text:
Pytheas of Massalia (; Ancient Greek: Πυθέας ὁ Μασσαλιώτης Pythéas ho Massaliōtēs; Latin: Pytheas Massiliensis; born  350 BC,   320–306 BC) was a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille, France). He made a voyage of exploration to northwestern Europe in about 325 BC, but his account of it, known widely in antiquity, has not survived and is now known only through the writings of others.

On this voyage, he circumnavigated and visited a considerable part of modern-day Great Britain and Ireland. He was the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes. He is also the first person on record to describe the midnight sun. The theoretical existence of some Northern phenomena that he described, such as a frigid zone, and temperate zones where the nights are very short in summer and the sun does not set at the summer solstice, was already known. Similarly, reports of a country of perpetual snow and darkness (the country of the Hyperboreans) had reached the Mediterranean some centuries before.

Pytheas introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest one known that suggests the moon as their cause.

Dates
Much of what is known about Pytheas comes from commentary written by historians during the classical period hundreds of years after Pytheas's journeys occurred. Pliny said that Timaeus (born about 350 BC) believed Pytheas' story of the discovery of amber. First century BC Strabo said that Dicaearchus (died about 285 BC) did not trust the stories of Pytheas. That is all the information that survives concerning the date of Pytheas' voyage.  Henry Fanshawe Tozer wrote that Pytheas' voyage was about 330 BC, derived from three main sources.

Record

Pytheas described his travels in a work that has not survived; only excerpts remain, quoted or paraphrased by later authors, most familiarly in Strabo's Geographica, Pliny's Natural History and passages in Diodorus of Sicily's history. Most of the ancients, including the first two just mentioned, refer to his work by his name: "Pytheas says …" Two late writers give titles: the astronomical author Geminus of Rhodes mentions  (ta peri tou Okeanou), literally "things about the Ocean", sometimes translated as "Description of the Ocean", "On the Ocean" or "Ocean"; Marcianus, the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes, mentions  (periodos gēs), a "trip around the earth" or περίπλους (periplous), "sail around".

Scholars of the 19th century tended to interpret these titles as the names of distinct works covering separate voyages; for example, Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology hypothesizes a voyage to Britain and Thule written about in "Ocean" and another from Cadiz to the river Don, written about in "Sail Around". As is common with ancient texts, multiple titles may represent a single source, for example, if a title refers to a section rather than the whole. Presently, periplus is recognized as a genre of navigational literature. Mainstream consensus is that there was only one work, "on the Ocean", which was based on a periplus.

Diodorus did not mention Pytheas by name. The association is made as follows: Pliny reported that "Timaeus says there is an island named Mictis … where tin is found, and to which the Britons cross." Diodorus said that tin was brought to the island of Ictis, where there was an emporium. The last link was supplied by Strabo, who said that an emporium on the island of Corbulo in the mouth of the river Loire was associated with the Britain of Pytheas by Polybius. Assuming that Ictis, Mictis and Corbulo are the same, Diodorus appears to have read Timaeus, who must have read Pytheas, whom Polybius also read.

Circumstances of the voyage

Pytheas was the first documented Mediterranean mariner to reach the British Isles.

The start of Pytheas's voyage is unknown. The Carthaginians had closed the Strait of Gibraltar to all ships from other nations. Some historians, mainly of the late 19th century and before, therefore speculated that he must have traveled overland to the mouth of the Loire or the Garonne. Others believed that, to avoid the Carthaginian blockade, he may have stayed close to land and sailed only at night, or taken advantage of a temporary lapse in the blockade.

An alternate theory is that by the 4th century BC, the western Greeks, especially the Massaliotes, were on amicable terms with Carthage. In 348 BC, Carthage and Rome came to terms over the Sicilian Wars with a treaty defining their mutual interests. Rome could use Sicilian markets, Carthage could buy and sell goods at Rome, and slaves taken by Carthage from allies of Rome were to be set free. Rome was to stay out of the western Mediterranean, but these terms did not apply to Massalia, which had its own treaty. During the second half of the 4th century BC, the time of Pytheas' voyage, Massaliotes were presumably free to operate as they pleased; there is, at least, no evidence of conflict with Carthage in any of the sources that mention the voyage.

The early part of Pytheas' voyage was outlined by statements of Eratosthenes that Strabo said are false because taken from Pytheas. Apparently, Pytheas said that tides ended at the "sacred promontory" (Hieron akrōtērion, or Sagres Point), and from there to Gades is said to be 5 days' sail. Strabo complained about this distance, and about Pytheas' portrayal of the exact location of Tartessos. Mention of these places in a journal of the voyage indicates that Pytheas passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed north along the coast of Portugal.

Voyage to Britain

The "circumnavigation"

Strabo reported that Pytheas said he "travelled over the whole of Britain that was accessible". Because there are scant first hand sources available regarding Pytheas's journey, historians have looked at the etymology for clues about the route he took up the north Atlantic.  The word epelthein, at root "come upon", does not imply any specific method, and Pytheas did not elaborate.

He did use the word "whole" and he stated a perimetros ("perimeter") of more than 40,000 stadia. Using Herodotus' standard of  for one stadium gives ; however, there is no way to tell which standard foot was in effect. The English foot is an approximation. Strabo wanted to discredit Pytheas on the grounds that 40,000 stadia is outrageously high and cannot be real.

Diodorus Siculus gave a similar number: 42,500 stadia, about , and explains that it is the perimeter of a triangle around Britain. The consensus has been that he probably took his information from Pytheas through Timaeaus. Pliny gave the circuitus reported by Pytheas as 4,875 Roman miles.

The explorer Fridtjof Nansen explained this apparent fantasy of Pytheas as a mistake of Timaeus. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus never saw Pytheas' work, says Nansen, but they and others read of him in Timaeus. Pytheas reported only days' sail. Timaeus converted days to stadia at the rate of 1,000 per day, a standard figure of the times. However, Pytheas only sailed 560 stadia per day for a total of 23,800, which in Nansen's view is consistent with 700 stadia per degree.

Nansen later states that Pytheas must have stopped to obtain astronomical data. Presumably, the extra time was spent ashore. Using the stadia of Diodorus Siculus, one obtains 42.5 days for the time that would be spent in circumnavigating Britain. (It may have been a virtual circumnavigation; see under Thule below.)

The perimeter, according to Nansen based on the 23,800 stadia, was . This number is in the neighborhood of what a triangular perimeter ought to be, but it cannot be verified against anything Pytheas may have said, nor was Diodorus Siculus very precise about the locations of the legs. The "perimeter" is often translated as "coastline", but this translation is misleading. The coastline, following all the bays and inlets, is  (see Geography of the United Kingdom). Pytheas could have travelled any perimeter between that number and Diodorus'. Polybius added that Pytheas said he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, of which he, Polybius, was skeptical. Despite Strabo's conviction of a lie, the perimeter said to have been given by Pytheas is not evidence of it. The issue of what he did say can never be settled until more fragments of Pytheas's writings are found.

Name and description of the British
The first known written use of the word Britain was an ancient Greek transliteration of the original P-Celtic term. It is believed to have appeared within a periplus by Pytheas, but no copies of this work survive. The earliest existing records of the word are quotations of the periplus by later authors, such as those within Strabo's Geographica, Pliny's Natural History and Diodorus of Sicily's Bibliotheca historica. According to Strabo, Pytheas referred to Britain as Bretannikē, which is treated a feminine noun.

 "Britain" is most like Welsh Ynys Prydein, "the island of Britain", in which is a P-Celtic cognate of Q-Celtic Cruithne in Irish Cruithen-tuath, "land of the Picts". The base word is Scottish/Irish cruth, Welsh pryd, meaning "form". The British were the "people of forms", with the sense of shapes or pictures, thought to refer to their practice of tattooing or war painting. The Roman word Picti, "the Picts", means "painted".

This etymology suggests Pytheas most likely did not have much interaction with the Irish as their language was Q-Celtic. Rather, Pytheas brought back the P-Celtic form from more geographically accessible regions where Welsh or Breton are spoken presently.  Furthermore, some proto-Celtic was spoken over all of Greater Britain, and this particular spelling is prototypical of those more populous regions, but there is no evidence that he distinguished between the peoples of the archipelago.

Diodorus based on Pytheas reported that Britain is cold and subject to frosts, being "too much subject to the Bear", and not "under the Arctic pole", as some translations say.
The numerous population of natives, he says, live in thatched cottages, store their grain in subterranean caches and bake bread from it. They are "of simple manners" (ēthesin haplous) and are content with plain fare. They are ruled by many kings and princes who live in peace with each other. Their troops fight from chariots, as did the Greeks in the Trojan War.

The three corners of Britain: Kantion, Belerion and Orkas
Opposite Europe in Diodorus is the promontory (akrōtērion) of Kantion (Kent), 100 stadia, about , from the land, but the text is ambiguous: "the land" could be either Britain or the continent. Four days' sail beyond that is another promontory, Belerion, which can only be Cornwall, as Diodorus is describing the triangular perimeter and the third point is Orkas, presumably the main island of the Orkney Islands.

The tin trade
The inhabitants of Cornwall were involved in the manufacture of tin ingots. They mined the ore, smelted it and then worked it into pieces in the shape of knuckle-bones, after which it was transported to the island of Ictis by wagon, which could be done at low tide. Merchants that purchased it there packed it on horses for 30 days to the river Rhône, where it was carried down to the mouth. Diodorus said that the inhabitants of Cornwall were civilized in manner and especially hospitable to strangers because of their dealings with foreign merchants.

Scotland
The first written reference to Scotland was in 320 BC by Pytheas, who called the northern tip of Britain "Orcas", the source of the name of the Orkney islands.

Thule
Strabo related, taking his text from Polybius, that "Pytheas asserts that he explored in person the whole northern region of Europe as far as the ends of the world." Strabo did not believe it but he explained what Pytheas meant by the ends of the world. Thoulē, he said (now spelled Thule; Pliny the Elder uses Tyle; Vergil references ultima Thule in Georgic I, Line 30, where the ultima refer to the end of the world) is the most northerly of the British Isles. There the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle (see below on Arctic Circle). Moreover, said Strabo, none of the other authors mention Thule, a fact which he used to discredit Pytheas, but which to moderns indicates Pytheas was the first explorer to arrive there and tell of it.

