Bartleby Quotations

Wha'd I say

Churchill, Winston S.

..."man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on."

Here are a few of one hundred + reference sources available free:

Bartleby.com

• American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary
  
• Brewer's Phrase & Fable
  
• Bulfinch's Mythology
  
• Cambridge History
  
• Columbia Encyclopedia
  
• Columbia Gazetteer
  
• Dickinson, E.
  
• Einstein's Relativity
  
• Eliot, T.S.
  
• Farmer's Cookbook
  
• Fowler's King's English
  
• Gray's Anatomy
  
• Lawrence, D.H.
  
• Mencken's Language
  
• Oxford Shakespeare
  
• Presidential Inaugurals
  
• Roget's Thesaurus
  
• Strunk's Style
  
• The King James Bible
  

Also see: Project Gutenberg 


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Foley Sounds

Clip Clop

Here's a subject you have heard about:

A Foley Artist 'recreates' sound effects for film, television and radio productions on a Foley Stage in a Post Production Sound Studio.
Using many different kinds of shoes and lots of props - car fenders, plates, glasses, chairs, and just about anything found at the side of the road - the Foley Artist can replace original sound completely or augment existing sounds to create a richer smoother track.
Almost every motion picture and television show you have ever seen and heard contains a Foley track!

NPR presented this story:
Jack Foley: Feet to the Stars

Also:
Art of Foley

Film Sound Q&A


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And Then There Was Word

Remember the past

As one writer put it:

"Before the development of personal computers and word processing software, documents were produced on typewriters."

Chris Pratley, a Microsoft Program Manager, started with the Excel team in 1994 and then worked with the Word team. He has written about the early days:
Let's talk about Word


Also see:
WordStar Resource Site
(Includes a WordStar emulator for Word)


And:
In Search of Stupidity


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Horrific Stories

What did your Grandparents do?

"Unsuspecting visitors in crime-infested Port Townsend, victims of shanghaiing, are sold to the highest bidder
Bunco Kelly, Spider Johnson and fourteen dead men on the deck of the Flying Price.
Urban East Hicks surrounded by Indians in 1886.
Earthquakes, riots, robberies, murders and a host of other terrifying events which created panic in the streets of communities throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Selected from the Clippings File of the Tacoma Public Library's Northwest Room /Special Collections, these true-life tales chillingly capture the dark side of our state's history."

Unsettling Events!


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World War I

Color pictures

"Louis Lumière had already invented instant photographic plates and the Cinematographe when, in late 1903, he and his brother Auguste patented a new process for producing colour photographs : the Autochrome.

Before the invention of the Autochrome, colours were separated using a complex three-colour process whereby three successive exposures had to be taken and then superimposed onto each other.

Louis Lumière, however, devised a method of filtering light by using a single three-colour screen made up of millions of grains of potato starch dyed in three different colours.

This mixture was then laid out on a varnished glass plate, which would be ready for use once it was coated in a black and white emulsion.

Developing the plate entailed applying the same process as was used for black and white photographs at the time, with the impression being processed to reversal.

Institut-Lumiere.org
Here are some examples:

"It looks like a painting by impressionist Edouard Manet, but it is a real color picture, made in 1914, by Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud, Commander of the Photography and Cinematography Section of the French Army.

When the Great War broke out, in 1914, French poilu's (common soldiers) still wore their Napoleontic uniforms with red trousers. They made perfect targets.

Here are some more:
World War I Photos

The Great War


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Tuva or Bust

Richard Feynman's Last Journey

By Ralph Leighton
ISBN 0-393-32069-3
W.W.Norton & Company, Inc. 2000, 1991

Tuva or Bust

There has been a lot made of the PowerPoint contribution to the failure of the Challenger shuttle (see Edward Tufte.)

Before that was the Columbia disaster. Richard Feynman found the problem with the "O" rings, He too complained about PowerPoint like presentations:

"Then we learned about bullets — little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides."

This book however is about something altogether different.

