Conway’s Game of Life in HTML 4

SixFootTallRabbit just put together a very nice implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using HTML 5’s canvas element as seen here.

Having put together a maze generator using HTML 4, I was certain an equally as aesthetically pleasing Game of Life implementation could be written in plain HTML 4. While this version isn’t quite as slick nor quite as performant as the canvas element’s implementation, the results are pretty decent.

This should be usable in all the latest versions of all major browsers, and so offers a way of running the automaton in a browser without the need of plug-ins or applets.

Note: IE8 has a problem with onMouseOver handling that is apparently well-known. There is no work around that I could find, so “painting” cells is very slow, but individual cells can still be clicked on. It also runs much slower than Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari, so consider switching browsers for a better experience.

War and Peace: The Missing Footnote

I finally read War and Peace - a great book of course, but one minor bit of self-censorship on Tolstoy’s part caught my eye.

The context is just before the Battle of Krasnoi as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée retreating from Moscow. Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues:

“But, that said, who invited them here? It’s their own doing, f… th… in the f…”, he suddenly said, raising his head.” (Book 4, Chapter VI, p. 1089 of this edition.)

So what could this be: “f… th… in the f…” ?

This translation by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, has been highly praised for its faithfulness to Tolstoy’s original, and as well-documented as it is, there was no footnote indicating what the literal meaning might be here. I went back to some older translations to see how they handled it, but they were even more redacted:

1. (1904) “To tell the truth, who sent for them? Serves them right those ————————,” he suddenly said, raising his head.

2. (1928) “But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the b… b… ! …” he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

3. (1930) “But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody bastards!” he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

4. (2008) “But, that said, who invited them here? It’s there own doing, f … th … in the f …”, he suddenly said, raising his head.

I looked up the original text to see if Tolstoy himself had censored it, and (as I expected) it was:

— А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м… и… в г…. — вдруг сказал он, подняв голову.

Clearly this had to be some standard, idiomatic phrase, so I turned to some of my Russian colleagues to see if they recognized it, but even they were stumped. After some looking around they came across a paper (in Russian) with the phrase spelled out:

” - А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м[ать] и[хъ] в г[узно], - вдруг сказал он [… и] галопом в первый раз за всю компанию поехал прочь от радостно хохотавших и ревевших ура […] солдат” (IV, 4, VI; 1951-1953, 7: 194).

So this is the original phrase:

“мать твою в гузно”

The reason my colleagues didn’t recognize it is that it is a rather old fashioned phrase, and one that would have only been used by an old man, such as Kutuzov, even back then; but the literal meaning still carries a sting:

“Mother’s ass fuckers.”

New Maps of Pluto

The “New Horizons” probe recently passed the half-way point to Pluto - at least in terms of total distance flown. According to this simulation, it will be half-way between Pluto and the Sun on July 14th, and then half-way in terms of total mission time on October 16th. It’s traveling around 59,000 km/hr relative to the Sun and still won’t reach Pluto until July 14th, 2015 (at 07:59:00 GMT, so set your watches.)

Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute recently unveiled the highest resolution maps of Pluto yet produced:

Simulated true-color spherical projections of Pluto

This video shows a single complete rotation:

These maps and how they were produced are outlined in two recently published papers (one, two). Some of the raw images used to produce the maps captured by the Hubble telescope are shown below. The ones furthest to the left were obtained by the Faint Object Camera (FOC) in 1994; this camera is now out of service and has been replaced by the High Resolution Camera (HRC) which (despite its name) produces slightly lower resolution images (as can be seen below). Faster computers have allowed a reanalysis of the original images and a comparison to be made with maps produced from the analysis of the newly acquired ones.

Raw Hubble images captured in 1994 (left-most column) and 2002/3

Similar processing techniques were applied to images taken in 1994. Compared to the latest data, these show what Buie calls a “complex and dynamically interacting surface–atmosphere system.”

Maps showing surface changes between 1994 (top) and 2002/3 (bottom)

It has long been known that Pluto has a thin atmosphere which gradually freezes and thaws as it moves closer to and further from the Sun over its 248-year orbit. These maps though show direct evidence of this effect.

Ipswich, Massachusetts 1832

A map of Ipswich Massachusetts by Philander Anderson.

Ipswich, Massachusetts. 1832

Notice that the current Washington Street is called Gravel Street, which follows the path of the current Liberty Street to Lord Square. The current Mineral Street is called Back Street here. Gravel Street takes its name from the two open gravel pits depicted on the map, one at the corner of Back Street and the other at the turn of what is now Liberty Street.

Closeup of the Ipswich Village inset

A KMZ file viewable in Google Earth is of the village inset map is available here.

