Water, water everywhere

...and the trouble is, it's not flat  The trade winds make it pile up on one side of the planet, and when the trade winds vary - as they do, largely unpredictàbly - the water slooshes back and forth, with earth-shattering consequences.

This is el Niño,  officially known as 'El Niño Southern Oscillation' (ENSO).

<bon-ish_mot critique="It doesn't really work, does it?">

With its sister la Niña (the same, but with polarities reversed).

should the terrible twins be known together as the SOENSO?
<bon-ish_mot>

A June 8 BBC explanation says

The phenomenon was first observed by Peruvian fisherman in the 1600s, who noticed that warm waters seemed to peak near the Americas in December.

They nicknamed the event "El Niño de Navidad", Christ Child in Spanish.

And Advent has started early this year: the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced the beginning of the latest El Niño in June 2023:

A seven month Advent. One tries ones best to be a glass-half-full sort of person, but - as some wag on the radio last week put it - it's half full of  economy cava rather than champagne.

If that explanation is not enough, I recommend the edition of The Climate Question, devoted specifically to El Niño, which starts off from some mysterious structures criss-crossing the Pampa de Mocan. These were pre-hispanic earthworks, investigated by the Proyecto Arqueo-Ambiental de la Pampa de Mocan

The north coast of Peru is a relatively flat area, with rivers running across it from the Andes mountains down to the Pacific Ocean, making it susceptible to extreme flooding during El Niño. However, using a flexible irrigation system, ancient farmers in the Pampa de Mocan were able to prepare for these sudden floodwaters and use them for agricultural production. Canals were constructed in the area from the Early Horizon Period (1100 BC) up to the Late Intermediate Period (c.AD 1460). These canals had multiple functions, carrying river water at some points in their use-lives and diverting floodwater at others, followed by a third life as agricultural fields once they were no longer used to channel water.

Discussions about the management of natural disasters are especially relevant in the present day, with most modern strategies focused on predicting and detecting events and mitigating their effects. The research from the Pampa de Mocan reveals that pre-Hispanic farmers in this region had a different approach, using opportunistic agricultural techniques to turn El Niño from a catastrophe into an advantage, and allowing them to utilise the Pampa de Mocan as both a productive agricultural area and a risk-management strategy.

PAAPM article

<anachronism_alert>

As these irrigation ditches were pre-hispanic, how did they know it was called El Niño? Some kind of miracle, I reckon.

</anachronism_alert>

 The Mochica civilisation, which built and/or maintained these irrigation ditches during the first millennium CE (I say 'and/or' because the archeologists of PAAPM haven't ruled out the possibility that they were dug in pre-Moche times) were eventually wiped out by a 'Super El Niño'. But, as that El Niño programme observes, they did a lot better with a few hand-tools (not sure whether they had technology as advanced as a wheelbarrow) than current Peruvian authorities.

And for some more glass-half-full stuff have a listen to the latest edition of The Climate Question, featuring an extended interview with the new chairman of the IPCC...

<newspeak_alert>

They're so right-on on that programme that they call him 'the new chair'. I suppose someone who speaks for the agency would be a spoke. I know there are issues with the male-bias of the language, but this sort of '-man' is just an undefined  person (German man) as opposed to a man (German Mann). And in any case Professor Jim Skea is one of us poor chromosomatically challenged caitiffs.
</newspeak_alert>

..., who you will be relieved to hear, has his fingers crossed as to whether governments are going to meet their net-zero goals.

That's all for now.

b

Update 2023.12.29.12:00 – Added PS

PS A few months after  I published this, an article in  The Conversation, added to the picture, with particular reference to fresh water:

It is a well-known fact that water is the key to life on Earth. But it is less well known that only about 1% of all water on the planet is fresh water available to humans, plants or land-based animals.

The rest is in the oceans, or locked up in polar ice sheets and rocks. In a climate changing world, the global distribution of that 1% takes on a whole new significance.

 It went on to give specific information about the effects of El Niño in Australia (and in the the southern hemisphere generally (in unquoted bits of the article):

...Drying will change vegetation patterns and further increase temperatures, which could be above 35°C for large parts of the year by 2100 if emission rates continue to be high. This would have severe effects on the health of humans and habitats.

Similarly, drying in central Australia has knock-on effects on weather and climate for coastal areas where most of Australia’s major cities and population are situated. Drying trends are also being experienced in the south-west and south-east of the country leading to habitat stresses and change, wildfires, depleted rivers and impacts on human health, especially in urban areas.

As with many aspects of climate, the exact nature and scale of changes and impacts are hard to predict or model at local or regional scales. But this new paper points to clear shifts in patterns and complex climate processes in the southern hemisphere which will reduce water availability during El Niño events.

Drying will generate additional stresses on habitats and species in key regions. It will also impact human populations with varying capacities to adapt and, ultimately, our global food systems. Although the southern hemisphere is mostly water, what happens there really matters for the whole planet.

My bad - a mis-step in the culture wars minefield

<apologies-for-absence>
Sorry. In a recent frenzy of tidying I accidentally deleted everything but this update (the 08.06 one). I imagine it's squirreled away in a trash bin somewhere, but until I find it ...
</apologies-for-absence>

<STOP_PRESS update="2023.08.07.10:15">

No, it's gone without trace. Here are the highlights: I've better things to do than try to reproduce the deathless prose. 

I noticed some time after the fact that Elon's fearless scythe had cut off an account I had on the app formerly known as Twitter:

This was accompanied by a screed that explained steps I could take to appeal/reverse/otherwise fix the ruling. As my last tweet was dated back in March (I haven't  been inclined to spend much time on Twitter since  Mr Musk started his race to the bottom), I didn't think it worth my while to go through all this,. but here's the gist:

I suspect, though, that my unwitting transgression was my use of 'cotton-pickin'' in a tweet about Nadine Dorries. Look hard enough and there's racism at the root of this term. But I used it in a paraphrase of something Deputy Dawg used to say before jumping to a wrong-headed or obvious conclusion; his southern drawl should have warned me that I might be treading on some toes..

</STOP_PRESS>

 

Update: 2023.08.06.07:10  – Added PS

PS:

 <background> 

As Li'l Miss Barnacle's Long Goodbye ticked into its seventh eighth week, this tweet appeared:

 

 

Having said she was standing down "with immediate effect" seven eight weeks ago, she cannot now stand down until Parliament is back in session (after the party conferences, or – perhaps more significantly – after the publication date of her book). So her constituents ("marvellous", according to her June tweet) will remain unrepresented until then. I imagine the local booksellers will have  got their pre-orders in.

</background> 

PPS And the last bit of the repair:

<REPAIR Update="2023.08.08.12:55">      

Victoria Boliviana in the wild

As a passing thought I mentioned a TV programme I had seen about the discovery and naming of a new giant waterlily:

For a (stupid) moment I thought "Aha, so that's what Victoria means, but as any fule kno Victoria was the goddess of victory, and there's nothing particularly victorious about a waterlily. No, the reason for the name was just that a Victorian collector wanted to curry favour with his monarch, just as William Herschel had done with her grandfather;

<background> 

Herschel, a devoted subject of England’s King George III, suggested that the new planet be named Georgium Sidus, or George’s Star. This went against the naming convention that had developed in the Western world, in which planets were named after Roman deities. It was also less appealing to astronomers outside Great Britain for obvious reasons. Several alternative names were tossed around, including Herschel (after its discoverer) and Neptune. German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, whose observations helped establish the new object as a planet, suggested another possibility: Uranus.

Bode’s suggestion became the most popular, and chemist Martin Klaproth even named his newly discovered element “uranium” in a show of support. Although astronomers in England continued to use Georgium Sidus until around 1850, they eventually joined the rest of the world in calling the seventh planet Uranus.
Source

</background>

Update: 2023.08.31.09:05  – Added PPPS  

When I wrote about the timing of Li'l Miss Barnacle's exit my suggestion of the coincidence of her publication date was not entirely serious. But in a recent The Rest Is Politics Rory Stewart is convinced that the timing is no accident. He says something measured (or do I mean mealy-mouthed?) like 'she should be very careful'. But he is obviously quite aghast at her atrocious behaviour.

Perhaps, though, he is being diplomatic rather than mealy-mouthed. I wonder if there's a risk of prosecution for Contempt:

Contempt of privilege is a term used to describe any act - or failure to act - that may prevent or hinder the work of either House of Parliament. A more specific offence against parliamentary privilege is known as a breach of privilege.

source

Maybe not. Litigation in politics is a rather hackneyed weapon in the culture wars...

<parenthesis>
(and has given the word weaponize a new lease of metaphorical life): this is from Ngrams:

</parenthesis>

... but involving electoral realities in a tawdry publicity stunt is hardly a mark of good faith. She obviously has contempt both for Parliament (in particular for the PM – who only got to read her letter of resignation via the Daily Mail...

<tangent>
(For some reason I'm reminded of Alan [not then  Lord] Sugar and Jürgen Klinsman's shirt: 'I wouldn't  wash my car with it'. No idea where that memory came from.)
</tangent>

... and for her constituents. Come to think of it, her contempt extends to the public in general. But maybe actual contempt doesn't come into the legal definition. 

</REPAIR>

 

 

The other St Pancras...

.... Not a station but a church. The church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, known familiarly as 'The Cathedral of the Moor, is dedicated to St Pancras, patron saint, it says here, of  '...children, jobs, and health':

When Saint Pancras was born toward the end of the third-century, Diocletian was the emperor of the Roman Empire, sharing ruling authority with three others. In the years prior to Diocletian’s reign, Christianity began to be tolerated within the empire. Emperor Diocletian slowly reversed that trend, beginning the final wide-reaching persecution of Christians before Emperor Constantine the Great legalized Christianity.

One tradition states that around the year 299, Emperor Diocletian and one of his co-rulers, Galerius, took part in a pagan divinization ceremony.... In 303, after Diocletian and Galerius consulted an oracle, they published an edict that began a great persecution of Christians. Churches were destroyed, Scriptures were burned, and Christians who failed to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods were killed. A fourteen-year-old boy named Pancras was among them.

<autobiographical-note>
At the same age I remember  being impressed by the words of "Faith of our fathers":

How sweet would be their children's fate,
If they like them  [HD: our fathers] could die for Thee!

Unfortunately the opportunities for juvenile martyrdom weren't great in London W.5 at the time.
</autobiographical-note>

On a holiday I am just back from,  in the West country, I was reminded of a piece I wrote a while ago, which mentioned (tangentially, of course) the odd-looking symbols applied to some chemical elements., for example Hg (mercury, or quicksilver):

This sort of "quick" [2023 clarification: the "living" sense, as in "the quick and the dead"] is the basis for an aperçu that I've recently had about an anomaly I met in the school chemistry lab. Some elements have seemingly random symbols, like K and Sn  and Hg. As a schoolboy I was content to just learn them; some of them, anyway,  had mnemonic value – tin and Sn shared an n; and s is close to t both alphabetically and with regard to where the tongue goes in forming it. But Hg? 

Well the alchemists (or whoever) who first named mercury chose a different metaphor for its fluid behaviour; not alive-silver, but watery-silver, not quicksilver but hydrargyrum.

And my stay near Widecombe has led to an explanation of Sn  (slightly more persuasive than the ones I gave back then).

Tin-mining was overseen in Dartmoor by four stannary towns  (from Latin stannum). Wikipedia says:

Devon's stannaries are usually referred to by the names of stannary towns which were the locations where white tin was assessed, coined, and sold. They were also the location for some of the institutions associated with the operation of the stannary.

King Edward I's 1305 Stannary Charter established Tavistock,   Ashburton and Chagford as Devon's stannary towns, with a monopoly on all tin mining in Devon, a right to representation in the Stannary Parliament and a right to the jurisdiction of the Stannary Courts. Plympton became the fourth Devon stannary town in 1328 after a powerful lobby persuaded the Sheriff of Devon that it was nearer the sea and therefore had better access for merchants.^[2]

The Devon stannary towns are all on the fringes of Dartmoor, which is the granite upland which bore the tin. No definition of the boundaries of the Devon stannaries is known, if indeed one ever existed.

<autobiographical-note>
In the late 1980s I worked with [more under than with, as he was a bit of a silverback] a west-countryman with the (to me) unusual name 'Stannard'. I'm sure he had a tin-mining background.

<tangent>
He flew to the USA (in those pre-facetime days) to spread the word about X.25... 

<meta-tangent> 

Wikipedia hasn't heard of VAX PSI, the product he was king of (Google has, but with only scrappy links to odd books, because what was once a free-standing product is now a part of DECnet/OSI. Don't ask.).

</meta-tangent>  

.... Just before his flight he realized he needed a pointer [pre-infrared of course]. I  had just  acquired a telescopic one and added it to my professional writer's kit. I lent it to him (well, gave it, as it turned out).

While abroad he had a heart attack, and (a mark of his eminence - I did say he was a king) DEC laid on a wake and invited his widow.

Remembering a story told by Tommy Cooper...

<just-like-that>
A man rings at a front door, which is opened by a lady who has obviously been crying.

"Can I speak to Eddie?' he asks, and she bursts into tears again. 'Eddie's dead' she wails.

'Did he say anything about a pot of paint?"
</just-like-that>

...(or maybe it was Frankie Howerd), I didn't mention my pointer. I'd never have used it anyway, but it was a bargain at a car-boot sale, and a treasured possession.
</tangent>

</autobiographical-note>

 

Where was I? Oh yes, Widecombe
.

b

In the church there was a... Is that the time? Stay tuned for an update.

Update: 2023.07.21.18.25 – Added PS

PS (on Dan'l Whiddon et al)   
In St Pancras church there is an automaton depicting the grey mare lent unwisely by Tom Pearce in the song Widecombe Fair. It was originally made in 1959, and after many years in pieces in a box several miles away from its home, it has been lovingly and expertly restored.  

                                                                        

The fair is still held annually, on the second Tuesday in September.

<tangent subject="schedule?">
Unless Tom Pearce was very patient (as well as naïve) - I'm thinking of 'Friday soon or Sarurday noon' - the fair must have been rescheduled since the song was first sung  (it was first published in 1890, but must have predated that. Widecombe and District Local History Group have tra Dartmoor ced it to an actual occurrence in 1802:

We found a sign at the Tom Cobley Tavern at Spreyton, which says all these characters left from outside that pub in 1802 to go to Widecombe. 

"That's the earliest date we've been able to find."

Source

 </tangent>                  

 In another Dartmoor church, at Chagford ...

<inline-pps>

(home of my spare rubber ferrule...

<etymological-peccadillo>
(interesting expression, that. The -ule suffix says it's small, and the ferr- bit says it's made of iron; a small iron bit. But a rubber one? This is another example of the workings of the etymological clock (mentioned on this blog all over the place [here's an early case]. There's nothing salty, for example, about a salary, and a companion shares more than bread. The sal- and the -pan- had relevance at an early stage in the words' development, but language moves on. Show me someone who insists on decimation involving a penalty of one tenth, and I'll show you a pedant.)
</etymological-peccadillo>

... – dropped in Chagford car.park less than an hour after I bought it. Until I replaced the old worn one I had sounded like Blind Pew delivering the Black Spot.)                                           

</inline-pps>

...(one of the four stannary towns), lies the body of Mary Whiddon, whose ghost... 

<spectral-background>
(she was shot by a jealous former lover on her wedding day in the seventeenth century, in the church, just as the ceremony was starting)
</spectral-background>

...haunts the nearby Whiddon Park, and the possibly connected Three Crowns Inn. A rather breathless webpage has it that

Whiddon Park is where Mary lived and in 1971 a daughter of the house was to be married in Chagford church. On the morning of the wedding a guest awoke to find the apparition of a young woman dressed in a period wedding gown standing in the doorway of his room. Luckily the bride of 1971 did not take this to be an omen and went ahead with the wedding. It is said that she placed her bridal bouquet on the grave of Mary Whiddon as a mark of respect. Locally it is also said that Mary’s ghost also haunts the Bishop’s Room and corridors of Chagford’s Three Crowns Inn. This is also substantiated by the belief that an ancient tunnel once linked Whiddon Park with the inn? (HD: sic. Perhaps the ? reflects some doubt in the writer, or maybe it was just a reminder, not meant for publication, to check. Why, I wonder, would a ghost need a tunnel [however ancient]?)

I wonder if she was related to the Dan'l Whiidon mentiomed as one seventh of the improbable load on Tom Pearce's grey mare. But perhaps Whiddon is just a common surname thereabouts .

But there's cricket to watch.

b

Update: 2023.07.23.17.05 – Added <inline-pps />

Charivari

 A quickie, before a 'planned outage' while I get an all-over rust in Dartmoor.

I was talking last night about the derivation of charivari. It doesn't look French, although it has been used in the name of an orchestra in a context that suggests Frenchness: Charivari Agréable. I have seen it only rarely, notably in the full name of the satirical (and defunct) 

Punch, or the London Charivari

which led me to suspect (wrongly, as so often) it was a nonsense word referring to a mixture – a gallimaufry...

<tangent>
(and where does that come from? The first two syllables suggest something to do with France. No time though)
</tangent>

...or pot pourri (France again). 

But it was indeed French albeit Late French...

<autobiographical-note>
(and I'd be in a better position to say what that was if I'd bitten the bullet in 1972 and studied The History of French paper, with a notoriously soporific lecturer who'd written the one essential text. I took the coward's way out and learnt Portuguese instead)
</autobiographical-note>

.... [ed. Four dots, because it's the end of a sentence.]

Thr OF form was, as Etymonline reports

chalivali "discordant noise made by pots and pans" (14c.), from Late Latin caribaria "a severe headache," from Greek karebaria "headache," from karē- "head" (from PIE root *ker- (1) "horn; head") + barys "heavy" (from PIE root *gwere- (1)

And if you follow that *gwere- link, you'll find that another meaning of that PIE (Proto Indo-European) root (meaning 'favour' – which makes sense when you think about it: the favour being the thumb on the scales). So that that orchestra's name  (Charivari Agréable) goes back to the same PIE root twice. I wonder whether they knew....

But my interlocutor (the bloke I was talking to) probably wouldn't care.

<autobiographical-signoff>
I've been enjoying the latest Charles Paris mystery, which is set in Edinburgh. The lead character is a down-at-heel actor, played by Bill Nighy. The last time he appeared on the Edinburgh Fringe was in 1976. Strange, I didn't see him, but I was there, appearing in the Oxford Theatre Group's No, we have some bananas –  Rowan Atkinson's one-man show (with a cast of nine).
</autobiographical-signoff>

Bye, b 

Clash of the bakewell tarts

 You'll have to excuse that subject line; it occurred to me as a possible caption for the 'artist's impression' used by the BBC to illustrate...

<hmm>
(a flamboyantly inappropriate image, come to think of it, in the case of jousting black holes; on what is light being thrown ?)
</hmm>

... a cosmic event earlier today (the  newscast silly, not the cosmic event, which happened really quite a long time ago):

In a galaxy far far away, well two actually

Meanwhile down here in Harmless-Drudgery land, something cataclysmic (though not quite on the same scale) is afoot. In the early days of what I think of as 'the June Event' (a slight misnomer as it started in the dying days of May) I reported in updates to this post on a sudden resurgence in interest in the blog. As the end of June approaches I can say that those early comments didn't do justice to the enormOUSNESS (you 'eard; there is a special place in Hell reserved for abusers of enormi... (oops, is my closet prescriptivism showing? I blame my English teacher.)

June saw a blip in visits to HD that didn't just match the previous year's total, as shown here:

But since the blog's first days at the end of 2012, and even in comparison with the glory days of 2016-19 (when the blog deserved its name as I was doing wordy work), June seems to have been much busier (about twice as busy as the busiest, at the turn of 2016-17).

This is strange. 20-odd years of IT-related work has led me to suspect that something has changed in the way the data is collected and/or recorded (rather than any change in the quality or popularity of the writing). I'll keep an eye on it.

L'envoi

And while we're on the subject (of irrelevant and unrelated observations) I was recently reminded of my feeling (before I hung up my cycle clips) of quiet rage at this ubiquitous sign on the backs of lorries:
 

Grr. 😠😠😠
Subtext: 'If you get crippled,
you deserve it, thicko'

'Beware' doesn't work like that. You beware of a dangerous thing (a dog, say). There is danger when a cyclist overtakes on the inside of a left-turning vehicle, but the thing that does the damage is the vehicle. So the heart of the designer of this notice is in the right place; I wouldn't say the same for the hearts of the thousands of users who use it to assuage a guilty conscience: 'not my problem, mate'

But there's cricket to watch.

b

PS Listening to Chris Van Tulleken on last week's Infinite Monkey Cage on the subject of Ultra-Processed Food ...

<side-swipe>

(which is engineered not to be resistible, so although it seems to be  wholesome – and is more-ish – it intentionally overrides the body's satiety mechanism. Intentionally. In other words, there is an obesity crisis because the UPF-mongers want it that way)
</side-swipe>

... I was struck by the appropriateness (dictionaries recognize "appropriacy", and PGCE students can't avoid it [as I know to my cost], but there are limits) of the term "binge-watch". The streamers use the same ploy (of interfering with the sense of satiety).

/ends

Update: 2023.07.06.15:00 – Added PPS

PPS I've come across a very impressive website: steno.ai , which encourages me to quote Dr Chris verbatim, on the subject of obesity and will-power:

...[O]besity is nothing to do with willpower. Because all of the genes that affect our propensity to gain weight are all expressed in the brain. So they're all about eating behaviors. And people will be able to tell if they have any of these genetic risk factors because they will find themselves highly motivated by food. And we all know people who are somewhat indifferent to lunch and can skip dinner. Those of us with these risk factors are obsessed with food. We're prone to, you know, we'll plan dinner at breakfast time and we'll be foodies. And so that's how you can tell.... [T]he really interesting thing is that the way you inherit those genes, the way they're expressed, is entirely dependent on your family income. So obesity is heritable in low-income populations, and this was all sorted out with twin studies.

..[I]n high-income families, we don't see obesity being inherited. And that's because people who live in places with lots of money and have access to good food are much less likely to gain weight. So what the twin studies really tell us is that if we could get rid of inequality and get rid of poverty, we would deal with well over half of the problem of diet-related disease and obesity. 

Source

This is impressive, although the incidence of obesity in the USA shows that there's no slam-dunk here: a privileged background doesn't automatically guarantee a healthy diet (it just makes it possible to choose one). 

Update: 2023.08.08.15:45 – Added PPPS

The 'June Event', which I mentioned above (a sudden increase in reports of visits to the blog, starting towards the end of May and continuing into July) has died down:

I suspect that someone in Blogger-stats-land was playing with a new toy. Still, it was (mildly) exciting while it lasted.

