For Auld Acquaintance Sake

For Auld Acquaintance Sake--another New Year's card that was never sent; the image is printed on a stiff, translucent yellow material, and the ribbon joins this with the paper inner layers.

Happy New Year, From the Old Country

While my grandma's mom came from Bohemia, her father was from Scotland, and Scots-themed New Years' greetings are well represented in the card collection.

Wishbone and Merry Christmas

That's a mighty large wishbone, to support all that holly and mistletoe! 1907 seems to have been a very festive year.

Florence Williamson At Year's End, 1907

It's disconcerting for me to think about my grandma, 101 years ago, a young woman putting her postcard collection in an album. I'm closer in age now to what her mother, Agnes Williamson would have been in 1907. Agnes was born in Bohemia and married to a Scotsman in Iowa. Her childhood included an ocean crossing under sail and labor as a domestic servant in Des Moines, while her married life began with relocating in a covered wagon to a sod house in western Nebraska. She died in 1936, at age 88, from a farm accident. The comparison makes me feel like a sissy, worrying about my troubles.

Christmas Snow Report

Evidently, it was snowing in Des Moines on Christmas Eve day in 1909.

Christmas Angel

The postmarks on these old cards run through the New Year, so I feel justified in further seasonal displays. May the year end well for you all.

Merry Christmas, 2008

While I've been paging through my grandma's postcard collection, Sherry and Dave have been making their own seasonal postcards. Meanwhile, needle artists like SharonB have been making fabric postcards. So many wonderful things to see, so little time!

The Brick Testament

Brett, newly established at The Hendricksonians, made me aware of The Brick Testament: The world's largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible. That title fails to mention that the Bible is entirely illustrated by photos of scenes built of Legos. The stories' texts are straight from the Bible, but the Brick Testament is not devotional in intent, nor is it for children. I have found it disturbingly addictive. So far, I particularly liked Acts of the Apostles, which includes stories such as Accept Communism or Die and Paul Gets Stoned. The latest addition, The Book of Job, is also interesting, especially the sight of God speaking out of the whirlwind, constructed of Legos.

If your sensibilities are delicate, you probably want to give this site a pass.

Secular Christmas Images, 1909

Pretty ladies and pretty birds--I don't know if the juxtaposition means anything, but there's nothing overtly seasonal except the holly and the message. I wonder if this is the beginning of Fox News' perceived "War on Christmas?"

Merry Christmas, 1908

Here's a Christmas card my grandma received 100 years ago. She was 24, single, living with her parents on their farm at Williamson. Williamson consisted of her uncles' store and Williamson Hall, a community center still used for dances and reunions when I was a kid. By 1908, Williamson no longer had a post office, and her cards were addressed to Prescott, Iowa.

The text of the card: Front: A Bright and Happy Chrstmas from Margaret to Florence. Back: Florence Williamson, Prescott, RFD #3, Iowa. Postmark: December 22, 6 PM, 1908, Prescott, Iowa

Antikythera Device--The Ancients Knew More Than We Credit

Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery: The model of the Antikythera Device is based on the latest discoveries of the mysterious mechanism. I remember reading about the Antikythera device many years ago, in the sort of periodical devoted to Roswell cover-ups, alien encounters, and the evidence about the lost continent of Atlantis. I was really surprised to hear about it again a couple of years ago, and this year, a new article in Nature has prompted a string of articles, and this amazing video. Remember, the original object is 2000 years old!

I've put together a list of links about the Antikythera device below. It's so cool, you'll have to read more about it. My favorite observation comes from New Scientist's December 12 article, Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer:

Historians have often scoffed at the Greeks for wasting their technology on toys rather than doing anything useful with it. If they had the steam engine, why not use it to do work? If they had clockwork, why not build clocks? Many centuries later, such technology led to the industrial revolution in Europe, ushering in our automated modern world. Why did it not do the same for the Greeks?

The answer has a lot to do with what the Greeks would have regarded as useful. Models of people and animals, like those of the cosmos, affirmed their idea of a divine order. Gadgets like Hero's were also used to demonstrate basic physical laws in pneumatics and hydraulics....

Rather than being toys, devices like the Antikythera mechanism were seen as a route to understanding and demonstrating the nature of the universe - a way to get closer to the true meaning of things. To what better use could technology be put?

