caesar novus
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Posts posted by caesar novus
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On 4/1/2024 at 5:30 AM, caesar novus said:
to which I would add Roman historian Goldsworthy's very worthy youtube channel:
I like his "introduction" video chats which encapsulate Roman figures based on actual evidence vs popular stereotypes:
The British School at Rome has a good lecture on Roman house genealogy, sort of a blockchain of previous owners ancient Romans liked to trace:
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2 hours ago, guy said:
Although convenient for the casual tourist, I think it will further disfigure the already-diminished ancient footprint of Ancient Rome.
I think phase 2 will be a spectacular win, linking the under visited Circus Maximus to under visited Baths of Caracalla to u. v. Via Appia. I think we discussed the Darya video on how the isolated new Map museum and sculpture garden is included too. Nobody but me makes the horrible walk between these relatively adjacent sites due to multi-lane fast roads, industrial vibe where you can hardly buy a hydrating drink, and poor signage/sidewalks/crosswalks. I hate the logistics and loss of context using wheeled travel instead.
Phase 1 could turn out intrusive, but I think taps into the less busy side of the coliseum towards the weird grassy hill east side of the Forum. Not many go there since you can't see what's ahead and whether it is worth the climb; I stumbled around there only because of the new Nero dining room excavation, which I found practically deserted. It would be a plus even relieving pressure on the coliseum by offering alternative strolls.
Crossing thru the Palace area to the racetrack could be intrusive, but folks need a little guidance there anyway because it isn't obvious you can get thru the palaces to the racetrack. It is such a maze that on my first visit back when the forum was free, I found myself walking on an exquisite decorated floor all wavy and fragile with poor options to avoid it or back off.
It's not clear where the route will go due to the articles having paywalls, etc but I think phase 1 generally doesn't intrude except to give guidence in areas where there is a lot of random congestion and confusion. I include a picture that falsely looks intrusive, but depicts almost no change to the recent practice of closing off the horrible road Mussolini plowed thru the Forum. I would rather Via dei Fori Imperiali be torn out and excavated, but shutting out vehicle traffic with a few niceties seems fine:
Other anecdotes: Now you can be walking quite close to the massive Baths of Caracalla and not see it. I made a rare exception and asked directions which just confused things since I accented the wrong syllable into gibberish. I looked for a street sign for a major road branching off another major one to shortcut to Via Appia, with absolutely none in sight in the industrial wasteland deprived of pedestrians. Another shortcut was super narrow and twisty with fast traffic barely scraping brick walls and each other with side mirrors. I was like a hunted animal who couldn't see when to creep thru the rubble safely. The only foot traffic was a couple stunning blondes walking with just wisps of clothing and cheap flip flops. Unlike me, they could obliviously walk in traffic lanes because the drivers stopped on a dime to stare. Ah, so much more I could pass on...
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A UCSD history professor riffs on Mary Beard's new book as well as state of Roman study in both academia and popular culture. Quite articulate altho I find some of the points odd, as I usually do for Mary as well. See "The Crisis of Classical Studies" https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-crisis-of-classical-studies-on-mary-beards-emperor-of-rome/
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On 7/18/2023 at 8:41 AM, caesar novus said:
essential Roman channels to subscribe to ...
https://www.youtube.com/@AncientRomeLive/videos
to which I would add Roman historian Goldsworthy's very worthy youtube channel:
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Here is a malaria map of Italy 1882 but the hotspot returned in the 1940s when Germans sabotaged drainage canals from the Roman thru Mussolini era in deliberate biological warfare.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontine_Marshes for this swamp shaping the location of Via Appia, and how pre Mussolini:
QuoteThe Italian Red Cross related that, during the malaria season, 80% of those having spent one night in the marsh became infected.
So for south of Rome it was solved in the 1930s, backfired cruelly in the 1940s, and:
QuoteThe last of the malaria was conquered in the 1950s, with the aid of DDT.
After benefiting from DDT tough love, the first world scaremongered third world countries out of even one time eradications.
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Max Miller: “Eating at the Colosseum.”
I already had posted that video several days ago at https://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/19852-notable-videos-of-roman-misc/?page=3&tab=comments#comment-133696 . I also had put in the effort to go thru his catalog of videos which has countless Roman related ones, and featured 4 additional ones most likely interesting to this forum.
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Granted, much of the age categories are uninteresting but that is just one of 10 ways to break it down, like whether self employed. Even aside of timeframes and breakdowns, I am amazed at some of the overall wealth levels in spite of housing or wuflu cycles. How representative are these survey responders?
