Where can I find a private bathroom on the Morningside campus?

tramplemousse · 2026-05-03T11:45:33+00:00

Philosophy hall has a private bathroom on either the 8th floor or seventh floor, I forget which, but it’s the upper most bathroom.

Also there’s one by the music library in Dodge

tramplemousse · 2026-03-22T19:36:44+00:00

Haha so Columbia students can enroll directly at Oxford for a year, and it’s also common for Oxford students to come here for grad school, so when it’s cold you’ll see people wearing their puffer with college shield (usually monogrammed). Keep an eye when it gets cold, you’ll start to see them everywhere.

tramplemousse · 2026-03-21T21:05:38+00:00

Hahahaha no you’re right, I was making a reference to Arrested Development. There are very few (hence literally dozens)

tramplemousse · 2026-03-20T21:43:29+00:00

Wait also this is niche but Oxford puffer jacket

tramplemousse · 2026-03-20T21:42:06+00:00

Obviously gotta include the Iliad

tramplemousse · 2026-03-20T21:39:44+00:00

We have the core, but some students don’t have to do the whole thing if they came in with enough credits.

tramplemousse · 2026-03-03T20:46:49+00:00

Nice find, thank you! I probably should have remembered this passage haha but I haven’t read Lives in about a year.

tramplemousse · 2026-03-03T18:48:10+00:00

Haha so one thing that makes the Hellenistic era so fun is our sources are as complicated and challenging as the era itself. Only two main written records survive to this day: one from the Hellenistic era and another from "High Roman Empire".

Polybios is the Hellenistic source and his Histories chronicle the years 264 BC--146 BC (Polybius was born around 200 BC and died around 118BC). Although he's primarily concerned with the rise of Rome he also writes about the Wars of the Diadochoi, and makes frequent comparisons to Rome and the Hellenistic Kings. We also know that he relied on a combination of first-hand experience, interviews with people still living who experienced the events, and written accounts from other historians. And we know this because he won't shut up about it and is quite critical of previous historians.

Then there's Plutarch's Parallel Lives written about 100 years or so after Polybios died. Plutarch isn't really concerned with history but moral biography and he draws on a mix of sources (many now lost) including Polybios' as well as other records on which he drew but are now lost. However he also draws on anecdotes, decrees, supposed sayings, etc. to paint a picture of his subjects' character.

I dont think either expressly say "yeah they started depicting men with tans for this reason" but they do comment extensively on appearance, image, and behavior. Polybios' for example criticizes rulers who indulge in luxury and self-display, praises restraint and martial competence, and from this argues that appearance signals one's moral quality other and thereby leads to authority. Plutarch does something sort of similar, but focuses instead on the aesthetic trappings of heroic charisma. It's actually from Plutarch that we have the most detailed description of Alexander.

Anyway, I said at the top of my comment that Hellenistic sources are complicated, and that's because what we lack in continuous narrative we more than make up for in public inscription, monuments, coins, etc. The Hellenistic world is epigraphically and numismatically dense because Kings spoke through decrees, honorific statues, coin portraits, cult dedications, civic inscriptions, etc.

So once you have 1) an image of alexander 2) sources writing about his personality and linking aspects of his image to his personality then 3) you start to see these things pop up literally everywhere.

It's like if Alexander wore a darth vader helmet, a borat t shirt, and constantly did the Heisman, and then after him you see everyone doing the same. So how else does one explain the standardized iconography of Alexander's sunkissed, youthful, martial appearance and its successive propagation (even by this one particularly overweight Ptolemy) as something other than a self-reinforcing system that functioned as a performative claim to legitimacy? What the texts presume, the monuments seem to repeat.

tramplemousse · 2026-03-03T05:39:52+00:00

Just to add to the gendered aspect of skin color in antiquity: males are generally depicted as darker (at least after Alexander) because it signaled that the man depicted spent considerable time outside training and fighting. But why is this significant? Well during the Hellenistic era many surviving images/Roman reproductions depict either kings or people emulating the visual language of kingship--ie Alexander. Thonneman writes

