Suppose you're very indecisive, so whenever you want to watch a movie, you ask your friend Willow if she thinks you'll like it. In order to answer, Willow first needs to figure out what movies you like, so you give her a bunch of movies and tell her whether you liked each one or not (i.e., you give her a labeled training set). Then, when you ask her if she thinks you'll like movie X or not, she plays a 20 questions-like game with IMDB, asking questions like "Is X a romantic movie?", "Does Johnny Depp star in X?", and so on. She asks more informative questions first (i.e., she maximizes the information gain of each question), and gives you a yes/no answer at the end.
Thus, Willow is a decision tree for your movie preferences.
But Willow is only human, so she doesn't always generalize your preferences very well (i.e., she overfits). In order to get more accurate recommendations, you'd like to ask a bunch of your friends, and watch movie X if most of them say they think you'll like it. That is, instead of asking only Willow, you want to ask Woody, Apple, and Cartman as well, and they vote on whether you'll like a movie (i.e., you build an ensemble classifier, aka a forest in this case).
Now you don't want each of your friends to do the same thing and give you the same answer, so you first give each of them slightly different data. After all, you're not absolutely sure of your preferences yourself -- you told Willow you loved Titanic, but maybe you were just happy that day because it was your birthday, so maybe some of your friends shouldn't use the fact that you liked Titanic in making their recommendations. Or maybe you told her you loved Cinderella, but actually you *really really* loved it, so some of your friends should give Cinderella more weight. So instead of giving your friends the same data you gave Willow, you give them slightly perturbed versions. You don't change your love/hate decisions, you just say you love/hate some movies a little more or less (you give each of your friends a bootstrapped version of your original training data). For example, whereas you told Willow that you liked Black Swan and Harry Potter and disliked Avatar, you tell Woody that you liked Black Swan so much you watched it twice, you disliked Avatar, and don't mention Harry Potter at all.
By using this ensemble, you hope that while each of your friends gives somewhat idiosyncratic recommendations (Willow thinks you like vampire movies more than you do, Woody thinks you like Pixar movies, and Cartman thinks you just hate everything), the errors get canceled out in the majority. Thus, your friends now form a bagged (bootstrap aggregated) forest of your movie preferences.
There's still one problem with your data, however. While you loved both Titanic and Inception, it wasn't because you like movies that star Leonardio DiCaprio. Maybe you liked both movies for other reasons. Thus, you don't want your friends to all base their recommendations on whether Leo is in a movie or not. So when each friend asks IMDB a question, only a random subset of the possible questions is allowed (i.e., when you're building a decision tree, at each node you use some randomness in selecting the attribute to split on, say by randomly selecting an attribute or by selecting an attribute from a random subset). This means your friends aren't allowed to ask whether Leonardo DiCaprio is in the movie whenever they want. So whereas previously you injected randomness at the data level, by perturbing your movie preferences slightly, now you're injecting randomness at the model level, by making your friends ask different questions at different times.
And so your friends now form a random forest.
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12:46 / 2013-12-10)
Thus, your friends now form a bagged (bootstrap aggregated) forest of your movie preferences.
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09:32 / 2013-05-31)
So instead of giving your friends the same data you gave Willow, you give them slightly perturbed versions. You don't change your love/hate decisions, you just say you love/hate some movies a little more or less (you give each of your friends a bootstrapped version of your original training data).
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09:32 / 2013-05-31)
non-traditional epics, composed orally or in writing, and in a “traditional style” are the most common form of epics, present in many national literatures.[4] The hard task is to find bona fide traditional poems. (It requires a thorough knowledge of a specific tradition, and the proper definition and understanding of the term tradition)
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19:32 / 2013-11-25)
a fundamental misunderstanding was introduced by Parry of what is tradition and traditional, and the relation to orality
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19:08 / 2013-11-25)
the founders’ wrong equasion: oral = traditional, and in their exaggerated and passé notion of “abyss between oral and written.”
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12:21 / 2013-11-24)
Homer’s inversion of tradition gave birth not only to his expression of his own Weltanschauung, but later on greatly contributed to the formation of Greek religion, geography, mythography, mythology, history, tragedy, philosophy, art, science, education and politics… and gave birth to the Western point of view and to the Western literature. Studying Homer with all of this in mind gives us an insight into the beginnings and the origin of the Western essentially post-traditional and non-traditional culture.
Our culture stands on feeble legs, as it has been built (and continues its progressive building) on post-traditional sand, not on tradition’s rich soil, which conservatively and wisely looks at progress as re-egress, and is nostalgically turned backwards, toward the idealized past when everything was necessarily better. Homer did a few things right, and many wrong, when he inverted and betrayed his tradition. At some point during the 8th century BC, a few post-traditional and professional poets, among them Homer and Hesiod, started to question their own heroic and religious tradition, and recognized their limits, as some important changes and ideas took hold in their life and in their society. They have learned of other, much older non-Greek traditions, they traveled wherever they were welcome, and they became well acquainted with various Greek traditions. Some of these poets were very probably able to read and write (both in Greek and in other languages), and they have created their new individual style and ways of creation and performance, built on the imitation of inherited traditional heroic epic singing, and on the improvisation on its themes.
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22:28 / 2012-10-10)
Neither the singer, nor his audience, knows exactly what will be the final product of his singing. The singer in his rapid performance necessarily skips some important parts of the plot, and adds some other parts in the moments of inspiration. Experienced collectors have witnessed that the singers are as amazed with their poems, and their own ability to “reproduce” and “revive” them, as is the case with their audience
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22:10 / 2012-10-10)
I offer the hypothesis that there was one individual, whom the Greeks decided to call Homer, who “fixed” the texts of his Iliad and Odyssey. (This is not a new answer to the Homeric Question, but rather my attempt to give it back its question mark and its proper deep meaning.)[13] Homer contributed with his fixation, deliberately or unintentionally, to the destruction of his own tradition. Namely, not-to-be-fixed is the essence of tradition. The fixed plot and the fixed text of a poem do not exist in the tradition of heroic epic-making. The fixation appears only when the content and the plot of epic becomes firmly established and thus petrified, when it contains counter-traditional meaning and new or inverted-traditional themes and motifs, and when it is preserved in writing (in order to be non-traditionally learnt by heart and delivered in a non-traditional form of oral performance).[14]
The mythic-historic traditional poems of the siege of Troy and the tragic sacrifice of the substitute became, when “fixed,” the Iliad and the poem of Achilles’ anger.[15] The author of the Iliad deprived his creation of its traditional mythic-historic content and deep traditional meaning. On the other hand, the Iliad gained by its transformation: its volume, its poetic and many other values, and its productive strength.
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22:06 / 2012-10-10)
I hypothesized that Homer's epics differed from ancient Greek tradition similarly as Međedović's epics differ from the Bosnian tradition
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21:53 / 2012-10-10)
To state it bluntly, non-traditional epics, composed orally or in writing, and in a “traditional style” are the most common form of epics, present in many national literatures.[4] The hard task is to find bona fide traditional poems. (It requires a thorough knowledge of a specific tradition, and the proper definition and understanding of the term tradition).
Numerous heroic epics, collected from all over the world, as well as a close study of their style in comparison with the style of Homer’s poems,[5] point to the conclusion that Homer’s epics are not traditional. My own collecting experience and study led me to define Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as post-traditional epics, as they abound with innovations and inverted-traditional themes, and were probably conceived as new poems (see Fowler’s important study Homeric Question)
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21:51 / 2012-10-10)
Nurse. "Little gentlemen, Master Eric, leave the last mince-pie to their sisters."
Generous Little Girl. "O Nurse, do let him be a little cad."
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12:37 / 2013-11-18)
A scientist has succeeded in putting a pea to sleep with electro-magnetism. The clumsy old method of drowning it in a plate of soup should now be a thing of the past.
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11:44 / 2013-11-18)
We are informed that, on and after the 1st of January, Mr. Churchill cannot undertake to refute the opinions of any writer who has not been officially recognised as a best seller.
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11:44 / 2013-11-18)
People step out into the road and never look to right or left, says a London coroner. This makes things far too easy for motorists.
Dr. A. Graham Bell recently told a Derby audience how he invented the telephone. We note that he still refuses to say why.
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11:44 / 2013-11-18)
The Morning Post has remarked that nowadays the Eton boy is often reduced to travelling third-class. It is hoped to persuade Sir Eric Geddes to disguise himself as an Eton boy during the holidays to see how it feels.
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11:38 / 2013-11-18)
It is rumoured that the repeated assassinations of General Villa have made it necessary for him to resign his position as Permanent Chief Insurgent to the State of Mexico.
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11:37 / 2013-11-18)
It is stated that rabies does not exist in Ireland. Our opinion is that it wouldn't be noticed if it did.
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11:36 / 2013-11-18)
Mme. Delysia has been bitten by a dog in New York. The owner's defence, that the animal had never tasted famous dancer before, is not likely to be accepted.
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11:35 / 2013-11-18)
A New York policeman has been arrested in the act of removing a safe from a large drapery store. It is said that upon being seen by another policeman he offered to run and fetch a burglar.
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11:35 / 2013-11-18)
Readers should not be alarmed if a curious rustling noise is heard next Saturday morning. It will be simply the sound of new leaves being turned over.
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11:34 / 2013-11-18)
Readers should not be alarmed if a curious rustling noise is heard next Saturday morning. It will be simply the sound of new leaves being turned over.
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11:34 / 2013-11-18)
Our magistrates appear to be made of poor stuff these days. A man named Snail was last week summoned before the Feltham magistrates for exceeding the speed limit, yet no official joke was made. Incidentally, why is it that Mr. Justice Darling never gets a real chance like this?
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11:34 / 2013-11-18)
everyone – governments, corporations, marketers, policymakers – is in the business of trying to change people's minds
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11:18 / 2013-11-18)
Occasionally something is able to rise above the noise, and everybody hears about it and pays attention to it. But that is extraordinarily rare and somewhat arbitrary
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11:17 / 2013-11-18)
in ideas, it's always a contest. Everything that's spreading at a time, in ideas, it's always a contest. Everything that's spreading on Twitter is fighting for oxygen with everything else
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11:17 / 2013-11-18)
So when something becomes popular, is it a "broadcast" or is it "viral"? Intuitively, you might guess one or the other. But when we looked, we found tremendous diversity: some popular things are pure broadcasts, and some display pure viral spreading. We also found about every conceivable mixture of the two. There's no typical way in which things become popular
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11:16 / 2013-11-18)
People who study diffusion are generally looking for a critical threshold where ideas go from not spreading to spreading like wildfire.
And what have you found?
Initially, we found that nothing really spreads like that
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11:15 / 2013-11-18)
We're attracted to the Enlightenment idea of ourselves as independent individuals who decide what we want to do and go out and do it
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11:14 / 2013-11-18)
"Examples of the oral folk tradition of the Turkic peoples and some fragments of literary works in Turkic are to be found in the Middle Turkic-Arabic dictionary Diwān lughāt al-Turk [Compendium of the Turkic Dialects] compiled in 1071-4 by Mahmūd b. Husayn b. Muhammad al-Kāshghari, who lived in the town of Balasaghun, in the heart of the Karakhanid state. He laboured for many years collecting material for his work, visiting all the regions in which Turkic peoples lived, from China to Transoxania, Khwarazm, Bukhara and Ferghana."
"A poetic description of early summer:
"The storm has brought heavy clouds.
Raindrops fall splattering,
"Pushing aside the light blue clouds.
"It is uncertain where they will go."
(p 379)
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23:24 / 2013-11-11)
"Another prose work from this time that is worthy of attention is the Sarguzasht-i Mahsati [The Adventures of Mahsati], written by Jawhari Zargari Bukhāri (second half of the twelfth century), of which manuscripts are preserved in St Petersburg and Baku. ... The thirteenth-century Mongol invasions destroyed or temporarily submerged many of the ancient literary centres of Transoxania and Khurasan, and many great writers fled or were killed. Hence in southern Iran, Anatolia, India and other places, new literary centres began to function" (p 377).
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23:18 / 2013-11-11)
"Awhad al-Din Anwari (1090-1175) ... wrote a famous ode, The Tears of Khurasan, reflecting the tragic events of 1153, the invasion of the Turkish Oghuz and their pillaging of the towns of Khurasan, and expressing the theme of the passing of Iranian grandeur and splendour."
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19:08 / 2013-11-11)
"From the end of the tenth century to the first quarter of the thirteenth century - that is, until the Mongol conquest - literary circles emerged and disappeared at various provincial courts, such as Ghazna, under the patronage of Sultan Mahmūd and his descendants; the title 'Prince of Poets' or laureate was created for `Unsuri by Mahmūd. Significant literary circles also appeared in other cities, under the patronage of local princes and governors, including those at Merv, Samarkand, Urgench, Isfahan, Nishapur, Tabriz, Khujand and as far as Lahore in north-western India." (p 374)
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19:02 / 2013-11-11)
"The collecting of stories and legends about the reigns of the ancient Iranian rulers and their systematic arrangements, culminating in the writing of the Shāh-nāmas, must have responded to certain spiritual and social needs of the time. ... The greatest national epic of the Iranian people is of course the Shāh-nāma of Abu 'l-Qāsim Firdawsi, the first version of which was completed by the author in 994." (p 373)
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18:58 / 2013-11-11)
"Bashshār b. Burd, a descendant of Iranians from Tukharistan, vaunted his Persian ancestry. In his poems he sang of the bravery, courage and heroism of his ancestors, describing slave girls, musicians and women of the street. Bashshār b. Burd called himself a zindīq (free-thinker); he resorted to hyperbole, describing wine and banqueting, was free in his speech and imitated madness, and yet his lucid, enchanting comparisons and metaphors and the profound philosophical content of his works testify to his intelligence." (p 370)
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21:17 / 2013-11-10)
At first, the Islamic faith and culture had to compete with older established faiths in Central Asia such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Buddhism. For over four centuries, the advance of Islam was gradual, but it was to have far-reaching consequences as it extended north-eastwards. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Islam and Islamic culture achieved dominance over all its rivals in Transoxania and the area to its north and also established a firm footing in north-western India and southwards through the subcontinent.
Thus arose a unique moment in history for the interchange of ideas and aspects of material culture, in which Central Asia acted as an intermediary. The faiths of the West and the South, of the Near East, of the Iranian world and the Indian, now had an impact on the lands further east and north. In the reverse direction, commerce, highly skilled crafts such as ceramics, and technological achievements such as silk production and woodblock printing, spread from China to the Islamic world and thence to Europe.
C. E. Bosworth
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21:11 / 2013-11-10)
Part Two The search for knowledge through translation: translations of Manichaean, Christian and Buddhist literature into Chinese, Turkic, Mongolian, Tibetan and other languages
P. Zieme
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21:08 / 2013-11-10)
Part One The contribution of eastern Iranian and Central Asian scholars to the compilation of hadîths
A. Paket-Chy
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21:08 / 2013-11-10)
Chapter 15 Oral tradition and the literary heritage
Part One Persian literature
A. Afsahzod
Part Two Literature of the Turkic peoples
A. Kayumov
Part Three Tibetan and Mongolian literature
G. Kara
Part Four The literatures of north-western India
C. Shackle
Part Five The Kyrgyz epic Manas
R. Z. Kydyrbaeva
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21:07 / 2013-11-10)
The relative permanence of their villages allowed owed many complex hunter-gatherers to develop more elaborate technologies than more mobile hunter-gatherers. This is often seen, as on the Northwest Coast, in a proliferation of large, durable, and heavy ground-stone tools, such as mauls, heavy celts (adz blades); stone bowls, mortars, and pestles; and even stone sculptures. Specialized tool kits on the coast included, for example, tackle for use only against particular kinds of sea mammals, such as whales and seals. Much of the region's magnificent art was the work of specialists; others were skilled at felling trees, hunting particular animals, healing the sick, or fighting.
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11:42 / 2013-11-05)
Jomon village sites are sometimes quite large (up to 95 acres), with houses having been rebuilt many times, but not in exactly the same spot, suggesting that villages were regularly abandoned and reoccupied
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11:41 / 2013-11-05)
The Calusa hunted land mammals, but fishing in shallow bays and estuaries was the foundation of their economy. While they caught as many as 30 species of fish, they focused on capturing small fish in very large numbers using nets and traps. They also ate a wide array of plants, including peppers, acorns, papaya, water lilies, and tubers.
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11:39 / 2013-11-05)
Peoples on the Northwest Coast made use of literally hundreds of species of fish (especially salmon), sea mammals, land mammals, plants, and marine mollusks. As early as 1000 B.C., the Indians of western Oregon were burning extensive areas to encourage the growth of good deer forage and oak groves for acorns. Farther north, people burned to maintain berry patches. Women collected roots, weeding and tilling to increase productivity. This food was processed so it would keep, and storage facilities were needed to prevent it from being eaten by rodents, insects, or other vermin.
For the Natufians, subsistence included harvesting the wild forebears of wheat and collecting almonds, acorns, and other wild seeds and fruits. They may also have culled antelope herds, selecting particular animals to kill to maintain the health and quality of the herds. While it is extremely likely that Natufians stored grain, remains of storage facilities are rare. By ca. 9700 B.C., they began cultivating the progenitors of grains such as barley einkorn, and emmer wheat and established farming villages, making them the first people known to have domesticated plants.
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11:39 / 2013-11-05)
In the 1968 volume Man the Hunter, edited by Lee and DeVore, hunter-gatherers are described as living in small societies of perhaps 25 to 50 people who moved often to harvest food and had no permanent settlements. Their possessions were few, limited to what they could carry, though their technologies (given that limitation) were quite sophisticated. They had little or no private property, and social relationships were egalitarian, with no permanent inequality. Their population densities were quite low.
Even as the Man the Hunter picture was coalescing, archaeologists and anthropologists recognized that some hunter-gatherers did not fit this picture. Chief among these were the Indians of the Northwest Coast of North America. These people, whose descendants still inhabit the region, lived in permanent towns of up to 1,000 people. They developed an elaborate and rich technology and one of the world's great artistic traditions, and they had I specialists such as wood-carvers, canoe-makers, and whalers, as well as permanent social classes comprising slaves, commoners, and a chiefly elite. They built fortresses and carried out warfare and long-distance trade. These traits were universally regarded by anthropologists as requiring agriculture. But the Northwest Coast was blessed with a rich environment, legendary for its once massive salmon runs. Environmental wealth, it was argued, had permitted these peoples to transcend their economy and develop a complex society otherwise impossible without agriculture. They were an anomaly, the exception that proved the rule. The discovery of complex hunter-gatherers happened during the 1970s, when archaeologists tried to apply the Man the Hunter model to modern and ancient cultures. They found that many such societies had more in common with the Northwest Coast peoples than with small, mobile groups. Among them were the Natufians in the Levant (13,400-10,500 B.C.), the Jomon in
Japan (10,000-300 B.C.), and the Calusa in Florida (A.D. 800-1600). Watson Brake's unknown builders are an important addition to this list.
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11:38 / 2013-11-05)
The preface to Rivoli's "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy" discusses this well also.
(
09:18 / 2013-10-29)
I watched #17, 19, and 20, on the Mongols, on the relationship between the Venetians and the Ottomans, and this one on Russia. I think the writers do a great job indicating a diversity in scholarly opinion, e.g., (paraphrasing) "Curse you truth for making history not simple"; in the Mongol episode, they say, "How you view the Mongol empire is a reflection of your values: do you value artistic patronage over freedom of religion? Is short-lived imperialism better than everlasting imperialism? Are there some kinds of warfare that are just wrong?"
This kind of history will certainly make you smart in the "broadly knowledgeable" sense of recognizing connections. But if I were to be reborn as a historian, I'd advocate for a style of history that emphasizes extremely clear visions of as many kinds of people in the past. Of their material culture, of what they wore and ate and how they spent their time, if we can reconstruct a minute-by-minute "GPS trace" over a day (as long as possible really, probabilistic of course), what modes of travel were available to them and how often they availed themselves, how they spoke and in what language and to whom (and to whom did they *not* speak), etc. Fictionalized semi-reconstructed narratives are fine: see "Life along the Silk Road" by Whitfield; Ibn Batuta, Zhang Qian, Rabban Bar Sauma are fine as "upper bounds" on travel. The goal is to get as clear of a vision of individuals to avoid thinking of "empires" or "merchants" or "slaves" or "the Venetians" or "builders", etc., as some kind of unitary entity. To boot out of historic thinking purely imaginary constructs (replacing them with slightly less imaginary reconstruction of individuals).
In summary, jointly emphasizing diversity and clarity.
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22:54 / 2013-10-26)
how Russia evolved from a loose amalgamation of medieval principalities known as the Kievan Rus into the thriving democracy we know today. As you can imagine, there were a few bumps along the road. It turns out, our old friends the Mongols had quite a lot to do with unifying Russia
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22:39 / 2013-10-26)
I called it quits. Later I did come across a book, Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, which apparently does accomplish what I’d hoped. Per one Amazon reviewer it involved, “years of international adventure and research.” For a T-shirt (5).
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09:09 / 2013-10-29)
Unlike product manufacturers, supply chain people turned out to be quite approachable, perhaps because their feats, so fundamental to modern business, aren’t always appreciated as such, at least by people outside the business world
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08:33 / 2013-10-29)
“If you are trying to scientifically identify every supplier to Toyota,” Rubenstein said, “you will find that job impossible.”
(
08:30 / 2013-10-29)
It was unrealistic. “Capturing all the logistics linkages for a mobile phone would take years,” said Linden. Even focusing on one part, a single display or chip, would be a daunting: They’re too complicated, and the companies secretive and distant
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08:28 / 2013-10-29)
logistics cluster. As car manufacturers once gathered in Detroit, or Internet companies in Silicon Valley, logistics—supply chain managers, IT providers, warehouses, shippers and truckers and dispatchers, the myriad businesses that support them—now concentrates in places like Memphis, Tenn.; Zaragoza, Spain; and Rotterdam, Holland, which in a few decades might be considered archetypal 21st century cities, our new Detroits. Vivek Sehgal, a product strategist at Manhattan Associates, which counts Wal-Mart and Adidas among its customers, likened them to the Silk Road of antiquity
(
08:27 / 2013-10-29)
what I really didn’t get was that supply chains don’t just carry components and ingredients, but synchronize their movements. Shipping a box of pens to Staples is the obvious part. Coordinating the arrival of barrels, caps, boxes, ink cartridges, and nibs (through which ink flows) at the pen factory—and also metal to the nib factory, oil to the plastics-maker, and so on—is the bulk of what supply chains do
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08:09 / 2013-10-29)
But Mr. Grestoni is still waiting. "We've probably hit the bottom," he says. "Now the question is, how long are we going to stay here."
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08:40 / 2013-10-29)
The effects ricocheted across Asia. In Japan, the economy shrank at an annualized pace of 12.7% in the final three months of last year, the fastest drop in nearly 35 years.
In China, many of Zoran's factory customers furloughed their workers, says Mr. Gerzberg. In recent months, some 20 million Chinese migrant workers have lost their jobs.
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08:38 / 2013-10-29)
"There was a lot of guessing going on," says Mr. Pederson of Zoran. "Everybody under-bet to a certain extent."
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08:38 / 2013-10-29)
If Best Buy felt ambushed, its suppliers had even less insight into consumer demand. The slashing began.
Two or three links down the chain, chip designer Zoran quickly felt the pain. Even before last fall's crisis hit, Zoran's customers were getting nervous, executives say. When Best Buy and other retailers cut their orders in October, it turned into a rout.
"Everyone was looking at others, asking, 'How much money do they have? Can they survive?' " recalls Mr. Gerzberg, Zoran's CEO.
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08:38 / 2013-10-29)
Vitelli, the merchandising chief, abandoned Best Buy's prior forecasts and slashed orders to electronics giants such as Japan's Toshiba and South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co.
Demand was shrinking so rapidly, he says, he wasn't even sure how deeply to cut. "You actually had to pick a number with no knowledge whatsoever, because nobody knows anything," he recalls
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08:38 / 2013-10-29)
Zoran is the kind of niche firm spawned by the widely dispersed global tech industry: It designs specialized video- and audio-processing chips for products such as cameras, TVs and cellphones. Its customers are mainly little-known Asian companies -- rent-a-factories, basically -- that manufacture the world's gizmos on behalf of brand-name giants like Toshiba Corp.
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08:37 / 2013-10-29)
Forced to guess at demand for their products in a plummeting market, everyone hit the brakes, hard. An examination of the electronics supply chain -- from retailers all the way back to makers of factory machinery -- shows that, at almost every stage, companies were flying blind as they cut.
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08:35 / 2013-10-29)
Because modern industry rewards suppliers with the leanest inventories and fastest reaction times, when economic crisis struck, tech companies up and down the line contracted as sharply as possible in hopes of being the ones to survive.
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08:35 / 2013-10-29)
Although there have long been critics of Wertham's methods and reasoning in Seduction of the Innocent, I am a reluctant witness to his reputation's final descent
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07:54 / 2013-10-29)
I didn't want to write the scholarly paper on Wertham and the problems I found in his evidence, but not to write it seemed a disservice to the young people whose words and experiences Wertham distorted to help make his case against comics. That many of these young people were socially and culturally marginalized - living in poverty, abused, of color, learning disabled, and the like - makes it more important to correct the record.
(
07:53 / 2013-10-29)
I wasn't even really that interested in Fredric Wertham as a subject (he's been vilified, discredited, mocked, and even re-habilitated in part)
(
07:52 / 2013-10-29)
more than 95% of elementary-school aged kids - girls and boys, black, white, yellow, and brown, rich and poor -- counted as regular comics readers, sometimes reading dozens of titles each week. Teens and adults read comics too
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07:51 / 2013-10-29)
A New York City-based forensic psychiatrist and pioneering mental health advocate, Wertham also was a prolific cultural critic, who decried the potential effects on readers and viewers of violent images and racial stereotypes in the mass media. Between 1948 and 1955, this German-born doctor was also among the most vocal opponents of the nascent comics industry. He was certainly not alone: teachers, librarians, parents, police officers, religious leaders, and other adults lent their voices to the anti-comics movement. But Wertham was different from many of the others in that he had a scientific / medical background and could enrich his arguments with examples from case studies of children.
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07:50 / 2013-10-29)
One of the differences between a pigeon and a human being is the ability to think about the mechanisms that drive cause and effect, rather than being ruled by superstitions that may be based on completely spurious correlations
(
09:12 / 2013-10-28)
The worst market declines on record have been accompanied by a “friendly Fed.” At the time, I quoted Stevie Wonder: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.”
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09:12 / 2013-10-28)
In 2001, after the market had lost a quarter of its value, a major brokerage took out a full-page ad in Barron’s arguing for a one-year price target that was more than 50% above then-prevailing market levels, saying “Stocks should soon be benefiting from the sweet spot of a friendly Fed: low interest rates and improved earnings visibility.” Yet despite the friendly Fed, the market went on to lose another third of its value in just over a year.
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09:12 / 2013-10-28)
There is, in fact, a strong inverse relationship between unemployment and real wage inflation
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09:11 / 2013-10-28)
The correlation between any two diagonal lines is nearly always greater than 90%
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09:01 / 2013-10-28)
Don’t misunderstand. Quantitative easing has undoubtedly been the primary driver of stock prices since 2010. But the benefit of having a human intelligence is the ability to evaluate the extent to which there is any mechanistic link between the cause and the effect. If there is not, investors may be resting their confidence on little more than perception and superstition
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08:57 / 2013-10-28)
Importantly, the impact of the FAS 157 change is easier to appreciate in hindsight than it was in the fog of war.
(
08:55 / 2013-10-28)
The balance sheet of a major bank looks like this: for every $100 of assets, the bank typically owes about $60 to depositors and $30 to bondholders, with the other $10 representing retained earnings and “equity” capital obtained by issuing stock. With $100 in assets against $10 in capital, a bank like this would be “leveraged 10-to-1” against its equity capital. At non-banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman, the leverage ratios were 30-to-1 or higher. Given 30 times leverage, it only takes a decline of just over 3% in the value of the assets to completely wipe out the capital and leave the company insolvent (as the remaining value of assets would be unable to pay off the existing obligations to customers and bondholders). In such an environment, a “run” on the institution can force asset sales, which accelerate capital losses and increase the likelihood of insolvency.
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08:54 / 2013-10-28)
the larger the events, the more important the events are to survival, and the closer in proximity those events occur, the more likely an organism is to believe those events are tied together by cause and effect. This makes the 2008-2009 credit crisis an ideal playground for superstition
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08:47 / 2013-10-28)
The ability to infer cause and effect, based on the frequency with which one event co-occurs with some other event, is called “adaptive” or “Bayesian” learning. Humans, pigeons, and many animals have this ability to learn relationships in their world. Still, one thing that separates humans from animals is the ability to evaluate whether there is really any actual mechanistic link between cause and effect
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08:46 / 2013-10-28)
They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.
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11:44 / 2013-10-23)
during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison.
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11:43 / 2013-10-23)
Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in
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11:42 / 2013-10-23)
I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.
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11:42 / 2013-10-23)
A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it.
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11:40 / 2013-10-23)
It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children
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11:39 / 2013-10-23)
The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read.
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11:38 / 2013-10-23)
"Still poring over the letter? Must be a very long one, I imagine," she said.
"Yes, this is an important letter, so I'm reading it with the wind blowing it about," I replied—the reply which was nonsense even for myself
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08:09 / 2013-10-21)
The room had become a little dark, and this rendered it harder to read it; so finally I stepped out to the porch where I sat down and went over it carefully. The early autumn breeze wafted through the leaves of the banana trees, bathed me with cool evening air, rustled the letter I was holding and would have blown it clear to the hedge if I let it go. I did not mind anything like this, but kept on reading.
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08:09 / 2013-10-21)
To compromise is a method used when no decision can be delivered as to the right or wrong of either side. It seemed to me a waste of time to hold a meeting over an affair in which the guilt of the other side was plain as daylight.
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07:49 / 2013-10-21)
the fact that I accept another's favor without saying anything is an act of good-will, taking the other on his par value, as a decent fellow. Instead of chipping in my share, and settling each account, to receive munificence with grateful mind is an acknowledgment which no amount of money can purchase. I have neither title nor official position but I am an independent fellow, and to have an independent fellow kowtow to you in acknowledgment of the favor you extend him should be considered as far more than a return acknowledgment with a million yen.
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07:42 / 2013-10-21)
If I wished to dodge the punishment, I would not start it. Mischief and punishment are bound to go together. We can enjoy mischief-making with some show of spirit because it is accompanied by certain consequences.
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14:50 / 2013-10-16)
Mr. Chertkov has begun to crave order, something he imagines existed under Stalin
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14:21 / 2013-10-16)
quoted a line from Pushkin: “Russia will arise from her age-old sleep,” it goes, “and our names will be inscribed on the wreckage of despotism.”
It was a stirring line of poetry, but it was written 99 years before the October Revolution.
(
14:19 / 2013-10-16)
Compared with populist steps like raising salaries and pensions, spending on infrastructure does little to shore up Mr. Putin’s popularity, said Natalya Zubarevich, a sociologist at Moscow’s Independent Institute of Social Policy. If something goes wrong, the Kremlin can always fire a regional official.
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14:18 / 2013-10-16)
A visiting dignitary will express public and sputtering rage at the city’s condition. He will fix the mayor — often, a loyal member of his own political team — with a glare like an ice pick. The mayor will look at his shoes and remain silent. Moral responsibility is in that way transferred downward, the public mollified. The name for this spectacle, among the most cherished in Russian political life, is, “I am the boss, you are a fool.”
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14:17 / 2013-10-16)
The past was tugging on all of them. Before the Soviet Union collapsed, the Education Ministry insisted that all children attend school, but not now. Forty percent of the children here do not study at all, said Stephania Kulayeva of St. Petersburg’s Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center. The vacuum has allowed the tradition of child marriage to come roaring back.
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09:38 / 2013-10-16)
Driving the highway, the M10, today, one finds beauty and decay. There are places where wild boars roam abandoned villages, gorging themselves on the fruit of orchards planted by men.
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09:37 / 2013-10-16)
"scientific studies" have taken over the place that bible stories used to occupy. It's only fundamentalists like me who worry about whether they're true. For most people, it's enough that they can be interpreted to be morally instructive.
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08:46 / 2013-10-09)
So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning
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11:12 / 2013-06-26)
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
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08:18 / 2013-05-28)
It wasn't hard to learn Ruby. In fact after a few days with it, Ruby felt as comfortable as languages I'd been using for years.
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22:50 / 2013-05-09)
To me, the most interesting part of the entertainment known as history is learning more about what people ate and how they earned their livelihood (to pay for their food and for the entertainment that they crave after their bellies are full).
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09:47 / 2013-04-03)
plant a garden, connect two chickens to their kitchen, install a vermicomposter, construct a simple solarium on the south side of their house, or plant vegetables in pots on the patio
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12:58 / 2013-03-16)
There are just two pieces of dogma in my feminist tent: Society deals with gender in a way that, on balance, harms women. This is a problem that must be corrected.
(
08:58 / 2013-03-09)
People use Twitters as (i) web clippers, (ii) instant messaging, (iii) content announcements (PR, go here to see the main article). They use blogs for (i) and (iv) content itself. Blogs are Twitters are terrible for all these purposes.
(
21:27 / 2012-10-22)
The purpose of the autocrat is to essentially let the people who are experts do their jobs, make large strategic decisions and be a figurehead, but a lot of it’s just human resources work. Resolving disputes, hiring good people, firing bad people.
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19:47 / 2013-10-08)
It’s essentially about delegation. People will show up and be good leaders, but they’ll try and do everything, then they’ll burn out, disappear and their alliance dies. For example, in Goonswarm we have a team structure. I’m the autocrat, but we have a finance team, a fleet commander team, a logistics team and so on, and these teams don’t have heads. These teams simply work together to solve common problems, and that removes single person dependencies which are a huge problem in alliances.
In some ways, it’s a lot more complicated than running a small business. Most small businesses are between a hundred and two hundred employees, or less. We run an organisation of six thousand people in a coalition of ten thousand.
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19:46 / 2013-10-08)
Later, after watching so many failure cascades, I saw some commonalities in what made good and bad leaders. Through my spy network and watching the mistakes of others I developed into what I would call a good leader.
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19:45 / 2013-10-08)
Failure cascades just fascinate me. That’s why I play the game, really- to tear social groups apart. That’s the stuff that’s interesting about Eve. The political and social dimensions. Not the brackets shooting brackets shit. That’s why we say Eve is a bad game.
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19:44 / 2013-10-08)
During the Great Wars 1 and 2 we had destroyed Band of Brothers and taken their space, but they were still a cohesive social force and simply reformed. It was only most recently during the Fountain campaign that they went into true failure cascade, and are now three or four different alliances which hate each other’s guts now. Which is great!
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19:44 / 2013-10-08)
You can’t kill an alliance unless you break up the social bonds that hold it together. Espionage is only ever a means to an end to induce a failure cascade.
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19:43 / 2013-10-08)
I would like Eve to be a better game. Eve has always been a vision, an idea of a universe, that’s always been poorly realised through the medium of a game client. I almost never log on to Eve Online itself because I run a spy network. For me, Eve Online is talking to people in a Jabber client.
(
19:42 / 2013-10-08)
RPS: For my money, Eve might be the most fascinating game in existence today. But that doesn’t stop it from being interminably boring as well.
MT: Right. I mean most Eve players are stuck in high security space mining, and a lot of the core PvE in Eve has you sitting there are watching three grey bars slowly turn red.
Goonfleet is a socialist alliance. We give people ships so that rather than being forced to rat [fight low-powered AI NPCs] they can take part in PvP, we teach them how to scam so that they don’t have to mine, we teach them how to make ISK most effectively, we give them a lot of ISK and we reimburse their losses. This way they can focus on the fun aspects of the game, like griefing and warfare, so they’re not forced to endure derp-derp-ing around high sec.
(
19:22 / 2013-10-08)
Also, at the time Goonswarm owned half the galaxy. We controlled all of these regions, but as soon as we disbanded Band of Brothers we abandoned everything and all moved into what had been their territory. Over the course of two very bloody months we purged them and took all their space.
RPS: You hated them that much?
MT: Well, this goes back to the T20 scandal and these people declaring us a cancer on Eve. The entire Great War took four years, so yeah, maybe we were a little vengeful.
(
19:17 / 2013-10-08)
Thus we find that in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—not to mention the need to head off feuds.
(
13:39 / 2013-10-08)
in the Welsh case, the exact value of every object likely to be found in someone’s house were worked out in painstaking detail, from cooking utensils to floorboards—despite the fact that there appear to have been, at the time, no markets where any such items could be bought and sold
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13:38 / 2013-10-08)
how else might a system of pricing, of proportional equivalents between the values of any and all objects, potentially arise? Here again, anthropology and history both provide one compelling answer, one that again, falls off the radar of just about all economists who have ever written on the subject. That is: legal systems.
If someone makes an inadequate return you will merely mock him as a cheapskate. If you do so when he is drunk and he responds by poking your eye out, you are much more likely to demand exact compensation. And that is, again, exactly what we find. Anthropology is full of examples of societies without markets or money, but with elaborate systems of penalties for various forms of injuries or slights
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13:38 / 2013-10-08)
So even if some sort of rough system of fixed equivalences, measured by silver, might have emerged in the process of trade (note again: not a system of actual silver currency emerging from barter), it was the Temple bureaucracies that actually had some reason to extend the system from a unit used to compare the value of a limited number of rare items traded long distance, used almost exclusively by members of the political or administrative elite, to something that could be used to compare the values of everyday items. The development of local markets within cities, in turn, came as a side effect of these systems
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13:36 / 2013-10-08)
But look at the historical record and there they are. Sumerian Temples (and even many of the early Palace complexes that imitated them) were not states, did not extract taxes or maintain a monopoly of force, but did contain thousands of people engaged in agriculture, industry, fishing, and herding, people who had to be fed and provisioned, their inputs and outputs measured. All evidence that exists points to money emerging as a series of fixed equivalent between silver—the stuff used to measure fixed equivalents in long distance trade, and conveniently stockpiled in the temples themselves where it was used to make images of gods, etc.—and grain, the stuff used to pay the most important rations from temple stockpiles to its workers
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13:34 / 2013-10-08)
non-state bureaucracies are a phenomenon that no economic model would even have anticipated existing. It’s off the map of economic theory
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13:31 / 2013-10-08)
A desert nomad band might not attack a caravan carrying lapis lazuli, especially if the only potential buyers were temples which would probably know all the active merchants and know that you had stolen the stuff (and even if you could trade for them, what are you going to do with a big pile of woolens anyway, you live in a desert?)
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13:30 / 2013-10-08)
it was not used mainly as a medium of transactions, but rather, primarily as a means of account
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13:29 / 2013-10-08)
In ancient times, if you do see regular exchange between strangers, it’s because there are specific goods that each side knows they want or need. One has to bear in mind that under ancient conditions, long-distance trade was extremely dangerous. You don’t cross mountains, deserts, and oceans, risking death in a dozen different ways, so as to show up with a collection of goods you think someone might want, in order to see if they happen to have something you might want too. You show up because you know there are people who have always wanted woolens and who have always had lapis lazuli.
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13:27 / 2013-10-08)
it’s almost impossible to see how any of this would lead to a system whereby it’s possible to measure proportional values. After all, even if, as sometimes happens, the party owing one favor heads you off by presenting you with some unwanted present, and one considers it inadequate—a few chickens, for example—one might mock him as a cheapskate, but one is unlikely to feel the need to come up with a mathematical formula to measure just how cheap you consider him to be. As a result, as Chris Gregory observed, what you ordinarily find in such ‘gift economies’ is a broad ranking of different types of goods—canoes are roughly the same as heirloom necklaces, both are superior to pigs and whale teeth, which are superior to chickens, etc—but no system whereby you can measure how many pigs equal one canoe
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13:23 / 2013-10-08)
But it’s almost impossible to see how any of this would lead to a system whereby it’s possible to measure proportional values.
(
13:22 / 2013-10-08)
Indeed, on both US and UK Amazon, I have seen fans of Austrian economics appear to inform potential buyers that I am an economic ignoramus whose work has been entirely discredited
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12:35 / 2013-10-08)
You seem not to understand what “pay to win” is about. You can not pay to win in eve. you can pay to lose more.
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12:22 / 2013-10-08)
You can buy all the ISK you want, but without investing a significant amount of time into training skills, you can’t do much of anything with it.
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12:22 / 2013-10-08)
RPS: I want to see what currencies are the best. I have here a selection of currencies. [Gets up and lays out seven ‘currencies’ on the seat] This is a dollar. I’ve got an Icelandic króna. A one pound coin. I think this one is a Russian ruble. Then this is, uh, play-money.
Dr Eyjó: [picks up and inspects plastic disc with ‘£1’ stamped on it] Ah yes, okay.
RPS: This one’s a watch battery. And then finally, this paper represents ISK – Interstellar Kredits.
Dr Eyjó: Mm-hmm.
RPS: So which is the best one?
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12:16 / 2013-10-08)
RPS: But then, where did you get the PLEXs for yourself from? Did CCP just ‘print’ those?
Dr Eyjó: No. We don’t print those because we only allow PLEXs to go into the system that are bought with real life money. So, our way to do it is to buy it off the [in-game] market and keep it in stock ourselves – so exchange ISK for PLEXs. Or we can reutilise PLEXs that are found on, uh… *other* accounts. That are perma-banned. We can acquire those assets.
RPS: So you’re not printing money. It’s a completely different thing?
Dr Eyjó: It’s a completely different thing
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12:14 / 2013-10-08)
RPS: EVE is mostly about players being nasty… well, not ‘nasty’ but it is about them getting one over on their enemies –
Dr Eyjó: No, I think that’s a misunderstanding because, if you think about it, there are Alliances that have two, three, four thousand members.
RPS: But a lot of it is about the pursuit of ISK, right?
Dr Eyjó: No, ISK is a means to an end. They want to control the universe
(
12:11 / 2013-10-08)
No, it’s basically what happens when stuff evolves – you get more stuff in and a lot of stuff that used to be good is not so good anymore, so everything just inflates
(
12:10 / 2013-10-08)
No governments have, in the long run, been able to withstand the temptation of printing more money. It’s a really, really difficult temptation to withstand
(
12:07 / 2013-10-08)
For in these dales the dream of Unna came true, that saw love abiding and labour continuing, heedless of glory and fearless of death.
SO ENDS THE STORY OF THORSTEIN.
(
13:56 / 2013-09-30)
reasonings of unknown things, piecing together his scraps of learning with her, as an old wife plans patchwork: for all the bits must fit into the pattern, whether or no they matched.
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13:45 / 2013-09-30)
when she would have to be as any other house-mistress, and his the less: judged by their words and fettered by their ways. Then life would no longer be so free and so loving as it was to the wood-biders.
(
13:43 / 2013-09-30)
After the worry and weariness of the court, where there was no true friend to count on, it was the merriest company. The loneliness was when she was lost in the crowd.
(
13:41 / 2013-09-30)
while Thorstein was away in the boat fishing. He was never so far but she could climb upon a rock and spy him, a speck on the broad water-line. Then she would wave to him, and if he was not so busy with a fish he would wave back. So it was not lonely.
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13:41 / 2013-09-30)
It was no wedding at all, the heathen Northmen would have said, this of the outlaw to the stranger, unwitnessed and unwarranted. But then, to the Christian the bridals of the Northmen were nothing, no more than a manner of partnership in trade, that could be on and off like any other bargain in worldly matters
(
13:39 / 2013-09-30)
it was no new story for a stranger, man or wench, to be sold off as useless or troublesome rubbish
(
13:25 / 2013-09-30)
They were grand times for the women-folk. A wife could turn off her husband like a hired servant, for almost anything that displeased her. And there was nothing a man could do in law that the woman could not do as well, or better.
(
13:23 / 2013-09-30)
"King," he said, "I will slay thy foes for thee, and spend my heart's blood for thee. And I will take thy faith, and break Thor down from the temple yonder, if thou wilt."
(
17:52 / 2013-09-24)
hardened into sturdy lads, fit for the give and take of the world they dwelt in.
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17:28 / 2013-09-24)
How they wrought for him at ship-smithying, and fought for him in raids on the Scots and on rough neighbours, and how they saw many a roof burnt and many a limb lopped, and how they hunted and drank and quarrelled and escaped
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17:28 / 2013-09-24)
When they came out of the firth of Clyde they rounded Satiri's mull, the Mull of Cantire: and sailed to the Hebrides, which they called Il-ey and Myl, Tyrwist and Skidh, Iwist and Liodhus
(
17:27 / 2013-09-24)
They sailed from Galloway up the firth of Clyde, and by the Kumreyar or Isles of the Welsh, to Alclyde, which was also called Dun-breton, where was the chief city of king Domhnall
(
17:26 / 2013-09-24)
And as they scudded out of Dublin Bay, they thanked their luck, and cursed all kings' houses for downright wolf-traps
(
17:23 / 2013-09-24)
On salt shores, where farming alone could never thrive; on bleak headlands among the seamews' nests; on lone islands veiled in the mist or girdled with the surf,-- homes where any but a race of sailors would have hungered slowly to death, or pined into dismal savagery,-- there they bred and multiplied, and sang through the winter, and throve through the summer; their wit and wisdom and valour putting to shame (though little they knew it) the follies and the vices and the idleness of the South
(
17:20 / 2013-09-24)
The age of the vikings was over, and it was now the turn of cooler heads and wiser counsels to set to rights the new order of things, and to establish the kingdoms and governments which had arisen out of the disorder and wreck of the old world.
By these days the Northmen had left being nought but rovers and robbers: they had become settlers and traders and rulers of realms on the seaboard of all the northern lands. And not only in the North; for scarce a spot was there between Greenland and Constantinople where they or their children were not found, like bees in a garden, at once gathering honey for themselves, and sowing for others the seeds of new life and strength; the busiest and brightest of the all the kindreds of the age.
(
17:20 / 2013-09-24)
and even across the sea there was a lull, so to say, in the turmoil of the nations
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17:19 / 2013-09-24)
she kept her head, while the other women-folk were shrieking and scurrying; and she was dry-eyed while they were weeping; or sober while they giggled like fools. But even for that they thought worse of her, as one who had not the feelings of other folk, and never laughed nor greeted when she ought, nor was shocked like a decent lass, nor disgusted like a dainty one
(
17:06 / 2013-09-24)
for her people were grave and staid, though forceful and rapid in speech and gesture: while the Northmen, slow of speech and drawling, were ready with rough jokes and childish fooling.
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16:54 / 2013-09-24)
there was a huge incentive for those involved to not think it through
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05:21 / 2013-09-20)
A vital new technology enters society as an expensive item for the wealthy elite, who use it to expand their power base. But it's the middle classes who build the products. The technology falls into their hands and they improve it aggressively. They compete for customers by making it faster, cheaper, more reliable. It enters mass production, and becomes available to all. The farmer and the laborer suddenly get access to this new power. Society shifts like bubbles in a lava lamp, new businesses emerge, and power moves from old to new.
Of course, old money fights back, tries to squash the newcomers. It buys oppressive laws, builds police states, crushes the commercial middle classes. Old money sometimes wins, but not for very long. Political systems crash, and are replaced by new ones. The page turns and the story starts again.
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14:36 / 2013-05-15)
Cost gravity doesn't just explain why so many things are cheaper than ever before. It also sets human history in context. It takes emperors' toys and turns them into commoners' tools, and as it does this, it drives profound social, economic, and political change
(
14:35 / 2013-05-15)
the real answer is that it represents three and a half billion years of cost gravity at work.
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14:33 / 2013-05-15)
Cost gravity affects our whole human world. It's driven by the spread of information and knowledge, inevitable and unstoppable. Every two years, any given technology will become twice as available, half the cost, twice as powerful, half as bulky. Any old technology is today effectively free except for natural resources and friction.
Cost gravity has existed and will exist as long as life itself. Superficially, technology is a human thing. But broadly, all life is information-based, and subject to cost gravity.
(
14:33 / 2013-05-15)
This mechanism, which I call "cost gravity", pushes the down the price of any given technology by about half every two years.
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14:32 / 2013-05-15)
at layer 2, devices always know exactly how to send to every device on the network. At layer 2, either you know exactly how to get data to your destination (btw, usually represented by a "MAC address") or it's not possible to get it there. (For example, Ethernet and WiFi simply broadcast the entire packet onto the whole network, and the destination is expected to be listening for its MAC address and pick up the packet. If it's not there or not listening, Ethernet can't get it there. [And btw, network "sniffers" works by taking advantage of this broadcasting.]
(
14:36 / 2013-09-18)
"UDP multicast might seem a bit exotic, but it's actually more common that you think. ... it is used for a lot for discovery and automatic confguration in apps like Skype, iTunes, and uPnP. It's also used in a few places in the WCI portal.
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11:45 / 2013-09-18)
You might think that UDP is unreliable, because, you know, TCP is supposed to be the reliable one of the siblings. But in fact, over the same network segment, or over LANs with good quality gear and not excessive traffic, UDP is in practice very reliable. If there's no packet loss and packets arrive in order (which is almost always the case on a short LAN link), there's no need for any retransmissions of packets, so all the acknowledgements and waiting around of TCP is just a bunch of wasted overhead, creating latency.
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11:38 / 2013-09-18)
-Do you have any ideas on how today's children, such as Chihiro, can regain their energy?
M: If you let me have my own way, I'd first reduce the amount of manga, video games, and weekly magazines. I would drastically reduce the number of businesses that target children. Our work is part of them, but I think we should let our children watch animation only once or twice a year, and ban cram school as well. If we let children have more of their own time and have their own way, they'll become more lively in a year or so. There are too many people who make money off of children. There is evidence we can live without such things here in this park, yet there are too many things around us to relieve our unsatisfied hearts and boredom. This is the fault of adults; it's adults who are in the wrong shape. Children are just mirrors, so no wonder they are in the wrong shape.
(
20:14 / 2013-09-16)
Still, it is true that the creators of fantasy are getting emotionally weaker. Surely more and more people are saying, "I can't believe such a thing." But it's just that a fantasy that can confront this complicated era has not been created yet.
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20:13 / 2013-09-16)
*Edo Tokyo Tatemonoen: A park with Japanese houses and shops from the Meiji and Taisho era (about 120 to 70 years ago). Miyazaki-San loves the park and often visits there. The interview took place in the park.
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20:10 / 2013-09-16)
Until now, I made "I wish there was such a person" leading characters. This time, however, I created a heroine who is an ordinary girl
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20:05 / 2013-09-16)
it's not a story in which the characters grow up, but a story in which they draw on something already inside them, brought out by the particular circumstances... I wanted to tell such a story in this movie. I want my young friends to live like that, and I think they, too, have such a wish
(
20:04 / 2013-09-16)
So, I read the shoujo manga such as Nakayoshi or Ribon which they left at my mountain cabin.
I felt this country only offered such things as crushes and romance to 10-year-old girls, though, and looking at my young friends, I felt this was not what they held dear in their hearts, not what they wanted
(
20:03 / 2013-09-16)
it may be that part of what determines who lives on you is stochastic
(
21:23 / 2013-09-13)
none of the variables we have considered appear to explain these different groups; not age, not gender, not ethnicity, not innie vs. outie, not where you live now, not where you grew up, not whether or not you have a dog. No, no, no, none of it. We see hints of things (a hint, for example, of an influence of the region you grew up in), but such hints have so far proven illusory and depend on just how we run the analysis
(
21:23 / 2013-09-13)
none of the variables we have considered appear to explain these different groups; not age, not gender, not ethnicity, not innie vs. outie, not where you live now, not where you grew up, not whether or not you have a dog. No, no, no, none of it. We see hints of things (a hint, for example, of an influence of the region you grew up in), but such hints have so far proven illusory and depend on just how we run the analysis
(
21:23 / 2013-09-13)
Some people’s belly buttons have beech forests, or at least their bacterial cognates, others have maple forests
(
21:23 / 2013-09-13)
Question: is this true: that probability of a microbe strain being found on separate people is proportional to it's population on a person (relative to other strains), and the converse holds: very populous strains on one person are likely to be found on other people. And that one may replace "person" with "disjoint population".
(
21:20 / 2013-09-13)
Such individuals are probably more representative of the state in which our bodies existed until a few generations ago when it became popular to bathe regularly
(
21:17 / 2013-09-13)
One participant self-reported he had not washed in years (On its own, this was a “find,” though not really the type we anticipated). Interestingly, he was one of just two people on which we found not only Bacteria but also Archaea
(
21:17 / 2013-09-13)
If a species was found on very few individuals at Science Online, the odds were that it would also be found on very few people visiting the Museum of Natural Sciences
(
21:16 / 2013-09-13)
In some tropical rain forests, even though there are many species of trees, a few species are both present in most forests and common when present. Those species have been called oligarchs; the belly buttons seemed to also have oligarchs too
(
21:15 / 2013-09-13)
We were finding hundreds and then thousands of species, many of which appear new to science. They included strange species, such as one species found on my body that appears to prefer to break down pesticides
(
21:11 / 2013-09-13)
We expected that in employing this more complete method of sampling that the species in different belly buttons would become more similar from one belly button to the next (as we got a more complete sample of who was present in each). They got more different
(
21:10 / 2013-09-13)
Of all the houses the team has so far examined, about 40, I am the only person with H. effusa around. But outlier homes like mine—with a bacterium no one else seems to have—are not unusual. They’re actually very, very common, Dunn says. It’s in the nature of microbes that some sneak in unexplained; a different flavor for everyone.
(
20:24 / 2013-09-13)
Hydrocarboniphaga effusa. When I search for it, I turn up a 2004 paper announcing the discovery of this bacterium not too far from where I live, in soil contaminated by a fuel oil leak in New Jersey, where it was happily digesting the spill. What it was eating at my house is not clear. Perhaps it stowed away on a fossil-fuel-based substance, a fertilizer or a pesticide that was contaminating produce I brought in.
(
20:23 / 2013-09-13)
“You touch the fecal bacteria of strangers ALL THE TIME,” wrote Dunn in an email, with unsettlingly capitalized emphasis. “And so long as you aren’t talking about pathogens, that isn’t actually a big deal.”
(
20:23 / 2013-09-13)
In general, the frame’s trend towards skin bacteria is characteristic of apartments, while houses tend to have more soil there. “In apartments you’re losing a lot of this stuff that you would see in a house,” says Dunn, “a lot of the soil stuff goes away, and in some cases it really becomes this whole world dominated by the stuff that falls off of us.”
(
20:22 / 2013-09-13)
Unlike the spread of a biological disease, threshold contagion does not spread through well-connected nodes. In fact, these nodes tend to resist the message
(
07:41 / 2013-09-10)
Thomas Schelling in his work on racial segregation. Threshold behavior works like this: If enough of your friends believe in something, then so do you
(
07:39 / 2013-09-10)
Just as real forests must be ready to burn before a forest fire can erupt, the key condition for spreading in social networks is a global one: Many average, trusting people need to be able to experience and then want to share choices in their social networks, far away from the source
(
07:39 / 2013-09-10)
This is a patently ridiculous story—a single match is not the entire reason for a wildfire starting and spreading. But that’s exactly how we naturally think about social wildfires: that the match is the key. In fact, there are two requirements: a local requirement (a spark), and a global requirement (the ability of the fire to spread). And it’s the second component that is actually the bottleneck: If a forest is dangerously dry, any spark can start a fire. Sparks are easy to come by, and are not intrinsically special.
(
07:33 / 2013-09-10)
there is no such thing as fate, only the story of fate. This idea is encoded in the etymology of the word: “fate” derives from the Latin fatus, meaning “spoken”—talk that is done—in direct opposition to the root of “fame,” which is fāma, meaning “talk.”
(
07:31 / 2013-09-10)
This line hard-reminds me of Lei's response to stupid cultural questions, that there are approximately as many views of Mao in China as there are people in China. That critical diversity of viewpoints and horizons of expectation are tragically ignored by historians.
(
07:31 / 2013-09-10)
But social groups are far more complicated than any individual story. Networked, distributed, conflicting, and changing, they do not simply map onto an individual.
(
07:27 / 2013-09-10)
Changing my work schedule to a pattern of high-intensity days and calming days could be interesting: Monday-Tuesday is a 48 project in microcosm; Wednesday is relatively calm; Thursday-Friday is another intense 48-hour project. Then the weekend. Would this burn me out or make me super fast and happy?
(
06:49 / 2013-08-29)
Every task begets more tasks at the code level (typing, commenting, optimization) and the quality level (testing, debugging, refining).
It’s almost mathematical. For every hour you spend working, you must spend another 10 minutes responding to or expanding that work. After six hours of working you have accumulated an additional 1 hour of this metawork, which of course—being work—needs its own 10 minutes of response and expansion. Six hours of metawork later, you’ve accumulated an hour of metametawork, which needs yet another layer of response and expansion, and so on. Each layer of metawork is another layer of snow on the snowball. The larger the tasks get, the larger the tasks get.
(
06:48 / 2013-08-29)
in every game there are systems that have no serious likelihood of bottlenecking—you will gain mental energy back by essentially ignoring performance. You cannot do this in C++: it requires an awareness of execution and memory costs at every step. This is another argument in favor of never building a game without a good scripting language for the highest-level code
(
06:47 / 2013-08-29)
It’s remarkable how subtle and constant the performance concern is. A good C++ programmer—especially one working on a relatively slow platform like mobile phones—is continually assessing the cost of what he or she is writing. Should I use a vector here? A map? An unordered_map? Will it be faster to pass this argument by reference? Should I reserve() this vector so that it doesn’t overshoot its necessary size? You use C++ because you want to squeeze frame rate out of tightly constrained hardware. Every variable, every function becomes a potential choke point, and a seasoned programmer is always measuring the ramifications of each choice. The C++ programmer is a deer sniffing the air for the scent of boots and gunpowder: everything’s an opportunity for gain; everything’s an opportunity for calamity.
(
06:47 / 2013-08-29)
C++ headers. More than once during the competition I would reach a point in the code and think, “Argh, I don’t want to have to add/change/look up/remove that function because it would mean having to mess with the header file.” Then I thought, “Oh wait, this isn’t C++. There are no header files.” The feeling of liberation and simplicity that hit me in those moments convinced me that for a great deal of coding situations, headers are a serious bane. They impart a constant agony of redundancy onto everthing you write.
(
06:41 / 2013-08-29)
Easy object placement and animation tools. The UI work in particular went incredibly fast and this was entirely due to working in Flash. I could drag a bitmap into Flash to import it, then place it, position it, add filters, animate it, and attach the animations to code all in one tight motion, all within Flash. Tasks that can take a whole day took minutes. I need this all the time.
(
06:41 / 2013-08-29)
But in pit vipers, one of these natriuretic venoms is produced inside their brain.
No one knows what this venom is doing inside the snake’s brain. But it’s obvious what it’s not doing: killing prey. It’s likely that the venom, borrowed from other parts of the body, has now been borrowed back.
(
09:48 / 2013-08-21)
The targets fall into two main categories: the channels and receptors on neurons, and the molecules involved in clotting blood. For example, cone snails, scorpions, and anemones have all evolved venoms that attack channels on neurons that pump out potassium. Snakes and bees have evolved the ability to block platelets from clumping together, a crucial step in blood clotting. These results show that there are a limited number of ways to kill your victim quickly. No matter what genes you borrow for the evolution of venom, they will end up very similar to other venoms.
(
09:46 / 2013-08-21)
Venoms did not pop out of the void. They started out as genes for other functions. Venom genes are closely related to other genes that carry out entirely different jobs, both in venomous animals and non-venomous ones. Some venoms are closely related to immune system proteins, for example, which attack bacteria invading the body. Others are closely related to digestive enzymes
How does an enzyme end up as a venom? There are a number of ways. A common type of mutation causes DNA to get duplicated. At first, the duplication just means that twice as much of the original protein gets made. But then the extra gene can mutate again without harming the function of the original one. A mutation can, for example, change the signal a gene gets about where it should make its protein. Instead of becoming active in the pancreas, for example, it might start making proteins in the mouth.
When an animal bites its prey, the enzyme can then get into the wound. It might happen to have a harmful effect. Even a small effect could help the animal catch more prey, and thus be favored by natural selection
(
09:45 / 2013-08-21)
Added 20 and found all 4 new ones!
```python
In [213]: test = lambda kstr: test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db, dbdict, n=465, kanji=kstr)
In [214]: test(u"敗活書高本武談右前越格的六昭日語連載大品自辻逃金了太水見肺夏月 一名士大三先京市吉川旧有同企泊合寛" + u"政" + u"賊" + u"宝" + u"章芸転立")
54 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 465
You got 54 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
```
(
21:52 / 2013-08-12)
In [195]: test = lambda kstr: test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db, dbdict, n=446, kanji=kstr)
In [192]: test(u"敗活書高本武談右前越格的六昭日語連載大品自辻逃金了太水見肺夏月 一名士大三先京市吉川旧有同企泊合寛" + u"政" + u"賊" + u"宝")
50 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 446
You got 50 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
(
11:03 / 2013-08-11)
敗戦後の活動[編集]
敗戦後は、その衝撃から筆を執ることができなくなってしまった。親友の菊池寛の求めでようやく書き始め、『高山右近』『大岡越前』で本格的に復活する。ただしこのころ、『宮本武蔵』の版権をめぐって講談社と六興出版（英治の弟晋が勤めていた）との間で騒動が起きた。1950年（昭和25年）より、敗れた平家と日本を重ねた「新・平家物語」の連載を開始する。連載7年におよぶ大作で、この作品で第1回菊池寛賞を受賞。また『文藝春秋』からの強い要望で、1955年（昭和30年）より自叙伝「忘れ残りの記」を連載。なおこのころ身を隠していた辻政信に会い、逃亡資金を渡している。『新・平家物語』終了後は、「私本太平記」「新・水滸伝」を連載する。『私本太平記』は、従来逆賊といわれてきた足利尊氏の見方を改めて描く。1960年（昭和35年）文化勲章受章。しかし通俗作家と見なされ、芸術院には入れられなかった。
「私本太平記」の連載終了間際に肺がんにかかり、翌年夏にがんが転移し悪化。1962年（昭和37年）9月7日、肺がんのため築地国立がんセンターで死去。70歳。法名は、崇文院殿釈仁英大居士。従三位勲一等に叙せられ、瑞宝章を贈られた。疎開先だった東京都青梅市に、吉川英治記念館がある。なお東京都港区赤坂にあった旧吉川邸は講談社の所有となり、（同社での企画出版のための）泊まり込みでの執筆や、座談・打ち合わせに使用された
(
11:02 / 2013-08-11)
In [95]: kstr=u"下昭軍口多止朝日安田夕連載"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db, dbdict, n=422, kanji=kstr)
13 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 422
You got 13 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
(
20:07 / 2013-07-16)
1942年（昭和17年）、海軍軍令部の勅任待遇の嘱託となり、海軍の戦史編纂に携わっていた。山口多聞、加来止男の戦死を受けて、「提督とその部下」を朝日新聞に執筆し、安田義達の戦死後は「安田陸戦隊司令」を毎日新聞夕刊に連載している。[1]
(
20:06 / 2013-07-16)
```
In [85]: kstr=u"運八太道書万本武誕額寄女安定獄奇小兄昭唄全好大学唱談運白省吾田三百村同月日連載上如一目品下"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db, dbdict, n=422, kanji=kstr)
44 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 422
You got 44 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
```
Emily helped me with this batch!!!
(
21:49 / 2013-07-14)
『宮本武蔵』の誕生
こうして巨額な印税が入ったが、貧しいときから寄り添っていた妻やすは、この急激な変化についていけず、次第にヒステリーになっていく。これを危惧し、印税を新居に投じ、さらに養女をもらい家庭の安定を図った。こののち、『万花地獄』『花ぐるま』といった伝奇性あふれる小説や、『檜山兄弟』『松のや露八』などの維新ものを書く。しかし妻のヒステリーに耐えかね、1930年（昭和5年）の春に半年ほど家出し、この間『かんかん虫は唄ふ』などが生まれた。このころから服部之総と交友を結ぶ。1933年（昭和8年）、全集の好評を受け、大衆文学の研究誌・衆文を創刊、1年続き純文学に対抗する。松本学の唱える文芸懇談会の設立にも関わり、また青年運動を開始し、白鳥省吾・倉田百三らと東北の農村を回り講演を開いた。1935年（昭和10年）『親鸞』を発表。同年の8月23日から「宮本武蔵」の連載を始め、これが新聞小説史上かつてない人気を得、4年後の1939年（昭和14年）7月21日まで続いた。剣禅一如を目指す求道者宮本武蔵を描いたこの作品は、太平洋戦争下の人心に呼応し、大衆小説の代表作となる。
(
21:48 / 2013-07-14)
I guessed that 関東大震災 was related to the great earthquake of the 1920s that Emily's book on Tokyo started out discussing, due to "east" (which I haven't yet gotten to in Heisig), "big" and "disaster".
(
21:46 / 2013-07-13)
In [53]: kstr=u"一売大災京夕品談名白連載本吉川女書植運客多読日景完成現学全"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db,dbdict,n=396, kanji=kstr)
29 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 396
You got 29 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
(
21:45 / 2013-07-13)
関東大震災により東京毎夕新聞社が解散すると、作品を講談社に送り様々な筆名で発表し、「剣魔侠菩薩』を『面白倶楽部』誌に連載、作家として一本立ちする。1925年（大正14年）より創刊された『キング』誌に連載し、初めて吉川英治の筆名を使った「剣難女難」で人気を得た。このとき本名の「吉川英次」で書くように求められたが、作品が掲載される際に出版社が名を「英治」と誤植してしまったのを本人が気に入り、以後これをペンネームとするようになった。キング誌は講談社が社運をかけた雑誌だが、新鋭作家吉川英治はまさに期待の星であり、「坂東侠客陣」「神洲天馬侠」の2長編を発表し、多大な読者を獲得した。執筆の依頼は増え、毎日新聞からも要請を受け、阿波の蜂須賀重喜の蟄居を背景とした傑作「鳴門秘帖」を完成させた。これを収録した『現代大衆文学全集』もよく売れ、また作品も多く映画化された。
(
21:41 / 2013-07-13)
```
In [33]: kstr=u"明京浅草町江書川上介大語談吉子名向連目小母夕"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db,dbdict,n=396, kanji=kstr, printer=True)
24 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 396
You got 22 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 2 kanji
```
I missed 下 because it was embedded in a stream of kana. And I missed 活 because I got excited about seeing "yonder", i.e., 向. Doh!
(
22:33 / 2013-07-10)
1910年（明治43年）に上京、象眼職人の下で働く。浅草に住み、このときの町並みが江戸の町を書くにあたって非常に印象に残ったという。またこのころから川柳をつくり始め、井上剣花坊の紹介で「大正川柳」に参加する。1914年（大正3年）、「江の島物語」が『講談倶楽部』誌に3等当選（吉川雉子郎の筆名）するが、生活は向上しなかった。のちに結婚する赤沢やすを頼って大連へ行き、貧困からの脱出を目指したが変わらず、この間に書いた小説3編が講談社の懸賞小説に入選。1921年（大正10年）に母が没すると、翌年より東京毎夕新聞社に入り、次第に文才を認められ『親鸞記』などを執筆する。
(
22:32 / 2013-07-10)
```
In [12]: kstr=u"高小学時少運母兄中具工負"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db,dbdict,n=396, kanji=kstr, printer=True)
13 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 396
You got 12 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 1 kanji
中
負
具
工
母
兄
小
少
時
落
運
高
学
```
Dargh, I didn't recognize 落!
(
21:04 / 2013-07-09)
山内尋常高等小学校に入学。当時騎手の馬屋に近く、将来は騎手になることを考えていた。また10歳のころから雑誌に投稿をするようになり、時事新報社の少年誌に作文が入選した。家運が衰えたのはこのころで、異母兄と父との確執もあり、小学校を中退。いくつもの職業を転々としつつ、独学した。18歳のとき、年齢を偽って横浜ドックの船具工になったが、ドックで作業中船底に墜落、重傷を負う。
(
21:03 / 2013-07-09)
1892年（明治25年）8月11日（戸籍面は13日）、神奈川県久良岐郡中村根岸（現在の横浜市）に、旧小田原藩士・吉川直広、イクの次男として生れた。自筆年譜によると出生地は中村根岸となっているが、地名としては中村根岸はなく旧地名で中村町で現在の横浜市中区山元町に当たる。父・直広は県庁勤務の後小田原に戻り箱根山麓で牧畜業を営みさらに横浜へ移って牧場を拓く。イクとは再婚で、先妻との間に兄正広がいた。英治が生まれた当時、直広は牧場経営に失敗し、寺子屋のような塾を開いていた。その後貿易の仲買人のようなことを始め、高瀬理三郎に見出されて横浜桟橋合資会社を設立。一時期安定するが、直広が高瀬と対立し、裁判を起こし敗訴すると、刑務所に入れられ出所後は生活が荒れ、家運が急激に衰えていく。
(
20:13 / 2013-07-08)
```
In [139]: kstr=u"明月日川中村現旧小田原士吉直自名町元先兄時牧敗寺子塾高理三見桟合一安運活"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db,dbdict,n=396, kanji=kstr)
36 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 396
You got 36 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
```
I owned 塾 on the first try with Mac OS X Chinese handwriting recognizer. Go me!
(
20:12 / 2013-07-08)
```python
In [120]: kstr = u"太学活本読大小的品語昭連載"; test_recognition(getkanji(instr), db, dbdict, n=396, kanji=kstr)
13 kanji in input are known if you are at Heisig # 396
You got 13 kanji right
You got 0 kanji wrong
You missed 0 kanji
```
But I flubbed the English keyword for 連 :-/.
(
22:08 / 2013-07-07)
様々な職についたのち作家活動に入り、『鳴門秘帖』などで人気作家となる。1935年（昭和10年）より連載が始まった『宮本武蔵』は広範囲な読者を獲得し、大衆小説の代表的な作品となった。戦後は『新・平家物語』、『私本太平記』などの大作を執筆。幅広い読者層を獲得し、「国民文学作家」といわれる。
(
22:07 / 2013-07-07)
This
anecdote suggests that
some degree of publishing productivity is essential to get into the
pool of competitive candidates
but, after that, other fac
tors are more important for getting the job
.
(
13:05 / 2013-08-06)
If replication were
essential for every new phenomenon, then researchers might be disinclined to pursue new and
challenging ideas
to ensure pub
lishability
of what they produce
.
(
08:06 / 2013-08-06)
We
can
agree that the truth will win
eventually
, b
ut we are
not
content to wait
(
08:03 / 2013-08-06)
W
e do believe t
hat
self
-
correction
occurs. Our problem is with the word “eventually.”
The
myth of self
-
correction
is recognition that
once published
there is
no
systemic ethic of
confirming or disconfirming
the
validity
of an effect
.
False effects
can
remain for decad
es, slowly fading
or
continuing to
inspire
and
influence
new research
(Prinz et al., 2011)
.
F
urther, even when it becomes known
that an effect is false
,
retraction of the original result is very rare
(
08:03 / 2013-08-06)
Investing hundreds of thousands of
dollars on a new treatment that is ineff
ective is a waste of resources
and
an
enormous
burden
to
patients in
experimental
trials
.
B
y c
ontrast,
for academic researchers
there are few consequences for
being wrong.
If
replication
s get
done
and
the original result
is irreproducible
nothing happens
.
(
08:01 / 2013-08-06)
The disinterest in
replication is
striking
given its centrality to science.
(
15:02 / 2013-08-05)
Publishing a result does not make it
true.
Many published results have uncertain truth value. Dismissing
a
direct replication as “we already knew that”
is misleading; th
e actual
criticism
is
“someone has already
claimed that.”
The former indicates that the truth value is known, the latter
indicates that someone has
had the idea
and perhaps provided some evidence
. Replication is a means of increasing the confidence
in the truth value of a claim.
(
14:17 / 2013-08-05)
Instead, we might
remember the gist of what the study was and what we found
(
14:16 / 2013-08-05)
even if we resist those reasonin
g biases in the moment,
a
fter a few months, we might
simply
forget
the details
(
14:15 / 2013-08-05)
Once we obtain an
unexpected result, we are l
ikely to reconstruct our histories and perceive the outcome as something
that we could have, even did, anticipate all along
–
converting a discovery into a confirmatory result
(
14:15 / 2013-08-05)
M
otivated reasoning
can occur
without intention
.
We are more likely to be convinced that our
hypothesis is true, a
ccepting uncritically when it is confirmed and scrutiniz
ing
heavily when it is not
(
14:15 / 2013-08-05)
We have
enough faith in our values to believe that we would
rather
fail
than fake
our way to success. Less simple
to put aside are ordinary
practices that can increase the likelihood of publishing false results, particularly
those practices that are common, accepted, and even appropriate in some circumstances.
(
14:14 / 2013-08-05)
he incentives for publishable
results can be at odds with the
incentives for accurate results.
(
14:08 / 2013-08-05)
Our immediate react
ion was
“
why the #
&
@! did we do a direct replication?
”
Our
failure to
replicate
is not definitive
that the original effect is false
, but it
raises enough
doubt
to
make reviewers
recommend against publishing
.
Any temptation to ignore the replication and publish the original
only
was squashed by the fact that our lab
mates knew we ran a replication.
(
14:08 / 2013-08-05)
the rapid advance of resistance and the consequent need to use these drugs sparingly has convinced pharmaceutical companies that antibiotics are not worth the investment.
(
17:30 / 2013-07-27)
Hospitals in Israel now practise 'active surveillance', meaning that if a new patient has been to any other health-care institution in the past six months they are checked for CREs
(
17:10 / 2013-07-27)
bacteria carrying the enzyme were present in sewage and municipal water in south Asia6
(
17:10 / 2013-07-27)
But rather than using KPC, the bacterium dismantled the antibiotics with a different enzyme, a metallo-β-lactamase
(
17:09 / 2013-07-27)
Most clinical microbiology labs no longer painstakingly culture bacteria over days to determine which drugs they are susceptible to: instead, automated systems, which expose bacteria to graduated dilutions of drugs, can give a result in hours. But these tests, Quale and his collaborators realized, were giving misleading results and were causing physicians to give patients doses or drugs that would not work
(
17:07 / 2013-07-27)
Prudent use, researchers thought, would keep the remaining last-resort drugs such as the carbapenems effective for decades.
The North Carolinan strain of Klebsiella turned that idea on its head. It produced an enzyme, dubbed KPC (for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase), that broke down carbapenems. What's more, the gene that encoded the enzyme sat on a plasmid, a piece of DNA that can move easily from one bacterium to another. Carbapenem resistance had arrived
(
17:03 / 2013-07-27)
Obama-ism: The renewed skepticism about capitalism, the urgency of the problem of inequality, the artisanal turn away from modernity, the rapid decline of American exceptionalism
(
09:31 / 2013-07-24)
We think of the desire to be American as a form of idealism, and sometimes it is. But it also has something to do with economic growth. We are a nation of immigrants to the extent that we can make immigrants rich
(
09:30 / 2013-07-24)
In 2007, Mexicans stopped emigrating to the United States. The change was not very big at first, and so for a few years it seemed like it might be a blip. But it wasn’t. In 2000, 770,000 Mexicans had come across the Rio Grande, but by 2007 less than 300,000 did, and by 2010, even though violence in Mexico seemed ceaseless, there were fewer than 150,000 migrants.
(
09:28 / 2013-07-24)
How much do we owe, culturally and politically, to this singular experience of economic growth, and what will happen if it goes away?
(
09:24 / 2013-07-24)
The math is punishing. The American population is far larger than it was in 1870, and far wealthier to begin with, which means that the innovations will need to be more transformative to have the same economic effect
(
07:39 / 2013-07-23)
Paul Krugman’s description of his kitchen: The modern kitchen, absent a few surface improvements, is the same one that existed half a century ago. But go back half a century before that, and you are talking about no refrigeration, just huge blocks of ice in a box, and no gas-fired stove, just piles of wood. If you take this perspective, it is no wonder that the productivity gains have diminished since the early seventies
(
07:38 / 2013-07-23)
All of the wars, literature, love affairs, and religious schisms, the schemes for empire-making and ocean-crossing and simple profit and freedom, the entire human theater of ambition and deceit and redemption
(
07:34 / 2013-07-23)
Since then, the nurse had developed her own way of explaining why newborns needed to be warmed skin to skin. She said that she now tells families, “Inside the uterus, the baby is very warm. So when the baby comes out it should be kept very warm. The mother’s skin does this.”
(
05:34 / 2013-07-24)
“It wasn’t like talking to someone who was trying to find mistakes,” she said. “It was like talking to a friend.”
(
05:34 / 2013-07-24)
In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites
(
04:50 / 2013-07-24)
Use of oral rehydration therapy skyrocketed. The knowledge became self-propagating
(
04:49 / 2013-07-24)
The effort was, inevitably, imperfect. But, by going door to door through more than seventy-five thousand villages, they showed twelve million families how to save their children
(
04:49 / 2013-07-24)
If cholera victims were alert, able to drink, and supplied with enough of it, they could almost always save their own lives.
(
04:48 / 2013-07-24)
Eventually, the team hit upon using finger measures: a fistful of raw sugar plus a three-finger pinch of salt mixed in half a “seer” of water—a pint measure commonly used by villagers when buying milk and oil. Tests showed that mothers could make this with sufficient accuracy.
(
04:48 / 2013-07-24)
It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.
(
04:47 / 2013-07-24)
In 1980, however, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization called brac decided to try to get oral rehydration therapy adopted nationwide. The campaign required reaching a mostly illiterate population. The most recent public-health campaign—to teach family planning—had been deeply unpopular. The messages the campaign needed to spread were complicated.
Nonetheless, the campaign proved remarkably successful
(
04:46 / 2013-07-24)
Throw the salt concentration off by a couple of teaspoons and the electrolyte imbalance could be dangerous. The child must also keep drinking the stuff even after she feels better, for as long as the diarrhea lasts, which is up to five days. Nurses routinely got these steps wrong. Why would villagers do any better?
(
04:46 / 2013-07-24)
I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.
(
04:44 / 2013-07-24)
To many people, that doesn’t sound like much of a solution. It would require broad mobilization, substantial expense, and perhaps even the development of a new profession. But, to combat the many antisepsis-like problems in the world, that’s exactly what has worked. Think about the creation of anesthesiology: it meant doubling the number of doctors in every operation, and we went ahead and did so.
(
04:42 / 2013-07-24)
neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm
(
04:41 / 2013-07-24)
In the United States, according to Ringer, more than half of newborns needing intensive care arrive hypothermic. Preventing hypothermia is a perfect example of an unsexy task: it demands painstaking effort without immediate reward. Getting hospitals and birth attendants to carry out even a few of the tasks required for safer childbirth would save hundreds of thousands of lives
(
04:40 / 2013-07-24)
From the nurse’s point of view, she’d helped bring another life into the world. If four per cent of the newborns later died at home, what could that possibly have to do with how she wrapped the mother and child? Or whether she washed her hands before putting on gloves? Or whether the blade with which she cut the umbilical cord was sterilized?
(
04:40 / 2013-07-24)
Everything about the life the nurse leads—the hours she puts in, the circumstances she endures, the satisfaction she takes in her abilities—shows that she cares. But hypothermia, like the germs that Lister wanted surgeons to battle, is invisible to her. We picture a blue child, suffering right before our eyes. That is not what hypothermia looks like. It is a child who is just a few degrees too cold, too sluggish, too slow to feed.
(
22:06 / 2013-07-23)
Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.
(
21:49 / 2013-07-23)
This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful
(
21:47 / 2013-07-23)
“They were all highly interested,” Mr. Kleijwegt of H.P. said, “but wanted to see someone else prove it.”
(
09:37 / 2013-07-22)
he remembered from his early boyhood in eastern Kazakhstan how camel caravans, a fixture on the Silk Road for two millenniums, had still traveled to mountain villages.
“They were used to go places you couldn’t reach in a car,” he recalled. “In the old days, people used them for caravans, but now they’re just kept for the wool, the meat and the milk.”
(
09:36 / 2013-07-22)
Kazakhstan looks a bit like North Dakota; both grow a lot of wheat. But Kazakhstan is slightly larger than the United States east of the Mississippi River, with fewer people than Florida
(
09:35 / 2013-07-22)
China’s previous system allowed clerks to choose only an adjacent country in Asia as the final destination for rail shipments, Mr. Kleijwegt said, because no one had envisioned that exports in sealed rail cars might be sent nearly 7,000 miles to destinations in Europe
(
09:34 / 2013-07-22)
the Dzungarian Gate, a low, wide valley through the snow-capped mountain ranges that separates China and Kazakhstan
(
09:33 / 2013-07-22)
The effort to move more cargo from China to Europe by rail received considerable help from a development so obscure that few outside the transport sector initially noticed it. Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus created a customs union that took full effect in January 2012, eliminating lengthy inspections at their borders with one another
(
09:32 / 2013-07-22)
Trucking goods from inland factories to the ports of Shenzhen or Shanghai on the coast and then sending the goods by ship around India and through the Suez Canal takes five weeks. The Silk Road train cuts the shipping time from western China to retail distribution centers in western Europe to three weeks. The sea route is still about 25 percent cheaper than sending goods by train, but the cost of the added time by sea is considerable.
(
09:30 / 2013-07-22)
ultimately you need to identify a problem which is ultimately due to a bad decision made by an individual, and nothing more than that. All software APIs are simply constructs of human opinions: nothing more.
Asian cultures have a strong focus on guanxi, reputation, and respect for the elders. The West tends to be more rebellious and willing to accept outsiders as champions, and they have less respect for the advice of elders. As a result, I think it’s very culturally difficult in an Asian context to discuss code quality and architectural decisions
(
10:23 / 2013-07-12)
If your sole value to the consumer is your ability to make stand-alone hardware, and you have no strategic advantage in terms of cost, then you would like to keep your plans secret to try to delay the low-cost copiers for as long as you can
(
10:19 / 2013-07-12)
even as the world becomes more efficient at logistics, you will never be able to buy a TV as easily as you can download the movies that you watch on the same TV.
(
10:15 / 2013-07-12)
Simply giving someone a copy of my schematics and drawings doesn’t mean they can make exactly my product. Even injection molding has art to it: if I give the same CAD drawing to two tooling makers, the outcome can be very different depending on where the mold maker decides to place the gates, the ejector pins, the cooling for the mold, the mold cycle time, temperature, etc
(
10:15 / 2013-07-12)
Open Hardware is more of a philosophy. The success or failure of a product is largely disconnected with whether the hardware is open or closed. Closing hardware doesn’t stop people from cloning or copying, and opening hardware doesn’t mean that bad ideas will be copied simply because they are open
(
10:11 / 2013-07-12)
the million-unit blockbusters for things like smartphones and coffee makers
(
10:10 / 2013-07-12)
I just slammed into this idea that list comprehensions aren't simple, they're compound: debugging why `[some expression for x in range(3)]` was wrongly building a list of arrays instead of scalars is much easier if you replace the list comprehension with a map. I'd always thought this roughness with list comprehensions was due to language or IDE or repl support. I can feel the tonic of simple doing me good already!
(
13:41 / 2013-07-01)
Parph.: it’d be great if we could go back to what these words really mean (instead of what they’re commonly understood to mean), *especially for software*. We want to adopt older usages of something, like words, in order to help us think better about something new, like software, that didn’t exist back when we’re returning to.
Central point of this talk: being able to think about whether some software is braided together, folded together.
Why would simple and easy ever be interchangeable. To me, Maxwell’s equations are simple. But they’re not easy to apply and use.
“Easy” ~ “lie near”. The opposite of easy, “dangerous sense” (a la C.S. Lewis), is “hard” which has nothing to do with being far away. (“Hard” would imply “strong”.)
“One braid” is about interleaving, folding, in terms of objective: *not* cardinality, not number, not e.g., “one operation”.
Easy as near physical; and preexisting notion, familiarity. We’re fixated on this? There’s a third slant: within one’s capability, which is very uncomfortable for most to talk about.
When I say “I like this technology, it’s simple”, I mean “easy.”
Some very harsh things said in “Contstruct vs Artifact” slide. As programmers, we make constructs, the code we write, but what we deliver to our users are artifacts—they run the code, they don’t look at it. Yet we’re apparently very focused on the experience of the use of construct, e.g., programmer convenience, e.g., no semicolons, which don’t matter to the user. And this badness is compounded because our employers share our infatuation to the construct: if there’s a second programmer to whom your code is “easy”, familiar, in that the language and tools are familiar with them, then you’re replaceable. Caring about the artifact would apparently imply correctness, quality, maintenance, performance. The employer doesn’t care, he explicitly says, about the third aspect of “easy”, i.e., whether your code is easy for someone to *understand*, they just care about getting a replacement programmer into your seat and commanding them to type. I can’t believe he just slammed business owners in general like that.
We must base our assessment of constructs based on artifacts, not on the experience of using the construct, of typing it in.
- Reliable things require us to understand them.
- Intertwined things must be considered together.
- Complexity undermines understanding.
What’s true about all bugs? They got written :P, but no: they compiled and the passed tests. Very funny delivery of his “guardrail programming” notion of being able to change things because the tests will tell me if I break something. (Or, how to change code without thinking: use tests?)
Very interesting chart that illustrates the notion that if you focus on easy, you will be able to move fast in the beginning but you’ll stop moving at all soon. If you focus on simple, you’ll start slow and speed up.
Worst: easy and complex. The user doesn’t look at out software (code) and *doesn’t care how good a time we had when writing it.*
Knitted castle versus Lego castle: changing them.
It’s in our hands: we install (change location), we learn. But we can’t get smarter :(). Another surprising shocking thing. And it’s not like some super-smart person can do all these great things because it’s juggling: juggling skill is thin-tailed, average juggler can do three, the best can maybe do twelve; none can do a thousand. We are *all* bad at understanding complex things.
CL/Scheme DO braid parens: overloaded for calls, grouping, data structs.
We look for benefits, as programmers, without ever asking for the cost.
“complect” is an archaic word but we can use it of course.
Very interesting diagram of knots: you start with four cords and you end with a complex knot. The underlying material is the same! You’re doing this all the time: you can write the same program multiple ways and in some ways, you see the four cords right away because they’re not intertwined, they haven’t been complected. You use a different language or system or construct and suddenly you get a braided knot.
Complect braid simple things together. Compose place them together. Modularity is *not* the key: you can write all kinds of software that are modular: “they might not call each other but they are completely—complected!” Partitioning and stratification (code organization) can be done by complex or simple.
State complects value and time: you can’t get a value independent of time if at all. State is easy though—this complexity is so easy. Methods and modules or encapsulation don’t hide it. State is when you call a function or method with the same arguments and get a different result out: “it’s like poison”.
Rich Hickey is very angry in this talk.
He has a very interesting slide around 44min that talks about the simplicity toolkit and how to get them in whatever language you’re using. “Data. Please. We’re programmers. We’re supposed to write data processing programs. There’s so many programs that don’t have any data in them.” “There are maps, there are sets, there are linear sequential things.” Apparently polmorphism a la carte are amazing. Look into Clojure protocols.
Rules (Prolog) are better than conditionals. Declarative logic. Paraph.: please, start using maps and sets now, don’t feel like you have to write a class because you have a new piece of information. Artifacts, not authoring.
Simplifying isn’t about counting! You might get more things, more threads hanging straight down, than fewer threads all entertwined. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (LdV).
(
10:12 / 2013-07-01)
"The lesson is to put out your small technology nugget, not typing too much, and wait to see whether the environment changes so it has an interesting new use for your nugget and then change your product to take advantage of it and how it’s used." --- I think he's being tongue-in-cheek. I think this simple prescription is very hard, because at any given time, there's several things that you can interpret as an important environmental change that now renders your product valuable---or that could, if you added a twist. You produce your nugget and you *hope* the environment is changing or changed recently, or you can convince enough people that it's changed, as you put it out.
"There is no evidence that a lineage that starts away from the left wall demonstrates any
directional bias (neither in size nor in complexity)" From http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf
"Natural selection preserved the basic structure for their original (found) purposes—cooling and memory, attractiveness to mates, signs of health"
Wow: "Therefore, the myths business holds conspire to execute the theory of technology acceptance"
(
12:23 / 2013-06-29)
I recommend
Eight Little Piggies
by Stephen
Jay Gould
(1993)
for those interested.
In other words, natural selection provides very little incremental improve-
ment. Rather, almost all dramatic change occurs because the environment
changes and makes the worthless invaluable.
(
13:30 / 2013-06-27)
Only things that are relatively worthless change rapidly and dramatically.
These worthless things provide variety, and someday an environmental change
can make one of those changes or a related group of them important to survival.
Then that one or that group will join the ranks of the natural-selection protected,
and perhaps some formerly static parts may no longer be essential and can begin
to change.
(
13:29 / 2013-06-27)
Natural selection is a mechanism to reject changes not to establish them. In
fact, natural selection is used to slow down changes in the areas that matter—if a
particular wing structure works, you don’t want to try changing it. Therefore,
those parts of an organism most central to its survival mutate over time the most
slowly
(
13:29 / 2013-06-27)
The mammals had something that enabled them to survive, and almost
certainly it was something marginal or irrelevant until the catastrophic event
(
13:29 / 2013-06-27)
The free market means improvement for the consumers, but at the slowest
possible rate, and companies that try to go faster than that rate are almost always
hammered down or killed. On top of these factors is the feedback loop in the free
market. We’ve seen some reasons that it makes business sense to make small
improvements rather than large ones. Because companies use these techniques,
the pattern is established that the free market goes slowly. Given that, consumers
now act in accordance with the free market. For example, because consumers
rarely see radical innovation—it’s too expensive, so companies don’t do it, and a
series of incremental improvements seldom if ever amounts to a radical innova-
tion—they suspects its value. You might say that consumers are conditioned by
the free market against radical innovation.
(
13:22 / 2013-06-27)
To some it might seem that there is value to users in adding lots of fea-
tures, but there is, in fact, more value in adding a simple, small piece of technology
with evolvable value.
The goal of a software enterprise is to make it into the mainstream, and being
in the mainstream does not mean selling to a particular set of corporations. It
means selling to customers with particular characteristics.
One of the key characteristics of the mainstream customer is conservatism.
(
13:20 / 2013-06-27)
t seems like the idea is inten-
tionally to put out an inferior product and then hope that things go well. This
isn’t the case
(
13:18 / 2013-06-27)
it has no compelling systems written in it that people
want to use and could use in such a way to see and appreciate the advantages of
Modula-3. This last point can be understood by thinking about how much more
likely it would be for people to use Basic English or Esperanto if there were a com-
pelling piece of literature written in it
(
13:17 / 2013-06-27)
It would seem that the players would keep their
positions of roughly equal amounts of pennies. But in mathematical terms, this is
an event of measure 0—it will never happen. The probability is essentially 1 that
one player will lose all his or her pennies.
(
13:15 / 2013-06-27)
There is a tendency to think that somehow the free market is fair and that all
seemingly fairly matched competitors will survive. If there is some aspect of a
business that involves consumable resources used in competition, that business is
subject to gambler’s ruin.
(
13:15 / 2013-06-27)
One thing that amazes me is that we could have noticed the
paradigm shift from programming systems to programming
languages right when it happened—using incommensurabil
-
ity as the theoretical basis and “this looks like nonsense” as
the instrument.
(
11:50 / 2013-06-27)
my intuition that programming systems versus
programming languages represents a micro-paradigm shift
might just be a difference of material set-up or more precisely
a difference between the kinds of “machines” the two camps
use to observe and manipulate the realm of programming in
order to manufacture scientific facts about it
(
11:48 / 2013-06-27)
Bracha & Cook and Cannon are perfectly capable of un
-
derstanding everything about each others’ material set-ups
and conceptual frameworks, but they don’t want to, because
they are in the mangle of their own practice
(
11:47 / 2013-06-27)
A programming system consists of an executing software system, tools for examining and altering that system (typically but not necessarily executing as part of that same system), and a mechanism for people to express changes to that system. That mechanism of expression typically looks like program source text. The machine or material set-up is the executing system, its tools, and program source text; and the conceptual framework is how the program source text describes or specifies acts of examination or mutation.
A programming language consists of a set of program source texts, an empty & idle computer, and a semantics that states what computation the computer would perform when executing the semantics specified by a syntactically legal program source text. The machine or material set-up is the computer and the program source text; and the conceptual framework is the semantics.
Just like the two quark experiments, these two material set-ups and conceptual frameworks are similar, and using them similarly leads to different conclusions. For one thing, programming systems exhibit behavior which can be observed or modified while programming languages are for specifying computations.
(
11:46 / 2013-06-27)
programming languages versus programming systems—
these terms each package both the machines or material set-
ups as well as the conceptual frameworks that go with them
(
11:44 / 2013-06-27)
what counted as evidence for one was
something that needed to be explained away for the
other. And yet, this divergence did not quite fit the
Kuhnian mould. Kuhn’s basic idea was that incom
-
mensurability arises from differences in paradigms,
which set people up to perceive the world and pay
attention to it differently. I could not see any split
between Fairbank and Morpurgo in that sense. The
relevant difference was rather that they had arrived
at different material set-ups, and that Fairbank’s ap
-
paratus really did provide evidence for free quarks
while Morpurgo’s apparatus really did provide evi
-
dence against their existence. It was as simple as that.
–Andrew Pickering,
Reading the
Structure, 200
(
11:43 / 2013-06-27)
what counted as evidence for one was
something that needed to be explained away for the
other.
(
11:42 / 2013-06-27)
Read especially Feynman’s comment in the section labeled “Millikan’s
experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology
(
11:40 / 2013-06-27)
A number of scientists and philosophers have concluded
that incommensurability is nonsense. The central reason for
this conclusion is the belief that reality is real, the truth is the
truth, and scientists are moving toward perfect understand
-
ing slowly but surely. In this they are claiming implicitly that
unlike biological evolution, the evolution of scientific theories
has a fitness function directing it toward a definite goal: the
truth that underlies the real universe
(
11:38 / 2013-06-27)
The difficulty is the narrative. Kuhn realized that it wasn’t
simply a matter of defining technical words from one para
-
digm into terms familiar in another—a good deal of the entire
theory surrounding the technical terms needs to be explained
in order to understand how the terms interact and play out.
Recall the description of the phlogiston theory of combus
-
tion I gave before. I couldn’t have simply defined
phlogiston
in isolation. If I had said phlogiston was...
...
a substance contained in all combustible bodies,
released during combustion
...
...you would think me mad because you would be interpreting
this statement in the paradigm of thermodynamics. Instead,
I wove a story about how this “substance” did its thing, and
thereby you came to understand—I hope—that it was a sen
-
sible theory that happened to be wrong or perhaps not as ac
-
curate as the caloric theory and, later, thermodynamics, but
when it was in force, it was used to do useful and accurate
computations about physical phenomena
(
11:33 / 2013-06-27)
Incommensurability is a notion that for me emerged
from attempts to understand apparently nonsensical
passages encountered in old scientific texts. Ordinar
-
ily they have been taken as evidence of the author’s
confused or mistaken beliefs. My experiences led me
to suggest, instead, that those passages were being
misread: the appearance of nonsense could be removed
by recovering older meanings for some of the terms
involved, meanings different from those subsequent
-
ly current.
–Thomas Kuhn,
The Road Since Structure
[25]
(
11:32 / 2013-06-27)
This is one of the confusions I found while reading the
Bracha & Cook paper. It is an example of incommensurabil
-
ity in which those authors were befuddled by the technical
details of an earlier paradigm
(
11:27 / 2013-06-27)
"CLOS is decidedly a system designed to create and manipulate executing systems. Here’s how you know: CLOS defines a protocol for updating class objects and instances, while retaining identity, when a class is redefined. Were CLOS a programming language, no protocol would be needed because the programmer would simply recompile and rebuild the program—such a change is a text editing chore, not a system update: CLOS describes how the affected objects in the running system should be updated and how the programmer can determine how best to do this in the context of the system’s domain"
(
11:22 / 2013-06-27)
When working with a system one must explicitly attend
to careful design, good organization, and modular thinking.
In Lisp, the underlying system is designed to help you. And
your design thinking is effected by altering the living, run
-
ning system right in front of you
(
11:21 / 2013-06-27)
t while the System and
Language paradigms were of essentially equal prominence
before
1990,
after
, the System Paradigm disappeared almost
completely until the mid-2000s
(
11:21 / 2013-06-27)
yntax—a hallmark in
the Language paradigm—is relatively unimportant for Lisp.
Lisp is about execution because you can “feel the bits between
your toes” [21]. Alan Perlis said it most eloquently, I believe,
when he wrote the following:
Pascal
is for building pyramids—imposing, breath
-
taking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy
blocks into place.
Lisp
is for building organisms....
–Alan Perlis
(
11:20 / 2013-06-27)
systems are about things happening, and languages are
about conveying meaning.
As we’ve seen in quotes from Moon and Cannon, for sys
-
tems, good design by a human designer is essential, and
though the system can go only so far to help you, it should
go some distance. Today, one of the goals of
programming
language
designers is to make some kinds of bad or poor
design ungrammatical, thereby cutting them off.
(
11:19 / 2013-06-27)
But: how fascinating! —That incommensurability could be
real. I had lived through this micro-paradigm shift, and my
realization came as a surprise because it explained so much
while remaining hidden from me all these years.
(
11:16 / 2013-06-27)
A paradigm shift is not a clean demarcation between past and future—
paradigms co-exist. The Newtonian paradigm is still used for many com
-
mon calculations
(
11:15 / 2013-06-27)
Cannon’s
community of practice, good design was important, and the
set of available tools and underlying mechanisms needed to be
flexible enough to express such a design when it came along.
Moreover, a good design can live on many programming
substrates using conventions if they are adaptable enough—
“
structs
with an attitude” was usually enough to support
OOP.
(
11:10 / 2013-06-27)
Bracha & Cook were studying the reality created
by Birger Møller-Pedersen, Kristen Nygaard, Howard Can
-
non, David Moon, Danny Bobrow, and the designers of CLOS.
From this (engineering) reality, Bracha & Cook came up
with a theory of mixin-based inheritance, creating a new
(scientific) reality.
Engineers and scientists understand these two realities
differently, using different vocabularies and more than that,
different language.
(
11:04 / 2013-06-27)
Skilled manual labor entails a systematic encounter
with the material world, precisely the kind of encoun
-
ter that gives rise to natural science. From its earliest
practice, craft knowledge has entailed knowledge of
the “ways” of one’s materials—that is, knowledge of
their nature, acquired through disciplined perception.
–Matthew B. Crawford,
Shop Class as Soulcraft
[6]
One good example is the steam engine. Engineers began
its development while scientists were making their way from
the
phlogiston
theory of combustion to the
caloric
theory of
heat, both today considered hilarious.
(
10:54 / 2013-06-27)
the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number
(
14:05 / 2013-06-25)
Why didn't rating agencies build in some cushion for this sensitivity to a house-price-depreciation scenario? Because if they had, they would have never rated a single mortgage-backed CDO
(
14:04 / 2013-06-25)
Li wrote a model that used price rather than real-world default data as a shortcut (making an implicit assumption that financial markets in general, and CDS markets in particular, can price default risk correctly).
(
14:01 / 2013-06-25)
Li's breakthrough was that instead of waiting to assemble enough historical data about actual defaults, which are rare in the real world, he used historical prices from the CDS market
(
14:01 / 2013-06-25)
If you're an investor, you have a choice these days: You can either lend directly to borrowers or sell investors credit default swaps, insurance against those same borrowers defaulting. Either way, you get a regular income stream—interest payments or insurance payments—and either way, if the borrower defaults, you lose a lot of money. The returns on both strategies are nearly identical, but because an unlimited number of credit default swaps can be sold against each borrower, the supply of swaps isn't constrained the way the supply of bonds is
(
14:00 / 2013-06-25)
af-dráusjan, wv. I, to cast down.
af-drugkja, wm. drunkard, 355.
af-dumbnan, wv. IV, to hold one's peace, be silent or still, 331
(
20:47 / 2013-06-23)
aba, wm. man, husband, 206, 208 note, 353. O.Icel. afe.
abraba, av. strongly, excessively, very, very much.
abrs, aj. strong, violent, great, mighty. O.Icel. afar.
af, prep. c. dat. of, from, by, away from, out of, 88, 350. OE. æf, of, OHG. aba, ab.
af-aikan, sv. VII, to deny, to deny vehemently, 313, 402
af-airzjan, wv. I, to deceive, lead astray; see airzeis, airzjan.
afar, prep. c. acc. and dat., av. after, according to, 350 OHG. avar, afar.
afardags, sm. the next day, 356
afargaggan, sv. VII, to follow, go after, 313 note 1, 403.
afar-láistjan, wv. I, to follow after, follow, 403
(
20:47 / 2013-06-23)
for an overwhelming majority of manga and light novels and other original properties, the rights to those properties are held by their individual creators. Or their agents. Either way, they're in charge of who gets to handle their properties, for how long, and so forth. As I explained earlier, though, they don't often get to exercise any sort of creative control over their anime adaptations - and most of the time they simply don't have the time nor the inclination to do so - but the rights to the property are theirs
(
21:46 / 2013-06-22)
One of the great appeals that manga held for Westerners was that manga could be about ANYTHING, and often were. The range of story-types and target demographics was HUMONGOUS compared to the American market
(
09:39 / 2012-07-29)
it's all just the differences between the audiences and their expectations. There's also the way that manga is read differently, and I'm not talking about right to left. According to a study from McGill University, if I remember correctly from a couple of decades back, Japanese and English text are processed by different parts of the brain. While English is processed by the same part that parses our spoken language, while written Japanese is processed by that part the parses visual stimuli, and this is why manga is usually paced differently than western comics. With this is mind, you can see why tropes that work for one, don't work for the other
(
09:38 / 2012-07-29)
The important thing to note about Case Closed is that in Japan, it's a family show. It airs on YTV, one of the bigger Japanese networks. It airs in prime-time; a rarity for anime shows. The yearly Detective Conan films often rank among the highest-grossing films in the Japanese box office, bested only by Hollywood blockbusters like Batman and Spider-man. The show is an often bizarre marriage of the saccharine and the sadistic; gruesome murders and twisted tales solved by cute, bug-eyed kids with kooky gadgets. Kids tune in for the wacky antics, while their parents tune in to play along and try to crack the case along with Conan.
Replicating that broad, four-quadrant success in America was always going to be tricky - Americans never seem to enjoy realistic violence in their cartoons unless it's played for laughs, and the people who flock to crime dramas certainly aren't going to waste their time watching some cartoon show. But the show is such a cash cow for Tokyo Movie Shinsha that they've tried and tried to bring the show around to Western audiences
(
09:21 / 2012-07-29)
'El Watan’s call relays none of the fears of ‘manga invasion’ and cultural dissolution that were prevalent in the west when manga first appeared' (compare with Pokemon ban in Saudi)
'the comics created in a large-scale process in industrialized countries (America, Japan, Europe) that tend to be conceived for and read by a ‘globalized’ audience' --- not sure, 99% of Japanese manga is for Japanese.
'This argument highlights the agency of historically dominated subjects, while entirely avoiding narratives of victimization.'
'we should see it as the reflection of a society first pulled into – and now actively participating in – a global cultural marketplace. Dz-manga represents a fascinating artefact: the combined result of global cultural trends, local Algerian strategies of indigenization, and the particular fluidity of manga as a medium.' --- Only if you insist.
'Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas (1994, 175), in particular, have noted that the predominance of French in Algerian comics could transform such works into a ‘linguistic battlefield’ and the ideological stronghold of Francophonia.'
'graphic artists and scriptwriters now take frequent discursive liberties, mixing French with Darija (Algerian Arabic), Modern Standard Arabic and even Tifinagh in drawings and speech balloons. Similarly, Algerian art now explores aesthetics beyond those derived from the ex-colonizer – including, but not limited to, manga'
'The unique role that manga has been able to adopt is due as much to the nature of manga as a medium as it is to the geopolitical implications of its use.' --- what about the specifics of the products in that medium?
(
20:34 / 2013-06-19)
Considering the network of effects produced by such transcultural
exchanges, Arjun Appadurai (1996, 198) notably argued that, rather than leading to global
cultural homogenization, foreign influences are adopted and mixed with local elements
through a process of ‘indigenization’
(
11:32 / 2013-06-19)
Renowned
bédéiste
Slim, for example, argued for manga (and similar
projects), saying that the time was right for young artists to distance themselves from
cultural forms imported from France.
(
11:29 / 2013-06-19)
he largest of these, the ‘Festival International
de la Bande Dessinée à Alger’ (FIBDA) occurs each autumn in Algiers. Although not
specifically focused on manga, peripheral activities accompanying it serve to foreground
the medium. Notable recent events have included Cosplay contests organized by Editions
Z-link and projections of anime, such as FIBDA’s 2011 showcasing of Shinkai Makoto’s
Kumo no muk
̄
o, yakusoku no basho
sponsored by the Centre algérien du cinéma (CAC) and
the Japan Foundation.
(
10:33 / 2013-06-19)
Zerdani, Fella and Brahimi, as well as Bennediouni and Sabaou all support the mar-
ket for Algerian manga by using it to serve existing cultural projects or to echo popular
demands for societal reforms. At the same time, cultural authorities in the government also
encourage manga as part of their commitment to strengthen local cultural production.
(
10:32 / 2013-06-19)
the style of
Le voyage de la Mouette: au coeur de l’aventure
(Zerdani
2011b) is consciously heterogeneous. The volume centres around the story of Rym, the
niece of the Dey (the ruler of Algiers during the Ottoman empire) as she is kidnapped
by a band of pirates modelled after the group in Oda Eiichir
̄
o’s famous Japanese manga
series
One Piece
(1997–present). Although each chapter narrates a particular episode that
is part of an overarching plotline, the separate sections are designed by various artists
and convey multiple parts of the story in entirely different styles
(
10:26 / 2013-06-19)
Street politics mix casually with religious topics. Specific traits
borrowed from Japanese manga pair with styles and themes characteristic of comics and
Franco-Belgian style BD
(
10:25 / 2013-06-19)
Published for the Ahaggar Arts International
Festival, celebrating the cultural heritage of this Saharan region,
Nahla et les Touareg
pro-
vides an extremely effective – didactic yet fashionable – mode of transmission of Targui
culture to urbanized Algerian youth.
(
10:23 / 2013-06-19)
manga has not yet established an identity internally
within the Algerian cultural landscape. This lack of tradition is compounded by the nature
of manga itself: its relative newness, its constitutive topical heterogeneity, and its com-
plete independence from French-Algerian postcolonial rhetoric make manga a free agent,
without a well-defined market or tradition. Recognizing this, producers of manga have
attempted to graft their art onto other causes and traditions in order to expend Dz-manga’s
appeal and insinuate it into broader Algerian culture
(
10:22 / 2013-06-19)
Editions Z-Link and Kaza Editions both pride themselves on ‘horizontal integration’ of
their in-house management, where the artists are given full control over all steps of the pub-
lication of their product – from creation, to editing, publishing, and distribution. Editions
Z-Link goes even further, working to foster new talent until it can gain a truly public fol-
lowing: traditional calls for submission are supplemented by scouting of unpublished works
on blogs, Facebook pages and other collective platforms used by fan communities online
(
10:20 / 2013-06-19)
Among these, the most notable
is Editions Z-Link: with a specific focus on developing new artists and bringing them
to the market, Z-Link predominantly publishes small-format, paperback, black-and-white
manga books with a small Dz-manga icon in the bottom-left corner of their jackets. These
run either as independent volumes or, on rare occasions, as instalments in a small series
(
Victory Road
). They are printed on low-quality paper, allowing locally published vol-
umes to remain affordable. This combination of publication strategies has enabled Algerian
manga to circumvent the financial barrier to access the young Algerian consumer face with
imported manga and even local
bande dessinée
albums.
6
Easy to serialize, Z-Link’s low-
cost medium has also helped artists to compete – at least on a local level – with foreign
manga that admittedly are more intricate and include higher-quality graphics.
(
10:19 / 2013-06-19)
More recently, the rise of the Internet age further enhanced the
spread of manga in Algeria: video-sharing technologies have made a wide selection of
anime available at little or no cost, and Algerian
otakus
’ blogs have brought together the
community of manga enthusiasts, encouraging the development and exchange of fan-made
productions and ‘scanlations’ (amateur captionings of foreign comics)
(
10:19 / 2013-06-19)
These programmes were largely an oddity: at a time when mass media explic-
itly aimed to differentiate Algerian national identity from western influences, the RTA
was pressured by the Ministry of Information and Culture to favour local productions
and shows from the Arab world.
2
The RTA, however, was often unable to answer this
growing demand (Amin 1996; Rugh 2004); following the example of nearby Arab coun-
tries, it chose Japanese animation as an economical and culturally accessible alternative
to American animation. As a result, anime such as
Grendizer
or
Captain Majed
3
made an
indelible mark on youth growing up in the 1980s, leading Yacine Haddad – a rising star
in the Algerian manga community – to dub this generation ‘la génération otaku’
(
10:14 / 2013-06-19)
Editions Z-Link’s publications follow the emerging inter-
est of Algerian readers in cultural models outside of Europe.
1
Works in this spirit strictly
follow the aesthetic formalisms of Japanese manga, including right-to-left pagination,
stereotyped facial features such as oversized doe-eyes, caricatured facial emotions and
expressive dialogue bubble
(
10:14 / 2013-06-19)
I approached the festival believing that the history
of Algerian literature was so intertwined with Algeria’s colonial history and fight for
independence that all works of interest generally reference, in one way or another, the
complex relationship between Algeria and its ex-colonial metropolis, France.
(
10:13 / 2013-06-19)
Forced to choose between speed and safety, most people choose speed. This is the only conclusion
consistent with what happens on our highways. Even people who distrust Our Government ( for no
apparent reason ) trust the accuracy of computer arithmetic, so they too choose speed above all else
(
20:08 / 2013-06-17)
Vendors prefer that software users accept
aberrations due to roundoff as Acts of God instead of errors induced by historically accidental language defects
(
09:50 / 2013-06-13)
Error-analysts like Hirondo Kuki who warned about the new architectures’ impact upon floating-point were not
heeded until too late
(
09:49 / 2013-06-13)
The speed-accuracy trade-off is so tricky we would all be better off if the choice of precision could be
automated, but that would require error-analysis to be automated, which is provably impossible in general.
(
09:48 / 2013-06-13)
Error-analysis is always tedious, often fruitless; without it programmers who despair of choosing precision well,
but have to choose it somehow, are tempted to opt for speed because they know benchmarks offer no reward for
accuracy.
(
09:48 / 2013-06-13)
To expose the fallacy in this argument we must first cleanse some of the words in it of mud that has accreted after
decades of careless use.
(
11:56 / 2013-06-12)
Quite often a drastic departure of
intermediate results ( like LN(Z) above ) from what would have been computed in the absence of
roundoff is no harbinger of disaster to follow. Such is the case for matrix computations like inversion
and eigensystems too; they can be perfectly accurate even though, at some point in the computation,
no intermediate results resemble closely what would have been computed without roundoff. What
matters instead is how closely a web of mathematical relationships can be maintained in the face of
roundoff, and whether that web connects the program’s output strongly enough to its input no matter
how far the web sags in between
(
11:56 / 2013-06-12)
By now 95% of readers should be aware that there is more to floating-point than is taught in school.
Moreover, much of what is taught in school about floating-point error-analysis is wrong.
Because they are enshrined in textbooks, ancient rules of thumb dating from the era of slide-rules and mechanical
desk-top calculators continue to be taught in an era when numbers reside in computers for a billionth as long as it
would take for a human mind to notice that those ancient rules don’t always work. They
never
worked reliably.
13 Prevalent Misconceptions about Floating-Point Arithmetic :
1• Floating–point numbers are all at least slightly uncertain.
2• In floating–point arithmetic, every number is a “ Stand–In ” for all numbers that differ from it in
digits beyond the last digit stored, so “ 3 ” and “ 3.0 E0 ” and “ 3.0 D0 ” are all slightly different.
3• Arithmetic much more precise than the data it operates upon is needless, and wasteful.
4• In floating–point arithmetic nothing is ever exactly 0 ; but if it is, no useful purpose is served by
distinguishing +0 from -0 .
( We have already seen on pp. 13 - 15 why this might be wrong.)
5• Subtractive cancellation always causes numerical inaccuracy, or is the only cause of it.
6• A singularity always degrades accuracy when data approach it, so “ Ill–Conditioned ” data or problems
deserve inaccurate results.
7• Classical formulas taught in school and found in handbooks and software must have passed the
Test of Time, not merely withstood it.
8• Progress is inevitable: When better formulas are found, they supplant the worse.
9• Modern “ Backward Error-Analysis ” explains all error, or excuses it.
10• Algorithms known to be “ Numerically Unstable ” should never be used.
11• Bad results are the fault of bad data or bad programmers, never bad programming language design.
12• Most features of IEEE Floating-Point Standard 754 are too arcane to matter to most programmers.
13• “ ‘ Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
.” ... from
Keats’
Ode on a Grecian Urn
. ( In other words, you needn’t sweat over ugly details.)
(
10:29 / 2013-06-12)
Footnote:
“
Validate
” a programming language’s design? The thought appalls people who think such design
is a
Black Art
. Many people still think Floating-Point is a
Black Art
. They are wrong too
(
10:27 / 2013-06-12)
Omg, Firefox with its Javascript pdf renderer plays nice with the DOM and works with InstAldebrn!
(
10:25 / 2013-06-12)
Why such plots malfunction
, and a very simple way to correct them, were explained long ago i
(
10:19 / 2013-06-12)
The social planners, therefore, lack the force to subject humanity to their experiments. Even though they should win over to their cause the Czar of Russia, the Shah of Persia, and the Khan of the Tartars, and all the rulers who hold absolute power over their subjects, they still would not have sufficient force to distribute mankind into groups and categories*17 and abolish the general laws of property, exchange, heredity and family, for even in Russia, even in Persia and Tartary, men must to some extent be taken into account. If the Czar of Russia took it into his head to alter the moral and physical nature of his subjects, he probably would soon have a successor, and the successor would not be tempted to continue the experiment.
(
20:26 / 2013-06-16)
do not the social planners realize that this principle, inherent in man's very nature, will follow them into their new orders, and that, once there, it will wreak more serious havoc than in our natural order, in which one individual's excessive claims and self-interest are at least held in bounds
(
20:19 / 2013-06-16)
the political theorists to whom I refer, while enthusiastically and perhaps exaggeratedly proclaiming the perfectibility of mankind, fall into the strange contradiction of saying that society is constantly deteriorating
(
20:18 / 2013-06-16)
Heaven forbid that I should raise my voice against intentions so manifestly philanthropic and pure!
(
20:17 / 2013-06-16)
they have risen up against the nature of things; and, in a word, they have proposed to organize society according to a new plan in which injustice, suffering, and error could have no place
(
20:17 / 2013-06-16)
for a great number of human beings, the sum of unmerited sufferings far exceeded the sum of enjoyments.
1.28
Faced with this fact, many sincere and generous-hearted men have lost faith in the mechanism itself
(
20:17 / 2013-06-16)
They are also the motive forces, for the source of the power is in them. They are more than that, for they are the ultimate object and raison d'être of the mechanism, since in the last analysis the problems of its operation must be solved in terms of their individual pain or pleasure
(
20:16 / 2013-06-16)
So ingenious, so powerful, then, is the social mechanism that every man, even the humblest, obtains in one day more satisfactions than he could produce for himself in several centuries.
(
20:01 / 2013-06-16)
If we examine matters closely, we perceive that our cabinetmaker has paid in services for all the services he has received. He has, in fact, received nothing that he did not pay for out of his modest industry
(
19:52 / 2013-06-16)
"We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display—language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty—and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates, and gaining pres- tige. Instead we rely on goods and services acquired through educa- tion, work, and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to- face interaction. We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our own friends and mates."
"drives for status, respect, prestige, sexual attractiveness, and social popularity"
(
09:08 / 2013-06-16)
"In the global long run, it doesn't much matter how the United States or U.K. change their consumption patterns, because their pop- ulations and economies are such a small and shrinking proportion of the entire world's." <-- Not true. The Roman culture influenced the Byzantine and European cultures for a thousand years after it passed.
X "have seen both the social and cultural costs of runaway consumerism". Wtf?
(
09:03 / 2013-06-16)
"Investment and charity could be made more salient in everyday life as signals of one's personal traits. ... More matter, energy, time, and skill would be invested in the long-term infrastructure of civilization, and less in burning through short-term displays of conspicuous waste, precision, and reputation. ... Civilizations change most dramatically when their status-signaling systems change. Marx overlooked an important truth: the means of display, not just the means of production, are crucial factors in economic and social revolutions. Signaling systems show strong lock-in effects: once a signaling convention such as runaway consumerism gets established, it can be very hard for a population to shift to another set of conventions. The signaling conventions start to look like an inevitable outcome of cosmic evolution, rather than a system of historically defined cultural norms. Conspicuous consumerism is neither natural nor inevitable, but just one possible mode of human trait display."
Paraphrasing that last line: X is neither natural nor inevitable, but just one possible mode. One could insert all kinds of things for X about our government and society.
(
05:43 / 2013-06-16)
"We might even consider arranging economic incentives so we can enjoy built environments that age gracefully through hundreds of years, like Umbrian villas or Oxford rectories. It's the least we can do for future generations"
(
00:06 / 2013-06-16)
This guy makes software for non-developers, and that's the second time in as many days that this invisible ocean of computer users has crossed my netpath: I had read some of their plaintive pleas to Apple about this Mountain Lion upgrade killing their laptops' battery life. Living one's entire life around tool-makers (programmers, makers, writers, nerds) makes one forget about this vast majority of non-makers.
(
20:36 / 2013-06-01)
Because even if you wouldn't pay the asking price, even if you think it's currently just a 3-star app, there are people out there who need your software's functionality, are more than willing to pay for it, and would love to build a relationship with a developer who's actively working on their problems
(
12:39 / 2013-05-31)
a small issue for a paying customer might be a huge issue for a non-customer.
(
12:38 / 2013-05-31)
My theory is that Pro users want to feel special and that their Pro Dollars are hard at work delivering new features only for elite Pro users such as themselves
(
12:37 / 2013-05-31)
That's why I personally will never sell another app for less than $50 if I can help it.
For example, many people will download a $20 app having barely read the product description. Go out and read customer reviews of apps that sell for $19.99 if you don't believe me. Heck, read the Magic Maps reviews. If you sell software for under $30, people will look at a screenshot, read one sentence, and then fabricate a fictitious app description in their heads and assume they are buying the nonexistent software that they just imagined. If you're going to sell software for under $30, your app had better be so incredibly simple that it's absolutely impossible to misunderstand what it does
(
12:35 / 2013-05-31)
If the regulatory changes work, or if market forces prevail despite regulations, I predict we will see smaller, simpler financial businesses replace the gigantic global institutions created in the late 1990s, which have never enjoyed two successive years without a major crisis. These institutions will have to manage risk in the quant sense, or they will blow up and disappear from the gene pool. The benefits to the economy of efficient, effective, innovative, honest, and risk-controlled financial institutions are immeasurable
(
15:54 / 2013-05-31)
A regulator thinks large companies with many risk-taking businesses need less capital than the same businesses considered as stand-alone entities because the individual business lines are not likely to all fail at the same time.
(
15:51 / 2013-05-31)
From a quant perspective, you want each individual business to make the right risk decisions. If no individual business has a disaster, the institution will be fine. Businesses will be run the same way whether they are independent or part of large organizations. This situation generally favors smaller companies because you save the layers of management above the day-to-day decisions
(
15:51 / 2013-05-31)
they induce moral hazard on the part of the business. If the government is willing to stick successful businesses with some of your losses, you can take risks in which you get the profits while losses are paid by others. This creates the need for the government to limit the amount of risk you take. One simple way to do that is to demand minimum capital levels, and liquidate businesses that fall below the minimum when there are still enough assets to pay all creditors in full
(
15:49 / 2013-05-31)
Before going any farther, note that the government concern is legitimate, although largely self-created. In a free market, potential suppliers and employees will consider the business' prospects and either go elsewhere or demand terms that compensate them for the risks. If a business fails, the losses are allocated among people who took on the risks willingly.
Of course, we don’t have a completely free market. The government likes to help voters
(
15:49 / 2013-05-31)
How much capital does it take to support a new business idea? Clearly there are a variety of answers. With minimal capital, an innovator might build a prototype by hand in his or her garage on weekends, then use it to get a single customer to order ten units, for which production could be outsourced. Initial growth of the business would be slow, but over time profits from each stage could fund the next stage. Alternatively, a big company or venture fund might pour a large amount of money into the same idea, helping it to grow more quickly. It might build a factory and begin aggressive marketing, spending tens of millions of dollars before the first dollar of revenue is generated.
Now suppose a quant comes in and models the process to determine an optimal schedule to supply capital to this business. Too little capital guarantees failure because at each stage the business must succeed in order to generate capital for the next stage. An unbroken run of successes is virtually impossible, even if you start with a great idea. The business needs to be able to survive setbacks, and possibly to run at a loss for a period, both of which require capital. However some businesses with inadequate capital will have substantial runs of success. These will be flashes in the pan, overnight sensations followed by spectacular busts.
Too much capital can insulate a business from the selection pressure needed to evolve and, in any event, will be wasted. So in principle—and I believe in practice—it is possible for a quant to come up with an optimal schedule for supplying capital to a business venture.
The government has a different perspective on the problem. It doesn’t like companies failing and leaving unpaid liabilities. It might decide business ideas must be funded by a minimum amount of capital so that suppliers and employees (not to mention taxes) are paid in full if the idea doesn’t work. We could imagine regulators seizing on the calculations done by quants, and insisting businesses have equity capital at least equal to the optimal level
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15:44 / 2013-05-31)
Physicists sometimes do something grander. They build an entirely new thing based on extensive theoretical calculation — an atomic bomb, a collider, a superconductor. These do involve real mathematics. But the practical implementation still takes a huge amount of arithmetic, trial and error, and scaling up of pilot implementations. Lots of engineers, technicians, machinists, and other skilled staff are necessary
(
09:47 / 2013-05-31)
It takes sophisticated, fragile predictions that compile long-term track records of success and encourage excessive reliance to generate Black Swans. Black Swans do not come from nature; they are an unintended product of human engineering. Another key point Weatherall apparently misunderstands is that Black Swanness is not a property of an event -- it is a relation of an event to a person. The 9/11 attacks were not a Black Swan to the hijackers; it had extreme impact, but they expected it. It was not a Black Swan to most of the people in the world. They did not expect it, but it did not have an extreme impact on them. It was a Black Swan to US policymakers and many other groups, but not to everyone
(
09:45 / 2013-05-31)
After disasters, people like Weatherall rush in to explain why the event should have been predicted, and to propose fixes. It usually turns out that people had already been taking more sophisticated precautions than the newcomers recommend, and in any case, more precautions may make the situation worse
(
09:44 / 2013-05-31)
Nassim Taleb labeled extreme events that happen because they are unexpected “Black Swans,” and argued that long-term results are dominated by them. Attempts to predict them or protect against them may make them less common, but only at the expense of making them bigger and more anomalous
(
09:44 / 2013-05-31)
Though Bokeh is young and still missing a lot of features, I think it’s well-poised to address the challenges mentioned above. In particular, it’s explicitly built around the ideas of Grammar of Graphics. It is being designed toward a client-side, in-browser javascript backend to enable the sharing of interactive graphics, a la D3 and Protovis. And comparing to matplotlib’s success story, Bokeh displays many parallels:
Just as matplotlib achieves cross-platform ubiquity using the old model of multiple backends, Bokeh achieves cross-platform ubiquity through IPython’s new model of in-browser, client-side rendering.
Just as matplotlib uses a syntax familiar to MatLab users, Bokeh uses a syntax familiar to R/ggplot users
Just as matplotlib had a coherent vision of focusing on 2D cross-platform graphics, Bokeh has a coherent vision of building a ggplot-inspired, in-browser interactive visualization tool
Just as matplotlib found institutional support from STScI and JPL, Bokeh has institutional support from Continuum Analytics and the recent $3 million DARPA XDATA grant.
Just as matplotlib had John Hunter’s vision and enthusiastic advocacy, Bokeh has the same from Peter Wang. Anyone who has met Peter will know that once you get him talking about projects he’s excited about, it’s hard to make him stop!
(
08:53 / 2013-05-29)
In this talk, John outlined the reasons he thinks matplotlib succeeded in outlasting the dozens of competing packages:
it could be used on any operating system via its array of backends
it had a familiar interface: one similar to MatLab
it had a coherent vision: to do 2D graphics, and do them well
it found early institutional support, from astronomers at STScI and JPL
it had an outspoken advocate in Hunter himself, who enthusiastically promoted the project within the Python world
(
08:47 / 2013-05-29)
“We didn’t try to be the best in the beginning, we just tried to be there...” and fill-in the features as needed
(
08:47 / 2013-05-29)
Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is?
(
08:21 / 2013-05-28)
So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading
(
08:20 / 2013-05-28)
most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today
(
08:19 / 2013-05-28)
So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.
(
08:18 / 2013-05-28)
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
(
08:13 / 2013-05-28)
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas
(
08:12 / 2013-05-28)
When he was running Mosul in 2003 as commander of the 101st Airborne and developing the strategy he would later formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and then ultimately apply throughout Iraq, he pissed a lot of people off. He was way ahead of the leadership in Baghdad and Washington, and bureaucracies don’t like that sort of thing. Here he was, just another two-star, and he was saying, implicitly but loudly, that the leadership was wrong about the way it was running the war
(
08:10 / 2013-05-28)
the changing nature of warfare means that officers, including junior officers, are required more than ever to be able to think independently, creatively, flexibly. To deploy a whole range of skills in a fluid and complex situation. Lieutenant colonels who are essentially functioning as provincial governors in Iraq, or captains who find themselves in charge of a remote town somewhere in Afghanistan. People who know how to do more than follow orders and execute routines.
(
08:08 / 2013-05-28)
To quote Colonel Scott Krawczyk, your course director, in a lecture he gave last year to English 102:
From the very earliest days of this country, the model for our officers, which was built on the model of the citizenry and reflective of democratic ideals, was to be different. They were to be possessed of a democratic spirit marked by independent judgment, the freedom to measure action and to express disagreement, and the crucial responsibility never to tolerate tyranny.
(
08:07 / 2013-05-28)
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders
(
08:06 / 2013-05-28)
That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering
(
08:05 / 2013-05-28)
The Company, after all, is just that: a company, with rules and procedures and ranks and people in power and people scrambling for power, just like any other bureaucracy. Just like a big law firm or a governmental department or, for that matter, a university. Just like—and here’s why I’m telling you all this—just like the bureaucracy you are about to join
(
08:01 / 2013-05-28)
what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.
(
08:00 / 2013-05-28)
I found it wonderfully meta: the millenarian nature of this warning against millenarianism.
(
20:22 / 2013-05-27)
Mr. Barkun, who reads widely in this backstairs literature, argues that in recent years "ideas once limited to fringe audiences became commonplace in mass media" and this has inaugurated a period of "unrivaled" millenarian activity in the United States
(
20:21 / 2013-05-27)
the author who worries about the Secret Service taking orders from the Illuminati is old school; the one who worries about a "joint Reptilian-Bavarian Illuminati" takeover is at the cutting edge of the new synthesis. These bizarre notions constitute what the late Michael Kelly termed "fusion paranoia," a promiscuous absorption of fears from any source whatsoever.
(
20:20 / 2013-05-27)
not just an erosion in the divisions between these two groups, but their joining forces with occultists, persons bored by rationalism
(
20:19 / 2013-05-27)
Such themes enjoy enormous popularity (a year 2000 poll found 43% of Americans believing in UFOs) but carry no political agenda
(
20:18 / 2013-05-27)
Conspiracy theories grew in importance from then until World War II, when two arch-conspiracy theorists, Hitler and Stalin, faced off against each other, causing the greatest bloodletting in human history.
This hideous spectacle sobered Americans, who in subsequent decades relegated conspiracy theories to the fringe, where mainly two groups promoted such ideas.
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20:18 / 2013-05-27)
"Willkie spoke of men and women
from different parts of the world as if they were his
hometown neighbours. He crossed racial, ethnic
and national lines in order to impress on Americans the dangers of nationalism in a world so tightly
woven together."
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21:30 / 2013-05-26)
"Most of the exhibits which you call maps are not maps
at all. A map must have coordinates, that is, the
parallels and meridians must be shown. A map should
be drawn on a projection and scale which will further
its purpose. In most cases a map needs to be so
designed that its north-south dimension is parallel to
the longitudinal direction of the page. Any deviation
from this idea confuses most readers. There are many
things which cannot be shown on maps or at least
cannot be shown under our present knowledge of
cartography. To be effective maps need to be agreeable
in color especially in their gradations within a color.
Most of your maps have not met these basic
considerations. Many of your maps, moreover, have
been messy in appearance and confused in detail." Wow!
(
21:28 / 2013-05-26)
The use of a polar route to connect Japan to Alaska
effectively transformed the Pacific Ocean from a
massive body of water protecting the United States
into a smallish lake. The shrunken ocean connects,
rather than separates, the American nations to Asia,
linking the eastern with the western hemisphere.
(
19:45 / 2013-05-26)
"Harrison's use of the oblique
orthographic angle instantly reminded the user that
the world was round and that aviation had created
new realities of travel and movement (Fig. 6).
Harrison had turned the viewer into a pilot floating
above the horizon and, by portraying mountains
instead of relying on the more traditional method of
hachuring, he made these maps seem even more
like a photograph of the Earth from the air, thus
helping Americans recognize the real effects of the
air age."
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19:43 / 2013-05-26)
My goodness, the "Three Approaches to the US... from Berlin, from Tokyo, from Caracas" are startling because of the great circle directions.
(
19:37 / 2013-05-26)
First, he simply
sketched the desired region from a globe to help the
magazine editors envisage the illustrative potential
of the map. He then photographed that particular
angle of vision on a large physical globe, using the
photograph to check his proportions and guide the
addition of proper terrain in a second sketch. ... While Harrison's techniques were unremark-
able, his real artistry lay in his choice of angle and
perspective. The daring appearance of his maps set
Harrison's work apart from that of the large map
companies, and in many ways his style owes more to the persuasive look of contemporary advertising
than to cartography
(
19:33 / 2013-05-26)
Just as engaging as the polar projection were
Harrison's signature perspective maps, which he
used to highlight spatial relationships among cities,
nations and continents made relevant by the war.
These maps, resembling a photograph of a globe
from a distance, brought home the world's spheri-
city by moving the viewer out to a fixed point
above the Earth. In this way, the maps created a
new vantage point that Harrison judged to be the
'missing link' between globe and map, valuable for its ability to translate three-dimensional relation-
ships into a two-dimensional realm. Harrison's
editors at Fortune quickly realized the popularity
of these maps and continued to print them in the
magazine throughout the war.7 The public's recog-
nition of the maps was furthered by Fortune's
decision to publish eleven of them as an 'Atlas for
the U.S. Citizen' in its September 1940 issue. The
aerial view offered by these maps pulled the reader
into the actual theatres of conflict, and at a moment
of impending American involvement, their vantage
point carried an internationalist message
(
19:32 / 2013-05-26)
"Having mastered the mysteries of their craft, they
never felt it necessary to explain them in simple
language to the layman. Perhaps there is a little of that
tendency, common also among doctors and lawyers, to
impress the yokels with a mumbo-jumbo terminology
. . . the established mapmakers were left at the post,
and the burden of explanation was assumed by rank
outsiders-the magazines and daily papers"
(
18:56 / 2013-05-26)
he grew to disdain the label
'cartographer' and chose instead to see himself as
an artist free from the conventions and confines of
a profession. Despising what he considered the
'outmoded and utterly antiquated geography'
learned by most Americans, Harrison blamed
professional geographers and cartographers who
were mired in 'a static condition bordering on
senility'. The orthodoxy that dominated commer-
cial cartography, Harrison argued, was entrenched
further by the long-standing devotion among the
military, naval and teaching professions to the
Mercator projection.
Richard Edes Harrison and the Challenge to American Cartography
Susan Schulten
Imago Mundi
Vol. 50, (1998), pp. 174-188
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17:53 / 2013-05-26)
William Thurston: On proof and progress in mathematics
When a significant theorem is proved, it often (but not always) happens that the solution can be communicated in a matter of minutes from one person to another within the subfield. The same proof would be communicated and generally understood in an hour talk to members of the subfield. It would be the subject of a 15- or 20-page paper, which could be read and understood in a few hours or perhaps days by members of the subfield.
Why is there such a big expansion from the informal discussion to the talk to the paper? One-on-one, people use wide channels of communication that go far beyond formal mathematical language. They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what's going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well.
In talks, people are more inhibited and more formal. Mathematical audiences are often not very good at asking the questions that are on most people's minds, and speakers often have an unrealistic preset outline that inhibits them from addressing questions even when they are asked.
In papers, people are still more formal. Writers translate their ideas into symbols and logic, and readers try to translate back.
(
09:51 / 2013-05-16)
Which is the premise of this project, of course -- people don't use math. But everyone seems to believe, if only math were taught better, they would use it!
(
09:46 / 2013-05-16)
If I had to guess why "math reform" is misinterpreted as "math education reform", I would speculate that school is the only contact that most people have had with math. Like school-physics or school-chemistry, math is seen as a subject that is taught, not a tool that is used. People don't actually use math-beyond-arithmetic in their lives, just like they don't use the inverse-square law or the periodic table.
(
09:46 / 2013-05-16)
Complex numbers provide a similar example. Being able to work with complex numbers (as abstract values) is seen as an essential skill in many scientific fields. Then David Hestenes came along and said, "Hey, you know all your complex numbers and quaternions and Pauli matrices and other abstract funny stuff? If you were working in the right Clifford algebra, all of that would have a concrete geometric interpretation, and you could see it and feel it and taste it." Taste it with your monkey-mouth! Nobody actually believed him, but I do, and I love it.
(
09:42 / 2013-05-16)
"That's what it might be like to write an algorithm without a blindfold on."
"Two principles of information display. Show the data. Show comparisons. That's all I'm doing here."
"Even today people think a REPL is interactive programming, because that's the best you could do on a teletype."
