Miscellaneous for June 2015

I've got quite a few miscellaneous topics that don't warrant full posts, so I'll just group them into one post. Previously I put them at the end of articles, but that was kind of confusing. I'll group them into one monster post each month. Go ahead and skip to the next post if this sort of trivia isn't interesting to you.

• Delvaux, Paul
• 1897-1994  Belgian surrealist painter. Skeletons bury skeletons.
• Delvigne, Henri-Gustave
• 1800's Helped introduce cylindrical bullet.
• dema deity
• ancestral beings of souther New Guinea. People are like tubers. They are cut up and planted to grow new things.
• Demades
• 380-319 BC. Athenian orator. Shrewd speaker. Liked by Alexander the Great. Convinced citizens to put Demosthenes to death. Put to death in Macedonia.
• demand curve
• reason by Britannica was so expensive
• Demavend, Mount
• volcanic peak in Elburz Mountains in Iran. 3000-8000ft taller than nearby mountains.
• deme
• Greek village council of all 18+ males.
• Demeter
• Greek daughter of Cronus & Rhea. Sister & consort of Jupiter. Goddess of grain & vegetation except beans. Triptolemus was her 1st priest & inventor of agriculture.
• December
• Month of Poseideon.
• Democracy
• Began in Greece, but that had little direct influence on future democracies. 200 years later saw beginning of constitutional democracy. Numerous nations adopt democratic governments that are really dominated by a single dominating party.
• Democratic Party (US)
• Donkey logo never officially adopted by the party. Parties changed names a lot. The party names went from "Republican" to "Democratic-Republican" then split into current parties (sort of).
• Dempsey, Jack
• 1895-1983 Boxer who held title from 1919-1926. Forfeited knockout by standing over Tunney rather than going to a neutral corner.
• demurrer
• In criminal law one party admits facts are true but denies that the opponent has cause for redress.
• Denakil Plain
• Lowland in Ethiopia where water flows in and stays. Mined for salt.
• Denali National Park & Preserve
• Alaskan park with Mt. McKinley. Highest mountain in North America at 6194m.
• Dench, Dame Judi
• Dame is the female version of sir. It's like being knighted.
• Deneb
• One of the brightest stars. It's in the constellation Cygnus.
• dengue
• Fever with 4 serotypes. Each is separately infectious. Passed by mosquitoes.
• Denis, Maurice
• 1870-1943  French painter. Famous quote about painting being colors assembled in a specific order. (Seems trivial to someone who knows about pixels on a monitor, but it was probably more profound before the advent of modern screens.)
• Dennis, John
• 1657-1734 English dramatist who quarreled with Alexander Pope about importance of passion in poetry. Long angry feud. English bishop tried to stop in 1698.
• Dennison, Aaron Lufkin
• 1812-1895 Father of American watchmaking. Pioneer of interchangeable parts for mass production of watches.
• Denon, Dominique Vivant, Baron
• Helped develop Louvre collection. Sketched ancient monuments while under fire from enemy. (like that episode of Black Adder)
• densitometer
• measures density or degree of darkening of photographic film or plate or any semitransparent material like sunglasses.
• density current
• Water currents created by cold water or sediment or salinity which is pulled down by gravity displacing water. Large amounts of pollution can cause currents. Sediment also decreases reservoir capacity.
• Dent, Edward John
• Clockmaker who made Big Ben. Died before completion. Sons completed it in 18543.
• Dentatus, Manius Curius
• Died 270 BC. Roman general, victor against Pyrrhus, king of Epirus.
• Denver
• Largest city between Missouri River & Pacific states. (doesn't include any state south of the southern points of those rivers)
• Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad aka. The Rio Grande
• Founded 1870. Absorbed in 1988 by Southern Pacific Rail Corp.
• deontological ethics
• Ethical theories that place emphasis on duty of morality.
• depersonalization
• Feeling that one's body is dissociated from mind. See oneself from distance.
• depletion allowance
• Like depreciation tax deduction but for mining. Now eliminated for large companies.
• deportation
• England ended criminal deportation in 1850's due to inhuman treatment in US & Australia.
• depressant
• A drug or other agent that slows activity of vital organs. Ones acting on central nervous system: general anesthetics, opiates, alcohol, hypnotics. Tranquilizing drugs (ataractics) act on lower levels of brain. Relieve tension without reducing mental sharpness.
• depth finder
• Modern systems use electrical pulse or audible frequencies below 15kHz.
• Derby
• English horse race named for Edward Stanley 12th earl of Derby. Other horse races like Kentucky Derby named after it (although they are pronounced differently).
• Derby, * Stanley earls
• Family of earls who generally betrayed their rulers. "Strange" was held hostage but escaped an execution order.
• Derbyware
• Porcelain figures made in Derby central England.
• Deringer, Henry
• Made pistol used by John Wilkes Booth. Reporter incorrectly wrote "Derringer" in papers. This mistake was widely copied to other reports, so the name of that pistol was eventually changed to match the misspelling.
• dermestid beetle
• Any of 700 species of insect family Dermestidae. They are household pests, usually brown or black.
• dermis
• Thicker layer of skin under epidermis.
• Derrida, Jacques
• 1930-2004 French philosopher, very influential.
• Deruta ware
• Tin glazed earthenware. Early 1500's from Deruta Italy.
• dervish
• Any member of ṣūfī Muslim mystic fraternity.
• Derzhavin, Gaurila Romanovich
• 1743-1816 Russia's greatest 18th century poet.
• Des Moines, Iowa
• Possible corruption of French "de moyen" which means "middle" because it is halfway between Missouri and Mississippi rivers. (Britannica mentions this, but wikipedia doesn't.)
• Des Moines Register
• Paper that started the Gallup poll.
• des Périers, Bonaventure
• French storyteller & freethinker & humanist.
• Des Plaines River
• completion of drainage canal to Chicago river reversed flow of Chicago river & allowed traffic from Mississippi river to the Great Lakes.
• desalination aka. desalting
• Generally involves one or more of: decrease pressure, increase heat, use membranes to filter.
• Desargues, Girard
• 1591-1661 Introduced principals of projective geometry. Used unique terms based on botanical names & didn't use Cartesian symbolism, so was forgotten for 2 centuries. Tech adviser to Cardinal Richelieu. He knew Rene Descartes and Marin Mersenne. Poncelet in 1639 created projective Euclidean space (Euclidean space with points at infinity where parallel lines meet.) This simplified many theories.
• Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline
• 1786-1859 Paul Verlaine put her in his 1884 Damned Poets (Poetes maudits)
• descant
• Countermelody composed or improvised above a familiar melody.
• Descartes, Rene
• 1596-1650 Cogito ergo sum. Father of modern philosophy.
• descent
• Patrilineal, matrilineal, or ambilateral (or ambilineal). Mean you are kin with father's side, mother's side, or both. Double unilineal have 2 separate lines that both operate at the same time.
• desensitization
• Injections under the skin can cure hay fever and asthma.
• desert
• Britannica has a list of total square miles for all deserts in the world. These would make good MyMindBlewUp.com objects.
• desert cultures
• People were in Nevada, Utah, Arizona from 8000 BC to 2000 BC.
• desert fathers
• Christian desert hermits in Egypt in early 200's who formed basis of Christian monasticism.
• Desiderio Da settignano
• 1430-1464 Sculptor in Florence Italy
• Deslandres, Henri-Alexandre
• 1853-1948 Invented spectroheliograph
• desmid
• Microscopic green algae.
• Desmoulins, Lucie-Simplice Camille-Benoist
• 1760-1794 Moderate French democrat who was one of the most influential journalists of the French revolution. His friend Robespierre guillotined him because of his articles against the powerful Committee of Public Safety.
• Dessalines, Jean-Jacques
• 1758-1806 Started as slave until 1791 when he joined a rebellion. Eventually became emperor of Haiti in 1804 when he declared independence. Massacred whites and powerful mulattoes in order to ensure black dominance. Killed in a revolt comprised mostly of mulattoes.

