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On the 12^th of this month I presented at Lone Star Ruby Conf V

I have been working on a project for the last few years that conjugates regular Latin verbs into specific, as well as aggregated, results (Code). While coding this library, I had some ideas about the tools and techniques that made it possible for me to handle the complexity of this issue. From these ideas I derived some guidelines about how to decide “when to metaprogram and how.” I presented this.

Here are the slides slides from the presentation.

I really enjoy my Latin classmates, they all are fine students, committed to the cause of studying something strictly for its beauty, its import, and its bond that it makes us feel to yesteryear.

As an advice to anyone in languages let me recommend that you always be bold: come in, try to do that horrendous Dutch guttural ‘g,’ fully nasalize your French vowels, etc. When you’re unafraid to err, you open up the possibility that you will actually learn.

I say this as preface because one of my peers made an error which induced a laughter such as I have never seen before in a language class. We all err often in our translations, so I mean to say that while it’s common, acceptable, etc. to err, rarely does it have this comedic value. The fellow himself seems to have gotten a good laugh out of it as well and appears to be an excellent Latin scholar in the making so I’m going to assume sharing the laughter will be a wish he is behind.

In Book 3 of the Metamorphoses Ovid relates the tale of Echo and Narcissus. You may recall that Echo is a nymph who can only repeat endings; Narcissus is (fatally) beautiful. Echo, having seen this boy (he’s 16 in the story), burns to be taken by him.

To clarify the scene for the class we had two students enacting the actions and relating the dialog while a “director” in the class read forth the action. À mettons le scène Narcissus has lost his friends, is alone in a dark wood, and begins to get the idea that he is being followed.

Narcissus’ first question is:

“ecquis adest?”

“equis” means “who” and adest means “to be present”, it’s opposite is “absent.” So, Narcissus basically says “who’s there?.”

So the “director” in the class said:

“The strong boy had been separated from the line of his friends and said…[cue to actor to relate the dialog of “equis adest” translated from Latin to English]”

Thespians speak of having “commitment” to the scene, boldy letting go of fear and acting with ones full voice, body, spirit. This fellow portraying Narcissus would have made Stanislavsky applaud with his commitment.

[Boldly]: “A HORSE IS HERE?!”

Our actor, on stage, nervous, and reading quickly had confused the word for “horse” (equus) with “who” (ecquis). I suppose the notion of Mr. Ed lurking in the Arcadian woods behind this most-beautiful of humans popped in our minds and the giggles started.

“Well hello, Narcissus, how bout them fatal flaws?”

After of few minutes of doubled-over laughter we recovered enough to continue, but it was a great moment showing the humanity and joy that a cameraderie centered about learning can yield.

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” — Alexander Pope

A recent Wikipedia article of the day sent along notice that the anniversary of the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” had just past. I thought I would take a look at the original text and see what my substantial investment in Latin education seine me of it. Google Books has a fine scan with the Le Seur commentaries.

I was taking a look at De Mundi Systematae: Liber Tertius and saw several small postulates that were exceedingly brief and nowhere as complicated as the language in the rest of the text.

In philosophia experimentali, propositiones ex phænomenis per inductionem collectæ, non obstantibus contrariis hypothesibus, pro veris aut accurate aut quamproxime haberi debent, donec alia occurrerint phænomena, per quae aut accuratiores reddantur aut exceptionibus obnoxiæ.

My basic 4-semesters-of-Latin Translation

In experimental philosophy, propositions collected from phenomena through an observational process must be held either as true, or as close to it as possible — existing contrary hypotheses notwithstanding — until such time as other phenomena occur by which they [the propositions] may be more accurately given or be found erroneous.

— Regula IV: Regulae Philosophandi: Isaac Newton

The modern might casually assert “No duh,” but this is to give too-short a shrift to the intellectual milieu of the era.

Consider that Newton’s fairly erudite audience — they could read Newtonian Latin, mind you, and that was a relatively small, educated population — lacked sufficient default orientation toward this foundation of scientific reasoning. They lacked it to the extent that Newton had to teach the reader to think scientifically before he could expect him to even consider the revolutionary theories of physics contained earlier in the book. It’s almost like when someone makes a highly contentious blog post and then, to head off the trolls, tries to help the trolls orient themselves so as to minimize unnecessary, follow-up correspondence.

Wikipedia has a translation of Newton’s propositions as well.

Newton was urging us to eschew magical thinking, at least in the realm of natural philosophy. We should have no allegiance to any model any longer than until the data contravenes the model’s existence. But as a deist, or perhaps a latent alchemist, Newton realized that his laws of motion left him open to procedural complaints from Galiean neo-Platonist critique as well as rationalist ontological complaints from the Scholastics. Curiously, he had to defy both ends of the spectrum and find a middle way that both required the non-visible and non-mechanistic, but which also embraced a neo-Platonic / Galilean model of law forming science.

On top of all that he had the humility to say he was a standing on the shoulders of giants!

