This and that...

I had loads of fun (not!) trying to download a 350 MB zip file of all the files in my hosting account directory. I must've tried a dozen times, and each time, things went well for about the first hundred megs, after which the process sort of trailed off into nothingness.

Changing browsers did not help.

Once, I got almost entirely through the download, only to have it die at the 99% level.

Fortunately, a bit of quick thinking (and Filezilla) allowed me to move the file to a directory I could get at via ftp.

All of the issued having to do with IP addresses appear to have been solved, and I even got a refund for an IP address "rental" that I really didn't need.

* * *I thought I was a pretty advanced org-mode user until I stumbled across just how easy it is to keep a personal journal of "who did what to whom, on what day, and for what amount." I now do this in parallel with my org-mode to-do list, and it's pretty powerful.

I suspect that trying to teach anyone how to go about doing this would encounter resistance, unless said student was already something of a fan of emacs (or had few compunctions about learning how to use that venerable editor).

Time to go get ready for the last tai chi workout of the year...

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall...

Back when I worked as a production editor at Plenum, I had the misfortune of sending a journal to press with a cover that, save for the name of the blessed thing, was completely wrong.

It was a most embarrassing moment, and one that I have described previously.

So it is with no small interest that I am quite curious about a pair of nearly identical stamps issued in France in 1937, to mark the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the appearance of a work known to us English-speakers as Discourse on the Method, by René Descartes (aka "Cartesius").

Descartes was quite an amazing fellow. His life spanned several careers. He was a philosopher, a mathematician, and a soldier. He lived in a time of intellectual giants. Shakespeare died when Descartes was twenty, and Descartes himself lived during the same period as Milton, Galileo, Fermat, and Pascal.

A dream he had led to his developing what has come to be known as analytic geometry, which he wrote about in an appendix to the aforementioned Discourse on the Method.

Now, anyone with a couple of years of high school French under their belt will easily recognize Discours sur la Méthode as a word-for-word translation of Discourse on the Method, and thus, will likely not find anything particularly amiss with the image of the postage stamp below, featuring (among other things) the title of Descartes' work and a drawing of Descartes based on a portrait made by Frans Hals:


As it turns out however, in one of those curious twists of linguistic orneriness, the actual French title of Descartes work is, and always has been, Discours de la Méthode (note the "de" instead of "sur").

One way or another—and how, exactly is what I would like to know—French postal officials became aware of this mistake (roughly the equivalent of referring to Margaret Mitchell's book as Gone with a Wind) and issued a stamp that, with the one editorial change, was identical to the previous stamp:


According to my Yvert & Tellier catalog, 5 million stamps were printed with the wrong title and 4.5 million were then printed with the correct title. And while the stamp is not particularly valuable or rare, the second (correct) stamp is worth more than its erroneous predecessor (my 2009 catalog cites a value of €12 for the corrected stamp in mint condition and with undisturbed gum, which is about three times the value of a "typo" stamp in the same condition.)