Happy (early) birthday, Shakespeare

I was wondering about April 23rd really being Shakespeare's birthday, given the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. I found that addressed at bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.com

In fact, we don't have a record of Shakespeare's birth, but of his christening on April 26, 1564. The assumption is that he was born 3 days before that.  However,  April 23rd of 1564 was a date based on the Julian calendar. What's the effect of the shift to the Gregorian calendar?

The Julian calendar was made up of 365 1/4 days a year. It defined the dates of Europe from the days of Julius Caesar in 45 BCE until 1582, adding up to ten extra days by that time.    Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, subtracting those ten days with a massive leap forward. So that year the day after October 4th was designated October 15th.

England being England, though, and not considering itself subject to Catholic rule, adhered to the Julian calendar for nearly two more centuries. It only adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. By then an additon day was added on January 1, 1700. A day was also added 100 years later and 100 years after that. However, there was no additional day added in 2000.

According to the calculations of that blog, Shakepeare's April 23rd birthday actually translates into a May 3rd birthday in the Gregorian calendar.

The most memorable part of a book

I usually remember quite a bit from books I've read even years later. Sometimes I may forget the title and start reading a book only to realize I have read it before once I get to a more distinctive section. Then I will only read it again if it really has something going for it. Classic works, on the other hand, I do remember reading and reread deliberately.

It gave me a strange feeling, though, when I realized that the book I read in under 4 hours was one I had read back in my teen years. I remembered absolutely nothing about the plot or even the characters. But I did remember the pearl necklace. In Anna and Her Daughters ( in which the good are rewarded as Wilde's Miss Prism asserts is the meaning of fiction)  the narrator/heroine is given a very valuable pearl necklace to wear from the woman she works for. The woman explains that she had the wrong kind of skin for it, which caused the pearls to get discolored. Locking them up did not improve their conditions either. The young heroine agrees to wear them, and the pearls return to their original luster. The woman then tells her to keep them.

I read this 1958 book many decades after it was published, though quite a few years before Google, so I never looked into the question of curing sick pearls, as they are described in this book.  Even with Google, I haven't been able to find much about it beyond an eHow piece that says dry conditions can cause pearls to turn yellow and that agrees with what the novel claims that pearls need to be worn to retain their luster. There is a comment on that article that gets rather scientific in describing what causes the discoloration and insisting that it can't be reversed:

There is no scientific evidence to back up the claim that wearing pearls will prevent them from turning yellow. Pearls turn yellow because they are made of an unstable substance called aragonite which due to the immutable laws of chemical science will eventually crystalize into calcite which is a more stable structure of calcium carbonate. Both substances are forms of calcium carbonate. Once this has happened the pearls turn yellow and nothing can reverse it. Oils in your skin cannot keep this from occurring, and there is no scientific evidence or even scientific conjecture to back up this idea. ''Drying out''from air tight storage might cause the nacre to peel but drying out does not hasten the process from aragonite to calcite which causes pearls to yellow. That process is hastened by moisture and heat.

The eHow articles that give tips on cleaning pearls also warn not to soak them because they will absorb the moisture and become soft. Sevenson's heroine, though, makes a special trip to the seaside to place the pearls in saltwater, as she has been told that will improve them. And the book that, in combination with her daily wearing, reverses the discoloration altogether.

On this reading, I realized that the author intends the pearls to function as a kind of symbol, though, at least she doesn't hit the reader of the head with it It still strikes me, though, that the image of the sick pearls being cured by being worn as they should really stuck in my head for a couple of decades when nothing else in the book did. 

Though I do tend to remember whodunit in mysteries, for other novels, concretely rendered images in books are much more memorable than plots. 

Dating Homer

From Geneticists Estimate Publication Date of  the "Iliad."
Of course, publication is not exactly the term one would use for an oral work, which, as the research shows seemed to have grown out of various other oral traditions that go back another 500 years or so before the "publication" date. Still, the language itself served as the bread crumbs that mark the trail of origins to when the compilation of stories known as the Iliad became set in the form that has been passed down to generations.
  
"Languages behave just extraordinarily like genes," Pagel said. "It is directly analogous. We tried to document the regularities in linguistic evolution and study Homer's vocabulary as a way of seeing if language evolves the way we think it does. If so, then we should be able to find a date for Homer."

The date they arrived at was 763 BCE, give or take 50 years.

The researchers employed a linguistic tool called the Swadesh word list, put together in the 1940s and 1950s by American linguist Morris Swadesh. The list contains approximately 200 concepts that have words apparently in every language and every culture, Pagel said. These are usually words for body parts, colors, necessary relationships like "father" and "mother."They looked for Swadesh words in the "Iliad" and found 173 of them. Then, they measured how they changed.

