Logographer

I’ve been distracted with other activities this week, which might explain the scant blog posts. Here are a few things from other blogs to wet your whistle.

• Mark Grimsley’s interest in counterfactual history is on display in his post entitled What If France Had Not Fallen in 1940?
• Dean Dad responds to a reader’s question and provides guidance on teaching a class at a community college in contrast to teaching an upper level class at a university. “[N]othing is too good for the proletariat.”
• Toby Lichtig reviews Tod Wodicka’s novel, Jonathan Cape, which sounds like an odd but interesting book.
• Jonathan thinks there might be something to the claim that modern gadgets and distractions leave us with no time to think. I suppose an intellectual is defined by the propensity to think about thinking.
• Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval participates in the amusing game of Medieval Wikigroaning. (No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Matt Groening or The Simpsons. Groening doesn’t even sound like groaning.) Maybe I’ll play along later, when I feel like exerting myself.
• And even though it’s summertime and school isn’t in session, Dennis at CAMPVS MAWRTIVS is compelled to delve into historiography, making a few comments about Jacob Burckhardt, a name that reminds me of my mentor, which in turn reminds me that summertime is nearly over and I really should be thinking about my thesis more often, if not about historiography per se.

That’s it for now.

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The latest ancient-medieval carnivalesque is up, courtesy of Gillian Polack.

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“[T]he mob of the sluggards has so grown in numbers that unless there are at least a modest few like yourself to defend the exact use of the language of Latium from the rust of vulgar barbarisms, we shall in a short time be lamenting its extinction and annihilation, so sadly will all the bright ornaments of noble expression be dulled by the slovenliness of the mob.” — Sidonius, writing in the fifth century, to his friend Hisparius, Ep. 2.10.1. (Translation W. B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library).

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Well, I did it. Went and got me one of them iPhones. The WordPress admin pages aren’t terribly well-suited to the device, but I think I’ve figured out how to post an entry from the phone.

It’s the best phone/iPod/PDA I’ve owned, in spite of a few annoyances. One dissappointment is the poor interaction with the Bluetooth hands-free feature in my Audi A3. The phone and car make a connection when I start the car, but the connection is unstable and usually breaks in five or ten or fifteen minutes. I filed a bug report with Apple this morning, and hope they can and will produce a software fix for it. A BMW owner said he has seen this problem, and found that by disabling the phone’s WiFi while in the car, he could get a stable Bluetooth connection. I’ll give that a try the next time I’m out and about.

Now for full disclosure. I wrote most of this post from the iPhone, but had to finish it from my laptop. I can’t copy and paste on the iPhone, which makes adding a lengthy URL to the post a difficult chore. Some of the controls on the Web interface for WordPress administration are invisible on the iPhone, too. Just the price of being an early adopter, as they say.

Update Turning off WiFi while in the car didn’t fix the Bluetooth hands-free operation bug. A search of the web for iPhone bugs leads me to believe that Bluetooth support is one of the most unreliable of features on the phone.

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Christian Johnson shares his thoughts on some of the best “geek movies” ever, from the year 1982. The post brings back memories of my salad days in college, but 1982 seems like only yesterday. Standing in line for Star Trek II (“Khaaan!!”), Poltergeist, and Tron — I saw a lot of movies that year, I guess. Still haven’t seen E.T. though.

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Having mentioned the impending doom of Antioch College twice already, it seems worth pointing out this article by George Will on the college’s fate. Thanks to the Cranky Professor for the pointer.

To be honest, in spite of my romantic recollections of driving past the Antioch campus on a warm summer day, the college was always a laughing stock in my ‘hood.

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In another sign that medievalism sells, CBS just signed a multimillion-dollar contract for a new “costume drama” set in the Middle Ages, outbidding NBC and Fox for the show.

The broadcast networks went medieval over “The Kingdom,” a Middle Ages drama set in Europe’s world of castles, kings and typhoid fever.

That doesn’t sound like the period I’m studying, unless there was a vase-of-Soissons-moment in the negotiations.

Written by “Runaway” creator Chad Hodge, “Kingdom” is described as a medieval “Entourage.” It revolves around four guys, one of whom is crowned king and reluctantly takes the throne despite preferring drinking and sex to procession and war.

I don’t know anything about “Runaway,” but “Entourage” is one of our favorite shows at Castle Logographer. It’s unclear from the article whether “Kingdom” is going to be a comedy, though. And there’s no mention of when it will air. At any rate, I’ll tell my TiVo to watch for it.

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It was a beautiful summer morning for a visit to Stanford today. There is no parking fee on Saturday, and since it’s summer, there are no crowds.

I went to Green Library to consult the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, and although I transcribed some entries directly into a text file on my computer, some entries were just too long for me to copy that way. So I took out my trusty pocket camera and, in the fashion of Cold War spies, took snapshots of some of the longer passages. This worked pretty well, I think, but you can see for yourself.

After collating the photos of the pages into a single PDF file in Acrobat Pro, I then used the OCR feature of Acrobat. Now I can select text from the scanned pages and cut and paste to my heart’s content. I’m not sure if it saved me time in the long run, but it sure seemed like it in the library. Besides, I don’t think I could have taken the PLRE out of the reading room, so photocopying didn’t seem like an option.

I also scanned some pages of Alberto Ferreiro’s supplemental bibliography on the Visigoths while I was there.

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My thesis studies are taking me back to the writings of Sidonius, a fifth-century Roman aristocrat and bishop from Gaul. Some time ago I stumbled into Joop van Waarden’s Classics Site, which is dedicated to the use of “digital techniques for research and publication” for “the study of Sidonius (or Sidonius Apollinaris, as 15th century humanist Angelo Poliziano was the first to write, arbitrarily), especially book 7 of the correspondence.” It’s a good example of the application of modern technology to historic research. The bibliography and files from van Waarden’s site are proving to be very helpful for my current research.

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Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories of the occasional discovery of well-preserved mammoths. Now comes news of a six-month-old female mammoth discovered in Siberia. The animal is thought to have died about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. It’s surprisingly well-preserved, by the sounds of it, missing only its tail.

Mammoth specimens usually end up “being lost to a lucrative trade in ivory, skin, hair and other body parts,” according to one scientist interviewed for the article. Scientists themselves have Jurassic Park aspirations for the extinct beast.

Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth.

Dr [Larry] Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning[.]

“When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: ‘if you can get us good DNA, we’ll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months’,” he told BBC News.

The prospect of bringing the mammoth to life intrigues me, but I wonder if it’s really a good idea. I also wonder how many scientists share Agenbroad’s optimism. The article doesn’t quote any skeptics.

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