Mahmoud

Image by via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned scholar who works hard to place the writer and his work in historical context. Even onetime director of London’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, once said, “I’ll admit that I hardly ever go to a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays without experiencing blind panic during the first five minutes. I sit there thinking… I have no idea what these people are talking about.”

Of course, none of that means we can’t learn to appreciate Shakespeare, and we do not need a graduate-level education to do so. But much of his archaic language and obscure references will always sound foreign to modern ears. How much more so, then, the language of the ancient Greeks, whether in translation or no? Although we’ve also been taught to think of the Homeric epics as containers of universal truth and beauty, the world of Homer was, in many ways, an alien one—and the literature of ancient Greece was far closer to song than even Shakespeare’s musical speeches.

In fact, “before writing was generally known among the Greeks,” the University of Cincinnati notes, “poets recited and sang stories for audiences at the courts of city leaders and at festivals. A poet could actually improvise a tale in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse if he knew the plot of his story.” We do not know whether Homer was one enterprising scribe or “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were collected” under one name. But in either case, that poet or poets heard the tales of Hector and Achilles, Odysseus and Penelope, and all those meddling gods sung before they wrote them down. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, we have some idea of what those songs may have sounded like.

“In the course of the last years,” write Danek and Hagel, “we have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics, which is appropriate for the primarily oral tradition from which these poems emerge.” The two scholars caution that their theoretical recreations are “not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse.” Accompanied by a four-stringed lyre-like instrument called a phorminx, “the Homeric bard” would improvise the “melody at the same time as he improvised his text, which was unique in every performance.” In the audio above, you can hear Danek and Hagel’s melodic recreation of lines 267-366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite.

At their site, the two scholars present an abstract of their Homeric singing theory, with musicological and linguistic evidence for the recreation. Their technical criteria will confuse the non-specialist, and none but ancient Greek speakers will understand the recording above. But it brings us a little closer to experiencing Homer’s epic poetry, “the foundation stones of European Literature,” as the ancient Greeks might have experienced it.

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Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8CNWbqmhDw&feature=youtu.be

We interrupt your growing anxiety at America's emergent cyberpunk dystopia for a tense missive from the Syrian War. In this video, an explosive-laden suicide truck bears down on a position held (reportedly by French special forces with the SDF) near Raqqa. The perspective on the video makes it hard to tell, but the vehicle is well-armored and only seconds from putting the defenders in serious trouble. Bullets ricochet off; a missile sails past its target. It is not long before everyone is becoming quite alarmed at the driver's progress. What happens next, though, will probably not surprise you. (more…)

The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.

Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port.

Photographers will rejoice at the surprising and welcome addition of an SDXC card reader, a sign that Apple might be thinking seriously about photography.

The new MagSafe connector is a bit of Apple design genius. The charging cord stays seated securely, but pops right off if you yank on it. No more worries about destroying your $2k laptop just by accidentally kicking a cord.

What hasn't changed: Apple has kept the beautiful Retina display, and storage and memory are the same as before. The new machines will be slightly thicker (to accomodate the USB ports) and 200 grams heavier, but it's not clear how this will affect battery life.

Interestingly, Apple has removed the fingerprint reader and its associated dedicated chip, perhaps assuming that developers would not comfortable with a machine they don't fully control.

The most obvious change is the redesigned keyboard. Removing the Touchbar creates room for a row of physical function buttons and, in a nice touch, an escape key. This isn't a perfect solution: the function buttons map to a confusing series of actions that can send windows flying around the screen with an errant keystroke, and the new physical off switch is too close to the backspace key. But it is certainly a huge step forward, and it will be interesting to see how software developers take advantage of this clever new feature.

Everything about the new machine seems designed for typists. The trackpad has been made smaller, so you're less likely to brush against it with your palm. The keys themselves are much more comfortable to type on, with improved key travel, a softer feel, and more satisfying tactile feedback. You no longer feel like you're tapping on the glass surface of an iPad. And not having a TouchBar means no longer having to look down at your hands all the time.

Despite the many improvements, Apple is actually dropping the price on its flagship 15" MacBook Pro by $400, another sign that they're serious about winning over developers.

The release is an encouraging sign of life at Apple, whose products have not seen significant changes since the company introduced a separate operating system for its laptops in 2019. There's even speculation that Apple may refresh its antiquated Mac Pro and desktop macs, neither of which have been updated since their release in 2022.

Rumors are also swirling that the company will add a headphone jack to its already popular iPhone. The announcement could come as early as this month.

Try getting your Board to take security seriously when perps are flogged with wet lettuce

Fifteen of the United States of America have flogged Adobe with warm, wet, lettuce for its 2013 mega-breach that saw 38 million credentials leaked.…

Dangerous levels of inappropriateness.

This husband cheats on his pregnant wife as she goes into labor, literally minutes before giving birth! He chooses the ambulance lady to get down and dirty...

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vintagegeekculture:

I don’t know the context for this, but it isn’t necessary. A more truthful ad has never been printed.

keep lookin’ jesse.

psyched about the new very light (and thin) new macbooks. i do all my work on a 2013 MBP, and it’s holding up pretty good, but i was excited to see if it was worth upgrading. and i guess it’s a lot lighter now, but not a whole lot faster or anything. but it is thin, which was my whole problem.

they also added a very small touch strip at the top of the keyboard so you can “touch” virtual keys that appear there, and those keys have functions dependent on what program is running. sort of like the function keys at the top of my keyboard right now.

still! if anyone can trim off a couple more millimeters, it’s apple. now that’s innovation

If you need another reason to be paranoid about network security, a serious exploit that attacks a nine-year-old Linux kernel flaw is now in the wild. The researcher who found it, Phil Oester, told V3 that the attack is "trivial to execute, never fai...

"Plotblocking" is a new word for describing what's wrong with a lot of television writing.

Delay of audience gratification has been a staple of episodic storytelling for a long time, but no show advanced the practice more than the grandfather of plotblocking, Lost. No matter how well-written the various flashbacks often were, the writers knew that what kept us hooked was the mystery of the island -- and that storyline was illiberally meted out like capfuls of water to a thirsty man. Just enough to keep us alive. I've actually found that the shows that are the most "binge-worthy" are the most narratively stingy. You start each new episode almost out of frustration, hoping it will deliver a morsel of satisfaction, an inch of forward progress.

That paragraph right there nails it. I find the rest of the article to be kind of rambling, partly because I hated Stranger Things, but, that right there.

(I hated Stranger Things because it is composed almost entirely of things that I despise: 1: Steven Spielberg movies; 2: Stephen King movies; 3: Nostalgia.)

A lot of my friends are freaking out about the season premiere of The Walking Dead, and I feel their emotions are misdirected: rather than feeling sad for the fate of characters they liked, they should feel angry at the crass manipulativeness of the writers.

The "who died?" cliffhanger at the end of the last season was forgivable. It's just a cliffhanger. Those are a staple of season-based television. It's a cheap technique, and time-honored, while not in any way honorable.

But the real manipulation came in the followup episode, where, for almost the entire episode, the only people in the dark about what just happened were the audience.

If you are a writing a story and you hide from the audience facts that are well known to all of the characters in the story, you are a hack.

If you are a writer and your viewpoint character is an omniscient narrator, but you made that narrator be more ignorant than literally every character actually participating in the plot, what the fuck is that? That's hack writing, that's what the fuck that is. It's cheap, it's cheating, you are bad at your job and you should feel bad.

Let me be clear: my anger about how bad that writing was is not based on my love of the show. I don't have any emotional investment in The Walking Dead. I watch it, but I think it's mediocre. It's not bad, but I just don't care that much about any of the characters.

Though like I keep saying, Fear The Walking Dead seems to exist solely to remind us of how much worse The Walking Dead could be: a good metric for when you should stop watching a show is if you can't think of a single character where that character's death would leave you with any emotional impact besides, "Yay, I don't have to hear their whining any more, or be angry at their reflexive secrecy, at their stultifying incuriosity, or at their stupid decisions that seemed to exist solely to create bullshit plot problems for the writers to solve."

Some people have accused Mr. Robot of plotblocking, but I don't think that's really true. Mr. Robot is a show that is explicitly about an unreliable narrator. Most of the reveals we get happen when Elliot learns about them, or when Elliot's various mental compartments allows him to know them. Most of the time, he's our viewpoint character and his confusion and ignorance is ours. Or he's directly and explicitly lying to us in the second person.

Previously, previously, previously.

