ὀτοτοῖ, ὀτοτοῖ

Why oh why is this book so expensive? And this one?

The Tablet of Cebes, or, A Gap in my Education

Recently a Textkit study group has formed to read the Discourses of Epictetus. Naturally I slurped up the text into Scholiastae, and one scholiastic activity I've been involved in is creating a list of the most common Stoic terms and idioms used in Epictetus. A few weeks ago, in the course of my hunting down references, I discovered that Keith Seddon (“The Stoic who Never Sleeps”) in 2005 came out with a translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion. In addition to the Enchiridion, however, the book contains a translation of the Tablet of Cebes — a work I had never heard of until that point.

It turns out the Tablet was once frequently paired with the Enchiridion, with Theophrastus' Characters often rounding out the collection. The Tablet is a brief, 1st century dialog introducing Plato's puzzling doctrine of pre-existence, and the value of philosophy in general (it is invariably compared to Pilgrim's Progress in English references).

It is astonishing to me that the Tablet has no showing in any of the many introductory and intermediate Greek textbooks I have seen in my life. The work, along with its usual company, was once quite popular, both in Greek and in translation — into Latin, of course, but also into European vernaculars and even Arabic. It seems well suited to beginners in Greek. The language is not too trickified; it is short and could be read entirely in even a quarter-system school schedule; it introduces philosophy, a subject which doubtless draws more people to Greek in the first place than does Xenophon; one can even bring in discussion about Hellenistic and Imperial intellectual trends — how many philosophical dialogs start with ekphrasis?

The Wondrous Textual Powers of the Internet give us several reading options.

Drosihn's 1871 Teubner seems to still be the standard critical edition, but I'll gladly hear correction about that. It is available on Google Books, a copy of which is also at Archive.org.

C.S. Jerram of Oxford has a 1878 school-boy edition with extensive notes, including many useful to those with wobbly Greek. Again available via Google Books, with a copy of the Google scan at Archive.org.

Richard Parsons brought some Yankee ingenuity (well, Ohio Wesleyan ingenuity) to Cebes, producing a 1897 edition with less copious notes. It does, however, have a brief vocabulary at the end, which makes his book prime bus-to-work reading material. There are several indifferently produced off-prints on the market now, but if you don't love your printer too much, there are again both Google Books and independent Archive.org editions.

There is a 1997 Bryn Mawr Greek commentary by T.M. Banchich, about which I can find little information.

A project at the Université catholique de Louvain has text versions (in Greek and French). I am as yet uncertain, given the editorial markings, of the provenance of their text. And I do wish they had a clear statement of copyright for this very tasty pot pourri.

Finally, Archive.org houses a rather florid 1910 English translation — to say nothing of the typesetting — The Greek Pilgrim's progress; generally known as The picture.

In Praise of Little Ideas

While it is true that there are plenty of science fiction authors who are writerly, whose language shows signs of care beyond the bare need to tell the story, it is nonetheless the case that most of such literature is read for the ideas. A good number of these ideas are conventional, a well-worn path the experienced reader of science fiction uses to get up to speed on whatever it is the author is about to do that's new.

Though I might appreciate The Big Idea in many of these books as a way to generate a story or to work out the idea, an awful lot of the time I don't consider The Big Idea terribly plausible. From time to time, however, I do run across a Little Idea — a one-off or a minor point — that strikes me as either absolutely true or a Really Good Idea.

For example, in one book, the title of which I cannot even remember, is a scene in a giant space ship several kilometers in length. Charlie Stross has convinced me that travel between solar systems is monumentally impractical, as much magic as dragons and rings of power. In any case, in this book the computing subsystems all over the ship were a pain in the ass to deal with because they were all kept on isolated networks. It turns out most of the ship's computers were riddled with viruses and couldn't be connected safely. This, sadly, strikes me as all too likely, should it ever happen that we have a legitimate reason to build such ships.

In Vernor Vinge's most recent book, Rainbows End, he makes occasional mention of the "Friends of Privacy," an organization that produces lots of false information about people all over the internet, with the goal of concealing people who want a little privacy in a world of ubiquitous online presence and data recording. This seems to me at least a possible development, and, frankly, given the growth of the participatory panopticon, a desirable one.

I have recently been reading Neal Stephenson's latest tome, Anathem. Because it's Neal Stephenson book it has quite a few Big Ideas. You can read the overview at the link, but the main point I'm interested in here is the world of this book, scholars are sequestered away in things quite like convents — here called "concents" — while the outside world goes on without them. Once a year doors are opened which allow those inside and those outside to mingle for about a week. Within the concents populations are sequestered from each other, too, so that the "centenarians," for example, only encounter the outside world once every hundred years. Within the concents people select different specialties — physics, philosophy, math, etc. One brilliant Little Idea mentioned a few times in passing and with a minor role late in the book is the order known as the Lorites,

Lorite: A member of an Order founded by Saunt [< Savant — Wm] Lora, who believed that all of the ideas that the human mind was capable of coming up with had already been come up with. Lorites are, therefore, historians of thought who assist other avout in their work my making them aware of others who have thought similar things in the past, and thereby preventing them from re-inventing the wheel.

