"Attractive and rare set of decrees concerning the functioning of the judiciary in the papal city of Bologna. These city statutes were promulgated by the Pope's legate, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621). Despite the issuing authority, the constitutions (a word indicating legislation of the highest level) are entirely non-religious in content, relating to civil law justice in the city. They shed considerable light into how courts worked in Bologna. Included are instructions on cases involving poor people; rules for notaries; the keeping of registers; seizures of property; taking of suspects; payment of officers; expert witnesses; and the governing of appeals. Pages 192-198 comprise papal edicts on the salaries of Bolognese judges and notaries." -- Leo Cadogan Rare Books (Dec. 2011)

"The university's John Carter Brown Library has long held the "Roger Williams Mystery Book," a book that purportedly belonged to Roger Williams, the radical religious thinker and founder of Rhode Island. The book is missing its title page and thus has little identifying information (besides a subtitle, "An Essay Concerning the Reconciling of Differences among Christians") -- but it's covered with extensive shorthand marginalia suspected to have been written by Williams himself sometime in the mid 1600s. The students, who include history and math majors, are using this semester to decipher the writing and to determine whether or not the shorthand handwriting was Williams's hand."

"…Matching blue morocco doublures are tooled with an attractively complex central ornament encompassing considerable stippling and twenty large stylized flowers on curvilinear stems. Vellum free endleaves are ornamented with gilt hearts at the corners, and the top edge is gilt."

"So who was responsible and when is it from? Since the sheet is neither signed nor dated, we can only make this assertion thanks to the sleuthing done by earlier scholars, most importantly by John Dreyfus for his collection of type specimen facsimiles, and the source of much of the information I give here.1 This sheet can be connected to its type caster thanks to the detailed records kept by the Dutch printer Christophe Plantin and the remarkable longevity of his press, now the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Plantin’s 1575 inventory of fonts includes the double pica italic typeface shown on this sheet (it’s the largest size of the italic face, on the right-hand column), with a note on the facing page identifying it as “Ascendonica Cursive de Guiot.” François Guyot was a type caster in Antwerp who worked from the 1540s until his death in 1570, and who was the main caster for Plantin from 1555 onwards; he also seems to have worked briefly for John Day in London."

"Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears."

"Humans have been seeing strange things on the surface of Mars for centuries. From the 1700s up through the present day, widespread fame has been available to anyone able to produce even the slightest bit of flimsy evidence that there's Martian life."

we need these in Ann Arbor

"The map is truly a beautiful bit of geologic history. For more info on it, see my previous blog post. So many amazing swirls and details in the river's course. Rendering it as a slippy map makes it easy to see the map in great detail, for instance the Old River Control Structure, a site threatened by the floodwaters of 2011. (Interestingly, the modern channel was built on relatively dry land.) The opacity slider (or text box) in the upper right lets you look through the Fisk map to a contemporary Google map. Check out this flood plain, for example. The satellite view contains echoes of the various old meanders, too, like these curved fields."

"This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887)."

"Although Laposky, a draftsman by profession, had received a proper recognition as a pioneer of electronic art, at no time his name has emerged in the context of dynamical chaos theory. The circuits he had implemented for generation of “oscillons” on the screen of a cathode ray tube oscilloscope, remain a mystery. It is known that some of his thirty-seven circuits [2] had “as many as 70 different setting of controls”[3] and that ac-voltage has been used for the circuit feeding. Our analysis is based on the vanity press booklet with the still photos of the fifty-six oscillons, which were exhibited at the Sanford Museum (Cherokee, Iowa) in 1953 [2]."

"Ron Doerfler has created a truly gorgeous 2010 calendar titled The Age of Graphical Computing. Ron has transformed nomography into a form of art."

"…Being on fire, you would probably apply powerful pails of water to put it out, and send off your man for the engines? You would do very wrong.…"

"For example, the manual for the Franklin Ace 100 begins with about 40 pages of computer basics (What are they? What can they do? etc). And then, on page 40, two thirds of the way down the page, there is a chapter heading called “The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan.” Here’s how the chapter begins:…"

"In 1903, Crayola had eight colors in its standard package. Today, there are 120, along with special packs like Gem Tones and Silver Swhirls. What happened? Above, from Weather Sealed, shows the growing color selection (and a few color retirements) in the standard package from 1903 to now."

"Although much comes in, there is still plenty for us to seek out and acquire. We are omnivorous in our appetite for material printed in the United States before 1877—if we don’t already have it, we want it, and even if we do have it, we might want another copy if it is slightly different or in better condition than the one we have. We also add secondary materials to the collections to support research here."

"According to Mental Floss Magazine, Kennedy managed to work all of the Ku Klux Klan's most secret recruiting and organizational practices into his 1940s radio serial, "Clan Of The Fiery Cross." And as a result, the Man Of Steel dealt a crushing blow to the racist organization:"

"Though one of our most ancient holidays, Halloween wasn’t celebrated widely in America until the latter part of the 1800s. Ypsilanti likely didn’t celebrate Halloween for half a century after the city’s founding in 1823—the quote above is the first Halloween story to appear in old newspapers dating back to the 1840s."

Be sure to look at the background and silhouetted wires in this shot. See the comment, "That's one of the most amazing collections of overhead wires I've ever seen on Shorpy. I'll bet that it has a lot to do with the business on the ground floor of our featured building."

"The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”"

"The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext."

"The proposition of the paper is that a direct relation held between the spatial shape of the church, its dedication and the cultural and political situation in the region. These churches inspire further studies of the use of the equilateral triangle plan in architecture, particularly for sacred buildings. In the future such studies should result in a more complete review and perhaps a full catalogue of buildings established on such a plan."

"Most of the Lyceum topics were ones that to modern sensibilities would seem unbelievably trite, pedantic, and didactic. It's hard to get into the 19th-century mindset and grasp how anyone could sit through these talks instead of, say, trimming one's toenails. But this was a popular pastime, in a society with no radio, no telephone, no movie theater, no TV. Faced with the absence of those things, I might wander down to the Lyceum hall too, to see what my friends were presenting on."

"The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced. Advertising is easily recognized as the literary form that most completely responds to the technique of the printing press, because it demands, above all else, a numerous and receptive "public" of readers. A great number of improvements in the graphic arts have been adaptations to the needs of advertisers. Yet, in its development of "direct mail" methods and circular letters, advertising seems to be more emancipated than literature from the printing press. One of the most curious recent developments in the graphic arts is the effort of the advertisers to make printed matter look like typescript, while the authors of books that are not in sufficient demand to warrant publication are seeking a typescript that will look like print."

"The ad protests a bit too much that the higher cost of electrification is actually a LOWER cost once you figure in the benefits. People are creatures of habit, and I'm sure many Ypsilantians said, "No--the gaslights I've got now are fine, thanks." An imperfect analog today is solar power. Of course it's more expensive, and similarly offers benefits in the long run. Perhaps one day every home will come with built-in panels and we will look back on DTE as something as quaint as gaslight."

Wandered here after following up on the A2 Mech Shop open house http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/04/13/electric-vehicles-to-be-produced-in-scio/

"... Moreover, in order to raise capital and extend their credit over the long, unpredictable term of [an item's] market life, they often endorsed or guaranteed each other's promissory notes, in this way creating elaborate networks of mutual dependence. As a result, when one firm became insolvent, it often took several others down with it. But to make things even worse, many [brokers of these items] estimated their net worth based on unsold (and devalued) inventory rather than on a more realistic accounting of their assets. This meant that, at any given time, it was difficult for a [broker of these items] to know either his own true financial position or that of the firms whose notes he'd endorsed. Thus, by 1819, with many thousands of worthless [items] circulating as inflated currency, the bankruptcy of a [broker of these items] was a frequent occurrence."

"Can we learn anything from all this? Going back to the triumph-of-evil quote, we may ask, how can we defend ourselves from the bogus quote? It is clearly unreasonable for anyone to have to prove a quote bogus...."

A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.

"So for our inaugural Wiki Wednesday, we start with names. ArborWiki has articles about the Ann Arbor City Council, the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, and the Downtown Development Authority. Those articles include lists of current councilmembers and board members, respectively.

But who served on those bodies before the current casts of characters?"

"1. Repetition is the soul of the net. If I've told you this once, I've said it a thousand times. Every year, regular as clockwork, there is an audience for people reading about where to pick blueberries, how to get election returns, who makes the best paczki, what to do on your birthday or your kids birthday. You get a free pass to repeat your good content over and over again annually, do it."