As a stamp-collecting boy always fascinated by remote places, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was particularly taken by the diamond-shaped stamps from a place called Tannu Tuva. He hoped, someday, to travel there. In 1977, Feynman and his sidekick — fellow drummer and geography enthusiast Ralph Leighton — set out to make arrangements to visit Tuva, doing noble and hilarious battle with Soviet red tape, befriending quite a few Tuvans, and discovering the wonders of Tuvan throat-singing. Their Byzantine attempts to reach Tannu Tuva would span a decade, interrupted by Feynman's appointment to the committee investigating the Challenger disaster, and his tragic struggle with the cancer that finally killed him. Tuva or Bust! chronicles the deepening friendship of two zany, brilliant strategists whose love of the absurd will delight and instruct. It is Richard Feynman's last, best adventure.

Quote

"Sure enough, occupying a notch northwest of Mongolia was a territory that could well once have had the name Tannu Tuva.
"Look at this," remarked Richard, "The capital is spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L."
"That's crazy," I said. "There's not a legitimate vowel anywhere!"
"We must go there," said Gweneth.
"Yeah!" exclaimed Richard. "A place that's spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L has got to be interesting."

More Tuva:
Tuva Movies and Sounds
Friends of Tuva

Also:
Listen to the music of Tuva on this CD. Willie Nelson is on one track, but it does demonstrate two toned throat singing:

Tuva Throat Singing

Here's another great Tuva story:

Genghis Blues

" Paul Pena is a blind San Francisco blues singer who has played with the likes of John Lee Hooker and Jerry Garcia (he also penned "Jet Airliner," which Steve Miller covered). One night while listening to his shortwave radio, he picked up a Radio Moscow broadcast and heard the mesmerizing, gutteral sound of throat singing, which is peculiar to Tuva's region of upper Mongolian. Enthralled, he became a master of this obscure art form. Enter Friends of Tuva, a curious group that included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who likewise had become fascinated with Tuva. In 1993 they sponsored a San Francisco appearance by Tuvan singers. Pena was in the audience and met with the singers afterward. Pena so impressed the Tuvans that he was encouraged to come to Tuva and participate in its annual festival competition. Genghis Blues chronicles this incredible journey."

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STIFF

The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

By Mary Roach
ISBN 0-393-05093-9
W.W. Norton 2003

About the Author
Has written for Salon, Discover, New York Times Magazine

Book Description

For two thousand years, cadavers -- some willingly, some unwittingly -- have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

In this fascinating, ennobling account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries -- from the anatomy labs and human-sourced pharmacies of medieval and nineteenth-century Europe to a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab, to a Scandinavian funeral directors' conference on human composting.

Quote
Besides a study about what happens to our remains, Roach has this comment:

"Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics. While there existed, I am told, cultures in Central America that actually ranched humans -- kept enemy soldiers captive for awhile to fatten them up -- it was not practical to do so, because you had to give up more food to feed them than you'd gain in the end by eating them. Carnivores and omnivores, in other words, make lousy livestock."

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Internet History

Two tin cans

From Forbes:

The Internet: A Short History of Getting Connected.

When the Defense Department issued a $19,800 contract on December 6, 1967, for the purpose of studying the "design and specification of a computer network," the world didn't take notice. But it should have. For, from that small, four-month study grew the ARPANET. And, from ARPANET emerged the Internet.

Also:
Living Internet

"An elegantly organized tour of the history of the Internet -- both fun and informative -- a rare combination!"
Steve Crocker, invented the Request For Comments.

All About the Internet

Hobbes' Internet Timeline v11.0


A Brief History of the Internet

"When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the "interfaith message processor" contract."

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President's Day or Presidents' Day

Neither

The third Monday in February is officially Washington's birthday, not Presidents' Day according to the federal government.

Individual states may designate the day as anything they want, but the federal holiday is Washington's birthday.

Snopes.com

Interestingly enough, although Georgia celebrates Washington's Birthday, the Governor is accorded the right to designate when state holidays occur. In Georgia, Washington's Birthday is recognized the day after Christmas.

There is an urban legend that when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was implemented in 1971, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation calling for a Presidents' Day on the third Monday to honor all U.S. presidents.

Each February both the Law Library at the Library of Congress and the Nixon Library field an upsurge in calls on this question. No evidence of this exists in Nixon's official papers.

Wikipedia


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One Summer America, 1927

EVERYTHING happened in the Summer of 1927!

by Bill Bryson




"It’s amazing what a talented writer at the top of his game can do with a seemingly narrow topic. The title of Bill Bryson’s latest sums up the simplicity of his task: to document the “most extraordinary summer” of 1927, beginning with Charles Lindbergh’s successful flight across the Atlantic. 

Even though we know many of these stories--Lindbergh’s flight, Babe Ruth’s 60-homerun season, the Mississippi River flood, Al Capone’s bullet-ridden reign over Chicago--in Bryson’s hands, and in the context of one amazing summer of twentieth-century ingenuity and accomplishment, they feel fresh, lively, and just plain fun. The book is so jammed with “did you know it” nuggets and fascinating origin stories (the opening of the Holland Tunnel, the first Mickey Mouse prototype, the source of the term “hot dog”), the effect is like sitting beside a brilliant, slightly boozy barstool raconteur, who knows a little bit about everything. 

From a tabloid murder trial to a flagpole-sitting record to the secret origins of the looming Great Depression, One Summer offers a new look at a transitional period in history, re-introducing us to such characters as Capone, Jack Dempsey, Al Jolson, Charles Ponzi, and Herbert Hoover. Ultimately, this is a book about the moment when important things, for good or ill, began happening in the US. With a giddy narrative voice and keen eye for off-kilter details, Bryson has spun a clever tale of America’s coming of age." --Neal Thompson




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Historical Documents

Remember good old paper?

"Fold3 helps you find and share historic documents. We are able to bring you many never-before-seen historic documents through our unique partnerships with The National Archives, the Library of Congress and other institutions.

Our patented digitization process is helping bring other collections to life on the web everyday.

But Fold3 is more than just a dusty, digital archive online. We provide you the tools to share your historical passions and connect with others."

Fold3.com


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History is Something to Play with

Games for kids (and you)

History can be boring when the only reward is a scribbled "Acceptable" on a test paper.

But what if part of the game is to build a trebuchet to fling the teacher?

"Welcome to the SchoolHistory.co.uk downloadable resources centre. This has been updated to allow quick, easy access to our resources kindly contributed by other teachers. There are now over 1,400 pages of resources available."

Interactive History Games



Also see Build a Trebuchet in your Backyard


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Go Back 23 Hours

Really save useful time

"Therefore, let us keep the fall ritual as it is. However, one Sunday each Spring, let us set our clocks not one hour forward, but TWENTY-THREE HOURS BACKWARD.

Think of all the advantages. We will not lose an hour of sleep; we will gain (almost) a day of rest. It will be Saturday all over again. You will never again miss Confession, or an airplane, or the Redskins game.

Naturally, if this were the whole plan, our calendars would fall behind one day in each year. However, the second part of the Revised DST Plan deals with this. Every four years, instead of adding a day, let us SUBTRACT THREE DAYS.

Furthermore, let these be Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, which according to recent polls are the least popular days.

Stop Daylight Saving Time

---

Daylight Saving Time

About Daylight Saving Time

Wikipedia Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Savings Google News

As a result of the U.S. passing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. changed starting in 2007. DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November.


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Your Grand-cestors Swore

Your Grandmothers told them to stop

What is there about a well placed curse that spices a novel or a conversation?
Perhaps it's genetic or evolutionary.

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

Almost before we spoke

Refered to by:
LanguageHat.com
The Antiquity Of Cursing


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Julian Dates

Gregorian to/from Julian

Julian dates refer to the number of days from the first of the year and the number of days until the end of the year.

The year -45 has been called the "year of confusion," because in that year Julius Caesar inserted 90 days to bring the months of the Roman calendar back to their traditional place with respect to the seasons. This was Caesar's first step in replacing a calendar that had gone badly awry. Caesar created a solar calendar with twelve months of fixed lengths and a provision for an intercalary day to be added every fourth year. As a result, the average length of the Julian calendar year was 365.25 days.