Thule was described as an island six days' sailing north of Britain, near the frozen sea (pepēguia thalatta, "solidified sea"). Pliny added that it had no nights at midsummer when the sun was passing through the sign of the Crab (at the summer solstice), a reaffirmation that it is on the Arctic Circle. He added that the crossing to Thule started at the island of Berrice, "the largest of all", which may be Lewis in the outer Hebrides. If Berrice was in the outer Hebrides, the crossing would have brought Pytheas to the coast of Møre og Romsdal or Trøndelag, Norway, explaining how he managed to miss the Skagerrak. If this is his route, in all likelihood he did not actually circumnavigate Britain, but returned along the coast of Germany, accounting for his somewhat larger perimeter.

Concerning the location of Thule, a discrepancy in data caused subsequent geographers some problems, and may be responsible for Ptolemy's distortion of Scotland. Strabo reported that Eratosthenes places Thule at a parallel 11500 stadia (1305 miles, or 16.4°) north of the mouth of the Borysthenes. The parallel running through that mouth also passes through Celtica and is Pytheas' base line. Using 3700 or 3800 stadia (approximately 420–430 miles or 5.3°–5.4°) north of Marseille for a base line obtains a latitude of 64.8° or 64.9° for Thule, well short of the Arctic Circle. It is in fact the latitude of Trondheim, where Pytheas may have reached land.

A statement by Geminus of Rhodes quotes On the Ocean as saying:
... the Barbarians showed us the place where the sun goes to rest. For it was the case that in these parts the nights were very short, in some places two, in others three hours long, so that the sun rose again a short time after it had set.

Nansen claimed that according to this statement, Pytheas was there in person and that the 21- and 22-hour days must be the customary statement of latitude by length of longest day. He calculates the latitudes to be 64° 32′ and 65° 31′, partially confirming Hipparchus' statement of the latitude of Thule. And yet Strabo said: Pytheas of Massalia tells us that Thule ... is farthest north, and that there the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle.

Eratosthenes extended the latitudinal distance from Massalia to Celtica to 5000 stadia (7.1°), placing the base line in Normandy. The northernmost location cited in Britain at the Firth of Clyde is now northern Scotland. To get this country south of Britain to conform to Strabo's interpretation of Pytheas, Ptolemy has to rotate Scotland by 90°.

The 5000 stadia must be discounted: it crosses the Borysthenes upriver near Kyiv rather than at the mouth. It does place Pytheas on the Arctic Circle, which in Norway is south of the Lofoten islands. It seems that Eratosthenes altered the base line to pass through the northern extreme of Celtica. Pytheas, as related by Hipparchus, probably cited the place in Celtica where he first made land. If he used the same practice in Norway, Thule is at least somewhere on the entire northwest coast of Norway from Møre og Romsdal to the Lofoten Islands.

The explorer Richard Francis Burton in his study of Thule stated that it had had many definitions over the centuries. Many more authors have written about it than remembered Pytheas. The question of the location of Pytheas' Thule remains. The latitudes given by the ancient authors can be reconciled. The missing datum required to fix the location is longitude: "Manifestly we cannot rely upon the longitude."

Pytheas crossed the waters northward from Berrice, in the north of the British Isles, but whether to starboard, larboard, or straight ahead is not known. From the time of the Roman Empire all the possibilities were suggested repeatedly by each generation of writers: Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and later Greenland. A manuscript variant of a name in Pliny has abetted the Iceland theory: Nerigon instead of Berrice, which sounds like Norway. If one sails west from Norway one encounters Iceland. Burton himself espoused this theory.

The standard texts have Berrice presently, as well as Bergos for Vergos in the same list of islands. The Scandiae islands are more of a problem, as they could be Scandinavia, but other islands had that name as well. Moreover, Procopius says (De Bello Gothico, Chapter 15) that the earlier name of Scandinavia was Thule and that it was the home of the Goths. The fact that Pytheas returned from the vicinity of the Baltic favors Procopius's opinion. The fact that Pytheas lived centuries before the colonization of Iceland and Greenland by European agriculturalists makes them less likely candidates, as he stated that Thule was populated and its soil was tilled.

Concerning the people of Thule Strabo says of Pytheas, but grudgingly:
... he might possibly seem to have made adequate use of the facts as regards the people who live close to the frozen zone, when he says that, ... the people live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them. As for the grain, he says, – since they have no pure sunshine – they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither; for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains.

What he seems to be describing is an agricultural country that used barns for threshing grain rather than the Mediterranean outside floor of sun-baked mud and manufactures a drink, possibly mead.

Encounter with drift ice

After mentioning the crossing (navigatio) from Berrice to Tyle, Pliny made a brief statement that:
A Tyle unius diei navigatione mare concretum a nonnullis Cronium appellatur.

"One day's sail from Thule is the frozen ocean, called by some the Cronian Sea."

The mare concretum appears to match Strabo's pepēguia thalatta and is probably the same as the topoi ("places") mentioned in Strabo's apparent description of spring drift ice, which would have stopped his voyage further north and was for him the ultimate limit of the world. Strabo says:

Pytheas also spoke of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it was said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.

The term used for "marine lung" (pleumōn thalattios) appears to refer to jellyfish of the type the ancients called sea-lung. The latter are mentioned by Aristotle in On the Parts of Animals as being free-floating and insensate. They are not further identifiable from what Aristotle says but some pulmones appear in Pliny as a class of insensate sea animal; specifically the halipleumon ("salt-water lung"). William Ogle, a major translator and annotator of Aristotle, attributes the name sea-lung to the lung-like expansion and contraction of the Medusae, a kind of Cnidaria, during locomotion. The ice resembled floating circles in the water. The modern English term for this phenomenon is pancake ice.

The association of Pytheas' observations with drift ice has long been standard in navigational literature, including Nathaniel Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, which begins Chapter 33, Ice Navigation, with Pytheas. At its edge, sea, slush, and ice mix, surrounded by fog.

Discovery of the Baltic

Strabo said that Pytheas gave an account of "what is beyond the Rhine as far as Scythia", which he, Strabo, thought was false. In the geographers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, such as Ptolemy, Scythia stretched eastward from the mouth of the river Vistula; thus Pytheas must have described the Germanic coast of the Baltic Sea; if the statement is true, there are no other possibilities. As to whether he explored it in person, he said that he explored the entire north in person (see under Thule above). As the periplus was a sort of ship's log, he probably did reach the Vistula.

According to The Natural History by Pliny the Elder:
Pytheas said that the Gutones, a people of Germany, inhabited the shores of an estuary of the Ocean called Mentonomon, their territory extending a distance of six thousand stadia; that, at one day's sail from this territory, is the Isle of Abalus, upon the shores of which, amber is thrown up by the waves in spring, it being an excretion of the sea in a concrete form; as, also, that the inhabitants use this amber by way of fuel, and sell it to their neighbours, the Teutones.

The "Gutones" is a simplification of two manuscript variants, Guttonibus and Guionibus, which would be in the nominative case Guttones or Guiones, the Goths in the main opinion. The second major manuscript variant is either Mentonomon (nominative case) or Metuonidis (genitive case). A number of etymologies have been proposed but none very well accepted. Amber is not actually named. It is termed the concreti maris purgamentum, the "frozen sea's leavings" after the springtime melt. Diodorus used ēlektron, the Greek word for amber, the object that gave its name to electricity through its ability to acquire a charge. Pliny presented an archaic opinion, as in his time amber was a precious stone brought from the Baltic at great expense, but the Germans, he said, used it for firewood, according to Pytheas.

"Mentonomon" is unambiguously stated to be an aestuarium or "estuary" of 6000 stadia, which using the Herodotean standard of  per stadium is . That number happens to be the distance from the mouth of the Skagerrak to the mouth of the Vistula, but no source says explicitly where the figure was taken. Competing views, however, usually have to reinterpret "estuary" to mean something other than an estuary, as the west of the Baltic Sea is the only body of estuarial water of sufficient length in the region.

Earlier Pliny said that a large island of three days' sail from the Scythian coast called Balcia by Xenophon of Lampsacus is called Basilia by Pytheas. It is generally understood to be the same as Abalus. Based on the amber, the island could have been Heligoland, Zealand, the shores of Bay of Gdansk, Sambia or the Curonian Lagoon, which were historically the richest sources of amber in northern Europe. This is the earliest use of Germania.

Voyage to the Don
Pytheas claimed to have explored the entire north; however, he turned back at the mouth of the Vistula, the border with Scythia. If he had gone on he would have discovered the ancestral Balts. They occupied the lands to the east of the Vistula. In the west they began with the people living around Frisches Haff, Lithuanian Aismarės, "sea of the Aistians", who in that vicinity became the Baltic Prussians. On the east Herodotus called them the Neuri, a name related to Old Prussian narus, "the deep", in the sense of water country. Later Lithuanians would be "the people of the shore". The Vistula was the traditional limit of Greater Germany. Place names featuring *ner- or *nar- are wide-ranging over the vast Proto-Baltic homeland, occupying western Russia before the Slavs.

Herodotus said that the Neuri had Scythian customs, but they were at first not considered Scythian. During the war between the Scythians and the Persian Empire, the Scythians came to dominate the Neuri. Strabo denied that any knowledge of the shores of the eastern Baltic existed. He had heard of the Sauromatai, but had no idea where to place them.

Herodotus had mentioned these Sauromatai as a distinct people living near the Neuri. Pliny the Elder, however, was much better informed. The island of Baunonia (Bornholm), he said lies a days' sail off Scythia, where amber is collected. To him the limit of Germany was the Vistula. In contrast to Strabo, he knew that the Goths live around the Vistula, but these were definitely Germans.

By the time of Tacitus, the Aestii had emerged. The former Scythia was now entirely Sarmatia. Evidently the Sarmatians conquered westward to the Vistula. The Goths moved to the south. That the Balts lived east of the Vistula from remote prehistoric times is unquestioned. The Baltic languages, however, are only known from the 2nd millennium AD. They are known to have developed in tribal contexts, as they were originally tribal. The first mention of any tribes is in Ptolemy's description of European Sarmatia, where the main Prussian tribes are mentioned for the first time.

