More on Mozart

Heard on Yellowstone Public Radio's Sunday Classics:

The humorist Roy Blount, Jr., said, “Homer is cruel, Shakespeare is uneven, Faulkner goes overboard, and Ray Charles has let his band get too big, but the pleasures of Mozart are unqualifiable.”

TVEyes | New Online Search

According to SearchEngineWatch, TVEyes has announced a new key word search service which allows users to search by key words spoken during TV news segments. Included in the search are newscasts from

• FoxNews.com
• CNN.com
• MSNBC.com
• CBSnews.com
• Reuters.com
• News.BBC.co.uk

The search results include source, date, a snippet of transcript which shows the context for the search term, a screenshot of the news source, and a link to the full clip. Apparently, the service is just starting and not entirely at full strength, but it looks like a wonderful addition for news searches.

Department of Ingenious People

Honda Civic UK has an amazing ad in which a choir imitates the sounds made by a moving Civic. Your can view it at the Honda web site; after the Flash introduction, choose the Watch option.

ALA Announces Book Winners

This week, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the literary award winners for books and video for children and young adults. Criss Cross (pictured above) by Lynn Rae Perkins won the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature, and The Hello, Goodbye Window by Norton Juster and Chris Raschka (illustrator) won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children.

See the complete list of award winners on the ALA web site.

Classic American Architecture for Fido

Above, 19th c. Greek Revival doghouse, with inspiration in background. (Photo by Alison Rosa)

This Old House web site offers an article on 5 Doghouses Crafted in Classic American Architecture. It's a painless way to learn about the key features of five classic American home designs: Greek Revival, Victorian, Craftsman, Tutor, and Georgian.

Mozart's 250th Birthday

January 27th marks the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth. His Horn Concertos would be enough for nHumanities to love and honor him forever, but Mozart was so much more. Here are the essential links on Mozart:

• National Public Radio's list of anniversary stories covering many aspects of Mozart's life and work and including performances (searchable)
• Must-Have Mozart, favorite recordings of Mozart's music selected by Nicholas Kenyon, director of the BBC Proms and author of The Faber Pocket Guide to Mozart
• Mozart 2006, Austria's official web site for the anniversary celebration -- includes an online promotional video and links to events in Salzburg and Vienna
• The Mozart Project, biography, compositions, etc.
• The Genius of Mozart, BBC production
• The Mozart Effect from the Human Intelligence Lab at University of Indiana

Too Many Trebuchets? Nonsense!

Oh bliss! Oh joy! nHumanities just spent an enraptured hour watching trebuchets smash ersatz castle walls with 250 lb. stones on Secrets of Lost Empires: Medieval Siege. NOVA assembled teams of engineers and craftsmen in Scotland to test two hypothetical trebuchet models, similar--the producers believe--to those used by Edward Longshanks in his siege of Scot castles. Both models worked famously.

You, too, can watch this wonderful program thanks to encore broadcasts this week:

Wyoming Public Television (cable channel 10 KCWC)

• Wednesday, January 25, 1:00 AM
• Saturday, January 28, 4:00 PM
• Sunday, January 29, 12:00 AM
• Sunday, January 29, 3:00 AM
  

Denver Public Television (cable channel 9 KUED)

• Friday, January 27, 12:00 AM
• Sunday, January 29, 2:00 PM
  

---

For past nHumanities posts on trebuchets, see

• Punkin Chunkin' Trebuchet (01Dec05)
• More on Trebuchets (22Jun05)
• Trebuchet of the day (26Apr05)
  

The Magic of Harry Potter

From Safety: With Harry Potter, Injuries Dip Like Magic, originally published in The New York Times:

British researchers report that on the weekends when the last two books of the series came out, young people made far fewer visits to an Oxford emergency room. . . .

The effect, it turns out, was significant. The researchers looked at how many children ages 7 to 15 went to the E.R. with musculoskeletal injuries on the 2003 weekend after "The Order of the Phoenix" was published, and on the 2005 weekend of "The Half-Blood Prince." They compared these numbers with admissions in a three-year period.

