I'm literally aghast

Merriam-Webster, who should know better, has decided that literally means the exact opposite of literally.  Google has followed suit.   They've decided that since most of the internet world has no clue how to use literally, that they might as well give up and give it the wrong definition.  

This will inevitably raise the age-old question whether dictionaries should describe the language as it's used, or the language as it should be used.  

But, if you're going to take the rubbish written on the internet as the definition of English, then it's only a small matter of time before school dictionaries tell u that u means you.  Looking forward to that, r we?

Vicki Leon in the LA Times

The excellent Vicki Leon, who pops in to comment on this blog from time to time, and who wrote Working IX to V, and The Joy of Sexus, today has an opinion piece on the assassination of JFK published in the LA Times.

It's very much worth reading.

Vicki also has a previous piece in the LA Times.  She suggested that killers who do it for the notoriety would be less inclined if there was a perpetual ban on publicizing their crimes or their names.  She uses as her example what happened to the guy who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356BC.  (It's the same temple that my heroine Diotima works at in The Ionia Sanction, and it was indeed destroyed by arson).

To find out what they did to him, here is Vicki's article.

I thought as much

I know funny error messages on web sites are common, but this one confirms something I've long suspected.  This from one of GOOGLE's own services:

500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information: ...

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad

Your quiz for today:  who said "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad"?

Was it Shakespeare?  Was it Homer?

Nope.

If you googled for the answer, you probably think Euripides.  This is a classic example of something being repeated on the internet so much that people think it must be true.  The answer isn't Euripides.

In its usual wording as above, it comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  But he was rephrasing a saying that goes back more than 2,500 years.  The earliest use I know of is the play Antigone, where Sophocles quotes a version, which I've stolen from the Perseus translation:

For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous,
that evil at one time or another seems good,
to him whose mind a god leads to ruin.

Sophocles then adds:

But for the briefest moment such a man fares free of destruction.

Which is a variant of, "Well it seemed like a good idea at the time!"

And as the text makes clear, by the time of classical Athens it was already considered an old saying.  The origin must go back into prehistory.  Which is rather cool really for such a subtle idea.

Death of the China Bots

Something changed on the net a few weeks ago that I think is rather interesting.  If you run a web site you might have noticed the same.  The Chinese bots suddenly disappeared from my blog.

Web site stats for a long time now have been flooded with obvious robots, all running out of China, flooding every web site with hits.  I presume they're looking for anywhere they can put spam.   Or a more sinister interpretation would be they're probing for weaknesses to break in.  Since the Chinese government runs one of the most repressive firewalls in the world I can only assume it's being done with government approval.

Then a few weeks ago, suddenly, overnight, the number of hits from Chinese bots fell to almost zero.  It might have been a random glitch, except it stayed at almost zero for days that turned into weeks.  Now I'm seeing the bot numbers slowly creep up again.  But they're still less than 10% of what they used to be.

I can only suggest one of these possibilities:

1. All of China has decided I am boring.  This is quite possible.
   
2. The Chinese government has decided to block their online criminals.  This is incredibly unlikely.
   
3. Western nations have quietly decided to block the packets of Chinese spammers and cyber criminals.  Since this would require western governments to make a  sensible decision about the net it is virtually impossible.
   
4. Google has quietly blocked the Chinese spammers from their servers.  This is quite likely.  A lot of those bots are used to artificially click ad links to make money for the web sites.  What you do is create a zillion web sites with ad and buy links to major stores.  Then for a few thousand dollars you rent from a cyber criminal a botnet to click your links tens of millions of times and thus make a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue.   Which is ripping off Google's customers.  So it makes sense that Google might have decided to block the bots.  

I'd be interested to know what's happening.

The Polemarch lives in the Epilyceum

The Polemarch was one of three senior archons who ran classical Athens.  The job title means war leader, but by the time of my stories his job had changed to being mayor of all the resident aliens in the city, of which there were many.  The resident aliens were a big part of the economy.

Like all archon jobs, people got elected Polemarch for a year, and having done the job once you could never be elected to it again.  Also, if you won the election, you moved home.

The Polemarch had an official residence, called the Epilyceum.  (I'm using the latin form of the name here.  The exact transliteration is Epilykaion.)

Aristotle says that the Polemarch's official residence used to be called the Polemarcheum, but the name changed after one man who held the job, a fellow named Epilycos, totally renovated the place out of his own pocket.  Which was rather clever of him because now he'll be remembered forever.  Though I imagine his real motive was along the lines of his wife saying, "I'm not living in that horrible, drafty, run-down place until you fix it up!"

Some modern historians reject Aristotle on the grounds that epilyceum in Greek means "outside the Lyceum".  Since there happened to be a place called the Lyceum, they take it to mean the Polemarch's residence was next door.

It sounds reasonable, but the problem is they're guessing from a distance of 2,600 years, while Aristotle was passing on what was probably common belief a hundred or so years after the fact.  They can't argue that the name is odd.  There was a comedian called Epilycos, so an archon by that name is perfectly possible.

So now you can say to people at parties that the Polemarch lived in the Epilyceum.

What is the oldest name still in use?

Here's a question for you:  what is the oldest name still used by people today?

I had this fun conversation with Aven and Amalia on twitter yesterday, and we weren't able to come to a decisive answer.  Aven cleverly suggested Eve.  Amalia thought maybe Krishna.  My idea was Inana, who appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Some rules:

It has to be a name either written down or provably used by a real person of ancient times.

To be counted as still in use it has to be a name chosen by parents or in some sense natural (i.e. not one deliberately adopted in later life).

The floor is open for suggestions!

The Archimedes Palimpsest: a correction

Some time ago I wrote about the Archimedes Palimpsest.  It's an incredibly ancient book written by Archimedes, that was thought to be totally lost for two thousand years.  Then a copy of it was found underneath a bunch of Christian writings.  A mediaeval monk had re-used the parchment, you see.

Researchers used some very clever imaging systems to recover the original text, at which point they not only discovered a lost ancient book, but they also discovered that Archimedes had been well on the way to discovering calculus, one thousand eight hundred years(!) before Newton and Leibniz got it.

Two days ago a correction appeared in the comments of that post I wrote.  I'd said that the monk who covered over the text was unknown.   Someone named Roger Easton, a newcomer to the blog, wrote to say that the name of the monk was indeed known, and that he's credited with (inadvertently) saving the book.  

I get random comments on older posts all the time, so I didn't give it a lot of thought.

Then the next day it suddenly hit me...the name of the imaging guru who recovered the Archimedes Palimpsest was none other than... Professor Roger Easton.

I think we can take this comment as coming ex cathedra.  Here's what Professor Easton had to say:

The comment that we do not know the name of the monk who erased the original Archimedes text is incorrect -- it is Ioannes Myronas, as discovered in 2006 when the manuscript was imaged using X-ray fluorescence. Dr. William Noel, Director of the Archimedes Palimpsest project, has said that he believes that Myronas may be credited with SAVING the writings rather than destroying them, since he provided a camouflage that actually preserved them.

The (fictional) distribution of death

Here's a fun idea.  My publisher Soho has put a map on their web site showing the location each of their authors uses in their books.  The map's on the front page of their crime imprint.  It doesn't locate the author, it locates the books.

So it's effectively a scene of the crime map!

What's interesting is the distribution of death across the globe.  There are some clear inferences:

If you're worried about being slaughtered by a Soho author, you should avoid traveling to Europe.  The whole place is just a hotbed of crosses on the map.

China and East Asia in general is another good place to avoid.

You'll be perfectly safe in Russia.  Also most African states, the Ukraine, New Zealand and Mongolia.

There's no point trying to hide in the South Pacific.  Someone died in the Solomon Islands.

Australia has a surprisingly high murder rate for the population.  (Don't blame me!  I contributed to the European body count.)

America has a remarkably low murder rate.  The Euro-to-US ratio is the complete opposite of reality.  I wonder why?

The Marathon Conspiracy: cover reveal!

The Marathon Conspiracy is number 4 of the Athenian Mysteries, and here's the cover!

It's another beautiful artwork from professional artist Stefano Vitale.  During the course of the series Stefano has moved to Venice from the US.  So we have an Australian author, a US publisher and an Italian artist.

You might have noticed the bear.  The bear and the skull that Nico holds are part of the story, needless to say.  The stoa in the background is the Sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron.  It is famous, amongst other things, for being one of the world's first school for girls.

Incredibly, we're actually organized for this book.  The release details are already up on the major stores.  Release date is early May 2014.