In Tacitus, only the language of the Aestii is mentioned. Strabo distinguished the Venedi, who were likely Slavs. From these few references, which are the only surviving evidence apart from glottochronology and place name analysis, it would seem that the Balts of Pytheas' time were well past the Common Balto-Slavic stage, and likely spoke a number of related dialects. By turning back at what he thought was the limit of Germany, he not only missed the Balts, but did not discover that more Germans, the Goths, had moved into the Baltic area.

Polybius related: "... on his return thence (from the north), he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe from Gades to the Tanais." Some authors consider this leg a second voyage, as it does not seem likely he would pass by Marseille without refitting and refreshing the crew. It is striking that he encountered the border of Scythia, turned around, and went around Europe counter-clockwise until he came to the southern side of Scythia on the Black Sea. It is possible to speculate that he may have hoped to circumnavigate Europe, but the sources do not say. In other, even more speculative interpretations, Pytheas returned north and the Tanais is not the Don but is a northern river, such as the Elbe.

Measurements of latitude

Latitude by the altitude of the Sun
In discussing the work of Pytheas, Strabo typically used direct discourse: "Pytheas says ..." In presenting his astronomical observations, he changed to indirect discourse: "Hipparchus said that Pytheas says ..." either because he never read Pytheas' manuscript (because it was not available to him) or in deference to Hipparchus, who appears to have been the first to apply the Babylonian system of representing the sphere of the Earth by 360°.

Strabo used the degrees, based on Hipparchus. Neither say that Pytheas did. Nevertheless, Pytheas did obtain latitudes, which, according to Strabo, he expressed in proportions of the gnōmōn ("index"), or trigonometric tangents of angles of elevation to celestial bodies. They were measured on the gnōmōn, the vertical leg of a right triangle, and the flat leg of the triangle. The imaginary hypotenuse looked along the line of sight to the celestial body or marked the edge of a shadow cast by the vertical leg on the horizontal leg.

Pytheas took the altitude of the Sun at Massalia at noon on the longest day of the year and found that the tangent was the proportion of 120 (the length of the gnōmōn) to 1/5 less than 42 (the length of the shadow). Hipparchus, relying on the authority of Pytheas (says Strabo), states that the ratio is the same as for Byzantium and that the two therefore are on the same parallel. Nansen and others prefer to give the cotangent 209/600, which is the inverse of the tangent, but the angle is greater than 45° and it is the tangent that Strabo states. His number system did not permit him to express it as a decimal but the tangent is about 2.87.

It is unlikely that any of the geographers could compute the arctangent, or angle of that tangent. Moderns look it up in a table. Hipparchos is said to have had a table of some angles. The altitude, or angle of elevation, is 70° 47′ 50″ but that is not the latitude.

At noon on the longest day the plane of longitude passing through Marseille is exactly on edge to the Sun. If the Earth's axis were not tilted toward the Sun, a vertical rod at the equator would have no shadow. A rod further north would have a north–south shadow, and as an elevation of 90° would be a zero latitude, the complement of the elevation gives the latitude. The Sun is even higher in the sky due to the tilt. The angle added to the elevation by the tilt is known as the obliquity of the ecliptic and at that time was 23° 44′ 40″. The complement of the elevation less the obliquity is 43° 13′, only 5′ in error from Marseille's latitude, 43° 18′.

Latitude by the elevation of the north pole
A second method of determining the latitude of the observer measures the angle of elevation of a celestial pole, north in the northern hemisphere. Seen from zero latitude the north pole's elevation is zero; that is, it is a point on the horizon. The declination of the observer's zenith also is zero and therefore so is their latitude.

As the observer's latitude increases (traveling north) so does the declination. The pole rises over the horizon by an angle of the same amount. The elevation at the terrestrial North Pole is 90° (straight up) and the celestial pole has a declination of the same value. The latitude also is 90.

Moderns have Polaris to mark the approximate location of the North celestial pole, which it does nearly exactly, but this position of Polaris was not available in Pytheas' time, due to changes in the positions of the stars. Pytheas reported that the pole was an empty space at the corner of a quadrangle, the other three sides of which were marked by stars. Their identity has not survived but based on calculations these are believed to have been α and κ in Draco and β in Ursa Minor.

Pytheas sailed northward with the intent of locating the Arctic Circle and exploring the "frigid zone" to the north of it at the extreme of the Earth. He did not know the latitude of the circle in degrees. All he had to go by was the definition of the frigid zone as the latitudes north of the line where the celestial arctic circle was equal to the celestial Tropic of Cancer, the tropikos kuklos (refer to the next subsection). Strabo's angular report of this line as being at 24° may well be based on a tangent known to Pytheas, but he did not say that. In whatever mathematical form Pytheas knew the location, he could only have determined when he was there by taking periodic readings of the elevation of the pole (eksarma tou polou in Strabo and others).

Today the elevation can be obtained easily on ship with a quadrant. Electronic navigational systems have made even this simple measure unnecessary. Longitude was beyond Pytheas and his peers, but it was not of as great a consequence, because ships seldom strayed out of sight of land. East–west distance was a matter of contention to the geographers; they are one of Strabo's most frequent topics. Because of the gnōmōn north–south distances were accurate often to within a degree.

It is unlikely that any gnōmōn could be read accurately on the pitching deck of a small vessel at night. Pytheas must have made frequent overnight stops to use his gnōmōn and talk to the natives, which would have required interpreters, probably acquired along the way. The few fragments that have survived indicate that this material was a significant part of the periplus, possibly kept as the ship's log. There is little hint of native hostility; the Celts and the Germans appear to have helped him, which suggests that the expedition was put forward as purely scientific. In any case all voyages required stops for food, water and repairs; the treatment of voyagers fell under the special "guest" ethic for visitors.

Location of the Arctic Circle
The ancient Greek view of the heavenly bodies on which their navigation was based was imported from Babylonia by the Ionian Greeks, who used it to become a seafaring nation of merchants and colonists during the Archaic period in Greece. Massalia was an Ionian colony. The first Ionian philosopher, Thales, was known for his ability to measure the distance of a ship at sea from a cliff by the very method Pytheas used to determine the latitude of Massalia, the trigonometric ratios.

The astronomic model on which ancient Greek navigation was based, which is still in place today, was already extant in the time of Pytheas, the concept of the degrees only being missing. The model divided the universe into a celestial and an earthly sphere pierced by the same poles. Each of the spheres were divided into zones (zonai) by circles (kukloi) in planes at right angles to the poles. The zones of the celestial sphere repeated on a larger scale those of the terrestrial sphere.

The basis for division into zones was the two distinct paths of the heavenly bodies: that of the stars and that of the Sun and Moon. Astronomers know today that the Earth revolving around the Sun is tilted on its axis, bringing each hemisphere now closer to the Sun, now further away. The Greeks had the opposite model, that the stars and the Sun rotated around the Earth. The stars moved in fixed circles around the poles. The Sun moved at an oblique angle to the circles, which obliquity brought it now to the north, now to the south. The circle of the Sun was the ecliptic. It was the center of a band called the zodiac on which various constellations were located.

The shadow cast by a vertical rod at noon was the basis for defining zonation. The intersection of the northernmost or southernmost points of the ecliptic defined the axial circles passing through those points as the two tropics (tropikoi kukloi, "circles at the turning points") later named for the zodiacal constellations found there, Cancer and Capricorn. During noon of the summer solstice (therinē tropē) rods there cast no shadow. The latitudes between the tropics were called the torrid zone (diakekaumenē, "burned up").

Based on their experience of the Torrid Zone south of Egypt and Libya, the Greek geographers judged it uninhabitable. Symmetry requires that there be an uninhabitable Frigid Zone (katepsugmenē, "frozen") to the north and reports from there since the time of Homer seemed to confirm it. The edge of the Frigid Zone ought to be as far south from the North Pole in latitude as the Summer Tropic is from the Equator. Strabo gives it as 24°, which may be based on a previous tangent of Pytheas, but he does not say. The Arctic Circle would then be at 66°, accurate to within a degree.

Seen from the equator the celestial North Pole (boreios polos) is a point on the horizon. As the observer moves northward the pole rises and the circumpolar stars appear, now unblocked by the Earth. At the Tropic of Cancer the radius of the circumpolar stars reaches 24°. The edge stands on the horizon. The constellation of mikra arktos (Ursa Minor, "little bear") was entirely contained within the circumpolar region. The latitude was therefore called the arktikos kuklos, "circle of the bear". The terrestrial Arctic Circle was regarded as fixed at this latitude. The celestial Arctic Circle was regarded as identical to the circumference of the circumpolar stars and therefore a variable.

When the observer is on the terrestrial Arctic Circle and the radius of the circumpolar stars is 66° the celestial Arctic Circle is identical to the celestial Tropic of Cancer. That is what Pytheas means when he says that Thule is located at the place where the Arctic Circle is identical to the Tropic of Cancer. At that point, on the day of the Summer Solstice, the vertical rod of the gnōmōn casts a shadow extending in theory to the horizon over 360° as the Sun does not set. Under the pole the Arctic Circle is identical to the Equator and the Sun never sets but rises and falls on the horizon. The shadow of the gnōmōn winds perpetually around it.

Latitude by length of longest day, and by Sun's elevation on shortest day
Strabo used the astronomical cubit (pēchus, the length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the little finger) as a measure of the elevation of the sun. The term "cubit" in this context is obscure; it has nothing to do with distance along either a straight line or an arc, does not apply to celestial distances, and has nothing to do with the gnōmōn. Hipparchus borrowed this term from Babylonia, where it meant 2°. They in turn took it from ancient Sumer so long ago that if the connection between cubits and degrees was known in either Babylonia or Ionia it did not survive. Strabo stated degrees in either cubits or as a proportion of a great circle. The Greeks also used the length of day at the summer solstice as a measure of latitude. It is stated in equinoctial hours (hōrai isēmerinai), one being 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset on an equinox.

Based partly on data taken from Pytheas, Hipparchus correlated cubits of the Sun's elevation at noon on the winter solstice, latitudes in hours of a day on the summer solstice, and distances between latitudes in stadia for some locations. Pytheas had proved that Marseille and Byzantium were on the same parallel (see above). Hipparchus, through Strabo, added that Byzantium and the mouth of the Borysthenes, today's Dnieper, were on the same meridian and were separated by 3700 stadia, 5.3° at Strabo's 700 stadia per a degree of meridian arc. As the parallel through the river-mouth also crossed the coast of "Celtica", the distance due north from Marseille to Celtica was 3700 stadia, a baseline from which Pytheas seems to have calculated latitude and distance.

Strabo said that Ierne (written Ἰέρνη, meaning Ireland) is under 5000 stadia (7.1°) north of this line. These figures place Celtica around the mouth of the Loire, an emporium for the trading of British tin. The part of Ireland referenced is the vicinity of Belfast. Pytheas then would either have crossed the Bay of Biscay from the coast of Spain to the mouth of the Loire, or reached it along the coast, crossed the English channel from the vicinity of Brest, France to Cornwall, and traversed the Irish Sea to reach the Orkney Islands. A statement of Eratosthenes attributed by Strabo to Pytheas, that the north of the Iberian Peninsula was an easier passage to Celtica than across the Ocean, is somewhat ambiguous: apparently he knew or knew of both routes, but he does not say which he took.

At noon on the winter solstice the Sun stands at 9 cubits and the longest day on the summer solstice is 16 hours at the baseline through Celtica. At 2500 stadia, approximately 283 miles, or 3.6°, north of Celtica, are a people Hipparchus called Celtic, but whom Strabo thought were the British, a discrepancy he might not have noted if he had known that the British were also Celtic. The location is Cornwall. The Sun stands at 6 cubits and the longest day is 17 hours. At 9100 stadia, approximately 1032 miles, north of Marseille, 5400 or 7.7° north of Celtica, the elevation is 4 cubits and the longest day is 18 hours. This location is in the vicinity of the Firth of Clyde.

Here Strabo launched another quibble. Hipparchus, relying on Pytheas, according to Strabo, placed this area south of Britain, but he, Strabo, calculated that it was north of Ireland (Ierne/Ἰέρνη). Pytheas, however, rightly knew what is now Scotland as part of Britain, land of the Picts, even though north of Ireland/Ierne. North of southern Scotland the longest day is 19 hours. Strabo, based on theory alone, states that Ierne is so cold that any lands north of it must be uninhabited. In the hindsight given to moderns Pytheas, in relying on observation in the field, appears more scientific than Strabo, who discounted the findings of others merely because of their strangeness to him. The ultimate cause of his skepticism is simply that he did not believe Scandinavia could exist. This disbelief may also be the cause of alteration of Pytheas' data.

On the tides
Pliny reported that "Pytheas of Massalia informs us, that in Britain the tide rises 80 cubits." The passage does not give enough information to determine which cubit Pliny meant; however, any cubit gives the same general result. If he was reading an early source, the cubit may have been the Cyrenaic cubit, an early Greek cubit, of 463.1 mm, in which case the distance was . This number far exceeds any modern known tides. The National Oceanography Centre, which records tides at tidal gauges placed in about 55 ports of the UK Tide Gauge Network on an ongoing basis, records the highest mean tidal change between 1987 and 2007 at Avonmouth in the Severn Estuary of .

The highest predicted spring tide between 2008 and 2026 at that location will be  on 29 September 2015. Even allowing for geologic and climate change, Pytheas' 80 cubits far exceeds any known tides around Britain. One well-circulated but unevidenced answer to the paradox is that Pytheas was referring to a storm surge. Despite the modern arguments, the fact remains that Pytheas experienced tides that exceeded by far the usual tides in the Mediterranean, and particularly those at Massilia.

Matching fragments of Aëtius in pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus attribute the flood tides ( plēmmurai) to the "filling of the moon" ( plērōsis tēs sēlēnēs) and the ebb tides ( ampōtides) to the "lessening" ( meiōsis). The words are too ambiguous to make an exact determination of Pytheas' meaning, whether diurnal or spring and neap tides are meant, or whether full and new moons or the half-cycles in which they occur. Different translators take different views.

That daily tides should be caused by full moons and new moons is manifestly wrong, which would be a surprising view in a Greek astronomer and mathematician of the times. He could have meant that spring and neap tides were caused by new and full moons, which is partially correct in that spring tides occur at those times. A gravitational theory (objects fall to the center) existed at the time but Pytheas appears to have meant that the phases themselves were the causes (αἰτίαι aitiai). However imperfect or imperfectly related the viewpoint, Pytheas was the first to associate the tides to the phases of the moon.

Literary influence
Pytheas was a central source of information on the North Sea and the subarctic regions of western Europe to later periods, and possibly the only source. The only ancient authors we know by name who certainly saw Pytheas' original text were Dicaearchus, Timaeus, Eratosthenes, Crates of Mallus, Hipparchus, Polybius, Artemidorus and Posidonius. Notably the list does not include Strabo or Tacitus, though Strabo discussed him and Tacitus may likely have known about his work. Either of the two could have known him through other writers or have read his work in the original.

Strabo, citing Polybius, accused Pytheas of promulgating a fictitious journey he could never have funded, as he was a private individual (idiōtēs) and a poor man (penēs). Markham proposes a possible answer to the funding question: seeing that Pytheas was known as a professional geographer and that north Europe was as yet a question mark to Massalian merchants, he suggests that "the enterprise was a government expedition of which Pytheas was placed in command." In another suggestion the merchants of Marseille sent him out to find northern markets. These theories are speculative but perhaps less so than Strabo's contention that Pytheas was a charlatan just because a professional geographer doubted him.

Strabo did explain his reasons for doubting Pytheas' veracity. Citing numerous instances of Pytheas apparently being far off the mark on details concerning known regions, he said: "however, any man who has told such great falsehoods about the known regions would hardly, I imagine, be able to tell the truth about places that are not known to anybody." As an example he mentioned that Pytheas says Kent is several days' sail from Celtica when it is visible from Gaul across the channel. If Pytheas had visited the place he should have verified it personally.

The objection although partially true is itself flawed. Strabo interjected his own view of the location of Celtica, that it was opposite to Britain, end to end. Pytheas, however, places it further south, around the mouth of the Loire (see above), from which it might justifiably be several days' sail. The people across from Britain in Caesar's time were the Germani in the north and the Belgae in the south. Still, some of the Celtic lands were on the channel and were visible from it, which Pytheas should have mentioned but Strabo implies he did not.

Strabo's other objections are similarly flawed or else completely wrong. He simply did not believe the earth was inhabited north of Ierne. Pytheas however could not then answer for himself, or protect his own work from loss or alteration, so most of the questions concerning his voyage remain unresolved, to be worked over by every generation. To some he was a daring adventurer and discoverer; to others, a semi-legendary blunderer or prevaricator.

The logical outcome of this tendency is the historical novel with Pytheas as the main character and the celebration of Pytheas in poetry beginning as far back as Virgil. The process continues into modern times; for example, Pytheas is a key theme in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems.  Details of Pytheas' voyage also serve as the backdrop for Chapter I of Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, The Boat of a Million Years. The Stone Stories trilogy by Mandy Haggith (The Walrus Mutterer, 2018; The Amber Seeker, 2019; The Lyre Dancers, 2020) revolve around Pytheas of Massalia's journeys.

See also
 Britain (name)
 Cruthin
 Euthymenes
 Mining in Cornwall
 Prydain
 Scythia

Notes

Bibliography

 Spekke, Arnolds (1957) The ancient amber routes and the geographical discovery of the Eastern Baltic. Stockholm: Goppers.

 John Taylor, ''Albion: the earliest history" (Dublin, 2016)

External links

350s BC births
Ancient Greek astronomers
Ancient Greek explorers
Ancient Greek geographers
Ancient Massaliotes
Explorers of Europe
Explorers of the Arctic
Prehistoric Britain
Peripluses
350 BC births
4th-century BC geographers
3rd-century BC geographers

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Talking helps us make sense of ideas.
Talking helps us synthesize our ideas.
Talking helps us communicate our ideas.
We want to get this kindergarten class talking — a lot — throughout our current unit: geometry.
But the students weren't talking much…. yet.
After exploring student understandings about shape during our Same or Difference activity — see blog post from 1.4.19 — Jessica and I prepared for the Shape Hunt. It's based off a task by Illustrative Mathematics (from the current website, not the forthcoming elementary curriculum).
I cut out six shapes — some familiar to the kindergartners, and some less so — which Jessica and I placed strategically around the classroom.
Once the students returned from music class, we gathered them at the class meeting area on the rug to launch the investigation.
I pinned shape number 1 — a rectangle — to the white board.
"What can you say about this shape?" I expected they would say things like "it's long" (attending to an attribute) or "it's a rectangle" (which most know intuitively at this point).
Instead, the first student, Savannah, said "we can add squares together to make it." I recorded her words on the board.
"I see it! It's three squares!" Cedric burst out.
"Where?" I pushed them for clarity.
I added a caret clarifying the number of squares that fit into that rectangle.
From the third row on the rug, I could see Gianna scrunching her face.
"The shape," Gianna responded. A dead end.
"No. The shape." Gianna was insistent.
"A lot," Gianna said quickly. We were spinning our wheels, and we wanted to launch the investigation. I took a few more responses before we moved on.
During the investigation, students, armed with clipboards and pencils, did their best to sketch the shapes around the room on their recording sheet. We encouraged the students to talk with one another about the shapes while they worked, but most were so focused on their own drawings that they didn't talk much.
I wandered over to shape 2, a "tilted square," to observe.
Bo's drawing, shown at left, closely matched the shape.
Meanwhile, George had drawn the outline of a blue triangle (shown below).
"No, you're missing a point!" Bo said indignantly.
"My shape is pointy!" George seemed defensive of his work. As I watched, I wish we had prepped them more for how to talk to one another.
Sara overheard them. "It's got points on both sides. It's flipped." I couldn't tell if she was attending to the fact that this tilted square looked like two isosceles triangles, joined at the base, or what, but I decided to just listen.
George had already gotten out a regular pencil to revise his shape, which he then filled in with a red colored pencil.
This one seemed challenging for students to sketch. I wondered if it was because many students saw it as composed of other figures as opposed to one solid shape. None of the students were talking to one another.
Here's Gianna's sketch of shape #3. To us, it looks like she sees it as two figures, possibly two rectangles. It looks like she drew the lower one, and started to close the shape before veering back out to show the upper rectangle. Her lower rectangle features straight(ish) lines and sharp 90 degree(ish) angles. The upper one is anemic and curved.
Back at the carpet for the close, I tried to use a "Collect and Display" math language routine to capture and make visible students oral language. Unfortunately, many students were still feeling stuck in that Level 0 of Van Hiele. They were able to name familiar shapes, and felt uncomfortable with some of the others.
I was disappointed, but tried not to show it.
I asked a few students to share their drawings, but I had been so caught up in trying to listen to and capture the vocabulary students were using — even though it was spare — that I hadn't been as deliberate as I would like about selecting and sequencing the share. Oops.
Some students seemed to focus on the composition of the shape from other shapes, or the straightness of the lines, or the measure of the angles (how "pointy" they are), and making prominent points jut out at the expense of some of the lines. Some students seemed to equate pointiness with triangles, and smoothed that tilted square out to become a rectangle with a long base.
So even if the students weren't talking as much as we wanted yet, at least the teachers were. Getting the teachers talking — anticipating, sharing, and analyzing — is an excellent first step. Talking about both the mathematics and the student work together gives us the same benefits of talk that students get — making sense of and synthesizing ideas, and communicating reasoning. We had a lot to think about for the next day.
Thank you for this, Jenna. Especially, as it the lesson didn't live up to your best hopes – it's always good to have an injection of reality! I think, even though the conversation wasn't as rich as you'd wished for, the activity is still valuable for the students. Seeing a shape and being able to represent it on paper involves so much thinking about the shapes. We can see with that L how it's challenging for some of the students.
Some of us at my school have got a focus on talk in the mathematics classroom too, but I guess we should remember that there's a lot of learning in seeing and doing too!
And as you say, we teachers get to talk about it, and learn that way!
Thanks, Simon! Yes, the start of this unit served as an important reminder in the value of learning even WITHOUT discourse! Even though students would not have been able to articulate how they thought about that L shape, their visuals led to a powerful conversation between me and the classroom teacher.


text:
Tattoo Ideas: Words & Shelley Jackson's SKIN Project
Updated on February 19, 2019
becauseilive
I have thirteen tattoos as well as several piercings, and I think they're all pretty cool.
Shelley Jackson's SKIN Project, Ineradicable Stain
Shelley Jackson's "Skin" Project, Ineradicable Stain, has been in progress since 2003. Jackson, a published author, put out a call for volunteers who would tattoo the manuscript on their skin, one word per participant.
The novel will not be published anywhere in book form and will be known only to the volunteers, who will each receive a copy upon completion. The term "completion," however, is up for interpretation. When Jackson first launched her website and proposed the idea, she stated that if not enough volunteers came forward to complete the first (and only) edition, then the incomplete version would be considered definitive.
The words are assigned to volunteers in the order in which they sign a release form. The assigned word may be any size (the volunteer decides), but must be tattooed in black ink in a classic book font. The word may be placed anywhere on the body, as long as the volunteer did not receive a word which names a body part. In this case, he or she can tattoo the word anywhere EXCEPT on that body part. (For example, the word "hand" can not be tattooed directly on someone's hand.)
She also explains on her website that the participants are not carriers of the text, but are the words themselves, the embodiment of a concept. If any volunteer wanted to cover up or remove the word on their body, it would alter the larger work and change its meaning, but only the actual death of participants would remove their words from the text. Jackson went so far as to say she would make an attempt to attend the funerals of her words.
Sounds self-righteous? Perhaps it is, and maybe it seems as though Jackson is removing the autocracy and agency from her participants, but that hasn't stopped 2,095 volunteers from coming forward.
Here are some examples from Shelley Jackson's SKIN project, along with a few others who are using the art of writing to convey a message best expressed in words rather than images.
SKIN PROJECT
Click thumbnail to view full-size
Below, you'll find some other examples that use the art of tattoo to convey a message via words, quotes, and phrases rather than images.
Word Tattoos
Tattooed Phrases
Tattooed Quotes
BMEZINE.COM
Images courtesy of BMEzine.com
INERADICABLESTAIN.COM
Shelley Jackson's SKIN Project
Tattoo Ideas: Words and Phrases III
Tattoo Placement
Finger Tattoos: Designs, Ideas and Pictures
by Catherine Taylor10
Latin Tattoo Ideas: Words, Phrases, Quotes, and Photos
by becauseilive1436
Edgar Allan Poe Tattoo Designs
by MakinBacon1
1.6 Billion Reasons NOT to Get Japanese or Chinese Tattoos (If You Can't Read Them)
by Jorge Vamos6
The Art of Choosing the Perfect Font and Lettering for a New Tattoo
by Anne3
Top 50 Tattoo Quotes
iiiliivvv
i wrote in latin words in my left arm- we have limits cuz we are afraid...
These tattoos are pretty amazing except for the one by the armpit
I love the lettering in da tatt
(And in Time this too shall pass) :]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiangotlost/386884001...
I got this tattoo a few weeks ago. It means "love is everywhere," or more literally, "there is no place where love does not exist." My friend whose first language is Chinese wrote it for me... ignore the comment that it's grammatically incorrect.
I really like 'silence is a dangerous sound' I'm considering it now for my next tattoo but, my first tattoo will always be my favorite, it says 'hold onto your dreams'
cool tatos.
^rofl!
but i agree.
Where did these photo's come from.... one of these is a good friend of mine ("Dark will turn to light, in time I'll be alright")
starrkissed
10 years ago from Arizona

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Home » Jane Austen , Pride and Prejudice » Discuss Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen's world on "two inches of ivory".
A reading of Jane Austen's novels shows that her materials are extremely limited in themselves. Her subject matter is limited to the manners of a small section of country-gentry who apparently never have been worried about death or sex, hunger or war, guilt or God.
However the exclusions and limitations are deliberate. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as "two inches of ivory". In a letter to her niece Jane Austen wrote, " three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on". Those three or four families are the kind she knew intimately ---- the landed gentry, the upper classes, the lower edge of the nobility, the lower clergy, the officer corps of the military. The novels including Pride and Prejudice exclude the lower classes, not only the industrial masses of the big cities, but also the agricultural labourers who must have been numerous around Meryton and Longbourn.... She hardly touches the aristocracy, and if she does it is only to satirise it ---- as for instance Lady Catherine Dr Bourgh. The Bennets, the Lucases, the Bingleys and Darcy all belong to the class of landed country gentry, with the Bennets and the Lucases at the lower end of it and the Bingleys and Darcy with their personal fortunes at the higher end of it. Very rarely as in Pride and Prejudice the country gentry may include people like the Gardiners who are in trade.
Pride and Prejudice like other Jane Austen novels has a narrow physical setting. The story revolves around Netherfield Park, Longbourn, Hunsford Parsonage, Meryton and Pemberley. There is no reference to nature itself. It is one of the ironies of English literary history that at a time when the English Romantic writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and others were discovering external nature, Jane Austen manages to keep her characters imprisoned indoors. A trip to the lake district is cancelled in Pride and prejudice and the only description of nature at Pemberley is brief and fairly generalized.
Since her settings are the drawing rooms, ball rooms, parks and gardens of a civilized leisure class, she was unlikely to introduce lunatics, villains or ghostly figures. With strict adherence to the probability of life in a country village, she allows nothing terrible to happen. The greatest villainy that disrupts the evenness of a Jane Austen novel is an elopement or may arise from an unkind word or social faux-pus as Darcy's snubbing of Elizabeth at the Netherfield Ball. Jane Austen's theme was also limited to love and marriage. In all of her six novels, there are beautiful girls waiting for really eligible bachelors to get married to. Beyond this, there is no other pursuit to engage them. It was the period of the American war of Independence, of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic wars. But Jane Austen's characters are blissfully unaware of these tumultuous events. The only relevance of the militia in a Jane Austen novel is its ability to provide girls with handsome military officers to flirt with and if possible to marry ------ Wickham and the other military officers in Meryton in Pride and Prejudice serve as objects for flirtation for Lydia and Kitty the younger Bennet girls. Similarly there is no discussion of spiritual or metaphysical issues and Mr. Collins the vicar is only an absurd, comic figure satirized by Jane Austen.
Another limitation of Jane Austen is the 'feminization' of her novels. Men do not appear except in the company of women. There is no 'men talk' or depiction of male sports like hunting. This might be one of the reasons for Darcy not appearing to be a wholly credible character. We never see Darcy except in the company of Elizabeth and since the novel is unfolded from the heroine's point of view, we look at Darcy through Elizabeth's eyes.
These limitations of Jane Austen have occasioned some very scathing criticisms and there is much that has been said in her depreciation. H. W. Harrod complains of the monotonous uniformity of her materials, "A drab scenery, the worse for use, a thin plot unfashionably cut and by turning, relining and trimming made to do duty for five or six novels, a dozen or so stock characters ------ these are Miss Austen's materials". Charlotte Bronte her most famous critic, feels a want of "passion" in her works and believes her to be an author of the surface only: "She ruffles her readers by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound, ....... Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eye, mouth, hands and feet". Wordsworth admitted that her novels were an admirable copy of life, but since the pervading light of imagination way totally absent in them, they could hardly interest him. Since, her women are eminently pre-occupied with economic security a number of critics think that her text is just money. And since she looks at things from an ironic point of view, it being assumed that an ironist is only a detached and disinterested observer of life, Leonie Villard and Marvin Mudrick conclude that she does not have any moral concern.
But the limitations are self-imposed and within her deliberately restricted field of art, Jane Austen is perfect. The restricted social setting, purely local interests lend a sense of discipline to her art and account for the accuracy and precision of portrayal. Her characters stem from the class and society she knows well and hence they are very realistic and life-like. Elizabeth Bennet is one of the most delightful heroines one could come across in literature. She is not the simpering, holier-than-thou heroine of a romantic novel, but appeals by her ordinary and real next door girl image with wit, humour and also very human failings of pride and prejudice. Her characterisation is indeed superb. She may choose her characters from the country gentry but no two characters are ever repeated in any of her novels. Mr. Elton, the vicar in Emma is totally different from Mr. Collins the vicar in Pride and Prejudice. Similarly her heroines are all different. Elizabeth is as different from Emma as Emma is from Fanny Price. About her characters, Macaulay comments "She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet everyday. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings".
It is wrong also to say that her novels lack passion and profundity. It is true that Jane Austen's view is essentially ironic and hence she chooses only those aspects of social behaviour that can lend themselves to ironic treatment --- the inconsistencies and follies of human behaviour, hypocrisy, pretentiousness, incongruities of speech and conduct, self deception. But it does not mean that she touches only the surface. Jane Austen's theme are love, courtship and marriage and it is impossible to keep the feeling out of such a novel. Jane's emotional involvement with Bingley is nothing but a matter of heart as also the Darcy-Elizabeth affair. The emotional conflict in Elizabeth when she refuses Darcy's proposal and later when she recognizes her own blind prejudices on receiving his letter of explanation, are all very finely delineated. So also her distress at the Lydia-Wickham elopement is proof of her deep feelings. Besides love, there are other significant emotions like the jealousy and hypocrisy of Caroline Bingley, the cunning of Wickham, the snobbery and vanity of Lady Catherine, all of which have been depicted by Jane Austen with perfect sincerity and conviction. In Jane Austen, emotions are experienced within a social frame work and hence they are controlled, but they are not absent.
Similarly, it would be wrong to say she is not profound or lacks moral concern. She has delineated with great skill the psychological workings of Elizabeth's mind, her torment on recognizing her own, blind prejudices, in Pride and Prejudice it is definitely possible to work out a scheme of moral values. The moral concern is unobtrusive, but ever present and Jane Austen skillfully portrays the marriages of Lydia and Wickham, Collins and Catherine and the Bennets which by contrast serve to highlight the propriety of the Elizabeth-Darcy marriage which is seen in the social context of the stability and happiness it brings not just to themselves, but to everyone around them. As Andrew H. Wright says, "sht develops themes of the broadest significance, the novels go beyond social record, beneath the didactic, to moral concern, perplexity and commitment... Her novels may be read as broad allegories, in which, sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice, and a number of other virtues and defects are set forth and commented upon."
Within her limited theme and subject matter, Jane Austen is unparalleled in her skill in plot construction. In Pride and Prejudice not a single event or character is out of place and each contributes to the development of plot and theme. Following a logical and coherent pattern the plot of Pride and Prejudice proceeds like that of a drama from exposition, with the characters being introduced in the first few chapters, the development of the complication with Bingley's departure from Netherfield and Elizabeth's prejudice against Darcy, to the brilliant climax at Hunsford parsonage where Darcy proposes and is rejected, to the final denouement and resolution with the marriages of the Bennet sisters after the Lydia-Wickham elopement. The sub-plots of Lydia and Wickham, Charlotte and Collins are all closely linked to the main Elizabeth-Darcy plot and highlight the theme of the right marriage Jane Austen has a brilliant ear for dialogue and her characters reveal themselves through their speech. The witty and ironic language add much beauty to Jane Austen's art.
Thus, we may conclude that within her limited range Jane Austen's art is perfect. She handles, characters and events, dialogue and plot with an exquisite and masterly touch, fusing all the elements of novel into one, weaving and interweaving them so fine, that no strand can be separated. Her visible structure may be flimsy but she is profound in plumbing the psychological depths of her characters and in delineating the basic principals of human conduct. On her two inches of ivory, Jane Austen carves with a miniature delicacy to present a polished and refined work of art.
By Literaturemini - August 20, 2019
Labels: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


"Mae ffrog briodas Alys yn brydferth."
Translation:Alys's wedding dress is beautiful.
I was taught to simply put an apostrophe after the s tu pluralise a word ending in s in English. This should be accepted AT LEAST as an alternative correct answer!
I assume you mean, you were taught to put an apostrophe after an "s" to signify possessive, since there is no plural in this sentence. In which case yes that should be an acceptable answer, I'll add it to the database now if we don't have it already.
Current usage, according to Longman's Student Grammar, is to use the form given. Also Wales's, Jones's, etc.
We are taught "Alys'" in school now.
When you read it out loud, if you say two s-es, then you should write two s-es, as in Alys's.
Should bridal dress be an alternative to wedding dress?


text:
package org.squonk.util;

public class MimeTypeUtils implements CommonMimeTypes {

    public static boolean isDatasetMediaType(String mediaType) {
        return mediaType.toLowerCase().startsWith(MIME_TYPE_DATASET_BASE);
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


It was pure monkey business in Florida as cops nabbed a suspected car thief with a pet primate clinging to him.
Cops said the capuchin monkey, clad in baby's diapers at the time, would not let go of the suspect in Holiday, Fla., as he was taken into custody. The animal had to be separated from with the man by officers.
Even as suspect Cody Blake Hession, 23, was arrested, he seemed more concerned about his pet monkey, named Monk.
Cops allowed Hession to have a moment to say goodbye to Monk before the beloved pet was taken to a local animal sanctuary.
Hession has been charged with grand theft auto. Since he did not have a permit for the animal, he is additionally charged with possession of wildlife without a permit and a violation of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission regulations in regard to captive wildlife, the Miami Herald reported.
The Pasco County Sheriff's office later posted about the arrest on their Facebook page.


This is a bright spectraflame blue Custom Camaro with white interior and black roof.
This is the US model and is in excellent condition with only mild wear at the nose and left front corner and a razor thin nick on the trunk.
The taillights and rear edge have very mild wear as well.
Wheel chrome and red lines are near-perfect. The base appears to have never been plated and has the initials BH inscribed on it.
I purchased this car as part of a collection from a former Mattel employee.
Though I'm not an expert on the different variations of Custom Camaros, I'm pretty sure the non-plated base is significant and should lead to further investigation as to which "type" Camaro this is.
In looking at this car, it has a beautiful bright, deep blue spectraflame paint with no toning anyw, and nice even shading. It's a great effect.
Be sure to take a look at the other amazing red lines I've listed on eBay today by visiting my eBay store!
Priority insured shipping is $8. I do combine shipping.
HOT WHEELS REDLINE Red 1968 US Custom Camaro - HYBRID!
Franklin Mint 1:18 1970 Camaro Z-28 FREE SHIPPING!!


Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is a great smart tab this year. Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 full review and show all the new features, Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 features, and specifications. The Samsung brand company's tab is very popular and adds new features to each of its tabs. Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is different from Ananya tabs, except for Samsung, all the tab is different.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is the very nice tab. Samsung is the best brand one in the top smart tab market all over the world. Samsung this year new tab release in the market tab name is Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4. This tab is very nice to see. This tab screen size 8.4 inches – display resolutions 1600 x 2560 pixels, 16:10 ratio ~359 ppi density full HD PPI type Super AMOLED Capacitive touchscreen with Corning Gorilla Glass (unspecified version) protection.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 tab colors available in market Dazzling White, Titanium Bronze. Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 tab back camera resolution 8 megapixel and front camera 2.1 megapixels full HD video recording, soft-toned selfie-light also good performers. This tab's two version number one ROM 16 GB RAM 3 GB and number two ROM 32GB RAM 3 GB. Because of this, the tab price is a little low and more.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 tab first-time release July 2014. This tab battery backup was too good for the user, battery capacity 4900mAh. CPU Octa-core – 4×1.9 GHz Cortex-A15 & 4×1.3 GHz Cortex-A7 Smooth gaming experience. Game faster and more efficiently with system-level optimizations.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 full review all information.


Dubai Wharf by Dubai Properties is a center point of Al Jaddaf Waterfront. It is located at the paramount location on the Dubai Creek. Dubai Wharf is a blend of residential, commercial and cultural communities. It offers studio flats and 1, 2, and 3 bedroom apartments residences with cleverly combining the fashionable interior with contemporary architecture feature to live the waterfront life at its best.
This real estate project features 4 towers with 582 residential segments including 147 one BR, 276 two BR, and 68 three BR apartments and 91 studio flats situated in the 2nd to 8th floors. Dubai Wharf also contains 150 eating, entertainment, and retail segments on the ground floor and 1st floor.


text:
Q: getLocation method in LookupService return null LookupService lookup = new LookupService(url.getPath), LookupService.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE);
Location locationServices = lookup.getLocation(ipAddress);

ipAddress is String , lookup is not null & locationServices is null
i used geoip-api-1.2.10.jar & GeoLite database
What I am missing?

A: There is not enough information there what is lookupservice and where does it come from, is it one of your own classes or something you downloaded from the internet?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Home Entertainment CADA will be a partner for Kendrick Lamar's The Big Steppers Tour
CADA will be a partner for Kendrick Lamar's The Big Steppers Tour
CADA has just announced that the multi-platform brand is a presentation partner Kendrick LamarFreshly announced Big steps Tour of Australia.
One of the most influential rappers of our generation – Kendrick Lamar has released his fifth studio album Mr. Moral and Great Steps.
CADA will launch Kendrick Lamar's experience throughout CADAverse with content that will expand and support album release and ticket sales. Using CADA's multi-platform approach, fans will gain access to multiple discovery points that go far beyond audio, creating Kendrick's moments that will be talked about forever.
ARNCEO of CADA Emily Copeland said, "Kendrick Lamar Big steps The tour will be an important moment in hip hop and R&B, and CADA is proud to work with Live Nation as a presentation partner of the Australian and New Zealand performances.
"CADA is about honoring artists and helping our audience gain access to the best in hip hop and R&B from local and global talent. We are really excited to announce this iconic partnership and introduce Kendrick Lamar's music and stories to the CADA audience in the coming months ".
The CADA is represented by Kendrick Lamar, Big steps A tour company, fans are waiting for exclusive content, gift tickets and more. There are several points to attend and participate, from the free iHeartRadio app, FM in Sydney West and DAB + nationwide, to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and cada.com.au
In March, ARN announced the rebranding of The Edge to CADA. At the time, general manager Emily Copeland told Media Week:
"We identified the opportunity to rethink The Edge as a multi-platform youth brand that is still entrenched in hip-hop and R&B, but is really driven by cross-platform content," says Copeland. "So it happened because we looked at how young audiences interacted with the content, and knew that taking our offer outside of audio was very important."
VOZ shows Total TV has reached 19.027 million Australians. 54% of the population watched exclusively on linear television, 5% watched exclusively on BVOD and 13% watched on a combination of linear television and BVOD at 17 weeks. Click to learn more
https://www.mediaweek.com.au/cada-to-be-presenting-partner-for-kendrick-lamars-the-big-steppers-tour/
Previous articleSecureCo is working with IBM on the voice platform
Next articleHome buyers from WA were spoiled for choice of location and amenities in new communities


text:
House passes motion calling on Ottawa to pay First Nations child welfare compensation ordered by tribunal
The House of Commons passed a non-binding NDP motion Wednesday calling on the federal government to pay compensation to children and families affected by the on-reserve child welfare system, as ordered by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in September.
Indigenous services minister says government has no plans to drop court challenge of compensation order
Jorge Barrera · CBC News · Posted: Dec 11, 2019 7:04 PM ET | Last Updated: December 12, 2019
NDP MP Charlie Angus asks a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
The federal government is seeking a judicial review before the Federal Court aimed at quashing the human rights tribunal compensation order.
"All parties have called on them to comply with the ruling," said NDP MP Charlie Angus, who tabled the motion.
"You can't comply with the ruling if you are trying to quash the ruling."
The tribunal told Ottawa to pay $40,000 each to First Nations children — along with some of their parents and grandparents — who were apprehended from their families and communities through the on-reserve child welfare system and in Yukon.
Talks to start soon on settling First Nations child welfare compensation, minister tells AFN
Federal Court denies Ottawa's attempt to pause First Nations child welfare compensation order
If the federal government proceeds with the judicial review, Angus said, it will be in defiance of Parliament — which could trigger committee hearings that would see Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller and his officials hauled before MPs to answer questions.
"This is going to be a lose-lose for them if they think they can defy Parliament on this," said Angus.
The compensation order also included children who were denied health services, or who had to leave their communities to obtain those services.
The motion called on the federal government to "fully comply with all orders made by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal as well as ensuring children and their families don't have to testify their trauma in court."
The motion also called for "a legislated funding plan for future years that will end the systemic shortfalls in First Nations child welfare."
No plans to drop challenge
Miller said that while the government has no plans to drop the court challenge, it is still committed to finding a way to compensate First Nations children affected by the on-reserve child welfare system.
"There are still issues that are of concern to the government [over tribunal compensation ruling]," said Miller.
"But that doesn't prevent us from entering and continuing the discussions that are so needed and haven't happened up to now."
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller says the government has no plans to drop its court challenge of a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal compensation order. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Federal lawyers have argued the tribunal order overreached its jurisdiction by crossing into class action law.
Miller said he has appointed Valerie Gideon, the assistant deputy minister for the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, to begin talks with the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) to develop proposals on how the compensation should be distributed.
"We will not stop in our resolve in making sure First Nations children are adequately and justly compensated," he said.
Talks continue on settling proposed class action lawsuit
The Caring Society and the AFN filed a human rights complaint in 2007 that led to a January 2016 ruling from the tribunal that found Ottawa discriminated against First Nations children by under-funding on-reserve child welfare services. That ruling led to the compensation order issued in September.
The tribunal's compensation order required all parties to submit proposals on how to distribute the compensation.
Free financial literacy services proposed as part of First Nations child welfare compensation order
Ottawa admits it's 'wrongdoer' as judge prepares ruling on compensating First Nations children
The tribunal initially set Dec. 10 as the deadline to submit proposals on compensation mechanisms, but moved that date to Jan. 29, 2020, after the federal government sought and failed to obtain a stay of the tribunal order before the Federal Court.
The federal government refused to engage in any discussions around developing compensation mechanisms until it lost its attempt to obtain a stay.
Miller also said the government would continue with settlement talks on a proposed class action lawsuit over on-reserve child welfare and denied health services that was filed in March.
The government hopes to use the class action negotiations to come up with a comprehensive settlement deal that could be struck outside of the tribunal process, but would still include the AFN and the Caring Society, Miller has said.


text:
Saudi-friendly Kushner 'keeping low profile' as Trump admin shrugs off Khashoggi case, report claims
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump accompany Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud (L), Saudi Crown Prince and Minister of Interior, Muhammad bin Nayef Abdulaziz (C), and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed in Riyadh in May 2017. © AFP / Bandar Al-Jaloud
Amid growing outrage over Jamal Khashoggi's case, US media seem to have found a target in Jared Kushner, claiming he's being kept at arm's length over ties to Riyadh – all that despite the openly pro-Saudi stance of Donald Trump.
Pleasantries were exchanged between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman earlier this week, while President Donald Trump himself signaled that lucrative arms deals would prevent a rift in US-Saudi ties.
However, now CNN reports that Jared Kushner – who has cultivated close ties with both Riyadh and Tel Aviv – has been hiding in the shadows, lest the Trump administration is painted as overly friendly towards Saudi Arabia.
READ MORE: Christian leader urges viewers to 'cool down' anti-Saudi rhetoric, and protect vital arms deals
Citing "multiple people familiar with the matter," the report says that Kushner has remained "intentionally in the background this week" as the White House fears a more conspicuous role in dealing with the diplomatic nightmare created by the Khashoggi case could spark public anger.
Kushner is reportedly working behind the scenes, using his relationship with the Crown Prince to help navigate the choppy diplomatic waters that have resulted from the alleged macabre murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The network even hinted that Kushner may have been informally consulting with Salman using the popular messaging app, WhatsApp. All of this has been allegedly hidden to prevent the American public from getting too upset about its country's ties to a state that beheads heretics accused of wizardry.
Oh, look, Nepotism Boy is a little worried about his links to a murderous regime... https://t.co/Yy3JRM4wEkpic.twitter.com/q1BfFYchkU
— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) 18 октября 2018 г.
There is, however, little evidence to support this alleged damage-control campaign – or the logic behind it – since the Trump administration has been remarkably transparent about its affection for Riyadh and its appetite for US weapons.
CBS breathlessly reported on Wednesday that a Secret Service agent blocked one of its reporters from asking Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and Middle East adviser, about the disappearance of Khashoggi, who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2.
The incident occurred on a domestic flight from Washington DC to New York, with the Secret Service agent telling the CBS reporter: "I don't give a damn who you are, there's a time and a place."
Jared Kushner did not answer my question and the secret service informs me, while obscuring my phone, that despite identifying as WH press, there is a "time and a place" for questions. It is unclear when and where that is. pic.twitter.com/KRzlj3hrqw
— errol barnett (@errolbarnett) 16 октября 2018 г.
Donald Trump and many of his administration's most senior officials have fielded dozens of questions about Washington's position on the Khashoggi case, and have made no attempts to hide Washington's vested interest in maintaining warm relations with the Saudis.
Jared Kushner, who flew to NY last night, has remained intentionally in the background as West Wing officials feared a public role would prompt backlash because of his close ties with Saudi Arabia's powerful and domineering crown prince. https://t.co/btTMawUJ9f
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) 17 октября 2018 г.
The president himself seems to have believed Salman when he denied any involvement in or knowledge of Khashoggi's mysterious disappearance. This makes the media's focus on Kushner and the suggestion that his coziness with Riyadh has caused concerns in the White House all the more suspicious.
READ MORE: Suspected member of Khashoggi 'hit-team' dies in mysterious 'traffic accident' in Saudi Arabia
Meanwhile, Kushner has made several public appearances with the president and his entourage. He was seen at the president's side during a trip to Orlando just last week, which even CNN has acknowledged. Later, he was seen hamming it up with Chief of Staff John Kelly as they returned to Washington.
JaredKushnernews
Trends:Jamal Khashoggi newsJared Kushner newsMohammed bin SalmanSaudi Arabia news US news
'Nice try, Earth is flat': Conspiracy theorists can't handle first ever 360 space video


text:
2000 ND23 (asteroide 32185) é um asteroide da cintura principal. Possui uma excentricidade de 0.04344470 e uma inclinação de 11.59072º.

Este asteroide foi descoberto no dia 5 de julho de 2000 por LONEOS em Anderson Mesa.

Ver também

 Lista de asteroides
 Asteroide da cintura principal

Ligações externas

Asteroides da cintura principal
Objetos astronômicos descobertos em 2000


text:
Philosophical me (2)
The Footnote Pioneer — by Frederic Friedel
In part one of this series I told the story of how I started my university studies as an Aristotelian philosopher, became thoroughly disenchanted by ancient Greek philosophy and, after a crisis phase, discovered that contemporary philosophy is so much more meaningful than what I had been doing, and so much more relevant to our lives in the modern world.
So I immersed myself into: the Philosophy of Science (empirical reasoning, its methods, consequences and justification); Evolutionary Epistemology (the cognitive mechanisms that were developed during human evolution); Linguistics and Linguistic Philosophy (language and how it works); Analytical Ethics (how problems I wrestled with during my ancient philosophy phase can be elegantly solved by understanding the linguistic mechanisms of discourse). This was so much more fun than thinking about people chained in a cave, facing a blank wall, as Plato did in his Dialogues; or seeking practical applications of Aristotelian syllogisms as presented in his Organon. More about all this transition in future articles.
I had rediscovered philosophy, and decided to continue on my chosen path for a university career. The first steps were taken: I had a very nice job at the university, as an assistant, and was well into completing my "Magister" (a degree which precedes the PhD). For my thesis I chose Analytical Ethics, which I will describe briefly. If you are not passionately interested in the details of modern analytical philosophy jump to the section entitled "Pencil and paper" below.
Moral philosophy, as I understood (and understand) it, should not be concerned with judgements about what is good or bad — leave that to moralists; neither should it systematically describe what different peoples and societies consider good or bad — that's for anthropologists and historians. Philosophers should study the processes by which we reach moral judgements, identify which mechanisms come into play when we derive them, and decide what is subjective and what is objective.
For my Magister thesis I chose to analyse a moral dilemma most succinctly defined by the 18th Century philosopher David Hume. He marvelled at the custom of philosophers and moralists to proceed from descriptive statements to prescriptive (normative) ones, without a clear logical justification for the transition. It became known as the "is–ought problem" and had been recently revitalized by John Searle, a Professor of Mind and Language at Berkeley. Searle held a flamboyant lecture at my university in Hamburg, and turned me into an ardent student of Speech Act theory, as described in a previous article.
In a now famous paper (which you can still read here) Searle had proposed a counter-example to Hume's proposal that there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. This was the subject to my thesis: analysing Searle's argument with the instrumentarium of Analytical Ethics. I basically agreed with him that the empirical objective statement "Jones uttered the words 'I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars'," logically leads to the normative statement (Searle traces five steps) "Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars," and that denying this does not imply moral disagreement but rather linguistic confusion. That is a very brief and wholly inadequate description of the main subject of my thesis, and I promise to write more extensively on this very topical subject in the future.
My thesis was 119 pages long and described the development of Analytical Ethics, the Is-Ought problem, Speech Act theory, and its general application to major problems of philosophy in general. The last section was a preamble to a PhD thesis I was planning to write, a strategy devised by my professor at the University of Hamburg.
Pencil and paper
All this took place in 1977, and there were no computers, no "word processors" to assist in the production of an academic thesis. I did my first drafts on paper (very thin slices of wood) using a pencil (a instrument that uses a form of carbon to create marks on the paper) and an eraser (a piece of rubber that could remove these marks). Here's what my notes looked like (click to enlarge):
While writing my thesis I kept showing my professor how I was progressing, and she was full of praise and most encouraging. Unfortunately the second professor who would be evaluating my thesis expressed severe criticism — actually clear rejection — of what I was doing. It was not real philosophy, he said. I should mention that he was from Greece and had witnessed my abandoning of Plato and Aristotle a few years earlier. My thesis would clearly not be something he would look upon positively.
So there was a problem. My work needed to be graded extremely well if I were to pursue a university career. I tried to have the evaluation switched to a different professor, citing bias (and quoting an outrageous statement the Greek professor had made to me: "It is a purely subjective opinion" — which is exactly what an academic evaluation should not be). But it did not succeed — students cannot select professors.
So I set out to make the thesis as well researched and erudite as I possibly could. I visited and subsequently befriended a leading expert in Analytical Ethics, Richard M. Hare, as described here. He helped me along, with wonderful discussions in his home over evening gin and tonic. So it was turning into a very substantive and well constructed thesis. But I decided to do something about the optics as well, about the overall presentation.
An historic picture: me typing my thesis from my pencil notes, with two-year-old son Martin watching.
If you look carefully (click to enlarge) you see the template I was using to create footnotes, as described below.
Footnote pioneer
At the time it was quite normal to put the hundreds of footnotes and citations that a work of this kind required into a separate section at the back of the thesis, for the simple reason that there was no way a student or academic scholar could insert them where they belonged: at the bottom — the foot — of the page. Not a single thesis in the library of the University of Hamburg had deviated from the practice. Unfortunately, putting them in the back of the thesis meant they would be generally ignored.
So I came up with a technical solution: I used two typewriters (mechanical, of course — electricity had barely been invented), with different fonts, larger and smaller. I constructed two templates like the one shown here. They had numbers on the left margin, in descending order in one case and ascending in the other. Using the first I would type the main text, inserting index numbers for the footnotes, as superscript — you could turn the platen (the roller that holds the paper) back a little. Whenever I hit a line with a footnote I typed it out on the second machine, which showed me exactly how many lines my footnotes had so far taken. That was the space I had to leave free on the main page.
When a page was completed I would cut out the footnotes and glue them to the empty space at the bottom of the main text (an early example of cut-and-paste?!), drawing a line to separate text and footnotes. On the left you can see what a page looked like (as with all the images in this article you can click to enlarge). I had managed, for the first time in academic history, to place footnotes on typed pages exactly where they belonged.
But there was still a residual problem: the university stipulated that you had to hand in an original typed version of your thesis, together with two photocopied versions. Unfortunately my thesis was was twice as thick at the bottom than at the top.
So how do you solve that, if you are a devious person? I searched for and found a photocopy shop that had a very advanced (and expensive) machine. It could brighten the page and filter out defects — optically, not digitally, I would like to mention. I used it to make one very fine copy of my typed and glued pages. On the left you see what that looked like. Then I searched for a very poor copy machine and made two copies of the first copy.
I remember somewhat nervously handing in the three bound copies of my thesis. The lady in charge examined them, quickly flipping through the pages. "Ah, so this one is the original," she said, "and these two are copies. Okay, that's fine." It had worked, I had got away with it.
My professor gave me the highest possible grade, and the co-professor a very average one. I protested (as planned) and the thesis was submitted to a third, external professor, a fairly famous expert on Analytical Philosophy. He gave the thesis a first grade and expressed bewilderment at how anyone could have given it substantially less. The dissenting evaluation was cancelled and I got the highest grade, "Mit besonderer Auszeichnung" (with special commendation), which was perfect for the start of a postgraduate university career. Everyone praised the extraordinary presentation, meaning of course the neat footnotes at the bottom of the page. And a number asked me to show them how I had managed to do this. Teach us, master!
I need to add that my intended career as a teacher of philosophy ground to a halt when I realized that there would be no vacancy for me at university to get a post — ever. I would need for a professor to die, and would then have to battle it out with a dozen of my best friends for the job. Which is why I went on to become a science journalist, making documentaries for German TV. That is described in another article which might be of interest.
How the Hero Narrative and the Just World Fallacy Interact to Create Evil
Riley Haas
What is utopia?
Ben Mann
The Quantum Revolution Is Not About Computers
Adam Gordon in The Startup
Evolutionary Ambition and its Contemporary Effects
Anshul Kapoor
A normative critique on fair-trade: two sides of the de-fetishization thesis
Michiel Kemmer
Are Our Moral Beliefs Fully Determined by Evolution? a Response to Richard Joyce.
Anthony DiMauro in Curious
The Climate Minds dialogues #2
Steve Thorp in unpsychology magazine
We Only See Lions
Fernando J. Contreras in Hades United


text:
> Sonoma Day Trip
Sonoma Day Trip
Beautiful views, excellent dining, and rich history entwine in this wine country city.
Laura Kiniry
Before the city was established, the site was home to Spain's northernmost California mission.
Boulders line the Rattlesnake Cut-off between Montini Open Space Preserve and the Sonoma Overlook Trail.
A hiker ascends through oaks on a trail in Sonoma's Montini Open Space Preserve.
A coyote stares down a photographer in the Montini Open Space Preserve in Sonoma.
At OSO, bavette of beef comes with cherry tomatoes, roasted potatoes, and a dressing of chimichurri.
The city's leafy plaza, bustling restaurants, and sweeping hilltop vistas belie Sonoma's turbulent role in California's emergence as a state. Gentle trails through the 98-acre Montini Open Space Preserve, one of the area's newest parks, lead right through that early history. The routes cross open pasture and foothills that once belonged to General Mariano Vallejo, a 19th-century commander who transformed Sonoma from a mission settlement into the northernmost outpost of the Mexican government and the capital of commerce north of San Francisco.
Easily accessible from Fourth Street West, the preserve backs right up to town and boasts a series of short, well-marked paths that lead past shady oak trees and across tiny streams, occasionally opening onto sweeping views of the surrounding valley and San Pablo Bay.
For a longer walk of about four or five miles, take the Rattlesnake Cutoff to Sonoma Overlook Trail (three miles out and back), which ascends through mixed evergreens and wide, grassy meadows to even broader vistas. From its high point in 1846, observers could have watched rebellious U.S. settlers take Vallejo prisoner and raise a flag featuring a bear—the inspiration for today's state flag—over Sonoma Plaza. They held the town for a few weeks before turning it over to U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War.
These days, the revolutions on the plaza are more peaceful but no less exciting. Since it opened a year ago, OSO has set the pace for urbane cuisine, drawing crowds with creative small plates that include crab-topped deviled eggs and mole-braised short-rib tacos. The sleek space features walls crafted from reclaimed wood and a long, bustling bar.
Nearby, Sunflower Caffé offers gourmet breakfasts, killer grilled cheese sandwiches, salads made from locally sourced ingredients, and champagne cocktails—they're not kidding when they call it a "Monster Mimosa"—that encourage guests to linger, especially on sunny days when its year-round backyard garden is abuzz.
To provide a true sense of Sonoma's historic importance, Sonoma State Historic Park weaves six scattered buildings, most of which are found around the plaza, into multiple histories, including the story of Mexican colonization. Standouts include the Mission San Francisco Solano, California's northernmost mission and the only one built under Mexican rule, and Vallejo's furnished former home. As adaptive as the town itself, the general began building the house in 1850 and lived there until his death, witnessing California's admission as the 31st state in the Union and serving as a state senator and Sonoma's mayor.
Photography by Charlie Gesell, courtesy of Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (Montini Open space Preserve); Megan Clouse (Sonoma Mission); Bree Mayorquin (OSO beef)
Sonoma, Calif.: Weekender
An olive festival, playful shops, an old-fashioned plaza, and vineyards make this a perfect wine-country escape.
Sebastopol, Calif.: Weekender
A Sonoma County town tempts with Gravenstein apples, the Antique Society, Graton Ridge Cellars, and K&L Bistro.
Napa, Calif.: A Classy Escape
A capital of California's wine country boasts a bounty of restaurants, shops, and outdoor draws.
6 Smart Tips for Driving Safely in the Dark
These smart tips will keep you safe when you have to drive at dawn, dusk, and night.
Places to Visit in California > Napa, Sonoma, & Wine Country