Monday Muse: Omentown Ballad

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  My work lately focuses on Port End, Maine, a town that I talked about a little bit in my last "Day in the Life" post.  The end of that story will get posted in the middle of this week, but for today I wanted to relate something of a "country" song about this "Omentown."

  I think what is really important about this particular case in anachronism is that the omens in Port End arise from strange abnormalities in the same physical laws that give rise to Augury and my work here at the University.  If the laws exist, then there are time streams where they behave a little funny.  Omentown is from one of those time streams.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Wan'drin' out by the bay

With my back to the sea 
I saw Old Man Osprey

And he asked me to tea

Friday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part I

Dear Readers,

  Every Friday I write a piece that represents a "seminar" in my introductory Anachronism class, CHRN/AUG 100, to give you an idea of what our department does at the University.  This we

Image via Wikipedia

ek, I talk about the ideas of relative truth across different time streams, and how that affects both the episteme and techne of our work.

   Recently we've been working on the idea of different ways to connect the information obtained through Augury, but we haven't talked much about drawing conclusions.  The bottom line is this:  If you read a poem from Time Stream X, and that poem says that Anubis favored George W. Bush, which allowed him to win the War in Iraq, how much of that do you actually believe?  In that time stream, is there some prime arbiter named Anubis?  Did George W. Bush actually believe in him?  And was the War in Iraq won because of it?

  It can be quite challenging to separate the various reasons to believe something, and I do not believe that I can cover the entire topic in just one sitting.  There is a long history of philosophies of truth, many of which my colleague Professor Bacon is an expert on.  In our class, it is typically he who teaches this lecture, and I have to acknowledge Francis's help in writing this post.

  The best place to start is to look at the different sorts of information that one may obtain inside Augury data.  One I will call techne and the other episteme.  I am not using these words quite how your Ancient Greeks would have used them, however.

  When I look at a source, I think of the techne type of information to be day to day details about life in the time stream of origin.  As in, like the original definition of techne, I say this category contains the information on how one would go about the art of living and creating within the given time stream.  Until the recent attack on our University, I would have said that one could never really live in another time stream, but with the new technology we captured this may be possible.  At any rate, consider techne to be the kind of information that would help you write a tourist's guide to the time stream that you study.

  In the Anachronist's work, episteme refers to knowledge that a source expresses that betrays their physical and metaphysical understanding of their world.  Scientific texts, philosophical works, religious tomes, all of it is part of episteme, usually.  These pieces of information are vital to breathing life into a translation because they tell you the filter through which time stream contemps view their world.  Where the techne will give you the actual mechanical operations of a person, the epistemiological information tells you how they feel about it and what their worldview is; their inner struggle.  This is vital to writing an anachronistic narrative, just as technical information is vital to having a narrative to write.

  I will end here, since I wish to transition into this topic gracefully and none too quickly.  The story that I began this week will be concluded next week.  For those of you in this time stream who live in the United States, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving and I hope to communicate with you again in the coming week.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

A Day in the Life: Thanksgiving in Omentown, Part I

Dear Readers,

   This is another one of my "Day in the Life" posts, where I take a slice of life in one of the time

Image via Wikipedia

streams I study and fictionalize it for your time stream.  The world is real, the events are not.  This one is a two-part story.

   For this time around, in light of the US Holiday of Thanksgiving being this week, I've decided to feature a Thanksgiving story set in a contemporary but divergent time stream.  This Day in the Life is set in Port End, Maine, which does not exist in your time stream.  I like to call it "Omentown."  You'll see why.

 Always,
 Dr. John Skylar
 Chairman
 Department of Anachronism
 University of Constantinople

"Friday" Seminar: Great Expectations

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  I am sorry about the glitch that leads to this post's late release.  I place the blame squarely on bad software created by the Augury Department.  I do not think, as their Chairman does, that the graduate student responsible should be sent back to a time-normal existence, but I imagine that Provost Notaras will talk some sense into her.

  At any rate, it is now your Sunday, and we have managed to fix the problem, so here is the Seminar that I hoped to post on Friday.  It is, as per usual, drawn from my lecture materials for CHRN/AUG 100, my introductory Anachronism class here at the University.

  Today I want to talk to you about the idea of likely and unlikely events, and how we can use them to get at the "big idea" of my last few seminars.  That idea surrounds the various "tricks" that we as Anachronists must use to put together the raw text that we get from Augury.  Remember that because data comes from distinct choice paths, it can be nigh impossible to correlate two datasets and say that they come from the same time stream, or that one follows the other temporally.

