A busy day working over the html files for Ibn Abi Usaibia. 25 of the 26 are now done. 26 contains the footnotes on the first 100 pages, added by someone else. I need to consider how to present these. I also need to join the first 25 files together and do some global changes. Nevertheless, this is progress indeed.
Author: Roger Pearse
Blogger considering legal action
Still more on the curious case of blogger Tallbloke, who was raided by the police who seized his computers, about which I posted here. Tallbloke has sought some legal advice, and is being advised that a goodly quantity of legally punishable wrongdoings may have been committed by the police and others. Wattsupwiththat blog posts a legal opinion by his solicitor. Bishop Hill blog advises that a legal fund is being set up for donations. I’ve donated something myself.
A fighting fund is being set up in order to mount a proper legal response. Donate here.
Note also the comments by Tallbloke’s solicitor at WUWT, outlining the legal action that is possible. My guess is that the police may have a problem here:
i) Potential libel claims against Laden and Mann and any others who might be found to have stated, suggested or implied that there was criminality on the part of Tallbloke.
ii) Potential malfeasance by the persons responsible for the obtaining of the Warrant in the form deemed appropriate (but actually wholly inappropriate) and for the heavy handed treatment of Tallbloke who would always have been prepared to assist voluntarily.
iii) Various damages claims under UK law for distress, inconvenience, invasion of privacy and damage to property.
iv) Possible injunctive relief preventing examination, copying, cloning or any unauthorised use of Tallbloke’s private data.
v) Requests for immediate return of Tallbloke’s property and rectification of damage done during the process.
vi) Investigations into the sequence of events that led to this farrago and the identities of the person or persons responsible.
Other possibilities may come to mind in due course.
Tallbloke is clearly a man of courage: the English courts are not a place for the faint-hearted, and only the rich can afford to use them.
But something needs to be done. The police felt that a blogger was easy prey, that’s for sure. It would be very good to establish that this is not so.
A 1629 picture of the ruins of Aurelian’s temple of the sun
Judith Weingarten has written a post on Whose Christmas is it anyway? at her blog, which is solid stuff, and kindly mentions me. But I got very excited when I read it! Because of this: a picture of the ruins of the temple of Sol Invictus in Rome, from 1629:
The image is from the The Amica Libary website.
In truth I’m not sure what we’re looking at, or where from. The temple was on the Quirinal, I know; and steps from the temple survived as they were reused for some other monument in modern times.
The book from which this image is drawn is Giovanni Batista Mercati, Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma, (=Some Views and Perspectives of the Uninhabited Places of Rome), Rome, 1629, in which it is plate 27. The volume was in quarto, comprising some 52 sheets in all. An Italian reprint exists: I’m almost tempted to stump up the 100 euros to buy it! (But not quite)
O, if only this were online!
A letter of Jerome to Eustochia, on the fall of Rome
I happened to come across the French translation of letters of Jerome online here — the menu on the left hand side divides them by date into several pages — and was struck by one, written in 410, to Eustochia, which mentions the fall of Rome and noble Romans turning up at Bethlehem who have lost everything.
Here’s a quick translation from the French (and why is there no translation into English of all Jerome’s letters?) —
Nothing exists that has no end; and yet the long succession of past ages must in no way be considered as the completion of anything. Every author will run dry, unless he has amassed in advance the materials from good works, from works that have a claim to have a future, aimed at a sort of eternity and do not foresee a limit in time to their usefulness. But let us hold on to these elementary truths: everything that is born dies; everything that can reach a peak declines. And again: there is no work of man which reaches old age. Who would ever have thought that Rome, that Rome which conquered in every part of the world, would collapse; that she would be at the same time the mother and the tomb of all peoples; that she would be enslaved in her turn, she who counted among her slaves the orient, Egypt and Africa? Who would have thought that the obscure Bethlehem would see illustrious beggars at its doors, once loaded with every kind of wealth?
Since we cannot help them, let us pity them at least to the bottom of our hearts, and let us mingle our tears with their tears. Bent under the load of our holy labours, but all the while unable to avoid a profound grief in seeing those who mourn, and while bemoaning those who weep, we have continued with our commentary on Ezekiel, and we are nearly at the end, and we really want to finish our work on the Holy Scriptures. It’s not about talking about the projects, but about executing them. So then, encouraged by your repeated invitations, O Eustochia, virgin of Christ, I return to my interrupted work, and I defer to your wishes in my haste to finish the third volume. But before starting, I commend myself to your goodwill, as well as the goodwill of those who condescend to read me; asking you to have more regard to my good intentions than my actual powers. The former are part of the frailty of man, the latter depend on the holy will of God.
