Since I began studying Greek, the whole wine-dark thing has struck me as pretty silly. The actual phrase is οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos) which means "wine-face sea." Pontos refers to the open sea, not the shallows or the sea near shore.
For some reason the English-speaking world thinks it has to be translated as a color word. Maybe because it was incorrectly translated as wine-dark? But it's not exclusively a color word, just like "metallic" is not exclusively a color word in English. It means exactly what it says: wine-faced, having a wine-like surface.
The Greeks didn't drink wine in glasses like we do today. They mixed wine in a giant mixing bowl called a κρατήρ (krater). It could be different colors and was sometimes cloudy, like natural wines are today. They often mixed in honey, herbs, and fruit. Wine was also seen as a god: we say that Dionysos was the god of wine, but to the Greeks, wine itself was commonly thought of as being Dionysos.
So when imagining an oinops pontos, instead of picturing of a glass of pinot noir, imagine a huge bowl sitting in a candle-lit room, filled with a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling slightly, shapes occasionally surfacing, a sheen reflecting the flickering candle light, containing a mysterious divine power. That's what Homer's referencing when he says wine-faced. The surface of the sea is like the surface of that bowl of wine–probably with the implication of a mysterious divine power beneath.
Eric Lippert's "Wizards and Warriors" blog posts seem appropriate here, especially as an example of how tracking state and OO can clash pretty badly.
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is:
A wizard is a kind of player.
A warrior is a kind of player.
A staff is a kind of weapon.
A sword is a kind of weapon.
A player has a weapon.
But before we get into the details, I just want to point out that I am not really talking about anything specific to the fantasy RPG genre here. Everything in this series applies equally well to Papers and Paychecks, but wizards and warriors are more fun to write about, so there you go.
OK, great, we have five bullet points so let’s write some classes without thinking about it! What could possibly go wrong?
The market rate is unrelated to marginal productivity, unless you think North Dakota Walmart employees are twice as productive as Walmart employees elsewhere.
Walmart is, in many markets, a big enough employer in the low skills employment marketplace to be a price setter not a price taker.
This is the first concrete example I've read of the EU being drastically more pro-business than the USA. Very interesting.
And for someone who wants to point out the lack of that regulation in the USA is still "pro-business" I'd say it's pro-monopoly, and against the 'culture of business' that was traditionally a large part of the US.
For some reason the English-speaking world thinks it has to be translated as a color word. Maybe because it was incorrectly translated as wine-dark? But it's not exclusively a color word, just like "metallic" is not exclusively a color word in English. It means exactly what it says: wine-faced, having a wine-like surface.
The Greeks didn't drink wine in glasses like we do today. They mixed wine in a giant mixing bowl called a κρατήρ (krater). It could be different colors and was sometimes cloudy, like natural wines are today. They often mixed in honey, herbs, and fruit. Wine was also seen as a god: we say that Dionysos was the god of wine, but to the Greeks, wine itself was commonly thought of as being Dionysos.
So when imagining an oinops pontos, instead of picturing of a glass of pinot noir, imagine a huge bowl sitting in a candle-lit room, filled with a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling slightly, shapes occasionally surfacing, a sheen reflecting the flickering candle light, containing a mysterious divine power. That's what Homer's referencing when he says wine-faced. The surface of the sea is like the surface of that bowl of wine–probably with the implication of a mysterious divine power beneath.