Jakob's Journal

10:31PM - What your fingers tell

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4314209.stm

I'll spare you from sharing my conclusions on a close examination of the length of my fingers.

9:34PM - Weird or what...

Frankly, only idiots would bid so much on this.

3:24AM - The Commonly Confused Words Test

Advanced
You scored 86% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 81% Advanced, and 55% Expert!

You have an extremely good understanding of beginner, intermediate, and advanced level commonly confused English words, getting at least 75% of each of these three levels' questions correct. This is an exceptional score. Remember, these are commonly confused English words, which means most people don't use them properly. You got an extremely respectable score.

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=14457200288064322170
------------

At least it looks like I got most of my basic English in order. I do however wonder why I scored lover in Beginner than Intermediate...

8:48PM

Recent readers here should be able to tell what is wrong with this picture.

3:29PM - Sweet!

Calvin and Hobbes - the collected works

I'm pretty sure it violates at least a couple of laws but it's great.

6:54PM - Black and white

In 1988 Oxford University Press published Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. 40 volumes to bring the works of a double minority of writers to the worlds attention. But what if a novelist celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women's literature turned out not to be black at all?. That seems to be the case with Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, who wrote the novel Four Girls At Cottage City (1895) - the novel that actually gave inspiration for the the 1988-publication.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of the Schomburg Library comments the discovery with these words: "I'm intrigued by the idea [...] that so many scholars have concluded that this woman was black, and it certainly will be interesting for us to figure out why".

I would like to know that too. There must have been something that made at least one person at some point think that she was black. But what?

11:38PM - Hamlet, scene II

Hamlet
Then is doomsday near: but your news is not true.
Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,
that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern
Prison, my lord!

Hamlet
Denmark's a prison.

Rosencrantz
Then is the world one.

Hamlet
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.

Rosencrantz
We think not so, my lord.

Hamlet
Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

Denmark as a prison amuses me. And a remark like there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so seems oddly postmodern.

9:58PM - Information at your fingertips - almost

It's rare that I can't get a hold of a book or journal at some Danish library but this isn't to be found. Good thing I don't need Susan Reynolds' article in it cause it usually takes the State Library here a couple of months to get a hold of things from a foreign library.

It's so much easier when an article can be found in JSTOR or similar places. Or even just to order a good old photocopy from the holdings at the State Library. Or wait a couple of weeks for a copy from any Danish library to be delivered to the State Library for me to pick up. But the Gutenberg Galaxy is really slow compared to the Turing Galaxy.

Funny how the improvement in the speed of getting access to information makes you more impatient when you have to do things like they did them in the old days. The 90's that is.

5:00AM - The f-word

Fundamentalism

Feudalism

Fascism - twice even (but thrice might be a bit much)

Feminism

Fat

Franchise

Freedom

Failure

Foregiveness

I like a good pun but it gets less pungent used frequently.

2:18AM - Maybe I should just make up stuff

Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten seem to have based his career on making stuff up. Wonder if it would take 30 year for someone to figure out if I just faked it?

10:34PM

8:43PM - Word

We need more people like Miss Gould in today's publishing business.

9:50PM - So I don't forget

Littleprofessor had a interesting little piece on Christian historiography march 2004. I should read it at some point.

And I should remember that it isn't a good idea to have comments sent to me on email when I post something interesting in the Christianity-community....;)

7:27PM - Oh the irony...

...in being bought up by people younger than me!

And yes, I know I'm being over dramatic.

6:14PM - Sometimes things comes in pairs

Weird. Shortly after I was made aware of Marginalia, a journal for medieval studies where the theme of the first (forthcomming) issue is "margins", I find an article on that very subject in (Swedish) Historisk Tidskrift 2004:3. I haven't really looked at it yet but Medieval Margins – a Site for Communication? Images of Culture and Nature in the Bayeux Tapestry sounds interesting. Even though it's a subject I know nothing about.

11:17PM - An acedemic reflection

In the Early Modern Notes blog there's an interesting comment on the recent debate on history and philosophy in some blogs. The key part of the comment would be:

In short: historians don't really need to beat themselves up about whether their accounts correspond to 'what really happened', so long as they correspond to the evidence relating to what happened, however problematic that relationship.

I find myself both agreeing and not agreeing. The problem is that we also judge accounts on how they talk about the relationship between the evidence and the reality they describe. We judge a letter from the king to a nobleman to be a better source for what the king was really thinking than a chronicle written 200 years later. If the chronicle tell us another story than the letter we tend to trust the letter - if there isn't a reason to think that the king lied. An account who trust the chronicle over the letter with no reflection on why will be judged by most historians as a "bad history". And that has nothing to do with that accounts' lesser correspondence to the evidence but purely with the assumed lesser correspondence to reality.

11:13PM - Brave new (e)world

It makes me feel a bit left behind when I read that fifth-graders and a great deal of academics and students use blogs in their education. The academic use of my blog is not exactly worth mentioning.

And it makes me fell a bit old too. I had graduated from high school before I ever experienced the internet. I got my first email address when I started at the university. And I only got internet at home after I got my BA. And some time after that I got a blog.

The (e)world move a bit fast for an old geezer like me. 10 years ago virtually nobody was online, today 8 million people have created blogs - and some get fired for having one.

In some point in the near future I feel the urge make a real academic, serious blog. There are some some good ones out there who mainly sticks with the academic stuff. Not a lot on livejournal though. Maybe it's because the spell check protest when you write "blog". Or maybe because it seems livejournal has the nickname teenangst.com. Someone should have mentioned that to me before I signed up at the high age of the 26 or something.

5:33PM - New watch

Yeah, I got a new watch (bought for birthday money from my mom and grandmom). And I like it:) So for the odd freak who likes a nice watch...

9:20PM - Ironic

There's a cruel irony to this.

3:50PM

I love the fact that I can't look at georgewbush.com anymore because I'm not placed in the US. Security reasons they say. Like it's going to take a hacker more than two seconds to get around it. I at least thought that George had smart people around him.