50 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
      • for: Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, The Upside of Down, Commanding Hope, Cascade Institute, Polycrisis

      • SUMMARY

        • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a researcher in polycrisis and author of a number of books on aspects of the polycrisis.
        • Here he talks about "Commanding Hope", following his other books "The Ingenuity Gap", "The Upside of Down".
        • Homer-Dixon explores the idea of hope situated in his life, especially surrounding his children and their future in an uncertain world.
        • In particular, he explores a robust form of hope that is honest, astute and powerful and he unpacks the meaning of each of these qualities.
        • Even when the odds are stacked against us, robust hope gives us hope that we can make a big difference.
        • Homer-Dixon offers a bounty of insights for anyone engaged in rapid whole system change. His Cascade Institute is developing tools to assist individuals and organizations alike who want to find the leverage points for rapid system change.
    1. the other part of this thinking about stories is to recognize that we don't know the worlds around us the systems 01:14:16 around us well enough to know that good things are impossible
      • for: quote - the impossible, quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon

      • quote

        • We don't know the world's around us the systems around us well enough to know that good things are impossible
      • author: Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • date: 2021
    2. o i come back to this issue of stories and how we organize our thinking 01:11:03 and worlds around stories and especially stories of ours of what our own purpose in life is uh how we respond to our desperate fear of mortality and death i draw on the work of the anthropologist 01:11:16 and social psychologist ernest becker which has been elaborated by social psychologists in something called terror management theory
      • for: adjacency - Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ernest Becker, terror management theory, immortality project
    3. when we get our story wrong we get our future wrong
      • for: quote - when we get our story wrong, we get our future wrong, quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon

      • quote

        • When we get our story wrong, we get our future wrong
      • author: David Korten, quoted by Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • date: 2021
    4. i think the most dangerous thing about ai is not 00:47:11 super smart ai it's uh stupid ai it's artificial intelligence that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes in our societies but not good enough to not make really 00:47:25 bad mistakes
      • for: quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon, quote - danger of AI, AI progress trap

      • quote: danger of AI

        • I think the most dangerous thing about AI is not super smart AI, it's stupid AI that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes but not good enough to not make really bad mistakes
      • author: Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • date: 2021
      • for: polycrisis, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cascade Institute Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series, etymology - polylcrisis

      • Talk: Hope in the Polycrisis

      • Speaker: Thomas Homer-Dixon
      • Host: Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series
      • Date: 2023

      • SUMMARY

        • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a leading complex systems scientist and director of the Cascade Institute, which he co-founded at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., Canada, to study the polycrisis and identify strategic high leverage interventions that could rapidly shift humanity's trajectory in the next few critical years.
        • The talk, entitled "Hope in the polycriisis" chronicles Homer-Dixon's multi-decade journey to understand the convergence of crisis happening in the world today.
        • In a real sense, the evolution of his thinking on these complex problems are reflected in the series of books he has written over the years, culminating in the 2023 book "Commanding Hope", based on a theory of hope:

          • Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999). - a book showing how other factors combine with environmental stress to produce violence.
          • “The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity?,” which appeared in Population and Development Review in 1995
          • “Resource Scarcity and Innovation: Can Poor Countries Attain Endogenous Growth?" ?” coauthored with Edward Barbier, which appeared in Ambio (1999)
          • The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), examined the threat to global stability of simultaneous and interacting demographic, environmental, economic, and political stresses. This led to examining energy as a major factor in our modern society.
          • "Commanding Hope: The Power we have to Renew a World in Peril"
        • Homer-Dixon also talks about practical solutions, His team at Casacade Institute is researching a promising technology called ultra-deep geothermal, which could provide unlimted energy at energy densities comprable to fossil fuels.

        • He finishes his talk with his theory of Hope and how a "Robust" hope can be the key to a successful rapid transition.
      • etymology - polycrisis

        • https://polycrisis.org/lessons/where-did-the-term-polycrisis-come-from/
        • Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern first used the term polycrisis in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to argue that the world faces
          • “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem" (p. 74).
        • South African sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling then adopted the term to capture
          • “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause” (2013, p. 98).
        • Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact (Swilling 2013, 2019).
    1. Why do some societies successfully adapt while others do not? I concluded that a central characteristic of societies that successfully adapt is their ability to produce and deliver useful ideas (or what I call “ingenuity”) to meet the demands placed on them by worsening environmental problems.
  2. Oct 2023
    1. Wilson’s translations are the first in English to jettison slurs or euphemisms that mask the abjection of women in a society where a goal of war, according to the Iliad, was to rob men of their women, and where female captives of every rank were trafficked for sex and domestic labor.
    2. Homer introduces him with the adjective polytropos—literally, “of many turns.” Previous translators have called him “shifty,” “cunning,” and a hundred other things. After grappling with the alternatives, Wilson chose “complicated,” hoping also to convey the sense of “problematic.” Her first sentence—“Tell me about a complicated man”—instantly makes him our familiar: that charismatic prince who’s too impossible to live with and too desirable to live without.
  3. Sep 2023
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U3lGD2mNRY

      Calling Homer "poetry" here may be slightly helpful, but modern baggage of the concept is unhelpful. It also leaves out the rich texture of orality inherent in Homer, which she only touches on briefly.

  4. Aug 2023
    1. BookmarkTypes and uses of PKM

      Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

      If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

  5. Aug 2022
    1. Class discussion reflected onthe emphasis on “family values” in recent news coverageof politicians looking for issues near election time.Perhaps you were stimulated by what the pundits had tosay. Or maybe you were offended by the superficiality ofthe “soundbites” – after all, you had just read Odysseustelling Agamemnon in Book Eleven that “empty wordsare evil.”

      What a fantastic juxtaposition!

  6. Jul 2022
    1. Imagine that when you reading The Odyssey in a WorldLiterature class, you found you were interested in

      Or maybe you were interested in color the way former British Prime Minister William Gladstone was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age

      Or you noticed a lot of epithets (rosy fingered dawn, wine dark sea, etc.) and began tallying them all up the way Milman Parry did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry

      How might your notes dramatically change how we view the world?


      Aside: In the Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes (2009), Watson's dog's name was Gladstone, likely a cheeky nod to William Gladstone who was active during the setting of the movie's timeline.

  7. Jun 2022
  8. May 2022
  9. Apr 2022
    1. Alexander possessed an additional weapon: Homer’s Iliad. He had learned to read and write by studying this text as a young man, and thanks to his teacher, the philosopher Aristotle

      Significance of Homer's Iliad and his teacher, Aristotle, in Alexanders formative years.

  10. Nov 2021
    1. In the early 1930s, Milman Parry, a professor of Classics at Harvard, sought to test his theories regarding the composition of the Homeric poems by observing living traditions of oral poetry in then-Yugoslavia.

      The songs he collected, on phonograph discs and in notebooks, form the core of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

      In addition to being one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of South Slavic oral traditions, the Parry Collection also contains uniquely important subsidiary collections documenting numerous other Balkan oral traditions. These include:

      • the collection of Albanian epics gathered by Albert Lord in the mountains of northern Albania in the fall of 1937;
      • Lord’s own collection of South Slavic materials made in 1950 and 1951, including some recordings of singers Lord had met in the company of Parry in the 1930s;
      • the Whitman-Rinvolucri Collection, which contains a variety of materials relating to the Greek tradition of shadow puppet theater as practiced in the 1960s;
      • and the James A. Notopoulos Collection, which includes hundreds of recordings from the 1950s of folk music and narrative poetry from the Greek mainland and the Greek islands.
    1. 405

      Our close reading passage this week is from Book 10, lines 406-449:

      from: 10.406 "so she spoke, and the proud heart in me was persuaded..." to 10. 449: "...but followed along in fear of my fierce reproaches."