"When I see a violation of this principle. I don't see that as an opportunity." (An inefficiency or an injustice isn't first an opportunity to shine, to produce.) "I'm not excited about finding a problem to solve. I'm not in this for the joy of making things. Ideas are very precious to me. And when I see ideas dying, it hurts. ... Not opportunity but responsibility."
"Social activists typically fight by organizing, but you can fight by inventing."
Paraph.: Larry Tesler's invention was different than Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph. Larry's invention was a reaction against a cultural context. He also didn't just "solve a problem" because the problem was only in his head. To everyone else, the problem was just how things were and there wasn't anything obviously wrong with it. "Today we recognize gender discrimination as wrong. But back then, it was part of society. It was invisible." (Regarding Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)
"The world will try to make you define yourself by a skill. If you want to spend your life pursuing excellence in practicing a skill, you can do that, that is the path of the craftsman. That is the most common path. [Or] the path of the problem solver: academics and entrepreneurs. There's the problem, there's the needs of the market, and you make a contribution."
"Building up this corpus of experiences that I felt very strongly about, for some reason..."
(
20:04 / 2013-05-15)
You can't see anything. I see the word array, but I don't actually see an array. And so in order to write code like this you have to imagine an array in your head. You have to play computer. You have to simulate in your head what each line of code would do in a computer. And the people we consider to be skilled software engineers are people who are really good at playing computer. But if we're writing our code on a computer, *why* are we simulating what our code would do in our head?
(
14:31 / 2013-05-14)
"If you're designing something embedded in time, you need to be able to control time. You need to be able to see it across time. Otherwise it's like you're blind."
(
14:25 / 2013-05-14)
"I want to bring up the mountains a little bit", wow!
"I can make these changes as quickly as I can think of them, and that is so important to the creative process. To be able to try ideas as you think of them. If there's any delay in that feedback loop..."
(
14:18 / 2013-05-14)
{line,0,0,639,479}
I know it works, because I can see it right there. The line starts at coordinates 0,0 and ends at 639,479. It works on any computer with any video card, including systems I haven't used yet, like the iPad. I can use the same technique to play sounds and build elaborate UIs.
That the results are entirely in my head is of no matter.
It may sound like I'm being facetious, but I'm not. In most applications, interactions between code and the outside world can be narrowed down to couple of critical moments. Even in something as complex as a game, you really just need a few bytes representing user input at the start of a frame, then much later you have a list of things to draw and a list of sounds to start, and those get handed off to a thin, external driver of sorts, the small part of the application that does the messy hardware interfacing.
The rest of the code can live in isolation, doing arbitrarily complex tasks like laying out web pages and mixing guitar tracks. It takes some practice to build applications this way, without scattering calls to external libraries throughout the rest of the code, but there are big wins to be had. Fewer dependencies on platform specifics. Fewer worries about getting overly reliant on library X. And most importantly, it's a way to declutter and get back to basics, to focus on writing the important code, and to delve into those thousands of pages of API documentation as little as possible.
(
10:05 / 2013-05-14)
The Tk library for TCL, which is still the foundation for Python's out-of-the-box IDE, allows basic UI creation with simple, declarative statements
(
10:03 / 2013-05-14)
There's a clear separation between programming languages and the capabilities of modern operating systems. Any popular OS is obviously designed for creating windows and drawing and getting user input, but those are not fundamental features of modern languages
(
10:03 / 2013-05-14)
People tend to contrast Unix with systems like the Lisp Machine and Smalltalk. But I see more similarities than differences: Code as data. Everything is programmable. Dynamic language prompt. Universal data structure. A propensity for "dialects" or "distributions". Garbage collection.2 Unix just made a lot of compromises to make it practical on the limited hardware that was available.
(
07:55 / 2013-05-14)
If you look at it the right way, all of these little programs that do one thing are like functions in the higher-level language that is Unix. We see that languages like Perl and Python have huge numbers of libraries for doing all sorts of tasks. Those libraries are only accessible through the programming language they were developed for. This is a missed opportunity for the languages to interoperate synergistically with the rest of the Unix ecosystem.
(
07:54 / 2013-05-14)
Wrong turns
Unix has a long history. Some of that history was kind, some was unkind. Most of the development of Unix was just practical people doing their best with the tools they had.
What's unfortunate is that we now have better tools and we see what could be done, but to do it would break backwards compatibility. And so we continue with sub-optimal tools.
(
07:52 / 2013-05-14)
The world of computers has grown up a lot since the early days of Unix. There has been a Cambrian explosion in the number of file formats
(
07:52 / 2013-05-14)
If I want to write a new program, even a short one, I have to open up a text file in Emacs (make sure it's in the path!), write the program, save it, switch to the terminal, and chmod +x it. Compare that to Clojure, where you constantly define and redefine functions at the REPL. Or, if you like, a Smalltalk system where you can open up the editing menu of anything you can see and change the code which will then be paged out to disk at a convenient time. Unix clearly has room to grow in that respect.
(
07:51 / 2013-05-14)
Unix is homoiconic
There's another property that I think is rarely talked about in the context of Unix. In Lisp, we often are proud that code is data. You can manipulate code with the same functions that you manipulate other data structures. This meta-circularity gives you a lot of power.
But this is the same in Unix. Your programs are text files and so can be grep'd and wc'd and anything else if you want to. You can open up a pipe to Perl and feed it commands, if you like. And this feeds right back into Unix being programmable.
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07:50 / 2013-05-14)
The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.
(
22:52 / 2013-05-09)
users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing. Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.
(
22:51 / 2013-05-09)
It is important to remember that the initial virus has to be basically good. If so, the viral spread is assured as long as it is portable. Once the virus has spread, there will be pressure to improve it, possibly by increasing its functionality closer to 90%, but users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing.
(
22:50 / 2013-05-09)
A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.
The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix-namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.
(
22:49 / 2013-05-09)
It wasn't hard to learn Ruby. In fact after a few days with it, Ruby felt as comfortable as languages I'd been using for years.
(
22:45 / 2013-05-09)
I can't just tromp into most companies and announce I'm going to be writing in Python; they'd lynch me. So to this extent, Python has failed. And I really, REALLY wish it hadn't. Because unlike when it happened with Smalltalk, I was invested this time around.
(
22:41 / 2013-05-09)
one last odd thing is that programmers often have to learn at least one new language when they arrive at a new job, but they never have any trouble. Programmers usually think learning a new language will be hard. When it's a job requirement, though, it happens amazingly fast. Programmers are generally pretty smart people.
You'd be amazed at how much resistance the "old guard" of a company will offer if you try to use your favorite language, and it's not on the approved-list. The "old guard" could even be 23-year-old CS grads that have just made a successful startup. "Old" here just means "first".
I've heard their arguments for 20 years. Don't use C++, it's slow (my first company). Don't use Java, it's slow (my second and third.) Don't use Python, it's slow and has that whitespace thing. (All but my most recent.) Don't use Ruby, it's weird (90% of all companies). Language diversity is bad. What if someone has to debug your code in the middle of the night and they don't know that language? (every company, even those that don't work in the middle of the night) Don't use other languages; we don't hire for those skills. We don't trust those languages. We've invested in Fortran or Cobol or C++ or Java or whatever. No, no, no.
(
22:33 / 2013-05-09)
The first is that most programmers don't like to learn new languages. I don't know why, but true polyglots like me seem to be comparatively rare, maybe 5%-10% of the programmer population. Most folks apparently prefer to master one language and stick with it for life.
(
22:32 / 2013-05-09)
You can argue that Smalltalk would have failed fair and square, without Java, but I think most people agree that Java was a key contributor to Smalltalk's failure. And it wasn't a quiet thing, either. Millions of dollars were at stake. There were two large commercial Smalltalk vendors, and a bunch of unhappy about-to-be-ex-Smalltalk programmers, and hallways echoed with roars of protest at how Java, an "obviously" inferior language, had unfairly stolen a market that rightfully belonged to Smalltalk.
It all quieted down eventually, and to most of you, Smalltalk probably feels like a niche academic language that never had any real popularity.
I think Java coming along and smooshing Smalltalk was largely due to marketing. It's not the only factor, of course. Timing was a factor in various ways. Syntax and static typing were both factors, because Java deliberately went after disenchanted C++ programmers, which wasn't a bad strategy at all. And Java had some genuine innovations that helped, too.
But it was marketing that tied all those things together and helped Sun build a worldwide community of millions of Java programmers.
Java wasn't really offering anything that Smalltalk hadn't already been doing for years. (Where have we heard that argument before?)
(
22:31 / 2013-05-09)
It's very easy for you to say something insensitive about Smalltalk, *especially* if you don't know the language. You can take one look at it and say: "looks dumb", and you've just made someone mad.
(
22:30 / 2013-05-09)
Death of a beautiful language
I watched Smalltalk die.
I wasn't particularly invested in Smalltalk at the time, but I had done some programming in it. Smalltalk was (and still is) a superb programming language. And it died after I learned it.
(
22:29 / 2013-05-09)
Chickens are more than just egg and meat producers; they are part of a resilient, productive cycle in the backyard farm. Chickens can eat food scraps and marginal produce that would otherwise go to the compost or trash. With this energy source, they produce fertilizer, dig up weed roots, and consume pest insects when they are permitted to roam in the vegetable garden or yard. Finally, chickens are a visually attractive and dynamic element in the backyard, with discernible personality
(
11:33 / 2013-04-25)
If one hatches their own chicks, about half will be cockerels which, along with culled pullets, can be used for meat. Older hens can be turned into stewing fowl when they are no longer productive as layers. The meat tends to be more flavorful, firmer in texture, and with a higher percentage of dark to white meat compared to hybrid meat birds.
Traditional meat classes by age are:
Broiler: 7 to 12 weeks
Fryer: 14- 20 weeks
Roaster: 5 to 12 months
Stewing Fowl: 12 months or older.
The appropriate cooking method to obtain the best results varies with age. Older birds required lower cooking temperatures and longer cooking times
(
11:31 / 2013-04-25)
Eggs should not normally be washed since they have a natural “bloom” that is a barrier to contamination. Very soiled eggs are a good idea to wash though, especially just before cracking. Collecting eggs more than once per day if possible will reduce the potential for hens to soil or break the eggs. The decision to refrigerate stored eggs is a personal preference, but refrigerated eggs may be kept for several weeks. Writing the date of lay on each egg will help ensure the oldest eggs are used up first.
(
11:30 / 2013-04-25)
Feed costs vary depending on the source and percentage of waste, but should be about $2 to $3 for every dozen premium quality eggs.
(
11:29 / 2013-04-25)
Kitchen scraps or “treats” are also a great source of food for chickens, as long as they do not make a majority of the diet. Treats can include apple cores, carrot peeling, bread, pasta, squash cores, and tomatoes
(
11:29 / 2013-04-25)
Full grown layers should cost about $10 to $15/each and be preferably under one year old. Egg production from older hens may decline a lot after a year or two, with less return on the cost of feed.
(
11:24 / 2013-04-25)
Raising your own baby chicks involves more work and a wait of about six months until they begin to lay
(
11:23 / 2013-04-25)
Some common chicken terms include:
Bantam: Miniature chicken.
Brooder: Heated enclosure used to imitate the warmth and protection a mother hen gives her chicks.
Broody: Describing a hen that covers eggs to warm and hatch them.
Cockerel: Male chicken less than a year old.
Comb: The fleshy, usually red, crown on the top of a chicken’s head.
Hen: Adult female chicken that has laid eggs for six months.
Hybrid: The offspring of a hen and rooster of different breeds.
Incubate: To maintain favorable conditions for hatching fertile eggs.
Litter: Straw, wood shavings, or other material scattered on the floor of a coop or brooder to absorb moisture and droppings.
Molt: Annual process in which chickens shed and grew new feathers.
Pullet: Young female chicken, usually less than a year old, or until the first egg is laid.
Rooster or Cock: Adult male chicken.
Sexed: Newly hatched chicks sorted by males and females.
Straight run: Newly hatched chicks that are a mix of males and females.
Wattles: The two red flaps of flesh that dangle under a chicken's chin
(
11:21 / 2013-04-25)
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Black Sea / Neal Ascherson. Ascherson, Neal. 02-19-2013 Copy 1
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Stephen Biesty's incredible cross-sections / illustrated by Stephen Biesty, written by Richard Platt. Biesty, Stephen. 02-28-2013 Copy 1
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Stephen Biesty's cross-sections. Castle / illustrated by Stephen Biesty ; written by Richard Platt. Biesty, Stephen. 02-28-2013 Copy 1
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The journeyer / Gary Jennings. Jennings, Gary. 02-28-2013 Copy 1
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Foreign devils on the Silk Road : the search for the lost cities and treasures of Chinese Central Asia / Peter Hopkirk. Hopkirk, Peter. 04-09-2013 Copy 1
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Miyazawa Kenji tanpenshū = The tales of Miyazawa Kenji / Miyazawa Kenji cho ; Jon Besutā yaku. Miyazawa, Kenji, 1896-1933. 04-09-2013
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18:39 / 2013-04-24)
Cultural atlas of China / by Caroline Blunden and Mark Elvin.
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Black Sea / Neal Ascherson.
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The other Greeks : the family farm and the agrarian roots of western civilization / Victor Davis Hans
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Miyazawa Kenji tanpenshū = The tales of Miyazawa Kenji / Miyazawa Kenji cho ; Jon Besutā yaku.
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21:31 / 2013-03-27)
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(
05:37 / 2012-05-29)
The math paper is hard to read because the ideas are hard. If you expressed the same ideas in prose (as mathematicians had to do before they evolved succinct notations), they wouldn't be any easier to read, because the paper would grow to the size of a book.
(
11:36 / 2013-04-18)
What readability-per-line does mean, to the user encountering the language for the first time, is that source code will look unthreatening. So readability-per-line could be a good marketing decision, even if it is a bad design decision. It's isomorphic to the very successful technique of letting people pay in installments: instead of frightening them with a high upfront price, you tell them the low monthly payment. Installment plans are a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line probably is for the programmer. The buyer is going to make a lot of those low, low payments; and the programmer is going to read a lot of those individually readable lines.
(
11:36 / 2013-04-18)
The true test of a language is how well you can discover and solve new problems, not how well you can use it to solve a problem someone else has already formulated. These two are quite different criteria. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want to make, but are absolutely lousy if you don't. When you want to discover the image as you make it-- as you have to do with anything as complex as an image of a person, for example-- you need to use a more fluid medium like pencil or ink wash or oil paint. And indeed, the way tapestries and mosaics are made in practice is to make a painting first, then copy it. (The word "cartoon" was originally used to describe a painting intended for this purpose).
(
11:20 / 2013-04-18)
And the only real test, if you believe as I do that the main purpose of a language is to be good to think in (rather than just to tell a computer what to do once you've thought of it) is what new things you can write in it. So any language comparison where you have to meet a predefined spec is testing slightly the wrong thing.
(
11:20 / 2013-04-18)
So any language comparison where you have to meet a predefined spec is testing slightly the wrong thing.
(
11:20 / 2013-04-18)
it was my equivalent of writing school. While living in Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have and it has stood me in good stead over the years.
(
08:35 / 2013-04-14)
We must recognize that in the West, as in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, there are great numbers of people who, by force of circumstance, have become xenophiles, in the deepest sense, of acknowledging – as Tayyib Salih did so memorably in Mowsam al-Hijra ila-ash-Shimaal - that in matters of language, culture and civilization, their heritage, like ours, is fragmented, fissured and incomplete
(
11:09 / 2013-03-14)
an ideology of permanent victimhood such as that which the French rightly castigate as ‘tiers-mondisme’
(
11:08 / 2013-03-14)
some nostalgia: and indeed there was much that was valuable in that period. Yet it would be idle to pretend that solutions could be found by looking backwards in time. That was a certain historical moment and it has passed.
(
11:08 / 2013-03-14)
Empires are not the sole threat to the continuation of our conversations: over the last fifteen years, in many parts of Asia and Africa, we have seen a dramatic rise in violent and destructive kinds of fundamentalism, some religious, and some linguistic. These movements are profoundly hostile to any notion of dialogue between cultures, faiths and civilizations. They are movements of intolerance and bigotry and they mirror the ideology of imperialism in that they seek to remake the world – or at least their corners of it – in their own images.
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11:06 / 2013-03-14)
Empires always profess, and sometimes even believe in, noble ideals: the problem lies with their methods, which are invariably such as to subvert their stated aims and ends. This is because the processes of conquest, occupation and domination create realities that become alibis for the permanent deferral of the professed ideals.
(
11:05 / 2013-03-14)
It is strange to think that the fall of the Berlin Wall is still widely read as a vindication of ‘capitalism’. The truth is that the world’s experience over these last fifteen years could more accurately be read as proof that untramelled capitalism leads inevitably to imperial wars and the expansion of empires.
(
11:01 / 2013-03-14)
It is possible that I would have discovered these writers even if I had not lived in Lataifa, but I doubt that my readings of their work would have had the same resonance if I had not lived in Egypt.
(
11:00 / 2013-03-14)
all around the world there are novelists, who, like Mahfouz, build their books on families and their histories, on the endless cycle of birth, marriage and death. But in Mahfouz’s hands this invitation into the family has an extra dimension of excitement. This is because in Egypt, as in India, the family is often a secret, curtained world, protected from the gaze of outsiders by walls and courtyards, by veils and laws of silence. To be taken past those doors, into the forbidden space of failed marriages and secret desires, the areas that lie most heavily curtained under the genteel ethic of family propriety, is to prepare oneself for the the pleasurable tingle of the illicit
(
10:59 / 2013-03-14)
While living in Beheira I maintained a detailed journal, in which I made extensive notes about my conversations with people, and the things I saw around me. Not only did this teach me to observe what I was seeing; it also taught me how to translate raw experience on to the page. It was the best kind of training a novelist could have
(
10:58 / 2013-03-14)
I would either have failed to get a visa or would not have been permitted to reside in the countryside. It was only because of the good relations that prevailed between India and Egypt that I was able to do what I did. It is important I think to acknowledge this, for no matter how sincere an individual’s desire for cultural communication might be, it is impossible for such exchanges to occur in the absence of an institutional framework.
(
10:57 / 2013-03-14)
xenophilia, a desire to reclaim the globe in my own fashion, a wish to eavesdrop on an ancient civilizational conversation
(
10:56 / 2013-03-14)
Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased. Even in the 19th century, the high noon of Empire, people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, sought each other out, wrote letters to each other, and stayed in each other’s homes while traveling. Lately, a great number of memoirs and autobiographies have been published that attest to the depth and strength of these ties. It was no accident therefore that Mahatma Gandhi chose to stop in Egypt, in order to see Sa’ad Zaghloul before proceeding to the Round Table Conference in London. This was integral to the ethos of the time. Similarly, it is no accident that capitals like New Delhi, Abuja and Tunis have many roads that are named after leaders from other continents.
(
10:48 / 2013-03-14)
an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance
(
10:42 / 2013-03-14)
Long before the machine made its entry into the village, a posse of children would be sent to summon me: as an Indian I was expected to be an expert on these machines, and the proud new owners would wait anxiously for me to pronounce on the virtues and failings of their new acquisition.
Now it so happens that I am one of those people who is hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket. At first I protested vigorously, disclaiming all knowledge of machinery. But here again, no one believed me; they thought I was witholding vital information or playing some kind of deep and devious game. Often people would look crestfallen, imagining, no doubt, that I had detected a fatal flaw in their machine and was refusing to divulge the details. This would not do of course, and in order to set everyone’s fears at rest, I became, willy-nilly, an oracle of water-pumps.
(
10:40 / 2013-03-14)
In vain would I try to persuade them that cows were frequently beaten in India: they wouldn’t believe me, for they had not seen otherwise in Hindi films?
(
10:39 / 2013-03-14)
A photo needs to make sense instantly to anyone who looks at it. No one is going to try to figure out your photo any more than anyone would try to figure out why you've got dirty shirts thrown in three random piles
(
16:35 / 2013-04-13)
This is composition, and most men hate it. I know I sure do. That's why our photos usually suck.
Like a dirty room, your photos always make sense to you, but they won't make sense to anyone else unless you clean them up first.
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16:34 / 2013-04-13)
You have to move the position of your camera in four dimensions: moving left and right, moving in and out, moving up and down, and being there at the right time.
Once you get to the best position in four dimensions, then, and only then, do you get to worry about framing, which is simply zooming and pointing the camera.
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16:33 / 2013-04-13)
Framing has almost nothing to do with composition, but sadly, few photographers realize this. Framing can't do much of anything to change the relationships between objects.
Framing is easy. One usually can frame a picture after it's shot by cropping.
Composition is very difficult. Composition is what makes or doesn't make a picture. Composition is the organization of elements in the picture in relation to the other elements.
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16:32 / 2013-04-13)
In the toilet photo above, the sky isn't a a sky. The sky is used as a big, blue shape. The toilet isn't a toilet: it's a dark blob that balances against the row of pylons. The row of pylons isn't a row of pylons: it's a swash that guides our eye from the bottom left up and into the photo. The car headlights lighting up the middle of the row of pylons isn't a car headlight: it's a visual trick that draws our eyes to the middle of the image and keeps them coming back as we explore the image. The picnic table cover on the right isn't a picnic table cover: it's the smallest in a series of three progressively smaller triangles which includes the roof of the toilet, the mountain, and then the picnic table cover.
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11:23 / 2013-04-13)
An ultrawide will make a small back yard seem like a park.
This effect is so powerful that you have to be careful. When I posted an online ad to rent out my old condo, I had people calling from all over the USA thinking it was such a deal because it looked cavernous. I had to explain this effect to them, but they didn't believe me and I people were calling from as far away as Pittsburgh trying to leave deposits, sight unseen.
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11:20 / 2013-04-13)
See how the windshield appears twice as far away in the 14mm shot, but that the tip of the hood is now twice as close? I quadrupled the apparent depth by going from 37mm to 14mm and getting so close that I was almost under the hood.
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11:17 / 2013-04-13)
Long lenses compress perspective: they seem to squeeze everything into looking like it's in the same plane.
Ultrawides do the opposite: they expand the apparent depth of an image. Shots made with ultrawides push back the background, and since you have to get close, pull near objects even closer.
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11:15 / 2013-04-13)
Big things need to be printed bigger. If you want to "get it all in," you'd better be prepared to print huge. If you aren't going to print huge, the only thing an exotic wide lens or panorama does is make the things in your picture too darn small.
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21:02 / 2013-04-12)
Scale means paying attention to the size at which an image will be printed as you're creating it.
Images have entirely different meanings when printed at different sizes.
A photo of a mouse printed at 4x6" (10x15cm) is normal. The same photo printed at 20x30" (50x75cm) is kind of weird. Why would someone make a print of a tiny mouse so big?
The reason photos of the Grand Canyon usually lack the "you are there" feeling is because they are only printed a few feet wide at most. A 40x60" (1x1.5m) print is a big print, but still doesn't do the Grand Canyon justice. Show the Grand Canyon as an IMAX movie as shot from a moving helicopter, and the audience feels it.
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21:01 / 2013-04-12)
The demagogues would not know their business if they had not acquired the art of hiding the rough hand while showing the gentle hand
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13:09 / 2013-04-09)
It should:
Stimulate laudable enterprises, and encourage and aid them with all the resources capable of making them succeed.
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13:02 / 2013-04-09)
If it withholds the boon that is demanded of it, it is accused of impotence, of ill will, of incapacity. If it tries to meet the demand, it is reduced to levying increased taxes on the people, to doing more harm than good, and to incurring, on another account, general disaffection.
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12:59 / 2013-04-09)
Strictly speaking, the state can take and not give. We have seen this happen, and it is to be explained by the porous and absorbent nature of its hands, which always retain a part, and sometimes the whole, of what they touch.
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12:58 / 2013-04-09)
It will take a great deal; hence, a great deal will remain for itself.
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12:39 / 2013-04-09)
all of us, with whatever claim, under one pretext or another, address the state. We say to it: "I do not find that there is a satisfactory proportion between my enjoyments and my labor. I should like very much to take a little from the property of others to establish the desired equilibrium. But that is dangerous. Could you not make it a little easier? Could you not find me a good job in the civil service or hinder the industry of my competitors or, still better, give me an interest-free loan of the capital you have taken from its rightful owners or educate my children at the public expense or grant me incentive subsidies or assure my well-being when I shall be fifty years old? By this means I shall reach my goal in all good conscience, for the law itself will have acted for me, and I shall have all the advantages of plunder without enduring either the risks or the odium."
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12:37 / 2013-04-09)
Slavery is on its way out, thank Heaven, and our natural inclination to defend our property makes direct and outright plunder difficult.
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12:36 / 2013-04-09)
Man is averse to pain and suffering. And yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation if he does not take the pains to work for a living. He has, then, only the choice between these two evils. How arrange matters so that both may be avoided? He has found up to now and will ever find only one means: that is, to enjoy the fruits of other men's labor; that is, to arrange matters in such a way that the pains and the satisfactions, instead of falling to each according to their natural proportion, are divided between the exploited and their exploiters, with all the pain going to the former, and all the satisfactions to the latter. This is the principle on which slavery is based, as well as plunder of any and every form: wars, acts of violence, restraints of trade, frauds, misrepresentations, etc.—monstrous abuses, but consistent with the idea that gave rise to them. One should hate and combat oppressors, but one cannot say that they are absurd.
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12:34 / 2013-04-09)
I demand nothing better, you may be sure, than that you should really have discovered outside of us a benevolent and inexhaustible being, calling itself the state, which has bread for all mouths, work for all hands, capital for all enterprises, credit for all projects, ointment for all wounds, balm for all suffering, advice for all perplexities, solutions for all problems, truths for all minds, distractions for all varieties of boredom, milk for children and wine for old age, which provides for all our needs, foresees all our desires, satisfies all our curiosity, corrects all our errors, amends all our faults, and exempts us all henceforth from the need for foresight, prudence, judgment, sagacity, experience, order, economy, temperance, and industry.
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12:32 / 2013-04-09)
Now I mentioned that they will hiss and show their teeth as a first line of defense, but if that should fail, their body has an automatic reaction that is also pretty neat. Have you heard of the expression “playing ‘possum?” These cuties will actually slip into a comatose state, with their mouths open, drooling and everything, to appear dead. They will even emit a foul smell from their anal gland and their heart and breathing rates drop. It’s quite convincing and many predators, such as foxes and bobcats, will leave them be.
After all of this, I think the most interesting thing about Virginia opossums is their mating and reproduction. They are the only marsupial found in the United States. The male opossum courts a female by clicking its teeth and following her around. At some point the female accepts his appeals and he mounts her in a typical mammalian fashion. Then they will fall to their right side. Yes, almost always to their right side. If they stay upright, or if they fall to their left side, then the female is not likely to be inseminated. The opossum penis is forked, which is probably why people used to believe that male opossums would inseminate the females through their noses and that the females would then sneeze their babies into their pouches. Yes. People really believed that. Their sperm are also paired and can only swim properly in pairs. If you separate a pair of sperm, then each sperm just swims in circles. I could not make this shit up.
Alright, the male is now done and everything else is up to the female. Like all marsupials, she has a pouch and the incredibly tiny young are born shortly after fertilization and climb into her pouch. However, for opossums its not quite so easy. Up to 25 small opossums are born. They are all so tiny that you could fit all of them together in a teaspoon. And they will all race to mom’s pouch, because in an extreme case of survival of the fittest (not the Darwinian definition of fitness, but in terms of physical strength and endurance) only 13 will be able to attach to a nipple. (In “North American Wildlife” by David Jones, he calls it the “world’s cruelest game of musical chairs.”) That’s right mom only has 13 nipples and once a young opossum attaches to a nipple, it swells up and they are essentially locked on until they are developed enough to leave the pouch (about 2 months). The rest of the babies, if they even make it into the pouch, just die. While we’re on the topic, the Virginia opossum is one of the few mammals that has an odd number of nipples. She has 12 nipples in a circle, and then one right in the middle. They are truly unusual mammals.
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09:08 / 2013-04-04)
Can't believe that after centuries of financial investing, this point still has to be made by advisors. Perhaps euphoria, like governments and predators, are unavoidable. Just as predators consume our biologics and governments consume our production, euphoria is caused by memetic agents that prey on our minds.
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07:50 / 2013-04-04)
The eventual outcomes are easy to identify on a long-term chart, and because the typical losses were severe, it’s tempting – in hindsight – to imagine that avoiding risk and ignoring reckless optimism at the top would have been easy.
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07:45 / 2013-04-04)
News item: Barron’s Magazine carried a fairly cheerful article last week – “Wealthy Families Leveraging Up.” They would be well to remember what happened after previous surges in the number of investors who decided that speculating with borrowed money was a brilliant idea.
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07:45 / 2013-04-04)
Now consider the 1987 instance. It’s certainly easy to identify on the chart, because the 1987 crash appears to immediately follow the emergence of overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yield conditions. But in fact, the first emergence of this version of the syndrome was in June 1987, at about 307 on the S&P 500. The index then soared to 337 by August, in a nearly relentless day-after-day advance. Put yourself in the shoes of investors during that ramp to new highs day-after-day. It is only in hindsight that we know what happened next (and even then, the S&P 500 was within 8 points of its August high only 10 sessions before the October 19, 1987 crash). It is only hindsight that tempts investors to believe that it would have been easy to maintain a defensive position in response to the warning signs.
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13:55 / 2013-04-01)
many approaches that perform beautifully over the long-term would often have felt intolerable at a day-to-day resolution
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13:51 / 2013-04-01)
"Thor's Angels": writers from Tacitus to Gregory aren't "tainted" because they are using their history to achieve some ulterior goal in their own societies because all history works today do exactly the same thing and we don't think of those as tainted. I view every modern work of professional history with as much suspicion as Victorian or Leninist/Stalinist history (viz., Soviet archaeology holding the Russian state to be immune from non-Slavic incursions of blood or ideas since time immemorial). Our modern ideologies are just harder for us to see. The vain desire to stand outside of one's society and oneself to reflect on the past is as pervasive as the problems of academic history.
The Goths and Huns encountering Roman wealth no doubt had much to envy, just as the steppe people envied the Chinese manufacted finery.
Any major institution exists in a complex balance of power and control; one can even say it is defined by such a web of alliances and contentions. The Huns were a black swan that upset many or most of those balanced polarities. Such an unbalancing can rewrite the nature of any institution defined by the original web.
White traders or prisoners who lived with the native American peoples in ten years often look like them. *Look.* How much of what passes for race is techno-cultural?
These Romans (in the fifth century?) in times of crisis (as the Huns definitely caused) would grant titles to non-Roman peoples to rule lands in the Roman name ("feudal" or in today's parlance, semi-autonomous) but they would also hand out sovereignty out-right, and concomitantly forge alliances with the new de facto independent states. "Delegated itself out of existence". This is very rare today, and goes back to the idea I've been thinking a lot about: you don't own your land, you rent it from the state which can take it away and sell it to someone else if you don't pay your taxes; and there's no more land that you can go to to set up a new sovereign state without negotiating for that right with a state that's already there. Unless you went to very poor parts of the world? Can you buy a piece of Liberia or the Maldives from those states?
Church says: heretic < infidel.
Tacitus: "It stands on record that armies already wavering and on the point of collapse have been rallied by the women, pleading heroically with their men, thrusting forward their bared bosoms, and making them realize the imminent prospect of enslavement - a fate which the Germans fear more desperately for their women than for themselves. Indeed, you can secure a surer hold on these nations if you compel them to include among a consignment of hostages some girls of noble family. More than this, they believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do not scorn to ask their advice, or lightly disregard their replies. In the reign of the emperor Vespasian we saw Veleda long honoured by many Germans as a divinity; and even earlier they showed a similar reverence for Aurinia and a number of others - a reverence untainted by servile flattery or any presence of turning women into goddesses."
The decline in living standards in post-Roman Gaul and Britain (among others?) ought to be expected (predicting in the past being what it is) and has very obvious parallels today. When a society experiences any changes, skills and methods of earning livelihood (i.e., getting food, clothing, shelter) become misaligned from reality. When these post-Roman peoples ceased to be a part of a very urban and pluralistic empire, many service-providers and manufacturers were out of business and not earning livelihoods because they couldn't get inputs to their business, or there were no markets or ways to get outputs to markets, etc. A deurbanizing people has to rediscover agriculture and farming. The very complex skills of herding, gathering, and farming will take potentially generations to relearn. Mongolians who felt that herding was in their blood have found it very hard to make a living with it after they attempted to return to it after the withdrawal of the Russians after a hundred years of domination. No longer were Mongolian factories supplied by the Soviet empire and no longer could Mongolian products compete in markets they could access, and on top of that, the Mongolian people rediscovered this notion that herding and farming is terrifically complicated and requires much skill, experience, and lore. No doubt Cuba went through something related when it adjusted to a low-oil society.
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to see it... If two barbarian peoples go to war and there was nobody around to memorialize it in some fixed medium such as writing... (it would have been sung about, no doubt, and incorporated into the national heroic lays, but they don't last unmixed).
Just as many barbarian warrior kings are just as henpecked and bullied by strong women (wives, mothers, sisters, daughters) as men today. Yes, that includes Arab and Indian men, believe me... the veils and the separation of genders and theoretical subservience of womankind never changes the age-old fact that strong women will never be subservient to their men in private.
People are always surprised when they see that Christianity, whose first martyrs showed their other cheek when struck on one and who wouldn't dream of killing their persecutors, was co-opted by warrior peoples like Constantine (in hoc signo vinces) and Clovis. Or that the Buddha, who was rebelling against a theology where deities controlled men's lives, was himself made the central deity of many of today's Buddhists; or that reincarnation, which he pooh-poohed as a distracting non-issue became a central aspect in most Buddhist traditions. There really isn't anything like *religious* authority versus *secular* authority, or the power of the *wealth*. There's just political power: the ability of few to demand taxes of the many in exchange for nominal governmental services like not stealing *all* your property and maybe trying to keep other tax-booters (I shouldn't say freeboothers) from taking much of your property either. Almost orthogonal to this dimension of human affairs is that of psychology and ethics and literature, the realm of ideas on self-conduct and of songs of others' conduct. I call the key discoveries and core proposals of later-deified religion-founder types (Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, etc., who very often couldn't tell at the end of their lives if they'd started anything remotely significant, since these examples were black swans, hugely successful saint-sage types, most of whom are, like writers, almost assuredly unsuccessful) as psychologies. They aren't religions, they're intelligent and practical theories which would probably earn them a PhD and at least a journal paper today. The religions that grow around these ideas are by my definition related to political power and the ability to tax people. Religion is an example of political power that grows out of the discoveries of psychological algorithms. (Over the last couple of hundred years, definitely since the poorly-named Enlightenment, methods of political control that grew around techno-mythical theories like Marxism or capitalism or scientism---science as thought about by non-science-math-types---have dominated our societies, causing much more suffering and death than religion-based or classic I-have-a-big-army-so-pay-up political power.) Methods of gaining and maintaining the power (to tax) that grow around psychological or social ideas will very likely propagate not the original theory but some altered version of it, changed if just in order to make it work. You don't expect a Matlab script to run on an airborne embedded processor, or a cluster; the implementation and even the basic algorithm might need to change to take properly take advantage of the target platform. Jesus and Confucius and the Buddha can maybe be analogized as R&D PhDs coding their breakthrough algorithms in Matlab and Python. Constantine and Ashoka and the Spring and Autumn emperors were the folks who look at the code they're handed, shake their heads, throw it away and rewrite it from scratch for a PIC processor or a Hadoop cluster. It's unreasonable to expect that the psychologies propounded by later-deified-as-religion-founders thinkers would survive intact their incorporation into a system of political control.
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09:04 / 2013-04-03)
Max Hastings: "Even if Britain had been invaded, the inhabitants of its cities would have chosen to surrender, rather than eat each other". And Gunter Koschorrek: "When will people realize that it is possible for *any* of us to be manipulated by domineering and power-crazed individuals who know how to motivate the masses in order to misuse them for their own ends. While they keep well out of the way in safety they have no hesitation in brutally sacrificing their people in the name of patriotism. Will mankind ever stand together against them, or are those who died in the fighting dead forever, and will the reasons they gave their lives be forgotten?"
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12:25 / 2013-04-02)
Ghosts of the Ostfront IV: quoting Gunter Korshorrek: 'no one was fighting by the Nazi new world order or any other such idea by this point. "After you have spent some time at the front like I have, you no longer fight for the Furher, Volk, and Fatherland. These ideals has long gone, and no one talks of National Socialism or similar political matters. From all our conversations, it's quite obvious that the primary reason we fight is to stay alive, and help our front line comrades do the same."'
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12:16 / 2013-04-02)
This is from Ghosts of the Ostfront II: 'Hitler once said that one of the main advantages of a totalitarian state is that it forces its enemies to act in a similar manner.'
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11:43 / 2013-04-02)
A German surgeon: "the ingenious way totalitarian states by making people who oppose government policies simply disappear deny their opponents the opportunity to die a martyrs death for their convictions". A Soviet writer: "you become an accomplice to the system even though you're an adversary because you are unable to express disapproval even if you're willing to pay with your life". No citations.
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11:29 / 2013-04-02)
I grew up hearing about the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and how in retrospect, that conflict was a testing ground of new weapons for WWII. In the future, I suspect we’re going look back to Afghanistan the same way.
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13:03 / 2013-04-02)
1. Are these civilian massacres unique or rare?
One of the problems with the media frenzy about the Kandahar killings is the impression that what happened is an abnormality. I can’t agree. Massacres of innocent people by all sides are routine in wars, and I’ve not known or been in one without them. Certainly there has been reporting on such massacres perpetrated by both sides in Afghanistan.
In Viet Nam and other wars I've been in, I heard many stories of these sorts of atrocities, and they were usually not disputed, except by diplomats in the presence of cameras. When we allow our country into a war, we have to assume that civilian horrors will ensue. A variation on the uniqueness story is the incessant hinting from our media that the perpetrator must be insane. This point sounds good, but it’s somewhat without significance, and it runs the risk of letting the politicians and military brass off the hook.
You can’t send tens of thousands of women and men anywhere without knowing that a predictable percentage of them will be nuts, and another knowable fraction will become so. So if you’re honest, and responsible, you’ll have mechanisms in place to lessen armed individuals doing terrible things. I’m pretty sure our military does try to decrease these slaughters. They are not doing it well enough; the proof is in the pudding. This mass murdering second lieutenant will no doubt be punished. Those who created the circumstances that made this and other outrages possible and inevitable, will likely escape accountability, as happened with My Lai.
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13:01 / 2013-04-02)
The Times op ed is from June 6, 1972. It was called, “Again, The Suffering of Mylai.” When I was invited before Ted Kennedy’s committee, I brought along the partially burned prosthetic leg to illustrate my testimony.
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13:00 / 2013-04-02)
We kid ourselves with these little lies that seem to make sense, that seem so reasonable, and then someone comes who has been making the right little decisions for a long time, and we call them “talented”, we say they were “lucky”, it was “in their blood”, or maybe we outright accuse them of lying
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11:13 / 2013-04-01)
So I started building a Mandarin immersion environment. That involved getting Mandarin dubs of my favorite American cartoons — stuff like 蝙蝠俠/Batman, 飛天少女驚/Powerpuff Girls, almost all the Disney/Pixar movies. As it turns out, almost all of these DVDs had a Cantonese track as well. Occasionally I would switch to the Cantonese track for laughs — it sounded so funny!
Anyway, this “funny-sounding” language or dialect started to grow on me. The Bruce Lee effect and the fact that (until recently) the Chinese that most non-Chinese people heard was in fact Cantonese, certainly played a part. Cantonese is even more “magical”, more BS-ed about, more Orientalized, more feared, more hyped than Japanese; this, I am sure, tickles my reverse-BS glands.
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11:11 / 2013-04-01)
I needed to know how to pronounce Cantonese without, like, balancing an equation every two seconds (because that’s what tone numbers turn life into). The tone markers had no meaning to me – I could not differentiate them – until I actually heard a lot of Cantonese. I needed to focus on what Cantonese sounds like, because that’s what matters, not some trainwreck of a Romanization system. This is what led me in the direction of TTS. The results are good so far – one Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong on Skype accused me of lying about not being Chinese, despite my insistence that “it’s not that good…yet”, so I had to borrow a friend’s webcam (see Fig. 2), and then the Skype guy made me undress. It just goes to show that watching and/or listening to Cantonese dubs of American cartoons 18 hours a day doesn’t not have an effect. And, yes, I do randomly find Cantonese speakers on Skype to talk to. I learn a lot from them if I shut up. Skype chat records are automatically saved, so you can go back later and sentence-pick, and also to absorb the corrections you no doubt asked for.
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11:11 / 2013-04-01)
Neal Stephenson: Recluse
Some years ago, I began to receive e-mail from strangers, almost all of them perfectly reasonable and well-mannered sorts, who wanted to get in touch with me for one reason or another. I was unable to respond to all of this e-mail without its having a detrimental effect on my work, and so I posted a Web page explaining that I did not have time to answer all of my e-mail. To my astonishment, this actually increased the amount of e-mail that I received. All of it began with some variation on the phrase ``I have read your Web page explaining why you don't answer unsolicited e-mail, but I think you'll make an exception in my case because...'' Consequently, I had to post another web page reiterating what the first one had said, somewhat more forcefully.
Not long after, I saw myself referred to somewhere as "reclusive."
Now, since I live in a crowded neighborhood in a populous city and socialize with people every day, and frequently take part in parties, dinners, etc., I found it very strange that I should be characterized in this way. I do like to have a fair bit of time to myself each day, so that I can get work done. But outside of that, I am quite sociable. If anything, I am one of the least reclusive persons I know. Clearly, the person who had tagged me as ``reclusive'' was responding to my Web page in which I explained why I could not respond to unsolicited e-mail.
For a while it was difficult for me to understand how this could be confused with reclusivity. Then I had a sort of epiphany, as follows. I walked into a friend's house where a television set happened to be on. It was tuned to one of the all-news channels such as CNN, MSNBC, or FOX (there is no point in my specifying which network exactly). This occurred during the build-up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Beyond that story, of course, much else was going on: a nuclear standoff in North Korea, global climate change, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and countless other stories that ought to be covered by the all-news channels but are ignored. The particular news item that filled the screen when I entered the room was that today was the fifty-third birthday of Richard Dean Anderson.
For those of you who are reading this in the distant future, I should explain that there once was a broadcast medium called television, and on it appeared serialized dramas called TV shows, and one of those shows was called MacGyver; by this point (early 2003) it had been defunct for some years, however Richard Dean Anderson had been its lead actor, and the fact of his reaching 53 years of age was deemed worthy of a few moments' screen time by this particular all-news channel.
This is not to be read as criticism of Mr. Anderson. If he saw this news item on the TV, he was probably as taken aback as I was. Rather, it is to make a point about how our culture assigns priorities to current events. A society in which news about an impending war is interrupted to announce the birthday of an actor, will categorize as reclusive a man, of a normal level of sociability, who posts a Web page explaining why he does not have sufficient time to answer all of his unsolicited e-mail.
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09:58 / 2013-03-25)
Why I am a Bad Correspondent
by Neal Stephenson
Writers who do not make themselves totally available to everyone, all the time, are frequently tagged with the "recluse" label. While I do not consider myself a recluse, I have found it necessary to place some limits on my direct interactions with individual readers. These limits most often come into play when people send me letters or e-mail, and also when I am invited to speak publicly. This document is a sort of form letter explaining why I am the way I am.
When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.
All of this seems perfectly reasonable---I should know, since I have had these feelings myself! But it turns out to be a bad idea. To begin with, a novel has roughly the same relationship to a conversation with the author, as a movie does to the actors in it. A movie represents many person-years of work distilled into two hours, and so everything sounds and looks perfect. But if you have ever met a movie actor in person, you know that they are not quite as dazzling and witty (or as tall) as the figures they play in movies. This seems obvious but it always comes as a bit of a letdown anyway.
Likewise, a novel represents years of hard work distilled into a few hundred pages, with all (or at least most) of the bad ideas cut out and thrown away, and the good ideas polished and refined as much as possible. Interacting with an author in person is nothing like reading his novels. Just about everyone who gets an opportunity to meet with an author in person ends up feeling mildly let down, and in some cases, grievously disappointed.
Authors are participants in a kind of colloquy that joins together all literate persons, and so it seems only reasonable that they should from time to time stop writing fiction for a few hours or days, and attend public events, such as conventions, signings, panels, seminars, etc., where they should exchange ideas with other authors and with other members of society. Therefore, authors such as myself frequently receive invitations to do exactly that.
Letters or e-mail from readers, and invitations to speak in public, might seem like very different things. In fact they are points on a common continuum; they have more in common than is obvious at first. The e-mail message from the reader, and the invitation to speak at a conference, are both requests (in most cases, polite and absolutely reasonable requests) for the author to interact directly with readers.
Normally, my only interaction with readers is to go to a Fedex drop box every couple of years and throw in the manuscript of a completed novel. It seems reasonable enough to ask for a little bit more than that! After all, the time commitment is very small: a few minutes tapping out an e-mail message, or a day trip to a conference to speak.
For some authors, this works, but in my case, it doesn't. There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can't concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can't do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.
That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can't do both; the first one obliterates the second.
Another factor in this choice is that writing fiction every day seems to be an essential component in my sustaining good mental health. If I get blocked from writing fiction, I rapidly become depressed, and extremely unpleasant to be around. As long as I keep writing it, though, I am fit to be around other people. So all of the incentives point in the direction of devoting all available hours to fiction writing.
I am not proud of the fact that some of my e-mail goes unanswered as a result. It is never my intention to be rude or to give well-meaning readers the cold shoulder. If I were a commercial best-seller, I would have enough money to hire a staff to look after my correspondence. As it is, my books are bought by enough people to provide me with a sort of middle-class lifestyle, but not enough to hire employees, and so I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent.
--nts
(
09:57 / 2013-03-25)
As economist David Rosenberg has noted, if recent decades have taught investors anything, it is that every time the Federal Reserve drives interest rates to negative levels after inflation, it creates a bubble that subsequently bursts. As part of this painful learning experience, investors have become at least somewhat practiced in identifying bubbles within individual sectors – technology, housing, and debt, for example. The problem, in my view, is that the present bubble is systemic – with short-term interest rates at zero, the prospective returns of nearly every asset class, looking out over a 5-7 year horizon, is also close to zero. Equity investors, in particular, don’t see it because part of this bubble is captured in profit margins rather than in prices
(
06:50 / 2013-03-25)
While it is impossible for the economy as a whole to “rotate” out of bonds and into stocks – since both must be held in exactly the amount that has been issued – global central banks have already forced a “rotation” by the public out of Treasury bonds and into far more zero-interest money than they would ever voluntarily hold
(
06:49 / 2013-03-25)
One of the striking things about the late-1990’s bubble was that even investment professionals who should have known better were swept into New Economy thinking. To some extent, the same dynamic is true today – even among some investors whom I greatly admire.
(
06:43 / 2013-03-25)
the EU imposing massive losses on depositors in order to protect lenders in an unstable banking system where Cyprus is the iceberg’s tip
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06:42 / 2013-03-25)
the 2000-2002 decline wiped out 6 years of S&P 500 total returns in excess of T-bills, and that the 2007-2009 decline wiped out 14 years of excess returns
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06:38 / 2013-03-25)
brooding on the vast Abyss. Milton's "brooding" is a better translation of the Hebrew than the familiar "moved upon the face of the waters" of the Authorized version of Genesis 1:2.
(
19:27 / 2013-03-24)
the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought [ 215 ]
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.
(
19:51 / 2013-02-08)
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation
(
00:17 / 2012-12-24)
If then his Providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil; [ 165 ]
Which oft times may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, if I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from thir destind aim
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00:09 / 2012-12-24)
There the companions of his fall, o'rewhelm'd
With Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,
He soon discerns, and weltring by his side
One next himself in power, and next in crime
(
23:18 / 2012-12-23)
brooding on the vast Abyss. Milton's "brooding" is a better translation of the Hebrew than the familiar "moved upon the face of the waters" of the Authorized version of Genesis 1:2.
(
23:03 / 2012-12-23)
Drought. Notwithstanding relatively plentiful average rainfall, the prairie peninsula suffers from severe drought 50 to 200 percent more often than the surrounding forests.
Dry season. In contrast to forest regions, which have relatively uniform precipitation throughout the year, the prairie peninsula is noticeably drier in late fall and winter.
High ratio of evaporation to precipitation. A key insight of Transeau's, this one gets a little technical, but the main idea is that despite abundant rain, plants dry out faster in the prairie peninsula due to wind, temperature, and so on.
Flat terrain. The prairie offered few natural barriers and particularly--you see where I'm going with this--few natural firebreaks.
Lightning. After Florida and the Gulf Coast, the prairie peninsula has electrical storms more often than any other region in the U.S.
Fire. There seems little question that recurring fire promoted by periodic dry spells was the central formative feature of the prairie. How the majority of fires got started remains a matter of debate. Native Americans evidently torched the prairie frequently to create more desirable grazing land for game. Other blazes were started by lightning, which often struck the highest thing around, namely the trees. Whatever their cause, the fires were certainly dramatic, racing across the prairie at speeds of up to 15 to 20 kilometers per hour and incinerating vast tracts. Forests were slow to recover from the destruction, but prairie grasses, whose seeds and buds remained cool a few inches below the scorched surface, were back the next year. Grasses, in short, thrived because they were better adapted to the stressful prairie environment than trees, surviving everything except civilization's appetite for arable land.
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07:49 / 2013-03-22)
Except it's not that simple, you knuckleheads. True, the plains themselves--anything west of Omaha, say--are too arid to support trees. But that doesn't explain the "prairie peninsula." By this we mean the immense wedge of grassland that extends eastward from the Great Plains through Iowa and Illinois, over parts of Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin, and into western Indiana, with isolated patches in Michigan and Ohio. In terms of average annual rainfall, this area, or at least the eastern end of it, doesn't differ significantly from the regions to the immediate north, south, and east, which prior to European settlement were dense woods. Trees can and do grow in the peninsula--the Illinois prairie, for example, was originally 30 percent trees, mostly clustered along riverbanks and in scattered groves. The rest, though, consisted of grasses reaching 10 to 12 feet in height, and for that reason the region is classified as tallgrass prairie, the characteristic grassland east of the 98th meridian.
(
07:48 / 2013-03-22)
His book is also, to a quite extraordinary degree, free of rancour: he very rarely speaks of ill of anyone, including the ‘enemy’. Despite the horrors that he witnessed and experienced, he evidently never lost his ability to perceive the humanity of others, his jailors and captors not excluded. This too must be considered a remarkable quality in a book about the First World War: this was, after all, a time when most European writers were scarcely able to appreciate the humanity of people outside their own class, let alone their nation.
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10:45 / 2013-03-19)
‘After this I couldn’t write in my journal for about a year. In the first place opportunities were hard to find. Apart from that I had to tear up many of my notes for fear that they would be found; I re-wrote some of them later; but I couldn’t with some. You [the reader] mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that the diary that I’ve referred to so far, and which I’ll refer to again, was my original diary (156). After the surrender at Kut, I ripped apart my diary, tore the pages into pieces, and stuffed them into my boots; using those scraps I filled out a new journal later – in Baghdad. This journal was also ruined when I crossed the Tigris on foot. But the writing wasn’t all wiped off, because I had used a copying pencil. I dried the book and used it for my notes of the march from Samarra to Ras al-‘Ain. At Ras al-‘Ain I had to bury the diary for a while but it didn’t suffer much damage. In the infirmary at Aleppo I wrote it out again. (157)’
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10:44 / 2013-03-19)
India’s literary silence about the First World War is especially notable because this great conflict was an enormously fecund subject for soldiers of other nations. In England, France, Germany and elsewhere it generated enormous amounts of writing, of many sorts. Yet even in this vast corpus On to Baghdad commands a place of special notice, and not only because it happens to be one of the few such accounts written by an Indian. Sisir’s memoir is also one of the relatively few accounts to be written not by an officer, but by a low-ranking private, (the greatest of all First World War memoirs, Erich Maria’s Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front, was another).
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10:43 / 2013-03-19)
Both Dan Carlin and Lazlo Montgomery have now said, (mildly paraphrasing) "I cannot stress enough how complicated the period of the Punic Wars/Three Kingdoms was, with the names, dates, battles, factions, politicians, generals..." This is total bullshit. *Every* period of history is as complicated as any other period, every *moment* of history is as intricate as any other moment. Just because, thanks to chance we have more evidence from one than another doesn't make them more complicated. As James Burke said in his interview by Dan Carlin, "I don't think there was ever a 'dark age'." There really isn't an era where people stopped expanding the complexity of their interactions with each other and their environment, within the scope of their world views. I.e., today it's very much a social force to question the status quo and invent new things, good or bad, whereas that particular more wasn't present a thousand years ago, but other societal lenses were in full force compelling people's intricate interactions.
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16:19 / 2013-03-17)
About 願, Stegall points out that it is not far from the etymology of the english word for it: ‘petition (n.): early 14c., "a supplication or prayer, especially to a deity," from Old French peticion "request, petition" (12c., Modern French pétition) and directly from Latin petitionem (nom. petitio) "a blow, thrust, attack, aim; a seeking, searching," in law "a claim, suit," noun of action from pp. stem of petere "to make for, go to; attack, assail; seek, strive after; ask for, beg, beseech, request; fetch; derive; demand, require," from PIE root *pet-, also *pete- "to rush; to fly" (cf. Sanskrit pattram "wing, feather, leaf," patara- "flying, fleeting;" Hittite pittar "wing;" Greek piptein "to fall," potamos "rushing water," pteryx "wing;" Old English feðer "feather;" Latin penna "feather, wing;" Old Church Slavonic pero "feather;" Old Welsh eterin "bird"). Meaning "formal written request to a superior (earthly)" is attested from early 15c.’
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19:34 / 2013-02-04)
I would like to write a complete math library for Clojure or Racket---or even a C-embeddable language like Lua or Guile or Chicken Scheme---using Eigen, FFTW, et al., and run it on something like BareMetal OS.
(
13:05 / 2013-02-04)
Have I mentioned kanji is awesome: 願 = # 143 in Heisig's 6th edition. It means "petition". Left sub-kanji = "meadow", right sub-kanji = "page"---so my visual story is I'm getting thousands of signatures for more meadows, standing in a meadow, and my pages go flying in the cool spring breeze. 19 strokes are easy to write when you've built up each module component: "meadow" = cliff+spring; "spring"=white+water; "page"=one+drop+money; and "money"=eye+legs. (And of course "white"=drop+sun!). Truly one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life.
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20:27 / 2013-02-01)
My Amazon wishlist has become another way to explore snapshots, threads of topics. A lot of oral poetry and Japanese and Chinese studies, before which are much Borges, Tolkien, Old Norse, ...
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07:44 / 2012-11-24)
Well, it didn't take long to be sidelined and swamped with culture and language. As these notes show.
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14:35 / 2012-11-09)
Was sidelined by the mostly fabulous book by Dunn, "The Wild Life of our Bodies" and at the same time in smaller portions Katz's "The Art of Fermentation" and Zimmer's "Parasite Rex" (reading in Safari on iPad and clipping via email). All three, along with blogs and journalistic articles on e.g., Toxoplasma gondii, are boosting my interest in microbiology and biochemistry. I am digging into Goodsell's books including "The Machinery of Life" and Feynman's "Lectures on Physics", and Yoonhee suggested "Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple" (related to the "Clinical Biochemistry ..."), which I have obtained. I note now that the previous (i)--(iii) have been temporarily sidelined, especially with practical matters like Katz's book.
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10:11 / 2012-09-10)
(i) Netting on smallholding householders, (ii) Yu's and Waley's translations of Journey to the West, and (iii) Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. Heliand is hard to get, and Moyashimon is (for now) edutainment.
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14:20 / 2012-08-20)
'He had little interest in creating instruments of government and as a result he left behind a throne that stood on very weak supports. Nine years after his death, his son Humayun was driven out of India by Sher Shah Suri ... Sher Shah created a bureaucratic and administrative machine of extraordinary complexity ... on his death in 1545 he left behind a sound administrative infrastructure. Ten years later Humayun invaded northern India and conquered Delhi once' --- and inherited this infrastructure?
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14:37 / 2013-03-14)
His fifth and final campaign was launched in October 1525. It had a characteristically light-hearted beginning: "We mostly drank and had morning draughts on drinking days". Between marches Babur and his nobles wrote poetry, collected obscene jokes, and gave chase to the occasional rhinoceros.
(
12:20 / 2013-03-14)
His nineteenth year proves to be a hard one: "During this period in Tashkent I endured much hardship and misery. I had no realm - and no hope of any realm - to rule. Most of my liege men had departed. The few who were left were too wretched to move about with me... Finally I had had all I could take of homelessness and alienation. 'With such difficulties,' I said to myself, 'it would be better to go off on my own so long as I am alive, and with such deprivation and wretchedness it would be better for me to go off to wherever my feet will carry me, even to the ends of the earth.'" But in the end, stoically, he resigns himself to the difficult business of finding a realm: "When one has pretensions to rule and a desire for conquest, one cannot sit back and just watch if events don't go right once or twice." Eventually his perseverance paid off. In 1504, 'at the beginning of my twenty-third year (when) I first put a razor to my face', moving ever southward, staying one step ahead of the Uzbeks, he stumbles upon the kingdom of Kabul and decides to seize it for himself
(
12:10 / 2013-03-14)
perhaps, in these accelerated times, it won't be long before most Americans begin to long for an escape from the imprisonment of absolute power.
(
10:56 / 2013-03-14)
many in the British political establishment were so dismayed by the buildup to the Iraq war. They know all too well that an aura of legitimacy and consent is essential in matters of empire.
(
10:53 / 2013-03-14)
The military power of the United States is so overwhelming that it has caused America's leaders to forget that the imperial project rests on two pillars. Weaponry is only the first and most obvious of these; the other is persuasion. When the empire was in British hands, its rulers paid almost as much attention to this second pillar as to the first. Its armies were often accompanied by an enormously energetic apparatus of persuasion, which included educational institutions, workshops, media outlets, printing houses, and so on. British teachers, doctors, civil servants, and other functionaries spent long periods living in Indian towns and villages, while soldiers were generally contained within barracks.
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10:52 / 2013-03-14)
Many believe that displays of military might are always erased or offset by countervailing forces of resistance. But those who are accustomed to the exercise of power know otherwise. They know that power can be used to redirect the forces of resistance.
In the case of the 1857 uprising, the truth is that the reigning power's brutal response resulted in some significant changes in Indian political life. Britain's overwhelming victory was instrumental in persuading a majority of Indians that it was futile to oppose the empire with an armed struggle. This consensus led many in the next generation of anti-colonialists to turn in a more parliamentary and constitutionalist direction, and was the necessary backdrop to Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of nonviolent resistance.
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10:51 / 2013-03-14)
In fact, if John Minford's cultural lens for translating the I Ching (Yì Jīng) is Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker, tales of far future with fragmented memories of greater long agos, of nuclear war and environmental collapse, then mine might be the importance of intricacies, the complexity of events that stretches and ripples like the ocean surface, of John Keegan's "Face of Battle", of contingency and surprise.
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10:44 / 2013-03-13)
This reminds me of something I thought of when listening to the China History Podcast on the Three Kingdoms period, where Lazlo Montgomery kept emphasizing how intricate that time was and how many characters there were, etc., to which I could only think, *every* time period is like that, with just as many people and happenings and breathtaking unpredictable outcomes as this---it's just that they haven't been attested. Just as Albanian might be traceable to thousands of years ago but was only written down (as far as we know) 500 years ago.
(Lazlo's ignorance of the Halo Effect sometimes bugs me.)
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10:41 / 2013-03-13)
Languages are continuously evolving over time, and probably most languages, even conservative ones, require special training in order for modern speakers to fully understand older texts. In the final analysis, most modern languages are equally young.
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09:58 / 2013-03-13)
In 3200 BC, there were many, many languages spoken besides Sumerian and Egyptian, but they weren't fortunate enough to have a writing system. These languages are just as old. To take one interesting case, the Albanian language (spoken north of Greece) was not written down until about the 15th century AD, yet Ptolemy mentions the people in the first century BC.* The linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that Albanians were a distinct people for even longer than that. So Albanian has probably existed for several millennia, but has only been written down for 500 years. With a twist of fate, Albanian might be considered very "old" and Greek pretty "new".
*See An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages by Philip Baldi.
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09:56 / 2013-03-13)
When recently asked "Do I speak GAME BOY?" all I could think was "No, but I speak BUFFY (The Vampire Slayer)." Actually both the U.S. Game Boy generation and myself speak English, but we do have different vocabularies from other people reflecting our experiences with gaming and watching cult television. Our world views and thinking processes may even be slightly different, but we still express it in some form of English. The changes in English that happen in younger generations use the same processes that have happened in Latin, Byzantine Greek and Old English. It's just new to us!
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09:54 / 2013-03-13)
Because the process is automated, parents are not well able to overtly correct their children. When they try, children are typically confused and ignore the correction, but months later parents will notice that the error has been fixed.
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09:53 / 2013-03-13)
Language acquisition, on the other hand, is an automated process in which children (starting at infancy and ending at about the age of 3-4), process the speech they hear from adults and construct their own internal grammar of the language. When the internal process is done, the language has been acquired.
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09:52 / 2013-03-13)
I think the best comment on how language taste functions is the following - "People who don't like the sound of German have never heard Marlene Dietrich speak it."
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09:51 / 2013-03-13)
The important point is that no matter what historical stage a human language is in, it has the same level of complexity as in other eras. Even if a portion of the grammar is simplified, another becomes more complex.
(
09:50 / 2013-03-13)
Some quotes about Albania/ns, by foreign Historians and travelers, who actually spend time in the Country.
“They are strewn with the wreckage of dead Empires–past Powers–only the Albanian “goes on for ever.”
- Edith Durham
“The true history of mankind will be written only when Albanians participate in it’s writing.”
-Maximilian Lambertz
“In 3200 BC, there were many, many languages spoken besides Sumerian and Egyptian, but they were not fortunate enough to have a writing system. These languages are just as old. To take one interesting case, the Albanian language (spoken north of Greece) was not written down until about the 15th century AD, yet Ptolemy mentions the people in the first century BC.* The linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that Albanians were a distinct people for even longer than that. So Albanian has probably existed for several millennia, but has only been written down for 500 years. With a twist of fate, Albanian might be considered very “old” and Greek pretty “new”.
-Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Linguistic PhD
“The men who marched to Babylon , Persia and India were the ancestors of the Albanians…”
-Wadham Peacook
“There is a spirit of independence and a love of their country, in the whole people, that, in a great measure, does away the vast distinction, observable in other parts of Turkey, between the followers of the two religions. For when the natives of other provinces, upon being asked who they are, will say, “we are Turks”(meaning muslim) or, “we are christians”, a man of this country answers, ” I am an Albanian”
-J. C. Hobhouse Brughton, A Journey Through Albania 1809-1810
“They may be only soldiers, but never let them get close to your plate, and don’t make them kneel before you, if you don’t intend to decapitate them.
- Pasha Sulejman the Lightened
“…isn’t the Albanian, who, being a slave, did not allow enslavement, freedom-loving? This is a question that could hardly be understood by anyone who has not lived in Albania. The most liberty-loving people in the Balkans is the Albanian people. The Albanian, taken alone, as an individual, is an anarchist by nature. He would brook no bondage let alone on his people, he would not let anything, seen as possibly humiliating, befall his house. The Albanian house stands alone and apart from the rest…”
– Description from a brilliant Bulgarian observer and connoisseur of Albania. (1924)
“Land of Albania, where Iskander rose,
Theme of the young, and beacon of the wise,
And he, his namesake, whose oft-baffled foes
Shrunk from his deeds of chivalrous emprize.
Land of Albania, let me bend my eyes
On thee, though rugged nurse of savage men!
Where is the foe that ever saw their back? …..”
– Lord Byron in “Child Harold’s Pilgrimage”
You should also check out this book:
The Albanians: An Ethnic History from Prehistoric Times to the Present
By, Edwin E. Jacques
(
09:46 / 2013-03-13)
“I wondered what would happen if the siren would go on Wednesday,” says Galjaard. “I discovered that you’d just have to go home and put on your television and hope that nothing happens.”
(
09:45 / 2013-03-13)
This is I think why dinosaurs are so popular among kids. They are mythic creatures, that once used to roam the earth and seas and skies---or did they? (Mythic canvas.)
(
13:34 / 2013-03-12)
Rohrer has watched the clip, and he believes that Ji only pretended to throw the drive. “I think that each of these videos is just a staged bit to serve as misdirection about where Chain World actually is,” Rohrer says. His tone is one of bemused, distanced curiosity, not concern.
(
09:04 / 2013-03-12)
“It’s literally a burden to have this thing, which I think is true of a lot of holy artifacts,” he said in early April while still in Hawaii. “I want to get rid of it.”
(
09:04 / 2013-03-12)
Now people weren’t just creating unpredictable stories within the game, they were building new myths around this game.
(
09:04 / 2013-03-12)
The point of this great quote is that creators of entities like religions will likely get annoyed by what ensues. Very Pratchettian.
(
09:03 / 2013-03-12)
“This was totally not something I would have wanted to happen at all,” Rohrer says. “On the other hand, it’s interesting that [Ji] would take something that I had done and irritate me with it.”
(
09:02 / 2013-03-12)
Rohrer said that he had been player one, the first to leave a mark on Chain World. “I had one of the most heartbreaking and poignant deaths, way too soon, that I’ve ever experienced in a videogame,” he said. “And my child, who was sitting there, was in tears, and he wanted to tear this out of the back of my computer and stomp on it. ‘We didn’t do anything for them! We didn’t leave anything for them to discover!’” He sighed. “So, someone in the audience is going to get to be player … two,” Rohrer said
(
09:02 / 2013-03-12)
He wanted his game to encourage players to contemplate the monuments of those gods
(
09:02 / 2013-03-12)
How do you make a videogame that, in some sense, is a religion, especially if you’re an atheist? Rohrer began by defining the sort of spiritual practice that interested him, which had to do with the physical mysteries of everyday human experience. Rohrer spoke about his late grandfather, a colorful man who served as mayor of a small town in Ohio and left behind a legacy that soon turned into legends—the house he had built and the interstate whose path he had altered, forcing it to swerve around his town. (“It’s like my grandfather’s dogleg,” Rohrer said, putting up a slide of a bend in I-77.) In Rohrer’s family, these physical places had been turned into shrines of a sort. “We become like gods to those who come after us,” Rohrer told the crowd.