developing a wikipedia reader

Over the weekend I started work on a new project. As I've mentioned before, I want to make an app that will assist others in reading the encyclopedia. Of course, that means wikipedia rather than Britannica.

The first step involved processing the vast amount of data in wikipedia. I downloaded the bzip2 compressed 15 gb file containing all the textual data in wikipedia. I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday afternoon working on it, but I now have a program that processes that file (without needing to decompress it first) and outputs an xml file containing a stripped down version that contains only the introduction of each article, the id of the article, and an image from the article if possible. By my calculations, it should be able to process the whole file in about 30 hours.

There were plenty of obstacles. I needed to find a Java library that handles streaming a bzip2 file. I found one in the ant project. I needed to parse the xml in a streamed manor (no way that I could load a 100gb decompressed xml file into memory). That was easy enough. I've used Java StAX before.

Finally I needed to parse the mediawiki format, strip out all the data I wanted to ignore, convert it to a format that I could use in an android app, then find a useful image link from the article. This was tricky, but I found a library called Sweble that parses mediawiki format. It's poorly documented, but once I figured it out, it worked beautifully.

Mediawiki articles sometimes have image links in the description, sometimes that have them in a sidebar, sometimes they have it only in the main article, and sometimes they have no image at all. I can now handle most of the easy cases, but to save time I currently omit the body of the article from parsing. That means I have no image link for any article that has image links exclusively in the body of the article. I'll have to work on how to handle that without adding significant time to the parsing.


The next step is to get genre information and generate a pagerank so that I can determine what articles to prioritize. When someone is reading the encyclopedia, it'll be terribly boring if I only show them the most popular articles. They would include almost nothing but celebrities and current events. Some might be interested in that, but I want to split things into genres and then include only the most popular and/or important articles in each genre.

Importance is hard to judge though. Popularity is one way (judged by page hits). Another way is page rank (a wikipedia article linked to by lots of other wikipedia articles has a higher page rank than one that's never linked to). Another way is centrality. If you plot a graph of how everything is linked, some articles will show up more centrally whether or not they are linked directly to more articles.

I wasn't able to find a freely available source of page rank data for wikipedia, so I'll have to calculate it myself. That'll be my project next. I'll parse the wikipedia data, output a list of pairs indicating which articles link to which other articles. Then I'll generate page rank data from that.

I'm hoping to find genre information, but I may need to derive that from information in the article itself like the info boxes. Then, for articles without info boxes, I could probably determine genre by finding how strongly they are linked to articles of known genre. That'll probably be a big project. I'm still hoping I can find sources of this data so that I can make use of it, but if it's not available, it should be fun to figure it out. If it works out I could even try to make it available to others (although I don't think I want to pay bandwidth costs, so I'd need to figure out a place to put it that wouldn't charge me for bandwidth).


Of course, all this is what I need to do before I even bother developing a portable app for reading the information. I'm not even going to think about that until I've done all this data processing. That part is probably more fun anyway. I'm interested in probability and statistics. I got a minor in math in college, but I somehow never went through a statistics course. I've gotten a few weeks into an online MIT course in the subject, but I've been putting off working on that while I've been doing this encyclopedia stuff. I'll get back to it though. It seems like it'll come in useful for data mining in any case.

Deucalion - Noah for Greeks plus stone birth

Apparently history is full of gods destroying the Earth with floods accompanied by a select group who made a zoo ark. There are apparently 3 of them: Deucalion, Noah, and Utnapishtim.





