π Day

Today is π Day. 3.14, &c.

Richard Preston's 1992 New Yorker profile of the Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory, calculators of π, is online. David Chudnovksy:

"We need many billions of digits. Even a billion digits is a drop in the bucket. Would you like a Coca-Cola?"

in 1992 the Chudnovksy brothers were unsalaried, untenured "senior research scientists" at Columbia University. They are now distinguished professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

The Mountains of Pi (New Yorker)

Pluto Day

It's Pluto Day in Illinois. Above, an imaginary headline, also in Illinois.

Related post
MVEMJSUNP!

Resemblance: The Portraits

Here's a beautiful project with an appropriately Proustian title: Resemblance: The Portraits. David Richardson has made sixty-three 3" x 4 1/2" paintings, acrylic on balsa: one of Marcel Proust as a young man, one of Jeanne Proust, five of scenes from À la recherche du temps perdu, and fifty-six of the novel's characters.

These imagined portraits are wonderfully lit and highly expressive, and again and again, they seem right. Consider the portraits of young Gilberte Swann and the writer Bergotte:



Richardson's work also shows an understated sense of humor. A portrait of the composer Vinteuil bears a strong resemblance to César Franck, whose Violin Sonata in A Major (1886) is one of the real-world analogues of the Vinteuil Sonata. And Richardson's portrait of the the lift boy at the Balbec Grand Hôtel appears to be modeled on Johnny Roventini, the bellhop of "Call for Phillip Morris." I lived in Roventini's Brooklyn neighborhood when very young. No remembrance of things past here: I know only what I've been told. I was very, very young.

David Richardson's work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Thanks, David, for letting me know about your work.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

NYT and higher ed

If you've read last Friday's New York Times article Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times, follow up with Marc Bousquet's Junk Analysis of Higher Ed by the Times. The Times:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever.

As Bousquet points out, it's not "the economy":

Most of the people who won't get tenure track jobs this year, like last year, and every year since 1968 (that’s all four "recent decades," but who's counting?), won't get them because universities have substituted casual student labor for full-time faculty and staff positions.

And then of course there are adjunct positions. As Frank Donoghue notes in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), tenured and tenure-track professors now compose only 35% of college teaching personnel in the United States, and that percentage is dropping.

[Update: The American Association of University Professors released new figures yesterday. In 2007, tenured and tenure-track professors composed 31.2% of college teaching personnel.]

Domestic comedy

"My childhood has bled into my adulthood. They're no longer separate entities."

Related reading
All "domestic comedy" posts

MVEMJSUNP!

My state in action:

WHEREAS, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, was born on a farm near the Illinois community of Streator; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh served as a researcher at the prestigious Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh first detected the presence of Pluto in 1930; and

WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh is so far the only Illinoisan and only American to ever discover a planet; and

WHEREAS, For more than 75 years, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the Solar System; and

WHEREAS, A spacecraft called New Horizons was launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto in the year 2015; and

WHEREAS, Pluto has three moons: Charon, Nix and Hydra; and

WHEREAS, Pluto's average orbit is more than three billion miles from the sun; and

WHEREAS, Pluto was unfairly downgraded to a "dwarf" planet in a vote in which only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union's 10,000 scientists participated; and

WHEREAS, Many respected astronomers believe Pluto's full planetary status should be restored; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois' night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared "Pluto Day" in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.

That's SR0046, from the Illinois General Assembly. I've never been prouder of my state — and its solar system. Maybe your state or country can get its own solar system too!

This article corrects a deep error in the bill's argument:

State Sen. Gary Dahl leads Illinois' fight for restoring Pluto's planetary status (Chicago Tribune)

[If this post's title makes no sense to you, see here: Mnemonic.]

Rite-Rite Long Leads

[4 1/16" x 5/16".]

Another item from a now-defunct downstate-Illinois stationery store. Affixed to the back, a label with a price — 10¢ — in fountain-pen ink.

