A cloudy day with not a hint of rain. After much wrangling last night I assented to getting up at 6am to go on a ten-mile run with my sister. I don’t mean to make that sound too casual. I haven’t run that far in maybe four years. A couple of months ago I signed up for the half-marathon in Duluth on a whim and now I’m paying the price. My training method consists of nothing more than “just make sure you’re able to run thirteen miles by race day.”
So now I get up and drive with Paige over to the five-mile loop in Arden Hills and we run twice around it.
I have heard people bandy about some idea of a running “high,” some endorphin-induced euphoria supposedly felt by long-distance runners. The longest run I ever did was 16.3 miles and I did not feel a high. If it takes running more than sixteen miles to get a high than in my opinion it won’t be worth it when it comes.
I am, though, intimately familiar with a running “low,” a storm of roaring stomach pain, which visits me anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour after the run is over. Such was the case this morning, and after driving home and trying to eat some breakfast, I crashed on the couch and slept for three hours while my body rode out the worst of it.
I like to think that after this life and after Armageddon and just after the last judgment, all the souls in heaven will hit the sack for a few days; you know, to sleep off the effects of the whole long history of the world. Not a defensible idea maybe, but a pleasant thought. After all that terror and hardship and effort, it would be good to recover a bit before the big dinner.
The first thing I noticed on board ship was that something was not quite right. The ship turned and heaved under my feet in a way I ought to have expected, and my legs did not quite give me the same mileage to which I had been accustomed back on terra firma. But in the same way, time itself seemed to heave and turn in like manner, just as the ship would slowly climb a wave and then have it drop out from beneath her.
By the aid of my wristwatch, I soon found out the cause. The ship’s hourglass was biased in one direction. So every other hour lasted an hour and a half, but when you flipped the glass over, the sand flowed fast again and that hour only lasted about thirty minutes. No one else noticed; presumably they had adjusted to it in their minds, just as their legs now habitually compensated for the lolling of the waves. The time was never off by much, but it was not well-behaved either. It took some getting used to.
The ship had been christened the Regular Vein by some well-meaning duffer. In all likelihood he meant to say Jugular, in the same way a Yorkshire farmer will refer to the baby as having a Biblical cord. Whatever the reason, it was not a name that I liked and I spent many of the “long” hours pondering what the real context could have been and in what spirit the name had really been given.
Foget was the night watch, the quintessential nocturne. His eyes were round and big, and his pupils were somewhat dilated from peering out into the dark all the time. He kept a dogged watch. You couldn’t just let them sneak up on you, he said. He had read Poe’s Descent Into the Maelstrom and it had bored him out of his mind. Foget didn’t have the judgement to know whether the author had actually seen those things, but he knew Poe oughtn’t to have written such a rambling yawner unless he was trying for a legal document, and those aren’t usually set out on store shelves and marketed as fine reading for paying customers. But if something like this happened on Foget’s watch, he was fully prepared to take advantage of it. So he was always looking.
By day, Foget was a different creature. He let his eyelids down halfway over his big round blue eyes. If he was a watcher-for of phantoms by night, by day he was a disinterested listener-to of tales and sagas. Most of the hands’ tales put him to sleep, probably because he had read too much Poe and it had altered his tastes. Particularly when the Port-sands Mariner was narrating, he suspected the day-watchmen of always using the slow end of the hourglass (a theory that in his more wakeful moments he recognized as improbable). The Port-sands Mariner had been on the crew longer than he, and was known by that unhelpful title for some unknown original reason. He was often referred to simply as Port-sands. However, he managed to retain his full title, and not to let us forget that it was properly The Port-sands Mariner, by often referring to himself in that way when relating some extravagant and obscure history in which he had played a part – which is a long way of saying what the sailors call more simply, a Yarn.
Foget, then was most wakeful and clear-headed at night when there was no one to weary himself listening to; and Port-sands, he was most sleepy at night, when there was no one to talk to. So their personalities fit pretty well, and they were around each other a bit more than any of the rest. How funny it is that the most dissimilar fellows will seek each other out and keep each other company.
So now, in your mind’s eye, maybe you can picture wakeful Foget out on his nightly watch up in the crow’s-nest, being waved in the windy night as though on the end of a wand, and flipping over the hourglass every thirty minutes (if it was one of the fast hours), or every hour and a half (if it was one of the slow hours)…and, by turns, peering out into the darkness in expectation of a phantom (if it was one of the fast hours) or huddled down out of the wind, reading Poe by dark lantern (if it was one of the slow hours). Forty-two feet in the air. Sometimes he did get tired, though, and a salesmen or a lieutenant from one of Port-sands’ stories would get mixed up with Poe’s cats and ravens and tell-tale beating hearts.