(
09:01 / 2013-03-12)
“Fani Popova-Mutafova was the most prominent of the few writers of historical fiction, and among the most prolific and published women authors of the interwar period. By 1944 she had published twenty-six books – historical novels, short stories and legends – some of which underwent several editions. Historical topics played such an important role in her oeuvre because, as she once said:
“‘the historical past, and the past of the Bulgarian people in particular, has always impressed my imagination with its interesting ways of life, not typical of our times, with its picturesque costumes and the peculiar colour of the epoch.20’
“It is not by chance that she turned to history and mostly to the Bulgarian medieval past. To understand this we should imagine the social and political situation in Bulgaria after World War I. Bulgaria was among the defeated states that had been treated severely by the victors. The ideal of ‘national unification’, which had claimed so many victims and caused so much suffering, was destroyed. The humiliating defeat led to intellectual pessimism and worry about the future of the country.21 The atmosphere was fertile soil for the spread of leftist visions about society and for the discrediting of nationalist projects. The past became the only refuge for a wounded national pride, and was a source of reassurance. As Georgi Nokov wrote in 1930:
“‘No literary genre to date equals the success of her historical
novels, chronicles and novelettes. This is due to a large extent to
the despair and discouragement that the treaty of Neuille brought upon
us, with its cruel provisions that aimed not only tohurt but even to
kill our national consciousness.22’”
“Fani Popova-Mutafova took the theme for this novel from The History of the Byzantine Empire by Charles Lebeaux, who wrote:
“‘Boril did not have children and gave Henry the daughter of his predecessor Ioanikii (Kaloian) for a wife; thus the French saw the daughter of their biggest enemy become an empress of their empire, and for that reason some historians accused her of poisoning her husband Henry on 11 June 1216, because she harboured in her heart the hatred against the French that her father Ioanikii (Kaloian) taught her.24’
“She turned this short, dry historical reference into a vivid and dramatic narration of a piece of Bulgarian history, with three main focuses: the Bulgarian king Boril in Turnovo, Kaloian’s daughter Maria, and the (crusaders’) Latin empire and its emperor in Constantinople. The main message of the novel is to praise the patriotic feelings of the Bulgarian princess Maria, who sacrificed her love and life in the service of her people.”
‘The heroic and patriotic pathos of her historical novels and stories combines perfectly with her erudition and systematic study of historical data and sources: Bulgarian, Byzantine and West European. She not only studied the available historical sources very carefully but draws in details of everyday life that make her novels read like a panorama of life in thirteenth-century Bulgaria and Byzantium. This passion for details, for the minutiae of everyday life, and the combination of the romantic and the realistic, made critics compare her works to those of Sir Walter Scott, not least because of the pleasure derived from reading them.’
‘Patriotic as they are, Fani Popova-Mutafova’s historical epics are far from simple nationalism.’
‘Although not a university-educated historian, Fani Popova-Mutafova was considered a professional historian by ordinary readers and academic scholars both before and after 1944.29 She immersed herself in the past and collected every single document, even if it only contained a few words about the time, people or places she was depicting. She investigated the historical facts included in her novels and tried to give them a proper interpretation, presenting them from various points of view. Fani Popova-Mutafova was a true social historian at a time when social history did not exist as an academic field in Bulgaria, and she made great efforts to reconstruct everyday life both of the elite and of common people in the thirteenth century.’
‘as the well-known Bulgarian intellectuals Professor Stefan Mladenov and Kiril Hristov pointed out, Fani Popova-Mutafova was not content to place her heroes in the narrow frames of the Bulgarian, Balkan or even Latin-Byzantine history, but looked for a comparative European context.’
‘The first current is the so-called narodo-psykhologia or folk psychology, inspired by the German Volkspsychologie, which essentialised ‘typical traits’ and ‘mentalities’ of the people. Bulgarians in the past, according to this vision, possessed many virtues: they were brave, courageous, strong and daring and at the same time trustful to the point of being naïve and credulous. These latter qualities were manipulated by the diabolical Other for the Bulgarians in the Middle Ages: the Byzantine empire. In fact, many Bulgarian male academic scholars (Professor Petur Mutafchiev is a case in point34) made a lot of the devastating role of ‘Byzantinism’ in Bulgarian medieval history.’
‘The second major influence in her philosophy of Bulgarian history texts is eugenics. To make a clear distinction, she was an advocate of positive eugenics, that is, measures for promoting nativity and health, rather than negative eugenics (sterilisation, and other measures dear to the Nazis).’ — Fani is not a Nazi!!! the writer cries.
‘Fani Popova-Mutafova warned that increasing involvement of women in the paid labour force would cause serious decline in fertility and natality. She linked the question of fertility to debates on population size and its relation to national strength.’ — And we have seen that industrializing countries correlate perfectly with declining birthrates.
‘During the 1920s and 1930s the Bulgarian governments (following German examples) actually adopted several laws aimed at the improvement of the situation of women, but they were ineffective, as small-peasant Bulgaria could not emulate the western welfare state and its provisions.’
‘“women who were driven by strong, hardly suppressed emotions”’
“Those who had praised Bulgarian medieval history, especially the early epoch of the proto-Bulgarian khans before the establishment of the Bulgarian medieval state, and who had ‘underestimated’ the role of the Slav component in the formation of the Bulgarian nation, were considered ‘racists’”
‘Ninety-eight people were sentenced alongside Fani Popova-Mutafova, fourteen to death.’ — So again we see that this great tragedy mainly affected very few people, partly explaining why the masses didn’t rise up against this minor oppression.
“the annual report of GLAVLITfor 1955, which states: ‘it would be unjust to claim that all Fani Popova-Mutafova’s works are dangerous’.”
‘intellectuals and authors like Popova-Mutafova continued to live in isolation, without prospects for a better future, unless they agreed to collaborate with the regime or at least stated publicly that they accepted Marxist ideology, and adopted ‘socialist realism’ as their literary style.’
‘Expressing one’s ideas in Aesopian language was quite common in the East European literary process under communism.’
‘Throughout her life Fani Popova-Mutafova believed that she was serving her people and her country.’ — God save us from these people.
‘the situation of a defeated Bulgaria after World War I, with its thwarted national dreams and expectations’
(
11:13 / 2013-03-09)
"I do not intend to defend or accuse the woman’s emancipation as Emmeline Pankhurst wanted it or as it is today. This emancipation was a necessity and a historical fact, which is almost over and which shows us already its assets and liabilities: gaining economic independence and political rights but losing the right to a joyful motherhood, to a warm house, losing the feeling of being protected by a father-figure, that have been won with enormous effort during so many years of civilisation.1"
(
08:58 / 2013-03-09)
'Fani Popova-Mutafova’s ideas clashed with
the more advanced emancipatory ideas of the movement for women’s
emancipation in Bulgaria between 1918 and 1944.7
Her traditionalism
becomes perhaps more understandable when set in the context of the
situation after World War I, from which Bulgaria emerged as a defeated
country. Her anxiety about the future of the Bulgarian nation was in tune
with the new nationalism that developed in the 1930s. Taking demographic data as a starting point,8
she warned about the danger of the
population decline when ‘there will be no Bulgarian people in the Balkan
Peninsula and it won’t be necessary for some foreign invader to conquer
us with weapons’.9
She insisted that the issues of women’s struggles for
more rights were not only women’s issues but were also closely related to
the socio-economic development and the need to strengthen the nation.'
(
08:53 / 2013-03-09)
'Fani Popova-Mutafova’s life spanned two epochs – the ‘bourgeois’
epoch prior to World War II, and the communist era. While she was
celebrated as one of the best and most productive writers and intellectuals in interwar Bulgaria, the communist regime pronounced her a
‘people’s enemy’, held her responsible for ‘Great-Bulgarian chauvinism
and fascism’, banned and destroyed her books and ruined her life. The
story of her life is embedded in several decades of Bulgarian intellectual
life and besides giving an idea of a woman writer’s existence there at that
time reveals wider sociopolitical and ideological contexts'
(
08:52 / 2013-03-09)
The article explores the life and professional activities of Fanny Popova–Mutafova – the most prominent of the few writers of historical fiction in Bulgaria and one of the most prolific and published Bulgarian women authors of the interwar period. Her life spanned two epochs – the ‘bourgeois’ epoch prior to World War II, and that of the communist regime. While she was celebrated as one of the best and most productive writers and intellectuals in Bulgaria before 1944, the communist regime pronounced her ‘a people’s enemy’, held her responsible for ‘Great–Bulgarian chauvinism and fascism’, banned and destroyed her books and ruined her life. The story of her life is embedded in several decades of Bulgarian intellectual life and, besides giving an idea of a woman writer’s existence there at that time, reveals wider sociopolitical and ideological contexts in which various discourses affecting Bulgarian women were articulated.
(
08:50 / 2013-03-09)
Military history was too loaded a subject, loaded with questions of national unity, of national survival, of dynastic prestige, for any German to feel ultimate detachment about it; and without a measure of intellectual detachment, of course, any historian is bound to become either an obscurantist or a publicist
(
09:49 / 2013-03-07)
our limited conception of military-historical controversy... It does not comprehend questions about whether or not, by better military judgment, we might still govern ourselves from our national capital — as it does for the Germans; whether or not we might have avoided four years of foreign occupation — as it does for the French; whether or not we might have saved the lives of 20 millions of our fellow countrymen — as it does for the Russians. Had we to face questions like that, were military history not for us a success story, our military historiography would doubtless bear all the marks of circumscription, over-technicality, bombast, personal vilification, narrow xenophobia and inelegant style which, separately or in combination, disfigure — to our eyes — the work of French, German and Russian writers.
(
09:47 / 2013-03-07)
The commander, for efficiency's sake, must visualize the events and parties of the battle in fairly abstract terms: of 'attack' and 'counter-attack', of the 'Heavy Brigade', or the 'Guard Corps'... For soldiers, battle takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment... 'Battle', for the ordinary soldier, is a very small-scale situation which will throw up its own leaders and will be fought by its own rules — alas, often by its own ethics.
(
09:45 / 2013-03-07)
'win' or 'lose' — the concepts through which a commander and his chronicler approach a battle — are by no means the same as those through which his men will view their own involvement in it.
(
09:44 / 2013-03-07)
A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbruck in Germany, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain, and an English follower of his, Lt-Colonel AH Burne, proposed the applicability of a principle he had tested on every major English battlefield (Inherent Military Probability) and which, used with circumspection, is a rewarding as well as intriguine concept — the solution of an obscurity by an estimate of what a trained soldier would have done in the circumstances.
(
09:38 / 2013-03-06)
This is very Abelian sandpile. You can know exactly the cause of massive perturbations and can even predict short-term perturbation variances, yet be completely helpless despite such knowledge.
(
16:33 / 2013-03-06)
Growth in gross domestic investment has already turned lower, and while employment growth doesn’t move in lock-step, it’s fair to say that investment growth is moving in the wrong direction if job creation is an objective of economic policy.
(
16:32 / 2013-03-06)
Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx, recently observed “The only thing that’s correlated 100% with job creation – and particularly good job creation – is business investment. It’s our reduced level of capital investment that has produced our low GDP growth rates and our high unemployment.”
Well, the correlation isn’t quite 100%, but his point is accurate
(
16:32 / 2013-03-06)
Attempts to “stimulate” the economy by suppressing savings and increase consumption, or by pursuing “beggar thy neighbor” exchange rate policies are weak options compared to policies that encourage productive investment, research, and development. A nation’s “standard of living” is reflected by the amount of goods and services that its people can consume as a result of their efforts. A nation’s “productivity” is reflected by the amount of goods and services that its people can produce as a result of their efforts. Ultimately, one cannot increase for long without the other. Robust domestic investment provides the foundation for both.
(
16:30 / 2013-03-06)
the "paradox of thrift" and the Keynesian response to recession (government deficit spending) both rely on the assumption that gross domestic investment is fixed despite a desired increase in private saving. Stimulate real investment, and the paradox of thrift vanishes. As a result, sustained government deficits become unnecessary.
(
16:29 / 2013-03-06)
“the really Byzantine version of the story. In it, Alexander is not a Hellenic king, but the ideal Byzantine emperor, with the qualities of a basileus kosmokrator, a righteous ruler of a kingdom where the sun never sets”
(
19:33 / 2013-03-03)
‘Using Keegan’s methodology of investigating primary sources, and cross-referencing with what we know from other battles, this study will deduce what we can about the battle of Beroia in 1122 AD.’
‘The fixed formation of the Byzantines is also suggested by the fact that John was riding up and down the lines with his bodyguard of Varangians (axe-bearing heavy infantry from Britain, who in this and other battles seem to have acted like dragoons in that they dismounted for combat)...’
“John Birkenmeier has noted that this account presents historiographical problems, as it perfectly mirrors the battle of Adrianople in AD 476, where the Goths’ war wagons defeated the Emperor Valens. Birkenmeier suggests that Anna’s knowledge of the classics caused her to write her account of Dristra in this way so that, despite the defeat, Alexios ‘would gain some amount of reflexive glory from the allusive comparison of his deeds with those of Valens, an emperor from a time of greater imperial power’. This is very unlikely as no Emperor would want to be equated with the loser of Adrianople. Thus I will treat Anna’s account, which blames Alexios’ army’s failure to breach the wagon laager for the defeat, as being largely truthful.”
“Choniates says, ‘whenever the Roman phalanxes were hard pressed by the enemy falling furiously around them, he would look upon the icon of the Θεοτόκος, wailing loudly and gesturing pitifully, and shed tears hotter than the sweat of battle’.”
“There is, however, one incident during the battle that shows a slight wavering of this will to fight and could have meant a repeat of Dristra. When John ordered the assault upon the laager, Kinnamos notes that ‘the Romans did not agree to this’ and that therefore John ‘ordered the axe-bearers round him (of)…/the British nation’ and went himself. Meanwhile, Choniates praises John for not only giving cunning orders, but also being the first to carry them out. ... If Kinnamos is correct, we can imagine the scene of the army commanders, relieved that they had weathered the Pecheneg storm, who were then ordered to attack the invulnerable wagon-fortress by an Emperor being treated for an arrow wound. They might have, understandably, disobeyed his orders. Therefore, John could only pursue the battle personally with his bodyguard if he wished to truly win the day.” — Lucky John II Komnenos!
(
19:28 / 2013-03-03)
‘a notion that these cultural icons—superheroes and giant robots—are rooted in the religious and mythological foundations of the cultures that produced them.’
‘The best way to insult an artist is to ask them what their art means. If the revelation has to be explained, it’s not a revelation.’
‘Joseph Campbell’s definition of mythology. In his lecture entitled /Man and Myth/, Campbell starts his talk by saying that most people think of mythology as other people’s religion. He counters that religion is often misunderstood mythology. In Campbell’s view, any living mythology can be broken into four aspects: the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological, and the pedagogical.’
‘Many times this sociological structure mirrors the cosmological one. People may rest on the same day the divinity rested. Rulers who are identified with celestial phenomenon may be buried alive when their cosmological counterparts cycle through the constellations. Still other cultures regard their ritual sacrifices as necessary for ensuring that the seasons will continue so that life can survive’
‘Uchida Kenji. At the time, Mr. Uchida was working for Sunrise, a division of Bandai Entertainment. During his presentation at the symposium he said something very interesting: “In America, when you want to make something stronger than a human being, you make a superhero. In Japan, when you want to make something stronger than a human being, you make a giant robot.” Most of the audience chuckled at his comment but I was intrigued. My hand shot up. I asked him the reason for this difference. He answered that it was because America and Japan had different concepts of “god.” He went on to say that in America, God is anthropomorphized. The God of the Bible is thought of as a person, and we are “made in His image.” It would make sense then that an American superbeing would manifest itself in human form. In Japan, he said, the situation is quite different. There, the traditional concept of god comes from Shintō, the indigenous, animistic, and polytheistic religion of Japan. In Shintō, the concept of god or kami is much more malleable. The Sun, Mount Fuji, and other natural phenomenon are worshipped as kami. Ancestors are also venerated as kami. Until the last century, the Emperor was honored as kami. Kami can be thought of both personally, as in the case of ancestor worship, and impersonally, in the case of deifying natural phenomena. Uchida explained that in anime, the giant robot comes from this more protean and elemental notion of divine energy. Supernatural power can manifest itself in a mechanical form that may be humanoid in shape and may even demonstrate some human qualities, but it is certainly not human. It is the personification of a divine force that is elemental in nature.’
‘“Megadeus” is a combination of the Greek word mega meaning “big” and the Latin word deus meaning “god.” The giant robot, Big O, is therefore a “Big God.” However, Big O is not the monotheistic god of the Abrahamic tradition. Big O is one god among many and is closer to the notion of Shintō kami. There is a longstanding tradition in anime of giving giant robots divine names, designating them kami of sorts.’
‘While the language of synchronization in The Big O sounds biblical, the relationship between pilot and robot is certainly not. Because the show is not set in a dualistic Abrahamic paradigm, there is nothing inherently good or evil about these Megadeuses; they are simply supernatural forces in robot form.’
‘Like most giant robots in anime, the spiritual nature of a Megadeus is closer to the concept of “noble kami” than to the completely benevolent and omnipotent Abrahamic God.’
‘From a Buddhist perspective, a giant robot can also be interpreted as a vehicle to enlightenment’
‘Because the robot is also a manifestation of divine energy, the pilot who learns how to control his robot is not only striving toward a sense of enlightenment, he is also putting himself at one with the forces of the cosmos. This unity with the robot is not only an alignment with divine elemental forces, it is also an alignment with the pilot’s own ancestral kami. The kami in question is usually the pilot’s father.’ — This can definitely be seen in Gundam. And also of course Evangelion. In RahXephon, it’s the mother connection.
‘Aligning with a robot’s elemental power, while at the same time coming to terms with the legacy of the father who built it, is a twofold ritual essential to the mythology of giant robots. It seems to be a prerequisite for most stories in the genre ... The rules of the giant robot genre were so well established by the time Evangelion was produced in the mid-1990’s that Eva not only follows these rules but is able to use the conventions of giant robot storytelling to subvert its audience’s expectations!’
(
23:40 / 2013-03-02)
For many free software hackers, the act of writing software and learning
from others far exceeds the simple enactment of an engineering ethic, or a
technocratic calculus for the sake of becoming a more pro" cient as well as
ef" cient programmer or system administrator
(
13:39 / 2013-02-28)
'archetypal hacker selves: self- determined and rational individuals who use their well- developed faculties of discrimination and perception to understand the “formal” world—technical or not— around them with such perspicuity that they can intervene virtuously within this logical system either for the sake of play, pedagogy, or technological innovation. In short, they have playfully defiant attitudes, which they apply to almost any system in order to repurpose it.'
'Even though the Constitution famously states that “Congress shall make no law [ . . . ] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” during the first half of the twentieth century the US Supreme Court curtailed many forms of speech, such as political pamphleteering, that are now taken to represent the heart and soul of the democratic process. It is thus easy to forget that the current shape of free speech protections is a fairly recent social development, largely contained within the last fifty years'
(
13:29 / 2013-02-28)
At the start of my research period, then, I rarely wanted to leave my
apartment to attend F/OSS hacker social events, user group meetings, or
conferences, or participate on email lists or Internet relay chat channels— all
of which were important sites for my research. But within a few months, my
timidity and ambivalence started to melt away. The reason for this dramatic
change of heart was a surprise to me: it was the abundance of humor and
laughter among hackers. As I learned more about their technical world and
was able to glean their esoteric jokes, I quickly found myself enjoying the
endless stream of jokes they made in all sorts of contexts. ... It soon became clear to me, however,
that this was not done for my bene" t; humor saturates the social world
of hacking. Hackers, I noticed, had an exhaustive ability to “misuse” most
anything and turn it into grist for the humor mill. Once I began to master
the esoteric and technical language of pointers, compilers, RFCs, i386, X86,
AMD64, core dumps, shells, bash, man pages, PGP, GPG, gnupg, OpenPGP,
pipes, world writeable, PCMCIA, chmod, syntactically signi" cant white
space, and so on (and really on and on), a rich terrain of jokes became sensible to me.
My enjoyment of hacker humor thus provided a recursive sense of comfort to a novice ethnographer
(
13:23 / 2013-02-28)
what the logicians used to call the ratio cognoscendi, the reason why we perceive and understand a phenomenon rather than the explanation of its emergence and the cause of its existence
(
09:38 / 2013-02-28)
“The typical Western view of WWII’s European Theater—as a struggle between freedom and fascism that climaxed with the Normandy landings—is harshly critiqued in this scathing reappraisal. Historian Davies (Rising ‘44: The Battle of Warsaw) argues that British and American campaigns were a sideshow to the titanic conflict between the Wehr-macht and the Red Army on the Eastern Front, where most of the fighting and decisive battles occurred. The war was therefore not a simple victory of good over evil, he contends, but the defeat of one totalitarian state, Nazi Germany, by another, the Soviet Union, whose crimes were just as vast, if less diabolical.”
(
09:34 / 2013-02-28)
Chinese script in much simplified cursive, was “the first shorthand in history. Commonly used to note down on the spot conversations, political discussions, legal proceedings, the torrent of words uttered by people possessed by spirits, Chinese writing made possible very early on and very widely something that alphabetic scripts achieved less easily, the immediate notation of the spoken word. An Arab work written in Baghdad in 988 records the astonishment of the famous Mohammed al-Razi (850–925) when he saw a Chinese, no doubt passing through the Abbasid capital, translate and note down as they were dictated the works of Galen.”
(
09:34 / 2013-02-28)
“Historical narratives do not have a ‘pure’ historical aim, if such an aim could ever exist. Their aim is political, moral, theological, or whatever else it may be, and therefore they view events from a particular perspective.”
(
09:25 / 2013-02-28)
From the introduction, “The writing of history, even ancient history, far from being an innocent didactic exercise, is inevitably influenced by changing political needs, religious, political and ideological biases, and so on.”
“For instance, Liverani’s historiography of studies on Mesopotamian urbanism (‘The Ancient Near Eastern City and Modern Ideologies’, in G. Wilhelm [ed.], Die orientalische Stadt: Kontinuität, Wandel, Bruch, Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Verlag, 1997, pp. 85–108) connects views of the city to the contemporary situations of the scholars who express them: Orientalism, colonialism, neo-capitalism, and others.”
(
09:25 / 2013-02-28)
From an Amazon critical review, “There is a close connection, Liverani finds, between the writing of history and the validation of political order and political action.” Really!
(
09:24 / 2013-02-28)
Go Simo Parpola! This last bit is excellent, except I would rather say that "the changes ... with each change of leadership... were relatively slight, one could almost say cosmetic only" as is the case with most empires! Genocide and deportation are hard to do (but often done to various degrees of completion), but I think continuity of the people is a much more important and durable aspect of history than politics-obsessed historians give credit.
(
10:33 / 2013-02-26)
The Babylonian, Median and Persian empires should thus be seen (as they were seen in antiquity) as successive versions of the same multinational power structure, each resulting from an internal power struggle within this structure. In other words, the Empire was each time reborn under a new leadership, with political power shifting from one nation to another.
Of course, the Empire changed with each change of leadership. On the whole, however, the changes were relatively slight, one could almost say cosmetic only. The language of the ruling elite changed, of course, first from Assyrian to Babylonian, Median, and Persian, and finally to Greek. In its dress the elite likewise followed its national customs, and it naturally venerated its own gods, from whom its power derived
(
10:30 / 2013-02-26)
Contemporaries and later Greek historians did not make a big distinction between the Assyrian Empire and its successors: in their eyes, the "monarchy" or "universal hegemony" first held by the Assyrians had simply passed to or been usurped by other nations. For example, Ctesias of Cnidus writes: "It was under [Sardanapallos] that the empire (hegemonia) of the Assyrians fell to the Medes, after it had lasted more than thirteen hundred years. "
(
10:29 / 2013-02-26)
in a sense the Assyrian Empire had already been re-established long ago. Actually, in the final analysis, it had never been destroyed at all but had just changed ownership: first to Babylonian and Median dynasties, and then to a Persian one.
(
10:29 / 2013-02-26)
Under the Achaemenid Empire, the western areas annexed to Babylonia formed a satrapy called Athura (a loanword from Imperial Aramaic Athur, "Assyria"), while the Assyrian heartland remained incorporated in the satrapy of Mada (Old Persian for "Media"). Both satrapies paid yearly tribute and contributed men for the military campaigns and building projects of the Persian kings. Assyrian soldiers participated in the expedition of Xerxes against Greece (480 BC) according to Herodotus, and Assyrians from both Athura and Mada participated in the construction of the palace of Darius at Susa (500-490 BC).
(
10:28 / 2013-02-26)
in Harran, the cults of Sin, Nikkal, Bel, Nabu, Tammuz and other Assyrian gods persisted until the 10th century AD and are still referred to in Islamic sources
(
10:27 / 2013-02-26)
many of the Aramaic names occurring in the post-empire inscriptions and graffiti from Assur are already attested in imperial texts from the same site that are 800 years older
(
10:26 / 2013-02-26)
These names are recognizable from the Assyrian divine names invoked in them; but whereas earlier the other name elements were predominantly Akkadian, they now are exclusively Aramaic. This coupled with the Aramaic script and language of the texts shows that the Assyrians of these later times no longer spoke Akkadian as their mother tongue. In all other respects, however, they continued the traditions of the imperial period. The gods Ashur, Sherua, Istar, Nanaya, Bel, Nabu and Nergal continued to be worshiped in Assur at least until the early third century AD
(
10:25 / 2013-02-26)
over a hundred Assyrians with distinctively Assyrian names have recently been identified in economic documents from many Babylonian sites dated between 625 and 404 BC, and many more Assyrians undoubtedly remain to be identified in such documents. We do not know whether these people were deportees or immigrants from Assyria; their families may have settled in Babylonia already under the Assyrian rule.
(
10:20 / 2013-02-26)
it is clear that no such thing as a wholesale massacre of all Assyrians ever happened. It is true that some of the great cities of Assyria were utterly destroyed and looted -- archaeology confirms this --, some deportations were certainly carried out, and a good part of the Assyrian aristocracy was probably massacred by the conquerors. However, Assyria was a vast and densely populated country, and outside the few destroyed urban centers life went on as usual.
(
10:19 / 2013-02-26)
I believe the post-war balance of power ( in theory, the USA/France/UK/Russia as co-equals) would be significantly different if a delay in surrender allowed significant Soviet gains.
(
10:23 / 2013-02-25)
But where I might differ is in your final conclusion, where I take a more constructivist position. Things change the world if we think that they do. If the presence of the atomic bomb changed how the Japanese, or Americans, thought of their relative position, then they did change the world. If they don’t, then they don’t.
(
10:19 / 2013-02-25)
imagine if they had, haphazardly, sent American troops through recently atomic-bombed zones as part of the invasion. What would the legacy of American use of the bombs been, then?
The concern with the possibility of a “dud” is also counter to the usual historiography. What if one of them hadn’t gone off? The Los Alamos folks had calculated that the possibility of a bomb failing was pretty high; neither of them did fail, so it’s easy to see them as resounding successes, but the sample size here (n = 3) is awful small.
(
10:02 / 2013-02-25)
“The other use”: what a euphemism! Though perhaps no worse than “strategic bombing,” which is a nicer formulation than “terror bombing” (as it was, for awhile, originally called, in the context of firebombing). This idea of one-bomb-as-you-get-them or holding them up and then “pour[ing] them all on” is one of the ones that has stuck with me. A “rain of ruin” indeed.
(
10:01 / 2013-02-25)
Murasaki Shikibu, Diary of Lady Murasaki, trans. Richard Bowring, Penguin, 1999.
Karen Brazell, ed. and trans., The Confessions of Lady Nijo, Stanford UP, 1973.
Yamakawa Kikue, Kate Wildman Nakai (Translator), Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, 1997, Stanford UP
Robert John Smith, Ella L. Wiswell, Women of Suye Mura, 1982, Chicago UP.
Mikiso Hane, ed. and trans., Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan. University of California Press, 1993.
Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, eds., Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1994. ISBN-13: 978-1558610941
Kaori Okano, Young Women in Japan: Transitions to Adulthood, Routledge, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0415590518
(
10:13 / 2013-02-25)
Hiller later approached NASA to develop a concept for a giant ramjet helicopter in the 1,000,000 lb. class to capture spent Saturn V stages as they parachuted to earth. NASA eventually decided that a reusable space shuttle was a more effective way of overcoming the economic burden of throwaway rockets than trying to catch spent rockets in mid-air with a giant helicopter. Ironically, by this time, Hiller had finally succeeded in overcoming the engineering difficulties in designing reliable tip-jet turbine engines, which would have made such projects feasible. He would not get another chance to develop the technology, before he left his company during the controversial loss of the Army's Light Observation Helicopter (LOH) contract to Hughes aircraft. The remnants of his company began a project to replace the ramjets on one of the old HOE-1s with turbojets, but the company closed its doors before this project was completed
(
22:09 / 2013-02-24)
The HOE-1 proved to have a number of operational problems that precluded its deployment in the field. The small helicopter could not be safely approached while the rotors were turning since they hung close to the ground. The lightweight construction of the helicopter meant that it could easily be blown off balance in moderate wind conditions. The flames coming out of the ramjets produced an incredibly bright white halo when the HOE-1 was flown at night. This was a considerable disadvantage in the military environment, and the effect prompted a number of UFO sightings when operated in the vicinity of populated areas. The noise generated by the ramjets was also quite considerable, and did not endear the United Helicopter's Palo Alto, California facility to its neighbors. The most serious limitation was the enormous fuel burn of the ramjets, which consumed fuel at approximately ten times the rate of a piston engine providing the same power output. The fuel capacity of the HOE-1/YH-32 was only 136 kg (300 lb.) This had to supply a full power fuel burn of nearly 272 (600 lb.) per hour, which led to a maximum endurance of just over thirty minutes including start-up and shut down. The never exceed airspeed of the helicopter was mere 62 knots, which resulted in a maximum range of less than 30 nautical miles
(
22:07 / 2013-02-24)
A year later, Hiller perfected a ramjet engine that weighed only 5 kg (11 lb.) and put out 14 kg (31 lb.) of thrust when the rotor tip was moving at a maximum operational speed 207 m/sec (680 ft/sec) at 550 rpm. Since the two bladed rotor of the Hornet had one ramjet mounted on each tip a total of approximately 27 kg (60 lb.) of thrust was produced. This does not seem like much, but the only mass that the engines had to move was their own weight in addition to the small, lightweight rotor blades, for which this thrust was more than adequate. Since the rotor was freewheeling, there wasn't any torque that required a tail rotor. The high speed airflow required to start the ramjets was achieved through the use of a small 50 horsepower motor that spun the rotor up to 150 rpm at which point the airflow was sufficient to sustain the operation of the ramjets. Ignition of the fuel, which could be gasoline, kerosene, or fuel oil, was accomplished through the use of a device, similar to a glow plug, referred to as a "flame-holder," which insured re-ignition if the ramjet flamed out.
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22:04 / 2013-02-24)
Tip-jet technology originated in World War Two with Baron Friedrich von Doblhoff, an Austrian who developed and flew several practical models. Doblhoff's "cold-cycle" tip-jet rotors used high-pressure air from a compressor that was ducted through the rotor blades to their tips to power the blades around at a sufficient rpm to generate lift. Hiller's experimentation initially revealed that a "hot-cycle" system, which used exhaust gases and an afterburner type arrangement at the exhaust ducts, created greater efficiency and thrust. However, it did not take Hiller long to recognize that the greatest weight savings, and propulsive efficiency could be gained, by mounting the engines directly onto the tips of the rotor blades
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22:03 / 2013-02-24)
‘people digest new information in ways that tend to reinforce what they already think. In part, we do this by noticing information that confirms our existing beliefs more readily than information that does not. And in part, we do it by subjecting disconfirming information to greater scrutiny and skepticism than confirming information’ — it’s hard to do /anything/ when you believe /nothing/.
‘Determining which features are relevant about a situation requires us to associate it with some set of comparable situations. Yet determining which situations are comparable depends on knowing which features are relevant. This inherent circularity poses what philosophers and cognitive scientists call the frame problem, and they have been beating their heads against it for decades ... The intractability of the frame problem effectively sank the original vision of AI, which was to replicate human intelligence more or less as we experience it ourselves.’
‘WE DON’T THINK THE WAY WE THINK WE THINK’
‘Paul Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader of the American Soldier found every result and its opposite is equally obvious’
‘no matter how many times we fail to predict someone’s behavior correctly, we can always explain away our mistakes in terms of things that we didn’t know at the time. In this way, we manage to sweep the frame problem under the carpet—always convincing ourselves that this time we are going to get it right, without ever learning what it is that we are doing wrong’
‘although virtually everyone agrees that people respond to financial incentives in some manner, it’s unclear how to use them in practice to elicit the desired result’
‘once we realize that some particular incentive scheme did not work, we conclude simply that it got the incentives wrong’ — and we’ll try and try and keep failing, until the problem disappears on its own.
‘our impressive ability to make sense of behavior that we have observed does not imply a corresponding ability to predict it, or even that the predictions we can make reliably are best arrived at on the basis of intuition and experience alone’
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23:00 / 2013-02-23)
‘rather than producing doubt, the absence of “counterfactual” versions of history tends to have the opposite effect—namely that we tend to perceive what actually happened as having been inevitable.’ — I am dying to know what Crusader Kings II fans think of this. And what Abelian (Per Bak-ian) sandpile fans.
‘Creeping determinism, however, is subtly different from hindsight bias and even more deceptive. Hindsight bias, it turns out, can be counteracted by reminding people of what they said before they knew the answer or by forcing them to keep records of their predictions. But even when we recall perfectly accurately how uncertain we were about the way events would transpire—even when we concede to have been caught completely by surprise—we still have a tendency to treat the realized outcome as inevitable. ... But once we know..., it doesn’t matter whether or not we knew all along that it was going to happen (hindsight bias). We still believe that it was going to happen, because it did.’
‘Creeping determinism means that we pay less attention than we should to the things that don’t happen. But we also pay too little attention to most of what does happen.’
‘Just as with our tendency to emphasize the things that happened over those that didn’t, our bias toward “interesting” things is completely understandable. Why would we be interested in uninteresting things?’
Our modern sensibility: ‘If we want to know why some people are rich, for example, or why some companies are successful, it may seem sensible to look for rich people or successful companies and identify which attributes they share.’ We make decisions about our behavior based on how we hope they turn out, rather than what we believe the right thing to do is with no expectation of recompense.
For a potential catastrophic event, there are necessary but insufficient conditions (for planes: broken radios, fatigue, fog, tower error, stress,...), and we may have some probabilistic model for how often all the conditions lead to catastrophic breakdown. After the catastrophe, though, the conditions become in our heads necessary and sufficient: all we have to do to avoid these is target these conditions and prevent them from happening.
This reminds me of the “xly” post clipped herein: necessary but insufficient relationships are labeled with “xly” to indicate that they are meaningful but don’t correlate all the time (or in this context, very rarely).
‘creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy’ — in other words, post hoc ergo procter hoc.
‘If you hear a bird sing or see a cat walk along a wall, and then see the branches start to wave, you probably don’t conclude that either the bird or the cat is causing the branches to move. It’s an obvious point, and in the physical world we have good enough theories about how things work that we can usually sort plausible from implausible. But when it comes to social phenomena, common sense is extremely good at making all sorts of potential causes seem plausible.’ — we have a model for this kind of problem: sympathetic magic and prescientific ways of thinking are “primordial versions of” science (cf., Stephen Asma on Buddhism).
It’s not possible to ‘attribute the success of the Mona Lisa to its particular features’ — this actually paraphrases the Wikipedia article on Abelian sandpile models! Recall: “Once the sandpile model reaches its critical state there is no correlation between the system's response to a perturbation and the details of a perturbation.” In other words, because there’s no correlation between the event and the system’s response to it in a tuned system, when you’re talking about a major response (like a big sandpile landslide or Mona Lisa), the kickoff event’s specifics is uncorrelated with it.
‘Commonsense explanations therefore seem to tell us why something happened when in fact all they’re doing is describing what happened.’ — This is the book’s theme, if I recall. (I read this first time around May 2011.)
This section is what I’ve been after since I started thinking about novels and Crusader Kings II: ‘HISTORY CANNOT BE TOLD WHILE IT’S HAPPENING ... surely we can at least be confident that we know what happened, even if we can’t be sure why’.
He contrasts Tolstoy’s Bezukhov, stumbling around on the battlefield of Borodino, with Danto’s Ideal Chronicler entity, a ‘panoptical being, able to observe in real time every single person, object, action, thought, and intention in Tolstoy’s battle, or any other event’: *‘the Ideal Chronicler would still have essentially the same problem as Bezukhov; it could not give the kind of descriptions of /what was happening/ that historians provide.’*
What does this mean? I think this is a really important and interesting point Watts is trying to make here but he fumbled the handoff immediately after this by incoherent references to Danto’s jargon and toy examples. What this means is that the kinds of things we wish to write and read about history can’t be written by just the Ideal Chronicler and its recordings: these have to relevant to some preconceived notion of what’s “interesting” or “important” (cf., Gooseberry in Pratchett’s “Thud!”: ‘what is interesting?’). Watts: historians’ works require ‘foreknowledge of a very specific event that will only color the events of the present after it has actually happened’. To be more concrete: the Ideal Chronicler would have to be told, at the end of the Battle of Borodino, “Napoleon will be considered to have won the battle but will lose the war, and his achievements will be rolled back, and all that will remain are major French institutions...” and the evolution of public thought on the topic, in order to write something like what a historian would write.
Watts is being incoherent (for me) here again with a very important observation: ‘Danto’s point is precisely that historical descriptions of “what is happening” are /impossible/ without narrative sentences’, i.e., that “what happened” implies some criteria for judging relevance:
‘literal descriptions of what happened are impossible. Perhaps even more important, they would also not serve the purpose of historical explanation, which is not to reproduce the events of the past so much as to explain why they mattered. And the only way to know what mattered, and why, is to have been able to see what happened as a result’, and not just what happened in the area under investigation but also what’s happened in the arena of public opinion and academic analysis since then that can shape the future that you’re interested in.
‘History cannot be told while it is happening, therefore, not only because the people involved are too busy or too confused to puzzle it out, but because what is happening can’t be made sense of until its implications have been resolved.’ Nutshelled, thank you Duncan Watts! This is definitely one of the biggest highlights of this book, packed with important highlights well-synthesized (speaking in Milton).
*‘the characters in a story don’t know when the ending is’ ... ‘the ending of a movie is really an artificial end to what in reality would be an ongoing story [to the characters]’. And to those characters, ‘at no point in time is the story ever really “over.”’*
Watts goes on and develops this idea further: when should the guillotine of relevance fall on the historical narrative? ‘Choices that seem insignificant at the time we make them may one day turn out to be of immense import. And choices that seem incredibly important to us now may later seem to have been of little consequence. We just won’t know until we know. And even then we still may not know, because it may not be entirely up to us to decide.’ I.e., *‘Something always happens afterward, and what happens afterward is liable to change our perception of the current outcome, as well as our perception of the outcomes that we have already explained’*.
‘Historical explanations, in other words, are neither causal explanations nor even really descriptions—at least not in the sense that we imagine them to be. Rather, they are stories. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis points out, they are stories that are constrained by certain historical facts and other observable evidence. Nevertheless, like a good story, historical explanations concentrate on what’s interesting, downplaying multiple causes and omitting all the things that might have happened but didn’t. As with a good story, they enhance drama by focusing the action around a few events and actors, thereby imbuing them with special significance or meaning. And like good stories, good historical explanations are also coherent, which means they tend to emphasize simple, linear determinism over complexity, randomness, and ambiguity. Most of all, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, at which point everything—including the characters identified, the order in which the events are presented, and the manner in which both characters and events are described—all has to make sense.’ — Now this is what interests me, at this time; not how this interferes with our scientific work.
‘For evidence of confidence afforded by stories, see Lombrozo (2006, 2007) and Dawes (2002, p. 114). Dawes (1999), in fact, makes the stronger argument that human “cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story.”’ — Cool footnote!
‘When we investigate the causes of the recent housing bubble or of the terrorist attacks of September 11, we are inevitably also seeking insight that we hope we’ll be able to apply in the future ... whenever we seek to learn /about/ the past, we are invariably seeking to /learn/ from it as well’. Santayana’s famous quote is fool’s gold.
These are incredibly important topics. Watts has done good by bringing them together in such a synthesis, but I need to do a lot more work in order to make coherent sense of them all.
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23:04 / 2013-02-09)
‘CHAPTER 5: History, the Fickle Teacher. The message of the previous three chapters is that commonsense explanations are often characterized by circular reasoning. Teachers cheated on their students’ tests because that’s what their incentives led them to do. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has all the attributes of the Mona Lisa. People have stopped buying gas-guzzling SUVs because social norms now dictate that people shouldn’t buy gas-guzzling SUVs. And a few special people revived the fortunes of the Hush Puppies shoe brand because a few people started buying Hush Puppies before everyone else did. All of these statements may be true, but all they are really telling us is that what we know happened, happened, and not something else. Because they can only be constructed after we know the outcome itself, we can never be sure how much these explanations really explain, versus simply describe.’
‘By systematically piecing together the regularities in our observations, can we not infer these laws just as we do in science? ... HISTORY IS ONLY RUN ONCE’ --- but supposing we had a history that could be run multiple times: Crusader Kings II could be to history what MusicLab was to products. Then we'd have to think about Per Bak's sandpile models.
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10:58 / 2013-02-09)
'in contrast with theoretical knowledge, it requires a relatively large number of rules to deal with even a small number of special cases. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to program a robot to navigate the subway. It seems like a relatively simple task. But as you would quickly discover, even a single component of this task such as the “rule” against asking for another person’s subway seat turns out to depend on a complex variety of other rules—about seating arrangements on subways in particular, about polite behavior in public in general, about life in crowded cities, and about general-purpose norms of courteousness, sharing, fairness, and ownership—that at first glance seem to have little to do with the rule in question. Attempts to formalize commonsense knowledge have all encountered versions of this problem—that in order to teach a robot to imitate even a limited range of human behavior, you would have to, in a sense, teach it everything about the world'
'What these results reveal is that common sense is “common” only to the extent that two people share sufficiently similar social and cultural experiences. ... the acquisition of this type of knowledge can be learned only by participating in society itself—and that’s why it is so hard to teach to machines.'
'whatever it is that people believe to be a matter of common sense, they believe it with absolute certainty. They are puzzled only at the fact that others disagree.'
'Geertz, Clifford. 1975. “Common Sense as a Cultural System.” The Antioch Revew 33 (1):5–26.'
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15:42 / 2012-08-24)
it requires a relatively large number of rules to deal with even a small number of special cases. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to program a robot to navigate the subway. It seems like a relatively simple task. But as you would quickly discover, even a single component of this task such as the “rule” against asking for another person’s subway seat turns out to depend on a complex variety of other rules—about seating arrangements on subways in particular, about polite behavior in public in general, about life in crowded cities, and about general-purpose norms of courteousness, sharing, fairness, and ownership—that at first glance seem to have little to do with the rule in question
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15:38 / 2012-08-24)
Was it in the Flaubert keynote lecture where it was said how, once a sentence, a word, is uttered, it's meaning can't help but tumultulate and gyrate and spiral around and away from what it originally might have meant? And in light of this, a translation must be the same as a re-creation, made by a substitute's hands? Or was it the Borges "Invisible Work" book? (2012 Nov 2)
"We easily become undisciplined, so we seek the discipline of others instead of finding our own." (Lei Ma)
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09:53 / 2013-02-20)
‘One can translate within the same language, and one can copy from one language to another. Borges would call a text a “copy” if the most pertinent observations to be made about it could also be made of the original. In contrast, a “version” is a text with relevant differences with respect to either the original or another translation of the same work. For Borges, a literal translation attempts to main-tain all the details of the original, but changes the emphasis (un-derstood as meanings, connotations, associations, and effects of the work). A “recreation,” on the other hand, omits many details to conserve the emphasis of the work, and it may add interpolations. Since a “copy” maintains both the details and the emphasis that matter in a discussion of a work, most translations, especially prose translations, include some measure of “copying.” A faithful translation, for Borges, retains the meanings and effects of the work, whereas an unfaithful translation changes them. A literal translation that changes the emphasis of the work is therefore unfaithful, as opposed to a recreation, which conserves them.’
‘A translation, for Borges, should be evaluated with the same criteria applicable to any work of literature’ --- what are those? MusicLab?
‘He sometimes expressed restraint in modifying an original to avoid hostile reactions, and he also expressed his envy of those translators of classical texts who en-joy the right to transform an original with a freedom not available to a translator of contemporary works. The barriers against trans-forming a contemporary work are not only legal; they also involve the understandable reservations of readers who prefer a rough approximation to a creative recreation.’
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22:57 / 2013-02-02)
‘Notwithstanding his achievement as fabulist, poet, essayist, editor, anthologist, and specialist of English and Argentine literature, Borges committed no injustice to himself by foregrounding his translations. Indeed, translation played a major role in every one of his literary endeavors, and it was his conviction that some of the most cherished pleasures of literature become available only after a work has passed through many hands and undergone many changes.’
‘Steiner argues that “a true translator knows his labor belongs ‘to oblivion’ (inevitably, each generation retranslates),’
‘Borges’s first book of prose fiction, includes a series of stories that are actually loose translations of nonfictional texts depicting the lives of criminals and outlaws.9 Callois noticed that Borges recreated and transformed his originals at will. This clue has been ignored in the vast amount of literary criticism devoted to Borges’s most celebrated works.’
‘no activity, other than reading, has been more central to his creative process than translation’
‘he at times favored a translation over its original, other times an original over its translation, and he was often interested in weighing their relative merits, aesthetic and otherwise’
‘My method, therefore, differs sharply from Borges’s. For Borges translation was a means to enrich a literary work or a literary idea. For me translation provides a way of understanding his oeuvre.’
‘ The inevitable rewriting of previous works of art in any individual work is also central to Wollheim’s doctrine of criticism as retrieval: “[The artist] will assemble his elements in ways that self-consciously react against, or overtly presuppose, arrangements that have already been tried out within the tradition.”’
‘Gombrich’s suggestion that the study of a work of art should pay as much attention to the repertoire of the artist as to the finished product.’
‘he abandoned two positions he had considered seriously and in some cases defended vehemently. The first is the idea that literature is fundamentally autobiographical and that its ultimate significance is lost on those who ignore the circumstances of individual authors. The second, which he sometimes related to the first, is the view that literature is the expression of a nationality or a national character. Borges was so embarrassed by these and other views he held in the 1920s’
‘Given a choice, he preferred to discuss literary effects rather than the meaning of literary works’
‘since the 1930s the individuality of the writer played an ever-diminishing role in his observations on literature, especially when compared to the impersonal and collective factors of the literary experience. In this context Borges developed a view on translation in which an original work does not harbor an advantage over a translation. The work, for Borges, became a collective enterprise that carries more weight than the input of any individual author, reader, or translator.’
>> can a book about Borges help but be Borgesian? :)
‘His translations transform his originals into drafts that precede them; his own literary works transform his readings into a repertoire of possibilities in which his own translations, and his views about translation, play a decisive role.’
‘In the sections of this book comparing Borges’s translations into Spanish from English, I will offer my own English versions of Borges’s translations in the body of the work and will include Borges’s Spanish versions in the endnotes. In my comparisons of Borges’s translations from foreign languages (German, French, Italian, and Old Norse), I will also include the foreign language originals in the endnotes.’
‘A good translator, according to him, might choose to treat the original as a good writer treats a draft of a work in progress.’
'“It is far easier to forgo someone else’s vanities than one’s own.”3 According to Borges translators should be willing to cut, add, and transform for the sake of the work.' I can see this as being very useful in translating the Norse sagas and songs.
‘the potential to ameliorate a draft should not be taken as an argument against publication, because correcting drafts is a never ending process. Borges was fond of quoting Alfonso Reyes, who would say, “We publish because otherwise we would spend our lives going over our drafts.”5 That being said, Borges would often make changes to existing published works when they were reprinted. Thanks to Jean Pierre Bernès’s remarkable French Pléiade edition of Borges’s Oeuvre—the first extensive account of Borges’s transformations of his own works (offering rich bibliographical information indicating the original publication of many works)—we can begin to appreciate the full extent of his revisions.6 Just as Borges revised his original works, including the contents of his books, from edition to edition, he also revised some of his own translations when published in new contexts.’
‘(“literal translations are not literary”).7 He recognized that in translation some aspects of an original will disappear, but he did not consider those losses necessarily undesirable.’
‘Borges became increasingly interested, especially after 1960 when he lost his sight, in poetic lines that provoked emotional effects in him, even before he understood their meaning, on account of the connotations and even the arbitrary associations of words. In some cases, as in Quevedo’s famous line “Y su epitafio, la sangrienta luna” (literally, “and his epitaph, the bloody moon”), Borges felt that the power of a poetic line can be impoverished by its immediate context or by interpretation.’ Totally true. Taleb copies, 'The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine'.
How is poetry a series of drafts...? The original went down one lane, a translation will go back "several drafts" and go forward several drafts more.
‘Petrarch wrote a letter to ask a friend to emend phrases from his “Bucolicum carmen.” He had recently noticed he had unwittingly pilfered them from Virgil and Ovid’
‘Borges would differentiate between what he called “the language of ideas” and “the language of emotions.”’ <-- do not understand this at all... :( Maybe I do now: 'According to Eco, Borges is at his most conservative in his own writing when it comes to the organization of sounds in literature, and at his most experimental when it comes to ideas.' This might be the opposite for Tolkien?
‘In his commentary on Salas Subirat’s translation of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel he considered failed, tedious, and chaotic, Borges insists on its moments of “verbal perfection.” At times Borges referred to Ulysses as an almost impossible challenge to a translator, by which he meant it would be impossible to render all of Joyce’s verbal experiments into any other language.17 On other occasions he denied that the novel was untranslatable, recommending that it be used as a pretext for the creation of another work.’ /Star Wars/ is something else worth only of being a pretext for another better work (Jackson Crawford's)!
‘As an objectivist Borges was persuaded that the cadences and arbitrary associations of words in certain combinations warrant the claim of “verbal perfection,” and that some literary works are more successful than others in producing literary effects. As a relativist, he endorsed transformations and misprisions, and did not mind if ideas and other aspects of an original were either eliminated or transformed in translation. His objectivistic and relativistic standards converge in his conviction that original works do not have, in principle, any advantage over translations from the perspective of their literary merits.’
‘However, those linguistic aspects that cannot be reproduced in translation do not cause Borges any more anxiety than the fact that a paraphrase is never identical with its original. In general one paraphrases to underscore certain features of a text while ignoring others, and one generally translates to underscore certain aspects of an original while downplaying others.’
‘Where the cadences of the original are lost, the translator may be able to find new cadences that did not exist in the original. In short, for Borges, the poetry of ideas can always be translated in such a way that the original and the translation amount to the “same” text, and the poetry of emotions can be translated also, as a recreation: “[Poetry] can always be translated as long as the translator forgoes either scientific or philological precision.”’
‘"I believe Benedetto Croce held that a poem is untranslatable, but that it can be recreated in another language." Borges agrees with those who claim that “each language has its own possibilities and impossibilities” but does not draw the inference that a translator is doomed to failure.22 On the contrary, he affirms that the differences between languages and modes of expression offer multiple possibilities to a translator whose aim is to recreate the original.’
‘In the case of poetic lines like those of Quevedo and Hopkins quoted above, it makes no sense for Borges to fault a translator for failing to render what cannot be rendered. But such moments of literary concentration are rare in the work of any poet, and they are not the sole province of an original. Indeed, a translation may sparkle in passages where the original falls short. Borges would agree with George Steiner’s conten- tion that a translation can tap into potentialities unrealized in the original, precisely because the linguistic differences or incompatibilities between two modes of expression may bring forth aspects of the work that would be obscured in the language of the original. : In some cases, as in Quevedo’s famous line “Y su epitafio, la sangrienta luna” (literally, “and his epitaph, the bloody moon”), Borges felt that the power of a poetic line can be impoverished by its immediate context or by interpretation.10 One of the compensations for his blindness was his memorized anthology of poetic lines, in several languages, which he considered “unique and eternal,” lines which, in or out of context, gave him a joy that had more to do with associations than with meanings,11 for example Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line “Mastering me God, giver of breath and bread.”’
‘the point worth stressing is that for Borges, as for Steiner, a translation can bring to light aspects of a work that may be lost on a reader of an original.29 But Borges would go further than Steiner. As far as he was con- cerned, a translator can also interpolate his own inventions and excise passages that could have been rendered with ease. A translator can produce an unfaithful work that surpasses the original precisely because it is unfaithful. This is so because a translator can correct mistakes and inconsistencies of a text and edit sections that may obscure an aspect of the work that might be worth foregrounding.’ I shudder to think how much this kind of translation would annoy professional Old Icelandicists or Old Englishicists.
‘A translator, therefore, should not be faithful to an imperfect text, but to a perfectible work. Why should a translator find equivalents for what Borges has called the “idiocies of the text” when these may hamper the very effects the text would otherwise produce? Why should a translator forgo those possibilities and potentialities in a text that the author of the original neglected out of carelessness or lack of vision? Borges’s answer to these questions is so unequivocal that he included it verbatim in several of his essays on translation: “To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that a draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.”’
‘In his general views on literature, the work is more important than the writer: “An artist cares about the perfectibility of the work, and not the fact that it may have originated from himself or from others.” “If the work improves, why not? Why not make it a collective project?”’
“Our concept of plagiarism is, without a doubt, less literary than commercial.”
‘Borges admired “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and his views on translation can be read as a compliment to Eliot’s ideas on the depersonalization of literature. Borges’s own skepticism about individuality or personality in literature informs his notion of a perfectible work, his endorsement of the liberties a translator might take, and his suggestion that contradictory versions of the same work can be equally valid.’
‘On many occasions Borges affirmed that after three thousand years of literary production it is highly unlikely that contemporary writers can generate new or original ideas. There is a sense, there- fore, in which translation, in one way or another, is an element of any literary work of the recent past.’ Correct: all works are in large part retranslations, readaptations. We're just too polite to ask writers too many questions. Untraditional bards!
‘Borges preferred Dante in the original but Cervantes in an English translation. He remembers, perhaps in jest, that Don Quixote seemed to him like a “bad translation” the first time he read it in Spanish.’
Carter Wheelock: “Borges and di Giovanni have created a situation as ambiguous and subtle as one of Borges’s tales.”
Even if something had Borges' approval, haters can still hate on general terms.
‘Borges also regrets that “no one likes to celebrate those pages whose paternity is uncertain.”’ This is because people want to be sure they won't be laughed at for celebrating something others think is unworthy of celebration. (Duncan Watts. MusicLab. Cumulative advantage. Winner takes all Extremistan.) This situation is unfortunate and is only recently being perversely subverted by the arrival of internet memes (O-zone, Justin Bieber?, and others).
‘Wheelock, Bensoussan, and others have a valid point to make when they express serious reservations in their assessments of translations that transform or mollify the uniqueness or idiosyncrasies of Borges’s literary genius, even when the gestures appear to be in the spirit of views that Borges himself held or in terms of the very conceits Borges was fond of practicing. ... it is important to recognize that the reception of his work, for decades, has faced a dilemma: one can accept Borges’s views about the impersonality of literature and thus downplay the significance of his personal genius, or downplay the significance of his literary views in order to appreciate his genius.’
>>> They author is the demiurge of the universe subtended by the original work and its descendants, a universe that is open and universal because it also contains this original work's antecedents.
‘Molloy seems to suggest that once Borges’s readers recognize the Borgesian conflation of fiction and fact they can enjoy it, but she also suggests that there is something misleading about the Borgesian game when it is not clear that it is being played.’ Haters gonna hate.
‘di Giovanni once reported that a university professor complained that a translation of a Borges short story had corrected an inconsistency. The professor would have preferred that the translation conserve the inconsistency, as he con- sidered it a charming Borgesian touch. As di Giovanni recalled the matter: “Borges was mildly angered; first of all, he found nothing charming in the slip, and, secondly, he feels that he has the right to shape and alter his work as he sees fit. One of the great luxuries of working with Borges is that he’s interested only in making things better and not in defending a text.”’
‘An original text offers a translator opportunities precisely because an equivalent word may have different connotations and arbitrary associations in the language or in the linguistic modalities of the translator. Borges also conjectured that one of the possible advantages of a translation over an original is its likelihood to eschew aspects of a work involving historical or linguistic idiosyncrasies that have little to do with why the work is worth reading in the first place. That is why Borges would at times recommend to young writers that they read great works of literature in translation rather than in the original: “It is better to study the classics in translation to appreciate the substantive and to avoid the accidental.” !!!!!!!!!! I didn't know Borges' mind ran down these paths too! Arbitrary and unfortunate connotations and associations will be in all languages and being able to read a work in a couple of different languages can help alleviate them. (This like many things in translation seems to offer local benefits, and global only in a language ensemble.)
*Once* an idea has been expressed in Chinese (or Sanskrit or Icelandic or Nahuatl), it can be translated and thoroughly explained into any other language, and vice versa (from any other language to Chinese). But maybe some languages make it easier to think new thoughts for the first time.
Learning other languages is thought to be beneficial because this helps one to create and encounter thoughts that one otherwise would not. *Once* a thought has been expressed in a language, however, it can be translated into any other, and vice versa---with varying levels of fidelity and connotative completeness depending on the target language but I dare say always close enough to enter its speakers.
The *ideas* of a work can usually be, according to an earlier quote from this book above, be conveyed in a translation. Here's that quote:
‘Borges would differentiate between what he called “the language of ideas” and “the language of emotions.” He maintained that in literary translation ideas raise no significant difficulties, while emotions suggested by words raise problems that are almost insurmountable. Certain works, therefore, afford pleasures lost in translation. A writer like Shakespeare cannot be successfully translated into a foreign language, even into modern English, because “in an English that is not Shakespeare’s many things would be lost.” But with regard to the translation of ideas, he could feel deeply affected by a production of Macbeth in a horrible translation, with bad actors, and misguided scenery.’
I.e., the emotions, the language-dependent features, are very hard to translate to full completeness (impossible usually given the lack of connotative completeness correspondence), but certainly the ideas can be translated and developed and improved. (Remember also that Borges believed correctly that one could be greatly moved by a context-free line or passage, even in a language one didn't understand. The sounds can cause emotion: ‘“A cadence is akin to the cipher of an emotion. Two lines may be conceptually identical but not emotionally; intellectually they may be the same, but not emotively.”’)
‘A translator—like a writer correcting a draft—often cuts, adds, and reorganizes a text to produce a work that improves on rougher sketches. For Borges, therefore, translation from one language to another is a special case of rewriting a draft that does not differ, in principle, from the transformation of a text in the same language, from one dialect or one modality to another. It may be easier, for example, to translate a journalistic article from French into English than to modernize Chaucer or Shakespeare into any modern lan- guage, including English.’ << certainly this is true: McKinney and Minford predispose me to believing that it's much easier translating in space alone rather than in time or space & time.
‘Borges cites a fragment in which the German Romantic poet [Novalis] affirms that words have singular meanings (eingentümliche Bedeutungen), connotations (Nebenbedeutungen), and arbitrary associations (will-kürlichen Bedeutungen).’
‘From the 1930s onward Borges continued to think of language in terms of meanings, connotations, and arbitrary associations. This view determined how he examined the vicissitudes of a text over the course of time: the meanings of words survive while connota- tions and associations change, even across languages and modes of expressions, because the same words may have different connota- tions for different language communities separated by space or time. ... He also believed that the transformations of a language, its accidental developments over time, could either improve or impoverish a work [*alpha*] as the connotations and arbitrary associations of words evolve, even as general meanings are maintained. Borges would often indicate that meanings, concepts, and ideas are easier to transfer from one mode of expression to another than are connotations and associa- tions, where emotions play a greater role.’
There is a LOT to say about this, some of it already noted here and in InstAldebrn.
[*alpha*] especially a short work like a poem or a two-paragraph fable.
‘Borges likens Madrus’s role as translator to the graphic artist charged with illustrating a novel or short story: the artist includes details not necessarily mentioned in the work. Borges does not object, in principle, to the practice of adding details to a work of literature, but it disturbs him when the claim of “complete veracity” is made of any translation that expands the original to produce effects of strangeness or local color: “The announced purpose of veracity turns the translator into an impostor, since in order to maintain the strangeness of what he is translating, he is obliged to express local color, to make the raw rawer, to turn sweetness into syrup, and to emphasize the lot until it becomes a lie.”’ <<< It seems to me that Madrus was having a mighty joke with his ‘traduction littérale et complète du texte arabe’!
Borges' ‘definition of translation he would continue to restate for decades to come: translation is a long experimental game of chance played with omissions and emphasis.’*
‘the incommensurability of any two languages, or even two modes of expression within the same language’
‘Borges, however, does not assume that the effects of a literal translation are necessarily objectionable, because they can enrich and even revitalize a language: “The para- dox is—and of course, ‘paradox’ means something true that at first appearance is false—that if you are out for strangeness, if you want, let’s say to astonish the reader, you can do that by being literal. [Literal translations can create] something that is not in the origi- nal.”’ So Borgesian yet true: the original might have nothing of the astonishing about it but a literal translation can astound its reader.
“If Matthew Arnold had looked closely into his Bible [and Arnold had rec- ommended to Newman that one might want to approach the trans- lation of Homer with the model of a biblical translation] he might have seen that the English Bible is full of literal translations and that . . . the great beauty of the English Bible lies in those literal translations.”68 Had the powerful biblical phrase “Tower of Strength” been translated according to Arnold’s approach it should have pro- duced something akin to the drab “a firm stronghold,” and the “Song of songs” would lose its poetry had it been translated more faithfully as “the highest song” or “the best song.” << My goodness, this is true. The really famous Biblical phrases (a few cited in "How to read literature like a professor" and in my Bible illustrated by the great masterworks) overflow with that deep-time resonance (well, not deep-time as much as deep-impact). Brother's keeper. Cup of trembling. Song of songs. NIV and even the Action Bible can't hold a candle to KJV (I believe that efforts to make a modern readable Bible should seriously look at sociolects).
“Newman favored the literal mode that retains all verbal singularities. Arnold, on the other hand, favored the severe elimination of distracting de- tails. The latter produces sound uniformities, and the former produces unexpected surprises.”
In his famous essay “The Homeric Versions” Borges compares six versions of a passage from the Odyssey in his own Spanish “cop- ies.” Eliot Weinberger restores the original English texts in his su- perb English translation of Borges’s essay. Borges’s procedure and Weinberger’s restoration are both justified. The aspects Borges un- derscores in his comparisons do not involve linguistic differences between English and Spanish but other considerations, such as the reverential manner of one version, the luxuriant language of another, the lyric tone of one versus the oratorical tone of another, the vi- sual emphasis of one versus the more factual emphasis of another, the spectacular versus the sedate features of another. A translation, as opposed to a copy, suggests a transformation that may surpass the original. << a copy seems to be a translation. But it isn't.
“If we did not know which was the original and which the translation, we could judge them fairly”
Truly a magnificently entertaining book on a magnificent bastard.
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22:14 / 2013-02-02)
Sometimes the literary language of the elites can suddenly or quickly change without any changes seen in the day-to-day language of the working population. Other times, the language of the working population changes much more quickly than the literary language. Many examples of these can be found, but in cultures that appear to be mixing, such as Chinese and English, there might be no two-way cross-pollination of literature, folklore, culture because the literary, serious language remains fixed in the minds of the speakers.
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09:18 / 2012-10-30)
‘he introduced fantastic and detective fiction to Spanish American readers, as well as the first Spanish versions of contemporary novelists such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Borges wrote a book on Buddhism, as well as eventful essays on the Kabbalah and Chinese literature, and is also responsible for the first history of Old English and Germanic literatures written in the Spanish language. As the critic José Miguel Oviedo has noted, “Borges incor- porated a literary culture almost alien to Spanish American literature and that, thanks to him, is now a part of its tradition.”’ This is a very interesting and important question: how do alien works such as Beowulf or Chaucer (to the Chinese mind) become common?
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18:38 / 2012-10-29)
‘Belyaev believed that the patterns of changes observed in domesticated animals resulted from genetic changes that occurred in the course of selection. Belyaev, however, believed that the key factor selected for was not size or reproduction, but behavior—specifically amenability to domestication, or tamability. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tamability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among human beings. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body’s hormones and neurochemicals. Those changes, in turn, could have had far-reaching effects on the development of the animals themselves, effects that might well explain why different animals would respond in similar ways when subjected to the same kinds of selective pressures.’
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22:08 / 2013-02-17)
Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment
Foxes bred for tamability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development
Lyudmila Trut
At an experimental farm in Novosibirsk, Siberia, geneticists have been working for four decades to turn foxes into dogs. They are not trying to create the next pet craze. Instead, author Trut and her predecessors hope to explain why domesticated animals such as pigs, cattle and dogs are so different from their wild ancestors. Selective breeding alone cannot explain all the differences. Trut's mentor, the eminent Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev, thought that the answers lay in the process of domestication itself, which might have dramatically changed wolves' appearance and behavior even in the absence of selective breeding. To test his hypothesis, Belyaev and his successors at the Institute have been breeding another canine species, silver foxes, for a single trait: friendliness toward people. Although no one would mistake them for dogs, the Siberian foxes appear to be on the same overall evolutionary path—a route that other domesticated animals also may have followed while coming in from the wild.
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21:59 / 2013-02-17)
‘To give up hunting in favor of herding is always a mixed blessing.'—ain’t it always.
‘Because there is no firewood over much of the steppeland, the Mongols traditionally cooked on fires of dung or fell back on the use of meats which could be processed without fire, by wind drying or by the characteristic method which has impressed and repelled European observers since the Middle Ages: a cut of meat is pressed under the horseman’s saddle to be tenderized in the beast’s sweat by the pounding of the ride.’ — Yes!!! Thank you for being bald, Felipe, Weatherford was too coy to explain this in detail!
‘It is not true, however, that nomadic herders despise the fruits of agriculture: their historic problem has been getting hold of them. Because grains and cultivated fruits and vegetables are alien in the nomads’ environments, they are highly prized and often brought in at great cost, or—until the last three hundred years or so when sedentary societies have opened up a technology gap which nomad warfare could not close—they were wrested as tribute through war or the threat of war.’ — I love the bit about the last 300 years technology gap. But I’m not too sure yet about this notion that nomads prized agricultural production, it doesn’t jibe with the Mongol slaughters in China.
‘It is never satisfying to historians to be forced back on formulations of what “would” or “might” have happened (though this recourse is inevitable in any meditation on an episode as remote and ill documented as the origins of agriculture). We want to know what really did happen and to base our findings on evidence, not on reasoning alone.’ — Interesting notion, stupid on part of historians and anthropologists. You never “know” something to be “true”, your beliefs just define a probability distribution on their correctness. which you use to guide behavior. The best thing about the Bayesian approach to this is the built-in notion of updating beliefs in light of new evidence (even if this is quantitatively never easy). Why can’t historians live with a little uncertainty, with the hope that future work may find a way out of their current quandaries?
‘The assumption that “savage” attainments must be of a kind which requires “little forethought” makes us uneasy, because it is incompatible with one of our most cherished findings about human nature: as we have not progressed in cleverness, as far as we know, since the emergence of our species, we have to acknowledge that genius occurs, uncumulatively, at every stage of history and in every type of society—as well in the Paleolithic as in postmodernity, “in New Guinea as well as in New York.”’ — If this notion is so cherished by scholars, why isn’t it more practiced.
‘“the ethnographic evidence indicates that people who do not farm do about everything that farmers do, but they do not work as hard.” Gatherers use fire to clear ground, renew fertility and privilege or favor particular species. They often sow seeds and plant tubers. They use enclosures and scarecrows to protect plants. Sometimes they split tracts of land into proprietary plots. They have first-fruit ceremonies, rites of rain making, and prayers for the fertility of the earth. They harvest edible seeds and thresh, winnow and mill them. They are often experts on the toxic and prophylactic properties of the plants they use, processing the poison out of their own food and extracting it to stun fish or kill game. Indeed, some of the most reputedly “primitive” people in the world are expert in the control of this recondite scientific knowledge.’ — That first quote is hardcore (Jack R Harlan).
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22:04 / 2013-02-17)
To me, the most interesting part of the entertainment known as history is learning more about what people ate and how they earned their livelihood (to pay for their food and for the entertainment that they crave after their bellies are full).
After discussing marinating, hanging, drying, fermenting or allowing to ferment (rot), burying, sweating, etc., he says of cooking (the application of heat): ‘Cooking deserves its place as one of the great revolutionary innovations of history, not because of the way it transforms food—there are plenty of other ways of doing that—but because of the way it transformed society.’
So far agreeable. ‘Culture begins when the raw gets cooked.’ Wait, what? ‘The campfire becomes a place of communion when people eat around it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food but of organizing society around communal meals and predictable mealtimes.’ What about the culture and communion around the marinating bowls, the hanging meat, the drying and burying and fermenting pits? ‘It introduces new specialized functions and shared pleasures and responsibilities. It is more creative, more constructive of social ties than mere eating together.’ Can I get a “WTF” to go?
Funny. ‘Accident has recently been rehabilitated in historical writing, because in the random world revealed by quantum physics and chaos theory, unpredictable effects indeed seem to ensue from untrackable causes. Cleopatra’s nose resembles a butterfly’s wing’
Brilliant zoology! ‘It is possible that cooking of a sort was practiced even before fire was tamed. Many animals are attracted to the embers of naturally occurring fires, where they sift for roasted seeds and beans rendered edible by burning’
‘Bitter manioc, the Amazonian staple, which is the usual source of tapioca, contains enough prussic acid to kill anyone who eats a meal-sized quantity, but this can be dissipated by the processes of pounding or grating, soaking and heating which are used to prepare it. How the Indians who first cultivated this plant, and came to rely on it, discovered these peculiar properties is an intriguing but insoluble problem’ — this is the exact same problem as the discovery of any technology: tanning, kefir, etc.
Now I am more suspicious of this claim than at the beginning of the chapter: ‘Cooking perfected fire’s power of social magnetism by adding enhanced nourishment to these functions.’ No more of this nonsense shall be quoted here.
‘It is hard to resist the impression that research has slowed or stopped prematurely, because a cheap culprit has been found. The prejudices induced by the modern health cult are social as well as—perhaps, rather than—scientific: they profile an identity and constitute a common creed. To anyone independent-minded, these are grounds to question, rather than to conform.’ — much of funding-driven science is so: it builds and then adheres to a common creed.
‘It was probably only in the last century, as a result of promotion of the delights of certain rustic “regional cuisines” by Parisian restaurateurs of provincial provenance, that snails began to be rehabilitated as a delicacy after centuries of marginalisation and contempt. Until the era of short rations in the Second World War, it was said that no top chef would have served them.’ — What can I say, I enjoy collecting these Wattsian tidbits.
‘Compared with the large and intractable quadrupeds who are usually claimed as the first domesticated animal food sources, snails are readily managed. Marine varieties can be gathered in a natural rock pool. Land varieties can be isolated in a designated breeding ground by enclosing a snail-rich spot with a ditch. By culling small or unfavored types by hand the primitive snail farmer would soon enjoy the benefits of selective breeding. Snails are grazers and do not need to be fed with foods which would otherwise be wanted for human consumption. They can be raised in abundance and herded without the use of fire, without any special equipment, without personal danger and without the need to select and train lead animals or dogs to help. They are close to being a complete food, useful as rations for traders’journeys, pilgrimages and campaigns. Some varieties, such as eremina, contain water for several days’ travel as well as plenty of meat.’ — I want some now!
‘In the history of the exploitation of marine creatures for food, it is obviously reasonable to propose that herding may have preceded hunting, for fishing is a kind of hunting which demands highly inventive technology, adjusted to an unfamiliar medium. Mollusk farming, by contrast, seems a natural extension of gathering and can be done by hand.’
‘Off the coast of Senegal, at Lake Diana in Corsica and at Saint-Michel-en-l’Herme in the Vendée, there are islands formed entirely of discarded oyster shells, which are still growing in a sea rich in natural oyster beds.’
‘The assumption usually made by historians is that an increase in the consumption of mollusks can only be explained by a shortage of bigger game. But small, easily managed creatures had considerable advantages over big game, provided they could be supplied in large quantities. Archaeologists label mollusks as a “gathered” food, but where they were eaten in huge quantities it will make better sense, in some cases, to think of them as being systematically farmed.’ — Stupid historians! Go Felipe!
‘two strands, both characterized by a progressive model: agriculture and the scientific improvement of plant food species are conventionally classed as growths from gathering; while herding and stock breeding are treated as developments from hunting. These are marginally misleading traditions: some kinds of farming and stock breeding are probably older than some kinds of hunting; mollusk farming is a kind of herding which is closer to gathering practices than anything which can fairly be called hunting. And sedentary farming communities can acquire domestic animals by means unconnected with the hunt: by weaning strays or by attracting scavengers to their settlements.’ — Thank you Felipe!!!
‘Herding has been classified as an extraordinary development in historical ecology, which could not have happened independently in more than a very few places. If it is now found almost everywhere in the world, that must—according to traditional reasoning—be a result of diffusion: a practice initiated in one place, or a very limited number of places, by a stroke of accident or genius, then radiated across the world, transmitted by migration or war or trade. This kind of reasoning is still popular in scholarship but it really belongs to the mental tool kit of a bygone age. Diffusionism as a philosophy arose among intellectual elites committed to hierarchical models of the world. Only people peculiarly favored by God or nature could initiate great ideas. Other people—less intelligent or less evolved—could only progress by learning from their betters. The idea appealed in a world dominated, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by white men’s empires, whose justification was that they were spreading the benefits of their own innovations to lesser breeds. It seemed convincing in a world of scholarship dominated by traditions of classical humanism and schooled in the tracing of the transmission of texts. Since cultural developments really do spread by diffusion from a single original source and the same models, the same techniques of research got transferred to other disciplines.’ — Brutal! Thank you!
‘Many hunting cultures do not just accept the bounty of nature. They drive herds where they want them, sometimes constructing drive lanes for the purpose and penning or corraling the catch: this is already a form of herding. Or they produce food by wielding fire to manage the environment. ... Although some hunting communities prefer not to pursue such techniques to the point where they become the permanent custodians of the herds, these hunting methods clearly belong to a continuum which includes pastoralism. Whether to take the process further and become full-time managers of flocks is a decision which depends on a balance of considerations: if the supply of animals for the hunt is plentiful, the extra trouble of undertaking pastoralism may not be worthwhile. The great benefit of undertaking that extra trouble is that it facilitates selective breeding’ — A new twist: hunting versus herding both involve selection, but herding makes it much more natural.
‘Indeed, in many parts of the world, the disappearance of numerous species which were the prey of man in the “great Pleistocene extinction” probably owed something, at least, to hunters’ prodigality: most of the large fauna of the Western Hemisphere and Australia disappeared completely, while the Old World lost its biggest elephants—partly, perhaps, to hunters hungry for fat.’ — Interesting hypothesis.
‘Bushmen who persist with this taxing way of life to this day are obviously pursuing a commitment which has grown out of generations of invested emotion. Cultural capital is tied down in practices that would be heart-wrenching to change for the mere sake of material gain.’ — Never think in terms of few-dimensional subspaces when it comes to humans. It’s not just subsistence, then entertainment. It’s subsistence, entertainment as telling stories, entertainment as making beautiful things, entertainment as making tech advances.
‘It is not always easy to draw the line between a herding culture and a culture which hunts herds.’
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23:51 / 2013-02-15)
All evidence from the past is partial, even things that we have witnessed ourselves, because memory plays such tricks with us
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15:21 / 2013-02-16)
Thinking isn't modern. It isn't a product of any culture. It is a human disposition. Most of great thoughts and ideas are therefore very, very ancient; deep into pre-history
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15:17 / 2013-02-16)
Is it not impossible to know what people thought 150,000 years ago?
"It may seem unsatisfactory to make inferences of what people thought by looking at the objects, but it isn't that much more chancy than making inferences of what people have thought in written evidence
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15:17 / 2013-02-16)
History is sources, I am much more interested in them than in what actually happened, if you could ever know them
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15:15 / 2013-02-16)
Many people think that materialism is this modern idea that it took a great deal of effort to get away from non-material beings like spirits, I think exactly the opposite. It's easy to believe in materialism because the evidence is there. It is extremely sophisticated to say 'just because I see this table in front of me doesn't mean that it is really there.' I think metaphysics – animism is terribly profound and subtle
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15:14 / 2013-02-16)
deeply influenced by Christianity. They find it very difficult to escape. The trouble is that when you try to escape from something you remain in relation to it
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15:13 / 2013-02-16)
Most people's religion isn't metaphysical or transcendental. For most people religion is about this world, about coping with and mastering the forces of nature. That is what Dawkins has done. He has aligned himself with most people
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15:13 / 2013-02-16)
Richard Dawkins is a profoundly religious figure, his religion is Darwinism. He is as passionate about Darwin as any Muslim is about Muhammad
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15:13 / 2013-02-16)
We don’t need any more Star Wars, we need something that does what Star Wars did — create something new out of old elements, something vibrant, stylish, gripping, alien and familiar, packed with more ideas than you could understand and more images than you could look at
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12:41 / 2013-02-14)
Games like Sins of a Solar Empire feel very Star Warsy to me. FTL is a really good Star Wars game, I think
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12:40 / 2013-02-14)
I’d like a real story in an incredible world, not an incredible story in a boring one
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12:18 / 2013-02-14)
They’re unassuming. Star Wars is this really specific story set against the backdrop of a thousand worlds and a billion alien races. It shows them off for sure, but it’s not a show off. That’s why Boba Fett was so cool to begin with, he was just a side character, amongst a thousand side characters, all of whom were amazing, and all of whom would inspire young imaginations by their brevity
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12:18 / 2013-02-14)
I love the seedy underworld. The scenes in Jabba’s Palace are some of my favorite scenes. There are so many characters packed into such small screens that you wonder who they are and what they’re all about
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11:28 / 2013-02-14)
Being a Jedi is all well and good if you’re into the whole galactic choir boy thing. And yes, whipping out a lightsaber is always going to impress people. But Luke, Obi Wan and Yoda, while nice enough guys, aren’t exactly relatable. As characters, they are driven by destiny, by fate, by an all-powerful Force. That makes for a great story, but a great game needs to give the player a motivation that goes beyond some fabricated narrative. And if you’re looking for a powerful motivator, well, it’s hard to beat greed.
Han Solo is the real hero in Star Wars. He doesn’t have the Force, he wasn’t foretold by any prophecy, he’s just a regular guy trying to make an illicit living
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11:27 / 2013-02-14)
what really made the game stand out was its unique portrayal of the Empire/rebel relationship from the perspective of a simple soldier (needless to say, the Imperials are the “good guys” in this story). I also liked that big-name characters like Vader were used sparingly but effectively — that kind of restraint is a hallmark of good design
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11:27 / 2013-02-14)
‘What else was to have been ex- pected from a society with a warriorist culture whose entire popula- tion was perpetually on the move, whose economy was highly fragile, and whose wider society was not only highly fragile but dependent upon the extortion of agrarian wealth for its very ex- istence?’ — uncool question. Anything could be expected, including what happened. This kind of question reminds me of Lazarsfeld’s practical joke mentioned in the beginning of Duncan Watts’ “Everything is Obvious” book. This is circular reasoning: the example in question has property X (in this case, ‘the Mongols' sudden invasions’); we highlight all its other properties Y, Z, ..., in the context of X; then we ask, “in light of Y, Z, ..., what other than X should we expect?”
Per Bak’s book has a chapter called “storytelling versus science” and so far this opus of Fletcher’s has been good storytelling (Y, Z, ..., even if refracted through the prism of X).
‘Historians do not, by and large, enjoy explaining why a certain conjuncture of events did not occur at times other than when it did or why the full potentiality of any historical situation was not always realized, and I intend to leave aside that question for later consideration.’
‘Third, chance must not be omitted from the equation.’ — He goes on about chance for a good bit.
‘So tanistry, nemesis of steppe empires, did not, at Chinggis Khan's death, bring civil war to destroy what he had made. Had it done so, Chinggis Khan's name would be known to historians but not to history, as may be seen from the example of Tamerlane, who conquered more territory than Chinggis Khan but lost most of it, after his death, to tanistry.’
‘At first glance, one might have expected the Turks and the
Mongols to have followed a common pattern in the Middle East. Both peoples came from Mongolia. They spoke cognate languages, shared common elements of folklore, had practiced the same range of nomadic adaptations, and had both first viewed the sedentary world from the perspective of the nomad face to face with China. ...
‘In the desert habitat, nomads and settled peoples had frequent and repeated contacts. The desert constricted all agriculture, both pastoral and agrarian, so that wherever pasture was to be found, it was likely to be interspersed with towns and cultivated fields. The nomad, whose pastoralism would, under such conditions, require him seasonally to return to the same places, wanted peace with his sedentary counterpart so as to be annually welcomed back and so that exchanges, which occurred mainly in markets and eye-to-eye between the individual nomad and the merchant or farmer, could continue with a minimum of difficulty. Living as part of a relatively tight nomadic-sedentary continuum, which, using his military strength, he of course tried to control, the desert nomad understood agrarian cultivation and urban society. In response to his habitat, he developed a distinct pattern of interaction with his sedentary neighbors, one that stressed control. ...
The Turks ‘had fallen heir to the desert pattern of control that the Arab conquests had bequeathed to them. They had spent enough time in the vicinity of settled populations to understand sedentary society, and they regarded themselves to some degree as its protectors.’ In contrast, ‘Nomad and farmer or townsman were not usually acquain- tances. Geography did not force steppe pastoralists and settled folk together in seasonal reunions. It separated them. At the eastern end of the steppe zone, where the lines between nomad and sedentary were most sharply drawn, Mongolia and China confronted one another through much of history as worlds apart. ... The steppe pastoralist's political ideology did not equip him to try to govern the agrarian world; so he left the settled peoples to their own political devices. For him, raiding was as important as trading. Here, the supratribal ruler performed the only function for which the steppe nomad needed him (apart from his role as the organizer of predatory campaigns): to conclude agreements with settled governments on terms of extortion. The settled government delivered wealth (commonly cloaked as return gifts and concessions in return for the face-saving device of nomad tribute), and in return the nomad withheld his raids. But when the steppe pastoralist did in- vade the settled world, he looted and destroyed as much as his heart desired so as to remind the agrarians of the wisdom of rendering peaceably the wealth that he wanted.’
Fletcher continues this fascinating line: ‘Unlike the Turks, they entered the desert habitat suddenly, en masse, in centrally-planned campaigns, phases of a concerted and temporally compact effort. There was no time for them to acculturate themselves to the desert habitat; so they carried with them, directly into the middle East, at- titudes nurtured in the East Asian steppe: disdain for peasants, who like the animals that the Mongols herded, lived directly off what grew from the soil. (The Mongols were not the only ones who have compared the agrarian population to ra'dya, "herds.") With the steppe extortion pattern in mind, the Mongols did violence with a will and used terror, reinforced by their ideology of universal dominion, to induce their victims to surrender peaceably.’ According to Weatherford, they also very much sought to avoid spilling their own blood.
‘The Mongols came into Central Asia, into Rus', and into the Middle East like a series of avalanches. Ahead of them lay the fabulous wealth of India, the riches of western Europe, and Egypt rich in agricultural production and commerce. There is nothing to suggest that the Mongols, who had defeated the armies of the Jur- chens' Chin empire (probably the strongest military forces, apart from the Mongols themselves, anywhere in the thirteenth-century world), viewed the Delhi sultanate or the European princes or the Mamluks as too strong to conquer. Yet the Mongols withdrew from their raids into India after destroying Lahore in 1241; they turned back from Europe a year later, before reaching Vienna; and they failed to punish the Mamluks for defeating them at 'Ayn Jalut in 1260. Why?’
‘when Chinggis Khan entered India again in 1224 he withdrew once more because a rhinoceros (or "unicorn")35 was sighted and his Khitan adviser Yeh-li Ch'u-ts'ai persuaded him that this was a bad omen. (Given the beliefs of the time and the important role of the individual leader in the Mongols' political culture, the latter explanation is by no means an im- possibility.)’
An /electrifying/ punchline: ‘The old wisdom is best. The Mongols stopped where they were in India and Europe in 1242 because of Ogodei's death at the end of 1241. They stopped where they were in the Middle East in 1260 because of Mongke's death in August of 1259. The decease of a steppe emperor, as all the Mongols knew, was no small matter. The classic pattern of the steppe empire, as I have suggested above, was one so closely tied to the ruler's person that when he died, it stood in real danger of collapse. If it were to be preserved, the preservation would have to be based on political maneuvering, struggle, and pro- bably civil war. All of these followed the deaths of Ogodei and Mongke. The Mongols had little choice but to break off their cam- paigns.’
‘A corollary question, which I shall not pursue here, is why the Mongols, having stopped to deal with the problems of succession, did not resume their conquests and continue to expand. For this, geopolitical factors, the dynamics of steppe imperial politics, the small size of the "Mongghol" population, the heat of India and Southeast Asia, and other reasons, including those given by Qureshi, Ikram, Sinor, and Saunders, will help to provide an answer.’ — I asked myself this opening question as soon as I came to the above punchline, and my answer was that by then, the four uluses had de-steppified like Fletcher describes the Turks to have done above. They may therefore no longer have had the same needs for conquests nor the resources to achieve those (mobility, lack of defended territory (though I recall from Weatherford that Chingis always had to worry about enemies attacking the ger)).
Fletcher acknowledged this possibility: ‘new tribes came into being as constituents of the "nations," each of which eventually formed a supratribal polity in its own right.’ I would also say that the new supratribal polities ceased being tribal, but rather Persian (Chagatay), Turkic (Jochi), Chinese (Touli) and Mongolian (Ogedei)? He continues, ‘a basic issue confronted the Mongols of the Hiilegiiid, Chaghadayid, and Toluyid "nations": should they adhere to their nomadic traditions and remain an empire-or at least a nation-of the steppe, or should they create a mixed society (fundamentally the "desert pattern" of exploiting the agrarian world)? ... Had the khaghan and the bulk of the Mongolian population remained "nomadizers" in the steppe and followed their traditional steppe pattern to exploit the agrarian world, their empire might have had a longer lease on life. But the bulk of the Mongols moved into the agrarian world, where, as "cohabiters, " they pursued the "desert" pattern and were transformed into several peoples, several separate realms. Speaking different languages, putting their trust in different religions, and pursuing different aims in different habitats, they could no longer form a single polity. The steppe, which had been their center, became a periphery.’
Bravo.
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18:32 / 2013-02-09)
The Mongols: Ecological and Social Perspectives
Joseph Fletcher
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jun., 1986), pp. 11-50
Published by: Harvard-Yenching Institute
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14:23 / 2013-02-09)
‘tanistry,3 a central element in the dynamics of Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchurian politics that historians of Asia have too often overlooked. Put briefly, the principle of tanistry held that the tribe should be led by the best qualified member of the chiefly house. At the chief's death, in other words, the succession did not pass automatically, in accordance with any principle of seniority such as primogeniture, but rather was supposed to go to the most competent of the eligible heirs. By custom, a father's personal property passed, at his death, by "ultimo-geniture" to his youngest son by his principal wife. Chieftaincy did not.’
‘Unless the tribe was very large, most tribal interests were usually best served by a timely resolution of the succession question’ — reverse the clauses for more punch: ‘most tribal interests were usually best served by a timely resolution of the succession question, unless the tribe was very large.’ ... ‘in a large tribe, rival candidates for the chieftaincy, each closely backed by his own retinue of personal supporters (nökör), might occasionally split the tribe, either temporarily or permanently. In a succession struggle, the rival candidates and their nökör competed for the support of the tribe's leading men and formed factions that could either compromise or fight. Nor were the rivals limited to the backing of members of their own tribe. If a tribe were part of a confederation, a given candidate might win the backing of the confederal ruler or other powerful elements within the confederation. Tribes or leading tribal families also commonly had special relationships with tribal (or even non-tribal) elements outside the confederation and sometimes even beyond the edges of the steppe. These too could be called upon for support or for asylum in the event that a given candidate met defeat.’
‘Commoners themselves, however, followed the leaders of one or another of the noble clans and rarely formed secessionist factions on their own initiative.’ — what is the basis of nobility (peerage) in this society?
‘Another important figure in tribal politics was the shaman (böge). The nomads' need to know the unknowable under quickly changing conditions and their need to deal with the whims of fortune and the forces of nature lent power to the shaman's role’
‘The tribe's organizational structure would seem to have been a compromise between, on the one hand, the authority of the chiefly and noble clans, each of which retained control over its own commoners, and, on the other, the requirements of grazing and migration’
‘Given the mobility of nomadic life, the inessential character of supratribal social organization, and the fissiparousness of steppe politics, supratribal polities—being based on segmentary opposition—were unstable and frequently dissolved altogether. So there could be long periods when the largest effective unit was the tribe. But even in such periods of lapse, traditions of supratribal society persisted, and tribesmen thought of themselves as belonging to "nations" (ulus) that had existed in the past and might at any time be reconstructed under a new or an old name.’
‘Steppe empires came into existence only through the efforts of individual aspirants for the office of supratribal ruler, who, so to speak, conquered the tribes of the supratribal society and then, to keep them united, had no choice but to keep them busy with lucrative wars.’
‘As our present-day experience recedes from the time when individuals as such played the leading parts in history, historians have increasingly tended to downplay the historical roles of individuals, trying to see them and their actions as merely the products of deeper social and economic forces. It is now sometimes difficult even to imagine a historical setting in which society and politics were so structured as to put immense power to initiate into the hands of individual persons, whose personalities and eccentricities thus played a major part in determining the course of history. But in the twelfth-century Mongolian steppes, the population was small-probably no more than about a million or so people. Political structures were fragile, and rule was highly personal.’ — !!!
‘Being the ruler's creation, a steppe empire-as opposed to a confederation-depended for its existence upon his person. When he died, it ran a risk of collapse.’
‘The steppe khan was surrounded by no pomp, ceremony, or mystery to clothe his kingship in a nimbus of the divine in the way that Iranian, Roman, or Chinese emperors were revealed. His pur- pose was down-to-earth: to obtain and distribute wealth. Great em- phasis was placed on the quality of generosity. (Ogodei, for exam- ple, as portrayed in the Persian sources, seems profligate to modern readers, but generosity was essential to popularity-and thus to an empire's cohesion-in the context of pastoral society.)’
‘In a steppe empire-as opposed to a confederation-the bond be- tween the khan and the tribal chief was the bond between leader and follower, between general and regimental commander-but be- tween the two men as persons not as offices. So personal was this bond-upon which the integrity of the steppe empire was based- that at the khan's death, unless his successor recreated the empire on a similar personal basis, the empire soon dissolved.’
‘No single person was ever equal to the task of being a thoroughgoing autocrat. Delegation of authority has always been unavoidable, and as autocrats succeeded one another on the thrones of empires, the amount of delegated authority tended to increase so that bureaucrats or oligarchs gradually drained away the autocrat's power. In agrarian empires, dynastic founders most closely approached the autocratic ideal, and their successors distanced themselves from it more and more, unless, as usurpers, they refounded their dynasty and repersonal- ized the substance of their authority.’ — What’s that mean exactly?
‘If the empire survived from generation to generation at all, it was because each successor tried not to be a successor in the agrarian empires' sense but rather a *refounder*.’
Esen Taishi. Selim the Grim.
‘Legitimist historians, coming from sedentary civilizations in which the pattern of succession followed a more automatic course, write of "usurpations" and tend to date the reign of a given khan from the time of the khuriltai that acclaimed him. But this fails to take account of the lapse in supratribal government that occurred while the out- come of the steppe succession struggle was being decided. The over- throw of a sitting ruler by an eligible member of the ruling lineage was not "usurpation" in the steppe nomads' eyes. A reign's real beginning dated from the winning contestant's definitive triumph over the last of his serious rivals.’
‘to some degree, succession struggles—participation in a common enterprise—reinforced the continuance of ecologically unnecessary supratribal polities. ‘
‘During this process, the integri- ty of the supratribal polity continued through the medium of the suc- cession struggle itself. (The sources, it should be noted, do not pre- sent such struggles in this light. The majority of the sources-the Persian histories and the more voluminous but less exploited material in Chinese-are pro-Toluyid and might therefore be ex- pected to emphasize tanistry and the legitimacy of struggles for suc- cession, but they were written not by nomads but by sedentary historians and therefore reflect the legitimist conceptions with which these historians and agrarian societies generally were imbued.)’ — The fight for succession was the conduit through which the supertribal polity continued.
‘In fact, a strong potential for succession war was always present even in the most harmonious confederations too, because every candidate for supratribal rule probably at least dreamed of making himself a steppe autocrat, breaking the autonomy of the tribes, and leading his united nation in glorious and lucrative war.’ — I’m clipping so much because it’s all so reminiscent of Gibbon and Asimov.
‘to rule an empire successfully-rather than merely reign over a confederation-a khan had to possess a keen eye for war and politics, the personality to command a following, and the ability to conquer his own people and subjugate them to his ab- solute rule. The best way to find a ruler with such qualities was to see who prevailed in a civil war of succession.’ — Unjustified final claim. All would know the winner was lucky—the fight was only populated by capable individuals.
‘A succession struggle was, by its very nature, one of the high points of tribal autonomy, but as a given candidate for the khanship began to win out, the pendulum would start to swing in the other direction. Uncommitted elements would go over to him. The more he won, the more factions would rally to his banners.’
‘Not uncommonly, when opportunity presented itself, tribal chiefs rebelled, but it was customary for the khan to take a more or less tolerant view of such circumstances, understanding that a chief's popularity with his tribesmen often required him to try to maintain as much autonomy as possible for his tribe.’ — This article is basically politics 101.
‘A leader who won battles won followers. A leader who lost battles lost followers. Everyone wanted to be on the winning side. Everyone wanted a share of the spoils.’ — Very Hollywood.
‘Tenggeri or Tengri (scribally, Tngri), the universal vic- tory-granting sky god, which-like horse nomadism, fire worship, ex- posure of the dead, the etymologies (perhaps) of all the Turco- Mongolian terms for chiefs and rulers, and, I suspect (although diffusionists may ascribe them to Egypt and anti-diffusionists to in- dependent invention in each of the major civilizations), the concept of universal dominion and also monotheism itself-came from the early Aryans, some of whom eventually migrated into Iran and In- dia and some of whom remained in the steppes.’
‘(Possession of Tenggeri's mandate was demonstrated by success in battle, and in this respect it differed from the European idea of the divine right of kings, which adhered even to unsuccessful mon- archs.)’
‘For the sake of mere extortion, a confederation with a nominal ruler would suffice. But if the tribes were to remain under the discipline of a steppe autocrat, he must raid and invade’
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14:21 / 2013-02-09)
‘the minimum number (about twenty to forty animals for
each unit family)’
‘The logic of the foregoing analysis is that the main purpose of the tribe was to exploit the pastoral habitat and that the main purpose of the supratribal polity was to extort wealth from agrarian societies.’
The tribe was the basic unit of society. It had its own traditions,
institutions, customs, beliefs, and myths of common ancestry.
These, if the tribe was of mixed linguistic or ethnological origin, promoted unity and the idea of a shared identity. All members of thetribe, including the common people (haran), were, by tradition, con-sidered descendants of a single ancestor. Especially close was thefictive kinship ascribed to the leading families, who were usually regarded as nobles.
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13:20 / 2013-02-09)
‘Within the broad and complex variety of environments in which they have lived in different times and places, various Turkish-speaking and Mongolian-speaking populations have adapted themselves to the entire spectrum from intensive cultivation to strict steppe pastoralism, a spectrum in which the sharp nomad-peasant dichotomy disappears. Turks and Mongols have been nomads, semi-nomads (practicing various forms of transhumance but with some fixed places of abode), and cultivators.’
‘Probably neither the Mongghol tribe itself nor the other tribes in the confederation to which the Mongghols gave their name consisted entirely of ethnological Mongols or of people whose first language was Mongolian. Nor were the ethnological Mongols and native Mongolian speakers confined to the Mongghol confederation. The other three main confederations in Mongolia-the Tatar, the Naiman, and the Kereyid-also contained Mongols in the ethnological and linguistic meaning of the term’
‘The livestock of a camping group, most of the animal wealth of a tribe, even most of the herds of an entire confederation, could be lost virtually overnight to disease or starvation.’
‘pastoralism was not labor-intensive.’
‘"vengeance" (os)’
‘Ecologically, no social organization was needed above the level of the tribe. Any would-be supratribal ruler had to bring to heel a highly mobile population, who could simply decamp and ignore his claims to authority’
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12:28 / 2013-02-09)
The high plateau of Mongolia, east of the Altai Mountains, is the original homeland of both Turks and Mongols; two groups much intermingled in history. The emergence of the Turks from Mongolia is a gradual process. Each successive wave makes its first appearance in history when they acquire power in some new region, whether they be the Khazars, the Seljuks, Ottomans or one of many other such groups. The sudden eruption of the Mongols from their
homeland was different.
A better circular explanation of the concept may be found in the following often used form:
There can be no state without men
There can be no men without money
There can be no money without prosperity
There can be no prosperity without justice
There can be no justice without state.
Chang Chun's answer to Chingiz: ‘Before this I have had several invitations from the southern capital and from the Sung, and have not gone. But now, at the first call of the Dragon court (he means the Mongol court), I am ready. Why? I have heard that the emperor has been gifted by Heaven with such valour and wisdom as has never been seen in ancient times or in our own days. Majestic splendour is accompanied by justice. The Chinese people as well as the barbarians have acknowledged the emperor's supremacy.’ Written April 1220, in response to a letter from Chingiz on May, 1219.
Ibn Battuta: "[Their faces are] visible for the Turkish women do not veil themselves. Sometimes a woman will be accompanied by her husband and anyone seeing him would take him for one of her servants."
Mesnevi, by Jalal al-Din Rumi: Parrots are taught to speak without understanding the words. The method is to place a mirror between the parrot and the trainer. The trainer, hidden by the mirror, utters the words, and the parrot, seeing his own reflection in the mirror, fancies another parrot is speaking, and imitates all that is said by the trainer behind the mirror. So God uses prophets and saints as mirrors whereby to instruct men, viz., the bodies of these saints and prophets; and men, when they hear the words proceeding from these mirrors, are utterly ignorant that they are really being spoken by "Universal Reason" or the "Word of God" behind the mirror of the saints. Earthly forms are only shadows of the Sun of Truth---a cradle for babes, but too small to hold those who have grown to spiritual manhood.
“Turkish craze finds its way into 'Algiers'” By Richard Nilsen, The Arizona Republic ,Feb. 17, 2006: The West and Islam go way back.
On the serious side, there were the Crusades. On the more trivial side, there was the Dutch craze for Asian tulips in the 17th century. And one of the more interesting collisions between the West and Islam occurred in Europe in the 18th century with a craze for all things Turkish. It gave us coffee, croissants, Angora sweaters and Mozart's Rondo alla Turca. It also finally gave us Rossini's Italian Girl in Algiers (L'Italiana in Algeri), which Arizona Opera brings to Phoenix this week. Europe had been under the gun from the Ottoman Empire for centuries, but when the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed in 1699, it ushered in not only an era of peace but a fad in fashion. For the next century and a half, all things Turkish, Moorish and Islamic became the source of the culturally exotic in European minds.
It's really quite stunning to see it all: Turkish cigarettes, Turkish baths, Turkish carpets, harem pants, slippers with upturned toes. There were harem girls painted by Ingres and Delacroix. The turkey named for the color of its wattles, which matched a popular fabric dye of the time, called "Turkey red." And one of the most pervasive effects was the popularity of "Turkish music." Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote versions of Turkish music.
When the Ottoman Turks sent janizary bands - their military bands - to Vienna as a kind of culturalexchange program, the European ears were perked by the exotic sounds of drums, cymbals and chimes. You hear the European orchestra expanded with new percussion instruments at just this time, when Haydn wrote his Military Symphony and Mozart his Turkish concerto for violin. The characteristic rhythm of Turkish music was the march beat of "Left . . . left . . . left, right, left," and you can hear it in Mozart's Turkish rondo as well as in the concerto. And Beethoven even included a segment of Turkish music in his sublime Ninth Symphony, the "Ode to Joy," when the whole thing comes to a momentary halt, interrupted by the burps of a contrabassoon, followed by the Turkish marching music ...
In fact, German military music made such pervasive use of the Turkish rhythm that it soon lost all sense of being exotic and became the drumbeat of Germanic militarism: If you watch the Leni Riefenstahl film, Triumph of the Will, about the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg before the war, you are nearly oppressed with that "boom . . . boom . . . boom-boom-boom" rhythm. That is a baleful end to what began as pure fluff. Operas about Turkish pashas and European women were a regular occurrence.
Mozart wrote his Abduction From the Serail, filled with Turkish effects, and Rossini, decades later, imitated that sound - and pretty well stole the plot - from the Mozart, for his Italian Girl in Algiers. In it, a crafty Italian woman outwits a foolish Turkish bey and saves herself and her fiancé from a fate worse than Wagner. It's a wonderful opera, full of Rossini's best tunes and imbroglios. You can't leave the hall without them resounding in your head. A few years later, Rossini wrote a sequel: The Turk in Italy. He knew a good thing
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08:29 / 2013-02-09)
Personally, I think chicken is the least interesting of the 3 (bigloo, gambit and chicken) scheme->c compilers.
Bigloo has the best FFI, hands down, it's simple, it offers mapping, and doesn't require you write chunks of C for each definition. It's also slightly easier to call from, and embed in, C, in my experiments.
Bigloo has better potential performance, due to the strict typing abilities.
Gambit has the best performance, this is probably debatable though, at least according to the benchmarks I've seen.
Gambit also has the best portability, bigloo and chicken only 'mostly' work on win32 - bigloo's socket support has some annoying bugs on win32, for example, and I've had problems with chicken even compiling properly on win32, often failing to find compilers, etc.
Whether Chicken or Bigloo has the best built-in module system is debatable, personally I'd prefer bigloo's over the two. Gambit's lack of a built-in module system is offset by 'black hole' which is progressing nicely, and is possibly better than both bigloo's and chicken's, in the long term.
License wise, Gambit is dual (LGPL and Apache), Chicken is BSD and Bigloo is LGPL. All are pretty much equal, really, from an end-user's point of view and none of them should impart any restrictions on any programs you create with them, as far as I can tell.
Edit: I knew I forgot something, I didn't mention the '4th' option - JazzScheme. Which is really just a version of Gambit with an integrated IDE, a module system similar to bigloo's, and a bunch of pre-built library mappings (Gtk, OpenGL, and a bunch more, iirc). It has potential, but for me, I don't like to have to use a provided IDE, I prefer emacs, and the 'command line' version of jazz isn't really finished yet.
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12:58 / 2013-02-07)
Great topic of historical linguistics! Let's look at it from two sides: what evidence can help us learn about the topic? and what might have happened in the absence of all ontemporaneous evidence that has been long lost?
1. What evidence is available?
Reconstructing the linguistic past of the Indo-European protolanguage can go only so far back, which means the picture dims the farther back we go in time. As for the availability of evidence in the formative stage of the Indo-European protolanguage, you can be assured there is none. We can only infer with evidence from the later stages from when written records survive to the present.
2. What might have happened?
(1) Minimal Syntactic Construction Requires Maximal Inflection
Sentences were probably very short, consisting of 1, 2, or 3 word strings predominantly. With nouns and adjective conveying at least 3 grammatical meanings (gender, number, and case) and verbs conveying at least 5 grammatical meanings (person, number, time, voice, aspect, mode), most simple sentences requiring S+V could be expressed in 1 word, those requiring S+V+C or S+V+O 2 words, and those requiring S+V+O+O or S+V+O+OC 3 words, not counting the modifiers. When context provided continuing (constant) variables, often times a 1-word sentence would suffice. A heavily inflected language made this possible from our point of view, but the reverse reasoning could also have given rise to the inflectional complexity of the language(s) ancestral to the proto-Indo-European tongues, i.e., short made stout.
(2) Vocabulary
Most probably no independent tribe or band of tribes had the full classical vocabulary we have in the classics reference room. Similar to an average modern person having limited vocabulary, small groups had only those that were required in their daily material (hunting, gathering, farming, and herding) and religious culture.
(3) Longer sentences beget simpler inflection
Emergence of chiefdoms gave rise to longer sentences. The longer sentences served two purposes: long winding oral literature to satisfy the needs of education, religious rites, and entertainment and memorising catalogues to keep track of inventories, rolls, laws, and contracts.
As longer strings of words became more popular, the heavily inflected device that used to play a communcative function in shorter sentences began to lose its import. Thus arose from the formerly synthetic language a less inflected analytic language that relied more on word-order than inflection. This pattern has been observed across the attested languages of the classical period onto later daughter languages, e.g. from Homeric Greek to Classical Greek to Koine to Medieval to Modern.
This scheme proposes that the classical langauges developed from a highly inflected language with simple syntax evolved into a less inflected language with more complex syntax. Classical Latin, for instance, had virtually nill word order whereas its remote daughter language Italian has a more complex set of sytactic rules. Something had to give when the sentences got longer and the words voluminous; loss of inflection and incresingly analytic constructions.
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21:44 / 2013-02-02)
Further notes from 2012/11/24.
‘An alternate route to China via the Northwest Passage around and/or through North America—and also eastward through the Arctic Sea—continued to be eagerly sought for centuries thereafter.’ All that yearning and striving seeking for something that wasn't there!
A nation can encourage trade, after it reaches the max extent allowed by conquest. This is helped by paper money, roads, law men. Payment of taxes (aka tribute?) in goods can also be an important role. These are thoughts to look again for in Weatherford.
‘The production was centralized on places where the costs of labour were lowest. This, not primarily low transport-costs, explains [that] ... comparative cost-advantages were pulling Asian and American markets together—no matter what mercantilist restriction. Another case was the substitution of Indian, Arab and Persian products like indigo, silk, sugar, pearls, cotton, later on even coffee—the most profitable commodities traded in the Arabian seas in the late seventeenth century—by goods produced elsewhere; generally the American colonies.... Due to this global process of product-substitution, by 1680 the transit-trade of the Arabian seas with Europe had disappeared or was in decline; this was for a brief period cushioned by the rise of the coffee-trade. But it contributed to a prolonged depression in the commerce between the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian west coast. This decline of transit-trade was smoothed by internal trade within the Arabian seas. But the Middle East had to pay for imports from India by selling bulk products in the Mediterranean, like grain or wool. A precarious balance ... spawned an inflationary pull both on the Ottoman and the Safavid currency. (Barendse 1997: chap. 1)’
‘the trade, industry, and wealth of Venice and Genoa were due primarily to their middlemen roles between Europe and the East, some of which the Italian cities had preserved even through the Dark Ages. During the periods of economic revival after A.D. 1000; both tried to reach into the trade and riches of Asia as far as they could. Indeed, Genoa attempted in 1291 to reach Asia by circumnavigating Africa. Failing that, Europe had to make do with the three major routes to Asia that departed from the eastern Mediterranean: the northern one through the Black Sea, dominated by the Genovese; the central one via the Persian Gulf, dominated by Baghdad; and as its replacement, the northern one through the Red Sea, which gave life to Cairo and its economic partner in Venice. The expansion of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors cemented the decline of the middle route after the capture of Baghdad in 1258 and favored the southern one.’
‘The Mongols then controlled the northern route onward from the Black Sea and also promoted the trans-Central Asian routes through such cities as Samarkand, which prospered under Mongol protection. Yet all of these trade routes suffered from the long world economic depression between the mid-thirteenth-century and the end of the fourteenth century, of which the Black Death was more the consequence than the cause (Gills and Frank 1992; also in Frank and Gills 1993). The economic determinants of this growing and ebbing trade, production, and income, however, lay still farther eastward in South, Southeast, and East Asia. As we will observe below, a long cyclical economic revival began there again around 1400.’
‘The problem [of specie shortages], in the long run, engendered its own solution. Rising bullion prices, the corollary of contracting stocks, largely account for the intensified prospecting for precious metal all over Europe, as well as the ultimately successful search for new techniques of extraction and refining. And it was the acute "gold fever" of the fifteenth century that was the driving force behind the Great Discoveries which would end by submerging the money-starved European economy with American treasure at the dawn of modern times. (Day 1987: 63)’
‘Some estimates suggest a population decline in the New Word as a whole from some 100 million to about 5 million (Livi-Bacci 1992: 51). Even in nomadic Inner Asia, the Russian advance through Siberia would be spurred on by the germs of the soldiers and settlers as much as by their other arms. As Crosby (1994: II) observes, "the advantage in bacteriological warfare was (and is) characteristically enjoyed by people from dense areas of settlement moving into sparser areas of settlement."’
’the relatively greater impact of the Black Death on Europe had also been a reflection of the isolation and marginality of Europe within Eurasia.’ I don't know how legitimate this claim is since the Black Death caused some enormous disruptions in Asia as well, possibly acting as the trigger for the Yuan collapse and the Ming ascension.
‘The Columbian gene exchange involved not only humans but also animals and vegetables. Old World Europeans introduced not only themselves but also many new animal and vegetable species to the New World. The most important animals, but by no means the only ones, were horses (which had existed there previously but had died out), cattle, sheep, chickens, and bees. Among vegetables, Europeans brought wheat, barley, rice, turnips, cabbage, and lettuce. They also brought the bananas, coffee, and, for practical purposes if not genetically, the sugar that would later dominate so many of their economies.
‘Through the Columbian exchange, the New World in turn also contributed much to the Old World, such as animal species like turkeys as well as many vegetables, several of which would significantly extend cropping and alter consumption and survival in many parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Sweet potatoes, squash, beans, and especially potatoes and maize vastly increased cropping and survival possibilities in Europe and China, because they could survive harsher climates than other crops. The absolute and probably the relative impact was greatest on new crops in the more populated China where New World crops contributed to doubling agricultural land and tripling population (Shaffer 1989: 13). The growing of sweet potatoes is recorded in the 1560s in China, and maize became a staple food crop in the seventeenth century (Ho Ping-ti 1959: 186 ff.). White potatoes, tobacco, and other New World crops also became important. Indeed as we note below, the resultant population increase was far greater in China and throughout Asia than in Europe. Today 37 percent of the food the Chinese eat is of American origin (Crosby 1996: 5). After the United States, China today is the world's second largest producer of maize, and 94 percent of the root crops grown in the world today are of New World origin (Crosby 1994: 20). In Africa, subsistence was extended especially by cassava and maize, along with sunflowers, several nuts, and the ubiquitous tomato and chili pepper. Later Africa also became a major exporter of cacao, vanilla, peanuts, and pineapple, all of which were of American origin.’
‘expatriate merchant and trade diasporas. They had already played important roles in the facilitation of trade in the Bronze Age and certainly did so in the early modem period. ... In the period under review, Malacca was peopled almost entirely by expatriate merchants, so much so that Pires counted eighty-four different languages spoken among them.’
‘Manila counted up to 30,000 Chinese residents in the seventeenth century to oil the wheels of the transpacific-China silver and porcelain trade. Armenians from a landlocked country in western Central Asia established an also landlocked trade diaspora base in the Safavid Persian city of Isfahan, used it to trade all across Asia, and published an Armenian how-to-do-it handbook in Amsterdam. Arab and Jewish merchants continued to ply their worldwide trade as they had for at least a millennium and continue to do so today. New Englanders not only sought Moby Dick and other whales throughout the world oceans; they also plied the slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean, and they regularly buccaneered off the coast of Madagascar.’ --- Now I fear if ReOrient is like a business-book, ignoring the huge graveyard of the ordinary and focused on the rare (how common were Armenians in Isfahan and Amsterdam? and how much can you exaggerate just to make a point?)
‘New World sugar supplied calories to Europe that it did not have to provide for itself. Later of course, imports of wheat and meat from the New World fed millions of Europeans and permitted them to put their scarce land to other uses, as did the import of cotton, replacing wool from sheep that had grazed enclosed land. We will return to the matter of ecological imperialism in some of the regional reviews below and again in chapter 6.’
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21:42 / 2013-02-02)
Some further notes made 2012/11/24:
‘These four regional maps are constructed also to illustrate the major interregional imbalances of trade and how they were covered by shipments of silver and gold bullion.’
‘almost all European imports from the east were paid for by European exports of (American) silver ... predominantly China ... was the "sink" for about half of the world's silver’
(
20:00 / 2013-02-02)
"'World economic integration' is as significant a fact of organized life in earlier centuries (despite all appearances to the contrary) as it more obviously is in the days of instant computerized markets..." (Perlin 1994)
(
07:57 / 2012-05-01)
'the Japanese took up "the Chrysanthemum and the Sword" (Benedict 1954.) and produced and prospered without Western colonialism or foreign investment, not to mention the Protestant ethic, even after their defeat in World War II. So James Abbeglen (1958) and Robert Bellah (1957) sought to explain these developments by arguing that the Japanese have the "functional equivalent of the Protestant ethic," while, too bad for them, the Confucian Chinese do not. Now that both are surging ahead economically, the argument has been turned around again: it is East Asian "Confucianism" that is now spurring them onward and upward.'
(
11:43 / 2012-04-24)
"A derivative observation is that Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European "exceptionalism" of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word---of race. We will see that Europe also did not do so primarily through its participation and use of the Atlantic economy per se, not even through the direct exploitation of its American and Caribbean colonies and its African slave trade. This book shows how instead Europe used its American money to muscle in on and ben
efit from Asian production, markets, trade---in a word, to profit from the predominant position of Asia in the world economy. Europe climbed up on the back of Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders---temporarily. This book also tries to explain in world economic terms how "the West" got there---and by implication, why and how it is likely soon again to lose that position."
(08:26 / 2012-04-24)
That excerpt is really appealing to me as I read about Alfred asking a Norseman about Norway, about the mixing between Welsh and Anglo-Saxon (both in Tolkien), and /The Heike Story/.
(
07:57 / 2012-04-24)
If they gave any credit to anyone else, it was only grudgingly with a "history" that, like the Orient Express on the westward bound track only, ran through a sort of tunnel of time from the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, to the classical Greeks and Romans, through medieval (western) Europe, to modem times. Persians, Turks, Arabs, Indians, and Chinese received at best polite, and Often not so polite, bows. Other peoples like Africans, Japanese, Southeast Asians, and Central Asians received no mention as contributors to or even participants in history at all, except as "barbarian" nomadic hordes who periodically emerged out of Central Asia to make war on "civilized" settled peoples. From among literally countless examples, I will cite the preface of one: "The Foundations of the West is an historical study of the West from its beginnings in the ancient Near East to the world [sic!] of the midseventeenth century" (Fishwick, Wilkinson, and Cairns 1963: ix).
(
21:39 / 2012-04-16)
‘In traditional steppe systems of thought, everyone outside the kinship network was an enemy and would always be an enemy unless somehow brought into the family through ties of adoption or marriage. Temujin sought an end to the constant fighting between such groups, and he wanted to deal with the Tatars the same way that he had dealt with the Jurkin and the Tayichiud clans—kill the leaders and absorb the survivors and all their goods and animals into his tribe’
‘in a 1306 illustration of the Robe of Christ in Padua, the robe not only was made in the style and fabric of the Mongols, but the golden trim was painted in Mongol letters from the square Phagspa script commissioned by Khubilai Khan ... Old Testament prophets were depicted holding scrolls open to long, but undecipherable, texts in Mongol script’
(
20:16 / 2013-02-02)
‘By 1351, China had reportedly lost between one-half and two-thirds of its population to the plague. The country had included some 123 million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but by the end of the fourteenth century the population dropped to as low as 65 million.’
‘By the winter of 1350, the plague had crossed the North Atlantic from the Faeroe Islands on through Iceland and reached Greenland. It may have killed 60 percent of the settlers of Iceland, and the plague was probably the single most important factor in the final extinction of the struggling Viking colony in Greenland.’ In twenty years, from China to Greenland.’
‘in the tremendous destruction of World War II in Europe, Great Britain lost less than 1 percent of its population, and France, the scene of much fighting, lost 1.5 percent of its population. German losses reached 9.1 percent. Widespread famine pushed the World War II death rates in Poland and Ukraine toward 19 percent’
‘The disease brought down urban dwellers more readily and thereby destroyed the educated class and the skilled craftsmen’
‘Despite a papal bull from Pope Clement VI in July 1348 protecting the Jews and ordering the Christians to stop their persecutions, the campaign against them escalated. On Valentine’s Day in 1349, the authorities of Strasbourg herded two thousand Jews to the Jewish cemetery outside of the city to begin a mass burning. Some Jews were allowed to save themselves by confessing their crimes and converting to Christianity, and some children were forcefully converted. More than a thousand perished over the six days that it took to burn them all, and the city outlawed the presence of any Jew in the city. City after city picked up the practice of publicly burning Jews to thwart the epidemic. According to the boasts of one chronicler, between November 1348 and September 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria had been burned. In the Christian parts of Spain, the people initiated similar persecutions against the resident Muslim minority, driving many of them to seek refuge in Granada and Morocco’
‘The plague not only isolated Europe, but it also cut off the Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia. The Mongol rulers in Persia could no longer procure the goods from the lands and workshops they owned in China. The Golden Family in China could not get its goods from Russia or Persia’
‘As foreign conquerors, the Mongols had been tolerated by their subjects, who often outnumbered the Mongols by as much as a thousand to one, because they continued to produce a tremendous flow of trade goods long after the strength of their army had dissipated. In the plague’s aftermath, with neither trade nor the likelihood of military reinforcement from other Mongols, each branch of the Golden Family of Genghis Khan had to fend for itself in an increasingly volatile environment that might easily turn hostile. Deprived of their two advantages of military strength and commercial lucre, the Mongols in Russia, central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East searched for new modes of power and legitimacy by intermarrying with their subjects and consciously becoming more like them in language, religion, and culture. Mongol authorities purged the remaining elements of shamanism, Buddhism, and Christianity from their families and strengthened their commitment to Islam, which was the primary religion of their subjects, or, in the case of the Golden Horde in Russia, the religion of the Turkic army that helped keep the family in power.’ Viz., Islam?
‘Officials in the court decided that they had allotted the Chinese too much freedom and that the Mongols had allowed themselves to become too acculturated to Chinese life. Rather than further integrating into Chinese culture, they intensified their foreign identity and further separated themselves from Chinese language, religion, culture, and intermarriage. In the mounting paranoia, Mongol authorities ordered the confiscation not only of all weapons from the Chinese people, but their iron agricultural tools as well, and limited the use of knives. They forbade the Chinese to use horses, and in fear of secret messages being passed, they stopped performances of Chinese opera and the traditional storytelling and other public and private gatherings ... Rumors circulated regarding the mass extermination of Chinese children by the Mongols or of plans to kill everyone bearing specific Chinese family names’
‘local people along the newly opened Mongol route to Tibet carried the obligation not merely of feeding, housing, and transporting the monks, but of carrying their goods for them as well. The monks, often armed, acquired a terrible reputation for abusing people who served them’
‘After the overthrow of Mongol rule, the triumphant Ming rulers issued edicts forbidding the Chinese from wearing Mongol dress, giving their children Mongol names, and following other foreign habits’
‘They expelled the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish traders whom the Mongols had encouraged to settle in China, and in a major blow to the commercial system of the Mongols, Ming authorities abolished the failing paper money entirely and returned to metal. ... After an abortive effort to revitalize the Mongol trade system, the new rulers burned their ocean vessels, banned foreign travel for Chinese, and spent a large portion of the gross national product on building massive new walls to lock foreigners out and the Chinese in. In so doing, the new Chinese authorities stranded thousands of their citizens living in the ports of Southeast Asia.’
‘While Korea, Russia, and China returned to the hands of native dynasties, the Muslim territories experienced a more complex transition from Mongol rule. Instead of returning to the control of Arabs who had been the traders, the intermediaries, the bankers, the shippers, and the caravan drivers who connected Asia and Europe, a new cultural hybrid emerged that combined a Turco-Mongol military system with the legal institutions of Islam and the ancient cultural traditions of Persia. The eastern part of the Muslim world had found a new cultural freedom in which they could still be Muslims but without the domination of Arabs, whom they never allowed to regain power. New dynasties, such as the Ottoman of Turkey, the Safavid of Persia, and the Moghul of India, sometimes called Gunpowder Empires, relied primarily on the vast innovations in Mongol weaponry, a military organization based on both a cavalry and an armed infantry, and the use of firearms, to fight foreign enemies and, perhaps more important, to maintain domestic power over their ethnically varied subjects’
‘Following their purge of Mongol influence in public life, the Ming rulers went to great effort searching for the official seal of the Mongols, and they preserved the use of the Mongol language in diplomacy as a way of maintaining continuity with the past. As late as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Chinese court sent its letters in the Mongol language. In turn, the Manchu, who overthrew the Ming in 1644, strategically intermarried with the descendants of Genghis Khan so that they could claim legitimacy as his heirs in blood as well as in spirit’
‘By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol holdings in central Asia had fallen under the control of Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane, a Turkic warrior who claimed, with flimsy evidence, descent from Genghis Khan ... Despite all that Emir Timur sought to do in restoring the Mongol Empire, he did not follow the ways of Genghis Khan. He slaughtered without reason and seemed to find a perverse but persistent pleasure in torturing and humiliating his prisoners. When he seized the sultan of the Ottoman kingdom of Turkey, he forced him to watch as his wives and daughters served Timur naked at dinner and, in some reports, satisfied his sexual demands’
‘When Timur delighted in public torture or piled up pyramids of heads outside his conquered cities, it was assumed that he was carrying on the traditions of his Mongol people. The practices of Timur were anachronistically assigned back to Genghis Khan’
‘The descendants of Timur became known in history as the Moghuls of India. ... Akbar organized his cavalry along the traditional Mongol units of ten (up to five thousand) and instituted a civil service based on merit. Just as the Mongols made China into the most productive manufacturing and trading center of their era, the Moghuls made India into the world’s greatest manufacturing and trading nation’
‘Whereas the Renaissance writers and explorers treated Genghis Khan and the Mongols with open adulation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe produced a growing anti-Asian spirit that often focused on the Mongols, in particular, as the symbol of everything evil or defective in that massive continent.’ Racism?
‘The most pernicious rationale for Asian inferiority did not emerge from the philosophers and artists in Europe, however, as much as from the scientists, the new breed of intellectuals spawned by the Enlightenment. In the mid-eighteenth century, the French naturalist, the Compte de Buffon, compiled the first encyclopedia of natural history in which he offered a scientific description of the main human groups, of which the Mongol ranked as the most important in Asia. His descriptions seemed like a return to the hysterical writings of Matthew Paris and Thomas of Spalato, more than five hundred years earlier’
‘In a popular 1924 book, The Mongol in Our Midst, British physician Francis G. Crookshank easily moved back and forth between Mongoloids as a race and as a mental category in what he delineated as the “Mongolian stigmata,” including small earlobes, protruding anuses, and small genitals among both males and females. The obvious conclusion of this linking of retarded children with another race was that these children do not belong in the communities, or even the families, into which they were born’
‘In evolutionary theories of race and retardation, the scientific community supplied hard and supposedly dispassionate evidence of what political demagogues and newspaper editors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called the Yellow Peril’
‘The focus on the Mongols as the source of Asian problems, and therefore the rationale for European conquest of them from Japan to India, developed as an integral theme in the ideology of European conquest and colonization’
Nehru: “It would be foolish not to recognize the greatness of Europe. But it would be equally foolish to forget the greatness of Asia.”
‘Nehru depicted Genghis Khan as a part of an ancient struggle of Asian people against European domination’ --- I thought that Europe was a distance province, a hinterland, of the Afro-Eurasian world.
‘Some Japanese scholars circulated the story that Genghis Khan had actually been a samurai warrior who had fled his homeland after a power struggle and found refuge among the steppe nomads, whom he then led on a conquest of the world’ (sounds like something Terry Pratchett would come up with)
‘The Mongol armies destroyed the uniqueness of the civilizations around them by shattering the protective walls that isolated one civilization from another and by knotting the cultures together’
‘great historical events, particularly those that erupt suddenly and violently, build up slowly, and, once having begun, never end. Their effects linger long after the action faded from view. Like the tingling vibrations of a bell that we can still sense well after it has stopped ringing, Genghis Khan has long passed from the scene, but his influence continues to reverberate through our time’
(
21:09 / 2012-11-20)
I bagged the audiobook and the ebook versions of this and am listening to it (for help with the pronunciation?) and simul-reading it. It's a well-told, impassioned, yarn of a history and some parts make me wonder.
Are the following two excerpts contradictory? First, ‘The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs.’ Then, a few paragraphs later, ‘The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan’s empire exercised a determined drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from China, Persia, and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell-casting technology, they produced the cannon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles.’
This was really cool, ‘The long, broad steppes that stretch out along these small rivers served as the highways for the Mongols toward the various regions of Eurasia. Spurs of this grassland reach west all the way into Hungary and Bulgaria in eastern Europe. To the east, they reach Manchuria and would touch the Pacific Ocean if not barred by a thin ridge of coastal mountains that cut off the Korean Peninsula. On the southern side of the Gobi, the grasslands slowly pick up again and join the heart of the Asian continent, connecting with the extensive agricultural plains of the Yellow River.’ I see a chunk of this in Bregel's monumental atlas.
I have separated two adjacent sentences into two separate paragraph-quotes here because I think they are two very important ideas that might be muted when read one next to the other:
‘In nearly every country touched by the Mongols, the initial destruction and shock of conquest by an unknown and barbaric tribe yielded quickly to an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and improved civilization.’
‘In Europe, the Mongols slaughtered the aristocratic knighthood of the continent, but, disappointed with the general poverty of the area compared with the Chinese and Muslim countries, turned away and did not bother to conquer the cities, loot the countries, or incorporate them into the expanding empire.’
(
07:19 / 2012-11-10)
Some notes made around 2012/11/27:
‘The essential elements of the First Story, which may appear incompletely or in a slightly different order in the actual attested versions, are:
- A maiden is impregnated by a heavenly spirit or god.
- The rightful king is deposed unjustly.
- The maiden gives birth to a marvelous baby boy.
- The unjust king orders the baby to be exposed.
- The wild beasts nurture the baby so he survives.
- The baby is discovered in the wilderness and saved.
- The boy grows up to be a skilled horse man and archer.
- He is brought to court but put in a subservient position.
- He is in danger of being put to death but escapes.
- He acquires a following of oath-sworn warriors.
- He overthrows the tyrant and reestablishes justice in the kingdom.
- He founds a new city or dynasty.
‘This looks very much like a schematic folktale, not history, at least when presented as a list. It may be difficult for historians and other scholars today to accept that people of the early second millennium bc would believe such stories to be actual history, or perhaps idealized history, but the theory that human societies sometimes base far-reaching actions on ideological or religious beliefs should be no surprise to medievalists, or indeed to anyone living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries ad.’
‘Where did all the silk come from? There is a widespread misconception that Central Eurasians pillaged and plundered the poor innocent Chinese or Persians or Greeks in order to get the silk. ’
‘In short, it is known that the vast majority of the silk possessed by the Central Eurasians in the two millennia from early Hsiung-nu times93 through the Mongols down to the Manchu conquest was obtained through trade and taxation, not war or extortion.’
‘We normally think of nomadic states as stimulating long-distance exchange through the creation of a pax that provides security and transportation facilities; but in fact the process of state formation among the nomads in and of itself stimulates trade through an increased demand for precious metals, gems, and, most particularly, fine cloths. Politics, especially imperial politics, was impossible without such commodities.’
‘The comitatus was among the Central Asian cultural elements introduced into the Near East from the very beginning of the Arab Empire’s expansion there. ‘Ubayd Allâh ibn Ziyâd, the first Arab to lead a military expe- dition into Central Asia, returned to Basra with a comitatus of two thousand Bukharan archers.97 His second successor, Sa‘îd ibn ‘Uthmân, brought back fifty warriors, nobles' sons, from Samarkand, but when he settled them in Medina, he took away their beautiful clothes and treated them as slaves. They murdered him and then, true to their comitatus oath, committed suicide.98 ’
‘The Islamicized comitatus has been nearly universally misunderstood by Western scholars, who refer to it as a “slave soldier” system and argue that it is an “Arab” institution. For criticism of this mistaken view, see Beckwith (1984a) and de la Vaissière (2005b, 2005c, 2007)’
‘Within traditional Central Eurasia, such burials are attested among the Scythians and their immediate predecessors, the Iranian and pre-Turkic peoples of the Altai-Tien Shan region, the Huns, the Merovingian Franks, the Turks, the Tibetans, the Koguryo, and the Mongols. Outside Central Eurasia proper, such burials are found in Shang China and premedieval Japan as well as among the Anglo- Saxons and other Germanic peoples of northwestern Eu rope. The burials are signs that the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was at one time alive and functioning in these places. ’
‘The rewards paid to a comitatus member were substantial. They included gold, silver, precious stones, silks, gilded armor and weapons, horses, and other valuable things, as vividly described in many sources.’
‘Though some of this wealth was obtained by warfare108 or tribute,109 methods used by powerful states throughout Eurasia for the same purpose, the great bulk of it was accumulated by trade, which was the most powerful driving force behind the internal economy of Central Eurasia, as noted by foreign commentators from Antiquity through the Middle Ages. ’
‘When Chinese or Romans demanded payment from other nations it is called “tribute” or “taxation” by most historians, but when Central Eurasians demanded it, it is called “extortion.”’
‘in the agricultural-urban society of China, in which the people—both in the cities and their surrounding agricultural areas and in the more distant purely agricultural areas—were in most cases ethnolinguistically more or less identical. The difference was that in Central Eurasia the distal rural people—the nomads—were usually distinct ethno- linguistically from the urban people of the city- states and their proximal rural people, with both of whom the nomads traded and over whom they usually exercised a loose kind of suzerainty maintained by taxation ’
‘To the nomads, therefore, Chinese cities in or near their territory were—or should have been—just as open to trade with them as the Central Asian cities were. Throughout recorded Chinese history, the local Chinese in frontier areas were more than willing to trade with the nomads, but when the frontiers came under active Chinese central governmental control, restrictions often were placed on the trade, it was taxed heavily, or it was simply forbidden outright. The predictable result, time and again, was nomadic raids or outright warfare, the primary purpose of which (as repeated over and over in the sources) was to make the frontier trading cities—which were built in former pastureland that had been seized from the nomads—once again accessible. ’
‘the Great Wall, which mainly connected earlier walls together and strengthened them. These walls were not built to protect the Chinese from the Central Eurasians but to hold Central Eurasian territory conquered by the Chinese’
‘That is, they were offensive works, not defensive ones. The purpose of the nomadic raids or warfare against the Chinese was undoubtedly mainly to remove the Chinese from the seized pastureland and restore it to nomadic control, as indicated by the fact that the nomads almost exclusively took animals and people as booty on these raids (cf. Hayashi 1984). The theories ultimately based on the idea of the Chinese as victims of Central Eurasian aggression, and the nomads as poverty-stricken barbarians greedy for Chinese silks and other products, are not only unsupported by the Chinese historical sources, they are directly contradicted by them, as well as by archaeology. The same applies all along the frontier between Central Eurasia and the periphery of Eurasia, from east to west.’
‘All of it together—the nomadic pastoral economy, the agricultural “oasis” economy, and the Central Asian urban economy—constituted the Silk Road. ’
‘Based on words referring to flora, fauna, and other things, as well as on archaeology and historical sources, it has been concluded that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was in Central Eurasia, specifically in the mixed steppe-forest zone between the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and the Black Sea. ’
‘The Indo-Europeans spoke more or less the same language, but in settling in their new homes they took local wives who spoke non-Indo-European languages; within a generation or two the local creoles they developed became new Indo-Europe an daughter languages. ’
‘Proto-Indo-European, when still a unified language, was necessarily spoken in a small region with few or no significant dialect differences. ... On the recently growing failure to understand this necessity, and the implications thereof, see endnote 30.’
‘No one can say that the heroes who accomplished these deeds for their people did not do them. The Chou Dynasty of China, the Roman Empire, the Wu-sun Kingdom, and the Hsiung-nu Empire are all historical facts, as are the realms of the Koguryo, the Türk, the Mongols, and others. How these nations really were founded is obscured by the mists of time, in which the merging of legendary story and history is nearly total. Even the relatively late, more or less historical accounts of the foundation of the Mongol Empire contain legendary or mythical elements that are presented as facts along with purely historical events. Yet that is unimportant. What really mattered was that the unjust overlords who suppressed the righ teous people and stole their wealth were fi nally overthrown, and the men who did the deed were national heroes.
‘In each case the subject people lived for a time under the unjust rule of their conquerors, and as their vassals they fought for them. By fi ghting in their conquerors' armies, the subject people acquired the life-style of steppe warriors. They also learned from their rulers the ideal of the hero in the First Story, which was sung in diff erent versions over and over from campfi re to campfi re around the kingdom along with other heroic epics that told stories almost as old, with a similar moral. Aft er the subject people had thoroughly assimilated their overlords' steppe way of life, military techniques, political culture, and mythology, they eventually rebelled. If successful, they followed the ideal pattern told in the stories and became free, replacing their overlords as rulers of the steppe.
‘In their successful campaign to establish their power over the land, the former vassal people, now the rulers of their own kingdom, inevitably sub- jugated other peoples, one of whom would serve them, learn from them, and eventually overthrow them in exactly the same way. This cycle began at least as early as the foundation of the Hittite Empire in the seventeenth century bc and can be traced historically in Central Eurasia itself over a period of some two millennia from the first known large, organized state of the steppe zone, the Scythian Empire, which was established in the seventh century bc, down to the Junghars and Manchus in early modern times.’
‘[Caesar's] conquests were unprovoked, purely imperialistic expansion, in which resistance—for example, that of the Veneti in northwestern Gaul—was “crushed ferociously, their leaders executed and the population sold into slavery.”’
‘Virtually every account of successful Chinese campaigns into Central Eurasia includes information on the booty acquired, but it is generally ignored by modern historians, who, regardless of where their sympathies may lie, gener-ally list only the number of “plundering raids” by Central Eurasians against the Chinese’
‘the capture of artisans and of valuable trea sure as booty are good examples of what happened in warfare practically throughout Eurasia in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, not only warfare as practiced by Central Eurasians. While there does not seem to have been any signifi cant coercion applied in the actual trading pro cess at border mar-kets, the obtaining of the right to trade was often a matter of diplomacy and involved the threat of war, just as it does today. Furthermore, all states, whether nomad- ruled or otherwise, used force or the threat of force or imprisonment to ensure payment of taxes and tribute from their subjects, just as they do today.’
‘It is important to realize that before the advent of telecommunications a unitary language could only be maintained by continuous, direct intercommunication among its speakers’
(
20:16 / 2013-02-02)
‘The biggest myth of all—that Central Eurasians were an unusually serious military threat to the peripheral states—is pure fiction.’
(
20:43 / 2012-11-07)
‘Solutions [to Problems with a capital P] usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee.’
(
21:58 / 2013-01-26)
16. A COMPLEX SYSTEM DESIGNED FROM SCRATCH NEVER WORKS AND CANNOT BE PATCHED UP TO MAKE IT WORK. YOU HAVE TO START OVER, BEGINNING WITH A WORKING SIMPLE SYSTEM.
(
21:57 / 2013-01-26)
A System represents someone's solution to a problem. The System does not solve the problem
(
21:42 / 2013-01-26)
Systems can do many things, but one thing they emphatically cannot do is to Solve Problems. This is because Problem-solving is not a Systems-function, and there is no satisfactory Systems-approximation to the solution of a Problem. A System represents someone's solution to a problem. The System does not solve the problem
(
21:41 / 2013-01-26)
The Mode Of Failure Of A Complex System Cannot Ordinarily Be Predicted From Its Structure.
(
21:05 / 2013-01-26)
the list of absolute monarchs who were hopelessly incompetent, even insane, is surprisingly long. They ruled with utter caprice, not to say whimsicality, for decades on end, and the net result to their countries was -- undetectably different from the few of the wisest kings
(
20:58 / 2013-01-26)
Nothing is more useless than struggling against a law of nature. On the other hand, there are circumstances (highly unusual and narrowly defined, of course) when one's knowledge of Systems-Functions will provide
(
20:57 / 2013-01-26)
Efforts to remove parasitic Systems-people by means of screening committees, review boards, and competency examinations merely generate new job categories for such people to occupy.
(
20:21 / 2013-01-26)
a word of warning is in order. A priori guesses as to what traits are fostered by a given system are likely to be wrong. Furthermore, those traits are not necessarily conducive to successful operation of the System itself, e.g., the qualities necessary for being elected president do not include the ability to run the country.
(
20:21 / 2013-01-26)
An apple that has been processed through the supermarket system is not the same as an apple picked dead ripe off the tree, and we are in error to use the same word for two different things.[*]
[Footnote. We shall not attempt to pursue the origins of this sloppy semantic habit back to medieval scholasticism, which was more interested in the general essences of things than in their particularity.
(
18:58 / 2013-01-26)
The System of Management by Goals and Objectives, designed to improve Trillium's efficiency and measure his performance as a botanist, has gotten in the way, kicked back, and opposed its own proper function.
(
18:50 / 2013-01-26)
‘writers kill off characters ... How significant do those deaths feel? Very nearly meaningless.’ Watching Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and this sentiment strikes me down. Writers kill off their characters much too facilely: it's a weakness of writing!
(
20:43 / 2013-01-25)
‘a hunger to disapprove of someone’
‘In those works that continue to haunt us, however, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else’
‘who can say that a poem isn’t engineered?’ Or a symphony?
‘Actually, I think I prefer that it be apocryphal, since made-up anecdotes have their own kind of truth’ Just as gods exist based on belief, a story that's untrue can be true in that there's enough of a reason for people to say then and thus affect their behavior.
‘If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it. The characters have to work as characters, as themselves. ... If the story is good and the characters work but you don’t catch allusions and references and parallels, then you’ve done nothing worse than read a good story with memorable characters. If you begin to pick up on some of these other elements, these parallels and analogies, however, you’ll find your understanding of the novel deepens and becomes more meaningful, more complex.’
‘My first guess is that you probably have not read most of the plays from which these quotations are taken; my second guess is that you know the phrases anyway. Not where they’re from necessarily, but the quotes themselves (or the popular versions of them).’ Like Icelandic sagas for modern Icelandics!
‘There is a kind of authority lent by something being almost universally known, where one has only to utter certain lines and people nod their heads in recognition.’
'Irony features fairly prominently in the use not only of Shakespeare but of any prior writer.'
'Do the values endorsed by Shakespeare lead directly to the horrors of apartheid? For Fugard they do'
‘A Bible scholar? Well, I’m not. But even I can sometimes recognize a biblical allusion. I use something I think of as the “resonance test.” If I hear something going on in a text that seems to be beyond the scope of the story’s or poem’s immediate dimensions, if it resonates outside itself, I start looking for allusions to older and bigger texts.’
'Most of the great tribulations to which human beings are subject are detailed in Scripture. No jazz, no heroin, no rehab centers, maybe'
‘Once you’ve seen Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck in a version of one of the classics, you pretty much own it as part of your consciousness. In fact, it will be hard to read the Grimm Brothers and not think Warner Brothers’
Irony, in various guises, drives a great deal of fiction and poetry
‘we want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we’ve read before. At the same time, we look for it to be sufficiently like other things we’ve read so that we can use those to make sense of it.’ Traditional versus post-traditional epics?
‘Those who have never read it assume mistakenly that it is the story of the Trojan War. It is not. It is the story of a single, rather lengthy action: the wrath of Achilles.' Help me to sing, muse, about the wrath, the black rage of Achilles that sent thousands of men to hell and left their bodies to be eaten by carrion birds.’
'Virgil has him undertake these actions because Homer had already defined what it means to be a hero.' Post-traditional!? Or just traditional?
'Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves'
'There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.'
‘Even assuming equal levels of knowledge about the subject, who probably has had the most ideas – you in five minutes of reading or me in five days of stumbling around? All I’m really saying is that we readers sometimes forget how long literary composition can take and how very much lateral thinking can go on in that amount of time. ’
‘Figure at least three corpses for a two-hundred-page mystery, sometimes many more. How significant do those deaths feel? Very nearly meaningless.’
‘are as nothing to the universe, of which the best that can be said is that it is indifferent, though it may be actively interested in our demise’
‘writers kill off characters for the same set of reasons – make action happen, cause plot complications, end plot complications, put other characters under stress’
‘Accidents do happen in real life, of course. So do illnesses. But when they happen in literature they’re not really accidents. They’re accidents only on the inside of the novel – on the outside they’re planned, plotted, and executed by somebody, with malice aforethought’. There are no RNGs in literature. It's for this reason reality pollution.
‘in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing. If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory.’
I don't think the author has read Republic because his reference to the analogy of caves is totally bogus.
‘For people of that age, one of the sexiest shots in film consists of waves breaking on a beach. When the director cut to the waves on the beach, somebody was getting lucky.’
‘So film directors resorted to anything they could think of: waves, curtains, campfires, fireworks, you name it.’
‘To tell the truth, most writing that deals directly with sex makes you wish for the good old days of the billowing curtain and the gently lapping waves.’
‘what a British coroner would call “death by misadventure.”
‘American soldiers don’t really know the land, don’t understand what they’re up against. And it’s a forbidding place: dry or wet, but always hot, full of microbe-filled water and leeches the size of snakes, rice paddies and mountains and shell craters. And tunnels. The tunnels turn the land itself into the enemy, since the land hides the Vietcong fighters only to deliver them virtually anywhere, producing surprise attacks and sudden death. The resulting terror gives the land a face of menace in the minds of the young Americans.’
‘Maybe it’s hardwired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death.’ Is it?
‘Shakespeare is very much a product of his time in suggesting that one’s proximity to or distance from God is manifested in external signs. The Puritans, only a few years after him, saw failure in business – ruined crops, bankruptcy, financial mismanagement, even disease in one’s herd – as clear evidence of God’s displeasure and therefore of moral shortcomings. Evidently the story of Job didn’t play in Plymouth.’
‘So what can this “great work” and its spirituality, sexual politics, code of machismo, and overwrought violence teach us? Plenty, if we’re willing to read with the eyes of a Greek’
(
09:29 / 2012-10-15)
Duncan J. Watts, Six degrees: the science of a connected age (2004), excerpt from page 263--267.
Coase’s main claim, therefore, was that firms exist in order to sweep away all the costs associated with market transactions, replacing them with a single contract of employment. Inside a firm, in other words, markets cease to operate, and the skills, resources, and time of its employees are coordinated through a strict authority structure. Although Coase himself never specified what this authority structure should look like, the consensus of subsequent economic theory is that it should be a hierarchy. Markets, meanwhile, continue to operate between firms, where the boundary between firm and market is a trade-off between the coordination cost of conducting a particular function within the fin-n and the transaction cost of striking an external contract. If the relationship between two firms ever becomes so specialized that one is effectively in a position to manipulate the other, the problem is assumed to be resolved by a merger or an acquisition. Hence, firms grow by the process of vertical integration: one hierarchy effectively gets absorbed into another, generating a larger, vertically integrated hierarchy. Conversely, when a firm decides that some internal function is too expensive, it either spins off that branch of the hierarchy to form a specialized subsidiary, or eliminates it altogether, outsourcing the function to another firm. Whatever the scenario, firms remain hierarchies (only their size and number change), and markets operate between firms.
It really is an elegant theory, and has such a ring of plausibility that it has dominated economic thinking on firms for more than half a century. But in 1984, a revolutionary book written by two MIT professors, an economist and a political scientist, tired the First warning shots in what has become an increasingly tangled conflict over the true nature of industrial organization and the future of economic growth. The book was called The Second Industrial Divide, and the political scientist of the pair was Charles F. Sabel—the very same Chuck Sabel who accosted me in Santa Fe fifteen years later.
Industrial Divides
From an economist's perspective, perhaps the most polemical (if not the most significant) point that Chuck and his coauthor, Michael Piore, made is that the theory of the firm came about essentially after the fact. Only after large-scale industrialization had effectively settled on the model of vertical integration and its associated economics of scale did economists start to develop a theory of the Firm. And as a consequence, it was only a particular type of firrn—the large, vertically integrated hierarchy—that they tried to explain, as if no other theory of industrial organization could even make sense. But looking back at the late nineteenth century, when the modern image of the industrial firm first emerged, Piore and Sahel showed that the hierarchy was nut the only successful form of industrial organization, nor was its eventual preeminence necessarily based on universal economic principles.
Vertical integration, of course, did not become the dominant form of industrial organization by accident—for a variety of reasons, it made perfect sense at the time. What Piore and Sabel claimed, however, was that organizational forms arise as the solution to problems that are partly economic and partly social, political, and historical. The strongest manifestation of the noneconomic dependence of economic decisions is that technological history occasionally encounters branch points, what they called divides, at which a decision is made between competing solutions to a general problem. And once a decision is made, the winning solution gets so locked into contemporary and historical thinking alike that the world forgets it ever had an alternative.
Piore and Sahel argued that the first such industrial divide was the Industrial Revolution itself. During this time, the vertically integrated model of huge factories, highly specialized production lines, and generally unskilled labor outcompeted and nearly eliminated the previously dominant craft system of highly skilled craftsmen operating general purpose tools and machines. For nearly a century thereafter, industrial organization followed the hierarchical model. And like researchers focused on a particular scientific paradigm, economists, business leaders, and policy makers simply assumed that no other form of organization was conceivable. The division of labor, industrial organization, and vertical integration were all thought to be interchangeable concepts.
By the late 1970s, however, the world had begun to changes. The rapid growth of the world's postwar industrialized economies had begun to reach the limits of what their domestic consumer markets could demand, and further growth required a dramatic globalization of both production and trade. Around the same time, and partly for the same reason, the fixed currency exchange rate system of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement began to break down, and the first cracks appeared in the walls of trade protection behind which many nations' postwar reconstruction strategies had sheltered, Exacerbating these tectonic changes in the global economy were a series of economic and political shocks—two oil crises in quick succession, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and a combination of growing unemployment and inflation in the United States and Europe—all of which eroded the industrialized world's vision of an endlessly prosperous future. Within the span of a decade, the world had become a murkier, more uncertain place, and business leaders had to start thinking outside the box of conventional economic wisdom in order to survive. Although it was clear to anyone paying attention that the postwar prosperity party was over, no one seemed to recognize that the old economic order itself had been overturned—that the world was, in fact. entering its second industrial divide.
The Second Industrial Divide was therefore partly an economics version of the emperor's new clothes and partly an attempt to sketch out an alternative, better-clothed point of view. The craft system, Piore and Sabel pointed out, had never entirely gone away, having persisted in the manufacturing regions of northern Italy and even parts of France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In part, it had survived in those places because of their unique histories, the social networks that existed between traditional family-based production systems, and the geographical concentrations of specialized skills they represented. But craft production had survived also on its merits, outperforming vertically integrated economies of scale in fast-moving and unpredictable industries like fabric production, which depends for its livelihood on the ever transient world of fashion.
Far more important than the persistence of the craft system itself, however, was that its essential feature, what Piore and Sabel dubbed flexible specialization, had slowly been adopted by a multitude of firms, even in the most stalwart economies-of-scale industries. The U.S. steel industry, for example, has spent the past thirty years abandoning its traditional blast-furnace technology in favor of smaller, more flexible mini-mills. Flexible specialization is the antithesis of a vertically integrated hierarchy in that it exploits economies of scope rather than economies of scale. Instead of sinking large amounts of capital into specialized production facilities that subsequently produce a restricted line of products quickly and cheaply, flexible specialization relies on general-purpose machinery and skilled workers to produce a wide range of products in small batches.
Returns to specialization, remember, derive from the frequent repetition of a limited range of tasks. and repetition is only possible if the tasks themselves don’t change. In slowly changing environments, therefore, in which generic products appeal to large numbers of consumers and the range of competing choices is limited, economies of scale are optimal. But in the rapidly globalizing world of the late twentieth century, with firms pinned between uncertain economic and political forecasts on the one hand, and increasingly heterogeneous tastes of consumers on the other, economies of scope gained a critical advantage. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and rapid change, in other words, favor flexibility and adaptability over sheer seals. And in the two decades since Sabel and Piore first pointed this fact our, the world of business has become only more and more ambiguous.
Recently I asked Chuck how he felt the ideas in his book were holding up almost twenty years after he had first espoused them. Had he and Piore been proved right? Well, yes and no.Yes, in the sense that the dominance of so-called new organizational forms over traditional vertically integrated hierarchies was now essentially unquestioned (except perhaps in the more conservative economics journals). And yes, in the sense that the reason for this shift was generally agreed to be the sharp increase in uncertainty and change associated with the global business environment of the past few decades, in old-economy staples like textiles, steel, automobiles, and retail as well as the new-economy industries of biotechnology and computing. But there was a sense in which, over the past ten years in particular, Chuck had come to see their proposed solution of flexible specialization as critically incomplete.
(
19:25 / 2013-01-24)
Chapter 3. The purpose and objectives of a business
Asked what a business is, the typical businessman is likely to answer, "An organization to make a profit." The typical economist is likely to give the same answer. This answer is not only false, it is irrelevant.
The prevailing economic theory of the mission of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit---which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear---may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, or how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless. The danger in the concept of profit maximization is that it makes profitability appear a myth.
Profit and profitability are, however, crucial---for society even more than for the individual businesses. Yet profitability is not the purpose of, but a limiting factor on business enterprise and business activity. Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but rather the test of their validity. If archangels instead of businessmen sat in directors' chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their total lack of personal interest in making profits.
The root of the confusion is the mistaken belief that the motive of a person---the so-called profit motive of the businessman---is an explanation of his behavior or his guide to right action. Whether there is such a thing as a profit motive at all is highly doubtful. The idea was invented by the classical economists to explain the economic reality that their theory of static equilibrium could not explain. There has never been any evidence for the existence of the profit motive, and we have long since found the true explanation of the phenomena of economic change and growth which the profit motive was first put forth to explain.
It is irrelevant for an understanding of business behavior, profit, and profitability, whether there is a profit motive or not. That Jim Smith is in business to make a profit concerns only him and the Recording Angel. It does not tell us what Jim Smith does and how he performs. We do not learn anything about the work of a prospector hunting for uranium in the Nevada desert by being told that he is trying to make his fortune. We do not learn anything about the work of a heart specialist by being told that he is trying to make a livelihood, or even that he is trying to benefit humanity. The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business.
In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm. It is a major cause of the misunderstanding of the nature of profit in our society and of the deep-seated hostility to profit, which are among the most dangerous diseases of an industrial society. It is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy---in this country as well as in Western Europe---which are squarely based on the failure to understand the nature, function, and purpose of business enterprise. And it is in large part responsible for the prevailing belief that there is an inherent contradiction between profit and a company's ability to make a social contribution. Actually, a company can make a social contribution only if it is highly profitable.
To know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
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19:23 / 2013-01-24)
This guy. This novel sound like something I'd write. People described /Cryptonomicon/ as “funny” but I think they might have meant “random” and very different than Pterrian (Terry Pratchettian) “funny”. The “stupendous badass” bit in the introduction is a very interesting and well-phrased perspective but it doesn't integrate at all with the surrounding text. Alan Turing's homosexuality is introduced in a humorously unexpected way that reflects well Lawrence's geekiness, but I can't tell if the ensuing crassness (continuing into subsequent chapters) has structural symbolism, or if it's just random vulgarity. He makes absorbingly interesting observations about Shanghai's silver-backed standard and I really hope he goes back to it (I heard it's a Theme of the book, so I'm hopeful he does). His jabs at literary criticism theory (Horatio Alger) sound like ones I'd make---five years ago. Does he build on any of these or are they random one-off rapids in his Mississippi of a book? I do want to find out what happens (and what's happening)---it doesn't help that my supposedly unabridged audiobook version seems to skip parts of the book (one-note flute)?
To think about: literary criticism theory as a formal system.
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20:18 / 2013-01-23)
‘The modern world’s hell on haiku writers’
‘certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New)’
‘"There was this implicit belief, for a long time, that math was a sort of physics of bottlecaps. That any mathematical operation you could do on paper, no matter how complicated, could be reduced—in theory, anyway—to messing about with actual physical counters, such as bottlecaps, in the real world." ... "when mathematicians began fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps. And yet they were still getting sound results." "Or at least internally consistent results," Rudy said. "Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps."’
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19:56 / 2013-01-23)
‘His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat broader concept of normalcy, was useful...’
‘Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
‘As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.’
(
21:20 / 2013-01-22)
Git also makes it easy to stage parts of files. This is a feature that has prevented coworkercide in my professional past. If someone has changed 100 lines of a file, where 96 of them were whitespace and comment formatting modifications, while the remaining 4 were significant business logic changes, peer-reviewing that if committed as one change is a nightmare. Being able to stage the whitespace changes in one commit with an appropriate message, then staging and committing the business logic changes seperately is a life saver (literally, it may save your life from your peers). To do this, you can use Git’s patch staging feature that asks you if you want to stage the changes to a file one hunk at a time (git add -p).
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16:31 / 2013-01-22)
You get home on Friday after a long week of working. While sitting in your bean bag chair drinking a beer and eating Cheetos you have a mind blowing idea. So, you whip out your laptop and proceed to work on your great idea the entire weekend, touching half the files in your project and making the entire thing 87 times more amazing. Now you get into work and connect to the VPN and can finally commit. The question now is what do you do? One great big honking commit? What are your other options?
In Git, this is not a problem. Git has a feature that is pretty unique called a “staging area”, meaning you can craft each commit at the very last minute, making it easy to turn your weekend of frenzied work into a series of well thought out, logically separate changesets.
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16:29 / 2013-01-22)
In Git, a common use case is to create a new local branch for everything you work on. Each feature, each idea, each bugfix – you can easily create a new branch quickly, do a few commits on that branch and then either merge it into your mainline work or throw it away. You don’t have to mess up the mainline just to save your experimental ideas, you don’t have to be online to do it and most importantly, you can context switch almost instantly.
(
16:27 / 2013-01-22)
Perhaps only the last year's reading history (ending last month) is stored by the Arlington public library. Cool!
(
14:22 / 2013-01-16)
Reading History ( 68 )
Mark Title Author Checked Out Details
Sunday baroque [sound recording] / National Public Radio, Inc. 12-20-2011 Copy 1
Miracles at the Jesus Oak : histories of the supernatural in Reformation Europe / Craig Harline. Harline, Craig. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Piano trio music. Selections Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
The Oxford companion to Irish literature / edited by Robert Welch ; assistant editor, Bruce Stewart. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Táin bó Cúailnge. English. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Requiem, K. 626, D minor Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Symphonies, C major Bizet, Georges, 1838-1875. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Selections Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. 01-04-2012 Copy 1
Water music Handel, George Frideric, 1685-1759. 02-02-2012
Water music. No. 1-10 Handel, George Frideric, 1685-1759. 02-02-2012
Concertos, violin, orchestra, no. 1, op. 19, D major Prokofiev, Sergey, 1891-1953. 02-02-2012 Copy 1
Flos campi Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 1872-1958. 02-02-2012 Copy 1
Concertos. Selections Vivaldi, Antonio, 1678-1741. 02-02-2012 Copy 1
Styx [sound recording] / Kancheli. Viola concerto / Gubaidulina. Kancheli, Gi︠i︡a. 02-02-2012 Copy 1
Instrumental music. Selections Strauss, Richard, 1864-1949. 02-02-2012 Copy 1
Why I am a Buddhist : no-nonsense Buddhism with red meat and whiskey / Stephen T. Asma. Asma, Stephen T. 02-07-2012 Copy 1
The gods drink whiskey : stumbling toward enlightenment in the land of the tattered Buddha / Stephen T. Asma. Asma, Stephen T. 02-07-2012 Copy 1
Great tales from English history. Joan of Arc, the princes in the Tower, Bloody Mary, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and more / Robert Lacey. Lacey, Robert. 04-07-2012 Volume pt. 2 Copy 1
Great tales from English history. : the truth about King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and more / Robert Lacy Lacey, Robert. 04-07-2012 Volume pt. 1 Copy 1
The ghost of freedom : a history of the Caucasus / Charles King. King, Charles, 1967- 04-07-2012 Copy 1
Lebek : city of Northern Europe through the ages / Xavier Hernandez & Jordi Ballonga ; illustrated by Francesco Corni ; translated by Kathleen Leverich. Hernàndez, Xavier, 1954- 04-07-2012 Copy 1
The Book of war / edited by John Keegan. 04-07-2012 Copy 1
Baby play & learn / Penny Warner. Warner, Penny. 04-07-2012 Copy 1
Xenophon's retreat : Greece, Persia, and the end of the Golden Age / Robin Waterfield. Waterfield, Robin, 1952- 04-07-2012 Copy 1
You are not so smart : why you have too many friends on Facebook, why your memory is mostly fiction, and 46 other ways you're deluding yourself / David McRaney. McRaney, David. 04-07-2012 Copy 1
The monsters and the critics, and other essays / J.R.R. Tolkien ; edited by Chrostopher Tolkien. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892-1973. 04-07-2012 Copy 1
You can farm : the entrepreneur's guide to start and succeed in a farm enterprise / by Joel Salatin. Salatin, Joel. 04-07-2012
Historical atlas of East Central Europe / Paul Robert Magocsi ; cartographic design by Geoffrey J. Matthews. Magocsi, Paul R. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
The new Penguin atlas of ancient history / Colin McEvedy ; maps devised by the author and drawn by David Woodroffe. McEvedy, Colin. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
Ancient history atlas: cartography by Arthur Banks. Grant, Michael, 1914-2004. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
National Geographic atlas of world history / Noel Grove ; prepared by the Book Division, National Geographic Society; [foreword by Daniel J. Boorstin]. Grove, Noel. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
The Prentice Hall atlas of world history. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
The atlas of the ancient world : charting the great civilizations of the past / Margaret Oliphant. Oliphant, Margaret. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
The Heiké story. Translated from the Japanese by Fuki Wooyenaka Utamatsu. Yoshikawa, Eiji, 1892-1962. 04-20-2012 Copy 1
Hobbit. Spanish Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892-1973. 05-05-2012 Copy 1
Essence of decision : explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis / Graham Allison, Philip Zelikow. Allison, Graham T. 05-05-2012 Copy 1
The world of the shining prince : court life in ancient Japan / Ivan Morris ; with a new introduction by Barbara Ruch. Morris, Ivan I. 05-05-2012 Copy 1
Ina May's guide to childbirth / Ina May Gaskin. Gaskin, Ina May. 05-05-2012 Copy 1
The new evolution diet : what our paleolithic ancestors can teach us about weight loss, fitness, and aging / Arthur De Vany ; with an afterword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness. De Vany, Arthur. 05-10-2012
Husband-coached childbirth : the Bradley method௦ natural childbirth / Robert A. Bradley ; updated and expanded by Marjie, Jay, and James Hathaway. Bradley, Robert A. 05-10-2012
Reflections on a ravaged century / Robert Conquest. Conquest, Robert. 05-16-2012 Copy 1
The illustrated face of battle : a study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme / John Keegan. Keegan, John, 1934- 05-16-2012 Copy 1
Empire des steppes. English Grousset, René, 1885-1952. 05-16-2012 Copy 1
The Harper concise atlas of the Bible / edited by James B. Pritchard. 05-30-2012 Copy 1
Bringing up bébé : one American mother discovers the wisdom of French parenting / Pamela Druckerman. Druckerman, Pamela. 05-30-2012 Copy 1
The ultimate breastfeeding book of answers : the most comprehensive problem-solving guide to breastfeeding from the foremost expert in North America / Jack Newman and Teresa Pitman. Newman, Jack, 1946- 06-01-2012 Copy 1
Touchpoints birth-3 : your child's emotional and behavioural development / Berry Brazelton with Joshua Sparrow. Brazelton, T. Berry, 1918- 06-14-2012 Copy 1
The womanly art of breastfeeding. Wiessinger, Diane. 06-23-2012 Copy 1
London : a life in maps / Peter Whitfield. Whitfield, Peter, 1947- 06-23-2012 Copy 1
Life in a medieval monastery / by Marc Cels. Cels, Marc. 06-23-2012 Copy 1
Life in a medieval village / Frances and Joseph Gies. Gies, Frances. 06-23-2012 Copy 1
Empires of the word : a language history of the world / Nicholas Ostler. Ostler, Nicholas. 11-09-2012 Copy 1
The secret history of the Mongols, and other pieces. Waley, Arthur. 11-09-2012 Copy 1
The life and times of Po Chü-i, 772-846 A.D. Waley, Arthur. 11-09-2012 Copy 1
Kalevala. English. 11-09-2012 Copy 1
Ancient poetry from China, Japan & India, rendered into English verse by Henry W. Wells. Wells, Henry W. (Henry Willis), 1895-1978. 11-09-2012 Copy 1
Turkestan solo : a journey through Central Asia / Ella Maillart ; introduction by Dervla Murphy. Maillart, Ella, 1903-1997. 11-21-2012 Copy 1
Empire des steppes. English Grousset, René, 1885-1952. 11-21-2012 Copy 1
Glimpses of world history; being further letters to his daughter, written in prison, and containing a rambling account of history for young people [by] Jawaharlal Nehru, with 50 maps by J.F.Horrabin. Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1889-1964. 11-21-2012 Copy 1
Beowulf : an imitative translation / by Ruth P.M. Lehmann. 11-21-2012 Copy 1
Alexander the Great : a novel / Nikos Kazantzakis ; translated by Theodora Vasils ; illustrated by Virgil Burnett. Kazantzakis, Nikos, 1883-1957. 11-21-2012 Copy 1
Papal envoys to the great khans, by I. de Rachewiltz. Rachewiltz, Igor de. 11-27-2012 Copy 1
Killing the cranes : a reporter's journey through three decades of war in Afghanistan / Edward Girardet. Girardet, Edward. 11-27-2012 Copy 1
The Odyssey; a modern sequel. Translation into English verse, introd., synopsis, and notes by Kimon Friar. Illus. by Ghika. Kazantzakis, Nikos, 1883-1957. 11-27-2012 Copy 1
Tambours de la pluie. English Kadare, Ismail. 11-27-2012 Copy 1
Historians' fallacies; toward a logic of historical thought. Fischer, David Hackett, 1935- 12-05-2012 Copy 1
Seven years in Tibet / Heinrich Harrer ; translated from the German by Richard Graves, with an introduction by Peter Fleming. Harrer, Heinrich, 1912-2006. 12-05-2012 Copy 1
How the other half lives : studies among the tenements of New York / by Jacob A. Riis ; edited with an introduction by David Leviatin. Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August), 1849-1914. 12-05-2012 Copy 1
(
14:21 / 2013-01-16)
This was found in the comments section: 'Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo still basically require you to use C/C++ as the primary language on their systems. Languages like Lua have taken off in *commercial* game development because Lua integrates exceptionally well with C/C++, and have a philosophy of "want to use Lua? Sure. Don't want to use Lua? We're fine with that, too." Other languages (e.g. Java/Lisp/D) generally have a philosophy of "thou shalt have no other languages before me."'
(
14:39 / 2013-01-15)
I'm really glad that in most of the system integration or algorithms programming I've done, I haven't ever felt like I needed tongs and a face shield to disentangle the assumptions baked into some code. Either I have a lot of heap in my brain, my languages are concise enough, or my problems self-contained enough.
(
12:17 / 2013-01-15)
If you consider the most toxic functions or systems you have had to deal with, the ones that you know have to be handled with tongs and a face shield, it is an almost sure bet that they have a complex web of state and assumptions that their behavior relies on, and it isn’t confined to their parameters.
(
12:13 / 2013-01-15)
I was just thinking the other day that one should have an official (if flexible) time window for code use: if code is going to be used for more than a man-week (or man-month, or man-half-year, or year/men even), it should be written in the most powerful language---not the most convenient.
(
12:12 / 2013-01-15)
If you are just writing throwaway code, do whatever is most convenient, which often involves global state. If you are writing code that may still be in use a year later, balance the convenience factor against the difficulties you will inevitably suffer later. Most developers are not very good at predicting the future time integrated suffering their changes will result in.
(
12:06 / 2013-01-15)
I do believe that there is real value in pursuing functional programming, but it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be blunt, any other fringe language. To the eternal chagrin of language designers, there are plenty of externalities that can overwhelm the benefits of a language, and game development has more than most fields. We have cross platform issues, proprietary tool chains, certification gates, licensed technologies, and stringent performance requirements on top of the issues with legacy codebases and workforce availability that everyone faces.
(
12:00 / 2013-01-15)
they—like the Chinese, the Jews, the Armenians, and others—came from a culture that valued education, even when most of them had very little education themselves. Nor was education the key to their initial rise. Typically it was after becoming established economically as entrepreneurs that middleman minorities could then afford to dispense with their children’s labor in order to let them go to school instead
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10:59 / 2013-01-15)
the Chinese minority in Malaysia produced an absolute majority of the students at the University of Malaysia, until government-imposed quotas cut back their numbers. They were an overwhelming majority of those receiving degrees in engineering in the 1960s—404 Chinese to 4 Malays. This concentration of college and university students from middleman minority backgrounds in the more difficult and more remunerative specialties has been a common pattern
(
10:58 / 2013-01-15)
When people are confronted with a choice between hating themselves for their stagnation or hating others for their progress, they seldom hate themselves.
(
10:58 / 2013-01-15)
Southeast Asian peasants who did not save could get loans and credit from overseas Chinese middlemen only because the overseas Chinese did save. For the overseas Chinese to allow their children to become part of the larger culture around them and absorb their values and behavior patterns would have been to have the family commit economic suicide. The same has been true of other middleman minorities around the world.
(
10:40 / 2013-01-15)
“Parasites” has been another epithet applied to middleman minorities because, as retailers or money-lenders, they do not produce any physical product but are simply intermediaries between manufacturers and customers. “Bloodsuckers” is another epithet expressing the notion that middleman minorities do not add anything to the wealth of a community or nation but simply manage to extract a share of the existing wealth for themselves, at the expense of others. This charge has rung out against innumerable middleman minorities, from the villages of India to black ghettos in the United States.
In many times and places, middleman minorities have been forced to flee for their lives from mobs or have been expelled en masse by political authorities. Yet the departure of these supposed “parasites” and “exploiters” has not been followed by a more prosperous life by the rest of the population but usually by economic decline
(
10:35 / 2013-01-15)
‘Obsessive love is the most antifragile thing outside of economics’
‘/nonpredictive/ decision making’ — this switch from predictive to non-prediction requires you to discard most the decisions you were trying to make as counter-productive under the new regime of non-prediction and find totally new decisions to make. /Not/ how to make those same decisions except now nonpredictively. In other words, you might be struggling now with selecting which stocks to buy—if you follow this book’s advice, you might stop worrying about stocks and start buying land to start up natural farming.
‘In every domain or area of application, we propose rules for moving from the fragile toward the antifragile, through reduction of fragility or harnessing antifragility’ — see above. You move from fragile (predictive) to antifragile (nonpredictive) by reevaluating your life plan (à la Remy in the beginning of /Ratatoullie/).
‘An annoying aspect of the Black Swan problem—in fact the central, and largely missed, point—is that the odds of rare events are simply not computable’ — really, I thought this was the central claim of /The Black Swan/: that fat-tailed random variables have parameters and densities that can’t be empirically well-estimated: there’s /nothing/ you can do about it when the expectation and variance integrals diverge.
‘“robust” is certainly not good enough. In the long run everything with the most minute vulnerability breaks’ — again I am reminded that the actions one takes when trying to robustify life are /very/ different than those taken when trying to /antifragilize/ your life.
‘Engineers and tinkerers develop things while history books are written by academics; we will have to refine historical interpretations of growth, innovation, and many such things’ — the book should be good.
‘You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote event or shock is more likely than another (unless you enjoy deceiving yourself), but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen’ — Rickards mentioned in his talk at JHUAPL’s seminar that you can’t predict exactly where a car skidding on an icy mountain road will end up but you can predict that the system is unstable.
‘(unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge’
Antifragility ‘likes volatility et al. It also likes time.’ — plants and herds, spaced-repetition system cards.
‘Time is functionally similar to volatility: the more time, the more events, the more disorder. Consider that if you can suffer limited harm and are antifragile to small errors, time brings the kind of errors or reverse errors that end up benefiting you. This is simply what your grandmother calls experience.’ — Experience can come from unhappy events.
‘Commerce, business, Levantine souks (though not large-scale markets and corporations) are activities and places that bring out the best in people, making most of them forgiving, honest, loving, trusting, and open-minded. As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance. It beats rationalizations and lectures. Like antifragile tinkering, mistakes are small and rapidly forgotten.’
‘Logically, the exact opposite of a “fragile” parcel would be a package on which one has written “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly.” Its contents would not just be unbreakable, but would benefit from shocks and a wide array of trauma’ — this is overselling it: some of the contents of the antifragile box may, upon mishandling, be broken, but all in all, the trauma would benefit the entire system, and your champagne glasses might become gold coins, or tree seeds.
‘Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don’t have a name for’
‘You want to be Phoenix, or possibly Hydra’
‘We know more than we think we do, a lot more than we can articulate’
‘the apophatic (what cannot be explicitly said, or directly described, in our current vocabulary)’
‘These populations are culturally, though not biologically, color-blind. Just as we are intellectually, not organically, antifragility-blind. To see the difference just consider that you need the name “blue” for the construction of a narrative, but not when you engage in action.’
‘Let us call Mithridatization the result of an exposure to a small dose of a substance that, over time, makes one immune to additional, larger quantities of it. It is the sort of approach used in vaccination and allergy medicine. It is not quite antifragility, still at the more modest level of robustness, but we are on our way. And we already have a hint that perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and that the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.’
‘Some researchers hold that the benefits of vegetables may not be so much in what we call the “vitamins” or some other rationalizing theories (that is, ideas that seem to make sense in narrative form but have not been subjected to rigorous empirical testing), but in the following: plants protect themselves from harm and fend off predators with poisonous substances that, ingested by us in the right quantities, may stimulate our organisms—or so goes the story.’
‘The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates’
‘note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley’
‘Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste. ... The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.’
‘If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well-known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks. Overcompensation, here again’ — the personal productivity people indeed do say this: if you want to get more done, allow yourself less time at work. Instead of 8 hours at 25% productivity, you’ll spend 4 hours at 95% productivity.
‘One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive.’
‘Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually.’
Most people, even if they aren’t Soviet-Harvard types, /want/ to live in a world run by Soviet-Harvards, the world promised by Soviet-Harvards. The experts and the planners didn’t become powerful by chance—their popularity is a natural outcome of the Enlightenment ideals. “I’d like to live in a society of comfort, with a side of no-Viking-Greek-Mongol-pillaging-raping-plundering, where every day is mostly like the one before.” Ask and thou might receive.
‘A system that overcompensates is necessarily in overshooting mode, building extra capacity and strength in anticipation of a worse outcome and in response to information about the possibility of a hazard. ... redundancy is not defensive; it is more like investment than insurance’
prepare ‘for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible.’
‘If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.’ — Presumably it extrapolates harm by an evolutionarily-derived scaling factor.
maximum lifts: ‘This method consisted of short episodes in the gym in which one focused solely on improving one’s past maximum in a single lift, the heaviest weight one could haul, sort of the high-water mark. The workout was limited to trying to exceed that mark once or twice, rather than spending time on un-entertaining time-consuming repetitions’
‘What does “fitness” mean? Being exactly tuned to a given past history of a specific environment, or extrapolating to an environment with stressors of higher intensity? Many seem to point to the first kind of adaptation, missing the notion of antifragility. But if one were to write down mathematically a standard model of selection, one would get overcompensation rather than mere “fitness.” ... a stochastic process subjected to an absorbing barrier will have an observed mean higher than the barrier.’
‘If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate), one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments’
‘antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage’
"My son, I am very disappointed in you," he said. "I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy."
'With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them.'
'Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferation of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that were hard to see ahead of time.'
'your bones will get stronger when subjected to gravity, say, after your (short) employment with a piano moving company. They will become weaker after you spend the next Christmas vacation in a space station with zero gravity or (as few people realize) if you spend a lot of time riding a bicycle. The skin on the palms of your hands will get calloused if you spend a summer on a Soviet-style cooperative farm. Your skin lightens in the winter and tans in the summer (especially if you have Mediterranean origins, less so if you are of Irish or African descent or from other places with more uniform weather throughout the year)'
'We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system.'
'my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one's tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes-things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization.'
'The fragilista mistakes the economy for a washing machine that needs monthly maintenance, or misconstrues the properties of your body for those of a compact disc player. Adam Smith himself made the analogy of the economy as a watch or a clock that once set in motion continues on its own. But I am certain that he did not quite think of matters in these terms, that he looked at the economy in terms of organisms but lacked a framework to express it.'
'And once in a while one hears shouts of "who is governing us?" as if the world needs someone to govern it.'
'for something organic, equilibrium (in that sense) only happens with death.'
'You pick up a language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances' --- a myth, according to Antimoon and AJATT, whom I'm inclined to believe.
'What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life'
On ‘Ancestral life’ he says: ‘all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.’
‘Restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is antifragile for that very reason. Had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, the overall business would be either stagnant or weak, and would deliver nothing better than cafeteria food—and I mean Soviet-style cafeteria food.’
Let it be known that Khatzumoto has been about some of these antifragility ideas and applying them to Japanese language acquisition for years now: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/series/social-resistance
‘a different, stronger variety of antifragility linked to evolution that is beyond hormesis—actually very different from hormesis; it is even its opposite. It can be described as hormesis—getting stronger under harm—if we look from the outside, not from the inside.’
‘By some nasty property, a random event is, well, random. It does not advertise its arrival ahead of time’
‘They can prepare for the next war, but not win it.’
‘Post-event adaptation, no matter how fast, would always be a bit late.’ — Very interesting phrase, ‘post-event adaptation’.
‘fell into the common mental distortion of thinking that the future sends some signal detectable by us. We wish.’
‘nature is antifragile up to a point but such point is quite high—it can take a lot, a lot of shocks.’
‘Organisms Are Populations and Populations Are Organisms’
‘the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution’
In good systems, ‘mistakes lower the odds of future mistakes’
(
22:20 / 2013-01-13)
This book talked about lifelogging. These life clipper called Instaldebrn takes a more sparse, compressive approach: random samples of samples.
(
18:39 / 2012-12-28)
‘ Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories. They helped turn the book into something like a modern CD, where you can skip directly to the track you want, as compared to unindexed books, which, like cassette tapes, force you to troll laboriously through large swaths of material in order to find the bit you’re looking for. Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars.’
Say again, ‘ unindexed books ..., like cassette tapes, force you to troll laboriously through large swaths of material in order to find the bit you’re looking for.’
(
08:45 / 2012-12-26)
‘Unlike the letters in this book, which form words that carry semantic meaning, letters written in scriptio continua functioned more like musical notes. They signified the sounds that were meant to come out of one’s mouth. Reconstituting those sounds into discrete packets of words that could be understood first required hearing them. And just as it is difficult for all but the most gifted musicians to read musical notes without actually singing them, so too was it difficult to read texts written in scriptio continua without speaking them aloud. In fact, we know that well into the Middle Ages, reading was an activity almost always carried out aloud’
‘When St. Augustine, in the fourth century A.D., observed his teacher St. Ambrose reading to himself without moving his tongue or murmuring, he thought the unusual behavior so noteworthy as to record it in his Confessions. It was probably not until about the ninth century, around the same time that spacing became common and the catalog of punctuation marks grew richer, that the page provided enough information for silent reading to become common.’ --- Alan Kay talked about this.
‘If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you’d never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read.’
‘“The stuffy nose may dim liquor” and “The stuff he knows made him lick her.”’
‘The first concordance of the Bible, a grand index that consumed the labors of five hundred Parisian monks, was compiled in the thirteenth century, around the same time that chapter divisions were introduced. For the first time, a reader could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through.’ --- !
‘Indexes were a major advance’
‘When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today. Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can’t read a page a minute, the rate at which you’re probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you’ve read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.’
(
16:32 / 2012-12-25)
‘ The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.’
‘When the Slavic bards were asked whether they repeated their songs exactly, they responded, “Word for word, and line for line.” And yet when recordings of two performances were held up against each other, they clearly were different. Words changed, lines moved around, passages disappeared. The Slavic bards weren’t being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall. Not that this should have been surprising. Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.’
Of course he talks about reci.
(
15:43 / 2012-12-25)
if you're not doing things that are unique and different and memorable, this year can come to resemble the last, and end up being just as forgettable as yesterday's lunch. That's why it's so important to pack your life with interesting experiences that make your life memorable, and provide a texture to the passage of time.
(
13:21 / 2012-12-25)
Read this about a month ago on the metro.
Albanian pronunciation: c, ts as in curtsy; ç, ch as in church; gj, gy as in hogyard; j, y as in year; q, ky as in stockyard or the t in mature; x, dz as in adze; xh, j as in joke; zh, s as in measure.
‘If everything was decided up on high, why did Allah put them through so many trials, why did he allow them to spill so much blood? To one camp He had given ramparts and iron doors to defend itself, and to the other, ladders and ropes to try to overcome them, and He was content just to be a spectator of the ensuing butchery.’
‘An army, he said, before it was a marching horde, or a swathe of flags, or blood to be spilled, or a victory or a defeat---an army was in the first place an ocean of piss. They had listened to him open-mouthed as he explained that in many cases an army may begin to fail not on the field of battle, but in mundane details of unsuspected importance, details no one thought about, like stench and filth, for instance.’
‘He had heard it said that no foreign army except the Mongols had a special unit, as theirs did, whose job was to announce the coming of rain. Everything that's any use in the art of war, he said to himself, comes from the Mongols.’
‘all the leaders had features that seemed to have been designed solely in order to make it harder for him to write his chronicle. Traits unworthy of appearing in a battle epic automatically came into his mind: Olça Karaduman's sty, the Mufti's asthma, Uç Kurtogmuz's extra tooth, the chilblains of his namesake, Uç Tunxhkurt, and the humped backs, short necks, scarecrow arms and sciatic shoulders of many others, and especially the coarse hairs sticking out of Kurdisxhi's nose.’
‘"Supplying food to an army is the key problem in war... Anybody can wave a sword about, but keeping forty thousand men fed and watered in a foreign, unpopulated and uncultivated land, now that's a hard nut to crack"’
‘walking among throngs of soldiers. Some of them were sitting outside their tents undoing their packs, others were picking their fleas without the slightest embarrassment. Çelebi recalled that no chronicle ever mentioned the tying and untying of soldier's backpacks. As for flea hunting, that was never spoken of either.’
‘"What about the /akinxhis/? .. Aren't they going to be allowed to pillage in the environs?" "The booty they take usually covers less than a fifth of the needs of the troops. And only in the early stages of a siege."’
‘"great massacres always give birth to great books"’
‘"You really do have an opportunity to write a thundering chronicle redolent with pitch and blood, and it will be utterly different from the graceful whines composed at the fireside by squealers who never went to war"’
‘A squad of janissaries marched past noisily. "They're in a good mood. Today is pay day." Çelebi remembered that pay was also never mentioned in that kind of narrative.’
‘sitting cross-legged so as to examine the corns on the soles of their feet. "Their feet are sore from the long march," the Quartermaster said with sympathy. "I've still never read a historical work that even mentions soldiers' feet. ... In truth, the vast Empire of which are all so proud was enlarged only by these blistered and torn feet." ’
‘"At the behest of the Padishah, master of the universe, to whom men and genies owe total obedience, a myriad harems were abandoned and the lions set forth for the land of the Shqipetars..."’
‘Mevla Çelebi was sufficiently astute not to turn his head towards the general in case the latter, once he had regained his poise, might feel annoyed at having been caught in a moment of weakness by a mere chronicler, or, in other words, at having let himself be seen to be astonished, when he was supposed to be far above such emotions.’
‘"Taxation. ... You don't realize the full meaning of that word, nor how many things, including the siege of this fortress, depend on it."’
‘/These hallucinations, no doubt caused by weariness and waiting,, are perhaps distant reminiscences of the time when the Albanians, like all other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, believed in a multiplicity of gods. Many of us are convinced that these divinities are not only gathering in the heavens above us, but will sway the outcome of battle, as they did in the past. They hope that the heavens which have been less clement to us, for who knows what reason, will look on us more kindly and take our side, as they did long ago. We shall hear the rumblings of the wheels of the celestial chariots and the rustling of their wings, so they say, and we no longer know whether the outcome of the fight and the fate of each of us will be fixed on this blackish earth of up on high, among the clouds./’
‘But the Pasha knew from experience that if they were allowed to pillage before the day of the assault, then the booty they would gather would bring the instinct of preservation to the fore and thus diminish their thirst for battle. He wanted the citadel to be not just a monster to be vanquished but a prize that all would hanker after.’
‘"It's going to be quite a night when we take the citadel! A real riot! Just wait to see the orgies we'll have! When the men have taken their pleasure they'll swap their captives. They'll keep them for an hour, then sell them on to buy others. The girls will go from tent to tent. There'll be brawls. Maybe even murders!"’
‘"Your name will be remembered." "For good or for bad?" "Does it matter? In this world nothing is either good or bad for all men."’
‘"Every people in the world goes on increasing at a greater or lesser rate. The annual increase is usually around twenty or thirty people per thousand." It was the first time Çelebi had heard figures of that sort. The books he read didn't generally contain that kind of information."’
‘Skanderbeg would speak only Latin, the better to mark his complete break with the Empire. ... "He broke one of the dreams of our empire. You know which one? The most beautiful dream of all: bringing the Albanian Catholics back into the bosom of Islam." Their conversion had been a miracle. To be sure, there hand't been many of them, only a handful really, but you mustn't forget they were ancient Christians, they had adopted the faith thirteen centuries ago and since then had been attached to the Church of Rome and under allegiance to it. So it was a sign that Islam was managing to make a breach in Christianity in one of its staunchest bastions. No better news had ever reached the heart of the Empire. But the dream was soon destroyed by that demon with a double name, George Castrioti-Skanderbeg. ’
‘"Normal-looking people are those I fear the most"’
‘"He's in the process of achieving an uncommon exploit. ... He's trying to create a second Albania, outside of anyone's reach, a kind of immaterial Albania. So that when one day this Albania, the terrestrial one, falls to the Empire, that other, ghostly Albania, its shadow-self will go on wandering among the clouds... He's devoted himself to a task which almost nobody has ever thought of before: how to re-use a defeat... the eternal recycling of defeat in battle. ... He's trying to oblige us to fight his shadow. To vanquish a ghost, so to speak, the image of his own defeat."’
‘"a strange rumour spread among the officers that Skanderbeg didn't exist, and never had existed. At first this truck everyone as good news, but we soon saw that it was the opposite. Why? Because, as I told you before, if there is no Skanderbeg, then we are fighting a ghost. It would be like struggling with one of the departed. What can ou do if you are attacked by the dead.... so if you try to slay a ghost, all you do is bring it back to life."’
‘"We confronted the Balkans sixty years ago, on the plains of Kosovo. My father was there, and he never stopped talking about that battle. That's when we saw them all gathered together---Serbs, Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats and Romanians, all allied against us. The fight lasted ten hours, as you know. For the first time we saw our army based on land and obedience up against an opponent driven by pride and daring. Our soldiers, who had no titles or noms de guerre, some of whom didn't even have a family name, just their first name, overcame those proud counts and barons. Now, Çelebi, think what a marvel it would be to mix the noble earth of Anatolia with those rocks that spark!"’
‘"the poison of jealousy" ’
‘"A general who destroys your supply train before attacking you is a true soldier."’
‘He cited the names of other besieged garrisons and citadels that had been brought low by water, a weapon more fearsome than the sword.’
‘Çelebi felt as if he really had returned from the grave. In it he had buried his only chronicle that was hostile to the State.’
‘"I remember that at the first siege of Szemendre we spent a week flinging rats, dogs ad even dead donkeys into the fortress. Then they took to catapulting the corpses of prisoners, and the minders of the machine got so carried away that they started hurling vats of waste water, night soil, and god knows what else over the walls. Sure, the defenders caught diseases and finally surrendered, but what was the point? The stink was so sickening that ou soldiers wouldn't go into the place once it was ours."’
‘Once again he cantered alongside the wall at whose foot what people call a "war" was taking place. On this occasion it took the form of a human mass rising from below towards another mass of men overhead.’
(
18:35 / 2012-12-28)
When the Israelites on their way out of Egypt found themselves in the difficult position between the pursuing hosts of Pharaoh and the menacing waters of the Red Sea, Moses turned to God in impassioned prayer. But the Lord responded with a sharp rebuke: "Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward" (Exodus 14:15). Rabbi Eliezer elaborates on this: "Thus did God speak unto Moses: 'Moses, my children are in great distress; they are hemmed in by the sea on one side and the pursuing enemy on the other. And yet you stand and indulge in prolonged prayer. Wherefore criest thou unto me? There
p. 17
are occasions when it is proper to prolong and there are occasions necessitating action when prayer is to be abbreviated.'"
(
16:13 / 2012-12-21)
Interestingly, these are the kinds of statements that the the Quran condemns and hold against the Jewish forefathers. Meanwhile, the Jews not only admit to such argumentation but are proud of it and, from this introduction by Bokser, see as essential. There are other examples of one culture holding something against another which doesn't see why it's a big deal (some Hindus find it unseemly if not disgusting that Khadijah, Muhammad's first and only wife until she died, married him, a younger man, and moreover her employee.)
(
10:51 / 2012-12-20)
The Biblical text often needs clarification. The Bible, for instance, allows the termination of marriage through divorce, without, however, defining the grounds for divorce, the procedure by which it was carried out, or the fate that was to befall the children of the dissolved family. The Bible similarly prohibits work on the seventh day of the week, but it does not define what is meant by work. Are we to infer that writing a letter, marketing or preparing food is to be construed as work? Must the country's armed services go off duty on the Sabbath? Was the priest to halt his Temple duties, and must the rabbi suspend teaching and preaching? Was healing the sick work, and must it be discontinued on the Sabbath? The answers to these questions must have been common knowledge at the time Biblical law was formulated, but in the course of the centuries that body of unrecorded knowledge was forgotten, and those provisions of the Bible were, therefore, in need of clarification.
(
07:22 / 2012-12-20)
'I remembered reading about how the printing press led to a huge change in how ideas were argued. The reliability and accuracy of printing allowed people to present their ideas with fewer claims and more logic, with less allegory but tighter reasoning. So I wondered how computers could change the way ideas are presented and tested.'
'Before I got involved with computers I had made a living teaching guitar. I was thinking about the aesthetic relationship people have with their musical instruments and the phrase popped into my mind: "an instrument whose music is ideas."'
'the Dynabook idea. To really use a computer, you've got to be the author as well as the reader. Or in terms of music, a computer is something through which you can compose and play'
'The last 20 years have been basically air guitar. The same thing happened back when television came along. In 1945, people thought that television would bring serious works of theater to the general public.'
'Literature is a conversation in writing about important ideas. ... But somehow we've come to think of science and mathematics as being apart from literature. In spite of the fact that our society is built largely on the technologies that come out of understanding science and math, we've ceased to regard literacy about these things as important. And that's a big mistake. Literacy is not just about being able to read street signs or medicine labels. It means being able to deal in the world of ideas.'
'I think it was Stravinsky who said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." Music is already a means of expression in itself. There's only so much you can say before it's all bullshit, because what is special about music is precisely the stuff that you can't put into words.' --- A similar but less general idea is the Neal Stephenson--Michael Drout divide (writing SF versus writing about written SF).
'people all have got an instrument inside them. If you have a great musician and a bunch of children, you've got music, because that person can teach them how to sing. ... You can look for the music inside the piano, but that's not where it is. Same thing with the Dynabook. You don't need technology to learn science and math.'
'Marshall McLuhan made the point that one of the crucial things about printed books was that you didn't have to read them in a social setting, such as a classroom. People can pursue knowledge independently and from the most unorthodox, subversive, or just plain weird points of view. But that is rarely how things are taught in school. Most educators want kids to learn things in the form of belief rather than being able to construct a kind of skeptical scaffolding, which is what science is all about. The ability to explore and test multiple points of view is one of the great strengths of our culture, but you'd never know it by looking at a classroom.'
'Science today is taught in America as a secular religion. But science is not the same as knowing the things learned by science.' --- Like dancing about architecture or Stephenson on Drout, doing science has nothing to do with reading science. Dawkins writing /The Selfish Gene/---that was biology and brilliance. Your old mum reading Dawkins---that was just entertainment. Your old mum reading Dawkins and then starting experimenting with fermenting and permaculture---that's back to biology.
'One of the problems with the way computers are used in education is that they are most often just an extension of this idea that learning means just learning accepted facts. But what really interests me is using computers to transmit ideas, points of view, ways of thinking. You don't need a computer for this, ... just as [you don't need] a musical instrument [to make music].'
'Seymour Papert used to talk about the kid who has difficulty in mathematics. Typically, the teacher will say, "Well, this kid is not math-minded. Let's try the kid on something else." But if the kid were having difficulty in French, we couldn't say that that kid is not French-minded, because we know that had the kid been born in France he or she would have no trouble learning French. So Papert's idea was that there's something environmentally wrong about the way math is taught to kids.'
'the biggest question about education is, "What is this kid going to do when teachers and parents are not around?" If children love the learning process, they want to spend all their time at it. If they don't love it, it doesn't matter much what you do in a classroom.'
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10:39 / 2012-12-17)
‘ignorance, cruelty, and squalor—fanaticism, poverty, and vast, unbridgeable divisions between rich and poor … superstition and backwardness’ — Shutt is talking about people’s perceptions of an era but this tight grouping applies to all eras.
‘the Middle Ages saw the birth of the immediate predecessors of our own ideas about love and marriage as important concerns in their own right, utterly central to a happy and fulfilling personal life’ — if so, how delightful! Marital harmonies are important and seem unusually rare in history.
‘The gain in “purity,” if such it was, was counterbalanced at nearly all points by a diminution in utility. But that was a price well worth paying if your aim was to sound as much like Cicero as possible, and to avoid—indeed, to avoid at all costs—“barbarous” neologisms’ — this harkens back to what Victor Stevenson was saying about French bureaucrats believing dictionaries dignifying working mens’ terms and languages as ‘subversive’. ‘Barbarous’ indeed! And they were partly successful! Debt, doubt…
‘Italy was never really medieval in the sense that England and France were, but on the other hand, the Renaissance came earliest and, far and away, most pervasively there’ — interesting claim, Dr Shutts.
‘Despite the efforts of the Church, however, both within the monasteries and beyond, the collapse of the Western Empire saw a pronounced narrowing of cultural horizons’ — would it be appropriate to describe the post-1500s as a period of narrowing horizons for Mongolia? Or would it be just as silly there as in western Europe (Italy and France and west, out to Ireland)? Life goes on, business goes on. Narrowing of horizons is shortening and degrading supply chains. ‘Living standards’ might not have declined by many criteria.
He describes a Near East and Egyptian culture melded through Greco-Roman societies with lots of Germanic and Celtic contributions, always growing. ‘from wine and olives and sheep and goats to beer and beef and milk and cheese, from sunny and warm to cold and cloudy’.
‘the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament was written predominantly in Hebrew, and the New Testament was written almost entirely, save for a few Aramaic expressions, in koine Greek, the Greek of the Eastern Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, virtually no one in Western Europe could read either, and as a result, the Bible known to Western Europeans was the Latin translation of St. Jerome, the so-called “Vulgate,” completed between 391–406, and until Vatican II in the 1960s, the official Bible of the Catholic Church’ — as well as Augustine and Boethius.
‘The landscape in Germany didn’t much appeal to them anyway. Heavy soil and dark, seemingly endless forests, nasty weather, and ferocious, if chronically undisciplined warriors’ — I like Shutt’s regular allusions to climate, landscape, food, and drink.
‘Tacitus has ulterior motives in evoking the virtues of the German tribes … They were, in the first instance, brave, almost suicidally brave, and in love with warfare, which was, for a man, the quickest and surest route to prestige and power’ — similar in some ways but not in others to the Mongols and their kin.
‘They were loyal to a fault. The expectation seemed to be that the members of a warrior band would fight to the death with their chosen leader’ — this is what Beckwith describes as a comitatus, an apparently very widespread phenomenon in Central Eurasian culture complexes. Wife’s Lament is an Anglo-Saxon poem related to this.
‘“Skald,” or “shaper”’ — like metod: meter, measurer, of fate.
‘What you could raise easily was livestock, and it was upon livestock—and fish and sea-birds—that the Icelanders depended. There were no cities. There was no king or aristocracy. There were instead farmers—or ranchers—some more prosperous, some less, and, lower on the social scale, laborers and thralls. That was it.’
‘No striving for effect, no frills or flourishes—just the story, plain and tall. To me, and to many other readers, the effect is deeply exhilarating and in almost moral terms. The style says, “We do not flinch; we are not trying to impress; we simply take things the way they come and then deal with them as best we can.”’
‘It is intricately and minutely patterned, but as you read, it doesn’t feel patterned. It feels, or feels to me at least, like life.’
‘Robert Kellogg, pointed out, the Icelanders during the winter had a lot of time on their hands. Iceland lies just south of the Arctic Circle, and winter nights are long. Beyond that, they had lots of vellum. They had lots of livestock, much of which had to be slaughtered in the fall, Icelandic winters being what they are, so there was lots of writing material lying more or less ready to hand.’ — Beautiful imagery.
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19:14 / 2012-12-16)
‘in 782 … Buddhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical goodwill, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: So, what exactly is this “bodhisattva” we hear so much about? Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do? Scholars still speculate whether Adam infiltrated Christian concepts into the translated sutras, consciously or otherwise’ --- I wonder if any scholars speculate whether Nestorianism picked up some Buddhist elements from this contact.
‘Timothy said, the pearl of true faith had fallen into the transient mortal world, and each faith naively believed that it alone possessed it. All he could claim—and all the caliph could assert in response—was that some faiths could see enough evidence that theirs was the real pearl, although the final truth would not be known in this world.’ --- First Origen, now this, these Nestorians had extremely deep doctrines.
‘It is common knowledge that medieval Arab societies were far ahead of those of Europe in terms of science, philosophy, and medicine, and that Europeans derived much of their scholarship from the Arab world; yet in the early cen- turies, this cultural achievement was usually Christian and Jewish rather than Muslim. It was Christians—Nestorian, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others—who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world—the science, philosophy, and medicine—and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus. Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim. Syriac-speaking Christian schol- ars brought the works of Aristotle to the Muslim world: Timothy himself translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph. Syriac Christians even make the first reference to the efficient Indian numbering system that we know today as “Arabic,” and long before this technique gained currency among Muslim thinkers.’
‘Latin Europe’s low point came soon after 900 when, within the space of a couple of years, areas of central France were ravaged in quick succession by pagan Vikings from the north, Muslim Moors from the south, and pagan Magyars from the east: Christians had nowhere left to hide. Perhaps history would ultimately write off the Christian venture into western Europe as rash overreach, a diversion from Christianity’s natural destiny, which evidently lay in Asia. Europe might have been a continent too far.’
‘While most Christians in Europe certainly lived in a kind of “Christendom,” in which church and state could be seen as broadly identical, that was far from the reality facing the millions of Christians who lived under other and possibly hostile faiths, under Persian, Muslim, Hindu, or Chi- nese rule. These believers were well accustomed to a modern idea of Christianity as a minority faith operating far from centers of power, usually suffering official discrimination, and facing the recurrent danger of persecution. About 1420, an Italian traveler observed that “[t]hese Nestorians are scattered all over India, in like manner as are the Jews among us.”20 He found it hard to grasp the idea of Chris- tians as a scattered group living among many other creeds, probably as a small minority.’
‘Asia Minor, the region that is so often mentioned throughout the New Testament: it is here that we find such historic names as Iconium and Ephesus, Galatia and Bithynia, the seven cities of the book of Revelation. Still in 1050, the region had 373 bishoprics, and the in- habitants were virtually all Christian, overwhelmingly members of the Orthodox Church. Four hundred years later, that Christian pro- portion had fallen to 10 or 15 percent of the population’
‘unlike Islam, Christianity has not retained its original foundation, in that its original homeland—the region where it enjoyed its greatest triumphs over its first millennium—is now overwhelmingly Muslim. To offer a parallel example to understand how radical the uprooting of Christianity was, we would have to imagine a counterfactual world in which Islam was extinguished in Arabia and the Middle East, and survived chiefly in Southeast Asia, using scriptures translated into Malay and Bengali. Christianity is just as severed from its original context.’
‘When a movement or church fails or vanishes, hindsight can make us assume that it was doomed to failure from the outset, and that it was never going to play a serious role in history. Yet movements that ultimately became marginal were not always so.’
‘The success of a particular religion or faith tradition in gaining numbers and influence neither proves nor disproves its validity.’
‘How Religions Die’
‘When one faith succeeds another, its members will devote little care to the fading writings of a rival religion they may well regard as wrong, or even diabolical.’ --- In some contrast to the Chinese dynasties.
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14:53 / 2012-12-16)
‘By the time of the Arab conquests in the seventh century, the Jacobites probably held the loyalty of most Christians in greater Syria, while the Nestorians dominated the eastern lands, in what we now call Iraq and Iran. The West Syrian church was Jacobite; East Syrians were Nestorian. Using these sectarian labels is misleading if it paints these churches as anything less than authentically Christian. Not surprisingly, modern adherents resent the names, just as much as a Roman Catholic would hate to be described as a papist or a Romanist.’
‘The Mongol ruler whom I call Hulegu has in various sources been referred to as Hulagu, Holaaku, and Hülâgû, while Genghis Khan is more correctly called Chinggis. Older sources refer to the Uygur people as Uighurs, and to the Ongguds as Onguts.’
‘Christianity appears to have spread freely and inexorably, so that we rarely think of major reverses or setbacks. When we do hear of disasters or persecutions, they are usually mentioned as the pre- lude to still greater advances, an opportunity for heroic resistance to oppression. Protestants know how their faith survived all the perse- cutions and slaughter of the wars of religion; Catholics recall how the worst atrocities inflicted by Protestant and atheist regimes could not silence true belief. Modern observers witness the survival of the churches under Communism, and the ultimate triumph symbolized by Pope John Paul II. ... Anyone familiar with Christian history has read of the planting, rise, and development of churches, but how many know accounts of the decline or extinction of Christian communities or institutions? Most Christians would find the very concept unsettling. Yet such events have certainly occurred, and much more often than many realize.’ --- Unsettling concepts indicate frailty.
‘Repeatedly through its history, the church’s tree has been pruned and cut back, often savagely.’
‘Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. Matters could easily have developed very differently.’
‘We should rather regret the destruction of a once-flourishing culture, much as we mourn the passing of Muslim Spain, Buddhist India, or the Jewish worlds of eastern Europe. With the possible exception of a few particularly bloody or violent creeds, the destruction of any sig- nificant faith tradition is an irreplaceable loss to human experience and culture. Furthermore, the Christian experience offers lessons that can be applied more generally to the fate of other religions that have suffered persecution or elimination. If a faith as vigorous and pervasive as Middle Eastern or Asian Christianity could have fallen into such total oblivion, no religion is safe. And the means by which such an astonishing fall occurred should be of keen interest to anyone contemplating the future of any creed or denomination.’
‘many aspects of Christianity that we conceive as thoroughly modern were in fact the norm in the distant past: globalization, the encounter with other faiths, and the dilemmas of living under hostile regimes.’
‘How can our mental maps of the past be so radically distorted?’
‘Much of what we today call the Islamic world was once Christian. The faith originated and took shape in Syria-Palestine and in Egypt, and these areas continued to have major Christian communities long after the Arab conquests. As late as the eleventh century, Asia was still home to at least a third of the world’s Christians, and per- haps a tenth of all Christians still lived in Africa’
‘When we move our focus away from Europe, everything we think we know about Christianity shifts kaleidoscopically, even alarmingly.’
‘When we speak of the medieval church, we are usually referring to conditions in western Europe, and not to the much wealthier and more sophisticated Eastern world centered in Constantinople. But there was, in addition, a third Christian world, a vast and complex realm that stretched deep into Asia.’
‘At every stage, Timothy’s career violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity—about its geo- graphical spread, its relationship with political state power, its cultural breadth, and its interaction with other religions. In terms of his prestige, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on a par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople.’
‘Focusing on the Asian, Eastern story of Christianity forces us to jettison our customary images of the so-called Dark Ages. From Timothy’s point of view, the culture and learning of the ancient world had never been lost; nor, critically, had the connection with the primitive church. We easily contrast the Latin, feudal world of the Middle Ages with the ancient church rooted in the Semitic languages of the Middle East, but in Timothy’s time, the Church of the East still thought and spoke in Syriac, and its adherents continued to do so for several centuries afterward.’
‘If we are ever tempted to speculate on what the early church might have looked like if it had developed independently, avoiding the mixed blessing of its alliance with Roman state power, we have but to look east.’
‘Like its ancient predecessors, Timothy’s church remained thoroughly in dialogue with Semitic and Jewish traditions. Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth.’
‘In contrast to the rigid homogeneity that is so often associated with the Western Middle Ages, Eastern prelates had to confront real diversity of thought, with daring mystical and theological speculations.’
‘One continuing influence was the third-century Father Origen, who had proposed that the soul was preexistent and that salvation and damnation might be temporary states leading ultimately to a grand restoration of all things, the apokatastasis. At this climax beyond history, even the Devil would be redeemed, and all would share the divine nature.’
‘Thomas Hobbes famously described the papacy as “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”’ (Reminds me of a vision of Nazgul)
‘In England, to give a comparison, the medieval church had two metropolitans: respectively, at York and Canterbury. Timothy him- self presided over nineteen metropolitans and eighty-five bishops. Though the exact locations of metropolitan seats changed over time, map 1.1 on page 12 identifies some of the leading centers. Just in Timothy’s lifetime, new metropolitan sees were created at Rai near Tehran, and in Syria, Turkestan, Armenia, and Dailumaye on the Caspian Sea.’
‘He reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. In a magnificent throwaway line, Timothy described, about 780, how “[i]n these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a met- ropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans.”’
‘We can’t understand Christian history without Asia—or, indeed, Asian history without Christianity.’
‘In central Asia, the Christians’ main rivals were the Buddhists, who were then engaged in their own great missionary era. For many Mongol and Turkish peoples, Buddhism and Chris- tianity were familiar parts of the cultural landscape, and existed comfortably alongside older primal and shamanic traditions. So widespread were these Asian contacts, in fact, that it is tempting to see Timothy as a holdover from the great Axial Age in which the world religions were formed, even as he looks forward to later eras of global faith and intercultural contact. And the process went far beyond mere polite discussion: Christianity affected and trans- formed other faiths, and was in turn reshaped by them.’
‘About 780, a Nestorian community erected a monument that recounted the Christian message in Buddhist and Taoist terms, just as European Christians were trying to make the faith acceptable to peoples of western and northern Europe: “The illustrious and honorable Messiah, veiling his true dignity, appeared in the world as a man; . . . he fixed the extent of the eight boundaries, thus completing the truth and freeing it from dross; he opened the gate of the three constant principles, in- troducing life and destroying death; he suspended the bright sun to invade the chambers of darkness, and the falsehoods of the devil were thereupon defeated; he set in motion the vessel of mercy by which to ascend to the bright mansions, where- upon rational beings were then released; having thus completed the manifestation of his power, in clear day he ascended to his true station.”’
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04:57 / 2012-12-06)
"there are literary critics, and journals that publish their work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But they are also performing an economic function by making judgments. These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed worthy of" support.
'the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when viewed from the other side.' (the Dante side)
'I don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.'
'Literary critics know perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on sales.' (Borges' reviews?)
'It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the
feeling that something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as Slashdot is Exhibit A.'
I like Neal Stephenson.
'Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their sophistication.'
'Publishing is a very ancient and crafty industry that existed and flourished before the idea of copyright even existed.'
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09:23 / 2012-12-16)
the publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as "commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them Beowulf writers.
But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called "literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm going to call them Dante writers
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09:21 / 2012-12-16)
art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also economics
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09:21 / 2012-12-16)
‘The bow is made of horn, bark, and wood. The arrow is usually made from willow, and feathers are from local birds of prey, especially vultures.’
‘Therefore, the door of a ger is always open, and guests are welcome to enter and have a snack or a nap even if none of the ger’s inhabitants is home. Knocking is never required, and it is not considered rude to arrive even in the middle of the night. Older or esteemed guests are met and seen off, if possible, at the door of the ger or fence, if there happens to be one. Hosts do not come outside to welcome younger guests. If the owners are home, it is customary for them to offer guests some hot tea and perhaps a plate of cheese, fresh cream, and candies (even if the guests arrive in the middle of the night). Guests should accept these offer- ings before beginning conversation. Then, the guest should inquire about the health of the host, the health of the family’s animals, and the quality of the grazing. Mongolians always answer optimistically, even if this is not realistic. The host customarily inquires where the visitor is from and where he or she is heading. ... While guests, even Westerners, are not expected to compensate the host for their stay, small gifts are appropriate. Large gifts can be perceived as insulting’
‘In a year, the things they were encouraged not to think about became all-important, and most of the things they had taken for granted were gone. They had skills that were sometimes worth nothing, children they could not afford to support, and money that was worth less all the time.’
‘The street children’s health is poor. The very cold Mongolian winters are particularly hard on them. Children form groups to stay warm, and they sleep either in apartment building stairways, luggage racks on trains, or underground.’
‘Mongolians are also known for their sayings, which are short and easy to pass on. Sometimes these bits of wisdom are put in the form of a triad, or three-line poem. Some examples of triads are: Three endless: Skies are endless / Wisdom is endless / Stupidity is endless’ --- these people would like Pratchett.
‘The “triple master- pieces” of the Mongolian epic tradition are the Geser, the Jangar, and the Secret History of the Mongols.’ They quote from Waley's translation of the last.
They conclude their book as such: ‘Since the fall of the Mongol Empire, Mongolia has been consistently overwhelmed by outside influences—either Russian or Chinese. Now, will it be overwhelmed by Western or global influences or manage to preserve its unique and beautiful character? The answer depends upon a commitment to honest, representative government and hard thinking about values and priorities.’ No, I think the answer depends on chance and fate.
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04:45 / 2012-12-06)
‘The recent dzud was severe in itself, but the economic conditions caused by the transition from communism also made herders especially vulnerable. For one, many of the people herding now are novices. The Soviets had encouraged Mongolian industry. When they left, the machinery to make manufactured goods and the consumers to buy them left too, and many industrial workers were among the jobless. In response, the number of herders in Mongolia tripled between 1990 and 2000. Ochir, an ex-timber worker who became a herder, summed it up: “In this situation, what do you do? Our national heritage is herding. . . . We live in tents in the countryside and raise animals . . . So I bought a few sheep and goats.” Not only are small herds always vulnerable, but Ochir had no idea what to do when things went wrong. He was not accustomed to plan- ning for tough times and emergencies. The Communist government had always done that, storing fodder for the winter, having the equipment to transport it to the countryside, and providing veterinary services. Ochir admits he was at a loss. “When bad weather hit I was caught completely by surprise. I didn’t have a winter shelter. I didn’t have enough hay or fodder. I didn’t have enough horses or any camels to move on to a better place. So what happened? Everything died.”’
‘Increased herd sizes as well as increased numbers of inexperienced herders have contributed to the dzud disaster. Under communism, the gov- ernment controlled herd size. Since communism fell, herd sizes have increased as herders compete with each other. The Communist government also provided a market for animal products in other Communist countries, and ran factories for processing animals into useful goods. In recent years the market for livestock has suffered, so animals have remained alive, needing grass, that otherwise would have been slaughtered.’
‘“The one thing you can say about the Communists is that they knew what they were doing,” said David Dyer of the Gobi Regional Growth Initiative. “That paternalistic attitude may have taken all self-motivation out of the peo- ple here. . . . They must realize that they must get together so that spe- cializations can develop: people to grow hay, some to market the products, and that way to spread the cost of the vet[erinarian] between several families.”’
‘The Ministry of Nature and the Environment believes that the livestock economy will be threatened in the long-term as much by land degrada- tion as by dzud. It estimated in 2001 that 78 percent of Mongolia’s land was in a state of decline due to overgrazing. “Decline” means soil degradation, vegetation degradation, and eventual desertification. In the 10 years between 1991 and 2001, the ministry believed, the percentage of desert-like land in Mongolia increased by 3.4 percent’
After explaining the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path, the author trots out, ‘Considering this path, one can understand why Buddhism acted as a pacifying influence on the formerly warlike Mongolians.’ No, actually, I can't understand. I hope my ethnography never commits such crimes.
‘In the wake of communism’s fall, other religions have also thrived. Among these, which include Islam and the Nestorian, Mormon, and Catholic forms of Christianity, the most important is Shamanism. ... Shamanists see divine force in all of nature. Father Heaven (Tenger Etseg), they believe, is in the blue sky that is visible most of the time in Mongolia, in the almost ever-present wind, in lightning, and in meteorites. Shamanists see Mother Earth (Gazar Eej) in trees, minerals, and plants.’
I should look into Mongolian Nestorism.
‘The three traditional or “manly” sports are horse racing, wrestling, and archery. Despite the category under which it is included, wrestling is the only one of three sports that women do not participate in.’
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12:12 / 2012-12-02)
‘Horses, camels, cattle (including yaks), sheep and goats, the five snouts, are all native to the region, accustomed to grazing over wide stretches of land. Over time, the Mongolians have become so accustomed to their nomadic lifestyle that many disdain forms of work that cannot be done on horseback, such as growing crops. They are also prejudiced against food that does not come from the five snouts. For example, although Mongolia’s rivers teem with fish, Mongolians mostly ignore them. They also reject vegetables, believing that “meat is for men, leaves are for animals.” They have elevated the five snouts to national symbols and objects of love, telling folktales about them and representing them on the national seal.’
‘There are approximately the same number of horses in Mongolia as there are people—well over 2 million. ... Mongols have more songs about the love of horses than about the love of women, and in Mongolian epics the horse is often the hero’s best adviser and is able to predict future events.’
‘Without a load on its back, a camel can outrun a horse.’
‘Cow horns are used to make the Mongolian bow.’ --- Weatherford could have mentioned this. But where do Mongolians get wood for gers?
Humorous --- ‘In addition to the herding animals, most Mongolian families keep a very fierce dog to guard the ger and herd from wolves or other unfriendly visitors. When a friendly stranger approaches a camp, he or she calls out from a dis- tance so that the families will restrain their dogs. It is generally the children’s task to come out and hold the dogs down by sitting on their heads.’
More that Weatherford could have indicated: ‘Most meat is eaten dried rather than fresh, however. Mongolians do most of their slaughtering in the late fall, drying the meat so that it will last through the winter. Since animals do not give milk in the winter, meat is the main source of protein then. One cow and seven to eight sheep, or their equivalent, will get a family of five through the winter. In place of beef, herders in the Gobi will preserve camel meat. Mountain herders may kill a yak or goats. Herders cut the fresh meat into long, inch-thick, and several- inch-wide strips. They hang them on a rope inside the ger but near the smoke hole, which is airy. The meat’s moisture all evaporates within a month, leaving hard, brown sticks with the texture of wood. The meat shrinks so much that all the meat from an entire cow could fit inside its stomach when dried. The dried meat, or borts, is broken up and stored in a canvas bag that allows air to circulate, so the meat will stay dry. Borts may be stored this way for months to years. When herders wish to eat some meat, they add the borts to boiling water. The meat expands in size by two and a half times when placed in water. Borts is an ideal food for nomads.’
‘Orom is the cream that rises to the top of boiled milk. Aarul are dried cheese curds that Mongolians bake and store on top of ger in the summer. Eetsgii is another dried cheese. Tarag is a sour yogurt. Shar tos is a butter formed from melting aarul and orom. Tsagaan tos is boiled orom mixed with flour, fruit, or eetsgii. Sour varieties of these dairy products are considered good for cleansing the stomach. Consumption of all of these dairy products pales in comparison to the national consumption of airag, however.’
Under ‘Dangers’, the book lists wolves, hustlers (some bad old traditions never have a reason to disappear), and dzud.
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11:50 / 2012-12-02)
‘About half of Mongolians participate in the herding economy, Mongolia’s traditional means of subsistence. However, herding is more than a job to Mongolians. It involves a deep, spiritual relationship with animals; vigilant observation of the land and weather; and an ability to make a home without accumulating a large number of heavy possessions that would hamper movement. It also requires an ability to be happy without most of the sources of entertainment people in cities enjoy...’
‘Felt consists of specially treated wool and holds together because the wool fibers have little barbs that lock together when processed. To make felt, wool (taken directly from sheep) is first beaten to loosen the fibers. Then, Mongolians take a piece of old felt, called the “mother felt.” It is placed on the ground and moistened. A layer of new sheep’s wool is placed on top of it, wetted again. Two more layers of new wool are then added, each moistened in turn. Grass is placed on top, and then the entire bundle is rolled up (the grass prevents the wool from forming a huge mass). This roll is wrapped in a wet ox hide and fastened with leather straps. Once again, it is thoroughly wetted, with water poured inside each end of the roll. The roll is tied with a long leather rope, and two riders on horseback take each end and pull it in opposite directions, squeezing out the water and pressing the wool firmly into place. Then the package is unrolled and people proclaim the birth of “sweet daugh- ter” felt. The entire process is then repeated using the daughter felt as the starter.’
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11:22 / 2012-12-02)
‘As a result of government incentives for having children, the population of Mongolia at this time was disproportionately young (70 percent was under age 30). Songs such as “The Ring of the Bell” were an extremely effective way of spreading the message of freedom among young people’
‘At one performance, Hongk lowered a portrait of Genghis Khan over a stage to wild applause and dared to celebrate his accomplishments in the lyrics: Forgive us for not daring / To breathe your name. / Though there are thousands of statues, / There is none of you. / We admired you in our hearts / But we dared not breathe your name.’
‘“Our population has awakened,” Zorig told a reporter in January 1990 (emphasis added). “We have lost the feeling of groundless fear.”’ --- Growing up in democracies, I cannot fathom how groundless or real such fear might be.
‘Others urged Batmonh to crush the demonstrators with tanks as the Chinese government had crushed protesters a few months earlier in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.’
‘Instead of emphasizing their differences and attacking each other, the political parties each acknowledged the need for cooperation and communication with the other party. The newly formed democratic parties, which included the Mongolian Democratic Association, the National Progress Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Party of Free Labor, and the Green Party, largely united in acknowledging their inexperience in governing, lack of funding, and lack of name recognition by citizens. Meanwhile, the Communist Party, now known as the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), recognized the need for reform of the political structure, foreign policy, and economy. It also promised seats in the legislature to the democratic opposition even if the opposition lost miserably, which in fact it did. ... To ensure fairness, the elections were closely supervised by international observers.’ --- This is what surprises and pleases me: it takes a small handful of years (or less) for a hardline militaristic dictatorial political system to soften. One can ponder for a while on what this, with other examples (Japan, 1945), means.
Humorous --- ‘The MPRP claimed that it was no longer a commu- nist party, but did not plan to change its name because “there were no good names left.”’
‘The government, although not tied to those ordering the purges of the 1920s and 1930s, decided to take responsibility for them. Every year, on September 10, it holds a memorial service for the politically oppressed of that era. Although people were executed throughout the Communist era, September 10, 1937, was a particularly brutal day. Sixty-nine people were accused of being Japanese spies or otherwise allegedly disloyal.’ --- I can't make any comments about Turkey or Japan (and hopefully this non-comment won't come back to recriminate me later).
‘In the 1990s, the Khural passed a law on the Exoneration and Compensation of Politically Repressed People. The government has gone through the records of those convicted of political crimes and sentenced to death or imprisonment and officially absolved them of guilt. More than 30,000 people have had their names cleared in this manner. The government also began giving homes and money to surviving victims of political repression or their spouses, if the victims were dead.’
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08:38 / 2012-12-02)
‘The Communists prohibited all mention of the most famous noble name, Genghis Khan, completely. The government prevented history museums from including Genghis in any exhibit. People were afraid to even say the name “Genghis Khan” for fear of being accused of commit- ting a thought crime.’ Racy diction for a schoolbook?
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05:56 / 2012-12-02)
‘Since the monasteries had enjoyed so much wealth and power, they were the repositories of most of the country’s artworks. Trea- sures equal in Mongolia to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper were burned by the Communists. ... the Communists demolished the monastery, sending the gold and silver sculptures of deities to the Soviet Union to be melted down’ --- no Monuments Men for the Soviets.
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05:53 / 2012-12-02)
‘Grass was very thick and high, and we almost stumbled over a dead monk. He lay there with his stomach inflated . . . We were so terrified that immediately began to run back. But dead bodies in red and yel- low attires [traditional monk clothing] were everywhere and we did not know where to run. I do not remember how long we ran and when got home. My mother told us never to mention to anyone about what we saw.’
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05:52 / 2012-12-02)
This book might be written for grade schoolers which would go some way to explaining its blurriness.
“Marxism-Leninism holds that the owners of enterprises (the capitalists) oppress the workers (the proletariat), paying them little and making them work in unpleasant or hazardous conditions, while the capitalists live a life of luxury. This was, in fact, a fairly accurate picture of life for many in the United States and Europe at the end of the 19th century ... Marxist-Leninists believed that the proletariat should rise, overthrow the capitalists and the governments that permitted them to be oppres- sive, and take away the capitalists’ wealth and distribute it equally among the people. Lenin, but not Marx, believed that only a dictator- ship would have the ability to impose these changes.”
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05:40 / 2012-12-02)
‘While it was possible to reach Burma over difficult mountain passes leading there from the upper Yangtze valley, the most practicable routes to the west were by way of Kansu, Inner Mongolia, and eastern Turkestan and then on to Khorasan and southern Russia. These were the famous silk roads which for centuries had served as the gateways to the East Asian world. In addition to such land connections, however there also existed another route to the civilized worlds of Eurasia---by sea along the coasts of Annam and Champa, around or across the Malay Peninsula, to the Indian Ocean. By the year 1000, as we will note, this route had become as important as the older land routes to the north and west of it.’
‘Thus we can divide East Asia into three zones---one of rice, on of wheat and millet, and one featuring both a pastoral and a forest, hunting economy. The decisive line, however, was along the Great Wall in China and the Yalu River in Korea, which separated the settled farming folk of East Asia from the nomadic or forest tribal societies which lay beyond.’
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19:40 / 2012-12-01)
‘The historian is neither a prophet nor a seer, but if his craft teaches him anything it is that there can be no assurance that the Western European civilization which now seems so dominant in the world is more than a temporary phenomenon. Civilizations are and have been many, but man is one, so it may well be that our worldwide Western civilization at this very moment is in the process of giving place to another or other which are better adapted to the future needs of mankind.’
‘In the year 1000 five great civilizations existed in the world of Africa and Eurasia: the East Asian, the Indic, the Islamic, the Byzantine-Russian, and the Western European. The first four of these had been considered the important ones by the Arab merchant and writer Suleiman more than a century earlier. By the year 1000 each had had a long history of development which gave them a distinct and different character.’
‘East Asia consisted of a Chinese heartland which in 980 had just been reunited by a new dynasty called the Sung. Around this were clustered a number of smaller independent states which shared Cl1ina’s general culture. They were Annam in northem Vietnam, the Thai priiicipality of Nan-Chao in what is now the Chinese province of Yunnan, the realm of Hsi Hsia centered in Kansu controlled by nomadic Tanguts, the Kitan kingdom of Liao which included most of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria and some of North China south of the Great Wall, the new united Korean kingdom of Koryo, and a Heian empire which controlled the Iapanese islands. Three other regions might conceivably also be considered as part of this East Asian civilized complex but for various reasons, as will be noted, have been excluded from it. They are Tibet, Mongolia proper, and eastern Turkestan, which, although they tended to be much affected by various facets of East Asian civilization, had cultures which were sufficiently different from those mentioned earlier that their relationship to them was essentially ambiguous.’
‘Geography was a major factor which shaped this East Asian civilization.’
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19:32 / 2012-12-01)
That said, long-term concerns about economic growth like this could very well be reinforced and popularized at the depths of the next bear market and recession, whenever those occur. In that event, the “growth is over” view could easily contribute to the depressed valuations and “death of equities” mood that gives rise to a new secular bull market – though likely from much lower price levels than we observe today.
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08:54 / 2012-11-28)
Robert Lucas was correct – there is a very steep cost to economic welfare from losing even a fraction of a percent in long-term growth. It is worth a great deal of short-term discomfort to restore those long-term growth prospects
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08:47 / 2012-11-28)
what Gordon and Grantham see as a precipitous decline in per-capita productivity and growth over the past quarter century is actually the product of distorted capital markets and misallocation of capital, thanks to a pernicious duo of monetary interventionists that society would have been better off without.
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08:46 / 2012-11-28)
The Nobel economist Robert Lucas once calculated that the gain in economic welfare from an increase of just a fraction of a percent in long-term economic growth would exceed the benefit of entirely eliminating business cycle fluctuations
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08:46 / 2012-11-28)
However, it is likely. And I have, in the last year or so, decided to become a maximum likelihooder for general life situations.
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08:46 / 2012-11-28)
We can’t dismiss these concerns outright, particularly since some of the demographic inputs are more or less baked in the cake. On the economic front, the real question is what the prospects for future U.S. productivity growth and capital accumulation are likely to be. To the extent that we continue to follow monetary policies that discourage saving, misallocate capital, promote speculative bubbles, and effectively trade away long-term growth for short-term stability, Gordon and Grantham may very well be correct. But in my view, that outcome is neither necessary nor assured
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08:43 / 2012-11-28)
Grantham argued that “The U.S. GDP growth rate that we have become accustomed to for over a hundred years – in excess of 3% a year – is not just hiding behind temporary setbacks. It is gone forever. Yet most business people (and the Fed) assume that economic growth will recover to its old rates… Going forward, GDP growth (conventionally measured) for the U.S. is likely to be about only 1.4% a year, and adjusted growth about 0.9%...The bottom line for U.S. real growth, according to our forecast, is 0.9% a year through 2030, decreasing to 0.4% from 2030 to 2050. This is all done presuming no unexpected disasters, but also no heroics, just normal “muddling through.” (h/t Business Insider).
These estimates reflect a fairly uncontroversial observation that U.S. population growth is presently much slower than historical rates, and appears likely to average less than 0.5% annually in the next few decades, compared with a rate of 1-1.5% since 1950. Similarly, total hours worked have been gradually declining over time, even ignoring the recent recession. The key additional observation is that annual productivity growth per worker has actually been declining over time, from a peak of about 2.5% in the mid-1900’s, falling to 1.8% by 2000 and on pace to decline further, hindered by a persistent slowdown in net capital formation, which has dramatically worsened in recent years
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08:41 / 2012-11-28)
Last week, GMO head and famed value investor Jeremy Grantham published a piece about long-term economic prospects that CNBC’s Josh Brown tweeted “makes Hussman sound like Mary f***ing Poppins”
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08:39 / 2012-11-28)
Then they seated the president under a tent, and the concert began. I sang. Suddenly Boris Nikolayevich jumps off the chair and runs up to me. He commands: "OK, do it again!" he through that I was holding something in my mouth, and that is what made those weird sounds. He stood over me looking into my mouth, to see if I was hiding something.
I was even anxious for a moment: I am not a big guy, and there was this big president hanging over me, peering into my mouth. What to do? I had to sing, what else could I do, I am supposed to be an artist.
I was looking at him from below, and singing he listened with such interest, then he asked again: "Once more!" I sang some more. He applauded. Then he took my hand and raised it up: "What a talent! Does he have some Russian title?" They answered him: "No."
At that time Evgeniy Sidorov was the Russian minister of culture. Yeltsin pestered him: "Sidorov, how come this is the first time that I hear this unique talent?" "Boris Nikolayevich, I have not heard this before either." "What kind of a minister of culture are you? Give him some title!"
After that they gave me a title right away, already in October - Merited artist of Russian Federation. And not just to me, but to many other Tuvan artists as well. They sent a whole file of documents from Moscow, and they all passed: artists as well as culture workers-officials got Merited titles.
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09:49 / 2012-11-26)
By that time Boris Nikolayevich was already dressed in the Tuvan coat that they gave him, had already tried araka, and evaluated it, but he still could not believe that this Tuvan moonshine was distilled from milk. So they specially brought him to see a shuuruun , (traditional still-HJ) which stood on a fire by the yurt. His bodyguard was holding him back: don't go near it, everything is boiling! But he: don't hold me! He tried it and was astonished: really, it is milk, just imagine if we collect all the milk in Russia, how much araka there would be!
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09:48 / 2012-11-26)
we need innovation in new industries that have large employment effects. During periods of economic weakness, a common belief seems to emerge that the government can simply “get the economy moving again” through appropriately large spending packages – as if the economy is nothing but a single consumer purchasing a single good, and all that is required is to boost demand back to the prior level. In fact, however, recessions are periods where the mix of goods and services demanded becomes out of line with the mix of goods and services that the economy had previously produced. While fiscal subsidies can help to ease the transition by supporting normal cyclical consumption demand, the sources of mismatched supply – the objects of excessive optimism and misallocation such as dot-com ventures, speculative housing, various financial services, obsolete products, brick-and-mortar stores – generally don’t come back. What brings economies back to long-term growth is the introduction of desirable new products and services that previously did not exist. This has been true throughout history, where the introduction of new products and industries - cars, radio, television, airlines, telecommunications, restaurant chains, electronics, appliances, computers, software, biotechnology, the internet, medical devices, and a succession of other innovations have been the hallmarks of long-term economic growth
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11:37 / 2012-11-19)
The holes seem only loosely related: non-performing mortgages, widespread unemployment, massive U.S. budget deficits, a “fiscal cliff” sideshow, inadequate European bank capital, European currency strains, a surge of non-performing loans in China, and unexpected economic softness in Asia and global trade more generally. All of this gives the impression that these problems can simply be addressed one-by-one. The truth is that they are all intimately related to a single central issue
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11:21 / 2012-11-19)
Nonetheless, vegetation (split between the three categories of bare, forest, and herbaceous) and temperature are not enough to indicate whether there would be forests or steppe. Aha, they address this too, for Natural Earth II: ‘Different methods and references guided the painting of potential forest extents. General geographic knowledge was most helpful. In the mid-latitudes, for example, eastern Asia, eastern North America, and northwestern Europe once supported dense forest. In drier, colder, and higher places, determining potential forest extent was not so easy (Figure 7). Useful references for these areas included the Köppen climate maps and Küchler potential vegetation maps obtained from a print atlas. For areas where doubts remained, consulting geo-tagged photographs online confirmed the existence or absence of trees.’
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08:32 / 2012-11-18)
Creating the final version of Natural Earth I posed additional challenges. First among
them was that MODIS VCF, with only three data categories, is insufficient for portraying
the varied land cover of Earth. For example, the herbaceous category includes a wide
range of landscapes from wheat farms to steppe grasslands to arctic tundra.
Differentiating tundra from these other herbaceous areas involved a color adjustment in
Photoshop based on climate data. For this case, the 10-degree Celsius isotherm for the
warmest month of the year generally defines the polar limit of tree growth (Arno and
Hammerly, 1982)
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08:13 / 2012-11-18)
MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields: ... MODIS VCF is comprised of three data classes, depicting woody vegetation, herbaceous
vegetation, and bare areas. What makes VCF especially suitable for natural color
mapping is how the data blend. Any given pixel representing a sample on Earth’s surface
can contain all three of the data classes in relative proportions adding up to 100 percent.
For example, data for a pixel representing the African savannah will depict both woody
and herbaceous vegetation. In drier areas of the Kalahari, a bare component enters this
mix. By contrast, the Sahara is entirely bare (Figure 4).
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08:12 / 2012-11-18)
They are a completely different artists singers. Stylistic features of their formation compared in chapter heroic mythical story of the book Three eagle tragic world, so here I will talk more about their perception of the world and history, and the way of singing. Avdo MEDJEDOVIĆ sang a very deep voice, monotonous, unintelligible, and the fiddle almost and he did not play. I have argued that weak shock in fiddle, because the gig later learned, and that the song has surpassed the gig. Formed a blistering speeds (20-25 lines per minute, and sometimes faster!) Linguistic wealth surpasses all his lyrics Bosniac singers. Also, his characterization of the characters deeper, and during the song the characters change, grow, acquire the character of his works. It is a sign of excellent arts creation, according to Aristotle. Their stories MEDJEDOVIĆ placed in clear mythic circuits, and unusual skillfully used the traditional technique of duplication and parallelism, to deepen the meaning of their topics. Finally, his songs constantly refer to other songs from the tradition. Referentiality is a significant characteristic of the Homeric epics, and is also in close MEDJEDOVIĆ Homer. (Please note that U.S. researchers this essential trait MEDJEDOVIĆ formation are not noticed.) So-called catalogs and decorative themes (ENUM hero, collecting military, descriptions of beautiful, heroic uniform or horses, descriptions of sets), MEDJEDOVIĆ also makes perfect than any other singer. He was thoughtful, very humble and pious man, and its entire lesion extolled Suleiman empire of which it was dreamed his entire life. He deeply believed in the essential fulfillment of God's will, and in many of his songs, especially Ðerdjelezu and Halil Hrnjica, God helps heroes. Murataga Kurtagić in many ways is the opposite MEDJEDOVIĆ. His fiddle playing is extraordinary, and his melody constantly varied and modulated, creating distinctive technique that allowed him to sing continuously for eight hours. That any singer except it was not possible. He started learning the songs even earlier than MEDJEDOVIĆ, as a child, from his grandfather, Abdullah, who was an extraordinary singer. Though he sometimes creates huge lines at a speed of 20 lines per minute, he sings more slowly (average of 13-16 lines per minute), but he creates an excellent verses that shapes beautiful, and speaks clearly. Murataga never Taller his song, but he tried to express what is important (so formed and his teachers, especially the famed Suleiman MaKic Alihadžic RESA). Unlike MEDJEDOVIĆ, Murataga avoids formation of ossified topics, and are reluctant to use traditional methods of duplication and parallelism. He thinks deeply about each poem, and each of them forms a single action. I deliberately took from him some of the best songs collection by Kosta Hoermann. Murataga each of them is formed infinitely better! As the man was a true hero and role model was his Halil Hrnjica. He was much more realistic, and I would say, and wiser than Avda. He's had as many evils, and his life was full of hardship and struggle, and did not admire the empire, but a good man and junaènom. He is not idealized past, because it was clear that the poor, and then was difficult, and that the history of Bosnia is full of suffering and national calamities. Although he was a devout like Awda, he deeply believed in the eternal battle between good and evil, and he was aware that evil often prevails over good. Some of his songs have an epic real tragic circuits. Finally, Muratagine songs are also full of referentiality, and was, like MEDJEDOVIĆ, sovereign traditional epic skill formation.
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10:45 / 2012-11-15)
At work was a huge conflict of two worlds, on which Bosnian epics witnesses clearer and truer than written history. Epic poems and myths that have begun to form in late 15th Ages savior-protector Ðerzelezu, dragons or dragon-fire, like wolves Sibinjanin Janka, DOJČIĆ captain or Raven-perch, remain the foundation of Bosnian epics until the end of the 20th Ages. It is in itself also retain the old Slavic beliefs in fairies, dragons and werewolves. traditional epic new content is won over somewhere until the end of 18th century, and especially great shape cycles around famous Mustajbega Licko and brace Muja and Halil Hrnjica. Also, created a huge naval siege epic, based on historical events and describe a series of military campaigns in which the expansion or defense of the empire and Bosnia from 16 to 18 Ages actively participated Bosnian heroes
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21:16 / 2012-11-14)
The highlight of his collection of epics are epics about MEDJEDOVIĆ Ðerdjelezu, raven-perch, slavery and Tala Licanin Candian war.
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21:15 / 2012-11-14)
What is a better singer, it was his song truer. If you know the history, he understands the present and predict the future, such as prophets. Singers are describing war and similar events, taught his listeners a good, courage, justice and humanity. The best hero is one who possesses all these qualities. Bosnian epics, like Homer, containing all historical, geographical, ethical and other knowledge Bosniaks. Represented the supreme form of entertainment and precious lessons.
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09:34 / 2012-11-13)
The conquered Greek cities were not allowed to strike gold, but the issue of silver and copper by them was not interfered with; in addition certain Persian satraps were allowed to issue silver coins bearing their own names.
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05:10 / 2012-11-11)
The races map might make a great base projection for a Afro-Eurasian historical atlas! The economic map is on the accursed Mercator, but it shows a very interesting set of things: engaged in international trade; undeveloped but could engage in international trade; open to trade only in summer; and barren regions. And very interestingly there is a thin spur of international trade from western Russia across central Asia to north of the Korean peninsula. Is this the spur of grasslands? (Also: the Indians at this time, and for many decades thereafter, really liked India. Why, and what geoconnotations did it have for them and the rest of the world?)
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23:29 / 2012-11-10)
Wow, the river basin map of Asia is really sweet! I love hydrology. Colors for the Indian, the Pacific, the Arctic oceans, and the endorheic Central Asian basin. And it's very interesting, I didn't know that a single cut from the Caspian to Shanghai and the sea of elevation could be so educational. It even has January and July temperatures and annual rainfall! These climatological factors (both long-term average and short-term, even annual) are going to be very important to carto-linguistic digital intelligence (calidin).
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23:18 / 2012-11-10)
1912. Beautiful! The ‘ASIA ABOUT 1740’ map is a good base projection for a prospective historical atlas of Asia, although Gunder Frank's admonition to think of Afro-Eurasia makes me wonder if I should think about that first.
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23:12 / 2012-11-10)
dedicate the volume to the people and the princes of India, Japan, and the other countries of which it is a memorial, believing in their great future.
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22:29 / 2012-11-10)
its compiler, Miss Grant, has tried to mark in brief, close compacted in small type, the place-associations, historical and other, that give life to the names of town or country. She has related them to the books that have dealt with them, and the events they have witnessed: given Ning-po its allusion to Marco Polo's travels, and Madras its San Thomé pedigree, connected Palmyra with Tamerlane, viii and Puri, Bengal, with the gold tooth of the Buddha and the Temple of Vishnu's incarnation
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22:28 / 2012-11-10)
But Asia, as Japan has taught us and as China will undoubtedly teach us again, has her own destiny to bear out, apart from our European interests and politics; and it is in that aspect we need to study her on the lines laid down and made clear and positive in this volume. It is not the military records, the charts of mutinies and battle-fields, interesting as they are, which are alone important; but those showing the conditions, physical and climatic, of the country; the dispersion of the tongues, the sites of the old religions, the wealth and tillage of the earth with its fruits, grain and minerals, its rice fields and tea plantations; the prevalence of rain, sun and trade-winds
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22:28 / 2012-11-10)
I'm reminded of Foster writing, ‘If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it.’ I was thinking just this thing earlier walking back from the library and in light of what I've been reading about translation: I didn't want to read Waley's Monkey because I wanted something authentic and complete and provided a close look at the culture and history of the author. But consider how two similar people can read the same contemporary English book and remember different parts of it, and be moved by different aspects. These two people would provide descriptions of different works, and each might find the other's points to be one that they agree with, or that they forgot about, or that they suddenly realized was indeed interesting and important, or most spectacularly, disagree with. If two contemporary people reading the same contemporary book can disagree about some some aspects of the work in describing it to the world, *what possible hope do we have* when crossing spatial, language, temporal, or cultural barriers? How could dynamic equivalence possibly occur between such barriers when it invariably occurs to some extent without any barriers? What does transfer well are ideas (plots and descriptions, etc.), as Borges indicates, but cultural embeddings like significance, allusion, subtext, etc., have to be explained. And in fact, it's usually only when a work is published and when enough people like it enough to write dissertations (or now, blog posts) on some aspect of it that, e.g., for a relatively contemporary work, all these subtleties get exposed and discussed, subtleties that the author erself might not have consciously intended. Scholarly studies happen on a tiny subset of works worth reading and translating and enjoying (in the original and in translation), and it comprises a body of written commentary that might be tens or hundreds of times the length of the original---how is a translation roughly the same size as the original work supposed to compress all these aspects? My previous requirement of finding the most perfect translation was clearly ridiculous.
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14:06 / 2012-11-09)
At first it may seem intimidating to try to bridge the gap between the twenty-first century and 2800 BCE. After all, we don't know know what the original readers in ancient Sumeria knew—their legends, their daily lives, what their kings were like, and what their heroes and legends meant to them.
But we do share a key characteristic with them and with readers from any era: we love a gripping story and The Epic of Gilgamesh is just that
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13:43 / 2012-11-09)
Outright subversion is taboo. It is instead assumed that the rulers would be virtuous if only they knew the truth
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13:34 / 2012-11-08)
In modern China, entire cities nearly shut down for the gaokao exam, the do-or-die college test that is the Imperial Exams' modern counterpart. References to tests and scholar-official culture likewise remain a staple of bedtime stories, soap operas, regional theaters, aphorisms, art, newspaper headlines, and even cuisine.
(
13:33 / 2012-11-08)
Because if Mo Yan was indeed "under a spell," then China's indigenous literary pantheon is a rogue's gallery of delusionally craven collaborators, apologists, stooges, and sellouts. To a man, all trained for government service and either served as officials or aspired to become one. These writers are little known or read by Westerners -- or Western journalists posted to Beijing. But their literary legacy casts a longer shadow on modern China than the Voltaires or the Byrons who shape our post-Enlightenment notion of how a "writer" should behave. In the Chinese tradition, literature does not exist as a sphere outside the state: literature is the state. Or rather, the state is literature itself.
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12:47 / 2012-11-08)
So literature shouldn't be organized by officials."
Just don't tell that to Tang dynasty wordsmiths Li Bai and Du Fu, or the historian Sima Qian, painter-poet-calligraphers Su Dongpo and Ouyang Xiu, 11th-century public-interest crusader Bao Zheng, or prominent 2nd-century BC anti-corruption activist Qu Yuan. And definitely don't tell noted itinerant philosopher Confucius.
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12:46 / 2012-11-08)
A little before 60 minutes, Minford quotes Angus Graham (who wrote a book, "Poems of the Late Tang" that was popular among rock musicians, but this quote doesn't come from it):
‘There's no reason to doubt that divination systems do help many people to reach appropriate decisions in situations with too many unknown factors and that the book of Change, the I Ching, is among the more successful of them. Unless we are to follow Jung in postulating an acausal principle of synchronicity, we must suppose that the I Ching serves to break down preconceptions by forcing the diviner, i.e., the reader, to correlate his situation with the chance set of six prognostications. IF these meanings were unambiguous, the overwhelming probability would be that the prognostication would be either obviously inapplicable or grossly misleading. Since on the contrary the hexagrams open up an indefinite range of patterns for correlation, in the calm of withdrawal into sacred space and time [and this is where Angus Graham starts to sort of really say something important], the effect is to free the mind, to take account of all information,whether or not it conflicts with preconceptions, awaken it to unnoticed similarities and connections, and guide it to a settled decision adequate to the complexity of factors. This is conceived not as discursive thinking but as a synthesizing act in which the diviner sees into and responds to everything at once with the lucidity which is mysterious to himself. The I Ching is not a book which pretends to offer clear predictions, but hides away in tantalizing obscurities, it assumes in the diviner the kind of intelligence we have discussed in connection with the Daoist philosopher (Drongze?). Opening out and responding to stimulation in perfect tranquility, lucidity, and flexibility.’
He mentions a 1933 Waley essay on the layers of the I Ching (children's songs, magic incantations, wide variety of styles and eras). (I thought a quote I had recently heard from Waley was in this but I guess not.) Minford says there only two questions about translating. ‘What kind of text is it that you're translating. Who are you translating for?’
Eric Abrahamsen of Paper Republic had the most fascinating and information-packed talk I've heard on the topic (or any topic perhaps).
‘I interpreted a few weeks ago for a conversation between a British writer named Andrew Miller and a Chinese writer named Yan Lianke. And Yan Lianke is probably one of the best writers working in CHina right now, he's daring, he writes things that get banned or very nearly get banned. He has a conscience, he's trying to improve society through his writing. Andrew Miller is, I didn't know before hand, but a pretty well-known British writer who writes a lot of historical fiction, so almost all his books are set in different places and different times. And so they're having this conversation and Yan Lianke said to him, "i think it's fascinating to see how mobile you are, you go all over the world, you write other people's stories you write other people's histories. We could never do that. Chinese writers could never do that. We have too much of our own history. We're overburdened as it is with the things we're trying to digest and write." And I think that that's at the heart of the problem. First of all, the Chinese writers are overwhelmed. There *is* to much history, there IS too much going on, social issues are all overdetermined and overloaded with political meaning and political demands. But more than that, let's see, how to put this---the thing that we want out of great literature is that it absorb our society, our surroundings, just little details, the language, and the writer by some alchemical process turns that into something that's both familiar and unfamiliar, that showed that in all its details is nothing that we haven't seen before, and yet in its whole somehow something that is completely unfamiliar, and defamiliarizes our self with our surrounding, and at the same time you feel that it happened to the writer at the same time that it's happening to you as the reader. You feel that the writer going into this story was somehow overwhelmed by it, somehow forced to submit to it, or inhabited by it or inspired by it, that there's for a period of time that the writer was writing, there was nothing more important to the writer than this vision of society or a vision of a particular character or this voice was just coming out of him. This isn't a very interesting insight, it's sort of a sophomoric view on what literature does but you don't realize how important it is until you see a society where it doesn't really happen very much. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what Marcel was saying yesterday about ownership of language. My understanding from what you're saying and the Spanish speaking world, is that there're writers fighting for control over the language, and all of society is fighting each other for control of the language. Whereas in China it's very much writers are fighting society, not just for control of the language but for the right to interpret what they see and the right to reimagine society around them---so in China of course it's a political issue. I'm not talking about censorship, because that's what everybody thinks about when you talk about politics in china, not a censorship issue but the idea that the right to interpret society and the right to own the understandings and the proper "what's said about the way things are"---that's a very political issue and it's not ownership that either the government or the power structures of the society give up lightly. And so this is not something that just exists within the government, it's really on all levels of society. It's the way parents tell their children, "that's an interesting sotyr but you should write something about how grandma is really nice to you." Or you get to school and they write something about how the sky is green, and the waffles taste like barbecue And the teacher says, "No no no no no, that's not the way waffles taste, and obviously, look at the sky". By the time a writer reaches maturity in his writing, and is writing fiction, they've already had a whole lifetime of this reminder of "This does not belong to you' That there are correct understandings of history, and of people, and of places, that there are correct interpretations of these things and if you stray from them---no one's really going to like that very much. Language too, language belongs to someone, and it does not belong to writers. And writers who take the language for themselves and say "I'm going to take this and make something completely new and it's going to scare the hell out of you and its going to be something that you have never seen before and yet is strangely familiar." People often will see that and say "You're not supposed to write this way, this is not the way, this is not Chinese, you're not allowed to do this." So it happens anyway, but it's very, very rare and the writers who do it like Yan Lianke tend to be very mentally conflicted and they have an inbred sense of guilt like "I've taken something that didn't belong to me but I HAD to take it because I'm a writer and I couldn't do anything else, but then everyone's looking at me." So it creates an internal tension in these writers. That's what I wanted to say about the general atmosphere in which a lot of these writers are working.‘
Then:
‘So in this particular excerpt, language-wise there's nothing really that leaps out and grabs you. And that was the point, that was the first thing that attracted me to this. It's in the story that he really does something impressive, and what he does manage to in the language is to leave out EVERYTHING that doesn't have anything to do with the story. Which, if you've read a lot of contemporary Chinese literature, that's a pretty good feat. Everyone feels that they have to shovel in as many adjectives as possible and all the metaphors---pile it up, pile it up. And here he makes use of the Chinese ability to be concise. To leave out all the grammatical particles. You can just cram nouns and verbs together and good luck to the reader. The rest of it is on you. So in terms of his language, it is impressive because of its concision. In terms of the story, I thought he did a pretty amazing thing by writing a story about ... he runs around and has all these wonderful adventures. Nothing in this story indicates any moral stance on the part of the author. And I want to impress how amazing this is for a Chinese writer, especially somebody writing about the lower reaches of society---criminals essentially. Nothing in there says "this is good" or "this is bad" or "I approve and don't approve." And I think that caused him a lot of difficultly within the literary establishment because people want that... It's the inability to let go of interpretations and ideas and a society-wide awareness of the potential threat within a story, just within a story, or just within language is really really very present in a way that seems a little maybe archaic or even unimaginable to people moving within the international literary scene.’
He talks about a story called ‘The Wee Small Hours of 1993’ by Lu Yang (http://paper-republic.org/authors/lu-yang/):
‘the potential of the Chinese language not only for concision but for the overload of meaning within individual characters, and the freedom from the grammatical structures that are required by English and French, that if you want to, you can write as unclearly as you want, and of course if you're unclear in an artistic way it can be brilliant. ... He mixes a bit of that classical Chinese ability to be imprecise with a little bit of learned Western writing structure.’
(
22:25 / 2012-11-06)
Minford's talk about the I Ching was really interesting and the book sounds very Borgesian. It makes a lot of sense: for tense and complex decisions, most minds are acutely limited by their preconceptions about their situation, options, and chances. Fortune-telling with the conscious effort to subvert the conscious is as good a way as I can imagine to get an edge---it'll help sometimes. Minford of course quotes a great logician and also Waley, quotes that I will try to reproduce here.
(
19:12 / 2012-11-06)
Panel Three
‘Ideas of the literary’ Eric Abrahamsen, Simon West, Brian Nelson
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11:12 / 2012-11-06)
I mostly enjoyed McKinney and Minford's talks. McKinney talks about *the voice* of a work, original or translation. Who is doing the speaking, whether a contemporary ordinaire, a crusty old cowboy grandfather, Roger-Moore-gentlemen-of-the-Queen-circa-1975, Edwardian or Jeffersonian, this is a terrifically important part of a work, I realize. She mentioned some very interesting ideas about how classics are currently thought to need retranslating every fifty years (what is one being asked to do when one is commissioned to do a new translation of a classic? just a business decision on part of publishers and an opportunity for you to do something new?), and how in English the "noble tone" thought to befit a translation of a classic is the language of 100--150 years ago, due to the slow drift of language.
These two ideas popped up when she did Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (many?) years ago, and now when she is working on Yoshida Kenko's Essays in Idleness. McKinney wound up rendering Sei Shonagon's prose in contemporary English because this author, who would come to be revered as one of the giants of Heian literature, one of the paragons of Japan's golden era, used quite contemporary, "pithy" language for her prose. McKinney compares Sei Shonagon's to Yoshida Kenko's prose, the latter written 300 years after the former and when the Heian era was already seen as the pinnacle of Japanese culture. Yoshida Kenko is found to deliberately try to affect the language of Sei Shonagon, language which sounded contemporary to Heian ears but in which Kamakura audiences must have heard many resonances of the past. So McKinney poses the question: if Sei Shonagon would be translated into contemporary English, how ought she do Yoshida Kenko? One problem any answer must somehow address is that I don't think the Anglophone world has a period that it looks back on with as much reverence and nostalgia as the Japanese over the last thousand years have looked back on the Heian. I don't think that Shakespeare's era might come closest but would still be very far. The closest analogy to the west one might make is how in some periods Europe looked back upon the Homeric or Classical age of the Greeks (or how the Classical-era Greeks might have looked back on Homeric times). So my guess now would be to drop the whole Heian connection from a translation of Yoshida Kenko and try to make it sound like (and I apologize) Roger Moore in 1970s Bond films (the gentlemen-of-the-Queen sociolect). Forty-odd years is certainly enough time for language to drift noticeably but recognizably.
I should come back to McKinney's talk as I read "Invisible Work" on Borgesian translation, especially as she mentioned early on how the perception today is that, especially for classics, a translation mustn't introduce anything that wasn't "originally there." The most interesting idea though is related to voice: she mentions how a contemporary voice, for example, encodes within it many assumptions that may unpardonably influence a reading. "After a century, not only language but social mores and indeed everyday life itself have undergone considerable changes, such that conveying it in our contemporary English can often seem rather jarring." "Contemporary language would have set up expectations deeply at odds with the style, the themes, the whole substance of the novel" (Kokoro, 1914).
Yet another neat idea presented by McKinney is how a translation of a classic can achieve the classic status as an independent work of literature. Elsewhere here I have clipped a translator mentioning that the Polish translation of Winnie the Pooh wound up becoming a major impact on the Polish language (just how I don't know). Along these lines, we're starting to get used to the idea of retellings of older stories becoming much more famous than their progenitors---Disney films are an unsavory example, and while retellings/stories isn't quite the same as translations/classics, this certainly has a pleasant Borgesian perversity.
(
19:18 / 2012-11-02)
Panel One
‘The Classic in Translation’ Meredith McKinney, John Minford
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18:27 / 2012-11-02)
I found this keynote to be very much not in my taste. But in the first thirty or so minutes, two interesting notions are presented. (i) Jules Germain Cloquet suggested to Flaubert on the latter's first journey (to Corsica) that one could write as axioms what one believes to be true and seal these in an envelope undisturbed for fifteen years---and when opened one would find a different person. (ii) Flaubert reads Montaigne quoting Caesar on his soldiers' fears at hearing the far-away sounds of the battle against Vercingetorix, fears that evaporated when the battle was around them (a dangerous stage fright?). Montaigne says that like these soldiers, one will fear death when contemplating it but will find it far less frightening when it is there.
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11:57 / 2012-10-31)
Keynote lecture
Esther Allen ‘Snakebite: Flaubert and the Imprint of the Real’
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11:50 / 2012-10-31)
The DIY book scanner people are always interested in ways of recording 3D information about a book that they're taking taking a photograph of, to aid with dewarping and proper image display, without the use of a glass platen [1]. I stumbled upon this post when thinking of using a 2D sonar array, maybe 10 vertical and 10 horizontal receive elements with one transmit element, placed around the camera, to construct a 3D synthetic aperture sonar image of the acoustically-illuminated scene. (10 because perhaps splitting up a book into 10x10 2D resolution cells might I think be enough to construct a good enough depth map?)
As a brief experiment I used my laptop's microphone to record while broadcasting a 1 second linear chirp (1 KHz to 15 KHz) from a speaker roughly a meter away, and cross-correlating the received data with the broadcast chirp. I saw some nice big peaks but it looked like there was lots of multipath (I just did this in my living room). Apparently speakers have frequency-dependent directivity, with lower frequencies being more isotropic, so it's possible that just using the broadcast chirp as a reference in cross-correlation is suboptimal: different frequencies will have different attenuations even if the mic was boresighted with the speaker, and this problem would only be compounded if the mic was off-axis. I used a long wideband chirp just because that's what we use in synthetic aperture *radars* for imaging...
So my experiment just told me that I need to do more experimentation to see if, between a good microphone and a good speaker ("good" meaning well-characterized), I can even get enough SNR to achieve the theoretical range resolutions ($c / (2 B)$ is the equation usually thrown around, so 343 meters per second / (2 * 15 KHz), a bit more than 1 centimeter resolution, which itself might be too low for book dewarping without super-resolution signal processing). And if that's possible, then the question is
- can one get 20 of these microphones and one of these speakers comfortably mounted around a camera (iPhone?) or alternatively use a motor to drive a single microphone around a loop, and
- either record all 20 channels at once (ideal) or sweep through them all fast enough (with or without a motor), and
- deal with the parallax problem (the sonar image will always be taken from a very slightly different azimuth/elevation angle than the camera image, unless you arrange the receivers in a rectangle around the camera sensor?), and
- make it quiet and unobtrusive enough,
to get good book dewarping going in the Bodleian Library.
Keep hacking acoustic magic,
Ahmed
[1] http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=788
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19:17 / 2012-11-03)
As a brief experiment I used my laptop's microphone to record while broadcasting a 1 second linear chirp (1 KHz to 15 KHz) from a speaker roughly a meter away, and cross-correlating the received data with the broadcast chirp. I saw some nice big peaks but it looked like there was lots of multipath (I just did this in my living room). Apparently speakers have frequency-dependent directivity, with lower frequencies being more isotropic, so it's possible that just using the broadcast chirp as a reference in cross-correlation is suboptimal: different frequencies will have different attenuations even if the mic was boresighted with the speaker, and this problem would only be compounded if the mic was off-axis. I used a long wideband chirp just because that's what we use in synthetic aperture *radars* for imaging...
(
09:05 / 2012-10-12)
A simple example is sundwudu, literally 'flood-timber' or 'swimming-timber'. This is 'ship' in 208 (the riddle's bare solution, and often the best available, though quite an inadequate, rendering), and 'wave-borne timbers' in 1906 (an attempt to unfold, at the risk of dissipating it, the briefly flashed picture). Similar is swan-rad, rendered 'swan's-road' in 200: the bare solution 'sea' would lose too much. On the other hand, a full elucidation would take far too long. Literally it means 'swan-riding': that is, the region which is to the swimming swan as the plain is to the running horse or wain. Old English rad is as a rule used for the act of riding or sailing, not as its modern descendant 'road', for a beaten track. More difficult are such cases as onband beadurune in 502, used of the sinister counsellor, Unferth, and rendered 'gave vent to secret thoughts of strife'. Literally it means 'unbound a battle-rune (or battle-runes)'.
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19:43 / 2012-10-13)
An example is eoten 'giant' 112, etc. This word, we may believe on other evidence, was well known, though actually it is only recorded in its Anglo-Saxon form in Beowulf, because this poem alone has survived of the oral and written matter dealing with such legends. But the word rendered 'retinue' in 924 is hose, and though philologists may with confidence define this as the dative of a feminine noun hōs (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Old High German and Gothic hansa), it is in fact found in this line of Beowulf alone
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19:40 / 2012-10-13)
Thus 'stalwart' in 198, 'broad' in 1621, 'huge' in 1663, 'mighty' in 2140 are renderings of the one word eacen; while the related eacencræftig, applied to the dragon's hoard, is in 2280 and 3051 rendered 'mighty'. These equivalents fit the contexts and the modern English sentences in which they stand, and are generally recognized as correct. But an enquirer into ancient beliefs, with the loss of eacen will lose the hint that in poetry this word preserved a special connotation. Originally it means not 'large' but 'enlarged', and in all instances may imply not merely size and strength, but an addition of power, beyond the natural, whether it is applied to the superhuman thirtyfold strength possessed by Beowulf (in this Christian poem it is his special gift from God), or to the mysterious magical powers of the giant's sword and the dragon's hoard imposed by runes and curses.
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19:37 / 2012-10-13)
Međedović developed his own recitation technique, or mostly declamation, instead of singing. I suggest that Homer used a similar technique. Međedović transformed the music, the rhythm and the melody of traditional sung verse into recited verse. In his recitation technique that music, rhythm and melody inhabited his rapidly spoken verse. It is clearly visible in the written transcription of the verses of traditional and post-traditional singers. While the sung verses appear to the reader “less poetically attractive,” when unaccompanied by music and out of their performance context, such is not the case with the recited verse, which gains more “literary” and poetic value. Whoever had the fortune to see both performance modes,[27] will agree with me that the performance of a good traditional singer of tales is more interesting to watch and feels more authentic than the performance of a post-traditional singer. The post-traditional singer’s performance is more interesting to hear and read as it possesses much richer and finer diction.[28]
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07:46 / 2012-10-11)
[27] I have video-taped ca 40 hours of traditional singers’ performances and ca 2 hours of post-traditional singers’ performances. I have also audio-recorded an additional 50 hours of traditional epic performances (the list of the Čolaković collection is provided in MGJP and Almanah 31-32, Podgorica, 2005).
[28] The traditional singers sometimes play their gusle with virtuosity, they act, they often change their voice and melody and their facial gestures are very interesting to watch. Often, they act theatrically, and their audience seems to be enchanted, as hypnotized. The audience believes that the vividly described action happens “right now, here.” The legends about Blind Huso tell that “he spoke with his bow.” Indeed, he was using declamation while waving his bow. It seems obvious that he used singing-declamation in a mixed mode. Finally, some singers, although remaining seated during their singing, extremely slowly moved their body from one corner of the room to another. To the audience this seemed miraculous.
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07:45 / 2012-10-11)
Vlahovljak in his criticism claimed that Međedović, using his «embellishing» technique:
unnecessarily lengthened Vlahovljak's poem
did not follow the truthfulness of Vlahovljak's traditional poem as he learned it, but introduced lies in it
mixed many parts of other poems into that single poem, thus making a hybrid poem, which is forbidden in traditional oral epic-making.
(
22:53 / 2012-10-10)
Economic globalization has spread Western styles of life across the planet, and many people’s perception of the world is nowadays mediated entirely by television and the internet, technologies that were invented the day before yesterday. Leaders of our society in the 1950s would have felt ashamed not to possess a working knowledge of life in ancient Rome and Greece; their successors today often seem to have only a cartoonish conception of life in the 1950s. As a result, people who should know better take it absolutely for granted that the political and social arrangements which happen to be the norm at the beginning of the 21st century are the only arrangements which could be taken seriously ever, anywhere
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15:44 / 2012-10-06)
Chu Hsi of the Sung dynasty. He once said that the hsing “often arouses feelings by simply referring to something else, not employing its meanings at all” (quoted in English translation by Fu Hongchu in Pacific Coast Philology vol. 29, 1994, p. 19)
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15:43 / 2012-10-06)
(A truly scholarly translation might have been “Krón, krón calls the [unkown bird]” – or even “[debatable sounds] calls the [unkown bird]” – but I don’t imagine that would have inspired many readers.)
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15:39 / 2012-10-06)
(In Old Chinese, tsa-kou, fish-hawk, in the first line rhymed with tou, islet, in the second line, but in modern Mandarin chü-chiu scarcely rhymes with chou. In other cases the original rhymes, assonances, and so forth have been even more thoroughly wrecked in the modern language.)
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15:37 / 2012-10-06)
A duck says quack because that’s the noise ducks make, not because they put us in mind of unqualified doctors. Why would it have been different for the early Chinese?
(
15:36 / 2012-10-06)
at the very beginning of the poem, the manuscript reads “egsode eorl,” but this is ungrammatical. The traditional emendation is to “egsode eorlas” (terrified earls). But to accept this emendation, we have to assume (among other things) that the scribe made a massive blunder in the first six lines of his poem. Tolkien, following Chambers, thought instead that the word “eorl” came from the scribe not being familiar with the tribe of the Heruli, whose name might be spelled “eorle” in the scribe’s exemplar. The beginning of the poem, then, would be saying not that Scyld terrified generic earls, but that he specifically subjugated the tribe of the Heruli, something that the Danes do appear to have done. That is a pretty serious change in the feeling and significance of the opening lines of Beowulf, yet I did not encounter it in my undergraduate or M.A. studies and only discovered that people had hypothesized that “eorl” was really “Heruli” when I was reading for my Ph.D. exams
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19:36 / 2012-09-30)
And if he were now professing he might well have made some efforts to shift the ground of Beowulf criticism towards addressing the significance of the poet’s setting of his heroes and monsters within heroic history in the named lands of the north
(
06:55 / 2012-05-29)
But I think if Tolkien were alive today, he would also not be pleased that interpretations of Beowulf have slipped the surly bonds of history and culture (and sadly, in many cases, even of philology)
(
06:54 / 2012-05-29)
When the majority of the readers of a text knew the material in great detail due to their training by, in large part, the apprentice method, people could write this way and have their books remain influential. In the vast expansion of the universities after World War II, particularly in America, the apprentice system began to break down and people had to learn more from texts. Also, although there was an uptick of German language learning during the war, for obvious reasons German culture and scholarship fell out of favor and the number of Anglophone medievalists who were comfortable working in German began a steep decline that has continued to the present time. Because many of the pioneering studies—and a great deal of the work on the historical material in Beowulf—had been written in German, the changing fortunes of this language and culture in British and American universities also contributed to making it easier for scholars to move away from historical-literary interpretation to purely literary approaches to Beowulf
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06:51 / 2012-05-29)
Tolkien writes “Something more significant than a standard hero, a man faced with a foe more evil than any human enemy of house or realm, is before us, and yet incarnate in time, walking in heroic history, and treading the named lands of the North.” I have italicized the last parts of this sentence because I think their importance has been overlooked by many. Tolkien is here—and elsewhere in the essay—making the case not only that Beowulf is a more significant hero for fighting the Grendel-kin and the dragon than he would have been if he only triumphed in the Swedish wars, but also that the entire story is more significant because it is not set in a generic fantasy land, but is instead placed in physical geography and historical time
(
06:49 / 2012-05-29)
Beowulf would be a far weaker poem if it were not so set and if we could not read the allusions and understand the cultural and political implications of characters’ statements and actions, as we can, to a degree, with the references to Hrothulf
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06:49 / 2012-05-29)
This may or may not be true, and even if it is, that has nothing to do with whether or not such a structure is aesthetically pleasing, but it was the kind of sharp observation that critics love, and it gave the field an excuse to do what it had wanted to do for a long time
(
06:46 / 2012-05-29)
'recent generations have seen fermentation eclipsed as a food preservation method by canning, freezing, chemical preservatives, and irradiation'
'four major benefits of fermentation: preservation, health, energy efficiency, and flavor'
'alcohol (unless concentrated by means other than fermentation) exposed to air ferments to acetic acid, transforming it into vinegar.'
'acid food fermentations: (1) they render foods resistant to microbial spoilage and the development of food toxins, (2) they make the foods less likely to transfer pathogenic microorganisms' This Is what's meant by spoilage, and more: production of toxins, growth of pathogenic microbes, (less bad but not good, degradation of nutrients)
'Food could simply be kept in a dry and cool spot; or it could be actively dried (microbial activity is suspended without adequate water) using the sun, and/or gentle heat or smoke, and/or salt. Or food could be fermented'
'Canning is vulnerable to botulism because it so happens that when stressed by heat, C. botulinum produces a spore that has an extraordinarily high tolerance to heat. Destroying this spore requires sustaining temperatures above the boiling point of water, between 240° and 250°F/116° and 121°C, which can be attained in a pressure cooker at 10 to 15 pounds per square inch. At normal boiling temperature of 212°F/100°C, destroying the C. botulinumspores can take as long as 11 hours!4 If the spores persist in a non-acidic medium after insufficient heating, they find themselves in an ideal environment: an oxygen-free vacuum, devoid of competition from other bacteria.'
'it is improperly canned foods, not ferments, that can harbor botulism (except in the case of meat and fish, which require specific precautions, covered in chapter 12). Plant-based ferments are generally safe, protected by their native or introduced organisms.'
'By analyzing blood and fecal samples collected at regular intervals through the study, researchers evaluated the influence of removing the fermented foods from the diet.64 “The volunteers were asked to exclude from their diet any kind of fermented food or drink, such as fermented milk and dairy products including cheese, fermented meat, and fermented beverages like wine, beer or vinegar, and also any other kind of fermented food product such as cured olives.” According to the researchers, “The dietary deprivation of fermented foods modified the gut microbiota and caused a decrease in immune response.” After two weeks, the diets continued to be restricted, but participants were provided with yogurt each day for two more weeks, with half given standard live-culture yogurt, half yogurt fortified with probiotic strains. Interestingly, neither yogurt alone could fully restore participants to pre-restriction blood and fecal counts. This only occurred after they resumed their usual diets, with varied types of ferments'
'Ingested bacteria taking up residence in the intestines is the image suggested by Metchnikoff in 1907, and behind the subsequent healthful reputation of kefir, yogurt, and other traditional live-culture foods. But it seems that actually the scenario is a bit more circuitous. A 2007 research review in The Journal of Nutrition summarized that current studies “demonstrate conclusively that ingested strains do not become established members of the normal microbiota but persist only during periods of dosing or for relatively short periods thereafter.”55'
'because of the genetic fluidity of bacteria (see chapter 1), the specific bacterial strains are not critical to maintaining healthy live-culture stimulation. What is more important is variety, diversity, and incorporating the bacteria native to different raw ingredients'
'DO YOU HAVE TO AVOID ALL FERMENTED FOODS TO GET RID OF A CANDIDA OVERGROWTH? Candida albicans is a fungus (yeast) that is a normal part of the human microbiota, found in most adult humans. A carbohydrate-rich diet can encourage its growth and increased prominence. The most important dietary modification you need to make to counter the C. albicans growth is restricting carbohydrate-rich foods, meaning not only sugar, grains, fruits, and potatoes, but also certain ferments made from them, such as bread, alcoholic beverages, vinegar, and possibly even kombucha. But to compensate for the deprivation, other live-culture ferments, based on less carbohydrate-rich foods such as vegetables or milk, even beans and meats, have lactic acid bacteria that can help to restore C. albicans to a more benign role.'
'as the days pass after baking sourdough rye bread, the bread continues to sour, suggesting that perhaps the genes of the sourdough bacteria are taken up by new viable bacteria that continue the sourdough’s metabolism of carbohydrates into lactic acid. “For the most part, it is assumed that the active component of probiotic products is viable bacteria,” noted a paper published in the Journal of Nutrition as part of a Symposium on Probiotic Bacteria. “However, the literature suggests several situations in which viability is not required.”66'
'Often, fermented meat and fish are not cooked at all. ... some of the transformations wrought by fermentation can substitute for or supersede some of the changes produced by cooking'
'For people who are squeamish about stinky cheeses, it is usually because they associate the smell and appearance of the cheese with food that is rotting and no longer fit to be eaten. McGee describes fermentation as “controlled spoilage” and observes:
In cheese, animal fats and proteins are broken down into highly odorous molecules. Many of the same molecules are also produced during uncontrolled spoilage, as well as by microbial activity in the digestive tract and on moist, warm, sheltered areas of human skin. An aversion to the odor of decay has the obvious biological value of steering us away from possible food poisoning, so it’s no wonder that an animal food that gives off whiffs of shoes and soil and the stable takes some getting used to. Once acquired, however, the taste for partial spoilage can become a passion, an embrace of the earthy side of life that expresses itself best in paradoxes.73'
'Please do not take the idea that the boundary between fermented and rotten is blurry and slippery as a suggestion to start eating anything you would previously have rejected as rotten. Learning a sense of boundaries around what it is appropriate to eat is necessary for survival. But precisely where we lay those boundaries is highly subjective, and largely culturally determined.'
'Like the stinky cheese, the fermented fish requires an acquired taste, and perhaps an acquired microbial ecology. One culture’s greatest culinary achievement is sometimes another’s nightmare. And usually, both involve fermentation.'
'make something delicious each time, acknowledging that the qualities manifested by each batch of kombucha, or bread, or yogurt will be different, and that this is something to be celebrated. It’s a tough lesson to learn for someone who is admittedly seduced by the siren song of uniformity.'
'Even though they’re insufficient, rules are good to follow. Culturing foods isn’t a purely mechanical activity, but being a bit careful and meticulous (and systematic) about it will increase your chances of success tremendously. Not everything in life is a stir-fry—an endlessly flexible, infinitely adaptable dish. Some things are yogurt—fussy about the temperature difference between 108° and 115°'
'A tablespoon of yogurt culture is good, but a cup of it is disastrous. Two weeks at the ocean is not necessarily better than one.'
'No two people will make sauerkraut exactly the same, even if they follow the same recipe exactly. The air they are breathing (and thus changing) as they chop cabbage contributes to the flavor of the finished product.'
'while different cultures may subtly influence one another through the air over time, typically this is not an issue. Alcohol makers wish to discourage Acetobacter, bacteria that ferment alcohol into vinegar. However, these bacteria are virtually everywhere,' In the air!!
'Unfortunately, new, more stable forms of chlorine—called chloramines—are increasingly being used in water systems. Chloramines—produced by mixing chlorine with ammonia—are valued because they are less prone to dissipation than simple chlorine. Chloramines cannot be boiled out, or evaporated at ambient temperatures'
'I typically work with unrefined sea salts. Because one of the important nutritional benefits of fermentation is making minerals bioavailable, I have come to the conclusion that it makes sense to ferment with salts containing a broad spectrum of minerals, rather than sodium chloride alone. ... having had the opportunity to ferment vegetables with every possible kind of salt handed to me by workshop organizers, I have observed that lactic acid bacteria seem tolerant to a wide variety of salts, including iodized table salt, and are not particularly picky.'
'when you are trying to catch some organisms from the air to supplement what is already on the flour, and aeration stimulates yeast growth, you don’t need the lid on the jar. Instead use a cloth, towel, coffee filter, or other barrier that will keep flies out but allow airflow and with it both oxygen and microbial life.'
'Historically, and still in many places to this day, alcoholic beverages have often been drunk only partially fermented, lightly alcoholic, still sweet, and sometimes sour. Acetobacter needs oxygen and begins growing on the surface of the beverage, where liquid meets air. To ferment to dryness (converting all the sugars to alcohol), especially with slow honey- and fruit-based ferments (as opposed to faster grain-based ones), minimizing surface area and blocking access to air helps avoid souring.'
