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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Hm, well I live (as I mention now and again) in the northeastern U.S., where it looks like conditions are not going to be particularly good tomorrow evening for viewing the Transit of Venus. If you live somewhere where the sun is shining, be sure to check it out! Cornell's Fuentes Observatory invites you to come take a look, rain date December 11, 2117. More info at nasa's Eclipse website.
Below the fold, from hyperarts, an account of Mason & Dixon's time at the Cape of Good Hope, where they observed the Transit 250 years ago; taken from the Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa, November 1951. (Thanks for the link, Henry!)
In Astronomy and Geodetics the names of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon are inseparably linked together. They were colleagues in making observations of the Transits of Venus in 1761 in 1769, in the survey of the famous Mason and Dixon Line in America and in the measurement of the length of a degree of latitude also in America. How they came to be at the Cape in 1761 is almost what Shakespeare would call a tragical-comical-historical-pastoral story which I regret must be considerably curtailed in this talk.
Though Gregory was the first to point out that transit of Venus over the Sun's disc afforded a means of ascertaining the solar parallax, Halley was the first to explain how it was to be accomplished. This he did in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1716 wherein he urged young astronomers who should live to observe the phenomenon to apply themselves diligently with all their might to the making of this observation so that it may redound to their immortal fame and glory. He assumed the Sun's parallax to be 2 seconds and the difference between the parallaxes of the Sun and Venus to be 31 seconds. It is impossible to go into the details of his prediction but it must be mentioned that he was careful to explain that the motions of the Nodes of Venus had not yet been discovered and could only be determined by such conjunctions of sun and planet. If the Nodes remained in the same place and if the plane of Venus's orbit were immoveable in the sphere of the fixed stars the planet would pass four minutes of arc below the Sun's centre.
He laid great stress on observtions being made either at Madras or Bencoolen on the western coast of Sumatra and also at Fort Nelson on Hudson's Bay in North America. At the first named places the whole of the transit would be visible while at Fort Nelson it would enter on the Sun's disc just before sunset and leave it immediately after sunrise. Moreover the duration of the transit would be 15 minutes 10 seconds longer at Fort Nelson that in the East Indies.
As the date of the transit approached astronomers of all nations got busy. The Royal Society raised money, including £800 from the Crown, to send Maskelyne to St. Helena and Mason and Dixon to Bencoolen. Maskelyne was unfortunate as bad weather prevented his observing the Transit. Mason and Dixon embarked on H.M.S. Seahorse but a French frigate of superior force attacked their vessel and killed 11 and wounded 38 of the crew. The Frenchmen sheered off when another English vessel hove in sight but the Seahorse had to put back to repair damages. Our astronomers had not bargained for fighting and they wrote to the Royal Society declining to proceed to Bencoolen but offering to go to Scanderoon. The reply was a letter which (let us hope) has never been equalled by that illustrious body before or since. It threatened inflexible resentment and prosecution with the utmost severity of the law. It prophesied an indelible scandal upon their characters and utter ruin, and concluded with an express command to go on board the Seahorse and enter upon the voyage be the event as it may fall out.
Fear of the Royal Society proved greater than fear of the French and the voyage began but they soon found that they could not hope to reach Bencoolen in the time, so by the advice and consent of the captain of their frigate they made for Cape Town, then of course a Dutch colony. As good patriots they could not admit to foreigners that an English ship had had a bad time from a Frenchman so with economy of truth they informed the Dutch Commander that diverse disasters in the Channel had unduly delayed them.
They asked to be allowed to spend some time here, that a site suitable for an observatory should be granted and that materials for the erection of the observatory should be supplied. All of which requests were duly complied with, and when they left our Astronomers wrote conveying their grateful appreciation of the assistance rendered to them. The site of the observatory was between John and Hope streets behind St. Mary's Cathedral. (I may mention here that thanks mainly to Mr. Wells, Capt. Cook's chief astronomer, and Sir Thomas Maclear the site of the taking of every astronomical observation made at the Cape can be ascertained with geodetic precision.) Its latitude was determined as South 33° 44' 42" and its longitude East 1hr.13m.35s.
