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alfar

@alfar

319 followers 20 following 70 posts Reputation 42.43

alfar
@alfar Sep 11, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

Sumerian Word of the Day - Ud

Ud is the Sumerian word for "sun". When the Babylonians arrived, this became Utu. There are a number of different types of sign in Sumerian - they used logograms (a symbol that represents a word) and…

4 upvotes 3 replies $0.02
alfar
@alfar Sep 11, 2016, 3:01 AM UTC

How did cuneiform arise?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_list.svg/1280px-Proto-cuneiform_Lu2_list.svg.png Now, the general belief is that the Sumerian writing system evolved from…

3 upvotes 0 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Sep 10, 2016, 12:03 AM UTC

Sumerian of the Day

http://cdli.ucla.edu/dl/daily_tablets/RSM7-521c91d137921.jpg The writing implement used in writing cuneiform was a reed that was cut at a slight angle so as to produce more of an arrow rather than a…

4 upvotes 1 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Sep 9, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

Assorted Steemit ideas from a geek of many chromosomes

The first of these, I've plugged elsewhere but will put here as an actual posted idea for discussion - the multi-queue. The idea is very simple. You have a proto-story queue, which I am tempted to ca…

5 upvotes 0 replies $0.01
alfar
@alfar Sep 8, 2016, 10:30 PM UTC

Cursive Writing, Recipe Books and a Challenge

I include for your delight and/or memory exhaustion (it's a big file) and/or patience exhaustion (it's very hard to read) a scanned page from Caroline Duncan's handwritten recipe book from the 1800s.…

3 upvotes 0 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Sep 7, 2016, 5:32 AM UTC

Is the Universe natural, artificial or simulated?

This post is inspired by the following culprits: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160901-we-might-live-in-a-computer-program-but-it-may-not-matter https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 https://en.wikipedia…

3 upvotes 1 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Sep 5, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

On the topic of fan fiction

My previous post, way back in the mists of time, was a short specimin of fan fiction. Admittedly, not the best that is out there, but that is neither here nor there. Attempting to write in this art f…

1 upvotes 0 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Aug 28, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

Fan Fiction: Sapphire & Steel/Tomorrow People (original) crossover

This was originally written for a Tomorrow People fan fiction website. When that was closed, I copied it over to FanFiction.net, where it resides in obscurity today. As, indeed, do the two series it…

2 upvotes 0 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Aug 23, 2016, 11:40 PM UTC

Terrifying TV (for a child of the 70s or 80s)

This was the golden age for psychiatry, with children in their millions getting terrorised by perfectly reputable TV stations. I revisited my old haunts, to see if they were as good as I remembered.…

2 upvotes 0 replies $0.00
alfar
@alfar Aug 23, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

Learning a foreign language

Y'know, I learned French and German at school. I can even remember bits of it. Boring. I actually passed a French exam five years after my last French lesson - not by trying to remember any of it, bu…

4 upvotes 1 replies $0.00