inbetween

Or something like that.

I was already tired of the old one, and I do like this one more.

I demand chocolate.

Not a piddily, stupid nestlé bar either. I DEMAND REAL chocolate. It shall be bitter-sweet chocolate, melted into an almost-boiling cream/milk mixture with a touch of cinnamon and vanilla. There shall be sugar added, but not too much. It will be slightly thick, and absolutely delicious.

AND I MAY GO ON STRIKE UNTIL I GET IT!

Damnation. I found two tins of ovaltine in the cupboard today. Both had congealed into solid, round bricks at the bottom of the container. I have bittersweet chocolate, but not enough milk to make it worth while.

BRING CHOCOLATE AND LEAVE IT ON THE PILLOW, OR ELSE!

My only salvation for the night is a package of chocolate frosting. I hope to hell it lasts.

I HAVE GIVEN A NAME TO MY PAIN, AND IT IS CHOCOLATE!

Scientists unearth earliest known Hebrew ABCs - Africa & Middle East - International Herald Tribune

Scientists unearth earliest known Hebrew ABCs
By John Noble Wilford The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2005

In the 10th century B.C., in the hill country south of Jerusalem, a scribe carved his ABCs on a limestone boulder - actually, his aleph-beth-gimels, for the string of letters appears to be an early rendering of the emergent Hebrew alphabet. 

As a point of reference, the oldest cuneiform tablets date only to around 3500 BC, and are (or were, at least) the oldest examples of writing.

The big work project launched into cyber-space on Friday at 4:30 PM. And now I can put links to the site on the blog!

Internet Shakespeare Editions

Michael Best created the site in 1995, and has been adding to it ever since. Many of the files were never touched in that time, and the site was really starting to show its age. Our job (a team of four programmers and two research assistants -- all students!) over the last year was to renovate it, stem to stern, top to bottom and metaphor to simile. The graphics for the site were created by outside folks. We aren't graphic designers, so that was a very easy call.

How to use this site

Michael wrote the content for the pages. I created the templates from the graphic designs, with lots of contributions from the rest of the team. The page contents box on the right (not my creation) is generated dynamically, which still blows my mind sometimes.

About the Internet Shakespeare Editions

The creation of the site is described in more detail, and a "technical info" page is forthcoming. The site is served with Cocoon, an XML processing framework. Most of the data is stored in XML files, or in databases. Cocoon transforms that XML into the HTML that you see in the browser. That's the overly-abbreviated explaination

Some of the components in the Internet Shakespeare Editions:

Shakespeare in Performance

A searchable database of performance materials from 1000 film and stage productions. Think IMDb, but Shakespeare-specific. The Romeo & Juliet section alone is huge:Romeo and Juliet :: Shakespeare in Performance

First Folio, page 669

Of course, what good are the performance materials without the plays? This folio was published in 1623. The particluar copy on that page is owned by the State Library of New South Wales. Of course, we have images of three other folios, and the two Romeo & Juliet Quartos. (Book Facsimiles: Romeo and Juliet).

Romeo and Juliet (Folio 1, 1623)

And what then about a text transcription? We've transcriptions of the First Folio, and the Quartos, in different stages of editorial review. Each editor is also preparing a new, unique modern version for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, with full annotations.

ISE Links Database

Any good website must contain the highest quality content, and also be a portal to other sites. Our links database has over 800 links to various sites on Shakespeare, his texts, and Renaissance life. Selected Romeo and Juliet links are available.

Shakespeare's Life and Times: Home Page

Who was William Shakespeare? What life like as the Renaissance ended? Michael Best wrote and collected a thousand pages dedicated just to the Bard, his life, and Renaissance London. The Life & Times contains images, music, and dialog. Video clips will be added in the near future. Of course, the Life & Times also examines Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet Home Page

And to bring all these varied components together, we have the play home pages. Each one is generated dynamically, sending off queries to the independent databases, applications, and other areas of the site. New Romeo and Juliet links will automatically appear, as will the facsimilies, transcriptions, and discussions in the Life and Times.

More?

Oh yes, there is much more to the site. Michael Best has documented the creation of the site from its beginning in 1995. We've reproduced, in facsimile form, Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition by John Velz (a seminal academic work on Shakespeare's writings). We've textual studies essays, critical works, international contributions and descriptions of Shakespeare's work outside England ( Shakespeare in South Africa: SeZar Table of Contents is one of many, describing a South African adaptation/production of Julius Cesar), and background materials on which Shakespeare based many of his plays.

And by the way, we're number one: "demon sex" - Google Search. We even beat out the smut.

[As promised to Caroline]

Zero (0) the number means nothing, emptyness. Zero the numeral (106) is a symbol used as a placeholder in writing. The two concepts are related but different. Zero means, literally, nothing. It expresses the lack of any quanty or amount of something.

As a number, zero is the only number which is neither positive nor odd. It preceeds one and succeeds minus one. Zero is neither even nor odd.

The word "zero" comes to English from Arabic, through the Greeks, and Latinate Europeans of the Late Dark Ages.

The first arithmetic system was developed by the Babylonians, called cuneiform (ca. 2000 BC). Cuneiform is a base sixty writing system. At first, the Babylonians would leave a small space between two cuneiform digits in the same way that we would use 0 as a placeholder. This resulted in a very ambiguous writing system, as there was already a space between the digits. According to Wikipedia the Babylonians began using a particular glyph as a zero numerial at around 300 BC. Howard Eves' A History of Mathematics places this transition at around 400 BC. It is interesting to note that the Babylonians did not use their zero symbol alone as a number. There is no written record of "zero apples" in cuneiform.

There is no zero symbol in the first Greek or Roman numerial systems. Even the Ancient Egyptians (who had sophisticated fractions with the Eye of Horus) lacked a symbol for zero. The Greeks questioned wether zero (the number) was a number at all!

The first western use of zero as a number was by Ptolemy the Great (ca. 130 AD). The Romans (ca. 525) would later use "nulla" to mean nothing, the number zero.

During the European Dark Ages, the rest of the world made significant progress in arithmetic. Indian, Hindu, Chinese and Islam mathematicians all began to use the number zero.

Leonardo Fibonacci (ca. 1200) spent parts of his youth in North Africa, where he learned of the Hindu-Arabic numerial system, including the zero numeral. In his work Liber Abaci he showed European mathematicians and businessmen that "with the nine figures of the Indians ... and with the sign 0 which in Arabic is called zephirum, any number can be written."

The first printed, as opposed to scribe-copied, arithemtic appeared in 1478 in the anonymous Treviso Arithmetic. The first known person use of "+" and "-" to denote addition and subtraction was Johann Widmann, ca. 1489. Robert Recorde's The Whetstone of Witte (ca. 1557) was the first usage of a symbol for equality, two horizontal lines close together.

Brahmagupta (598-668) established the arithmetic rules now used for zero in the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (tr. The Opening of the Universe).

Courtesy of the BBC:

Classic poets' voices go online
Last Updated: Wednesday, 30 November 2005, 00:10 GMT
Classic poets' voices go online

The voice of Kipling is among those to be heard on the archive. Historic recordings of poets such as Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, Betjeman and Sassoon are being made available through a new online initiative.