u/benjamin-crowell

Aithiopika 1.21:

ἣ δὲ πολύν τινα χρόνον τὸ βλέμμα τῇ γῇ προσερείσασα, καὶ πυκνὰ τὴν κεφαλὴν ἐπισείουσα, λόγον τινὰ καὶ ἐννοίας ἀθροίζειν ἐῴκει·

The context is that she is being held captive by a pirate chieftain, who has asked her if she will marry him of her own free will. She is an upper-class virgin, in love with a different man, and is very brave but AFAICT is either shy as part of her personality or behaves shyly as part of the author's characterization of how a virtuous girl should behave in such a situation.

What does πυκνά mean here? Frequently? Wisely? Discreetly? The translation I looked at had "slowly," which didn't seem to match anything in the LSJ entry.

For some time now, reddit has had a misfeature that non-transparently replaces a post with a machine translation into what it thinks is the user's native language. I got reminded of this recently when I made a post here that was in ancient Greek, and I started getting comments that didn't seem to make sense -- because the people writing the comments were seeing a machine translation into English. For example, people were criticizing the translation, which they attributed to me.

It's possible to turn off this misfeature for specific languages, but it seems like you can't turn it off globally. In the web browser interface, Go to Settings - Preferences - Language - Content Languages. You can turn it off for up to 10 languages.

Your experience will probably also depend on whether you're using the cell-phone interface or the web browser one. They also seem to fiddle around and change the behavior of this feature every 6 months or so.

It seems like a no-brainer that reddit should allow specific subreddits, such as this one, to turn off the feature throughout the subreddit. However, they don't really care as long as they're optimizing ad revenue. Just one more way in which tech billionaires are making the world worse in ways that nobody asked for.

The title says what it is. Recently I noticed that, after curing, there were about a dozen tiny craters in the fairly thick coat of ki I'd just applied to a plate. I thought maybe it was something happening during curing. I had to fill them in with sabi.

But then I did another coat today on the same plate, and I noticed the same thing in the fresh ki as I was brushing it on. It looked like little bubbles. Maybe they're air bubbles? Nuclei formed by dust? I though they might be drops of vegetable oil that I hadn't succeeded in cleaning out of the brush when I got it ready to use, but that seems like it wouldn't make sense because urushi and oil are mutually soluble.

I kept brushing to try to get them to go away, and after about 5 min of steady brushing, the ki was getting tacky and they were almost all gone.

Have other people experienced this?

Another thing that occurred to me was that it might be because the ki was going bad. I think I bought it in April. I've had this portion of it in a 60 mL plastic syringe, inside a ziplock bag with a big dessicant packet, in the fridge. But maybe air or moisture is getting in and messing it up...? However, I don't see any signs of cured urushi collecting inside or gumming up the gasket on the plunger.

Or maybe the problem is something else having to do with the brush, like I have some kind of crud trapped in it (other than oil) that I'm not getting out.

σχολαστικοὶ δύο ἐδυσφόρουν πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐπὶ τῷ τοὺς πατέρας αὐτῶν ζῇν.

τοῦ δὲ ἑνὸς εἰπόντος· «θέλεις οὖν; ἀποπνίξει ἕκαστος ἡμῶν τὸν ἴδιον.»

«μὴ γένοιτο,» εἶπεν ὁ ἄλλος, «ἵνα μὴ πατραλοῖαι ἀκούσωμεν. ἀλλ᾽, εἰ βούλει, σὺ τὸν ἐμὸν σφάξον, κἀγὼ τὸν σόν.»

--Φιλόγελως

I've been a computer hobbyist since about 1980, and I'm a lifelong science nerd. When LLMs became a big thing around 2022, I played around with them and interpreted them as snake oil or "stochastic parrots."

But things change over time, and although I initially saw the technology as 100% stupid, I see the current iteration as 90% stupid, 9% evil, and 1% ... holy shit, it's amazing that it can do that. One thing that's changed is that although the initial chatbots were LLMs and not much more, there are now more complex systems with a lot of moving parts, with an LLM as just one of the parts.

Has there been a book written yet at the semi-popular level that explains the science while showing appropriate skepticism about the hype? It's OK if your answer is "No, book publishing hasn't yet caught up." I'm not super interested in sociological, political, or environmental critiques of AI, since I have already formed my own provisional opinion on those aspects of it (that it's probably really bad). I'm open to reading a book that describes the science as it was a couple of years ago, or an interesting, well-researched book that is in some other way a near-miss in terms of my criteria.