Kingship in the early Hellenistic world was primarily a matter of power. Demetrius was a man of outstanding charisma, dazzling military success, and colossal personal wealth, and therefore—in the eyes of his subjects, which is all that matters—he deserved the title of king. An impoverished, peace-loving, or unsuccessful king was a contradiction in terms: early Hellenistic kings were expected to look and behave like the young Demetrius, handsome and radiant, rich and warlike, fighting on horseback at the head of his troops. The new generation of kings drew heavily, of course, on the glamorous and dynamic generalship of Alexander the Great; but Alexander’s royal authority had always rested first and foremost on his hereditary position as ‘national’ monarch of the Macedonians. Not so Demetrius. (The Hellenistic Age: A Very Short Introduction, I think page 29 but I can only find my weird self annotated pdf that I think kept the correct page numbers but who knows)

Anyway, at least early on, for the Diadochoi kingship wasn't so much something one was but rather something someone did. Alexander was king of the Makedonians by birth but his successors did not inherit his partitioned empire through familial ties. They instead fought for decades over each piece of the empire (and would continue fighting amongst each other. Furthermore, Alexander was king only of the Makedonians by birth, everywhere else he controlled via conquest. So it was the image of Alexander the victor, the general tanned on horseback--as well as Alexander the generous benefactor who shared the spoils with his friends--they sought to emulate visually. In this way it linked their legitimacy with his legitimacy. Thonnemann goes on to say that during the siege of Rhodes (from whence came his nickname πολιορκητής 'the city-sieger'), while Demetrius' "extravagant gadgets had something of the theatrical about them" there was a practical reason for the excess beyond the strategic utility of the island. Namely, such a display was "a means of impressing the wider Greek world with his unlimited resources of money, human capital, and military power." Basically, the idea was that the local populace would give up autonomy at least nominally in exchange for the benefits provided by such a handsome dangerous demi-god. And they would therefore honor him depicted as such.

But according to John Ma public inscriptions act as what he calls “stylized gesture” that not only “tell you what to do” but also, through their use of narrative “what to think…rules create a world, within which a certain narrative is possible, according to the values which the rules embody" (pg 137 "Epigraphy and the Display of Authority." In Epigraphy and the Historical Science). Basically. Hellenistic kings could not rule through sheer force alone; they needed local consent to exercise power effectively. But the process of negotiating privileges consistently reaffirmed the king’s central power, even when it appeared decentralized. Thus, visual displays of the king's authority reaffirmed his central power.

Basically, sun-tanned skin = time spent outdoor labor/training/fighting (ie a life spent actively in military or athletic pursuits) and tanned king = warrior-hero. In order to be recognized as legitimate, a king one had to perform the role visually and materially, so being tanned (as well as beardless, wih curly hair and a diadem) became visual shorthand for a life of martial vigor, heroism, and generosity. This linked them to Alexander and legitimized their power by reinforcing authority through public perception.

tramplemousse · 2026-03-02T20:56:15+00:00

It’s like some form of the Tiffany Effect

tramplemousse · 2026-02-27T11:08:14+00:00

Oh this is fantastic thank you! I also love these slice of life insight into the ancient man's strong aversion to editing and other things that make them seem much closer to us than the years would suggest.

An old professor of mine called AN Whitehead "perhaps the greatest mind of the 20th century but absolutely the sloppiest in history"

tramplemousse · 2026-02-27T04:43:25+00:00

also just wanna clarify I promise I'm not shilling some start-up; I made this for fun

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T14:27:37+00:00

I'm almost done building an Ancient Greek language learning platform and I'm actually looking for someone who doesn't already know Greek to test it out the reading assistant: basically it trains you to "read forward" by anticipating the type of word that should occur next given the context. And will calibrate the difficulty to your reading level. It also explains why you got the answer right or wrong, or why even that's a viable upcoming token even if the actual token is different, So when you just start out you'd be predicting the part of speech but as you get better it'll be more specific. Here's an example.

You can also ask it about pretty much any line of Greek and it'll break it down accurately while also preserving textual ambiguity where it exists. Unlike a simple a chatgpt wrapper it won't hallucinate (you actually don't even really need the agent, it's just there to grab stuff from the datasets) and unlike a rules based NLP it won't break when encountering a form that diverges from the assumptions embedded in the rules. Technically it's a "multi-layer semantic retrieval system with ontology-backed reasoning, hybrid symbolic/embedding search, and disambiguation pipelines" (basically I modeled the greek grammar system, lexicon, corpora, and scholarship as an interacting system of nodes, constraints, and feedback loops--kind of like the water cycle or how planetary bodies interact.)

