Dov Halevi

About this profile

Who I am, what I teach, the things I refuse to post about, and a standing invitation to tell me my translations are wrong.

Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat

A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.

The Bristol Channel and a very confused datum

Chart Datum at Avonmouth sits 6.50 m below Ordnance Datum Newlyn. Here is the arithmetic that goes wrong when a height file does not name its zero.

Justified text on the web is a lie we agreed to

A browser fills one line and forgets it, then pays for the mistake in word spaces. Worked examples, what hyphens and text-wrap pretty really buy, and what I set.

Catullus 85 in Arabic, and what broke

I disagreed with Nefeli about excrucior, so I translated the poem into Arabic to test it. The root fought back and she turned out to be partly right.