Deucalion has a particularly prestigious lineage because he is the son of Prometheus. I was unable to determine if Prometheus begat Deucalion before, during, or after being chained to a rock as punishment for giving us fire. I prefer to think that it was during. I'm sure that he really needed comfort during that time due to the annoying liver consuming eagle that kept bothering him. (Big shout out to Heracles for getting rid of that eagle.)

After the flood, everyone else was dead. This concerned the 82 year old Deucalion because repopulating the Earth by protracted incest was not something he was into. (Presumably Noah was ok with it.) So, after consulting an Oracle (presumably one that had been on the ark) he found out that he and his wife needed to toss rocks over their shoulders. His wife's rocks turned into women. Deucalion's rocks turned into men.

Deutschlandied (German national anthem) - Germany above all else

The German national anthem Deutschlandied was written in 1848, but it was not adopted as the national anthem of Germany until 1922. Originally the first verse was supposed to be a call to unity, but its connotations were a bit different under Nazi Germany. Here is the first verse in English:

Germany, Germany above all things,
Above everything in the world,
when, for protection and defense,
it always stands brotherly together .
From the Meuse to the Memel,
From the Adige to the Belt,
|: Germany, Germany above all things,
Above everything in the world! :|

There are 4 places mentioned in that verse, but only the Belt and the Memel were ever actually boundaries of Germany. As of 1920 the Belt was no longer in Germany. As of 1945 the Memel was no longer in Germany. So, post 1945, none of those 4 locations is actually in Germany.

When Germany was split up, West Germany eventually decided (in 1950) to switch from the 1st to the 3rd verse as the official anthem. It sounds a little less take-over-the-world-ish:

Unity and justice and freedom
For the German fatherland!
Let us all strive for this purpose
Brotherly with heart and hand!
Unity and justice and freedom
Are the pledge of happiness;
|: Bloom in the glow of happiness,
Bloom, German fatherland! :|

The verses above are wikipedia's translations. The translation in Britannica of the above verses looks a little different:

Germany, Germany above all,
above all else in the world,
When it steadfastly holds together,
offensively and defensively, with brotherhood.
From the Maas to the Memel,
from the Etsch to the [Little] Belt,
Germany, Germany above all,
above all else in the world.

Unity and rights and freedom
for the German fatherland.
Let us strive for it together,
brotherly with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
are the basis of good fortune.
Flower in the light of this good fortune,
flower German fatherland.

soap - better than scraping yourself with a strigil

A detergent and soap are both surfactants, but soap is generally made from saponification of fats whereas detergents are generally synthetic.

Tallow is rendered beef or mutton fat.

Wax is synthesized from various plants and animals.

If you don't have soap, you can use clean ash or sand / soil as a substitute. (It seems like washing yourself with "soil" would just make you muddy, but perhaps that's better than being oily and smelly.)

Although there is evidence of soap usage as early as 2200 BC (a recipe was found on a clay tablet from that time period), it's use was not widespread.

The Romans' preferred method of cleaning involved massaging oil into the skin and then scraping it away with a strigil.

strigil

detective story - who created the genre? when?

The detective story has some roots in ancient literature, but the genre as we know it started surprisingly recently in 1841 when Edgar Allan Poe published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". According to Britannica, the profession of detective had existed for only a few decades at that point. Wikipedia doesn't say who the first police detective was, but it does indicate that the first private investigator was Eugène François Vidocq in 1833.

A detective story may consist of the following traditional elements:

• seemingly perfect crime
• wrongly accused suspect to whom circumstantial evidence points
• bungling dimwitted police
• greater powers of detection and superior mind of the detective
• startling and unexpected climax and resolution

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction (apparently it's an actual name that deserves capital letters) is the period between the 1920's and the 1930's.

There are plenty of big names, some of which I hadn't connected to being detective authors:

• Sherlock Holmes : Sir Arthur Conan Doyle : 1887
• Inspector French : Freeman Wills Croft : 1920
• Hercule Poirot : Agatha Christie : 1920
• Miss Marple : Agatha Christie : 1930
• Lord Peter Wimsey : Dorothy L. Sayers : 1923
• Philo Vance : S.S. Van Dine : 1926
• Albert Campion : Margery Allingham : 1920
• Ellery Queen : Frederic Dannay & Manfred B. Lee : 1929
• Sam Spade : Dashiell Hammett : 1930
• Perry Mason : Erle Stanley Gardner : 1933

Demophon of Eleusis - better walk on eggshells around Demeter

Poor Demophon. King Celeus managed to please Demeter by being hospitable to her. As a reward she was going to make their son Demophon immortal by coating him in ambrosia and cooking him in a fire.

When Queen Metanira walked in and saw her son baking, she rather understandably freaked out. This annoyed Demeter who decided not to bother making Demophon immortal after all.

I can't help but feel that Demeter tends to overreact. A dry home and a nice meal probably don't warrant granting immortality. At the same time, screaming when you see your baby in a fire is not cause to take away immortality. Someone needs to teach her about the concept of proportionality.

demons - gods without so much personality

In ancient Greece, gods were supernatural forces with personalities while demons were activities and events with much less emphasis on the personality. Sudden unexpected interventions were blamed on demons.

The seven deadly sins actually equate to different demons. In modern Christianity all these names refer to the same creature, but Jesus referred to Beelzebub as the chief of all demons, so at that time they were all supposed to be separate. In the middle ages a hierarchy of demons was developed and many demons were assigned specific sins:

• pride : Lucifer
• avarice : Mammon
• lechery : Asmodeus
• anger : Satan
• gluttony : Beelzebub
• envy : Leviathan (I hadn't realized this was a demon at all.)
• sloth : Belphegor

Islam has its own hierarchy of demons which shares much in common with Jewish and Christian demonology. In particular, the devil is Iblis which became leader of a host of jinn which are generally evil. He is also known as Shaytan (Satan).


