cbfrench

I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.

I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.

I did, and then I flashed Crossink, and I’m currently using vCodex at the moment, just because I wanted to check out the various options. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with vCodex, since I don’t really care that much about all of the stats, and I liked the interface of Crosspoint/Crossink marginally better.

That is very true, and certainly I’m in agreement that fast, digital reading isn’t necessarily desirable as a mode. Then again, my academic background is in English lit, and I’m a priest, so my professional reading has generally been slow and analog! Reading novels quickly allows me to become immersed in them without allowing my analytical lit-crit brain entirely to take over, and that itself is a nice change of pace, so the e-reader has been a welcome introduction. I do enough wrestling with dense theological texts that I appreciate being able simply to read.

I’m a big proponent of physical books: I have several thousand in my home. But last week, I finally got my first e-reader, the Xteink X4, which I got because it was small and cheap.

In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.

This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!

I may be one of the few HN users for whom this is an extremely useful resource. I’m an Anglican priest, so I’m often scanning and pasting bits and pieces of chant into our bulletins. This will, I hope, allow me to create much cleaner looking chant texts in the future! Thank you for sharing it!

Apart from being one of the finest poets in the modern era, Housman was also an excellent textual critic, and he once gave the most amusing and acerbic paper on textual criticism you’ll ever read: https://wsproject.org/method/philology/housman/complete.pdf

Anyone know the little padfolio case that’s featured here? I’d like a better carry solution for my pens and notebooks, and that one looks about perfect for the job.

The tech ban was not just about trying to create better individual learning outcomes or whatever; it was also a matter of respect to one’s colleagues in the class. I was teaching a discussion section of a larger class, so there was a minimal expectation that one would be attentive to what one’s classmates were saying. Allowing students to retreat into their screens effectively undermines the whole project and is, quite frankly, extremely rude to everyone else. That doesn’t strike me as overly “weird.”

If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).

Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.

My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.

It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.

Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

My college (Sewanee: The University of the South) is one of the few places in the US with a change ringing tower. It definitely fit the Anglophilic vibe of the place. It was always lovely to hear.

Apparently, I now live in one of the other places where there is a tower (Carmel, IN), but I’ve never heard changes rung on it. It doesn’t appear from the website that it has any local players, which is too bad.

This is true. I’m sure most dispensationalists consider themselves “literalists” even though they require charts upon charts to demonstrate how their “literalism” isn’t just creative interpretation. And besides, “literalism” is just a modern framework; none of the Church fathers (or most interpreters of Scripture for over 1900 years) were literalists in the sense it’s meant today. And heck, read the Sermon on the Mount to see that Jesus himself probably wouldn’t have qualified as a “literalist” lol.

They’re dispensationalists, though. Actual biblical literalists would probably have a hard time reconciling St. Paul with this idea that the modern nation-state of Israel has anything at all to do with the Israel of either the Old or New Testaments.

I highly doubt the judge was tracking down citations or reading those cited cases herself to verify what was in them. They have law clerks for that. It doesn’t make it any less an egregious waste of the court’s time and resources, but I would be surprised if a district court judge is personally doing much, if any, of that sort of spadework.

“Alternative Pharmaceuticals Purveyor”

Probably meant evanesce, which has the same sense as evaporate and could be easily confused with effervesce.

None of the models ingests that data, mostly because there is no way to ensure that personal weather stations are sited correctly. So, for instance, an anemometer has to be around 30’ above ground with no obstructions to generate usable readings. Most people putting a personal weather station in the backyard aren’t going to the trouble to locate the station where it can provide data that are usable.

Plus, surface readings are only a small part of the atmospheric picture; you need weather balloons to generate a more holistic reflection of the atmosphere at a site. There are also data generated from aircraft, but those are more one-dimensional (in the sense that they are only sampling conditions at a single altitude) than twice-daily balloon launches from selected sites. Until someone decides to implement a private, nation-wide radiosonde network, there probably won’t be a numerical prediction model that operates independently of NOAA data.

15. Defend minimalism.

“No.”

Here am I, a grown-ass man, softly giggling to myself over seeing 5318008 on the list. It’s fifth grade all over again.

I primarily read theology, and lots of early-to-mid-20th century Anglican theology. So, many of the books I read are out of print—and thus only available used. I’ve found that reading in a niche area tends to put some interesting copies in my lap. I have quite a few copies around that previously belonged to “famous” (at least within my little world) theologians. Many of these other copies are often ex-library, often from seminary or monastic libraries. It’s always interesting to see what libraries are getting rid of and to think about the monks or nuns who sat around reading them. (Or not, as the case may be—they were withdrawn, after all.)

My favorite is a copy of Martin Thornton’s The Function of Theology, which had been deaccessioned from the library of the Seminary of the Southwest at some point. I happened to flip to the back to glance at the loan card. It had been borrowed precisely one time—October 23, 1987—but it had been borrowed that one time by a priest who became a friend of mine in 2021 during a course at a different institution. The small world of Anglican theology! I texted him a picture of the book, and he still remembered checking it out.

