Fogbow

northland10 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 16, 2023 2:27 pm What if? 2, by Randall Monroe. Now I need to go back and read the first one (this one is a gift, and I did not know of him before).

https://xkcd.com/what-if-2/

It is great fun. His fun "answers" seem scientifically sound but are also fun to read,

Foggy wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:22 am I've seen N10 on the Virtual Meetup, and if he's your sister, I feel very, very sorry for you. It must have been really tough in middle school.

Artificial intelligence uncovers lost work by titan of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’
Discovery of Lope de Vega play could lead to other important finds, researchers say

Sam Jones in Madrid
Sun 5 Feb 2023 08.00 GMT

Lost or misattributed works by some of the finest writers of Spain’s Golden Age could be discovered thanks to pioneering AI technology that has been used to identify a previously unknown play by the wildly prolific dramatist, poet, sailor and priest Lope de Vega.

This week Spain’s National Library announced that researchers trawling its massive archive had stumbled upon and verified a play that Lope is believed to have written a few years before his death in 1635.

Like many plays of the Spanish Golden Age – the 16th- and 17th-century cultural boom that accompanied Spain’s imperial growth and which birthed masterpieces by Lope, Cervantes, Calderón and Velázquez, among many others – La francesa Laura (The Frenchwoman Laura) is a tale of love, jealousy and social hierarchy in which suspicion demands an innocent woman be sacrificed on the altar of her husband’s honour. But, unlike many similar plays of the period, Laura survives and the third act ends happily.

Equally unusual was the manner of the play’s discovery. In 2017, Germán Vega, a Golden Age literature expert at the University of Valladolid, and Álvaro Cuéllar, now at the department of Romance studies at the University of Vienna, embarked on Etso, a project that uses AI analysis to determine the authorship of Golden Age plays, many of which are anonymous or believed misattributed.

As part of the project, 1,300 plays – most of them from Spain’s National Library – were digitally transcribed using a platform, Transkribus, trained to identify and understand 3m words.

Once transcription was complete, another program, Stylo, compared their language and style with the 2,800 digitised works by 350 authors in the Etso database.

Held by the library as an 18th-century manuscript copied from earlier texts, La francesa Laura had long been catalogued as an anonymous work, but Etso’s computer quickly came to its own conclusions.

“After it had transcribed the 1,300 texts, the computer noticed that one of them was similar to 100 or so works – almost all of which were by Lope,” says Vega.

“That really grabbed our attention – we didn’t think we’d find a Lope … [But] we then found a lot of expressions in La francesa Laura that fitted with those in other Lope plays. There were things in La francesa Laura that people in other Lope plays had said or would later say.”

More traditional analysis of the play – focusing on everything from plots and character names to metre, elisions and the pronunciation of diphthongs – corroborated the computer’s theory.




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... golden-age

Roald Dahl rewrites: edited language in books criticised as ‘absurd censorship’
Author Salman Rushdie among those angry after some passages relating to weight, gender, mental health and race were rewritten

Associated Press
Mon 20 Feb 2023 04.05 GMT

Critics are accusing the British publisher of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s books of censorship after it removed colourful language from works such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda to make them more acceptable to modern readers.

A review of new editions of Dahl’s books now available in bookstores shows that some passages relating to weight, mental health, gender and race were altered. The changes made by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, first were reported by Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Augustus Gloop, Charlie’s gluttonous antagonist in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which originally was published in 1964, is no longer “enormously fat,” just “enormous”. In the new edition of Witches, a supernatural female posing as an ordinary woman may be working as a “top scientist or running a business” instead of as a “cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”.

The word “black” was removed from the description of the terrible tractors in 1970s The Fabulous Mr Fox. The machines are now simply “murderous, brutal-looking monsters”.

Booker prize-winning author Salman Rushdie was among those who reacted angrily to the rewriting of Dahl’s words. Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 issued a fatwa calling for his death because of the alleged blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses. He was attacked and seriously injured last year at an event in New York state.

“Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship,’’ Rushdie wrote on Twitter. “Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’’





https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/ ... ge-altered

Kriselda Gray wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 4:56 am Currently reading:
Poetic Edda translated by Jeremy Dodds
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of Britain (400-1066) by Marc Morris
Queen of Stone (Book 2 of the Celtic Rebels series) by Melanie Karsak

I try to read a bit of each every day...

Lani wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 5:30 am

Kriselda Gray wrote: ↑Wed Feb 22, 2023 4:56 am I try to read a bit of each every day...

I read the Fogbow.