Monday, February 06, 2012

weekend update

Friday night we saw "Hugo", being the sole film this year to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Visual Effects, and met Baltimore's best bartender (according to the readers of City Paper).

Saturday we continued our tour of Baltimore's high-end coffee scene by visiting Zeke's.

Saturday night Morgan went to the Magic tournament with Tom, and I went to the symphony, and heard
J.S. Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 1
Rameau - Orchestral Suite from Naïs
Haydn - Trumpet Concerto
Mozart - Symphony No. 39

Sunday we continued our climate change journal club with a paper correlating SNPs in Arabidopsis thaliana with viability and fecundity grown in four different sites around Europe, and I wasn't really sure how the data they showed justified the conclusions they drew.

Sunday night we saw "Fifty Words" at Everyman.

Word of the day: manumit

The word of the day is manumit:

< classical Latin manūmittere < manū , ablative singular of manus the power of a father or master (lit. ‘hand’: compare manus n.1 2) + mittere to release, send (see mission n.); manū ēmittere is recorded from earlier texts. Compare Law French manumettre to set free (1338 in Middle French), Middle French manumitter (1354), manumiter (15th cent.); also Italian manomettere (end of 13th cent.), Spanish manumitir (early 18th cent. or earlier).
Now chiefly hist.
To release (a person) from slavery, bondage, or servitude; to set free. Also intr.: to obtain one's release from slavery, etc. (OED)


"The Romans, he writes, had no concept of progress: 'The implication is that the order of the universe is static, that social perspectives do not change; they must be the way they are.  The 'is' and 'ought to be' of the world are the same.'  Thus, a slave might dream of manumission, but hardly of abolition."

 - Adam Kirsch, "The empire strikes back: Rome and us", 9 January 2012 The New Yorker, quoting Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans