Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
quaternion, n. [LL quaternio, a body or group of four, the number four.] 1. the number four. [Rare.] 2. a set of four. He put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers. —Acts vii. 4. 3. a quadrisyllable, or word of four syllables. 4. in mathematics, (a) a factor which, by multiplication, changes one vector into another: it is expressible as a quadrinomial; (b) [pl.] the form of calculus using the quaternion. Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
The copy of it gave Chaldean clay its permanence.
The little brick of good answers itself might crumble, but its replicated otherself, here and there diffused by copy among the collected leavings of Chaldeans, gave the tabulated lists of starry observations in Chaldean clay a real and useful permanence outside the reach of the fate of any single one of the bricks in and of itself.
That the good answers would not go away, the Chaldeans took up the mathematics implicitly attached to the clays of the older Babylonians of before, with all their Babylonian millennia of tabulated observation of the skyparts still readily at hand to those who cared to reach, for the Babylonians, who had stirred themselves to create, quite nicely, a positional notation system of arithmetic which they had investigated to the fair boundary of algebra itself more than 1200 years before the emergence of the Chaldeans, had also left explicit and instructive methodologies at hand for the persistent copying transmission of the good answers such permanency requires.
Pervasively enough, this adoption by Chaldeans of the prior mathematics of the Babylonians of before, yetcurrent foundation of the familiar modern methodology for counting time, drives the little cyclic clockwork if it on in counts of 60 still, a count whose particulars are so familiar to one and all that the results of a good count based on the Chaldean methodologies, fitted into the framework of the one, thouroughgoing Roman calendrics, needing hardly more elaboration than a simple wording of the result, is as popularly announced as it is understood by the sort of people who so commonly refer to it, which, in point of fact, they so commonly do.
The stylus which shapes the time stamp even here at HCE we find to be the Chaldean stylus of before, once famously used to elaborate in Chaldean clay a peculiarly successful mathematics of the skyparts.
The quite literal stylus of Chaldeans quite literally stylized the clays at their disposal. That Chaldean stylus with all its nice entailments of tabulature and the implied mathematics making such a table became itself ephemeralized, stylized in our age to the point where the good result is available at every hand — even, as we admit, here at HCE, where, though following the Barry Family Standard in this regard we may yet hold to the grudging calendric argument of our forbears against Roman startpoint of the year hand, we bow to the Chaldean standard in the finer quotidian measure of its daily parts (just as the Babylonians would have had it, were they capable of expressing their views on the matter at this time).
.
How unlike, the drift of the Barry Family Standard in that long age following Discovery of the Barry Family.
Influenced by as–yet unchallenged bogknowledges, all the main and minor makers of the Barry Family conversation in that age went on about their announcements in utter, satisfied ignorance of the wider scheme just then being brought to its full classical flower by the efforts of Chaldeans.
The bogabode, great commodious parish of parochiality, was continuous home to the Barry Family all this time, and continuous focus of its cheif concerns.
The Barry Family took what meager warmth it could from the aggregating boglore all that storied time.
However parochial its focus on the meteorology of the skypart "cloud," which it ancestrally and understandably mistook for sky, given conditions (especially and crucially, as compared to the vastly more encompassing astronomy of Chaldeans), the Barrys, perhaps relaxed a bit much into a bogaggregating atittude of well, here comes everything, nevertheless developed over time a most exquisitely discriminating understanding of at least that, the weather of it, with a true and astute and endlessly explicable methodology for describing in particular the recourse to rain, which in the main became their lot to explain.
The sky deployed its drops of rain, the Barry Family conversation turned to the weather of it again and again, acquiring over time a subtle sense, quite supply said, of the fluxy flow of weather.
Little did the Barry Family know or particularly care just then that elsewhere the Chaldean clay accumulated, mounting its overarching challenge to the Barry Family's conflation of cloud with sky. The Barry Family eventually gave over to this new, superior and overarching view, introduced to it first by the inferential usages encoded in the Roman calendrics, and then again, more forcefully, as a seemingly necessary prelude to the history of the new sciences as taught by nuns.
