Everyone should learn ancient Greek. It does take motivation and discipline—if you can afford the time and money (and if, preferably, you have some decent background in grammatical concepts like participles and direct objects), the intensive summer workshops can be great. They do require 100% life commitment for 10 weeks or so. There are programs at CUNY, Berkeley, U of Chicago, and elsewhere. Of course regularly paced Greek at the nearest college or university should be considered.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 8:48 AM on October 19, 2006

What Pattie said.

Also Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan's Dream.

I can think of more, but these are already too depressing.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 4:44 PM on May 11, 2006

I'm way late here, but just in case a word counts from someone who spends a good part of every week reading the stuff in Greek... I'll try to stick to Homer and tragedy.

There are merits to all kinds of translations of Homer--I believe that Homer (likewise, say, Herodotus) is an author who survives translation very well. Yet at the end of the day I don't feel that reading any other translation reminds me much of reading Homer in Greek, only Lattimore. Awkward, stilted,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 4:53 PM on March 19, 2006

Metis is not a bad suggestion for something bordering on the strategy of the game (see here).

You don't seem interested in known-to-everyone but implicit norms of conduct (e.g. Antigone's "unwritten laws"), so I'll skip that.

Bourdieu first applied term habitus in the context of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, so it goes back via the scholastics to the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 1:30 PM on June 28, 2005 marked best answer

OK, I knew you were interested in implicit, but I was dubious that you were interested in very articulable and normative and "clear" ordinances, which happen not to be codified in writing by the state (unwritten laws, agrapta nomima). In any case, the speech of Antigone's in question is this one. If it was Bourdieu et al. who inspired this question, I still recommend looking into Aristotelian hexis, and also the book on metis... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 2:57 PM on June 28, 2005

I'm still waiting for a physics mefite to come by and tell us the calculus way to do it....

It is a one-dimensional (plane curve) problem. Here's the one-dimensional curve that describes the film winding around in the xy plane:

? = ( (r + t?/2p) cos ?, (r + t?/2p) sin ?)

where ? is our parameter (=angle), r is the radius of the spool, and t is the thickness of the material.

Now, what tomble can... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 6:43 PM on April 27, 2005

Whoops, HTML character trouble there. I meant:

I'm still waiting for a physics mefite to come by and tell us the calculus way to do it....

It is a one-dimensional (plane curve) problem. Here's the one-dimensional curve that describes the film winding around in the xy plane:

γ = ( (r + tθ/2π) cos θ, (r + tθ/2π) sin θ)

where θ is our parameter (=angle), r... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 6:45 PM on April 27, 2005

OK guys, I gotta finish watching Halloween in a minute here, but I've solved the problem analytically (according to the assumptions mentioned before). I get the same answer from my integral as gus above (66.04 length units of stuff, when spool r=2, thickness=1, and you wind it around 3 times).

Renaming theta/2*pi as just N (=number of times wound around), the arc length integral was

integral from 0 to N of the square root of —
t^2 +... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 7:17 PM on April 27, 2005

You've got to love the Longman Annotated English Poets series: unsurpassed for Milton and Spenser, a brand-new Marvell, etc.

Dante: I wouldn't trade my one-volume Italian edition of the Commedia with concise English notes by Grandgent on the same page (rev. ed., 1933) for anything.

The best Shakespeare's Sonnets, IMHO. (The introduction is incredible, too.) As far as Shakespeare in general goes, though, I think people too reflexively reach for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 3:56 PM on September 19, 2004

No problems on Vaio desktop or Presario laptop, but some annoyances. It may also have killed my Shareaza (I wasn't using it much before; skallas, do you mean that changing the port used will fix it?). The firewall seems ok, but I will probably disable it as unnecessary.

The pop-up blocker, too, is over-zealous.

Yes, I had to turn it off because it wouldn't allow sidebar links such as the classic MetaFilter bar (and there's no way to make an... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 3:24 PM on September 19, 2004

Franklin shouldn't be considered a serial killer, then, just a graverobber, like most men of medical science in his day!

It seems that first name-middle name combos like Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Leonhard Euler, what have you, are unpopular these days, though we just had a POTUS of that ilk. Why, really? I think folks are too worried about "saddling" their kids with odd names. Anyway, who's really going to know that "Ben F. Horton" is named... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 2:43 PM on August 29, 2004

As others have suggested, the comic novels that have these kinds of headings were at their zenith before Victoria. Cf. Tom Jones or Rabelais.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Zurishaddai at 7:59 PM on March 29, 2004