Mason and Dixon arrived in Table Bay on April 27th, took the instruments on shore on May 2nd and set the clock going on May 4th. The body of the observatory was circular with a radius of 6 feet and the height of the wall was 5 feet. The roof which was made of board was conical in shape and was moveable. The opening was 3 feet broad and the roof was easily turned to any part of the heavens. The clock was fixed against two timbers of 10 x 8 inches section sunk 4 feet into the ground and joined by rods 1 inch in diameter. The pendulum of the clock was not altered in length. The other instruments were (1) a quadrant of one foot radius made by Bird and the property of the Earl of Macclesfield and (2) two reflecting telescopes, each 2 feet local length and magnifying 120 times, mady by Short. One at least of the telescopes had a micrometer because we find a small table for the adjustment of the nonus of the micrometer. On May 4th they fixed the quadrant satisfactorily and found by meridian observations of Procyon on the 4th, 5th and 6th that the clock has a losing rate of 2m 17s, 2m 18s, and 2 m 16s. The report says that on this date the observatory being now finished I put the clock into it, wound up the pendulum and set it to nearly sidereal time.
On the great day the sun ascended in the thick haze and immediately entered a dark cloud but in 20 minutes they obtained their first sight of Venus which of course was on the Sun's disc. Then it became first hazy and then cloudy but at 1h 18m 7s they obtained a measurement of the distance between the Sun's farthest limb and Venus's southern limb. They made 5 more similar measurements and also determined the apparent diameters of the Sun and Venus. Very soon after the transit finished the sky again became cloudy and remained so until night. Mason reports "When I saw the planet first its periphery and that of the Sun's were in a great tremour, but this vanished as the Sun rose and became well defined. Four minutes before the internal contact the Sun's disc was entirely hidden by cloud for about one minute."
During the remainder of their stay at the Cape our astronomers made many observations of stars at equal altitudes to obtain meridian passages, measured zenith distances of various stars for determining the latitude, and observed immersions and emersions of Jupiter's satellites for determining the longitude.
On September 28 they packed up their instruments and the next day put them on board the Mercury on which on October 3rd they sailed for St. Helena where they joined Maskelyne. There the clock was set going again (the length of the pendulum still not having been altered) and from Oct. 31st 1761 to Jan. 22nd 1762 they made observations for determining the rate of the clock.
They left soon afterwards and reached England in safety.
Currently reading Nostromo on the subway to and from work, The Lives of Things and (very, very slowly) Manual de pintura y caligrafÃa* for weekend reading, and making plans to open up and read and write about Antigua vida mÃa as my contribution to the Spanish Lit Month which Richard of Caravana de recuerdos will with his various co-conspirators be hosting in July. Here is a snippet of reading experience from this weekend --
One could say that the chair about to topple is perfect. In what sense? "complete" certainly -- is the implication here that perfection is death?
Two books in hand on Sunday morning, Sunday morning, pleasant summer Sunday in South Orange, in the village where I live. The orderly torrent of yellow luxurious sunlight amazes me, soft on my skin like satin.
I open up The lives of things and read about the Chair, about the bench beneath me, the allegory's still not crystal clear to me, I'm happy though to dig the plain, the superficial meaning of the words and phrases, marvel at the beauty of the key instead of trying it in its lock.
*(And what, precisely, is the point (you will ask) of reading Saramago in Spanish translation, a novel which is available in English translation, in translation by Pontiero no less? Not sure. But I am having fun with it...)
Here is the utterly beguiling epigraph Saramago chose for his short stories:
If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human.
It is from Chapter 6 of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians which was their first collaborative effort. Saramago's method of carrying out this transformation of the environment, while I cannot imagine it to be just what Marx and Engels had in mind, is somehow exactly the right thing.
posted evening of June third, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
In Pontiero's translation, Saramago calls silence the "universal synonym, the omnivalent" -- a basis, a bottom layer to the intricate sediment of meaning which accretes as sounds are given voice and associated with their meanings. As these fluid meanings set and stick and harden, deepen, language diverges, attaining "a variety of words which never say the same thing, however much we might want them to. If they were to say the same thing, if they were to group together through affinity of structure and origin, then life would be much simpler, by means of successive" erosions of the sediment. Perhaps it is implicit here that this destructive simplification is/was a goal of Salazar*, the "poor wretch" sitting in the termite-eaten chair in its last moments as chair, but I may be reading this in.