An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: Remember how smartwatches were supposed to be the next big thing? About that... The market intelligence firm IDC reported on Monday that smartwatch shipments are down 51.6 percent year-over-year for the third quarter of 2016. This is bad news for all smartwatch vendors (except maybe Garmin), but it's especially bad for Apple, which saw shipments drop 71.6 percent, according to the IDC report Apple is still the overall smartwatch market leader, with an estimated 41.3-percent of the market, but IDC estimates it shipped only 1.1 million Apple Watches in Q3 2016, compared with 3.9 million in 2015. To a degree, that's to be expected, since the new Apple Watch Series 2 came out at the tail-end of the quarter. But the news is still a blow, when you consider how huge the Apple Watch hype was just 18 months ago.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

envisioning a better tomorrow, today

while i’m on the subject, did you know some schools in america don’t even have gaming rigs powerful enough to run last-gen VR peripherals? we’ll never approach the singularity at this rate. yet more confirmation for roko’s basilisk and the berenstain bears parallel universe theory

“think about it this way: all we’d have to bring to the table is the robots. the rest of it is dirt and snakes and wooden buildings”

IEEE Spectrum writer Tekla Perry writes: Early this year, analyst Trip Chowdhry from Global Equities Research predicted that the tech world was going to see big layoffs in 2016 -- some 330,000 in all at major tech companies. At the time, these numbers seemed way over the top. Then IBM started slashing jobs in March -- and continued to wield the ax over and over as the year progressed. Yahoo began layoffs of some 15 percent of its employees in February. Intel announced in April that it would lay off 12,000 this year. So, was Chowdhry right? "Yes," he told me when I asked him this week. "The layoffs I predicted have been occurring." And worse, he says, these laid-off workers are never again going to find tech jobs: "They will always remain unemployed," at least in tech, he said. "Their skills will be obsolete." Some of these layoffs are due to a sea change in the industry, as it transforms to the world of mobile and cloud. But some are signs of a bubble about to pop. It's all going to get worse in 2017, he predicts, because that's when the tech bubble will burst. Chowdhry, someone who has never been reluctant to go out on a limb, is predicting that'll happen in March.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Rosetta Disc is now safely installed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: "Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation." [...]

So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

“sorry my man. if i was a little less strong this wouldn’t even be an option for me. blame your yellow sun”

have a great weekend

sweethotnight:

he made the sign

A few more thoughts on this one.

A lot of people stopped by when the word about the Hip Hip Mixtape Collection got around. They stopped by this little site, and then hopped over to the main collection, and they’ve been having a great old time.

When tens of thousands of people swing through a new thing, you get variant opinion, and if you’re really super double-lucky, you get some discussions way down there that are rather interesting on a “well, few people were ever going to talk about that” way.

Here are those, based on what I read:

• Why doesn’t this guy monetize this!
• A bunch of these tapes are fakes/crap
• Aw, man, it’s only post-2000 stuff

Let’s address those, plus a few other things.

Why doesn’t this guy monetize this! 

Because I work for a non-profit that’s a library and archive, and we don’t monetize stuff like this. We don’t put up ads and we don’t put up click-throughs or pop-ups or demands for cash. It’s actually heartening to get these sorts of comments, because it means they’ve probably never heard of the Internet Archive before, and woo-hoo, new patrons! The more people who hear about the Archive for the first time, the better the world is for everyone. So anyway, no monetization/financial schemes behind this, sorry. (Some wanted to invest.) I’ve learned there are sites that do ad-supported distribution of these mixtapes, and they have all sorts of barriers and clickthroughs to ensure you see the ads. We are not them, that’s not what we do over at the archive.

A Bunch of these Tapes are Fakes/Crap. 

So, I came into this thing like I do a lot of things – go out and acquire whatever I can find and pump it basically automatically into thousands of items (you don’t think I’ve listened to these things in any great amount, do you?). As a result, it’s been a learning curve to find what’s in there. And what I learned is that there’s a wide spectrum of tapes out there, and that Sturgeon’s Law applies quite readily.

There are tapes that are cool amateur productions (created by a small crew or by someone trying to break into the business or get their voice heard), tapes that are kind of promotional items (like, they drop them into the world so word about the artist gets far and wide, usually done by some professional organization) and then there’s DJ mixes, where they do intense remixes of music to showcase their talents. Oh, and then there’s DJ mixes that are basically just a bunch of mp3s thrown together. As we’re finding those or get told about them, they go down. There’s nothing creative or new there (except maybe the cover art). The world is not bettered by them – I won’t miss them. So it’ll take a little while for this all to wring out, but it’ll happen.

Aw Man, it’s Only Post-2000 Stuff.

There’s definitely a lean towards the present with these mixtapes, probably a function of how I’m getting them, from online collections. There’s a few that predate 2000, but those are going to be from cassette tapes, and I’ve not yet stumbled on the Elephant Graveyard of old hiphop mixtapes from cassette. (I’ve got collections of rave tapes, and other 1980s and 1990s artifacts, of course.) I think it’s just a matter of time – after this current pipeline dries up, I’ll start trying to get us to host older and older stuff. How well that goes is up to the people out there – like everything else on the archive, it’s a matter of folks reaching out or giving good pointers or suggestions. I might stumble on things myself but it’s not guaranteed. As it is, the current collection is low-hanging fruit, and some of it is rotten and some of it is very fresh. But I definitely am not sitting on some hidden pile of pre-2000 stuff and going “nah, too historic”.

A few other thoughts

The most intense part of this whole thing was that I had to write this crazy ecosystem of around 15 scripts that deal with a whole pile of contingencies with the tapes. These scripts will fix ingested files, verify they’re what they say they are, reconfigure cover images so they’re in the right order, and add automatic metadata where possible. I actually have directories that drain into other directories that then drain into other directories, and then scripts do automatic evaluations all the way around, and then upload. It’s a terrible contraption but the results are generally OK. I then have to write scripts that crawl through the stuff and clean up what went there, and the result is what you see.

The result of this scriptology is that I’ve learned even more about dealing with odd ingestions that will be reflected on other collections as I go, i.e. the console demos collection I’ve been adding, which does all sorts of crazy robot stuff on combination .zip/.rar/whatever stuff from all sorts of sources. It sort of works! It’ll make things easier in the future! Everyone wins!

And finally – I realize that I am just stumbling backwards into this mixtape thing. It got along quite well without me or the Internet Archive for decades. It doesn’t “need” us anymore than many subcultures “need” us – but my hope is that the appearance and ease-of-access of these tapes will foster both spread of the best of what’s out there, and bring more people to the site to check out all the other things we’re hosting. I’m due someone to come in and lecture me on the “right” way to do all this and what it all “means”, and I’m up for that conversation. What I do know is that tens of thousands of listens are already on the site, with a few thousand more listens every day so whatever it is we’re doing, we’re doing it right for somebody out there. Let’s keep doing that.

And finally.

If you only have one album from this whole collection you want to be told to listen to, if you want just one single tape to somehow magically consolidate all the thousands and thousands of works on the site into one single item, well, ladies and gentlemen, your humble curator must point you in a single direction:

Yes, that’s right, I’m betting the house on Hamburger Helper: Watch The Stove, a 5-song EP mixtape of rap and hiphop, even sort of a ballad, about Hamburger Helper. Hey come back

Sure, you’re going to scoff, but over the course of this mixtape, you will have your eyes open to the myriad feelings and deep emotions of Hamburger Helper, and you too will sympathize with Helper as he explains how the world simply can’t do without this delicious mix. And if there’s one caveat, one life motto you will walk away, it’s to never take someone’s Helper. Just… don’t do it.

Enjoy the tapes. And yes, if you have leads on good additions to the collection, hit me up.

 

Next month I'll be giving a talk at Smashing Conf in Barcelona on "New Directions in Web Bloat". This talk will be a follow-up to one I gave last year on the Website Obesity Crisis.

I need your help! Please send me examples of the flabbiest, most ridiculous, puffed-up, overbuilt sites you've come across in 2016, particularly if they use new advertising formats, or demonstrate a fresh kind of design pathology.

I'm especially interested in examples of the following:

• New advertising formats you've noticed in the past few months

• Particularly egregious examples of sites that use megabytes of cruft to display a tiny amount of text. (Note: everybody emailed me the one-word NYT article already.)

• Interesting examples of ad-blocker detection, or even better, ad-blocker-detection-blocker-detection.

• Magnificently gratuitous use of video.

• Examples of the Inner Platform Effect, particularly with multiple levels of nesting.

• Bloated articles about bloat.

For maximum ha, I prefer well-known sites to obscure examples. But I'm not picky. If it makes you weep quiet tears of rage, I want to hear about it! Let me know also if you mind being credited by name in my talk.

Thank you!

Hovertext:
I am merely a conduit for all the most insightful notions in the history of humanity.

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