The Reading Room

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2:49 AM

Q: Is part of Mark Antony's speech to the conspirators in the play "Julius Caesar" meant to be honest?

In Act III, Scene I of the play Julius Caesar, when the conspirators are approached by Mark Antony after they have assassinated Caesar, they assure him that they do not wish to kill him and ask him to wait until they gained control of the situation to be satisfied of the legitimacy of their motiv...

4 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

6:47 AM

@verbose hasn't been around for a while, either in chat or posting answers ... I hope he's OK.

bobble

I'm probably going to be effectively out of answer-action until I get home from vacation; no predictable amounts of time for me

Rand al'Thor

7:19 AM

@Bookworm This migrated question has gone HNQ.

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

9:21 AM

"Awful day today. I had 2 volumes of the collected work of Hegel in my car and someone broke in and left 2 more." (@meta_nomad on Twitter)

Response by @DennisLogue: "Tame neighborhood. If it was really rough they would have left the complete works of Rawls and Foucault."

@HarkHarktheMark wrote: "It was literally the densest and most incomprehensible thing I’d ever tried to read, outside of STEM scientific literature. My professor said he wrote like that to bypass the Karlsbad Decrees and im still not sure if he was joking or not lol"

Bookworm

9:45 AM

Q: How did the relationships in Henry James' "The Golden Bowl" strike contemporary readers?

In The Golden Bowl, the main characters are a woman (Maggie Verver), her father (Adam Verver), her friend (Charlotte Stant), and her husband (Prince Amerigo). Maggie seems to encourage Charlotte and her father marrying, and once they marry there is no indication that this is in any way unusual. I...

henry-james the-golden-bowl

b_jonas

10:09 AM

@Tsundoku Yes, basically all of Europe derives its history as a divine right of royals running countries where those royals all descend from Caesar by a chain of supposedly rightful heirs and lieges, plus a bunch of countries that got rid of monarchy but still continue the same country, though sometimes with serious upsets including the French revolution and the Soviet Union.

So eventually all of Europe is just a legitimate continuation of Troy, according to the established myth.

b_jonas

10:23 AM

@Tsundoku That's the good part, you don't need a license to quill because the constitutions guarantee that the government can't require a license. You also don't need a license to mathematics.

@bobble I just preemptively "join" a lot of SE sites, as in create a user there and get the three easy badges (except on a few sites where some of them aren't possible).

On most of them I never ask or answer a question.

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas bobble and I prefer to limit our set of SE accounts to sites where we actually have some activity (even if minimal).

My lowest-activity account is Maths Overflow, where I made one post back in my early SE days. (Now I keep my personal/professional and SE life clearly separate.; if I wanted to use SE for professional stuff like maths or LaTeX now, I'd set up a separate account rather than being Rand al'Thor for that.)

Then there's ELL where I had a few posts migrated from ELU, and Constructed Languages and Vegetarianism which I joined in private beta and didn't really keep up after that.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor That would be ideal. For a while I used to have just my MathOverflow account separate (because I created it before MathOverflow became part of SE minus the esacpe clause), but eventually the SE interface got changed to make that rather inconvenient. Plus when I post about mathematics, sometimes it's not clear whether I'm posting it as professional or a private person.

Anyway, I gave up and now I only have a personal account of which a very few questions on MathOverflow and elsewhere are from professional life.

My questions on Server Fault are about Windows software stuff, those are clearly from professional life. On MathOverflow, I don't think I can draw a clear line. It's not like there's any piece of mathematics that I only expect to use professionally or only privately.

Rand al'Thor

10:42 AM

@b_jonas Maths is love, maths is life.

Rand al'Thor

11:20 AM

The Science Fiction & Fantasy election has entered the voting phase. I guess most people here who have voting rights there are already aware, but may as well mention it anyway.

Bookworm

Q: I came across the following parahgraph in Dickens' American Notes. Paraphrase needed

I have made no reference to my reception, nor have I suffered it to influence me in what I have written; for, in either case, I should have offered but a sorry acknowledgment, compared with that I bear within my breast, towards those partial readers of my former books, across the Water, who met m...

charles-dickens

Rand al'Thor

12:14 PM

Open bounty on a literary influences question on SFF.

Bookworm

12:59 PM

Q: The title of a book of a native american story about a mailman

Almost a decade ago I borrowed a book from my school library, which held the tale of a young native american (if I remember correctly) boy who wanted to become the fastest one from his village, for his life dream was to become the village's mailman, who basically had to have a good memory and be ...

identification-request

Tsundoku

1:23 PM

Strangely, the chat comment about the current topic challenges doesn't stay pinned at the top. It's the second time I haven noticed this with one of my pinned messages.

I'll just create a new one and see what happens.

Ongoing topic challenges: the Mahabharata and its adaptations and Old English Literature.

"Taking my keyboard and headset into the garden, and leaving my laptop inside, because who needs a screen?" Léonie Watson on Twitter. (Because she literally doesn't need one. Superpower.)

2 hours later…

Bookworm

3:27 PM

Q: Small hardback with illustrations about an inventive boy and the houses he makes for his friends

I read this one as a child, in the mid 1980s, in a book about the dimensions of a coffee table book, but only about 20-30 pages long. The main character is a young boy, with two parents and at least one sibling, who likes to build things, which annoys his family because he builds them inside the ...