*And a million thanks to Pontiero's introduction for elucidating this supremely important detail -- when I was reading this story in Spanish last year, I could mostly understand and make sense of the words and sentences, but was unable absent this critical bit of backstory to put them together into anything like a meaningful whole. Wikipædia says,
I spent this morning reading Saramago in Spiotta Park, where the geniuses of Rebel Yarns had conspired to give the park a surrealistic makeover as part of the South Orange Maplewood Artists' Studio Tour. Click thru for pix.
Mountain Station's set last night at Desmond's Tavern went off very nicely. The 8:00 set was Grain Thief, whose music was entirely copacetic to ours (and who has just quit his job to pursue music full time -- best of luck to you, Patrick!) -- when we arrived around 8:15 he was playing a tune from our songbook, "Angel From Montgomery". We had about 7 people show up to hear our set, plus Patrick and several of his friends stuck around to hear us; felt like a nice crowd.
Our gear took only about 5 minutes to set up and we launched right into our set, and played for a good 45 minutes or so. The list was a good mix of songs we've been playing for a long time with new songs:
Drowsy Maggie/ Dancing Barefoot
Meet Me in the Morning
Swallowtail Jig/ Galway Girl
Red Overalls
Cole Durhew
The L&N don't stop here anymore
Highway 61
NJ Transit
Praying Mantis
Get up high, come down easy
A great advantage to the size and acoustic nature of our band -- after we broke our gear down and listened for a while to the 10:00 act (Queen Orlenes, whose lead singer is the spitting image of a young Grace Slick and has the voice to match), we headed out and were able to take a walk -- no amps to lug around! -- in the technicolor glory of New York at night. We went down to Madison Square Park and chilled out over a burger and fries at the Shake Shack, before we headed back out to Jersey.
Am Am(sus)
Finding aptly chilling epitaphs in Robyn Hitchcock lyrics,
Am Em
All I want to do is fall in love while there's still time
Am Am(sus)
Sitting crosswise on the centerpiece and shining off the mantlepiece
Am Am(sus) Am
A skull, a suitcase and a long red bottle of wine.
I was playing in a pubful, of afternoon drinkers
And I asked them as I strummed my guitar, who's got all the chunes
And he crawled along a centipede and rode on his velocipede
Cutting paper napkins into little crescent moons
Tom and Kevin citing happily the sages of their destiny
His living words were dying words he smiled and he said "Yeah"
Searching sadly for that bluegum you can take my eyes I've used 'em
Searching sadly for a quaint old fashioned way to say goodbye
"Very well," had said the considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand. There would be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic. So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and -- a Government; or rather, two Governments -- two South American Governments. And you know what came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould."
Somehow I had gotten in mind from The Secret History of Costaguana, that Nostromo held specific allegoric reference to the building of the Panama Canal. That does not seem to be quite right... Certainly the story of the Canal is a relevant line of thought for approaching this book; and the Atacama, too -- nitrate was of huge importance when Conrad was writing this.
posted evening of May 29th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Nostromo
In his 7th chapter, "The Dethronement of Cronus" (full text of the book is here), Graves slips in a fun quick reference to Epimenides' paradox:
Some say that Poseidon was neither eaten nor disgorged, but that Rhea gave Cronus a foal to eat in his stead, and hid him among the horseherds. And the Cretans, who are liars, relate that Zeus is born every year in the same cave with flashing fire and a stream of blood; and that every year he dies and is reburied.
posted afternoon of May 28th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
We spent some time this morning reading Graves' take on The Gods of the Underworld, comparing the details to the stories she knows from Riordan's novels...
posted morning of May 28th, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Book Shops
In Pontiero's translation, Saramago calls silence the "universal synonym, the omnivalent" -- a basis, a bottom layer to the intricate sediment of meaning which accretes as sounds are given voice and associated with their meanings. As these fluid meanings set and stick and harden, deepen, language diverges, attaining "a variety of words which never say the same thing, however much we might want them to. If they were to say the same thing, if they were to group together through affinity of structure and origin, then life would be much simpler, by means of successive" erosions of the sediment. Perhaps it is implicit here that this destructive simplification is/was a goal of Salazar*, the "poor wretch" sitting in the termite-eaten chair in its last moments as chair, but I may be reading this in. 
