Newton Archive

November 1, 2003 5:00 PM

Isaac Newton Massive, ongoing project based at Cambridge University, devoted to putting Newton's MSS on the Web. At present, the digitized materials available range from journals to scientific MSS to theological speculations.
posted by thomas j wise (6 comments total)

project based at Cambridge University

Uh, the URL and the copy on the homepage would strongly suggest that this is hosted at Imperial College, London. The staff are from all over the world though.
posted by lowlife at 6:38 PM on November 1, 2003

Oops, got myself slightly confused there--some of the manuscripts are from Cambridge.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:49 PM on November 1, 2003

someone's been smoking the bad xml again -- only works in msie, according to the site (and indeed, mojira firebird seems less than happy with it).

rather than using the outdated (and broken) working-draft xslt namespace, they could simply do the appropriate 1-line function call in php, jsp or even asp. snur! even the recommended 1999 namespace should work properly in ie6, if they're really so ms-bound.

well to be fair, it does say they are working on fixing it...

'cos this is something I would really love to see. aside from the fact that the content is unavailable to me, good post!
posted by dorian at 9:44 PM on November 1, 2003

well, I managed to ignore it for a while, but then I was all "but it's newton, baby!" so I wrote a basic transform script; but their wacky xsl (and java-scripting, ugh) killed the output pretty badly.

the best result I got was simply putting an xhtml doctype and namespace in place of the xml content's stylesheet tag. not very pretty formatting-wise, but legible enough.

if I hadn't been drinking so much tonight, I'd probably be able to write a parser to convert their xml into decent xhtml by formatting it along the lines of their xsl doc. then again, the person who wrote that stylesheet was on some serious crack ... reminds me of why I quit my job.

bah (*wanders off to badly-format and read newton msseses*)
posted by dorian at 11:00 PM on November 1, 2003

Neal Stephensons book Quicksilver mentions how Newton once wrote all his sins down in a list, and lo and behold, here they all are. Some good ones include: "Peevishness with my mother", "Squirting water on Thy day", (wtf?!?) and "Using Wilfords towel to spare my own".
posted by kev23f at 1:27 AM on November 3, 2003

"Squirting water on Thy day" I presume means whackin' it on Sunday (or at least emittin' it).
posted by shabrem at 7:31 PM on November 5, 2003