andquitefrankly asked: 13. TRIVIA. GIVE ME ALL THE TRIVIA. please. :)
Ooh! Let’s see, here are some of my favourite bits
of classical trivia (I know no other trivia). I should warn you that my
idea of amusing trivia is quite… esoteric :’) (A couple of these are a
little gruesome)
Ancient Greek had a pitch accent (i.e. the
pitch of the syllable went up or down depending on the accent). This
mattered, because once during a performance of a tragedy, an actor got
the pitch accent wrong and said ‘weasel’ instead of ‘calm sea’ and we
are still laughing about it 2000 years later.
Once during a
battle between Argos and Sparta, the Argive generals told their troops
to do whatever the Spartan herald shouted. The Spartan generals figured
this out and ordered their troops to attack when the herald
shouted ‘have breakfast’
The tyrant Polycrates of Samos was so
lucky in everything that he did that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt,
advised him to get rid of the thing he valued the most. This was a
golden and emerald ring (?????). Polycrates threw it into the sea. Soon
afterwards, it turned up in the belly of a fish that a fisherman had
caught and presented to Polycrates. Amasis said, ‘That’s it, you’re too
lucky, I’m cutting off our friendship before the gods screw you over.’
The
tyrant Peisistratos of Athens married an aristocratic girl in order to
form an alliance with her family, but he thought the family was cursed,
so he would only have sex with her ‘not in the customary way’ and I
still do not know what this means because my Greek history tutor was the
most awkward person ever and would not tell me
An Ancient Greek word for ‘extravagant dandy’ was ‘someone who is obsessed with fish’
The great Greek general Pericles was mocked because he allegedly allowed his mistress to boss him around in bed
It is 100% true that Plato published a serious piece of work criticising Aeschylus for making Achilles top and Patroclus bottom
This
is the what the Greeks came up with to explain intersex people:
Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes & Aphrodite, was born a boy but
attracted the attentions of a rather obsessive girl who tried to force
herself on him. Fortunately for her, they were in a magic spring and she
prayed to be joined to him always, so they were joined together in one
body that was part male and part female
In Cyprus, the goddess Aphrodite was represented with both male and female sex organs
Alexander
the Great used to get foreign kings to line up their favourite
prostitutes and then he would make a big show of walking along the line
and acting disinterested
Allegedly, Alexander met the cynic
philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for
him. Diogenes said, ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ Alexander said, ‘If I were
not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes,’ and Diogenes replied, ‘If I
were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.’
The Roman
playwright Terence, considered by later writers to be the best example
of ‘pure literary Latin’, might have been an African immigrant and is
widely thought to have been a slave
Julius Caesar annoyed the populace of Rome because he used to answer his mail during the races
Cicero
was told to change his name because it meant ‘chickpea’ and he
responded that he would make it the most glorious name in Rome
It
is 99.9% likely that it is actually the case that Cicero was not let in
on the assassination of Caesar because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut
Caesar once said, ‘I know I am the most hated man in Rome, because Cicero hates me, and God knows Cicero is easy to please’
Cicero and his brother Quintus seemingly spent an alarming amount of time chasing Cicero’s secretary around, asking for kisses
The
poet Vergil (Vergilius), for sadly modern-esque reasons, was nicknamed
‘Parthenias’ (which renders itself quite nicely as something like
‘Virginia’)
Augustus nagged all his poet friends to write an
epic about him, and when Vergil said he would do it, Propertius
published a poem saying ‘THANK THE GODS: someone else is doing it - and
it’s pretty good btw you should read it when it comes out’
The poet Ovid was exiled for a ‘poem and a mistake’ and we STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS
The emperor Augustus was teetotal and lame in one leg
As part of his propaganda against Augustus, Mark Antony claimed that Augustus singed off his leg hair
Augustus
responded that Mark Antony was a drunken hooligan. Antony wrote a
pamphlet defending himself, entitled ‘On the subject of my drunkenness’.