Word came, as all things must eventually to the bog, of the encompassing clockworks of the skyparts as copied in Chaldean clay.
It would be anachronistic to say the Romans brought Ptolmey's Almagest to the Paris Basin when they came there.
But they had their calendar, the Romans, practical result of all that close attention given to the matter by Chaldeans long before. And they had their colonizing polis, great urban plan adapted from the likes of Greeks (great successful kit bag of it the Greeks had made, with all the great Greek architectural and political and economic and all too attractively social methodologies stored up, ready for transplant anywhere along the vasty streches of clement shore as lapped by the reputedly dark wine of Pontus Euxine, and the reportedly wine dark waters of the Mediterranean as well), the Romans did have their colonizing polis, but crucially, turned the power of the polis inland toward that great expanse of land lying to the north, to the eventual detriment of the Barry Family, whatever other good it may have done.
Instead of laying down by the shore as was the way with Greeks, the Romans made an inland empire of urban colonization, inheritors of all the cunning work the Greeks had done in in the field but extending those intrusive talents into a domain where stretches of land instead of stretches of sea sepaprated the urban centers they introduced.
They came, the Romans, to the Paris Basin, clutching symbolically the practical civilizing cudgel of their Greek– and Chaldean– and indeed Persian– and Egyptian–derived methodologies, as they clutched quite unsymbolically on the other and entirely literal hand the pointed result of millennia of civic attention given over to the adversities of war. And, as the civil mind is a war-minded mind, and as all the great attentive efforts of the civil minds of the Mediterranean directed toward that end had been so winningly incorprated by Roman practices, they had their way with it, the Paris Basin, the Romans did.
The Barry Family meteorology, formed in accumulated contact between Barry Family skin and the admonishments of the cloud of weather all those many millennia in the Paris Basin, was understandably considered true wherever cloud might travel.
The Barry Family credited that meteorology, the Barry Family did, with being a scheme quite coextensive with the passage everywhere of the then seemingly necessary cloud. Wherever it might go, they reasoned, the scheme as they understood it would prevail as well.
Over the millennia the Barry Family made its observant notice of what may come of cloud.
The tufted little line of hair known as the eyebrow came to be the place from which the Barry Family meteorology would issue its first report, the very frontline of the far fuller telling of the scheme of cloud to which the Barry Family conversation always inclined. Given the Barry Family's prodigous immersion in the data, any spoken reference to the thing threatened to open the great floodgates of common knowledges on the matter, engulfing the conversation in all the extensive nuanced evaluations of the underlying processes involved which when let slip, could easily take up as much time as any concievable conversation might allow.
Dedicated to the looker's reading by the culminating masterstrokes of the illustrative methodologies of the Greek geometry, Ptolmey in his Almagest described a way of drawing all the skyparts into a sensible scheme of mathematics. A scheme so sure that little mobile models could be made, of wood and metal, following the prescriptions of that mathematic's machineries along in miniature when operated, tangibly replicating at scale the far more encompassing motions of the skyparts.
The influence of the skyparts on the little mobile model is indirect, but sure. Ptolmey's astronomy complements them both, drawn up from the decisive data of Chaldeans based on more than a millenium of acutest observation. The Almagest, by its complementary mathematical machineries suggests the necessary relation between the two, between the noticable skyparts and little mobile models of those motions.
The data is always silent on that which has not yet occured, or on that which by dint of mischanced mark or lapsed attention on the part of the otherwise willing observer lays unmentioned there in the list. The data itself is the notably observed, preserved, persistent record of the willing observer, absent yet the record of the future of the thing. Entailed by the tabulated data, though, is the pointed reference, implicit yet unseen, to the guessable, or at any rate learnable relation to be had there, some characteristically absent formulation drawing the orderly table from the listed data.
The most marvelous schemes are implied by the most cunning arrays of good answers. The best tables implicate the grandest schemes.