Hinduism has devas (benevolent supernatural beings) and asuras (demons) which battle each other constantly. Nāga are serpent demons.

Deseret - the waterless land of milk and honey and ice cream

Back in 1849 a provisional state called Deseret unofficially existed in the United States for about 2 years. Looks like they wanted most of Nevada and parts of most other surrounding states. But, eventually they just had to settle for what is now Utah.

The word "deseret" means "honeybee" in the Book of Mormon, so it could be added to the plentiful puns that exist regarding desert and dessert.

Democritus - shiny, round, rough, or flat. It's all just atoms dude.

Democritus (460 BC - 370 BC) apparently is not the namesake for Democracy. The origin for that word is actually the Greek word "dēmokratía" which means "rule of the people".

What he is remembered for is his formulation of atomic theory. He wasn't thinking about what we think of as atoms though. At least, not exactly. Here is the popular conception of atoms:

Here is something more like the reality of what atoms actually are.

But he was really thinking of something more like oddly shaped building blocks or Legos.

For example, his theory is that water is made up of smooth round atoms. Rock consists of rough edged atoms that lock together. The color white was supposed to actually consist of smooth flat atoms while the human soul consisted of some other type of atom.

He also subscribed to a belief in a single god that he referred to as "cheerfulness". Everything about the world could be explained by atoms and the way they interacted. Remember that he was an ancient Greek and, popularly, the gods were quite numerous.

I tried to find a source which described all the different types of atoms that Democritus postulated, but it appears that most of his work was lost. Most of what we know about his theories comes from secondhand reports contrasting his views with the views of others.

department stores and the military brought us ready-to-wear

I was reading the entry on department stores and it struck me as odd that it focused so much on the selling of ready-to-wear clothing. What other type of clothing would you buy?

When I play games set in a medieval setting, sometimes you'll encounter tailors. However, games never require that you be measured so that you can come back next week after your leather armor is put together. You buy "leather armor" and that's that. Tailors are essentially portrayed as having small clothing shops filled with ready-to-wear clothing.

So, prior to the early 1800's, you either made your own duds or you went to a tailor, got measured, then came back when they were finished. When fashions changed, you simply added a larger collar to your shirt or shortened your skirt or added buttons to your fly.

Apparently the first mass produced clothing was made during the war of 1812. Unless you're in G.I.Joe, there isn't much individualization going on, so it was pretty efficient to order large numbers of the same military outfits of each size rather than measuring each soldier.

It wasn't until the early 1900's in the US when department stores opened up offering lots of clothing in various sizes, ready to be purchased and worn without modification.

Opah - hot stuff

The Opah is the first and only fully warm blooded fish currently known. There are others that can warm parts of their body, but the Opah is alone in being able to warm its whole body to temperatures exceeding the surrounding water by about 5 degrees Celsius.

We don't know much about it because it lives its whole life in the open ocean at meopelagic depths.

This is a recent discovery, so I obviously didn't read about it in my encyclopedia. But, I thought it was so awesome that I had to mention it.

Derby - a town in the shire

Low Tide in Derby

Derby is a town in the Kimberley shire of Western Australia that has a tidal range of 35 feet. I took a look at the google street view, but I was unable to find Hobbiton anywhere. If you can find it, let me know.

So how can the tidal range be 35 feet (vertical)? In the open ocean, the vertical tidal range is only about 2 feet. Does the moon's lovely attraction pull harder on the water in some areas of the Earth? To find out what's going on we can take a look at the Bay of Fundy. It has the highest tidal range in the world at 53 feet.

There's a whole page explaining why Bay of Fundy tides are the highest. Basically, the bay acts as a funnel with a natural oscillation period of between 12 and 13 hours. This happens to match up with the Atlantic ocean tide flooding which occurs every 12 hours and 26 minutes. This results in resonance just like pushing on a swing does for the swinger. If you changed the shape of the bay, the tides wouldn't be as high.

The Derby visitor centre has plenty of other beautiful stuff about Derby on it. My favorite thing about the place is the Boab Prison Tree. I just love crazy looking trees:

Boab Prison Tree

dentists used cocaine and plaster

I'll continue on with the dental theme here. If you read the previous article on dental drills you'll be squirming in your seat just thinking about the pain. Thankfully, it's not quite so bad these days.

Anesthesia and analgesia was introduced at the end of the 1800's. Interestingly, cocaine and nitrous oxide were used.

ivory dentures from 1700's

These days dentists can create extremely realistic looking teeth which can be integrated into the jaw bone using a titanium base. Titanium will actually bond to bone, so it's a good material to use when trying to attach things to bone. The bonding process is called osseointegration.

But in the old days, dentures were your only option. Impressions were taken using plaster which needed to be chipped away (painfully) and then reassembled to make a mold. I can't imagine how unpleasant it would be to have a mouth full of wet plaster.

Dentures were made of wood, ivory, or tortoise shell. The teeth were made of ivory or porcelain.

Dental Drill - OMG, the pain!

foot powered dental drill

My teeth hurt a little bit just reading about this. The first dental drills were hand cranked. Just imagine a dentist trying to drill a tooth using a drill the same way you might use a hand turned egg beater. I saw Dances With Wolves and the way that they cut off limbs without any anesthetic. Imagine someone doing that, but for teeth. I'll bet they had people hold that poor sucker down while he screamed in agony. Oof! You might want to take a deep breath.

Dentistry actually goes back much farther than that though. There is evidence that in 7000 BC the Indus Valley Civilization (now known as India and Pakistan) drilled cavities using a bow drill. This seems like an astonishing modern thing to do. I always assumed that back then they'd just yank out the tooth if it hurt.

A bow drill wouldn't spin particularly fast though. The slower the speed, the longer the suffering lasts. In 1914 electric dental drills could reach 3000 rpm. Modern drills operate between 400,000 and 800,000 rpm.

That seems like a lot. 800,000 rpm is 13,333 rotations per second. If you're watching TV while the dentist bores into your teeth, in the time it takes for a single frame to display on the TV, the drill has rotated between 200 and 300 times.

Dentin - Brush Your Breath! ™

Dentin is harder than bone (according to Britannica, but I couldn't find any indication of this in wikipedia),  but softer than enamel. The hardness is determined by the percentage that is minerals.

Enamel is 96% minerals. Dentin is 70% minerals. Bone is also 70% minerals (although there are multiple types of bones).


Dentin is not to be confused with Dentyne, the Brush Your Breath gum that helps keep breath fresh.

Cellini's Halo - we're all saints in the morning, especially on the moon

I laughed when I read about this one. There are many things in life that remain nameless, so it always gives me joy when one of those things turns out to have a name. It reminds me of Douglas Adams' book The Meaning of Liff. Here are some wikipedia examples from the book:

Examples are Shoeburyness ("The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat that is still warm from somebody else's bottom") and Plymouth ("To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place").

Cellini's Halo (aka. Heiligenschein) is the bright light that appears around the head of the shadow of a person during the early morning when the sun is low in the sky. It's particularly prominent when the ground is s covered in dew or dust.

The image above is a close up of the reflection in the visor of Buzz Aldrin. You can see that, from his perspective, there's a halo around the head of his shadow.

Densmore, Frances - recorded Native American music

Densmore, Frances began learning, recording and transcribing Native American music in 1907 for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE).

Over the course of 50+ years she made thousands of recordings. She used wax cylinders, many of which still exist in the Library of Congress.

The following is a (rather noisy) example. It's looks like it's actually being played directly from a wax cylinder!

Read Britannica Books on Archive.org

I currently own the 2007 Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th edition as well as a reprint of the 1771 first edition. However, libraries won't let you check out an encyclopedia and few have old versions anyway. So here I'll try to link to all scanned versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on archive.org that I'm able to find.

If I missed any, someone please let me know!

Wikipedia has a summary of all the editions ever produced.

1797 (3rd edition) (18 volumes)

• Vol I (missing) or Vol I
• Vol II (missing) or Vol II
• Vol III or Vol III
• Vol IV
• Vol V
• Vol VI or Vol VI
• Vol VII or Vol VII
• Vol VIII
• Vol IX or Vol IX
• Vol X or Vol X or Vol X
• Vol XI
• Vol XII
• Vol XIII
• Vol XIV
• Vol XV (missing) or Vol XV
• Vol XVI
• Vol XVII
• Vol XVIII

1798 (3rd edition) (18 volumes)

• Vol I or Vol I
• Vol II or Vol II
• Vol III or Vol III
• Vol IV (missing) or Vol IV
• Vol V or Vol V
• Vol VI or Vol VI
• Vol VII or Vol VII
• Vol VIII or Vol VIII
• Vol IX or Vol IX
• Vol X or Vol X
• Vol XI
• Vol XII
• Vol XIII
• Vol XIV
• Vol XV
• Vol XVI
• Vol XVII
• Vol XVIII

1801 (supplement to 3rd) (2 volumes)

• Vol I (missing)
• Vol II or Vol II

1803 (supplement to the 3rd) (2 volumes?)

• Vol I (marked as published 1797, but the book says 1803)
• Vol II (marked as published 1797, but the book says 1803)

1810 (4th edition) (20 volumes)

• Vol I
• Vol II
• Vol III
• Vol IV or Vol IV
• Vol V
• Vol VI
• Vol VII
• Vol VIII
• Vol IX
• Vol X
• Vol XI
• Vol XII
• Vol XIII
• Vol XIV
• Vol XV (missing)
• Vol XVI
• Vol XVII
• Vol XVIII
• Vol XIX
• Vol XX

1823 (6th edition) (20 volumes)

• Vol I
• Vol II (missing)
• Vol III
• Vol IV
• Vol V
• Vol VI
• Vol VII (missing)
• Vol VIII (missing)
• Vol IX
• Vol X
• Vol XI or Vol XI
• Vol XII (date is missing from title page. Seems to be a misprint)
• Vol XIII
• Vol XIV
• Vol XV
• Vol XVI (scanner left their fingers in the picture! :) )
• Vol XVII (missing)
• Vol XVIII
• Vol XIX
• Vol XX (missing)

1824 (supplement)

• Vol II
• Vol III
• Vol IV
• Vol VI

1888 (9th edition) (25 volumes)

• Vol I
• Vol II (missing)
• Vol III
• Vol IV (missing)
• Vol V (missing)
• Vol VI
• Vol VII
• Vol VIII
• Vol IX (missing)
• Vol X (missing)
• Vol XI
• Vol XII (missing)
• Vol XIII
• Vol XIV (missing)
• Vol XV (missing)
• Vol XVI
• Vol XVII
• Vol XVIII
• Vol XIX (missing)
• Vol XX (missing)
• Vol XXI
• Vol XXII
• Vol XXIII (missing)
• Vol XXIV (missing)
• Vol XXV (missing)

1890 (9th edition) (25 volumes)

• Vol I or Vol I
• Vol V
• Vol VII
• Vol VIII
• Vol IX
• Vol X
• Vol XI
• Vol XXIV

1907 (The New Werner edition?)