• The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project--the project's home page.
• July, 2008 article in Nature, Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism. You can only read the abstract here without paying US$32, but you can download a download a 44 page pdf of "supplementary notes," which probably rivals or surpasses the costly but prestigious Nature article.
• Reproduction of 2,100-year-old calculator deepens mystery, by John Cox, December 17, 2008, Network World
• Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer . This New Scientist article by Jo Marchant (reference below) gives historical context on the ancient Greeks' inventions as well as a synopsis of modern thought on the device. It's no accident I first read about the device in "Believe It or Nuts!" sort of publication.
• Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer--and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, a book about the device by Jo Marchant. There's also a website for the book.

Ponzi

I don't know where I got the wrong idea, but somehow, I thought that "Ponzi" was a mathematician or economist who described the swindle, maybe in the 18th or 19th century, some early student of probability and statistics. The Washington Post set me right with this interesting feature: One Name Stands Alone in The Grand Scheme of It All--Madoff? Meh. History Put Its Money on Ponzi.

Apple Cake

About 10 years ago, someone made me an apple cake. I've been looking for the recipe ever since, and this year, with an abundance of apples, I've tried lots of them. The closest approximation of the cake in my memory came from this recipe. It's based on Cathy Anderson's award-winning apple cake recipe, with some substitutions and additions on my part. The cake is very sweet, and very moist, so it tastes fine unfrosted. Sprinkle a little confectioner's sugar over the top if you want to make it look pretty (like a first snowfall). If you must have frosting, the cream cheese recipe from my old Betty Crocker cookbook works better than most of the richer recipes you'll find on the Internet these days. You can definitely overdose on sweetness with this cake.

Apple Raisin Sheet Cake

• 4-5 cups chopped apples (cored, but with peels)
• 1 and 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup blackstrap molasses
• 1/2 cup salad oil
• 1 cup raisins
• 2 eggs, well beaten
• 2 cups flour (1 cup white, 1 cup whole wheat works well)
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (F). Mix apples and sugar thoroughly. Add oil, molasses, raisins, eggs. Combine dry ingredients (flour, spices, salt, baking soda), add and stir to mix. Bake in a greased 13x9 inch pan for 1 hour, or until cake pulls away from sides of pan and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out without any batter.

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 3 oz. cream cheese
• 1 Tbs milk
• 1 Tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 c confectioner's sugar

Blend cream cheese, milk, and vanilla--an electric mixer works best for this. Add the sugar and continue to blend. If frosting is too stiff to spread, add a little more milk.

Florence Nightingale's Graphical Presentation of Data

She's remembered as a nurse, public health advocate, and career-minded woman in a patriarchal society, but I was fascinated to learn that Florence Nightingale was a statistician!

Through her work as a nurse in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in establishing the importance of sanitation in hospitals. She meticulously gathered data on relating death tolls in hospitals to cleanliness, and, because of her novel methods of communicating this data, she was also a pioneer in applied statistics. We explore the work of Nightingale, and in particular focus on her use of certain graphs which, following misreading of her work, are now commonly known as 'coxcombs'.

The article includes links to several interesting sources on Florence Nightingale. I found this November 11 blog post from Understanding Uncertainty via Slashdot (/.), which pointed to Florence Nightingale: The passionate statistician By Julie Rehmeyer, published November 26, 2008 in Science News. This column didn't actually reference Understanding Uncertainty, except in an incorrect URL crediting a graphic, but the whole Science News column seems to be based on the Understanding Uncertainty posting.

Understanding Uncertainty is well worth a visit. Their mission is to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining! and I found plenty to entertain and instruct. Like Slow Food and Slow Bloggers, they even have a manifesto: Manifesto for a statistically literate public. They appear to be using Drupal in a fairly straightforward way, so I'm learning something from their site design, too.

Blogging More or Less

I've written 30 posts in 30 days for November Is National Blog Posting Month, although I haven't posted each day. At the same time I've been trying to post more often, a number of people have been posting about why it would be good to post less often. Leslie at The Clutter Museum brought this to my attention through 5 Things Teachers Could Learn From Slow Blogging. Leslie focuses on the uses of technology in higher education, but she links to a collection of articles on "Slow Blogging."

It seems a New York Times article by Sharon Otterman (November 21, 2008) triggered this month's discussion: Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail's Pace

...Ms. Ganley, 51, is part of a small, quirky movement called slow blogging. The practice is inspired by the slow food movement, which says that fast food is destroying local traditions and healthy eating habits. Slow food advocates...believe that food should be local, organic and seasonal; slow bloggers believe that news-driven blogs like TechCrunch and Gawker are the equivalent of fast food restaurants--great for occasional consumption, but not enough to guarantee human sustenance over the longer haul.

