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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, once exiled like Adam from academe?
Anyone who’ll pay you to think for a living. They do exist, though the pathways to those gigs are often happenstance. Consider:
- Government. Policy development, research, communications.
- Consultancies and corporate. Business analysis, process analysis, business architecture.
- And the old humanities standbys: publishing, marketing, editing.
I don’t know that your PhD will always be considered an asset in such gigs. But at least it won’t be a hindrance.
Good luck!
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 certain passages, in the positive sense; they don’t necessarily make it boring!)
What is it about the Lydian Mode that suggests “magic” or “uncanniness”?
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 that Greek has a IV♭, and Arabic even has a VIII♭. Yes, you read that right.)
Add to that that the IV♯ is a Tritone, the “diabolus in musica”. It is an interval that Western music always found problematic, and the cultural associations have gone along with that.
What do you think of the Census fail In Australia?
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 lot of merriment following the #censusfail hashtag on Twitter in between hitting Refresh (and the occasional ping).
But as a kinda public servant, I’m saddened. I’m saddened that the public’s trust in the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been trashed. I’m saddened that the data quality of the 2016 census will take a severe beating. I’m saddened that the census has ended up politicised.
Many people (particularly my fellow public servants) have been blaming the government for this, for stripping the ABS of funding. And yes, the rush to doing the census online was motivated by cost-cutting rather than efficiency. But the hubris and miscommunications out of the ABS, about the ability of their systems to deal with the load, aren’t the government’s fault. And no, I don’t buy it that hackerz brought the site down, rather than having five million citizens log in at once. Few Australians do.
[MEME DELETED]
“1 Million Forms Per Hour”: the amount of traffic the ABS stress-tested for. Double their expected volume. A fifth of the volume expected by anybody else.
I hate to agree with anything Newscorp publishes, but this nails it: http://www.news.com.au/technolog…
AUSTRALIA just lost something rare. The Census was one of the national institutions we truly trusted. Now that trust is gone.
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, Feast Day of the Dormition, commemorating the ascent of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Heavens,
you and yours were tipsily driving through fog and darkness, INTO THE VERY GATES OF HADES?!
Why, yes, I do think I have visual of the occasion…
Do Australians like being Australian citizens?
Take everything that Tracey Bryan said as read. Even if she does live in Brissie.
Why, yes. I like being an Australian citizen. Let me count the whys.
- I like that I get to be an Australian citizen, and not a British subject. I am happy that my country finally cut itself from the apron strings of Mother England. (It took a while.)
- I like that my Australianness gets to be defined by being an Australian citizen. I am happy that my country has embraced civic nationalism, and does not require a blood test for me to prove my bonafides; that no bastard gets to tell me they’re more Australian than me.
- I like that my country is multicultural. That (again, with a lot of pushing) it has become more open to different ways of cooking things, and conducting yourself, and (gradually) seeing the world.
- I like that my country has a culture; that cultural plurality has not led to cultural nullity. I love that we have a distinctive accent, and lifestyle, and popular culture, and shared mythology.
- I like that my country has learned to be skeptical of mythologies. At times, it looks like it needs reminding of it; but people are irreverent, and skeptical, enough of them are prepared to poke at sacred cows.
- I like that my country can still wave its flag: that its skepticism of mythologies has not turned it into Germany, terrified of saying anything good about itself. And I like that my country subverts its own flag, half the time waving the Boxing kangaroo instead of the Blue Ensign.
- I like that my fellow Australians can take the piss out of anything, and refuse to take themselves seriously. #censusfail, the grousing about the Bureau of Statistics allowing its online census to crash, became comedy gold—with Australian tweeters hoping that “Season 2 of #censusfail would be picked up on Netflix”.
- Including politicians: Kristina Keneally on Twitter (former premier of NSW, grew up in Toledo OH): “When my kids ask why I haven’t made dinner tonight, I’m going to tell them it’s not a failure, just a denial of service. #CensusFail”
- I like that my fellow Australians are secure enough to love their country even while acknowledging all that has gone wrong with it (as Tracey Bryan does here and elsewhere). That’s a mature nationalism you don’t see often enough in the world.
If you could go back time to 500 years ago, with your current skill and career training, what kind of job would you do? List your current job or your major in college. Feel free to disregard gender or social status factor.
Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking.
- University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering
- Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering.
- University education: Bachelor of Computer Science
- … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks.
- University education: Masters in Cognitive Science
- Dude, you can’t get a job with that now
- University education: Doctorate in Linguistics
- Quite apart from the woe is me of Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? …
Well, let’s think about it. 1516, Crete and Cyprus were both under Venetian rule. They were colonial outposts, but the Renaissance was starting to make an impression there: there were Petrarchan sonnets in Cypriot, and literary societies in Crete. (The best of Cretan literature was still a century down the road.)