• Vol III
• Vol VI
• Vol XIX
• Vol XV
• Vol XXII

1910 (11th edition) (29 volumes)

• Vol I or Vol I or Vol I
• Vol II or Vol II or Vol II
• Vol III
• Vol IV or Vol IV or Vol IV
• Vol V or Vol V or Vol V
• Vol VI
• Vol VII
• Vol VIII
• Vol IX or Vol IX
• Vol X or Vol X or Vol X
• Vol XI or Vol XI or Vol XI
• Vol XII or Vol XII
• Vol XIII or Vol XIII
• Vol XIV or Vol XIV or Vol XIV or Vol XIV
• Vol XV through XXIX are missing (all are in 1911?)

1911 (11th edition) (29 volumes)

• Full text of 11th edition
• Vol I through XIV are missing (all are in 1910?)
• Vol XV or Vol XV or Vol XV
• Vol XVI or Vol XVI
• Vol XVII
• Vol XVIII
• Vol XIX or Vol XIX or Vol XIX
• Vol XX or Vol XX or Vol XX
• Vol XXI or Vol XXI or Vol XXI or Vol XXI
• Vol XXII or Vol XXII or Vol XXII
• Vol XXIII or Vol XXIII or Vol XXIII
• Vol XXIV or Vol XXIV or Vol XXIV
• Vol XXV or Vol XXV or Vol XXV or Vol XXV
• Vol XXVI or Vol XXVI or Vol XXVI
• Vol XXVII or Vol XXVII
• Vol XXVIII or Vol XXVIII or Vol XXVIII
• Vol XXIX

1929

• Vol II
• Vol XII
• Vol XXIII

That's all I could find. There may be more. If you find any, let me know!

Denmark - the Britain of the North

Denmark is the location of Copenhagen, the current capital of Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. It is also the former capitol of Norway, Iceland, much of Sweden, and part of Finland.

The height of Denmark's control was in 1397 when all those countries were under the control of Margaret I. The was referred to as the Kalmar Union.

As a result of the Stockholm Bloodbath, Sweden officially seceded in 1521. Denmark lost Skåneland to Sweden 1658, but then got it back in 1660. Norway left in 1814. Iceland was granted limited independence in 1874 which was expanded in 1904.

I love aquariums, so let me give a shout out to Denmark's national aquarium. It was opened in 1939 and as of 2013, has 450 unique species and 20,000 total animals. I can't read Danish, but thankfully they have an English version of their site.

Denis, Saint - a horseless headless horseman

Denis, Saint was a persistent fellow. In 250 AD he annoyed pagan priests by converting too many people to Christianity. Up with that they would not put, so they lopped off his head.

Some people, after beheading, decide to haunt the area of their death and kill anyone who crosses their path. Although the beheading irritated Denis, he simply decided to give people a good talking to.

He picked up his head and walked 10 kilometers (6 miles) across Paris while preaching repentance to anyone who decided to linger while a headless figure carrying a head strolled by. It's actually a pretty good viral marketing scheme. If a normal guy walks around preaching at you, most people would ignore them. If a headless guy starts preaching at you while holding their head like Alex Rogan did in The Last Starfighter, you'll probably pay attention. It certainly alarmed Louis! (That was Alex's kid brother.)

In 258 AD the Benedictine abbey of St. Denis was founded at the spot where Denis was no longer able to continue his stroll.

denitrifying bacteria - metabolizing to keep the world breathing

Denitrifying bacteria convert nitrates in soul into atmospheric oxygen. As a gardener, I need to maintain the levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in my soil. These bacteria are one of the ways that soil nitrogen is depleted.

When you fertilize your garden, if you used 16-4-8 fertilizer, you'd be adding material consisting of 16% nitrogen, 4% P₂O₅, and 8% K₂O. You need to use the right one or you'll end up turning your garden into a low grade phosphorus mine.

However, we can't blame these microorganisms too much. They're pretty crucial to life on the planet. Nitrates are highly soluble and readily absorb into water. Without denitrifying bacteria, the nitrogen would eventually accumulate in the oceans and the atmosphere would end up nitrogen free.

demiurge - it turns out we're all evil

To ancient Greeks, a demiurge was a craftsman or artisan. In 360 BC, Plato used it to refer to a being responsible for fashioning and maintaining the universe. It is not necessarily the same as a creator figure in the monotheistic sense because the material that the demiurge is made of is either uncreated and eternal or it is the product of some other being.

Gnostics were a group that considered the material universe evil and the non-material universe good. Therefore, they considered the demiurge to be a creature of evil. Seems kind of harsh to consider everything the human race has ever accomplished or experienced as inherently evil.

denim - blue is the best color

Denim is what jeans are made of. Everyone knows that, but what exactly is it that makes denim feel and look different from other 100% cotton fabrics?

Before we get into that, let's get something out of the way. Levi Strauss didn't invent denim. In 1853 he founded Levi Strauss in San Francisco, California to sell stuff. After a customer kept purchasing denim to repair pants, they started producing denim overalls in the 1870's (well after the California gold rush of 1849). The first pair of Levis 501 jeans were manufactured in the 1890's.

The name "denim" actually derives from the French serge de Nîmes which refers to the city in France from which Strauss imported the fabric.

Denim is a twill woven fabric with colored warp (usually blue) and white filling threads. This is part of the unique look. The mixture of two different thread colors gives it an overall different appearance. It is also usually all-cotton. (I don't know why Britannica puts a dash in all-cotton, but I included it here because it seemed so weird.) 

So, why do jeans feel different than shirts? Compare your 100% cotton T-shirt with your 100% cotton denim jeans. It's not too difficult to tear a hole in that shirt, but your jeans will probably stand up to a lot more punishment. They don't look or feel similar either. The shirt is smooth and flowing whereas the jeans probably have a stiffer rough feel.

