Jul/100
5 Things I’ve Learned Lately
Talia’s 10 Things… has inspired me to write a new blog post to put down a few thoughts on my blog. Here’s 5 things that I’ve learned lately.
1. Jquery’s Draggable and Droppable classes don’t work on iOS devices. Obviously this is because the browser uses this drag/drop motion to scroll and pan around the screen. There is one JS library that I found that provides drag and drop abilities to iOS, though. It can be found here. I’m considering taking the code and turning it into a JQuery plugin.
2. The account of the Gracchus brother (Tiberius and Gaius) in “Plutarch’s Lives” is fascinating. In fact, the entire document is surprisingly readable. Tiberius, and after his death, Caius led sort of a sudo-revolution in Rome through the office of tribune of the people – cut short by the senate. The effects of which, one could argue, led to the downfall of Rome.
3. When Hitler implemented the ‘Final Solution’, he asked Jozeph Tiso, then President of the Slovak State (a satellite state of Nazi Germany) and a Catholic Priest, to send all the Jews in Slovakia state to Nazi Germany / Poland for ‘processing’. Although Tiso was anti-semetic, he also knew that (some of) the Jewish population of Slovakia was crucial to the economy. He ended up sending Jews anyway, to maintain an alliance with Nazi Germany, but not all of them. He personally allowed about 25,000 out of 200,000 to remain. After the war Tiso was tried and executed for war crimes – but many Slovaks maintain that he was a good guy because he saved so many Jews.
4. Isaac Casaubon was a Genevan born Humanist and Scholar in the Renaissance. He wrote a commentary on “Theophrastus’s Characteres”, which contained an unusual note on the front cover. It was unusual because it wasn’t written in Greek or Latin, but rather, in Hebrew – not a language you expect to find on a book about Theophrastus, an Athenian writer. It said “Praise be to God, creator of the universe”. One of the discoveries you make when you look into the life of Casaubon is that a prominent Jewish element exists. He copied and annotated many Hebrew texts (including books of the bible) that now reside in the Library of London.
5. To add an Arduino library (such as WiShield) to Arduino for Mac, you need to right click the Arduino application and choose Show Package Contents. From there, navigate to Contents -> Resources -> Java -> libraries and copy the library to this folder.