People who've spent a lot of time with me have heard me complain that the field of computer science seems so consistently and utterly ignorant of its own intellectual past. This is a field that desperately needs Lorites. Granted, about half of the time our CS Lorites would be saying one of three things — (1) Lisp did this in 1960-mumble; (2) Alan Kay's group did this in 1970-mumble; or (3) MULTICS — but there'd still be plenty of work for them. Lots of fields of study could probably use a Lorite or two in the department. It would certainly save wasted paper on pointless dissertations and books.

Weekend Puzzlements

1) If the system name of the DTD is a 404-ed URL is your XML document valid?

2) What's the point of a DTD, anyway, if you're just going to obliterate it when you think up something cleverer?

3) Anyone who thinks the modern world is "too coldly rational" isn't paying attention.

Arc, or, Láadan for Programmers

Paul Graham, six years after announcing it, has released arc, his new dialect of lisp.

One of the odder corners of my library — for most people at least — will be the section that has all the books on constructed languages. Of course there's Esperanto, but Klingon is represented along with several works on Tolkien's languages. I also have the second edition of A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan by Suzette Haden Elgin (neatly abbreviated SHE). SHE is a linguist by training, but is also a science fiction writer. She created Láadan not only for a series of books, but as an experiment to see if a language designed specifically to represent the views of women could change society, sort of an informal test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Láadan is thus presented as representing women's views better somehow. I've never really been convinced that it does so — I know more gay men who have learned the language than women — but there is no doubt it does represent the viewpoint of one extremely intelligent woman.

Arc is just Láadanified lisp. It represents the particular views of one particular lisp programmer. He may be aiming at a hundred year language, but all I can see is perfectly conventional lisp with a few common functions spelled differently and a few parentheses eccentrically deleted.

This was my first warning sign:

It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language.

Whatever one's feelings about speech codes, I think it's safe to say that any time someone warns you, or brags, that they're about to be politically incorrect you're almost certainly in for some first class assholism or lunacy. I've not previously seen it used in a programming language context, but it seems to hold here, too.

At long last, Graham's vaporous Microsofting of lisp is over. I need to prepare some Homer (I'm taking a class again this semester), but I think I'll spend some time this evening refining my Common Lisp betacode to unicode conversion library, and maybe play with Hunchentoot some more.

Huffing Web 2.0: The "Web OS"

If you write a pile of AJAX and server code which fills our browsers with something that looks vaguely like a windowed desktop, congratulations on your innovation, and good luck rising to the top of the ever-growing pile of these. If your marketing people tell you to advertise this as a "Web OS" bop them on the head with a wiffle bat and tell them to try again. If you, the developer, are tempted to call it a Web OS, change professions this instant.

A desktop-looking thingie running in a browser is just a GUI app. It's an operating system as much as my first cell phone's a Cray supercompter.

Those Pesky Single People

Do the pitying looks no longer properly motivate the future spinster? Do the condescending "we just want you to be happy"s no longer get suitably enthusiastic agreement from the creepy bachelor uncle? Does "be fruitful and multiply" not motivate your secular single friends? Well, now you have another way to intrude yourself into that single person's life and lay on the guilt: single people are unecological!

A Cynic's Internet Dictionary: wise

wise adj., of statements, commonplace or banal sentiment expressed in a manner advocates of the sentiment have not previously encountered; giving the impression of insight though obscure, elevated or metaphorical language; adj., of people, prone to expressing banalities in novel language.

Perseus is not a new kind of crutch.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born. — Alan Kay

Early in April 2007 one of the few redeeming web sites on the entire internet, Perseus, had a security compromise. For two weeks the site was completely down, and as of this writing, three weeks later, it is still barely usable on those occasions when it is even capable of answering a HTTP GET request. It wasn't exactly overpowered before the security problem.

The absence of Perseus drew comment in all the expected places, but Mark Goodacre made a comment on his blog which I confess I find completely baffling:

Useful as these are in teaching and research, and grateful as we are to their developers, perhaps we should all sponsor "electronic free April" every year and insist that everyone has a good month each year when they are only allowed access to print resources for Greek. Perhaps we could institute it as a kind of compulsory Lent abstinence for all NT scholars and students?

Unless one believes that tedious labor (κάματος) is a worthwhile goal in itself, I cannot see how this is a good idea.

There is not a single resource Perseus offers which doesn't exist in print. The Greek and Latin texts of course have been around a good long while, but the commentaries and lexica for them have existed nearly as long. I don't know how long concordances have existed, but several centuries at least. There are interlinears available for the most popular texts, and parallel translations have their own publishing industry (Loeb, Budé). I can wander down to my local bookstore and buy a brand new copy of a work with the morphology parsed for me — Vergil comes in for this treatment especially — and numerous dictionaries will provide parsing help for beginners, plus you can always get one of those verb books for Greek.

