Grab the nearest book

It was written, as well as the ‘Milton,’ during the Felpham period, though probably added to, and finally finished after his return to London.
Those who have heard the extraordinary tone-poem called ‘Also Sprach Zarathurstra’ by Richard Strauss, may not think it far-fetched to suggest a parallel between revolutionary, chaotic, yet somehow great music, such as it is, and the so-called poem of “Jerusalem”. To the authors of both, the classical, the established forms of expression belonging to their respective arts, seem outworn, inadequate, cramped.
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From ‘William Blake – a study of his life & art work’, Irene Langridge, London, 1904.

(5) A sum assessed on a company by such an assessment as is referred to in [section 252(5) of the principal Act]2 (recovery of payment of tax credit or interest on such a payment) shall carry interest at the [rate applicable under section 178 of the Finance Act 1989]3 from the date when the payment of tax credit or interest was made until the sum assessed is paid.]1

(b) the earlier period does not fall wholly within the period of twelve months immediately preceding the later period, and

Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook 2007-2008 Part IA. Doing this at work was perhaps a mistake.

My nearest book is “Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture” by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. Unfortunately, page 123 (in chapter 2, “The Literate Tradition and Social Conservation”) contains less than five complete sentences (both their sentences and their chapters are long…), so I’ll quote the three sentences that are on the page:

But it would be naive to suppose that the function of social distinction performed by the cultivated relation to culture is exclusively and eternally attached to “general culture” in its “humanistic” form. The glamour of econometrics, computer science, operational research or the latest thing in structuralism can serve, no less well than knowledge of the classics or the ancient languages in another epoch, as an elegant ornament or an instrument of social success: consider the technocrats who hawk from conference to conference knowledge aquired at conferences; the essayists who draw from a diagonal reading of the most general pages of the least specialized works of specialists matter for general disquisitions on the inherent limits of the specialization of specialists; or the dandies of scientificity, past masters in the art of the chic allusion which instantly places the speaker in the outposts of the avant-garde sciences which bear no stain of the plebeian sin of positivism.

Conversation and conservation
But to suppose that practices and ideologies whose possibility and probability are objectively inscribed in the structure of the relation of pedagogic communication and in the social and institutional conditions of its conduct can be explained solely by reference to the interests of the teaching corps or, still more naively, by the pursuit of prestige or gratifications of self-esteem, would be to forget that, in order to fulfill its social function of legitimating the dominant culture, an educational system must obtain the recognition of the authority of its action, even if this has to take the form of recognition of the authority of the masters appointed to inculcate that culture.

Whew…

There will be no end to evils in the world, Socrates asserts in Republic 5 (473d-3), until philosophers become rulers, and the point is repeated in similar words in book 6 (501e). It is striking that, in criticizing the poets’ portrayals of the gods in Republic 2, Socrates concedes that human life contains more evil than good, but his concern is to deny that the evil can be attributed to divine causes, as in the famous Iliadic passage about Zeus’s two jars (379d). But does Plato purport to claim that suffering of misfortune would disappear if society were radically reformed along ideal lines?

The book is Ancient Literary Criticism (ed. Andrew Laird), and the page is from early in chapter 5, “Plato and Aristotle on Denial of Tragedy,” by Stephen Halliwell. Finally got me to open the damn book, which I’ve had out of the library, and on my desk, for weeks.

In our forensic work we will often need to consider relatedness. This can occur because of a specific defense such as “my brother committed the crime”, but is becoming incresingly relevant even in the absence of such a specific defense. There are several probabilities that we may be interested in regarding relatives.

Ch. 4, “Relatedness”, by John Buckleton and Christoper Triggs, in Buckleton, Triggs and Walsh (eds.), Forensic DNA Evidence Interpretation.

OK, so it would have been more interesting if I were at home rather than at work. ;)

Unfortunately, most do not.

The operators , (comma), && (logical and), and || (logical or) guarantee that their left-hand operand is evaluated before their right-hand operand. For example, b=(a=2,a+1) assigns 3 to b.

— Bjarne Stroustrup, C++ Programming Language – 3rd Edition

God, I’m boring.

As for Eurochocolate – this was a relatively large political issue in Belgium, where commercial chocolates made by giant, non-Belgian multinationals – especailly British ones – using non-cocoa vegetable oils are refered to by a particular local colloquialism: “de la merde”.