In 1921, the Rite-Rite Mfg. Co. began mfg. fountain pens, mechanical pencils, and pencil leads, clips, and erasers. The company later became a subsidiary of the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company (as in Dixon Ticonderoga). I have these details from a 1950 case heard in the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, Rite-Rite Mfg. Co. v. Rite-Craft Co. Rite-Rite was unhappy about Rite-Craft's choice of name, claiming that it would lead to confusion among customers. The Court's decision includes this bit of dry impatience:

We cannot understand how any purchaser of a lead pencil or a fountain pen, which had applied to it as a mark the word 'Rite,' could imagine that such term meant anything except that it was a misspelling of the word 'write.' It is clearly descriptive of the character of the goods of both parties.

Thus Rite-Rite and Rite-Craft kept mfg. under their chosen names, supplying supply-hungry writers before fading into the stationery past.

I wonder what sort of calculation went into the spelling of the name Rite-Rite. Having opted for the pun, the company must have decided that twin misspellings would make it simpler for customers to keep the name straight. Greater convenience when calling Directory Assistance!

Related post
Real Thin Leads

[This post is the second in an occasional series, "From the Museum of Supplies." The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family's word, for all manner of stationery items.]

From the Doyle edition

"The Doyle edition" is what a friend and I called our paperbacks of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, every page covered in notes from studying the poem in Modern British Poetry with James P. Doyle. The earliest notes on this page from "East Coker," the second of the quartets, must date from 1976, when I was a junior in college. I added to those notes when sitting in on the same Doyle course as a graduate student (to get all that I'd missed the first time). Many of the later notes came in when I was working on 20th-century long poems and, later still, when I was teaching a course on William Butler Yeats and TSE. The notes on this page span at least twelve years of reading.

I prefer my copy of Four Quartets to the Kindle.

Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
Doyle and French
Jim Doyle (1944–2005)
A Jim Doyle story
Teaching, sitting, standing

No Kindle for me

From Cool Tools, a paean to the Kindle, by Alexander Rose:

Yes, it is now time to get a Kindle. . . .

I have discovered the real reason why you want one. It is because you think of books that you want to read while you are reading other books. On the Kindle you have the unique ability to buy the book right then and there, while you are thinking about it, and it appears on the device moments later all via a free cellphone link they call Whispernet. This feature is one of the least discussed, and to me most useful parts of owning a Kindle, especially compared to the other readers out there. It is because of this feature that I am now reading more than ever.

I sometimes feel that I must now be living on Twin Earth, where "reading books" means something quite different from "reading books." To my mind, reading a book involves a form of attention that make Rose's "real reason" almost laughable. I don't want to stop to buy another book while I'm reading, no more than I want to stop to buy another movie while watching one. On Rose's model, reading turns into a mode of consumer activity, impulse buying at that, the Kindle ready at every moment to take your order. The library? Posh! Get that book now. I expect the day will come when one can click on a word or phrase in an e-book — cashmere sweater, Swiss Army Knife — and be presented with a range of objects for purchase.

I don't doubt the enthusiasm with which some readers have greeted the Kindle. But there are many ways to think about one's relation to books. Annotating, re-annotating, lending — these are activities that undergo essential redefinition or become impossible via the Kindle. The craving for content-on-demand seems to miss the ways in which one might want to go back to a book — one's own copy of it — over time, as it accumulates annotations, as it begins to show wear, as it turns into a record of one's reading and one's life experience. And how does one inscribe a gift book on the Kindle?

One of my great pleasures in listening to music is listening to the copy of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue that my dad brought home in 1959. (It left the house with me when I went out on my own.) One corner is torn, the result of my "indexing" my dad's records for him with slips of paper and tape when I was a kid (dumb kid!). This 1959 LP is my favorite Kind of Blue. Such attachment is not merely sentimental — or if it is, it might be necessarily so. We human types get attached to stuff. Proust understood that.

[The last two paragraphs of this post began as a comment I made on this Boing Boing post. Yes, I have Kind of Blue on CD. My dad does too.]

Related reading
From the Doyle edition
"So cheap, so accessible"

George Wein rides again

George Wein, eighty-three, founder of the Newport Folk Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival:

"My legs are shot, but for some reason, my head is doing better than ever."

Wein is returning as producer of both festivals this summer.