Quote of the week!

[Nite Owl]

The Olympic Committee should impose a new rule.

The Winter Olympics must be held in a place that has received at least one foot or one third of a meter of snow per year, on average, for a period of at least the last 8 years.

Back in my youth when cold weather, snow, and skiing were a thing (living in warmer climes these days) artificial/man made snow was a disliked commodity. Granted that the technology to make artificial snow has probably been vastly improved since then but the whole concept of a Winter Olympics held almost exclusively on man made snow just hits me as being wrong. Might as well hold the entire Winter Olympics indoors in Saudi Arabia if that is what it is coming to. Actually given the Global Warming threat that is probably what it is coming to.

[Cholmondely]

The Olympic Committee should impose a new rule.

The Winter Olympics must be held in a place that has received at least one foot or one third of a meter of snow per year, on average, for a period of at least the last 8 years.

Back in my youth when cold weather, snow, and skiing were a thing (living in warmer climes these days) artificial/man made snow was a disliked commodity. Granted that the technology to make artificial snow has probably been vastly improved since then but the whole concept of a Winter Olympics held almost exclusively on man made snow just hits me as being wrong. Might as well hold the entire Winter Olympics indoors in Saudi Arabia if that is what it is coming to. Actually given the Global Warming threat that is probably what it is coming to.

Having spent several months looking at ancient methods of dating (including that of the Olympiads -the 4 year Olympic games cycle - see the Chronicon Paschale), and armed with the knowledge that Mount Olympus is today snow-covered from September to May, were the original Olympics what today we would call winter olympics?




And found this on Capt Solo's website (select Haiku and then Olympus)

[spud42]

https://www.neds.com.au/blog/2022/02/ex ... ter-games/

[RockDoctor]

armed with the knowledge that Mount Olympus is today snow-covered from September to May, were the original Olympics what today we would call winter olympics?

Since the original Olympics were a set of GYMNASTIC competitions, and the word root "GYMN-" in that and "Gymnasium" (and Gymnosperm, for the botanists amongst the audience) means "naked", I very much doubt that the competitors would have hung around very long if there was a flurry ...
I do like your idea of moving the WO permanently to an indoor Saudi snow-sports arena. Keep the detritus and wreckage of rusty ski-tows and the like off the summer hills where more of us used to be able to walk. Maybe if it's indoors, they'll paint it well enough to control the rust. Ye Ghods, I'm being optimistic today.
Really, take an August walk around Aviemore or the Lecht one of these days. A more miserable, smashed up, soil-eroding landscape you'd be hard to find. Until your search took you to Tyndrum, where the 16th century lead-silver mining debris adds poisonous soil to the wreckage. (Naturally, the construction of a new mine which would also re-process the remnant gold out of the 16th century waste heaps is vigorously opposed by out-of-villagers because - shock horror - it would give the locals some chance of employment outside serving the weekenders from Stirling and Auld Reekie.)

[Cholmondely]

armed with the knowledge that Mount Olympus is today snow-covered from September to May, were the original Olympics what today we would call winter olympics?

Since the original Olympics were a set of GYMNASTIC competitions, and the word root "GYMN-" in that and "Gymnasium" (and Gymnosperm, for the botanists amongst the audience) means "naked", I very much doubt that the competitors would have hung around very long if there was a flurry ...

Not so sure about this one. There is supposedly the most wonderful description in one of the Pliny's of his visit to the Greek mountains where - in the middle of the winter - he met a gathering of ladies, utterly starkers, chasing a deer through the snow (armed with long poles topped with male members), celebrating an ancient greek ritual. They looked freezing, but were persevering nevertheless.

[Cody]

Olympia - the site of the ancient games - is a long way south of Mount Olympus, and probably never saw snow. They reckon one of the purposes of the Antikythera mechanism (an utterly amazing thing for its time) was to track the four-year cycle of the games.

[Old Murgh]

Not so sure about this one. There is supposedly the most wonderful description in one of the Pliny's of his visit to the Greek mountains where - in the middle of the winter - he met a gathering of ladies, utterly starkers, chasing a deer through the snow (armed with long poles topped with male members), celebrating an ancient greek ritual. They looked freezing, but were persevering nevertheless.

This is course the origin of the biathlon discipline.

[Disembodied]

In an extended case study, the paper explains how rents paid on plots of moon land could be leveraged to benefit the whole of humanity through alleviating poverty on Earth, as well as democratising space travel.

(I can't help but feel that the word "explains" there is doing more heavy lifting than a Saturn V …)

[RockDoctor]

he met a gathering of ladies, utterly starkers, chasing a deer through the snow (armed with long poles topped with male members), celebrating an ancient greek ritual. They looked freezing, but were persevering nevertheless.

Sounds like a "Dionysiad" - a women-only festival in honour of Dionysius / Bacchus. See ... Euripides (?) for details. (I had to check whether it was Euripedes or Sophocles, but I was right ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bacchae ; SPOILER : it doesn't end well for the guy.) Pliny was probably the least drugged-up person there. Well, possibly the donkey (if it was Pliny the Elder) was more sober.

It's not that long a way from "normality" to stripping off in the snow. It's a fairly well-known symptom of significant hypothermia, to the extent that the rescue services have a name for it : "paradoxical undressing". (As such, it's something that gets mentioned in training for mountain leadership candidates, which is where I heard the name ; the phenomenon I'd heard reported years previously.) So I'm not terribly surprised to see it associated with a notoriously drugged-up religious party. If there is a Glastonbury mud-fest this year, the news reports are likely to include some drug-induced paradoxical undressing. Come to think of it, half the high streets of the country see something probably related on a weekly basis.

[Cody]

A deadline to register forgotten historical paths in England by 2026 is set to be scrapped by the government.

As someone who used to do a lot of walking/rambling, I can only applaud. BBC article here.

[Disembodied]

“It may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.”

“In the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.”

[Cody]

<chuckles> The professor is clearly a pastafarian!

[RockDoctor]

<chuckles> The professor is clearly a pastafarian!

Praise Be!

[Cody]

Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).

I do so like a good acronym. Once upon a time, Apricot made really nice computers. Then Mitsubishi acquired the company.

[Cody]

Scientists just outside Chicago have found that the mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.

Those bosons - tricky little devils! BBC article here.