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Post by stepper on Oct 21, 2012 13:29:58 GMT -6
scamp will like this one, and probably knows more about it than I do, but..
kleroterion (a Greek device - not a ramdom number generator, but it was used for some kind of randomization)
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Post by Phalon on Oct 23, 2012 3:35:46 GMT -6
online
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Post by stepper on Oct 23, 2012 19:45:22 GMT -6
linear
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Post by fallenangel on Oct 23, 2012 21:48:40 GMT -6
arcade
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Post by scamp on Oct 23, 2012 23:26:03 GMT -6
scamp will like this one, and probably knows more about it than I do, but.. kleroterion (a Greek device - not a ramdom number generator, but it was used for some kind of randomization) Ya had to ask, dinna ya? The kleroterion (κληρωτήριον) was a randomization device used by the Athenian polis during the period of democracy to select citizens to the boule (the boule was a council of citizens appointed to run the daily affairs of Athens), to most state offices, to the legislature, and to court juries. To understand why the kleroterion was needed it is useful to know how Athens managed its participatory democracy. The citizens of Athens were divided into ten phyles or tribes, which were in turn divided into a number of demes. Citizens were born into their demes, and it was through his deme and phyles (tribe) that the city tracked a citizen's place in the political system. To insure a corruption-free, “true” (ie, only open to free, adult males) democracy, there had to be an element of functional randomness. Hence the kleroterion. The kleroterion were large stones. The face of the stone was a rectangular matrix of deep slots that were carved into the rock. The slots were arranged in rows and columns, usually 50 rows down and typically 5 or 11 columns across. Along the left side of the grid a tube was attached to the stone, running from the top to near the bottom of the slab. To show how the kleroterion worked, let me use jury selection as an example. Each phyles, for example, had the responsibility of supplying jury members, a complicated job in a “true” democracy. Ideally, jury pools were large, random, and selected at the last possible moment. This could only occur because of the high tech kleroterion which allowed the Athenians to efficiently go about the business of, say, condemning Socrates to death. It worked like this. When a citizen had jury duty, he went, along with other potential jurors, to the kleroterion maintained by his phyles. He brought with him an identity token, a pinakia, that was given to the presiding phyles officer (the archon), who then slotted it into one of the kleroterion's columns. Once all the pinakia were slotted in, the archon took a quantity of small bronze balls or dice, some colored white, some black -- and poured them into a funnel that fed the tube portion of the kleroterion. The total number of balls was equal to the number of rows filled with pinakia, and the number of white balls was a function of the number of juries that needed to be filled that day. At the bottom of the tube they were stopped by a crank-driven device. The crank was turned, and one ball dropped out. If the ball was black, the first row of pinakia was removed from the kleroterion, and their owners were dismissed. If the ball was white, the first row of pinakia remained in place, and their owners were jurors for the day. Based upon the elemental intersection of an ordered grid (the matrix of slots) and a randomized flow (the tube of balls), the kleroterion could almost be read as a representational diagram of the Athenian political system. Doing so reveals how complex and revolutionary that system was. What I mean by that is that for perhaps the first time in history, the political was, in principle, no longer the personal. This meant there had to be some conceptualization of the “abstract citizen” – an idea which radically altered the philosophy of politics in general and certainly the history of the Western, post-Enlightenment idea of nation. Oh yeah, adenoid
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Post by stepper on Oct 24, 2012 17:10:15 GMT -6
I knew you had the answer!
idiom
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Post by Phalon on Oct 26, 2012 5:56:03 GMT -6
omit
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Post by moonglum on Oct 26, 2012 6:41:22 GMT -6
Itemise
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Post by stepper on Oct 26, 2012 17:14:18 GMT -6
miser
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Post by moonglum on Oct 27, 2012 1:22:07 GMT -6
serialization
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Post by Phalon on Oct 27, 2012 3:24:43 GMT -6
ionic
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Post by stepper on Oct 27, 2012 18:53:46 GMT -6
nictitate
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Post by fallenangel on Oct 27, 2012 19:06:39 GMT -6
termite
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Post by Phalon on Oct 28, 2012 7:19:43 GMT -6
item
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Post by stepper on Oct 28, 2012 12:10:09 GMT -6
temporal
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Post by Phalon on Oct 29, 2012 6:00:37 GMT -6
oralist - someone who teaches the deaf to communicate through lip-reading and speech, rather than sign language
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Post by fallenangel on Oct 29, 2012 10:19:53 GMT -6
staple
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Post by stepper on Oct 29, 2012 15:59:19 GMT -6
pleasure
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Post by Phalon on Oct 30, 2012 5:50:02 GMT -6
surefire
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Post by vox on Oct 30, 2012 12:53:38 GMT -6
firearm
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Post by fallenangel on Oct 30, 2012 13:32:09 GMT -6
armed
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Post by moonglum on Oct 30, 2012 13:37:48 GMT -6
medical
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Post by stepper on Oct 30, 2012 17:13:49 GMT -6
calligraphy
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Post by Phalon on Oct 31, 2012 4:23:59 GMT -6
physique
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Post by fallenangel on Oct 31, 2012 13:58:56 GMT -6
quest
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Post by stepper on Oct 31, 2012 15:25:58 GMT -6
established
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Post by Phalon on Nov 1, 2012 6:31:06 GMT -6
hedge
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Post by fallenangel on Nov 1, 2012 9:13:06 GMT -6
german
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Post by stepper on Nov 1, 2012 16:03:01 GMT -6
mandate
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Post by Phalon on Nov 2, 2012 4:10:52 GMT -6
dateline
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