On the Harry Potter weekends, they found, the admission rates went down by almost half - even though each was a pleasant summer weekend when business in the E.R. would ordinarily be good.

The authors see the possibility of broadening the benefit. "It may therefore be hypothesized," they wrote, "that there is a place for a committee of safety-conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention."

See the original study at BMJ.com: Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident Prone Children

American Word Origins

Answers.com has added American Word Origins to its database. Now you can determine easily that you-all entered our nation's lexicon in 1824; airlines originate in 1813, long before airplanes existed; and groovy doesn't belong to the hippies since it was born in 1937 (African-American jazz musicians coined it in the early 1930s).

Botswana, Beef, and Cowboys

Sher Hruska, vice president for academic affairs, will launch the NWC Spring Writers Series Tuesday, Jan. 24, with a reading and travelogue program from a journal she kept on a recent trip to Africa.

Her presentation, which begins at 7:30 p.m. in Room 70 of the Fagerberg Building, follows a trek Hruska made through South Africa, Namibia and Botswana earlier this year. She’ll accompany her narrative with photography taken during the journey, offering what she calls “memorable moments with the people and animals of those lands.”

Hruska traveled mostly through remote and rural areas, accompanying her son, Tracy, who had just finished his research on the rhinoceros populations and habitat in those regions.

“Botswana is the Wyoming of Africa,” Hruska discovered. “Lots of beef and cowboys. And like Wyoming, this country also struggles with the often conflicting desires for development and protection of a precious way of life.” she said.

In all three countries she visited, Hruska found incredible openness and ever-present risks. “I came away with appreciation for the people we met and the complex challenges” they face in these new, yet surprisingly stable, democracies located in the southern most tip of the continent.

Hruska’s presentation is sponsored by the Northwest College Writers Series, in cooperation with the NWC Multicultural Series. Tom Rea, author of “Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur” will be the guest writer at the next Writers series program Feb. 13.

"What good shall I do today?" -- BF

(At left, Benjamin Franklin painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Ref. NPG.87.43)

Today is Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday--his tercentenary. Franklin is the first man of genius which America produced who achieved international status: statesman, author, printer, diplomat, scientist, inventor, postmaster, and philanthropist. He was revered by his peers primarily as a scientist and statesman, vilified later by the Romantics as a money-grubbing utilitarian, and now rehabilitated for our own age as a true polymath.

At nHumanities, we honor him as a writer. In Philadephia, Franklin helped found the Junto, a club of like-minded individuals who read and debated issues with the aim of self-improvement. For the Junto, Franklin wrote this query, which still forms some of the best advice available on writing style:

How shall we judge of the goodness of a writing? Or what qualities should a writing have to be good and perfect in its kind?

Answer. To be good, it ought to have a tendency to benefit the reader, by improving his virtue or his knowledge. But, not regarding the intention of the author, the method should be just; that is, it should proceed regularly from things known to things unknown, distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words used should he the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonymes should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily, it should be smooth, clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing.

But, taking the query otherwise, an ill man may write an ill thing well; that is, having an ill design, he may use the properest style and arguments (considering who are to be readers) to attain his ends. In this sense, that is best wrote, which is best adapted for obtaining the end of the writer.

--A query written by Franklin for the Junto

Another writer on these pages prefers a a different work by Franklin--one which reveals Franklin's humor and satire. In the "Old Mistresses Apologue," Franklin advises a young friend "that in all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones." To support this advice, Franklin gives numerous sound reasons, ending with "8thly and Lastly They are so grateful!!"

In honor of Franklin's birthday, here are some useful links which will improve the reader's knowledge and virtue:

• Ben from Clusty.com, a search engine devoted to all things Franklin (including images and teaching resources)
  
• Benjamin Franklin, A Documentary History, from J. A. Leo Lemay
• Benjamin Franklin, resources and links from PBS to support its 3-part biography
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library
  
  

Let's give Ben the last word. When he was 22, he composed this epitaph for himself--nothing seems more appropriate for a person to whom books and the written word were so important:

The body of
B. Franklin, Printer
(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents torn Out
And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)
Lies Here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be Lost;
For it will (as he Believ'd) Appear once More
In a New and More Elegant Edition
Revised and Corrected
By the Author.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

nHumanities thinks it's a shame--literally--that Wyoming does not recognize Martin Luther King, Jr., Day and instead acknowledges a hybrid Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyoming Equality Day (passed into law in 2000), usually shortened to "Equality Day."

Equality Day.

If you Google that one, you'll find pages of results related to Women's Equality Day (it occurred August 26th) and the Religious Coalition for Equality's Equality Day (it'll be January 23rd), but you'll have to search long and deep in your results to find mention of Wyoming's Equality Day. (We gave up after 11 pages of results.)

According to the Infoplease web site, Congress passed the Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 with Ronald Reagan signing the legislation into law. Infoplease reports,

A number of states resisted celebrating the holiday. Some opponents said King did not deserve his own holiday--contending that the entire civil rights movement rather than one individual, however instrumental, should be honored. Several southern states include celebrations for various Confederate generals on that day. Arizona voters approved the holiday in 1992 after a tourist boycott. In 1999, New Hampshire changed the name of Civil Rights Day to Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

The web site does not mention that resistance to the holiday apparently still exists in Wyoming.

We think a nice way to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is to visit some of the wonderful web sites on the internet that celebrate the great man's life:

• The King Center, established by his widow Coretta Scott King
• The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, established by Stanford University
  
• The new Martin Luther King, Jr., Newspaper Archive, which documents more than 50,000 historical newspaper pages
• Dr. King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech (delivered in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, the night before his death), from American RadioWorks web site Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches
• The Poynter Institute's Links to the News on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, an incredible list of online sources

Wyoming on lii.org

This week, the Librarians' Internet Index (lii.org)--one of our favorite ways to search the Deep Web--newly lists some useful resources on Wyoming:

• Wyoming Memory Portal--a digital archive of Wyoming history, created by the Wyoming State Library's Statewide Digitization Committee and hosted by the University of Wyoming Libraries. (Picture at right comes from the web site's collections.)
• About Wyoming--history and facts about Wyoming from the State of Wyoming.
• Be Our Guest: Dude Ranching in Wyoming--from University of Wyoming's Visiting Faculty Dr. Amanda Rees.
  

Search Engine Zeitgeist

Many of the top internet search engines compile their stats annually to see if "the aggregation of billions of search queries" reveals anything interesting.

Google, for instance, issues an annual Zeitgeist in several categories, such as World Affairs, Nature, Movies, Celebrities, and Phenomena. It's top searches for Google News were

1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter

Yahoo! Search compiles a similar group of lists at 2005 Top Searches; its top news searches were

1. Tsunami
2. Iraq
3. Michael Jackson trial
4. Natalee Holloway
5. Afghanistan
6. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
7. Hurricane Katrina
8. Cindy Sheehan
9. President Bush
10. Tom Cruise

Ask Jeeves offers similar analysis, and AOL.com does, too. Since MSN Search made major changes to its search engine this year, its 2005 results are released yet.

Expressions of Literary Gratitude

• Jean Louis Costes encouraged me exuberantly not only while we were actually living this book, but even through rough drafts detailing his creepier relationships or his briefly failing member. He is the best ex-husband in the world. --Lisa Crystal Carver, Drugs Are Nice.
• Along those lines - thanks respectively to Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories and Stuart Pharmaceuticals for further expanding that narrow channel of joy by manufacturing Effexor and Elavil; drugs so good they feel illegal. --Thom Jones, Cold Snap.
• Then there is Naaman Seigle, who was in the wrong place and still retains some of his original anger over being gassed. --Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, Bonus Army.
• My hands, damaged by the residual effects of frostbite, suffered so badly during the winters in the punishment unit of the prison that many pages of the manuscript journal, which survived and which I still have with me, are stained and streaked with my blood. --Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram.
• Don't read "your" chapter out of sequence or you'll be even angrier with me. Read the chapters in the right order and then decide who has been betrayed by whom. --Charles Palliser, Betrayals.
• You have inspired me like Goliath inspired David, and like David, with my measly slingshot I vow to the world that I will personally help stop the needless suffering of millions of people that you are directly causing. Your organizations and the individual people involved will be exposed, disgraced and defeated. --Kevin Trudeau, Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About.