Update: 2023.08.31.15:10 – Added P⁴S

P⁴S

I spoke too soon when I said it had 'died down'. HD Page Views in August are set to amount to well over half as much again as those in July (although most of that increase is due to a sharp uptick in the last 10 days of the month):

Cashing in

When I arrived outside Corpus Christi College Cambridge in September 1971...

<cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

(Oh yes. I think I've mentioned before the belief in academic circles that the best time for Part I modern language orals to be held was before we had started the first term. In the days before the year abroad became [rightly] compulsory, this meant that the only proof that an examinee could talk a foreign language was gathered before the course started.)
</cambridge-terms-parenthesis>

...'my suitcase and guitar in hand'  à la Paul Simon ...

<inline-pps type="brickbat-dodging">

(and if  you would have preferred "au Paul Simon",  read more about à la here)

</inline-pps>

...(except that he didn't have a third bit of baggage for his rugby kit) I was struck by the unevenness of the pavement outside the main gate:

But there were other things on my mind at the time (quite a few, come to think of it) and I put it out of my mind, until in due course it just became one of many Cantabrigian oddities.

Nearly fifty years later, all became clear. A 'Cantabrigian oddity' was indeed involved, but it was in the mind of the architect of Corpus's New Court, William Wilkins. The design and building of New Court (inter alia) is discussed in The Courts of Corpus Christi – not a must-read, I grant, but with a certain interest.

Wilkins graduated from Gonville and Caius College in 1800, with a strange interest in King's – particularly the chapel, which he measured and drew as an undergraduate (the drawing is in a libray in New York...

<need-to-know needfulness="0"> 

"A volume of engravings based on the survey is held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York." 

</need-to-know>

...).

This bee stayed  buzzing around in his bonnet for  years. To quote The Courts of Corpus Christi:

New Court’s Trumpington Street facade is aligned exactly with the southern of the Chapel’s two eastern towers .... Is this alignment a coincidence or intentional? No drawing survives of the setting-out of New Court and its relation to the street and neither has any written explanation by Wilkins of the building. However, the plinth along the street frontage may offer a clue. The edge of the plinth marks the boundary between the street and the College. The generous space between that edge and the façade suggests that the façade was moved back in order to ensure the alignment with King’s Chapel...– Wilkins’s private link between the site of his first architectural endeavour and, later, his favourite building and final resting place.

<inline-ps>
Wilkins is buried in Corpus Chapel. 
</inline-ps>

Corpus, on a line between
King's College Chapel ² and St Botolph's ³
(so not quite aligned with Trumpington Street)

<extra-credit>
St Benet's ¹ adds to the arcanity. If you want the full story, you know where to look: The Courts of Corpus Christi.
</extra-credit>

 L'Envoi

When I was first introduced to the Worldwide Web in the late 1980s or early 1990s the distant graphically rich site that everyone gave as an example of this brave new world of sharing and altruism was the Vatican Library.  Another such site that I have recently been drawn to is the Parker Library on the Web. But such sites are few and far between. The need to make money out of web-sites has called for a new word – well an extension of an old one. The word "monetize" has existed for centuries – ever since kings (or whoever) felt the need to turn stuff into cash.

The word was first recorded in the nineteenth century, and the Collins English Dictionary gives these definitions:

But the third of these definitions seems to have been waiting for Tim Berners-Lee to come along. The Collins page, if you scroll down far enough, shows this trend:

So the word spent its early years doing a workmanlike but not very interesting job, and then took on a new meaning in the early 1980s; if only the Collins data went beyond 2008 we could no doubt see the full 'hockey-stick' curve.

Enough for today.

b

Update 2023.06.20.15:15 – Not quite enough; added <inline-ps />

Update 2023.06.22.19:50 – Added <inline-pps />