Any question answered...

where is my husband?

at the crown and greyhound in dulwich village, apparently! dammit!

In the toilet of the Crown and Greyhound to be presise.

glory be.

this is total bollocks right?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8773000/8773564.stm

Absolute and utter nonsense. This sort of thing comes up every couple of years. People trying to find secrets in Plato are ten a penny. I've certainly read attempts to make him a Pythagorean before. Funnily enough, most of Plato's key views are rather in conflict with Pythagoreanism. :)

What this is is really someone trying to justify some of today's most prevalent views by reference to Plato. It's not particularly interesting. Plato's work is infinitely rich and the work of utter genius, but most of that can be worked out by good old-fashioned thinking (I kid you not) rather than computing symbolic patterns and the like.

Absolute and utter nonsense. This sort of thing comes up every couple of years. People trying to find secrets in Plato are ten a penny. I've certainly read attempts to make him a Pythagorean before. Funnily enough, most of Plato's key views are rather in conflict with Pythagoreanism. :)

What this is is really someone trying to justify some of today's most prevalent views by reference to Plato. It's not particularly interesting. Plato's work is infinitely rich and the work of utter genius, but most of that can be worked out by good old-fashioned thinking (I kid you not) rather than computing symbolic patterns and the like.

thought so.

thanks oliver.

Who is Justin Bieber?

You mean what is Justin Bieber?

why is Justin Bieber?

yes but *who *is he?

This^^^^

He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Cyrus tell it, anybody could have worked for Bieber. You never knew. That was his power.

YouTube- Justin Bieber - Baby ft. Ludacris

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone.

glory be.

this is total bollocks right?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8773000/8773564.stm

Absolute and utter nonsense. This sort of thing comes up every couple of years. People trying to find secrets in Plato are ten a penny. I've certainly read attempts to make him a Pythagorean before. Funnily enough, most of Plato's key views are rather in conflict with Pythagoreanism. :)

What this is is really someone trying to justify some of today's most prevalent views by reference to Plato. It's not particularly interesting. Plato's work is infinitely rich and the work of utter genius, but most of that can be worked out by good old-fashioned thinking (I kid you not) rather than computing symbolic patterns and the like.

I have not got around to reading the article yet (wanted to yesterday, hopefully tonight), but I would not dismiss it so quickly. It's gone through peer review, and is making waves in academia. He is not saying (as far as I can tell) anything about Plato's views (at this point).

Also, I believe the seventh letter is a legitimate and therefore, tend to believe Plato was an esoteric writer - and therefore, does have a "hidden" (or, let's say, difficult to comprehend) message in much of what he wrote.

yyyyyeah but

We now understand our roots. Plato was a key founder of Western culture. So the birth of Western thought and science looks different

hhhrrrreally? it's a very perfunctory article and doesn't get into any detail so maybe... i'd be intrigued to see the paper itself.

I haven't read the BBC article you're linking to, but I wouldn't be surprised if main stream media used hyperbole to make something that's of little interest to 99% of the population a bit more sexy.

Here's a link to the article: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/jay.kennedy/Kennedy_Apeiron_proofs.pdf

Mark, as you know, a lot of bollocks gets published in peer-reviewed journals. :)

Well, obviously I haven't read the article, either, but the BBC article certainly ascribed views to Kennedy about Plato's philosophical views:

Fascinatingly, it's a musical code," he said. "Plato and the Greeks believed music was the key to mathematics and the cosmos.

"What we didn't know was that he used Greek musical scales to give his works a hidden structure and then built layers of hidden meanings beneath that."

The hidden codes reveal that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

I believe that it is nonsensical to attribute any of these views to Plato, although I'm sure Kennedy is putting it rather more carefully.

I'd be very surprised if there was anything much in it. I'd obviously be happy to be persuaded, but unless a senior Platonic scholar comes out supporting this I am going to be extremely reluctant to call it anything but nonsense.

There is a lot to be said about how Plato wrote and people often hope to reduce that complexity. It's not enough that he actually tells you quite a lot about why he writes the way he writes. He even tells you a lot about his method, and yes, he didn't put all of his views perfectly openly, and for very good reasons. There's a huge amount of work on all this.

Unfortunately, I have a rule against having philosophical debates on-line, but I'm most happy to discuss it in person. :)

Mark, as you know, a lot of bollocks gets published in peer-reviewed journals. :)

Well, obviously I haven't read the article, either, but the BBC article certainly ascribed views to Kennedy about Plato's philosophical views:

I believe that it is nonsensical to attribute any of these views to Plato, although I'm sure Kennedy is putting it rather more carefully.

