william.scherk

I do not know yet if this has anything to do with the fabled Scythian gold. Iron Age, Bronze Age, Neolithic, precursors to the Ossetes?  I do not know yet.

It's maybe Off-Topic Thursday.  Time to share out some weird songs, videos, dispatches or speeches that ring down through the decades for me. I spent some time looking at OL's early happy community building on a couple of online schism topics.  Soon it will be anniversary time. WSS among a crop of early adopters, sweet sixteen.

We should probably have one of them what the Germans called (and the scholarly anglo-saxon guilds adopted) ye olde Festschrift on Michael's earliest and most lavish arguments.  Time to display some of the finer pieces from the hoards of gold?

[I just figured out how to use an aspect of Michael's gift-tip (lifetime license) with Blakify.com's text-to-speech renderings. The super-special voices have some but not all of the really wonky voice modifications that require a facility in writing SSML code -- but some have easier to use buttons and selections lists. For example, "Sara," a rather casually-voiced American, can be tuned to Cheerful, Angry or Sad, whereas a few choice others can be tuned to have a News voice. The voice below was the best I could do to get an elderly, been through the wars UK English voice to render Susan Haack]

I was a bore on Susan Haack then in my boring debut posts, but retained a decent quote:

“We are in danger of losing our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, disinterested inquiry. The preposterous environment in which academic work is presently conducted is inhospitable to genuine inquiry, hospitable to the sham and the fake.”

Fuller context, pithy and topical for the age. Article link below.

Full-text:  PDF