To me this is one of the greatest losses of antiquity
The emperor Tiberius was obsessed with pears and cucumbers
The
emperor Claudius allegedly ordered for his third wife to be executed,
then got so drunk that he had to ask why she was not at dinner
Claudius had a son who died when he threw a pear core in the air, tried to catch it in his mouth and choked
Augustus
complained that Tiberius used words in their strict etymological sense
(or used literal equivalents of phrases that were used in a
non-etymological sense), and the emperor Hadrian, when reading about
this, commented, ‘It sounds like Augustus was not very well educated if
he chose his words according to their usage and not their etymology.’
The
emperor Galba is the only Roman male who is explicitly said to have had
a sexual preference for adult males (i.e. of his own age) and not boys
Hadrian
and his wife went travelling with Hadrian’s lover Antinous and an
aristocratic woman named Julia Balbilla. At a tourist site in Egypt,
Julia Balbilla carved a poem in the style of Sappho on a famous statue.
One of my history professors said that this suggests Hadrian’s wife was a
lesbian and they covered for each other
The historian Tacitus
was a keen hunter. His friend Pliny went hunting one day and sent him a
letter, ‘You won’t believe it, Tacitus, I went hunting, and I enjoyed
it! I took all my books and I sat in the shade by the nets and it was so
peaceful, I got so much done. You should try it!’
The Greek finance ministry had a Grexit plan after all, involving hacking their own servers and setting up a system of tax reserve accounts. Perhaps understandably, this has the Greek opposition parties upset; on the other hand, they were also upset that no Grexit planning had taken place.
The government had made contingency plans for a temporary alternative
currency, in the form of electronic I.O.U.s. On June 30th, Greece missed
a payment to the I.M.F., joining three other countries in arrears:
Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Three days later, Klaus Regling, the head
of the European Stability Mechanism, which was managing the debt that
Greece owed to the countries of the E.U., e-mailed Varoufakis to remind
him that, because of the missed I.M.F. payment, the European Financial
Stability Facility had the option of asking for immediate repayment of
E.U. funds. “I personally owe €142.6 billion,” Varoufakis said. “It’s my
name on the contract.” He recalled that his response, delivered with
war-weary humor, and some contempt, was a two-word quotation of the King
of Sparta: “Molon labe,” or “Come and get it.” On the night of
July 3rd, Varoufakis was mobbed as he passed through a crowd of tens of
thousands of Greeks, to a final rally for the “no” cause. Walking
behind him, I saw a man in his seventies kiss Varoufakis’s shoulder.
Michel Thomas, the language teacher, was in his teens when he escaped the Nazis and joined first the French Resistance and then the US Army. In this interview with the BBC, he describes seeing people being loaded onto cattle cars to be taken away to concentration camps. He also describes that he felt at one point when he had been sentenced to death, as if Nature had reached out to embrace him and calm him in preparation for death, and that only by resisting that welcoming embrace was he able to survive.
Yanis Varoufakis gives his first interview since resigning as Finance Minister. “You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway.”
The new tech entrepreneurs and culture of Iran. I am not sure who is more representative of Iran, them or the hardliners, than I am sure who is more representative of America, us or our hardliners.
Scott: Hello again and welcome to the Startup Geometry
Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Gosnell. For more episodes of this series, please
visit iTunes or Stitcher and look for a Startup Geometry Podcast. For show
notes, please go to bottlerocketscience.net or to windcastlevc.com/podcast.
Today's interview is with Brad DeLong who is the chair of the Economics
Department at California, Berkeley and is a senior economist with the Center for
Equitable Growth in Washington, DC.
Brad: . . . intelligent swarm of
bees masquerading as a human being for purposes of preparing delay for alien
invasion. I thought everyone knew that.
Scott: You're perhaps the third
person who said that to me this week or at least in my presence.
Brad:
Bees?
Scott: Bees, yeah. John Scalzi said that on Twitter
yesterday.
