Now it is done. After two and a half years, today I sent Prof. Norman the final draft of the dictionary, which I hope will see print within 12 months, as A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary.

Flinders Petrie has counted nine attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one of them failed just as ours is failing. They failed because the citizens and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne. … If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilised life, and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.

In Back to Methuselah, Part II, (orig. pub. 1921; New York: Penguin Books, 1977): 129–30.

Things seen today: At 20th St. and Bway, SE corner, a garbage man was fiddling with the lock of a hard-shelled brown suitcase that had been left near a city garbage can. When I got near, he wheeled it around and looked at me. “What is this. I don’t trust this.” Nervous chuckle. And then he threw it into the garbage truck.

When I started the term, it was taking me an average of 30 minutes per problem — something I can’t imagine the other students are experiencing. I spent four hours on actual problem-solving today, plus perhaps another hour or so of flash-card making and other sorts of review. It hardly seems very much time. But I am pleased to find that my average speed is now down to 20 minutes/problem. That’s cause for optimism, even if it still feels as though my brain is a corroded mass of old gears. Come to think of it, I’ve had that sensation every time I’ve taken math recently, but somehow the immediacy of the sensation is replaced by a feeling of accomplishment after the stress of the moment has passed. It has been 25 years since I took Calculus II, but I think the gear-box is getting back to functioning condition.

Initially, I studied by taking careful notes on the ideas of each section in the text book, and only doing problems afterwards. But now I think that’s for the birds. Doing problems and groping my way through the ideas as I need to has proven a more effective way to get comfortable with the material. The notion that theoretical understanding, gained from reading the chapter, is a useful guide to problem-solving, is nonsense here just as it is in every other field I know of.

By far the most common cause of error in my work is sloppy arithmetic errors — half the time, it is just the result of getting plus and minus signs wrong. This in spite of considerable effort to avoid such mistakes. I have had this problem since my childhood. Using LaTeX to do my problems makes it easier to find them, since I can now actually read and even search mechanically through what I’ve written.

The United States is probably the only country ever heard of on earth in which stockbrokers are almost ipso facto members of good society. … In all other societies that I know of they sit below the salt, and in many countries they are thought of as inferior to ordinary business men, and the general attitude toward them is that of suspicion. They are regarded as traders of a peculiarly anti-social type, and that is precisely what they are. But in the United States they belong to the best clubs, and their wives and daughters move in very haughty circles.

[This passage presumably dates to before Mencken's 1948 stroke. It appears in his Minority Report (1956), a collection of odds and ends from his private notebooks, as the second paragraph of item #267. Minority Report was originally published at New York by Alfred A. Knopf but is now kept in print by the Johns Hopkins University Press, part of something called the Buncombe Collection.]

The period when I have done without email for the longest — I mean, when I had regular access to email but chose not to use it — was when I was finishing my dissertation some 15 years ago. I allowed myself 20 minutes, twice a day, for all internet access unconnected to my research. I didn’t really miss it. I also took two hour-long walks every day, regardless of weather, at that time.

During my fieldwork trips I almost never had email; an American friend let me use his account occasionally when I was in the same city he was, but it was a minor part of my life — I spent a lot more time watching the early-morning slaughtering of pigs (to learn the names of butchering processes and body parts) and trying to make accurate records of dialect idioms, improvised dialect songs (shān’gē 山歌) of very old farm women, names of local plants and places, and secret language. Email would have seemed a terrific bore in comparison with those things.

* Yama is the king of hell in Vedic lore; his Chinese form is the Yánluówáng 閻羅王.

A sage I know claims that a browser is merely an extension of Adblock Plus, just as Ubuntu is merely an extension of Apache2.

Adblock Plus uses filters to determine what is an ad. Finding filters, unless you write them yourself (a most tedious procedure), requires you to subscribe to existing lists. I subscribe to eleven in all, and I almost never see an ad — either graphic or text-based — when I use Firefox. It makes the Internet a liveable place for me.

