mastodon 4.7.3Retired physicist. Free information enthusiast. Phone refusenik. Author of science fiction and open-access physics textbooks. I live in Southern California and enjoy rock climbing and trail running. My current free-information project is a presentation of the Iliad with student aids done in a novel way: https://bitbucket.org/ben-crowell/ransom .
I've been on #mastodon for six months, and my enthusiasm has been steadily waning. I've decided to stop using it. It's too hard to find interesting content. Following the #climbing tag means I mostly see random photos of climbing routes people did, which they don't bother to identify or describe. Following the #greek tag (due to my interest in ancient Greek) means I see material about fraternities and Greek politics. #physics is 90% inaccurate pop-sci stuff, often repeated over and over.
In Iliad 16.50, Achilles denies to Patroclus that he knows of an prophecy about his death, even though Patroclus was present in 9.410 when it was discussed, and has specifically recalled it in 16.36. A lot of ink has been spilled over this, incl. suggestions that it means Homer wasn't a single author, which seem wrong to me given 16.36. Isn't the best explanation simply that Achilles is dissembling? He wants to rewrite his own story so his conduct will sound better.
#greek #homer #classics
@jschauma@mstdn.social There's also chegg. I'm so glad I'm retired from physics teaching.
Would anyone well versed in #Greek be willing to explain to me why this is subjunctive?
ἠΰτε πορφυρέην ἶριν θνητοῖσι τανύσσῃ
Ζεὺς ἐξ οὐρανόθεν, τέρας ἔμμεναι ἢ πολέμοιο,
(#iliad 17.547)
My understanding of the usages of the subjunctive is: negative and first-person commands, first-person possible actions, constructions with μή, and opinions about the future. This doesn't seem to fit any of those.
I love #jazz saxophonist Frank Morgan's recordings from after he got out of prison. Prison is a cage where we lock up monsters, but his playing is infinitely gentle. People should take personal responsibility for substance abuse as a conscious choice (not a disease like cancer), and Morgan also committed property crimes to support his habit. But when an artistic voice like his is locked away, it's a brutal wake-up call about the failure of Richard Nixon's "war on drugs."
#massincerceration
The 2016 U.S. presidential election caught a lot of people by surprise, including me. What caused its outcome, and how do we keep it from happening again?
In this blog post, I explain why I don't think individualized explanations like status threat are useful in finding a way forward. Instead, we should pay attention to broader factors like engineering the internet so it doesn't become even more of a cesspool.
@howelloneill@infosec.exchange I once received a fairly credible death threat in a forum. The mods responded by banning the guy and deleting info about what had happened, didn't give any public info about why he was banned. I can see why people just don't want any record that it happened to be on their site -- it creates a horrible impression to prospective new users. But in this case, the guy was a popular user, and the erasure meant that his partisans may never have realized how bad a lot of his behavior was.
@iangriffin@mastodon.nz Funny, I saw it first as the mastodon software had cropped it, with the bottom taken out. I liked it better that way than in the full square composition!