I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
Although he’s still pretty complicated. I’m reminded somewhat of a Franciscan sister friend of mine who runs a blog (and until recently, a podcast) called “Messy Jesus Business” which leans into how complicated the whole being Christian thing can get.
There's one of those "midway" memes with a peasant on one side, saying "God is Love" and Aquinas on the other, saying "God is Love" and the middle is a bunch of Jesuit complications. :)
Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
In fact, the baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records, so when you’re married, the marriage is communicated to that parish and added to your sacramental record (likewise for confirmation if it doesn’t happen at your baptismal church, and, less commonly ordination will also be communicated there). When parishes are closed or consolidated, the bishop will indicate what parish becomes the new keeper of sacramental records for the closed parish.¹
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1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.
> baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records
Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.
I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.
For those baptized in a different church but received into the Catholic church, they will go through a ceremony at the Easter Vigil Mass (where they will typically receive confirmation and first communion) and that church will be their official keeper of records. They will have a copy of whatever proof of baptism the person had. In rare cases where a person was baptized, but there is absolutely no written record (things like an inscription in a family Bible count as written record), they will receive conditional baptism where the person doing the baptism (usually a priest, but not necessarily) will preface the words of the baptism with the phrase, “if you are able to be baptized.” This was the normative practice for those baptized outside the Catholic church before Vatican II. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the baptismal and sacramental records of the church are a key source of genealogical data for many researchers.
For a long time this was a common concept: that more central authorities should only come in where more local cannot effectively do it (subsidiarity). This was of course pretty universal until recently. The oldest counter-example I can think of is the French Revolution that started to centralise.
The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)
When my mother retired, she volunteered at the local church to transcribe and prepare 100 years of sacramental records to prepare them for digitization by the archdiocese. There were records in filing cabinets in offices, some in chests stored in the basement of the church, some with water damage.
The Catholic Church keeps pretty good records, for the most part. In New England, Quebec, and maritime Canada, many people can trace their ancestry back to at least the 1500s based on these records.
Or you can find learning a Slavic (or a Baltic) language easier if you learn Latin first. The bonus being that there are more useful cognates in Latin than in Slavic languages (although while learning Czech, I was a bit amused to discover that many of my childhood friends’¹ surnames were just Czech words for colors). Latin has fewer cases than Czech (five³ versus seven) and fewer declension patterns (there are five declensions with most nouns falling into the first three. In contrast, Czech has twelve and the adjective declensions differ from noun declensions (as opposed to Latin where adjectives follow either a first-second declension pattern or a third declension pattern).
Slovene is a bit simpler in its grammar and lacks some of the tongue-twisting phonemes of Czech (albeit with lj being a challenge for learners).
I don’t really know much of any other Slavic languages beyond the ability to occasionally decipher Polish or Ukrainian billboards via cognates. Bulgarian apparently has abandoned nearly all inflections in its nouns other than the genitive which perhaps makes it one of the easier languages to learn.
For those who want to learn Ancient Greek, in my limited experience, I’ve found Biblical Greek instructional texts easier to work with than Attic Greek (the grammatical differences are not that great with the biggest differences being more in vocabulary than grammar—it seems a smaller shift than between, say Elizabethan English and contemporary English).
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1. I grew up in an essentially vanished American subculture where ethnic diversity meant that there were a handful of Italians amongst the Czechs and Poles. The Czech population of Chicago, which once was the majority population of the West side of Chicago has since dispersed and assimilated to the point where there are only a couple Czech restaurants left in the whole Chicago area where even twenty years ago they were fairly common. The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline and larger population to begin with² have not suffered the same fate.
2. While there were a large number of Poles on the West side of Chicago, the larger center of the Polish population was, and still is more Northwest side.
3. Technically, Latin has six, but the vocative case only differs from the nominative in the second declension singular and so is generally omitted from declension tables.
> The Poles, having a still-active immigration pipeline
That pipeline has since dried up as well, especially since 2004 when immigration began to shift toward the EU. And since then, we see the reversal of that process, with far more Poles returning home from abroad.
So, Polish immigration has effectively ended. Old Polish neighborhoods are in the process of being displaced by new immigrant groups and yuppies.
(Curiously, even under foreign occupation, a good deal of Polish immigration was intended to be short-term. Poles would move to places like the US to earn some money and return home. Naturally, immigration is “sticky”, so a good number stayed behind and assimilated.)
I would guess that it’s very much a pass-sharing thing—I’ve noticed that the level of security around passes has increased a great deal over the past 30ish years. In 2000, a Disneyworld Pass had no expiration date and was simply labeled by gender. In 2023, the same pass was date limited and had a photograph of the passholder digitally associated with it.
I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.
Mexico City. The big gotcha is that I have two kids and an ex-wife who will be living a few miles away so there will be 1–4 times per week that I’ll need to manage their transport between homes. The kids are the main reason I own a car now.
He’s been pretty quiet in the news for a while so he sort of fell into the category of those famous people who when they died, half your response is a bit of surprise that they were still alive (which is neither a good nor bad thing, just a thing¹).
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1. I once had an idea for a party game which involved people trying to guess whether a formerly prominent person was alive or dead.
The MTV show Remote Control had a round called "Dead or Canadian", which has morphed into pub quizzes as "Dead or Canadian, Both or Neither?", which is shockingly tricky at times.
I had a similar idea, Who's Still Alive / Who Died First with pairs of people. (Who died first: Johnny Carson or Ed McMahon? John Glenn or Neil Armstrong?)
I made a list that I kept on my phone of potential names (Provided below with the answers removed—I made the list three years ago so I know at least one of the living then are alive no more).
Actors:
Gary Burghoff
Alan Alda
Wayne Rogers
Jamie Farr
Loretta Switt
Harry Morgan
Mike Farrell
David Ogden Stiers
McLean Stevenson
Lary Linville
Cast of Gilligan’s Island
Crocodile Dundee
Musicians:
Pete Best
Stuart Sutcliffe
Frankie Avalon
Annette Funicello
Politics:
Henry Kissinger
Geraldine Ferraro
Jane Byrne
Michael Bilandic
Eugene Sawyer
Eddie Vrdolyak
I'd be a bit surprised if anybody who knew who Stuart Sutcliffe is didn't know he was dead. He's not particularly well-known outside of people who have read about the history of the Beatles, and the fact that he died while they were still in their heyday is probably the only thing that people who know about him would be remember.
It’s putting him with Pete Best that makes it tricky so that people have to remember which one is the one who died early. George (Harrison and Martin), Paul, John and Ringo are all gimmes.
I never got to use this, but it seems like it would hit my dream computing environment (which has since advanced to an idea that my phone would fill that role so I could be working on my phone, plug my phone into a desktop or laptop workstation, continue working there, unplug, continue on the phone, move to another computer, etc. Apple’s Handoff almost scratches that itch, but it’s not quite as reliable or ubiquitous as I would like and the ideal would be that I have my whole working environment portable via the phone.
I never used it, but Microsoft's Continuum [1], was supposed to scratch that itch too. Your phone could drive a desktop experience when you connected (wired or wireless) to a docking station (I saw a laptop shaped dock which might have been a prototype), and with the proper implementation of UWP apps (which didn't really happen, afaik) you could interact with your apps/data equally in desktop and mobile. Didn't let you run win32 apps though, which makes it kind of limiting, but if all you do is browser, messenger(s), and office suite, it could have worked pretty well. I think this would have worked better with Intel's x86 phone cpus, but those were cancelled days before the Continuum reveal, and Microsoft also did a really poor job on WM10, so nobody knows about any of this.
The real question is whether the phone is the actual compute, or if it's just the key card that lets you access the remote compute. I think that (provided sufficient connectivity) both of those can be reasonable trade-off options, but they certainly present different views of the world.
It took me a long time to adjust to a PC environment after being minicomputer/mainframe-based for a lot of my key years (from age 15 through 22, my main access to computing was through college/university systems running VAX/VMS, VM/CMS and a bit of Unix. TBH, other than its lack of pipes and a command path, I generally preferred VMS to Unix, with the VAXstation being my preferred working environment.
Never worked with VAX/VMS, however have spent enough time reading through its manuals.
Systems programming with compiled BASIC, its Extended Pascal version, the API surface that somehow we can find traces where Windows NT got its design inspiration from, really leaves some space for what ifs, in the operating systems adoption evolution.
The VMS influence is also why DOS and NT used / for options rather than - like Unix. I was a big fan of the CLD method of defining commands. It provided a nice standardized way of parsing command line arguments that was going to be consistent between all applications.
DOS uses / because programs written for CP/M, and which were subsequently ported to MS-DOS, used forward slashes.
when PC/MS-DOS 2.0 was released, with support for directories, it supported both forward and backward slashes for directory separator because Microsoft programmers wanted to use forward slashes (bringing them over from Xenix, including adding virtual "DEV" directory with device files), but for compatibility and user friendliness the default was \ for directories and / for options
Oops, the influence was a bit higher up the ancestry chain on both sides. CP/M uses / under the influence of VMS’s ancestor, TOPS-10. That’s what I get on relying on old memories of things I was told that were probably inaccurate from the start.
When I had a C-corp in the 90s for a magazine I was publishing, my dad’s cousin insisted that I should incorporate in Delaware or Nevada. The thing is that because I was operating in California, especially at the small scale that I operated, it did nothing for me at all really. I would still pay California taxes and be subject to California regulations. Mostly it would make a difference if I were sued.
(Obligatory disclaimer that these are ~30-year-old memories of some dumb 20-something’s understanding of the law at the time.)
It might also make a significant difference if you sold the company, which is one reason why many companies move to Delaware when they are looking for an acquirer.
Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).
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