Microblog

Aaron Straup Cope writes:

One of the reasons I think these considerations are so important to the cultural heritage sector is that the act of revisiting is the bedrock underlying the whole idea of cultural heritage itself. The act of re-reading a book, or re-listening to a piece of music or of going to see the same painting or sculpture again and again and of celebrating the evolution of an understanding about those works is what separates cultural heritage from entertainment. Entertainment, born of the moment, can and does become cultural heritage but it is precisely through the act of revisiting that one becomes the other.

The web simply makes those acts of revisiting possible for more people, in more ways, than ever before. When I say these things are possible I mean that the economics of participating in this global network of documents are within the reach of, if not everyone, then more people than ever before. These things become possible because technologies underlying the web are simple enough to meaningfully lower the barrier to participation and unburdened by licensing in a way which allows people to share their work and for others still to extend that work to meet their needs.

Spot on. One of the things I’ve long considered a key strength of digital history is our ability to reach wider audiences than our more traditional avenues of communication (books, articles) tend to reach. It’s also one of the reasons I was so excited to join RRCHNM, where our core mission is the democratization of history. By and large, we do this work on the web—which is also one reason I worry so much about the web itself.¹

W. H. Auden:

The state of enchantment is one of certainty. When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.

All folk tales recognize that there are false enchantments as well as true ones. When we are truly enchanted we desire nothing for ourselves, only that the enchanting object or person shall continue to exist. When we are falsely enchanted, we desire either to possess the enchanting being or be possessed by it.

We are not free to choose by what we shall be enchanted, truly or falsely. In the case of a false enchantment, all we can do is take immediate flight before the spell really takes hold.

Recognizing idols for what they are does not break their enchantment.

All true enchantments fade in time. Sooner or later we must walk alone in faith. When this happens, we are tempted, either to deny our vision, to say that it must have been an illusion and, in consequence, grow hardhearted and cynical, or to make futile attempts to recover our vision by force, i.e., by alcohol or drugs.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

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Alan Lightman:

Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand . . . the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

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“The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical.”

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Gary Wills:

We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily.

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Vicki Boykis:

The best way you can defy crap content on their own is to write your own blog on your own platform. Don’t let threads, Facebook posts, and Medium take your words and your creative license.

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Leslie Lamport:

One last thing, about another side project of yours with a sizable impact: LaTeX. I’d like to finally clear something up with the creator. Is it pronounced LAH-tekh or LAY-tekh?

Any way you want. I don’t advise spending very much time thinking about it.

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Robin Sloan:

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

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I don’t know that documenting this will be of any use, but here it goes.

On May 14, I tested positive for COVID-19. My symptoms first started Wednesday night, following a long day of travel back from Virginia. I feel like I’ve been lucky: fully vaccinated and one booster means my symptoms have remained mild. Most of my symptoms have been just a low fever and chills and congestion. With just a normal dose of ibuprofen, I feel mostly like myself. But I haven’t had any of the symptoms that I think of as the typical COVID symptoms: no brain fog, no abnormal fatigue, no issues with taste or smell, and so forth. My Apple Watch reports a higher resting heart rate than I normally have, but that isn’t strange when your immune system is fighting something off.

I’m writing this on the day I tested positive, and hopefully I’ll start recovering from this before too long. And thankfully, so far no one else in my family has tested positive. Just as importantly, no one around CHNM seems to have gotten it from me either.

UPDATE: I finally tested negative after five days. The worst of my symptoms were major congesion (to the point where I couldn’t taste or smell very well, which I thought might’ve been a COVID symptom but ended up returning pretty quickly), a slight cough, a fever I managed to control with ibuprofen—but that I absolutely needed. For the entire duration from testing positive to five days following my negative test, per CDC recommendations, I wore an N-95 mask around the house.

UPDATE: My wife ended up testing positive, but her symptoms were even more mild than my own — if I hadn’t been sick, it’s doubtful she would’ve even tested herself.

UPDATE: As of June 24, I’ve so far seemed clear of any long-COVID or post-COVID symptoms. No brain fog or other health issues that have been noticable or detected. I consider myself very lucky for that, and am so very glad I’m vaccinated and boosted.

The day began fairly early, but is typically occupied with getting kids up, fed, and out the door to where they need to be.

A wrench in this morning: one of the dogs had to go to the vet at 8:15, and one of the kids had to stay home due to illness. So, make that a vet appointment and a doctor’s appointment.

At 8:15, a newsletter I wrote yesterday evening went out. If you’re not subscribed to Breve, I’d be delighted if you considered it.

Around 8:45 I was at my computer getting the day started in earnest.

At 9:30, I joined our weekly RRCHNM senior staff meeting to discuss a few agenda items. We have some cool stuff coming up soon.

Between the end of that meeting and lunch, a few things happened: I helped troubleshoot and deploy the updated website for DataScribe. I started digging into the Bills of Mortality project. This was also about the time I had my third cup of coffee.

Lunch, then back to the Bills of Mortality. I’m building the application in Vue, my first time using the framework, and a few things clicked today that I think, overall, will be good for the application’s development and sustainability. But it’s going to take some work.

Coffee number four.

More Vue work, some reading of documentation.

Back to work on an R script we use for the DataScribe-to-PostgreSQL workflow. The database powers our data API which we use for our data-driven projects around the Center. The R script is used to take the transcriptions completed in DataScribe, convert them into a tidy data format, and generate CSV files that then find their way into PostgreSQL.