Every year at the beginning of August, I've been posting a vocabulary quiz here (2024 2025). The comment threads from the previous tests contain a lot of discussion of the most common issues and questions that occur to people about this test. The source code for generating the quizzes is here. If you don't want to count compounds as part of your vocabulary, on the theory that many compounds have meanings that are obvious, then simply don't count those, and your estimate will be lower. There is no universally valid way to estimate the size of someone's vocabulary, and for example, there are various published estimates of the average size of a US first-year college student's English vocabulary, differing by more than an order of magnitude. This year's test was generated using the same algorithm and data as last year's, so if you took the test then and take it again now, the results should be comparable, and you can tell if your vocabulary grew.

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 20: ________
  ἄν βία γῆ δίδωμι ἕ
  εἰς ἐπεί ἱερός καί κατά
  μή οἶκος παῖς πᾶς πρός
  πρόσωπον σπέρμα τίκτω χρόνος χρύσεος

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 100: ________
  ἀνάγω ἀνδροφόνος διαιρέω δμώς ἐπιβάλλω
  ἡλικιώτης ἵκω λίθος πατρίς πεντακισχίλιοι
  πολίτευμα πομπή πρόθυμος προσάγω σός
  συλλαμβάνω συνήθης τίω τυγχάνω χρηστός

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 200: ________
  ἀίδιος ἀνδραποδίζω ἀπαρχή ἀραβέω δισμύριοι
  δόλος εὐψυχία ἠθεῖος ἰάχω κατάκειμαι
  κατακρίνω κατατίθημι μέδομαι μήδομαι ὅρμος
  παραβάλλω προβολή σκηπτοῦχος σύμπτωμα τύραννος

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 1000: ________
  ἀδόκιμος αἶνος ἀκρογωνιαῖος ἀνακαινίζω ἀρχεῖον
  ἀφθορία βλάξ γεῦσις ἐκπαθής ἐπιλείπω
  ἠπεροπευτής αἱμοφόρυκτος κατακαλέω κορυφόω νεόδαρτος
  περιούσιος σκόπελος στηρίζω συμφερτός τιμόω

Add up the results. This is an estimate of how
many dictionary words you know in ancient Greek,
out of the 26838 most common words.

[EDIT] There was an error in the original test I posted. The bogus lemma ἰμάτιον (nonexistent lemma with smooth breathing) was included in the final group. I replaced it with another randomly chosen word, αἱμοφόρυκτος.

Heliodorus, Aethiopica 1.16:

ἐπῄνει ταῦτα ἡ Δημαινέτη, καὶ προστιθέναι τάχος τοῖς δεδογμένοις ἱκέτευεν.

Here Demaineta is telling her slave to go ahead with a plan. My understanding of ἱκετεύω is that it's something like "supplicate, beg," and it has connotations that it's what a mortal does to a god or a human to another human who is in a position of power or dominance over them. Is it unusual that this is used here to describe what a mistress does to her slave? Can the verb's meaning just be diluted to "ask to?" Or is there a humorous implication here, that, ha ha, the slave has her mistress wrapped around her finger?

I'm looking for any type of resin beads similar to Paraloid B-72 or B-84, but with a higher glass temperature, like 100 C. This would be something I can mix with a solvent and titanium dioxide, for example, to produce a liquid that I can brush on, and then the solvent evaporates and the resin cures, leaving behind a white lacquer. Preferably pure, food-grade, and not mixed with any plasticizers. I don't care if it's reversible, but it probably would be -- as long as it's not reversible with substances like ethanol that could actually be present in food. It seems like my best bet for this kind of application is PMMA, which can be dissolved in acetone.

However, I can't seem to find any retail suppliers, only industrial suppliers on alibaba who sell it in 25 kg bags. Dental acrylic polymer powder seems like it would be great, but as far as I can tell it's only marketed with dyes already added.

There are powders sold for use in making false fingernails, which might actually work if you dissolved them in acetone rather than the liquid they're intended to be mixed with, but they probably contain a lot of other substances mixed in, and the sellers don't seem to disclose what they are, so safety for food contact seems doubtful. My guess is that plain old nail polish would probably work for my purposes, since people do eat fried chicken with nail polish on their fingernails, but I'm just a little doubtful about using anything that isn't advertised for food contact and doesn't have a disclosed list of ingredients.

