Just watched The Matrix, but seeing as I’ve already reviewed this movie somewhere else on this blog, I’m going to limit myself to pointing out how much the whole Matrix/human batteries thing seems like something out of Marx.
You’ve got your people, right, who can be likened to either the people in Marxist theory in general, [...]
Posts filed in What I Learned Today
The Matrix
For better or worse, you just don’t get life stories like this anymore (Or, the only thing missing is piracy)
“Raised in an Ibo village (in modern Nigeria), Olaudah Equiano (ca 1745-1797) was kidnapped by African raiders and slod into slavery. He survived the horrors of the Middle Passage to the New World, where an English naval officer bought him ito serve as a cabin boy and renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish [...]
I was, in fact, not aware of this
“To Athens and Sparta Xerxes sent no demand for submission because of what happened to the messngers whom Darius had sent on a previous occasion: at Athens they were thrown into the pit like criminals, at Sparta they were pushed into a well — and told that if they wanted earth and water [signs of [...]
Inspiration strikes from the weirdest skies…
So, we’re doing syntax in the English linguistics course I’m taking, and in today’s lecture, we went through the various ways of determining whether or not a string of words is a phrase or not — a mildly put important part of the whole syntax bit. One of the examples the lecturer used was the [...]
Why I’m skeptical to Toynbee
At several occasions in the past two years, I’ve found myself in positions where I critizise other people for referring to Toynbee in discussions on the Roman Republic, but I’ve been unable to remember where I got this antipathy from. Today, I believe I learned why I’m skeptical to Toynbee.
It is often so that one’s [...]
Debunking “feudalism”
Today, I learned the details of something I first learned the general idea of two and an half years ago, namely the reality of feudalism in the European Middle Ages.
Traditionally — that is, in the tradition of the Brunner Thesis — Feudalism has been perceived and presented as a system where a material reward (the [...]
On the occasion of my (relatively) long absence…
On Monday, I learned that the parts in the Iconoclasm dispute — both Iconoclasts and Iconodules — were desperate for something with real authority to lean on, and so started a frantic search for old manuscript in which the authorities of old might have scribbled something that could be interpreted as supportive of the Iconoclasts’- [...]
PoV? Whassat?
Today I learned that the term “point of view” has largely gone out of use in literature studies, and been replaced by “perspective” and “voice”.
Why? Well, first of all because “point of view” is used in a lot of other ways, too, such as “one’s point of view on politics” and such like. More importantly, [...]
Oh. My. Fucking. Gods.
I just found out that there exists a British television show from 1990 where Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry plays the parts of P.G. Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves. Naturally, all my viewing plans and schedules have been postponed until I’ve downloaded and watched all four seasons.
Not that that means much — I’ve hardly watched any [...]
Literacy among Norwegians in the 18th century
Today I learned that Norwegian peasants and farmers in the 18th century read a lot more than we have previously thought. The idea of “The Reading Peasant” was long considered to be a National Romantic myth, meant to build up under another myth — that of Norwegians being free, despite being a Danish colony and [...]
My knowledge of basic household appliances…
… is really sorry.
I already knew this, but I got a reminder today, when I learned from my mother that washing machines (i.e. the kind that do laundry, not the dishes variety) don’t use pre-heated water from the, ehem, water heater, but actually heat cold water from scratch.
New… thingy, let’s call it a “quasi-daily”, or whatever.
For the past two or three years, I’ve been considering to make a thread at one of the forums I hang at, a thread called “What I learned today”. In case some of you think that’s a cool acronym or something, let me assure you it’s not. I’d simply be a thread where people could [...]
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