Gerard Nolst Trenit
Archive for November, 2004
The Chaos, revisited
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004Maps > Encyclopedias > Reunion Sites
Monday, November 22nd, 2004Wikipedia is among the 5 most visited reference sites, after reference.com and two map sites, according to everyone’s favorite inconsistent public eyeball yardstick (inconsistency: WP shows up as both 5th and 6th; www beats out en: by a hair). At least now it is linked from the main Reference page.
Dearest Dutchman in Creation
Monday, November 22nd, 2004For all you linguists out there. Here is a fantastically droll essay on the sufferings of a British expat pronouncing his way through life in Holland (Hmm, here’s another shorter one; must be the latest fad).
The author references what must be the greatest English pronunciation criticism ever written, The Chaos — one which I first encounted this month. I ascribe this in part to my growing up in the US, where few English teachers could pronounce all of the Britishisms required to preserve rhyme and meter. However, it turns out that this gem was genreally lost for a few decades, and only slowly and in various editions made its way into the general consciousness at the end of the last century. It never fails to make me smile just trying to read it through in my head.
The origin of the poem is curious; it is claimed to have been devised by a teacher of English for a young student, or to help multinational NATO personnel polish their accents. It was certainly composed by a Dutchman, Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946), and parts continued to be written until his death. Perhaps this is why I first saw it on a page about pronouncing Dutch… I like it so much, and clean online copies are so hard to come by, I should put up my own.
Lack of versioning, texts on CD
Monday, November 22nd, 2004This business of Manila not storing the history of posts is a real shame… a template bug just blanked a pair of posts. And my local text editor doesn’t store temporary revisions, so I lost a segment of writing last night in a crash. What is it about tracking revisions of text — an amazingl cheap operation these days – that is so difficult?
What I wanted to say about texts on CD is that the German Wikipedia CD — shorter, cleaner, and well-cut — has seen 100k downloads on top of its physical distribution to 30k people, and the CD image has had many times as many downloads. Lovely. And, contrary to popular belief, it works on both Windows and Macs.
The company (Directmedia) that helped bring this about also publishes titles like “The Great German Classics” on CD. A good decade into the Gutenberg Project, why are these publishing houses so unknown? Why can’t I rattle off the name of a major publisher of Classic Literature CDs in English, the way I can say “Addison-Wesley, Penguin, O’Reilly, Dover, Springer-Verlag“?
Touching the Void
Monday, November 22nd, 2004I just saw Touching the Void (imdb)again last night. There are only six people in the film; Joe Simpson, Simon Yates, Richard Hawking, and their early-life doppelgangers.
It was every bit as riveting the second time through; and I appreciated the direct commentary from the climbers (now middle-aged and still climbing) a good deal more. There is something about people robustly expressing their real thoughts and dreams – the thousand half-formed emotions that pass across their faces before they pick one idea to express and speak it aloud – which is more nuanced than the greatest matchup of director and actor.
Every time I turn around to check up on some part of Simpson’s life story, I find another one of his co-authors or fellow climbers being referred to as “late”; something like the world of private piloting, everyone who climbs professionally has a handful of friends who have died in the act. Jono may have given up flying as a result, as Simpson finally has climbing (mainly due to the disintegration of the ankle on his good leg), but as Joe says early on, “if death weren’t involved, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
On the most devastating part of dying alone, aside from an eternity of Boney M‘s “brown girl in the ring”:
Once right at the end I made a critical mistake, I believed they might still be there. When I called out and they weren’t, it was a devastating moment because I allowed myself a little bit of hope.
Still hungry for more? Here’s a quick post-film interview with Joe Simpson.
Wikipedia meetup
Sunday, November 21st, 2004Everything about the Incredibles is… Fantastic
Sunday, November 21st, 2004Incredibles. lovely film. a pleasure to watch ten times over. And yet every watching is tempered by two things:
1. Marvel Comics and the Fantastic Four get no credit, despite being inspiration for almost every superpower and character in the story. The FF in particular provided the template for most of the Incredible family, from their family worries to their particular powers. In an odd sort of homage, the gratuitous Next Villain who shows up at the end of the film was pulled straight out of FF #1, their first marvel comic ever. (Mole Man lives!)
2. The last 15 min of the film are garbage, when compared to the glory of the rest of the film. They show how mediocre the whole film could have been, were there no time for polishing script, score or scenery.
XXX40
Wednesday, November 17th, 2004They say you can never know somebody perfectly, not even yourself. It can make you feel helpless in the face of the gaping maw of the eternal Void. There are days when the pointlessness of life hangs from your neck like a bronzed baby, and even a second helping of scallion pancakes seems unappetizing. And yet redundant lightweight wireless devices secreted about your person, with touchscreens and zpf keyboards, interconnected via infrared and thumb-sized harddrives, can make these worries disappear for a few fleeting hours.
Posting from a much beloved X40,
SJ
ucsd med school
Tuesday, November 9th, 2004I missed the live panel with HIV-positive children yesterday, but everyone is stll discussing retroviruses (when did “virus” take on the generic plural?). David Baltimore just made a conversational appearance, along with purified viral stocks. This state is passing lovely, and somehow I am dancing between predicted rainclouds; sunny, fogless, and clear today, as twas in SF all weekend.
accelerating change
Sunday, November 7th, 2004Here I am in Palo Alto, sitting nezt to Shimon and Bruce at the
Accelerating change conference. There are about 300 people at the
conference, and we just enjoyed a rare presentation by will wright
(talking about second life, among other things)
waiting to hear
his debate with jaron lanier later today. and, of course, posting from
the ipaq… still about 40wpm, but havent migrated to touchtyping yet.