The main thing is the 25 or so types of financial issues, and secondarily to map across time. The tertiary age details do let'you examine for instance how are the recently retired faring or the middle aged. The 75+ group seems to be doing surprising well as in not running out of money. The young are struggling in various ways sensitive to interest rates, which the fed is setting. Other gov't may use these numbers to adjust social security.
More example chart variations:
Debt by current work status of reference person
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How are your neighbors doing? The US Federal Reserve offers interactive charts of income, net worth, debt, vehicles, real estate, etc from surveys the last 33 years. I about fell off my chair at the numbers, altho not so much the change over time. Best to leave it showing median rather than mean or else the crazy outliers will dominate. You can slice it many ways, like to see if folks were house-rich but cash-poor at a certain year and age group.
I will show examples by age breakdown, but keep in mind that it's not the same people over time but the same age group at each year. One distortion is that a pension really means the custodian has to have a hidden million or so to fund it, while someone who retires only on their own savings looks deceptively well off especially when they will have to pay cap gains taxes on liquidation. Play with the charts as you like:
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Really good depiction of Roman cooking and historical context:
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12 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
wife wants us to move to Honolulu
Retirees may find an arbitrage opportunity for mainland vs Honolulu real estate. The former high vs the latter maybe impacted by China's real estate crash. I know someone who did this during Japan's crash a couple decades ago.
Wealthy Chinese invested in various Honolulu luxury towers just for asset hiding; rarely actually occupied I believe. Desperation sales may arise, but often for units intended for transient time shares with the associated fees. But U.S. mainlanders rarely last more than a few years in Hawaii, which has unique flavors of dysfunction yet strives to adopt California type dysfunction.
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I understood that they first used conventional approach to virtually unwrap and examine, as done for the dead sea scrolls. Then let the contestants try to find still elusive words:
Quote“crackle” — that seemed to form the shapes of Greek letters. Luke Farritor, an undergraduate studying computer science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, used the crackle to train a machine-learning algorithm
That was from skimming the Nature article; maybe I missed something from the videos which are too linear for my patience. The news article may have oversold/clickbaited the AI angle.
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I wonder if they can make an estimate of how accurate their AI results are. Pattern matching approaches may be biased to find known stereotypes. Maybe they can calibrate by running against remains of an old Torah vs. modern, which I gather doesn't change even punctuation marks for ages.
I had involvement in early AI approaches, which were quite elegant in tracking degree of certainty and could even explain it's reasoning. But sometimes this approach hits a wall, and fuzzy pattern matching approaches became popular, which I didn't respect much.
An example of the difference is innocence vs reasonable doubt of guilt (= not guilty). An exact AI system may flail forever trying to determine innocence with uncertainty of alibis etc. A pattern matcher can step back and rule not guilty if the perp looks anywhere from 0 to 98% guilty (with 99-100% being guilty). BTW I hate those "innocence projects" that crow about tiny adjustments of reasonable doubt.
Wikipedia unexpectedly has a very lucid description of various current AI approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence which puts me more at ease that more than just pattern matching is used. The sloppy AI narrations common on youtube probably shouldn't blacken the reputation of AI in general.
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18 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
it would be broos- ketta. Neither is right
I'm still clinging to the hard c approach, as claimed in wiki: Italian: [bruˈsketta]. Once an effete waitress on Oxford campus condescendingly corrected me with the sh sound, and regardless of her Nobel prizes I want to think my way was closer to correct. Otherwise my only claim to worldly distinction was once being asked directions by a UPS man in my first few minutes in London. I may have been helpful since I memorize maps of new places rather than use anything digital.
Quotehope everything is alright by you...
We were one magnitude short of looting in the streets, which happens with extended power outages even among gentle acculturated people. The issue of structural safety is more slow-burn, with tension cables stealthily snapping within concrete. Takes a few years to catastrophically fail... or be found and fixed. Tension cables seem a nasty invention less forgiving than rebar.
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Ciao is supposed to retain it's intimate origin by not being used with strangers by Italians according to https://italyexplained.com/the-history-of-the-word-ciao-why-you-shouldnt-say-it-in-italy/ . Sort of like another hello/goodbye word aloha. But the foreign enthusiasm for the word detached from it's origin may seep into Italy.
I am surprised foreigners properly pronounce the Italian i as h (ciao=chow) and (lasagna=lazonya) and (pizza=peetsa). But they don't remain true to phonetic rules to harden the ch in bruschetta or silence the first i in Gianni.
Word origins may sometimes carry almost no meaning except as a random seed for a utilitarian word or phrase. The most annoying of such is to reward a sloppy malignant sneezer with a blessing which happens in several languages as a vacuous placeholder according to video below. I propose the sneeze response instead to demand accountability, as in "can't you spare a penny for your allergy with an antihistamine?" or "don't you ever wash your hands?" or "wear a dustmask when you vacuum, knucklehead!".