Brad: I think Scalzi must be the source of the meaning
then.
Scott: It could be.
Brad: He is the person who has the
potential reach to do so to get that meaning into people's minds. So have you
read his latest?
Scott: I have not, no. Although I've been reading his
battles with the Sad Puppies.
Brad: I see. Well, yes.
Scott: And
the other puppies.
Brad: That's a sad story, or a rabid story, or simply
a crazy story. I suppose it's ultimately the craziest because the font and
origin of social justice warriorhood and weird gender presentation of self stuff
in science fiction is really not so much Joanna Russ who is always way out there
or Ursula Le Guin who was an elite taste, but rather Baen Books' Lois McMaster
Bujold who has been writing space opera and military science fictions. But it's
really about gender relations and similar things for three decades or so now,
and winning huge numbers of Hugo Awards doing it.
So it's just that a
lot of people who've been reading Lois McMaster Bujold's books from Baen Books
have simply not been understanding the authorial intent or indeed authorial
execution at all.
Claudia Azula Altucher is an idea machine; an accomplished yoga practitioner and teacher; and a popular podcaster, author and YouTuber. Today, she brings all of this to the podcast to help you get your life on the move. She'll teach you what you need to do to clean up your life, how to get your idea muscles sweating, and why she should be the next CEO of Twitter. You canfind her online at claudiayoga.com, through her podcasts, which include Ask Altucher and Claudia Yoga, and through the Claudia Yoga YouTube Channel. Her books, including, Become an Idea Machine: Because Ideas Are the Currency of the 21st Century are available through Amazon and, as they say, wherever books are sold. From the book's description:
HOW DO I TRANSFORM MY LIFE? The answer is simple: come up with ten ideas a day. It doesn't matter if they are good or bad the key is to exercise your 'idea muscle', to keep it toned, and in great shape. People say ideas are cheap and execution is everything but that is NOT true. Execution is a consequence, a subset of good, brilliant idea. And good ideas require daily work. Ideas may be easy if we are only coming up with one or two but if you open this book to any of the pages and try to produce more than three, you will feel a burn, scratch your
head, and you will be sweating, and working hard. There is a turning point when you reach idea number 6 for the day, you still have four to go, and your mind muscle is getting a workout. By the time you list those last ideas to make it to ten you will see for yourself what "sweating the idea muscle" means. As you practice the daily idea
generation you become an idea machine. When we become idea machines we are flooded with lots of bad ideas but also with some that are very good. This happens by the sheer force of the number, because we are coming up with 3,650 ideas per year (at ten a day). When you are inspired by an extraordinary idea, all of your thoughts break their chains, you go beyond limitations and your capacity to act expands in every direction. Forces and abilities you did not know you had come to the surface, and you realize you are capable of doing great things. As you practice with the suggested prompts in this book your ideas will get better, you will be a source of great insight for others, people will find you magnetic, and they will want to hang out with you because you have so much to offer. When you practice every day your life will transform, in no more than 180 days, because it has no other evolutionary choice. Life changes for the better when we become the source of positive, insightful, and helpful ideas. Don't believe a word I say. Instead, challenge yourself to try it for the 180 days and see your life transform, in magical ways, in front of your very eyes.
If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.
Brad DeLong visits Startup Geometry today to talk about economic currents and current economics. He may or may not have confessed to being a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, a historian in disguise as an economist, and/or a Keynesian. He reviews the effects and effectiveness of US economic policies including the 2009 Recovery Act; the Trans-Pacific Partnership; tax, education, infrastructure and other proposals. We discuss the entertainment revolution and the fall of middle class security, and what to do if someone has a bigger yacht than you.
If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.
Note: I have to apologize for referring to Lois McMaster Bujold a "very competent writer" in the podcast. I tend toward understatement when in interview mode. She's a tremendous writer, and I read everything she publishes greedily, as soon as it comes out. I facepalm myself regularly.
[0.00.36] Brad DeLong is a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, John Scalzi, Lois McMaster Bujold, gender politics in SF, Science fiction and economics as worldbuilding exercise.
[0.09.25] Trends in the economic profession, economics considered as the Nile delta. Ulrika Malmendier , Stefano DellaVigna, and Raj Chetty as leading researchers at the behavioral, individual scale. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez at the macro, sociological scale.
[0.13.58] Keeping in mind the lessons of the Great Depression. George Osborne and the perpetual budget surplus idea.
[0.16.00] Why is Ricardian Equivalence not a thing? Why should the government invest? What's the benefit to putting off our bills?
[0.21.19] What about tax cuts as stimulus?
[0.23.23] Why transfer payments, tax credits, infrastructure spending, are better than cutting taxes on the rich from either an efficiency and equity standpoint. The effectiveness and politics of the 2009 Recovery Act. Christina Romer, Barack Obama. $600B in stimulus, where we needed $4T. A fire engine intervenes.
[0.29.54] Prospects for improving the situation now. Impact of the social safety net on JK Rowling & entrepreneurs. "You get very few tightrope walkers without a powerful safety net."
[0.32.40] Hillary Clinton's agenda. Zero debt grads, infrastructure broadly defined.
[0.38.20] Costs and benefits, 20th c. vs. 21st c. Losing the secure middle class existence, gaining better entertainment and communication. Who's rich, and what does that mean psychologically? George Romney vs. Mitt Romney. Jann Wenner vs. Paul Allen. Spalding Gray on the Hamptons. The Buddha: "Desire is infinite."
[0.43.00] The end of the fundamental problems (fire, flood, famine, marauding Huns & water buffalo) as we climb the Maslow hierarchy. Noah Smith. The entertainment revolution.
[0.47.30] The trade deals. How the TPP could be improved, and what its flaws are. How to negotiate a trade agreement that's better in its distributional effects.
[0.55.45] One policy recommendation & one personal recommendation for the listeners. Obama's most costly mistake. The R statistical package. Controlling your infinite desires.
Read more from and about Brad DeLong at the Equitablog at the Center for Equitable Growth, or at his blog, DeLong's Grasping Reality, and is readily Google-able.
And why these trade deals on these specific terms? His reasoning and negotiating stance are opaque. This is never a good place to be on anything, especially if you are President.
Nearly every constituency in the Democratic Party
opposes it; and the more they learn about it, the more they oppose it.
And yet their leader, Obama, wants it badly.
But
why? Maybe it’s a better agreement—better for the American middle
class, for American workers—than it seems in the leaked drafts, where it
appears bent to the will of multinational corporations. John Kerry, the
Secretary of State, and Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense,
co-authored a column on Monday in USA Todayarguing,
in evangelical tones, that the T.P.P. will usher in a glorious new era
of American-led prosperity, a “global race to the top” for all parties.
Meanwhile, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sees only a race to the bottom. Organized
labor, by all accounts, plans to punish any elected Democrat who
supports the T.P.P., or even supports fast-track for Obama, in the next
campaign. It’s difficult, again, to evaluate the agreement when we can’t
see it. And it will be difficult for Congress to do its job if its
members can’t study each part of the many-tentacled T.P.P. on its
merits, but must simply vote yes or no on the whole shebang. What’s the
rush? Is it simply Obama’s wish to make his mark on history and to
complete his pivot toward Asia before his time is up? Politicians are
often accused of supporting pro-corporate policies to please wealthy
backers, looking toward the next campaign. That can’t be Obama’s motive
now.
On one of the specific issues Warren raised, about
whether the trade deal could be used to undermine the 2010 Dodd-Frank
financial reform act, Obama might be right, although we’ll have to take
it on trust; the text of the provisional agreement is classified. (When
Senator Barbara Boxer went to inspect it in a secure room at the
Capitol, a guard told her she couldn’t take notes.)