Home builder wanted to run new residential construction company. Framing carpentry experience on at least twenty houses. Must have at least working knowledge of siding, roofing, concrete, insulation, plumbing, electrical, heating. Must have a well-developed sense of aesthetics and be in tune with national and local trends in color selections, new materials, and other home design details. Competent trim carpentry skills a plus. Must have a solid grasp of all local building codes. Must be an able accountant and bookkeeper to keep the business from going under. Coordinate and schedule construction of new homes and service requests on existing homes. Must be willing to fill out reams of paperwork when it is nice out, as well as get out there and swing a hammer when it is nasty hot or bite-your-head-off cold. Other required areas of expertise: written communications; people skills and negotiations; a good head for numbers; ability to make snap decisions in unexpected circumstances; teaching and training new employees; safety regulations compliance; assist in insurance audits; participate in local government hearings related to zoning and employment laws; human resources management; analyse job cost and sales reports; and repair of power tools.
As humans we are continually faced with questions of conscience. One such question seems utterly unique: whether to drive under the speed limit. I never follow the speed limit strictly, and I know of few people who do. I don’t even drive in terms of sixty or seventy miles an hour, but in terms of limit plus five or limit plus ten. The actual experience with most of us is that the conscience generally does not bother us about our driving speed.
We might remember the first time we told a lie or the first time we stole something from the drugstore and our mothers dragged us back and made us admit it, and we were pardoned by the spineless, kindly old manager. But who remembers the first time they broke the speed limit?
No Natural Counterpart
People’s consciences simply do not bother them about speeding in the same way they might about lying or stealing. And little wonder: the speed limit has no counterpart in the Ten Commandments or the laws of nature. There simply is nothing inherently moral about not going fast.
Regarding the laws of nature, there is one obvious example of a speed limit: the speed of light. The fastest forces in the universe, the massless particles of gravity and light, cannot travel faster than this. But this “speed limit” is not analagous to the black-and-white signs on the freeway. It’s only a “limit” because it’s impossible to travel any faster. The essential speed laws of particle physics and of natural biology are: “go as fast as you possibly can.” If we were to accept this principle as the basis for speed limits, we would be driving about with the pedal constantly floored, and our engines would wear out a lot faster.
Indeed, the notion of speed limits, in a pure physical sense, is even more nonsensical when viewed in the light of general relativity. Einstein showed that speed is relative, that acclerated motion is (for all practical purposes) indistinguishable from gravity, and that all objects are traveling through spacetime at the speed of light.
The realm of natural biology operates in a similar way. There simply aren’t any examples of creatures or processes in nature creating arbitrary, self-imposed limits on their speed.
We’ll Protect You…
What then is the thinking behind speed limits? Well, the idea is that people given an unnatural potential for destructive activity when surrounded by 2,000 pounds of moving metal. Furthermore, our reflexes (so the thinking goes) are not naturally equipped to account for and react to events at high speeds. When you have a high density of these fast-moving pinheads, you have to impose an arbitrary limit on speed, to prevent destruction to life and property. Because the natural has been sidestepped, the laws of nature, which are laxadaisical in this matter, cannot apply.
But this is exactly why we don’t feel guilty. The speed limit tells us we pose a threat, when it’s obvious to us that we don’t. Everyone’s cooking along at eighty miles an hour; what’s the problem? We may be breaking the law, but we don’t appear to be posing the threat that the speed limit says we are. On the other hand, the possibility of being late for an appointment poses a more clear and present risk, and arguably an equal claim to the dictates of conscience. So the official rules of the road are often sacrificed on the altar of punctuality or plain lack of patience.
I would argue that in most cases where a person seems to feel a moral sting while driving above the limit, it is because he or she feels a keen awareness that their behaviour poses a saftey threat, not simply because his odometer shows a higher number than the sign says is legal.
With these two things in mind — the theoretical danger posed by human nimrods hurtling around encased in two thousand pounds of metal armour, and the vast majority of everyday experience telling us it’s no big deal — we are led to ask: are speed limits really any good at mitigating danger?
What Happens in The Real World
The answer is two-part. Yes, the fact of having a speed limit at all is an effective way of preventing destruction. More on this later. But second, contrary to popular understanding, slower speed limits do not necessarily mean safer roads. This is because raising and lowering speed limits has no effect on motorists’ speeds.
