I’m a big fan of footnotes and found this interesting; so I’m passing it along.
The Chicago Manual of Style recommends the following symbols for sequential footnotes (in section 12.51 of the 14th edition):
I’ve seen elsewhere (in Churchill so maybe it’s a British thing) and in Docutils the replacement of || with ¶.
The boring old MLA says to just use numbers.
I visited John Adams’ birthplace this weekend. It was mostly dullsville, but they saved the best for last: the Stone Library. The Library is a stone building built so that any fire in the main residence would not burn the valuable stuff: books.
It wasn’t the biggest thing ever, nor did it have any particularly interesting books (not that I knew anyway — they only let us see so much). What impressed me was the smell.
It was this overpowering sense of rotting books. So much leather bounding, so much glue binding, so much trapped paper. It was delightful.
I hope to goodness there is a scented candle called “Old Book.” I would also accept “New Magic Cards,” which are also intoxicating albeit less quaint.
Due to a quirk in scheduling differences between schools in the Northeast and schools in the South, I somehow missed reading Romeo and Juliet by moving from Alabama back to Massachusetts.
So I finally read it.
It was typically awesome Shakespeare. The only thing that really struck me was that their love didn’t seem as ideal as pop culture usually plays it. In the first act, Romeo is madly, passionately, forever in love with a certain Roseline. Then he sees Juliet and is instantly madly, passionately, forever in love with her.
Romeo’s speeches make me think he is more in love with love itself than Juliet. Maybe the play was just one big send-up of Italian amorousness.
So I read Collapse, by Jared Diamond. I liked it a lot; while not as entertaining as his previous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, it gave me more food for thought. Collapse is all about environmental crises and the degrees of success with which different societies react to them.
Well, it is pretty clear that the world is extracting natural resources at an unsustainable rate. So what do we do about it?
There are all sorts of examples of a society clinging to maladaptive behaviors, though many are subtle. Here’s a couple that I think are silly and past due for a change:
Diamong gave a compelling illustration of unsustainable lifestyles: Greenland’s doomed Viking settlers viewed cows as a status symbol and kept as many as they could afford. But cows were a terrible farm animal for Greenland. The input to output ratio was not great, and in order to feed them, the farmer needed to spend most of the summer months storing food to keep the cows alive through the winter. The much more plebian goat, to which they also had access, was a far better choice for the climate.
Thus, for the sake of the status, a farmer who kept cows would be less profitable, weaken the sustainability of his farm, and lower his standard of living (by spending more time working). Point is, ostentation for ostentation’s sake is stupid and small efficient cars are way more sensible than a Hummer.
The most important thing that First World citizens can do is lower their per capita impact. We consume and waste so much a person that, medium-term, we need to drastically lower either our impact or our population size.
Diamond talks about several efforts to certify goods as being made from sustainable processes, about which I didn’t know:
This has more to do with the Long Now Foundation [1] than Collapse, but I believe it serves the same purpose. Most of the foolish behavior described in Collapse came from short term goals and thinking. If you consider your land’s well-being past your lifetime or even past your lease, you’re less likely to pursue destructive maintainership.
One thought that gave me pause is the short historical lifespan of the United States. Societies in Collapse rose and fell in terms of many hundreds of years. We’ve only been around for a couple hundred. Our success as a society isn’t in the bag, and we should be measuring ourselves for the long haul.
[1] Who, by the way, have neat seminars for download — in Ogg Vorbis no less!
After seeing a Boing Bong post about Kelly Link, I started reading her Stranger Things Happen short story collection, which she released under a Creative Commons license(!).
I haven’t finished it, but so far it is worthy of recommendation. If you like science fiction or strange stories in general, check it out. I don’t read enough short stories, and this was a welcome reintroduction.
What I particularly like is that she released it under a CC license. It’s nothing new to me, really, but it may be the first time I’ve seen it with a work of fiction. I’m much more familiar with the factual or functional copyleft community. It’s a pretty cool idea to be able to play around with characters, plots, and narration. I’d be even more excited, but I don’t consider myself a writer.
My one beef is with the noncommercial clause she used. I’d argue that the NC clause does more harm than good. The attribution and share-alike clauses are enough to prevent people from screwing you over.
My opinions on the matter are largely informed by this article, but I’ll briefly say that NC works are not compatible with the growing body of GNU-licensed works, prevent even small-time derivers who happen to support themselves via advertising (e.g. a blogger that uses banner ads), and (if you can instead use the SA clause) prevent an ecosystem around the work rather than letting it grow.
As long as you have Share-Alike, then any value added is as easily resellable by you as them. No evil corporation can come swooping in and profit of your work while you sit there unrewarded. But letting someone else profit off their value-added can create incentives to do so. Imagine a Chinese dude that wants to translate your work. If he can do so and sell it around, that’s great! He’ll expand the market for your work, and you can sell the translation too.
