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.