Posts by Joshua

I might also observe that when I do read customer reviews for books on Amazon, it seems there's always someone complaining about their ebook being badly formatted or otherwise unreadable. All that being said, I do have a kindle paperwhite packed away in a closet somewhere.

It's been a few years since I looked into the world of Ebooks, but in general outline the problems likely haven't changed; eReaders are shockingly niche products, which don't sell very well. This is partially because they last a long time (not for eReaders the 2-year obsolescence typical of smartphones), and partially because so few people really read. PDF's have meant that unscrupulous users can get the ebooks themselves for free, making the whole enterprise awfully unprofitable.

The upshot is that eReader manufacturers put precious little effort into delivering the kind of options that people want. It took Amazon 8 generations of the Kindle to finally make it water-resistant! Even by then, a user could read a book, OR listen to the audiobook (through audible), but they could never do both at the same time on the same device! Issues like text adjustment (alignment), file compatibility, and connectivity have all likewise been neglected for long periods of time.

The Barnes and Noble Nook is more or less dead as far as I can see. Amazon can afford to prop up the Kindle line probably indefinitely, but it's certainly not a focus. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has tried some of the other options.

Since we were on the subject of Hermes earlier, I thought I would post this. It's a passage from The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, quoting Giordano Bruno. Bruno was illustrating the silliness of the idea that human life is divinely ordained and influenced. Bruno himself, of course, was heavily influenced by Lucretius.

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"He has ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Father Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that several shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox two hundred and fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random."

This is by no means all that Mercury has to arrange.

"Laurenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all. Antonio Savolino's b.i.t.c.h shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro's dog. In that moment a cuckoo shall be heard from La Starza, cuckooing twelve times, no more and no fewer, whereupon it shall leave and fly to the ruins of Castle Cicala for eleven minutes, and then shall fly off to Scarvaita, and as for what happens next, we'll see to it later."

Mercury's work in this one tiny corner of a tiny corner of the Campagna is still not done.

"That the skirt Mastro Danese is cutting on his board shall come out crooked. That twelve bedbugs shall leave the slats of Costantino's bed and head toward the pillow: seven large ones, four small, and one middle-sized, and as for the one who shall survive until this evening's candlelight, we'll see to it. That fifteen minutes thereafter, because of the movement of her tongue, which she has pa.s.sed over her palate four times, the old lady of Fiurulo shall lose the third right molar in her lower jaw, and it shall fall without blood and without pain, because that molar has been loose for seventeen months. That Ambrogio on the one hundred twelfth thrust shall finally have driven home his business with his wife, but shall not impregnate her this time, but rather another, using the sperm into which the cooked leek that he has just eaten with millet and wine sauce shall have been converted. Martinello's son is beginning to grow hair on his chest, and his voice is beginning to crack. That Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants. . . ."

That's the claim Bernard Frischer makes several times in his book. Apparently there were several "candidate" busts conforming to various pet theories, but the conclusive evidence didn't come until 1742.

(This passage does not describe the double-herm in question, but a separate herm bust now lost. Only the shaft with the inscription survives.)

I say "peculiar interest of mine" because, for one thing, I am a land surveyor and these statues in their original forms were boundary stones. But I'm also beginning to think of Epicurean philosophy as, in a lot of interesting ways, a radical reinvention of limitations. There is Lucretius and his "deepset boundary stone" (alte terminus haerens), showing what can be and what cannot; there is the atom, a lower limit on the size and scale of the material; there is matter itself, without expiration and eternal; there is the void, infinite, without boundary; there is the limit of the scope of pleasure in the removal of all pain–not the highest pleasure, not the telos in itself–but the limit of its magnitude; there is the circumscription placed around the gods, bundled up and bounded off-oh, somewhere.

There is the utterly final boundary line of death, beyond which there is nothing. There is nothing itself, limited in its own way–for nothing can come from nothing.

