This webpage lists occupations common in the middle ages… Yielding some amusing and fascinating words.
For example, an eggler is an egg salesman, an alewife is a female public house keeper, and a fruiterer is a seller of fresh fruit.
(via kottke)
February 13th, 2012
subtle sci fi
I like the paranormal if it’s subtle like this. But then again, I also like Ghostbusters.
Sassetta, The blessed Ranieri frees the poor from a Florentine jail, San Sepolcro Altarpiece, 1437-44, Musée du Louvre, Paris
January 28th, 2012
the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century
George Orwell wrote a short essay on his favourite pub…
My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.
Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of “regulars” who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.
If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”
To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.
Read further here. There’s an interesting note at the end.
January 8th, 2012
the impracticality of infinite information
I discovered the pictured device — a note-taking machine invented by one Vincentius Placcius — via a nice opinion piece on the BBC website about how we have dealt with information overload up until today.
In 1689 a professor at the University of Hamburg with a passion for new technologies, unveiled a device for managing information overload – a purpose-built mahogany cabinet designed to hold and organise several thousand hand-written notes taken by an individual reader from the books they were reading.
Along the back of the cabinet were narrow vertical posts, each headed by a letter of the alphabet. Running the length of each post was a sequence of brass plates engraved with alphabetised headings designed to capture topics of particular interest to the reader, each heading furnished with a metal hook, to which slips of paper containing information extracted from the owner’s reading were to be attached, ready to be retrieved for re-use at a moment’s notice.
It is not clear whether this rather cumbersome piece of equipment caught on (though apparently the philosopher Leibniz owned one) but the impetus behind it is obvious.
Sounds like a glorious object, no matter how impractical… I want one.
The danger today is rather that we are reluctant to let go of any information garnered from however recondite a source. Every historian knows that no narrative will be intelligible to a reader if it includes all the detail the author amassed in the course of their research. A clear thread has to be teased from the mass of available evidence, to focus, direct and ultimately give meaning to what has been assembled for analysis. Daring to discard is as crucial as safe-guarding, for effective knowledge management and transmission today.
There is all too little danger of the knowledge currently accumulating in floods – multiply-owned, stored and captured – being lost. Rather, if we are going to make sense for posterity of today’s information-saturated present, one of the things we will have to learn to do is decide how to prune the evidence, and ultimately, what to forget.
Addendum: Here’s an interesting article about the Belgian intellectual of the early 20th century Paul Otlet, and his approach to the same problem. Thanks Arnaudt!
October 30th, 2011
the most mysterious manuscript in the world
But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world’s best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.
With a University of Chicago computer scientist, Dr. Knight this year published a detailed analysis of the manuscript that falls short of answering the hoax question, but does find some evidence that it contains patterns that match the structure of natural language.
“It’s been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world,” he said. “It’s super full of patterns, and so for somebody to have created something like that would have been a lot of work. So I feel that it’s probably a code.”
From NYtimes article about the Copiale cypher and its decryption.
From wikipedia:
The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration.
The image above is fro the “biological” section of the book (“A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.”). The other presumed topics are herbal, astronomical, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes.
The manuscript has a nice wikipedia page devoted to it.
August 23rd, 2011
how to cook a mastodon
A 1998 article from the Cornell University Chronicle:
Fans of hot, spicy cuisine can thank nasty bacteria and other food-borne pathogens for the recipes that come — not so coincidentally — from countries with hot climates. Humans’ use of antimicrobial spices developed in parallel with food-spoilage microorganisms, Cornell biologists have demonstrated in a international survey of spice use in cooking.
The same chemical compounds that protect the spiciest spice plants from their natural enemies are at work today in foods from parts of the world where — before refrigeration — food-spoilage microbes were an even more serious threat to human health and survival than they are today, Jennifer Billing and Paul W. Sherman report in the March 1998 issue of the journal Quarterly Review of Biology.
“The proximate reason for spice use obviously is to enhance food palatability,” said Sherman, an evolutionary biologist and professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell. “But why do spices taste good? Traits that are beneficial are transmitted both culturally and genetically, and that includes taste receptors in our mouths and our taste for certain flavors. People who enjoyed food with antibacterial spices probably were healthier, especially in hot climates. They lived longer and left more offspring. And they taught their offspring and others: ‘This is how to cook a mastodon.’ We believe the ultimate reason for using spices is to kill food-borne bacteria and fungi.”
