@samuelpepys

This is Mary Cromwell, born 1637, third daughter of Oliver Cromwell. The oddities of early Restauration England.

In 1657 Mary had married Thomas Belasyse, Viscount Fauconberg (later 1st Earl of Fauconberg). So here in 1663 she was Mary Fauconberg, or Viscountess Fauconberg. But Pepys refers to her by her father's name. Perhaps a subconscious sign of the overwhelming presence of the dead Oliver Cromwell in people's minds, even after his death? Cromwell had died only 5 years earlier, in 1658; Charles II had only taken power in 1660.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cromwell,_Countess_Fauconberg

#Pepys #MaryCromwell #Fauconberg #OliverCromwell #Restauration

I saw my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the House began to fill she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.

TIL In 1921, the American Yiddish-language press described the anti-Black Tulsa massacre as a “pogrom,” because they knew that was the word that would best make their immigrant Ashkenazi Jewish readers understand what happened. https://ingeveb.org/blog/the-most-awful-scenes

Wow, this is bleak.

https://blog.avas.space/llm-circus/

Our Lady Joan Mastodon smiled. Oh Sir Gregory, look at yourself, all New-Agey in your handwoven cloak and with the Gandalf stick. Sorry, my friend, there ain't no summer solstice today. Your excursion to Stonehenge is a little premature.

You've been reading Pepys again, haven't you, Greggsy. I agree, there's no better reading than Sam's diary. No better reading, Greggsy. But Sam counted differently. Everyone has since switched to the newfangled Gregorian calendar, don't you know. You of all people should be pleased about that, Sir Gregory!

Be that as it may, you do look great in that cloak of yours, Greggsy. Release your inner Gandalf, my friend, solstice or not.

And so they bantered through the rainy pre-solstice night. How we miss our Lady Joan.

#Pepys #SummerSolstice #JulianCalendar #JoanMastodon

@the_roamer @samuelpepys

Also, I tell the kids that the calendar was named after Pope Greg (or Ian).

@samuelpepys

I agree with Sam: "the longest day" is just a polite way of saying "the days are shrinking again, get ready for winter!" Gloom! :-)

The date (11 June) feels wrong for the summer solstice, but Sam is right.

In England, the Gregorian calendar was only adopted in 1752. France and Spain already used it since 1582, the year when Pope Gregor XIII had made it official.

In Pepys's time, England still used the older Julian calendar, which in 1663 was 10 days behind, so the 11 June 1663 in Pepys's London was the 21 June 1663 in Moliere's Paris or Bernini's Rome. The sun apparently didn't care much either way.

When the switch in England finally happened in 1752, the gap between the two conventions had grown to 11 days. And thus in Samuel Johnson's England in 1752, you went to bed on the evening of 2 September and woke up on the morning of 14 September. The dates in between got swallowed up.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/datingdocuments/juliangregorian.aspx

#Pepys #JulianCalendar #SummerSolstice

The consideration that this is the longest day in the year is very unpleasant to me.

@johncarlosbaez @dougmerritt

I was a grad student at MIT, when Viki Weisskopf was still a professor, though elderly.

He was invariably a gentleman, at least as far as I could observe.

An example:

Physics department colloquia were held in 26-100, a huge lecture hall, in those days. All the senior profs, particularly theorists, sat down front, stage left.

One day a visiting physicist giving the colloquium apologized for being so elementary, reminding us all of the basics of.... something or other.

Viki stood up and *interrupted*, something he *never* did. In his lovely Mittel-Europe accent, he shook his finger and grinned, saying: "Young man, you should never underestimate the pleasure of a physicist at being told something he already knows!"

Then he sat down, there was applause, and the talk went happily on from there.

Bibliotheek Neude, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The new central location for the Utrecht public library is inside a former post office from 1924. Its architect was Joseph Crouwel Jr, who designed it in the style of the Amsterdam School and drew inspiration from Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.

📷: Fuji X-T20 + XF14mm f/2.8 R
#library #libraryarchitecture #architecture #photography

Universiteitsbibliotheek Drift, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

This branch of the Utrecht university library is set inside a former palace built for Louis Napoléon, the short-lived King of Holland installed by his brother Bonaparte. The palace was completed in 1807, but by then the king had decided he didn't want to live in Utrecht after all and anyways abdicated 2 years later.

📷: Fuji X-T20 + XF14mm f/2.8 R
#library #LibraryArchitecture #architecture #photography

When we draw (actually sketch-draw), the very messiness is part of the surprise-generation process that draws us into a conversation with the page, and with each other.

Messy hand-drawn sketches communicate “not done” — in a way that is more likely to invite participation in thinking things through, and adding (different perspectives, views, sketches,..),

@dbellingradt

"The library was not yet a third space of meeting and collaborating, but a place where books were hidden."

Beautifully spoken. It makes for a fine entry into _The Dictionary of Things Past_ (The Guermantes Press, Combray 2056).

And your reflection brings back happy memories of young me trawling the dusty aisles of the MIT Barker Library, finding books by location, colour and smell, rather than via the catalogue. That sacred place sadly holds no more actual books: https://mastodon.art/@analogfusion/116648720737063701.

#libraries #RealBooks #hiding #BarkerLibrary

Students, who are nowadays working mainly with provided PDFs to do the reading, miss the fun and crazy practice of hiding the most relevant copies of books within a reference library to have the book for your eyes only.

But: Hiding the books was part of the game!

The library was not yet a third space of meeting and collaborating but a place where books were hidden. When I discovered a misplaced book, I took it to another place, just for fun and to annoy the hiding person.

Friday evening was the busiest time for the weekend hiders: you could see them travelling the shelves with books in their hands looking for hideouts. University platforms with pdfs ended this game and horror of hiding physical books in libraries.

So in this sense, the pdf changed it all. The hiding Gutenberg Galaxy was over. Something new started. Accessibility to literature was a different game back then, 20 years from now and earlier, and using books was an elite battleground of hide and seek.

#academicchatter

version 1: the letter

"If we happen, under certain circumstances, to have written and sealed and despatched a letter to a friend, which, however, does not find him, but is brought back to us, and we open it at the distance of some considerable time, a singular emotion is produced in us, on breaking up our own seal, and conversing with our altered self as with a third person."

#Goethe #WilhelmMeister #ThomasCarlyle #vol1book2ch1

version 2: the toot

"If we happen, under certain circumstances, to have written and sealed and despatched a [toot] to [the Fediverse], and at the distance of some considerable time it is brought back to us [by a belated boost], and we open it, a singular emotion is produced in us, on breaking up our own seal, and conversing with our altered self as with a third person."

#LateBoosts #MastodonCulture

Reminder: if you're a secondary-school teacher, and want to give your students a hands-on activity for learning logarithms, my site

https://cardboard-computer.org/

is free (libre and gratuit) and has no ads, analytics, or tracking cookies. You can download templates to build your own sliderule, and there are instructions and interactive exercises for using it.

(Tell them it's a steampunk calculator.)

#slideRules #teaching #math

New blog post!

I taught kids how to program using #Forth

https://gracefulliberty.com/articles/teaching-kids-forth/

"Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970."

#programming

"Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving."
Ivan Illich, Silence as a Commons

@lilithsaintcrow I am not on your level, not even close, but I wrote a book about programming with a very specific reader in mind: They were smarter than me, but didn’t know the material I wanted to share.

So I started from very basic first principles and built up from there, but never talking down. I was writing an introductory book, but not a book for simpletons. I started at the beginning and worked my way along assuming people would get each thing and carry on building upwards.

👇🏽

"--but you demand too much from your readers, you have to make the stories less complicated!"

No. My readers are *smarter than me*, and have no trouble with complicated things. Go with your tiny gods and be free, Person Giving Unwanted "Advice". Have fun out there.