Month: December 2011

Atheists in Santa Monica hijack nativity displays

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Atheists often complain that they are not a popular group, that they are misrepresented and so forth.  In Santa Monica they’ve managed to give a whole city a reason to hate their guts.  (h/t Mark Steyn).  This from the Daily Telegraph:

For more than six decades, religious groups have recreated life-size scenes   depicting the birth of Jesus, alongside statues of the Virgin Mary and the   three wise men, on the city’s cliff top promenade.

But this year the traditional tableau in Palisades Park was replaced with a   battleground on religion.

Instead of Jesus being rocked softy in a manger, passers-by were greeted with   images of Satan, Father Christmas  and Jesus with the strap line: “37 million Americans know a myth when   they see one… What myths do you see?”

Fifteen of the boxes were simply left empty with a security fence surrounding   them.

Councillors were forced to pool requests for the spaces in a lottery this year  after atheist groups objected to the traditional use of the displays.

By a quirk of fate, the atheists won 18 of the 21 available display areas. A   Jewish group won the other spots. …

Bobbie Kirkhart, of Atheists United, said their use of the boxes was  simply levelling the playing field.

“For many years, atheists were excluded from city-subsidised displays,” he said. “Now, finally, atheists have an equal chance. Christians who   believe their god is concerned about such things might take note of the extraordinary luck the atheist lottery winners have enjoyed.”

Yes, I’m sure we all know precisely how much luck is involved in “winning” 18 out of 21 display slots.  Kirkhart apparently was allocated 9 “slots” by the city.

The LA Times has more details.  It seems that the “slots” were really an organised display of the nativity scene, in 14 sections, from the annunciation, the manger, the flight into Egypt, and so forth.  The whole thing was put together by a united effort by local churches.

The same article features a selection of comments by various atheists:

Patrick Elliott, a lawyer for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said tradition is no excuse for violating the boundaries between church and state. “Just because they’re long-standing doesn’t mean they’re right,” he said.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said December is a busy time for the organization’s attorneys, who challenge the use of public spaces for religious messages.

“It’s littering — literally, littering — these spaces,” Gaylor said of such displays, which she said are a “territorial attempt by Christians to impose their beliefs in this season.”

“That creates an atmosphere of intimidation,” said Gaylor, who noted that the organization’s banner was destroyed by vandals after being hung in Palisades Park. “Christians are the insiders, and everyone else is an outsider.”

In Santa Monica, atheist Damon Vix called national organizations seeking help because he felt marginalized by the display, and tradition alone didn’t merit saving it. Vix, a 43-year-old prop maker from Burbank, said the display “defines Santa Monica as a Christian city, and I feel very excluded by that.”

Vix, apparently, is the other one whom the city officials considered was the best possible person to award nine slots to.

The Independent also covers the story, although I have yet to see the BBC mention it.  Nor have I yet seen an apology from the city of Santa Monica.

Mark Steyn comments dryly:

Perhaps Santa Monica should adopt a less-theocratic moniker and change its name to Satan Monica, as its interpretation of the separation of church and state seems to have evolved into expressions of public contempt for large numbers of the citizenry augmented by the traumatizing of their children. Boy, I can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan.

I have a feeling that it will be a long, cold, hard winter before the city of Santa Monica listens to atheist groups ever again.

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Ibn Abi Usaibia update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A day of misery.  I hate footnotes.  Particularly those which are positioned in some other place than the foot of each page of text.  If the notes were just a little less useful, and the work that I am scanning was accessible in any other way, then I probably wouldn’t bother.

UPDATE: 259 footnotes so far.  My bones hurt.

UPDATE:  Went out to get chocolate — the only answer.  But I get to note 274, and discover again the missing page in the footnotes.  This is not good news.  I’ve been numbering all the notes consecutively; with an unknown number of notes on the missing page, I can’t number (and so can’t link up) the remaining notes.  Oh sugar!  Nor do I really want to put this to one side, and pick it up in 6 weeks time.  I hope to be very busy at that time.  I shall have to consider.

UPDATE: OK, the answer is to split the book into three sections.  All the footnotes which involve the missing bit are in section 1 (chapters 1-5); the others have only incidental notes.  I’ve done this now, and indeed uploaded them.  What I need to do now is write a preface to the thing.  Since I know nothing about Ibn Abi Usaibia, this means reading Brockelmann.  I might defer this to tomorrow, tho.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A busy day working over the html files for Ibn Abi Usaibia.  25 of the 26 are now done.  26 contains the footnotes on the first 100 pages, added by someone else.  I need to consider how to present these.  I also need to join the first 25 files together and do some global changes.  Nevertheless, this is progress indeed.

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Blogger considering legal action

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Still more on the curious case of blogger Tallbloke, who was raided by the police who seized his computers, about which I posted here.  Tallbloke has sought some legal advice, and is being advised that a goodly quantity of legally punishable wrongdoings may have been committed by the police and others.  Wattsupwiththat blog posts a legal opinion by his solicitor.  Bishop Hill blog advises that a legal fund is being set up for donations.  I’ve donated something myself.

