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Interesting Stuff Thread
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Five thirty eight (better known for US election forecasting & US sports stats) has a good data science podcast.
The latest episode (link) is an interview with Justin Schmidt, the entomologist who stings himself with insects, thereby winning himself an Ig Nobel prize last year.
With a bewildering 83 species to choose from, Schmidt is your sommelier of stings, helping you select from least to worst and describing the different kinds of pain that nature has to offer.
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Saw this in my child's junior infants reader the other day. I'm sure it's totally a coincidink that the strap on the GREEN BAG was so carefully drawn to obscure the R and the N. and they just forgot to draw the unobscured bits of the R and the N. :pac:
In Cavan there was a great fire / Judge McCarthy was sent to inquire / It would be a shame / If the nuns were to blame / So it had to be caused by a wire.
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Join Date:Posts: 26436
so this is amusing, somebody got that annoying let it go song, put it through google translate to a few different languages and then translated it back to English.
Its much better then the Disney version :pac:
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In the early 80s Martin Amis wrote a little-known non-fiction book he has since disowned, on the subject of... videogames.
http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/the-arcades-project-martin-amis-guide-to-classic-video-games.htmlLike most Amis fanciers, I had heard of the existence of this video game book –- the full title of which is Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines –- but knew very little about it. What I did know was that he dashed it off at some point during the time he was writing Money, one of the great British novels of the 1980s, and that it has long been out of print (a copy in good nick will cost you about $150 from Amazon). And I knew, most of all, that Amis was reluctant to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian once suggested to him (facetiously, surely) that it was among the best things he’d ever written, and that it was a mistake to have allowed it to go out of print. “The expression on his face,” wrote Lezard, “with perhaps more pity in it than contempt, remains with me uncomfortably.”
Aside from the off-the-charts weirdness of its very existence, the book offers a number of peripheral pleasures. For one thing, there’s a half-expected (but still surprising) guest appearance from what I would be willing to bet is a young Christopher Hitchens. In a diverting rant about the increasing presence of voice effects in games, Amis recalls his first exposure to such gimmickry at a bar in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1980:
I was with a friend, a hard-drinking journalist, who had drunk roughly three times as much Calvados as I had drunk the night before. And I had drunk a lot of Calvados the night before. I called for coffee, croissants, juice; with a frown the barman also obeyed my friend’s croaked request for a glass of Calvados.
Then we heard, from nowhere, a deep, guttural, Dalek-like voice which seemed to say: “Heed! Gorgar! Heed! Gorgar … speaks!
“… Now what the hell was that?” asked my friend.
“I think it was one of the machines,” I said, rising in wonder.
“I’ve had it,” said my friend with finality. “I can’t cope with this,” he explained as he stumbled from the bar.In Cavan there was a great fire / Judge McCarthy was sent to inquire / It would be a shame / If the nuns were to blame / So it had to be caused by a wire.
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interesting graphic
A belief in gender identity involves a level of faith as there is nothing tangible to prove its existence which, as something divorced from the physical body, is similar to the idea of a soul. - Colette Colfer
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Please note both the URL and the actual headline contain a word which is possibly NSFW, but you wouldn't be reading boards on a work PC anyway would you?
'Webcam hackers caught me w***ing, demanded $10k ransom'
Hard to imagine the Irish or British public broadcasters being as forthright as the Australian one
In Cavan there was a great fire / Judge McCarthy was sent to inquire / It would be a shame / If the nuns were to blame / So it had to be caused by a wire.
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Peregrinus wrote: »First, just for clarification: with regard to, e.g., the conflict over the date of Jesus’ birth, you offer this as an instance of an “internal contradiction”. Is that strictly correct? Matthew suggests one date; Luke suggests an inconsistent date, but surely that’s an external contradiction, a conflict between two different texts by two different authors?
Yes, you're absolutely right. I should have said external contradiction. Apologies.Peregrinus wrote: »On the main point, Suetonius acknowledges different accounts and attempts to resolve them. Whichever of Luke and Matthew is writing later makes no mention of the earlier nativity account. This could be either (a) because he doesn’t know of it, or (b) he does know of it, but he’s not bothered by the contradiction and doesn’t expect his readers to be bothered by it.
If we assume (a), obviously the historicity of each of the nativity accounts is undermined by the existence of an independent, and completely different, account. But the historicity of other material which is common to the two texts is not compromised. If anything, surely, it’s enhanced? If we take the later writer to have known nothing of the earlier text, obviously he can’t be copying the earlier text, so he represents an independent source for the material that they have in common. Or, both are drawing common material from an earlier source (which could be Mark or Q) which is not compromised by the inclusion of a problematic nativity narrative.
