Comments on: Newton Archive

Newton Archive

thomas j wise — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 17:00:17 -0800

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.

By: lowlife

lowlife — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 18:38:31 -0800

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.

By: thomas j wise

thomas j wise — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 18:49:12 -0800

Oops, got myself slightly confused there--some of the manuscripts are from Cambridge.

By: dorian

dorian — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:44:46 -0800

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 rather than using the outdated (and broken) working-draft xslt namespace, they could simply do the appropriate 1-line function call in php, jsp or even asp.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!

By: dorian

dorian — Sat, 01 Nov 2003 23:00:30 -0800

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*)

By: kev23f

kev23f — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 01:27:59 -0800

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".

By: shabrem

shabrem — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 19:31:24 -0800

"Squirting water on Thy day" I presume means whackin' it on Sunday (or at least emittin' it).