A fighting fund is being set up in order to mount a proper legal response. Donate here.

Note also the comments by Tallbloke’s solicitor at WUWT, outlining the legal action that is possible. My guess is that the police may have a problem here:

i) Potential libel claims against Laden and Mann and any others who  might be found to have stated, suggested or implied that there was  criminality on the part of Tallbloke.

ii) Potential malfeasance by the persons responsible for the  obtaining of the Warrant in the form deemed appropriate (but actually  wholly inappropriate) and for the heavy handed treatment of Tallbloke  who would always have been prepared to assist voluntarily.

iii) Various damages claims under UK law for distress, inconvenience, invasion of privacy and damage to property.

iv) Possible injunctive relief preventing examination, copying, cloning or any unauthorised use of Tallbloke’s private data.

v) Requests for immediate return of Tallbloke’s property and rectification of damage done during the process.

vi) Investigations into the sequence of events that led to this farrago and the identities of the person or persons responsible.

Other possibilities may come to mind in due course.

Tallbloke is clearly a man of courage: the English courts are not a place for the faint-hearted, and only the rich can afford to use them.

But something needs to be done.  The police felt that a blogger was easy prey, that’s for sure.  It would be very good to establish that this is not so.

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A 1629 picture of the ruins of Aurelian’s temple of the sun

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Judith Weingarten has written a post on Whose Christmas is it anyway? at her blog, which is solid stuff, and kindly mentions me.  But I got very excited when I read it!  Because of this: a picture of the ruins of the temple of Sol Invictus in Rome, from 1629:

The image is from the The Amica Libary website.

In truth I’m not sure what we’re looking at, or where from.  The temple was on the Quirinal, I know; and steps from the temple survived as they were reused for some other monument in modern times.

The book from which this image is drawn is Giovanni Batista Mercati, Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma, (=Some Views and Perspectives of the Uninhabited Places of Rome), Rome, 1629, in which it is plate 27.  The volume was in quarto, comprising some 52 sheets in all.  An Italian reprint exists: I’m almost tempted to stump up the 100 euros to buy it! (But not quite)

O, if only this were online!

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A letter of Jerome to Eustochia, on the fall of Rome

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I happened to come across the French translation of letters of Jerome online here — the menu on the left hand side divides them by date into several pages — and was struck by one, written in 410, to Eustochia, which mentions the fall of Rome and noble Romans turning up at Bethlehem who have lost everything.

Here’s a quick translation from the French (and why is there no translation into English of all Jerome’s letters?) —

Nothing exists that has no end; and yet the long succession of past ages must in no way be considered as the completion of anything.  Every author will run dry, unless he has amassed in advance the materials from good works, from works that have a claim to have a future, aimed at a sort of eternity and do not foresee a limit in time to their usefulness.  But let us hold on to these elementary truths: everything that is born dies; everything that can reach a peak declines.  And again: there is no work of man which reaches old age.  Who would ever have thought that Rome, that Rome which conquered in every part of the world, would collapse; that she would be at the same time the mother and the tomb of all peoples; that she would be enslaved in her turn, she who counted among her slaves the orient, Egypt and Africa?  Who would have thought that the obscure Bethlehem would see illustrious beggars at its doors, once loaded with every kind of wealth?

Since we cannot help them, let us pity them at least to the bottom of our hearts, and let us mingle our tears with their tears.   Bent under the load of our holy labours, but all the while unable to avoid a profound grief in seeing those who mourn,  and while bemoaning those who weep, we have continued with our commentary on Ezekiel, and we are nearly at the end, and we really want to finish our work on the Holy Scriptures.  It’s not about talking about the projects, but about executing them.  So then, encouraged by your repeated invitations, O Eustochia, virgin of Christ, I return to my interrupted work, and I defer to your wishes in my haste to finish the third volume.  But before starting, I commend myself to your goodwill, as well as the goodwill of those who condescend to read me; asking you to have more regard to my good intentions than my actual powers.  The former are part of the frailty of man, the latter depend on the holy will of God.

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Academic papers want to be free

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting article at the David Colquhoun blog, Open access, peer review, grants and other academic conundrums.  It’s a report of a debate on open data held on December 6th by Index on Censorship.

People are obviously influenced by the release of the ClimateGate 2 emails, but if we look beyond this, the points being made are general, and very sound.

We all agreed that papers should be open for anyone to read, free.  Monbiot and I both thought that raw data should be available on request, though O’Neill and Walport had a few reservations about that.

A great deal of time and money would be saved if data were provided on request.  It shouldn’t need a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and the time and energy spent on refusing FOIA requests is silly.  It simply gives the impression that there is something to hide (Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data).  The University of Central Lancashire spent £80,000 of taxpayers’ money trying (unsuccessfully) to appeal against the judgment of the Information Commissioner that they must release course material to me. It’s hard to think of a worse way to spend money.

A few days ago, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published a report which says (para 6.6)

“The Government . . .  is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.”

That’s good, but how it can be achieved is less obvious. Scientific publishing is, at the moment, an unholy mess. It’s a playground for profiteers. It runs  on the unpaid labour of academics, who work to generate large profits for publishers. That’s often been said before, recently  by both George Monbiot (Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist) and by me (Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science).

David Colquhoun then goes on to detail just how corrupt the current system of academic journals is, with statistics.  It’s very well worth paging down through this.  Here are a couple of snippets:

UCL pays Elsevier the astonishing sum of €1.25 million, for access to its journals. And that’s just one university. That price doesn’t include any print editions at all, just web access and there is no open access. …

Most of the journals are hardly used at all. Among all Elsevier journals, 251 were not accessed even once in 2010. …

I haven’t been able to discover the costs of the contracts with OUP or Nature Publishing group. It seems that the university has agreed to confidentiality clauses. This itself is a shocking lack of transparency. …

And the hammer blows continue:

Almost all of these journals are not open access. The academics do the experiments, most often paid for by the taxpayer. They write the paper (and now it has to be in a form that is almost ready for publication without further work), they send is to the journal, where it is sent for peer review, which is also unpaid. The journal sells the product back to the universities for a high price, where the results of the work are hidden from the people who paid for it.

Precisely.  The publisher pays almost nothing for the product, and rakes in substantial money on it (and, as a publisher, remember, albeit with a different model, I know precisely what each stage costs).

It’s very encouraging to see a post like this.  The revolution is on the way.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia.  Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers.  I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages became disarranged.

I’ve also been experimenting with producing a version of the images of the pages which might be uploadable to Archive.org, by converting them to black and white using ImageMagick as I was doing yesterday.  This sort of works, but requires quite a bit of manual intervention, so I have parked it for now.

This morning I went to the library and obtained a copy of Maarten Vermaseren’s Mithras: De geheimzinnige God, the original version of Mithras: the secret God, which has caused so much misinformation to circulate.  It’s physically a tiny book — indeed the title page calls it an “Elsevier pocket book”, evidently one of a series — printed on very cheap paper which has yellowed and perished, and bound so tightly that the pages are almost impossible to open, and the printed text is so close to the binding that making a photocopy is almost impossible.  The perished paper tends to tear if you simply open the book!  I suspect that if I want an electronic copy of this, I shall have to buy a copy and destroy it, by cutting the spine off, in order to scan it.  Most vexing.

But the important bit so far is that this isn’t a scholarly work at all!  It’s just a bit of popularisation, probably undertaken at the behest of a publisher, who decided the format etc.

Meanwhile the postman brought me the 2010 translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel by Thomas Scheck.  Regular readers will remember that I commissioned a translation of this work — then untranslated — back in 2009, and that it was projected as volume 2 of Ancient Texts in Translation.  Nothing much has happened on this for over a year now, as it has been awaiting some revision work.  I think I shall have to draw up a plan whereby I can get it out of the door, and so I have purchased a copy of Scheck with this in mind.  I’ll work on this in January, perhaps.

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More on the raid on a blogger

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Further to the story earlier about a blogger’s computers being seized by Norfolk police on what seemed very dubious grounds, the victim is a blogger named “TallBloke”, who records events on the day here.

Fortunately his sense of humour was not damaged in the raid…

Visit cartoonsbyjosh.com and buy a t-shirt or mug or something!
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Converting a page photograph into black and white

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The typescript of Ibn Abi Usaibia reached  me in the form of digital photos of the pages.  These were evidently taken under fluorescent light, since the images are huge, green, and weirdly coloured.  They’re so large, in fact, that they are hard to manipulate.

But I needed something a bit more normal.  So I was tinkering with the image and, quite by chance, got what I needed.  This tip may be of general use, where we have black text on white paper in funny-coloured photos, so I add it here.

  • Export the selected page from FR10 as an image.  Mine was a png, and came out as 32mb in size!  Here’s a snippet.  Note particularly the “see through” text to the left of the diagram.

  • Open with Paint.net 3.5.10.  Trim to right size.
  • Adjustments | Black and White, to convert to greyscale.

  • Adjustments | Brightness contrast, to turn the background white.  So increase the brightness as far as you can without losing text.   The idea is to lose as much of the background as possible, and in particular any see-through text.  The text will be very grey.

  • Then you can also increase the contrast if you like.  Juggling the two should give a pale image.  Mine were brightness=100, contrast=20.
  • Then do Adjustments | Auto-level.  This will turn the pale grey text black again.  (If you didn’t get rid of enough background artefacts,  these will promptly appear as smudges, so you may have to go back a stage, and increase the contrast – that’s what disposes of a lot of them.)  The larger the image, the better the result when converted — this image is a little small, and the text ends up a bit fuzzy.

  • You can then do minor cleanup manually of dots etc.

As someone who is quite useless at image manipulation, I thought I would pass this on.

Ideally one would save the end product as black and white, but I haven’t worked out how to do that.

UPDATE: For some reason you can’t do it in Paint.Net.  But you can in the Windows accessory Paint, which comes free with Windows7.  Just do File | Properties, change the image to black and white and save.  The file size drops from 45k to 12k.  Here’s the sample:

Note that true 1-bit black and white doesn’t resize well — hence the jaggedness in the thumbnail above — but the full size version is fine.

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