server in the first place, and why and how he set it up IIS not to serve the domain-less name I can't guess. Probably I had never logged on through the web interface, for the menus and connection strings were unfamiliar. I wonder when corporate networks will be freed from the need for IE 7 compatibility, and what pain the change will inflict.

Author Unknown

Last night, while looking into Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, I noticed in the entry for Friday, 27th August (1773)

Mr. Grant having prayed, Dr. Johnson said, his prayer was a very good one;  but objected to his not having introduced the Lord's Prayer. He told us, that an Italian of some note in London said once to him, 'We have in our service a prayer called the Pater Noster, which is a very fine composition. I wonder who is the author of it.'--A singular instance of ignorance in a man of some literature and general inquiry.

This sounded familiar. In his memoirs, in an entry for 1707, Saint-Simon writes of the Comte de Gramont

When he was 85 and mortally ill his wife tried to speak to him of God; but the complete oblivion in which he had lived all his life made him regard the mysteries with utter incredulity, and when she had finished he said, 'But, Madame, is what you say really true?' When he heard her recite the Paternoster he said, 'I think that is a beautiful prayer, who wrote it?'

 I certainly don't doubt Johnson's word. Saint-Simon is a bit too fond of a good story, but apparently Gramont's obliviousness to religion is well attested.

(And while I'm not on the subject, why doesn't Oxford University Press bring back into print R.W. Chapman's handy volume containing both Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journey? If Chapman's work is superseded, then why not a few pages of notes?)