Armenian.
Not because my wife’s Armenian. She doesn’t speak the language.
Not because the alphabet’s well-designed. I think all the letters look the same.
In fact, precisely because I think all the letters look the same. The results look like this:
Beautifully flowing. My time at the Matenadaran was the highlight of my time in Armenia.
In the world of scholarly consensus, the earliest fragment of a Greek New Testament gospel is Rylands Library Papyrus P52, containing a few lines of the Gospel of John, and dating anywhere between 125 and 170 AD. As one might expect, there’s a lot of controversy around the exact date. It’s a fragment of a papyrus codex (that is, book as we know it, not scroll, written on both sides); Christianity is believed to have popularised the codex over the scroll as a format.
The earliest complete text of a book of the New Testament is Papyrus 66, a papyrus codex of John, from around 200. The earliest complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, a parchment codex, dating from the 4th century.
Greek:
psi psi psi psi.
In fact, the Greek for pussy cat is ψιψίνα psipsina.
I’m not scrolling, so I’ll reconstruct based on memory and the relative positioning of followers on my profile.
Philip Newton. I already knew him from my previous life as a Lojbanist; and he acted as what I like to think of as my Quora sponsor, being the first to upvote me and comment me.
.i ki’e doi filip .i fau le da’i nu do na zvati kei; mi na banro tu’a la kuoras.
Hello. Neighbour here.
I know Greeks’ opinion on this question might not be welcome, but it’s reminded me of a very similar question: Why do Greeks (fairly unanimously) hate the 500 years of Ottoman rule but no hate against Venetian rule which was 400–600 years?
You could argue rather convincingly that Venetian rule in the countryside was a lot more unpleasant than Ottoman rule. In Crete, it meant 400 years of corvée (feudal forced labour, whenever the landowner or the state felt like it). It meant the locals really were treated as a colony, and not just a millet. It meant no senior Orthodox clergy. It meant lots of uprisings against Venice, that even the local Venetian colonists took part in. It meant that when the Ottomans came to town to besiege the Venetian strongholds, Cretan villagers actually joined them.
And yet, you’ll only find out about any of that if you’re a professional historian, or you read professional historians. None of it in school, none of it in folksong, none of it in the formation of Greek identity. Why?
Recentism. Anything you hated about the hegemon 500 years ago is irrelevant; what continuity do you have with your ancestors from 500 years ago? Whereas what you hated about the hegemon 100 years ago is still going to inform your perception of who you are, and who you could have been. It’s enough of a time difference to transfer all the old resentments onto the more immediate cause of resentment.
Not saying this is the main reason; others’ responses have been very informative. But I’m sure it’s a factor.
Like Alec Fane (in comments to Peter Flom) I differentiate between trolling and non-trolling comments (including insisting on continuing a debate once the OP has agreed to disagree). Because otherwise, disable all comments ever, and be done with it.
An answer offered in the context of social media* is an answer informed by the reception and feedback of its peers. In that regard, social media is an advance on the traditional, unidirectional communication of opinion: it allows the answer to be enriched, collaboratively, and to be corrected or adjusted as need be.
In fact, in a domain where I don’t have the subject expertise, how the answerer interacts with comments questioning their premises or completeness will inform how trustworthy I consider them to be.
I do think less of Quora members who disable comments. Ernest Adams’ answers for example are (from what I have seen) largely trustworthy; but Ernest Adams has decided that two-way interaction is not for him. Well, if I wanted a one-way flow of information, I’d read a book (or a newspaper column, which is how he’s explicitly described his approach). In this medium, it means he is not opening his answers to inquiry. It is a poor cultural fit to how anyone online now consumes information. It’s his right to do one-way flow; it’s my right to construe that as arrogance, and not to want that on my feed.
And when people go further and offer factually wrong answers while disabling comments (as I’ve discovered in etymology questions), then their disabling comments is allowing them to spread misinformation. Yes, I do post separate answers correcting them. But that really isn’t the same, especially given that users usually see answers in isolation in their feed.
There’s a foundational disconnect here, I suspect, between those who believe an answer is to be judged in and of itself, as a disembodied text, vs those who construct a profile of trustworthiness around answerers.
See also Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why would a person who has blocked you upvote your answers? , which comes from the same worldview as this answer.
* Quora can deny all it wants that it’s social media. If they’ve got follows and comments, they’re social media. And if they lost follows and comments, well, good luck getting anyone to join…
Once answered, questions are indeed the community’s, and can’t be deleted: they belong as much to the answerer as to the asker, if not more. And believe me, the answerer does not want to see their answer disappear.
The only recourse you have is to ask a moderator to delete the question; but you’d have to have a very good reason, that cannot be addressed simply by going anonymous.
Hello Curtis Lindsay. I’ve been upvoting you for a little while. In fact, because of you, I’m about to force myself to listen to *shudder* Chopin. (Michael Masiello will be pleased.)
It’s about time I disagreed with you about something.
I think OP’s dystopian scenario is not impossible. The thing about machine learning is, it doesn’t need to understand its input in terms of rules and emotional state; you don’t need a good notation to do it. It just needs the input to be quantifiable; which music performances are. If you feed a music composition system lots of Bach, it will spin out more Bach (and that’s been possible for the last twenty years). Maybe not divinely inspired Bach, but certainly competent Bach: there are, after all, rules and regularities recoverable from Bach’s music.
Well, same with what we impute as emotion in music. Rubato may be ineffable in effect on humans, but it’s not ineffable in execution. Neither is articulation, nor dynamics. I think they can be learned.
The thing is that, as Curtis said, we have had player pianos for a century, and they were much more accurate than humans. Conlon Nancarrow relied on that for his pieces. But they didn’t put pianists out of business.
The reason is that, even if technically—or even emotionally—a machine does replicate a good musician, that’s not why we go to concerts. Live gigs have in fact taken a downturn in attendance, and performers will tell you they’re already losing out in competition to digitised sound; except the digitised sound is recordings of Billy Holliday or Miles Davis or AC/DC or Yitzak Perlman.
If people would rather show up to your live gig than listen to Horowitz at home, it’s not because they expect you’ll do a “better” job than Horowitz. It’s because the live performance is the point, and they want to see humans, imperfections and all, grappling with the piece.
But that means that live performances will be more a niche thing: they’ll be competing with computer performances, as well as YouTube and CDs and DVDs. They’re already a niche thing though, and they’ve been a niche thing for decades.
Yes. I don’t get it. I’m funny, but I’m not *that* funny. I’m knowledgeable, but that’s a dime a dozen here. My drawings are shit. I don’t get it.
… You know, this question is a good idea. We can find out! Yay!
If you’d asked this question 100 years ago, Pegah, I could give you an interesting answer. Then again, if you’d asked this question 100 years ago, you would have been my sworn enemy, and there’d have been no Quora to ask me this through anyway.
Australia:
Australia is absurdly urbanised, and those of us in the cities really don’t know enough about those of us in the country—even though our national mythology is all about how the country is where the Real Australians are.
We do know they listen to country music. We know that they wear jeans even more than urban Australians do.
And we know they all wear hats.
You can tell Lee Kernaghan is a Real Australian. He’s a country singer. And he wears a hat. A real Australian Akubra hat.
McLeod’s Daughters all wore hats (some of the time). It was a soap set in the country, with empowered female leads. Who wore hats some of the time. And jeans.
… This *is* safe to show in Iran, isn’t it? 🙂
I haven’t seen many hats in country Victoria. But I don’t think country Victoria is where the Real Australians are. It’s more the fine food and wine provedore for Melbourne, where urban Australians go to eat nice things. (And it’s a provedore, because that’s the kind of snobs we are.)
The hats seem to be more a NSW/Queensland thing. With sheep stations. And a Wide Brown Land. And Country Music.
The agrarian populist politician Bob Katter is from Queensland. He always wears a hat:
Alas, I am an effete urban Australian. The closest I’ve ever come to wearing a Real Australian hat was when I was in Texas:
Howdy pardner.