If we assume (b) then, again, the historicity of both nativity accounts is undermined. But we can’t say that the historical reliability of the later text as a whole is undermined; all we can say is that the author wasn’t seeking to write history in the way that Suetonius wrote it. Suetonius felt the need to reconcile known contradictions; the gospel writer did not feel a similar need, at least with respect to the nativity story, and he obviously didn’t think that this would impeach his credibility for his readers. He’s writing in a different genre, in other words, with differing conventions and differing expectation from his readers. That doesn’t necessarily mean that his reliability as a historical source is compromised; just that we have to read him mindful of the conventions of the genre.
Firstly, I would say that I think your dilemma between (a) and (b) above is incomplete. I think that the far more likely option is that Luke is aware of Matthew's gospel and rather than deal with the contradiction he simply corrects (from his perspective) Matthew's mistake. There is some precedent for this in the gospels. In chapter 5 of Mark, Jesus casts out a legion of demons from a possessed man which then enter a herd of pigs who run down the hill and are drowned. However, Mark, due to his ignorance of Palestinian geography places this event in the land of the Gerasenes about 30km from the Sea of Galilee, undermining the historicity of the story. Matthew, realising Mark's mistake makes a subtle but important change. He changes the location from the land of the Gerasenes to the land of the Gadarenes, about 5km from the Sea of Galilee. It doesn't completely solve the problem but it lessens Mark's mistake. However, in both instances the later writer simply overwrites the earlier writer's mistake rather than further draw attention to it. Whether this is done out of a desire to preserve the sanctity of the earlier work or because historical details are less important to the writer than the theological message, I'm not entirely sure.
Also, with regard to the infancy narrative and the relationship between Luke and Matthew, the two source hypothesis that Luke and Matthew derived their gospels from Mark and an unnamed Q source is at odds with this contradiction. Firstly, Q is a sayings gospel and as such an infancy narrative is not something which would have been documented in Q. Secondly, if the two authors are drawing their material from a common source, there shouldn't be a contradiction in the first place.
Secondly, I would say that the idea that Luke is unfamiliar with Matthew is very unlikely IMHO. There are some clear examples of passages where Luke borrows from Matthew.
One such example of Luke copying from Matthew is the parable of the Ten talents in Matthew 25 and Luke 19.
Matthew's account is more coherent and easier to read while Luke's contains some anachronistic passages which are hard to understand until you read the two of them side by side.
The problem originates from Luke changing the story from three servants in Matthew's version to ten. As a result, we see some very odd passages.
In Matthew's version there are three servants who are given five, two and one bag of gold respectively. They then earn five more, two more and none respectively. However in Luke's version, although there are ten servants we are only told about three (the first, the second and the other). Furthermore, the best servant in Matthew's version has turned his five bags of gold into ten, which prompts the line:
"So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags."
However, in Luke's version all ten servants are each only given one minas. So when the best servant reports:
"Sir your mina has earned ten more"
this servant now has eleven minas. However the king goes on to admonish the wicked servant by saying:
"Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minas"
So Luke directly copies the line from Matthew and fails to allow for the fact that the best servant actually has eleven minas, thus revealing his copying mistake.
Luke's version is incoherent and disjointed until you read it as a poor copy of Matthew's version.
Editorial fatigue is a moderately recurring theme in Luke and is best shown in the feeding of the Five Thousand. In this story Mark places the setting for the story in a desert place, making the lack of food make sense. However, Luke opens his version by placing the setting in Bethsaida. This causes two problems. Firstly, in a city like Bethsaida food and drink should be close at hand and a miracle would not be necessary. Secondly, later on in the story Luke forgets himself and agrees with Mark saying: "because we are in a remote place here."
Luke makes this exact same mistake in copying Matthew with the story of the Centurion in Matthew 8. In Matthew's version he refers to the centurion's servant as pais consistently throughout the story. However Luke opens his story by referring to the servant as doulos before forgetting and switching to pais in Luke 7:7 and then switch back again in Luke 7:10.
So, in conclusion I think we can dispense with the (a) option of your dilemma, which just leaves the (b) option. I agree with you that the unreliability of the infancy narrative alone doesn't undermine the historical reliability of the whole text. However, repeated examples of similar contradictions does. There are a multitude of examples from the different gospels where the historical reliability is compromised by external contradictions, factual mistakes, syncretic borrowings etc.Peregrinus wrote: »With regard to anonymity, the term may be a bit misleading. None of the four gospel writers name themselves, but does Suetonius? Or is it external evidence that persuades us that this text was, in fact, written by a bloke named Suetonius? And even if Suetonius does name himself, so what? The author’s name, as such, isn’t of great importance and, unless the author is a known associate of his subject or eyewitness of his events, it’s no indicator of historical reliability. As you point out Tacitus is explicit in saying that he didn’t know at least some of his subjects. We admire his candour, but how does this reassure us of the historical reliability of what he narrates about his subjects? If anything, the opposite, surely?
