Friday, June 23, 2023
Thursday, January 5, 2023
Quick Gear Notes
I love the Yakima Exo Swing Base + Exo Double Up combo for bike portage. The swing base is crazy solid, and I intend to play around with another module or two, e.g., the cookstove one. I am reading some reviews indicating that security is an issue, that anyone with 2x 24mm socket wrenches could get the whole base pretty easily - need to investigate.
https://yakima.com/products/exo-swingbase
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Map-Making
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Caroll, Lewis. 1894. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. New York and London: Macmillan and Co. Via Project Gutenberg, URL https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48795.
See also Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science.
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Verbiage
We'll see if this can work as a scratchpad for verbiage I encounter that has nowhere else to go.
"the Enlightenment fostered a strong aesthetic that looked with enthusiasm on straight lines and visible order" (Scott 1998, 55).
We always need to "reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation" (Scott 1998, 77).
"The belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time" (Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" [1943], quoted in Scott 1985, 241).
"the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all" (Scott 1998, 31).
"the Enlightenment fostered a strong aesthetic that looked with enthusiasm on straight lines and visible order" (Scott 1998, 55).
We always need to "reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation" (Scott 1998, 77).
“Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically
from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the
worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope” (Arendt 1985 [1951],
446).
"The belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time" (Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War" [1943], quoted in Scott 1985, 241).
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