christudor

America's Homer is Shakespeare!

This looks nothing like BBC Ceefax! Ceefax didn't have images or moving tickers or user comments...

Vaguely relevant: the biological symbol for female (the circle with a cross below it) is a stylisation of a hand holding a hand mirror.

G. E. Moore (in his Principia Ethica, 1903) makes a very similar case to this relation to consequentialist ethics:

"The first difficulty in the way of establishing a probability that one course of action will give a better total result than another, lies in the fact that we have to take account of the effects of both throughout an infinite future. We have no certainty but that, if we do one action now, the Universe will, throughout all time, differ in some way from what it would have been, if we had done another; and, if there is such a permanent difference, it is certainly relevant to our calculation.

But it is quite certain that our causal knowledge is utterly insufficient to tell us what different effects will probably result from two different actions, except within a comparatively short space of time; we can certainly only pretend to calculate the effects of actions within what may be called an ‘immediate’ future. No one, when he proceeds upon what he considers a rational consideration of effects, would guide his choice by any forecast that went beyond a few centuries at most; and, in general, we consider that we have acted rationally, if we think we have secured a balance of good within a few years or months or days."

I'm talking about the verb that follows 'none', not the noun.

'None of the team was [singular] prepared' and 'None of the team were [plural] prepared' are both correct.

If a noun denotes a group of people – even if it's technically a singular noun – it's okay (but not compulsory) to use a plural verb.

The sentences 'Real Madrid have performed well this year' and 'Real Madrid has performed well this year' are both grammatically acceptable, and probably used roughly the same amount.

A related example is the word 'none' (= 'not one'). Technically it should govern a singular verb (e.g. 'None of the players is good enough') but you'll now see it a lot with a plural verb (e.g. 'None of the players are good enough').

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is in my top three non-fiction books I have ever read.

Will I like The Dawn of Everything if I didn't like Harari's Sapiens? (I loved Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years)

Read a few years ago and agree with this assessment. A genuine work of genius, and probably in my top five books of all time.

Liftoff is already on my list, actually! Thought I'd read that one first before deciding whether to get Reentry.

Read this earlier this year -– enjoyable!

Another problem with advice is that in lots of cases the person giving the advice has absolutely no skin in the game. If the advice is bad, it’s only the advice-taker that suffers.

Sahlins’ ‘Apologies to Thucydides’ is one of THE best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

This isn't very sophisticated feedback but the image of the anime schoolgirl(?) on the front page made me leave your site immediately.

Because doctor comes from the passive doctus ('having been taught', i.e. learned) rather than the active docens ('teaching, instructing').

I don’t agree with the Twitter thread, but I do think there are fair criticisms to be made of Wilson’s translation, one of which is that she stretches the meaning of the Greek – up to and including just ignoring certain lines – in order to present a particular view of Odysseus.

Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s translation): https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

Wilson's Twitter threads on how she decided to translate certain words, lines, passages, etc. were absolutely brilliant, really getting to the heart of what makes translation so subjective.

That said, I disagreed with lots of her choices. Odysseus' "I could not do my exercise routine" (8.232) is a particularly egregious rendition of a line in Greek that says nothing more than "There were not sufficient supplies on the ship". There are many other examples.

This is exactly right.

This video goes some way to explaining how they know the structures are correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXZzftX03VY

MASSOLIT (www.massolit.io) might be up your street. Short video lectures from university academics on a whole range of topics.

Disclaimer: I run it.

Hesiod in his Works and Days (c. 700 BC) talks about the behaviour of octopuses, saying that when octopuses get hungry they will eat their own tentacles. Amazingly, Hesiod was right about this behaviour (octopuses do sometimes eat their own tentacles) but it's not because they're hungry, but because they're stressed.

It might be because yesterday was the anniversary of the first publication of On the Origin of Species (first published 24 November 1859) so people looking for Darwin-related news?

Thank you!

"lots of N+1s, but these are easy to avoid with things like bullet"

What is bullet?

This could be perfect for us. I've just scheduled a demo for later today.

The reason the Mona Lisa is so famous is because Vasari waxes serious lyrical about it in his Lives of the Artists (published in 1550). Here's what he says about it:

"Anyone wishing to see the degree to which art could imitate nature could readily perceive this from the head; since therein are counterfeited all those minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted: seeing that the eyes had that lustre and moistness which are always seen in the living creature, and around them were the lashes and all those rosy and pearly tints that demand the greatest delicacy of execution. The eyebrows, through his having shown the manner in which the hairs spring from the flesh, here more close and here more scanty, and curve according to the pores of the flesh, could not be more natural. The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, appeared to be alive. The mouth with its opening, and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse: and indeed it may be said that it was painted in such a manner as to make every brave artificer, be he who he may, tremble and lose courage. He employed also this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, while he was painting her portrait, he retained those who played or sang, and continually jested, who would make her to remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to their portraits. And in this work of Leonardo there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold, and it was held to be something marvelous, in that it was not other than alive."

"The old educational system is outmoded; that of learning from a person at the front and then regurgitating what they have told you in order to prove you know it."

I think most university tutors would find this an insulting caricature of what they and their students do. Is this what you actually think happens at university?

It seems to me that the Persians were just as good at record-keeping as any relatively sophisticated ancient civilization.

The Persepolis Fortification Archives, for example, contain about 20,000 records that deal with the movement of several commodities (e.g. cereals, fruit, livestock, etc.) in the region around Persepolis, and dates to exactly this period (c. 510-490 BC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_Administrative_Arch...

Google's latest reCAPTCHA is v3, which works behind the scenes to generate a 'trustworthiness' score for each user. There is no longer any button for the user to click. You're thinking of v2, I think.

You can actually set the minimum score requirements to whatever you want. The default is 0.5, but there's nothing stopping you setting it to 0.0 and letting everyone through.

Sexy startup office as a service is exactly what it is.

The prices are eye-watering, however, and don’t seem to come down much with scale. (A three-person office is about three times the price of a one-person office – at least when I last checked.)