During my blogging hiatus towards late April and Early May, I finished my fourth Latin class. During the class we covered the larger parts of Books I and II of the Æneid.

But we did not finish them. In a move that can only be considered arch-nerdly, I am reading the ending of these two on my own. In some ways, with several grand sunk, it seems like a very bad use of my funds to basically let all the knowledge leak out over the summer. On the other hand, couldn’t I be reading something else, something that doesn’t require a dictionary nearby?

Sigh.

So, I bought a 3-pack of those lovely brown-cardboard Moleskine mini-notebooks and am cruising through, picking up where we left off so that I can see what happens.

This is like that time when I was taking French III and we had read the first half of Patrick CAUVIN’s «Monsier Papa». What did I do on my flight to San Jose (that ultimately got me hired by Cisco)? Yep, I checked out the book from the library and read it on the plane.

Getting back into reading the Æneid was a bit of slow going, at first, but things started trucking along eventually and now I’m at a very critical point where Pyrrus encounters old king Priam (things don’t look to be too promising for old king versus son of Achilles).

My blogging has been light for the last several months because I’ve been focused on trying to get admitted to graduate school. Included in the portfolio of “why Steven is a special snowflake and you should admit him” argumentation is reference to a project which demonstrates the fusion of my interests in Latin, linguistics, Ruby, metaprogramming, and Rails.

To find out more about my project, visit The Verba Latina website. As a warning, the initial load is a bit pokey. I’m going to move to a more robust host later.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve been working on a library in Ruby used to model Latin Verbs.

Here’s a 5 minute demo of what you can do: My Latin::LatinVerb + Ruby’s IRB environment produces this:

It’s easier on the eyes if you watch the full-size version at blip.tv

I’m working on building a site around this code base. I hope to release it within the next month, but for the moment, I can give you a small sample of my recondite study.

I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging thanks to:

1. Car accident drama
2. Latin III
3. postponed GRE from this weekend to the 24^th of October
4. Work
5. The LatinVerb library.

Most of these don’t produce much in the way of visual artifacts, but here’s a short demonstration of the LatinVerb library ( it’s coherently working, but still needs some refactoring to get it to 0.1 release state… ). Here’s the video:

What’s going on here is that I have a Ruby debugger ( RDebug ) session open where I’ve created an instance of Latin::LatinVerb. I then proceed to execute some of the “vectors” that uniquely identify a single conjugation of a verb or a collection of verb tenses.

It’s not too pretty yet, my main work has been on getting the thinking working. The displaying part comes next.

Lauren and I took to calling that “eye klav-divs” towards the end of the series ( 13 episodes ). It’s an excellent mini-series, truly showing the capability of television to deliver high art, quality acting, and subtle direction to the masses.

Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!

Instead of the sublime, we now choose to stew in the mud.

If you have the chance and want to be boggled at the astounding amount of treachery that members of the same family can visit upon one another, “I, Claudius” is a great tale. I loved Jacobi’s Claudius, he captures a vulnerability and fear through the first 10 episodes that inspire so much pathos and tenderness that you have to root for him all the way through — even when the necessities of his office drive him onto a path of corruption and bloodshed.

I also liked the amazing or impressionistic way the sets were designed. Being a mid-70’s BBC drama, the budget was assuredly tight, but with just a few paper-mâché effects of pillars we had no problem accepting “Ah, this is a palace” or “this is a desolate island cottage”.

Siân Phillips receives eternal praise as the scheming, murderous, materfamilias, Livia. Episodes without her lacked a certain punch and I can definitely see why De Laurentiis and Lynch cast her as the Reverend Mother Mohaim in “Dune”.

Listen here, Claud, er, Paul, I’ve got a little box for you…

It’s definitely worth a viewing if you have, uh, 13 hours for it.

Today I took my Latin II final which represents a substantial weight off of my shoulders. It’s weird not to have the nagging sense that somewhere, somehow, i should really be reciting conjugational or declensional paradigms.

My efficient professor offered to grade it there on the spot and I walked out knowing that I got 97 points on it. Not too shabby. That locked me an “A” in the class.

I celebrated with a pho meal and trip to Target with my beautiful girlfriend.

Brian Blessed, scenery not being chewed

Last night instead of cramming, we watched the 1976 mini-series “I, Claudius” — it was at least in the Latin vein. Major cool part: Vultan from “Flash Gordon”, Brian Blessed, playing a (to my mind, rather portly) Augustus. Primus inter pares needs to be primus intering the gym.

I say, upholding the customs of the elders is paramount!

Tonight I hope to relax a bit and head to bed early.

Or maybe enjoying a tender family moment with Ming:

“with a mighty flash” indeed…

I’ve been pretty quiet of late because I’ve been trying to get ready for this year’s review season at work and because I have a very sick application ( as in, it is on a server with an indeterminate and short lifespan ) that I’m trying to clone on new hardware with an interface facelift and move to a new standard of Perl.

Additionally, I have my Latin II final tomorrow.

Probably won’t be much action here until I get the finals behind me and some writing done.