Unsystematic Likes #5
Interesting pieces from around the web
No Honeymoon Period
“Henry Stimson Didn’t Go to Kyoto on His Honeymoon”, Restricted Data, Alex Wellerstein
my conclusion, after spending some time looking into this, is that the honeymoon story is more probably than not a myth. Stimson did go to Kyoto at least twice in the 1920s, but neither trip could be reasonably characterized as a honeymoon, and explaining his actions on Kyoto in World War II as a result of a “honeymoon” is trivializing and misleading.
Library Cyber Punks
“Ingenious Librarians”, Aeon, Monica Westin
SUPARS and other largely forgotten systems were the forerunners of the contemporary search engines we have today. While the popular history of the internet valorises Silicon Valley coders – or, sometimes, the former US vice president Al Gore – many of the original concepts for search emerged from library scientists focused on the accessibility of documents in time and space. Working with research and development funding from the military and industry, their advances can be seen everywhere in the current online information landscape – from general approaches to ingesting and indexing full-text documents, to free-text searching and a sophisticated algorithm utilising previous saved searches of others, a foundational building block for contemporary query expansion and autocomplete. Indeed, these and many other approaches developed by campus pioneers are still used by the multibillion-dollar businesses of web search and commercial library databases from Google to WorldCat today.
Feline friends
“The Naming of Cats, and an Offering”, Stories from a Burning House, Brendan O’Kane
For anybody wondering how they said pspsps in the Qing dynasty, Wang Chutong’s 王初桐 1798 Mao sheng 貓乘 (A Cavalcade of Cats), the earliest collection of cat-related quotations and factoids I could find, has a section listing all the ways of calling a cat known to authoritative sources. Mi, variously written, is the clear consensus favorite, though the Yuan writer Bai Ting 白珽 suggests 汁汁, pronounced something like ji-ji at the time. (Wang comments that this “sounds like mice squeaking.”)
Sun Sunyi’s 孫蓀意 adorably titled Xianchan xiaolu 銜蟬小錄 (preface dated 1799, when she was just 16) has eight fascicles’ worth of feline-related quotations grouped under headings like “Origins,” “Nomenclature,” and “Tales of Karmic Retribution,” as well as a pretty impressive selection of what the preceding thousand years had to offer in the way of cat-related poetry. If you’re in the market for curious historical events, incidental verses, or bonkers little geomantic notes,Xianchan xiaoluhas got you covered. (“The cat's origins lie not in China but India,” it explains, quoting a late-Ming test-prep book. “As the cat was not engendered by theqiof China, the tip of its nose is almost invariably cold, the sole exception being the day of the summer solstice.”)
Unfortunately it doesn’t have what I’m looking for, which is a list of cat names.
Rules of the games
“Sid Meier’s Clash of Civilizations”, The Duck of Minerva, Andrew Szarejko
One might thus read Civ as containing content open to different interpretations regardless of whether any particular argument or message was intentionally crafted by Sid Meier and others on the creative team.
In particular, Civ’s representations of discrete “civilizations,” all of which must draw on built-in strengths and weaknesses to expand their dominion while progressing in an upward, linear trajectory through world history, might naturalize those seemingly real-world dynamics to players.