These and many others have engaged my thinking for the last several weeks. Epicurus' philosophy is the result of his boundary survey of the whole of nature. He established new boundaries, removed those that were set wrongly before him, and rediscovered even older lines that were set rightly by others but had been forgotten or overlooked since.

When Thomas More in his Utopia wanted to explore Epicurean philosophy, he flung it out onto the very margins of the New World, at the far tip of the spear of human knowledge. He seems to have intuited what we know in any case: that it doesn't matter much where you put him, because Epicurus and his students are "at home" in the universe. Diogenes of Oenoanda grasped this plainly;

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Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners. For, while the various segments of the Earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire Earth, and a single home, the world.

You're treading on a peculiar interest of mine, Cassius! The double herm was the reason I bought Bernard Frischer's book.

"Herm" in this case is short for Hermes, who was the figure chiefly represented in early herm statues. The typical herm was a standing stone with a bust carved into the topmost portion. In the case of Hermes in particular, the rest of the statue would be left squared off all the way down, apart in some cases from a conspicuous set of genitals at the appropriate location.

Hermes was the patron god of messengers, merchants and travelers, and–by extension–roads, highways, and crossings. The herm statue was in some places used to mark roads, in some places to mark milestones, and in others to mark boundaries (The Romans had their own patron god of boundaries, Jupiter Terminus, a statue of whom would be placed on property lines and propitiated by both neighbors in a special ritual on Terminalia every spring).

How the herm statue came to be sculpted with two heads facing opposite is an interesting question. There was another god, Janus, with a face on either side of his head–he presided over the new year, with one aspect facing to the future and one to the past. In Hermes' case, there was a cultural boundary line just as important as those of time and property; the diad between male and female. Aphrodite was often chosen as the figure to complement him.

In other statues the twin figures are an old man and a youth; the key feature in all of these artistic expressions is the curious interplay of limitation and continuity.

Metrodorus, who would certainly have succeeded Epicurus had he survived him, represented continuity–the master/student relationship, the succession of the scholarchs, etc.

I disliked the double herm at first sight, but I'm beginning to grasp its meaning better by seeing it through Greek and Roman eyes.

Where is the "Udders and Chian Wine" multimedia award? I, for one, would like "to hear things far sweeter than the land of the Phaeacians"!

If they can figure it all out on their own, well...

Leave it to beavers, ay?

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The pig may have to yield some of its place as an Epicurean symbol if this keeps up.

Off topic, but I discovered recently that Samos was one of a handful of Ionian cities that used flying boars on its coinage. I've searched widely, but nobody seems to know exactly why. Predates Epicurus by centuries.

I don't know if this is an example of the "uncanny valley" or not, but when I look at this picture it's just–it's just odd somehow...

In lieu of the ability to perform large-scale multi-generation experiments on these animals and their instincts, one thing we can do is study novel cases where nature herself (metaphorically, of course) laid out the experiment for us. In the case of birds, the classic example is to study isolated populations on remote islands. It's no accident that Darwin discovered the mechanisms of evolution after studying birds in the Galapagos.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/e…me%20flightless.

But possibly this only restates the same question; do island birds stop nesting in trees because they "forgot" the model, or do they start nesting on the ground because they "learned" a new model?

The central problem, as I see it, is that what we observe in individuals seems to argue for some kinds of uncanny innate 'knowledge'–but what we observe across populations seems to indicate the opposite.

And the further problem is that with individuals born in captivity and released into the wild, they don't survive long enough to furnish any useful data. The ideal experiment would be to take a large-ish population of beavers, raise them in captivity for successive generations where dam building is not possible, and then release them as a group into an environment where there are no other beavers to learn from except each other. Then wait for the dams.

I looked that over Godfrey, thank you for posting it!

Fascinating! Abiqur is, apparently, the Arabization of 'Epicurus'.

This is what came up for me as the reference image.

I can definitely try. Do we know the artist?

A bit off topic!

😄 Reminds me of this scene from my favorite cartoon

It's also a Roman copy of a Greek original. The Romans were skilled at many things, but in statuary they were hardly fit to carry the Greeks' chisels.