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After a sledgehammer last week, this week's class appreciated(?) a wedge and an ax. An on-line Japanese page^1 that traces version of an episode in the life of Florence Nightingale gave me the excuse. The rainy season coming early this year and has overwhelmed with fire-wood prep. With the wood piles next to the car it's quicker to leave the tools in the car. I'm more likely to get some chopping done in spare moments without walking back and forth getting tools When you have a dog, cats, and chickens you get distracted while going to (or into) the house for tools. I would be sure to take the extra weight out before long drives, but now the temptation to take my toys (er... tools) to class is another excuse to be lazy and leave the tools in the car. The sore throat from SakuraJima's volcanic ash and the humidity from the early rainy season make it hard to maintain the energy for educational temptations, but it felt like a "now or never" sort of thing. One of the nursing students seemed to enjoy holding the hammer after class last week. The ax and wedge got some giggles this week. Both tools illustrate how wordings change and stories get mangled over time.. I guess the spirit of the story may be maintained or emphasized somehow. The hammer wielded by someone else to break a storeroom door becomes an ax used by Florence herself to break open a chest of medicine. Her "wedges" diagram (a sort of pie chart but an effective and not awful?) comes to be called a "coxcomb" (鶏冠 けいかん とさか) but that was the name she used to refer to her books intended for popular ("vulgar") audiences. Maybe care is needed to avoid the warm fuzzy feeling you get from "wedges" to become perfume for the awful business pie charts. Bringin the "Lines" diagrams in may help with that.
> .. #FlorenceNightingale.. sent for an ax and commanded the storehouse doors to be broken open.
The Pacific Rural Press and California Farmer1887/11/12
- ^1 note.com/kuga_spqr/n/n12496411…
#LadyOfTheAx

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無用の用 The usefulness of the useless..

It's been a few years since I ask classes of 40 to 80 students for the meaning of "Don Quijote". They tell me it's a store. My question was intstigated by the extra (Not on the test!! just for your enjoyment if you finish quick) reading on the back side of a worksheet. While discussing proverbs in comparison with science, literature, and slang Bertrand Russel mentions Sancho Panza.^1

Sancho Panza produced more proverbs than any other character in fiction
サンチョ・パンザは、他の小説の主人公の誰よりも多くの諺を創りだした。


Bertrand Russel also refers to Don Quijote to illustrate a type of thinking.^2

The classic example of subjectivity is Don Quixote. The first time he made a helmet, he tested its capacity for resisting blows, and battered it out of shape ; next time he did not test it, but “deemed” it to be a very good helmet.

Don Quijote illustrates "subjectivity" in On Education in 1925, and decades later Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus uses Quijote thinking to illustrate the difference between "lyricism" and "truism":


... there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.... If Faust and Don Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch....


- ^1 russell-j.com/PROVERB.HTM
- ^2 russell-j.com/wp/archives/2640
- russell-j.com/beginner/OE16-07…
- ^3 pixelfed.social/bobfisherphoto
- pixelfed.social/p/bobfisherpho…
- pixelfed.social/i/web/post/828…

#BertrandRussel #AlbertCamus #MethodsOfThought #TypesOfThinking
#RusselWithQuijote #CamusWithQuijote

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"I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views."
..
"If you want to know why a decision is made, we will need humans. If we don't care about that, then we will probably use AI," he says.
...
"Even when you do a Google search it includes an AI overview, while some emails have a topline summary, So now it almost feels like we have no control. How do I turn all that off? It's snowballing."
bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzd…
#SabineZetteler
#AISalami #SalamiAI

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May 12 is International Nurses Day.
Would you support a proposal that we all take out sledgehammers every May 12th in memory of Florence Nightingale: Lady of the Hammer (and Data Visualization used to shift toward reasonable policies)...
> And the ‘Lady with the Lamp’? In reality, Nightingale was known to the troops as ‘The Lady with the Hammer’ after she broke into a locked storeroom to release much-needed medical supplies, in defiance of a military commander who had blocked her every move. They revered her for it, of course. But as Russell knew, a powerful, belligerent, rebel woman was far too coarse and unladylike for the readers of The Times, so in the finest traditions of journalism, he simply made it up.
virago.co.uk/virago-news/2020/…
#LadyOfTheHammer #LadyOfTheLamp #FlorenceNightingale
#NursingSchool #FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheHammer #ハンマーの貴婦人

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in reply to Brian Small

> ナイチンゲールが「斧を持って英軍倉庫から薬を奪う」アメリカの新聞報道の変遷と、「ハンマーを持った淑女」の由来探し
note.com/kuga_spqr/n/n12496411…
in reply to Brian Small

そこで、同書を入手して読んでみると、「備品庫におしいってシーツや包帯などを取り出す看護婦」と題したイラストと、それを補足するテキストが記されていました。以下、引用します。

兵士たちの苦しみについて新聞何度を読んで知ったイギリス国民は、シーツや包帯や食べ物を船に何隻分も寄贈しました。問題は、無能な医務官たちがそれをきちんとくばらないことでした。兵士たちはフローレンス・ナイチンゲールのことを「かなづちをもった婦人」と呼びました。フローレンスは兵士の苦痛をすこしでもやわらげようと、ほんとうに備品庫におしいって包帯などを取り出しました。

『ナイチンゲール: 現在の看護のあり方を確立した、イギリスの不屈の運動家』p.89



> All Crimean War hospitals were ghastly, she insists, and the statistics suggest that at least two had higher death rates than Scutari. McDonald also makes a persuasive case that Nightingale believed the blame for Scutari’s dreadful state lay elsewhere. In her letters, she pointed repeatedly at military doctors and administrators, chastising them for a host of “murderous” errors including sending cholera cases to overcrowded wards and delaying having the hospital “drained and ventilated.” The sanitary commission’s investigation confirmed Nightingale’s suspicions about the links between filth and disease, McDonald contends, and she became determined never to let those conditions occur again. “That is the foundation of all she does in public health for the rest of her life,” McDonald says...

> Throughout her sojourn, she faced the resentment of officers and bureaucrats who regarded her as an interloper. “There is not an official who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could,” Nightingale wrote from Crimea, “but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me.”

- smithsonianmag.com/history/the…

#FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheLamp #LadyOfTheHammer #Scutari
@bsmall2

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in reply to Brian Small

> Swayed by her presentations, the military improved hospitals throughout Great Britain, and Parliament voted to finance the first comprehensive sewage system for London. “She was a one-woman pressure group and think tank,” says David Spiegelhalter, a University of Cambridge statistician and author...
#SewageSystem #hospitalhygiene #FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheHammer #NightingaleStatistician
@bsmall2@nerdica.net
in reply to bsmall2

> She produced findings on the proportion of recoveries and deaths from various diseases, average disease recovery times..[by] age and gender, and high rates of communicable disease such as septicemia among hospital workers. Nightingale came to believe, says Spiegelhalter, that “using statistics to understand how the world worked was to understand the mind of God.” In 1858, she became the first woman to be made a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
#StatisticsGodliness
@bsmall2@fedibird.com @bsmall2@nerdica.net

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I thought I had posted some things to this account a few years ago... I wonder what happened?