Muninn

Though it is an unhealthy attitude, I admit, I find that meals and eating really are the most annoying interruptions to my daily schedule. The options are many (making food, eating out, pizza delivery, etc.) but everything, including the eating takes time and money.

I wonder when home delivery of food (in the US, pizza seems to dominate, but in places like Japan and Korea, I get the feeling no single thing really completely dominates the very diverse food delivery market in the same way) started? It looks like the German philosopher Leibniz was doing something of this sort:

“At home, he was monarch of all he surveyed; he always took his meals alone. He had not stated times for them, and no domestic staff. He sent out to a cook-shop for something to eat and took whatever was going. Very often he slept the night in his chair, and woke up none the less refreshed at seven or eight in the morning…” quoted in Hazard, Paul The European Mind 1680-1715 (1952), p234″

Early last year I tried to work out a convenient and simple way to incorporate footnotes into blog entries. The solution I settled on didn’t work well and I quite using it. I looked into it again today and found an excellent piece of coding over at Brandspankingnew for Footnotes with CSS which I think works well. The code there shows you how to get some embedded footnote information in a “Span” tag to get put together with all other footnotes at the bottom of your article, complete with anchor links back and forth.

All I had to do to make this work with a weblog is incorporate this code into the WordPress theme. For my own reference and for anyone else who wants to try here is how I did this with my WordPress installation:

1) Upload this Javascript file (on my server here if the link dies) to your server and remember where you put it.

2) Add this css code to your WordPress theme’s styles.css file. Modify it to your liking, this will change the appearance of the footnotes themselves.

3) In your theme’s post.php file, change <div class=”post-content”> to <div id=”post<?php the_ID(); ?>” class=”post-content”>

4) In the same post.php file, add the code <div id=”post<?php the_ID(); ?>notes” class=”footnoteholder”></div> after the div tag labelled class=”post-content” which we changed in (3).

5) In your theme’s index.php file, just before the body tag is closed at the bottom of the file (before the ), add:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//< ![CDATA[
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
< ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
formatFootnotes("post< ?php the_ID(); ?>","post< ?php the_ID(); ?>notes");
< ?php endwhile; ?>

//]]>
</script>

6) Also the same index.php file, add the line

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://the-address-to-the-javascript-file/formatFootnotes.js”></script>

just before the closing of the head tag (). (remember to change the address to point to wherever you uploaded the javascript)

7) Now we have to steps (5) and (6) for the single.php file and the category.php as well, which controls how your blog entries look like when they are viewed as a single posting or when a series of postings are viewed from the same category. Add the script just above the closing of the body tag () and add the call to the javascript from step (6) just above the closing of the header tag in both the single.php and category.php theme files.

That should be all there is to it. To create a footnote, simply embed it into a span tag with the class “footnote” like this: <span class=”footnote”>Lawson, Konrad Mitchell<em>My great book</em></span> and then it should come out looking like this.Lawson, Konrad Mitchell My great book

I figured this out by basically studying the great example provided by Brandspankingnew.net here and then going to the WordPress website and learning about template tags and template loops, with the most important information on this page under the category of multiple loops. Good luck to anyone else who tries! Here are a fewMy second footnote footnotesMy third footnote. to show how it works.My fourth footnote!

After writing this up, I found via a quick search that someone else has been working on footnotes for wordpress at Elvery.net. It looks very similar, may use the same footnote code, but comes in the form of a wordpress plugin which may be much easier. Also, Alex King has something which also looks really wonderful for this, called JS QuickTags but I haven’t tried it on my own server (if it ain’t broke…).

NOTES & UPDATES: I need to work more on this, for example, there is the question of what to do with RSS/atom feeds, in which the spans don’t get converted to footnotes…

Nicolas de Fer, geographer to the French royal court had this to say about Scandinavians in 1708:

“The Swedes are an honest and courageous folk and fond of the arts and sciences. The air of their country is clear, keen and salubrious; their forests are the haunt of numerous wild and ferocious animals. The Danes are more or less the same in their manners and customs as the Swedes. The Norwegians appear to be of a simpler type, and are very frank and ingenuous.” Paul Hazard The European Mind 1680-1715 Yale U Press 1952

I had to look up ingenuous: “(of a person or action) innocent and unsuspecting. See note at GULLIBLE.” at the note under gullible it says, “implies the simplicity of a child without the negative overtones.”

