Lelyn R. Masters

Aeschylus staged Persians 8 years after Salamis. No victory lap. No Greek hero. Only the defeated speaking. The test of victory isn’t winning, but what you become after. open.substack.com/pub/lelyn/p/pe… #Aeschylus #GreekTragedy #Persians #FreeSpeech #PoliticalThought

اول لقاء دبلوماسي موثق. المشهد التاريخي الذي يصور الملك الآشوري شلمنصر الثالث يصافح الملك البابلي مردوخ زاكر شومي الأول. المصافحة لم تكن مجرد تحية، بل كانت حركة رسمية توثق تحالفاً بين مملكتي آشور وبابل. يعود تاريخ هذه القطعة الفنية إلى القرن التاسع قبل الميلاد. #العراق

Phenomenal post, and one of the best uses of LLMs I've seen: "I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out. I used a list of 190 major inventions that I’ve used for previous analyses of technology. For each invention, I asked Claude Opus 4.7 how much earlier it could have been invented." construction-physics.com/p/how-long-do-…

I'm 100% in. The movie you're describing has 0 chance of making ROI, and would need a whole other director, but I for one would love it.

Ibn Rushd greatly admired Aristotle, even though he disagreed with him on several important issues. One of these issues is the exclusivity of reason to men and those who were not slaves. Like the Abbasid Mutazila before him, Ibn Rushd believed in the absolute justice of God, and since God could not justly create humans with unequal intellectual capacities and then limit salvation to those with well-developed intellectual powers, he argued that God endowed everyone with some rational ability, the differences are largely due to whether these abilities were developed or not. And from this notion he developed his theory on why there are three different ways to reach the truth depending one's intellectual abilities, through which God made the truth accessible to all people.

I don't know if we should fight about it, but it shouldn't sit well with us the way Odysseus kills the suitors. Why does Polyphemos get avenged, but Ithaca gets no justice against a man who twice destroyed a cohort of its youth?

I thank my brother HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, for the special gesture of receiving me at Abu Dhabi airport. I look forward to our discussions towards furthering India-UAE ties across key sectors like energy, investment, supply chains and more. @MohamedBinZayed

Where are those Venice photos?!

Nishida writes (in the preface to An Inquiry Into The Good) When I later wrote this book, I had no idea that it would be read for such a long time by so many people, or that I would live long enough to see numerous editions of it. I cannot help feeling like Saigyo: I never thought I would cross Mount Nakayama again; yet, growing old, I live long enough to do so tonight.

The Chinese President in San Francisco, United States, 1985 ..

Nature looks unstoppable, yet engineering keeps outsmarting it

Octopus Mosaic in Pompeii, Italy

Everyone debates Emily Wilson’s “complicated” for πολύτροπος (polytropos). But her “circumspect” for περίφρων (periphrōn) may matter just as much. Odysseus turns many ways because Penelope thinks all around. The home he seeks is not passive. It is watching.

Panel from a 16th-century Venetian edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, illustrating Paradiso Canto XXII with Dante and Beatrice among the stars.

Going through this I realized the joy of English is that we have so many words for each and every thing. The joy of this Greek word polytropos is one word that means many irreducible things.

@alfarojoshua3 oh, and Chatty. Exhausting, Boisterous. Baffling. Canny. Shenanigans loving. Joker. Bad. Infuriating. Problematic. Roundabout. Indirect. Multivalent.

@alfarojoshua3 Devious. Mischievous. Turnt. Crazy. Effed up. Turturous. Difficult. Surprising. Multiple. Gone. Shifty. Dodgy. Crafty. Contrary. Multitude containing. Excessive.

How to translate polytropos? Many ways.

@alfarojoshua3 How to translate polytropos? It's complicated

Night thoughts on “polytropos,” 1: The syntax of the Greek suggests that the relative clause (“who greatly wandered…”) that follows this adjective is intended as a gloss on it. Hence the translation of p should be a word(s) that describes his route as well as his personality.

If even one person reads the Odyssey who otherwise wouldn't have, then we all owe #ChristopherNolan a debt.

Every Arabic speaker says "ahlan wa sahlan" (أهلاً وسهلاً). Almost nobody knows what it actually means. It's not just "welcome." It's two promises hidden inside two words.