I believe the first Petrov Day was in Boston in 2013, not 2014.
“More than 20 people”? 20 seems to me like far too many; I never do a table with more than 11. (If you have exactly 11 people you have to put them all at one table, because you need at least six to do it properly, because that’s how many Children there are at the end. But if I had 22 people I might split them into three groups rather than two; I haven’t yet had to actually decide this.)
Boston significantly reduced the incidence of people reading the quote citations out loud by putting them in italic text, just like the stage directions, and then including a uniform “don’t read italic text out loud” stage direction.
The version of the ceremony on the site includes the inaccurate account of the Arkhipov incident made up by Noam Chomsky. You can see Boston’s corrected-after-fact-checking version starting on page 30 of this doc.
I have also been repeatedly told that the story in the ceremony of the Black Death’s effect on human progress is wrong, but haven’t changed it because I don’t really understand what’s wrong with it and don’t have an alternative lined up.
Petrov received the Dresden Peace Prize, not the International Peace Prize, which was long defunct by 2013.
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany started in 1919 and was complete by 1934, so can’t really be said to have occurred “in 1939”. (I just replaced this with “in the 1920s”.)
I still think the gag of duplicating the “preserving knowledge required redundancy” section is hilarious and should be included :-P
Thanks for the corrections. 2014 was based on the first-commit date in the git repo of the LaTeX version; I think we did something before that but IIRC it didn’t have the full ritual structure?
These are some good corrections and I’ll merge them in for next year.
FYI, my opinion is it’s a mistake to not have people read the quote-citations out loud (and a mistake not to read the stage directions out lout). Whenever I’ve done Petrov Day, not everyone is reading along, so people sometimes have the experience of “well I’m passing around a candle silently now but I don’t know why” or “I don’t really know who said that quote, I hope it wasn’t important.”
I think that either omitting the don’t-read-the-citations-aloud stage direction, or making it easier to follow (with a uniform italic-text-is-silent convention), would be fine, and I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is better. But before Boston made the change I’m now suggesting, what tended to happen was that people inconsistently read or didn’t read the citations aloud, and this was confusing and distracting.
This is good and I approve of it.
A few random notes and nitpicks:
I believe the first Petrov Day was in Boston in 2013, not 2014.
“More than 20 people”? 20 seems to me like far too many; I never do a table with more than 11. (If you have exactly 11 people you have to put them all at one table, because you need at least six to do it properly, because that’s how many Children there are at the end. But if I had 22 people I might split them into three groups rather than two; I haven’t yet had to actually decide this.)
Boston significantly reduced the incidence of people reading the quote citations out loud by putting them in italic text, just like the stage directions, and then including a uniform “don’t read italic text out loud” stage direction.
The version of the ceremony on the site includes the inaccurate account of the Arkhipov incident made up by Noam Chomsky. You can see Boston’s corrected-after-fact-checking version starting on page 30 of this doc.
I have also been repeatedly told that the story in the ceremony of the Black Death’s effect on human progress is wrong, but haven’t changed it because I don’t really understand what’s wrong with it and don’t have an alternative lined up.
Petrov received the Dresden Peace Prize, not the International Peace Prize, which was long defunct by 2013.
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany started in 1919 and was complete by 1934, so can’t really be said to have occurred “in 1939”. (I just replaced this with “in the 1920s”.)
I still think the gag of duplicating the “preserving knowledge required redundancy” section is hilarious and should be included :-P
Thanks for the corrections. 2014 was based on the first-commit date in the git repo of the LaTeX version; I think we did something before that but IIRC it didn’t have the full ritual structure?
These are some good corrections and I’ll merge them in for next year.
FYI, my opinion is it’s a mistake to not have people read the quote-citations out loud (and a mistake not to read the stage directions out lout). Whenever I’ve done Petrov Day, not everyone is reading along, so people sometimes have the experience of “well I’m passing around a candle silently now but I don’t know why” or “I don’t really know who said that quote, I hope it wasn’t important.”
I think that either omitting the don’t-read-the-citations-aloud stage direction, or making it easier to follow (with a uniform italic-text-is-silent convention), would be fine, and I don’t have a strong opinion as to which is better. But before Boston made the change I’m now suggesting, what tended to happen was that people inconsistently read or didn’t read the citations aloud, and this was confusing and distracting.