Jul 03 2009
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retro calculations
If you’ve ever wished that you could have that old HP scientific calculator, but on your iPhone, your wish has come true.
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decryption, 208 years later
Here’s Robert Patterson’s encrypted letter (1801) to President Thomas Jeferson:
The cipher has recently been solved.
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staying connected
When I headed for Alabama last week, I knew that my mom didn’t have internet access at home. I also knew that there ain’t a lot of internet cafés in the area. I figured I would just get a local…
Jul 01 2009
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"I will hate you till the day I die"
We interrupt this hiatus for this message from your host. The other day I had an email exchange that went something like this:
Anon. Why did you say those terrible things about me a few years ago?
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and yet more hatred
My friend David Michael of Wunderkammer fame points out a post by Will Leitch that, well, makes my previous post completely unnecessary. I LOL’d out loud.
Leitch points to further commentary …
Jun 23 2009
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Everybody seems to think that the Houses of Parliament are a sublime and loveable architectural embodiment of British tradition. In fact, the present Palace is a ridiculous building that is about as much to do with British tradition as my iPod. Its design was a grotesque Victorian compromise between those who favoured Gothic and those who preferred classical. Charles Barry, a classicist by temperament, did the plan and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, something of a prat, did the Gothic skin and interior detailing. The plan is good and the river frontage is explicitly classical. The rest is basically a bad three-dimensional Pre-Raphaelite painting, a Disneyesque evocation of Britain as a land of knights and churches which has come, in use, to resemble two giant pubs stuck in the middle of a truly nasty and extremely pompous club for fat philistines with occasional romantic longings and an inflated sense of their own importance. Neo-gothic, unlike neo-classical, seldom works.
Westminster Hall, in contrast, is one of Europe’s and possibly the world’s great interior spaces. It struck me dumb the first time I saw it. The hammerbeam roof is a glory of medieval carpentry. The stone structure is almost 1000 years old and its tone is utterly different from anything else on the site. Real, muscular grandeur contrasts with Pugin’s fussy mincing. The MPs, having moved into this great room, should be made to stand at all times, anything to stop them lolling like drunks on those green pub benches. Also standing, ideally on one leg, focuses the mind and would shorten debates. On entry into the hall they should be made to kneel and kiss these old stones. I am serious. Very.
— Brian Appleyard. I could not agree more.
Jun 22 2009
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a few links on my way out the door
Readers, I am about to decamp for a couple of weeks in the wilds of northern Alabama — “wilds” because my mother lives in the country with no internet access and spotty cell-phone signals. I’ll be…
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“ Oh, we all hated Holden [Caulfield] in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’
— a 15-year-old Long Island high-school student, quoted here
Jun 21 2009
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Zito celebrates scoring the second goal for Brazil against Czechoslovakia during the 1962 World Cup final.
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the joy of summer hoses
Jun 20 2009
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“ I hope I am not too old to take [flying] up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.
— Samuel Beckett, age 31, in a letter to a friend
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“ Definition of a park. It’s time to establish precisely what we mean by a “park”. I’m thinking principally of London, but I feel this definition will fit all parks in all cities of the world. There are certain determining characteristics, necessary conditions, for park status. First, there must be tall, mature trees, the older and taller the better. Second, the majority of the trees in the park must give the impression of random planting - no rectangles or neat lines, by and large. An avenue here or there is allowed, an allée, but we need the illusion of spontaneous, unplanned growth. Third, the ground must undulate in a significant way - flatness is not a park-criterion. Fourth, there is the question of scale: you mustn’t be able to see all sides of the park at once - one boundary at least must be invisible from wherever you stand. Fifth, there must be a gated entrance: a park need not necessarily be fenced or walled but it must have a portal - or several. Immediately we see how these five categories allow us to separate, for example, a park from a city square, however large or grand, or from a common. This is a particularly London issue: is Clapham Common a park? Is Barnes Common a park? Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park are perfectly adjacent - can’t Wimbledon be described as a park? By applying my five categories one can see why the answer has to be no (no portals). Is London Fields a park? Is Kew Gardens? The five categories say that they both are. Let’s cast the net a little wider. Is Les Tuileries in Paris a park? No - it’s too flat, there are not enough very tall trees, the trees are planted in straight lines. Les Tuileries is a jardin publique.
Jun 19 2009
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don't forget magazines
Following up on Farhad Manjoo’s love letter to newspapers: Here is Michael Hirschorn’s mash note to The Economist:
For a magazine that effectively blogged avant la lettre, The Economist has…
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While the rest of us Americans scurry about with a Blackberry in one hand and a to-go cup of coffee in the other in a feverish attempt to pack more achievement into every minute, it’s the New Orleans way to build one’s days around friends, family, music, cooking, processions, and art. For more than two centuries New Orleanians have been guardians of tradition and masters of living in the moment — a lost art. Their preference for having more time than money was at the heart of what made that city so much fun to visit and so hard to leave.
So when outsiders talked of making New Orleans “bigger and better,” the people of the city recoiled. “Bigger and better” struck many New Orleanian ears as code for whiter. But even more, I suspect, they heard it as a recipe for a city driven — like the rest of America — by the dollar and the clock. Who needs that?
— Dan Baum
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get your paper here!
Farhad Manjoo on what’s good about reading actual newspapers:
But both versions of the Kindle are missing what makes print newspapers such a perfect delivery vehicle for news: graphic design….