  Unless you use these tricks.  Last time I talked about how to use linguistics.  This time I'm going to talk about probability.

A Day in the Life: Naegling's Heroes

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  Monday brought you the Song of Naegling, a poem which I am convinced was written by the weapon itself.  How this is possible I am not sure, though I can imagine there are a number of mundane technical explanations for the creation of an intelligent weapon.  While your time stream makes a certain effort to provide itself with scientific explanations of things, I will leave that to my colleagues on the other side of the quad, and just remain impressed with Naegling's autobiography.
 
  I find it interesting that I can find outside sources that confirm the weapon's existence.  For one, Naegling survives in your time stream's versions of Beowulf.  Personally, I recommend the Seamus Heaney translation of the ones that are available to you and your contemporaries.

  My own work intersects with Naegling when she/he/it finds James Strongman, a personality who has yet to appear in your consciousness, but will become quite important in one of the time streams that branch off from your current temporal position.  Strongman is a warleader for a troubled age, and one that I hope you do not have the opportunity to visit.  Below you may find one of Strongman's journal entries during his rise to power.  I caution you that Strongman was never one to avoid profanity.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Monday Muse: The Song of Naegling

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

I have exciting news to share.  Something came in from the Augury Department that spans such a long thread of history that I am stunned.  It is, apparently, an inscriptional squeeze.  For those unfamiliar, a squeeze is a type of impression made when you take specialized paper and press it up against a carved inscription, thenuse a "squeeze brush" to produce a copy of the inscription and inscribed surface.  It is a lot like when you take tracing paper and use the edge of a pencil to copy a texture underneath, however, this method is less rough on the original.

At any rate, this source comes from a squeeze made of what must be the most exciting weapon in history, a weapon that according to the poem, Hrothgar called Naegling.  However, the text, which I have worked nonstop to translate, seems to differ from your time stream's established account of Beowulf.  Furthermore, the weapon's records go far past the end of that story, and even into your future.

I thought it would make a most excellent pick for Monday Muse.  See it below the cut.

Friday Seminar: Genetic Linguistic Analysis

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

Quite some time has passed since my last Friday Seminar, the series in which I adapt some of my CHRN/AUG 100 course materials for your time stream. So, forgive me if my post today is innappropriate in its complexity.

That said, today I want to tell you about a "back door" method to determine continuity between disparate augury datasets. If you recall, it is notoriously difficult to connect two datasets collected separately, because it is always hard to establish causality at the limits of quantum uncertainty.

Like I've said before, it takes rigorous standards to say two sources come from the same time stream. But there are easy ways to at least group time streams together based on common cultural features.

One such feature is language. Languages mutate based on a variety of factors, and so if you observe two sets of data that are in the same language, you can say with nearly one hundred per cent certainty that the two datasets are either contemporaneous OR they share a common "ancestor" time stream. In fact, since all you need to know for this sort of analysis is how similar the languages are in their written form, you may not even need to know the language. It can be very useful for an Anachronist whose specialty time stream has a language that is not well understood.

This sort of analysis has more advanced forms, too, and they are quite similar to how your contemporary scientists do evolutionary genetics. These scientists can take two different species and compare their DNA to determine their probable common ancestor. That is, the extinct species from which they both evolved.

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr

Languages are not so different from DNA. DNA tells cells how to make components for their life machinery. Language contains rules and components to give rise to communication machinery. And languages also mutate.

So if we have two languages with similarities, we can analyze and compare their differences to figure out a rough timeline for their divergence. This is timeline only in terms of probabilities, but it is better than nothing. Though we often find these language ancestry trees are inaccurate when we finally decipher the words, many working conclusions based on this analysis remain valid.

While it's a crude tool, it's very useful. I will try and expand more on this complicated topic in a future Seminar.

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople

Back in Business

Image via Wikipedia

Dear Readers,

  Today marks my triumphant return to your time stream.  I've spent quite some time hogging the Departmental bandwidth with manuscripts that I hope to publish time-normal to you, and now I am back to writing here.

  For the next two weeks, I may not return to my daily schedule as I still have some communications to make, and there is a backlog of transmissions work that my graduate students wish to send out.  Eventually, you will see my posts ramp up as we work through that delay.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople