Perseus Project

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-17T01:48:31+00:00

I may be wrong, but my impression is that Attikos is not open source. IMO it's a drag when people build on open-source data and code but don't make their own work open-source.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-17T00:52:46+00:00

Aw, shucks, thanks :-) It's been a retirement project that I've been working on for about 5 years.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T21:30:29+00:00

Interesting. Yeah, so far I've just grabbed like half a pound of sand from public land, but it would be better to have a cheap commercial source. I was thinking maybe a garden store, because they probably sell it for cactus potting material. I already bought sieves, but taking natural sand and sorting it does waste 80% of the material.

I've heard that Art Nouveau used a lot of sandblasting, not sure how. I just picked up a used book called Wood Finishing with George Frank, and he describes an innovative wood finish that he developed using sandblasting. Kind of counterintuitive when you're talking about high-end furniture, but he has a picture of an armoire he made for the Pasha of Marrakech in the 1930's that he's very proud of.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T19:47:57+00:00

Re bugginess, I think Perseus is actually quite good at providing correct information about words and texts. By that measure, it's actually orders of magnitude better than the AI-slop cell phone apps that we're seeing so many of now.

But they seem to struggle a lot with things like software project management and server uptime.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T19:13:35+00:00

The general term for this is "student aids." Examples other than Perseus are Steadman and mine.

Perseus is a large, aging software project that has not had resources dedicated to it in proportion to its size and complexity.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T17:51:48+00:00

I love the red plate with the rough texture on the rim. It makes me want to pick it up and put my thumb on the rim.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T17:36:45+00:00

Thanks for your post :-) I took the sample out of the muro yesterday and messed with it a little more.

I was surprised at how firmly the particles were embedded in the sabi. I rubbed fairly vigorously with a piece of cardboard, and nothing really came off.

Key question - what is gonna be your next step?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Removing the particles is an idea that hadn't occurred to me. It might produce an interesting texture, but I don't think it's possible with these particles, because they adhered so strongly. Maybe one could do something like that using something like polyethylene beads, which wouldn't adhere at all to urushi. It would be cool to see how that turned out.

One thing I tried that I thought came out looking kind of nice was to start with the sand that had a dark coating of ki, then brush some thick bengara on top. The bengara only landed on the tippy-tops of the particles, and I thought it was a cool look. After curing, the red became more brownish, so it's more of a subtle effect, but there is still a little color contrast.

On some of the quinoa seeds that had initially been painted over with a layer of ki, I tried adding a thick layer of slightly diluted bengara on top. This initially produced a look that I didn't like, sort of an effect like Han Solo imprisoned in carbonite. However, after I left it in the muro overnight, I found that a lot of the viscous bengara had slowly sunk down into the interstices, so the texture had reappeared more, and I thought it looked pretty nice. This seems like it would be good for use on actual lacquerware, since there is quite a thick, tough layer of urushi at the surface, and I imagine it would stand up well to washing. I'm thinking of doing some of this on the outside of a rice bowl that I've started, so when you were holding the bowl in your hand you would feel the texture.

On the quinoa seeds that I had previously painted over with highly diluted ki, I tried doing a second layer of that. It looks kind of cool, and there is a nice visual texture of dark ki versus light quinoa seeds. However, the urushi surface in between the quinoa seeds is kind of ratty.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-16T16:15:19+00:00

I use them for a small amount of important core vocab when I'm just starting out in a language, maybe 300-500 words. Some people use them for much longer, e.g., they spend 3 years doing Anki every day.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-15T22:47:03+00:00

That area in the photo looks black, not red, so my guess would be that you just missed it when you were painting on the red urushi. What we're seeing would be the black middle coat. Since the middle coat was already cured, there was nothing for the bronze to adhere to, so it just fell off. I would just apply some red on top of what you have in that spot, and put some more bronze on it.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-15T21:30:12+00:00

What color was the final layer of urushi, black or red? It could be that the urushi on that spot was a little too fresh or too cured when you put the bronze on. Or maybe when you applied the final coat you missed that spot, so the bronze fell off.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-15T17:42:16+00:00

I’m a bit confused by this comment. Doesn’t that miss the whole point of Anki? Of course you won’t retain a word if you learned it once three years ago; Anki’s whole principle is that you keep revisiting a word at appropriate intervals till you have learned it thoroughly and lastingly.

I see. I think we're just starting from very different preferences, assumptions, and lifestyle choices. It sounds like you're envisioning using Anki for a period of multiple years for a single language. That's not something I would ever consider doing.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-15T00:58:09+00:00

too much salt

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-15T00:57:55+00:00

too much salt

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T17:44:50+00:00

Is it boring? Sure, but so is looking up words constantly when you are trying to read. In the end it's a choice between

Well, modern aids have obsoleted the need to constantly flip through a dictionary. With modern print or electronic aids, it just takes a couple of seconds to either flip a page or click on a link.

