September’s reading assignment
Hi everyone,
The next reading assignment for the class on Thursday, September 11 at 1pm NY/10am PT is:
– Reading assignment for September phone call
Read in your Hastie & Dawes textbook – Chapter 3 sections 3.3 – 3.7 and all of Chapter 13
Please e-mail me with any questions for Dr. Eric Gold and we’ll get him online answering questions between class sessions.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you!
Deena
Behavioral Psychology and Economics August 2008 – audio recording
Here’s the audio recording for Behavioral Psychology and Economics August 2008 call. Listen online ordownload the mp3 file and listen to it as a podcast on your ipod.
Sarita Gupta (T2008)
Sarita Gupta is the Vice President for Development & Communications at Women’s World Banking, a global network of over 50 microfiannce organizations and banks in 30 countries, committed to increasing the economic access, power and participation of poor women. She is responsible for ensuring that WWB meets its annual fundraising goals, is positioned for strategic growth, and remains a thought leader in the sector. Sarita has a 25-year career in the non-profit sector, encompassing program development, fundraising, communications, marketing and management. Just prior to joining WWB in July 2007, she headed the fundraising and communications efforts at Acumen Fund, which seeks entrepreneurial approaches to alleviate global poverty; and before that held various fundraising and management positions at CARE, a leading humanitarian organization. Sarita has also worked for the American Friends Service Committee, the Asia Society, and a U.S. State Department-funded project on refugee resettlement.
She holds a Masters degree from the School of International & Public Affairs at Columbia University. She was born in India, moved with her parents to the US at the age of 10, and completed high school in upstate New York. She returned to India to get a Bachelors degree from Miranda College, Delhi University, and then chose to settle in New York City, her current residence.
Republic reading assignment for September, October and November
Folks,
Again, great to see some of you at the Met last week for ROAM 3. What a wonderful day we had.
I have finally come up with a set of reading assignments to take us through the whole Republic.
Sept 2: Books I, II and III (up to page 1052 in our edition)
Oct 6: Books IV, V and VI (up to page 1132 in our edition)
Nov 4: Books VII, VIII, IX and X (up to the end on page 1223)
Tuesday, Sept 2 and Monday, Oct 6 are at 8pm NYC time as always.
Nov 4 is in person at the Forbes offices for our “day of dialogue.” We also have reservations in the private dining room at Gramercy Tavern that night (I have to confirm we are going to Gramercy but I think we are set there).
More details coming – including a request to help share the costs of our dinner.
If you have not RSVP’d for our amazing day – Presidential election day – please let me know. It would be a pleasure to have everyone together.
Thanks!
Phil
P.S. You’ll all be getting an e-mail from me today with a link to photos from ROAM.
Book 7 Landmark Herodotus – audio recording
Here’s the audio recording for Herodotus Book 7. Listen online ordownload the mp3 file and listen to it as a podcast on your ipod.
happy, happy birthday!
Folks,
Today is the birthday of our colleague in the reading odyssey, Erin McKean.
Please join me in wishing Erin a happy, happy birthday.
For those of you who attended ROAM 3 you had the pleasure of meeting Erin and her mother.
Thanks, Erin for being part of our reading and learning community.
I can’t speak to the validity of what the author below says but it’s a fun read.
The first birthday celebrations in recorded history, around 3000 B.C., were those of the early
pharaohs, kings of Egypt.
Happy birthday, Erin – you join the kings of Egypt in your celebrations today!
