History through the Times

Someone on a writers' site pointed this out, and so I pass on the tip. The archive of the Times of London - starting 1 January 1785 (yes, that is a 7) - is available for free online. You can choose any date, or there is a scrolling "timeline" listing historically and culturally interesting (or curious) events.

The Thoughtful Side of Cassanova

The Guardian has an article on a new biography of Cassanova. Some newly reopened archives in Prague are providing food for literal thought. Aside from Cassanova's legendary amorous adventures (which included a few men as well as women, supposedly), he was an otherwise busy man:

In addition to the vast History of My Life, he wrote a total of 42 books and plays, including a translation of the Iliad, a five-volume science-fiction novel, mathematical treatises and opera libretti. He was also a committed follower of the Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish cult holding a deep fascination for him to the extent that he attributed his life's successes to its power.

Origin of Murphy's Law

I came across this origin of the term "Murphy's Law" and thought I'd pass it on. Apparently an Air Force captain, whose last name was Murphy, was an engineer working on a project to see how much decelleration a person could stand. On finding a miswired transducer - a device that transforms one type of energy into another, like a speaker changing electricity to sound - the officer reputedly said of the technician who had installed it, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it." A doctor associated with the project who gave a press conference mentioned that the clean safety record was because of adherence to Murphy's Law. There is some additional material, including a paradox named after that doctor.

Legislating Pi

Yesterday was the one hundred and eleventh anniversary of the Indiana legislature's unknowing attempt to set the value of pi. The story, told here, is amusing. A physician in Solitude, Indiana (that should have been a warning itself) was an amateur mathematician who thought he had devised how to square the circle. For those who aren't aware of this pastime, the idea was, using compass and ruler, to construct a square that had the same area as a given circle.

Although the possibility of doing this in a finite number of steps was disproved in the early 1880s when pi was shown to be a transcendental number (not the root of a polynomial with function with rational coordinates), Dr. Edwin Goodwin had apparently not heard. He wrote a bill encapsulating his idea and persuaded his local representative to introduce it.

The quasi-mathematical ramblings must have worn on the unfortunate elected officials, who, largely not understanding a word read out loud, were ready to pass it, with the byproduct of effectively setting the value of pi to 3.2 and also of legislating a royalty, to be paid the ingenious fellow, on the use of the new value. Luckily the universe did not need to adjust its functioning because an actual mathematician, the chair of Purdue's math department, happened to be in the chamber at the time, and he took the time to explain the problem.

A Chicken in Every Pot and a Gaseous Emmission From Every Nun?

In the US, we associate the phrase "a chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage" with Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign. But as I learned in reviewing a copy of Anne Willan's new cookbook, The Country Cooking of France, at least the poulty part of the saying dates back to France's King Henri IV, also known as Henri of Navarre. He wanted to make the transition into ruling as supported as possible. Being a Huguenot, he wasn't too popular on the surface, as the country has been embroiled in the Wars of Religion. So he decided to convert to Catholicism, and he also promised a chicken in every pot. He ascended to the throne in 1589 and nine years later issued the Edict of Nantes, which was probably the first real step toward religious tolerance, at least in that part of Europe, as it secured civil liberties for French Protestants. He was apparently popular among many of the people, although not with the Catholic who assassinated Henri in 1610.

The other humorous lesson in French came from a recipe for cream puff fritters. You fry pits of cream puff pastry and then top them with jam, honey, or sugar. The French name is pets de nonne, and I'll leave it to Anne Willan to explain the significance:

Toddlers learn the name and no polite translation exists. It means quite simply "nun's farts" because the fritters are so light.

I'm still trying to figure out whether it says more about the pastries or the nuns.

Happy Samhain?

It's Halloween - All Hallows Eve, which is an interesting story of a word. To hallow is to make holy, as in to revere as holy, and the Catholic church was trying to turn an old Celtic rite to its own use, making the day after All Saints' Day. The end of October was a dark time for the Celts and, specifically, the Druids. This was the official end of summer and the night Samhain (pronounced SOW-in), when the dead walked the earth. It was supposed to be a time auspicious for foretelling the future. People would build large bonfires, sacrificing animals and crops, and they would dress in animal costumes.

The Romans ruled the Celts for hundreds of years, and traditions of the cultures intermingled. Romans has festivals for the dead in October as well, and also a day to honor the goddess of fruit and trees - hence bobbing for apples today. I haven't yet found where the handing out of candy (technically, buying off kids who would otherwise play a trick) started, though this sounds suspiciously like wassailing. And in Ireland, there is still a tradition of the barmbrack, a cake with a plain ring baked in, which sounds like a Gateau Roi (King's Cake), but in this case, the person who gets the ring is supposed to find his or her true love the coming year. Talk about pressure for a pre-teen.

Redefining History

Those with power in the US, over a number of years, have been taken with the idea of using language - even redefining it - to further their own agendas. This has been an unfortunate situation, because when you change the meaning of words, you begin manipulating thought in subtle and permanent ways with often unpredictable results. George Orwell saw the approaching danger when he wrote 1984, and, unfortunately, his view was prescient.

Now we see another form of redefining words - this time in redefining our collective memory of history. It's not the first time, but, again, another disturbing trend. In this case, President Bush tried to argue that the situation in Iraq is like that of Vietnam in the early 1970s, and even referring to al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents in terms of the "war machine of imperial Japan," according to the Wall Street Journal. (Nothing like dredging up World War II imagery when Japan has greatly changed and is now a close ally.) He warns that a quick withdrawal could lead to chaos and another Khmer Rouge. "Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," he said.

But this is rewriting history, as the 1984 character Winston Smith saw it done. Instead of seeing the past as immutable, it become an assemblage of clay. When you want to support something you do today, you rearrange the parts, eliminating the ones you don't like, and trot out the "proof." But, again according to the Journal, some historians are upset by this comparison.

"The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early," says Steven Simon, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge." Ret. Army Brig. Gen. John Johns tells the Journal that what he "learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there, the worse it's going to get."

You won't hear too many politicians complain about this, because, at least in my opinion, the majority want access to the same tools to further their ends.

But nothing good can come out of pretending that the past is something other than it was beyond trying to interpret what happened. To remake history is to lie - no other word fits this. But it's not a lie just told to someone else, but to yourself. When you lie to yourself, you destroy your reason. How can you effectively be rational at all if you won't see what is there and insist on making your decisions based on personal fancy? That means we now have a generation of politicians that do their work in a dream world, where the building blocks of experience are set tumbling and the very material of thought - language - is warped and twisted for expediency. Is there any wonder why our country has become so messed up?

National Archives Find Lincoln Note

The Associated Press reports that the National Archives stumbled upon an important historic document:

a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln exhorting his generals to pursue Robert E. Lee's army after the battle of Gettysburg, underscoring one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War.

The text had been public knowledge because it was addressed to a general who then telegraphed the contents to the front lines at Gettysburg. Archivist Trevor Plante had literally been looking for something else when he came across this paper stuck in a desk drawer.