Abbas I (Egypt) and his well dressed sequel

That's Abbas I (Egypt)  on the left and Abbas II (Egypt) on the right. I gotta say that Abbas II had some good fashion sense. The hat and the mustache are just fantastic. (This comes from a guy who generally thinks beards are far superior to mustaches.)

Abbas I was ruler of Egypt 1848-1854. He didn't really like change. He undid everything his grandfather did. He abolished trade monopolies (sounds good), closed factories and schools (not so good), and reduced the region's army to 9000 men. He also shut down the Delta Dam and opposed construction of the Suez Canal.

Despite being the grandson of Muhammad Ali, he was unable to fight off two slaves who throttled him to death.

Abbas II ruled Egypt from 1892 to 1914. He seems to have started out cooperating with the British, but over the years he started playing both sides of the fence. It doesn't seem to have mattered though because in general he had no real political power. When you're the leader of the country and you suddenly learn from Archduke Ferdinand who learned from a British Army officer that your army invaded Sudan, well, you're probably not as in command as your title would indicate.

Abbas II was somewhat more successful than Abbas I in the sense that he managed not to get murdered, although he did get hurt during an assassination attempt in 1914 about 4 months before he lost power.

He eventually retired to Switzerland and died in Geneva at age 70. Living to age 70 is a pretty good accomplishment for a semi-autocratic ruler, so I say congrats.

A priori, this title has 14 words. A posteriori, this title may cause confusion.

A priori knowledge is what you know without having to experience anything whereas a posteriori knowledge is knowledge derived from experience (empirical evidence).

How can anyone really know anything? That's a difficult question that philosophers have pondered since the ancient Greeks. Well, probably before then, but you don't get credit for anything unless you write it down for future generations to know. Even then, if you used paper you had better hope there are monks out there that want to duplicate your stuff until the printing press comes along.

Back in college I loved thinking about this sort of thing. I took a class in Philosophy of Science (I highly recommend that class for every person who intends to vote or think.) and enjoyed it so much that I got a minor in it.

Philosophy is basically math without numbers. It's where you go when you want to get meta about anything. If you want to know the atomic weight of calcium then you should ask a chemist or a physicist. If you want to know whether to believe the chemist or physicist then you go talk to a philosopher.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (or would it be Quis custodiet philosophis dixit?) Well, if you want to know whether or not to believe a philosopher, you'll just have to ask other philosophers until you are satisfied. If you're still not satisfied, you can always ask a politician. They're always happy to tell you what you want to hear.

Celan, Paul - through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech

Celan, Paul was not a happy man. Perhaps that's why he was such a successful poet. He was a Romanian poet and lived 1920 to 1970. Britannica says he was largely inspired by the French surrealists of his time.

He was sent to a forced labor camp in WWII. His parents were sent to an internment camp where they both died. Britannica says his parents were murdered, but wikipedia indicates that his father probably died of typhus while his mother was shot after being exhausted while performing forced labor.

After being freed by the Red Army, he moved to Paris. Over the course of his life he wrote 9 volumes of (German) poetry. His poetry has been translated into English by various authors.

Wikipedia quotes him as saying about language:

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.

The guy had a way with words.
Sadly, but perhaps appropriately given that he was a poet, he died by his own hand. That's how Britannica phrases it anyway. Wikipedia is less lyrical about it and says that he committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in Paris, around April 20, 1970.



MISC:

• cedar
• 4 species of conifers. genus Cedrus. family Pinaceae.
• celadon
• East Asian vase decorated with green, blue, and gray glazes. Colors are from being washed in slip (liquefied clay) with high iron content before glazing.

celery. Myrmidons love it.

I think celery is the first food I've encountered in Britannica. Is celery interesting? Actually, practically everything is interesting when you dig a little deeper.

When I started reading about trees that are native to North America, I found it surprising that half the trees in my yard are actually non-native trees. That makes identification harder because all the identification books I have are North America specific. None of them mention Italian Cypress trees or Avocado trees.

The same goes for food I get at the grocery store. Where did these foods first come from? Britannica says celery is "native to the Mediterranean area". Wikipedia says the first references to celery are found in 1323 BC, although there is no evidence that it was cultivated until hundreds of years later.