All quotations are book acknowledgements taken from The New York Times article "I Thank You," by Henry Alford.

"The Unrest-Cure"

The academic year is always hectic, but we at nHumanities are just plain exhausted. Fall Finals ended on December 23, the grades were due January 2, meetings for the Spring semester started January 9, and classes began January 11--an inhumane holiday schedule if ever one was devised.

Consequently, we just read Saki's short story "The Unrest-Cure" with delight. Saki is the pen name of H. H. Munro (1870-1916), a Scot who wrote satires about Edwardian society that are reminiscent of Dorothy Parker and O. Henry.

In "The Unrest-Cure," Saki's recurring character Clovis overhears the middle-aged, complacent Rev. Mr. Huddle complaining to a friend:

"I don't know how it is," he told his friend, "I'm not much over forty, but I seem to have settled down into a deep groove of elderly middle-age. My sister shows the same tendency. We like everything to be exactly in its accustomed place; we like things to happen exactly at their appointed times; we like everything to be usual, orderly, punctual, methodical, to a hair's breadth, to a minute. It distresses and upsets us if it is not so. For instance, to take a very trifling matter, a thrush has built its nest year after year in the catkin-tree on the lawn; this year, for no obvious reason, it is building in the ivy on the garden wall. We have said very little about it, but I think we both feel that the change is unnecessary, and just a little irritating."

"Perhaps," said the friend, "it is a different thrush."

"We have suspected that," said J. P. Huddle, "and I think it gives us even more cause for annoyance. We don't feel that we want a change of thrush at our time of life . . .."

The friend recommends an "unrest-cure" as a solution to the Huddle household's discontent, and Clovis, who has overheard the entire conversation, decides to amuse himself by delivering the unrest-cure himself.

The story doesn't take ten minutes to read, and we highly recommend it as an antidote to a jaundiced-eyed view of the world.

(We recommend the Project Gutenberg edition of The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki. After clicking on the link, use your browser's "find" function to locate "The Unrest-Cure.")

The Prejudice Map

Here's a delightful idea: go to Google and type in the search phrase, "Germans are known for" and then see what comes up. Repeat for various countries around the world. Place the results on a map. Presto--the Prejudice Map, or, the world according to Google.

Here's the link to the full blown version of the map.

2005 in Review

(Photo from NPPA's best photojournalism of 2005 -- link below.)

Plato quotes Socrates as saying the unexamined life is not worth living, so nHumanities pauses at the start of 2006 to review 2005. Online, one of the best ways to gaze at our collective navel is by reviewing end-of-the-year lists.

Lists:2005 from Fimoculous.com provides an aggregate of all 2005 lists, including such gems as

• 25 Dumbest Quotes,
  
• Time's Top 50 websites,
  
• The New York Times Magazine's year in ideas (yep, the Anti-Rape Condom made the list),
  
• the 2005 American Architecture Awards,
  
• Ms. Magazine's Top Ten News Stories for Women in 2005,
  
• 100Notable Books of the Year from The New York Times,
  
• PublishersWeekly.com's Best Children's Books of 2005 (Hooray! The Problem with Chickens made the list)
  
• Salon.com's Beyond the Multiplex: The Best of 2005 ("It was the year of the penguin and the gay cowboy -- but don't forget the Chinese theme park and Syrian bride." Free registration required to view article.)
  
• The Worst Jobs in Science from Popular Science (being a science teacher in Kansas . . . pretty bad)
  
• New York Magazine's Culture Awards 2005: Art,
  
• The 10 Best Music Videos of 2005 posted by Entertainment Weekly,
  
• Top 10 Political Humor Videos of 2005, including Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Global Warming
  
• The 100 Best Companies listed by Working Mother (criterion: policies which make the companies family-friendly),
  
• Wired News's 2005's 10 Sexiest Geeks (no, that's not an oxymoron),
  
• PCWorld.com's 100 Best Products of 2005 (including, as product of the year, Firefox -- if
  you haven't switched browsers yet, do it now!)
  
• ModFabulous: Best Television of 2005,
  
• Top 20 Games of 2005 from jay is games.com (Warning! this webpage will eat hours of your time -- we're already embroiled in the BBC's Death in Sakkura),
  
• Sports Illustrated's Pictures from the Year,
  
• The Best of Photojournalism 2005 from the National Press Photographers Association,
  
• a slideshow of the year's best political cartoons from Newsweek,
  
• The 40 Best Albums of 2005 from SPIN.com or -- alternately -- the The Least Essential Albums of 2005 from The Onion/A.V.Club, and
  
• Top 10 from grocerylists.org (a collection of other people's grocery lists which have been found).

Bonus list: Top Ten Archive from The Late Show with David Letterman -- CBS created the archive of Letterman's trademark top ten lists because "The Smithsonian has asked us to do our part to organize and preserve our nation's precious comedy heritage."

Cryin' Those Old Computer Blues

Many years ago, at the dawn of the personal computing age, a poet visiting Northwest brought along his "portable" computer, which in those days was as large as a mid-size piece of luggage. When asked why so many Humanities types were enamored of computers, he replied with a phrase from Whitman: “They make the word electric.”

These days, most of us Humanities types aren’t just enamored of computers, we are addicted to them. While Computer Services takes care of our campus machines, we get downright cranky when our personal computers bog down with what seems an inevitable accumulation of digital sludge and plaque.

To start the new year off, nHumanities offers some online help in tuning your computer, as well a few suggestions for preventive maintenance.

Adware and spyware are constant irritations. Here are two of our old favorites for dealing with this junk. Both are free:

• Ad-Aware from Lavasoft removes popup ads which have been planted on your computer.
• Spybot Search and Destroy scrubs off malicious programs which track your web movements.
• (As readers of nHumanties know, we are big fans of Firefox, which does a better job of avoiding many of these problems than Internet Explorer. We'll have more to say about Firefox at a later date.)
  

One of the biggest reasons computers slow down has to do with the number of programs which get loaded into memory and stored on your hard drive.

• How to Maintain a Healthy Windows System offers a great overview of some simple and free programs to help your system.
• PC World has a nice article on Troubleshooting Windows which gives instructions on using msconfig so that you can control what is being loaded into memory. (It also offers advice on using the defrag command. With the large hard drives computers have today, we suggest starting defrag just before you go to bed.)
• Before you defrag your drive, we recommend running CCleaner -- you'll be amazed at the sheer volume of unnecessary files it cleans off.
• The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities has a great list of free programs for computer upkeep.
• WinPatrol is a slick little program which monitors what is running on your computer, as well as screening adware and performing a number of other useful little tasks.
• Holding down CTRL - ALT - DELETE pops open Windows Task Manager. Clicking on Processes allows you to see which processes are running on your computer. Most of us have no idea what these files do. You can find out by going to Process Library, which will explain what the processes are doing and if you can terminate them or not.

As always, we recommend backing up your data regularly. (Speaking of backing material up, keep in mind that external hard drives which run off a USB2 port have dropped dramatically in price and are widely available for as little as $80. There's no installation--just plug them in.)

P.S. We should have included this nifty little utility in our original list. As much as we may be in denial, we all know that sooner or later the hard drive in our computer will fail. The good news is that now you can have some warning. Modern hard drives come with built in S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology), which will let you know when the drive is beginning to feel puny or nearing the big sleep. A number of programs take advantage of this feature and provide you with updates on the status of your drive. HDD Health is a nice one (and free). Here's a link to download a copy.

Photo by Norman Ellison and taken from National Library of Australia News.