carrucates and bovates

It seems a carrucate should be the area that a team of eight oxen can plough in a year. It's about 2000 (English) acres, whereas a bovate is one-eighth of that, about 250 acres. Here, I take it from D. Holloway and T. Colton, The Knights Templar in Yorkshire, a very interesting read. Bovate derived from bos, bovis, as you would expect. But Webster says a carucate (note the single r) is the same as a bovate, same as a (Kent and Domesday Book) hide, equal to 120 acres. Hmmm. A toft, on the other hand, is not at all a precise area, but, like a vill, describes a kind of unit of the landscape. A toft is a dwelling, together with a plot of cultivable land, a house-and-garden. A county could be divided into hundreds, and a hundred into vills. Chain-mail is hammered chain!

Bookshelf

Philippe Aries. Centuries of Childhood. Penguin. 1960.  414pp.
Traces the evolution of the modern concept of childhood. Turns out that the way we think of children is a recent invention.

Gerd Gigerenzer.  Reckoning with Risk. Learning to live with uncertainty. Penguin. 2002. ISBN-13: 978-0-14-029786-7.
Gift from Ian Short.  Disturbing evidence of innumeracy in the general public, and, chillingly, among doctors.  Many people do not understand risks stated in percentage terms, and many medical professionals do not correctly interpret the results of screening tests to their patients.  This makes informed consent unlikely.  He advocates the use of proportions, instead of percentages, and other specific measures.  Specific case areas considered include screening and counselling for cancers and AIDS,  the use of DNA evidence in criminal cases, and even grant proposal evaluation.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg with Tina Klopp. Inside WikiLeaks. My time with Julian Assange at the world's most dangerous website. Jonathan Cape. 2011. 9780224094016.
Quick read.   Lifts the lid on something of a mess.  DD-B fell out with JA, and now runs an alternative, OpenLeaks, together with the key technician from the old site.
Looking at the sites, it would appear that WikiLeaks is still not accepting submissions.  This supports  DD-B's suggestion that their submission software is in a mess.  The submissions page carries no update date. On the other hand, nothing seems to be happening at OpenLeaks, either.  Most of the material is quite old.  On both sites, the recent material is essentially polemical.

Michael Smith. An Unsung Hero. Tom Crean - an antarctic survivor. The Collins Press. 2009. 9781905172863. 
Gift from KK, for Christmas. Interesting and well-researched story, worth reading for the facts, despite the mediocre style.

Novels:
*** John le Carré. A Most Wanted Man. Hodder. 2008. 978-0-340-97708-8.
** John Banville. The Sea. Picador. 2005. 978-0-330-48329-2.
* Anthony Cronin. The Life of Riley. 2010. New Island. fp 1964. 978-1-84840-083-2.
**** Yoko Ogawa. The Housekeeper + The Professor. Vintage. 2010. fp 2003. 978-0099521341.
*** Ian McEwan. Solar. Jonathan Cape. 2010. 9780224090506.

Only Ogawa's made an impression that still lasts, three months later. A beautiful story.

James Banford. Body of Secrets. How America's CIA and Britain's GCHQ eavesdrop on the world. Arrow. 2002. ISBN 0-09-9427745.
He has researched this, in part, by interviewing a number of participants who, late in life, decided to talk. I was amazed by three of the stories in this book: (1) The account of live firefights over Russia involving US bombers in the early fifties, in which over 40 of them (and an unstated number of Russian fighters) were shot down.  The missions  aimed to collect radar data, but would have appeared to the Russians as potential bombing raids. (2) The story of Ike's orders to all his subordinates to lie to a congressional committee (at an in camera hearing), to cover up his knowledge of the Gary Powers U2 mission.  His orders were followed.  (3) The appalling story of the Israeli attack on the US Liberty in 1967, and the coverup ordered by Johnson.

Tom Holland. Persian Fire. The first world empire and the battle for the west. Abacus. 2005. 978-0-349-11717-1. 
Very readable.  Complements the usual Greek accounts with material from Asian sources and excavations, and allows us a better idea of how these wars were viewed from the Persian side.

Tom Holland. Rubicon. The triumph and tragedy of the Roman republic. Abacus. 2003. 978-0-349-11563-4. 
Also very readable.  The classicists of my acquaintance approve of Holland.

R.K. Narayan. The Abduction of Sita. Penguin. 2006.  fp 1972. 978-0-141-02684-8.
An extract from a translation of the Ramayama.  Downfall and enlightenment of Ravana, once "the supreme lord of this and other worlds".  He underestimated Rama, which is a very, very bad idea.