I'd be very surprised if there was anything much in it. I'd obviously be happy to be persuaded, but unless a senior Platonic scholar comes out supporting this I am going to be extremely reluctant to call it anything but nonsense.

There is a lot to be said about how Plato wrote and people often hope to reduce that complexity. It's not enough that he actually tells you quite a lot about why he writes the way he writes. He even tells you a lot about his method, and yes, he didn't put all of his views perfectly openly, and for very good reasons. There's a huge amount of work on all this.

Unfortunately, I have a rule against having philosophical debates on-line, but I'm most happy to discuss it in person. :)

I don't think there's a debate here. I'm just not willing to dismiss it so easily. Plato on maths and science and harmonies is not new either - see the cosmological argument in The Laws (which I will be re-reading again very soon as it will, excitingly, be working its way into my dissertation. Reading group?). I've never really been able/willing to follow his cosmological arguments, but this might be a fruitful area of research for those who do.

Anyway, I am a believer of esotericism in philosophy, if I'm not a strict Straussian.

Have you read Al Farabi's Plato's Laws? Great example of the belief in hidden meaning in Plato that goes back to the end of the first millennium. Although we're still talking about over a thousand years after Plato wrote, the idea of secret meanings in his writings is not new.

I need to go back and do some serious boning up I think. My previous Plato experience is pretty basic (undergraduate stuff, theory of forms etc... and ten years ago at that). Still hav emy books stashed away somewhere. Will have a look tonight. Thanks for the link H.

I'd be quite interested in what Plato had to say about maths/music and harmony. I've been reading up on temperament a fair bit over the last few years which I imagine must crop up in there right?

the idea of secret meanings in his writings is not new.

I know. Of course there are aspects of Plato's dialogues that are not immediately apparent. However, a perfectly simple account can be given of all of this, and would you believe it, Plato actually tells his readers a lot of it himself. (No need to use the Seventh Letter at all.) :)

Thanks for the link. I've just had a quick scan of the article and it's exactly what I expected. The choice of dialogues that he looks at is perfectly predictable, too. So, I stay with my contention that it's absolute and utter nonsense. Showing it up to be such in detail will of course be hard work for scholars who could really use their time more productively. :(

This sort of thing will come back time and time again and isn't terribly exciting. It merely represents a failure of reading Plato.

Apologies for just making these claims and not backing them up here. I'd certainly be up for a reading group, as I've never read the Laws much. I'm afraid my Ancient Greek is extremely rusty by now, though.

37s too big for a tourer?

no. 35s are quite normal.

Hmmm Ive got 37s on now but they look enormous and slow.
I think I might go down to 32s, a little less comfort but a bit more speed.

why is the coffee appreciation thread blocked by my work under the category "sex"?

See if you can find anything in the tags:

a crap drink, a disgusting drink, a drink for fools, a heathen's drink, a shit thread, bad for your stomach, beans, bikes are rubbish, boring bastards, boys toys, cafe, caffe, cappucino, chicory, cofee, coffe, coffee, coffee is crap, coffee is dirt, coffee is for hipsters, coffee is lame, coffee is shit, coffee ponces, coffee pussies, coffee snobs, coffee wimps, coffee's fashionable, coffee's for cavemen, coffee's for heathens, coffee's for lame people, coffee's for losers, coffee's for neanderthals, coffee's for paedophiles, coffee's for ponces, coffee's for racists, coffee's for rapists, coffee's for wimps, coffee's rubbish, dilemma, dirty tongue coffee nobs, drink, elitist snobs, elitist wankers, girly coffee boys, got the shakes..., gullible fools, i <3 coffeeee!, its a drink not a pastime, java, latte, less talk - more drink, machine, melbourne, middle class ponces, middle class snobs, no coffee no polo, not real men, park, poncey coffee snobs, pretend sophistication, pretentious middle class, pretentious ponces, pretentious snobs, pretentious tossers, pretentious wankers, shit in a cup, show-offs, snobby coffee ponces, stfu about coffee ffs, stop showing off, stuffwhitepeoplelike #1, tea > coffee, tea 4 lyfe, tea 4 teh win, tea = great, tea = win, tea for life, tea for the win, tea ftw, tea is arse, tea is best, tea is crap, tea is for cunts, tea is for paedos, tea is for rapists, tea is for tossers, tea is for wankers, tea is for wimps, tea is fucked, tea is lovely, tea is piss, tea is poo, tea is rank, tea is shit, tea is wank, tea shit, tea's better than coffee, tea's for winners, tea's the best, teasome, toys for grownups, tweeks ftw, unhealthy crap, wannabe's, world's best coffee, world's boringest thread

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