Artists’ lists

A display of artists’ lists, from the Smithsonian — inventories, thoughts, to-dos. Alas, every image that’s large enough to read has a large repeating watermark that interferes with reading. So what’s the point? Bad move, Smithsonian.

π Day

Seeing the Google logo reminded me: it’s π Day. Recommended reading: “The Mountains of Pi,” Richard Preston's 1992 New Yorker profile of David and Gregory Chudnovsky, calculators of π.

Marcel Proust, running coach

My daughter Rachel reports that the Los Angeles garage where she parked before running a 5K race had a framed quotation from Marcel Proust atop its ticket-dispensing machine. Something about kicking butt and taking charge. Was it this passage, I asked?

[O]ur worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 344.

It was! This passage appears in the Orange Crate Art sidebar, under the heading “Words to Live By.” What great words to stumble upon on the way to a race.

I’m very proud of my daughter. And my son. I’m not proud of the pun one paragraph back.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

“ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE,” $35.00

A reader wondered in a comment how much “ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE” cost back in 1915. Here’s the answer, more or less:



[From the Library of Congress’s Catalogue of Copyright Entries (1913). Via Google Books.]

In an essay in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (ed. A. P. Cowie, 2009), Sidney I. Landau says that the selling strategy behind the New Standard Dictionary “might be summarized as, ‘Give them more for less,’ i.e. increase the coverage of vocabulary and package the book so that it can be sold cheaply.”

Ska desktop

Ska, a desktop wallpaper for Mac by Jon-Paul Lunney, available from Simple Desktops. This wallpaper takes me back to 1979 or so.

I stick to Mac’s plain Aqua Blue, but Simple Desktops is a great resource. Thomas A. Watson describes his site as useful to anyone looking for “something that isn’t a beautiful photograph but also isn’t a gradient and drop shadowed mess with a little lens flare and some annoying copyright information in the corner.”

For context: 2 Tone Collection.

The greatest student e-mail ever sent?

I would like to first express my respect for you and every other teacher that has placed their energy into educating me and my peers, as we all know that teachers are often the unappreciated foundation of our future. However, I must express a slight amount of disrespect, as I do not agree with your perception of my paper one bit.

The mild opening of what Chauncey DeVega calls the greatest student e-mail ever sent.

A related post
How to e-mail a professor

The iPad and college, continued

“I’ll come with you. I want to win an iPad”: the Better Business Bureau discovers the “iPad button.”

March 21, 2010: Apple is offering iPad ten-packs to educational institutions.

A related post
The iPad and college students

1 COMMENTS

A sample line from the bottom of a Blogger post:



One (no pun intended) sees this sort of disagreement often online: “There are 1 additional comments on this thread,” &c. It would be so easy for Blogger to fix its problem:



I‘ve written to Blogger Support with this suggestion.

Update: there‘s a solution, as you can see below. Thank you, Philippe Chappuis!

“ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE”

[Munsey‘s Magazine, January 1915. Via Google Books.]

The top third of the page seems to be selling the secret wisdom of the ancients, not a dictionary. But no, it‘s a dictionary: see the thumb notches?

What also strikes me in the advertisement: the dictionary‘s role in self-education about current events. Note: it‘s 1915.

“War-words” sounds like something from Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Five sentences on the ship

The Google search five sentences on the ship brought someone to my post on five sentences from Bleak House. But I will try to oblige:

The poor cook he caught the fits and threw away all my grits. And then he took and he ate up all of my corn. Let me go home. Why don’t they let me go home? This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.

[With apologies to the Sloop John B.]

Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
5 sentences about life on the moon
Five sentences for smoking