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- Hacker News
- Comenius! I'll be damned—this is the first time I've seen anyone actually reading his Orbis Pictus. There's a country whose educational system basically revolves around Comenius (the Czech Republic). And even there I don't personally know anyone who I'd be 100% sure has actually read the whole book!
- Slightly off topic: The title hits home. When I was young, books were a luxury item. Less rich people just used the library. But the library had a strict 7 books rental policy. Not enough for the avid reader that also needed a small programming reference library. So I had 3 steady, occasionally 4th, library card pool from family members to keep my bookshelf operational.by PeterStuer
- I also remember libraries having a very small limit back in the day, so I was surprised to find out that in the Bay Area libraries typically allow up to 100 books per card!by eliben
- > It [The Bible] is full of great wisdom and great stories, and also cruelty, evil lies, and reminders that the world now is in many ways better than it was because people are better.
Are people better? And if they are what made them better?
by UncleOxidant - I discovered that when I want to find the translation of a German word, it is far quicker to open a dictionary and flip to the word than open google, select the language, and type in the word.
Flipping pages in a book still has not been matched by computer text.
by WalterBright - Binary search is strongby frollogaston
- If I was designing an E-reader, flipping pages would be a problem I'd work hard to solve.by WalterBright
- I’ve been told the Legacy Standard Bible is one where the translators tried to not use the same English word when the original Greek or Hebrew words are different.by whitten
- I use the New Living Translation (NLT) for casual reading and was unaware of the LSB. I'll have to get a copy, thanks.
Here's a brief comparison (Titus 1)
LSB: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Titus%201&versi...
NLT: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=titus%201&versi...
by leetrout - This is a solid collection, one that shows real intellectual curiosity. Something that would be interesting to add would be something that falls entirely out of the canon of Western philosophy - you have what is by all measures a diverse sampling of the various permutations of the intellectual procession of western thinking, but nothing reflecting traditions from outside that procession, eg Chinese, Islamic, Indian, or even Mayan or others from the Americas. It’d be interesting to pull from something entirely outside the intellectual tradition you’re well steeped in, to take a play horizontally instead of vertically.
(Note this isn’t a knock on the author for staying within western tradition, which is both deep and interesting and also diverse in a way which provides a wide breadth of ways of thinking about the world; rather, getting outside the tradition entirely would provide yet another perspective on that tradition, eg its bounds and the lines it doesn’t realize its prescribing itself within even as it changes dramatically over different eras.)
by roughly - What would you recommend?by usef-
- I do own more than these seven books.by mjd
- > I have trouble connecting with the thinkers of the Middle Ages. Their thinking seems to me to be frightened, so overcautious, so cramped and circumscribed, I can't read it without sadness for the way that medieval Christianity strangled the human spirit for so long.
As I understand it, particularly for the bizarre natural sciences stuff, a lot of this is actually _Aristotle's_ fault, not Christianity's.
Adding the Pseudodoxia Epidemica to my list of things to read if I ever have infinite time.
by rsynnott - One really nice thing about Pseudodoxia Epidemica is that you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick it up, read the bit about whether “a Diamond is made soft, or broke by the blood of a Goate”, or what he has to say about Pope Joan (a woman who supposedly tricked the college of cardinals into electing her pope) and put it down gain ten minutes later. It's great bathroom reading.by mjd
- It's good to read Ada Palmer's Inventing The Renaissance, because understanding whatever the Renaissance is (and Palmer says it is many different things), you need to understand the Middle Ages, since the Renaissance started with the fallout of Middle-Ages Christianity's love of Aristotle and ended with the beginning of real science.
