Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Author: John Winkelman

Under-Appreciated

John Winkelman

Here it is, 10:00pm, and I am home sitting in front of my new 21″ flat-screen monitor (wooHoo!), taking a break from working. Yep: In one of those odd moments of convergence, I am working under pressure of a holiday deadline. Just like being in the retail business again. After all these years… Last Thursday I worked until midnight. Looks like the same thing tonight. And tomorrow, and Thursday… and Friday. And maybe Sunday.

I made the decision a couple of years ago that work would never again interfere with the martial arts classes . This has largely held true; the only time work EVER takes precedence over class is when a deadline is jeopardized through my own actions; i.e. almost never. Once in a month of blue moon Sundays. The upshot of that is, class becomes a three-hour break in a crushingly long day.

Class is also what keeps me from going all Skynet on the human race.

So how about a little informal poll here: What keeps you sane in an insane world?

The Good Old Days

John Winkelman

16. How much does seven hundred and eight pounds, exceed thirty-nine pounds, fifteen shillings and ten pence halfpenny?
Ans. £668 4s 1½ d . (p. 47)

4. In 61 Ells English, how many quarters and nails?
Ans. 305 qrs. , 1220 na. (p. 70)

8. How many barley-corns will reach round the globe, it being 360 degrees?
Ans. 4755801600 (p. 71)

50. A factor bought a certain quantity of broadcloth and drugget, which together cost 81 l , the quantity of broadcloth was 50 yards, at 18s. per yard, and for every 5 yards of broadcloth he had 9 yards of drugget; I demand how many yards of drugget he had, and what it cost him per yard?
Ans. 90 yards at 8 s. per yard. (p. 107)

3. In 9 firkins of butter, each weighing 2 qrs. 12lb gross, tare 11lb. per firkin, how much neat?
Ans. 4 C , 2 qrs. 9 lb (p. 116)

Daboll’s
SCHOOLMASTER’S ASSISTANT ,
Being a Plain Practical System
of
ARITHMETIK
adapted to the United States
By Nathan Daboll
with the addition of the
Farmers’ and Mechanicks’
BEST METHOD OF BOOK-KEEPING ,
designed as a
Companion to Daboll’s Arithmetick
by Samuel Green

Ithaca:
Printed and published by Mack and Andrus
By Permission of the Proprietors
1828

Bleh

John Winkelman

It is my sad duty to inform you, my readers, that Timeline is a steaming pile of poo. Let me ruin it for you:

The surfer and the cute chick live. The professor lives. The French guy dies. The British are being assisted by an evil scientist from the present day. The professor and the Hot Scottish Guy (who also lives, but stays in the past) blow up the English fortress with gunpowder made by the professor as part of a bargain to keep from being run through by the English lord. The sarcophagus with the portrait of a one-eared lord? It has the Hot Scottish Guy and the Cute French Girl in it.

The cliches run rampant like… like… cliches at a college Renaissance festival.

The best actors were the trebuchets.

You have been warned.

S-M-R-T

John Winkelman

Doesn’t it seem like it’s past time that some local parochial school recognized President Bush with an honorary GED? He’s certainly earned it…

Resonance and Harmonies

John Winkelman

While driving around yesterday I caught a show on PRI called The Next Big Thing, a weekly exploration of New York…sort of. I caught the tail end of the show, just in from the beginning of an essay by Bruce Odland on a project he and partner Sam Auinger have been working on for almost fifteen years: turning cities into musical instruments.

The tool they use is an aluminum pipe of a specific length – similar to an organ pipe – which resonates at a specific frequency; in this instance, a low B-flat. Microphones are mounted at specific distances along the inside of the pipe. They pick up the overtones generated by the vibration of the pipe. This data is sent to concrete speakers which feed the note and overtones back into the environment.

The result is something extraordinary.

Traffic becomes a chorus of Tibetan and Franciscan monks backed by cello and didgeridoo. Rough edges are smoothed and the crude instruments of industry become bellows in a gigantic pipe-organ.

There is a sample .mp3 at the bottom of this page .

The audio from The Next Big Thing is here . The Odlund piece is at the end of the hour.

A little digging at the O+A site uncovered a link to some more audio clips of their experiments in Germany (German site).

Flotsam

John Winkelman

It appears that the brain-busting work I did with cellular automata experiments is attracting a bit of attention. This fella has graciously linked to my site; an act I consider high praise indeed, considering the amount of Mojo he wields.

In other news [DEVELOPERS – you know who you are!!] someone with a Big Brain has figured out how to run multiple versions of MS Internet Explorer on Windows platforms (scroll to the bottom of the page for the standalone downloads). This one simple act suddenly makes cross-browser testing vastly easier. And on that note, I have two things to say to users of IE5.0 and 5.5: [1] Sorry about the glitches in my site, and [2] Upgrade your damn browsers to Mozilla or Firebird .

This development in no way lessens my loathing of IE5.0 and IE5.5. In fact, by installing them on my computer I feel like I am somehow now in league with the virus-writing 15-year-olds of the world.

Hearken Unto Me

John Winkelman

1. Across the ocean from Europe, there was a place called North America,
2. Which was discovered by an Italian explorer in the employ of the queen of Spain,
3. Colonized extensively by the Spanish and the French,
4. Developed into a rich nation by the labor of African slaves supplied by the Dutch,
5. And thus became the largest English-speaking nation on earth,
6. Namely, the United States of America.
7. The inhabitants of the United States decided to call themselves Yankees,
8. For some reason,
9. And eventually noticing that the rest of the world was there,
10. Decided to rule it.
11. This is their story.

The Book of Damn Yankees
(Otherwise known as the Book of Manifest Destiny)
Chapter I
Verses 1 – 11
of The Boomer Bible , by R.F. Laird

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