True Blue Island

It is partly what is missing in the poems, what we don’t know, to which we bring our own desires and interpretations, that enhances its erotic spell.  

In the fragments of just a single line, the words assume a particular, devastating power. [you burn me]

By bringing her particular kind of austerity to the translation, Ms. Carson has deepened Sappho’s mystery and yet brought us closer to her

Sappho’s poetry is filled with a golden eroticism. It is redolent of Attic sunshine, the sweet smells of the Aegean, Grecian meadows.

It is an eroticism from an ancient time when lines between homosexuality and heterosexuality were blurred, before distinctions were made and fear and prohibitions came into place.

It is said that Sappho died for love of a younger man, Phaon, a ferry boat captain, that she threw herself off a cliff because of him.

But that is probably a lie.

nytimes

Reasoning About Control: An Evidential Approach Authors: Leonard P. Wesley; John D. Lowrance; Thomas D. Garvey; SRI INTERNATIONAL MENLO PARK CA ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CENTER

Abstract: Expert systems that operate in complex domains are continually confronted with the problem of deciding what to do next. Being able to reach a decision requires, in part, having the capacity to “reason” about a set of alternative actions. It has been argued that expert systems must reason from evidential information — i.e., uncertain, incompletes, and occasionally inaccurate information. As a consequence, a model for reasoning about control must be capable of performing several tasks: to combine the evidential information that is generically distinct and from disparate sources; to overcome minor inaccuracies in the evidential information that is needed to reach a decision; to reason about what additional evidential information is required; to explain the actions taken (based on such information) by the system. These are a few of the formidable control problems that remain largely unsolved. If expert systems are to improve their performance significantly, they must utilize increasingly sophisticated and general models for dealing with the evidential information required for reasoning about their behavior. To this end we present an alternative, evidentially-based approach to reasoning about control that has several advantages over existing techniques. It enables us to reason from limited and imperfect information; to partition bodies of meta- and domain- knowledge into modular components; and to order potential actions flexibly by allowing any number of constraints (i.e., control strategies) to be imposed over a set of alternative actions. Furthermore, because it can be used for reasoning about the expenditure of additional resources to obtain the evidential information needed as a basis for choosing among alternatives, this approach can be employed recursively.