why we should

When I learned about joint attention I had my mind blown a little. It’s a term from psychology and studies of the acquisition of language, but the general idea goes back to the Greeks and their ideas on learning language. Basically a parent looks or points at something and the child notices, because they notice everything their parent does, and…

I was watching the youtube channel Religion for Breakfast on more recent scholarship on what the eucharist was, or represented, when remembering the last supper. The TL;DR or didn't-watch for this is that shared meals were a very common activity, which in the Greco-Roman world might be called a deipnon in the Hellenised eastern Mediterranean (at about 24 minutes in the…

Attic red-figured Pinax. Diameter: 19.5 cm Height: 1.9 cm. Attributed to Epiktetos by signature. Made in Athens about 520-510 BC; from Vulci, Etruria. Currently, London, The British Museum via https://www.flickr.com/photos/69716881@N02/7691738970/in/photostream/ Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022, ISBN 9780691240534) In large measure the book is composed…

I have just been reminded that Sargon was the first known ruler of the known world. This happened before empires were a thing. It was at a time when kingdoms were not yet available to be captured and incorporated. Imperialists had to make do with cities. This was in a post about Sargon's daughter Enheduanna by Historical Snapshots. Enheduanna being…

"Is there, in fact, such a thing as the specialization of the generalist?" Bill Ward asks this question after describing their own reading style and their attitudes towards those who read in a generalist manner and those who read with a special focus. Go read it, SPECIALIST AND GENERALIST READERS. It’s from 2009, it deals with the question from the…

This blog started out as a multi-voice poem nine years ago one easter. Well, laying it out by hand with coloured pencil in a highlight-coding for each 'voice'. The nine year old FB post said I am a year in at this stage. Before that is was just a ‘unsplit’ univocal poem. Or notes. I have lots of notes. The…