With the watery bog the wet thing and the watery sky the wet thing, too, they took it to be all universally and truly moist down to the last small indivisible iota of it, it is true, the Barry Family did, overinfluenced perhaps by the rainy reach of range they'd taken for their home. The waterpath carried in the cardinal direction, the waterpath carried through the downdepending gradient of the bog, in the Barry Family view, the captive cargo of Allstory, the allwatering waterpath the moist substrate of all the acts of existent things: a foamy raft the waterpath.
Reference is made to the Valentine's day message created and exchanged, with love, by those of us here at HCE who who still follow the old custom, on February 14, 2004.
All the other arrant nonsense deliverable to the looker who imagines any understanding of the good answers of the Chaldean clay, inclusive of the astrologies that came almost immediately to heel in the aftermath of the classic period of the stuff (of the efflorescent data-derived astronomies marked out in Chaldean clay, the endless trove of the thin brick tablets of good answers spreading everywhere about the home region of Chaldeans), all the conceivable other arrant nonsense introduced and nourished by each looker — whether merely for the sake of argument or for some other reason, adopted out of ignorance or vanity perhaps, or in response to an appeal to that looker's quite genuine feelings of solidarity with the well-established view of the matter on the part of that looker's own self-same ilk — all of this other arrant nonsense that can be had, will be had, over time, in the firm view of the Barry Family.
Hipparchus had at it early, well before the summary made by Ptolmey in his Almagest. Hipparchus took the tables of Chaldeans to indicate an ordered something always implicit yet not directly stated in their arrangements, which is in fact an accepted quality of all tables.
What Hipparchus proposed of course was astrology as it has come down to us, mapping he did the qualities of interest to humans onto the values of the observed elements of the skyparts as expressed by the machinations of the mathematics responsible for the good answers of the readily available Chaldean clay, counting, in the Barry Family estimate, Hipparchus does, as the admiral of all that great fleet of arrant nonsense so well launched by his great insights.
Oh, of course the Sun is influential. This foretaken fact, though based fundamentally on what went unobserved by The Barry Family as a result of their customarily occluded view of the element's gross unavoidable centrality, was nevertheless even before the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family, cogently adopted by its members as the hallmark of implicit truth. The Sun is influential.
And the moon, yes, with its bespoken tides and its illuminating nightshapes; influential. From the first, The Barry Family has acknowledged that, as well they must.
Confronted with evidences from astronomy the Barry Family grudgingly accommodated the notion of a fuller cast of skyparts than ever likely to be known to them by looking up. At the very least the anciently arrived good answers of the concientiously collected tables of Chaldeans unambiguously recorded the arrival in due course of some twinkling self-reported something from distinctly far away, and as the thrust of the astronomy of the Chaldeans depended on just that, the existence of the observably distant skyparts, per se, cannot be denied some elemental influence, however wan, on their resulting tables.
Clearly all the arrant nonsense attached to the good answers of Chaldeans, as epitomized by the grand good go at it of Hipparchus, on the other hand, if influences are to be weighed, has had much greater effect on the course of human events than the remarked motions of the more distant skyparts in and of themselves. Hipparchus intervened (oh, and of course the many others just like him spread throughout the widely dispersed range of humans intervened as well) to make the spare existent meaning of the skyparts bend to the influential needs of people.
So, influential, yes, the skyparts, as oddly inflected by the ongoing agency of humans.
Handy, that there can be so short a word accounting for the manyfolding depositings of the bog.
Blunt remark for it, bog, where under the influential cardinal direction, down, in the standard view of the Barry Family, all eventually comes to be enmixt over time.
Water the constant companion of sky and skin and sod there in the bog althroughout the long ages of the Barry Family in the Paris Basin (and even before that, reaching back to the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, as revealed by The Barry Family Timeline).
With the watery bog the wet thing and the watery sky the wet thing, too, they took it to be all universally and truly moist down to the last small indivisible iota of it, it is true, the Barry Family did, overinfluenced perhaps by the rainy reach of range they'd taken for their home. The waterpath carried in the cardinal direction, the waterpath carried through the downdepending gradient of the bog, in the Barry Family view, the captive cargo of Allstory, the allwatering waterpath the moist substrate of all the acts of existent things: a foamy raft the waterpath.