Can anyone recommend something to use for this application that I can actually get from a retail supplier in quantities like a kilogram or less?

90% of what's on this subreddit now seems to be people posting about their ARR and EMNLP stuff. The signal-to-noise ratio is so low that it's no longer worth my time to come here. I have a note on my calendar to check back in November and see if the situation is any better.

I believe B72 is the material more commonly used in museum restoration, but it doesn't do well in hot climates, so some people use B-48N (or a mix of the two). Dow only releases some information about the formulation of these products, as required by health and safety regulators, and they consider a lot of the details to be trade secrets. People have sent samples out to labs, and I've seen some qualitative descriptions of the results, but they are unsourced and short on quantitative details. In particular, does anyone know of any quantitative data, no matter how rough, on how much dibutyl phthalate (DBP) plasticizer there is in B-48N? All I've been able to gather is that B72 has no plasticizers, but B-48N does have some. Apparently some PVC products, such as medical IV bags and disposable gloves used in food service, can have as much as 40% plasticizer content. I would be interested to know even an order-of-magnitude number for B-48N. Since the cured substance is supposed to be rigid, I'd imagine it's a lot less than 40%...but I'm wondering if it's 10%? 1%?

I have some fine tin powder sold by a reputable supplier in Japan. Since tin and lead are in the same column of the periodic table, it seems inevitable that there is some lead in it. I would like to get a quantitative measure of how much. Just an order-of-magnitude estimate would be fine, but it would be of interest to know whether it's 1% or 0.0001%.

There seem to be two reagents commonly used for detecting lead, dithizone and sodium rhodizonate. Dithizone is used for higher quality quantitative testing. Rhodizonate is what is used in cheap swab kits sold on amazon. Dithizone gives false positives on stannous tin, so it seems likely that it would give a false positive in this application, and in fact the reagent used in the swab kits may actually be more appropriate for this purpose.

However, the swab kits are qualitative rather than quantitative, and it's not clear what their sensitivity is. US EPA regulates test kits and has done some testing of whether a couple of brands actually work, but it seems like the expected sensitivity has historically been quite low, since lead paints contain as much as 3% lead.

There are mail-in test kits that are actually pretty affordable ($35 for one sample) and intended for use with samples of dirt or dust, and they email you back a quantitative result. They use a method called EPA Method 7000B, which is spectroscopic, so I would think should be fairly immune to false positives from substances like tin, since they seem to heat the sample in a flame so that the molecules dissociate, and then measure how much of the element's emission spectrum is absorbed. This could be OK, but I'm not sure if my understanding of their method is 100% correct, and they certainly aren't expecting to receive samples of tin, so it leaves me uncertain about whether it would be accurate for this application. Also, if I buy more tin from the same supplier, or a different supplier, I probably have to pay again for testing.

Is there any fairly simple DIY test that I can do in my kitchen that will give me any quantitative idea, even to within an order of magnitude, of the amount of lead in a sample of tin powder? It seems difficult to get an absolute calibration without making up a sample with some known concentration of lead, which I don't want to do in my kitchen.

Blunden and Wallace, 2003, "Tin in canned food: a review and understanding of occurrence and effect," Food and Chemical Toxicology 41, 1651

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=blunden+and+wallace%2C+Tin+in+canned+food%3A+a+review+and+understanding+of+occurrence+and+effect&btnG=

I thought this was very useful in understanding the safety aspects of using tin powder on urushi lacquerware that needs to be food-safe.

The remaining issue in my mind is how to figure out how much lead might be in the tin powder sold by a supplier like Goenne. There are test kits with swabs that you can buy for $4 to tell you, for example, whether a crystal tumbler you bought at a yard sale has lead paint. Testing a sample of tin powder seems like a different task. What would really be desirable would be some way to test the tin powder and get an actual numerical measurement of the amount of lead in it. I don't know how to do that without sending it out to a lab and paying a lot of money.

