The Reading Room

« first day (4849 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (96 days later) »

Bookworm

02:25

Q: Locating Babylonian birth-omen tablets

It seems the Babylonian divinatory tablets is in the public domain, however, I'm quite unable to find English translations for it. https://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2013/12/cuneiform-texts-from-babylonian-tablets.html I realize these come to us primarily in fragments with a rather byzantine...

identification-request

3 hours later…

Bookworm

05:20

Q: Did Achebe base this on a particular real-life work?

Things Fall Apart ends with the British district commissioner imagining how he will write about the recent events in Umofia in a planned book with the working title of The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. While this work is clearly fictional (and as-yet unwritten, at the n...

chinua-achebe things-fall-apart

3 hours later…

Bookworm

08:15

Q: Was "The Princess and the Pea" written as satire?

"The Princess and the Pea" is a famous Hans Christian Andersen story about a princess proving herself to be a "real" princess by finding it deeply uncomfortable to sleep on a bed with a pea inside it, even if there are 20 mattresses on top of the pea. What is the moral of this story? Is it poking...

historical-context scandinavian-languages hans-christian-andersen satire

Gareth Rees

08:44

@CowperKettle I wrote up my concerns about Porter and Machery (2024) and put them on PubPeer.

1 hour later…

Clara Díaz Sanchez

09:52

@GarethRees Nice summary. I hope someone take notice, but I'm afraid that the bandwagon cannot be stopped now.

Rand al'Thor

10:15

@GarethRees Good call! By the way, Scientific Reports is not as prestigious as one might expect from being associated with Nature. I've heard negative views of it from senior colleagues; I know personally that one of its editors is involved in unethical practices (authorship swindles) and low-quality research; and my own experience with that journal is reviewing a paper that was clearly worthless but seeing it get accepted after adding some references requested by the other reviewer.

Clara Díaz Sanchez

10:45

Scientific Reports has two faces. On one side it is used to publish articles rejected by Nature, which can nevertheless be of high quality. On the other hand it will publish almost anything if the publication fee is paid, so long as the work is "not technically wrong".

Gareth Rees

11:06

@ClaraDíazSanchez Of course, but the PubPeer comment is there for future reference by academics reading or citing the paper. Anyone using one of the PubPeer browser extensions will be alerted to the PubPeer thread. Also, it's not impossible that the authors will reply to defend their paper or explain the coding error (and why it does not affect their results).

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

12:57

@GarethRees Nice!

Peter Shor

13:26

@ClaraDíazSanchez To quote a famous quantum computing skeptic (Landauer) "it's going to to take more than rain to stop this parade."

Tsundoku

14:03

New research shows people can’t tell the difference between human and AI poetry – and even prefer the latter. What gives? by Adam Dean, Lecturer, Writing and Literature, Deakin University, but curiously unaware of the flaws in the paper.

Gareth Rees

14:47

@Tsundoku It's not that surprising! You need persistence since the problems with the data aren't apparent if you only read the paper: you have to go to its OSF data repository and download the relevant files, in particular AI_Poetry_Study1_Discrimination.qsf for the discrimination task, and then decode the QSF format (Qualtrics Survey File—but actually just JSON), and then read the poems.

Tsundoku

I'll try to check those data next weekend. Thanks for the links.

2 hours later…

Clara Díaz Sanchez

17:20

Thank you for replying to lambie @PeterShor - I'm afraid I was too busy rolling my eyes to respond.

Peter Shor

17:46

@ClaraDíazSanchez A completely understandable reaction.

Rand al'Thor

18:38

Happy 85th birthday to margaret-atwood.

Slate

What a horror; a whole person taken and reduced to a tag label. To celebrate her birthday in such reduced form is mere consolation. I wish only to restore her from margaret-atwood to her physical form some day.

Tsundoku

19:39

@Bookworm A pajita flew into HNQ's eye.

@Bookworm Did Aristotle ever actually mention the HNQ?

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

21:54

@Slate Well, @Randal'Thor is the only Literature SE user who has a question about them here, so it doesn't come as a surprise that he thinks in tags.

To celebrate Margaret Atwood's birthday, I have ordered The Handmaid's Tale. That may be a strange way to celebrate, but we live in strange times ...

Can someone add a star to the chat message about the ongoing topic challenges, so it stays up a bit longer?

Eng Lit Learner

22:46

Q: What's the meaning of the "the inconsiderate act of existing"?

"Why don’t you leave if you don’t like it,” he said to her one day in answer to a complaint encompassing the house, his father, his sister, himself, the entire town; and then her stricken face had filled him with anguish not only for what he had said but for the inconsiderate act of existing. ...