Feats of Nerdiness

sufi

sufi

lala
catalog said:
Watched the first two of these now and think I will soon watch the 3rd as well, cos he's left it hanging.

He is a bit pompous as you say, very pleased with himself and when he gets a bit excited and moves his hands about, he's good fun to watch.

I like how hes quite up front about them not knowing a lot about why things happened.

The funeral description is captivating, gets more and more serious, unhinged, disturbing. The part about the slave girl looking over the fabricated doorway into heaven, describing it all.

Then all the stuff with the animals. Plus how he reminds you it was all at night, when they're paralytically drunk, with fires burning.

And I love how the main source material is from an Arab who met them on the Volga in 922 AD. Like finding out that there was a cohort of Central European Roman soldiers very near my house in the 1st century AD.

And he does a good job in the first one of emphasising how all the non-human beings were very much "reality" for the children of the Ash.

Had no idea that viking Myth posited a place called Niflheim, literally "Home of mist". I thought I'd found all references to fog/smoke/mist/haze and then another comes along...
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oh yes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan me and washyerhands were discussing that one here i think
you know that the british isles are known as

بلد الضباب​

balad az-zubab in Arabic - land of mist?

 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
WashYourHands said:
John Hines, an old Scandi prof, features in a bunch of In Our Time episodes focusing on Norse and Anglo-Scandinavian pantheons and material culture. If you listen and google image maps/objects alongside the chats it’s a treat

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Thanks for the tip - ages ago I listened to the "Icelandic Sagas" episode ( which doesn't feature John Hines ) which was entertaining as one of the guests had some opinions not shared by the others...
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
william_kent said:
Some of the superimpositions in that video have the look of a Cenobite straight out of Hellraiser - I had a bit of a flashback to Dead Snow as well...
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Not actually watched the video, but yeah, the whole thing is pretty grizzly.

i read the main "forensic architecture" monograph first and became very interested in them for a bit - i was in london for an exhibition about monet and whistler, which was crap, but wandered into the ica to see theirs, which was really good.

After that, I went to see Weizman speak at this event in Liverpool, he was very good. I've made loads of notes and drawings about them, i love how cross-disciplinary they are, bringing in video, reconstructions etc.

Their whole thing is incredibly nerdy, like the way they caught out the Israeli army by proving that they fired shots after agreeing a ceasefire, based upon calibrating multiple user generated phone photos and videos of bomb clouds. Basically reconstructed the city and time in a 3D model.

996209062_1920x1080.jpg


That first book, "Mengele's skull", is probably the best, cos it's succinct and got that slow creep of revelation going on, like like he's finding out himself what's up. Whereas the othe rone is a lot more smooth and worked out.

Again, I made a lot of notes when I read it, will try to dig them out.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
Here's a feat of nerdiness - I was watching the news this morning and the story was about the Tories "levelling up the country". "Levelling up" is a concept from Dungeons and Dragons which as a statistics based game made it a natural fit for computer games, and somehow this terminology has passed from D&D to video games and is now being used without shame by the UK government...although not quite as funny as when I saw a Tory woman on TV talking about some policy decision being "the money shot" ( did she not know the origin of that phrase? )...
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
The Obsessive Scholar Who Rescued Iceland’s Ancient Literary Legacy

Not really a feat of nerdiness, but a feat performed by a nerd who managed to save his large collection of rare manuscripts from the flames of the Great Fire of Copenhagen ( 1728 ). It's an entertaining read, especially given the distance of time, as the amount of mistakes made during the fire may cause multiple facepalms:

On a windy Wednesday evening, October 20th, a seven-year-old boy accidentally knocked over a candle. After a warm, dry summer, in the face of strong gusts, the flames quickly caught and spread from house to neighboring house, raging larger and larger. Firefighters had conducted a drill earlier in the day to test hoses; many of them had topped off the exercise with a few pints and now were drunk. They struggled to bring pumps to the fire through winding streets full of panicked civilians. To make it worse, the water supply in that part of the city was cut off due to construction. When orders came down to fetch water from the canals surrounding the city, the city’s panicked military commander ordered the city gate closed, fearing desertion. The fire raged all night, and by Thursday morning, the fire chief was so exhausted and overwhelmed that he…got drunk.
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version

version

Well-known member
catalog said:
Had no idea that viking Myth posited a place called Niflheim, literally "Home of mist". I thought I'd found all references to fog/smoke/mist/haze and then another comes along...
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You can go there in one of the God of War games. They tweaked it a bit to make it more interesting from a gaming perspective though and made it a maze filled with poisonous fog.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
william_kent said:
I'm glad you enjoyed those. He's one of those academics who has taken his nerdy interests to an extreme, basically turned his hobby into a career. I was intrigued by the mention of one of his other interests, "the archeology of the opium trade", I'd love to see him doing a lecture on that. I've been waiting for his book, "The Children of Ash and Elm", to come out in paperback but I gave up and the hardback should be arriving today.
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did you read this? any good?
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
catalog said:
did you read this? any good?
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what I've read of it was excellent, but somehow I got distracted and ended up reading about 20 other books instead of finishing this one off ( which I will have to do before his new book is published, Odin's Whisper: Death and the Vikings )
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
i've got about 5 on the go atm as well, i don't think there's anything wrong with that. there's so much going on nowadays.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
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