Michael Ventris, the Decipherment of Linear B, and the Value of Cross-Fertilization (via A Thinking Person)

Al Bredenberg makes an interesting connection between the work of a great linguist and the value of collaboration: Reading Andrew Robinson’s fascinating book Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2002, McGraw-Hill), I recently learned the amazing story of the decipherment of the Linear B script by amateur philologist Michael Ventris in the [...]

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John the Baptist’s Bones and BBC’s Quotation Marks (via A Thinking Person)

Al Bredenberg at A Thinking Person manages to highlight an interesting news story and criticize the BBC’s punctuation practices at the same time. A BBC article today (3 August 2010) highlights the discovery of a small box of bones reputed to be the remains of John the Baptizer, who announced Jesus’ appearance as Messiah and [...]

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Ovid’s Account of the Deluge From Indo-European Mythology

Most students of the Bible’s account of the Great Flood or Deluge are aware that many peoples of the earth had early knowledge of the Deluge before they had contact with Christianity. One interesting account based on Roman and Greek mythology comes from the Roman poet Ovid. There appear to be many online texts of [...]

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‘Snowflake Method’ Offers Innovative Method for Writing a Novel

On his Advanced Fiction Writing web site, physicist and fiction author Randy Ingermanson offers an exciting method for developing a novel, called the ‘Snowflake Method,’ which he describes in detail on his page, “How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method.” Since encountering the Snowflake Method, I’ve been using it on my current fiction project, [...]

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