Pragmatically this might as well be true about the waterpath, given the inexpungeable moistures of the bog, at least from the perspective of any who bother to look into it no more deeply than the Barry Family ever did. But traditional apologists for the boglore of those ancient Barrys go too far when they claim that in this universally moisty quality as percieved and eventually firmly expounded by the Barry Family in the highly verbose if regrettably repetitive stylings of its conversation, can be found in its generously made metaphors for the inclusive motile moist wet waterpath, a deep insightful anticipation of the fluent sloshing of probabilities advanced by the practices of the new sciences.
The Barry Family made no wave to the quantum world back then. The fundamental water it proposed was concieved of as just that, water. Even at the height of the Barry Family's brief interest in describing the thoroughgoingly tiny in any rigorous way, its supposedly indivisible iota remained a far plumper thing than that allowed for by the new sciences.
It is anachronistic to say that the pronouncements of the Barry Family then, however well-equipped to describe by metaphor the unspeakably probabilistic processes of water and its leavings, can be mapped directly onto the processes of the unspeakably probablistic processes of the quantum substrate as now envisioned by the new sciences.
There are the skyparts. We have to give them that, here at HCE. Admittedly there are the skyparts.
Often enough the one of them, cloud, which was once thought erroneously but pragmatically by the ancients of the Barry Family to be the same thing as sky but has for quite some time now been recognized as a dependent though constant part of what a glance up sees, delivers down to the thin observant skin of the members of that Family all its admitted and tangibly wetted bogevidences.
But, too, there are the considerable good answers of the Chaldeans based on the admittedly less tangible evidences of processes far beyond the ready view of the Barry Family itself.
Here at HCE, following the Barry Family in this, hefting as we do the prime tool of its bogknowledges, the notorious Good Standard (as amended), by which the good answer of others is just good enough for a Barry, we admit of all the skyparts of Chadeans, too, in adddition to all those enclouding parts of sky so conjointly close to our immmediately attentive own home skin.
Little inclination the Barry Family has ever shown, with this everevident remainder of the sky so near at hand, to root among the good answers of Chaldeans for the sweet contradicting nugget, however vocal the many advocates of always contradicting the good answer have otherwise proved to be in the ongoing engagements of the Barry Family conversation.
The skyparts are affirmed. What is submitted by cloud and what is suspected of sky (given the good answers of Chaldeans) are the equally admitted things, in the Barry Family view.
There are the skyparts.
Even among those of us here at HCE with a nose for the wind but no eye for the sky, bracketed as we are by the often obfuscated view avaiable to the Barry Family's meaner measure of meterology in this respect, and indeed with all due announced deference to the admittedly superior rhinosophies of the dog (ideally) when noses are bruited about in the first place, who, in and of ourselves, have ever had but the faintest experiential appreciation of the sort of data evident in the long listed observations of the skyparts by Chaldeans, and whose view is thus so consistently and naturally constrained by the nearby and inclusively rainy or rainlike or soonrainy cloud in the event, as to offer up few useful tools for evaluating what have long been understood to be the good answers contained in the persuasive and persistent tables of Chaldean clay, and are too unavoidably impressed by the same sort of deep and abiding connection between "it" cloud and "it" sky so confusing to conversation since the primordial nomenclature of that earliest era of the Barrys, antecedent even to the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, when the word for cloud and the word for sky were the still the same, do take to be true enough, by best evidence, the conclusive knowledges of skyparts as spied and scribed by Chaldeans with their admittedly more favorable view.
The cloud, familiarly confounded with sky by the singular misimpression of the earliest of Barry Family wordings, must by this view assume its place as nearest neighboring skypart only, among the hosted raft of the many other skyparts which strew themeselves above.
