A few years ago while I was overseas, I read the first two volumes of Shelby Foote’s massive narrative of the Civil War. Just today I picked up Volume 3. I know I’m not alone in becoming a fan of his after his appearance in Ken Burns’ documentary — which I just started watching again on DVD. I poked around the internet and stumbled upon a transcript of an interview from the show Booknotes.
Foote’s history of the Civil War took 20 years to write; about 3000 pages and 1.5 million words. And he wrote it 500 words at a time, in longhand, with a dip pen.
FOOTE: Five hundred or 6OO words is a good day for me. I write with a dip pen, which causes all kind of problems — everything from finding blotters to pen points — but it makes me take my time, and it gives me a real feeling of satisfaction. I’m getting where I’m going.
…But a dip pen, you have to dip it in the ink and write three or four words and dip it again. It has a real influence on the way I write, so different not only from a typewriter but from using a pencil or a fountain pen.
LAMB: What do you do with it after it’s written the 500 words every day?
FOOTE: I set it aside to dry; then copy it off on a typewriter, make a typewritten copy of it and then recopy on that until finally the day is over and I’m all the way satisfied with it and I put it on the stack — make a clean copy and put it on the stack. That way I don’t have to engage in something that to me is a particular form of heartbreak, which is revision. I don’t do that.
Holy smokes. Reminds me of the Truman Capote quote about Jack Kerouac writing On The Road on a single 120-foot scroll of tracing paper: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
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- Spend all waking hours cramming a year-long course into eight weeks.
- Spend any extra time reading other people’s stuff.
Well, since #1 is done, and #2 isn’t changing..best try to get back to it.
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I’m off to Owego, NY early in the AM for work. Need to coordinate all crappy weather to be somewhere other than O’Hare and Syracuse. I’ll be back on Friday. Here are some utterly random thoughts:
I’m kind of beaked that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 is going to be Intel-only
Message to all iPhone game developers that implement the stupid option to send my score to Facebook and/or Twitter: Stop it…that’s lame.
I’m a Dodgers fan, but I really detest the Yankees…Go Philly!
I’ll be the first to scoff the MSM for being in the tank for the Obama White House, so let me also say kudos for taking a stand against the administration’s silly cat fight against Fox News.
Who is the marketing genius that came up with the final tag line for those (completely annoying) Most Interesting Man Dos Equis commercials? “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.” Could he have qualified his support even more? Is the Most Interesting Man supposed to be Bill Clinton?
My carbon footprint is probably one tenth that of Al Gore’s. Therefore, I feel I am exempt from his nannying lectures.
Having lived in Las Vegas for the last 3+ years, trust me when I say that the Senator Harry Reid that the nation sees and the Senator Reid that is presented to the Nevada public in the form of campaign ads are two different people.
Did you ever notice that nametags worn by the Delta Force commandos masquerading as TSA employees are their first names? Police officers, military members, other professional fields: last names. That guy that sold you a Big Mac yesterday…first name. How fitting.
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Sorry for the site being down yesterday. Something about my hosting company changing registrars and this domain getting left out for some reason. If you can read this, then it is fixed.
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It’s tougher when you’re stupid. And it’s really tough when you whine about it like a little girl. St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Adam Wainwright talking about Matt Holiday’s error in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs and one run lead that allowed the Dodgers to score two runs, win the game and go up 2-0 in the NLDS.
That ball got lost in 50,000 white towels shaking in front of Matt’s face,” Wainwright said. “It doesn’t really seem fair that an opposing team should be able to allow their fans to shake white towels when there’s a white baseball flying through the air. How about Dodger Blue towels?”
You’re complaining about the fans? Who are waving little towels? It’s not fair? How about a nice cup of suck it? Wainwright — you pitched a nice game, it was a tough loss, but sack up and quit being a crybaby.
P.S. Go Dodgers!
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And the word for September is 9.8%. Isn’t Biden in charge of this?
Thanks to Don Surber
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What a bunch of f@#$ing cowards. From the article:
Anti-G20 protesters rampaged through the city centre of Pittsburgh tonight, smashing up shops and throwing rocks at police, as officers used tear gas and baton-charges in an attempt to bring them under control.
In riots which continued through the middle of the evening rush hour, about 300 protesters were reported to have remained from an initial crowd of 2,000 in Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s Little Italy.
Frustrated in their attempts to reach the venue where world leaders are meeting, the crowd, many of whom wore face-masks and armed themselves with rocks, broke windows at fast-food restaurants, a BMW dealership and a bank in the area, about a mile from the fenced-off convention centre.
If you anonymous mouthbreathing dipshits think it is so important to protest a meeting that will result in nothing anyway, then sack up and let the world know who you are. I guess you’re afraid Mommy and Daddy may cut off your allowance and then you’d be stuck at home contributing nothing to society rather than rampaging around and subtracting from it.
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I couldn't take it anymore. Everywhere I look, it's there. Everyone is doing it. I can't swing a dead cat without hearing about it. Was I missing out on the next big thing because it was only being talked about over there?
Twitter
Yes, I scoffed it before (something about a blowtorch). Whatever. I figured I would give it a shot and see. So feel free to make fun of me on Twitter: @nealsheeran.
Regards,
Your friendly neighborhood lemming.
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I’m sure the President wasn’t expecting this level of uproar over his pep talk to the nation’s schoolchildren. Personally, I don’t think the idea of a speech is terrible and it doesn’t necessarily justify the amount of vitrol; although that somewhat depends on the content of the speech.
On the other hand, the Department of Education deserves whatever flack comes their way. One of their suggested activities related to this speech was to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Ummm…help the President do what exactly? Ask Mommy and Daddy why they are mean for not wanting a public option? Are the angry grown-ups at town hall meetings too much for him? What issue is giving the White House’s crack squad of bright shining lights such a hard time that they need help from kids? I would like to see the grading criteria for this assignment. Actually, maybe not. I would probably get bent.
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the President’s address “will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.” Work hard, set goals—I got it. However, my initial reaction to that last part was this: you know who takes responsibility for childrens’ education? Their parents. Parents are right to be miffed about this. I expect my child to get an education in school (naive, I know), not be a pawn in some political game.
If I’ve done my job as a parent correctly, I’ve probably taught my son to be respectful to his teachers and pay attention to what they have to say. I certainly don’t want to be put in the position of having to counter that when he comes home with an assignment to “support the President” on some issue that I disagree with. Furthermore, if schools are doing their job at all (doubtful sometimes), then children are taught the importance and significance of the Office of the President. When taken in that light, this affair is borderline manipulative.
Granted, the backlash against this episode has resulted in the White House changing the assignment from helping the President to how to achieve goals, but it should never have come to that. And I’m well aware that teachers are fully capable of indoctrinating students towards a certain political slant all by themselves (because I had some), but for the federal government to get in on the act is kind of lame.
So if little Johnny comes home with an assignment to write a letter about why cap-and-trade is good, be a responsible parent and help out with some research.
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One area I have always found interesting is the standardization of measurements; that locked in a vault somewhere there was some piece of metal—probably some rare alloy in a vacuum or at some specific temperature—that was exactly twelve inches long or weighed precisely one pound, and these were the standard foot and pound by which all others were measured (and for once that phrase would not be a cliche). I also find the fact that the definitions for these measurements have changed over the years as science and technology evolve to higher levels of precision (What?! A yard isn’t a yard anymore?). I stumbled upon an article titled This Kilogram Has a Weight Problem and followed it up with this Wikipedia entry and came away with some interesting facts, in a dorky ‘umm… sounds great, gotta go’ kind of way:
Originally, the kilogram was defined as equal to the mass of one cubic decimeter, or liter, or water. In 1799, this was refined from water at 0° to 4°—the temperature where water reaches its most stable and maximum density.
In 1879, the International Prototype Kilogram was constructed, a cylinder of 90% platinum and 10% iridium. It was ratified as the kilogram in 1889…and remains so to this day. The IPK and six of its siblings reside under bell jars inside a vault that requires three keys and is maintained in an underground facility outside Paris, France by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. The kilogram is the only unit that is still defined by an actual, physical artifact.
Copies of the IPK have been produced and distributed around the world to other nations as their version of the “standard”. The United States owns two of these, named K4 and K20, and they come from a batch of 40 delivered in 1884. The IPK replicas are compared to the original every 50 or so years…and many of the copies have actually gained mass, albeit a near-infinitesimal amount, over the years. Or the original IPK has lost mass, but since it is the standard, it doesn’t lose mass—it is always correct.
Work has been ongoing for many years to redefine the kilogram in terms of fundamental concepts of nature, and not in relation to a physical piece of metal locked in a safe. This new definitions include using the number of carbon-12 atoms, a sphere of silicon, or a new-fangled machine called a watt balance.
The Meter
According to Wikipedia, in 1791 the meter was defined as one ten-milionth of the length of a meridian from the Equator to the North Pole (that happened to pass through Paris). In 1889, the meter was defined much like the IPK—the distance between two marks on a bar made of platinum and iridium, measured at the melting point of ice.
This was refined in 1927 to:
the distance, at 0°C, between the axes of the two central lines marked on the prototype bar of platinum-iridium, this bar being subject to one standard atmosphere of pressure and supported on two cylinders of at least one centimetre diameter, symmetrically placed in the same horizontal plane at a distance of 571 millimetres from each other
Not 570 millimeters. 571. In 1960 the meter definition was changed and became:
equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.
The current definition of the meter was determined in 1983:
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1⁄299 792 458 of a second.
The Second
Our current definition of the meter now begs the question; how long is one second? Again, Wikipedia says that the second first became measurable in 1670 with the development of a seconds pendulum for pendulum clocks [geeky sidenote: early proposed definitions of the meter related to the length of this pendulum].
In 1960, the definition of the second became:
the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.
Don’t ask me what ephemeris time is. With the advent of atomic clocks, the definition changed again in 1967:
the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.
This had to be “tweaked” in 1977 due to atomic clocks being affected by altitude and in 1997 it was further clarified to include the following:
This definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.
And that is how a second is defined today. The interesting thing to me in all of this is that as definitions for these measurements have evolved to become more precise, they have also become more esoteric. I like it that an actual, master kilogram exists somewhere.
What About the Foot and the Pound?
I almost forgot. Is there an extremely precise piece of metal that is exactly the mass of one pound or a foot or a yard long locked away somewhere or are they defined in terms of atoms or light? Ironically enough, since July 1959, US units are defined in terms of the metric system:
1 yard = 0.914 4 meter
1 pound = 0.453 592 37 kilogram
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