If I was a city dweller and/or Catholic, I’d have access to Renaissance learning. I’d probably write even worse Latin poetry than I write here to Michael Masiello, and I might get a gig in Venice. Aldus Manutius has just died, but I hear they’re still hiring Classical Greek proofreaders.
If I were a villager and Orthodox, there would be two paths for someone through book learning. The clergy would be one, and I think my chanting would be passable, as demonstrated here.
The other would be as a notary. I could have abysmal spelling in Greek, codeswitching with Italian for every third word. And five centuries down the road, some poor shmuck working in a digital library of Ancient and Mediaeval Greek would be tweaking their morphological analyser, to deal with the mess I’d bequeathed them.
I’m going to miss you, Manolis Varouchas.
Alas I’m forty
I’m turning 45 in a month, actually; but this Cretan song I heard in my youth has been haunting me since I turned forty. I even had the first verse of it as my Skype mood message for a fair while.
Άχι και σαραντάρισα, δεν κάνω μπλιο γι’ αγάπες
και μου ’ρχεται να τροζαθώ και να γλακώ στσι στράτες.
Γιατροί μου απαγορεύουνε, μα λεν το κι οι γι-ανθρώποι:
ξέχασε κειανά που ’κανες και τη ζωή την πρώτη.
Μην παίζω μπλιο, μην τραγουδώ, μην ξενυχτώ τα βράδυα.
Να πάψω να τσιλιπουρδώ στσ’ αυλές και στα σκοτάδια.
Ρακί, κρασί μην ξαναπιώ, τσιγάρω μην καπνίσω,
Μηδέ το μήνα μια φορά να μην ξαναγλεντίσω,
και προπαντός τα όμορφα μην τα λοξοκοιτάζω.
Χώρες χωριά και γειτονιές απού ’κραζα μην κράζω.
Και λέω ίντα θα γενώ, και τρέμει η ψυχή μου.
Σαν του χοχλιού το κέρατο εζάρωσε η χολή* μου.
Μα συλλογούμαι ίντα θα πεις Σαββάτο γή Δευτέρα,
και συνταγές και γιατρικά θα τα πετάξω πέρα,
και από τσι χάρες τση ζωής τσι πλια όμορφες θα πάρω,
να αφήσω αποδιαλέουρα στον κερατά το Χάρο.
Alas I’m forty, fit no more for love.
I feel like running crazy down the streets.
The doctors ban me, people say so too:
forgot what you once did, and your past life.
Don’t play no more, don’t sing, don’t stay up late.
Don’t hang around in courtyards and dark corners.
No wine, no brandy, no more cigarettes,
don’t have a party even once a month,
and never steal a glance at pretty girls.
Stop haunting towns and neighbourhoods I’d haunted.
What’s to become of me? My soul, it shivers.
Like a snail feeler my gall bladder* shrivels.
I wonder what you’ll think come Saturday,
when I throw all my scripts and pills away.
I’ll sample all the best life has to give.
The leftovers—that bastard Death can have.
*Censored from ψωλή “dick”.
What are some of the funniest results of censoring song lyrics?
Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question.
When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more versatile (and more photogenic), but Mountakis established the groundwork for the modern folk tradition.
One song I particularly liked was Άχι και σαραντάρισα, “Alas, I’m forty”:
Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
Alas I’m forty, fit no more for love.
I feel like running crazy down the streets.[…]
What’s to become of me? My soul, it shivers.
Like a snail feeler my gall bladder shrivels.[tʃe leo ida θa ʝeno, tʃe tremi i psiçi mu
sa du xoxʎu to tʃerato ezarose i xoʎi mu]
I heard that song when I was maybe ten.
It was only last year that I realised that the song was censored. Last year.
It isn’t the gall bladder /xoli/ that’s shrivelling. It’s a word that rhymes with gall bladder.
And now you know what the Greek dialect word /psoli/ means.
Dedicated to Michael Masiello, for our latest exchange.
If the Tanach (Jewish Bible) doesn’t mention heaven or hell, where did the Christians get this idea from?
There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach.
As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees.
That understanding of heaven is mentioned a couple of times in the Gospels, and was developed further by early Christian writers; but it was not alien to the Judaism of Jesus’ time.
Ditto hell: Gehenna as an antecedent to Hell is not much in evidence in the apocrypha, but it’s there in the Targums and the Talmud.
(I gotta say, btw, this was the result of 5 minutes on Wikipedia, and I’m astonished that none of the answers given looked into Jewish antecedents to heaven and hell.)
See also: