MoveOn.org is sponsoring nationwide vigils on Wednesday night in support of Cindy Sheehan’s vigil outside of Crawford, Texas.

I’ll be at the one at Washington Square in Brookline. Want to know why? I’m not sure I can tell you. I don’t have a simple solution to the war we were lied into, and I have no sympathy for the dictator we deposed. But I’m heartsick about an administration so abstracted from reality that our president can’t cut short his two-hour bicycle ride or his fund raising to speak with a gold star mom. And I am scared shitless by a powerful nation that thinks it is beholden to nothing but its own ideas…that it, alone in the world, is above the world.

So, I’ll take a half hour of silence in a public square to think about the course we’re on and those who are paying the first price for it. [Tags: CindySheehan MoveOn iraq]

Here’s a powerful voice (Iraq the Model) telling Cindy why her son didn’t die in vain.

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On August 2, Deborah Elizabeth Finn wrote:

…today I had the notion that a blog is a kind of bully pulpit, and that it would be fun and possibly even edifying for nonprofit bloggers engage in a bully pulpit exchange. In other words, we should get a group of folks who work for or with mission-based organizations, throw their names in a hat, and randomly assign each one to be a guest blogger for a day on somebody else’s nonprofit blog.

If you’d like to participate in the Nonprofit Blog Exchange on a date to be announced, you should send an email to Emily (eweinb04yahoo.com) with the following info:
Name:
Organization:
E-mail address:
Geographic Location:
Name of Blog:
Website Address of Blog:
Description of Blog:
[Tags: DeborahElizabethFinn nonprofits]

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From Dwight MacDonald’s scathing, funny, and right-on dismantling of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books anthology of 443 works by 76 authors in 54 volumes:

…books, like people, look better out of uniform. It bothers me to see Tristram Shandy dressed like the Summa Theologica.

The review, published in a New Yorker, is just too delightful and insightful. [Tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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Sure, what Cindy Sheehan is doing is symbolic. That’s why it’s important. [Tags: iraq CindySheehan]

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Ross over at Many2Many reports on a discussion, featuring Jimbo Wales, about Wikipedia and trust. He also talks about differences in the various language editions:

Don’t have enough academic studies about it, but anecdotally, articles across languages are similar. But there are exceptions. The English Wikipedia said the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, French said otherwise. Now there is a wonderful and detailed article on definitions and a discussion of the issue. Korean and Japanese Wikipedias differ on disputed islands. In the Japanese Wikipedia, incidentally, they use the discussion page for a long time before they make the article.

[Tags: wikipedia RossMayfield JimmyWales]

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Last year, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set aside one summer Saturday as No Tax Day: Whatever you buy for under $2,500 was free of the 5% sales tax.

Some Jews complained because the orthodox can’t touch money on the sabbath.

So, the Commonwealth responded admirably by declaring an entire tax free weekend, today and tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the Commonwealth didn’t consult its religious calendar: Sunday is Tisha B’Av, a fast day remembering the destruction of the Temples. Guess what orthodox Jews can’t do on Tisha B’Av? Yes, they can’t eat, bathe, wear leather, have sex…or touch money. You spend the day in shul studying Torah, so until the mall opens up a Study, Daven ‘n’ Beyond store, there’s not going to be a lot of temptation to shop anyway.

Nice try, Commonwealth! [Tags: massachusetts judaism]

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Ethan has compiled some amazing figures documenting GlobalVoices’ growth, as well as some analysis of whose linking. from where. [Tag: GlobalVoices]

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Tim has a great piece on his visit to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Cool photos, too. Tim was the architect of the SGML search engine first used by the Oxford English Dictionary, so he’s been thinking for a long time about how you organize information digitally.

The Bodleian was endowed by Sir Thomas Bodley — Greek scholar, promoter of Hebrew studies, spy — to replace the library that was destroyed in 1549. (Sir Tom sold his plate to raise money to finish the last building.) He insisted that the new catalog be arranged by author. Thomas James, the first librarian, almost complied: The library’s catalog, in 1605, was divided into four subjects, within which books were listed alphabetically by author. The books, however, were arranged on the actual shelves by size. The second catalog, in 1620, was alphabetical by author. (Here’s a source or three.)

So, for fifteen years a catalog was useful for browsing for books you did not know existed. After that, the catalog reverted to being a tool for inventorying stock and as a look-up table for librarians fulfilling requests for particular books. (Or so I understand it. Correct me, please!) [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous TimBray bodleian libraries]

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For my book, I’ve been looking into the history of alphabetization. The major work in the field seems to be Lloyd W. Daly’s Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, written in 1967. It’s a short work of intense scholarship bring a huge breadth of knowledge to bear on a tiny sliver of a topic…like using the Hubble telescope to help you pull out a splinter. Lots of fun.

Some stray facts:

Daly mentions that a 13th century book, Registrum librorum Angliae, is

a list of authors, not in alphabetic order, and of their works with a numeral key to indicate where in a list of 183 monasteries each work might be found. This early union catalogue was apparently compiled as an aid to wandering Franciscan preachers who might be looking for material for sermons anywhere between St. Andrews’ and Sarum. (p. 77)

The first catalog of a distributed library system. Cool!

For my purposes, I’m struck by scattered examples Daly gives of early alphabetical lists that leave blanks for later entries. The earliest alphabetized list he found dates to the 3rd century BCE on the Greek isle of Cos where 150 names are inscribed in stone. The names are broken into three lists, and each is alphabetized. One of them leaves blanks, presumably for names to be filled in later. (p. 44-6). He also refers to papyrus rolls from the 1st Century BCE in Egypt that kept track of the various tax payments individuals made. Since the entries were updated throughout the year, the ledgers had to leave blank space for each person. At the end of the year, some of the more active individuals’ spaces would be crowded with entries, and other individuals would have lots of white space. (p. 44-6). That’s the limitation that space and time impose when you are stuck organizing your information in the physical world.

The great French encyclopedia of the 17th Century hit exactly the same limit. Enlightening the World, by Philipp Blom, points out that the editors had to decide ahead of time what all the entries and cross-references would be since they were creating the Encyclopedia as a series of volumes, published over time, in alphabetical order. Imagine if Jimmy Wales had had to specify all topics and links in order to get Wikipedia built? Hah!

Damn that space and time! [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous wikipedia]

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Luxor, the pretty good Zuma ripoff (um, I mean, a game inspired by Zuma) sends you back to the beginning of a level if you fail to make it through all the stages. 11-4 is my downfall, which means I’ve gotten way too good at levels 11-1 through 11-3. I am tired of those levels.

I tried saving a copy of the data file as 11-4 begins, but Luxor does something funky to foil cheaters like me: It points into some address in a file with data I don’t want to monkey with. But it turns out that there’s an incredibly easy way to cheat: Start it up by appending “-unlocklevels” or “-unlockstages” and now you can start your day with 11-5. Eat my dust, 11-4! Woohoo.

(To do this, create a shortcut to Luxor.exe, select Properties, and edit “Target” so that it reads, for example, “D:\games\Luxor\luxor.exe -unlocklevels.”) [Tags: games luxor cheats]

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