Kinda Neat
Mar. 11th, 2009 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxAudible has picked up The Modern Scholar lecture series which is kind of neat. They're recorded lecture series on a variety of topics, and if you're geeky enough, they're rather interesting.
I've listened to Archeology and the Illiad: The Trojan War in Homer and History and I thought it was pretty darn good. It went from questions regarding whether Homer was an individual or a title and the problems involved with oral histories turned into printed ones. It also covered the archaeological excavations of "Troy" in Hisarlik, the debate over which layer of the excavation could plausibly be "Troy" of Homeric legend, and whether Homer had telescoped history. It also covered the anecdotes of the archaeologists who have done the work (a few of which were quite colorful). If you're a history geek, it's worth the listen (and though the lecture series is listed as about $70 on the Audbible site, if you're an audible member, it's just one monthly credit and monthly membership is only $15 dollars (a little less than $8 for the first three months of membership).
Am currently listening to A Way With Words, Part II: Approaches to Literature. The professor seems quite enthusiastic (and clearly loves his genre fiction... particularly Tolkien as he's using LOTR for a lot of his examples. And I laughed as his discussion of Elizabeth Bennet turned into her being attacked by trolls, isn't there some zombified Austen-thing coming out? I think I read that recently). Many of the discussions of interpretation of text and authorship falls right into some of the more interesting fandom debates (which I don't think would bother this professor as he seems like the type who would wade into those discussions himself). It's been interesting so far, and I'm thinking that I might download his next lecture series Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature where he covers the likes of Tolkien, Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, and Terry Brooks.
On a different note, I saw this story today which... you know, even the picture accompanying the article provokes some questions for me. What does a Creationist teacher say to his students when standing next to a dinosaur skeleton? Pay no attention to the huge thing looming over me?
Actually, I do have a good idea of what they say. I saw it on some Showtime special where the teacher sang some ditty "explaining" that a dinosaur was actually a Leviathan. So basically they're saying a fossilized skeleton is actually a totally fictional creature! You want to know who else created fictional explanations for fossilized bones? Ancient Greeks. How do you think they came up with the concept of Cyclopses, anyway? Oh, and if the explanation is that dinosaur/leviathans died out in the "great flood"... well, wasn't Noah supposed to save two of each animal? Did God have some secret pronouncement "Except the volociraptors and T-Rexes? Oh, and don't worry about the Mammoths or Dire Wolves either. You won't need those." And what about the creatures that inhabited water? Did they "drown" too? After all, the Leviathan itself is a mythical sea monster so it seems a bit off for it to die out in the great flood.
And I'm still scratching my head over how to explain the Grand Canyon as being only 6,000 years old. Is radiometric dating fictional too? And when visiting the hall of fossils, what exactly is the explanation for the separations indicating five mass extinctions? Is God such a jokester that he decided to go to the trouble to sort and file different extinct creatures in specific strata of rock just to screw with scientists minds? Enquiring minds want to know...
I've listened to Archeology and the Illiad: The Trojan War in Homer and History and I thought it was pretty darn good. It went from questions regarding whether Homer was an individual or a title and the problems involved with oral histories turned into printed ones. It also covered the archaeological excavations of "Troy" in Hisarlik, the debate over which layer of the excavation could plausibly be "Troy" of Homeric legend, and whether Homer had telescoped history. It also covered the anecdotes of the archaeologists who have done the work (a few of which were quite colorful). If you're a history geek, it's worth the listen (and though the lecture series is listed as about $70 on the Audbible site, if you're an audible member, it's just one monthly credit and monthly membership is only $15 dollars (a little less than $8 for the first three months of membership).
Am currently listening to A Way With Words, Part II: Approaches to Literature. The professor seems quite enthusiastic (and clearly loves his genre fiction... particularly Tolkien as he's using LOTR for a lot of his examples. And I laughed as his discussion of Elizabeth Bennet turned into her being attacked by trolls, isn't there some zombified Austen-thing coming out? I think I read that recently). Many of the discussions of interpretation of text and authorship falls right into some of the more interesting fandom debates (which I don't think would bother this professor as he seems like the type who would wade into those discussions himself). It's been interesting so far, and I'm thinking that I might download his next lecture series Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature where he covers the likes of Tolkien, Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, and Terry Brooks.
On a different note, I saw this story today which... you know, even the picture accompanying the article provokes some questions for me. What does a Creationist teacher say to his students when standing next to a dinosaur skeleton? Pay no attention to the huge thing looming over me?
Actually, I do have a good idea of what they say. I saw it on some Showtime special where the teacher sang some ditty "explaining" that a dinosaur was actually a Leviathan. So basically they're saying a fossilized skeleton is actually a totally fictional creature! You want to know who else created fictional explanations for fossilized bones? Ancient Greeks. How do you think they came up with the concept of Cyclopses, anyway? Oh, and if the explanation is that dinosaur/leviathans died out in the "great flood"... well, wasn't Noah supposed to save two of each animal? Did God have some secret pronouncement "Except the volociraptors and T-Rexes? Oh, and don't worry about the Mammoths or Dire Wolves either. You won't need those." And what about the creatures that inhabited water? Did they "drown" too? After all, the Leviathan itself is a mythical sea monster so it seems a bit off for it to die out in the great flood.
And I'm still scratching my head over how to explain the Grand Canyon as being only 6,000 years old. Is radiometric dating fictional too? And when visiting the hall of fossils, what exactly is the explanation for the separations indicating five mass extinctions? Is God such a jokester that he decided to go to the trouble to sort and file different extinct creatures in specific strata of rock just to screw with scientists minds? Enquiring minds want to know...