Homer's Iliad mentions that the horses of the Myrmidons grazed on wild celery in the marshes of Troy. (Apparently Troy was an actual real place which is now northwest Anatolia in modern Turkey.) If I was a vegetable, I'd be super stoked to be mentioned in the Iliad.

Be prepared. The following shocked me to the core:

Celery is NOT a negative calorie food! It does NOT take more calories to digest it than it provides to the body. Seriously, the web is awful at providing information about food and health. It's just absolute garbage at both those things. If you hear a fact about food on the web outside of an encyclopedia, just believe the opposite and you will probably be right. In fact, I'm not even sure that there are any true facts about food. Be skeptical!

Celebes black ape (photographer extraordinaire)

This fine looking fellow is a Celebes black ape (aka. Celebes crested macaque).

Britannica indicates that these beautiful creatures are arboreal monkeys from Celebes and surrounding islands in Indonesia. It also mentions that certain tribes see it as an ancestor. I'm assuming that this is not a scientific belief in evolution, although it may be something sort of like that. It's hard to say because wikipedia doesn't mention this and searching failed to turn up anything but other references to Britannica.

If anyone has details of tribal beliefs regarding this creature, please post and let me know!

Perhaps most notably, a Celebes black ape launched a huge discussion about copyright when it took the so-called monkie selfie. Strangely, despite having the decision come down on the side of less copyright, I'm not really satisfied. I personally have a strong belief that copyright should be short and far less intrusive than it is now. Yet, in this case it feels like the photographer got screwed.

In the future I assume he'll use a wireless trigger to take the photos while the monkeys handle the camera.


On a related note, spell check tells me that it is "monkeys" and not "monkies". Also, the musical band is "The Monkees".


MISC:

• Cegled
• Hungarian town. 2 famous speeches were delivered here. The first in 1514 by Gyorgy Dozsa and the second in 1848 by Lajos Kossuth.
• ceiling
• Exposed ceilings led to structural systems (e.g. pipes) which were attractive on their own.
• ceilometer
• Adevice which measures the height of cloud bases using UV light which reflects off of the clouds.
• Celaenae
• City of Phrygia (now Turkey) which was the starting point of the march of 10,000 under Cyrus in 401 BC against Artaxerxes.
• celandine
• poppy flower with poisonous orange sap. Once known as wartweed because it was purported to remove warts.
• celastrales
• Plant order, mostly trees. Has 12 families, 147 genera, and about 2000 species.

abbrev. snafu

Somehow, the idea that abbreviations were invented, just seems odd. But, I suppose every concept had to be thought--by someone--for the first time. We even have a name for that someone. Actually, he probably didn't invent the concept, but he appears to be the earliest user important enough to be mentioned in encyclopaedia entries on abbreviations.

Marcus Tullius Tiro was apparently a slave in Cicero's household sometime around 50 BC. Britannica says that many of his abbreviations are still in use today. Wikipedia indicates he might have been the first to record Roman speeches in shorthand.


The entry for abbreviation defines snafu as "situation normal, all fouled up". This is not the definition I had heard...

I took a gander at etymonline and it seems to indicate the term originally came from the military and was indeed not a polite term. I was wondering if Britannica did this on purpose or not (this is, after all, the entry on abbreviation, not the entry on snafu).

Nevertheless, I searched a bit, and found that the entry on slang recognizes that "fouled" is used to soften the shocking power of the term. Of course, the birds and the bees isn't just about fowl. It's about the bees too, but "situation normal, all flowerbuggered up" just isn't appropriate in polite company.


On a different note, I was just comparing the online Britannica entry for abbreviation with the entry in the paper encyclopaedia that I'm reading. The online entry isn't too much longer than the paper entry, but it certainly is a lot harder to read. It makes me sad that Britannica requires a subscription in order to get rid of all the visual clutter. If they need ads, they should be text-only google ads. OTOH, the wikipedia entry is clear of visual clutter, but it's about 6 times longer. That's great for research, but it's not great when you're just looking for an overview into all the world's knowledge.

I can't decide if the first paragraphs of a wikipedia article are enough. They are summaries. Reading just that text might be enough, but paper Britannica is a compromise between a summary and a full detailed wikipedia entry. I guess future encyclopaedia readers will have to make do. Someone should create an app that allows you to page through wikipedia, a-z, excluding non-notable articles, displaying just the summary text. Heck, maybe I'll make the app if it doesn't already exist. Sounds like a good project.

It would probably be more useful than my mymindblewup.com website which allows you to learn important facts like how many cows are required to bridge the gap between the Earth and the moon.


MISC

• Abbate, Niccolo dell
• Artist in 1500's France. Principle contributor t othe Fountainbleau style.
• Abbe, Ernst
• 1800's German scientist. Improved lenses. Discovered "Abbe sine condition" formula which is used when making lenses. Improved microscopes.
• abbess
• Female abbot.
• Abbeville, South Carolina, USA
• Cradle and grave of the confederacy.
• abbey
• A set of buildings built around a monastery. Basically small town.
• Abbot, Charles Greeley
• In 1953 discovered connection between solar radiation and long term weather patterns.
• Abbot, Bud and Costello, Lou
• Comedy act. They originally operated burlesque houses. Well known for "Who's on First." skit.

abacus - simple as 123... 456789

The abacus is far simpler to understand than I imagined before. For some reason I always assumed the abacus was like roman numerals or 5 count hash marks (where you make 4 vertical lines and then a diagonal 5th for every 5 you count).

It's actually very simple. Each vertical row of beads is a single digit. The beads on the bottom are worth 1 each. The beads on the top are worth 5 each. The bottom and top aren't separate, they are added together to form a single digit.

The pictured above is a Chinese abacus. There are many different types from all around the world. The Russian abacus just has 10 beads for each column rather than having separate beads for ones and fives.

Check out this simple simulator for a Chinese abacus. Just click on the beads and it should become crystal clear exactly how it all works.


MISC

• Cecchetti, Enrico
• Italian ballet dancer and teacher.
• Cecil (of Chelwood), (Edgar Algernon) Robert Gascoyne
• Cecil, 1st Vicount - British politician against Japan & Nazis before that was cool.
• Cecil, William; 1st Baron Burghley
• Honest adviser to queen Elizabeth in 1500's.
• Cecrops
• Greek. First king of Attica.
• cecum
• 1st part of large intestine. Larger in plant eating animals. Smaller in meat eaters. Contains bacteria to digest cellulose.

Ceaușescu, Nicolae - A jerk, but not actually a vampire.

Who do you think of when you hear about a communist leader who took a functioning country and restructured it so as to cause widespread famine? Mao is the one I knew about, and he probably killed far more people as a result, but there is another. This one managed to smash up Romania:

Ceaușescu, Nicolae Take some Mao, add a cup of Stalin, and add a dash of something charismatic like Putin, and you get Nicolae Ceaușescu. Not only was he a fiendish politician, but I'm pretty sure he chose his name to be difficult to spell. Even when I copy paste the name, the computer sometimes gets it wrong.

Sometimes I wonder why successful politicians work so hard to become supreme rulers. What percentage of authoritarian leaders actually live out their natural lives? I suppose every one of them thinks that they're special.

This guy spent the 1930's working his way up through the communist party so that by the 1960's he was the one in charge. He has some good ideas (hey, kick out those damn Russians) and some bad ideas (let's centralize everything and hope we don't screw up, and let's be super hardcore authoritarian bastards because helping people against their will is what everyone wants). The whole centralization thing resulted in massive debt due to mismanagement.

So your county is massively in debt. How to solve this? How about exporting all your unnecessary luxuries like food, medicine, and fuel? This genius step in the 1980's resulted in a totally unpredictable famine. Taking a page from Governor Jim Rhodes and the Kent State shootings, he decided to fire on some protesters in 1989. The military defected, and on Dec 25 (he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!), Nicolae and his wife received bullets in the head as Christmas presents.