Recursively enough, Slow Food (American style) has its own blog, The Slow Food USA Blog. I used to follow it regularly, because I'm interested in agriculture, food, cooking, gardening, old-fashioned skills, recipes, animal breeds, and crop varieties. However, I gradually lost interest in reading their musings on these topics. There's a line between being mindful of what you eat and where it came from and self-absorption, and they crossed it a little too often for my taste.

Unfortunately, as I made my way through the links Leslie provided, that same feeling began to creep over me. Maybe it was too many articles on the same introspective topic all at once. Perhaps if I approach these one at a time in a few days, I'll be able to get through them.

• Slow Blogging: Context, Transitions and Traditions (Back from Illinois, Part Two: Setting Up The Classroom Community) from Ganley's BGBlogging. The 2006 post that seems to have launched early discussion.
• Slow Blog Manifesto There's also a Slow Food Manifesto. I don't know which one came first.
• I Am a Slow Blog
• A "Slow Blog" Or Rather, "Bright Blog" Manifesto by David D. Perlmutter; Slow Blog: Part 2
• Why I Blog by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic.

I do believe it's valuable to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it, but I'm not sure how interesting it is for other people to read about it, at least in abstract terms. Heaven knows I love my tomatoes, and I slap photos, recipe, and how-to's on my blog expecting that others may enjoy or learn. The tomatoes are wonderfully concrete, and much more interesting than my second-hand analysis of the evils of agribusiness.

Aw shucks. I've gone and blogged about blogging again.

Buying a Drupal Book

I try to avoid buying computer books, partly because I'm cheap, partly because I have limited shelf space, and partly because free online resources are often better. However, I've been having trouble getting started with Drupal--I know how to make it work, but I don't really "get" what I need to know to start working on a real Web site. (By the way, my latest set of helpful Drupal links is listed below.)

• Drupal for Organizations: Part I - Site Architecture from Geoff Hankerson's Web site: "Web developer, Podcaster and Drupal Specialist."
• Tutorial: An Introduction to Drupal includes an explanation of Drupal "taxonomy" and how to use it.
• WebShaq Media's Drupal Resources Nice topics and how-to's but doesn't anybody write articles anymore? What gives with all these videos?
• Transitioning from Plone to Drupal from Marine Metadata Interoperability Some easy-to-follow nuts and bolts details about how their Drupal site is organized.
• What is the Content Construction Kit? A View from the Database

There's useful information here, but not what I'd been hoping to find. That's why I ordered Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6: Build your own professional blog, forum, portal or community website with Drupal 6 by David Mercer. It came in the mail yesterday, and I started working my way through it this morning. Even though it was quite pricey, I'm pleased to have it. The author walks you through developing and implementing a sample Web site. The drupal.org site tells you how to do hundreds of different things, but David Mercer tells you why you want to do a few of the more basic things, and what things you need to learn about first. It was this orientation that I've been missing.

Adventures in Slow Cooking--A Fascinating Blog

Speaking of "how-to" Web sites, I just happened across this blog: A Year of Crock Potting--A New Year's Resolution to use the Crock Pot every day in 2008. Every day Stephanie photographs her ingredients, gives "The Recipe" and "The Directions," and follows up with "The Verdict." I've found that many recipes on Internet cooking exchanges have typos, missing ingredients, or are passed along because they "should work," so "The Verdict" is a very important component.

Like Stephanie, I love my slow cooker, and I use it several times a week to cook big batches of oat groats (and other recalcitrant breakfast cereals), dried beans, deer roasts, and the odd chunk of meat we find on sale. However, her year of cooking slowly is much more adventurous than my bowls of fancy oatmeal. She has slow cooker beverages, deserts, fondue, quinoa, ethnic entrees and cornbread!

How To Do Stuff

In an attempt to get back on track blogging with "30 Posts in 30 Days" I've been sifting through my collection of half-written posts (now spread across three different computers--electronic clutter times 3!). Here's a resource I don't want to lose track of: 80 How-To Sites Worth Bookmarking. The list includes eight topics such as "Become a Technophile in 10 Easy Steps," "Dining on a DIY Diet," and "Every How-To They Can Get Their Hands On." It's a post on Stepcase Lifehack, a blog on productivity and personal development: Dozens of authors posting how-to's on dozens of topics.

