26 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. TheCalculagraph

      Beyond having people make direct copies of cards by hand or using carbon paper, The Calculagraph Company manufactured a copying machine for duplicating data.

      There is an accompanying picture (which I haven't copied here). Advertisement from 1906 System Magazine:

      The Calculagraph<br /> Makes individual records of actual<br /> working time on separate cards<br /> which may be used interchangeably<br /> for Cost Accounting, for Pay-rolls and<br /> for a number of other purposes with-<br /> out copying or transcribing a single<br /> figure, by simply assorting the cards<br /> and adding the records directly from<br /> their faces.<br /> A card containing all the work<br /> records of one man for a week may<br /> be useful for pay-roll purposes, but it<br /> is utterly worthless for learning the<br /> cost of products, until all the items<br /> have been copied or transcribed for<br /> classification.<br /> The Calculagraph requires a large<br /> number of cards in a factory employ-<br /> ing several hundred persons, but it<br /> Saves Clerical Labor. (In one<br /> factory it saves $150.00 per week).<br /> Cards Are Cheaper Than Labor<br /> The Calculagraph Makes No<br /> Clerical Errors.<br /> Let us send you our printed matter.<br /> CALCULAGRAPH COMPANY<br /> 1414 JEWELERS BUILDING, NEW YORK CITY

  2. Dec 2022
    1. He filled the library at Vivarium with texts onthese subjects and transformed the production of manuscripts in hisscriptorium by developing proper standards and methods forcopying. As one of the few notable scholars of his period,Cassiodorus played a vital role in the survival of classical culture inItaly, saving books from the smoking ruins of Roman libraries,preserving and reproducing them

      What exactly were the standards created for copying manuscripts by Cassiodorus at the scriptorium at Vivarium?

  3. Oct 2022
    1. Before the Xerox machine, this was a labour-intensive counsel of perfection; and it is no wonder that many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists.

      According to Keith Thomas, "many of the great 19th-century historians employed professional copyists" as a means of keeping up with filing copies of their note slips under multiple subject headings.

    2. If a passage is interesting from several different points of view, then it should be copied out several times on different slips.

      I don't recall Langlois and Seignobos suggesting copying things several times over. Double check this point, particularly with respect to the transference to Luhmann.

  4. Apr 2022
  5. Aug 2021
    1. You would take a Didion sentence like 'Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs,' and learn how to see it as "Only the ____ and the ____ may ____, ____, ____ and ____." A reusable format for pointing out similarities between two distinct things.

      An excellent little example of copying form and style.

    2. Great writers become great by closely studying and copying other great writers. This is how cultural knowledge works. We learn the foundational skills from each other first, and then get all weird and experimental later on once the normal rules become boring.
    3. I used to think copying was unseemly before one of my writing professors in college filled me in on the big, unkept secret. He handed us a small trove of writing samples from folks like Joan Didion, John McPhee, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ernest Hemingway. Essentially a Who's Who of New Yorker essayists. We had to copy out their work, then write our own pieces using the copied sentences as 'templates.'

      This general thought goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales

      "We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

      (Sound a bit like he's one of the original digital gardeners, but in an analog world?)

      He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."

      Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

      "You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."

  6. May 2021
  7. Feb 2021
    1. Now if you think about it, PJAX sounds a lot like Turbolinks. They both use JS to fetch server-rendered HTML and put it into the DOM. They both do caching and manage the forward and back buttons. It's almost as if the Rails team took a technique developed elsewhere and just rebranded it.
  8. Nov 2020
  9. Oct 2020
  10. Sep 2020
    1. The main rationale for this PR is that, in my hones opinion, Svelte needs a way to support style overrides in an intuitive and close to plain HTML/CSS way. What I regard as intuitive is: Looking at how customizing of styles is being done when applying a typical CSS component framework, and making that possible with Svelte.
    1. The more I think about this, the more I think that maybe React already has the right solution to this particular issue, and we're tying ourselves in knots trying to avoid unnecessary re-rendering. Basically, this JSX... <Foo {...a} b={1} {...c} d={2}/> ...translates to this JS: React.createElement(Foo, _extends({}, a, { b: 1 }, c, { d: 2 })); If we did the same thing (i.e. bail out of the optimisation allowed by knowing the attribute names ahead of time), our lives would get a lot simpler, and the performance characteristics would be pretty similar in all but somewhat contrived scenarios, I think. (It'll still be faster than React, anyway!)
  11. May 2020
  12. Jan 2020
  13. Aug 2019