“A great many Allied leaders were certain that the war could not be won before 1919, and Foch continued to plan for a massive final advance through Lorraine. But he also planned to make the best possible use of the rest of 1918. His objectives were the rail lines (shown in blue), by means of which the Germans supplied their armies — or would evacuate them in case of defeat.”

The West Point Atlas of War: World War I. Chief editor: Brigadier General Vincent J. Esposito.

(Note: had to cheat. Page 123 was a full-page map. This is from the accompanying text on page 122. The map is titled “Allied Final Offensive.”)

Arse. Second para above should be blockquoted, too.

It provided for a government loan to limited-dividend corporations of 90 percent of the cost of the project at an interest on 2 1/2 percent. The president thought the plan had some merit and sent it to Jesse Jones with a memorandum in which he asked him to talk it over with the secretary of the interior and inform the president with a reply. So many of the departments and agencies of the executive branch were becoming involved in housing affairs that the president sent a memorandum to the National Resources Board early in 1935 in which he asked it to investigate the possibility of coordinating all housing activities. The Central Housing Committee evolved out of the acitivity initiated by this memorandum.
The National Resources Board appointed a special committee to investigate the situation to which the president had referred.

Because this generator produces so many-universes [sic], just by chance it will eventually produce one that is fine-tuned for intelligent life to occur.
Given this distinction, we will next attempt to rigorously develop the argument from fine-tuning against the atheistic single universe hypothesis, and then consider four major objections to it. Finally, in section IV we will consider the many-universes hypothesis and some theistic responses to it.
In this section, we will attempt to rigorously develop the argument for preferring theism over the atheistic single-universe hypothesis.

From Robin Collins’s essay “God, Design, and Fine-Tuning”, in God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Raymond Martin and Christopher Bernard (New York, NY: Longman, 2002).

Boo for the fish! Evening announcements had always been the positive-reinforcement portion of the day, when kids would beam as they heard their name trumpeted and the entire camp would applaud them. As a camper, I loved the unapologetic peer recognition.

Josh Wolk, Cabin Pressure: One Man’s Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor (New York: Hyperion, 2007). (It’s a book about my old summer camp, which I stayed up late reading last night.)

Conversely, isomeric alkanes contain the same number of carbons and hydrogens, and one might expect that their respective combustions would be equally exothermic. However, that is not the case.
A comparison of the heats of combustion of isomeric alkanes reveals that their values are usually not the same.
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From Organic Chemistry: Structure and Function, 5th ed., Vollhardt & Schore.
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Somebody’s got to teach it.

The various formlae for the local epsilon factors that are spread throughout [19] and [118] allow us to decide whether a given place v of F belongs to S(chi), provided that the local components pi_v and pi(chi) of pi and pi(chi) are not simultaneously supercuspidal.

It goes on. L-function and Galois representations.

Then away with them as hard as they could go to the water. Not a spot of the strand but was hidden by the spouts of foam they sent up into the sky; and when we were within ten yards of the strand, not a seal was to be seen, the sea still again, save only the rings they had left in their wake. I looked down through the water.

From Maurice O’Sullivan’s gaeltacht memoir Twenty Years A-Growing, pulled from the bookshelf the other day prompted by John Updike’s recent somewhat purse-mouthed review in the New Yorker of the collected novels of Flann O’Brien, to remind myself what The Poor Mouth was making such glorious fun of.

Beware the sea-cat!

At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai has arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness…

– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver)

Now, that it has ceased-to-be in itself is not possible, because then it is; but it cannot be that the former now has ceased to be in another now, either. For we take it that it is impossible for the nows to be adjoining one another, as it is for a point to be adjoining a point; so, since the now has not ceased to be in the next but in some other one, it will be simultaneously in the nows in between, which are infinitely many; but this is impossible. Yet it is not possible either that the same now should always persist.

–Aristotle, Physics bok IV chapter 10, in A New Aristotle Reader, edited by J.L. Ackrill.

Everything runs along the color line, as W.E.B. DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. Still, it’s worth asking why the music of 10 percent of the population should have had such influence. In 1939, a Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein tried to give an answer, in a paper titled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music.”

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise.

The entire page is a reproduction of Albrecht Durer’s The Flight into Egypt from the Life of Mary.