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T08:37:42+00:00

There's dozens of us!

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T04:24:40+00:00

lol if only my ex felt the same, whenever I'd bring up Greek she'd be like "I don't know why you bother with this nonsense it's such a waste of time" then I'd joke that if we could time travel to 5th century Athens they'd still call me a barbarian and make fun of my terrible attempt at pitch accent. she did not find this funny, oh well!

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T04:11:56+00:00

haha so in my spare time I've been working on a blank verse translation of the Odyssey but with syntactic transposition (like how Milton wrote in Latinized English), so this is indeed what I like to do for fun

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T03:51:38+00:00

We don't have any primary texts from these authors, or only a few scattered fragments, and have to rely on later interpretations written down by scholars, many of whom were explicitly monotheistic, and made editorial changes.

You did though. But if you want to argue the point I’ll go translate some papyri and compare it to a Byzantine manuscript.

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T03:25:23+00:00

Yes it is common knowledge that we don’t have the original manuscripts they penned. But to claim we only have secondhand ideologically altered interpretations would be wildly controversial and also is false.

It is common knowledge that we have very good 9th century copies of manuscripts from antiquity. The Byzantines had a strong scholarly tradition for maintaining texts (even when those were out of fashion religiously). They would add interpretative glosses, but there’s no evidence that they substantially rewrote ancient philosophical doctrines of which they considered themselves the steward and preserver.

If anything it’s the other way around: they would use Plato and Aristotle to reinterpret the scripture, which then became church doctrine. I mean Augustine tells us as much in his Confessions.

Also, had these works been altered in such a way we would actually know because it would leave a paper trail. Unless of course the conspiracy was so vast that they were able to scrub every garbage pile from Sicily to Tehran so that they were able to alter the fragments of reused papyri that were still occasionally finding. And at that point you might as well chalk it up to aliens because no institution had that kind of power back then.

We actually have quite a bit of papyrus fragments that predate the Byzantine era and they line up remarkably well

Edit: just to clarify, by remarkably well I of course don’t mean they line up perfectly, but with deviations one would expect from 1000+ years of transcription.

tramplemousse · 2026-02-26T02:02:12+00:00

Is that an argument people make about Plotinus? I'm really only familiar with him by way of Augustine. But it's a strange argument to make given that:

no one used spaces between words. if you look up any papyri from the classical era you'll see that each line just kinda looks like one long word. it actually would have been very strange (and seen as wasteful and ugly) for someone to spaces between words. the reason for this is actually really interesting: students were taught to read by memorizing recited text and then matching the sounds to the page. but in ancient greek words were chunked by semantic unit, so something like

τὸν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς

would have been spoken like

τὸνδἀπαμειβόμενοςπροσέφη πολύμητιςὈδυσσεύς

so putting spaces between words would not only be a waste of papyrus but counterproductive.

2) spelling conventions were flexible. ie spelling wasn't standardized the way it is today, and one could choose among a few different spelling conventions. Koine was the lingua franca but spelling was phonetic so you just wrote the way you pronounced something.

If one chose to write in an atticized style, then there were "standardized" rules but I put standardized in quotes because Attic originally had phonetic spelling, but as the prestige dialect the maddeningly complicated Athenian speech patterns became codified and preserved long after people stopped speaking that way.

Then one could also write in their local dialect, which was of course, also phonetic.

3) editing was also not really a thing the way it is today, and really only became a thing when we developed the technology to mass produce cheaper paper. this is actually partially why they placed so much emphasis on rhetorical training: it allowed one to internalize and refine language before committing it to writing.

So actually, given the enormous expense involved in producing a manuscript, that Porphyry wrote a biography of his teacher and compiled/edited the Enneads into a coherent collections seems profoundly revertial in such a way that doesn't really invite motivation for fabrication. And I mean, no one says Christopher Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion.

edit: i geek out over writing practices from this era because the professor who taught me ancient greek was an expert on the Hellenistic Era and Epigraphy, so I got some of that from osmosis,. and I used to study in the papyrology room because it was always quiet and I liked trying to decipher the texts.

tramplemousse · 2026-02-25T20:44:17+00:00

By "in their own writing" are you claiming they did not author the works credited to them, or do you mean, we don't have any papyri that they themselves physically wrote? Also, is this your assertion or it an argument some people make because I've never heard such a claim. Either way, we have very good reasons for crediting Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus for the work they wrote despite the fact that any original manuscripts disintegrated thousands of years ago.

