Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The are even more interesting things going on in that neck of the woods. The 616 figure comes from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a huge collection of fragments of Greek and Latin text, found in an ancient Egyptian rubbish dump. As of last month, it's being subjected to a new infra-red imaging technique, which is letting us read many, many more of the fragments. So all kinds of things like this will popping up over the next few years. This is an unbelievably huge development - people are talking of adding 20% to the total amount of surviving Greek and Roman literature.

Apart from anything else, this would be an incredible opportunity for some kind of distributed project. If, say, wikisource or the Perseus project could get their hands on the data, I'm sure an army of classics geeks would spring up to transcribe, collate, and classify the fragments.

Perhpas the Beast has been working out and dropped down to a lean, mean fighting weght of 616 pounds. Uh oh!

Nah!
At 616, the beast will just do a leveraged buyout and take evil private.

Mawado