I’ve been continuing to think about ‘AI’ and LLMs and the like; partly through sheer annoyance at some very silly ‘This Is How AI Will Build Utopia’ and ‘This Is How AI Will Destroy Us All’ articles (it’s a two-man con, isn’t it? They set this up as THE debate we should be having … | Continue reading
No, I don’t have anything terribly profound to say about the current smorgasbord of social media platforms, but it’s an excuse to post this bit of ineffable cool… As someone with multiple accounts on the Twitter, it’s probably inevitable that I have different, not necessary coher … | Continue reading
Whenever I teach Greek Political Thought – which has now been for the last three years running – the opening discussion has always been on the meaning of ‘political’, and the emotions and values bound up with it. The aim, of course, is to highlight both the connection to antiquit … | Continue reading
Current sleeping pattern: wake around 4, brief panic about work and everything else, try to lie still so as not to indicate to Hans (eldest cat) that I’m awake as he’s want food, fuss or both, try to drop off again; this time managed to doze for an hour and a half without startin … | Continue reading
I’m in Bochum, for a conference starting tomorrow on Bier in der Antike; wonderful to be back in Germany rather than just getting fifteen minutes’ sanity from the Taggesschau every evening (time devoted to Johnson shenanigans in the last fortnight? Zero), lovely to be back on Eur … | Continue reading
I’m inclined to take it as evidence for the continuing collapse of Twitter as a workable platform for intellectual exchange and communication – yes, I’m still naive enough to try to use it for that purpose – that I’ve only just heard of the death of Dan Tompkins, about four days … | Continue reading
I came across a very nice, thought-provoking piece last week by Jim Dickinson of the WonkHE blog – actually written back in November, but reposted because of its relevance to debate about whether universities should have a formal ‘duty of care’ to students – considering higher ed … | Continue reading
See me, feel me, hear me, love me, touch me… One of this week’s ‘AI is here to make life wonderful; resistance is useless’ stories – as opposed to the equally pervasive ‘AI is going to destroy us all; resistance is useless’ takes – was that language processing models are being to … | Continue reading
Nothing’s right… Yes, there are times when I spend almost as much time deciding on a suitable music-referencing title for a blog post as I do actually writing the thing. The optimistic version would have been some variant on the famous line from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “There is … | Continue reading
It’s all going a bit third-century crisis down at the pond – which is to say that we’re into day 4 of the great Emperor Dragonfly Emergence 2023, and by my count we’ve now had either 35 or 36. A single Anax imperator emerging from the depths of the pond and breaking out of its [… … | Continue reading
I’m writing this on the train back from London on May 10th, after recording an episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg and wonderful colleagues Katharine Earnshaw and Diana Spencer, on the subject of Vergil’s Georgics – yes, there was a reason why I responded to thunderstorms an … | Continue reading
It’s actually remarkable that ChatGPT has been around for only six months; not so much because of how much it’s developed and transformed our lives in that time, but because of the volume of discussion about whether it’s about to transform our lives, restructure the entire econom … | Continue reading
And so farewell!* To Göteborg (and its unbelievable range of amazing imperial stouts, above all), to the European Social Science History Conference for another two years, and, slightly abruptly, to my role as one of the co-chairs of the Antiquity network of said conference. I thi … | Continue reading
One of the (relatively few) things I hate about marking student work is the sinking feeling when a suspicion of plagiarism starts to form; the moment when something like an abrupt switch of style or changes in spelling or the wording of a phase makes you look over the pages you’v … | Continue reading
I’ve been doing a lot of muting on the Twitter this morning – over eighty separate accounts, all of which tweet out short extracts from that early P.G. Wodehouse story I’ve discussed before, as well as other stuff that I can’t be bothered to look up. For the most part, that’s all … | Continue reading
According to my wife, my falling over and breaking my foot was my body, or perhaps the universe, telling me that I need to slow down and look after myself. I’m not sure how far this is a genuine philosophical position and how far she is grasping at any available argument to try t … | Continue reading
I massively pissed off my wife a few nights ago, by going upstairs to the ‘study’ (which doubles as the music room, as well as general storage and nursery for chilli seedlings) to work on my jazz composition homework for twenty minutes or so, and re-emerging just under an hour la … | Continue reading
What makes for a decent academic legacy? How should one want to be remembered, and by whom? Such a potentially morbid and self-regarding train of thought is not in fact prompted by the fact that I’ve now added a broken foot to the Long COVID, insomnia and constant general tiredne … | Continue reading
Many years ago, with my ‘faculty teaching quality assurance’ hat on, I had to go and observe a lecture as several students in the class had complained that the lecturer’s presentations were heavily plagiarised. This seemed an entirely bizarre and improbable accusation, but they w … | Continue reading
There’s a familiar idea that Thucydides might be considered the founding figure for journalism – rooting out the truth of contemporary news events through own observations and interviewing eye-witnesses – and perhaps especially war reporting. There is perhaps an even better case … | Continue reading
Will the Singularity please just get a move on? Immanentize the Eschaton already! In the first place the advent of sentient superintelligence would surely terrify a load of those ghastly Effective Altruism types, sending them scurrying off to their bolt-holes in New Zealand where … | Continue reading
One of the reasons I became quite invested in the #Receptiogate saga*, even before its full popcorn-munching bizarreness became fully apparent, was the phrase used in the initial response of Carla Rossi’s (quite possibly fictional) secretary to Peter Kidd’s initial enquiries abou … | Continue reading
Welcome – a guarded, once bitten twice shy sort of welcome – to 2023. Ironic self-pity in my Review of 2022 aside, I am genuinely resolved to do a bit better with the blog this year; to post at least twice per month, so that at least I have a choice when it comes to […] | Continue reading
