Jude Seal's Notebook

  I am currently in the process of reworking and rebuilding my various blogs in an effort to make things a bit more coherent, as well as some slight design changes here and there to improve reader experience.  

  GOSPEL BOOKS: The Book of Kells Latin: Codex Cenannensis Irish: Leabhar Cheanannais ; MS ID: Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I The Book of Kells is probably one of the most recognisable early medieval manuscripts from the British Isles (For why I use the term British Isles generally see here ).   It was created at the Columban monastery somewhere in either Ireland, Scotland, or England.   The manuscript consists of 340 folios bound into four volumes with a combined page count of 680.   The text is written using iron gall ink, with the vibrant colours were made up of a variety of mixtures, with some of the ingredients for the pigment having been imported.   Created at the very beginning of the ninth century, it came to the monastery at Kells, and is now held by Trinity College Dublin, where any two of the four volumes are on display at any one time. The text contains the four Canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with additi...

Content Warning: Racism, Violence, Murder, Genocide.   This is the story of Johann Wilhelm ‘Rukeli’ Trollmann.  You’ve probably never heard of him.  He was a famous Sinti Romani boxer in the 1920s.  The reason that, particularly in the English speaking world, he is not particularly well known is because of the events described in this post.  Part of the goal in writing this is to draw more attention both to Trollmann himself, and also to the suffering undergone by the Roma including the Sinti during the genocide carried about by the Nazis and their allies.  It is a story of pain, suffering, and defiance, and both the story and the man deserve to be remembered. Johann Wilhelm 'Rukeli' Trollmann as an amateur boxer in 1928 Johann Trollmann was born on 27 December 1907, at Wilsche near Gifhorn in what was then the German Empire.   In the 1920s he rose to fame as a skilled boxer, known for his technique, hand speed, and movement.   He was ...

C/W: Contains description of surgery and amputation.  The story of prosthetics is one of human ingenuity.  Based on the existing evidence the earliest entry in this story is of an individual who would eventually be buried near the ancient city of Thebes some time between 950 and 710 BC.  This individual at some point found themselves in need of a replacement big toe, and a prosthetic was made.  Their mummified remains, complete with their prosthetic toe, were discovered in AD 2000, and ten years later a team of biomechanical engineers would discover that the design of the prosthetic was such that it did not require the individual to wear any kind of specialist shoe to hold it in place - they could walk barefoot or in normal Egyptian sandals.  The previous earliest prosthetic we have (or rather had) physical evidence for dated from 300 BC - known as the Capua leg, named for the site of its discovery - it was held by the Royal College of Surgeons, but was destroye...

Attempts to free the Ever Given, March 2021 The blocking of the Suez Canal by the running aground of the freighter Ever Given has brought much attention to the importance of the Suez Canal as an international shipping lane.   News reports have noted that the other route – around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope – contains added risks of severe weather and piracy.   This is not the first time that the operations of the Suez Canal have been halted – and past incidents include the unusual story of what became known as the Yellow Fleet.   The 1967 Arab-Israeli War, sometimes referred to as the Six Day War, led to Egypt blocking both ends of the canal.   Debris, sunken ships, and explosives trapped ships from the UK, the USA, France, West Germany, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.   Caught in the desert winds, sand soon began to cover the ships, clinging to the metal, turning the ships to a dusty shade of yellow and giving the ships were colloquial nam...

Four important perspectives on the theology of miracles - Augustine of Hippo, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Thomas Aquinas, and Fredericus Mercurius (known in vernacular literature as Freddie Mercury) In the 1989 single ‘The Miracle’ from the album of the same name, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the legendary rock band Queen sings - “Every drop of rain that falls In Sahara Desert says it all It's a miracle All God's creations great and small The Golden Gate and the Taj Mahal That's a miracle…” - Queen, The Miracle . While there’s no precise record of his taste in music, it is a sentiment that Augustine of Hippo could quite possibly have approved of.  As Benedicta Ward explains in Miracles and the Medieval Mind for Augustine the only miracle was the miracle of Creation – in that it was a revelation of the mysterious creative power of God (Ward, p. 3).  Natural everyday occurrences from rainfall to child birth were all miracles contained within this singular miracle...

{ Since the writing of this piece the problem described has been corrected - however the problems it revealed are an interesting insight into the problems of translating certain languages and so I have elected to leave this post in place, unedited }  Google Translate can be something of a revelation to many.  It can sometimes feel like a magical box into which one can type a sentence in another language and be supplied with its translation into your desired language.  If you are unaware of the language of the sentence you can use the Detect Language feature - allowing the Translate engine to work out what the source language is before translating it.  Google Translate is however, often ridiculed for its lack of accuracy – and this all relates to the problems of faced by machine translation.  The production of accurate translation relies on many factors - but particularly the nature of the input.  In terms of single words - even in its best reviewed and most...