Plus it's a fun book.
by themadturk - Pleased to see Roget's thesaurus here. It's a fantastic resource without a great digital equivalent. I've found LLMs helpful in a pinch (and it's certainly better than a standard thesaurus), but Roget's is still the book I turn to for tricky word-picking problems.by euthymiclabs
- I was looking for it after reading the post, but there seem to be so many different versions and edtions. Harper, Penguin. College. The New. The Concise. The International. Some say they’re organized alphabetically. How do I know which one is the kind that the article talks about, if I buy used online and cant look into it?by leobg
- I never knew Roget's was organized like that and I have had several different editions over the years. I'm one of those people who always used it as a compendium of synonyms.by criddell
- Roget's Thesaurus is part of Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22by babo
- I've never owned a copy of Roget's, and now I'm curious/tempted to get one, but my go-to digital word picking assistant has always been OneLook Thesaurus: https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/by cryzinger
- Speaking of “witty, and learned, and wise, and humane”, this post is all of the above. The kind of writing that, before you’re even done reading, makes you eager to look up everything else the author has written.by bdr
- His book Higher-Order Perl was really good and introduced me to some interesting programming concepts, but it also helped me realize why no one uses Perl anymoreby sherburt3
- > After several repetitions of this, Samson decides that being shaved, blinded and crushed will be less exasperating than listening to any more of Delilah's nagging.
A very off-tangent note, but I recently learned that Samson's last words, "ἀποθανέτω ἡ ψυχή μου μετὰ τῶν ἀλλοφύλων"/"moriatur anima mea cum Philisthiim", pretty much have never been translated into English literally; it's always "Let me die with the Philistines" for some reason.
by Joker_vD - I'm curious, what would you be your translation?by wofo
- "Let my soul die with the Philistines" being the literal translation?by blharr
- The Hebrew is תָּמ֣וֹת נַפְשִׁי֮ עִם־פְּלִשְׁתִּים֒, which literally translates to "You shall die, my soul, with the Philistines."
- I always look it up in the original Hebrew if I really want to understand, and the difference is sometimes really HUGE (or simply wrong in modern translations).
It's also worth noting that some books of the Hebrew Bible are poetry (Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs), which doesn't show at all after translation. Hebrew poetry is unique!
As they say, reading the Bible in translation is like "kissing your spouse through a veil".
by ivrit-tirvi - > knowing full well that [Delilah] will betray [Samson]
It is not clear from the text that Samson is aware of the presence of Philistines the first three times. We are told they are lying in ambush in an inner chamber. We are not told that they make themselves known, attempt to subdue Samson, or interact with him in any way. Instead, we are told that Delilah announces their imminent presence, with no follow-through. (And why, after all, would they dare come in until Delilah has established that he is weak and harmless, given his reputation for strength and bloodthirst?)
I don't believe Samson understands Delilah is betraying him. Not until the end when he's told her the real secret. Until that point, he may only receive her behavior as, at worst, a taunt and, at best, an attempt to pursue a kind of relational intimacy in which he makes himself vulnerable to her. And indeed, that's exactly where the story goes. He eventually makes himself vulnerable to her, both emotionally and physically.
A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading. Frequently, the characters and nuances run much deeper, and a more careful and thoughtful reading is required. Ancient literature is stylistically terse compared to modern literature. Space on the manuscript is precious and not given over to things that the reader is meant to infer by reflection. And whenever a phrase or pattern is repeated, that means it is very, very significant. In this case, Samson's interaction with Delilah is not a one-off inexplicable behavior. It is one episode in a series of episodes, both preceding and following, where consistent patterns of behavior develop and escalate (e.g., his vengefulness, his vulnerability to women).
by cvoss - > A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading.
That's a neat summation of Biblical hermeneutics if I've ever seen one and more generally of religious hermeneutics.
What is being defended as a "close and thoughtful read" implicitly is from a more cynical view, a projection of nuance, complexity, and deep structure,
which is predicated and motivated by the axiom that the text must, definitionally, be subtle and its lessons profound. Because it is, you know, divine.
If you don't accept that axiom, the countervailing read is no, the characterizations are clumsy, the plots ridiculous, etc.; and it is precisely the gymnastic efforts one must go to, to find in them inspiration and divinity, that convince those who do of the ineffably mystery of the divine.
Sometimes a crude story succeeds on some merits and fails on others; when it is enshrined and glorified it creates a frankly dangerous social pressure to praise the emperor's clothes.
by aaroninsf - I'd like to caution against extending stories with too much of one's interpretation/imagination and insisting the extended version proves author intent of the original.