bookandswordblog @bookandswordblog@scholar.social

Most (sober, sensible) people get very deliberate when an edged weapon is pointed at them (the part in brackets is important). This week, I share three thoughts on the subject by an Athenian adventurer, a Modenese fencing master, and a British colonial official https://bookandsword.com/2020/02/22/is-that-a-dagger-i-see-before-me/

#patreon will offer payday loans under the Patreon Capital brand. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21142306/patreon-capital-loans-jack-conte-cash-advances They already offer a merchandise-distribution service for a low, low 3% of all your revenues forever. I just do not understand any of the business decisions they have made since September 2017.

as I sort out index headings I have been making sure that each foreign word is transcribed precisely one way and that is a task of its own (Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian, Greek, Old Persian, Hebrew ...)

Happy Cyril and Methodius' Day of languages, scripts, and literature https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6083 (c/o @JubalBarca )

New Post: Some Thoughts on "The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy" (2015) https://bookandsword.com/2020/02/11/some-thoughts-on-the-smart-girls-guide-to-privacy/#more-7082 #bookReview

A friend recommended a web app for making the maps for my first monograph! It will be fine for the archaeological sites. But maps are hard when you cover 4500 years in an area from Pakistan to Libya and North Macedonia (too many names, too many closely-grouped sites next to areas 500 km wide with no place you mention) #cartography

One reason why I have been backing away from the Internet is that more and more sites are blank without scripts, block you with Cloudflare/Project Shield, or want you to CLICK ON A LINK IN AN EMAIL to confirm your login, or randomly change URLs. It feels like they don't want me or anyone else who practices safe hex.

After Prof. Ehsan Yarshater died at the age of 98 in 2018, two of his foundations (one at Columbia University, another independent) are fighting over control of the standard open-access encyclopedia in my field. Duelling press releases at http://www.iranicaonline.org/ (EncIr Foundation) and http://www.encyclopaediairanica.com/ (Columbia University) This is very distressing and absolutely not something I can talk about in detail on social media!

New Post: too many people for the land, or too much land for the king? https://bookandsword.com/2020/02/01/too-many-people-for-the-land-or-too-much-land-for-the-king/ #historodons #economicHistory #farming #history

The scientific humanities, such as linguistics and my corners of history and archaeology, just don't have a lot of visibility or respect in mainstream Anglo culture right now :( We don't offer soundbites but nuanced, contextualized answers and more questions.

Someone tells me that there was a big kerfuffle on birdsite a few months ago after a Virginia economist and a SoCal startup person wrote an editorial calling for a new science of progress that didn't ask whether historians of technology or philosophers can contribute https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ Someone called Jason Crawford is trying the same on the basis of a BSc in Computer Science and a career as a software developer and manager and a lot of pop books and websites.

New Post: how reliable is one list of the largest empires in #worldHistory ? https://bookandsword.com/2020/01/25/be-careful-with-rein-taageperas-lists-of-largest-empires/ #historodons #history #methodology

I am trying to decide what kind of index to provide for my first monograph. I would have to create the list of headings and then provide the page references myself, so the more I include the more unpaid work I have to do but the more people are likely to =use= the thing (and no, 'just search the PDF' is not a perfect solution). #academicLife

Eureka! With the help of interlibrary loan, I just found some weapon graves in the Elburz mountains in a 1968 excavation report from Japan #archaeology #iran

A site which used to be covered on the #waybackmachine / #internetArchive now returns HTTP 504 Bad Gateway. How can I regain access to its archives?

New post: the Rise of Europe or the Age of Imperialism? Between 1500 and 1900, six or eight states claimed to rule most of humanity, but which six or eight changed https://bookandsword.com/2020/01/12/the-rise-of-europe-or-the-age-of-imperialism/

One of his articles is explicit that SOME PEOPLE are too inbred to be economically successful, the other just talks about how Catholic marriage laws reduced "kinship intensity" and supposedly made it easier for people who are not related to cooperate with each other :( But in the ancient world, wherever you see cities you see people governing themselves, India, Babylonia, Carthage, even the hicks in Greece and Italy figured it out after a while.

New Post: how the Greeks got Battering Rams https://bookandsword.com/2020/01/11/how-the-greeks-got-battering-rams/ #siegeWarfare #ancient #historodons #historyOfTechnology