Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Plato's careful composition...

..of his works was, of course, noted in antiquity.  Most famously, there is this story, told in Dion. Hal. Comp. 25.209-18 (cf. DL 3.37):
ὁ δὲ
Πλάτων τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ διαλόγους κτενίζων καὶ βοστρυ- (210)
χίζων καὶ πάντα τρόπον ἀναπλέκων οὐ διέλειπεν
ὀγδοήκοντα γεγονὼς ἔτη· πᾶσι γὰρ δήπου τοῖς φιλο-
λόγοις γνώριμα τὰ περὶ τῆς φιλοπονίας τἀνδρὸς ἱστο-
ρούμενα τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δὴ καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν δέλτον,
ἣν τελευτήσαντος αὐτοῦ λέγουσιν εὑρεθῆναι ποικίλως (215)
μετακειμένην τὴν ἀρχὴν τῆς Πολιτείας ἔχουσαν τήνδε
‘Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ μετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρί-
στωνος’.
 But Plato did not cease, when eighty years old, to comb and curl his dialogues and reshape them in every way. Surely every scholar is acquainted with the stories of Plato's passion for taking pains, especially that of the tablet which they say was found after his death with the beginning of the Republic ("I went down yesterday to the Piraeus together with Glaucon the son of Ariston") arranged in elaborately varying orders. (trans. W. Rhys Roberts).

Monday, June 28, 2010

Plato and stichometry

Jay Kennedy at the University of Manchester has an interesting piece coming in Apeiron applying a musical analysis to the construction of Plato's dialogues.  There's an introduction to his work here and the pdf of the proof of the article is here.

No one will deny, I think, that Plato was a careful writer.  But just how careful and for what end?

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Office 2010


So I have a shiny laptop to use for conferences and the like. And it has arrived with the new Office 2010 software. I hadn't spent much time with the 2007 version and the ribbon thing takes up an enormous amount of the screen (though you can hide it) but there are already a couple of small touches that seem to be a real improvement on the 2003 version I've used most on XP. Two examples for now, though these might seem standard to the Maccy types…

First, there is a cute button in Word that takes one click to attach the document you are working on to an email. That's handy; before you'd have to plug in a pdf printer-thing, print the file to pdf then find it and attach it to an email.

Second, Word comes with what I'm using now – a natty thing that lets you type a blogpost and then publish with a click, so you don't have to rely why you are typing on the WYSIWYG editor thing on the website. I quite like it.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Booooooo!

Here is some applied ethics for you.  Is it justifiable to boo your own team?  The World Service blog has some comments on the question and we now know that Mr Rooney's view is that it is never acceptable, even if you have watched your national team wander aimlessly around for 90 minutes unable to pass to one another.


There seem to be two relevant factors.  First, booing a team will demoralise them and make them play worse.  I'm not sure if that's true; certainly, last night it did not seem to help at all.  Second, booing a team is a reasonable reaction to being faced with a poor performance that has cost a lot of time and money to watch.  The tension here is between considering the team as something to which the fan owes allegiance and support and something that is being viewed by a paying audience member.

Both perspectives are evidently at work in any fan's experience; a fan both will consider his or herself as somehow contributing to their chosen team's performance and will think that they can positively influence that performance in some way and will also think that their commitment of time and money entitles them to some kind of return.  

Consider two different kinds of perspective.  Someone who pays to go and see a concert by a favourite performer will probably feel it reasonable to voice their objections if the concert is poor.  But this is only a partial analogy: it is not the case that a concert audience will  think it an integral part of their role in the whole concer try to inspire the performer to do better with cheering and chanting during the song.  Second, someone who goes to support their child in a school team will cheer on the team so as to encourage them.  But the parent will probably not feel it reasonable to boo the team if they perform below par.

So, Wayne isn't right.  But he isn't entirely wrong either because a football fan occupies a curious hybrid position as both a supporter and audience member/consumer.  Wayne might like only to think of us in the former category but his manager and PR people would do well to remember the latter category too.



Sunday, June 13, 2010

USA! USA! USA! etc.

(T-shirt available at When Saturday Comes.)  So we didn't beat Team USA!  (As R remarked as we watched the game: 'Why is there always someone called Brad?')  But then Spain lost to them when they played last year and there are quite a good team.  I'm more worried about us mucking up against Algeria and Slovenia.

Things to be cheerful about: Heskey did a good job; Lampard and Gerrard played well; Lennon and Wright-Phillips were good attacking wingers.  Rooney took a while to get going, and our centre-backs looks a bit dhort for pace when people ran behind them, but all in all we've seen worse.  France were poor in their first game, much poorer than England.  And only Argentina so far have looked very strong.  So let's cheer up.

And I did predict 1-1 in the college 1st round score-predictor-game, so silver linings and all that...

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Coming up for air

Phew. The examining is nearly over. We all take this bit of the job very seriously, of course, even though the marking can be grim.  Probably not as grim as taking the exams, but grim nonetheless.  There are some nice moments too and some very impressive performances, but we get everything done in an intense and short period of time - so as to leave the summer for research - so everything else gets dropped while the scripts get marked.  I shall console myself with a list of things I will do once we have seen the students off the premises.
  • I will watch lots and lots of the World Cup.  Even Serbia v. Ghana. 
  • I'm off to a conference in July in Hungary.  I've never been there before and it looks like it will be good.  Have to finish the paper first.
  • I will be able to get back to some thoughts stirring on some bits of Plato's Protagoras and Laws and trying to finish something on NE 10.4.
  • I want to read the new David Mitchell book properly.  I've started but haven't had the energy to dive in fully.
If I wanted, I could get very worried about the likelihood that Higher Education funding might be cut significantly and be partially replaced by higher tuition fees.  (You can read Willetts' speech given earlier today here.  He seems mostly to be interested in getting various places to do teaching for students then to be examined by external universities.  People will worry about an explicit and institutionalised  (return to a) two-tier tertiary sector, I reckon.)  I haven't got my head around precisely which bit of the oncoming storm is the most awful because I don't really want to think about it at all.  But it's coming alright.  What's worse is the likely dearth of jobs in the next few years so people, excellent people, finishing PhDs and trying to start a career, are going to find it even harder than ever.
Still, cheer up.  It's 'Universities week' next week.  (No, I didn't know either.)  There's a cheery website about it here


Friday, June 04, 2010

They might be giants

I'm very tempted to get tickets to the They might be giants Science Festival concert at the end of the month in the Babbage Lecture theatre.  More details here.  Here they are telling you about the Sun.



and here they are telling you about palaeontology.

Thought gang

Thought some of you might find this funny, from Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang (p.19):
I made the Ionians my speciality.  Very few people realise that you can read the entire extant oeuvre of the Ionians, slowly and carefully, in an hour.  Most of them come in handy packets and adages.  Extremely impotant, the first caught having a go with their reason, the inventors of paid thought and science - anything you'll find in a university - and blissfully curt.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Loofa

Was it just me or did Loofa (Idris Elba) last night ask his chum to get details on a crim from Detective Munch in New York? Is he a Homicide: Life on the Streets fan?  (Wikipedia says so...)