I Can Read That, uh, I Think...

Until a few days ago, I had never been to the Getty Villa. With a combination of it being far away and requiring an appointment, even when I was in the same city, I never got around to it. Until this time. It was incredible.

Getty Villa picture from Wikimedia Commons [1]

The floor plan is based on the Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, which got its name for the well over 1,500 papyrus scrolls found there. The Getty Villa is stunningly beautiful. The Roman architecture is paired with wonderful landscaping, pools of water, and replica bronze statues and murals.

Inside, I found an incredible collection of Greek pottery and statues, as well as Roman and Etruscan artifacts. The first room that I went into was an incredible time-line of pottery in these three civilizations. I was with my parents, and I was able to point out and describe the different pots, especially since I have been studying this recently (see my blogpost). We then moved into another room that displayed a mixture of Attic pottery and Roman pottery. Some of the attic red figure vases were incredible.

A few of the vases had names scratched above the characters depicted upon them. I went over and said "I can read this" and then I froze for a second. The words were in capitals with no accents. My mind went blank even looking at words that I clearly recognized. Fear just was struck into my heart. The same thing happened when I looked at the Latin inscription on a young girl's sarcophagus. Although the Latin turned out to be really easy, I froze. I think this comes from a combination of pushing myself into a Greek class I was not entirely ready for when I started college and a sense of extreme pride that hates passionately being wrong. My first class, on the Bacchae, I would not have given up for the world. It was amazing. However, it taught me a combination of bad habits: always assuming I was behind the curve (which often prevented me from moving out of this position), spending a lot of time on the Perseus Project instead of with a paper dictionary and a grammar (which I began work toward fixing in my junior and senior year), and getting bothered and antsy when translating took too long instead of enjoying the process of reading.

I have promised myself that I will fix all of these before I go to graduate school. I hope I am going to make it! The applications are a nightmare.

Endnotes

1. Wikimedia Commons

Cerinthus Reports: Octopus=Awesome

Sulpicia Asks: Could you send me some awesome photos.

Cerninthus Answers: Look! An octopus!
(Just kidding. Cerinthus actually responded by sending 93 incredible photos from Crete but this one is totally my favorite)

 This is Minoan. Other than that I don't know. I think Cerinthus saw it in a museum on Crete. More information forthcoming.

Update (09/14/10):

This is known as the "Octopus Jar" and is from the late Minoan period. The Stanford Humanities lab website says: 

"At the end of the Middle Minoan era the Kamares style has been relegated to background and a new style stealing from wall paintings of this period was developed. This new style delt mainly with vivid representation of human and animal figures in dark colors on light colored clay. This trend of naturalism is extreamly short lived however. The return to the formulated decorative patterns and stylized plant forms returns and is the basis for future styles."

This jar was made circa 1500 BCE found at the palace at Knossos and now sits in the Herakleion Museam, Crete (Saskatewan University).

The Problems with Free Books

This morning, my mother emailed me a thoroughly amusing article called "The Trouble with Google Books." The article deals with the errors and problems that Google books has, specifically with metadata (i.e. the data that allows you to find the book you are looking for, e.g. publication date, author, etc). Some of the pieces are particularly hilarious, such as attributing a book an the Mosiac Web browser to Sigmund Freud's distinguished co-authorship [1]. My biggest problem with google books was that it always omitted exactly those pages of a book that I needed most when I looked something up because some other enterprising classicist had checked it out of the library before I got there [2].

Although I have always been a massive lover of cheap books and used books (which is the only way I could have amassed the massive collection of books around my house and in boxes in the garage), receiving a Kindle (see my previous blogpost) I have become a zealot for free electronic books. Part of the time while Cerinthus was visiting, I stupidly spent showing him the wonders of ACLS Humanities E-Book Archive (because he still has access to our college's server). It is incredible. Although one can only download PDF pages in three pages bursts, there are some fabulous academic texts on every subject from archaeoastronomy to modern urban planning. If one compiles the books oneself, they're free (provided, of course, access to said archive through school or an academic institution). I also have spent a lot of time searching for books, especially classics books and found a number of different places (to many of which I link on Platonic Psychology). Some interesting ones are as follows:

• Project Gutenberg: An archive of out of print books and audiobooks. Has a pretty awesome variety of formats available, including MOBI documents for the kindle. They are now also compiling audiobooks, as well as adding works in their original languages, such as Greek and Latin (as well as German, French, etc)
• Internet Archive: Very much like Project Gutenberg, this archive includes a variety of out of print books in many different formats, including the Sanskrit Grammar that I included in my blogpost last night.
• Textkit: A selections of out of print materials for teaching Classical Greek and Latin.
• Free Books from Amazon: this is all in kindle format (but can be read with free kindle reading apps), but it includes out of print books, as well as government documents like the U.S. Budget, and a number of new studies on digital media and learning by MIT, like this one.
  

