May 2022 Archives
The Colour of Time: Leonardo da Vinci's CV letter
Leonardo was looking for work as an engineer and inventor with the Duke of Milan, so he sent a letter with 10 paragraphs describing his accomplishments, including these:
"4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable, with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail-storm; and the smoke from the cannon will instill a great fear in the enemy on account of the grave damage and confusion.
"5. Also, I have means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise, even if it should be necessary to pass underneath moats or any river."
Law & Liberty - Mark Judge - Men Searching for Their Lost Tribe
Mark Judge writing in Law & Liberty: "There are plenty of enemies to fight in the world, and they're not all in the hills of Afghanistan. They are the enemies of loneliness, illness, and despair that come to all tribes, modern or not. When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and I became her primary caretaker, a lot of my dreams were put on hold, including going to Hawaii to see the childhood friend who had contacted me on Facebook. I soon discovered that other members of my tribe also had parents who are now elderly and enjoy a visit from someone like me that they had watched grow up. Making the rounds a couple times a week to check in on them shows it doesn't take a fire fight or a hurricane to become what the men who were leaders in our tribe growing up in Maryland taught us to be, or at least try to be. In the words of the Jesuit motto of my high school, we should be men for others."
Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association: Quebe Sisters
An article by Charles Gardner from circa 2000, at the very beginning of the musical career of this phenomenal triple-fiddle and three-part vocal harmony band. "After relocating in Texas in early 1995, the young ladies continued training in classical violin, but according to their father, the girls caught the fiddling bug at a rodeo and fiddler's contest in late summer 1998 and there is no known antidote or cure in sight! This was the first time the threesome heard this exciting new music. There was something magnetic about Texas Fiddling that turned their ears."
The Magic of Legacy Shops Comes Back to Life in Buffalo
Buffalo's new zoning code allows for long-abandoned neighborhood retail -- corner stores, bars, and other commercial buildings -- to be reopened as commercial, with reduced regulatory hurdles and no minimum parking requirement. Bernice Radle provides several examples with photos -- a couple of coffee houses and a bar that honors the history of local labor unions. There aren't nearly as many such spaces in Tulsa -- urban renewal took out most of them -- but they exist and could be neighborhood gathering spots once more.
Unable to unmount an ISO image, An error occurred while ejecting - Microsoft Community
Increasingly software is distributed as large files that are images of CDs or DVDs rather than the physical objects. They can be mounted as Windows drives, but then they can't be unmounted with the Eject command that works with a real CD/DVD drive or a thumbdrive.
What's funny/infuriating is how the Microsoft employees' answers all follow the same script that someone with no knowledge of Windows internals would try, steps that require hours or days and may be destructive -- reboot in safe mode, do a system restore -- while some random user comes up with the actual answer that solves the problem in seconds.
(The answer is to use PowerShell, and probably need to run it as Administrator: mountvol DRIVELETTER: /d )
Texas is success and Illinois is failure | Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog
John Ruberry (Marathon Pundit) made a recent visit to Texas which inspired a comparison unfavorable to his home state of Illinois. "The Land of Lincoln had slightly more than 10 million residents [when I was born], while the Lone Star State had about half-a-million fewer people. According to the 2020 Census, Texas was the home of 29 million people, with Illinois at just under 13 million. Overall, in the same time period the overall US population soared from 179 million to 329 million.... The Prairie State has been losing population every year since 2014.... Since I was born four Illinois governors, three Democrats and one Republican, have served time in federal prison. No Texas governors have suffered that indignity. Last month, Michael Madigan, who was Illinois' most powerful politician until he was ousted as Illinois speaker of the House in 2021, was indicted on a whole slew of racketeering charges. Madigan, except for two years in the 1990s, served as House speaker beginning in 1981. From 1998 until 2021 Madigan was also chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party."
Ruberry quotes from the farewell letter from former Illinois State Senator Roger Keats, who is Gone To Texas.
The cost of woke: Appeals court rules Oberlin must pay Gibson's bakery $32 million - HotAir
Trying to be woker than their very woke students, Oberlin College officials falsely smeared a 137-year-old, family-owned bakery across the street from campus of racism after the bakery called police to deal with a shoplifter and accomplices who attacked the son of the store's owner. The price of Oberlin's defamatory attempt to placate woke students: A $32 million judgment, upheld by an Ohio appeals court.
You Can Succeed At College Once You Figure Out All The Little Things No One Tells You About | LAist
"Academics have a name for the often unspoken, sometimes murky set of skills and expectations that are intrinsic to thriving in a college environment: the hidden curriculum....
"These unwritten rules may be more familiar to some students than others, including first-generation college students and students of color who are underrepresented in higher education.The gap between students who have guidance navigating college and those who don't can starts to show up well before a student sets foot on a campus....
"For example, professors' office hours. 'I hear all the time, "Why didn't this student go to office hours?" And it's like, 'Why would the student know to do that unless they were explicitly told?'" Rodgers said. 'If [the professor is] not actually pedagogical and instructive in terms of naming what office hours are in the beginning, how they can be used, that they are not punitive, you're not coming because you're in trouble or you don't understand something or you're behind ... if you're not doing that type of setup, then how would students know?'"
St. John's College in Annapolis says its audacious tuition cut is paying off
"St. John's College, however, decided in 2018 to go in an entirely different direction, slashing tuition rates and making up the difference through a campaign to raise $300 million by June 30, 2023.
"The gamble has paid off, official say, with rising applications, a more diverse student body and a successful fundraising campaign about to wind up....
"The cut was just over 30%, with the yearly tab going from $52,000 to $35,000. The private liberal arts college has campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tuition for the 2022-23 school year is just over $36,000....
"Kelly Brown, vice president for advancement, said St. John's decided to reduce tuition because of a 'real understanding that the way colleges were presenting tuition numbers was deterring the middle class.'
"'Those of great wealth don't look at the tuition price as the first point of reference and those with great need understand that there are funds available, but in the middle class I think there is a sense that the sticker price is what you pay,' Brown said. 'In slashing (tuition), we made our front window, as it were, to be more appealing to the middle class.'"
Ulster Worldly: Theonomy Timeline
One of a number of resources on Presbyterian history compiled by Tim Hopper.
"In an attempt to better understand the theonomy/Christian Reconstruction movements of conservative presbyterianism in the second half of the last century, I started putting together this timeline of major events."
Ulster Worldly: Timeline of the Presbyterian Conflict (1906-1939)
Theological liberals take over Princeton Theological Seminary and the Presbyterian Church USA, driving orthodox Presbyterians to found new denominations and institutions. Beginning with J. Gresham Machen's appointment as a lecturer at Princeton, through the Auburn Affirmation, the founding of the Independent Board of Foreign Missions, Westminster Theological Seminary, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (originally called the PCA), and the Bible Presbyterian Church.
From the American Guide Series, a look at Texas in 1940.
Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs | Reuters
Green policies starve people: "'Last year, we got 60 bags from these two acres. But this time it was just 10.' The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka.... Sri Lanka is in the throes of its worst economic crisis in a decade, foreign exchange reserves are at a record low and inflation is soaring, especially for food. Fuel shortages have led to rolling power cuts across the country. The impact of the poor paddy crop could push up the retail price of rice by around 30%, said Buddhi Marambe, an agriculture professor at the University of Peradeniya, who blamed the decision to ban chemical fertilisers."
Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, writing for the Breakthrough Institute in Foreign Policy: "Prior to the pandemic's outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country's economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
"The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country's political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation's agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed."
Now Biden's head of the U. S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, hails fertilizer shortages in the US for forcing farmers to organic alternatives. "Never let a crisis go to waste."