P.S. this post was composed during a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, but power is still up...
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Roman Philadelphia, now with historical captions defaulted to "on" based on my urging. This one is a little spread out so you may want to increase the playback speed. Have you neglected to use captions on Prowalk's umpteen other Roman site walkthrus?
No, the below isn't another diversity rant on how princess Snow White was in reality a Kalahari Bushwomen:
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Roman marines and maritime aspects of that special exhibit:
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The Historian's Craft is a high quality channel often dipping into late Roman times. The graphics are excellent and most notable are the high quality comments, such as wisdom of Rome representing fractions in base 12 rather than 10.
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Guy sayeth:
QuoteThe B-52’s produced this memorable song with an ancient theme:
How about ancient egyptian in name only? Actually Sam below retired from "rock" to be a motivational speaker and has a sweet eccentric philosophical vlog series on https://www.youtube.com/@samtheshamvideos.
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3 hours ago, guy said:
The fact that none of the fragments were curved, however, makes me think a column was unlikely.
Oh, I just meant the principle of an elevated viewpoint to any tall vertical (or horizontal) surface . Actually that column is supposed to be viewed as almost a wall. Scholars say you don't follow the spiral but view narrative from the bottom to top from 2 nearly opposed sides. Maybe that is why I found the unraveled spiral casts at the EUR museum unsatisfying.
Anyway new answers and questions from:
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I thought until recently it was affixed to an external brick wall, but that was probably from a Mussolini era re-imagining. Whether horizontal or vertical, it could have had elevated viewing platforms, like for Trajan's Column or a mosaic floor in Anacapri:
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Not so much listening but watching performance theatrics of classic rock. Not the 98% of contrived over the top antics, but natural conviction and ability (Jagger took after his famous physical fitness guru father):
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10 hours ago, guidoLaMoto said:
Maybe the original was actually placed on the floor?
Stanford has the 1000+ fragments crisply digitized even in 3d, so maybe you can look for signs of sandal abrasion vs vertical weathering: http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/ They also show 87 lost fragments from Renaissance drawings of them! Furthermore Stanford has a project that maps transport networks throughout Roman empire: https://orbis.stanford.edu/
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Besides the "map" superimposed on a 300 year old map of Rome, they are refurbishing it's whole dilapidated historic property including walkable grounds with archeo fragments. Hopefully this will extend the foot traffic on kind of the "wrong" shadeless desolate side of the coliseum, and bridge to onward attractions like Baths of Caracalla / St John Lateran / Via Appia.
I love walking the continuous fabric of a city instead of being abruptly plunked at spots, although the shade of a few more umbrella pines there would help. Maybe can't dig a hole for a root ball without unearthing a zeroth-century vomitorium? Anyway, even Ostia Appia seems closer using a nearby train station. https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/archaeology/rome-caelian-archaeological-park-opens-to-the-public-with-new-forma-urbis-museum
QuoteThe project is part of a broader transformation of the Caelian Hill and the entire Monumental Archaeological Center, starting with a number of important interventions: consolidation and rehabilitation work on the former Municipal Antiquarium will begin shortly, which will put an end to the building’s almost century-long neglect. In addition, the green area of the Caelian will be upgraded in vegetation, paths, overlooks toward the Palatine and connections with the Colosseum area, through a project by the Department of Environmental Protection. Finally, the New Archaeological Walkway, along Via di San Gregorio, will connect the Caelian Park with the Monumental Archaeological Center.
May be some risk to the proliferation of niche museums in Rome, showing this new restoration and that. Often they are relatively expensive and you can see everything twice in 20 or 30 minutes. Then on to the next 5 niche mu$eum$ that day, some of which require inflexible appointments and weren't what you expected. They tend to have low attendance and are hard to staff. A normal medium or giant museum has diversity so a few disappointments are balanced by unexpected things that ring your bell. I knocked a ton of these small museums off on a "free museum" week they have around April, and got quite a perspective.
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The Pantheon sometimes opens interesting back rooms in a structure that was meant to reinforce an area developing cracks early on. There are even a couple of external flying buttresses there. I speculate that the huge front portico must be pressing the drum structure to the rear (no cracks on it's sides). Anyway this vid shows exhibits there including nice decorative fragments:
By the way, here is how decorative elements can be robo-sculpted now in case you want some Corinthian topped columns:
What Song Are You Listening to Now?
in Hora Postilla Thermae
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Kathy Sledge performs well in the Verona Arena, which is also featured in toldinstone video (3:43) on faked Roman reconstructions: