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Month: August 2016
Why do people dislike reading the King James Bible, preferring other translations?
How do I dare disagree with the Magister Optimus Michael Masiello, on this his home turf? By telling a personal anecdote around Classics, in the hope of sucking up to him. When I was doing my PhD, I had occasion to cite a few Ancient Greek texts. It was a linguistics thesis done after 1900, […]
What is your best music composition?
Eh… I looked through Compositions for the pieces I composed and put into music software in 2000. (I composed as a teenager, but didn’t quite know what I was doing; 2000 was when I had enough free time to try and polish things.) (Not that I quite knew what I was doing in 2000 either.) […]
Why do some Chinese call Britain “the nation of Yaoi”(腐国)? Is it because Britain has a relatively high rate of homosexuality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi The answer for Greece in the 1960s, when Britain was portrayed as a gay and trans wonderland, is almost certainly not the answer for China in the 2010s. But I’m reminded of it nonetheless. And the answer for Greece was, early and high publicity moves towards decriminalisation, that left people in conservative Greece puzzled. […]
How can one summarize the Watergate scandal to a kid?
Once upon a time, there was a president called Dick. No, that really was his name. Why are you laughing? Dick was very clever, and worked very hard. But he was also very angry. He was very angry, because he was sad that people didn’t think he was cool. Like the other president, Jack. People […]
Sierra in Trumpland
Sierra Spaulding’s answer to Are the media guilty of inaccurately portraying Trump supporters as uneducated and poor? captures the close encounter between the Sandersnista Sierra Spaulding and her aunt’s Trump-supporting friends, in deepest darkest San Diego. https://www.quora.com/Are-the-me… Hm… yes, I think I have access to some footage of this happenstance: Posted 2016-08-16 [Originally posted on […]
What can I do with a humanities PhD?
What do all those physics PhDs end up doing? A whole lot of running computer systems. An incidental skill they picked up during their apprenticeships. What incidental skill have you picked up during your apprenticeship? Critical thinking. Analysis and synthesis of disparate information. Communication skills. Research skills. Project management. Where can you apply those skills, […]
Is Bach’s music predictable?
There are underlying harmonic patterns that keep recurring in Bach, and that are his convention for moving music forward. The Circle of fifths is particularly prominent in Bach. It’s the kind of thing that writers, to be more complimentary about it, call “inevitable”. (And of course, recurring harmonic patterns make it predictable, at least for […]
What is it about the Lydian Mode that suggests “magic” or “uncanniness”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4T4vdAV5Vk&list=PLbb22k7us7Y-74-CI7wrIMF6lhpPJ1riN&index=7 Agree with Patrick Alan Burke. I’ll add that the Lydian sounds more strange to Western ears because it not only changes a pitch in the exclusive Major and Minor modes of Common Practice: it changes one of the core pitches of the scale, IV♯, which is disorienting for Western ears. (It makes me smug […]
What do you think of the Census fail In Australia?
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-reason-for-the-Australian-census-breakdown-on-August-9-2016 Hilarity abounds about #censusfail, the crash of the online census on August 9 2016: Census in Australia. And I will admit that, like millions of Australians that were under the impression we had to complete the census on that night (so the whole country hit the same server at 8 PM), I had a […]
Dimitra drives to the Acheron
The Acheron river was reputed in antiquity to be the gateway to Hades. Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to Are there any Greek towns built along the Acheron river in Greece? recounted driving through the drained Acherusian lake, and getting lost in the middle of the night, after a village festival. https://www.quora.com/Are-there-… On the 15th of August, […]