books and stars

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(tags via @en-theos)

he's cited for theorizing that the obscure thessalian princess Iphimedeia is somehow connected to Hecate via mycenaean religion, since the name 𐀂𐀟𐀕𐀆𐀊, i-pe-me-de-ja is attested in a linear B tablet from Pylos (and is likely a goddess), but he's listed on the wiki page as Pietro, not Paolo, even though he's definitely named Paolo since his CV is downloadable online and I found the journal behind a massive paywall. I'm personally very skeptical of finding greek gods in mycenaean tablets UNLESS it's a 1:1 name parallel, so I'd love to hear his argument for this. I'm guessing this wikipedia citation is a misdirection, since in a hesiodic(?) epic, the Catalogue of Women, Iphigeneia is called Iphimede/Iphimedeia, and after being sacrificed is immortalized by Artemis as Enodia, who is a Thracian goddess who very early on got syncretized with Hecate in her role as goddess of crossroads. Pausanias makes this connection to Hecate explicitly, but that's all the way in the ADs, not the 6th century BC of the Catalogue. the only connection with said Thessalian princess is that she's also from northern greece/north of Proper Greek Greece, and witches were stereotypically connected to Thessaly, and Hecate is a patroness of witches. Iphimedeia the Thessalian princess is ALSO in the Catalogue with her entire own genealogy and mythology, so she and Iphigeneia just happen to share names and nothing else within that text.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

Just losing my mind over here about how Catullus 64.37 (Pharsalum coeunt, Pharsalia tecta frequentant: “they come together at Pharsalus, they crowd the Pharsalian homes”) immediately before a description of abandoned ploughs and fallow fields becomes absolutely haunting in the long view of history, and how Vergil and Lucan absolutely knew it and dug up the intertextual fields of Thessaly and found the bodies