Chip’s journey

As an experiment to test iLabs version 3, and also to satisfy a long-standing impulse of mine to resurrect Quill, I created a Quill iLab http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/quill. This combines information that used to be on basic html pages regarding the book, Electronic Quills: A Situated Evaluation of Using Computers to Teach Writing, and new interactive features, which emulate what Quill did on Apple II computers many years ago. The example texts are taken directly from the book, and represent examples actually written during the Quill project.

I was pleased to see that iLabs could do much of what Quill did, and in a much easier way than writing in Pascal on the Apple, with its 64KB memory. I was also reminded that we had some good ideas for promoting writing and collaboration, even with that primitive equipment.

Check it out and let me know what you think. If you’d like to be authorized as a member so you can see how entering texts work, just let me know.

After being inspired by George Reese’s work with Buffon’s needle, then seeing the movie, Le Pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), then Buffon’s statue in the Jardin des Plantes, I’ve kept an eye out for Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. He did amazing work in natural history, mathematics, biology, cosmology, translation, and essays. He also examned alleged specimens for the beast of Gévaudan, which provided the basis for the movie.

On Sunday we saw his house in Dijon (where he lived from 1717 to 1742), on naturally, rue Buffon.

From his Wikipedia entry you can follow links to Buffon’s needle.