/aca/ — Academic Topics

>>3msy7rdqq4c2q
Monkey-shaped spout-and-bridge bottle, 200 BCE–100 CE, Topará culture, Peru

>>3msy7scnawc2q
Ndu (ceremonial drinking horn), early 20th century, Bamum kingdom, Cameroon

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/42124

Horse and female rider, China, 7th century

She looks chill

i realyl really like this one,, the jaguar hiding under the foilage is so cute to me

>>3mtwlowl76b2j the jaguar looks like it is chopping vegetables

Fish Figurine
Japan
20th century

>>3mt4lt73tak2b
great article. the bit about reading scientific literature through the lens of the humanities is something i found especially compelling. i confess to being imbued with a negative bias against secondary source reading after some bad experiences with rural high school english classes, but its felt immensely more rewarding to push past the kneejerk "curtains are blue" reaction and to be wrestling with theory for myself. i do wish it had gotten more into critiquing the "explain X or ill fucking kill you" memes rather than just the inter-academic reaction against theory, because i feel like the former stymied my critical thinking ability a lot more. the outright hostility never got to me as much as the self-defeating notion of being "too stupid" to understand.

in return, here's an article i really like:
https://felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrification-of-video-game-history-dfe11f1e08ae

outlining the extent that official Industry narratives of video game history both sideline the gaming histories of the global south (and/or anyone outside Japan or America), and bury the unofficial histories of modding, ROM hacking, LAN parties, etc. in favor of a monolithic consumer image of "suburban kid gets N64 for christmas". i think about it often and i think it's essential to read for anyone who cares about video games.

and one more video game-related piece that's definitive to me (though some on here might know it already)

https://harmonyzone.org/text/monsterparty.html

an appreciation of the spider from Monster Party that says "SORRY, I'M DEAD".

a very brief but expansive essay covering games writing, text processing, the disarming effect of non-sequitur, and various ways the "subterranean rhythms" of gaming as a medium leak through both the affordances and limitations of the form.

>>3mt5nlr34u22b
i thought this guy seemed familiar and then i remembered i saw it in a fucking jontron video

>>3mt5mdlzeek2b
My brain is fried from staying up late to play card games but I appreciate your response and have those articles tabbed for later. I'll probably share thoughts on em soon.

>>3mt5nlr34u22b
I really enjoyed both of these! I feel like Monster Party fits somewhere onto the genealogy tree of Mother as a game series leading to Undertale/Earthbound.

It served as a nice companion to the video game history article.

cool translation. i'd be curious to hear more about your thought process behind it, particularly with the use of "bed down" in verse 10 where i usually see it translated as "reborn".

>>3mt6erkosac2y
the last part of verse 10, word-for-word, reads "not indeed ever womb-bed again goes." Rebirth is definitely implicit, specifically being reborn in a human or animal realm. I think there's a further implication that if the successful practitioner were reborn, it would be in a heavenly realm where beings arise spontaneously. When people translate "goes" as "reborn" I think it's just to help the average westerner or modern person understand the implicit meaning. A lot of them probably haven't seriously thought about rebirth before.

As far as my general thought-process, I'd made the observation that (1) there are plenty of Metta Sutta translations already, and (2) modern translators tend to resolve the ambiguities in the same way. So a new translation may as well try to do something different.

I have a newer draft of this translation with some footnotes that go further into the ambiguous parts. I can share the footnotes with you now. Basically Verse 1 can mean a million things, and Verse 9 could be read as pretty anti-Brahminical if you want it to...

this is awesome thank you for posting this .
> I would believe in science if this were the science
agreed

>>3mrstuh7zxg2d
I dedicate each day of the week to a specific language -- Monday:Pali, Tuesday:Mandarin, etc. No mixing allowed.

I suspect it also helps to use a distinct input/output method for each language in a given period, but this is maybe only possible for someone learning modern and classical languages together. For example, I don't think Pali and Chinese interfere with each other cuz Pali is mainly reading and Chinese is mainly listening/talking, for the moment.