Academic papers want to be free
An interesting article at the David Colquhoun blog, Open access, peer review, grants and other academic conundrums. It’s a report of a debate on open data held on December 6th by Index on Censorship.
People are obviously influenced by the release of the ClimateGate 2 emails, but if we look beyond this, the points being made are general, and very sound.
We all agreed that papers should be open for anyone to read, free. Monbiot and I both thought that raw data should be available on request, though O’Neill and Walport had a few reservations about that.
A great deal of time and money would be saved if data were provided on request. It shouldn’t need a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and the time and energy spent on refusing FOIA requests is silly. It simply gives the impression that there is something to hide (Climate scientists must be ruthlessly honest about data). The University of Central Lancashire spent £80,000 of taxpayers’ money trying (unsuccessfully) to appeal against the judgment of the Information Commissioner that they must release course material to me. It’s hard to think of a worse way to spend money.
A few days ago, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) published a report which says (para 6.6)
“The Government . . . is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge.”
That’s good, but how it can be achieved is less obvious. Scientific publishing is, at the moment, an unholy mess. It’s a playground for profiteers. It runs on the unpaid labour of academics, who work to generate large profits for publishers. That’s often been said before, recently by both George Monbiot (Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist) and by me (Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science).
David Colquhoun then goes on to detail just how corrupt the current system of academic journals is, with statistics. It’s very well worth paging down through this. Here are a couple of snippets:
UCL pays Elsevier the astonishing sum of €1.25 million, for access to its journals. And that’s just one university. That price doesn’t include any print editions at all, just web access and there is no open access. …
Most of the journals are hardly used at all. Among all Elsevier journals, 251 were not accessed even once in 2010. …
I haven’t been able to discover the costs of the contracts with OUP or Nature Publishing group. It seems that the university has agreed to confidentiality clauses. This itself is a shocking lack of transparency. …
And the hammer blows continue:
Almost all of these journals are not open access. The academics do the experiments, most often paid for by the taxpayer. They write the paper (and now it has to be in a form that is almost ready for publication without further work), they send is to the journal, where it is sent for peer review, which is also unpaid. The journal sells the product back to the universities for a high price, where the results of the work are hidden from the people who paid for it.
Precisely. The publisher pays almost nothing for the product, and rakes in substantial money on it (and, as a publisher, remember, albeit with a different model, I know precisely what each stage costs).
It’s very encouraging to see a post like this. The revolution is on the way.
From my diary
I’m still working on Ibn Abi Usaibia. Yesterday I started going through the .htm files exported from Abbyy Finereader, to rejoin paragraphs and add in page numbers. I’ve so far found two pages which are out of order in the manuscript — the numerals at the bottom in pencil were clearly added after the pages became disarranged.
I’ve also been experimenting with producing a version of the images of the pages which might be uploadable to Archive.org, by converting them to black and white using ImageMagick as I was doing yesterday. This sort of works, but requires quite a bit of manual intervention, so I have parked it for now.
This morning I went to the library and obtained a copy of Maarten Vermaseren’s Mithras: De geheimzinnige God, the original version of Mithras: the secret God, which has caused so much misinformation to circulate. It’s physically a tiny book — indeed the title page calls it an “Elsevier pocket book”, evidently one of a series — printed on very cheap paper which has yellowed and perished, and bound so tightly that the pages are almost impossible to open, and the printed text is so close to the binding that making a photocopy is almost impossible. The perished paper tends to tear if you simply open the book! I suspect that if I want an electronic copy of this, I shall have to buy a copy and destroy it, by cutting the spine off, in order to scan it. Most vexing.
But the important bit so far is that this isn’t a scholarly work at all! It’s just a bit of popularisation, probably undertaken at the behest of a publisher, who decided the format etc.
Meanwhile the postman brought me the 2010 translation of Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel by Thomas Scheck. Regular readers will remember that I commissioned a translation of this work — then untranslated — back in 2009, and that it was projected as volume 2 of Ancient Texts in Translation. Nothing much has happened on this for over a year now, as it has been awaiting some revision work. I think I shall have to draw up a plan whereby I can get it out of the door, and so I have purchased a copy of Scheck with this in mind. I’ll work on this in January, perhaps.
More on the raid on a blogger
Further to the story earlier about a blogger’s computers being seized by Norfolk police on what seemed very dubious grounds, the victim is a blogger named “TallBloke”, who records events on the day here.
Fortunately his sense of humour was not damaged in the raid…
Converting a page photograph into black and white
The typescript of Ibn Abi Usaibia reached me in the form of digital photos of the pages. These were evidently taken under fluorescent light, since the images are huge, green, and weirdly coloured. They’re so large, in fact, that they are hard to manipulate.
But I needed something a bit more normal. So I was tinkering with the image and, quite by chance, got what I needed. This tip may be of general use, where we have black text on white paper in funny-coloured photos, so I add it here.
- Export the selected page from FR10 as an image. Mine was a png, and came out as 32mb in size! Here’s a snippet. Note particularly the “see through” text to the left of the diagram.
- Open with Paint.net 3.5.10. Trim to right size.
- Adjustments | Black and White, to convert to greyscale.
- Adjustments | Brightness contrast, to turn the background white. So increase the brightness as far as you can without losing text. The idea is to lose as much of the background as possible, and in particular any see-through text. The text will be very grey.
- Then you can also increase the contrast if you like. Juggling the two should give a pale image. Mine were brightness=100, contrast=20.
- Then do Adjustments | Auto-level. This will turn the pale grey text black again. (If you didn’t get rid of enough background artefacts, these will promptly appear as smudges, so you may have to go back a stage, and increase the contrast – that’s what disposes of a lot of them.) The larger the image, the better the result when converted — this image is a little small, and the text ends up a bit fuzzy.
- You can then do minor cleanup manually of dots etc.
As someone who is quite useless at image manipulation, I thought I would pass this on.
Ideally one would save the end product as black and white, but I haven’t worked out how to do that.
UPDATE: For some reason you can’t do it in Paint.Net. But you can in the Windows accessory Paint, which comes free with Windows7. Just do File | Properties, change the image to black and white and save. The file size drops from 45k to 12k. Here’s the sample:
Note that true 1-bit black and white doesn’t resize well — hence the jaggedness in the thumbnail above — but the full size version is fine.
Ibn Abi Usaibia update
“A leak?! Arrest those who found out what we’re doing!”
Curious news today, that the British police have been seizing laptops and routers from a blogger, and requesting police action in two other countries as well. This pretty clearly violates the principle of freedom of speech online, I think.
The context of all this is the “Climategate” emails. The climate research centre at the University of East Anglia was one of the big puffers of “climate change”. Their work was seriously undermined, however, when someone leaked a large tranche of emails from the centre to climate sceptics, who put them online.
The emails revealed key staff engaged in very dodgy-sounding activities. They were seen deliberately refusing to release data — as they legally should have done under the Freedom of Information Act — when the data would have (supposedly) shown that their conclusions were actually false. The emails also showed them generally behaving in a less than scientific or professional way. A second tranche of emails was leaked a little while ago.
The political effect of the scandal has been to torpedo the whole “global warming” lobby in the United Kingdom. An inquiry was held, and concluded that no-one at the centre did anything wrong (!), but this did nothing to alleviate a general impression that the unit had behaved fraudulently.
So who is being arrested now? Well, not the dodgy-sounding scientists. They did nothing wrong, we’re told. No, the police are pursuing the bloggers — the people who reported on this, it seems, and took delivery of the “stolen” emails. The Register has the details.
The question for me is not whether we agree with the climate change argument or not. The issue that causes me to blog about this here is the free speech issue. The police should not be doing this. The bloggers did what journalists are supposed to do and revealed dirty-looking deeds by the establishment. To silence them is what authoritarian regimes do. How is this action in the public interest?
The need for a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech in Britain has never been more obvious.
It would be interesting to know who, precisely, authorised this action. But as with so many things in modern Britain, that particular piece of information is not being made available.
UPDATE: Updates about this at Watts up with that, including links to the Telegraph and Guardian. A lot of people don’t like this one. It’s beginning to look as if the US DOJ is the main mover in this.