Alan Jacobs

Once more, John Siracusa has written a massive review of the newest iteration of the Macintosh operating system — 26,000 words of thoughtful and well-written analysis. Below you’ll find what to me — repeat, to me: your needs may be different — are some of the highlights of the review, and of Yosemite. (I’ve omitted quotation marks, but it’s all Siracusa from here on.)

---

• Yosemite includes a new “reduce transparency” option in its Accessibility preference pane, aimed at addressing possible usability problems created by the OS’s new look. Enabling this option removes transparency nearly everywhere. The Dock, menu bar, toolbars, sidebars, context menus, sheets, Notification Center—all completely opaque.
• The General preference pane contains a new option to switch the menu bar and Dock to dark backgrounds with light text. The command-tab switcher and Spotlight interface also adopt the darker theme, but window chrome and standard controls remain unchanged.
• Notification Center: The contents of the Today view are almost entirely customizable. The day and date cannot be removed from the top (which is a shame), but every other item can be reordered or removed. Individual widgets can be configured by clicking an easy-to-miss “i”-in-a-circle icon that appears in the upper-right corner of each widget on mouse-over.
• Apple is touting Safari’s ability browse the web for two hours longer than Chrome or Firefox on a single battery charge. Thanks to its “native” support for Netflix playback (i.e., without having to install any plugins), Apple claims Safari has a three-hour advantage over Chrome and Firefox when watching videos from this service.
• The second major feature Apple is promoting as part of Mail in Yosemite is called Markup. It provides a way to annotate attachments directly within the message composition window. Any attached image or PDF can be annotated.
• This year, Apple has decided that renaming files en masse is an important enough task that the Finder ought to be able to do it on its own. In the Yosemite Finder’s context menu, just below the option to compress selected files (and just above the increasingly irrelevant option to burn selected files to an optical disc) is a new “Rename…” option.
• The Mac will use your iPhone as a proxy for SMS communication, sending and receiving non-iMessage text messages through it. Both devices must be signed in to the same iCloud account, and there is a one-time verification process to allow a Mac to use a specific iPhone.
• Using a tethered iPhone as the source of Internet access for a Mac is now a lot easier in Yosemite for the common case of a Mac and an iPhone that are both logged into the same iCloud account. (Like cross-device SMS, Personal Hotspot requires iOS 8.1 or later.)

The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the launch of History of Humanities, a new journal devoted to the historical and comparative study of the humanities. The first issue will be published in the spring of 2016.

History of Humanities, along with the newly formed Society for the History of the Humanities, takes as its subject the evolution of a wide variety of disciplines including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, musicology, philology, and media studies, tracing these fields from their earliest developments, through their formalization into university disciplines, and to the modern day. By exploring these subjects across time and civilizations and along with their socio-political and epistemic implications, the journal takes a critical look at the concept of humanities itself.

Chicago to Publish New Journal: History of Humanities. I’m quite interested in this journal and look forward to reading it, but NB: of the 49 (!) Editors and Associate Editors, there is only one scholar of religion — a professor of Islamic Intellectual History — and no one in biblical studies or theology. And yet those disciplines have had some role to play in the history of the humanities, I dare say.

I’ve been asked more than once what the formula for effective action against Ebola might be. It’s often those reluctant to invest in a comprehensive model of prevention and care for the poor who ask for ready-made solutions. What’s the ‘model’ or the ‘minimum basic package’? What are the ‘metrics’ to evaluate ‘cost-effectiveness’? The desire for simple solutions and for proof of a high ‘return on investment’ will be encountered by anyone aiming to deliver comprehensive services (which will necessarily include both prevention and care, all too often pitted against each other) to the poor. Anyone whose metrics or proof are judged wanting is likely to receive a cool reception, even though the Ebola crisis should serve as an object lesson and rebuke to those who tolerate anaemic state funding of, or even cutbacks in, public health and healthcare delivery. Without staff, stuff, space and systems, nothing can be done.

The superhero death ritual is so exhausted at this point that the cynicism of Marvel acknowledging Wolverine’s inevitably temporary absence feels refreshing. Previous superhero deaths saw no such acknowledgement. In some far-distant past, when comic books were more innocent, death was even understood to be permanent. But here are some superhero deaths that at least had the virtue of being heroic, epic and moving ways to go out, however temporarily. Maybe the next time Marvel kills Wolverine they’ll get it right.

[gallery] World’s tallest cow

[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18756,18757”]

disciplinedd:

Periodic Table

[gallery] houghtonlib:

Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 1608-1679. De motu animalium, 1685.

*IC6 B6447 680db

Houghton Library, Harvard University

A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.

[gallery] Henry Sidgwick

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or, more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and, whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. It seems to presume perfect wisdom and virtue in the one order, and the greatest weakness and folly in the other.