But subscribing to filters is unpleasant because it requires many repetitive mouse-actions. A faster way is to create a file called patterns.ini containing only the following:

[Subscription]

url=~wl~

title=Exception Rules

defaults=whitelist

[Subscription]

url=~fl~

title=Ad Blocking Rules

defaults=blocking
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblockrules.org/download.php?type=all

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-adblocklist-addon.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity-Tracking.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-current-expanded.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-stats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok
[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/enhancedstats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok

(This is my own list, of course.) I save patterns.ini to the adblockplus directory, which is typically at a path something like this:

… Firefox/Profiles/<hash>.default/adblockplus/

where <hash> is a random-looking eight-digit alphanumeric sequence that identifies a given user profile to Firefox. (Each <hash>.default user profile needs its own set of Adblock Plus filters in the appropriate subdirectory.)

Then I go to Firefox and open the filter preference window for Adblock Plus. On OS X, that means Tools -> Adblock Plus -> Filter Preferences. In the bottom right corner of the window there is a checkbox marked “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”. If I click it, either to check or uncheck it, the filters in patterns.ini immediately repopulate from the URLs I have placed in the minimal file.

So it doesn’t seem to be necessary to go through the tedious manual installation method in order to get the filter subscriptions. I save a copy of the minimal patterns.ini file above in a normal directory for fast replacement if I need a new user profile for some reason.

The “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” option was introduced in v. 2 of Adblock Plus — in other words, it is recent. At the moment, only ads associated with two German sites, netzwelt.de and guruads.de, are involved, but surely this is the beginning of a much more pervasive trend, since advertising now funds most internet content, or so it appears to me. When I was a boy, all television was free as long as you had a TV set to receive it; apart from public broadcasting, it was paid for entirely with advertising. So I recognize the smell of this business model.

The instructor has said firmly:

The more problems you do, the more shortcuts you will figure out for yourself. The only way you can do this is to do a ridiculous number of problems. You must work almost every day on this stuff, for a couple of hours a day.

Homework is not graded, but we are supposed to keep a special notebook in which “assignments”, meaning hard problems apart from the homework proper, are to be done — and those he will examine on occasion. If we’ve done them. On Thursday morning we were supposed to visit his office before class to show him that we do, indeed, possess such a notebook. The point was to encourage students to make the effort to identify a notebook for those problems early in the term. I was the only one who came, though, and I’m going to be using LaTeX, with his blessing.

The assignment sheet for the semester went up just before class on Tuesday and he announced it in class and told us to do the first three sections, 23 problems in all, mostly vectors, which are not well handled in LaTeX. I spent six hours doing the first assignment and got through 19 of the 23; the last four remain undone several days later, despite my good intentions. On the day they were official due, several of the students were still asking him when he would post the problem sets.

This instructor says he is going at solving problems but his memory is terrible, so he has never learned LaTeX. Instead, he uses MathType, which provides a GUI. It’s a pity, because a math course is really the ideal place to introduce LaTeX and guide students in elementary use of it.

The instructor made a pitch to interest me in abstract algebra. I must admit, what he showed me seemed quite interesting and intuitively clear. I have yet to understand what the place of math will ultimately be in my life — I only know I am not yet done with this question.

I am the only student in the class of around 30 who is taking notes on a computer. Some students do open up a computer briefly, but it seems to have something to do with messaging. I ran into a little trouble today with LaTeX because I had anticipated that we was going to introduce determinants, which I haven’t learned how to handle yet (actually it’s not hard, I now see — the amsmath package has everything I’m likely to need).

A correspondent, seeing the comment about doing “a ridiculous number of problems,” replied:

That sounds reasonable to me. The “problem” is that the advent of software like Wolfram|Alpha removes any real usefulness from this kind of skill … it is now a purely aesthetic amusement.

But I disagree. Skill brings understanding, and understanding leads to insight into other things whose existence you can predict but whose content and requirements you can’t easily anticipate. Much of the mathematical and theoretical component of the computer science education at City College consists of exposure to proofs, or to things like proofs such as building a linked list in C++, and so on. It is not as though we will ever need to build our own linked lists or derive Chebyshev’s inequality. But struggling to produce them myself helps me to understand and retain them, and there is considerable value in that.