“The primary conclusion of this research is that the majority of motorist on the nonlimited access rural and urban highways examined in this study did not decrease or increase their speed as a result of either lowering or raising the posted speed limit by 4, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 24 km/h). In other words, this nationwide study confirms the results of numerous other observational studies which found that the majority or motorist do not alter their speed to conform to speed limits they perceive as unreasonable for prevailing conditions.”
— Effects of Raising & Lowering Speed Limits
“A study of speed limits on different freeway types in Michigan failed to show that speed was a substantial contributor to more frequent or more serious crashes. It showed that compliance with speed limits was not necessarily an accurate measure of safety. Although more crashes occur in urban areas, as can be expected from congestion and the need to react to other vehicles, drivers seem to choose speeds similar to the design speeds for different types of roads. The research suggests that lowering speed limits arbitrarily does not affect traffic safety. Speed limits and speed zones would be more effective if they were based on geometrics, traffic characteristics, and safety benefits rather than popular conceptions.”
— Freeway Speed Zones: Safety and Compliance Issues
In other words, common sense prevails over arbitrary law in practice.
These studies also contradict the popular idea that if you raise speed limits, everyone will simply drive that much faster and still break the limit.
The Freedom of Police Caprice
Speed limits do have value, however, precisely because of people’s current ability to fudge the system.
If there is no official system for judging safe speeds, who or what determines when safe limits have been exceeded? The answer is the whim of the law enforcement officer. Eliminating speed limits would place total authority and confidence in the universal good judgment of your local police force. We would be making the highway patrollers a law unto themselves.
Speed limit laws, however, create that higher rule of law to which everyone can look and see clearly who was right and who was wrong. They allow for the possibility of contesting the police officer’s judgment, and also allow for clear and strict punishment of drivers who actually cause accidents.
The system works because of a social quid pro quo between society and law enforcement. Drivers innately understand the need to avoid accidents, and so, on a given section of road, they will drive at generally the same speed (the design speed of the road) regardless of the limit. But patrolmen, in turn, recognize that speed limits are arbitrarily low, and do not enforce them strictly. In America, at least, most police officers generally will not pull you over unless you are going more than 10 mph above the limit — this we have (unofficially of course) from the officers themselves. But in addition, we know that if an officer is in a bad mood, he might ticket drivers for even slight overages.
Thus, the general unwritten “speed allowance,” combined with the random chance of strict enforcement, creates an environment in which we have the flexibility to use good judgment, but must also remain alert to being punished for abusing the privilege. On these grounds, I maintain that the system is not broken, and should not be changed.
The fastest way to raise speed limits would be to enforce them strictly. But as we have seen, this would not affect driving speeds, and would only call attention to a problem that arguably does not exist if you ignore it.
—JD
“What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our eyes!” —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799)
This article is here to explain the elements in the Textpattern structure of design, and their relationship to one another. A correct understanding of Textpattern’s concepts & intended purposes is grease on the waterslide of happiness and fulfillment.
Big Idea: Two separate hierarchies
This much is pretty well obvious from the get-go: Textpattern organises sites into two separate structures: Content and Presentation.
General Revelation: Textpattern’s Two Hierachies
The diagram below will tell you exactly what these two hierarchies are for and how their functions relate to each other.
Special Revelation: How the hierarchies play together
Remember this basic principle: “Content” organises information; “Presentation” organises different ways of viewing that information. Also note that Images and Links are separate bags of information, which can be referenced from individual Articles, Pages and Forms.
Anyway, Here is exactly what Textpattern means by all these terms:
Category
A method of organising articles by the nature of their content. (Not by their location in the navigation structure).
Category : Article
Most generically, a globally unique block of content. Textpattern attaches properties to these blocks, such as titles, authors, timestamps, categories, etc.
Section
Just like sections in a newspaper. They are accessed by the URL in your browser: “http://www.georgefrankly.com/about” puts you in the About section of georgefrankly.com. The section itself contains little information besides what page and what style to use. The home page is a separate, built-in section and does not appear in the list of sections.
Section: Style
Sections reference Styles, which contain CSS information about fonts, element positioning, etc. Styles are tied to sections, not pages or categories.
Section : Page
This provides the overall XHTML structure for a section’s pages. Pages make use of Forms and “non-atomic” Textpattern codes to connect with articles and other content.
Section : Page : Form
A form is a discreet, reusable chunk of content, which can contain text, HTML markup and “atomic” textpattern codes. Forms can also reference other Forms.
A Short Note on Code
As noted above, various parts of Textpattern can use Textpattern code, otherwise known as tags. There are two main types of textpattern tags; I like the descriptive terms atomic and non-atomic, but the normal names are Form tags and Page tags.
