browsing in my Wikipedia history

Posted on Wednesday, 2023 June 21 by Anton

I have been active on Wikipedia since 2005, mostly making incremental improvements – correcting punctuation here, tightening sloppy language there – with emphasis on heraldry and polytopes but wandering over a very wide range of subjects as whim takes me.

I have set the option to add to my watchlist whatever I modify. The result was a watchlist far too big for me to keep up. (Until recently there was no option to watch for a limited time.) A few months ago I began a campaign to trim that down from 18511, one by one; at the moment it’s 14876. In a year or two I should have it licked.

I have also been looking at my past participation on Talk pages, and am gratified at how often this happened: someone said “we should rename this article to …”; others pointed out disadvantages of the proposed new title; and I, coming in late, proposed yet another title, which was adopted. Among them: “Ambiguities in Chinese character simplification”, “Fossil fuels lobby”, “Growth hormone in sports”.

Posted in me!me!me! | 1 Comment

a question of boundaries

Posted on Tuesday, 2023 April 25 by Anton

If I were in charge of the partition of India, I’d do it bottom-up. Starting with the smallest practical districts, ask in each one: For each of your neighbors, would you amalgamate? Do the most favored mergers (skipping any that would create enclaves), and ask again.

(It appears that I had this idea first for Iraq after US occupation and later applied it to India.)

I imagine the result as perhaps a hundred unitary states in twenty confederations, each including both new republics and old monarchies.

A new thought. Suppose that, where mergers are least popular, we make the boundary permanent and not ask again. We might end up with some C-shaped states, partly divided by an internal boundary (imagine that France’s borders include the Loire). What would that mean?

Posted in geography, politics | 1 Comment

rolling top hits

Posted on Friday, 2023 April 07 by Anton

Rhino Records made a series of CDs of Billboard Top Ten songs for various years. I wonder, if you summed every sequence of 52 consecutive weeks, how many songs would show in those Rolling Top Tens that never made a calendar year Top Ten?

Being nerdy, I might suggest this to Rhino: package the Top Ten of the chart’s first 52 weeks, and thereafter make a new package each time ten songs not in a previous package have reached the Rolling Top Ten.

Posted in music+verse | Leave a comment

someone please make this movie

Posted on Saturday, 2023 March 25 by Anton

I have a very vague – call it abstract – memory of watching the beginning of this movie, but it seems not to exist, so I guess it was a dream.

The main character is a spy’s only daughter. Daddy (now dead) taught her to lose a tail, improvise a disguise, pick a lock, do basic forgery; normal father-daughter bonding stuff. She is now grown up with a career to which such skills are irrelevant, but in establishing scenes she practices them for fun.

She meets a girl (~14) who is running from Bad People and distrustful of the ostensibly Good institutions. She becomes the girl’s protector, and suddenly spycraft matters.

The local spooks become aware of her and are rattled. Who is this new player? How long has she been here? What else has she been up to, and for whom?

Posted in cinema, me!me!me! | 1 Comment

RDCB

Posted on Thursday, 2023 March 02 by Anton

A generation ago, it was reported that Readers Digest Condensed Books planned an edition of The Bible, provoking obvious jokes that it would cut three Commandments and four Apostles.

Now that I’m reading the thing, though, I do see where it could be shortened with little risk of offense.

  • Genesis and Exodus contain several repeated genealogies.
  • Exodus 36–39 could be summarized: “The tabernacle and its furnishings were made according to the detailed plans dictated to Moses by The LORD in chapters 25–27.” (I mostly skimmed over these chapters.)
  • Leviticus 1–7, prescribing rituals of sacrifice for all occasions, could be put more concisely in table format, as could various parts of Numbers.
  • Leviticus 13–14, concerning skin infections, may be obsolete.
  • Leviticus 18:6–18 details varieties of incest, all equally forbidden, and could be collapsed with “or”.
  • Joshua 13–21 mostly details the boundaries of the lands allotted to each of the tribes.

I will likely add to this later.

In some places the repetition makes me think the tale was relayed orally for some generations before being written.

Posted in prose, religion | 1 Comment

qualified peeve

Posted on Wednesday, 2023 February 01 by Anton

Not a week goes by when I don’t read that some trial court has “granted qualified immunity” to some criminal with a badge. That’s inaccurate. The aggressor was granted qualified immunity by the Supreme Court when it invented that doctrine in 1982.

In the popular mind, I guess that word “qualified” is taken to mean that the officer qualifies for immunity as a consequence of his office. But here it is a legal term of art meaning “conditional”, contrasting with the absolute immunity enjoyed by judges and prosecutors in their abuses of discretion.

When a trial court says to a plaintiff, “No recourse for you, because you haven’t cited a published precedent finding liability with exactly similar facts,” it applies the QI rule; but there is nothing qualified about the dismissal. (The q-word would apply if the judge were to dismiss the case without prejudice, allowing the possibility of a new trial if new facts come to light. Does that ever happen in police cases?)

When the pig is so unlucky as to violate “clearly established law”, he still has qualified immunity, which happens not to protect him for this incident.

Posted in language, law | Leave a comment

my citizenship(s)

Posted on Saturday, 2022 December 31 by Anton

The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I was born overseas to US citizen parents, and am thus a citizen by the Nationality Act of 1952 rather than by the literal language of the Constitution. So I have always wondered: as that clause does not apply to me, am I a citizen of any State? and if so which – one or more of those where I have resided, and/or the one where my parents resided before getting on the boat? Perhaps there is something in the laws of those States, enacted before 1868 and never repealed. (The constitution of California, where I dwelt longest, makes no mention of state citizenship.)

Now it occurs to me that the authority for the Nationality Acts must come from the power

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization

(Article I section 8); so I was naturalized in advance.

Posted in law, me!me!me! | 1 Comment