I’ve lately internally coined (meaning, in my mind and talking to myself, not in the wider world) these words:
A short post. Will try and post another about other things, like my yard.
So long that I was automatically logged out by WordPress. ANYWAY, I’ll write some things now, about what I have been doing:
It is “officially” spring as there are peepers in the swamps everywhere.
I had a big tree in my backyard cut down. It was in the way of something I wanted to do and after it was cut down, I found out that it had started to dry rot in the center. I had them leave the wood so I can burn it later myself, or dry it and sell it.
I bought and mounted a shelf in my basement to put all the “infrastructure” on – modem, router, AP, the UPS that powers them all, and the excess cable coils. With that, I was able to destroy the last of the old desk and workbench that were down there, and came with the house. They were made of cheap wood and had been left in that damp, often wet, basement for probably decades. Nasty things. Maybe someday I’ll hire a contractor to put in a curtain (“French”) drain to divert the ground water.
Now that it is spring, I am trying to get rid of alot of accumulated things. There must be some Pareto principle about moving: 20% of the things moved aren’t unpackt in the first 80% of the time lived there, or some such like. It isn’t trash either, there are things that I’ve put in a place to decorate or similar. Once I am done, that room will be open for use and not hard to move around in as it has been.
Work is taking time, but worth the effort I think. I like it and it pays well.
I’ve taken a few surveys – which were established and administered by legitimate medical / educational research institutions – and found it amazzing how bad some of them were in the mechanics. For example:
That’s enough of that. If you produce these things, take responsibility for your work being able to collect legit (usable, representative, …) data. Test them thoroughly, proof read them, have some one ELSE proof read/test them. Provide contact information that is at least as accessible as your IRB’s that is specifically for reporting inconsistency, software glitches, bad coding, and so forth and have it accessible and findable throughout the administration. If you get contacts to it, you will know if some thing has made your data suspect or unreliable before you go analyzing and publishing.
These are going to be used to produce possible reasons for society. If you get it wrong, you may kill people, and peoples, slowly.
In the Nashville (TennOssee) Union and Dispatch of January 26, 1868 on page 3 was this news item that I wanted to transcribe so it could be searched for and read more easily:
THE SHERIFFALTY.
Movements of the Negroes – Probabilities of a Colored Sheriff – Political Caucus in a Church.
It is evident that the enfranchised negroes of Davidson county are by no means going to sit down contentedly on hook-and-ladder truck honors or put up with the empty glory of the prospective 9th ward engine. They are going for something higher, and don’t intend to take the cold shoulder any longer. They are excited just now on the question of the Sheriffalty, and Nelson Walker and Alfred Menifee are pulling lively strings in that direction, each claiming a big share of “popular” favor, and each believing himself the future Sheriff.
To this end, an almost exclusively negro meeting was held at the 2d (colored) Christian Church, on Gay street, night before last. There were only two whites present, each of them candidates for jailer, prospecting on individual chances of success in their coming contest. Randall Brown, John Cockrell and other equally interesting mouth-pieces were there, and the crowd was a hundred strong.
There was considerable feeling manifested against the holding of a convention, Menifee declaring that it was impossible to secure fair play at any convention that might be held. It appearing that a majority of the crowd took this view of the matter, one of them who had prepared a resolution favoring a convention had not the courage to present it.
A resolution by W. A. Sumner, calling for the election of a colored man to the Sheriffalty was unanimously adopted. A committee was then appointed to select a suitable person for the candidate of the negroes of Davidson county, which, after due deliberation, reported the name of Alfred Menifee. It seems, however, that the friends of Menifee, though securing a majority of the committee, were out-generaled by Walker, and the meeting at once voted down the nomination, and finally adjourned without expressing any decided preference for either of the aspirants. The meeting lasted from seven o’clock until half past ten.
[The capitalization is as in the original, including “street”, “county”, and except for the subheadline “negroes”. You can read a copy here: https://www.newspapers.com/image/70855071/ ]
The universally heard of (in English anyway) story of “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” has been printed so much, especially once the copyright ended, that we have a ton of editions with minimal differences. The biggest must be how they are illustrated. The story itself encourages this.
The best, I think, are S. G. Hulme Beaman‘s doing. I found out about them via WikipediA, in turn linking to the British Library’s article on the subject. Unfortunately they got their website damaged by some people and the article is only viewable via the Wayback Machine, but the design of it prevents/prevented the images from being viewed/saved.
HOWEVER, I found that the edition, in the public domain, has been digitized by some one and is on the Internet Archive. If you want the best quality scans of the illustrations, you should go to that link and:
These are, in order: Black Mail House (the frontispiece); Utterson’s dreaming of Hyde; Utterson on the way to Hyde’s place; Hyde sneaking around Jekyll’s place; Hyde and Jekyll in the same room; Jekyll looking at Hyde; Fear.
I also recommend 162, the End of it all.