It’s that time of year again, when I look back over the previous twelve months of blogging and wonder why I bother. Levels of interest and engagement, on every single measure, continue their inexorable decline – the fact that it’s only a 20-25% fall from the already-feeble figure … | Continue reading
Gratuitous bonus post; last night we had neighbours round for a pre-New Year’s Eve event, and I was tasked with putting together a quiz. Having put in the work, I thought I might as well share it, in case anyone out there is desperately searching for precisely this sort of thing … | Continue reading
As we got towards the end of the year, with the general chaos on the Bird Site and speculation about what might replace it, there was a certain amount of nostalgia for the great days of blogging (as well as the odd suggestion, perhaps not too serious, that these might return). We … | Continue reading
Our publicationing makes double-good researches. Incorporated in Bruton (Somerset), London (poste restante) and Lugano (generous research funds with low levels of diligence). Prof Dr Dr Neville D. G. Morley MA PhD FRHistS FRHS NT AI, Director Owain Gwilym, BA MRes, Deputy Directo … | Continue reading
‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ I spend so much time thinking of ways to correct this misattributed Thucydides quote politely and constructively, and occasionally noting the context (a l … | Continue reading
There is no divide between people who play games and people who don’t; we all play games, or at least have played them in the past. But there clearly is a divide between people with varying amounts of experience of different sorts of games, and hence different expectations; betwe … | Continue reading
As the great philosopher Thucydides once said, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” This quote has been interpreted in many different ways over the years, but I believe it is still applicable … | Continue reading
It’s been a quiet fortnight on Thucydides Twitter – if you discount the 2000-odd P.G. Wodehouse bots continuing to pump out incomprehensible adverts for something that may or may not be linked to World Cup betting. The Social Jukebox bots that used to offer dodgy quotations have … | Continue reading
Something even weirder than normal is happening on Thucydides Twitter. I hesitate to use the word ‘invasion’ because of its association with the UK government’s racist anti-migrant rhetoric, but certainly I feel like a scientist in the opening act of one of those movies, puzzled … | Continue reading
The History of Ancient Rome, Definitively De-Woked; free from excessive emphasis on imperialism, colonialism and class struggle. Rome must be considered one of the most successful things in history. In the course of centuries Rome grew from a small town on the Tiber River into a … | Continue reading
he hand on the arm (or in this case the naked calf): affectionate, reassuring – or restraining, controlling, possessive? The expression that we can see on the face of the hand’s owner (the other face is turned away from us and invisible): peaceful and content, or smugly arrogant, … | Continue reading
If Elon Musk is going to destroy the Bird Site, inadvertently or not – the reported wheeze that everyone will get a timeline prioritising tweets from $8/month ‘verified’ users suggests he doesn’t have the faintest idea what makes it great for many people – I am hoping that he eit … | Continue reading
I seem to have been writing quite a lot of confidential reviews lately, of article submissions, grant applications and cases for promotion (way to make almost everyone a little bit paranoid…), and so I was intrigued by the news that a journal in the sciences, eLife, has decided t … | Continue reading
Our regular comfort rewatching of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is ar a fairly early stage, but there have been times over the last week and a half, with another bout of COVID now turning into a lingering cold colliding with the second week of teaching and the final stages of putting … | Continue reading
Events of the present and future will tend to resemble those of the past – or however else you want to paraphrase Thucydides’ key assumption about the usefulness of his work – or at any rate will remind us of them. This week has been very much a case in point, as commentators hav … | Continue reading
Okay, this is a first for me; I’ve just produced a new episode of the Thucydiocy podcast (Podbean link here; iTunes always takes longer to process), without it being based on a previous blog post. As I tend to use the blog as a repository in case I need to check up on misattribut … | Continue reading
Yes, it’s been a quiet month on here. Too much heat for my liking; a lot of time spent watering the chillis and aubergines in the greenhouse as a result; and [whispering very quietly so the gods don’t hear] I have actually been feeling slightly more myself at last, so have actual … | Continue reading
What should an academic career in the humanities look like today – beyond “not like this”? The question is prompted in the short term by the fact that Mary Beard, to mark her retirement, has taken the opportunity to promote discussion of the academic precariat and the extent to w … | Continue reading
The continuing joys of Long COVID… The main function of this blog post is just to give a link to a profound and thought-provoking piece by the ever-wonderful Maria Farrell over at Crooked Timber, talking about her experience of living with and adapting to ME/CFS, with an eye to t … | Continue reading
And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom onc … | Continue reading
I am not, I would like to think, an unreasonable Luddite. I suppose it could be said that what I am is at best inconsistent; sometimes not a Luddite at all, indeed sometimes the sort of middle-aged man who desperately strives to keep up with odd bits of the technological Zeitgeis … | Continue reading
It’s always nice to learn that someone has found something you did a while ago useful – yes, I know there are giants in the field who get thoroughly sick of being told how they’ve transformed the understanding and indeed life philosophy of another dozen junior scholars this month … | Continue reading
There is a small, rather marginal community, struggling to survive in the face of the pressures of the modern world, heavily dependent on attracting tourists. There is a series of odd and sometimes alarming occurrences, which most people ignore – but a few argue that there is a p … | Continue reading
Ah, the brand. The backbone of all that we do, the foundation of international success, the very heart of the institution. It’s not enough to produce excellent teaching and research if your logo fails to communicate your core values in just the wrong shade of green. But things co … | Continue reading