"Life hacks" as an information category has alternately irritated me and filled me with pity. The things kids need directions for, these days! How to shop on a budget; how to cook something for dinner; how to iron a shirt--didn't their parents teach them anything? Evidently not. Thank goodness someone taught them how to look stuff up on the Internet.

I started learning how to do stuff from books when I was 10 or 11, and the Internet sucked me in long before the World Wide Web appeared. Those Usenet newsgroups were a gold mine of esoteric "how-to" information, from statistical analysis (where I was legitimately using my computer guest account) through baking, brewing, photography, and musical instrument repair (not legitimate computer use for me, but very welcome). I don't know when directions for simple and mundane things like ironing your own shirts and comparative grocery shopping started to appear.

I guess I feel sorry for people who have to look up these things on the Internet because these are things adults taught me when I was a child. When I iron shirts, I remember my mom showing me how; when I roll out bread dough with a rolling pin, I think of my grandma; when I fry an egg, I remember fixing breakfast with my dad.

Learning how to do something is its own reward, but I really hope the "life hackers" have some knowledge that gives them a connection to the past and their families.

Fabric Shopping Online

Lest I misplace it again, here is the online accompaniment to an article in Threads magazine: Online Fabric Shopping: A List of Resources. If you quilt, there are several places to buy fabric in our area, but for wearables, I've shopped online for a long time now. As the article's author, Carol Fresia, says:

For lots of sewers, the pleasure of wandering through a local fabric shop, touching swatches of fine yardage and dreaming up future garment wonders, is a thing of the past. So where do you go when you need--or just want--to purchase fabric? In Threads #120, I discuss the many advantages of shopping for fabric via the Internet.

Her list includes my three favorite sources: Wazoodle.com, Sew Sassy Fabrics, and Dharma Trading Company, as well as many I've never seen before. This long, unannotated list will mean hours of browsing pleasure (or wasted time--you decide).

Full Bust Alteration on Sewing Patterns

It struck me after the last post that I had buried the useful links on full bust alterations in the middle of a post on another topic. Just to be clear, I think full bust pattern alterations are the cat's jammies, the cream in my coffee, and way, way better than sliced bread. (Feel free to add your own favorite archaic slang superlative.)

One reason I'm so excited about them is that for years I tried in vain to improve the fit of my shirts, blouses, and jackets. I read books, made slopers, bought pattern after pattern, and cut out disappointing garment after disappointing garment. My problem didn't fit the classic full bust diagnosis, and besides, this is America. How could anyone's bust be too large?

I happened on the issue when I was altering bra patterns. It seems that most sewing pattern companies assume a B-cup bra size. The majority of American women require a C-cup or larger, which means that many of us will benefit from a full bust alteration on sewing patterns.

I tried the adjustment to see what would happen, and it made all the other alterations I'd been using unnecessary. I don't have dowager's hump, forward thrusting shoulders, or a sway-back. Instead, I'm a Jane Russell kind of gal!

Now, this is not just a nicer label for my middle-aged figure. I'm reworking my pattern collection, and getting flattering garments with a minimum of fuss. Sewing is so much more fun when the results are pleasing.

Here's how to determine if the full bust alteration might help you with pattern fitting. First, wearing your best-fitting bra, measure your chest at its fullest point. This is called your full bust measurement, or often, simply your bust measurement. Then, measure your chest above your bust, just under your armpits. This is known as your high bust measurement. If the difference between your full bust measurement and high bust measurement is substantially more than two inches, you may find this pattern alteration useful.

Instead of selecting your pattern size based on your full bust measurement, take your high bust measurement, add two inches, and base your pattern size selection on that number. These helpful links give clear, well-illustrated directions on making a full bust adjustment for various garment types.

• Full Bust Alteration on Princess Seamed Bodice from Debbie's Sewing Projects--Tips and Project Instructions. Great diagrams, including animation! Also, check out her other projects and instructions.
• Full Bust Alteration. These are the directions I used for tee-shirts and blouses.
• Adjusting for a Full Bust on a Wrap Top. Photos instead of diagrams, but good instructions, and there are plenty of interesting posts on this blog.
• Full Bust Alterations (or Adjustments) ~ FBA from Sew, Mama, Sew, another blog of sewing tips and suggestions.