Patricians - INFO 100

Patrician:

A member of one of the original citizen families of ancient Rome to whom were restricted offices such as Senator. A member of the noble class created by Constantine. A hereditary noble of a medieval Italian city republic. A person of high or noble birth. A person of breeding and cultivation.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary

A list of idiosyncratic and partial answers:

Answer: Measurement is created

King Henry I decrees that the yard should be the distance from the tip of his nose to the end of his thumb. The length of a furlong (or furrow-long) was established by early Tudor rulers as 220 yards. This led Queen Elizabeth I to declare, in the 16th century, that henceforth the traditional Roman mile of 5,000 feet would be replaced by one of 5,280 feet, making the mile exactly 8 furlongs and providing a convenient relationship between two previously ill-related measures. A Brief History of Measurement Systems

Answer: Place is created

The International Meridian Conference, Washington DC, October 1884 establishes Greenwich, England as the center of time and space. 41 delegates from 25 nations voted that the meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory in Greenwich was to be the Prime Meridian.

Answer: Languages are codified

Cardinal de Richelieu founds the L'Académie Française in 1634. L'Académie governs French grammar, orthography, and rhetoric.

For e-mail, French read courriel

Goodbye "e-mail," the French government says, and hello "courriel" -- the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.

The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.

...

"The word 'courriel' is not at all actively used," Marie-Christine Levet, president of Frnech Interent service provider Club Interent, said Friday. "E-mail has sunk into our values." She said Club Interent wasn't changing the words its uses. "Protecting the language is normal, but e-mail is so assimilated now that no one thinks of it as American," she said. "Courriel would just be a new word to launch."

CNN.com Friday, July 18, 2003

Answer: Visual aesthetics are created

"The common view that brings these artists together in a group and makes of them a collective force within our disintegrating age is their determination not to aim for perfection, but to be satisfied with a certain general aspect. Once the impression is captured, they declare their role finished. The term Japanese, which was given them first, made no sense. If one wishes to characterize and explain them with a single word, then one would have to coin the word impressionists. They are impressionists in that they do not render a landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape. The word itself has passed into their language: in the catalogue the Sunrise by Monet is called not landscape, but impression. Thus they take leave of reality and enter the realms of idealism." L'exposition du boulevard des Capucines- Les impressionnistes April 29, 1874

Answer: Pornography is possible

"The reputation of "Ulysses" in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, -- that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.

If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.

But in "Ulysses", in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic. United States District Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59, December 6, 1933

Answer: Meaning is determined

The Dewey Decimal Classification is the most widely used classification system in the world. Libraries in more than 135 countries use the DDC to organize and provide access to their collections, and DDC numbers are featured in the national bibliographies of sixty countries.

What happens when patricians determine the construction and meaning of information?