A profile of Alice Kober and her groundbreaking work deciphering Linear B. “It was she who was working hundreds of hours with a slide rule sitting at her dining table… a cigarette burning at her elbow, poring over the few published inscriptions, looking and looking for patterns.”
William J. Rapaport shares and documents the history behind a sentence: “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” (via @booksadventures)
“[T]he Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.” Dr. Jacob Dahl, director of the Ancient World Research Cluster, and a team of researchers capture images of […]
In 1969, Joanna Russ spoke to the Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention about taboo words, their honest and dishonest uses and the unearned thrill: “I want to be able to use dirty wordies without shocking anybody. I want to write about the subjects they refer to without shocking anybody. […]
It’s been just over a year since I became a partner in the Mayfair Theatre, Ottawa’s oldest operating cinema. We’ve shown a lot of films in that time (we average about 40 a month), and I’ve written the synopsis for almost every one.
Andrew O’Hehir reads a book about artificial language and decides: “Tolkien’s languages, one might say, form the missing link between Esperanto and Klingon.”