Village inset map manipulated in Google Earth

This map can also be seen directly in Google Maps using a normal browser here.

A Short History of the Word “The” (Part 2)

This continues some earlier notes I had made on the etymology of the word “the”.

Old English is the earliest attested progenitor of modern English, so any earlier etymologies can only be done by comparing other related languages and reconstructing forms through the application of morphology rules. English is a Germanic language related to German, Dutch, Norse and Icelandic. The common ancestor of these languages is known as Proto-Germanic (PGmc)

Ringe (2006) has given the paradigm shown below. Notice that it has the same s- in the masculine and feminine nominative singular, and þ- for all other forms, as in Old English.

Things become more speculative reaching back to Proto-Indo-European. While there is general agreement that the stem of the demonstrative pronoun is so/to, the full inflection is more uncertain. The system given most often is that proposed by Beekes (1995). His is based on the theory put forward by Lane (1961). Given the many forms of the demonstratives among daughter languages, an inflection system based on the standard method of comparison would produce an unrealistic number of stems. Lane identified a fundamental mechanism within PIE of binding a number of standard particles to a basic stem. The most familiar example of this general PIE mechanism is the development of the word “this”: The OED gives the etymology as a Norse and West Germanic formation, produced by adding se, si (from Gothic, sai ‘see, behold’) to the simple demonstrative represented by “that”, as shown by the early Old Norse runic forms, sá-si, sú-si, þat-si. Later the compound was felt as a single word and inflected at the end.

Beekes applied a similar approach, though with a different set of particles and updated with the application of laryngeal theory.

Notice though that while PIE has a larger inflection system, like PGmc, it has the same s- in the male and female nominative and t- for the neuter and all other oblique forms.

Attempts have been made to find relationships between PIE and other language families. Greenberg (2002) has proposed “Eurasiatic” that groups PIE with languages as diverse as Korean, Japanese and Eskimo-Aleut.

Interestingly there is similarity between the PIE demonstrative root and the constructed ancestors of other members of this proposed group. E.g.:

Greenberg gives a general demonstrative stem of *tV, that is, “t” followed by some vowel.

Once etymologies get this deep, the standard linguistic tools begin to break down. The best that could probably be done would be to perform mathematical analysis which assigns a level of correlation and generates possible forms.

If this reconstructed stem is accurate, that “t” at the beginning of our word “the” goes back nearly 15,000 years.

Notes

[1] Ringe, Donald A., From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. 2006, p. 288-289.
[2] Mallory J. P.; Adams, Douglas Q., The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. 2006, p. 417-418.
[3] Lehmann, Winfred P., Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics. 1996, p. 158-159.
[4] Beekes, Robert S. P., Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. 1995, p. 201-204.
[5] Lane, George S., On the Formation of the Indo-European Demonstrative. Language, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1961), pp. 469-475.
[6] Greenberg, Joseph H., Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Vol 1. 2000, p. 94-101.

Distribution of Generic Watercourse Terms

Below are some interesting maps showing how generic terms for watercourses are distributed in the Northeastern United States from a 1955 paper by Wilbur Zelinsky.¹ The term river is universal throughout the examined area, so only terms applied to small- and mid-sized streams were examined.

The term creek was typically used in England only for coastal estuaries of which there are of course many along the Atlantic seaboard of America; however, it’s American usage as a generic term for fresh water streams occurs most commonly west of the Hudson River:

Zelinsky discusses the theory that because of the broader coastal plain in this area, coastal watercourses named as creeks actually flowed from much farther inland. The term was applied more generally as the population expanded to the interior.

The term brook is coincident with the New England cultural area and it’s expansion directly westward. It’s English meaning as a stream with a fast flow rate was more applicable to the hillier coastal topography.

The term run is dialectical to northern England and Scotland and may have become common in the Appalachian area because of the influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants.

Both branch and fork were used exclusively to describe tributaries in England, but were applied to general streams in America. Although the terms were used widely, no pattern can be discern from their application other than the fact that they are entirely absent from the earliest areas of settlement, indicating a later adoption.

The generic term stream is only common in the most northerly reaches (and most lately settled) areas of New England, and also very sporadically south to Virginia.

·

¹ Some Problems in the Distribution of Generic Terms in the Place-Names of the Northeastern United States by Wilbur Zelinsky. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Dec., 1955), pp. 319-349. back.

Old Burlington Mall

Off in a corner of a parking lot of the Executive Office Park in Burlington, Massachusetts there is a small waterfall where a little stream emerges out from under Mall Road and tumbles into what, for all intents and purposes, is a drainage ditch.¹ It’s a bit remarkable that in the otherwise dehumanizing surroundings of a typical suburban industrial park there remains this small remnant of relatively untouched landscape— such as it is.

