ℝ>library(tidyverse)ℝ>library(lubridate)ℝ>library(ggplot2)ℝ>read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wdenton/noa2co2/master/mauna-loa.csv",col_names=c("date","co2"))%>%mutate(month=floor_date(date,unit="month"))%>%group_by(month)%>%slice(which.min(co2))%>%ggplot(aes(x=month,y=co2))+geom_step()+labs(title="Minimum monthly CO₂ at Mauna Loa",x="Month",y="CO₂ PPM",subtitle="Data from https://github.com/wdenton/noa2co2",caption="CC-BY William Denton")+theme_minimal()+theme(axis.title.y=element_text(angle=0),axis.title.x=element_text(hjust=0))
Kady MacDonald Denton (my mother) has a new book out: What Are You Doing, Benny? It was written by Cary Fagan and published by Tundra Books. It’s available from your favourite book source, be that a store (personally, I recommend a real actual store you can visit in person) or a library.
Where I work, at York University Libraries, we’ve got a new web page up: vendor policies. It’s a big long list of everyone electronic resource that we subscribe to, with links (where known) to the vendor’s privacy policy and terms and conditions of use, and a note about whether account creation is optional or mandatory. The data was collected by Stephanie Power and is available on GitHub under a CC-0 license.
Screenshot of web page
There’s also a little script that generates the long HTML list, suitable for pasting into a content management system. The list isn’t pretty, but our goal was first to build a complete list so that all of these policies that affect our users are in one place. That’s done.
Our second goal is to tell other libraries about it. Perhaps this list is useful elsewhere, particularly in Ontario, where the academic libraries share a lot of online resources? Right now it’s a list of what York has, and for other libraries to use it we’d need to figure out a way of listing who has access to what, but maybe that’s just a matter of adding a column to the CSV.
If anyone’s interested in using the data or has ideas about improving it, please email me at wdenton@yorku.ca.
As a great admirer of A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve-novel sequence by Anthony Powell, I was interested to come across a mention of Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the most famous characters in the series, in The Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980, pp. 77–79) by Richard Gwyn.
Cover of The Northern Magus
The Trudeau is Pierre Trudeau, prime minister from 1968 to 1984 (with a short interruption) and father of our current prime minister, and Pitfield is Michael Pitfield, Clerk of the Privy Council of Canada.
Yet Pitfield remains dependent on Trudeau. Trudeau can do so much that Pitfield cannot: be an athlete; be an object of desire to women; be a writer (Pitfield’s prose is leaden); be popular; be elected Prime Minister. “Michael is scared of Pierre” says someone who knows both well. For all Pitfield’s power and intimidating presence, there clings to him a faint aura of Widmerpool, the dogged, seeker after power in Anthony Powell’s series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time. Despite his extraordinary success, Pitfield remains curiously solitary, uncertain, vulnerable. Only after about 1977, by then confident of his position, did Pitfield begin to act, as one minister describes it, “not as Trudeau’s representative to the civil service, but as he should have all along, the representative of the civil service to the Prime Minister.”
Kenneth Widmerpool by Marc Boxer
…
Just as in Powell’s novels Widmerpool emerges in the end as the most memorable of characters, Pitfield, in his way, is as memorable a figure as Trudeau. As complicated, less-controlled, more human for all his ruthlessness, and essentially more creative, Pitfield’s shining accomplishment has been to create the modern Privy Council Office, and to structure it, superbly efficient despite its flaws, as the central nervous system for the entire government. “PCO,” says a colleague, “is Michael’s Sistine Chapel.”
Dance is one of the best things written in English in the twentieth century. If you haven’t read it, you may find the first book rather episodic and wonder if you should continue, but for me it was the second in the sequence where I realized it was a work of genius. Half the book is devoted to an extraordinary night where the narrator goes a to a dinner party, then a ball (this is London in the 1920s), then meets an old friend from the first book and goes on to a wild party. Widmerpool is in both books.
I cannot recommend the series highly enough, though as Powell has narrator Nick Jenkins say, “I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.”
I have a Raspberry Pi at work that I use for listening to STAPLR. A while ago it fell off the university’s wifi network. Today I got around to fixing that. For some unknown reason I had to do more today than I did back when I first got it on the wifi, but such is the way of computers. For my own sake I’m documenting what I did here, and maybe it will be useful to others.
Then take the text in hash.txt and add it after “hash:” in the password field.
Columns
Restart network services (sudo service networking restart) and all should work … unless you don’t have a /etc/network/interfaces file, which I didn’t! Somehow it had disappeared. So I created one, with this incantation:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant
(That’s a tab for indentation there, in case it matters. The pre-up line should be all on the same line, it’s -c/etc/wpa..., but some formatting thing is messing up the display here.)
After rebooting it all worked, even though the network icon in the icon bar showed no connection.
Columns
Typing in your password means it’s in your history, which means it’s in a file on the system. That’s insecure. The easiest way to clear that out is to wipe your history:
history -c
But you can also just wipe out the one line by finding just which one it is, for example:
Amanda Wakaruk told me about an episode of Bonanza where Charles Dickens comes to town because his copyright has been violated. Yes, Bonanza, the old TV western with Lorne Greene as Pa to Hoss, Adam and Little John.
Future Lost in Space bad guy Jonathan Harris stars in this Bonanza episode as celebrated British novelist Charles Dickens. When the Virginia City newspaper begins serializing Dickens’ latest novel without his permission, the author arrives in town to register a protest-and gets arrested and fined for his troubles. Despite Dickens’ imperious refusal to pay the fine or speak in his own defense, Dickens’ cause is championed by four of his biggest fans–the Cartwrights. Others in the cast include Victor Maddern as Dave, Frank Albertson as Sam Walker, and Charles Irving as Rogers. “A Passion for Justice” originally aired September, 29 1963.
Amanda recommended it as having a surprisingly nuanced discussion of copyright issues.
Miskatonic University Press
