Got the time

From Clocks, a brief and picture-heavy book by Simon Fleet:

Small water-clocks were used in the Athenian Courts to limit the time a lawyer was allowed to speak. This led to those who filled the water-clocks being bribed by lawyers to fill only partially the container when rivals were pleading, and so reduce their opponents' allotted time, and the same thing used to happen in Rome under Pompey. There is a story that a Roman prisoner's life was saved by a pebble falling into a water-clock, which made the water drip so slowly that it gave extra time for some delayed evidence to arrive, which acquitted him of murder.

As Fleet notes elsewhere in the book, the timing of things down to the minute wasn't considered a necessity until the rise of the railroads in the nineteenth century. Up until that point, clocks were mostly considered a luxury. But duration, at the very least, was important in some respects, as in the Greek and Roman court systems. Perhaps it's not too surprising that the clocks of the time were sometimes used and abused in corrupt ways. Of course if you were an innocent man on trial for your life, you wouldn't object to their being a bit fallible.

Norse intensity

I just watched The Night Visitor. It's a movie from 1971. Max von Sydow plays an erstwhile farmer whose sister and brother-in-law framed him for murder years earlier. Now he's locked away in an asylum but he figures out a way to get out and back in, and he's got no compunctions about killing people for real now. It's sort of a Vincent Price role, but more physical. If von Sydow did a fraction of his own stunts then wow. Trevor Howard is a police inspector looking into the new murders and the old one. The cast includes Swedish, Danish, and British actors, and there's no real attempt to hide that.

It's all filmed in Sweden, though. Sweden in what appears to be the depths of winter. At one point you can see a bevy of swans swimming off a snowy shore. Wintry Sweden is really quite picturesque. Although I don't think I'd recommend running around everywhere in your skivvies, as von Sydow's character does through most of the movie.

Dee plus

It's interesting to see in a couple of different sources the suggestion that William Shakespeare might have based Prospero on John Dee. Prospero is the protagonist of The Tempest, a powerful magician, and also an exile. That would sort of seem to fit. 

John Dee in life was an accomplished mathematician and scientist, who also had a serious interest in the occult. The same could be said of Isaac Newton. It was less of an anomaly in Elizabeth I's time than it is in ours, when scientists are expected to be materialists only. And it just so happens we remember Newton for one thing and Dee for another.

Of course it's just something to ponder. Even if the Bard were still alive I'm not sure he could or would elucidate things.

Cyberpunk all night and party every day

I just finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. Not the first Gibson I've read. I'd previously read The Difference Engine, which he wrote with Bruce Sterling and which formalized steampunk fiction. Also The Peripheral. But Neuromancer is the one that kicked things off from him.

It's definitely influential. The seedy Pacific Rim setting, for one thing. The girlfriend who has herself programmed with kickass martial arts moves. Something like The Matrix movies wouldn't be imaginable without this book. A lot of synth & samples musicians have paid tribute to Neuromancer as well. 

And Silicon Valley has done their best to make this world real. Well, the villains in the book live pretty high off the digital hog. No wonder someone wants to emulate them.

Here kitty

This is kind of a déjà vu. I was walking home from a grocery run and saw a cat nearby. To give you some context, I was walking up a street that's basically a bridge. The cat was just off and under, on a hill. I could tell it was a domestic cat from the collar. This is not a great place for a cat to be, because it's close to the highway. Nor could I get to the cat. The whole setup of the bridge discourages that, for obvious reasons. Plus, the cat was already retreating despite the separation between us, so it probably would have broken into an all out run otherwise. 

I did describe what I saw in an entry on the Providence subReddit. Someone who responded said they think they know where the cat lives. I'm hoping the owners or somebody can do something from the other side.

Words for snow

It's interesting to take a look at the Sámi people. For the most part, they live in Northern Scandinavia and Finland. Their language is Uralic rather than Indo-European. Uralic languages also abound in Siberia and a few other spots in Asia. Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are all Uralic languages as well, and of course they're in Europe. But Sámi are different because many of them have maintained a nomadic lifestyle. In that way they have something in common with the Eurasian populations of thousands of years ago.

“Learning to read snow is crucial to proper reindeer migration,” says Frandy. Being able to identify and name skarta, for example, which means fallen rain has formed a hard layer of crust atop the snow, making wildlife grazing difficult, is an essential tool for herders. But reading snow can also tell you a bigger story about the season in general. “The way that snow packs, in particular, tells you a larger story about winter,” he says. "As the layers accumulate, it becomes a record of the season so far and you develop a relationship to it.”

That's led them to have a knowledge of and relationship to the natural environment, one which blows away those of us who live in more settled areas. 

Nice wheels

Yesterday, I was walking down the street and in the parking lot of the YMCA, there was a Dodge Challenger. Late 60s or early 70s model, I'd say offhand. A good Nixon Era sports car. It was painted sunshine yellow, which made it stand out even more. 

I wouldn't really call myself a car guy. In fact, both Eastern and (if you dig a little deeper) Western religions have apt warnings about getting too hung up on material possessions. Still, the owner of that car seems to have done an admirable job in keeping it nice-looking and roadworthy. Beauty comes in many forms.