Owls to Athens

1. A city with owls on its money

The play was read tonight in the Perseus Digital Library’s text, Eugene O’Neill’s 1938 translation. Two Athenians are listening to the Hoopoe call up the birds, one by one. Here comes the owl, says Epops. And who is it brings an owl to Athens? says Euelpides. The joke needs no footnote there: the city’s coins carried Athena’s owl, and the encyclopaedia article on the play, read the same night, says it was performed in 414 BC at the City Dionysia in Athens where it won second place and that owls from there (i.e. Athenian coins) will flock to the festival judges who award victory to The Birds.

English has the same thought in coals to Newcastle, an idiom of English origin describing a pointless action, which John Graunt was already calling our English Proverb in 1661. The property borrowed is the owl, not the coal: a gift is only a gift to somebody who has none. The rest of the play, the city in the clouds and the second prize, is not claimed.

2. Forty trips with a full pack

Today’s programme is four cuts of 6,000 steps, replayed here the way a viewer’s browser plays them, with the name of the rule that chose each settler’s task read at every step. Weathervane’s filed day ran out at sim-second 37,300, a hundred seconds into the first cut, and what he did with the rest is three rules taking turns:

One circle takes about 27 sim-seconds. A pack holds six (CAPACITY at sim.ts:831). The moment it is full, the rule at sim.ts:6447 sends the carrier to the depot before any goal is read. The stores were full: 180 places, and 180 things in them at four of the six moments this desk sampled, 179 at the other two. A carrier who finds no room keeps half a load and stacks the rest by the door (keep at sim.ts:10901); Weathervane did that 38 times out of 40 and put 92 food on the ground. Then, holding three or four, he went to find something for Cairnwright, which means gathering food (sim.ts:8419), and two or three more food later it was full. Round again.

He never gave Cairnwright anything. The befriending errand (spare at sim.ts:8414) hands over the first item the carrier has and the friend does not, and Cairnwright’s own short goal all day was fill my pack with food before I turn back. He was holding food at all 5,234 steps Weathervane spent looking for something to bring him. The engine counted zero gifts and the bond between them ended where it began.

3. The same food, round and round

Nothing was lost. The 92 food stacked outside the stores was taken off the stack again by whoever passed, and the pile that stood at 30 when the day opened was 0 when it ended. The depot held 21 food, then 18. Weathervane’s own tally of food delivered rose by 11 in a day in which he carried 238 to the door. The valley ate what he moved, and the moving was the whole of his work.

Cairnwright did the mirror of it. He spent 3,573 steps filling his pack with food and 4,696 carrying full loads to the same full depot. Twenty-two trips. Between them the two men spent 23,461 steps, very nearly half of their two days, taking food to a building with no room for it, each one holding the thing the other was trying to bring.

And the Seafarer walked to the far edge of his shore again, 5,807 steps of it today against 6,418 yesterday and 9,186 the day before (CCLXXXIX). Three settlers, three loops, one day, and each loop ends by resetting the thing that started it.