I was intrigued by how well the riddle’s tone and contents, read through the lens of referring to a travelling minstrel increasingly unneeded by his society, could map into the world of Impressions, and especially the druids’ fate.
Blog
The Book of Memory Review
Medieval scholars had a wiser perspective not just on memory, but on what we might today call “knowledge work” as a whole. In their view, simply reading a book was a useless exercise.
Sides of History
Legacy says more about the people doing the remembering than it does about the people or events being remembered, which is also true of things on the right or wrong side of history – such judgements say more about the people doing the judging than about what they are judging.
Worn Review
This is not a history of clothing, of fabric, its manufacturing, its properties, or its evolution. It is an unnuanced screed incoherently stitching together fragments of grievance politics and pet causes into a disjointed fabric that reads like a collection of opinion pieces written for a socialist periodical.
Addendum to “Linguistics, LLMs, and Empiricism’s Dangers”
Fedorenko asserts that the part of the human brain solely responsible for language itself does not actually understand that language.
Japanese Tales of Times Past Review
I did not read all thousand-plus stories, but I was intrigued by the collection, and came across a selection of ninety stories from the Japanese parts of the original anthology recently chosen and translated by Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen.
Comment Opportunity – NASA Technology Shortfalls
NASA is working on updating the shortfalls list, and they’ve changed the format in a way that maintains the detail while eliminating some of the overlaps and providing a higher-level basis for the ranking of shortfalls against each other.
Ruth Review
It focuses on individuals and intimate relationships, specifically women, in contrast to the immediately preceding books, and with a very different feel from the family relationships explored in earlier books.
The History of English (Podcast) Recommendation
Begun in 2012, the podcast is a history podcast about the English language, although it takes dozens of episodes for the host, Stroud, to reach the advent of the oldest English dialects from the start of the proto-Indo-European language.
Arthurian Romances Review
This is interesting from a historical perspective for its indirect insights into the cultural norms and beliefs of the French court at the time, but does not deliver the insight into the “authentic” form and function of the ancient Arthurian legends I sought.
IGC Publishing 