The best lack all conviction

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Meteora

The Theopetra caves 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) south of Meteora had inhabitants fifty millennia ago. The oldest known example of a man-made structure was found within a prehistoric cave in central Greece, according to the Greek culture ministry. The structure is a stone wall that blocked two-thirds of the entrance to the Theopetra cave near Kalambaka on the north edge of the Thessalian plain. It was constructed 23,000 years ago, probably as a barrier to cold winds.

Eureka Stockade: The Game

Ballarat Goldfields, colony of Victoria, Australia Sunday, December 3, 1854

We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and liberties. - Miners oath of allegiance to the rebel cause.

From what I have seen today, I am convinced more than ever that very strong measures are necessary on this goldfield and the sedition must be put down by force. The disaffected must be coerced. - Captain Pasley, acting Aide de Camp

The troubles on the Victorian Goldfields that culminated in the Eureka Stockade are a misunderstood event in Australian history. Reports in England, Canada and California at the time show exaggerated expectations that this was the start of a widespread revolt against British Colonial misrule. In Australia, it was usually reported as a minor aberration of no serious or immediate consequences, merely a protest against taxes that got out of hand rather than the culmination of a chain of events. So, who was correct ? The colonial Governor, Sir Charles Hotham reported to the British colonial secretary George Grey that if the battle was lost at Ballarat then the colony of Victoria was lost to British Sovereignty. The game is designed to both teach about the events at the stockade and to serve as an introduction to military and historical boardgames.

Each map hex is approximately 60 meters from side to side.

Each unit represents 10 men in the historical scenario. In the Hotham's nightmare scenario, each unit represents approximately 20 men.

Turns represent a few (about 5) minutes

Flying Scorpions

To the Finland Station

The Finland Station in Leningrad is the place where Lenin got off the train on the night of April 3, 1917, to take charge of the Russian revolution. There in the cold, draughty Tsar's Room of the depot, he stood looking uncomfortable while newly elevated bigwigs welcomed him with speeches and with a bouquet that he handled as gingerly as if it had been a bomb. The phrase "to the Finland Station" has a symbolic meaning, implies something like a rendezvous with destiny.

Garden of Earthly Delights

Janelle Monáe

Barthes

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. [Barthes' term for a process of perception which doesn't have an immediate effect, meaning is not apprehended in an instant.] But the punctum [the opposite of the studium - immediacy, almost shock at the recognition of meaning] is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is at stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (Barthes 96)

Religion

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels. Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count. The Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much, they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.

Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire

Transcript of Professor Joseph Peden's 50-minute lecture "Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire," given at the Seminar on Money and Government in Houston, Texas, on October 27, 1984.

Randall Jarrell - Bad Poets (1953)

‘Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem. A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.’

Alcohol is free

Next time you see a shot of Earth from space, this is the stock shot you will see.

Prisencolinensinainciusol

This whole video is about Italians singing a fake English language R&B/rock song. Imagine an American singing a a bad stereotype of Italian opera or some love song (like in Lady & The Tramp) and this is the delightful reverse of that.

Fractals

How to fold a Julia Fractal

Damn you GRRM, finish the books

This will go down as a classic Economist cover

Just finished reading... Letters to a Young Poet

http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm

Book Binding

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-bind-your-own-Hardback-Book/

This works pretty well, but a few tricks for young players:

1. Make sure the cover is very sturdy corrugated cardboard. Or even thin wood.

2. Buy some decent glue from a craft shop. Clag doesn't cut it.

3. Make sure the fabric bound to the spine of the pages is at least 5cm out from the edge.

4. Bind the pages with thread.

3, 2, 1... Let's Jam

Wrasslin’ a Grizzly.

It was the winter of ‘88 and as cold as people tell you that winter was, let me tell you, it was colder. Just walking outside made me feel like I had plunged into an ice bath. The Mississippi froze right down to the gulf of Mexico. Freak ice storms would sweep across the country and one chicken farmer I knew had emerged after a blizzard to find his cocks had frozen solid.

Well, me and Irondacks, we had teamed up to go west. For some reason or ‘nother we couldn’t get off until late in the year to start crossing the Rockies. Now, Irondacks had assured me that he knew a shortcut across those mountains that would get us through to San Fran’ before the worst of the weather hit. Any other year, he probably would have been right. But that year the snow blew in weeks before the start of the season and caught the two of us with our pants down just as we had reached the pass.

We stood there, watching the stormclouds roll up the foothills.

‘Figure’n we’ll be in for some snow,’ I said. ‘Them clouds are going to dump a load on us.’

‘Figure’n we will’ said Irondacks. He didn’t sound too worried, although this was the man that went 115 rounds against Teddy Roosevelt out in the Dakota badlands simply ‘cause he wanted to fight ‘the government’. No snowstorm was going to bother him over much! But being of a somewhat more submissive constitution, the idea of being frozen stiff wasn’t an appealing prospect for me.

‘I know a place we can hole up’ said Irondacks, and he trotted off into the trees with me scrambling to keep on his tail. Ten minutes later we were standing at the mouth of a cave as the first snow had started falling. I lit up a kerosene lantern and started walking into the darkness.

The bear had come in on our asses, driven to find shelter from the storm. He was long and heavy, having gorged himself for the winter and was about to start hibernation. He had obviously chosen this spot, and was not going to brook any company.

His roar filled the cave. I grabbed my pack and the lantern and ran further on into the cave, Irondacks just behind me. Then, around a corner, a deadend.

‘Quick, up there’ said Irondacks, pointing to a ledge about eight foot off the ground. I threw my pack up and over and Irondacks picked me up and gave me the same treatment as though I weighed nothing at all. Flying over the top, I saw that it wasn’t a ledge, but a hole in the wall where the cave continued. Thankfully the floor on the far side was only five foot down from the gap, but it still rattled my bones when I landed.

Like a shot, Irondacks had grabbed the edge of the gap and hauled himself across beside me. Seconds later the grizzly roared around the corner as well, howling in frustration at its lost prey.

Holding up the lantern I looked around our retreat. This was a true dead end, the cave only extended another 10 feet before it ended in sheer rock. There was only one way out, guarded by a demon. It looked like our options had narrowed to freezing to death, starving to death or trying beat off our captor.

With a roar the bear reared up to the gap, thrusting into the hole with a massive arm it reached for the two of us.

Well, without missing a beat Irondacks stepped up to meet it. With the difference in floor levels, they were both face to face. The bear’s paw was easily six inches across, but Irondacks took it easily. Grabbing the matted fur in his equally massive hand, Irondacks set his feet against the floor, elbow on the ledge, and began to twist the bear’s arm down onto the granite.

Instinctively the grizzly tried to oppose the force that was twisting down its arm, raising it back up until the two giants were locked together, arms straining against each other. In the flickering light of the lantern, it was hard to tell where the man ended and the bear began. How long they were together, I don’t know. It seemed like eternity, or it could have been seconds. But with a roar of his own, Irondacks’ hand slowly, but surely, moved over the top of the bears as it forced that giant paw down onto the stone. With an almighty crack, the bear’s arm broke, its sinews twisted into pulp as Irondacks drove his hand down in victory.

The bear collapsed without a sound. Picking up his knife, Irondacks jumped over the ledge to finish it off.

Well, we rode out that storm with a small fire and a dirty but life preserving bearskin rug. Three days later when the blizzard had passed, we emerged back into the wan sunlight.

I’ll never forget Irondack’s words as we left that cave, as he massaged his arm, still sore from the fight.

‘If I ever wrestle a bear again, I’ll make sure to beat it with my right arm!’

From the Vault

Those were the days

It was 'Weni, Widi, Wici' not 'Veni, Vidi, Vici'? Sacre Bleu!

THE PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN

We cannot be sure exactly how the ancient Romans pronounced their Latin, although the discipline of Historical Linguistics has given us a reasonably good idea of their general spoken practice. The early borrowings from Latin into various languages give some idea of the Roman pronunciation, for example Gothic "wins" meaning 'wine' was borrowed from Latin "vinum"; this shows the -w- pronunciation of -v- in Latin clearly, at least at the time that the borrowing took place.

In English speaking countries, two problems arise: First, are we to pronounce -v- as -w- is pronounced in English, or like English -v-? And then are we to say -ch- for Latin -c-, palatalizing the consonant before the fronted vowels, as in Italian, or pronounce it like English hard -k-? Teachers trained in the tradition of the Catholic Church will generally use the fricative -v- and the palatalized -ch-, others will use the other sounds, which the majority of modern scholars feels to be more authentic. A great deal of heat, if not light, has been spent on the problem of the "correct pronunciation of Latin". Probably most students will go with the method that their teachers use., but whichever way you follow, remember that this is a matter of scholarship, not of religion or faith. If there is any overriding parameter of judgment, it should probably be on the side of convenience, but in the last analysis the student who is really concerned with the way Latin may have sounded, as a part of his esthetic appreciation of a poet like Vergil, must try to find out the best way, so far as he can determine it, and follow it.

One person finds it ludicrous to read Vergil with an accent which appeared a thousand years after the poet's death; but another reads Vergil the way Dante read him, thinking this is good enough for him. Here as elsewhere de gustibus non disputandum est.

But if you are going to try to read Latin authentically, be sure you do not aspirate the stop-consonants, which is one of the oddities of English which makes the study of English so far for most others. It is virtually necessary to say "arpor" for 'tree" in order to avoid the Anglicized "arbhor". We know from grammarians that the Romans said "urps" for the city of Rome, and this is probably typical of their general pronunciation of the stop consonants. Furthermore, you should not use that nondescript English -r-, but roll your -r- broadly, as most of the Romanic language do. Whether it is a tongue trill, or a throat rumble is not important, so long as it isn't an English vanishing- consonant with a tongue flap (like "berry" pronounced 'Betty') or an American hybrid.

More important is the matter of the pronunciation of verse, for which see Section 14) of this supplement for a full discussion. The substitution of stressed accent in the place of genuinely LONG vowels is arbitrary and quite against the nature of both Greek and Latin poetry, which was length-conscious without any special attention to stress. If this process is justified by saying that it is a habit, understand that it is a bad habit, and please cut it out. Substituting STRESS for LENGTH is about as sensible as tapping your foot every time you hear a Chinese rising tone.

Incidentally much the same misfortune has accrued to the sensitive and lovely Classical Greek language, where a perfectly attested pitch inflection of a musical fifth (marked by an acute accent in the Alexandrian period for the benefit of benighted foreigners like us) is regularly replaced by a heavy stress. This identical stress is also used for the circumflex, which loses its double-length and up-and-down musical inflection, so reminiscent of Swedish. And (believe it or not!) this same stress is used for the grave, which is nothing more than the replacement of an acute by a low (barytone) at base level, and is so marked in some extant papyri on every syllable for real dunderheads in the Alexandrian schools. But for the pig-headed, caution to the winds!

If you did these thoughtless things to modern Bengali, people would fail to understand you, or jeer if you persisted. But since the Classical peoples are not around to defend themselves, it look like a case linguistic open-season on whatever is around. But the bottom line: You are losing authenticity, and more important a large measure of esthetic appreciation.
...in conclusion

As a practical way of reading Latin, I have a simple suggestion. Pronounce it pretty much as if you were speaking Italian, so the vowels come out strong and clear as if in Italian Opera. I would use the /v/ for /w/ since it is clearer and better carrying as a sound, and was so pronounced by the third century A.D. The hard /c/ instead of /ch/ is clear from historical record of the Latin insriptions on stone, which show the way people spoke.

But above all, do NOT read silently and think you are understanding the Latin. And do not speak in the modern manner of standard American speech, where all the vowels gets shoved together in a middle Marlon Brando potato-mouthed mumble. That IS America, no doubt about it, and it was great as a fresh breath in "On the Waterfront" for the l960's. But NOT FOR LATIN. Not for La Strada. Not for Verdi.

North-China Herald: First Edition: 3 August 1850

War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition

Cold morning + Hot coffee =

Weasels ripped my flesh

Lateralus

Just finished reading...

Once ideologies’ claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their simpleminded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality. - Arendt

May Day should be celebrated for more than one day a year

Water management in ancient Greek cities

  Water.management.in.Ancient.greek.cities.jun