A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and
Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones
Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and
investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries,
including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal
system. In a recent letter
to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of
the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a
new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far
from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws
and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at
risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.
President
Obama hasn’t addressed all of these concerns, and he has also failed to
provide much backing for his assertion that the T.P.P. would be
beneficial to the middle class. The most widely quoted study
of the deal’s likely effect, which was carried out by three economists
associated with the pro-free-trade Peterson Institute for International
Economics, found that its impact would be modest. By 2025, the study
said, the deal would boost over-all U.S. income by about 0.4 per cent of
G.D.P. If this is accurate, the new trade deal won’t have much effect
either way on American incomes.
But that isn’t the full story. In an important recent paper,
Josh Bivens, of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, pointed
out that estimates like the one produced by the Peterson Institute don’t
take into account the distributional aspects of trade agreements. The
traditional argument for free trade is that it reallocates resources,
workers included, to their most productive uses, and that this causes
over-all income and output to rise. But this churning process doesn’t
only create winners, such as consumers who can buy lower-cost imported
goods. It also creates losers, such as the Maytag-plant workers in
Illinois and many others who make things that poorer countries can
produce more cheaply because they have lower wages.
In this short preview of my interview with economist Brad DeLong, we discuss the economic and social impact of the trade deals currently being negotiated by the US Trade Representative, including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade Promotion Authority and related bills under consideration in Congress this month.
The full interview will be available next week. Please check back regularly, and please subscribe on iTunes to get all of our episodes.
A team from Massachusetts General Hospital under Harald Ott regrew rat and primate forelimbs ex vivo, and then transplanted it back into a host animal. They did it by removing all of the cells from an amputated arm, reseeding it with appropriate cell types for the various tissues in a bioreactor atop the existing extracellular scaffolding, and then reattaching it.
This is not quite as impressive as growing it up from nothing, but it represents a substantial step forward from existing technology which is capable of doing single or dual cell type tissue growth. This is multiple tissue, structured repopulation and regrowth of tissue. That's huge.
I had seen the photos of Karl Lagerfeld's enviable library before, so of course I could tell that most of the books are shelved horizontally. What I did not realize until Rain Noe pointed it out over on Core77 is that this is not just an eccentricity. It's an ergonomic hack, so Lagerfeld doesn't have to turn his head to read the titles. Note that in the closeup of the shelves below, all (or at least most) of the titles are turned for easiest reading.
I never have lunch, but when I do, I ask them to bring it to me in the
house. I actually have two houses. This house here, it's only for
sleeping and sketching, and I have another house two-and-a-half meters
away for lunch and dinner and to see people, and where the cook is and
all that. I don't want that here. Even if the place is huge, I want to
be alone. If I want something, I call them, and they're next door, they
come. The studio is next door, the office is next door. If I have guests
and butlers, I don't want them in my house. Everything is next door.
Adam Swartzbaugh, founder of the Genesis Network, works to defeat human trafficking and help rebuild local networks to help with disaster recovery. He's not only an active social entrepreneur, he's also a rapid language learner, world traveler and multi-sport athlete. He's also the only man I know who's won in hand-to-hand combat with a hawk.
In this episode of the Startup Geometry Podcast, I talk with Adam about:
What made him interested in the problem of human trafficking in Southeast Asia
How providing educational opportunities in remote locations is the key to interrupting trafficking networks
How finding a calling changes your motivational & energy levels
Why attending a highly creative university while doing a highly structured ROTC program made for a powerful combination of experiences
In this episode, I talk with Christoph Rehage, who filmed himself walking more than 5000km across China over the course of a year. Most of you will be familiar with him from the YouTube video that resulted from the trip:
He's also the author of three books, published in German and Chinese, an avid reader of travel books, collector of fine vodkas, filmmaker, photographer and newspaper columnist. We talk about his early travels, what China looks like beyond Beijing and the big cities, what Germany and China have to teach each other, and how travel improves our lives.
by Marie Kondo.