      Instructions: as with last week's passage, pay attention to every detail that catches your attention, or that doesn't seem to make sense. Context matters: the scene in last week's passage was Ithaca, a relatively normal if disorderly human community, but this week's passage deals with events on a magical island where humans are easily changed into animals. Is this island in any way a threat to the homecomings of Odysseus and his men? In your view, does it affect their behavior?

    2. 475

      Hopkins at Home The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

      Sample close reading passage: 5.475 - 5.493 (end of chapter 5)

      This moment occurs at the end of book five, just after Odysseus has escaped the rage of Poseidon by dragging himself ashore on the island of Scheria (likely Corfu), land of the Phaiakians/Phaeacians. Odysseus has just decided to look for shelter in the nearby forest, which despite the danger of wild animals offers somewhat more warmth than the wet shore of the river from which he has crawled. To help with our discussion I’ve divided the text into three parts.

      I’d suggest printing this out and jotting your thoughts down—circle words that strike you as significant, as having multiple meanings, etc. Enjoy! You can send your thoughts to me or just keep your notes handy for our next class.

    3. e spoke, and the river stayed his current, stopped the waves breaking,and made all quiet in front of him and let him get safelyinto the outlet of the river.

      An example of a figure calming waters in myth.

      cross reference: Moses and the parting of the Red Sea

      To what dates might we attribute these two texts? Which preceded the other? What sort of potential cultural influences would the original had on the subsequent?

      Also cross reference the many deluge/flood stories in ancient literatures including Genesis 6-9, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.

    4. I have used the Oxford text of T. W. Allen, 2nd edition, and followed itexcept in a very few places

      The source of the translation of the Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore is the 2nd edition of the Oxford text of T. W. Allen.

    5. The Odyssey of Homer translated with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore (Harper, 1965)

      Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-176020-4

    1. The Odyssey of Homer A Close Reading - Week 1

      Video: https://vimeo.com/642829312/245fb2b6a5

      The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

      • Will Quinn
      • Dr. Elizabeth Patton

      Looking at Chapters 1-4

      • Council of Gods on Mount Olympus
      • Journey of Telemachus (Telemachy)

      Translation

      Using Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey in part because he keeps the sens of the formulaic epithets.

      Dactylic hexameter

      "This is the forest primeval."

      Epithets

      • "The man of many ways" (Odysseus)
      • much enduring Odysseus
      • rosy fingered dawn

      These sorts of epithets are designed to fit the epic into the dactylic hexameter.

      Background of story

      Proem

      in Greek suffering can mean "learning"

      Q: When does the council on the gods take place?


      "Council of the Gods" in Galleria Borghese (Rome) ceiling_ceiling.jpg)


      Penelope with the Suitors by Pinturicchio


      Circumspect Penelope

    1. Homer’s Greek is an amalgam of dialects from various regions and eras. It includes words and grammatical forms that were already puzzling Athenians in the fifth century B.C., when students had to read Homer in school.

      The Greek in Homer is an amalgamation of dialects which is an indicator that the works were aggregated from many sources and turned into a final finished work.

    2. In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf published a book, “Prolegomena to Homer,” arguing that the Iliad and the Odyssey could not have been composed all at once in the form we know them now.
    3. In Athens, a similar feat of reconstruction was attributed to a different ruler, Peisistratus, a well-attested historical figure who lived in the sixth century B.C. He was said to be “the first person ever to arrange the books of Homer, previously scattered about, in the order that we have today.” He also instituted a quadrennial competition, the Great Panathenaea, in which the epics were recited in their entirety by a relay of rhapsodes.
    4. The Greek historian Plutarch, who lived in the first century A.D., wrote that the epics owed their existence as complete poems to Lycurgus, an early ruler of Sparta, who encountered them during his travels in Asia Minor
    5. Ultimately, the only evidence that such a person as Homer ever lived is the existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves.

      This makes me wonder what the linguistic origin of the name Homer is? Was it common/uncommon? Does it's root indicate anything about who Homer may have been?

    6. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that art historians determined that the figure was Aristotle

      What evidence was given for this identification of Homer and Aristotle?

    7. he Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years.

      Not sure how they manage not to link Rembrandt's 1653 painting "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer" here.

      Rembrandt - Aristotle with a Bust of Homer - WGA19232.jpg<br>By <span title="Dutch painter and etcher (1606-1669)">Rembrandt</span> - Unknown source, Public Domain, Link

      It might also be more interesting to use the metaphor of a ladder here than a chain to give a tangential nod to Western culture's scala naturae.

    8. The Classicist Who Killed Homer How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius. By Adam Kirsch https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer June 7, 2021

      Someone mentioned this in class today

    1. There was no ancient poet called “Homer,” he argued. Nor were the poems attributed to him “written” by any single individual. Rather, they were the product of a centuries-long tradition of poet-performers.

      Are there possibly any physical artifacts in physical archaeology that may fit into the structure of the thesis made by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies?

      What would we be looking for? Small mnemonic devices? Menhir? Standing stones? Wooden or stone circles? Other examples of extended ekphrasis similar to that of the shield of Achilles?

      cf: Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

    1. Contemporary English Homers

      Notice the careful use of contemporary here. One can find a plethora of translations and related materials in the Internet Archive.

    2. The Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University publishes the Homer Multitext, a collaborative research project that presents images and texts of papyri, Byzantine manuscripts, and scholarship relating to the transmission of the Homeric texts through time.
    3. Contemporary creative works – more adaptation, interpretation, even appropriation, than translation – have also brought the Homeric texts to new audiences. James Joyce's Ulysses is probably the best-known, while Ezra Pound's Cantos, Derek Wolcott's Omeros, Christopher Logue's "Accounts," and Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's, An Iliad, which recently concluded its second run at the Court Theatre, are just a few examples of Homer's influence on contemporary poetry, prose, and performance.

      Examples of Homer adaptations in contemporary culture. They've left off the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? which also comes quickly to mind as does Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and the 2003 film of the same name.

    4. Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Iliad (University of Chicago Press, 1951) achieved immediate critical success and enduring influence. Lattimore and his successors, including Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo, and Edward McCrorie each offer widely different approaches to verse translation.
    5. E. V. Rieu's translation of the Odyssey (1946), which launched the series of Penguin Classics in Translation, and the Iliad (1950),
  11. May 2021
    1. An overview of Milman Parry's life, work, and some of his impact on Homeric studies and orality as media.

    2. In fewer than seven years he had pub lished the papers that now fill nearly 500 pages of “The Mak ing of Homeric Verse.” The volume is a tribute to an intel lectual pioneer.

      Put The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry on my list to read.

    3. On the second odyssey, he was accompanied by Albert Lord, who ultimately wrote “The Singer of Tales,” drawing the conclusions Parry did not live long enough to reach.

      How poetic that he uses the title "Odyssey" of one of Homer's works to describe Parry's travels.

  12. Dec 2019
    1. Iliad

      The Iliad is an epic poem attributed to Homer; its action is set earlier than the plot of Homer's The Odyssey and takes place in the last year of the Trojan War.

  13. Sep 2013
    1. Indeed, who can fail to abhor, yes to contemn, those teachers, in the first place, who devote themselves to disputation,(2) since they pretend to search for truth, but straightway at the beginning of their professions attempt to deceive us with lies?(3) For I think it is manifest to all that foreknowledge of future events is not vouchsafed to our human nature, but that we are so far removed from this prescience(4) that Homer, who has been conceded the highest reputation for wisdom, has pictured even the gods as at times debating among themselves about the future(5) --not that he knew their minds but that he desired to show us that for mankind this power lies in the realms of the impossible.

      I think this is saying that teachers who debate or discuss are regarded with disgust because while they act like they are searching for truth the are really deceiving because no one can predict the future.

      Homer's texts were used as educational material at the time and was considered a reliable source of information. The gods could not predict the future and there was the Fates.