Still, even to this day when we say "sky" here at HCE we mean as often the obvious cloud instead, just as when we say "cloud" we might as well mean sky for all the pragmatically indiscernable difference we can make of it under the circumstances, acknowledging as we do by such use its befallen though still confluent sense of the word for both of them at once passed on by Barry Family boglore even in the face of the now recognized overarching measure of the encompassing astronomies of Chaldeans, as cloud and Barry have coextensively descended down the ages (cloud continuously forming and disgorging all that time its many mists and splats and gathered gallons, and the Barry Family continuous, all that time as well, whose thinnish skin, ever adjoining as it did the regularly evoked and in the main deliquescent disposals of that skypart, remained forever and perhaps overly impressed by that unfailingly apparent cloud).
Often a deep and abiding connection is claimed between the motions of the skyparts as so stringently scrutinized by, for example, the Chaldeans, and the motions ascribable to (dare we say) the evolving agency of humans.
Some conjoint identity is suggested by this claim, by which the formally regular motions describing the skyparts and the informally irregular motions describing the acts of humans, can be discerned to be both parcelled parts of one same thing.
We go along at least thus far with such reasoning here at HCE: admittedly all acts of humans do take place, whether past, present or presumptive, within the knowable expanse we have come to consider "space" here at HCE, which precinct includes all the vasty process of the skyparts. There is this direct, inextricable, coexistent connection between the two at every moment, as elicited anciently by the astonomies of each human civilization in its own clever way, between the redundant regular motions expressed by the skyparts and the redundant though irregular motions expressed by humans over time. They are coincidences of the same domain, the skyparts and the humans are. This domain we call familiarly, "time," when loosely speaking of it at all.
Sunday Puzzler
Any month so disposed to begin on a Sunday will have its Friday the Thirteenth, as entailed by the recognized operations of the Roman calendrics. And for each year in which March will have a Friday the Thirteenth (a condition which does not obtain in the current year but is easily enough imaginable), November and some other will entertain a Friday the Thirteenth as well that year, by the coincidental cycling of the day names along the listed lengths of the numbers of the days of the listed months therein, to arrive again at those twinned values, Friday, and 13.
Solve for some other.*
*Seeking some solution in our youth, those of us here at HCE who underwent such education as could be required of us by nuns would often find to our relief that instead of wielding the still cumbrous tools of arithmetic so recently introduced to us by their persuasive authorities to arrive at the solution to a question which by their firm schooling it was our duty to address, we might find readily enough at hand some tabled list of answers to the posed question already delivered up for use by the prior good work of others. In that age it was often enough the fellow up ahead in the row of desks to our right who was particularly helpful in this respect.
Looking it up is no trivial substitution, providing as it does so economically the good answer instead of all the necessary mathematics of it, a point we very briefly raised once in dialectic with a nun, in fact, not failing at that time to indicate our own very real personal regard for charms of mathematics itself, however much the pragmatic utility of our own chosen scheme won out in the end.
The nun admired at least she said our Chaldean methodologies, a phrase which struck us at the time, as did many another element of that conversation, in which the category of the Special Case was introduced to our first full notice by the most diligently entertained explications of that nun.
The Special Case she referred to, of course, was the Special Case Arising Out Of The Learning the Mathematics In The First Place, a category to which, in our own admitted memory of the matter, we had by our own preferred methodology given little if any attention, unheeding as we were that the good answer lying so welcomingly close to hand was far from the solution to our problem in this Special Case.
Nevertheless, even in that age, should we have been confronted with the problem in the Sunday Puzzler above, our first inclination, however bracketed by the many Special Cases offered up by nuns, would be to look the answer up somewhere regardless.
Certainly a properly outfitted archive gives access to the ready answer to the simple sort of question of the Puzzler. A brief scan of the residuum of research into the Roman calendrics there will offer up the sort of year in which March has its Friday the Thirteenth, and list additionally the number of other months in that year, including November, always required to have a Friday the Thirteenth as well when March does. Perpetual calendars establish the possible values of all the makeable months of years, and from such a compendium by a glance the solution may be had.
February is fit with four full weeks of days. It has 28 days, just the number for a quaternion of weeks.
And worded in the English of our standard usage here at HCE, "February" is in quality a quaternion (which is to say, by the measure of Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition — accepted standard in a dictionary here at HCE — a word of four syllables).
This quality, this being in word a quaternion, this fundamental quadrisyllabicity, is irreducible, however much we here at HCE when pronouncing February may, by force of long-held habit, elide the properly placed "r" in the second of the syllables there. For our reflexive "Feb–ewe–ary," best practices demand that we insert "Feh–brew–ary" instead, and as often as the thought reaches us before we've spoken, we comply. In this regard, The Barry Family Standard, acknowledged basis of much of what we go by here at HCE, is ever-accomodating to best practices.
But famously February's status as a quaternion of weeks is mutable. By the regular machinations of the Roman calendrics, sometimes a day is added to the end of that year's February, giving it 29, a number denying the sensible meaning of a quaternion of weeks, casting at least that proposed symmetry forever into question when a February of that sort occurs.
By the rule we understand to be Gregorian, the Roman calendrics does not adjoin that rough intrusive day to the otherwise well-formed quaternion of Februay in a year whose number is divisible by 100 but not divisible by four hundred (the years numbered 1800 and 1900 spring to mind as example); otherwise, every February of a year divisible by four is, by the incremental intrusion of this extra day no quaternion of weeks at all, while each February of the three years on either side of it is.
By one measure, February is perpetually a quaternion, by the other measure, intermittently not.
Wither the leader who's misled? (Part the First)
Our standard of untruth here at HCE is more encompassing than that contained in the most comprehensive list of lies. Lies of course have their known traditional relation to untruth, long recognized in song and story. Admittedly untruth would be a lesser thing without them, all the lies. But we acknowledge as well all the many other wide avenues of approach to its precincts, the lair of the counterfactual untruth. A lie will speed you there successfully, of course, to the recognized untruth, as will the nicely errant misstatement driving customarily to that same end, which, while not a lie in and of itself, arrives, conclusively untrue, on the porched ear of the attentive auditor with the self-same force and effect.
On this, the first anniversary date of its delivery, we here at HCE turn our attention once again to the conclusively untrue address of the Secretary of State of the United States of America to the gathered ministers of the nations of the entire world, given in the hushed halls of the Security Council of the United Nations, in support of the claims of the United States, and couched in the formidably free speech of its chosen speaker, regarding the casus belli which that great and fearsome nation purported to exist between itself (and by extension its friends) and the indicated enemy Iraq as so despicably embodied in the reviled person of its ruler, Sadaam Hussein.
The speech is a modern model of untruth. Each and every of its elements, all the claims put forward by it one year ago today, are now known to be verifiably and utterly false, as the closest investigation of the question in the intervening months by officially established experts has revealed, much to the rue, presumably, of the speaker of them in the first place, the Secretary of State of the United States of America.
A true paragon of falsehood must be delivered from the proper platform, the height of which fully complements the enormity of the offered untruth, which condition we find amply met in the venue chosen by the Secretary of State last year. We give such credit as is due, persuaded that the conclusively untrue statements of the Secretary of State will long remain a hallmark of their kind.
By the most successul apologia the settled point may be reached and rounded, as is the case with the equinox in March, a settled point reached and rounded in all the diverse complementary metaphors offered up to its description since the time of the astronomies of the older sciences of before.
By the time it reached the precincts of the Barry Family, the persuasive work of Ptolmey in his Almagest was mere addendum to the story of the skyparts as told to us here at HCE, for example, by nuns who, swallowing whatever institutional reservations they may have voiced, named Galileo, Newton, Kepler and their ilk, including even the problematic Pole Copernicus, as the settled artificers of the recognized newly grounded methodologies for regarding the skyparts at all.
Chaldean methodologies passed on to Ptolmey pragmatically take the route of the full count of the given thing to establish the element's identity, rather than acheiving that end by the illustrative methodologies of the Greek geometry, which seeks rather to vivify the implicit mathematical scheme accompanying nimbus-like all good counts when properly entabled.
The good count was anciently the good answer in all the sharp unavoidable business practices endemic to the home range of the Chaldeans, and became the fundamental focus of their own mathematics, as the survival of tables of good answers from that remote time attest. Clearly all the clever arithmetics still discernable in Chaldean clay were organized around the investigation of what could readily and observably be counted. They had their millennia of data, the Chaldeans, basis of thier good astronomy.
It is the self-satisied assumption of the new sciences that the firm distinction between itself and the older sciences of before is that it bases itself on the quantifying motions of its methodologies, rather than on the relations of given qualities suggested by, for example, the most humane and famous exertions of Late Scholastic humanists of Europe.
But though it is often claimed to be the revolutionizing motion of the new sciences to successfully elude the argument from quality of Scholastics, however Late, however humane, in favor of a scrupulously directed attention to quantity instead, it was the Chaldeans long before that time who behaved as if the conclusive count made full measure of the thing, and thus based the finely conceived Chaldean science of astronomy on tabulating the many many observable answers to questions considered countable, however tedious and lengthy such counts might prove to be.
Earlier than the new sciences, the Chaldeans were driven by precisely this same sound sort of quantifying. Let Tycho Brahe's notorious star charts be taken as the resumption of the Chaldean propensity for the well-observed answer to the good count, for making the countable thing the focus of the science. All the inclination toward quantifying in the collected record of Tycho Brahe's observations are a return to this previous Chaldean fashion.
Ptolmey performed the marriage of the data of the Chaldeans with the axiomatically explicable illustration of its implicit mathematical scheme given by the good Greek geometry, as it might be extended to a considerations of the skyparts, in his famous Almagest.
Thus even the claim that the mathematics of the new sciences acheived uniquely a quantifying arithmetic bound by an appeal to a rigorously axiomatic methodology, as of Greeks with their geometry, is belied by the precedent of Ptolmey's book. He had already made that suggestive gesture long before.
Data we find there in Ptolmey's book drawn from the collected clays of the data-driven arithmetics of the Chaldeans with all their tablets of good answers. Ptolmey profered a scheme for vivifying with his gifted knack for explicit illustration in the manner of the Greek geometry, the implicit mathematical relation there, some unseen but guessable, or as is necesary, learnable, relation which abides naturally in each and every tablet, and which, tested against the requirements of the data's already given answers, does indeed give the thouroughly suggestive scheme for considering the skyparts.
Astronomy was the first of the new sciences, made by Ptolmey a millenium before the first stirrings of organized interest in the subject at all among members of the Barry Family, engaged in their more traditional concerns all the while.
Relinquishing their markedly suburban habitation in the bog of the Paris Basin to the civilizing influences of the Romans, the Barry Family about this time began its inexorable, grudging motion westward, a motion westward which in the next millennium took the Barrys by way of Normandy and Brittany to the southern shore of Wales, where waited Nest, the mother of us all.
Surely in all that time the advocated astronomy of the Almagest lived on in closely contested conversations among the sort of people who still attended to such things in scattered urban corners here and there, but these conversations were unknown to the Barry Family. Millennia of direct observation upward among them revealed little more than meteorology and their own apprehended tendency to drift west.
In some casual sense February 3, 2004 is one month away from March 3, 2004, and thus one construed month away from what is by the standards of the Barry Family still regarded as New Years Day, which, by the currently agreed protocols of calculation, falls on March 3 consistently enough for that date to be the settled thing each year.
March is the month containing the spring equinox, customary start-point for the annual cycle as measured by the Barrys. We here at HCE who adhere to the Barry Family Standards at all, must on occasion wave with whatever wan enthusiasm we may muster the tattered standard of the equinoctical year, our own chosen startpoint as may be seen below in the Bogblog.