I've been learning to work with traditional Japanese lacquer, which is based on a tree sap called urushi (chemical properties). The main component of urushi is urushiol, which is a phenol with a long unsaturated hydrocarbon tail. When it's exposed to humid air and warm temperatures, it absorbs water and hardens into a beautiful, hard lacquer with a cross-linked structure. It's difficult to make pigments work with the material or get a broad color palette with it, so when you see sophisticated art done with it, usually most of the colors are done by sprinkling powdered metals such as gold and silver on top of a thin layer of partially cured lacquer, so that the particles are trapped at the surface and become embedded there, without sinking and becoming invisible. Historically it has been difficult to get a bright white color, and traditional artisans have resorted to expedients such as embedding pieces of eggshell in the surface.

I was trying to figure out if there was some modern material that just wouldn't have been known historically, and which could be used to get a white, perhaps by sprinkling a white powder. I did experiments with a couple of white powders that I happened to have, alumina and tricalcium phosphate, both of which are food-safe. This didn't work well. There was a lot of clumping and caking, and they didn't adhere well to the lacquer. I'm not sure how to predict what powdered materials will adhere, but in general all pure metal powders seem to work.

I was trying to brainstorm possible materials to get a food-safe white, and one that seemed possible was germanium. Germanium is in the same column of the periodic table as tin. Of course germanium is a semiconductor, not a metal, but I do know that tin powder works well. My idea was that I could buy a fine germanium powder, sprinkle it as I would with tin, and then later the powder would either spontaneously form a passivation layer of white GeO2, or it could be encouraged to do so with the application of a little heat or maybe a gentle oxidizing agent. Wikipedia says that germanium metal oxidizes slowly in air at 250 C, which is a little hotter than any temperature I want to expose my work to. Germanium is relatively affordable, about half the price of silver. The oxide is insoluble in water and nontoxic unless you eat large amounts of it. Elemental germanium is also nontoxic.

Any comments on whether this type of thing should be expected to work, and if so, what kind of gentle oxidizer to use? Or are there other materials that would make more sense? I'm a physicist by training, not a chemist, and I lack insight into the chemical reason why metal powders work but things like alumina don't. I suspect that egg shells work only because there is a protein component in it -- otherwise people would have been using calcium carbonate powder hundreds of years ago to get a white color.

I've also looked into things like acrylic resin (Dow Paraloid B-72 et al.) with calcium carbonate mixed in. Such resins are used in museum conservation work with urushi, but the reason art restorers like the ones they use is that the reactions are reversible with solvents like ethanol. I don't want my plate or bowl to dissolve the first time it is exposed to some substance like that. These pieces are also usually sanded, and I don't think sanding plexiglass-type materials will work well, and it might produce microplastics that I don't want in my food. There is a type of urushi marketed as "white urushi" that comes in a tube pre-mixed with white pigment, but when you cure it, it is actually beige or brown.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

These are all cognate, coming from PIE sterh₃, to spread. From that root meaning, you get Germanic words like English "strew," Greek στόρνυμι, and also Latin stratum, "blanket." But what I hadn't realized was that this was also the source of στρατός, "army," which Beekes explains as "camping army," I suppose referring to what you would see if a bunch of soldiers were spreading out in a certain area and making an encampment. It's also the source of στέρνον and "street."

I just finished Herodotus and am now reading the Aethiopica, and I'm getting some whiplash as I try to adjust from Ionic to koine. The following two things happened one after another, so I thought I would try to get a two-for-one by posting here for an explanation. This is section 1.14.

> καὶ μὴν προσεπιτρίψεις γε ἡμᾶς, ἔφη ὁ Θεαγένης, εἰ τὴν κακίστην ἀτιμώρητον ἐάσεις ἐν τῷ λόγῳ Δημαινέτην. οὐκοῦν ἀκούοιτ᾽ ἄν, ἔφη ὁ Κνήμων, ἐπειδήπερ ὑμῖν οὕτω φίλον.

> ἐγὼ μὲν ὡς εἶχον μετὰ τὴν κρίσιν εἰς τὸν Πειραιᾶ κατέβην, καὶ νεὼς ἀναγομένης ἐπιτυχὼν τὸν πλοῦν εἰς Αἴγιναν ἐποιούμην, ἀνεψιοὺς εἶναί μοι τῆς μητρὸς ἐνταῦθα πυνθανόμενος.

Just before the paragraph break, what is the meaning of φίλον?

After the paragraph break, there seems to be one subject pronoun and two finite verbs, with no conjunction. It seems to me that the sentence would make perfect sense without εἶχον, but I don't understand what εἶχον is doing there.

Thanks in advance!