Firstly, Suetonius does identify himself in the text. He makes numerous autobiographical references to himself. In The Life of Caligula he references his earlier writings:
"I myself find in the gazette that he first saw the light at Antium."
and in The Life of Otho he makes reference to his father (in such a way that a reader could verify his claims):
"My father Suetonius Laetus took part in that war, as a tribune of the equestrian order in the Thirteenth legion. He used often to declare afterwards that Otho, even when he was a private citizen, so loathed civil strife, that at the mere mention of the fate of Brutus and Cassius at a banquet he shuddered; that he would not have engaged with Galba, if he had not felt confident that the affair could be settled peacefully; further, that he was led to hold his life cheap at that time by the example of a common soldier. This man on bringing news of the defeat of the army was believed by no one, but was charged by the soldiers now with falsehood and now with cowardice, and accused of running away; whereupon he fell on his sword at the emperor's feet. My father used to say that at this sight Otho cried out that he would no longer endanger the lives of such brave men, who had deserved so well."
However, Suetonius in writing biographies rather than an even more rigorous historical account doesn't make the kind of explicit identification typical of the genre. For example, in The Roman Antiquities, Dionysius of Halicarnassus opens his work by explaining his motivation for undertaking his work, he cites previous authors in the field and their contribution and finally he makes this statement:
"Such things, therefore, will be the subjects of my history and such will be its form. I, the author, am Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the son of Alexander. And at this point I begin."
Dionysius' work reads like a modern scientific paper (although more long-winded) compared to Suetonius' textbook approach. However neither of these works, nor other historical works of the time read like the gospels. This is, of course, consistent with the academic position. Although we are merely scratching the surface of this topic here, the structure of the gospels and the import of this for their historical reliability has been well studied:
Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (Ronald Hock)
Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christian and Jewish Narrative (Jo-Ann Brant)
The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative: Fictional Intersections (Marilia Pinheiro)
Profit With Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles (Richard Pervo)
The Problem of Markan Genre: The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Novel (Michael Vines)
What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Richard Burridge)
The Homeric Epics and the gospel of Mark (Dennis MacDonald)
I think the best way to sum up the difference between the gospels and historically reliable accounts is this:
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson constructs a complex and in-depth narrative ranging from the codebreakers of WWII to the SE Asia tech boom of the 90s. It contains fictional characters such as Lawrence Waterhouse and real historical figures such as Alan Turing. There are parts of the book which are historically accurate. However, nobody in their right mind would suggest that we should treat Cryptonomicon as a source for answering historical questions because the book isn't intended to be a historical account, it is a novel. Similarly the gospels shouldn't be relied upon for historical information because that's not what they are. They are biographical novels, adding a backstory for Jesus to try and promote the newly formed Christian religion.Peregrinus wrote: »I’m not so much interested in the names of the writers, as their sources and purpose in writing; these will tell me far more about reliability, surely? Some of the sources we know or can conjecture. (Matthew and Luke are both relying on Mark and probably Q; each is also relying on other, not-shared, sources.) Sometimes the authors tell us a little about their purpose in writing. Luke, for example, starts off by telling his reader(s) that there are already a number of accounts in circulation, baseed on eyewitness testimony, and that his purpose is to compile them into a single narrative, to make their significance easier to understand. In other words, he’s not seeking to tell people facts they don’t already know; he’s compiling what they do know and presenting it in a way that underscores its significance. Which tells me that there was (or Luke believed that there was) already an audience out there who accepted the factuality of the material he is dealing with. Knowing that is much more useful as a critical tool, surely, than knowing Luke’s name?
Sorry, Peregrinus but I have to disagree here. The "sources" documented by Luke are so vague that they are completely useless. Luke claims that there are multiple sources for his work:
"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word."