The feel comes from the way the threads are organized. The primary weaves are the plain, twill, or satin weave. A plain weave is just a simple grid of threads.

plain weave

The twill weave forms a sort of diagonal pattern. The diagonal pattern makes stains a little less visible. It's also apparently more durable, although I was unable to figure out why that would be. I'm inclined to think it is similar to the way that a brick wall is stronger if the bricks are staggered rather than laid in a grid pattern. However, that's just my impression.

twill weave

Denim is a twill weave whereas a T-shirt is not woven at all. It apparently uses something called the jersey stitch which was originally used only to make underwear which caused quite the scandal at the time. However, when I hold my T-shirt up to the sun it looks a lot more like a plain weave than a jersey stitch to me.

Dendrochronology - preventing underage tree drunkenness since the 1500's

Dendrochronology is a method of scientific dating based on patterns of tree rings.

The first reference to trees having rings was by Greek botanist Theophrastus around 300 BC. Like Bilbo, he didn't realize the significance of the rings though. It wasn't until Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura (Treatise on Painting) that someone mentioned that rings form annually and that their thickness depends on the weather conditions that year. Later in 1833 Alexander Catlin Twining suggested matching growth patterns between many trees in an area to reconstruct historical weather patterns across entire regions.

The youngest rings are on the outside. Trees don't grow all over in the way that animals tend to do. They grow like houses that get a new coat of paint every year:

For trees in the wild, cores are taken using a long hollow drill bit. This leaves a long bore hole in the tree which would seem to be cause for concern. But, I found a thread where dendrochronologists discussed whether it was safe to leave the core unplugged.

Some preferred to seal the holes with beeswax, but most were convinced that trees self repaired and were not permanently damaged. It would be pretty catastrophic to drill out a core of someone's leg. Certainly there would be a tremendous amount of bleeding and cursing. But trees don't seem to mind. The trees immediately start filling the hole with sap (this seems to serve a similar purpose to bleeding) and a few years later the hole is difficult to find evidence of.

The primary concern seemed to be fungus. Unlike humans where imbibing alcohol generally increases risky behaviors that spread disease, in any situation where fungus is a danger, the borer should be cleaned with alcohol before moving to the next tree.

That's not all though! It's not just about preventing young trees from getting into clubs before they're 21. In the past, paintings were made on wooden panels rather than canvas. Those panels can be dated using this technology, although museum curators get really upset if you try to use a drill on their 500 year old paintings.

The above painting of Mary Queen of Scots was thought to be an 18th century copy, but dating of the wood panel determined that the wood came from the 16th century. It is now regarded as an original.

Strangely, in order to preserve wood panel paintings, sometimes the paint itself was transferred to canvas. Try and think about that for a bit. It seems crazy, but it is not impossible.

be - or not to be in wikipedia

Britannica says a be is "any of the hereditary occupational groups in early Japan (c. 5th–mid-7th century)". I'm linking to Britannica here because there is actually no article on this topic in wikipedia. I found this rather shocking!

Be was also a company that captured my interest in the 1990's. Their OS was so incredibly snappy compared to Macs and Windows PCs at the time. You could watch multiple videos at the same time! My PC hardware was pretty good and that wasn't possible for me at the time.

The logo above isn't the logo I remember, but I wasn't able to find a public domain image of the much nicer logo which has the "B" in blue, the "e" in red, and the OS in white.

I actually went to one of their developer outreach talks at their headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. I was a young developer at the time and never actually wrote anything for them, but I did buy two shirts and installed their OS. I still have a hard drive with the BeOS on it. I've booted it up a couple of times in intervening years and it always makes me smile. I normally get rid of old computer manuals, but I don't think I'll ever get rid of my BeOS manuals.

I have to quote the story for the company name here in its entirety. It doesn't sound any more believable than the nonsense about Apple's company name, but it's a great story. (It seems obvious that Jobs named Apple after Apple Records and then just retconned the whole thing about holding an apple. Jobs was a huge fan of the Beatles and wanted his company to be all about art and creativity.)

According to several sources including Macworld UK, the company name "Be" had its origin in a conversation between Gassée and Be co-founder Steve Sakoman. Gassée originally thought the company should be called "United Technoids Inc.", but Sakoman disagreed and said he would start looking through the dictionary for a better name. A few days later, when Gassée asked if he had made any progress, Sakoman replied that he had got tired and stopped at "B." Gassée said, "Be is nice. End of story."

Ultimately, BeOS never got traction because the only reason people use a particular OS is for the software that runs on it. BeOS didn't have any killer apps, so no one bought it. It was a thing of beauty though.

Bazaine, Francoise Achille - so brave he surrendered 140,000 troops

François Achille Bazaine was a Marshal of France from 1864 to 1888. While in charge of 140,000 (or 180,000. Wikipedia and Britannica disagree.) troops, he surrendered to the Prussians without a shot being fired.

I'm sorry. Jokes about the French surrendering just seem obvious and are usually unfunny, but this guy is seriously making it difficult to abstain. Ok fine, here are some French jokes. Most aren't funny at all, but the Euro Disney one made me chuckle.

Anyway, he was sentenced to death for his actions, but this sentence was later commuted to 20 years in prison. This wasn't much better given that he was almost 63 at the time. He apparently wasn't interested in waiting around because he knotted some baggage straps and rope together, attached one end to a gargoyle, and climbed down 300 feet (remember, he was 63) to a boat that his wife had waiting for him. He remained free, but lived in poverty for the rest of his life.

All that said, the full wikipedia article seems to indicate that his act was somehow not treasonous. Yet I honestly cannot figure out an interpretation of the events which would indicate why it wasn't. He apparently wasn't a fan of the current government, and his actions led directly to the loss of 2 cities. If anyone understands that, please let me know.

Bayeux Tapestry - not a tapestry, but at 230 feet it can call itself whatever it wants

The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry and was not created in Bayeux. A tapestry is a textile that has the image woven into it whereas the Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidered cloth. It was originally created in England.