Phil
Birthdays: 3000 B.C., Egypt
http://www.geocities.com/miekemoran/customsA.html
It is customary today to celebrate a living person’s birthday. But if one Western tradition had prevailed, we’d be observing annual postmortem celebrations of the death day, once a more significant event. Many of our birthday customs have switched 180 degrees from what they were in the past. Children’s birthdays were never observed, nor were those of women. And the decorated birthday cake, briefly a Greek tradition, went unbaked for centuries—-though it reappeared to be topped with candles and greeted with a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You”. How did we come by our many birthday customs? In Egypt, and later in Babylonia, dates of birth were recorded and celebrated for male children of royalty. Birthday fetes were unheard of for the lower classes, and for women of almost any rank other than queen; only a king, queen, or high-ranking nobleman even recognized the day he or she was born, let alone commemorated it annually. The first birthday celebrations in recorded history, around 3000 B.C., were those of the early pharaohs, kings of Egypt. The practice began after Menes united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms. Celebrations were elaborate household feasts in which servants, slaves, and freedmen took part; often prisoners were released from the royal jails. two ancient female birthdays area documented. From Plutarach, the 1st century Greek biographer and essayist, we know that Cleopatra IV, the last member of the Ptolemaic Dynastu to rule Egypt, threw an immense birthday celebration for her lover, Mark Anthony, at which the invited guests were themselves lavished with royal gifts. An earlier Egyptian queen, Cleopatra II, who incestuously married her brother Ptolemy and had a son by him, received from her husband one of the most macabre birthday presents in history; the slaughtered and dismembered body of their son. The Greeks adopted the Egyptian idea of birthday celebrations, and from the Persians, renowned among ancient confectioners, they added the custom of a sweet birthday cake as hallmark of the occasion. The writer Philochorus tells us that worshipers of Artemis, goddess of the moon and the hunt, celebrated her birthday on the 6th day of every month by baking a large cake of flour and honey. There is evidence of suggesting that Artemis’s cake might actually have been topped with lighted candles, since candles signified moonlight, the goddess’s earthward radiance. Birthdays of Greek deities were celebrated monthly, each god hailed with twelve fetes a year. At the other extreme, birthdays of mortal women and children were considered too unimportant to observe. But when the birthday of the man of the house arrive, no banquet was deemed too lavish. The Greeks called these festivities for living males Genethlia, and the annual celebrations continued for years after a man’s death, with the postmortem observances known as Genesia.
The Roman added a new twist to birthday celebrations. Before the dawn of Christian era, the Roman senate inaugurated the custom (still practiced today) of making the birthdays of important statement national holidays. In 44 B.C., the senate passed a resolution making the assassinated Caesar’s birthday an annual observance—-highlighted by a public parade, a circus performance, gladiatorial combats, an evening banquet, and a theatrical presentation of a dramatic play. With the rise of Christianity, the tradition of celebrating birthdays ceased altogether. By the 12th century, parish churches throughout Europe were recording the birth dates of women and children, and families were observing the dates with annual celebrations. Around this time, the birthday cake remerged, now topped with candles.
Herodotus’ story retold in Plato? ROAM 3
Herodotus and Plato readers,
Interesting tidbit – early in Republic II (the second book of Plato’s Republic), Plato’s character Glaucon brings up the story of Gyges of Lydia.
The Gyges story starts in Herodotus 1.8 and is the famous story of Gyges – the bodyguard of Kandaules – being ordered by the King to see the King’s wife naked (so the King can prove her beauty to Gyges). When the Queen foils their plot and see Gyges secretly seeing her naked, she says nothing until the next day when she informs Gyges she must either kill Kandaules and take his place as King or be killed.
Gyges chooses to kill Kandaules (surprise, surprise?) and then seeks oracular legitimacy leading to the Oracle of Delphi’s pronouncement that he is legitimate but his line will extend down only 5 generations. Gyges accepts and seals Croesus’ fate five generations later. Croesus is the one who asks the Oracle what of his invasion of Persia…and the Oracle famously says “a great empire will fall”. Of course, that empire is Lydia and not Persia and King Croesus cries to Apollo from his funeral pyre what of all his wonderful gifts to the god. Apollo replies his gifts bought him three extra years. And so the story goes in Herodotus.
Plato retells this story – or, rather Plato’s character Glaucon retells it. This time it’s Gyges’ ancestor, a shepherd, who acquires a magical ring. This ring has the property of allowing the ringbearer to become invisible. Sound familiar? did Tolkien read Plato? No doubt.
And this ancestor of Gyges (not Gyges himself) arranges to go see the king and “when he arrived there, he seduced the King’s wife, attacked the King with her help, killed him, and took over the kingdom.”
Wow. Quite a different way of understanding the story. No oracular involvement. No coercion from the King to the bodyguard. Instead, the shepherd (not the bodyguard) is the prime mover, seducing, killing and taking over.
Herodotus readers go check this out in Plato (about 2 pages in to Republic II).
Plato readers go refersh your memories of Herodotus’ version – section 1.8 in the first book of Herodotus.
For those of you coming to ROAM 3, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, Friday at 2:45pm at the Met. Among other things, we’ll enjoy seeing artifacts from King Croesus’ Lydia.
Best,
Phil
notes on ‘odotus book seven.
Hi All,
Normally I would have just added this to Marc’s google page, but I did this on a plane instead. I can add them later. I really enjoyed book 7. There are a lot of big themes we’ll talk about, but I noted a few highlights. All the stories are finally coming back to us now and I also detect a very pronounced dramatic or literary tone. The opening scenes with Artabamos (7.10) and the later scene with Demaratos feel like they could have come out of the Greek stage to me. My highlights, in brief, are attached, but I also kept wondering something we’ve discussed before: How much could H. possibly know about the personal conversations Xerxes was having? A lot of this book seems to reflect the thoughts and thought processes of the Persian king and his advisors in deep detail. Even in the Spartan example of Damaratos, where Spartan thought might actually be available to H., what we read is about “freedom” and what it means to Spartans.
Anyway, hope to see all on the call tonight and also at the ROAM meeting later this week.
Cheers,
Tim
Your favorite reading chair?
Folks,
I want to buy a good chair to read in. Right now I read in bed or on our couch.
Where do you read?
Do you have a good chair you like?
Phil
Herodotus and Rats: a comparison?
All,
For those of you who were at the ROAM 3 last Friday, it was really great for me. Nice to meet you guys/gals in person and have a chance to chat and tip a wine glass. For those of you who were not with us, you were missed and we toasted you. It was a very fine evening.
So, I left my xerox of the Republic in a bar on Sunday near Bryant Park, leaving me bookless for the flight back to Austin. Instead, I turned to Robert Sullivan’s Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. I picked it up (along with a few other choice NYC-centric non-fictions) Saturday morning at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (which I also recommend). I mention this because Sullivan reports a story I have heard myself from NYC friends, books, experts, et cetera: namely, that there is one rat for every human in New York, and thus, 8,000,000 rats.
It isn’t true. After better scientific survey, the more likely rat total is really a mere 250,000.
Here’s what was interesting about the story vis-a-vis Herodotus. The origin of the one human/one rat was some bad analysis done in 1909 in England. W. R. Boelter toured the countryside and asked respondents if they thought 1 rat per acre was a reasonable assumption. They did, and since there were 40 million cultivated acres in England at the time, he estimated 40 million rats. By coincidence, there were also 40 million people in England at the same time and the extrapolation has persisted ever since. Sullivan thinks people continue to like the one human/one rat statistic for some interesting reasons:
– It’s easy to remember
– It’s appropriately creepy, but not TOO creepy
– It humanizes the statistic
– It was sort of based on science
It got me wondering if some of H.’s whoppers (assuming you think he told some) might be based on the exact type of info collected from his interviewees. I mention it only because the misinformation persists in UN docs, NYC Health Services pamphlets, and lots of local wisdom. In other words, you can be both informal and inquire science and still come away with a very wrong fact.
Just food for thought. See you all shortly.
Tim
12. August 2008 by Arrian
Categories: Commentary, Herodotus | Tags: Herodotus | Comments Off on Herodotus and Rats: a comparison?