Posted by jerry on February 5th, 2005 — Posted in Journal, Writing
Happy Birthday Sharon! 
and Happy Birthday Greg
Now to a little tale that I’ve waited a couple of days to tell…
The other day I went hunting for Moleskines – you know those perfect notebooks I’ve raved over before? Well it turns out that Pepe’s Paperie in Woden (Canberra, Australia) has a whole new stock of them!
Not only that, but the whole staff is totally potty over them 🙂 I was buying one as a gift for you-know-who and I got chatting with the assistant who announced that she had one of the Moleskine stands as her CD shelf at home! Anyhow I told her all about the Moleskinerie site and she quickly wrote it down and said she’d pass it around the whole shop 😉
And I was introduced to a new range of Moleskines – the pocket music moleskine and the storyboard one…
It was a great way to buy a moleskine – and I’ll be back there (as always) for my next moleskine 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on February 2nd, 2005 — Posted in Journal, Writing
I was reading Fred On Something today, and he had a fascinating post on the complex problem of organising offline information contained in notebooks, like the wonderful Moleskine ones. Clearly some people had taken issue with the idea of linking ideas in an offline journal, resulting in a small clarification post. I think the concept is great – but then i’m too lazy to do anything that ambitious.
Leonardo da Vinci ran into the same issue – several times he attempted to organise the thousands of pages of his noteboks into some sort of publishable form, or at least in a form that would enable him to find information again, having once recorded it.
The problem of linking information and referencing it is practically as old as writing itself. The ancient Assyrians used referencing to keep track of clay tablets. The Library at Alexandria used tags on the ends of scrolls to reference the contents of information – Each group of tablets contained a brief citation to identify the contents and each room contained a tablet near the door to classify the general contents of each room. So the issue is not new.
It comes down to levels of personal organisation. how to link information across notebooks, or link later comments on earlier entries without having to re-write the whole entry. As I said I doubt I will ever be that organised, but I do use titles and dates in my Moleskines – that and the fact that I draw a lot of diagrams, means I can usually get to what I want by knowing either roughly when I wrote it, or by flicking through and looking for the drawings.
Anyhow thanks to Fred for a stimulating post 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on October 15th, 2004 — Posted in History, Journal, Writing
I really should keep more abreast of the literary theorist blogs – I have only just found out that Jacques Derrida, one of the key postmodern philosophers has died aged 74. Whether you revere or revile him, there is no doubting his enormous influence on 20th century philosophy. While his writing was never easy, the journey was always worthwhile. His famous philosophical practice of deconstruction, for which he is best known was of course not about destruction, but re-construal. His was a philosophy akin to existentialism which implied an ethics ultimately based on self-responsibility… He will be missed by supporters and detractors alike.
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on September 2nd, 2004 — Posted in History, Writing
There appear to be at least three major competing hypotheses to explain the rapid spread of the Indo-European language group throughout europe at the conclusion of the Younger Dryas cold event around 10,800 BCE:
• the battle axe movement – through displacement by warlike activity
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• the farming wave – as the climate improves more sparsely populated farmland becomes available relatively free of hunter-gatherers; and
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• rapid population growth resulting from improvement in climate, previously decimated by a mini ice age
There is an excellent article on the early history of Indo-European languages written by Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov that was published in Scientific American.
All of these can account for the spread and movement of language – by conquering, farming spread, or re-population of areas. But I wonder if there is a further explanation: namely the decimation of a population by a sudden cold climate event or natural disaster – or even the spread of disease. That is, language spread because of the need to preserve knowledge in a stressed or dying population. Among a static population, whether farmers or hunter-gatherers or more likely a combination of the two, once the main skills have been passed on, such groups would only need to exchange information that relates to change, because once you know the seasons in which to plant, or the signs of potential quarry, then there is little need for discussion. But in a stressed population, there is far more need to share information in case such knowledge is lost forever.
During the great bubonic plague outbreaks of the 14th and 17th centuries, up to a third of Europe’s population was wiped out – and locally it was not uncommon for between fifty percent and ninety-five percent to be killed by the disease. Both of these periods saw the emergence of two things: an increase in technology solutions in the increasing absence of ‘man’power; and the birth of instruction manuals for everything from blacksmithing to embroidery stitches – because there was such a risk of essential knowledge being lost that information had to be passed beyond the strict boundaries of the guilds.
– Just a thought
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on September 1st, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Writing
I just had to respond to something in Sara’s blog (Sara Splits Infinitives) As an Australian, I spent a little time in London, okay I suppose it was fairly central, and I needed a plumber – what with the pipes being of indeterminate age….
Anyhow the plumber turned up as I arrived home to grab some lunch, so I asked him if he’d like a coffee or tea. He looked at me standing there in my work clobber of chalk-stripe suit and tie as though I were from another planet, and started calling me ‘Guv’.
So I said ‘mate, the name’s Jerry, and what’s with the deference thing?’ I made him coffee and we talked a bit about how strange I was finding all this class stuff, so he asked me how I saw the situation.
I said ‘well, you’re a businessman, and you have a skill that I don’t have, and that I respect – and that makes me one of your clients… does it really matter that my overalls look a bit different? I’m sure we both like a beer after work…’ ‘Really?’ he said, ‘you know, I never thought of it like that!’ I’m not sure whether he was more surprised that I made him coffee, or that I had taken the time to talk with him!
cheers
Jerry
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