Viewing profile — christudor

America's Homer is Shakespeare!

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

Looking for some ideas for Christmas... Mine were: – Caro's The Power Broker – Koestler's Sleepwalkers – Lewis's The Discarded Image – Massie's Dreadnought – Packenham's Boer War –…

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 th…

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…

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: …

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!

I'm looking for inspiration for the Christmas holidays. Mine were: – Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000) – William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (1991) – John Ma, Polis (2024) – Jo…

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…

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 su…

I'm halfway through John Gall's Systemantics and have been really enjoying it. What might I move on to next? I think I'm more interested in the real-world applications of systems t…

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

When I put =PRODUCT(213458046676875,29) into Excel, it gives me the answer 6,190,283,353,629,370. The actual answer is 6,190,283,353,629,375. What has happened?

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 righ…