Updates

This is a list of content in this section that has been updated, along with the most recent updated annotation.

• @title
• Diegesis
• Kennedy Democrat
• Detroit
• Brittany

  I asked a friend about the political status of Brittany.

  it’s just like a region – it’s part of France since 1532… but there’s a strong identity including a regional language that was spoken (and not French) until WW1

  The language called Breton is actually a Celtic language, the only one spoken on the European mainland.

• Geographic Metonym

  I saw an infographic on how to write marketing copy that seemed to use metonyms:

  Don’t: Stop wiping with unrecyclable toilet paper
  Do: Stop wiping with trees!

  Don’t: 1,000 songs in your media player
  Do: 1,000 songs in your pocket!

• Great White Way

  Not surprisingly, the book Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles has an entire chapter entitled “Great White Way” which talks about how New York City’s Broadway got that name, and a period when other cities tried to copy the …vibe, that the Great White Way created for NYC.

• Breton Cap
• Kitten Heel
• Synecdoche

  In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, writing about Earnest Hemingway:

  He became his own fame, a fame that was interwoven with his masculinity. He became a human synecdoche for the condition of literary virility.

  I think this author is saying that Hemingway became an cliche or archetype of the manly, adventure writer. “Hemingway-esque” became a shorthand way of referring to the larger concept.

• Cloisters

  Here’s a video of someone making The Met Cloisters out of gingerbread.

  The real building is a museum in Washington Heights.

• The Quad
• Rectilinear
• Hagia Sofia
• Perdition

  The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambitions in the Italian Renaissance describes a Papal bull issued in the late 1400s that referred to someone as “a suckling of perdition.”

• Continental Divide
• Doppelganger
• Schloss
• Armory

  An article in the NY Times entitled “A Moonshot Plan to Fill a Cavernous, Dilapidated Armory in the Bronx” brought to my attention The Kingsbridge Armory:

  The estimated $1 billion redevelopment of the armory, a 1917 Romanesque arsenal on about five acres in Kingsbridge Heights that was once home to the National Guard …

  Wikipedia has some history:

  During World War II the armory was active in the war effort. Herbert Lehman, a former governor and U.S. Senator, ceremonially reviewed 10,000 troops there at a 1942 event. It was one of the few registration sites in the city for immigrants from enemy nations. After the war the city offered it to the United Nations General Assembly as a temporary meeting place until the main UN building was finished.

  In 1957 the two rear buildings were constructed. It was designated a city landmark in 1974. At that time the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission called it “an outstanding example of military architecture.” Over the years following, the main armory building was neglected, and by the 1990s, the Guard units who called it home were running most of their operations from the annex buildings on West 195th.

• Bourse
• Balustrade

  Found this in London.

• Cantilever
• ICBM
• Biltmore Estate
• Gilded Age
• Gold Leaf
• Hinterland
• Old Master
• Whiz Kids
• Brain Trust

  In Creativity, Inc. there is a lot of discussion about the “Brain Trust” at Pixar, which was a group of senior executives that would come together to discuss a project and make sure it was still on track. This was eventually renamed the “Story Trust.”

• Adept (noun)
• Auto-da-fé
• O'Hare
• Balkanization
• Erasmus

  I took a picture of a book page, but I can’t remember what book:

  The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasms, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books, using “an appropriate little sign” to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing.” He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.”

  This fits with the quote from the Stalin book (above).

• Muscovy
• Anthropocene

  I’ve become aware that we are technically in the Holocene epoch of geologic time. The argument is whether or not we should end the Holocene and begin the Anthropocene.

• ORD
• Non-Euclidean

  An image I found on some weird Facebook group.

• Bayesian

  In Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, there’s a great analogy to explain Bayesian theory:

  It can be briefly summarized by a common analogy using black and white marbles. Imagine someone new to this world seeing the first sunset of her life. Her question: will the sun rise again tomorrow? In ignorance, she defaults to a fifty-fifty chance and puts a black marble and a white marble into a bag. When the sun rises, she puts another white marble in. The probability of randomly picking a white from the bag – that is, the probability of the sun rising based on her present evidence – has gone from 1 in 2 to 2 in 3. The next day, when the sun rises, she adds another marble, moving it to 3 in 4, and so on. Over time, she will approach (but never reach) certainty that the sun will rise. If, one terrible morning, the sun does not rise, she will put in a black marble and the probability will decline in proportion to the history of her observations. This system can be extended to very complex problems in which each of the marbles in the bag is itself a bag of marbles: a total probability made up of many individual, varying probabilities…

• Declarative vs. Prescriptive
• Bitwise Operations
• Calculus
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl

  I watched a video entitled Where Did All The Manic Pixie Dream Girls Go?, about how the trope died out.

• Howard Beale
• Chewing the Scenery

  I found this quote about the movie Showgirls:

  Elizabeth Berkley chews the scenery to shreds, and the supporting cast makes for a glorious wallow into a dumpster fire of debauchery against the backdrop of Sin City.

  It’s an interesting way to say that she wildly overacts.

• Hebrew vs. Yiddish
• Ashkenazi Jew
• Method Acting

  In Will Smith’s memoir, he writes about how method acting on Six Degrees of Separation caused him to actually fall in love with his co-star, Stockard Channing.

  So the movie was over and I went home, and I was dying to see Stockard. I was like, “Oh no! What have I done? That was my last experience with method acting, where you’re reprogramming your mind. You’re actually playing around with your psychology. You teach yourself to like things and to dislike things.

  It is a really dangerous place when you get good at it. But once I had that experience, I was like, “No more method acting.”” For Six Degrees, I wanted to perform well so badly that I was spending six and seven and eight days in character before shooting, and you have to be careful with that.

• Passport Size