Pinging stuff I care about.
A former Hitler Youth and leader of the Inquisition is elected Pope.
Huh.
UPDATE: before somebody points it out in comments, I know that membership in the Hitler Youth was compulsory at the time. As I understand it, worshipping the Emperor was also compulsory in ancient Rome.
UPDATE 2: really detailed article on Ratzinger here. Interesting stuff.
Perhaps later: some writing on why I even care about who’s Pope, not being Catholic and all, and why I’m disappointed it’s Ratzinger.
Dr. Phil proclaimed “The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you’ve started.” So I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn’t finished, and before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of White Zinfandel, a bottle of Bailey’s, a bottle of Kahlua, a package of Oreos, the remainder of both Prozac and Valium prescriptions, the rest of the cheesecake, some saltines and a box of chocolates. You have no idea how freaking good I feel. Please pass this on to those you feel are in need of inner peace.
Seashore is an open source image editing program for Macintosh. It’s small and sleek. From the look of it, you’d think it was a very limited, simplistic program, and it certainly doesn’t pretend to have anything like the capabilities of Photoshop or the GIMP. But it has a surprising number of powerful abilities — painting in textures, multiple layers with many different blend modes (multiply, diffusion, blah blah), full alpha channel support, SVG import, and other things you wouldn’t expect out of a rinkydink paint program. It gets all that good stuff by leveraging the GIMP and the Mac’s native goodness — the guts are all GIMP code, the interface is all Aqua.
Unlike Photoshop, it’s Free Software.
Unlike the GIMP, it’s a native Cocoa application — no need for X11 to be installed, and it looks and acts like a proper Mac app should.
Unlike both, it’s super small — the entire app, installed, with optional extra SVG import added in, is about 8 megs on disk. The basic installer download is only 3.3 megs.
Also unlike both, it’s very new and probably hides some bugs. I’m gonna play with it a bit and report back. It looks like a very promising piece of Mac software.
UPDATE: Take with grain of salt.
ORIGINAL POST:
Holy smokes. This is as exciting in the Classical world as it would be in the paleontological world if somebody found a perfectly preserved mammoth in a glacier, thawed it out, and it woke up, trumpeted, and then gave birth to a litter.
For the first time since about ’96, I regret leaving the field of Classics.
The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus (“city of the sharp-nosed fish”) in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford’s Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.
The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi (“Progeny”) by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.
Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.
“The Oxyrhynchus collection is of unparalleled importance – especially now that it can be read fully and relatively quickly,” said the Oxford academic directing the research, Dr Dirk Obbink. “The material will shed light on virtually every aspect of life in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, and, by extension, in the classical world as a whole.”
The breakthrough has also caught the imagination of cultural commentators. Melvyn Bragg, author and presenter, said: “It’s the most fantastic news. There are two things here. The first is how enormously influential the Greeks were in science and the arts. The second is how little of their writing we have. The prospect of having more to look at is wonderful.”
Bettany Hughes, historian and broadcaster, who has presented TV series including Mysteries of the Ancients and The Spartans, said: “Egyptian rubbish dumps were gold mines. The classical corpus is like a jigsaw puzzle picked up at a jumble sale – many more pieces missing than are there. Scholars have always mourned the loss of works of genius – plays by Sophocles, Sappho’s other poems, epics. These discoveries promise to change the textual map of the golden ages of Greece and Rome.”
When it has all been read – mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian – the new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery and owns the collection.
