Interesting Links for 21-10-2014

[andrewducker]

• Ex-US Navy fighter pilot: Why drones beat humans and smartcars should be driverless
  (tags: drone cars robots )
• Cheap African solar energy could power UK homes in 2018
  (tags: solarpower renewables Africa UK )
• Human intestine grown in mouse for first time as scientists say there is hope to create spare parts for people
  (tags: mice organs humans

Comments

[gonzo21]

That is absolutely horrifying that they've convicted somebody for possession of some drawings.

By that logic any porn with a 'sexy schoolgirl' in will also be considered possession of child pornography?

[andrewducker]

Yup, I'm in complete agreement. Some people don't seem to be able to differentiate between "This is something which causes direct harm to a person" and "This is something which causes no harm at all to a bunch of lines on a piece of paper"

[gonzo21]

And if the bunch of lines on the paper are now a sex crime, then the bunch of letters are a sex crime too, and our idiot government have finally made possession of 'Lolita' a criminal offense.

[andrewducker]

Next up: Playing Call of Duty is punishable as murder!

[supergee]

Stanislaw Andreski, in Social Sciences as Sorcery, projected that in a century or so there will be more social scientists than people.

[danieldwilliam]

Don't the classicists become recursive with classicists studying other, earlier classicists ultimately leading us to Classical Classicist Studies.

[danieldwilliam]

I can't quite figure out if I would benefit from the Spotify Family account.

[andrewducker]

Sounds like you do if you have multiple people in the family using it.

What I'd really like is an easy way to switch between users so that I can have either Julie's music or mine on the tablet, depending on which of us is using it.

(More recent tablets can do this by having multiple accounts, ours is a little too old.)

[strange_complex]

The "When will there be more classical scholars than there were Classic Greeks?" post is really making me face-palm. I get that it's really about the ratio of living to dead people, uses Classics as a random example, and isn't meant to be entirely serious. But the utter failure of the author to grasp what Classicists actually do, or how the discipline functions, is annoying me.

Just a few problems with it include:

• The assumption that everyone with a Classics PhD goes on to a life-long academic career.
• The related guesstimate that there are 10,000 people currently professionally employed in the study of ancient Greece. (I'd guess more like about 1000 tops).
• The very idea that there is an 'amount' of history from any period, or that this is the major factor affecting how it is studied.
• The idea that the history from some centuries is inherently 'more important' than that of others.
• The notion that any given individual from the ancient world has left an equivalent trace in the historical record, and thus that there should be a study ratio of

[andrewducker]

"But the utter failure of the author to grasp what Classicists actually do, or how the discipline functions, is annoying me."

Sounds like a problem common to classicists - I've certainly heard it talked about before. Have you considered better PR? Possibly hiring some marketers to explain what it is you do?

[strange_complex]

It's not exactly a field rolling in financial resources, so we're not really in a position to literally hire PR expertise. But you'll notice that Classicists in any position of prominence are constantly extolling the value and benefit of the subject - see e.g. Mary Beard, Bethany Hughes, Michael Scott etc. Being an advocate for Classics is pretty much inherently part of the job of being a Classicist, because there are always plenty of people who will claim it's 'useless'. And I guess in the end it's not really a problem if not everyone understands what we do or why it's worthwhile. So long as people keep wanting to watch films, attend exhibitions and read books about the ancient world (which they evidently do, in huge numbers), we're basically happy enough. Just sometimes a bit frustrated, that's all.

[kerrypolka]

PR directed at whom? For what specific/measurable/achievable goal? I've heard similar comments from nearly every area of academia (it was the subject of that popular 'What I think I do/What society thinks I do/What my parents think I do/What my friends think I do' meme a year or so ago) - in what way is it different for classicists than the common issue that advanced academic study of any subject is generally misunderstood by people who aren't advanced academics in that area?