MetaFilter posts tagged with odyssey

found: keys to davy jones' locker

infini — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:39:36 -0800

Is salvaging sunken treasure a form of piracy or the preservation of history? Does commercial for-profit exploration of historical shipwrecks taint the historical legacy of these naval graveyards? Who owns the treasures lost for so many centuries? Marine archeology is testing its legal limits with one man's work. [previous]

HMS Victory Discovered

tellurian — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:59:54 -0800

World's Mightiest Ship Was Lost Without a Trace in 1744 "In July 1744, she set sail to rescue a Mediterranean convoy blockaded by the French Brest fleet in the River Tagus at Lisbon. After victoriously chasing the French fleet away, she escorted the convoy into the Mediterranean Sea as far as Gibraltar, then set sail to return to her home port in England. During the course of the voyage, her fleet captured a number of valuable prizes, and she was also reported to have taken on board a consignment of 400,000 pounds sterling for Dutch merchants. On her return trip to England, HMS Victory was lost with all hands in a violent storm on October 5, 1744." [pdf] The pdf is also interesting because it has information on how current fishing methods disturb shipwrecks, to wit:

Site 25C lies in an environmental zone that is notorious for trawler disturbance. Trawls equipped with chain mats and 'tickler' chains designed to fluidize the upper layers of sediment and drive flatfish from the seabed into a net weighing about 8,000kg, towed at about 11km per hour, may impact the same area of seabed multiple times each year, destroying 5-65% of the resident fauna and mixing the top 6cm of sediment in a single pass (Duplisea et al., 2001).

Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40

slimepuppy — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:40:13 -0800

Throwing bones in the air as 2001 turns 40. Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey turned 40 yesterday and Movie City Indie collated a good selection of links about the film and its maker to commemorate the occasion. Yeah, the links to moviewavs are annoying, but the rest of the content is ace.

To Erebus

CheeseDigestsAll — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:05:32 -0800

ObitFilter: Robert Fagles. One of the few men to tackle translating The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, Robert Fagles has died. All of his translations were fast-paced, vibrant renderings that turned the classics once again into best-sellers.

Duck-dragons, dancing raccoons, and robots

wanderingmind — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:38:55 -0800

Inspired by this earlier post, I thought it was time to formally introduce people to Rocky's Boots. Created in 1982 by Warren Robinett, Rocky's Boots was intended to teach digital logic to elementary-school kids. It was a sort of spiritual sequel (in that you also play a rectangle who can pick up and drop stuff) to his better-known game, Atari Adventure. Robinett is not only entirely responsible for that game (including the duck-dragons), but was the inventor of the Easter Egg, used there to make sure people knew whose work it was; it was Atari's policy at the time to never name its programmers or let them share in the profits from the sale of the games they'd spent so much hard work on. After leaving Atari, Robinett got funding from the NSF to found The Learning Company, which, in addition to producing Rocky's Boots, also came out with a much more difficult sequel two years later called Robot Odyssey, which has the player burning microchips and rigging up automated robots to solve puzzles. Robot Odyssey itself has been given an enhanced port to Java, although it hasn't been updated in a while.

The Winedark Sea 2.0

jason's_planet — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 07:22:54 -0800

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of how the language of Odysseus and his people found a home on the web. Of how the newest mass medium came to house a library of Ancient Greek literature. Of how the sounds of a dead language could find a new life online.

Odysseus's tomb found?

cerebus19 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:33:24 -0800

The tomb of Odysseus may have been found on the island of Kefalonia, near the island now known as Ithaca, which means that Poros may have been the Ithaca described in The Odyssey.

Heading into faggotland...

WolfDaddy — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 12:56:15 -0800

Babyface: A Times Square Odyssey "This interactive web piece about the Babyfaces of Times Square takes place in the past, when the center city was a clash of classes rather than today's funeral of a theme park controlled by middle class undertakers." This is definitely not safe for work (drugs, porn, men in bathroom stalls), but if you want to remember the seedier side of NYC, this is one way to do it.

The dark came swirling down across his eyes

mwhybark — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:46:43 -0800

Click -- MeFites, click the link of Wolfgang's new endeavor,
murderous, doomed, that cast as Achaeans countless actors,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
blonde-tressed, open-helmed *. Will careers be made carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
as the time of Bush is moving toward its end?
Begin, crows, when the trailers first were aired,
Agamemnon, some guy, and Brad Pitt, Achilles.

[a wee bit more inside]

Gone to hit the highway

pxe2000 — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 10:13:05 -0800

Highway Ulysses is a new play premiering at Boston's American Repertory Theatre. Playwright/composer Rinde Eckert and ART artistic director/Sam Shepherd's regular director Robert Woodruff have collaborated on an envigorating new play with music about a Vietnam vet on a road trip to find his son that parallels Homer's Odyssey. The ART's website is similarly informative and engaging as it points out the frightening timeliness of The Odyssey in the current world. (more inside)

willnot — Wed, 20 Feb 2002 17:51:19 -0800

Was the Gospel of Mark a rewrite of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey? The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark is a book that sets out to show just that. Several scholars who reviewed or commented on it have said this book will revolutionize the field of Gospel studies and profoundly affect our understanding of the origins of Christianity. Will it?

rosvicl — Wed, 24 Oct 2001 05:32:11 -0800

Success! Mars Odyssey 2001 is in orbit around Mars.