Site of the Burlington Mall; Burlington, MA.

My father talks about hunting in the area as a kid, of course long before the Burlington Mall and Route 128 were put in, when this area was what he thought of as the middle of nowhere. Burlington is currently a modestly sized suburb of Boston with a population of around 23,000, but back before it was tied into the national highway system, it hovered around 1000.

Site of the Burlington Mall; Burlington, MA, 1946 prior to the construction of Route 128.

Looking at some old USGS maps of the area shows just how much things of changed. The Vine Brook has been completely covered by the mall itself - and emerges out on the other side of the Vine Brook Plaza - another bit of development named in typical fashion after the very thing it has helped destroy… The waterfall is part of the Long Meadow Brook—which has more or less maintained its original course, although straightened along the edge of the parking lot before passing back under the road where it eventually joins with the Vine Brook before merging with the Shawsheen River.

Site of the Burlington Mall; Burlington, MA, c. 1870.

When 128 and the Mall were put in, a number of streets where reconfigured, including the location of the old South School at the junction of Blanchard Road and Lexington Street.

South School in Burlington, MA. Now a parking lot outside of Sears.

The only picture shows the old building in a verdant, rural setting—basically the antithesis of what is now there: the parking lot of the Sears Home and Garden Center.

¹ Here is a picture of the falls itself. The flow is unusually high here because of recent rains.

Long Meadow Brook Falls.

A file, viewable in Google Earth, showing the maps above laid out over the modern terrain is available here.

A map showing the precise location of the falls is here. In the satellite view, the arc of the brook can be easily made out even though it is obscured by vegetation.

A short video clip that captures some of the majesty of the falls is here.

Earliest References to “Ipswich”

These are the earliest written references to the city of Ipswich:

942 A.D.: Will of Theodred, Bishop of London. Sawyer 1529. See: Charta Anglosaxonicae, p. 293 line 9.

BISHOP ÐEODRED

In nomine domini nostri Ihusu Christi!

…

And ic an ðat lond at Waldringfeld Osgote mine sustres sune and min hage ðat ic binnin Gypeswich bouhte.

☩

front: ☩ EADGAR . REX . ANGLOR . (Eadgar, king of the English)
back: ☩ LIFINGE . MO . GIPSǷIC . (Lifinge, moneyer at Gipswic)

Hammered silver penny. “ON GIPESWIC” written on reverse.

¹ Golding, C. The Coinage of Suffolk. 1868. p. 8.

☩

Her wæs Gypeswic gehergod, ⁊ æfter þam swiðe raðe wæs Brihtnoð ealdorman ofslægen æt Mældune. ⁊ on þam geare man gerædde þet man geald ærest gafol Deniscan mannum for þam mycclan brogan þe hi worhtan be þam særiman; þet wæs ærest .x. þusend punda. Þæne ræd gerædde Siric arcebiscop.

Here Ipswich was raided, and very soon after that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was killed at Maldon; and in that year it was first decided tax be paid to the Danish men because of the great terror which they wrought along the sea coast. That was at first 10 thousand pounds. Archbishop Sigeric decided on the decision.

An Etymology of “Ipswich”

Ipswich as Gepeswiz from the Domesday Book, 1086

The name of the town of Ipswich in Massachusetts—originally called Agawam—comes directly from the city of Ipswich in Suffolk England. While some second-order sources claim that the name was chosen because that is where many of its early citizens were from, there is no actual evidence of this.

Inset of Ipswiche from John Speed’s Suffolke, 1610

The official records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for August 5th, 1634 make no mention of that supposed fact, stating tersely:

It is ordered, that Aggawam shalbe called Ipswitch.¹

Then governor John Winthrop, who had sent his son to establish the town in 1633, noted in his journal entry for August 4th, 1634:

At the court, the new town at Agawam was named Ipswich, in acknowledgment of the great honor and kindness done to our people which took shipping there, etc.; and a day of thanksgiving appointed, a fortnight after, for the prosperous arrival of the others, etc.²

Ipswich is a truncated version of its original name, Gippeswick, though that spelling is a relatively modern standardization of a name that took many forms (as was usual for the period.) It was spelled alternatively as Gipewiz, Gepeswiz, or Gypeswiz in the Domesday Book commissioned by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086.^3,4

“The half-hundred of Ipswich” from the Domesday Book, 1086

“The half-hundred of Ipswich” from the Domesday Book, 1086

There are two main theories on the origin of Gippeswick, both of which ultimately derive from an Anglo-Saxon personal name.

Indirect Adoption

The first is that Gippeswick took its name from the River Gipping concatenated with the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) word wic, meaning dwelling-place or abode.⁵ Wic is derived from the Latin vicus, for village, which was borrowed as *wik by Proto-Germanic, the unattested precursor to Anglo-Saxon. When applied to a town name it generally meant a trading place or port, which is what Gippeswick had become soon after its founding in the early 7th century.⁶

River Gipping takes its name directly from the village of Gipping near its headwaters.⁷ Gipping or Gypping is a concatenation of Gyppa, an Anglo-Saxon personal name and the suffix -ingas, meaning “the people of”. Who this person “Gyppa” might have been is lost to history, but it was perhaps the name of a Anglo-Saxon clan leader, someone who established a colony as part of the initial wave of Northern Germanic immigration in the wake of Rome’s abandonment of Britannia in the 5th century.⁸ In any case, it was someone of enough import that his descendants or followers maintained an identity through the name. The area became know as the land of “Gyppa-ingas” - “followers of Gyppa”.⁹

Direct Adoption

The second is that Gippeswick took the name of this putative Gyppa directly. Gyppa-wick would be the trading center of a man named Gyppa.¹⁰ Gipping would have taken it’s name more indirectly from Gyppa at some later period. This process would actually follow the ideas of Dodgson who put forth the theory that place names ending in -ingas are associated with the colonization of areas more distant (both physically and temporally) from those of the initial immigration.¹¹

In either case, fifteen-hundred years later, a shadow of this man’s name remains as part of a town across an ocean in a land he could hardly have imagined.

An Etymology of Ipswich

While all etymologies see Ipswich ultimately deriving its name from the Gipping River, earlier ideas for the derivation differ:

E.g., geap, an Old English word meaning “to wander” ¹²; or from the Gaelic word caep, cip, congate with the Latin caput, or head, source. The Gipping being the head of the river Orwell ¹³.

Notes

¹ Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. August 5th, 1633.

² The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649.

³ Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086. UK Data Archive. 2007.

⁴ Domesday Book. UK National Archives. 2006.

⁵ Russo, Daniel G. Town origins and development in early England, c.400-950 A.D. 1998, p. 161.

⁶ Ibid, p. 142.

⁷ Laflin, S., Do -ingas place-names occur in pairs? English Place-Name Society Journal, 35 (2003), pp. 31–40.

⁸ Stenton, Frank M.; Parsons, Doris M. (ed.) Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: being the collected papers of Frank Merry Stenton. 1970.

⁹ Carver, M. O. H. The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe. 1994, p. 54.

¹⁰ Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of British Place-Names. 2003.

¹¹ Dodgson, J. M. The Significance of the Distribution of the English Place-Name in-ingas,-inga in South-east England. 1966.

¹² Charnock, Richard S. Local Etymology: A Derivative Dictionary of Geographical Names. 1859.

¹³ White, Charles H.; Tymms, S. (ed.) The East Anglian; or, Notes and queries on subjects connected with the counties of Suffolk, Cambridge, Essex, and Norfolk, 1864.

Anton Chigurh’s Quarter

In Cormac McCarthy’s book (and in the Coen brother’s adaption of) “No Country for Old Men”, there is an infamous scene where the assassin, Anton Chigurh, subjects a gas-station owner to a trial where his life hangs in the outcome of a coin toss. The innocent owner is at first unaware of the purpose of Chigurh’s demand to “call it”, but the morbidity of the situation slowly starts to dawn on him. (I won’t repeat the entire oft-quoted exchange; you can read it here.)

“You know what date is on this coin?”
“No.”
“1958. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here.

Is there any meaning to the date, 1958? At first it just seemed random, but it struck me that perhaps this is not the case. In 1965 the Coin Act changed the make-up of U.S. coins so that dimes, quarters and half-dollars were no longer 90% silver, but where instead cladded nickel and zinc. Gresham’s Law states that bad money quickly pushes good money out of circulation as people tend to horde the coins with the higher intrinsic value. This is exactly what happened in the U.S.; silver coins quickly began to disappear from circulation until by 1980, when the Hunt Brothers’ attempt to corner the silver market pushed the price of silver to $50/oz., it was rare to find one.

What’s the most you ever lost in a coin toss?

So what was Chigurh doing with a silver coin in his pocket in 1980? There’s really no hint, but I doubt McCarthy wasn’t aware of the oddity of a silver coin being in someone’s possession at that late date. My guess is that the enigmatic Chigurh is meant to have a collection of these coins in his pocket for just this purpose. He seems to know the date of the coin without even looking at it. It has a significance known to only him which compounds for the reader the mystery behind his dark convictions.