Again, studying in the library together, my friend Brendan pointed out an unusual word in one of our readings for our Early Modern European Intellectual History Class. Here is a sentence from Trever-Roper’s “The Religious Origins of the Englightenment”:

It is interesting to observe the continuity…between the political radicals of yesterday and today: to see the torch, so nearly dropped from the failing hands of the last Whigs, skillfully caught and carried on by their successors, the first Marxists. This transfer of the same formula to different hands, this neat theoretical lampadophory, occurred at the close of the last century.”Trever-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze p194

The word, lampadophory, comes, according the Oxford English Dictionary, from lampadedromy, an old greek word meaning:

A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.

As we were studying together in the library one afternoon my friend and fellow historian Brendan pointed out a wonderful little passage from the Essays of Montaigne that he was reading at the time:

Do you ask me whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze? We produce three sorts of wind: that which comes from below is too foul; that which comes through the mouth implies some reproach of gluttony; the third is sneezing, and, because it comes from the head and is blameless, we give it this honourable greeting.Essays of Montaigne Harvard University Press, 1925. p74

I see that it has received mention elsewhere on the net, including the excellent Language Log. You can read a different translation of the whole essay, “Of Coaches” here.

As most foreigners who have been to Korea know, it is infuriatingly difficult to use a lot of Korean websites or order products online unless you have a Korean citizen’s registration number. The fact that unless you are using Internet Explorer and Windows many useful websites hardly function doesn’t help either, but the registration number is far more disruptive. Even the most simple tasks can been damn near impossible. This is a shame – it is a big fat slap in the face to all foreigners who want to do anything in the Korean online world, even if they master the Korean language.

I am told that even if you have an official Alien registration number, which has the same number of digits as the Korean citizen’s number, you still have problems. Read more at this article over at Korea Focus, written by a professor at Hanyang University and Hanoemo (The Korean-Speaking Foreigners Club). As it says:

Each year, the thousands of foreigners who come to Korea to learn the Korean language receive an ARN. In addition, tens of thousands of other people, including foreign company employees, teachers, and workers, come to Korea each year – all of whom receive an ARN. The number assigned to them remains theirs even after they return home from Korea. Most foreigners who have lived in Korea for an extended period of time will probably continue to maintain an interest in or seek to do some work that is related to Korea. It is my firm belief that these people can play a crucial role in helping to further invigorate the Korean economy and improve Korea’s image abroad. It is like sending out thousands of supporting Korean ambassadors around the world every year.

However, this golden opportunity to promote Korea will be lost to some extent if these individuals are not provided with the chance to participate in Korean media and culture. With hallyu (the Korean wave) sweeping across Asia, Korea should take advantage of every opportunity to assure the continuation of this phenomenon. Attention needs to be focused on the sheer disregard with which Korean corporations and the Korean media treat those motivated to come here to work and to learn about this country. (For those who would like to express their support for a law forcing organizations to accept the ARN, please sign the online petition found at: http://www.petitiononline.com/korea/petition.html.

I signed the petition and I hope you will to. Until this situation changes (and perhaps it has since this article was published or since I was in Korea), foreigners in Korea or interested in Korea will be left in an online ghetto.

My playlists in iTunes are a complete mess. I don’t have time to sort them out. Recently there are have been a variety of postings at various places online suggesting ways to incorporate tagging for songs of the sort used at places like the wonderful link management site del.icio.us (My tags are here by the way). Briefly here is how it works: 1) You assign certain tags or key words to identify your songs (for example “vocal” “folk” “dark” etc.) separated by spaces. 2) You then use this data later to find songs matching the particular combination of characteristics you want for any given listening session.

I have decided to use the “Grouping” field which each iTunes song has (it was originally meant for identifying groups of songs in classical music). I modified a wonderful open source Applescript written by Chris Brown called TuneTag which allows you to add tags to the Comment field of a song so that it instead adds tags to the Grouping field instead. You can download my modified version of his tag.scpt script here.

I use a great and very unique free program called Quicksilver which lets you use various short cuts to common functions on your computer. If you don’t have it, and want to try this iTunes tagging, install Quicksilver. Then put the modified tag.scpt into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ (where ~ is your user folder, you may have to create the Actions folder). Restart Quicksilver.

Then when you are listening to a song you want to tag just: 1) activate Quicksilver (Command-Shift-Space in my clase), 2) press “.”, 3) type the tags you want to save for the song, 4) press “tab” to go to the “Commands”, 5) press “t” and it will show the tag script as an option, 6) press return. Trust me, this is a piece of cake after the first time as it is just a few keystrokes and you never really leave the application in which your working (Quicksilver “floats above” what you are doing and disappears when you are done issuing the command).

It is also much faster than going into iTunes finding the song that is being played, opening its get info window, going to the info pane, and typing the tags in the “Grouping” field and exiting the dialog box and itunes to go back to whatever you are doing.

What can I do with this? Well, once you have lots of tagged music, you can create “Smart Playlists” in iTunes which includes only songs that have certain tags (add the condition that “Grouping” “contains” [whatever tag you want it to have]).

Ok, I’ve had it. I have been quietly putting up with this nonsense since at least elementary school and what I thought was silly back then, I still think is silly now: Why do we have to use that stupid system whereby the 1900s is called the 20th century, the 1600s is called the 17th century, and so on?

Yes, yes, I understand perfectly well “why” on the technical level that things ended up like this but it’s a damn nuisance I tell you! I know it doesn’t take much mental processing to adjust been the two, but it still takes a fraction of a second in my head to switch back and forth between number dates and which “th century” it is in. If you add all those fractions of a second together, for all of humanity, just think of the number of brilliant works of literature an army of monkeys at the typewriters could have generated? Ok, maybe not that many, but still…it is really starting to bother me.

As long as you operate mainly in one or two centuries, this is really no big deal. However, for PhD oral exams I have one reading field which stretches across almost half a dozen centuries (Early Modern European Intellectual History). When you are zooming out quite far and talking about key “moments” in history where there is a significant change in the intellectual, religious, technological or economic environment, we often only commit which “[early|middle of the|late] *th century” that change took place. This part of my memory doesn’t nicely link up with the mass of events and other dates in the **** format. I would like to believe that I’m not the only one who has this problem. Although I’m surely not the first to do so, I hereby recommend that both for our own memory’s sake and for the benefit of all our future students, we completely abandon the silly “*th century” method of dating.

From now on, and until I am offered some better way of doing it, when I want to talk about the 17th century, I’ll say 1600s, and when I want to talk about the 19th century, I’ll say the 1800s. If that is not “sophisticated” enough for some people, well…to hell with them. And as for people teaching and researching history related to years 1-100 – you can sort it out yourself, it is not our problem that you are missing a digit, or two, or three.

In Harvard’s “university daily since 1873,” the Harvard Crimson we find an excellent example of the general lack of geographical knowledge often attributed to the United States. Here is the opening paragraph of a provocatively entitled editorial, “The Clash of Civilizations” discussing the current cartoon crisis:

When it comes to problems with free speech about Islam, Denmark is something of a hotspot. Islamic radicals murdered Danish film director Theo Van Gogh in 2004 in response to his short film “Submission Part I,” which juxtaposed documentary footage of husbands beating their Islamic wives in the name of Allah and the same women praying, their bodies covered in verses from the Koran. In Islam, any visual portrayal of the prophet is blasphemous and last year, it seemed that the Dutch were too afraid of reprisals from Muslim fundamentalists for author Kåre Bluitgen to find an illustrator for his children’s book about Muhammad. A major Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten responded by publishing twelve “blasphemous” cartoons last September to “test whether fear of Islamic retribution has begun to limit freedom of expression in Denmark.

I think the author, an undergraduate English concentrator, would be greatly helped if someone were to tell her a few basic, but important facts:

People from Denmark are called “Danish”
Danish ≠ Dutch
Dutch people come from the Netherlands
The Netherlands is not the same country as Denmark

We can then move on to more nit-picky points like:

Theo Van Gogh is Dutch, not Danish
Kåre Bluitgen is Danish, not Dutch

This problem continues through the article, as when we are told that, “it makes no sense for Dutch Muslim protesters to burn the Danish national flag while claiming that they are not being respected by the state.” Also, we learn that, “Dutch illustrators are not the only ones who feel intimidated by Islamic fundamentalists.” Indeed, I hear that some Danish illustrators are having trouble too.

These sorts of mixups are common of course, and admittedly the Dutch and Danish have a lot in common (they both make cheap beer with green labels for example) but I’m a little dissapointed that the editorial staff at the Crimson didn’t notice this.

UPDATE: Since this article I realize that the Dutch-Danish mix up is even more widespread than I imagined. A friend of mine, a certain PhD student friend of mine at Columbia U also mixed the two up. Also, on the most recent Daily Show, when Jon Stewart is mocking the Danish in a skit about attacks on KFC in Pakistan, he threatens the crowd, who were laughing a little too hard, and says something like, “Hey, I’ll throw all you Belgians out!” Why would he mention Belgians when talking about Denmark, unless he though Denmark was the Netherlands?