Lift Up Your Hearts!

The lituus is not a test to determine the pH of a substance, although that's how I read it at first.  It's a musical instrument, and one of the last works written for it was J. S. Bach's O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht.  No modern listener has been able to hear Bach's motet as it was intended, however, because the instrument fell out of favor and became extinct.  No one today knows what it looked or sounded like. 

Until now.  Alistair Braden and Murray Campbell, from the University of Edinburgh, at the request of—ta da!—the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, applied to the problem software they had designed to improve modern brass instruments. (More)

The young lady at the grocery store was right:  a chopstick makes a great cherry pitter.

Until I was nine years old, I lived in a small house with a yard that was small by American standards, but large enough to support four beautiful trees:  two spruce, one maple that was the delight of my heart and the joy of my tree-climbing days, and one cherry tree.

The cherry tree produced a gorgeous display of blossoms every year, followed by an abundant harvest of cherries.  These were sour cherries, the kind used most often for pies, though to my child's tastes they couldn't get much better than straight from the tree into my mouth.  The abundance, however, was more than I could consume, even had that been allowed, so I remember hours of sitting around the table with my family, pitting cherries to freeze for future pies.  Despite the work, it was a delightful time because we were all together, working and talking and laughing.  It is nonetheless a pity that we didn't discover the delights of Chinese food until after we had left the house and its trees behind. (More)

A common theme over at the Front Porch Republic is a respect for place: for home and community, for not only eating locally but being locally, staying in (or returning to) one's hometown rather than venturing off to "better" places.  The article Root Hog or Die is where I chose to ask a question that has been bothering me about this approach to life, much as I like some of the ideas. (More)

A friend alerted me to an article on midwives from the May 20, 2009 Orlando Sentinel.  It's about a recently-developed program of the Orange County Health Department that provides hospital-based midwife services for low-income women in the Orlando area, and told me some things I didn't know about midwives and Florida law.

Knowing from experience that links to Sentinel articles break after a while, I'll provide a few relevant excerpts below.  (More)

Not only does North Korea continue to flaunt its testing of nuclear explosives and ballistic missiles, but it has abrogated the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean war.

Since its nuclear test Monday, North Korea has issued a stream of harsh rhetoric, even declaring that the armistice that ended fighting in the Korean War is null and void.

The situation in North Korea, with what appears to be a madman brandishing nuclear bombs, will require more knowledge and wisdom than even President Obama's most ardent supporters can claim for him.  Hence the prayers; feel free to join me.

Who the Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway? is a refutation of the idea that "[t]he bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site."  That disparaging notion came about by looking at Wikipedia editing activity to see who made the most contributions to the project.  Therein is the problem: What is "most"?

[Aaron] Swartz analyzed percentage-of-text instead of number of edits, and what he found was slightly different: The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site. The bulk of the changes to the original text, then, are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks).

When you put it all together, the story becomes clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site—the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

I find that reassuring; Wikipedia is useful and much better for finding the random information I look for than any other encyclopedia I've found. It's much like the news media:  great for getting information if you don't trust it overmuch.  In all the times I've actually known something from the inside about a news story, whether newspaper, magazine, or television report, it has been obvious that the story, as reported, was wrong.  Sometimes egregiously so, sometimes in minor detail, but never reliably correct.  So too with Wikipedia, as anyone who knows Old Saybrook, Connecticut, will attest upon reading the entry on Katharine Hepburn, which contains the following sentence:

On September 21, 1938, Hepburn was staying in her Old Saybrook, Connecticut beach home when the 1938 New England Hurricane struck and destroyed her house. Hepburn narrowly escaped death before the home was washed away over the cliffs.

Behold the cliffs....

It has been nearly five years since I honored here two family members who gave the "last full measure of devotion" in France during World War I:  Harry Gilbert Faulk and Hezekiah Scovil Porter, both of the 101st Machine Gun Battalion.  Today, for Harry I post a picture of the tree planted in his memory in Cypress Cemetery, Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  It has been a few years since World War I.  (More)

I know why I write, but why do you read?

Because writing is an essential part of the way I think, and blogging is the best venue I've yet found, I'm not likely to stop posting here anytime soon.  However, as part of an ongoing analysis of the most productive use of my time, I'd appreciate your feedback very much.  Feel free to answer here, by name or anonymously, or if you prefer you can e-mail me.  Below are some questions that are burning in my mind, but don't let them limit you.