Bishop Odo had a long graphical story to tell, but was constrained by the total lack of a comic book industry in the 1070's. The text is written in Latin, so it would be a pretty niche comic anyway, but being unable to read this thing is reasonably realistic given that most people were probably illiterate in the early, mid, and late 1000's anyway.

This not-tapestry was first referenced in a 1476 inventory of Bayeux Cathedral. It was later referenced in the Simpsons couch gag for E Pluribus Wiggum (2008). In 2012 there was another Simpsons episode Moe Goes from Rags to Riches which is about a similar very long tapestry which eventually became Moe's bar rag. The real one fared better. It appears to be missing up to 21 feet at the end, but the rest survived in good condition and is currently an exhibit in a museum in Bayeux.

Celestine V - keep quiet or they'll make you pope

Pope Celestine V wasn't cut out to be pope. In fact, he never wanted to be pope. In 1292 AD (BC was not a popular time to be pope) there was no pope. For 2 years, no consensus had been reached as to who the next pope should be. At that time, a Benedictine hermit named Pietro Angelerio sent a letter to the cardinals which warned of divine vengeance if they did not quickly elect a pope.

This was a bad move because the cardinals decided, what the heck, we can't agree so let's just elect Pietro. Apparently the squeaky wheel gets the papacy.

Pietro wasn't interested. He refused and tried to flee, but a bunch of cardinals, along with the kings of Naples and Hungary, convinced him to take the job.

Given his total lack of political experience, it is not surprising that he was exceptionally weak and incompetent in the role he had been forced into. After about 5 months of helplessness, he talked it over with Benedetto Caetani (his eventual successor) and decided that he would make a papal decree declaring the right of resignation. Shortly thereafter he resigned.

His plan was to go back to his old uneventful life of solitude, but that was not to be. The new Pope Boniface VIII thought others might use Pietro as an antipope, so he ordered him to go back to Rome. Pietro tried to escape and actually hid in the woods and then attempted to escape by sea. This failed and he was captured and imprisoned in the castle of Fumone near Ferentino in Campagna.

He died 10 months later at the age of 81. This certainly seems suspicious, but the historical evidence is lacking as to whether or not the current pope had him executed.


Celestine V seems to have gotten a pretty bad rap. There is general consensus that Dante sees him as a shade in hell:

I saw and recognize the shade of him
Who by his cowardice made the great refusal.
--Inferno III, 59-60

Pope Celestine V is often referenced as the first pope to retire, but this turns out not to be true. There were a few others that retired before, including one that had retired 250 years before Celestine V. After him, no other pope retired until 2013 when Pope Benedict XVI retired.

There was also the case of Celestine (II) who was elected pope in 1124, but resigned a few days later. He isn't included in the official list of popes. This guy is not to be confused with Celestine II who was elected in 1143 and died 5 months later.

Historically, the position of pope seems quite precarious and dangerous. The list of popes includes a decent number of folks who died of unnatural causes.

How to do celestial navigation - GPS didn't always exist

Celestial navigation is how you find your location if you are unlucky enough to live in an era before GPS or if you're in a war zone and the enemy is jamming your signals.

To do it well, you need the following:

• a sextant
• a marine chronometer
• This needs to be very accurate. For every 4 seconds it is off of UTC, your position will be off by one mile.
• a non-cloudy sky with one of the following
• the sun (if the sun has gone red dwarf, you're out of luck and probably also dead)
• the moon (won't work when the moon is new or if Hati Hróðvitnisson has swallowed the moon)
• one of the 57 navigational stars (assuming no god has knocked the celestial sphere out of alignment)
• a marine almanac which gives schedules for the locations of celestial objects
• sight reduction tables (these help with the computations so that only addition and subtraction are required)
• a chart of the region

Now take the following steps (see Altitude-Intercept Method):

• Find the altitude above the horizon of the celestial object (sun, moon, or star) using the sextant as instructed in this video (or the animated image above). As soon as you find the altitude, record the current time (to the second).
• Look up the sun's position in the almanac.
• Pick an assumed position (a rough estimate of where you think you might be).
• Refer to the sight reduction tables to find out how far off you are from where you think you are.
• This should allow you to determine your exact current position.

The following gives an overview of the entire process:

And this one actually gets into the nitty gritty:

 MISC:

• celestial sphere
• the surface of the heavens as seen from Earth.
• celiac disease
• alleviated by low gluten diet. (Apparently there is at least one real condition associated with eating gluten.)
• La Celestina
• Greatest work of early Renaissance in Spain. Involves a disastrous love affair. At first I assumed it would be a Romeo and Juliette type of love affair, but it turns out that there are more deaths and only one of the people commits suicide.

celesta - an unstrung piano

A celesta is a piano with bars instead of wire. Actually, they appear to be metal cylinders, but I couldn't figure out what to call them other than bars. It was invented in 1886 by Auguste Mustel. It sounds beautiful, but it's kind of amazing that it was developed almost 200 years after the invention of the piano. Once you figure out the piano, it seems like it'd be an obvious variation to have the hammers hit bars instead of strings. Perhaps there is more to it than that? The description indicates the entire instrument vibrates to make the sound. Unlike a piano, it appears not to use a soundboard.

In this video you can hear that the celesta sounds sort of like a xylophone. It's a very soothing sound.

I wasn't able to find a video that showed what was going on inside a celesta while it was being played. In some examples it's clearly an electronic instrument. In other images it appears to be acoustic.

Please let me know if anyone finds a video of a celesta being played while its insides are visible.

Abbevillian Industry - est. 700,000 BC

Abbevillian Industry refers to a tool tradition that includes the oldest sets of European stone tools ever discovered. They are estimated to come from about 700,000 years ago. This name is apparently an obsolescent name. They are currently referred to as Odowan.