29 March 26
Wikipedia At Home
Both Pica and I had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home when we grew up, always at hand to dig into some topic of interest. Nowadays Wikipedia plays that role, the jewel of the Internet, a master reference only one bit of typing away. But what if…something happen to the Internet? A tech enclosure movement or collapse of the root level domain name system or rampant cyberwarfare?
It turns out one can download all of Wikipedia pretty easily. Since 2007 there has been a project called Kiwix that has created a system for taking extremely large knowledge stores and compressing them into single files that are easily viewed with special software offline.
This software is not difficult to run and is available for all major platforms. Their catalog lists 3458 different works that have been compiled into this file format in many different languages. I’ve had a go and have downloaded the complete English Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and resources from iFixit. The Wikipedia file is 115 GB in size and took several hours to download.
It’s a comfort having Wikipedia on my own hard drive. You never know.
28 March 26
No Kings, Again
This morning we went to Winters to attend a No Kings rally. We knew it would be small and easy to get to compared to the much larger march from West Sacramento to the Capitol. Winters was very accommodating of people with mobility problems and featured a lot of sing-along music.
In the afternoon Numenius also went to a family-friendly gathering here in Davis (this photo is his and features local celebrity Whymcycler Peter Wagner).
From all accounts the turnout at today’s rallies set a record. The trick will be to have a massive turnout of voters in the mid-terms. Assuming they don’t get cancelled… at this point anything seems possible.
27 March 26
Riverfront Outing
Today I went on a little outing to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, walking to the museum from the Sacramento train station via Old Sacramento and the riverfront. Old Sacramento is the most touristy area in Sacramento; it developed during the Gold Rush. Since I have been reading a lot about Northern California history in the latter half of the 19th century and pondering the Gilded Age fortunes that were made during that period, it’s neat to see the actual storefront where Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made their wealth off miners needing supplies. This is a sketch looking west across the Sacramento River downstream from the Tower Bridge.
26 March 26
A New Short Row Technique
Short rows in knitting are used when you want a different amount of fabric in one section of a row than another without adding length at the end of the row. Typical uses include knitting a sock heel to make the L-shape of a foot, adding length to the back or front of a sweater (this can be extreme to accommodate a dowager’s hump or slumping shoulders or a large bust), or to shape a sleeve knit horizontally, as I’m doing with my Fort Amherst sweater.
For years the only short row turn I knew was the wrap-and-turn, where you knit to the desired stitch, yarn forward, slip next stitch, yarn back, turn work (in the middle of a row). It’s clunky and inelegant except in garter stitch, where the bulk of the knitting hides a multitude of sins… With the internationalization of knitting I learned, and much preferred, the “German” short row, where the stitch is yanked hard over the needle making a “double-stitch” which you then knit as one on the next row. This has been invaluable in the swing-knitting technique where short rows are flung around with abandon to make some very interesting effects (I’ve knit the Dreambird shawl several times using this technique, pictured at right draped over my late-lamented bicycle which got stolen a couple of years ago).
The Fort Amherst project has introduced me to a third method, the Japanese short row (though designer Jennifer Beale calls this “Sunday short rows” in her pattern). Here, a removable stitch marker is placed over the working yarn, the return row is knit, but on the way back, you pick up the yarn held by the stitch marker and knit it together with the following stitch, removing the stitch marker. It is all but invisible! It might become my go-to method.
26 March 26
The Ghost Airport of Aragón
There was an good piece yesterday about the epistemic collapse of the Iran war: nobody has any idea of what the facts are on the ground, and the information bubbles we all (separately) occupy are not communicating across to each other. Some interesting stories are emerging though, sometimes on the periphery of it all.
One of these stories concerns the airport of Teruel – Caudé in Aragón. This is not an airport for passengers. Rather, it’s a facility for aircraft maintenance and storage. When the war broke out, it began to receive big jetliners from the fleets of the Gulf States airlines to take refuge from the war. Planes from Qatar Airways, whose home base is Doha, are especially represented as part of the new arrivals, with about 20 of their widebody jets having come in by last Saturday.
24 March 26
Sketching Along with Jill Lepore
I like audiobooks, especially since there is a good selection of them at either the Yolo County Library or, even better, the Sacramento Public Library, which any California resident can join. I can knit complex patterns because the narrative isn’t competing with a chart (though I do pause the audio when I’m counting stitches!).
I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s The Deadline, a collection of essays read by the author, always a pleasure. (It’s great that they know WHERE to put an inflection, and where the emotion of a memory cracks the author’s voice.) Lepore is a historian at Harvard and has a knack for capturing events past and present succinctly and intelligently, but even more, is good at capturing the feeling, the zeitgeist, that gives rise to these events.
I drew these sketches while Lepore was reading her essay about gun control and the power of the National Rifle Association, sitting at a café in downtown Davis; I found the four-leaf clover on the way home.
23 March 26
Grapevine in the Spring
The landscapers have trimmed back a lot of the grapevines near the edge of our backyard, but there are still a few. Here is a sketch of one of them leafing out.
I am enjoying working with my new 72 color set of Derwent drawing pencils. It is interesting how I rotate through different combinations of media. Here I am experimenting with doing an underdrawing with the Derwent drawing pencils (it’s great having Fresh Green as part of the colored pencil set), adding in a bit of line work with black waterproof fiber-tip pens, and then doing a watercolor wash over the drawing.
22 March 26
La Volta al Món a Peu
Numenius, somewhat against my inclination, has been studying Catalan alongside Spanish for some time now (I have an aversion to learning languages that are too close simultaneously). He does consume a lot of content in both languages, and has joined the Easy Spanish conversation group on Friday mornings.
He discovered the YouTube channel a while ago of Enric Luzán, a Catalan who is walking around the world, as much as is possible (a great deal of Asia is not practical either because of war zones or visa restrictions). His rules include a minimum of 26,232 km on foot; a minimum of four continents, coast to coast, in a consecutive manner; rest days should not exceed six months or 25% of total time.
I started watching his first few days this evening, and it’s surprisingly compelling watching! He is currently in or about to enter Greece. I find I am able to knit while listening to the Catalan commentary, not following every word but definitely getting quite a lot of the sense of it all. His plan for North America is to enter San Francisco from Sydney and I hope we can meet him on his route and buy him a coffee or some lunch!
21 March 26
Turkey In The Dell
I went to today’s Davis sketchcrawl which was at the eastern end of the Arboretum. My main sketch for the day was of a wooden shade structure with trees in the background, but once I finished the sketch I turned around and saw several turkeys at close range, one of which was displaying prominently.
20 March 26
Emily Dickinson's Black Cake
My sister knows I like to receive mail, and she gave me the gift of a monthly History By Mail subscription for my birthday. She’s done this before… but this time it’s recipes by famous people. (Rosa Parks’s recipe for pancake batter includes, surprisingly, peanut butter.) The facsimile of a handwritten recipe is included with a transcription and some background on the person and in this case their relationship to cooking.
Emily was apparently a very keen baker and this recipe includes five pounds (!!) of flour, 19 eggs, and half a pint of brandy in which to soak oceans of dried fruit (the cake thus pickled lasts for about five months and I’m assuming she got over ten cakes out of it). She is said to have written poems on the backs of envelopes while she was baking, with the spatters of her bakes ending up on the poems. Since many of her manuscripts ended up at the Houghton Library at Harvard, maybe somebody should conduct an analysis of these spatters to see what she might have been baking on the day they were written.
A couple of years ago I developed a font of Emily Dickinson’s idiosyncratic handwriting, but looking at this sample I may not have kerned the letterspacing enough…