In general, I think you just need to be excited about doing it. Having study buddies and enthusiastic teachers go a long way

>>3mrstuh7zxg2d
i think its pretty much like learning a single language, ur facility will depend on the amt of input u get and how consistently ur able to practice. studying mandarin has only impacted my japanese ability in the sense that i have less time to spend studying japanese (and ig that i say すう學 instead of 數學）i dont find that they mix around too much in my head. its simply really difficult to resist the gravity of ur native language and that actually works to ur advantage when u try to pick up a third one imo

>>3mrtgnkt6lb25
iow the extent to which my japanese gets rusty as my mandarin gets better is from my POV is still the result of me not parcelling out enough of the time i spend speaking and thinking and writing in english to dedicate to japanese, and not because its inherently impossible or even particularly difficult to learn both at once

speedrunning latam spanish bc we moved to my partner's parents home country for [gestures generally at the state of the united states] since my home country was not an option for similar unchecked rampant fascism reasons

im hoping itd go quicker than learning english because that took uhhhhh 4+ years of living in an english speaking country, im so far doing really good with my selective mutism around language things, it seems promising [and also being somewhere where going outside is at all an option without spending sixty dollars helps]

>>3msxl6es36s2q
good luck! would enjoy reading updates about how your speedrun is going

Hi O. I've been reading Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Still working through the historical & "exigetical" sections. The late 19th/early 20th is a very funny time period for this stuff, since the theories of inheritance they were working with have all obviously been superseded, but they have to become specified as emperical understanding of evolution and developmental biology advances.

Also reading some Bakhtin.

>>3mrdcymql2k2c
I think that kind of history of science is really fun.

What are you reading by Bakhtin? It looks like he wrote about a lot of different things.

>>3mricvrvwjc2c
I have his set of four essays collected under the title "The dialogic Imagination". I read only the first essay before I was distracted by some other reading. I'm not sure if I think it is particularly true, or if the ideas will make reading literature more interesting or enjoyable. I don't doubt that B was well-read, but I'm just not used to this broad-strokes style of exposition and argumentation and it's hard to take him seriously. I'm not really familiar with the history of literature, so when he makes a broad claim about the development of some phenomenon and its qualitative relationship to literature as a whole, naming a couple of authors as a citation, it's unlikely for me to know if that is a commonly accepted idea or not, or what the most acceptable alternatives would be. And I also don't know what the standards for evidence and argument are in the field either, so I'm not sure how much to trust my intuition that he's often BSing. Nonetheless the basic ideas he is introducing are often quite fun! and I find myself considering them lately. Our book club has been doing Eliot's "Romola" and I find myself often considering the ironic or parodic elements of many of the passages there that I might not have otherwise considered in that light.

>>3mrnsc5oors2z
bakhtin is like huizinga for me, writers entirely carried by how interesting the ideas they present are despite having probably little to no basis in historical evidence. i think reading the diaologic imagination definitely helped me think about what was going on in novels, particularly wrt characters social types, even if ill probably never return to his work for any serious reappraisal

I have been reading heroes: mass murder and suicide.
Its a marxist analysis of that new kind of pointless violence, but also of the general hopelessness and violence of capitalist life, but most importantly he is the first person of this tone ive found to talk about the inner world of and the growth of lonely internet psychopath kids

ill join in. I was deeply moved by this one.
https://www.apanarcheo.nl/aurora%20jadeiet/PerattZpinch%20plasmaexperimenten.pdf
more or less arguing primitive folks across the earth witnessed plasma phenomena in the sky and carved in order to draw similar/same designs. why the squatter can be found all over. There's only so much you can do with simple lines, circles, and squares if one experimented youd prob arivve at many of these geometries - but I still love the plasma renders to show the shapes it could make...

abt teh process by which a relationship between 2 things tht was once taken as mere resemblance comes 2 b understood as a causal connexion. talks abt "Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art"

Ball, Christopher. “On Dicentization.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24, no. 2 (2014): 151–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12046

>>3mqo3lo3l5c23
this one is really fascinating, ive been looking at it all day. thank you for sharing

