Weekend Philology @feuerbox-blog - Tumblr Blog

The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

Kathryn Schulz’s July 20 article in the New Yorker, “The Really Big One,” is pretty sobering stuff (more so probably because the tone of the piece is more elegiac than alarmist). What strikes me is the story Schulz tells about our valuation of different kinds of knowledge. Humanistic kinds of knowledge about the last devastating earthquake in the American Northwest, transmitted via oral history and annals, has been long available but doubted for a number of reasons (some of them rather unflattering to us as a culture). Scientific confirmation came later - maybe too late, as Schulz notes, and remediation and attempts to prepare for disaster are moving too slowly.

#humanities newyorker earthquakes naturaldisasters

A novel bio-pesticide created using spider venom and a plant protein has been found to be safe for honeybees - despite being highly toxic to a number of key insect pests. New research has tested the insect-specific Hv1a/GNA fusion protein bio-pesticide -- a combination of a natural toxin from the venom of an Australian funnel web spider and snowdrop lectin.

HT: @nature_brains - a great Twitter feed from the science communications team at the Nature Conservancy.

#bees #nature #nature conservancy

houghtonlib

Bible in Greek, Romans 1:1-7, [Papyrus, ca. 300-ca. 350 AD].

MS Gr SM2218

Houghton Library, Harvard University

#greek #bible #papyrus

Letters were invented in order to remember things. We tie things down with words to keep them from falling into oblivion.

Usus litterarum repertus propter memoriam rerum. Nam ne oblivione fugiant, litteris alligantur. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive origines 1.3.2.

#st. isidore of seville #Latin #historical linguistics #etymology

#PM14 Day1

Seems appropriate for the first day of National Poetry Month. Book 4 (Kalends of April) Rite deam colitis, Latiae matresque nurusque et vos, quis vittae longaque vestis abest. aurea marmoreo redimicula demite collo, demite divitias: tota lavanda dea est. aurea siccato redimicula reddite collo: nunc alii flores, nunc nova danda rosa est.

Mothers and wives of Latium, and you, who do not wear fillets and long robes: worship the goddess well! Take the golden necklaces from her sculpted neck, Take off her riches. The goddess must be cleansed, completely. Once her neck is dry, return the gold collars, And give her flowers and a new rose. (Ovid, Fasti, 4.133-8)

#national poetry month #poetry #latin #ovid

From Newsweek - there's money in Homer:

Two Italian towns are battling over which was Odysseus’s true destination. Millions of euros hang on this ancient mystery

#reception #homer #odyssey #epic vacation

NYT sez: RIP the humanities!

The Times continues its theatrical hand-wringing about the health of the humanities in American higher ed with the ridiculously titled "Is It an Unaffordable Luxury to Major in the Humanities in College?" A forum for teens only! So hip! The Times recent coverage has been laughably tendentious, though at the very least folks like Benjamin Schmidt and David Hollinger have been given some space to respond to the Times' declinist narrative. I am glad to see some responses that decry the transformation of the university into a machine that solely serves short-term corporate interests.

#humanities #lazy journalism #higher education

Johnny Showcase & the Lefty Lucy Cabaret has blessed Philly with deeply e-mo-tion-al tunes & performances for years. This video of Sensual, Parts 1 & 2 has lots going for it, including local Philly performers Kristyn Chouniere and Felicia Leicht. They're in NYC this Saturday - come one come all.

#music #emotions #philadelphia

dicta catholica!!!:-)

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.

“It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” the pope told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal whose content is routinely approved by the Vatican. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."

--Pope Francis, as reported in the New York Times (Sept. 19, 2013)

If you have a Ph.D., at least you somewhat lower the chances that you will be seen as a crank.

Evgeny Morozov goes to graduate school.

Whoa: Anna Friel as Artemis in a Downton Abbey-inspired retelling of the Acteon myth (Downton fans will recognize Acteon). Inspired, so the film implies, by Titian's painting of the mythical tableau (National Gallery).

#greek myth #reception

The University of Leipzig is launching the Open Philology Project, which aims to make available online "every source text produced in Classical Greek or Latin from antiquity through the present, including texts preserved in manuscript tradition as well as on inscriptions, papyri, ostraca and other written artifacts." What's more, the Project plans eventually to work with "all historical languages." Laudable manifesto: "The greatest challenge of humanistic scholarship lies, in our view, in making available the human cultural heritage to the global community. Digitization is a necessary but, by itself, insufficient step in this process. Human cultural heritage must be represented in a way that supports intellectual access across barriers of language and culture. This requirement in turn has implications for the technologies but also for the rights regime that we choose. Open data provides the best strategy by which to promote the circulation of sources within a global context. Collections that are protected behind subscription barriers may serve the interests of specialist communities. Collections that cannot be freely modified and re-circulated may be useful for reference. But scholarship in general and philology in particular must build upon open data if it is to realize its intellectual and social obligations to advance the common understanding of human culture."

Via Greg Crane at Tuft's Perseus Project.

#philology #digital humanities #open source #IP

Latsis Foundation e-books: beautiful and free

View them here. Just ignore the cheesy page-turning sound effects in the embedded e-book reader and gag on the gorgeous!

#archaeology #Greece

Goodbye, Trojan gold.

“Archaeologists have to be diplomats as much as they have to know the archaeology of the ancient world, because there’s a political dimension to everything we do now.” -- Brian Rose, professor of Art and Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article on the Daily Beast about Penn's attempts to repatriate contested antiquities. Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a gorgeous and sprawling facility on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, is an incredibly rich resource for serious scholars, or for anyone interested in bit of mummy-gazing.

#classics #University of Pennsylvania

Placing the American Rubicon

On the Daily Kos, Mark Sumner discusses the widely felt "compulsion" to compare the U.S. to ancient Rome.

#rome #Exemplarity