Lee's Blog

I was going to do my duty on PGDP tonight, but it was offline. After several tries, I got the message that they were doing unscheduled maintenance, and a link to this. I sincerely hope they have really good back-ups …

Update (Friday morning): still down. Doesn’t even respond to pings. I’m starting to worry about this. Getting withdrawal symptoms …

Sixteen of my P2 pages have gone through P3. Fifteen went through without a hitch. But one contained this passage:

In the Kirikkot muri of the Karikkod proverty there is
a temple dedicated to Siva or Unnamalanathar, with a
large amount of property attached to it.

That’s exactly what it says in the text. There is no error in reading it. The P3′er marked “proverty” as possibly a typo for “property”. Well, maybe. But how am I to recognize proverty as a typo? Other than, I guess, Indian names don’t normally seem to be transliterated with a “y”, but then one might suppose that the typo is in calling it proverty instead of proverti, or something.

I don’t actually have a clue what a proverty would be, but then I don’t have a clue what a muri would be either (judging by Google, if lower case it seems to be a kind of food, and if capitalized it seems to be the name of a specific town, and neither meaning makes sense here). How would I know if a muri should or should not be found in a proverty?

Anyway, I hope that this will not imperil my proposed future in P3….

Update: almost immediately … if you google for muri and proverty and India together (and skip all the “poverty” that Google helpfully throws in), you can find this. Either two people made the same mistake, or else muries really are found in Proverties.

Phew.

I did five qualifying pages yesterday, and there were four already safely in P3 (safely meaning no errors). But were the five okay? I have been fretting over them all day, since I didn’t want to go on and do more qualifying pages if those were bad, since qualifying pages are a limited resource. And yet, and yet … I really wanted to go ahead.

So I went ahead and did three qualifying pages after I saw the first three pages from yesterday pass without error. The remaining two have now passed as well. That means nine safely in P3 … forty-one to go. Three more are there and presumably the P3′ers will eventually get to them, but they are not qualifying pages, so there’s no telling when they will go through.

I have just completed my three hundredth P2 page. For this week, though I fell down on the job Monday and Tuesday, I still have forty-five pages, which is more than double my (entirely personal) commitment. Also, four P2 pages have made it through P3 — and they had no changes. In honor of that achievement, I have done five qualifying pages today; these are pages in a book that will be rushed to the front of the P3 queue to get the fastest possible feedback. I will see how those five go before doing any more qualifying pages.

There are some interesting books (for me, anyway). Charles Lyell and modern geology, which I worked on in P1 last year, has made it to P2 and I have started working on it here. I will have to be careful not to P2 my own pages from P1. I am also working on The Mechanism of Life, which is a biology book from 1914. Trying to branch out a bit from science, I am also working on Studies in slavery, in easy lessons, which is … bizarre from a modern point of view, as it is a defense of slavery in America, published in 1852. Pretty much every kind of defense of slavery, such as we read about in history class, is in this book. It is, of course, filled with logical fallacies.

Update: I have done fifteen pages in Charles Lyell and modern geology, but now I have to stop and wait for somebody to do the next ten pages since I did them in P1. I have been waiting all afternoon for someone to work on them, and no one has taken any of them up. In fact, no one but me has worked on this book in the last twenty-four hours. Sigh. I’ll have to find another project to attack.

Also, while I was engrossed in proofreading I failed to note another milestone: I am in the top 1,000 P2 proofreaders. I am currently 995th out of 2,605.

I’ve been working somewhat late this week, especially since my boss-squared is here from London, so have not done my duty to PGDP. In fact, I didn’t do any pages Monday or Tuesday. To make up, I did eight pages today. Added to the eighteen on Sunday, that is a respectable total for the first four days of the week.

I haven’t blogged about this lately (not that anyone else cares anyway), but I have been at work. Since my epiphany about retyping each page myself, here are my stats:

The significance of this is that I had decided to do 100 pages in P2 the new way before attempting P3. I have now reached that milestone, and will start working for P3.