The only thing new thing Perseus offers is speed. I have spent many, many hours of my life paging through dictionaries. The vast majority of the time I know exactly what the lemma is (modulo declensional class), so there's no intellectual work in this at all. Further, using the Perseus lexica is probably superior for most people because it gives us access to the largest editions of these works. At home I have only the Middle Liddell. With Perseus I can spend a lot more quality time getting full range of a word's use from the Great Scott — a far better use of time than flipping pages.

It has been quipped that computers allow us to make errors faster than ever before. They certainly make it possible to indulge in poor study habits more easily and more quickly than before. That problem is not in the computers, but in us. Instead of giving up Perseus for Lent, we should give up checking translations from Perseus and Loebs. Instead of relying on Perseus word lookup, the impoverished dictionaries at the end of student editions or marginalia, let us build lists of words to memorize.

Driving home a point in the Works and Days, Hesiod addresses his brother Perses:

σοὶ δ’ εἰ πλούτου θυμὸς ἐέλδεται ἐν φρεσὶν ᾗσιν,
ὧδ’ ἔρδειν, καὶ ἔργον ἐπ’ ἔργῳ ἐργάζεσθαι.       382

But if the spirit in your own soul wants wealth,
do as I say, and upon work pile work with work.

The Greek word for work, ἔργον (ergon, earlier *wergon) is cognate with English. Hesiod plays with phonetics, and issues the command to do with a very similar sounding word, erdein. What he doesn't do is recommend κάματος, wearying toil. That word is frequently paired with words for "pain" and "woe" in Epic. Learning these difficult languages, and reading the refined and literary works in them, is a lot of work in the best of circumstances. Why add needless toil?

The Lunacy of the Lunate Sigma: A Rant

I was very excited last week to get the OCT edition of Hesiod — a requirement for a class I might actually get to take. My shocked, initial joy at finding a legible text in a new OCT, and decked out with a beefy apparatus, was dampened when I noticed a serious pet-peeve of mine — the silly lunate sigma.

For those who don't know Greek, the lowercase letter sigma (sounds "s") comes in two forms, one used at the end of a word, one used everywehere else, like σῖτος sitos "(food made from) grain" (cf. parasite). The lunate sigma, an ancient form of the letter, looks like a lowercase "c", ϲῖτοϲ.

For reasons I cannot fathom, it has become fashionable to use the lunate sigma in modern editions of Greek works. What is so bizarre about this that the lunate form is a zombie. In any modern text of, say, Homer, the font used is based on the habits of the Late Byzantine scholars from whom Western Europe reacquainteded itself with ancient Greek learning. The lunate sigma is alien to those hands. If we really must enforce sigma to a single form, there's much better precedent for using the non-final shape everywhere (see Thompson's A Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography for the evidence).

Another problem with the lunate sigma is that, as an intruder, it rarely plays well with other letters in a face. I've seen one book (I think the current "Teach Yourself" for classical Greek) that appears to have had the lunate form crammed in without any kerning information. It looks just terrible. OCT has done a better job with the lowercase form, but the uppercase form looks like it's delirious from a wasting disease. The best lunate sigma I've ever seen seems to have been designed with the rest of the font, and appears in H. van Thiel's Scholia D on Homer.

Now, I would be happy to see lunate sigmas in an apparatus. In fact, I would applaud it. But I cannot figure out why it's ending up in the main body of texts. It isn't more historically accurate, or is so only in a wildly eccentric way. It often looks awful. Greek offers a vast array of difficulties for beginners, so simplifying sigma isn't going to help anything at all. Finally, it is an active impediment to reading for people experienced with Greek. Unless they've never seen a word before, people don't actually phonate words when reading an alphabet. After years of experience "the" goes straight into your brain as "the." The shape of the word counts, so ruining my familiar εἰς and σῖτος to favor εἰϲ and ϲῖτοϲ is just annoying.

And don't get me started on adscript iota.

Double Dipping the Surplus Value

I have been thinking recently, as I often have cause to do, on the wretched state of software. This has lead me to an economic analysis of the software industry, not something I'd normally indulge in, but now that I have the vocabulary for what was annoying me, perhaps I can dwell on some other matter.

"Surplus value" is a technical term, associated with Marx but by no means discovered by him, describing how capital accumulation takes place. Horribly simplified, surplus value is the difference between the selling price of something and the labor cost, with the idea being that it's mostly unpaid labor that makes value for a business (i.e., people aren't really paid for the full value of their work). As I said, this simplification is gross, but it's the basic idea, no great surprise nor particularly radical.

Whatever you feel is the correct relationship between labor and the pay for that labor, it seems to me that software companies who produce crappy software (that is, most of them) rely on not one but two sources of surplus value, first from their own employees, second from the poor shlubs who buy their software and then have to hire even more IT staff. How much of that expensive software companies are convinced buy would get any use if there weren't an army of acolytes running around tending to it?

What percent of the average IT budget (training and salaries) is devoted to necessary infrastructure and what percent to dealing with software that doesn't quite work as advertized?