I'm feeling restless...

Who would get annoyed if I quietly changed my name again?

That would depend, for me, on what you wanted to change it to.

Hypatia, perhaps. I recently saw Agora.

So did I. They apparently named it that because they thought "Hypatia" was an ugly-sounding name; I disagree.

None of my beeswax, naturally, but I'm skittish around folks who choose Classical Greek (or Roman, for that matter) names for themselves. Is your choice based on a fondness for mathematics, or a looming sense that you may meet an untimely end at the hands of a religious book-burning mob?

The mob who killed Hypatia were a witch-burning (or witch-skinning, as it happened) mob, not a book-burning one; they thought she had hexed the prefect of Alexandria into not attending church.

Right, none of the Christian community had anything to do with looting the library. Messy end, whatever the immediate motive.

The Serapeum was destroyed in 391; Hypatia did not die until 415.

So the witch-stoning faction had nothing to do with any prior heretical book-burning cell? Cool, they were astute revolutionaries then.

She was a rather impressive female figure for her time. The film makes her out as an atheist, which would be great but as far as the historical record shows, she was probably a pagan.

I don't know. ... any suggestions?

If you want to don the mask of a leading figure, then power to you. Just saying, I wouldn't choose Archimedes nor Demosthenes for my own handle.

To this dyed-in-the-wool hard polytheist, neo-Platonism, of which Hypatia was an adherent, does not seem all that far from atheism.

In the old days, almost everyone was named after heroes or big-shots of some sort; in pagan Scandinavia, people used to prefix their names with "Thor" in bids for that God's protection.

In the olden days, when I was about eight or nine, living in the Near East, there was a neighbor kid named Aristotle. We called him Dealie, because when his mom would call him into the house it sounded like she was hollering, "Aristo DEALIE!!"

Well, anyway, I don't think I'll change it, the impulse is gone.

It wouldn't have been a "quiet" change anyway, since you mentioned it here.

Yes, that, and how much I'd shit all over recent changes with all my subpages.