The Body of the Artist by Pamela H. Smith

“Because these countries [USSR, China, India] had approximately half the world’s population, their entry into the global economy effectively doubled the nnumber of workers in the world’s labor pool. Absent China, India, and the ex-Soviet bloc, there would have been about 1.46 billion workers in the global economy in 2000. The entry of these countries into the global economy raised the number of workers to 2.93 billion…”

Richard Freeman’s “America Works.”

Eszter got to write about chocolate, and here I am writing about the global labor force. Some people keep more fun books clase at hand than I do.

The first 4 words give away the kind of book it is:

“On the other hand, to the extent that it enriches society as a whole, productivity growth should stimulate demand and therefore the creation of new jobs. Indeed, as shown by Pissarides (1990), an increase in productivity growth that affected all sectors and firms uniformly would necessarily raise aggregate employment, because firms would be induced to intensify their recruiting efforts in order to capitalize on more rapidly growing productivity.
History shows, however that technical progress does not raise productivity equally in all jobs and sectors”

Aghion and Howitt, “Endogenous Growth Theory”

“With respect to this issue, the Ottoman sources clearly diverge. While some of the chronicles attribute gaza raids and some military success to Ertogril, others portray that generation as mlitarily and politically inactive, at least after they came to Bithynia. The Yahsi Fakih-Asikpasazade narrative, for instance, states that at the time of Ertogril, after the tribe moved to Bithynia, ‘there was no fighting and warfare, they ust moved between the summer and winter pastures.'”

from Cemal Kafadar, “Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State”.

We paid a final courtest call on General Aziz, Werner’s friend who had lent us Abu and his jeep to film the Toraja. He received us wearing a sarong and bouncing a six-month-old grnadson in his lap. Je gave us an official letter to show the military commanders we might bump into along the way, and sent one of his high-ranking aides down to the dock to see us off.

From Lawrence Blair with Lorne Blair, Ring Of Fire – the unlikely tales of two film making brothers travelling around Indonesia when it was mostly difficult and inadvisable to do so.

I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational. But I have also assumed that they do not know their conception of the good. This means that while they know that they have some rational plan of life, they do not know the details of this plan, the particular ends and interests which it is calculated to promote.

Rawls, TJ

Throughout the following nine years I did nothing but roam about the world, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies that are played out there. Reflecting especially upon the points in every subject which might make it suspect and give occasion for us to make mistakes, I kept uprooting from my mind any errors that might previously have slipped into it. In doing this I was not copying the sceptics, who doubt only for the sake of doubting and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole aim was to reach certainty–to cast aside the loose earth and sand so as to come upon rock or clay.

Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (in vol. 2 of the CSM edition).

The IRR is calculated using a trial-and-error process where we make an initial guess and then reiteratively try successive values informed by how close we were to the solution in the last try until we solve the problem. Techniques have been developed to perform the iteration efficiently and converge on a solution quickly. The following sheet shows the calculation of the IRR using the Excel Solver utility.

Fabozzi, The Handbook of Fixed Income Securities

I cheated slightly by grabbing a book off my shelf, rather than the one that supports my monitor at a comfortable height.

Debugging with GDB: The GNU Source-Level Debugger

The most frequent case is in referring to static variables in other source files (see Section 8.2 [Program variables], page 70). File names are recorded in object files as debugging symbols, but GDB would ordinarily parse a typical file name, like ‘foo.c’, as the three words ‘foo’ ‘.’ ‘c’. To allow GDB to recognize ‘foo.c’ as a single symbol, enclose it in single quotes; for example:

p ‘foo.c’::x

looks up the value of x in the scope of the file ‘foo.c’.

The Vandals were hard-pressed in their war against the Franks, their king Godigisel was killed and about twenty-thousand of their front-line troops had been slaughtered, so that, if the army of the Alani had not come to their rescue in time, the entire nation of Vandals would have been wiped out.

It is an extraordinary thing that, although he tells us about the kings of these various peoples, including the Franks, when he describes how Constantine, who had become a tyrant, summoned his son Constans to come from Spain to meet him, he goes on:

The tyrant Constantine summoned his son Constans, who was also a tyrant from Spain, so that they might confer together about affairs of state. As a result Constans left his wife and the administration of his court in Saragossa, entrusted all his interests in Spain to Gerontius and hurried to meet his father by forced marches.

Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks (trans Lewis Thorpe), (Penguin, 1974), quoting the Roman historian Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus.

Juan es _____ Carlo.
Juan es _____ Maria.
Juan es el _______ de todos.

From “¿Cómo se dice…?” (6th Ed.), the answers are “más bajo que”, “más bajo que”, and “chico más bajo”, respectively. Poor Juan.

“This man sins, for he giveth no worship to the gods that speak to our prophets by starlight when none heareth.”

And Uldoon perceived that the mind of a man is as a garden, and his thoughts are as the flowers, and the prophets of a man’s city are as many gardeners that seed and trim, and who have made in the garden paths both smooth and straight, and only along these paths is a man’s soul permitted to go lest the gardeners say, “This soul transgresseth.” And from the paths the gardeners weed out every flower that grows, and in the garden they cut off all flowers that grow tall, saying: “It is customary,” and “It is written,” and “this hath ever been,” or “that hath not been before.”

ka.li [with macrons over the a and i]
n. Spine, spindle, rod, string, as used to thread things upon, as flowers for a lei, or candlenuts for a torch; long vine or runner, as of sweet potato. Cf. Kaili. Kali i’a, string of fish.

Hawaiian Dictionary, Pukui and Elbert

It is commonplace that psychotherapists are crazy, and that this is probably what led them to their jobs. “What still strikes me,” one woman I interviewed said, “is I’ll go to a party in New York, and inevitably the craziest person there is a psychiatrist. I mean the person who is literally doing childish, antisocial things, and making a fool of himself.

M. Neil Browne and Stuart Keeley, Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking, Sixth Edition.

By doubling up a very thin line, so that it is the same thickness as the one to which it is to be joined, it is possible to make what is referred to as an improved blood knot. In this case, the number of turns in the thinner line should be reduced, otherwise there will be twice as many as in the thicker one, and that is not necessary. (Although it may be difficult at first to work out the number of reductions, this can be done by trial and error.)

Knots, Geoffrey Budworth.

With respect to Bert at 12:35, I think this highlights the fact that age 123 is having a pretty rought time of it at the hands of authors and publishers alike. Isn’t it time that someone spoke up for the needs of page 123? Page 123 should be a place of daring action, incandescant metaphor and finely-honed, muscular prose, not the arid hypothesising and inane pretension it currently suffers. OK, page 123 can’t resonably expect to sport gems like ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man . ..’ (unless the editor’s miraculously managed to write an implausibly long introduction) or ‘Reader I married him.’ (unless someone’s abridged with extreme prejudice). But I think it’s time we started the Page 123 Support Group to promote better more interesting writing on page 123. Forget about the lush erotica of page 17, the metaphysical profundity of page 398 and the slickly choreographed action of appendix 1. Page 123 needs our help!

Very late to the party, I see.

“The old poet did not fall into that last feeble error of despising truth, because it was so large and potent as to have been observed by others before him.

The fact that deð is disyllabic is no proof that it is plural doað – it may be doið singular: cf. 1058 for a close parallel. Changes of number are not to be so lightly accepted in Beowulf as Williams would have it [perhaps deð should be amended to doð].”
.

“It has also been suggested that lower-power (FR I) radio sources might be related to BL Lac objects (Urry, Padovani, and Stickel 1991). This picture is consistent with the known properties of the two classes, their luminosity functions and space densities – BL Lac objects have weak emission lines and show little evidence for cosmological evolution, as with FR I sources. It is clear that the parent population of the OVVs must be different from that of the BL Lacs, and indeed the likely candidate is the FR II sources (e.g., Padovani and Urry 1992).”
From Bradley Peterson, Active Galactic Nuclei.

“The next it appeared to be only what, in all likelihood, it was: a kind of retraction.
Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother’s kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist’s love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips.
They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation…”

Michael Chabon, *The Yiddish Policemen’s Union*. The game in question is chess.

The nearest book-ish object to hand, I now realise, was O’Reilly’s Dynamic HTML, the Definitive Guide – but I’m sorry, that doesn’t count as a book, in my book. So, from the nearest Proper Book to hand:

I slapped Dudley on the back, hard. “I think that Vice sergeant had it wrong. This is no homo hangout, is it, Mr Brubacker?”

from James Ellroy, Clandestine.