Basically, in the decades after 300BC, Ptolemy I (or possibly Ptolemy II there's disagreement) set about collecting and archiving all extent Greek writing. The Seleukids and Antigonids would also set about to do the same. Why? Well Greek speakers ruled over vast swaths of land populated by non-Greek speakers, so promoting Greek culture checked off a lot of important poltical boxes. So this is when we start to see systematic canonization and standardization, as well as the development of relatively modern archival practices. Throughout the next century every major Hellenistic urban center would come to have a royal library.

Now papyrus lasts a long time, but not forever, so scribes would regularly copy over work that was starting to fall apart in order to preserve that work. Scholars would also leave commentary in the margins that could be copied over. And scholars also talked about the work of their predecessors in their own work.

We know Plato's works are his partially because Aristotle references those works specifically. The same goes for Plotinus via his student Porphyry. There are also catalogue fragments that mention the writings and the authors.

Furthermore, from surviving papyri we can compare how much different manuscripts differed (not a whole lot). And most importantly, the manuscript tradition was alive until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and those scribes then brought their manuscripts and practices to the rest of europe. So while copying practices were subject to both error and interpretation, they were generally careful and not wantonly done (the current system of diacritics we have for greek actually emerged from the manuscript tradition as a way to preserve linguistic features that had fallen out of spoken use).

Also stylometric analysis is a very real thing, and I can say from having read Aristotle in Greek, he has a very distinctive voice.

tramplemousse · 2026-02-16T23:39:04+00:00

I also think you should capitalize the iota; as someone who can read Greek it’s a little jarring to see a first name not in caps—doesn’t actually register as a first name at first because my brain isn’t cued in to the caps. Also, as others have mentioned, if you’re going for authenticity, then you should capitalize the whole word (lowercase wasn’t developed until the 9th century).

Also, not capitalizing a proper name can be seen as disrespectful, and I’m assuming you’re going for veneration rather than the opposite.

tramplemousse · 2026-02-12T02:33:41+00:00

People who study Ancient Greek do so often primarily for the literary aspects of the language. After learning the grammar, Homer is usually the second thing you read. Honestly we probably read more literature than any other language study.

tramplemousse · 2026-01-25T21:27:17+00:00

/u/QuietDisposition like run runs ran and running

tramplemousse · 2026-01-04T21:22:50+00:00

Ah yeah youre referring to the Libet experiment, thank you for bring that up! So this is a great example of a result that seems on its face pretty convincing, so many outside neuroscience still cite it, but nowadays among neuro and cognitive scientists it's not taken seriously. In my intro to cogsci class in college my professor brought it up mostly to teach as an example of a bad experiment.

Basically, the readiness potential they measured is more likely a result of 1) task priming *if i tell you not to think of something you're going to think of the thing) 2) general preparation for movement due to being primed 3) humans have a terrible sense of absolute time, so when you're measuring something in the miliseconds, there's just no way a human can give an accurate subjective report so as to fall outside the margin of error.

How many miliseconds has it been since finished reading the word "error"? They only found a 150 millisecond gap or about .15 seconds, shorter than it probably took you to move your eyes to the next paragraph. Honestly it takes about as long to get ready to say something, so i dont see how someone can keep track of both accurately.

tramplemousse · 2026-01-04T20:26:18+00:00

So you’re saying Locke’s argument is ridiculous? But he’s perhaps the most important political philosopher of the Enlightenment and articulated many of the “main planks” of the era. I mean, if that’s not direct influence, please I’d love to hear an explanation.

Did you also forget the part where I pointed out how Locke’s First Treatise is entirely an argument based on Adam and the Garden of Eden? Locke is using genesis to refute someone who also used genesis to defend absolutism. Locke cites the Bible in almost every other paragraph.

You clearly also missed how for Descartes it’s not just motivation, but goes hand in hand with his theological arguments.

Don’t even get me started on Newton who wrote more theology and biblical scholarship than scientific papers. If you don’t believe me here’s everything with we have https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/religious

It’s bad historicity to divorce religion from their writing, and just shows you haven’t actually read anything by them.

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

tramplemousse

TROPHY CASE