The Gregorian (Pope Gregory XIII) calendar is based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146,097 days. Since 146,097 is evenly divisible by 7. Dividing 146,097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year. The Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years.

Calendars by L. E. Doggett


From Chip Pearson's site CPearson.com:

"Many applications (especially mainframe systems) store dates in the Julian format, which is a 5-digit number, consisting of a 2-digit year and a 3-digit day-of-year number. For example, 24-August-1999 is stored as 99236, since 24-August is the 236th day of the year. Excel does not support Julian dates directly, but you can use them with only a few fairly simple formulas.

Converting A Standard Date To A Julian Date

The formula below will convert a standard Excel date in A1 to a Julian Date.

=RIGHT(YEAR(A1),2)&TEXT(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,0),"000")

This formula takes the 2 right-most characters of the YEAR of the date in A1, and then appends the number of days between the date in A1 and the 0th day of that year. The TEXT function formats the day-of-year number as three digits, with leading zeros if necessary.

Converting A Julian Date To A Standard Date

The formula below will convert a Julian date to a standard Excel date.

=DATE(IF(0+(LEFT(A1,2))<30 data-blogger-escaped-strong="strong">

If the year digits of the Julian date are less than 30 (i.e., 00 to 29), the date is assumed to be a 2000 century year. If the year digits of the Julian date are greater than or equal to 30 (i.e., 30 to 99), the date is assumed to be a 1900 century year. This formula works by taking advantage of the fact that the DATE function can handle days beyond the "normal" days in a month. For example, DATE correctly computes 100-Jan-1999 to be 10-April-1999.

These Julian dates must have the leading zero or zeros for years between 2000 and 2009. For example the 123rd day of 2000 must be entered as 00123. Format the cell as TEXT before entering the data, or enter an apostrophe before the Julian date -- e.g., '00123. This will prevent Excel from treating the Julian date as a number and suppressing the leading zeros."

US Naval Observatory has this definition (and a calculator):

Julian dates (abbreviated JD) are simply a continuous count of days and fractions since noon Universal Time on January 1, 4713 BCE (on the Julian calendar). Almost 2.5 million days have transpired since this date.

CE 2016 March 17 03:00:00.0 is JD 2457464.625000


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Half Staff

When and how

A Proclamation by the President: Death of Coretta Scott King

A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

As a mark of respect for the memory of Coretta Scott King, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that on February 7, 2006, the day of her interment, the flag of the United States shall be flown at half staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset on such day. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half-staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this sixth day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirtieth.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Issued 2/6/06


Free notification of Official orders to fly the flag at half staff. Contact FlagsExpress.com.

You will be notified when orders are released.

Also:

Veterans Administration:
Guidelines for Display of the Flag

and:

Flag Etiquette

Washington State flag


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Date an Octothorpe

Some more of those things I'm sure I used to know

The keyboard combination of Alt+Shift+D inserts the current date in MS Word and PowerPoint. Ctrl+; (semicolon) does it in Excel and Access.

If you do not like the date's format, select a different one with Insert>Date and Time and, if you would like to make that permanent, click on the Default button in the lower left corner of the dialog box (in PowerPoint it's in the lower right corner).

In Excel, Ctrl+Shift +# formats the entry as day-month-year. Ctrl+1 will display the "Format cells" dialog box.

BTW, the "hash, pound or number" sign # is also called an "octothorpe".

The person who named it combined Octo for the eight points and Thorpe for James Thorpe.

"Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new touch tone phone system. He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with octo-. He was apparently at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add thorpe to the end."

While we're at it, the "backwards P, Enter mark" ¶ is actually named a "pilcrow".

The pilcrow was used in medieval times to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of using paragraphs was commonplace.

Also see:
Geek-speak names for punctuation marks

Wikipedia:
Punctuation


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Dvorak Anyone?