1. Which subjects and approaches make you eager to read the post?  Which do you read with only minor interest or skip altogether?   Book reviews?  News, commentary, and ideas I've found elsewhere and repost here?  My own commentary on various issues?  Stories about our everyday life, including travels?  Education, children and family issues, conservationist living, health topics, food, genealogy, computing problems/solutions, amusing comics and other fun stories? Short posts with links, or longer posts with quoted excerpts?
2. How often do you like to see new posts?  Does one/day overwhelm you?  Does one/week disappoint you?  How often do you visit?  Do you come by every day, hoping for something new?  Or do you check in via feedreader once a week and think, "Oh, no, there are too many"?  (If you say the latter I won't take it as an insult; I love the quality of most of the Front Porch Republic posts, but I can't handle the quantity.)
3. What, if anything, do you find of value here?  This is not quite the same question as #1.

Many thanks for your responses.  I don't know yet how I'll use them, but I'm sure they'll help in my deliberations.  Choosing good over bad may sometimes be difficult, but at least it's usually clear.  Deciding among several good things can be rather murky territory.

Wolfram|Alpha is in its infancy, and like any baby it can be quite cute.  Like this example Janet discovered while trying to figure out how much powdered (confectioner's) sugar is in a box.

As if I don't already have a huge backblog, Jon keeps posting things in Google Reader/Facebook that I think those who can't see them will be interested in.  In this case, since I can't comment at GeekDad, I'll comment here.

When GeekDad's son was 12 years old he entered his school's science fair, which called for inventing something new and useful.  (More)

Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old boy with cancer, is being forced to receive treatment that both he and his parents have refused.

"It is imperative that Daniel receive the attention of an oncologist as soon as possible," wrote Brown County District Judge John R. Rodenberg in an order to "apprehend and detain....His best interests require it."

I often find myself in the minority when I argue for parental rights.  Doctors, teachers, social workers, and "concerned citizens" fret over the idea that parents should be allowed to make decisions that they believe are not in the bests interests of their children.  In one sense it's hard to blame them, as these are often people who are in a position to see better than most the consequences of physical, emotional, and educational neglect and abuse. (More)

It seems appropriate that Katherine Dalton's The Immoral Life of Children should appear on the Front Porch Republic just after a conversation I had with Heather about children's art books.  A friend of hers uses a particular homeschooling curriculum that she likes, but finds herself censoring certain illustrations in the art history sections that she deems inappropriate for elementary-age children.

I happen to disagree with this mother's approach.  Not that there isn't plenty of so-called art that I wouldn't want our grandchildren to see—pretty much the same art that I don't want to see, myself—but I have no objection to art nudes, per se, even for young children.  It may be that the Supreme Court will soon be unable to tell the difference between Michelangelo's David (picture alert) and something indecent, but I can.  :)  However, I don't understand the publisher of that curriculum.  If I think (as I do) that there are works of art which everyone should be able to recognize and appreciate, and if the list happens to include nudes (as it does), nonetheless I can't think of any potentially offensive work that is critical for an elementary-aged child to view.  Any introduction to art necessarily excludes vastly more than it includes; one ought to be able to put together quite an impressive elementary-age art curriculum without tempting mothers to deface the pages of the books.  What bothers me more is that this mother's over-protectiveness seemingly precludes taking her child to an art museum, an omission I think of much graver consequence. (More)

For every presidential election in recent history (meaning at least the last 30), I have had one overriding concern:  the nomination of Supreme Court justices.  I was asked once why it would be a problem if President Obama merely replaces retiring liberal justices with more liberals—other than missing the opportunity to "pack" the court to my liking.  That's when I realized that I don't want a biased Supreme Court, at least not in the sense my friend was implying.  But neither do I want a "balanced" Supreme Court.  I want one that will rule based on the Constitution, whether they are for or against me.  I don't want the Judiciary taking over the role of the Legislature.  If our Justices are chosen based on their positions on particular issues rather than for their position vis–à–vis the Constitution and the Law, I think we have little hope for real justice.

But enough heavy thinking!  Mallard Fillmore can make me smile, even about such an important issue.

As if Wolfram|Alpha weren't enough to lure me away from productive work, Phil (not the Phil who comments here) posts this news story.

You get the picture.

(Oh, Janet—look what happens when you lure your mother to the computer for a phone call and then go out for the evening!  )

James Burke's first Connections series drove home the idea that change in one area can have unexpected impact in far different fields.  The Butterfly Effect reminds us that the tiniest difference may lead to great changes.  The invention of the automobile was one event that led to vast societal changes no one could have predicted.  Television was another.  Then the Internet.  Within the Internet, there was Google, which may be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in our time, who knows?  And now there is Wolfram|Alpha. (More)