MISC:

• A-kue
• A Chinese general,
• a posteriori
• knowledge is experience
• Aaron
• This was Moses' right hand man. For some reason I remember Moses doing all that stuff on his own, but apparently Aaron was supposed to have been there representing the priest class.
• Aaron, Hank
• For some reason, when I hear about big name baseball players, I assume they all played for the Yankees.  This one didn't. He played minor league baseball in Eau Claire, WI, and went on to play for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Braves (in two cities).
• Abae
• Greek town with Oracle and some ruins.
• Abahai
• Manchurian tribal leader who conquered China in the 1600's.
• Abaiang Atoll
• coral atoll of Gilbert islands
• Discovered 1788 by Captain Thomas Gilbert (and, presumably, all the indigenous folks who were already there)
• abalone
• Marine snail

Plain lists of facts are boring.

I thought about how I should format these posts. It would probably be boring to just list topics, yet many topics I just want to save without really commenting on them. So, the plan is to title the post after a particularly interesting topic. I'll comment on it, then in a MISC section, just list the rest of the topics I encountered that I just want to save for future reference.

I guess that means I can't make any posts unless I encounter an interesting topic?

48 inches of concise knowledge

Last week I made a ridiculous purchase. I paid $700 for a full 2007 set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That's $700 for a 5 year old paper encyclopedia (encyclopaedia?).

Why? Am I a cranky old guy who doesn't get this new web thing? (Get off my lawn!) No, not really. At least, I'm not quite that old.

Am I a bookophile who just loves paper books (wik-whatia?) and refuses to get with the modern world? Well, no. I love my kindle apps and use google whenever I need to find out important things like how they did the driverless scenes in Knight Rider (a guy dressed up as a seat).

So what's the deal? The deal is that the great editors over at Britannica have spent about 250 years making articles that are as concise as possible. The paper form motivated them to fit as much information in as little space as possible. Wikipedia is great, but good gravy, concise it is not.

After years of reading news sites every day, I feel like things are just too repetitive. The pool of knowledge that they explore is just too limited. This is time I now plan on spending reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

When people celebrate holidays or make movies about wars, they almost always choose from a fairly limited set of wars. Everyone loves the Hitler, Washington, Lincoln, and Rambo wars. The countless other wars throughout history are barely mentioned. Those wars were great, but after years of hearing about them, I find them dull. I want to know about all the others. I hope Britannica can help me out.

I want to read the Micropaedia. Britannica actually has 32 volumes, but only the first 12 make up the Micropaedia. Most of the rest is the Macropaedia which has a lot more depth. I'll certainly spend time learning more about things that I find in the Micropaedia, but I'll probably just look them up online for depth. I bought these books so I could get access to the years of editorial writing and rewriting that distilled all the world's knowledge down into about 12000 pages (about 1000 pages per book) of 9 point type.

I've been asked why I didn't just go to the library. I could have read them there for free! Well, perhaps. Except for one problem. Libraries don't care about encyclopedias anymore! I went to 4 libraries. The first had a 2013 World Book (a children's encyclopedia). The second had a 2003 Britannica set. The third had a 2005 Britannica set with volume 1 missing. The fourth had the 2010 set! (the last one ever printed) But, they had it in storage. It wasn't even out on the shelves despite the tremendous amount of space in that library. (They were probably keeping it as a collector's item.)

Furthermore, despite not bothering to keep up to date, they also won't allow me to check out any of the volumes. Seems contradictory that they find them unnecessary, but they also won't let you check them out.

That's ok. Owning a set just feels right anyway. If I want to write notes in the margins or highlight things then I'll be able to do that in my own copy.

Will I actually make it through all 12000 pages? Maybe.  Maybe not. My interests in woodworking, metalworking, cement casting, origami, balloon twisting, diorama building, gardening, kayaking, snorkeling, sewing (mostly Halloween costumes), Pac-Man collecting, piano playing, and making android games have all had various durations. Some are ongoing. Others have fallen by the wayside. But, keeping a blog about this will help me retain more of what I read, so that's the plan. I'll write about whatever I find interesting enough to be worth remembering.

I'll have to be careful about leaving too much metadata lying around though. If I let slip which volumes are where, you'll be able to follow my locations by watching which words I've been reading about. If I start writing about Ceausescu, Nicolae (he was such a reckless bastard!), you'll know that I'm in the room containing volume 3 (Ceara-Deluc).