Sabine Baring-Gould was a fascinating man: https://theweek.com/articles/763465/last-man-who-knew-everyt...

I picked up a complete set of his Lives of the Saints that was being discarded from a seminary library a few years back. It’s a delight (in part owing to what Walther describes as the “inordinate” attention he pays “to the most minor details of his subjects' terrestrial existences”).

When I was in high school, my English classes focused quite a bit on performing that sort of analysis. Then I majored in English at a college whose department was still very much aligned with the New Critical “close reading” methodology. Then I went to a PhD program in a top-ten department.

My experiences: My college experience prepared me very well to analyze texts—to understand their mechanics, to discuss the ways in which they develop meaning out of those mechanics, and to argue for an interpretation on the basis of that. What it did not prepare me to do well was to conduct literary research, which was the point of the PhD program. Nevertheless, most of my grad school professors valued my ability to conduct a close reading of a text because many other students who came from more research- and theory-oriented undergrad backgrounds had difficulty in explicating texts without resorting to extra-textual frameworks.

I ended up leaving the PhD program for various reasons, but I will say that the close-reading skills I developed in college have been widely applicable for me outside of academia. Close reading forces you to interact with a text at a granular level and to be attentive to the assumptions that it is smuggling in through its construction. Some lit folks now prefer to talk about “slow reading,” but it’s mostly the same thing.

I would argue that, given the deluge of text with which any of us is confronted on a daily basis, the ability to slow down and to be attentive to a text is a necessary interpretive skill. Maybe students don’t all need to learn to identify figures of speech and poetic devices, but they should learn how to sit with a text and analyze how it’s put together. For one thing, this makes them more sensitive and acute readers. For another, it ideally can make them clearer and more forceful writers. (It is no accident that many of the greatest canonical writers honed their skills by producing parodies of other great writers: the exercise requires getting into the mind and comprehending the style of another writer in order to understand the choices that (s)he has made.) Good reading is a prerequisite for good writing, and that is partly a function of reading widely, yes, but it is also a function of reading deeply.

Rather than jettisoning analytical approaches entirely, we might be better off teaching students how to read, in the sense of showing them that different texts require different levels and forms of engagement. (Insert here the Baconian adage about the different kinds of books.) Some texts can be skimmed simply to mine for information, while other texts require much more deliberate and analytical reading. Students should develop the skills to perform both kinds of reading. And then there’s also reading that isn’t done for a purpose other than sheer enjoyment, and that should be encouraged too (perhaps by having students, as you say, read some stuff just to share their responses to it). But I think a disservice is done when we treat reading as a univocal act, whether that means we make it all about analysis or all about generating responses to texts.

It’s pretty remarkable to think in the 400k+ MLB games that have been played in 100+ years, this is the first time this has ever happened. To quote the line: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

Honestly, it’s probably a little of both. We’re all embedded in various communicative matrices, all of which have conventions to which we generally adhere because it’s how we were taught, it’s understandable by others (at least other guild members), and it makes communicating more efficient. There’s also a protective mindset to keep the uninitiated from peering too deeply into the mysteries—and thus rendering the work you do much less valuable.

This same study could have been conducted on medical writing and probably arrived at the same conclusions, except medical writing is probably even more jargon-laden than legalese, so I’m not sure a group of layfolk could produce a convincing parody of it.

In any event, I have the feeling this study could have been avoided by a trip across the quad to talk to someone in the English dept.

Now comes cbfrench and respectfully submits the following comment.

So they’ve discovered literary form and genre. Remarkable.

To be less snarky, my wife is a lawyer, while I am an Anglican priest (cue the jokes). Both of us are in fields where certain traditional literary forms—be it statutes, contracts, biblical texts, or liturgical prayers—play important roles. These forms tend to be inherently conservative because there is the sense among practitioners of both the law and the liturgy that things can go awry if one departs too far from established conventions, so it’s better to rely upon boilerplate conventions, which can actually be more efficient in spite of their syntactical convolutions. Indeed, C.S. Lewis makes the point w/r/t liturgical vs. extemporaneous prayer that formal, customary prayer frees one up actually to pray because one isn’t having to decide with every utterance whether or not one agrees. The extemporaneous prayer may be more “straightforward,” but it imposes its own set of cognitive burdens.

I would guess that legal writing operates similarly: boilerplate constructions have generally standard and agreed-upon meanings around which many of the substantive interpretive issues have already been resolved, which makes them on the whole more efficient. What law seeks to accomplish as a genre of writing depends upon striking a difficult balance among interpretive stability, capaciousness, and definitiveness, which necessitates certain concessions to what we might consider stylistic infelicity. (Plus, those concessions keep food on my table, so I’m rather grateful for them, lol.)

It shouldn’t be surprising or noteworthy that people who are asked to compose a bit of text in a particular genre respond by writing in a way that conforms to what they understand of its generic conventions. Similarly, if I asked people to write something that could be a passage from the Gospels, most people would probably produce a text with thees, thous, and verilys and that would also likely include something about sheep and being good to other people. They would do this because in their minds that is what “the Bible” ought to sound like. Likewise, if I asked you to compose thirty seconds of ad copy for a new car, you probably aren’t going to write it in the form of an epic prologue (“Ford and the man I sing…”).

We all have baseline understandings and expectations of what conventional forms look like and sound like, which are often tied to what the particular form is trying to convey or accomplish. So, perhaps legalese is a form of “incantation” trying to conjure up its own authority, but arguably so is every other literary form. That’s just how form works: if it doesn’t establish some implicit authority (even in the most rudimentary sense of “you should pay attention to this”), it’s effectively meaningless.

Further affiant sayeth naught.

IANAL, so spitballing here, but it seems like this might be false imprisonment, given the use of handcuffs to restrain the student. It would be hard to argue this was a reasonable means of maintaining order when the student was not actively disrupting proceedings and when, say, simply having the kid ejected from the courtroom would have removed whatever disturbance was being presented.

It doesn’t seem that the handcuffing was connected to any sort of contempt proceeding. Judges are, as you note, given wide latitude to determine how to maintain order in their courts, but there are usually limits to how they can exercise their contempt power. It would seem, though, that handcuffing a student who is not actively disrupting proceedings or posing a threat without a formal contempt proceeding would be considered a due process violation, regardless. I expect having a member of the gallery handcuffed without being held in contempt exceeds that wide authority, so I wonder if the student couldn’t recover some damages for the tort.(Edit: Probably not, as judicial immunity would likely shield the judge from any civil action against him. There was a recent Sixth Circuit case—Orta v. Repp https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/23... —that upheld the immunity claim in a similar case of abuse of contempt power.[0])

But even if this incident is not criminally or civilly actionable, it is highly likely that the state judicial ethics commission might take a rather jaundiced view of such behavior.

[0] The record in the Orta case honestly makes this whole incident look trivial by comparison. If you want to see what it looks like when an asshole judge goes on a power trip, here you go: https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/3/2020/2020-O...

It should be noted Repp was later suspended for a year without pay by the Ohio Supreme Court.

“There's a long drive... way back at center field... way back, back, it is a... Oh my! Caught by Mays!”

https://youtu.be/7bLt2xKaNH0?si=I1rvcp67qk2pV5yN

This Guardian piece does a decent job of explaining the background of the local militias: https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/jun/11/inside-...

Ham radio’s time has come and gone

I dunno about that. There are more licensed hams today in the US than there ever have been. And as a proportion of the US population, the number of hams is close to an all-time high.

https://www.clearskyinstitute.com/ham/stats/index.html

I also serve as a Volunteer Examiner (ham who helps administer license exams), and the group with which I volunteer administers remote licensing exams to multiple people on a daily basis. So, anecdotally, I do think there are still plenty of folks out there getting into the hobby.

Last night I got a place to stay in Switzerland through a PSK-31 QSO. Didn’t even ask. Mentioned that we would like to visit the country in the next couple of years, and it just so happened the ham I was contacting lives on top of an Alp next to a monastery. When he found out Switzerland was on our list, he enthusiastically offered to make whatever arrangements necessary for us to stay at the monastery to visit. I’m definitely sending him a QSL card.

Sure, that interaction could have happened on the internet, but it is highly unlikely to have done so, given how I (and most people) use the internet. And no one is calling random foreign strangers on their phone.

Perhaps radio is no longer “magical,” but it is still serendipitous. When I sit down, I have no idea who or where will be receiving my RF. I have talked to a wider variety of people all over the world with my radio than I ever have with my laptop—at least in terms of real conversation and not just interacting on a reddit post or what have you. And, sure, plenty of QSOs are also just about your rig, your antenna, the weather, etc., but even being marginally curious about others’ lives usually garners some interesting conversation.

These are people with whom I would never have had the chance to converse without the happenstance of the ionosphere. So, I dunno, seems pretty magical to me. Maybe the broader issue is that folks generally aren’t interested in having random encounters and conversations with others.

As far as the gatekeeping aspect, that’s definitely a problem. The number of sad hams out there still bitching about how “FT8 isn’t real radio” is too damn high. But it’s a big hobby, and there are more licensed hams in the US now than there ever have been in terms of raw numbers, and it’s pretty close to an all-time high as a proportion of the population, too. So I think there’s room for optimism about it.

Yeah in that case, you’d probably be better off just picking up some decent GMRS handhelds. Spend a little more on some antenna upgrades, and you should have no issues. If you really want to stay on the right side of the law, you can have everyone in your group (who isn’t related to you) throw $35 at the FCC for some GMRS licenses. But, depending on terrain, you should be able to stay in reasonable contact with everyone with 5W if you’re within a mile or two.