"Some of the claims here are sketchy — Geocities as a precursor to blogging? Really? — and suffer from web-centrism. After all, the world wide web was one of the LEAST interesting or effective things on the internet to spend your time on in the mid-1990s; usenet and email, which was mostly done over PINE or ELM servers in terminal clients, were where it was at. (I had a proto-blog my freshman and sophomore years of college whose “subscribers” were people in my email address book — most of whom were friends-of-friends I didn’t know.) All the same, it’s worth reading and remembering a little of what it was all like."

"As it happens, the fledgling United States was completely ripped off by the manufacturer of the first official penny. At the time, the United States didn’t yet have a national Mint, so they outsourced currency production to James Jarvis of Connecticut, who had bribed the head of the Treasury board with $10,000 for the contract. Jarvis was supposed to produce 300 tons of pennies, but ultimately only produced four tons of slightly underweight coins. Furthermore, a congressional report stated that “Jarvis had received a large quantity of federal copper but had only paid for a small portion.” (Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame)"

"That in and of itself is a rich testament to the circulation of books. But there is more to be discovered. If you examine the Folger's catalogue entry for this volume, you will notice that one of the associated names is "Wolfreston, Frances, 1607-1677, inscriber". If you follow that link, you will discover that the Folger has an additional 10 books signed by Frances Wolfreston in its collections. Frances Wolfreston, you will soon realize, was an early modern book collector and her library of books, nearly all carefully inscribed with "Frances Wolfreston her bouk", can be found dispersed among some of the greatest library collections today. Another post will be devoted to exploring her and her collection."

"Reproduced above is the title page of from a 1557 edition. The most noticeable thing about it, I think, is that nearly all the white space has been written on by its users. I want to point out one particular set of scribblings, those words just above the printer's device and enlarged below:"

“The Barter Theater first opened its doors in June 10, 1933, providing relief and diversions for Depression-era audiences. It was founded by Robert Porterfield, a young actor who suggested that audiences barter homegrown produce for admission. Its motto was “With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.” Crowds were receptive to the idea of ‘ham or Hamlet,” and an estimated 80 percent of the audiences paid with fruits, vegetables, and livestock, or dairy products.”

"In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet.

This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to Mozart's. However, it is not clear who the composer of these measures is."

"Because of the numerous squirrel migrations, John Audubon and John Bachman were convinced that the squirrels on the move were a separate species from the gray squirrels and used the scientific name Sciurus migratorius.

One of the earliest referenced migrations occurred in 1749 in Pennsylvania. Records show the state spending 3 cents for each squirrel killed. Over 640,000 were turned in for bounty.

Sometimes, hunts were organized to control the migration. One hunt in 1822 killed almost 20,000 squirrels. These hunts continued through the 1850s. In 1857, it was reported a hunter killed 160 in one day."

"The ebullition of your thoughts makes me feel as if I had been attracted to within a few hundred miles of the sun and had his gas-jets in full view."

"See yonder!" said Tom, stretching his long arm into infinite space, "see yonder—there's a bee!"

"I think there are times in our lives when we could all benefit from the Armless Tiger Man's philosophy and (whether at school or work or at the Motor Vehicle Bureau) bellow out, "MACHINES! MACHINES! I hate them! I hate them!!" See if you don't feel better."

May be the single coolest academic paper I've seen this year.

"Writing used to be a scholarly manly art, but is now reserved for disposable milquetoast bores and effete vacuous chumps whose bathrooms hold no ephemera from a long vanished world."

"The Internet has been around since the 1960s, but it was the development of the Mosaic browser in 1933 at the University of Illinois that made it possible to simply point and click your way to information that not only contained text, but also graphics."

"... time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable."

"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence in God's creation of Homo sapiens, the greatest pest the earth has ever borne."

Surely somebody I know owns photographs of the old swimming pool at the Santa Fe Institute. Maybe me, even. I'll have to check.

"Today, possibly because of Photoshop and other photography-doctoring software, people have become suspicious of photographs. This is a good thing."

Where my father was born. Submerged for most of 100 years under Lake Umatilla.

"Project Naming started in 2001 when Inuit youth took 500 digitized photos taken by Richard Harrington during the 1940s and 50s and asked their elders to help identify the people and places in the pictures."

An 1876 humorous song about an international terrorist,model for Jekyll/Hyde, who blew up a ship with dynamite in 1875. No, really. From a Gentlemen's magazine.

Seems I'm going to be giving a talk there, come Autumn. Wonder what it'll be about.

Barbara passes along a poem she's found in a book she's post-processing at Distributed Proofreaders (an 1650-something Chocolatier's advertising screed)