This is just a claim, just like the claim by Paul that there were 500 witnesses to the resurrected Jesus. And without identifying the sources, Luke's claim is just as useless to a historian as Paul's. It is hearsay, something that in today's system of jurisprudence we have learned to disregard completely. Compare and contrast Luke's vague declaration above with an actual historian's discussion of his sources below (Roman Antiquities by Dionysius):
Thus, having given an explanation for my choice of subject matter, I wish now to discuss the sources that I used when setting out to write my history. For perhaps readers who are already familiar with Hieronymus, Timaeus, Polybius, or any other historian that I mentioned a short while ago as being careless in their works, when they do not find many things in my own writings that are mentioned in theirs, will suspect me of fabricating them, and will want to know where I learned of such things. Lest anyone should hold such an opinion of me, it seems better that I should state in advance what narratives and records I have used as sources. I sailed to Italy at the very time when Augustus Caesar put an end to civil war, in the middle of the one hundred and eighty-seventh Olympiad [30 BCE], and having spent twenty-two years in Rome from that time to the present, I learned the Latin language and familiarized myself with Roman literature, and during all this time I remained devoted to matters bearing upon my subject. Some of my information I learned orally from the most educated men whose company I shared, while the rest I gathered from the histories that were written by esteemed Roman authors–such as Porcius Cato, Fabius Maximus, Valerius Antias, Licinius Macer, the Aelii, Gellii and Calpurnii–as well as other men who are noteworthy. Setting out with these works, which are similar to the Greek annalistic accounts, as my sources, I then put my hands to writing my history.
Dionysius is transparent and names his citations just as any modern peer-reviewed paper would. Luke doesn't and so his claim that there are sources is useless.
Secondly, you refer to Mark and Q as sources for Luke. However, this just pushes the question back a step. Mark is also anonymous and from the evidence of his gospel is someone who is clearly not an eyewitness and is unfamiliar with the customs, geography and laws of the region he is writing about. So what about Mark's sources? Q is even weaker since there is no extant copy of Q. It is just assumed that there must be a Q because both Matthew and Luke copy from it. However, the existence of Q is no measure of its reliability.
Finally, as you say, Luke is not writing for non-Christians. He is writing for an educated Greek-speaking Christian audience. His intention is to explain the meaning of events that have occurred rather than convince his audience that these events have occurred. However, this means that historical accuracy is not a primary motivation for Luke.Peregrinus wrote: »With regard to the narration of direct speech, yes, obviously we have to ask how journalistically accurate this can be. On the other hand, we have to bear in mind that Jesus is presented as an itinerant teacher who taught by preaching; that it’s reasonable to suppose that he delivered the same teachings many times over (and indeed there’s evidence in the texts that he did) and that his close followers would have heard them frequently over a period of possibly years; that his followers had an interest in recalling and preserving his teachings; that many “sayings gospels” which consist solely of teachings attributed to Jesus are known to exist or to have existed, and that the competing canonical gospels are far more likely to agree on speech attributed to Jesus than they are on any other point. So I suggest that Thycidides’ comments about recalling speech in the context in which he was writing are not entirely apposite in this context. The gospel writers could be capturing speech, if not perfectly reliably, certainly more reliably that Thucydides claimed to.
OK, there are two points here.
The first but less important point is that Christians are not likely to have been any better at remembering speeches forty years later than non-Christians were. It's very likely, even taking into account the repetition of the speeches, that the sermons recorded in the gospels are synopses of the original speeches, editorialised recollections. They will have gotten the message right and the basic structure right but they're not likely to be 100% accurate word for word.
However, the important point here is not about the faultiness in recording direct speech but the level of direct speech which is presented in the gospels. Both Acts and the Gospels have use direct speech at a much higher frequency than historical works of the era and much more in line with fictional novels of the time. Acts reports the highest usage with 51% of the overall text being made up of direct speech. The gospels have a slightly lower but similar proportion. This aligns well with Jewish novels of the day (Judith 50%, Susanna 46%) but stands in marked contrast to historical accounts and biographies: (Josephus’ Jewish War I: 8.8%, Plutarch’s Alexander: 12.1%; Tacitus’ Agricola: 11.5%).
Direct Speech in Acts and the Question of Genre
Mark's gospel which forms the backbone of the synoptics is written as a novel. It is told from the perspective of a 3rd person omniscient narrator and borrows heavily from the Old Testament, Egyptian myth and Homeric epics to construct a "hidden hero" style backstory for Jesus. It may contain historical characters and events but anyone looking to use Mark as a historically reliable document is barking up the wrong tree.
The gospels are backstories for Jesus, something used to put a bit of meat on the bones of the primordial Christian religion. They are not intended to be used as historically reliable accounts. Unfortunately for Christians, despite the claims of Matthew 4:24 and Mark 7:36, the fame of Jesus doesn't seem to have spread far or wide enough for any non biblical historians to have made anything more than passing references to him. So, as unreliable as the gospels may be, they're the best Christians have got.0 -
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofrW2YXoMTM
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