This item from the Classicists list looks right up rogueclassicism’s proverbial alley (whatever that means):

Dear all,

We would like to draw your attention to a new Classics resource that we have been developing in collaboration with many friends and colleagues over the past few months. Its name is Classics Confidential and it has the following website address:

http://www.classicsconfidential.co.uk

As the name suggests, Classics Confidential offers an informal behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of Classics, relaying details of the latest Classics-based stories that have been hitting the news headlines and featuring interviews with a wide range of people involved in the subject, from Profs to PhD students, all talking personally, and passionately, about what gets them going in the research that they do.

Interviewees so far include:
– Phil Perkins and Paula James (The Open University)
– Michael Scott (Darwin College, Cambridge)
– Chris Pelling (Christ Church, Oxford)
– Shaun Tougher (University of Cardiff)
– Katherine Harloe and Susanne Turner (University of Reading)
– Nurith Yaari (University of Tel Aviv)
– with Irad Malkin and Tim Whitmarsh soon to make appearances…

While topics embrace:
– Etruscan DNA
– Melancholy and the infinite sadness
– Cypro-Minoan writing
– Ancient Eunuchs
– Democratic turns
– Ariadne’s parrot
– Sextus and his apple
– And so much more…

There is a facebook group to keep you updated on additions … we will, of course, mention any that are drawn to our attention here …

The conclusion to Toby Young’s piece in the Telegraph makes an interesting point ‘Latin recruiters’ might want to make use of:

I’ve done some cursory research about Zuckerberg since seeing the film and, needless to say, he’s not the cold-blooded killer he’s portrayed as. Far from being a Howard Hughes character, he has a long-standing girlfriend who he’s been with since before he created Facebook. He may be rich, but he’s not selfish – he’s been happy to dilute his own share of Facebook to 24%, sharing the wealth with several of his old college roommates, and earlier this year he donated $100 million to the Newark public school system. My favourite fact about him is that he’s a Classicist, having studied the Classics at Ardsley High School and then immersed himself in Latin when he transferred to Philips Exeter Academy.

Next time some small-minded, utilitarian educationalist asks me why I want to make Latin compulsory at the West London Free School, and questions its “relevance” to the contemporary world, I’m going to point to Mark Zuckerberg. I have no doubt he would have created Facebook whether he’d met Saverin or not. But without a solid grounding in Latin, with its clear, logical structure that’s so similar to the language of computers, he probably wouldn’t have got to first base.

via After seeing The Social Network, I’m now a huge fan of Mark Zuckerberg – Telegraph Blogs.

… quibus rebus cognitis, it seems to add some auctoritas of sorts to something mentioned on the Classics list a few weeks ago:

Startups like ONEsite often cast a wide net when hiring–especially in Oklahoma City. “Because of our location, we didn’t necessarily have the largest pool of available technical talent to draw from, so we decided to hire our own people and train them to write computer code,” says founder Thad Martin, 28. “Some of our best developers have been classics majors and physicists with no previous programming experience. They were able to apply their knowledge of other ‘languages’ to think structurally and logically.”

Top Tips: 10 Companies Share What They Look For In Nontraditional Hires

Perhaps we should be pushing the ubergeek potential of Latin … if we aren’t already.

Alex Beam in the Boston Globe wonders about something I’ve been wondering about for a few weeks now:

Of course you have noticed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s uncontrollable tic — quoting from Virgil’s “Aeneid.’’ He did it twice during a long New Yorker interview and more recently in Wired magazine, where he popped — in Latin — what might be the epic’s most famous line: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this’’ (trans. Robert Fagles). Those are Aeneas’s consoling words to his battered, shipwrecked comrades. In the poem, various gods assure the Trojan hero that he will found “an empire without bound,’’ i.e. Rome, which is more or less what Zuckerberg has done. Facebook has more than 500 million active users and counting.

Inquiring minds want to know: Where did Zucko imbibe the foundational epic of the Roman empire? Not at Harvard, I am told. He majored in computer science and split after two years. Like many other high schools, Zuckerberg’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, teaches the “Aeneid’’ in fourth-year Latin, more or less preparing its students for the “Virgil AP,’’ which more than 4,000 students take each year.

Exeter and Facebook are closed-mouth on the subject of Zuckerberg’s classical training, but my investigation continues, sub rosa.

• via Ports in a storm – The Boston Globe.

… so far, I’m thinking he might be a ‘closet Classicist’ although it seems very much that ‘two lines of the Aeneid thing’ has taken on a life of its own, perhaps without as much weight as we’d like it to have  … in the conclusion to a big article about Zuckerberg in the New Yorker last month we read:

In our last interview—this one over the phone—I asked Zuckerberg about “Ender’s Game,” the sci-fi book whose hero is a young computer wizard.

“Oh, it’s not a favorite book or anything like that,” Zuckerberg told me, sounding surprised. “I just added it because I liked it. I don’t think there’s any real significance to the fact that it’s listed there and other books aren’t. But there are definitely books—like the Aeneid—that I enjoyed reading a lot more.”

He first read the Aeneid while he was studying Latin in high school, and he recounted the story of Aeneas’s quest and his desire to build a city that, he said, quoting the text in English, “knows no boundaries in time and greatness.” Zuckerberg has always had a classical streak, his friends and family told me. (Sean Parker, a close friend of Zuckerberg, who served as Facebook’s president when the company was incorporated, said, “There’s a part of him that—it was present even when he was twenty, twenty-one—this kind of imperial tendency. He was really into Greek odysseys and all that stuff.”) At a product meeting a couple of years ago, Zuckerberg quoted some lines from the Aeneid.

On the phone, Zuckerberg tried to remember the Latin of particular verses. Later that night, he IM’d to tell me two phrases he remembered, giving me the Latin and then the English: “fortune favors the bold” and “a nation/empire without bound.”

Before I could point out how oddly applicable those lines might be to his current ambitions, he typed back:

again though
these are the most famous quotes in the aeneid
not anything particular that i found.

• The Face of Facebook | New Yorker

Abstract of a payfer thing in the Journal of Archaeological Science … seems to confirm somewhat the oft-mentioned claim that damnatio ad metallum was essentially a death sentence:

The Byzantine period (4th – 7th centuries A.D.) site of Khirbet Faynan (Phaeno) was a state-run mining camp described in ancient sources as a destination for Christian martyrs and others prosecuted by the administration who were condemned to the mines (damnatio ad metallum). However, other evidence suggests that Phaeno had a much broader role and population in antiquity than that described by ancient writers. Here, strontium and oxygen isotope data on the level of migration into Phaeno were compared with elemental data on lead and copper skeletal levels to illuminate the varied exposure of local vs. non-local individuals to contaminated environments (presumably from working in mining and smelting operations). Dental enamel 87Sr/86Sr and δ18O data from 31 individuals excavated from the Southern Cemetery identified one individual born in a region with different strontium isotope values in the bedrock yet similar oxygen isotope signatures as Faynan. Most of the primarily locally-derived Faynan residents displayed skeletal copper and lead levels exceeding those seen in comparative samples, confirming that growing up and residing in the polluted environment of Faynan led to notable bioaccumulation of heavy metals and its resulting health effects. In addition, ten individuals had extremely elevated lead and copper levels in their skeleton resulting from more intensive exposure to contaminated environments, possibly through smelting and mining activities. These data confirm the relatively localized nature of this imperial operation and that this predominantly locally-derived population had different activities that put them ask varied risk for contamination by heavy metals.

via Condemned to metallum? The origin and role of 4th – 6th century A.D. Phaeno mining camp residents using multiple chemical techniques | Journal of Archaeological Science.