7pm CST tonight

Wolfram Alpha goes live at 7pm CST tonight. The whole thing will be screencast live here, for better or worse, from the "launch center" here in Champaign. Here's a bit from BBC 4 about the launch, and a handy guide to British accents (of which there are four in that BBC piece).

What a fascinating modern age we live in!

Worldwide shipping traffic, live.

Just a passing happy thought

One the government controls healthcare, they can use the threat of fines, penalties and punishments to control everything you do that influences your health. And we can expect a celebrated (by the "news" media) increase in physician-assisted suicides. Those will save the government insurance bureaucrats a bundle of money that would have gone toward end-of-life care.

The sound of a dying industry

Lisa and I stopped by Barnes & Noble last night to browse a bit. They had lots of big stacks of books we didn't want or need - stocked, I suppose, in the hope that someone would buy them. We finally found a small connect-the-dots book for the 6-year-old's birthday and trekked all the way back across the store to the checkout counter. Half-a-dozen registers there but only one cashier, and she was attempting to sell some discount plan to the customer ahead of us. Selling these things is a long process when you're next in line waiting for the one open register, and it takes even longer when the customer realizes she will have to fork over 25 bucks for the privilege of saving money. She balked at the price, which she hadn't heard during the hurried sales spiel. Paperwork then had to be undone, a phone call (?!) had to be made, and it dragged on and on while we waited and the line grew behind us like cobwebs in an empty house. Which the bookstore was, pretty much - there were so few customers we parked two spaces from the door. Just our little band of unhappy customers and the annoying jazz they piped in to hide the silence.

During the long wait while we listened to crappy jazz, I formulated White's Axiom: the longer the wait in a bookstore line, the better amazon.com looks.

Speaking of Elizabethan poets

here's the 1917 Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse.

You're welcome.

What's a poetical line like you...

...doing in a Bible like this? "The witchery of paltry things obscures what is right." -- Wisdom 4:12. A welcome spot of "dark speech" in the soggy cardboard of the New American Bible.

For the last few days I've been avoiding what's called "news" - the witchery of trivia, political propaganda and other paltry things. To follow the news nowadays is to be a misinformed citizen. Instead, I'm spending more time with Elizabethan poets, Constitutional history, the worthwhile blogs, etc. It's refreshing.

I prefer to call it the Holy Flu

...if it causes changes like this:

Jenky also suggested that the Sign of Peace should temporarily take on a new expression. Instead of a handshake or an embrace, parishioners are advised to interact with a “nod of the head or a smile.”

LET THERE BE SUNG TE DEUM!

Don't wet my pallet!

This guy unleashes a magnificent eggcorn - he wants to get my pallet all wet (see the end of the article). No, thank you. If I had pallets, I'd like to keep them dry and build a compost heap container with them. You may whet my palate, though, especially for things concerning Wolfram Alpha.

Paul Anka is the king of something

I would have bet cold hard cash that Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit couldn't be turned into a horn-heavy lounge tune straight outta 1965 Vegas with the swingin' Rat Pack. I would have lost. It's a quintessential Rat Pack tune.

The mystery of the dropped 'g'

"Keeping the faith" involves theology, dogma, orthopraxis; "Keepin' the Faith" involves sentimental liberal do-goodery.

Three mint julep recipes and a story

Gibbons Burke has a valuable compilation of mint julep recipes, one embedded in a story by William Alexander Percy, uncle of Walker Percy.

It's a 'an' thing

Have you noticed it lately? If you listen to a few interviews on the radio, you'll almost certainly hear someone using 'a' instead of 'an' before a word that starts with a vowel. Drives me up the fargin' wall. Doesn't take much, huh?

The Mountain Dew Song

From our goofy 12-year-old, to the tune Jingle Bells:

Charging through the glue
with a can of Mountain Dew.
It's such a wonderful drink,
it would make a freighter sink.

Just take another sip,
and your black cat won't nip.
And we'll be running through the cheddar cheese tonight.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun it is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

A history of the Constitution

The Founders' Constitution is the Oxford English Dictionary of ideas that formed the American Constitution, and FindLaw summarizes developments and interpretations.

The new Federalist Party

I first heard about it today from Jerry Pournelle. Sounds good to me!

After a day of 16th-century poetry

When you've immersed yourself in lines of lofty stately metre
Your thoughts do tend to fall in line and march a little neater.

Tasting of His roseate blood

Br. Stephen of the Cistercian abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank gives us the Easter Vespers hymn Ad cenam Agni providi and John Mason Neale's English translation of it. In particular, Br Stephen delights in Neale's use of roseate to describe Christ's blood. Neale himself, in his Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences, tells why he chose the word roseate, which is often changed to crimson in other editions of his hymn:

Again, in the same Hymn:---
Cruore ejus roseo

is translated by
And tasting of His roseate Blood.

The epithet is everywhere altered to crimson: because the editors did not see its force. The poet would tell us that, though one drop of our Lord's Blood was sufficient to redeem the world,

(Cujus una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere,
as St. Thomas says,) yet out of the greatness of His love to us He would shed all. As every one knows, the last dainings of life-blood are not crimson, but of a far paler hue: strictly speaking, roseate. Change the word, and you eliminate the whole idea.

Tortured for the fourth amendment

The fourth amendment is a dangerous thing to government goons.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Grr

I'm a "completist" - when possible I get the complete works, the complete discography, etc. So I ordered a 1992 edition of the Sidneian Psalms from a bookshop in England. It arrived this morning in all its utterly useless abridged, modernised-spelling ignominy. Abridged! WTF?

Psalm 1

From one of my multitude of small text-formatting projects, the first of Sir Philip Sidney's Psalm translations:

PSALM I.

Beatus vir.

He blessed is who neither loosely treads
The straying steps as wicked councel leads,
      Ne for bad mates in way of sinners waiteth,
      Nor yet himself with idle scorners seateth;
But on Gods law his whole delight doth bind,
Which night and day hee calls to marking mind.

He shall be like a freshly planted tree,
To which sweet springs of waters neighbours be;
      Whose branches faile not timely fruite to nourish.
      Nor withered leaf shall make it faile to flourish:
So all the things whereto that man doth bend
Shall prosper still with well succeeding end.

Such blessing shall not wicked wretches see,
But like vile chaff with wind shall scattred be;
      For neither shall the men in sinne delighted
      Consist when they to highest doome are cited,
Ne yet shall suff'red be a place to take
Where godly men do their assembly make.

For God doth know, and knowing doth approve
The trade of them that just proceedings love:
      But they that sinne in sinfull breast do cherish,
      The way they go, shall be the way to perish.

Here's the KJV.