 They took the language of the Hittites, a people that existed during the time the war may have been fought, and modern Greek, and traced the changes in the words from Hittite to Homeric to modern. It is precisely how they measure the genetic history of humans, going back and seeing how and when genes alter over time.

This relates to two blogs I posted here: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/01/you-say-blue-and-they-said.html and  http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-big-bow-wow-bit-of-ivory.html

Don't tell me what to like or re-post

I'll decide on my own what I like or wish to share.  I find any attempt to divide people into good and bad teams based on their choice to promote the post or not an insult to my intelligence.

When I see a post that includes the words "Like if you ..." or "Share if you ..." the last thing in the world I want to do is like or share. Not only do I not like the suggestion of chain letters inherent in such exhortations, but the posts themselves are often pointless.

For example, one of my Facebook connections put up the following picture post:



Really, this is beyond absurd. Why not then have "Like if you wish AIDs/stroke/dementia/asthma/diabetes/tuberculosis/malaria/
didn't exist." In fact, you can put in "Like if you wish flat tires didn't exist" or "Like if you wish blackouts (especially during Super Bowls) didn't exist."

Another Facebook connection put up the following, including the odd capitalization, shift from noun to adjective in "spousal" and use of "anytime" when "anything" was likely the word intended:


Abuse of anytime is Despicable - Animal , child or spousal


‎In other words, if I don't re-post that chain letter in a jpg, I prove I don't have a heart. Very intelligent way to promote your cause. And just how will  spreading this post help protect any child, spouse, or animal from abuse?

I see examples like these as social media at its worst in terms of equating a share with real care. People believe they are doing something for a worthy cause when, in fact, their actions do nothing to improve the situation. Liking and sharing does not contribute to safety, prevention, or research. It just allows people to show that they  consider themselves sensitive and caring individuals with nothing more than a click.

New site

I set up a new site at http://writewaypro.net

The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

Sir Walter Scott contrasted his style of writing with that of Jane Austen: "The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me". While he characterized his work as large, Jane Austen called her own small, a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush."

The two are married together, so to speak, by Mathew Jockers, who declares them the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve."

Systematic textual analysis has a history that goes much further back than computers. The first concordance, according to The Word Crunchers dates back about 800 years. It was a most labor-intensive project, taking up the work of 500 friars. A Chaucer concordance took 50 years until it was read for publication in 1927. Computers entered the picture as early as 1951 when "I.B.M. helped create an automated concordance."  Those were the days of punch card programming, so “indexing all of Aquinas took a million man-hours.” It was only complete in 1974.   Ten years later, though, computers could analyze texts effortlessly, as depicted in the reports of a novelist’s favorite word in David Lodge’s novel Small World.    

The proliferation of digitized texts, courtesy of Google books is what makes it possible for computers to now process huge volumes of text from thousands of works.  Matthew Jockers, along with Franco Moretti, founded the Stanford Literary Lab in 2010. 

Read more about the humanities going Google, as one article put it in my Big Data Republic blog, The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

Related: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/12/dissertation-on-charlotte-bronte.html

Art reflecting life reflecting art

This week I saw the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the first time. Among its recent acquisitions is a painting with photographic realism of the exhibit room in which it hangs. It's called Museum Epiphany III, and there's a very good write up of it at Art and Design Report,  and at Artfixdaily, my source for the picture, which is larger than on at the former site.

The woman and girl dressed in white sleeveless dresses echo the statues in drapery and pose with bent elbows and stand out from the rest of the people who are all dressed in dark  clothes more suitable for fall or winter.

At http://www.technologyinthearts.org/2012/07/the-meta-museum-a-work-of-art-depicting-museum-visitors-admiring-a-work-of-art/ you can see a picture of the artist painting this work.

By the way, the people working at this museum  are the friendliest of all art museum staff I've encountered so far, and pictures without flash are allowed unless otherwise noted. Some museums, like the Frick Collection, do not allow any photography, even for sculptures around the fountain. The intent is to protect copyright rather than the artwork. You may be surprised how many art works are copyright protected.

It was explained in a New York Times article about Cameron's switch of paintings from the first to the second release of Titanic.

Artists’ copyright is frequently misunderstood. Even if a painting (or drawing or photograph) has been sold to a collector or a museum, in general, the artist or his heirs retain control of the original image for 70 years after the artist’s death.

Think of a novel. You may own a book, but you don’t own the writer’s words; they remain the intellectual property of the author for a time.

So while MoMA owns the actual canvas of “Les Demoiselles,” the family of Picasso, who died in 1973, still owns the image. And under existing law, the estate will continue to own the copyright until 2043.

If someone wants to reproduce the painting — on a Web site, a calendar, a T-shirt, or in a film — it is the estate that must give its permission, not the museum. That is why, despite the expansion, Google Art Project still does not contain a single Picasso.