Wire stripper

I’ve never before so appreciated a tool.

I did some electronics as a kid; I stripped wires with a scissors or a penknife. I don’t think I ever managed to do it in one go without losing some wire in the process.

I’m building Ben Eater’s 6502 kit which comes with pre-stripped wires, but he didn’t have a black wire of the right length and being an obsessive sort I ordered some 22 AWG wire, a cutter, a stripper and a pliers (as recommended for his 8-bit CPU project which I will be building next.)

I just snipped and stripped my little piece of black wire and I am as happy as Eeyore on his birthday, putting his burst balloon into his empty honey jar and taking it back out again.

Rayanne Tabet and Tel Halaf

Faik Borkhoche was a civil servant in the French Lebanon-Syrian mandate, a translator of documents from Arabic into French. He was sent as Secretary to Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German banker and amateur archaeologist who spent considerable time at Tel Halaf on the Syria-Turkey border and was therefore suspected of drawing up maps of the region for military purposes, as many German intelligence agents operated as archaeologists and ethnologists.

Faik Borkhoche’s great-grandson Rayyane Tabet is a Lebanese artist who has followed his great-grandfather’s trail. Four artifacts in his maternal grandparent’s Beirut apartment were doubled in the course of his investigation: a photographic portrait of the Baron, on the back of which Faik wrote an arabic proverb: an orphan is not one without a father, an orphan is one without manners; a bright yellow copy of Der Tell Halaf, the Baron’s popular book on his work; a New Year’s greeting from the Baron to Faik on the back of a postcard issued by the Tell Halaf museum he founded in Berlin; and a photograph of Faik holding up a dead snake, which Faik sent as a postcard to his wife, writing, my dear Victoria I kiss you and the the children (names them, they have french names too) … I caught a snake under a Beduin’s tent… I miss you and the kids, love, yours, Faik.

Rayyane Tabet found another copy of the Baron’s portrait in the German Federal Archives, another copy of the Baron’s book withdrawn from the Metropolitan Museum Library, of the Museum postcard on which the Baron had typed his New Year’s greeting in a collection of papers bought by the Met from Ernst Herzfeld, a senior scholar departing the Princeton IAS, and of the photograph of his great-grandfather in the National Geographic archives for an unpublished article solicited from the Baron.

When the Met Bulletin arrived in the mail I intended to add it to the pile of unread Bulletins and New Yorker magazines sitting on the coffee table. This table comes from my maternal grandmother’s apartment. It is a low wooden table with a glass top protecting an Indian scarf or tapestry of elephants and peacocks done in sequins. Disconnected from my grandparents and self-alienated from my parents, I will never know the full story; where and when it was acquired, who commissioned the table built around it and why (that much I vaguely remember my mother mentioning.)

I was attracted by the cover showing a youngish dolicephalic man with a nice mustache holding up a snake; his clothes were “1930s adventurer”; beside him stood another similar man but sashed and kafiyyaed; what seems to be the hilt of a dagger protrudes from the sash. I was looking at a TinTin illustration and thought, how quaint. But I began to wonder who the man was - the person. So I decided to read the story.

I flipped through the magazine - I was prepared to dismiss it because I do not think much of modern artists and their self-conscious rhetoric: the oppressive colonializers the diachronic nature of artifacts and so on. But I was caught by the lovely arabic handwriting on the backs of the photograph and the postcard; and so the grandparents in their apartment and the quaint man holding the snake suddenly became literate and interesting to me. They were educated. They had thoughts and feelings and could express them. Then the letter to his beloved Victoria and their kids. Now I was committed to his story.

This is unlike me. I’m usually drawn in by colder intellectual abstraction, or by the yellow and sepia of a dry historical account, not by personal accounts. I am pleased.

The World of Odysseus

That the Homeric Poems, the Odyssey in particular, are 8th c. depictions of the 10th c. Greek world supported by analysis of anachronisms in the poem and material evidence of Mycenaean culture not matching descriptions in the poem. Linguistic, critical, and anthropological evidence that the poems were composed orally. A careful analysis of gift-giving culture and the the guest-friend relationship: the economics and social structure organized around kinship, the household (oikos) and the authority of a first among equals kingship. The transition-in-progress from a heroic age to the early stages of a polis-centered system.

The Neutrino

In his usual thorough, graceful, magisterial manner Isaac Asimov describes the discovery of the Neutrino, a particle which, invented to make the bookkeeping come out, delightfully deigned to exist.

The first half of this short book describes the nature of the scientific endeavor: careful observation, inference and generalization of principles, which guide further observation and theorizing. These generalizations, labeled Laws of Nature, are so useful that when new observations seem to violate a well-established law, every effort is made to adjust and preserve it by coming up with explanations for the new phenomena that are in accord with the established principles. Only occasionally must these laws be scrapped entire. And sometimes they guide theoreticians to new science.

So with the Neutrino, a particle so small and standoffish that it is very difficult to observe: huge numbers of them stream from the Sun and pass through the Earth without interaction with any other forms of matter, as though the Earth were not there at all. But certain neucleonic interactions could not be properly accounted for; a small amount of energy and linear and angular momenta always seemed to go missing: the theory requires these properties be conversed, but small amounts could not be measured. To preserve the conservation laws, the Neutrino was postulated - massless and without charge, but bearing the missing kinetic energy and momenta.

And having been predicted, it was in time observed.

The book was published in 1966 so the catalogue of physical facts is no longer complete and correct: there is a family of neutrinos and they are not quite massless and their interactions are complex and fascinating. But these are incidental matters to the lay reader, who may come away from this book with an appeciation for the nature of scientific work, the interplay of observation, intuition, deduction, imagination and aesthetic sensibility by which the working of nature may be increasingly deeply understood.

Bob Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters

Starting Bob Nystrom’s Crafting Interpreters. I’ll do his Java version in JavaScript, and maybe also in Lisp. I’ll do his C version in… Rust? Go? I should do one in Haskell. I should do one in Perl. Perl6. Python. How about Dart? Swift?

update Oct 11, 2019:

This is really a lovely book, well written, well coded. I followed along. Here is part I, the interpreter, in JavaScript: https://git.sr.ht/~dhf/jslox

Mister Miracle

Tom King is a marvelous writer. He is a perfect practitioner of post-modern meta-fictional super-hero deconstruction. This has been in fashion since Watchmen, and King does it more subtly and personally than most such takes. But King is even more interested in writing novels about his characters crises with family and intimacy and identity even as they deal with the external plot threats. He did the same thing for Marvel in 2016’s Vision limited series. King makes these characters completely accessible to us by writing them with an utterly plebian, quotidian side. These super-heros are in part friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and families from our own mundane lives, without losing any of their interest as characters of high fantasy.

Mitch Gerads’ art is superb, a blend of realism, surrealism and cartooning for emotional effect. Unmasked, his characters are realistic, emotions clearly readable. Masked they can vary at need from abstract beauty to frightening intensity to comic Saturday morning cartoonish distortion (is this a technique borrowed from the deformed and super-deformed miniatures in Manga and Anime art? Or has it always been part of American comics vernacular?) The comic is drawn in strict nine-panel format. The rigid discipline supports the stylistic variation, making the whole uniform. (Thematically, the rigid discipline reflect the many layers of plot and emotional dysfunction that trap the characters.) Some action sequences are delicate and perfectly choreographed, working like Eadweard Muybridge motion studies; others look like video game frames with dashed lines indicating motion and lolcat sound effects (‘kik kik. fite fite.’) And Gerads’ taste is superb: his choice of technique always matches the need and mood of the story perfectly, with humour serving to intensify tension, gore and violence to immerse us in the trauma his characters are experiencing.

The story is ambiguous. I don’t know what is really happening, and I don’t know what to make of the ending. I know what I need it to mean, but you may need something different. King has said in an interview that he knows what he intended, but isn’t going to tell. He wants his readers to engage with it themselves.

I know Kirby’s New Gods fairly well (though I have not read all of the original Mr. Miracle run) so the plot of the series read as a (very fresh) variation on familiar stories. I imagine this is how the great classic Athenian tragedies would have felt to their original audiences. And it is full of marvelous Easter Eggs, subtle surprises and references for those who know the canon more deeply. I would like to know how this story works for one new come to Kirby’s Fourth World mythology.

The True History of Tea

Did he not say otherwise in the acknowledgements, I would have suspected that Professor Mair wrote this book as an excuse to write Appendix C on the origins of the words for Tea in the worlds' languages. China learned tea drinking from Austro-Asiatic speakers from what is now Northeastern Myanmar and Yunnan province and spread the drink and its name throughout the world in two pronunciations, overland to Tibet, central Asia and beyond via the Silk Road as variants of “Cha” and oversea via European traders as variants of “Tea”. Appendix C goes on in ecstatic technical delight and was one of my favorite parts of the book - but the most of the book, jointly researched by Professor Mair and journalist Erling Hoh and largely drafted by Mr. Hoh, tells the story of Tea and its deep and widespread impact world-wide: Tea profoundly affected the culture of the Middle Kingdom and the people under Chinese cultural sway; played a major role in the relationship between the Chinese Kingdom and the Mongol and other Asiatic tribes with whom it struggled for centuries; impacted the Turkic and European empires, shaped and was shaped by Victorian England, triggered the Opium War and launched the American Revolution; was part of the industrial revolution, the rise of mass marketing, and saw the end of the age of sail in the beautiful Tea Clippers, last of the great trading sailing vessels.

It was almost impossible to put the book down - it is detailed, enthralling, beautifully written, and fascinating.

And I drank an awful lot of tea while reading it…