More Joseph Lewis! More!
Gary Edwards

graphic rule

From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Gary Edwards"
Subject: Re: WebMaster:_Positive_Atheism_Index
Date: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 4:58 PM

Left to right: Andre Watelet, Vice-President of the Paris Municipal Council; Joseph Lewis of New York, secretary and founder of the committee that sponsored the tribute, and Roger Verlomme, Perfect of the Seine Department. (New York Herald-Tribune, Paris, January 30, 1948.) This picture was taken immediately after Mr. Lewis had unveiled the statue, but, unfortunately, during a downpour of rain.I have copies of Lewis's work on Spain, his work against circumcision, and his work arguing that Thomas Paine, not Thomas Jefferson, penned the original Declaration of Independence. I plan, eventually, to post the latter work, but the others are very low priority.

Right now, I am slowly working on the Bruno book, which is tedious and very exacting work. If I could get my hands on even photocopies of his magazine, I'd convert and post them. Doing a short article is much easier than putting together a book-length piece with photos and linked footnotes.

The photos I have up (the portrait and the one with him unveiling the Paine statue in Paris) are the only ones I have.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
     people with no reason to believe

Graphic Rule

graphic rule

From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Gary Edwards"
Subject: Re: WebMaster:_Positive_Atheism_Index
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2000 3:08 PM

I would not go so far as to call it a fraud. Lewis clearly explains that Jefferson was appointed to the task, and for him to have allowed Paine to write it would be inappropriate. Paine also appears to have agreed, in his letter to Washington. See my notes under the Jefferson quotation from the Declaration in our Big List of Quotations.

I have the Wheeler edition of Paine's works, which seems to have been critically edited for modern readability

I have a couple of incomplete Ingersoll sets, which between them make up at least one complete set. One is of the smaller books, well-worn and missing a bundle of pages in vol. 2. The others are the first ten of larger books with dark red leather, and several miscellaneous larger books with dust jackets. Of these, I am missing volume 11. I am slowly digitizing Lewis's edition of Ingersoll's Greatest Lectures from these volumes, but I am so behind in my important work I cannot even see straight any more.

As for scanning, get the scanner that seems to spend the least amount of time between clicking the "scan" button and rendering the finished product onto the screen. Also, get one with the cool-burning lamp (about US60 more than the regular type) because you will never have to shut down operations due to an overheating error.

I hate all OCR programs, but still swear by TypeReader because it allows you to do the most as far as correcting is concerned. What little attention I paid to TextBridge showed it to be laughable if your intention is to do more than 20 pages during your lifetime. I had OmniPage for several editions, and the same bugs I reported in the first one I tried still show themselves in the latest trial I downloaded earlier this year. But TypeReader shows you a bitmap of the page, and then the mock-up of the text, and allows you to go line-by-line comparing the mock-up with the bitmap and editing as necessary.

Finally, I use WordPerfect to re-create a text mockup of the original. I use the sequence /– followed by a line break to insert a phony hyphenation code; I remove this sequence (slash, {Alt+0150} line break) with Search and Replace when I'm done. If it is a hyphenated word (where the hyphen will remain once I remove the sequence), I place a hyphen before the sequence. This way, I can tell if any words or lines came up missing (more a problem with OmniPage and the others than with TypeReader). I do this with a copy of the original in front of me. Furthermore, I don't trust any OCR program's ability to distinguish columns, so I create the graphics as single column, even if they aren't.

Finally, for now, TypeReader wants a two-color TIFF, so I use PaintShop to render the greyscale scan (don't ever scan in two-color -- ever!). I reduce the Brightness by 44 percent (easy to type) if it's light and 33 (again, easy to type if you're doing dozens of these in an afternoon) percent if it's darker. Then I convert the colors to Negative Image. Then I reduce the Brightness on this by 99 percent. Then I Stretch the colors to full spectrum. (This places your black-white cutoff point at either 33 or 44 percent, whatever you typed in above.) Then I convert the colors to Negative Image again (restoring it to positive). Finally, I reduce the colors to two-color black and white. Half of this rigmarole should be unnecessary, but the Stretch Colors function of PaintShop is a bit quirky.

I am, at this moment, almost two months behind on the print edition. I have October completed except for the editorial column (too brain-dead to write one), and am halfway done with the November edition. I have permission for enough material to take me through January, but it's about putting the thing together. Real tedious work. I think the election has really got me down: I cannot think of anything scarier than having Gore in the White House than having Bush there. I love my country and always have. Several ancestors worked to put it together. To see her become, for all practical purposes, a "Christian Nation" is very heart-rending for me.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
     people with no reason to believe

Graphic Rule

graphic rule

From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Gary Edwards"
Subject: Re: WebMaster:_Positive_Atheism_Index
Date: Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:36 PM

The Internet Infidels posted the Bank of Wisdom material (this is how they got their start, and they did quite well with this free leg-up), but the BoW stuff is very poorly done -- a single scan and OCR with little or no correction) and is not from the Dresden edition. I strongly recommend against using their material as references and for quotations, etc., simply because its quality is so poor.
 

I agree.
 

I see no reason to go that route: HP is very spendy for what you get. Unless their support elsewhere is dramatically different from what it is here, you do well to stick with brands such as UMAX. My experience with HP "everything else" has been that their support is not worth the extra money you pay, but I have found that a few independent technicians (non-warrantee) have done their homework and that a post-warrantee repair of an HP product can go very smoothly -- if and only if the technician has done her or his homework with HP products. However, I prefer to stick with HP's high ticket items (printers) and go with cheaper-brand scanners. But any scanner is definitely better than no scanner. Been there and done that! (And I'm a skilled typist!)

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
     people with no reason to believe

Graphic Rule

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