I’ve reproduced this whole page here, just because it’s so strange.

It starts off in the middle of a speech by Macbeth (which I think has a typo, because that “shard-borne” thing appears in Google almost always as “beetle” not “bettle”), then quotes Lady Macbeth and again Macbeth, then goes on explaining the plot of the play.

Uh … what does this have to do with the topic of the book? All I can figure is it’s something about the effects of conscience and why the conscience must have been specially created by the Creator. Trying to figure out why the page I’m typing contains the text it does makes the whole enterprise more interesting, which is why I don’t just look back a few pages (as I easily could) and find out the context.

In any event, this is my fourth page for the day, so I’m calling it quits.

I did eight pages on Sunday and four yesterday, although one of yesterday’s was a dictionary page which I started on Sunday. This page was notable in that I found an error on the second pass (a hyphen that I, the OCR, and the P1′er had all missed). This is only the second time that I have found an error on a later pass, since I started the policy of retyping each page myself. Given that I have done over sixty pages that way, I think that’s a pretty good record.

Also, in reference to Creation or evolution?, I want to add this link, showing four representatives of the dog species. I will have more to say about that.

Finally, PGDP is crawling again this morning, so I have not been able to do even a page.

Twenty P2 pages today. That’s a lot. But I did them all to the very best of my ability, including typing the whole page myself, going line by line from the bottom up in the spellchecker, running the page through three programs to pick up common punctuation errors, smooth-reading, and generally listening to Read Aloud’s rendition of the page. There were some pages that I didn’t give to Read Aloud because I didn’t think it could pronounce them (lengthy table of contents in “History of Greece” with many Greek person and place names).

I read that someone is reading the Origin of Species for the first time and will blog about the experience. Well, I read the Origin some time ago so that won’t work for me, but I may get Creation or evolution? and blog about that. The latest pages demonstrated the author’s inability to break away from “essentialist” thinking, a break-away that is essential (ho, ho, I made a funny) if you want to understand evolution.

One of the interesting features of PGDP is that you join “in medias res”. That is, you just get a page from the book — whatever page is next in line — which may be quite far from the previous page you edited in the book, if you had edited anything else in the book at all. So trying to follow an author’s train of thought can be an entertaining addition to the somewhat tedious process of proofreading.

Witness, for instance, page 337 of “Creation or evolution” by George Ticknor Curtis, which I have reproduced in toto here. This appears to be the middle of a discussion of political events in England and the United States. What does this have to do with creation or evolution?

I know what it would mean if I were writing it. I would contend that the choices available to every human being now alive — indeed the very lives of every human being now alive — are dependent on actions by people long ago and far away, so that existence for each person is shaped in large part not by his free will but by the results of past contingencies. A child might die in infancy because his ancestors chose — or were forced — to immigrate, or alternatively to remain, in an unhealthy environment, and thus that child would never get the opportunity to achieve anything or even to be “saved” as the Christians would wish.

If the Creator (or Intelligent Designer, or God) is okay with that, why would he not be okay with evolution, in which some lineages succeed and others fail, and some develop characteristics that enable them to spread widely while others are restricted to such tiny niches that they can go extinct when the niche is damaged?*

But I doubt that is Curtis’ argument. My guess is that he is making some contrast between the deliberate decisions of human beings as to how to form a government as opposed to the “random” results of evolution. Which would just show that this argument is based on a misunderstanding of where the randomness comes in, and where it doesn’t.

* Much as I love all mustelids, there is no denying that black-footed ferrets are not terribly successful. Even before human beings started destroying the prairie environment, black-footed ferrets were so rare that a quarter century elapsed between the first scientific description and the second. By the time the feds stepped in and did something useful for a change, capturing the entire species and starting a captive breeding program, there were just eighteen black-footed ferrets left in the entire world.