ZM˜˜ # PRinty# C with ABC
https://tom7.org/abc/paper.pdf

Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair, ie the proof that a 52-card deck becomes pretty well-shuffled after 7 shuffles https:/www.stat.berkeley.edu~aldous/157/Papers/bayer_diaconis.pdf

Picture is what I've figured out about this interface. Here are unsolvable boards for c=3, 4, 5:
[4 1 5] [2 1 4] [5 6 6] [2 0 0] [2 6 3] [5 0 3] [4 1 3]
[4 1 5 1] [2 3 3 5] [2 0 0 5] [2 0 0 4] [2 1 1 5] [4 4 3 3]
[1 3 4 2 2] [3 2 0 0 4] [0 3 4 4 1] [3 2 0 0 1] [1 3 4 2 1]
(I'm omitting the 2 empty vials when I report these btw)

I've validated by exhaustive search that (c=3, m=6) is always solvable, and likewise for (c=4, m=5) and (c=5, m=4). And finally I've validated that (c=6, m=4) is always solvable. All these results are just heavy computational searching.

I also have a construction of an unsolvable board for m=3 using very large capacity (c=27): 3 identical vials of
[1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 2 1]

The open questions are thus:
- what is the minimal capacity at which unsolvable boards exist for m=3?
- what is the minimal capacity at which unsolvable boards exist for m=4?

can you share the algorithm you've used for the exhaustive search?

>>3mqurbmqxa72l
- Best-first search with heuristic “sum over colors ( number of vials containing color)”, ie how spread out the colors are. The heuristic can be updated for cheap as you discover the state space.
- isometry group is “permutation of colors x permutation of vials.” Quotient by both when enumerating initial boards to check, quotient only by vial permutations when checking an individual board
- skip moves involving completed vials
- represent vials as ints, the board as a tuple, numba-fy and parallelize.

All told, each core ends up determining whether a board is solvable in about 100us on average

from a year or two ago but I like this photo I got of a mallard on Ektar 100, Nikon F100

yay!! a thread that's hyper-targeted at my interests lmfao

i started birding back in winter 2024 and nowadays, my life list is very nearly at 250 species (and that's without ever leaving the continental US).

i unfortunately don't have many good pics bcuz i can't afford a camera, but the best time i ever had birding was a trip to the sagebrush steppe to see a greater sage-grouse lek (!!!!) plus a bunch of new sagebrush-endemic species. like this gorgeous sage thrasher!

and this non-descript but adorable sagebrush sparrow!!

it amazes me honestly how many birds there are like this. tiny greyish-brown songbirds living exclusively in very remote areas that would easily be overlooked by almost anyone who didn't know how special they are, especially as their ranges and populations are shrinking more every day. it makes me all the more appreciative getting to see them with my own eyes.

>>3mraxq7z2c22d

I also started birding in the winter of 24/25 and have nearly 250 birds on my life list!

The latest bird on my list was a Scaly-breasted Munia. I saw a little flock of them in some reeds in Echo Park Lake.

Here's a RTHA eating a squirrel.

>>3mrddd7ec7s2c
the word echopark has been stuck in my head for like the last year b.cus i keep mixing up echospace and clarence park im so glad thats actually a real place now i manifested =^w^=

looking at todays spanish-inca poncho I was wondering if it could even have been central american, cause I didnt think camelids went up that north, apparently i was right..

the question i have now is what did the central americans use for textiles ??? salish wooly dogs??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl
ok so time for a bit of a conspiracy.. so like u guys know the macuahuitl right? that super iconic serated club design.. the wikipedia says its so well known and wide spread, so how come there are litterally only 3 known examples of them in history, all of them having burnt down in the 1800s?? isn t this so weird??

todays selection was incredibly good.. rlly rlly loved the azerbaijani carpet..

Jul 17 2026
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ヽ(´ー｀)ノ Jul 19 2026
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green fn>>3mqnsyy6uns2p

· Jul 20 2026
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new highs .. i had a fiasco where i knew it was rapa nui but couldnt find it on the map!! i looked for 20 mins!!

(;´Д`) Jul 21 2026
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time to study...