There are some more but this is a start and I would love to hear about more I have not found yet.

Harping on my education theme, again (sorry!), I think cheap used books and free ebooks are awesome. I believe, most certainly, that authors and the institutions who aid in dissemination their work should be paid and that they provide a vital service for society. However, the library near my house has a book section only twice the size of my bedroom. Thus far, I found no classics texts there I am interested in reading. The books are simply too expensive for a small local library. It seems to me that libraries are one of the great places that one can supplement or design their own education. It makes no sense that only university libraries have the necessary academic texts when cities and towns without universities are the ones could most use an extensive library. So I think that used book sites and free ebooks are great because they provide access to a whole range of materials not otherwise available.

Endnotes

1. This reminded me of when I asked a group of my SAT kids what they knew about Charles Dickens' writing, and I got three blank stares and a girl who told me that she had only read half of Alice in Wonderland and did not remember it very well. I was also shocked to learn that out of a 13 person class, not one person knew who Adam Smith was. On the other hand, every one of them can work a smartphone, an art which I have not yet mastered.
2. My junior year this was a particularly pernicious trend, which prevented me from ever getting a chance to read Genres in Dialogue for my Phaedrus paper. Luckily, I received a copy for my last birthday and I am enjoying it thoroughly.

Unconventional Education #2

Two of the reasons that I was so interested in Sugata Mitra's [1] TED Talk in my last blogpost are that I am now working as an educator and that I am a product of progressive education (in my formative elementary school years). From this, I understand the power of working in groups and students teaching themselves and each other.

I went to a progressive elementary school that was built on John Dewey's conception of experimental learning. We spent most of our time in school working in groups, block building, and wood working. We went on field trips to the source of each of the sites that we were studying. I remember vividly sitting through mass at a modern monastery when studying the life of medieval monks and getting up at 3am to go to one of the groups of vendors that supplies restaurants in order to see how the city worked. I gained a curiosity and a passion for learning there.


I picked the college that I did partially on the idea that it would be a return to these unconventional roots. Although it had grades, classes, and majors, like any traditional institution, there was a high premium put on working in groups for certain classes as well as an encouragement for self-competition rather than interpersonal competition. This was a lovely change from my traditional high school, and it fostered precisely the intellectual environment that I craved. In my senior year, I started a Heidegger seminar which met on Friday nights to discuss Being and Time. This class utilized a combination of technology (sometimes listening to Hubert Dryfus' lectures from his Philosophy 185 class, as well as individual in the group finding things online), and group work (the discussions every week) allowed us to gain an incredible amount of information out of the text. Emergence, in Mitra's words. We had very little outside intervention, except for a few visits from a wonderful German professor. I unfortunately was not able to read and participate in this as much as possible due to writing my thesis, but the Heidegger group was productive and wonderful and it was one of the great parts of my education.

The SAT prep that I teach involves some amount of group work in each class. Although often times the group work devolves into talking. The students in my class are tense about school, sports, and college applications, and many of them go to school together. However, the other day I witnessed a great moment. Two of the girls in my class, who have the most trouble with math were working together. One of the smartest, but also one of the tougher girls in my class, ended up in a group with them. When I came over to check on the group, she was helping them-- really explaining carefully how each of the math problems worked and encouraging them. I did not even have to help them out and I was able to focus on some of the other groups that were having trouble focusing. It underlined, for me, the true value of working together.

In some ways, that this self-generated learning is what I am trying to do this year. I am attempting to channel my curiosity in a way to further my own education and solidify those things I learned in the past in my mind. I am not, unfortunately, in a group of any kind (although there is an advanced calculus class at a local school I would absolutely love to take), but I am using the internet, the books I have around, and material from my old courses in order to try to create my own education. Part of the reason I write Platonic Psychology is that I provide a collection of resources for anyone who is out there looking, but more to provide me with a hypothetical group with whom I can interact. By articulating my thoughts to these theoretical people, I solidify my thoughts and allow them to grow (and hopefully generate emergence). So hopefully it will all work out.

Endnotes

1. I just discovered his blog and found it to be thoroughly charming.

Unconventional Education

My mother just sent me an incredible video. I'm not, generally speaking, one of those people who watches a lot of videos online, but this was so stunning that I had to share it. This video is from a TED conference, in which Sugata Mitra discusses the use of computers in child-driven education. The initial premise that he poses is that the places in the world to which good teachers cannot or will not go are not only the places that need them the most, but also the places that become the hotbeds of problems in the world. From there, he started an experiment by placing computers in slums in order to see if children could learn from them without instruction.

