Reading

side-tracks off side-tracks

One of the things I found yesterday, while getting distracted from transcription by regretting not having taken History and Philosophy of Science (or, more accurately, not having shown up to the lectures to just listen), was some tantalising notes on the existence of a four-lecture series entitled Visual Culture in Science and Medicine:

Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.

I've managed to track down a one-hour video (that I've obviously not consumed yet, because audiovisual processing augh). Infuriatingly Kusukawa's book on the topic only covers the sixteenth century, not the full timespan of the lectures, and also it's fifty quid for the PDF. I have located a sample of the thing, consisting of the front matter and the first fifteen pages of the introduction (it cuts off IN MID SENTENCE).

Now daydreaming idly about comparative study of this + Tufte, which I also haven't got around to reading...

Entry tags:

on pain of pain

a confession: today I have bought two more translations of Descartes

Item the first: the 1972 Harvard University Press Treatise of Man, translated by Thomas Steele Hall. This translation is quoted by two of the other books I'm working with, Pain: the science of suffering by Patrick Wall (1999), and The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021). It is also an edition that, as I understand it, contains a facsimile of the first French edition (1664, itself a translation of the Latin published in 1662). My French is not up to reading actual seventeenth-century philosophy, but being able to spot-check a couple of paragraphs will be Useful For My Argument.

Item the second: Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1997). This doesn't contain Treatise on Man, but it's the translation of Meditations on First Philosophy that's quoted in The Story of Pain by Joanna Bourke (2014).

Meanwhile the Descartes essay, thus far composed primarily but not solely of quotations from other works, has somehow made it north of 4500 words. I think it might even be starting to make an argument.

( Read more... )

I am resisting the urge to try to turn this into a Proper Survey Of Popular Books On Pain, because that sounds like a lot of work that will probably involve reading a bunch of philosophers I find profoundly irritating, and also THIS IS A TOTAL DISTRACTION from the ACTUAL WORK I AM TRYING TO DO. But it's a distraction that is getting me writing, so I'll take it.

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

(Last week's also now exists and is no longer a placeholder!)

Reading. Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. I want to be very, very clear: unless you are specifically researching attitudes and beliefs in pain clinics in early 2020s England, or similar, do not read this book. There are bad history and no references, appalling opinions on patients (), quite possibly the worst hyphenation choice I have ever seen, stunning omissions and misrepresentations of pain science, and It's Weird That It Happened Twice soup metaphors. Fuller review (or at least annotated bibliography entry) to follow, maybe.

Some further progress on Florencia Clifford's Feeding Orchids to the Slugs ("Tales from a Zen kitchen"), which I acquired from Oxfam in a moment of weakness primarily for EYB purposes at a point when it was extremely discounted. It is primarily a somewhat disjointed memoir for which I am not the target audience, but hey, Books To Go Back In The Charity Shop Pile but that I wouldn't actually hate reading were exactly the goal, so that's a victory. Mostly. I'm a little over halfway through it, sticking book darts on pages that contain recipes for easier reference when I go back through on the actual indexing pass.

I absolutely needed something that was not going to make me furious and furthermore that was not going to be demanding, and there's a new one in the series, so I have now reread several Scalzi: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades completed, The Lost Colony in progress.

I've also had a very quick flick through the mentions of Descartes in Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain, which is my next Pain Book. She does better than everyone else I've read, but I still think she's misinterpreting Treatise on Man. (Why do I have strongly-held opinions on Descartes now. CAN I NOT.)

Playing. ( Inkulinati, Monument Valley )

Cooking. SOUP.

smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto, two batches thereof, because I had promised A burrata to go with and then (1) the supermarket was out of it and (2) the opened part-pack of feta wound up doing two days quite comfortably, so the second batch was required For Burrata Purposes.

I have also established that the pistachio croissant strata works very well in one of the loaf tins if you scale it down to 50% quantities because there were only 3 discount croissants at the supermarket (... because you had to wait and watch the person who got there JUST ahead of you taking Most Of Them...), which also conveniently used up the dregs of the cream that I had in the fridge.

Eating. Tagine out the freezer (thank you past Alex). Relatively fresh dried apple. A very plain lunch at Teras in Seydikemer, which was apparently the magic my digestive system needed to settle itself down! And I am very much enjoying my dark chocolate raspberry stars. :)

some good things (a post)

Breakfast in bed, accompanied by completing my first ever playthrough of the main body of Monument Valley. I think I wound up getting two prompts from A, who also spent a significant chunk of the afternoon attempting to get it working on two different large-format touchscreen devices -- I'd been struggling with the trackpad, and was gratified when A reported that they'd had a go at playing the very first level with a trackpad and it really was kind of wretched. (Made it to approximately halfway through Appendix 1 before deciding I needed to call it for the day...)
smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto continues fantastic.
'tis The Season for my current Favourite Chocolate (I'm not sure if it's available year-round but the company we get groceries from only carries them during the winter, and I honestly probably enjoy them more because of the Seasonal Availability). I am writing this post with one of them + a mug of warm milk.
The box of meds I dropped in an airport this Monday gone has successfully been picked up! First step in a pass-the-parcel that will hopefully conclude weekend after next...
Got a substantial increase on my highest score in one of the silly clicky games in Flight Rising :)

quick note re bookshop.org

Previously: uk.bookshop.org were selling a Tor ebook with DRM applied, which I only noticed after I had bought it, because all? Tor ebooks? are DRM-free? at the request of the publisher? Like, Hive applies DRM to them, but given that bookshop.org lets you filter for DRM-free, this... was surprising.

My initial support request for (1) an explanation and (2) any chance of a refund, realise this is totally on me though, ... got me an almost-immediate refund, which I was not expecting, and a very entry-level explanation of What DRM Is, which I sort of was. So I wrote back saying thank you very much, and also, Tor went famously DRM-free in about 2012, and they're definitely supplying this specific ebook to other retailers without DRM applied.

There was A Pause.

A day or two later I received a response from someone with "Senior" in their signature, thanking me for my patience and saying they were Investigating.

A few days after that I noticed that the ebook in question was now marked DRM-free: hurrah! ... but when I bought it, and clicked on the "yes please download my DRM-free ebook" button, nothing happened.

I did not write back in because I have been. preoccupied.

But a few days after that I tried again and this time the download did work! So hurrah for bookshop.org needing me to do much less assertive escalation than I'd been expecting, and also for noticing that something was still broken and Fixing It without me needing to get around to e-mailing in about it.

... the quick part of this note was going to be: I know there were Questions on my first post about Hey They're Doing Ebooks Now, about how you actually filter for DRM-free. As far as I can tell this isn't actually possible from the ebooks landing page, which seems A Pity, BUT when you search for something (which can absolutely be as vague as "science fiction"), the FORMAT dropdown lets you filter for DRM-free ebooks only. Obviously this is Not Ideal, in that one might actually like to browse All DRM-Free Ebooks, but it does exist as an option, where as far as I can tell it doesn't, at all, on e.g. Kobo. Hopefully this knowledge is helpful! And certainly The Above Saga has caused me to think sufficiently positively of them that I'm likely to default to them for my ebooks in future.

Entry tags:

mudlarking

Mudlarking 69 - Ginger beer

I went to Chelsea, down the steps by the boats and walked between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, on the north side of the river. From the bus, I could see rainbows on the river, caused by the reflection of windows.

I spoke to a person on the foreshore and asked them what they'd found and they had found a ring, although a modern one.

I found a chunk of a stoneware ginger beer bottle - Clayton’s. It would have said on it:
Clayton’s
Old English
Stone
Ginger Beer
London and Kingston-on-Thames

I found two buttons.

The bus stop was still there, as well as a Lime bike.

A crisp packet floated by.

I found two stickers, one of which was a festive bauble.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Entry tags:

tech

Dr Crab Robot Reaches the Exit

I made ten levels for the programming puzzle game I wrote in rust!

Play online at the link: https://cartesiandaemon.github.io/rusttilegame/programming_release.html

It's clunky in several places but you can successfully play! Drag the instructions onto the flowchart. Press space to start the crab robot moving. Get them to the exit.

Leave the tab open, there's not yet any save :)

It's currently best played in a browser on a PC. (It works on mobile except that you need a spacebar. You can also build an exe for windows or Linux if you want, repo https://github.com/CartesianDaemon/rusttilegame)

Entry tags:

computer :-(

the inexorable passage of time and end of all things

For lo these many years (i.e. basically since I got a smartphone) I've been using Swype as an onscreen keyboard. Some time ago it was announced that it had reached end-of-life-and-support, but it wasn't until I went looking earlier today that I realised that happened in 2018, that being when I posted asking for suggestions for replacements.

And then I didn't think about it again for, apparently, approximately eight years, through several new phones and quite a lot of new major versions of Android... and then a few-ish weeks ago Fairphone rolled out Android 15 to the Fairphone 4 and alas That Was The End Of That.

Recommendations back in 2018 were for Gboard and Swiftkey; a question posted to reddit in 2022 garnered similar responses.

Since the Abrupt Keyboard Failure I've swapped to Gboard more or less by default. I don't hate the bit where language switching is now automatic (for the purposes of language learning apps, at any rate), but good grief I am missing the ability to e.g. type < or | without needing to go like three clicks deep in menus. Yes, when I have "Touch and hold keys for symbols" enabled -- as far as I can tell that only gives me one symbol per key, not "now select from a variety of them" as with the much-lamented Swype. I'm also missing the gestures I know for "yes, that word, but change the capitalisation", and still grumpily adjusting to the shift key mode cycle being in a different order to what I'm used to.

I've experimented briefly with AnySoftKey but rapidly got annoyed by the total lack of any Irish language pack (and how difficult it is to navigate the app listings to establish this fact). I'm trying to persuade myself that it's worth giving SwiftKey a try even though it (1) is now Microsoft, (2) has gone all-in on Bundling With Copilot, and (3) apparently "contains ads".