I found the “picaresque fiction” story “A True Relation of the Travels and Perilous Adventures of Mathew Dudgeon, Gentleman: Wherein is truly set down the Manner of his Taking, the Long Time of his Slavery in Algiers, and Means of his Delivery.” (also like the last, the title page is the entire title). According to Gutenberg, it is a later day imitation of something from long before, which makes all of this less interesting than the last, but I will write about it here anyway.
The book is something like Mrs. Barker‘s, where the narrator tells his story to the point they meet another person, who tells them their story, which includes another story, and so on. The second story, by Pablo Fraxado y Ribandeneyra (I think the last would be Ribandeñra), begins on page 88 with his boyhood and education by a Dom Vincente, who teaches him about “the hidden secrets of nature”, which includes a good deal of stories about gemstones, including:
Natron, which, as is wonderful to relate, being cast upon the water straightway kindles into flame without the help of fire
This would be sodium metal, given that “natron” is a sodium salt.
Shortly after there is this about a fish:
[…] called in Latin the Torpedo, which hath a hidden property which is very strange, for if a man do touch it with an angle rod, she enchanteth forthwith his arm, so that often time he is constrained to abandon his prize.
This is definitely an electric ray. I thought it was going to be an eel, but found on looking it is still known as torpedo in the nomenclature. I did not know there were other electric generating animals other than eel (which by the way there are 3 of them).
If you look at a Map of New York (the state) that shows the Counties, you will notice an especially stupid looking one, that I and many other decent people think looks like a top hat. This is Herkimer County. The header image is from Wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons specifically). Some time ago this county was encluded in a very ugly gerrymander, and the resulting district was despized as “Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum-cleaner“.
If you look further, you will see the towns within it (all counties in this state are broken up internally into towns and/or cities). There is a heavy concentration of other jurisdiction names here: German Flatts, Norway, Ohio, and Russia(!). Allegedly Ohio is named after Ohio, which is unusual as usually places further west in the United States are named after places to their east. There are also villages, which sit on top of/inside of towns. This includes Poland, which is partly in Russia and partly in … Newport. This does result in the Russia town office having a Poland street/mailing address. Russia claims it doesn’t know why it is called that.
The “top hat” is made of 2 towns, Webb (upper hat) and Ohio (lower hat). I cannot currently access the federal census website (lack of funding) to verify WikipediA’s information that Webb had in 2020 an “income for a household in the town was $102,873, and the median income for a family was $105,227. About 3.7% of the population were below the poverty line.” Ohio had “median income for a household in the town was $29,813, and the median income for a family was $36,667. […] About 18.7% of families and 20.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 26.2% of those under age 18 and 30.7% of those age 65 or over.” I do not know why this is.
Ohio is currently located at the Poland VFD building because its official building burned down on account of a bad vehicle modification.
Alot of my free time like week ends and evenings I spend reading or rereading digitized out-of-copyright matter on Project Gutenberg and kindred websites. Here is some meta-Gutenbergery that surprized me so much I came here to post it, after not blogging for months.
Continue reading Meta-Gutenbergery: Sandford and MertonKindred to the “AuBOOK” of 7 years ago (which no longer works despite all the AI-ness that Microsoft is pushing) is this depiction of CAS 1343-93-7 or “12-Tungstophosphoric acid”:
This screenshot was taken around 2010/2011 on what was then the current version of Firefox. The interface has changed aplenty since then, including where they put the tabs, the DNS name highlighting (gone now), the status bar (now gone), the menu bar (hidden by default), the Windows interface itself (titlebars now larger).
As to the substance itself, you can look @ it yourself on Common Chemistry. I don’t have access to ACS’s journal offering to see what the publication is like. To someone not familiar with high molecular mass organo?-metallic substances, it looks… disorganized… in this representation.
I was trying to look up a hashtag I saw on a sticker on a roadsign and ended up with Michigan’s Department of Corrections (prison system) “Most Wanted” list. Most prison agencias have these, where they list people who’ve escaped or disappeared on parole/probation. I noticed immediately that these are old. Most of the images look like newspaper scans or really old “xerox” copies.
For example, DAVID L COSSEY. Not to mention the most likely reason he hasn’t been found/returned is that he was born 82 year ago and is probably dead. (I’m assuming people who commit a number of felonies like his have less than average life expectancy.)
The most recent person on the list is ROBERT H BOOKER, in 1996. He was imprisoned for “Breaking & Entering – A Coin Telephone”. He was given an indeterminate sentence of 2 to 4 years. The upper limit is from MCL 750.503 and the lower from the judge, I suppose.
As well as being excessive, it is peculiarly harsh. Breaking and “entering” (how do you “enter” a payphone?) a coin operated telephone is automatically a felony (MCL 750.356b) when it would otherwise (MCL 750.356) be a misdemeanor, assuming there was less than 100.00 USD (since raised to 200.00 USD) in the box to be stolen.
FlowCoef 