It’s almost 10 am of a Sunday morning, and I have asphalt to pound exploring Second City. (Unless Toronto is the Second City. I don’t know these things well.) So in brief: I tried staying up till 4 am in Melbourne, so I could sleep peacably on the plane to Montreal. The staying up bit […]
I’ve been sidelined the past two weeks by Lerna, the e-Framework, and seasonal malaise that may or may not be porcine-related. Not necessarily in that order. So even if I had much to say on this blog, I wasn’t really going to get around to it. I have noted with some concern the dearth of […]
Our story’s not about him, really, but in the Year Of Our Lord 1295, Gregory Chioniades [Bio Enc Astronom, Wikipedia] went from Trebizond to Tabriz, to learn astronomy at the feet of the Persian masters. When he got there, he set about translating the Arabic Zīj al‐ʿAlāʾī under Shams al‐Dīn al‐Bukhārī. We’re reasonably sure he […]
In re: TLG: Ibycus The Ibycus computer was what Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data crunching got done on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was the stuff of legend, an HP 1000 customised in David Packard Jr.‘s garage, with spelling and format checkers and text editors in assembler, that crunched through tens of millions of words […]
The cleanout of my books complete, I’m slowly trying to rearrange them into place in my garage. There’s a couple of duplicates that have been mercilessly discarded—I didn’t need both the 3rd and the 5th edition of O’Reilly Javascript book, or two Perl in a Nutshell books. One might further argue that I don’t need […]
Surnames, they’re a labile thing. Not everywhere is Iceland, where your patronymic lasts a generation; but not everywhere has the self-same string of letters identify a lineage for a millenium, either. Crete switched to a new patronymic suffix en masse, -akis, in the mid-19th century. Well, the Christian Cretans did. The Muslim Cretans didn’t, but […]
Found this today in the Greek blogosphere, and name-checking it for the English blogosphere: reminiscences from 1964 of an Egyptian colleague of Cavafy at his desk job in the Irrigation Dept, Alexandria, who was his underling and succeeded him when Cavafy retired. The original newspaper publication of the reminiscences has also been digitised by the […]
There’s plenty a thing I’ve missed by not following network TV in the past decade. There’s plenty more that it’s just as well I’ve missed. My blood boils, my pores distend, my hands wrench into a strangling motion at the shlock, the pettiness, the smugness, the sanctimonious rejoicing at others’ misfortune, the proof of the […]
This should have been more traumatic than it was, but: Saturday I was at my parents’, sorting through my books that had ended up over the years in boxes in their garage, to determine what would stay (and go to my place), and what would be dispensed with. It should have been more traumatic, but […]
MX is a free give-away newspaper in Melbourne. It is published by the same mob as the Herald-Sun—but its vocabulary is even simpler. Its sentences are really short. Its paragraphs are short too. Like this. It also has lame-ass punning headlines—much like this post about a piece by Andy Burns. It’s light reading meant to […]