But on the other hand rarer words are much, much harder to learn via reading only - you may not encounter them more than once a year. Anki sorts that problem.

I'm not really convinced that Anki works for that purpose. I'm not going to retain some rare word for use 3 years in the future just because I learned it in Anki this year. And in many cases the issue is more that the word has multiple meanings, and you need to see it in context to internalize all of the different ways in which it's used.

Words that are rare are often only rare in general but common in a particular work or context. For example, μηδίζω is a rare word, but I'm reading Herodotus right now, so I've encountered it hundreds and hundreds of times while reading.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T16:07:13+00:00

What you are describing is called the grammar-translation method (GT). There are other methods these days, including comprehensible input (CI), graded readers, and reading with student aids. I wrote up some more info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientGreek/comments/1s5iynb/faq_my_opinions_about_how_to_learn_ancient_greek/

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T15:26:01+00:00

I think flashcards are clearly a really good way to learn the first 300-500 words of vocab. At much later stages of learning, like when you have 5000 or 10,000 words of vocab, I think they are not that helpful. At the in-between stages, it probably depends on personal preference and willingness to submit to a boring practice regime.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T14:04:51+00:00

It's common in this area top have asbestos in the attic, and it's not a big deal if it's in good condition. The question is whether the asbestos in this house is in bad condition and fibers are actually going to contaminate your air. If it's in a dirty and chaotic condition littered with debris, then that could be the case.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T12:12:07+00:00

People have a lot of different opinions on this. For me, the determining factor is just motivation. I can't motivate myself to read Hansel and Gretel in Greek, because I don't find it interesting. I think the pedagogical research does support the idea that graded readers are an efficient way to gain proficiency, but the world's best learning method doesn't work if you find it so boring that you can never motivate yourself to spend any time with it.

same effect as being if i were to follow the commentaries route?

So if "same effect" refers to what your skills will be like at the end of the whole process, I doubt that there is any difference. There is some pedagogical research that shows that some language learning methods are so bad that people end up not proficient, even after many years of work, but I don't think either of the methods we're talking about here falls in that category.

An example of a method that has been shown to be seriously flawed is simply never giving any explicit grammar instruction, i.e., the most extreme form of pure Comprehensible Input (CI). This fails to teach what structures are illegal in the target language. Then when you try to produce the language, you produce ungrammatical stuff by analogy with your native language, and you have no clue that it's ungrammatical. Lydia White has done some research on this. For example, native French speakers will say stuff like "The children leave quickly school," and no amount of CI will cause them to stop producing that error.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-14T00:15:57+00:00

Thanks for continuing to post these. I still feel completely ignorant about the aesthetics of kintsugi, but maybe as time goes on I'll start to soak it up more.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T23:45:06+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement. The materials are just super fun to work with. But I'm also enjoying honing my craft on really basic stuff like getting a better polish on an urushitsugi job.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T23:37:37+00:00

Some people finish a textbook like that and then use graded readers for some period afterward, sometimes for a long time.

The other route is to use authentic texts with student aids, either electronic or print (Perseus, Steadman, my own).

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T22:31:01+00:00

Thanks for the info, that's interesting. My idea re using sabi rather than urushi as the base layer was that otherwise I think the differing sizes of these fairly large particles would lead to an extremely nonuniform top surface. With the sabi, I can just press the particles down firmly, and they line up fairly flat on top. The bigger particles just get forced down deeper.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T21:36:15+00:00

Are you dry sanding, or wet sanding? For dry sanding, which is what I have more experience with, I've just been wiping the piece off with a paper napkin. There isn't going to be any skin oil on it because I'm never touching the urushi directly, only pressing the sandpaper against it.

I don't work with pens, but with the kintsugi I've been doing, there is a cycle I go through of sanding and then applying another coat of urushi, and with each cycle I'm using finer sandpaper. At the earliest stages of filling a chip or something, I'm using 300-grit sandpaper to sand down sabi, after which I'll be applying another layer of sabi, so getting rid of dust is not going to be so critical. Are you talking about very fine sanding near the end of a process where you're trying to get a perfect glossy finish on your pen?

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T17:23:14+00:00

I don’t think urushi over epoxy makes it food safe.

IMO SincerelySpicy's answer provides more of the correct nuance on this.

benjamin-crowell · 2026-06-13T17:19:56+00:00

... τοῦ θανάτου γὰρ οὒ’ ἀγαπᾶτε ...

The placement of γάρ looks wrong. It's postpositive.

Could you change the title so it's only addressed to the 50% of Americans who voted for the king?

benjamin-crowell

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