It would seem that most people confuse the roles of Categories and Sections, the common error being to treat Categories as a navigational structure. A person with this mentality is going to have a hard time understanding what sections are for.
Sections fence off articles into discrete bunches, totally separate from each other. A Category is nothing more than a label you put on an article. They are used for sorting information within a section.
Within a section you can display:
all articles for that section, or
only articles of certain categories, but still, only articles that are in that section. (Exception: with the new <txp:article_custom /> tag, you can direct Textpattern to display articles from other sections. However, the normal <txp:article /> tag will only show articles in the current section as described above.)
This should also explain why Textpattern does not paginate across sections.
Categories are universal and not tied to sections at all; If you have a “Musings” category, you can assign it to any article no matter what section it’s in. Again, this is because categories and sections are under two separate hierarchies.
Both categories and sections are optional. If you elect not to use sections (under the Admin tab), all your articles will be displayed using the same page (“default”). If you elect not to use categories, then you simply won’t have the option of putting those labels on your articles.
The “Front Page” Section
The front page is actually a section all its own. It has a specific page (“default”) and a specific style (“default”). However, you cannot assign an article to the front page as you can to other sections. The front page does not have its own articles; it simply displays articles from all the sections that have the “display on front page” option set to “yes.”
Permalinks
Permalinks are used as a permanent reference to a specific article. When you click on a an article’s permalink, you will see the article displayed using the page for the section it’s in. This is because, if your site uses sections, the permalink includes the section in the URL. Remember, sections are accessed via URL.
Here’s an example of a permalink address: http://www.spud.com/tech/12/CantArgue. From looking at it, we see that it refers to an article in the tech section, with a title that goes something like “Cant Argue” (Textpattern mangles article titles for permalinks). If you were to point your browser at that address, Textpattern would serve up the article using the page for the “tech” section.
Because Textpattern depends on the URL to know what page to use for an article, you can actually “trick” it into using a different page from a different section! For example, http://www.spud.com/about/12/CantArgue would make the article display using the page for the “about” section, even though the article is stored under a different section. I don’t know how useful that is, except to illustrate how Textpattern uses URLs in displaying content.
If you’re looking for a good place to host your Textpattern site, I suggest TextDrive. I currently have seven sites hosted here and they have worked out very well.
—JD
“Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.”
— Cullen Hightower
Flash. The lights are flicked
and sixteen feet all hit
the floor — we’re sorely ticked
we’ve had to leave our bunks
but to avoid a thrashing bit
we hide our funks;
we lick our sixteen lips
all chapped and quickly paste
on sickly smiles; haste
is health and ease, we’ve learned
while here, and memories erased
of jeans and hair and past lives spurned —
for what? I can’t recall.
Pendergast
A heavy burden is the Smaj’s post
Born by a man perforce a friend of few
Who, leaving out good Colonel, bears it most
And watches keenly o’er the men in blue.
He humbly served in tasks both mean and vast
With diamond-cut discernment held his rank
And though in thankless station ‘till the last,
Hath laid, by service, gold in heaven’s bank.
We’ll miss him at his post (though he does not)
And when recalling Sergeant Majors past
His smile will by memory be caught:
The voice, the name, the person, Pendergast.
Roger’s eyes welled up. He was peeling an onion & listening to radio news, commenting loudly on every point. His cat watched, trying to figure out the code, how he responded to what sorts of phrases, but it was all inscrutable, especially the crying part.
OK, so I posted a mean comment on this interview of Paul Ford, but I was goaded into it. Towards the end, though, in a sort of “final remarks” post, Mr. Ford said something interesting.
“Barnes & Noble turns reading into a commodified experience, w/focus on volume selling. It makes me itchy in their stores, and with all they have, they still never have what I want, nor do they have things that I didn’t know I wanted but turn out to want. It is a serendipity-proof book chain.”
Upon reflection I realized that this reflects my own experience as well. I like the feel of the stores and would love to sit down with some coffee and a good book and listen to some kind of weird twelve-tone progressive music, but every time I try, I end up wandering around for hours looking for a book that interests me. None of them ever do.
Having already announced an opinion on the matter, I decided I’d better go ahead and see the film for myself, now that such a thing is possible. My opinions remain unchanged.
As humans we are continually faced with questions of conscience. One such question seems utterly unique: whether to drive under the speed limit. I never follow the speed limit strictly, and I know of few people who do. I don’t even drive in terms of sixty or seventy miles an hour, but in terms of limit plus five or limit plus ten. The actual experience with most of us is that the conscience generally does not bother us about our driving speed.