Very few people want to contribute to an ecosystem where only one person is allowed to profit and it isn’t them. That’s been my experience with open source projects, anyway.
At Nick’s hearty recommendation, I read and enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. It can probably best be described as Harry Potter for grownups. It’s set in early 19th century Britain where the two title characters revive the dead art of magic.
The writing style was great. It felt very British, full of sarcastic humor and olde spellings. There was also a delightful tendency toward long, frequent footnotes. The footnotes would often span several pages, reference fictional works of magical literature, or relay an anecdote that added some flavor. All in all, a quaint device.
It was a bit long, but what can you do with these Brits, eh? I’d recommend it, and it looks like she plans to make a sequel, so here’s hoping.
I read the The Princess Bride a little while ago, and I must say I was not nearly as ecstatic as I am about the movie. Which may not be its fault; I came into it too jaded by the film.
The film’s script, also written by William Goldman, is word for word the book, minus a bit. Which means that not much was new to me. The frame narrative is a lot cuter in the book, but had neither Fred Savage or Peter Falk, so it’s a toss-up.
I couldn’t even tell if it was funny. All the jokes were the same old friends from the movie, which meant a lack of both novelty and familiar visuals associated with the lines. I just couldn’t appreciate it. Sigh.
But I love Bride, don’t get me wrong! My advice is to start with the book and then see the movie. You may enjoy both more that way. But the book is safely skippable if you’ve seen the movie.
If Google Book Search becomes successful, I can totally see authors changing the way they write. All inserting references to Harry Potter, Christina Aguilera, and Pokémon. All adding sex scenes with latinas. All intentionally misspelling Viagra.
Can I get a “what what” on how frickin’ awesome the Lone Wolf gamebooks are? I read them as a youth and enjoyed them immensely. So I was pleased to discover that Joe Dever, the author, has given permission for them to be published online. This is a great format for these now out of print books, and it’s really nice to see the authors and illustrators be so supportive of the community.
Apparently, Project Aon also plans to publish Dever’s Freeway Warrior gamebooks, which were extremely badass.
Finally, I’ve recently been pining for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I used to watch it all the time on Nick at Nite, and downloading the theme song has got me pumped about it. I do believe I’m going to queue some up on Netflix, to the chagrin of my flatmate.
Here’s a passage from The Battle of Gettysburg, a first-hand account of the fight by Frank Aretas Haskell. I like this part for its poetic description of a particularly intense artillery assault on their position.
“Who can describe such a conflict as is raging around us? To say that it was like a summer storm, with the crash of thunder, the glare of lightning, the shrieking of the wind, and the clatter of hailstones, would be weak. The thunder and lightning of these two hundred and fifty guns and their shells, whose smoke darkens the sky, are incessant, all pervading, in the air bove our heads, on the ground at our feet, remote, near, deafening, ear-piercing, astounding; and these hailstones are massy iron, charged with exploding fire. And there is little of human interest in a storm; it is an absorbing element of this. You may see flame and smoke, and hurrying men, and human passion at a great conflagration; but they are all earthly and nothing more. These guns are great infuriate demons, not of the earth, whose mouths blaze with smoky tongues of living fire, and whose murky breath, sulphur-laden, rolls around them and along the ground, the smoke of Hades. These grimy men, rushing, shouting, their souls in frenzy, plying the dusky globes and the igniting spark, are in their league, and but their willing ministers. We thought that at the second Bull Run, at the Antietam and at Fredericksburg on the 11th of December, we had heard heavy cannonading; they were but holiday salutes compared with this. Besides the great ceaseless roar of the guns, which was but the background of the others, a million various minor sounds engaged the ear. The projectiles shriek long and sharp. They hiss, they scream, they growl, they sputter; all sounds of life and rage; and each has its different note, and all are discordant. Was ever such a chorus of sound before? We note the effect of the enemies’ fire among the batteries and along the crest. We see the solid shot strike axle, or pole, or wheel, and the tough iron and heart of oak snap and fly like straws. The great oaks there by Woodruff’s guns heave down their massy branches with a crash, as if the lightning smote them. The shells swoop down among the battery horses standing there apart. A half a dozen horses start, they stumble, their legs stiffen, their vitals and blood smear the ground. And these shots and shells have no respect for men either. We see the poor fellows hobbling back from the crest, or unable to do so, pale and weak, lying on the ground with the mangled stump of an arm or leg, dripping their life-blood away; or with a cheek torn open, or a shoulder mashed. And many, alas! hear not the roar as they stretch upon the ground with upturned faces and open eyes, though a shell should burst at their very ears. Their ears and their bodies this instant are only mud. We saw them but a moment since there among the flame, with brawny arms and muscles of iron wielding the rammer and pushing home the cannon’s plethoric load.”