Mitra poses this hypothesis at the end of the talk, which he intends upon proving experimentally in the next five years:

"Education is a self-organizing system [1] where learning is an emergent phenomenon [2]."

This video is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

Endnotes

1. Mitra defines a self-organizing system as "one where the system structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system."
2. Mitra defines emergence as "the appearance of a property not previously observed as a functional characteristic of the system."

Wine Snob: The First Installment

Wine snob is kind of a joke. I am not educated in wines. In fact, my alcohol tolerance is so low that after about two glasses of wine not only can I feel the alcohol but the wine starts to taste funny (even if it is great wine). However, I like wines and I have some extremely limited knowledge of California wines. So I thought that I would add a wine entry, now and then, to my blog in order discuss and review wines. I find this review to be especially relevant because wine not only compliments cooking, but also may be used in the cooking itself.

My first wine to review is a 2002 Taft Street Savignon Blanc (Poplar Vinyard) from the Russian River area of Sonoma County, California. As a note, I'm not much of a white wine person, so my knowledge is even more limited. The wine was a gift, but I think it has been sitting a little too long. It has turned to a deep, rich golden color, which I think is pretty problematic for white wine, especially a Savignon Blanc. The taste is light and fresh, but the aftertaste has the distinctive bite of a middle shelf vodka, which I think means that it has become more alcoholic while sitting in the bottle for the last eight years.

However, the light fresh taste of the wine means that it will probably be good for cooking, and most of the alcohol will burn off. I plan on making my favorite butternut squash ravioli in a sage cream sauce later this week (yum!) and I will post my new and improved recipe, as well as a review when I do make it.

Does anyone have any idea on how to tell how long one is supposed to age wines? Is there some science, or does one just have to email a vintner?

A Bibliophile's Review of the Kindle DX

I have had my wonderful Kindle DX for a year now. It was a wonderful and incredibly useful gift from a close family friend. I think that is ample time to explore the benefits of the Kindle and also to demonstrate that owning an eReader is not going over to the dark side.

My Kindle DX

As I have mentioned before, I have a visual processing disorder, so reading off of anything (and especially a computer screen) for any length of time is difficult. Unfortunately, like at any university, many of my classes required supplementary readings that were held by online reserves, and had to be read either on a computer screen or by printing them out. Although I read many of them on paper, printing at school, as well as my own printing (with the cost of ink/toner) was expensive. Both of the two doctors who I consulted recommended the Kindle DX to me, because of the e-ink screen and because font size and word spacing are easily changeable, as well as the reading aloud function.

I was very skeptical, at first, of the idea of an electronic reader. I am a serious bibliophile (as presumably anyone can guess from the bookshelf at the top of my blog and my reading list). I love the feel of books in my hands, the tactile sensation of turning the pages and hearing the distinctive sounds of the paper. I love new books, so shiny and perfect one hardly wants to open them. I ordered a copy of Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals that releases the distinctive smell of jasmine soap upon opening. I also love used books, a little worn or with an inscription by the previous owner. For one birthday, my parents bought me a copy of Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow from the mid 1890s, with a beautiful sky-blue leather cover and accents of gold leaf, a little worn on the spine with use.

However, when I received my Kindle DX, I was almost immediately won over. The device itself is sleek and lightweight (and the new graphite ones are actually even sleeker). I can carry 3,500 books and documents. While I was at school, I no longer had to print, I could do my electronic reserve reading right on my Kindle [1]. Furthermore, I could download any PDF from Jstor or any of the wonderful electronic journal archives for research or pleasure reading and read them or save them for a later date. There are also a ton of free books on Amazon and Project Gutenberg (mobi documents) for the kindle, which can be annotated the same way that a traditional kindle document can.

I also found that writing my thesis, the Kindle was a real lifesaver. One of the primary texts that I used was Plato's Laws. I read the Laws in English, and then read selected sections I needed in the Greek. Much of the time I needed to refer to specific passages that all used the same word or phrase and sometimes either calculate the frequency of those phrases or discuss their placement in the text. Although I used the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for much of the searching, I also used the kindle search function in the English version in order to expedite certain processes as well as to contain vast annotations on particular passages.

I do have a number of criticisms of the kindle, some of which Amazon has addressed and fixed.
Concerns that Amazon has recently fixed:

1. No Organization-- The newest software update that I downloaded allows for collections of books, which means that I can organize the books in any way I choose. This is a huge help given how many ebooks I have.
2. No Zoom-- The newest software update also includes a zoom for PDF documents, which is very helpful.