I still haven't dented  The Tale of Genji.

 

The 12th of June, 2011: A Good Day.

 

The guy with the beard is the proprietor of Uri-Buri, in Akko, reputedly the best sea-food restaurant in Israel.

Static pages

Blow me! Static pages allow you to add stuff so that it goes at the end. Now, if I'd known this facility was available in Blogger -- maybe it wasn't until recently -- I would have used it for the Tipperary Tango. I ran a quick test to see if I could put the whole novel into a single static page, and it seems to be ok.

Catechism

Finally finished typing in the old catechism, which didn't seem to be anywhere on the web. Been at it at odd times for over a year. My feelings about the old religion are rather mixed: they combine guilt, relief, anger, nostalgia and affection in roughly equal proportions.
One of the most interesting aspects concerns the stuff they just never mention any more, such as indulgences, the state of grace, mortal sin. Another is the number of iron rules that turned out to be malleable. And then there is the monumental consistency, certainty, and triumphalism of the establishment.
Another curiosity is that it all worked. I remember being very happy for years when I accepted all that. I had lots of questions, but had been trained to question within the system.
I just included, of the prayers, those I learned by heart as a child. I still like these, and am grateful to the people who made me learn them.
Perhaps the saddest Q+A in the whole thing is number 425, in the chapter on Extreme Unction and Holy Orders. Not many catholics have such an uncomplicated view of our priests as
this, nowadays.

B/S Bingo

Here's the source. Copy to bsbingo.c and compile with some command such as
cc -o bsbingo bsbingo.c
Then use the commands given under usage (or package them in a little script and put a handy link on your desktop).
The resulting random 5x5 grid is used to relieve the tedium of an otherwise boring meeting.
/***********************************************************/

/* bsbingo
Generates a random bsbingo card.
AOF 4-ii-2011. Copyleft...
Usage:
bsbingo > temp
lpr -o landscape -P <printername> temp
*/

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

#define N 5  /* number of rows and columns*/
#define PHRASE_LENGTH 18
#define PHRASES {\
" outside the box  ",\
"end of the day    ",\
"   bottom line    ",\
"   iconic         ",\
"   leverage       ",\
\
"core competencies ",\
"   synergy        ",\
"   strategic fit  ",\
"   benchmark      ",\
"   24/7           ",\
\
"   empower        ",\
"   win-win        ",\
"   game plan      ",\
" above our weight ",\
"   bandwidth      ",\
\
"the good of the X ",\
"apples and oranges",\
" green field      ",\
" hopefully        ",\
" shoot ourselves  ",\
\
"game of two 1/2s  ",\
" rennaisance      ",\
"  transparent     ",\
" SWOT(any 2)      ",\
" meltdown         "\
}

void permutation(int* k, int M){
/* places a random permutation of 0,1,2,...,M-1
in the array k[0],...,k[M-1]
*/

int i,j,temp;
int P[M];

for (i=0;i<M;i++){ P[i]=i; }
/* start with the identity */

for (j=0;j<M;j++){
for(i=0;i<M;i++){
if (rand()%2){
/* randomly apply the transposition (ij) or not */
temp = P[j];
P[j] = P[i];
P[i] = temp;
}
}
}

/* copy P to k: */
for (i=0;i<M;i++){
k[i]=P[i];
}
}

void blanks(void){
/* print some spaces */
int i;
for(i=0;i<PHRASE_LENGTH;i++){
printf(" ");
}
}

void solids(void){
/* print some underscores */
int i;
for(i=0;i<PHRASE_LENGTH;i++){
printf("_");
}
}


int main(void)
{
int i,j;
int k[N*N];
char* phrase[N*N] = PHRASES;

srand( time(NULL) );

permutation(k,N*N);

printf("\n\n");

/* print the table, using k to randomise the entries: */


for(j=0;j<N;j++){
printf("_");
solids();
}
printf("\n");

for (i=0;i<N;i++){

printf("|");
for(j=0;j<N;j++){
blanks();
printf("|");
}
printf("\n");

for (j=0;j<N;j++){
printf("|%s", phrase[k[N*i+j]]);
}
printf("|\n");

printf("|");
for(j=0;j<N;j++){
blanks();
printf("|");
}
printf("\n");

for(j=0;j<N;j++){
printf("|");
solids();
}
printf("|\n");



}
printf("\n\n");
return 0;
}

/****************************************************************/