July 29th, 2011
1896 olympic marathon
May 26th, 2011
there’s no theatre like noh theatre
Fascinating stuff. Especially Noh’s use of masks. Youtube.
April 26th, 2011
if you find exiting exciting
If you find exiting exciting then you’ll love this early Lumiere Bros footage.
April 16th, 2011
the imagination is a telescope in time
The Ascent of Man with Jacob Bronowsky, on youtube in six parts. A nicely philosophical and poetic approach to question “what makes us human?”. Thanks to Machteld
February 13th, 2011
you can’t lose something you aint never had
From 1964, England. Almost like a music video!
February 11th, 2011
an example of making anything signify anything
For much of his long and largely secret career, Colonel William F. Friedman kept a very special photograph under the glass plate that covered his desk. As desks go, this one saw some impressive action. By the time he retired from the National Security Agency in 1955, Friedman had served for more than thirty years as his government’s chief cryptographer, and—as leader of the team that broke the Japanese PURPLE code in World War II, co-inventor of the US Army’s best cipher machine, author of the papers that gave the field its mathematical foundations, and coiner of the very term cryptanalysis—he had arguably become the most important code-breaker in modern history.1
At first glance, the photo looks like a standard-issue keepsake of the kind owned by anyone who has served in the military. Yet Friedman found it so significant that he had a second, larger copy framed for the wall of his study. When he looked at the oblong image, taken in Aurora, Illinois, on a winter’s day in 1918, what did Friedman see? He saw seventy-one officers, soon to be sent to the war in France, for whom he had designed a crash course on the theory and practice of cryptology. He saw his younger self at one end of the mysterious group of black-clad civilians seated in the center; and at the other end he saw the formidable figure of George Fabyan, the director of Riverbank Laboratories in nearby Geneva, where Friedman found not just his cryptographic calling but also his wife Elizebeth (flanked here by two other instructors from Riverbank’s Department of Ciphers). And he saw a coded message, hiding in plain sight. As a note on the back of the larger print explains, the image is a cryptogram in which people stand in for letters; and thanks to Friedman’s careful positioning, they spell out the words “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.” (Or rather they almost do: for one thing, they were four people short of the number needed to complete the “R.”)
The photograph was an enduring reminder, then, of Friedman’s favorite axiom—and he was so fond of the phrase that some fifty years later he had it inscribed as the epitaph on his tomb in Arlington National Cemetery.2 It captures a formative moment in a life spent looking for more than meets the eye, and it remained Friedman’s most cherished example of how, using the art and science of codes, it was possible to make anything signify anything.
More at cabinetmagazine via 3qd.
January 15th, 2011
adventure with a purpose
Palaeontologist Paul Sereno talks about his archaeological adventures, dinosaur evolution, the connection between art and science, and more. Great talk!
December 28th, 2010
womby and woman-tired
Shakespeare is known to have introduced a lot of words and meaning to the English language, either by enshrining existing language in his immortal works, or by creating new words. Looking through a glossary of his collected works, I’m enjoying reading about the words he used that faded from use or never caught on…
“Englut”, v. t., to swallow. Othello i,3.
“Elf”, v.t., to entangle hair in so intricate a manner that it is not to be unravelled; supposed to be the work of fairies in the night. King Lear, ii, 3.
“Fire-Drake”, n., a meteor, fiery dragon. Henry VIII v, 4.
“Flap-dragon”, n., a small burning body lighted and put afloat in a glass of liquor, to be swallowed burning. Henry IV ii, 4.
“Frippery” n., an old clothes shop. Tempest, iv, 1.
“Horn-mad” adj, made like a savage bull. Comedy of Errors, ii,1. Merry Wives of Windsor, i,4.
“Woman-tired”, adj., henpecked. Winter’s Tale, ii,8.
“Womby”, adj., hollow. Henry V, ii4.
Just a small selection from Pordes’ The Complete Works of William Shakespeare edited by W. J. Craig.
More information about the “flap-dragon” drinking game at wikipedia.