Category: misc

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Perhaps another way to find untranslated non-fiction books of interest in languages I cannot read is to not search directly for them, but to find authors first.
Scientists, practitioners, and thinkers of various disciplines may be mentioned in localised Wikipedia versions, and from there I might find their bibliography.

In the past few days I’ve been exploring the non-fiction section of online bookstores across the EU a bit, but then books translated from English to the other European language easily make it harder to see other publications.

I was mailed two book suggestions in Swedish. The authors have Wikipedia pages, i.e. Julia Ravanis and Peter Gärdenfors (who also has an English wikipedia page btw), and those pages list their bibliographies.

Going this path makes it possible to use the well known Wikipedia structures to search for authors across languages.
What it lacks is networked recommendation.

Last Tuesday, 23 September, the heating system came on for the first time. To me this always marks the start of autumn.

It was 30 September last year, 16th October in 2023, 2022 27th Sept, 2021 21st Sept, 2020 26th Sept.

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From ancient Greece 32 tragedies are available to us. These plays, from the 5th century BCE, mostly don’t have a good ending. Hence our use of the word tragedy.

The 32 remaining are from just three authors, Euripides (18), Aeschylus (7) and Sophocles (7).
Hundreds of tragedies have been written, we know of some 300 more through fragments and titles from just those three authors. There were other authors, and we know the number of festivals and stagings etc. that we know took place implies there have been hundreds more than that. Just at the Athens festivals alone an estimated 648 different tragedies have been performed over a 70 year period in the 5th century BCE. Just 1 or 2 percent of tragedies written and staged are left to us. A tragedy in its own right.

Why these 32 works? These three authors mostly because a century onwards, the Greeks themselves held them in high regard. But beyond that, why these out of the 300 or so the 3 authors wrote? Mostly because of the Romans. 24 of 32 remaining works were selected by Roman grammatic scholars 600 years later, becoming canon in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. All 7 from both Aeschylus and Sophocles, and 10 by Euripides. Likely because of their link to the Homeric tales, which was central in Roman educational efforts. The number 24 isn’t a coincidence either, aiding memory techniques and echoing the 24 chapters in the Iliad and the Odyssee. Of these 24 we have multiple manuscripts and comments and marginalia, because they were taught and used.

This filter, 600 years after the tragedies were written, and 1800 years ago to us means that neither the ancient Greeks nor we ourselves have had any influence on the logic of this selection. The 24 handed down to us through the Roman filter, weren’t selected because the Greeks thought them most representative, nor because we think they are the most outstanding work. And possibly not because of esthetic reasons at all, but because of Roman educational preferences in teaching Greek grammar.

The other 8, all by Euripides, have come to us via a different way. Their titles are in alphabetic order, ε to ι, a piece of what once would have been a full overview of Euripides work, being copied together by some scribes. No selection criteria, just coincidence that one part of these ‘collected works’ survived. No annotations or comments either, just the works.

We know tragedies end badly, right? The ancient Greek word, originally meaning something like ‘goat song’, has come to mean that very thing to us. But it’s not that the ancient Greek playwrights were all depressed or nihilists. It seems it’s just that the Romans selected 24 works that mostly ended badly. Contemporary sources from Ancient Greece tell us tragedies did also end happily, and that such plays were very popular. Yet, the Roman selection 600 years later definitely picked mostly ones ending in, well, tragedy.

Comparing the two groups of plays by Euripides gives an enormous contrast though: of the 10 Roman selected works by Euripides only 2 end happily (20%), of the 8 ‘alphabetical’ ones by the same author, 7 end happily (88%). A reverse image!

The Roman selection is what made tragedies tragedies for us. A group of people 600 years removed from the source of these plays and 1800 years removed from us. For their own, unknowable to us, reasons. It’s a survival bias, not an inherent trait of the plays concerned.

And we’re stuck with that choice.

Tragic.

Also highly fascinating, I find.

Sources: Libraries of the Mind by William Marx (2025), page 3 and 112-116, Greek Tragedy on Wikipedia.

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Today I received a copyright infringement notice from ANP Photo, the Dutch photo press organisation, telling me I was using an image they hold the rights to on this site without a license. And suggesting I pay them 370,56 Euro for the privilege.

The image, that I used in a 2018 blogpost, is this one:


Image: European Space Agency, Creative Commons BY-SA

While ANP, despite its phase of being venture capital owned some time back, is generally seen as a respectable agency, this is a clear and unworthy attempt at license trolling.

ANP Photo contains over 100 million images, and the one above is indeed in their image bank as well, although it doesn’t surface if you use Mars and ESA as selection criteria.

Early on in this blog in the ’00s, I have occasionally used images wrongly and afaik that’s all corrected and no longer the case.

The problem here however is of course that ANP does not have the IP or licensing rights to the image that they claim.

In this site I mostly use images that I made myself, and otherwise use Creative Commons licensed images where the rights holder specifies the types of use you don’t need upfront permission or pay for.

This is one such image.

The image is of the Korolev crater on Mars, so there is no dispute about its source, because no one else had a camera, let alone a human being or photo journalist, in orbit around Mars at the time it was taken in November 2018: the European Space Agency.

That’s also where I got it from, directly from the ESA website, under a Creative Commons license and the clear conditions of having to attribute the image (‘BY’, by attribution, here done by linking and mentioning the source in the text) and sharing any derivative under the same conditions (‘SA’, share alike, here true by default because the image wasn’t altered), but otherwise to do with it as I see fit, even commercially.
If you follow that link to the image, and click on it you’ll see the download link ESA provides for different sizes, and a repeat of the Creative Commons licensing information underneath.
Just posting the image, without me adding links or attribution, would have been enough though, because that is also clearly stated in the image by ESA itself, in the bottom left corner where it says (c) ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY SA 3.0 IGO.

Even if that CC license would now no longer be there at the ESA web page and had been retracted, it would still mean nothing for this image, because CC licenses cannot be retroactively withdrawn or altered: the license that applied at the moment of use remains always applicable.

That same Creative Commons licensing statement is in the image that ANP holds in their image data base.
So a false claim by ANP, and a very disappointing one too.

There even is a potential argument to be made, a lawyer friend told me, that this image can’t be copyrighted as it was automatically taken without any real time human influence as to timing, angle, composition etc (the camera being on a time delay of 4 to 24 minutes between Earth and Mars after all). But I doubt that argument holds here: I assume the image is a selection and crop of a much bigger image, and that choice and selection probably clears the threshold for creativity in copyright law.

[UPDATE] After I responded to ANP that their infringement claim was license trolling they withdrew the claim, albeit without apology. I followed up with asking if they know how many other Creative Commons licensed or even public domain images they have in their 100 million+ database, given a number of public sources they include for their images, and if they know how many false claims and payments they made and received on those images. I bet the answer is they don’t know (nor care apparantly).

Dutch homes, like most in northern Europe aren’t built to keep heat out but to keep heat in. As for most of the year it is colder than you’d like as inside temperature.

With the current heat wave I finally arranged a few things to keep things cooler. I ordered a few different types of ventilator, one silent enough to also be useful at night.

To keep the sun out we have screens in place on the east / south side of the house, already for some years. But on summer days the western side catches quite a lot of early evening heat too. And that means Y’s bedroom is warmest just as she goes to sleep, my office is not usable in the evening, and the kitchen catches a lot of sun right when I’m cooking dinner. On the lookout for a cheaper solution than remote controlled screens a colleague at a client suggested on window screens made to fit. So ordered those today, als of for the roof terrace door and window, on the east side.

Let’s see how that works out this summer.

We’re scouting to replace our car (a 2006 Volvo V50). The challenge is finding one that has similar luggage space. The V50 has a box shaped boot, whereas other cars have either very sloping backs or lack depth in the boot. For newer Volvo’s this holds true as well. Cars have generally become bigger on the outside, but that has been used for padding and for the passenger compartment it seems, not for luggage space which seems to have actually shrunk for compact models like the V50. This ensures our camping gear won’t fit a car, where it does fit our V50.

E booked two test drives for this morning, both Toyota (a 2019 Corolla and a 2018 Rav4). Part of the test was an attempt at loading our camping gear in front of our house. The Corolla failed due to its sloping back, the Rav4 passed the packing test as its back is more boxy. The Rav4 is however hardly compact.

Reminds me of when we were looking for a car in 2004, and one of our key criteria was whether it could comfortably fit the rabbit cage that E’s rabbit lived in. Which is how we ended up driving a Citroen Xsara Picasso, after trying a much wider range of models.

For our current car we didn’t have such rabbit based criteria when we bought it early 2013. After Y’s birth in 2016 and getting a bigger tent for camping, everything still fit through adding a rooftop box.

What currently fits our V50’s boot must however also fit the replacement car (while we assume the rooftop box will remain a necessity for summer holiday travel). And it turns out that is a difficult requirement for other cars to fulfill.