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2024-10-28

Week 199: Embra

The main excitement of the week was a trip to Edinburgh for the inaugural Haggis Ruby conference on Thursday. It revives the tradition of a Ruby conference in Scotland a full decade after the last Scottish Ruby Conference.

The trains had been disrupted the previous day by a problem between Newcastle and Berwick, but everything was resolved by Wednesday morning and I arrived pretty much on time.

Ten minutes after pulling into Edinburgh Waverley, I was eating a vegan haggis roll at Piemaker, an action which I intend to replicate on every subsequent visit to become a delicious tradition.

I went up early the day before, and came back late the day after, which gave me two half-days on either side of the conference to amble around the city and be a bit cultured. I went to the National Galleries of Scotland’s Modern One on Wednesday afternoon, and stayed until they started shooing us out the door.

The Everlyn Nicodemus retrospective was extensive, inspiring, and moving, both for the art itself and for the experiences that have informed it: upheaval, racism, PTSD, and grief.

The retrospective occupies the whole of the ground floor. The first floor holds a varied mix that I could have spent twice as long looking at if they didn’t close so early. I was at least able to stroll around the sculptures outside for a bit of time after the gallery closed.

It surprised me to see that an artist sufficiently well respected to have a retrospective exhibition in a national gallery didn’t even have a page on Wikipedia, so I created a basic page for Everlyn Nicodemus with references to her exhibition and a newspaper interview.

It was promptly hidden and turned to draft on the basis that it needed “more sources to establish notability”. Apparently an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland and a profile in the Guardian isn’t notable enough.

“Notability” is a troubling problem for those fighting for more content about women and minorities. Not everyone gets a Wikipedia page, after all. Editors have to prove the subject’s worth – maybe she’s had national news articles written about her, or perhaps his art is held in a museum’s collection. But there’s simply less documentation on many accomplished women and minorities throughout history – they were often ignored, after all, or forced to make their contributions as someone else’s assistant. That makes demonstrating why they deserve a mention on the Internet’s “sum of all human knowledge” more difficult.

The person who leapt in to downgrade the article to draft describes herself on her profile page as “Caucasian”, “German-American”, and having a “High average” IQ. That’s bizarre enough, but for someone who chooses to hide an article on a black artist, it’s not a great look.

I spent a couple of hours tracking down more sources, added explicit references to every statement, and submitted the article to the Articles for Creation process so that at least it would have someone else also in favour. It’s now been published, and other people have already started improving it. The hardest part is that first step.

Haggis Ruby was busy and inspiring, although I was disappointed when the first talk of the day featured a number of shitty AI slop images, full of uncanny people and computer monitors with the screen on the back. Next time I have a conference proposal accepted, I’m going to pay a real-life illustrator for any pictures I need, and make a point of it. Shame is the only way we’ll stop this tide of garbage.

I particularly enjoyed Rosa Gutiérrez’s talk about UTF-8. I’ve not explored the functionality that is now built into Ruby, and it gave me some ideas about how I can improve my old text-processing code. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that her example of Arabic text said فلسطين ⟨Filasṭīn⟩ (“Palestine”), but I appreciated it.

I caught up with old friends, met new people, and enjoyed a few pints al fresco on Thursday evening, thanks to unseasonably pleasant weather for Scotland in October. Is that good? It seems like a bad sign for the planet.

The conference registration desk had pronoun stickers available to put on passes. That’s helpful, although they were quite small and hard to read in practice, even assuming that the right side of the badge was facing out in the first place.

It set me wondering about how you’d give pronouns in Gaelic. In some languages, it’s moot (everyone and everything is o in Turkish), while in others it’s possible to use the same convention as English he/him: il/lui in French or sé/é in Irish.

But Gaelic lacks a nominative/accusative distinction: he and him are both e; she and her are both i; they and them are both iad. You’d end up with something like e/e that ceases to communicate much intent at all.

The solution, it turns out, is to use the emphatic grade of the pronoun: e/esan. Not so much he/him as he/HIM.

I spent Friday morning in the Scottish National Gallery. They have an enviable collection; in one room, Canova’s Three Graces stand right next to Hamilton’s Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, while an enormous portrait by Gainsborough is nearby. There are views of Venice by Canaletto (the brightest sunlight I saw on that dreich day) and a couple of rooms of big names of Post Impressionism.

I also learned something new about Santa Claus. According to the card next to a painting of Saint Nicholas:

St Nicholas was Archbishop of Myra in Asia Minor in the fourth century. The patron of children, he is better known today as ‘Santa Claus’. […] On the right, the saint, dressed as a bishop, revives three boys who had been murdered and salted down as meat during a famine.

He’s the patron saint of children … not being salted down into bacon!

I stopped off in the Fruitmarket Gallery to see (and hear) The Unforgetting by Holly Davey.

Finally, I managed a quick tour of the National Museum of Scotland before heading for my train.

It’s not surprising that I spent most of the journey back napping.

Il Gran Capitano della Morte by Musica Antica was the busiest I’ve ever seen a concert in that church, and I ended up helping out on the bar at the interval. Unfortunately, the singing lutenist who had been due to join them wasn’t able to perform due to laryngitis. But a stand-in lutenist was found, and it brings me joy that this is a place where you can find a lute player in an emergency on a Sunday morning before a concert.

Links of the week:

• Tobar an Dualchais is a collection of audio recordings of Scotland’s cultural heritage in songs, music, history, poetry, traditions and stories from the 1930s onwards.
• Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians. Up to 45% more likely to kill. Modern pickup trucks are murder.
• picoTracker aims to provide a low cost open source and DIY hardware music tracker platform.
• Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it’s haunted.
• Wild Spices of the UK.
• The blockquote element.
• DiscMaster is an experimental website to browse and search vintage computer files from archive.org.
• audapolis lets you transcribe spoken-word audio and edit it like text.
• Cracking an old ZIP file to help open source the ANC’s “Operation Vula” secret crypto code. The source of the encryption program that helped fight apartheid.