Alternative Keyboard Layouts

"Free keyboard layouts - called Dvorak layouts - are available for people who type with one hand or finger. These layouts make the most frequently typed characters on a keyboard more accessible to people who have difficulty using the standard keyboard layout (called the "QWERTY" layout).

Dvorak keyboard layouts reduce the amount of motion required to type common English text. Use of these layouts may also help avoid some types of repetitive strain injuries associated with typing.

Studies have also shown an increase in typing speed and accuracy when using the Dvorak layout for two hands. The left-hand or right-hand keyboard layouts can also be useful for people who type with a wand."

You do not need to modify your hardware keyboard to use these layouts, but you will need to change your keyboard settings to use the Dvorak layouts.

(A keyboard layout is a map or a definition of how keys are laid out on your keyboard. The keyboard layout you use is determined by software in your computer. The letters on your keys indicate the standard layout for your keyboard.)

Tutorials and downloads




Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard
By Marcus Brooks

A Brief Primer
by Randy Cassingham


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John Titor - 2036

The future came back

Why speculate about the future, when we've already been visited by a representative?

"A tale that disturbed me, concerned me, made me wonder if our world as we know it has less than 15 years left.

It is the tale of John Titor, a self-proclaimed time traveler from the year 2036.

Okay, it sounds crazy. It's not crazy, though . . .it's simply a hoax. It's a compelling hoax, so I decided to write my take on it. After some initial 'what if' excitement about it, the reality set in that this wasn't what it appeared to be. In this piece, I hope to prove relatively clearly that his claims are false both in theory and in fact. He seemed to know enough about physics to pass amongst laymen, but unfortunately he skipped philosophy and economics while he was reading all those physics books.

Since this story just won't seem to die and there is evidence that the same perpetrator is now claiming to be an alien on various boards across the web, I felt it was worth sitting down and analyzing."

Tackling John Titor, Time Traveler



Wikipedia:
John Titor

"John Titor was the name of a purported time traveler from the year 2036. He posted on several time travel-related Internet bulletin boards during 2000/2001, making many vague and seemingly falsifiable predictions about events in the near future and giving an explicit, detailed account of his supposed native time period. Whether or not John Titor was a hoax is a topic of controversy on web-based paranormal discussion boards."

John Ttior's Story

"Someone using the assumed name of John Titor and claiming to be a soldier on a mission from 2036 presented a considerable amount of information on the Web beginning around November 2000 about his mission and time travel machine, his perspective on our society, how our society is going wrong, and how society as we know it will end in a very short but massive global nuclear war in 2015. He's gone now, back to 2036 he said he was going in his last posting on March 24, 2001, and the threads he left across the Web in his five months with us have been slowly evaporating since then."

AboveTopSecret.com:
The John Titor Project

"Although many find it easy to dismiss all this as either science fiction or an elaborate extended hoax, there are those who still read his information and agree that there is something very troubling about John Titor and what he had to say."

Answers.com:
John Titor

" He claimed his time machine — a "C204 time displacement" machine-was created by General Electric. Supposedly, he transported it in a standard motor vehicle (a black, model-year 1966 Chevrolet Corvette Convertible shown in the photographs he provided), and the car also served as his vessel whilst traveling through time (it remained stationary throughout with the engine off). He claimed that the public is fully aware of time travel in his time period, although the extreme skeptics of his day do not believe it exists."

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Best of Clementine, The

Not lost and gone

Why write new words and lyrics? They're interchangeable.

" You've heard it sung around the campfires! You've lifted your voice to its haunting melody countless times! Now K-Smel records introduces an all-new collection... The Best Of Clementine! "

1. The words to Clementine can be sung easily to the tune of certain songs
   
2. By extension, the words to these songs can be sung to the tune of Clementine
   
3. By further extension, the words and tunes of any of these songs are interchangeable
   

There is an MP3 file on the site that can be downloaded to illustrate the principal. The Best Of Clementine By Carl Franklin

Original lyrics from: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

How I missed her, how I missed her, How I missed my Clementine, Til I kissed her little sister, And forgot my Clementine.

1885 version: Ingeb.org


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