The reason for the choice of the third day of March as the first day of the Barry Family year is obscured by the pragmatic victory over heated argument it represented at the time. Arguologists, spelunking through the undercurrent of encompassing and quite public debate that both mobilized and harried the Barry Family from the time of the Naming on, might ferret out by their investigations the point that won the day, if indeed the argument was won at all in any conclusive sense, rather than slunk away from with exhausted snarls by all parties to the conversation, leaving "3," the third day, behind for no conclusive reason. The scant surviving extant record of the standard's adoption attends almost completely to to the uses of acrimony as a tool of rhetoric, as would be expected of any random sampling of the Barry Family corpus over time.
In the famous novel Ulysses, written in the best way known to James Joyce, that well-worded one of Ireland and Paris, to be a classic, and in the otherwise inclined offering of his relatively infamous Finnegans Wake as well, didn't he have his own way with wording, James Joyce?
He had after the subject matter of it in his own sweet way, once he had your ear, the famous man.
From the restrained but pointed Flaubertian manners of his Dubliners to the indiscreet rollicking of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce had the mastery of style.
Shakespeare has the one style, the immediately recognizable Shakespearean one, for the looker to contend with. A vasty and capacious thing, that style, deserving of the singular esteem it so often receives, the style of Shakespeare, in the view of those of us here at HCE who have reviewed the matter at all. Within the wide reaches of that style he had, the man we mean when we say Shakespeare, ample space to populate his plays, for example, with the manyfolding measure of the character of humans, sized to fit by his unique saying of them, given the grand resources of his style.
James Joyce had at this disposal as many styles as he felt fit.
His best play is the parody of a play offered up in the notorious Nighttown of his Ulysses. He needed all the nested parentheses of his ever-shifting stylings there to contain what he proposed a play to mean, if he was ever to write a good one. Unstageably surreal the passage is, for a play, but still, unarguably his best.
Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we take to be, for James Joyce, formal proposals advancing his claim to a greatly talented mastery of the word, a claim he wielded to a nevermind thereafter, in Ulysses, and in Finnegans Wake.
Had James Joyce the curious counterfactual fortune to live this long, he would have been 122 years old today. As it is, we cannot get another word out of him, more's the pity.
By what remains the well-regarded standard here at HCE, February is the meanest month. Once last in the Roman calendar, it was promoted to second in the early reshuffling of the calendar's values ascribed to Numa, second of the many, many kings of Rome.
Abrupt, brief thing, February.
The word February is rooted in the more ancient formal tendency of that group to end the calendar year with a brisk period devoted to the expiation of the forgone thing itself, but that expectably dour review, drawing its uncomfortable crowd, came to be replaced by the more mirthfully disposed inclinations of the newer calendar said to have been made by Numa, which proposed a space at end of year called Saturnalia where all manner of communal merriment could see the old year off instead.
Here at HCE, where many of our faults and excesses as characterized so often by the snide mention of freind and foe alike are to be blamed on our poor upbringing, we yet recognize there comes a time to account for it all, to recognize and make to rectify the errant damaging things that came out of our acts, and we admit that right at the end of the freshly done thing is the proper place to confront the requirements of such an accounting.
Moving the expiations of February to the second month of the year may seem simply foward–looking on the part of the Romans after Numa (reputed maker of that move). From the vantage of the second month they could map out all the good excuses for their conduct in the coming year ahead of time (natural byproduct of any period of expiation, the good excuse, in the Bary Family view, and a thoroughgoing knack they had, the Romans, for prefabricating theirs), as well as uncomfortably if necessarily look back on the duncity, destructiveness and depravity that was the Roman share in the recently completed year past.
But the move of February had its other use as well, for by making that move the subtle hand suggested to be Numa's lifted up the period of expiation it had always meant, and moved it too, cleverly synchronizing the timing of its dutiful reflections, and thus the whole Roman calendar, with the alternate calendar as adopted by the quite wide range of people to Rome's north and west for example, who took the month of the spring equinox to be the firstmonth, and thus the month previous, call it February for the purposes of expiation, the last month of the cycled year.