Concerns Amazon still need to fix:

1. No way to refer to page numbers from the print edition. I was lucky with Plato, because Plato scholars refer to Stephanus pagination, rather than page numbers from any particular edition. However, this can be a serious issue when writing academic papers. It usually means that one has to check a print edition of the library as well and then cross-reference, which is really lame. It also provides a difficulty in citing pages for class discussion, which is part of why the kindle experimentation program at universities was not a raging success (my school included).
2. No way to borrow books. This is truly unfortunate. I lend print copies of my books to my friends all the time, and my mother and I frequently both read a book. I don't want to have to lend someone my kindle, because that is lending a portion of my library and it keeps all of my notes. 
3. The TERRIBLE pronunciation of times and sometimes problematic inflection of the reader. I know, it's difficult to get a computer to pronounce things properly. When I was taking a Thucydides course where we were focusing intently on Book I (in Greek), I would listen to the rest of the book (in English) while I was cooking or cleaning to provide context. I often had to go over and check the text because I could not understand the names and place names to which she was referring (I usually listened to the female voice).
4. Problematic edition differences. According to an Amazon representative that I talked to once, publishing companies put out their own version of the kindle books rather than Amazon doing it themselves. I understand this principle. However, I cannot understand the lack of standards between different publishers. One of my favorite features of the kindle is linked footnotes, and a lot of books just have endnotes in the back instead of the linked footnotes. It seems like it would be easy to have across-the-board standards for the different companies.

Overall, the kindle is awesome. I now only have to lug one book and a kindle on a trip, instead of taking 3-4 books with me. I love my kindle so much that I bought a second one off a friend (who got it as a gift and was not a fan) and gave it to my mom, who also loves it.

If anyone is interested, the case I have is also awesome.

Update 02/14/11: There are new updates for the kindle. The first two problems (page numbers from the print editions and borrowing books) have now been fixed, although the former has only been solved on certain kindle books and only for the newest editions of the Kindle 6". I discuss this in a recent blogpost. The borrowing books feature is also questionable. The book leaves your kindle and moves to the other person's kindle for either 2 or 3 weeks, and then it returns. Each book can only be lent once. As a person who lends out a lot of books and who is loaned a lot of books, this system seems pretty ridiculous. However, it's better than nothing.

Endnotes

1. For anyone interested, any documents that have been scanned with facing pages can be split into two separate documents with your pdf reader/editor program and then merged by alternate pages with PDFsam. This takes a few minutes, but if you do it once a week or so with all of the electronic reserve documents, it really helps. I got this tip from a friend.

Circumnavigating the Wall: Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Multivariable Calculus

From the time I was 10 or so I wanted to become an astrophysicist. I fell in love with looking at and reading about the solar system when I was four, but that was followed by a brief period where I wanted to join the CDC. By the time I was 13 I was voraciously reading any book I could understand about cosmology and quantum mechanics.

One summer, I did a program at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, One of the books that was assigned to me (that I never got around to reading) was the Archives of the Universe.

The book looks fabulous. It teaches about the history of astronomy through compiling selection from the revolutionary texts that changed the history of astronomy and the way that humankind views the universe. I did try to read it before, but I am embarrassed to say I had some difficulty with visualizing some of the mathematical moves made in Chapter 4: Measuring the Earth's Circumference. Recently I asked Cerinthus if he would read it with me, but unfortunately he had to leave for his adventure before we got the chance. The book is currently on my reading list, but I am not sure how long it will be before I get to it.

This image was taken by Alan, the leader of my summer program at PARI.

Teaching my SAT class reminds me how much I love theoretical math and science. Although I cannot get enough of both classics and the friends I made studying it, I sometimes wonder whether I should have continued down the other path. I just had trouble tolerating the way that Physics 100 was taught. I know that mechanics are radically important to physics, but I wanted to learn about the interactions of stars and galaxies, not the movement of a piece of wood attached to a spring. The only part of college physics that I really enjoyed was Special Relativity.

I also hit a wall in math. Although I took Introduction to Real Analysis and Introduction to Number Theory, both of which I adored, I could not understand my professor in Multivariable Calculus. I found single variable calculus in high school to be a breeze and it really made me love math. I recommend taking calculus to all of my students because it is such a fascinating subject. But I do not know whether it was my book or my professor, but I remember not being able to understand anything at all in my multivariable class and eventually dropped it. I plan on teaching myself both more math and more physics (and I would love book/website/etc recommendations, if anyone has any), but I sometimes long for a way to break back into the world of math and science.