Tag: From my diary

A few bits and bobs have attracted my attention today.

More technical manuscripts at the British library.  This is mostly medieval, but includes BL Harley 6, which contains the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.

Via Dunelm Road I learn of an interesting rationale for Christians to be learning NT Greek.

Curious Presbyterian has useful advice for people who write, from a Guardian article by Robert Harris.

I’d very much like to know what the sources are that tell us about Roman interest in tin mining in Cornwall.  This website gave some ideas; perhaps I will find the time to do some research on it.

I’ve received the printed copy of Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the light of recent discoveries, and I’ve started to read it. 

It’s a bit disappointing to discover that the reprinter, “Shelf2Life” (printed by Amazon themselves) didn’t trouble to get the reprint right.  The text is all stretched.  What they did was take a PDF, trim to the text block, and then send it to be printed as was on the next largest standard book size.  What they should have done was pad it with white space to that book size. Hmm.

But Lanciani is charming.  He begins by discussing  the mass destruction of material in Rome, and makes an interesting point, with examples; that the ruins provided hiding-places for thieves, robbers, poor people and other riff-raff.  In some cases demolition was a matter of security for the living. 

I’ve also been reading the Tim LaHaye &c, Left Behind series; a set of Christian novels imagining what would happen next if the teaching of the Rapture were correct, and all the real Christians in the world vanished.  The books are good, but some of the office politics described is too much like work for me!

In news from Italy, a Roman shipwreck reveals details of the medical paraphernalia of an ancient physician.  The vials in which he carried his drugs were very well sealed, and have been analysed.

And a curious freedom of speech issue from Boston, UK.  A pensioner  has displayed in his window a hand-written placard proclaiming that “Religions are fairy stories for adults”.  (Quite why he felt the need to say this to all his friends and neighbours we are not told, and one senses that part of the story is missing.)  Generally houses in the UK do not display placards in their windows.  Someone complained to the police that the item was offensive.  The police advised that potentially it could be, and recommended removal; and the NSS, the atheist society, is complaining about free speech.  Something smells a little about this one, to my eye.

This week I have been on holiday, at least notionally.  I had intended to undertake various projects, as well as visiting some friends.  Unfortunately a headache has been with me all week, and little has been done. 

This afternoon I took down volume 1 of the Loeb edition of Valerius Maximus and dipped into it, hither and yon, for some time.  We all need books that can be dipped into anywhere.  Books of letters can fulfil such a function, if they are short.  Aulus Gellius serves the same function.  Valerius Maximus is so relentlessly Roman and military that he is less attractive. 

But I have decided that volume 2 shall grace my shelves.  Amazon “guarantee” that it will be with me on Saturday.  If they send it by Royal Mail, that may happen.  If they send it by Home Delivery Network then it will not arrive until Monday, when it will be tossed over my garden gate, and discovered a week later, soaked from the rain.  Such is Amazon’s guarantee, these days.

I’ve also noticed, via Evangelical Textual Criticism, that Stephen Carlson’s dissertation, The Text of Galatians and its history, has now appeared on the web (as is very proper).  It looks interesting, in that it attempts to study how the variants made their way into  the text in the manuscripts.  Sadly there is no way that I can read 300+ pages of anything right now.

I chopped up the paperback English translation of Quintus Curtius, and ran it through my sheet-fed scanner.  It did work, but the results were less than satisfactory.  The scanner — a Fujitsu Scansnap — tended to look through the paper, or distort the colour of it.  That said, the OCR took place just fine.  But I’m not convinced that this is a satisfactory way to produce a PDF of a book.  The output was 100k in size, which is ridiculous.

Meanwhile several readers suggested that I investigate ways to convert a Kindle book into a PDF.  There is a script, written in Python, that removes the copy protection, but the sites on which this is hosted do not fill me with confidence.  However I was able to find a free utility, Calibre, that would do the whole process end-to-end.  I have not tried it on a commercial book, but I downloaded the Amazon Kindle-for-PC software, and Calibre seemed to work adequately with some free sample books.

I have continued working on some PHP scripts for the new Mithras pages.

Meanwhile my attention was distracted by something else.  The city of Norwich in East Anglia is a favourite day-trip destination of mine.  The city is commanded by a magnificent Norman stone keep on its mound, and has a splendid cathedral in the evocatively-named Tombland district.  It also boasts most of its medieval curtain wall.  But the medieval gates are gone, taken down on a evil day in the late 18th century by command of the local council.

If you drive into Norwich from Ipswich, you come to the curtain wall at a large roundabout, where once St Stephen’s gate stood.  To your left, on a public house, is a large relief showing what the gate looked like (above).  I always park in the car park at St Stephens, so I see this every time.  But … what is the source for this?

Today I went on a little hunt to discover whether any images of the gate were online.  There is, indeed, a very nice collection of images and text from Norwich City Council here.  But before I stumbled across this, I came across the source for some of the material.

It seems that a series of drawings were made during the 18th century.  Some of these were published in the mid-19th century, and the publication is online.^[1]

From this I extracted two images of the gate, with the town grown up around it, and clearly in poor repair but still standing.  Here they are:

And:

You can click on both, to see a larger image.  The gate had semi-circular towers, facing out, and a flat rear.

The council site has further images.  But it is interesting to see these items, all the same!

It would be facile to condemn the Norwich men of 1792 for ordering the destruction of these interesting historical monuments.  The gates were crumbling, doubtless unsightly, and a charge upon a corporation that had no use for them.  Why not demolish, they doubtless thought? (It would be interested to unearth their actual reasoning, which, curiously, is not given by Fitch in the book linked above).

Too often, it is only when men see the effect of their deeds that learning takes place.  It was the mass destruction of material in this period that helped bring about the romantic movement of the succeeding period, when what was being lost stirred a counter-movement. 

In Egypt, the mass pillaging and destruction of the treasure-hunting period inspired Flinders Petrie to create the modern discipline of archaeology.  But perhaps the former had to happen, in order for men to realise the necessity of the latter.

All the same, it is permissible to wish that the gates of Norwich still stood.

1. ^[1]Robert Fitch, Views of the gates of Norwich, made in the years 1792-3, by the late John Ninham, Norwich, 1861.  Online here.↩

Sometimes I need books.  And sometimes less so. 

I’m about to do something which seems totally unnatural to me.

I’m going to destroy a book. 

I bought it for the purpose.  It’s a cheap modern translation of Quintus Curtius in paperback. 

But I don’t want the paper book at all.  What I want is a PDF, which is searchable, and which I can use for reference.

But I can’t buy one of those.  Nor can I find one on the web.

So … strategy is to buy a paperback, chop it up, feed it through a scanner, and, hey presto, I have a PDF.  Which is what I actually wanted.

Of course I can’t circulate the PDF.  And, under Thayer’s Law,^[1] I wouldn’t dream of doing so anyway.

But it would be useful to me to have it, as a reference.

You know, I can imagine a bunch of students doing  this.  And sharing the PDF among them.

So … why can’t I buy a PDF of the thing?

I can buy a Kindle version.  But can I turn that into a PDF?

Perhaps I should experiment…

1. ^[1]Bill Thayer is not going to upload an English translation of Quintus Curtius, because QC is used by Latin classes all over the world, and the translation would simply be a way for boys to cheat!↩

The migration of my site has worked, and everything seems to be OK bar two things:

1. I can no longer access the Tertullian.org mail through Demon’s old and obsolete Turnpike software.  That’s because the new site enforces the use of SSH.  I know a workaround; to use stunnel; or maybe I should just accept the inevitable and forward it all to Gmail.  Hmmm…
2. The counter at the bottom of the pages no longer works.  This is a copy of Count 2.5, a C program, once at the cutting edge of the web — in 1998! — and which hasn’t been updated since 2001.  It compiles, although with errors; but it doesn’t work.  Should I just get rid of it?  But I quite like having it there.  Hmmm….

Update: Got the counter working.  It was just a question of the right (new) IP address.