Tag: books

Exposing the War on Fun!

Kevin C Pyle and Scott Cunningham’s non-fiction, book-length comic Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun! is a marvelous and infuriating history of censorship, zero-tolerance, helicopter parenting, and the war on kids. Bad For You covers many other subjects, from the demolition of America’s playgrounds to the panic of Dungeons and Dragons; from fear mongering over Internet predators and cyberbullies to the demonization of gaming and gamers. The final section, on zero tolerance and the conversion of American schools into police-states where children are arrested by armed policemen for sassing, possessing over-the-counter medication, and having “disruptive” hair colors, is the most frustrating of all.

Dark Age Myth

some of the efforts by the theologians to put some limits on what could and could not be accepted via the “new learning” actually had the effect of stimulating inquiry rather than constricting it. The “Condemnations of 1277” attempted to assert certain things that could not be stated as “philosophically true”, particularly things that put limits on divine omnipotence. The way was clear for the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages to move decisively beyond the achievements of the Greeks. Which is precisely what they proceeded to do. Far from being a stagnant dark age, as the first half of the Medieval Period (500-1000 AD) certainly was, the period from 1000 to 1500 AD actually saw the most impressive flowering of scientific inquiry and discovery since the time of the ancient Greeks, far eclipsing the Roman and Hellenic Eras in every respect.

The catholic church was far less responsible for the lack of scientific progress in the middle ages than commonly believed (and in fact was a major contributor). This leaves the lack of civilization between 500 – 1000 as the major culprit.
2022-08-26: As always, a lot of history is fictional.

The fantastical imagery that many of us consider “medieval” today has been invented in the centuries since. While some legends are rooted in the period, like the stories of King Arthur and Camelot, many others were embroidered onto an imagined, “medieval-ish” past through fantasy stories, films, and other forms of popular culture, especially from the 19th century on. Modern medieval tales have become populated with knights, dragons, witches, and fairies. Only knights and dragons were frequently depicted in the period, and anything magical or mysterious was understood through the lens of religion.

Much material is drawn from the 19th century, when the Romantic movement created its own version of the Middle Ages in the art, illustration, and architecture of the Gothic Revival. Their works embodied a romantic vision of simpler, more straightforward times and projected Victorian social mores onto medieval tales of heroism and tragedy. Everything from William Morris’s elaborate page borders (echoing illuminated manuscripts) to the now-iconic gargoyles added to Notre Dame contributed to an idealized aesthetic of the Middle Ages — and influenced our subsequent view of the time.

Renouncing the anarchist cookbook

i remember the idiotic glee i had when i discovered the anarchist cookbook on some bbs in 1993 (typical teenager bs). this is one of the best retractions in a while:

The Cookbook has been found in the possession of alienated and disturbed young people who have launched attacks against classmates and teachers. I suspect that the perpetrators of these attacks did not feel much of a sense of belonging, and the Cookbook may have added to their sense of isolation.The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher. It should quickly and quietly go out of print.

Medieval kids’ doodles


it is awesome that not just images of jesus (we have far too many of these) survive from the middle ages.

Here’s something very special. In the 1950s archeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up 100s of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century. The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process.

Existence

I hope someone optioned this. Brin is a very strong scifi author.

2015-05-15: I finally read this. I’d give it 3.5 stars. The story is compelling, the thing that grates (a lot) are the constant sermons from Brin. He’s not wrong, i just find the way he makes his arguments to be really tedious (you can get a sample from his website), it is full of “I told you so” and “I wrote about this x years ago”. The constant self-slapping on the back really detracts.

Homer social network

So homer checks out from a social network analysis perspective, how about that other fable, the bible? Anyone?

We managed to build and analyze a social network gathered across the classical epic, Odyssey of Homer. Longing for further understanding, topological quantities were collected in order to classify its social network qualitatively into real or fictional. It turns out that most of the found properties belong to real social networks besides assortativity and giant component’s size. In order to test the network’s possibilities to be real, we removed some mythological members that could imprint a fictional aspect on the network. Carrying on this maneuver the modified social network resulted on assortative mixing and reduction of the giant component, as expected for real social networks. Overall, we observe that Odyssey might be an amalgam of fictional elements plus real based human relations, which corroborates other author’s findings for Iliad and archaeological evidences.

The same thing is true for viking sagas:

Njal’s Saga has an average of 4 new characters every page. Whereas modern fiction tries to make sure you can keep track of everyone, with the exception of maybe Game of Thrones. That density of characters, and the realism of their networks, suggest a different purpose for literature than might be the case now — the creation of portraits of societies, rather than portraits of individuals.

Book burning in Timbuktu

I hope those savages get utterly eradicated, like we eradicated smallpox.

The Timbuktu manuscripts have become a casualty of the war in Mali. A large collection of them has been destroyed by Islamist rebels when they burned the Ahmed Baba Institute to the ground. The manuscripts were priceless world heritage and had to do with art, medicine, science, and ironically included multiple old copies of the Quran.

“The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveler Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

When European empires scrambled for Africa in the 19th century, the continent was seen as illiterate and lacking in history, memory, or literature. Its art was seen as “primitive”, partly because it lacked a written art history.

Timbuktu is a palimpsest in the sand that proves otherwise. Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa’s history from oblivion. Timbuktu is Africa’s city of books and learning that disproved racist myths about the continent. That luminous inheritance is what the Islamists have destroyed.”

UNESCO had been digitizing many of the manuscripts in the last 10 years… I just hope they got to these in time.

Video; Physicist Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. Its legacy is tangible, with terms like algebra, algorithm and alkali all being Arabic in origin and at the very heart of modern science – there would be no modern mathematics or physics without algebra, no computers without algorithms and no chemistry without alkalis.

2022-07-15: While the savages were unfortunately not eradicated, many of the books survived.

In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40k pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture. “Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did. These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past. There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts. What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”

West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.

Honor Thy Symbionts

at $2.99, this seems like a great buy:

In Honor Thy Symbionts, the lens of our evolutionary past is focused on obesity, GMO foods, diabetes, the rise in C-section births, ecology of our gut microbes, our African microbial origins, government dietary recommendations, probiotics vs. prebiotics, food poisoning, and more. 90% of the cells in the human body are not even human, but microbial. This makes humans super organisms. This biological truth is reframing the scientific and philosophical conversation around Who are we?