Eheu, alas, etc; all is woe; ... unless anyone knows of any other Android keyboards that provide ready access to All the punctuation...?

Entry tags:

mudlarking

Mudlarking 68 - Rain and Empires

It was raining so I went for a coffee while waiting for the rain to stop. It eventually did and I walked down onto Ernie’s Beach. It started raining again and I hid underneath Waterloo Bridge for a while. Not pleasant conditions for mudlarking.

Finds included:

Two pieces of Empire Ware. Empire Porcelain Co were based in Hanley and active from 1896 to 1967. https://www.thepotteries.org/allpotters/389.htm
One of these pieces is from the 1930s as Empire conveniently stamped their pottery with the month and year around that time. The 3 is quite visible.

Three pieces of Express Dairies.

It seems it was the river’s birthday. Happy birthday, River Thames!

A lid from something? Or a holder of something. It looks quite new somehow, so could be some kind of religious offering.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions is once again a placeholder

~~... to be expanded on tomorrow. <3~~ ("Tomorrow" was a lie; travel apparently took it out of me more than somewhat! So here I am instead on Sunday the 7^th of December...)

Reading. Treatise on Man, Descartes trans. Stephen Gaukroger. Very helpful, in that I now have a lot of opinions about what Descartes said that seem to be... decidedly in conflict with Received Wisdom about What Descartes Said. But, like, in such a way that I can see how they got there (by focussing on one paragraph in isolation) and can meaningfully argue that they're all wrong (based on the rest of the text). (Frustratingly many of the key passages supporting my interpretation are omitted from the other translation I have ready access to -- Cottingham -- and while my academic French is up to 1860s chemistry, I am not going to try reading the original text. In either language.)

Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. See next week for details.

Watching. We were visiting some of A's folk and their habit involves much more film watching than we normally get around to! Consequently I have rewatched Knives Out and The Glass Onion (which latter I think I actually liked more on rewatch than on my first go through, even if I do have ongoing quibbles with fiction that doesn't give you enough information that you can reasonably put clues together yourself before The Reveal Sequence), Kinky Boots (never seen it before and LOVED IT), and The Intouchables (also never seen it before, mildly impressed at what a solid go it made at being ~heartwarming~ despite all the workplace sexual harassment and, of course, the fundamental "millionaire pays immigrant to perform personal care work" of it all).

Playing. Inkulinati! Lots more thereof.

Also new-to-me games Rummikub (note "In Turkey, the game is known as [Okey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okey^{[citation needed]}") and Five Crowns. Extremely impressed with myself for picking both of these up via verbal instructions only without any panic attacks.

Eating. POMEGRANATES and ORANGES from the GARDEN.

( Read more... )

Exploring. Şehit Fehti Bey Parkı (SNAIL SCULPTURES (); local-to-that Tuesday Market feat. PERSIMMONS and ROSE BUDS FOR TEA and YOGHURT SERVED BY THE HALF KILO, and also many good ducks, and also so many quince and tiny medlar and many many other things; Babadağ Teleferik up to the 1200m station, where there was an utter lack of the kind of Walks For Tourists that I expected BUT we nonetheless met Some Very Good Dogs and also so many Quercus ilex; and the ancient city of Tlos, which I would very much like to visit again in future with a slightly more cooperative body. And of course the agricultural museum at Yalçin!

Observing. WE FOUND A BAT on an evening Stupid Little Walk to Get My Stupid Steps. Also GOATS and SQUASH and infinite cats and so on and so forth, but we were definitely most excited about the BAT.

Entry tags:

mudlarking

Mudlarking 67 - comb

A lunchtime lark and I found some bits of Westerwald, and what looks like a bit of a comb, with nit comb on one side, possibly bone.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore)

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

[pain] oh this book is bad

The terrible hyphenation one can reasonably attribute to a failure to invest in subject specialist proof readers (or possibly any proof readers at all, good grief).

The wildly ahistorical nonsense about the history of medicine? Less so. I begin to understand why there isn't a references section, and I've only made it as far as page 7 before needing to stop and shriek about it and also stare at a wall for a bit...

[pain] a strong contender for The Worst Possible Hyphenation

Spotted in today's book, with just as much of a medical theme as you might reasonably expect:

... biopsy-
chosocial...

Entry tags:

mudlarking

Mudlarking 66 - a rainbow and a non-spill ink well

I stood on the foreshore at Vauxhall and saw a rainbow appear over the Houses of Parliament, and that was my best find.

There was also a sculpture of a fish on the foreshore, just a metal outline.

Finds included:

A non-spill ink well! It's like magic, water goes in, but does not go out. This is likely Victorian.

A sherd that says “future” on it. This looks fairly modern but I'm not sure where it is from. Did Orange ever have promotional items with “the future is bright, the future is Orange” on them?

A sherd with a little bit of a Christmas tree on it, ready for the festive season!

What I thought was a bracelet, but I think it's actually a religious item - Hindu mala beads for an idol? I might take them back.

I stroked the lion’s mane as I left.