'sludge of dead yeast (called lees in wines and saké; trub in beers) ... The lees are edible and nutritious, but we have developed a cultural preference for clarified beverages, and many people prefer to minimize the yeasty flavor the lees impart'
'my motto is cleanliness, not sterility. Sterility is a myth, not achievable in our homes, nor desirable'
'cork harvesting is not only sustainable—the trees are not killed when cork is harvested, and the cork rapidly regenerates—but the cork industry is credited (by the World Wildlife Federation) with protecting millions of acres of forests in Southern Europe and northern Africa that are critical habitats for a number of endangered species.25 Bottles corked with natural corks should be stored on their sides to keep the corks moist; if they dry out, they may disintegrate.'
'A yeast far less famous than S. cerevisiae, Kloeckera apiculata, frequently dominates the early stages of spontaneous fermentation of fruit juices, even grapes. Yeasts capable of fermentation are everywhere, even if they are not the number one global superstar monoculture species. “Yeasts are a bottomless reservoir of biodiversity, with more to offer than the classical handful of species traditionally used or studied,” conclude Vaughan-Martini and Martini.'
'Raw honey contains abundant yeasts. (Pasteurization or cooking kills them.) The yeasts are inactive so long as the honey’s water content remains at or below 17 percent (as it is in fully mature honey). But increase the water content just a little bit beyond that and the yeasts wake right up. According to the US Department of Agriculture, “above 19 percent water, honey can be expected to ferment even with only one spore per gram of honey'
'If your honey is not raw, good air circulation is necessary, because the air is the source of the yeasts landing on the surface of the ferment'
'import wine and other luxury goods, befriend the rulers by presenting them with specialty wine sets, and then wait until they were asked to help in establishing native industries'
'Fermented alcoholic beverages exposed to air will inevitably turn into vinegar over time; acetic-acid-producing bacteria known as Acetobacter are present everywhere. These bacteria need oxygen in order to grow. In the earliest stages of fermentation, yeasts will always dominate in a sugary liquid. And during the most vigorous period of fermentation, even in an open vessel with a broad surface exposed to air, the constant release of carbon dioxide at the surface protects it from vinegar development. The potential for vinegar development comes later, as fermentation subsides. Drink beverages fermented in open vessels quickly, as fermentation subsides, or they turn into vinegar before long'
'I picked up a yogurt culture on a visit to Japan in 2001 and have been harvesting it ever since. (I’m sure if the customs officer at JFK had seen it, I wouldn’t have it today!) I have a super-simple technique: I simply skim off any foul-looking stuff at the top, eat as much as I want, and leave about ½ inch in the bottom of the container. Then I fill it with whole milk and leave it on the counter for 24 hours, covered with cheesecloth. Every three or four times I make it, I move the whole thing to a clean container. No cooking, no stirring, no nothing—super easy, and it’s lasted me nine years so far! It makes a somewhat runny yogurt (although sometimes it sets really nicely—I haven’t spent much time thinking about what makes it set better, although I suspect it’s timing when to put it in the fridge just right, and something about room temperature too).'
(
20:45 / 2012-09-20)
'"Sudan's foods are almost all fermented,"'
'"The accuracy of classifying commensal bacteria as 'detrimental' or 'beneficial' remains highly speculative," cautions epidemiologist Volker Mai, "because such classifications are based on examining their effects on only a few specific aspects of human health, and attempts have not been made to associate microflora composition with overall health."' Local versus global effects.
(
11:57 / 2012-09-07)
Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”
'In addition to exchanging genes directly with other bacteria, bacteria have receptors to receive genes from prophages, which Sonea and Mathieu call “a unique type of biological but inanimate construction: a micro-robot for gene exchanges . . . organized like an ultra-microscopic syringe with a hollow container (‘head’), and an ultra-microscopic needle (‘tail’). . . . This exclusively bacterial type of instrument for gene exchange among living beings may be carried across large distances by water, wind, animals, etc.” With so many mechanisms for genetic exchange, “all the world’s bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacteria kingdom,” summarize Margulis and Sagan.' I don't think that this is as fluid is portrayed here and by Margulis & Sagan. People in Ohio can learn Bantu phrases if transmitted to them but they never do. Acidophilus in the gut can pick up on prophage transgenics but why would it?
'“Consumption of hyper-hygienic, mass-produced, highly processed and calorie-dense foods is testing how rapidly the microbiota of individuals in industrialized countries can adapt while being deprived of the environmental reservoirs of microbial genes that allow adaptation by lateral transfer.”' Again, we're not sure how much HGT actually happens in the gut, are we? We might not be 'starving our microbiota of genetic stimulation'.
Plants are awesome! 'All these microscopic root hairs release exudates into the soil, highly regulated excretions including sugars, amino acids, enzymes, and many other nutrients and unique chemical compounds, creating a very selective environment in which they “literally call the proper bacteria to the area where [the plant] is growing,” according to Stephen Harrod Buhner'
'Is it possible that, rather than humans “discovering” alcohol and mastering its production, we evolved always already knowing it? Anthropologist Mikal John Aasved points out that “all vertebrate species are equipped with a hepatic enzyme system with which to metabolize alcohol.”38 Many animals have been documented consuming alcohol in their natural habitats.'
'This tree, its pollinating shrews, and the fermenting yeast community all coevolved this arrangement together. It would be absurd to think of one species as the primary actor in this mutualistic community.'
'science is gradually confirming what traditional cultures always somehow just knew'. I never like verbiage like this: traditional cultures always somehow just knew plenty of garbage too.
'primary health benefits of fermentation, each of which will be explored below, are: (1) pre-digestion of nutrients into more accessible and bioavailable forms; (2) nutritional enhancement and creation of unique micronutrients; (3) detoxification and transformation of anti-nutrients into nutrients; and (4) live LAB cultures, present and alive in certain ferments, but not all.'
'LAB-containing sourdoughs' vs 'pure yeast fermentations'
'accidentally harvested poison hemlock roots, thinking they were wild carrots'
'phytates—found in all grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts—function as anti-nutrients by binding minerals and thus rendering them unavailable for our absorption. During fermentation, the enzyme phytase releases minerals from their phytate bond, increasing their solubility and “ultimately improving and facilitating their intestinal absorption.”23 A 2007 study comparing availability of zinc and iron in idli batter (made from rice and lentils) before and after fermentation found that the process significantly increased bioaccessibility of both minerals.'
'After a round of antibiotics, researchers have found that “there are still persistent long term impacts on the human intestinal microbiota that remain for up to 2 years post-treatment.”'
(
11:34 / 2012-09-07)
“The presence of lactobacilli as a part of the normal vaginal flora is an important component of reproductive health.”19 Our indigenous bacteria protect us everywhere and enable us to function in myriad ways that are just beginning to be understood. From an evolutionary perspective, this extensive microbiota “endows us with functional features that we have not had to evolve ourselves.”20 This is a miracle of coevolution
(
13:37 / 2012-09-05)
Fermentation is more dynamic and variable than cooking, for we are collaborating with other living beings
(
13:11 / 2012-09-05)
Rather than fermenting just grapes, barley, and soybeans, let’s ferment acorns, turnips, sorghum, or whatever food surpluses we can access or create. The great global monoculture ferments are wonderful, indeed, but the practical thrust of localism must be learning to make the most of surpluses that make themselves, such as acorns, or are so well adapted that they practically grow themselves with only a minimum of intervention, such as turnips or radishes in Tennessee gardens
(
13:03 / 2012-09-05)
rural living is certainly not intrinsically better or more sustainable than city life
(
12:53 / 2012-09-05)
'The paper's title, "Traditional infrageneric classification of Gymnopilus is not supported by ribosomal DNA sequence data," pretty much sums up what the researchers discovered when they sequenced DNA from over 50 Gymnopilus specimens. The "traditional" way of looking at Gymnopilus (Romagnesi, 1942; Singer, 1986; Hesler, 1969) divides the genus into two major groups: the Annulati group, which features mushrooms in which there is a "[v]eil forming a membranous to densely fibrillose, persistent annulus" (quoting Hesler, 1969--the major monograph for the genus in North America); and theGymnopilus group ("[v]eil absent, or present and fugacious, not forming a persistent annulus").' Taxonomy is much lamer than biochemistry, evolution, and ecology!
'morphological and molecular data (as well as data from mating studies). Collectors will need to document substrates with precision, as well as forest types, weather patterns, evidence of animal (especially insect) activity--in short, the fullest documentation of ecology possible. This way there is a more legitimate, though still unfocussed, hypothesis being tested: that the mushroom has evolved in an ecosystem and that such data will be integral to understanding the mushroom. Subsequent, more specific hypotheses will undoubtedly suggest themselves as the data comes in--including hypotheses regarding the morphology of the mushrooms. Perhaps the scales on the cap of one species represent an adaptation to drier ecosystems, handily holding precious moisture on the mushroom rather than letting it slide away.' Or perhaps we have neutral evolutions!
'Korf documents a sad state of affairs in contemporary academic mycology: grant funding given primarily to DNA studies of a few crusty and poorly documented specimens in herbaria; the "bean-counting mentality" of universities and research institutes that prioritize faddish publications; the inability of fungal taxonomists to find positions . . . all of this in a field that was never highly popular to begin with and has been struggling to keep itself afloat within biology departments for decades. Some of these problems may be inherent to academia (this, anyway, is what my 20 years of experience in academic literary studies, where more or less equivalent problems occur, suggests), but mycology is very fortunate to have a large body of experienced and able collectors and enthusiasts outside of academia: amateur mycologists, mushroom hunters, and a large network of mycological societies and mushroom clubs across the continent.' The academy follows the practitioners.
'If the science must wait for academics to do it, it will never happen.' Dunn's book said the same thing about nematodes.
'What a potential resource for the science! But, as anyone who has been to a mushroom club's foray knows, the resource is only a "potential" one. The mushrooms are not picked with an eye toward documentation of ecological data; they are placed on collection tables after being hastily sorted and identified; the edible mushrooms are removed; someone may make a list of the species names that have been applied to the mushrooms . . . and everything is thrown away on Sunday. This is all very fun--but to be honest none of it, even the occasionally produced species list, is very useful to science. With just a few changes, however, the process could easily provide mycology with lots of invaluable data. I plan to make my suggestions for mushroom clubs more specific and detailed in further publications and in my lectures, but here I will paint them in broad strokes. At a minimum, three things must happen for mycological society forays to make more scientifically useful contributions: collection of ecological data, documentation of macromorphology, and preservation of specimens.'
(
20:32 / 2012-09-20)
mycologists have rarely bothered even to think about what selective advantage any of the features might provide for an organism; taxonomic mycology has been predominantly atheoretical--which is, frankly, another way of saying it has been largely unscientific. It sounds odd to claim that an effort dependent on highly technical monographs, jargon, and advanced microscopy skills is often "unscientific," but we should not confuse the trappings of science with science itself, which involves hypothesis and theory
(
20:22 / 2012-09-20)
150 years ago, death of a child was a common denominator among American families
(
20:45 / 2012-09-15)
It's remarkable that a tragedy so pervading, and so intense, has not been more considered by historians in examining the temper of the times. This grim fact of life seems to me to explain so much about the shape of 19th century American minds, especially where they seem different from ours: The determination to make something of oneself, the importance of family
(
11:47 / 2012-04-18)
Given that, I wonder if it is mere coincidence that the decline in religious intensity among the mass of Americans seems to have begun within a generation of the decline of the child death rate, reversed when medical men and women finally began to understand, and beat back, tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and whooping cough.
(
11:41 / 2012-04-18)
Scarlet fever broke out in the house of a local doctor in January 1854. It killed a son, age 3 years and 3 months, and three days later another, age 9 months, died of an inflammation of the lungs probably related to the fever. Three days after that the oldest son, less than a month past his eighth birthday, also died of scarlet fever. Their mother, Harriett, expressed her grief in a death notice in the local newspaper, grasping for solace in sentiment: “In one short week, what hath not death wrought? What desolation! What crushing of fond hopes! What agonizing grief! Thrice the blow has fallen on bleeding hearts, and thrice the Reaper has bidden a fire-side flower to the garden of God, and the harvest-home of Heaven. First, the prattling boy, then the nestling babe, then the eldest born. ‘Lovely and pleasant their lives, in death they were not divided.’ ”
(
11:36 / 2012-04-18)
Researchers into early nineteenth century families quickly come to accept the high death rates among children as a fact of life in those days. Families were large, medicine was crude, disease ran rampant, and it seems no family was untouched by the tragedy of a child lost.
We tend to think of death as a country for the old. It was not so then. People of all ages were vulnerable, the cold calculus of contagion meant that if a bacterium got into a household parents could lose some or all of their children in a matter of days.
(
11:32 / 2012-04-18)
Notes from my reading this a couple of months ago (on iPad Notes):
'and only recently have the last DCI (Porter Goss) and the new DNI (John Negroponte) launched major recruitments drive to hire into the intelligence community Americans with language skills and an understanding of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other parts of the world largely ignored by the United States until now'
'The 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi WMD controversy accelerated these recruitment efforts, but it has proven difficult to find Arabic, Farsi, and Pushto speakers who are citizens of the United States and who want to work for the CIA abroad at a modest government salary and in conditions that are less than luxurious – and sometimes downright dangerous.'
'Beyond needing more language translators, the chief difficulty faced by intelligence officers is the sheer volume of information that pours into their agencies.'
'Collection, processing, analysis, production-dissemination,'
'Good analysis depends on assembling the best brains possible to evaluate global events, drawing upon a blend of public knowledge and stolen secrets. Once again a major liability is the CIA's shortage of well-educated Americans who have deep knowledge of places like Afghanistan and Sudan. While all of the intelligence agencies have been scrambling to redirect their resources from the communist world to the forgotten world of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, hiring and training outstanding analysts takes time, just like the establishment of new humint spy rings.'
'...All for nought, if the world is inherently unpredictable? These individuals just serving as comforting blankets for politicians and bureaucrats?'
'One of America's worst intelligence embarrassments came in 1999 when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) misidentified the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as a weapons depot, leading to a NATO bombing of the building and the death of Chinese diplomats.'
'...embarrassment or tragedy?'
'Analysis can be irrelevant (efficiency of Russian rocket fuel), untimely (OBE---overtaken by events), inaccurate (embassy as weapons depot), free of political pressures (intelligence to please, supporting white house policies), and complete (integrated with other agencies, rather than letting the decisionmakers be the fusion).'
'data processing must be made more swift and more discerning in the discrimination of wheat from chaff. Analysts must have a deeper understanding of the foreignl countries that harbor terrorist cells, as well as a better comprehension of what makes the terrorists tick. Further, at the end of this intelligence pipeline, the information provided to the policymaker must be pertinent, on time, reliable, comprehensive, and unbiased.'
'I need examples of succeeds also, not just illustrations of failures. Intelligence. Counterespionage. Covert action (also subversion)'
'during the Kennedy administration (although without the knowledge of the president), the CIA hoped to spoil Cuban–Soviet relations by lacing sugar bound from Havana to Moscow with an unpalatable, though harmless, chemical substance. A White House aide discovered the scheme and had the 14,125 bags of sugar confiscated before they were shipped to the Soviet Union. Other methods have reportedly included the incitement of labor unrest, the counterfeiting of foreign currencies, attempts to depress the world price of agriculture products grown by adversaries, the contamination of oil supplies, and even dynamiting electrical power lines and oil-storage facilities, as well as mining harbors to discourage the adversary's commercial shipping ventures.'
'Influenced by the Pearl Harbor inquiries, especially the way Roberta Wholstetter used the findings of the penultimate investigation of Pearl Harbor, the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack, to write her famous treatise on surprise, Pearl Harbor Warning and Decision, the 9/11 commissioners attempted to capture the context of the September 11, 2001 disaster.'
'During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev also served as his own intelligence analyst.15'
'the demand for current, original and even entertaining intelligence products is so great that the drumbeat of constant intelligence warning and analysis output may take on a life of its own, creating an impression of certainty, threat, and immediacy that is not justified by the contents and data used in the production of finished intelligence.19'
'practitioners have even devised methodologies to help analysts avoid common cognitive errors.21'
'what generally inhibits “imaginative” analysis is “the concept”: shared assumptions among analysts and policymakers of what constitutes rational behavior on the part of a potential opponent.22'
'Prior to the 1973 Y om Kippur War, for example, Israeli officials based their defense policy on three assumptions: Egypt would be at the center of any Arab coalition against Israel, Egypt would not undertake a significant attack without a strong prospect of victory, and, unless Egypt destroyed the Israeli Air Force, an Arab victory was not possible. Israeli officials also believed that their intelligence agencies would provide a “war warning” in time for them to mobilize their reserves or even launch a pre-emptive attack, actions that would produce an Arab rout. The effects of “the concept” on policymakers and analysts alike was staggering. Even though they were equipped with actual Syrian and Egyptian war plans, reconnaissance photographs showing unprecedented force deployments along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights, a warning from a credible and trusted spy within the inner circle of the Egyptian government, information that Soviet personnel and dependents were high-tailing it out of Cairo and Damascus, and signals intelligence suggesting that their opponents were about to strike, the Israelis never managed to act as if they were about to be hit by an all-out Arab assault. As a result, the outbreak of the 1973 Y om Kippur War was marked by one of the greatest intelligence-command failures in military history'
(
10:28 / 2012-09-12)
'Admiral David Jeremiah, referred to as “mirror imaging.” Agency analysts assumed that Indian politicians were just like their American counterparts: both made a good many campaign promises, few of which were ever kept. T o win votes for boldness, Indian politicians in the victorious party (the BJP) had promised a nuclear test; now that the election hoopla was over, surely they would back away from this rash position. Such was the thinking at the CIA.'
(
14:42 / 2012-07-15)
'Beyond secrets that may be obtained through theft or surveillance by satellite cameras and listening devices (such as the number, location and capabilities of Chinese nuclear submarines and intercontinental missiles), the world also has mysteries, that is, information that may well be impossible to know about regardless of how many newspaper reporters and spies one may have. Who knows, for instance, how long Kim Jong il will survive as the leader of North Korea, or what kind of regime will follow in his wake? Who knows who will succeed President Vladimir Putin in Russia? The best one can hope for, from an intelligence point of view, is an educated guess by experts who have carefully studied such questions. These hunches are called “estimates” by intelligence professionals in the United States, or “assessments” by their British counterparts'
(
12:56 / 2012-07-15)
'That is why the United States has a CIA and other secret services: to go where journalists may not be allowed to go, or where they are not assigned to go by their managing editors, and to seek the answers to questions that a nation’s leaders may need to know beyond what may interest the average newspaper reader.'
(
12:54 / 2012-07-15)
'a standard definition of strategic intelligence is the “knowledge and foreknowledge of the world around us – the prelude to Presidential decision and action.”1 At the more narrow or tactical level, intelligence refers to events and conditions on specific battlefields or theaters of war, what military commanders refer to as “situational awareness.” In this volume, the focus is chiefly on strategic intelligence, that is, the attempts by leaders to understand potential risks and gains on a national or international level.'
(
11:54 / 2012-07-15)
'Our circulatory system evolved when we were still fish in the sea, and salt was everywhere. In that context, evolution favored salt and other common compounds for the core switches, levers, pulleys, and other parts of the body. Salt, in particular, was used throughout our bodies. It helped them to regulate blood pressure, which is still one of its main functions in our bodies. Other nutrients might have worked, but in the sea, salt was cheap and easy. Then we left the sea and moved ashore, where salt is scarce. We searched it out, as did other species. Macaws fly to saltlicks, elephants walk to them, and pregnant women can sometimes be found eating fistfuls of salty clay'
'We could be at the point of dying of high blood pressure—collectively
we are—and our taste buds would still say, “Salt is good.”'
'Species of beetles, mites, and even fungi sneak into termite nests.
They hide there, in plain view. They do not look like termites, but
they feel like termites. They smell like them too.'
'It is the diseases that such parasites transmit that kill. Ticks
transmit spotted fever, encephalitis, typhus, Kyasanur Forest disease,
ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease, and Astrakhan fever, to name a few. Lice
transmit relapsing fever and typhus. Fleas transmit the plague. To the
extent that our parasites carry such diseases, losing our hair may
have increased our chances of living longer, or at least long enough
to mate. It is even possible that hair favors the spread of some
diseases that do not require vectors. Bacteria can also live in
hair... It may also be why the birds that feed on dead animals have
evolved bald heads three times independently, once in New World
vultures, once in Old World vultures (which are actually descendants
of storks), and a third time in the ancestors of the bald-headed and
ungainly marabou stork.'
'The French wore hairpieces and in doing so augmented the habitat
available for lice and the diseases they carried. The Russians did not
wear hairpieces. Relatively speaking, they were more hairless and as a
consequence, saved. Nor was this the only example in which
ectoparasites played a significant role. By some estimates, World War
II was the first war in which more soldiers died in combat than of
ectoparasite-transmitted diseases'
'Once it did not have to worry about staying warm, the costs of living
in a society with fur may have outweighed the benefits and it, like
us, lost its fur' ... what about beavers?
'The most common gene variant for malaria resistance is not related in
any way to sickle cell anemia. Its name is G6PD, and it leads to the
production of blood cells that starve the malaria parasite of oxygen.
These are tough, protist-choking genes, malaria-killers, evidence of
the power of evolution and the adaptability of man. Sarah Tishkoff—the
geneticist at the University of Maryland who discovered the repeated
origins of the genes for digesting milk as an adult—has recently
studied the spread of G6PD. More than 400 million people in Africa,
the Middle East, and the Mediterranean have one of several versions of
this gene. It appears to have spread quickly, mother and father to
child. These gene variants, though, like the ones associated with
sickle cell anemia, come with a price. Individuals with the
malaria-killing version of the gene develop anemia when they eat fava
beans.'
'xenophobia might guard us against diseases that travel from one tribe
to the next. Perhaps it is for this reason that “others” have often,
across history and cultures, been described not only as scary but more
specifically as dirty and disease-ridden. It was “the others” that
almost always had fleas, lice, and rats'
'We are who we are because of disease. Or so these men, all of them
individualists, born in environments with a low prevalence of most
diseases, had begun to believe.'
'What if our brains recognize and categorize the level of disease
present in our surroundings and then without ever bothering to alert
our consciousness, respond to this perceived risk?'
'The experimental subjects were brought into the lab. Their blood was
taken and then they were shown the neutral slide show and one of the
two sets of stressful slide shows. After the slide shows, the
participants’ blood was taken again. Each blood sample was then
exposed, in a test tube, to a compound found in many pathogenic
bacteria, lipopolysaccharide. Schaller and his colleagues thought that
the blood cells of the participants who had seen the images of disease
might more aggressively attack the bacterial compound by producing
more cytokines. But, truth be told, they had no idea what they would
see. Then the results came in. The blood taken from the individuals
who had seen the disease slide shows produced 23.6 percent more
bacteria-attacking cytokines (IL-6) than did the blood taken from the
same individuals before the slide shows. But what about the
individuals who saw the violent slides without images of disease,
perhaps the response was just due to stress? It was not. The blood of
the individuals who had seen the violent slides did not change at
all.'
'Seeing signs of disease primed the participants’ immune systems to
respond to a pathogen like E. coli. This happened simply because they
saw the images. It happened subconsciously. It happened incredibly
quickly and easily. If you walk outside of your room and see someone
coughing, it is likely it will also happen to you'
'Schaller’s study of the response of individuals to disease stimuli
showed them pictures of sick people, pictures not unlike those we see
on TV every day. Could our bodies be reacting not just to actual sick
people but also to television sick people? No one knows'
(
16:39 / 2012-09-10)
'A case can be made for lichens, to be sure. They are a near miraculous
fusion of algae and fungi, life-forms that in coming together can live
in a way-on rock faces, eating air, sun, and minerals-that neither can
on its own'
'In addition to their big idea about our fondness for caves, the team
offered an explanation for the origins of the species-whether dandelions
or pigeons-that live with us in our cities. They noticed that the
species that make it unbeckoned into our cities tend to be the very same
species that originally lived with us in caves or on cliffs.'
(
16:38 / 2012-09-10)
Even today, considerable effort goes into convincing cows to “let down their milk.” As Juliet Clutton-Brock puts it in her book on the natural history of domesticated animals, “The cow must be quiet, relaxed and totally familiar with the milker . . . her calf must be present, or a substitute that she identifies with the calf . . . and it is often necessary to stimulate the genital area before the milk-ejection reflex will initiate secretion.”
Time spent addressing people's god complex viz., technology and elation and ecology is, I think, better served taking about biology. Oh well: 'The domestication of the aurochs was yet another manifestation of our power for innovation and the control of nature ... We tamed the cow, but also, later, horses, goats, cats, and dogs too. We did it one coupling or slaughter at a time. It is easy to get caught up in this godlike act of transformation. It turns out, though, that the aurochsen were not the only ones that were transformed. They changed us too, though no one knew that until very recently'
'In the Amazon, it takes about fifteen years for the fleas, lice, bats, and other realities of jungle life to build up in a group of houses beyond livable densities'
'each agricultural people started not from a great empire but instead from a few who struggled and made it'
'Binford’s view of agriculture as a kind of postapocalyptic sustainment was attacked and criticized by other anthropologists for years. It conflicted with the story we tell about ourselves in which we are innovative, successful, and in control of our fate. With time, Binford went on to do other things and think about other questions. He had, he thought, good evidence for his theory, but some potsherds and bones were not enough, and so his idea lay fallow, until now.'
'What is also possible, but unlikely, is that once a new gene arises, it becomes nearly immediately universal. The only way for that to happen is if its bearer mates with nearly everyone, or if nearly everyone missing the gene dies. Geneticists euphemistically call such scenarios “selective sweeps,”'
'Our lifestyles changed, permanently, as did our genes. We were no longer wild.' I disagree with this hyperbole. We still have (a large part of?) the entire kit of primal genes that might be even immediately expressible (e.g., epigenetics and methylation).
''Although humans could not, without the aurochsen as intermediary, eat grass, they could make more grass by burning and cutting down forests. They could also reduce competition by killing the other animals that ate grass.' And the aurochsen loved it! A very cool twist on the whole 'nature is love' meme.
'We depended and would continue to depend on the aurochsen to produce enough food to support the great densities to which our populations would rise. The aurochsen would depend on us to make ever more grass and to kill everything that might compete with or kill them in those new grasslands ... With our help, the aurochsen that became cows outcompeted those that did not ... We killed those competitors for the aurochsen and killed their predators too'
'At least twice (and probably more like four times) upon a time, aurochsen were domesticated. In each of these cases, Tishkoff has shown that individual humans who had the genes to digest milk as adults had far more children who survived to have children themselves than those who did not, and so on into subsequent generations.'
'Imagine that we performed an experiment in which we fed every person the same foods in the same quantities. We could come back and check on their (or really our) status through time. What do you predict would happen? We tend to act as though everyone would begin to look the same, or at least similar, in terms of their weight and health. This is the premise on which nearly every diet plan, exercise book, and weight-loss show is based, be it the grapefruit diet, the all-meat diet, the no-fat diet, or something else. It is the premise on which growth charts for babies are derived. It is the premise on which most of medicine, in one way or another, relies. The truth is that we would still differ even when eating exactly the same food. Those differences are the result of the differences among our pasts'
'How our bodies respond to the food we give them depends both on the ways in which our recent ancestors lived and on where we now live. One man’s survival gene is another’s belly roll.'
'Ten thousand years ago, all of our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, though they gathered different things as a consequence of where and how they lived. Some populations ate mostly meat, others mostly insects, and still others diets rich with bark'
'by some measures, the genetic diversity among African groups is as great as that found in all of the rest of the world combined'
'There are consequences to the realization that most of human diversity can be found in Africa. For one, it means that our categories of black, white, and brown are useless when thinking about health and disease. ... the artificial category “black” or “Asian” includes much more variation than the category “white.”'
'Where predators are common, perhaps three out of a hundred monkeys (or apes for that matter) die each year by being eaten, as was likely our fate for much of our history. For context, in a given year, cancer kills only one out of a thousand Americans, which is to say that if early humans were like modern primates, death by predation would have been 30 times more likely at any moment than is death by cancer today. More to the point, cancer tends to kill us after we have reproduced, whereas predators knew no such forbearance. Regardless of when humans escaped predation by making better tools or being smarter, we began like the other primates, eaten often and nearly inevitably'
'The vervet monkeys have three words, “leopard,” “eagle,” and “snake,” which were, in all likelihood among our first words, the most important nouns. Close behind them, one suspects, was the verb “RUN.”'
'This is one of the reasons cows and many other domesticated animals, such as lambs and even genetically modified salmon, are so susceptible to predators.13 Cows and lambs are not just meek. They are actually numbed to the dangers that once haunted them, too tame to flee even when the wolf or the butcher is at the door. ... Interestingly, not all domesticated animals have become so numbed. Horses remain twitchy, their tendency to flee ever ready, unbroken. In part, these differences reflect the traits we have favored in different domesticated animals. In horses (and other animals used in transportation, such as camels and donkeys), we wanted speed and power. In cows, sheep, and pigs, we wanted more simply milk and meat'
'Among primatologists, Isbell’s idea has no precedent. But often ideas new in one field are accepted truth in another. One field’s radical possibility can be another’s dogma. Predation is not the exclusive fate of primates'
'beaks, raspers, teeth, and the other murderous contrivances of evolution'
'some features are more obvious to fingers than to eyes'
'everything became more spiny, armored against fate'
'This was Vermeij’s law: prey respond to predators’ weaknesses, the ways they fail rather than the ways they succeed.' Hybrid warfare!
'In handling the shells, what Vermeij realized was that the evolution of the killing tools of predators had shaped the entire floor of the sea and its inhabitants'
'monkeys appear to signal not only to other monkeys but also to the cat itself. So useful is this notice of an ambush that several monkey species are even able to recognize the “large cat” calls of other monkey species and in hearing them know what to do, which is to first look down'
'In concert with the development of our vision, our brains began to expand. That visual and language abilities, both plausibly linked to our evolutionary relationship with snakes, were at the core of this early expansion is beyond doubt'
'Our vision may have been shaped when we were prey, but its greatest effects came once we had turned into predators.' We make the best of the past
'Relatively few of the truths we hold to be self-evident are held to be so everywhere.' None actually.
'If their only purpose were to modulate our internal hormones and digestive enzymes our taste buds would have no reason to notify our conscious brain that something had been tasted at all. This is just what happens in our guts. As late as 2005, no one knew we had taste buds in our guts. It now appears that that is where most of our taste buds, or at least taste receptors, reside. ... Although they are triggered subconsciously, the effects of the taste receptors in our guts are visible to us. We can see them at work when we eat noxious foods that make us vomit'
'That the taste buds in our mouths lead us to become pleased or displeased is because of our ancestors. Those ancestors whose taste buds triggered a pleasant sensation when they ate foods they needed to find more of were more likely to survive. The reverse holds for dangerous foods and unpleasant sensations. Like lab animals, our ancestors were trained by their sensations to chase after some things and flee others. Their tongues praised them into the right decisions: “Look for more of this sweet and you will be rewarded!” But they also scolded them out of wrong ones: “Put that plant in your mouth again and I’ll make you suffer. I swear to god I may even make you puke.”'
'A honeyguide, when it has found a hive, will come to the nearest house or person. There it will call, “tiya, tiya,” flash the white of its tail, and fly toward whoever is lucky enough to look on. It will continue to do so until someone follows it to a hive. At the hive, it will call again and wait. With luck, the hive is low enough to be climbed to, whereupon the person, a gatherer of honey, finds a food that rewards his or her sweet taste buds and the honeyguide finds a taste that rewards its too (our taste buds are sufficiently ancient that we and the honeyguide have similar fondnesses).2 No other mammals are known to follow the honeyguide, and so every bit of its elaborate act seems to have evolved for us, that we might help it and it us to sate our respective taste buds.'
'a useful food (corn) is farmed to produce nutritionally useless sweet high-fructose corn syrup. In 2010, more than 400,000 square kilometers of Earth were dedicated to the farming of sugar beets and sugarcane,3 an area the size of California. A similar quantity of land is dedicated to the corn used to produce corn syrup. ... Because we never, in our long evolutionary history, faced a situation in which we had too much sugar, we have no bell or whistle in our body that tells us that we have eaten too much. Our body’s demand for sugar is essentially infinite and irrational'
(
16:36 / 2012-09-10)
'Parasites attached themselves. No animal has ever been free of them. Predators ate everything; no animal has ever been free of them either. The pathogens that cause disease were common, though perhaps less predictably present than parasites and predators. Every species existed in mutual dependency with other species, in relationships that evolved essentially with the origin of life. No species was an island. No species had ever, in all of that time, gone it alone.'
'the consequences of removing the species our bodies evolved to interact with, be they predators (as in the case of the cheetah), mutualists like the animals that once dispersed the giant American fruits, or even parasites and disease. The loss of other species can make key elements of any organism’s body as anachronistic as the giant fruits left sitting in the dirt, waiting for the megafauna that never come to pick them up.'
'Wild speculation can be important to science, particularly in the early stages of a new field, when nearly anything is possible. In the early days, it seems as though anyone can solve the problem, so everyone tries. This stage of science can go on for decades, if not longer'
'It was not long before other researchers suggested that many or most, or perhaps all autoimmune and allergic diseases were the result of missing our parasites. Perhaps even depression was linked to the lack of worms, and some cancers too. ... When treated with worms, people with inflammatory bowel disease get better. Diabetic mice return to normal blood glucose levels.7 The progression of heart disease is slowed. Even the symptoms of multiple sclerosis improve.'
'our bodies are the same, essentially unaltered from 6,000 generations ago, when going for a run meant chasing after a wounded animal or fleeing a healthy one, water was drank out of cupped hands, and the sky still cracked wide open to reveal millions of stars, white dots as unexplainable as existence itself. Our bodies remember who we are. They respond as they have long responded, unaware that anything has changed, as anachronistically as the pronghorn’s running or the megafauna’s fat fruits.'
'Our parasites were the ether in which our bodies made sense. The presence of these hangers-on has long been as dependable as gravity. Then it happened, the great change. Humans began to live in buildings and use toilets, and everything, in the last few generations—a second on a day clock of life’s history—changed.'
Feedback control! Eventual acceptance after initial resistance! 'The answer appears to be, again and again, that if the parasite survives initially, the body learns to tolerate it. A team of peacekeeper cells calls off the antiparasite armed forces. The peacekeepers balance the response. They reserve the body’s energy to fight another day against a more beatable or virulent foe. ... Perhaps our bodies produce more of an immune response than is necessary because they are, in a way, “assuming” that some of their response will be dulled by the worms.'
'it is not just our immune system that evolved to depend on the presence of other species. It is the shape of our guts, the enzymes we produce in our mouths, and even our vision, brains, and culture too.'
Theory follows practice: 'the slow pace of science'
'He got out of the plane and the air was hot. He saw poverty everywhere. In the days that followed, he saw fingerless lepers, begging children, bus accidents, and a great and terrible disregard for life. Lawrence was also seeing the irony, though irony is not a strong enough word, of what he was doing. Much of the world, including Cameroon, remains unable to rid itself of the parasites that end lives prematurely and brutally. HIV, malaria, and dengue kill people, destabilize governments, and even precipitate wars. Alongside these other diseases, the worms too are thought to ruin lives. ... he wanted to go to the poorest, dirtiest places in the country. He wanted to go there barefoot so that he might contract hookworms. Surely this wasn’t the best way, but if he didn’t get better, he would go broke. If he went broke and ended up without Prednisone, he would die. So he found himself in Cameroon, looking for piles of human excrement to walk through on the chance that in those piles a few worms might crawl into him, through the thin barrier of his soft, urban skin'
'wild worms'
I think of bacteria as machines...: 'We still view our bodies like machines, in need of a little hammering here, some welding there, and the occasional drop of some chemicals to clean us out. They are not machines. They are organisms that evolved in the context of other wild species, organisms full of particulars'
'When we stoned, speared, or shot big predators, smaller predators did better.1 We used DDT to kill the pests on our crops and in our homes, and favored the resistant and insidious. We sprayed our crops and yards to kill the weeds and left the super-weeds to grow up between our rows of corn and out of the cracks in our cement'
'It was known that antibiotics kill pathogens such as syphilis (we know that because when patients are given the antibiotic, the syphilis goes away). But what actually happened to the other microbes in and on us when the syphilis was dying was never studied. The appropriate technology did not exist. And, more to the point, for the medical research community the goal was curing diseases.'
'Let us pause for a second to consider the possible results of their experiment. Perhaps our collective intuition is that those mice that had been treated with antibiotics would have fewer “bad” bacteria and the same or even more “good” bacteria than they had started with. In the context of human medicine, that is what our hope has long been. What did you think was happening when you took antibiotics? It is always easiest to assume someone else knows the answer, but in this case no one did'
'Kill the germs and we would be healthier and happier, just like the guinea pigs in their giant metal worlds.'
'No one studying germ-free vertebrates (rats, guinea pigs, chickens, and the like) considered this work on termites. In order to do so, they would have had to talk to termite people. Termite people do their own thing. They converse with ant and bee people only begrudgingly, and with people who study people even less. There are a few hundred of them and they are, largely, happy to focus exclusively on termites for the rest of their lives. Nor were vertebrate biologists particularly concerned about termites. Each group went its own way and ignored the fact that the two bodies of research had come to exactly opposing conclusions—one at the cost of tens of years of work and lots of metal, and the other at the cost of an ice cube tray. The difference in the results between experiments on termite and guinea pig guts is relevant to all of humanity. It explains what Reyniers got wrong in the context of Pasteur’s question. It is not that Reyniers made some big mistake, some folly of hubris.13 He failed in the same way that much of modern medicine does; he failed to put his question in context, whether of our origins or of our modern lives. He wanted to make the germ-free guinea pigs useful by making them survive, which he did. But in the process, he accidentally rigged the competition between germless and germy guinea pigs in such a way that it was nearly impossible for his germ-free guinea pigs to die.'
'When antibiotics were given, the salmonella was more likely to invade their body cavity through the gut. In addition, guts were more likely to be inflamed. But when the native microbes of these mice were allowed to reestablish, the salmonella no longer found its way into the body cavity. It was repelled, apparently by the native microbes that compete with the salmonella and in doing so prevent the salmonella from establishing itself. Antibiotics, in other words, kill the existing microbes in guts (be they ours or those of mice), but make it easier for whoever shows up next to move in. If, by chance, that happens to be a deadly pathogen, the result is dead mice or, in our case, humans.'
'Some of the indigenous bacteria are able to construct biofilms on a tissue surface, or they are able to colonize a biofilm built by another bacterial species. Many biofilms are a mixture of microbes, although one member is responsible for maintaining the biofilm and may predominate.'
'If you happen to get microbes that are very efficient at harvesting and providing energy from your food and you are hungry, they will save you. If you get those same microbes and feed them chips, cheese, and white bread daily, they are more likely to make you fat.'
'Pasteur was right; without their microbes, our ancestors would have died of hunger and disease. Without our microbes today we might be thinner, but we would be missing key nutrients, and we would be at a much higher risk of disease.'
Just as humans are robots' reproductive organs, plants are humans' external guts! 'For the ants, the fungus serves as an external gut, digesting the leaves in a way the ants on their own cannot.'
This seems chicken or egg. Mutualism can't be understood as farmer/farmed, landlord/tenant, etc. 'the idea that our bodies might farm good microbes, for our defense, came first from the ants'
'The appendix makes sense only in light of our evolutionary past ... No one had considered the possibility that it [the appendix] played a role in dealing with microbes, but they should have.'
'The students looked on, excited but dumbstruck. Bollinger and Parker soon believed that they had, in a few minutes on a spring morning, resolved a several-hundred-year-old question. They had figured it out. The answer was suddenly obvious. The appendix, Bollinger and Parker had come to believe, was a house for bacteria. It had evolved to serve as a place where the bacteria could grow, removed from the wash and grind of the intestines themselves. It was a peaceful alley. From that alley, they thought, microbes might also be able to recolonize the gut after an intestinal disease had wiped it clean.'
'antibodies sometimes help rather than attack other species, and that the appendix was, for reasons unexplained, full of antibodies. Not only was it strange that this apparently useless organ existed in the first place. It also seemed to be filled with antibodies that the body produces at great cost. Why this might be the case was ignored.'
'The IgA antibodies, he imagined, help the bacteria by providing a kind of scaffolding with which they can link together to form biofilms, a sort of commune of unrelated microbial cells.'
Great book name, Permission to Believe: 'soon others who had been quiet had been given permission to believe'
Heresy to dogma, an easy path in extremistan!: 'soon others who had been quiet had been given permission to believe. Almost as quickly as a tide climbs up under the roots of mangroves, Parker’s idea went from heresy to, if not dogma, credibility.'
'The appendix is a small incubator, removed as it is from the fast flow of the intestines (and the potential from infection by passing pathogens), a Zen garden of microbial life.'
'It was a breakthrough to realize that our immune system, appendix included, might be helping rather than hindering the microbes in our guts. It reversed the false conclusions of decades of research in giant guinea pig chambers and suggested not only that we might benefit from our microbes but that over evolutionary time we had benefited so much that it was worth evolving specific antibodies and organs to make sure those microbes were treated well'
How could medical professionals, having presumably studied about mutualism and symbiosis and dense feedback networks in grade school biology under inspired teachers, forgotten all about them? Truly we are narrow in our thinking these days. 'Mutualisms were reserved for the ecologists studying obscure organisms (tropical ants and termites, for example) in faraway lands.'
It is impossible to say where the human DNA ends and bacterial and viral DNA begins. In our eukaryotic nuclei even! 'You and I are like the colonies of leaf-cutter ants, dependent on other species without which we would not be entirely whole. We imagine ourselves besieged by germs, but this is a mistake. Our bodies are integrated with the microbes. In cross sections of our guts, it is impossible to say where the bacteria end and our guts begin. The IgA antibodies fail to recognize our good bacteria as foreign. Those good bacteria are, to IgA, self, the same as any of our other cells. While this new view of our lives is foreign to the medical community, to ecologists it is familiar.'
'A hundred thousand years ago, all humans lived in Africa. Then, one lineage of humans (one branch on the human tree) left East Africa and made it to Europe and then later down to tropical Asia, Australia, and eventually North America. In all of that time, no one farmed.'
'the Amazon, like the Congo or the forests of Asia, was a kind of petri dish, bounded by the Andes on one side and by oceans and deserts on the others. In this flat dish, populations grew more and more dense until there were millions of people in the forests, all of them gathering fruits, and killing monkeys and birds.2 ... Populations would have grown until resources were depleted. And then what? When human populations grew in the Amazon and elsewhere, they might have simply met with increasing rates of death and war. This is what happens to bacteria. It is the reason that we are not feet deep in great piles of microbes. Or they may have spilled over into marginal lands, farther from necessary water or easily accessed food. These were possibilities undoubtedly encountered in some places. The other possibility, though, was that some populations might find other ways of surviving. In such circumstances, two “inventions” repeatedly appear in history: agriculture and civilization—bread and kings.'
'although it seems clear that most groups knew many tens and often hundreds of species of plants and animals and their uses, the numbers of known medicinal plants may have been low until agriculture arose. It was with agriculture that the need for medicine to treat disease arose and so too the knowledge.'
'Farming is hard and unhealthy.'
(
10:55 / 2012-09-03)
Pathogens that cause disease were common, though perhaps less predictably present than parasites and predators
(
12:52 / 2012-09-01)
'Webster decided to feed the antipsychotic drug to newly infected rats to see how they reacted. Lo and behold, they didn’t develop fatal feline attraction.'
'“Seventy-five percent of the females would rather spend time with the infected male.”'
'“... in a small number of cases, [Toxo infection] may be linked to schizophrenia and other disturbances associated with altered dopamine levels—for example, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mood disorders. ... We should be cautious of dismissing such a prevalent parasite.”'
'In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,”'
'Epstein-Barr virus, mumps, rubella, and other infectious agents, they point out, have also been linked to schizophrenia—and there are probably more as yet unidentified triggers, including many that have nothing to do with pathogens. But for now, they say, Toxo remains the strongest environmental factor implicated in the disorder.'
'Once the parasite becomes deeply ensconced in brain cells, routing it out of the body is virtually impossible: the thick-walled cysts are impregnable to antibiotics. Because T. gondii and the malaria protozoan are related, however, Yolken and other researchers are looking among antimalarial agents for more-effective drugs to attack the cysts. But for now, medicine has no therapy to offer people who want to rid themselves of the latent infection; and until solid proof exists that Toxo is as dangerous as some scientists now fear, pharmaceutical companies don’t have much incentive to develop anti-Toxo drugs'
(
13:33 / 2012-09-06)
Those who tested positive for the parasite, both studies showed, were about two and a half times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers
(
12:24 / 2012-09-06)
heightened anxiety might be the common denominator underlying their responses. When under emotional strain, he read, women seek solace through social bonding and nurturing. In the lingo of psychologists, they’re inclined to “tend and befriend.” Anxious men, on the other hand, typically respond by withdrawing and becoming hostile or antisocial
(
12:24 / 2012-09-06)
The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.
(
12:22 / 2012-09-06)
we and other large mammals were widely presumed to be accidental hosts, or, as scientists are fond of putting it, a “dead end” for the parasite
(
12:21 / 2012-09-06)
But aside from rabies, stories of parasites commandeering the behavior of large-brained mammals are rare. The far more common victims of parasitic mind control—at least the ones we know about—are fish, crustaceans, and legions of insects, according to Janice Moore, a behavioral biologist at Colorado State University. “Flies, ants, caterpillars, wasps, you name it—there are truckloads of them behaving weirdly as a result of parasites,” she says.
(
11:44 / 2012-09-06)
Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia
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11:39 / 2012-09-06)
Even if maggots weren't spontaneously generated, parasites were a different matter. They simply had no way of getting inside a body and so had to be created there. They had never been seen outside a body, animal or human. They could be found in young animals, even in aborted fetuses. Some species could be found in the gut, living happily alongside other organisms that were being destroyed by digestive juices. Others could be found clogging the heart and the liver, without any conceivable way to get into those organs. They had hooks and suckers and other equipment for making their way inside a body, but they would be helpless in the outside world. In other words, parasites were clearly designed to live their entire lives inside other animals, even in particular organs.
(
10:23 / 2012-09-04)
As late as the Renaissance, European physicians generally thought that parasites such as guinea worms didn't actually make people sick. Diseases were the result of the body itself lurching out of balance as a result of heat or cold or some other force. Breathing in bad air could bring on a fever called malaria, for example. A disease came with symptoms: it made people cough, put spots on their belly, gave them parasites. Guinea worms were the product of too much acid in the blood, and weren't actually worms at all— they were something made by a diseased body: perhaps corrupted nerves, black bile, elongated veins. It was hard to believe, after all, that something as bizarre as a guinea worm could be a living creature. Even as late as 1824, some skeptics still held out: "The substance in question cannot be a worm," declared the superintending surgeon of Bombay, "because its situtation, functions, and properties are those of a lymphatic vessel and hence the idea of its being an animal is an absurdity."
(
10:23 / 2012-09-04)
"there are reified metaphors, which, if taken seriously, can be obfuscatory. For example, natural communities have been likened to aeroplanes, and each species to parts of an aeroplane. A metaphor is then constructed in which the removal of a species from a community is likened to the removal of an aeroplane part. Just as removal of one or more parts will cause the plane to crash, the metaphor asserts that the removal of one too many species from a community will result in collapse of the community. On closer examination, this is seen as empty. There is no ‘aeroplane’. Also, the designation of certain kinds of species as good or bad – specifically, alien species are bad and ‘native’ species are good – is empty and misleading. While invasive species, in some cases, actually do damage native species, the generalization that invaders will reduce species diversity is not well founded."
"Fields that are required to focus on research defined by social needs, like ecology and medi- cine, rather than on scientific capabilities, like astronomy and hydrodynamics, generate reifica- tions. Reifications are dangerous to the health of a research area"
Only ecologists would think support vector machines were sophisticated...
"I can tell you how to measure it, just as I can tell you how to count chromosomes. While I was in graduate school, human chromosomes were counted repeatedly as 48 until someone actually counted with a clear head and came up with 46. It has been reported (Pennock, 1999) that an ‘evolutionist’ biology teacher in a bible belt school had students count the ribs of male and female human skeletons in the classroom, so they could prove to themselves that Adam’s rib loss was not heritable. He reported that, over and over, students would mistakenly count one fewer rib on the male skeleton"
Beware setting up a straw man to be attacked, he might Turn into a marble statue, unmovable and worshipped! same with zen: "I proposed the 10% universal value in the hope of propping up a straw man, a target. I did not reify it. However, it was a round number and seemed to satisfy a desire for a natural constant."
"1. Natural selection can hone the properties of individuals but it is much more difficult to evolve constancies in populations (Williams, 1966). 2. Ecological efficiency is a ratio involving at least three separate populations. For example, the ecological efficiency of an herbivorous trophic level involves food organisms, the herbivores themselves and the first-level carnivores. 3. Genes for a tri-specific property cannot be selected by any of the usual mechanisms of natural selection. So, I can imagine no mechanism for evolving constancy in such a triad of populations."
Awesome! Gods = what has been written about them. Very Pratchettian! "Writings about gods and angels include some of the most beautiful and, in one sense, the intellectually deepest of human creations, and are therefore extremely important. For these reifications one can build institutes, receive grants, fight wars and even die. Once enough writing and painting about angels had accumulated, it seemed impossible, at least for some people, to disbelieve in their empirical existence. Angels had been reified. What, then, are angels? They are the sum of what has been written and painted about them. Isn’t that a kind of existence? Yes, but not a scientifically useful one."
"Interpreting the parable leads to the assertion that removal of one species from a forest may do no visible harm, but if enough species are removed, the loss of one last population will result in collapse of the community. This is a beautiful and vivid image. The parable suggests that loss or addition of critical species will send reverberating waves of change through a community. Sometimes this appears to be valid, but is it general? In what sense is there really an aeroplane?"
"There may be groups of species, each one closely connected to a few others, and only loosely connected to other groups. There is no aeroplane.
"Ruiz and Fofonoff (1999) estimated that more than 90% of alien species in estuaries have made no discernible impact on the native species diversity or species abundance distribution. It has also been suggested that some of the studies purporting to experi- mentally test the effects of invading species are subject to criticism on design grounds (Wardle, 1999). Levine and D’Antonio (1999) report a ‘consistent positive relation between exotic species abundance and resident species diversity . . . [suggesting] . . . that invaders and resident species are more similar than often believed’. It is as if some invasive species fit into niches that were in some sense empty, so that they are not strongly competitive with native species."
"As suggested by Sagoff (1999), if a species is not clearly a medical or agricultural pest, let’s learn to love it"
"The central questions of modern genetics are defined by the applicability of powerful techniques. Questions that cannot be answered by use of these techniques are not of immediate genetic interest, although the development of new techniques is of interest to any science. The terminology of modern genetics refers only to processes or categories for which there exist operational decision procedures"
"In ecology, such concepts as community integrity, benefits of diversity, natural efficiency, ecological services, ecological entropy and ecological health are all complex, in the accepted mathematical sense of having both real and imaginary parts."
(
10:44 / 2012-09-03)
Moyashimon has been somewhat life-altering! Watched the anime, then the live drama, and slowly reading the manga. It's led me to Rob Dunn and Sandor Ellix Katz's books, and to learning to pronounce scientific names for creatures---Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Gintama and Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou are also very funny.
Top Gear (UK) must me mentioned. Its specials and mini-specials are revelationary. The Bolivia special, the Botswana special, the Japan episode (GT-R vs bullet train), the northern Italy special (hot hatchbacks across the beautiful Italian countryside) are amazing and refreshingly new documentaries. These three British gearheads responding to the beautiful natural world is wonderful to experience (as is their endless repairs of ancient cars kept alive just to finish the thousand-mile trek). I am moved by Top Gear.
(
11:53 / 2012-09-02)
Pilgrimage to Karbala, The Beauty Academy of Kabul, Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, Pianomania, Behind the Burly Q. It makes very little sense to us, crying about a story of someone who died a thousand years ago, and not crying for the person sitting next to you on the bus. Religions that teach us to do the latter are better than the former.
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18:13 / 2012-08-27)
/Born to be Wild/ had a jaw-dropping bit where old-enough orphan elephants, when moved from an all-human nursery to a half-way house in the park, are met by many grown ex-orphans who come from miles around to greet the newcomers. :') incredible.
(
14:16 / 2012-08-20)
Today's two films, /Summer Wars/ and /The Princess & the Pilot/, made me consider the online world and the real world together at the same time.
(
21:44 / 2012-07-29)
This might be the lesser companion to the "Home reading" entry. Emily's been on a tear with the great sequence of carbohydrate-laden documentaries since looking for "Babies". Starting with "The Harvest/La Cosecha" (migrant farm workers in the country) and "Make Believe" (migrant magicians in the world [piccto-majikko]), "Afghan Star" (migrant "American Idol" contestants in Afghanistan), then I tried the episode on the migrant steppe-dwellers in "Wild China" before returning to the Emily sequence with "Voices of Iraq" (migrant camcorders in Iraq), "The Story of India" (migrating magnificence of the idea), "Page One" (migrant journalists and bloggers at the NY Times), "Nature: Braving Iraq" (migrant birds in Iraqi wetlands).
(
06:39 / 2012-07-19)
Provincial, county, and village officials are rewarded if they plant the number of trees envisioned in the plan, regardless of whether they have chosen tree species suited to local conditions (or listened to scientists who say that trees are not appropriate for grasslands to begin with). Farmers who reap no benefit from their work have little incentive to take care of the trees they are forced to plant. I saw the entirely predictable result on the back roads two hours north of Gaoxigou: fields of dead trees, planted in small pits shaped like fish scales, lined the roads for miles. "Every year we plant trees," the farmers say, "but no trees survive."
(
16:12 / 2012-08-27)
Confronting that head-on was politically difficult: It had to be done without admitting Mao's mistakes. (When I asked local officials and scientists if the "Great Helmsman" had erred, they changed the subject.) Only in the past decade did Beijing chart a new course: replacing the Dazhai Way with what might be called the Gaoxigou Way
(
16:08 / 2012-08-27)
"Tens of millions of people forced to work night and day on projects that a child could have seen were a terrible stupidity. Cutting down trees and planting grain on steep slopes—how could that be a good idea?"
(
16:07 / 2012-08-27)
Move Hills, Fill Gullies, and Create Plains! Destroy Forests, Open Wastelands! In Agriculture, Learn From Dazhai!
(
16:06 / 2012-08-27)
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO
(
15:43 / 2012-08-27)
Kwan Yin (or Kuan Yin, or Guan Yin). The Bodhisattva Kwan Yin, commonly called the Goddess of Mercy, is China’s favorite divine being—much more widely loved and worshiped than the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, the Jade Emperor, or any other. Her name means “heeding the cry.” She hears and helps all those who cry out to her in need, and also delivers babies to their mothers.
(
07:05 / 2012-08-16)
Jade Emperor, Heaven. Though the Jade Emperor is ruler of Heaven and Earth, he is not so much a supreme God as a supreme administrator. In fact, he is outranked by the three top divine beings of the Chinese pantheon, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius—who are themselves subject to higher universal forces.
The Chinese Heaven is modeled closely on the government of the Chinese emperors. In other words, it is a bloated bureaucracy, crammed with innumerable officials with pompous titles, with a finger in every possible earthly activity.
Lao Tzu, Immortals, Patriarch Subodhi. Centuries before Taoism was established as an organized religion, it existed as a spiritual discipline similar to the yoga systems of India. (Tao is pronounced “DOW,” rhyming with “cow.”) The followers of this branch of Taoism, represented in the story by the Patriarch Subodhi and his disciples, were ascetics living in mountain hermitages. These ascetics aimed to become “Immortals” by developing conscious spirit bodies that could transcend death. But for most Chinese, this was simplified into the belief that Taoist masters achieved physical immortality.
The founder of Taoism is said to be Lao Tzu, who became known as a divine being. He is thought to have lived around the 5th or 6th century B.C., though we cannot be sure he actually lived at all. He is also supposed to have written the Tao Te Ching (“Book of the Way”), the primary text of Taoism and the most famous of all Chinese classics.
In Taoist literature, secrets of spiritual discipline were often coded in the metaphorical language of alchemy. Most Chinese, though, took this language literally. And so Lao Tzu and other Taoist figures were thought of as master alchemists, producing “Elixir of Life” and “pills of immortality.” Cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide—which I’ve used for the name of Lao Tzu’s palace—was a prime ingredient in such “alchemy.”
(
10:57 / 2012-08-14)
There's not anything in Vermont Royster's last column to the effect that "they can't find enough news to fill the newspaper"! Though I wish there was.
(
22:21 / 2012-08-10)
It was March 1936 and as a 22-year-old I had just joined The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. Low man on the totem pole, of course, but the late Bernard Kilgore, then the bureau chief, let me write a few brief and inconsequential items now and then which the newspaper published.
So that means I have been writing for the Journal in one capacity or another for 50 years. A half-century is a span to spur nostalgia and give one to think.
They have been a fascinating 50 years for a journalist. They began with the years of the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. After a brief hiatus while I did some world travels courtesy of the U.S. Navy, they resumed in the Truman era when I myself served as Washington bureau chief. They have continued to this day.
My journalistic years thus embrace nine presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. In that period there have been other wars -- Korea and Vietnam -- and other troubled times for the country. Several periods of inflation as well as other recessions, although fortunately none like the 1930s. All manner of public disturbances from the labor riots of the thirties to the race riots of the sixties.
Political upheavals, too, as the Democratic Party dominance was interrupted by Eisenhower, returned with Kennedy and Johnson. Thereafter came Nixon, Watergate, our first-ever presidential resignation and our first-ever non-elected president in Gerald Ford. Later our first truly Southern president since the Civil War in the person of Jimmy Carter. Then with Ronald Reagan, our first openly avowed conservative to occupy the White House (for two terms) since Herbert Hoover.
It all began for me, amid the excitement of youth, with the on-going efforts of FDR and his New Deal to solve the Depression. All those efforts failed but my memory is clogged with remembrance of the colorful characters of that time now vanished into the history books. Of Henry Wallace and Henry Morgenthau, of Harold Ickes and his arch rival Harry Hopkins. With a bottle at hand I once "struck a blow for freedom" with John Nance Garner, FDR's crusty vice president. I remember standing in awe of courtly Speaker William Bankhead and in fascination before Joseph P. Kennedy, founding father of that enduring political clan. I knew among others Sen. Tom Connally of Texas, he with the flowing locks, Sen. Walter George of Georgia, whom FDR tried unsuccessfully to purge from the Democratic Party.
Although I know time may romance years past, it seems to me their counterparts today are, by comparison, a dull and somber group. Able men no doubt but wanting the verve to make politics fun-filled for the spectators. Except perhaps for Tip O'Neill and Jesse Helms we watch only dancers in a stately quadrille.
Among the presidents of my time Harry Truman was the most likeable as a person despite all his troubles, Jack Kennedy the most exciting, Eisenhower the most underrated. Richard Nixon was a character right out of a Greek tragedy, a potentially great man with a fatal flaw. Lyndon Johnson the most tormented. Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford are the nicest men you would ever want to know but neither strong enough to wear the presidential mantle without stumbling.
Ronald Reagan, whose time is not yet done, is the most self-possessed of them all, unruffled by any slings or arrows. No one has ever called him a brilliant man. He is, rather, a man of deep instincts strengthened by long life and many years in the political wilderness. Those instincts, no different now than when he was governor of California, are for a nation less burdened by government and the taxes it lays on its citizens. It is an irony that he has come to preside over the government's greatest deficits and the greatest burden of debt. How President Reagan will ultimately be measured must await history.
Having been privileged to follow so much history-in-the-making I am tempted to keep a journalistic eye on what unfolds hereafter. But 50 years is a long time and there comes a time when time should have a stop.
So with today's column I will call a stop. This will be my last appearance in The Wall Street Journal under this familiar rubric.
This column itself is a quarter-century old under this byline. I inherited it from two distinguished predecessors, the late Thomas Woodlock and William Henry Grimes, both of whom were Editors of the Journal before me. For each of us in turn it was a way to keep a journalistic role without the daily pressures in a newspaper office. I am grateful to the present managers and editors of the paper for allowing me this little space to put forward such thoughts as I might have and to leave me unrestrained as to my peculiarities of style or substance.
I admit to some sheepishness at this decision. After all, Woodlock was older than I when he wrote his last column from his hospital bed to be published posthumously. James Reston, older than I, still fills his place on The New York Times. And I am mindful of others who kept on in their journalistic endeavors long past my three score and twelve. David Lawrence, columnist when I began, was still writing in his eighties. So was Arthur Krock. Walter Lippmann outlasted the New York Herald-Tribune where he began.
But I offer no apologies. I fear the day when readers -- or those present Journal editors -- come to think I've outrun my time. Besides, I already find myself repeating myself. How many times can I deplore the government's deficit or inveigh against other recurring political idiocies without using shopworn words? Better to leave all that to younger minds which come afresh to age-old problems.
As it is, I can leave with a treasure house rich in memories, and not alone of presidents and politics. When I began in 1936 The Wall Street Journal was a small paper with a circulation of barely 35,000. By 1971 when I retired as the paper's Editor it exceeded a million. Since I left it has doubled, to more than two million in the U.S.; it's also published in Europe and Asia. How that growth came about is also part of my memory.
The chief architect of the transformation was Bernard Kilgore, the one who was my bureau chief so long ago. While many others contributed to this growth -- able editors, executives and pioneers in the printing trade -- his was the vision of a newspaper that could span this huge country delivering the same news on the same day to readers in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Ore. Doubters said it could not be done but the newspaper you hold today, better edited and more complete, is his monument. Other publishers of national newspapers came thereafter. Kilgore had the dream first and saw it fulfilled.
After 50 years watching that dream being fulfilled I cannot just stop without regret. So I hope this is not the end of the story. I intend now and then to submit some offerings to the editors on various subjects which, perhaps, they will think worth printing. There will be no longer, though, the regular weekly conversations with the readers. I have grown too weary of mind for that.
Not too weary to remember, of course, and memory is a pleasure that grows richer with age. These 50 years have seen much turbulence for the country. But for a journalist, let me confess, they have all been fun. So if this is not, as I hope, the end of the story, I am content that it be the end of a chapter.
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Mar 5, 1986
(
22:14 / 2012-08-10)
Discussions like this and later about net neutrality make me realize---it's the cyberpunk speculative fiction prediction-dream come true. The cyberspace gaining parity with real space in many ways. (You can't make the internet look very different whether you're on one provider or another. But real space is controlled by highwaymen--toll-collectors that maybe make one route easier than another.) "No technical solutions [to DDOS]. There's weird techno-market-social solutions which are very hard."
(
07:34 / 2012-07-17)
"It gets really exciting when you can provoke a government to block youtube, because then everyone goes 'wait a second, where did the cute cats go?'" The Turkish president complained on Youtube that his government blocks Youtube. His "cute cat theory" is bunk. Foreign governments can make soft-demands on Youtube or Facebook to remove content, but once such a service is fully blocked and a home-grown replacement is in place, one that's serving all the cute cats and one that's collaboratively or autonomously censoring, nobody notices any more. Ah, he talks about this, intermediary censorship, #2 in China, #1 is great firewall (thanks Cisco et al.), and #3 is paid commentators. Ways this is combated has been humor (but 2% get it), and weibo (speed-limited human filtering).
People running tech platforms are benevolent dictators, and the public is seeking a magna carta: habeas corpus, appeals, etc. The tech companies must 1, run a business, 2, make the internet thrive, and now 3, defend the most important political space in the world, their platforms. People in America might think there are millions of people in Country X who are unknowingly waiting for information about how bad their government is (via NYT, etc.) and then will rise up and march---Pratchett would help: everyone knows just how bad their government is (we do too).
(
06:58 / 2012-07-17)
"This guy who was read by at most a few thousand rugby fans went out and did what Kenyan journalists were afraid to do. He would go out and take pictures of the confrontations." Apparently, Human Rights Watch website is a good litmus test to see if your internet is being filtered. They estimate that "only" 2% of the Chinese population uses tools to get around the great fire-wall. 2% to me sounds like a lot, 2% is a lot of technical knowhow (how many people know how to use torrents to download movies? not much more than that).
(
06:22 / 2012-07-17)
"If the purpose of Web 1.0 was to share physics research papers, the purpose of Web 2.0 was to share pictures of cute kittens." "People think cute kittens are just something you pay for when you get Web 2.0. This is not true, it is what we built Web 2.0 to do."
He worked at Tripod: "it's not about professional creators creating content, it's everyone."
"To an activist, cell phones are essential to have and deadly to have: you can be tracked 24/7, you can be found in the physical world..."
(
06:06 / 2012-07-17)
"Things do not 'go viral'. If someone tells you something went viral it means, 'I do not know what happened next.'" And, "You make have seen the 'Thank you Facebook' shot, but you may not have seen the 'Thank you al-Jazeera' shot. Newest and shiniest: Twitter and Facebook must somehow be causal, but the broadcast may be the most important, or labor or trade unions..."
(
05:55 / 2012-07-17)
'Bouazizi wasn't the first person to light himself on fire [in Tunisia]. Bouazizi wasn't the first vegetable seller to light himself on fire. Bouazizi wasn't even the first vegetable seller in 2010 to light himself on fire.' Studying Patient 0. Like all things, it's extremely complicated and never comes down to a simple phrase. Finally, no soundbyting.
(
05:47 / 2012-07-17)
Many of the demonstrators in Tahrir went out into the streets *after* the government shut down the internet and cellphone service: paraphrasing, 'I was going to watch it online and tweet about it, but now I can't, I might as well get out there and see what's going on for myself.'
(
05:41 / 2012-07-17)
To stop or weaken enemy forces, the army will have at its disposal ballistic
or inertial-guidance SSMs and long-range artillery to strike in-depth and to
prevent the enemy from taking the initiative.
It will have tanks to counter enemy tanks. Those tanks will have
weapon delivery systems controlled by laser rangefinders, which enable them
to hit with the first shot, hopefully without having come to a halt.
The army will be provided with SAM systems (Figure 1.19) to counter
the enemy's ground attack aircraft, as well as with radar-guided artillery
(AAA)
(
10:58 / 2012-07-16)
Cruisers (Figure 1.14) are heavily armed, medium to high tonnage
ships (8,000-20,000 tons displacement). They defend the formations
that they escort from air, surface, and underwater threats. Destroyers
(4,000-8,000 tons) are in practice large frigates equipped with a variety of
armament. Frigates (Figure 1.15) are well-armed, low- to medium-tonnage
ships (1,5004,500 tons) whose task is to provide an effective escort to other
ships in convoy or formation
(
10:54 / 2012-07-16)
The techniques and technologies that lead to the construction of
devices capable of electronically countering a weapon system, and to the
development of counter-countermeasures, go under the name "electronic
warfare." However, given the basic harmlessness of these electronic sys-
tems-"electrons don't make holes," at least as long as no directed-energy
weapons are available-the name "electronic defense" seems more
appropriate.
(
10:15 / 2012-07-16)
'a very big step from (2) what you know to (3) what it means. How do we get the analyst there? The analyst cannot get there unless he first decides what it is he knows. ... That done, the analyst is in a position to go beyond the evi- dence—to think about what the answers mean. The preferred methodology is to use questions to think the issue through, questions designed to bring out the implications of the facts. There is a set of generic questions that can be used. Having di- gested the research, the analyst reflects on:
• What is new, or what is being done differently? • Why is it occurring? • What are the goals and broader concerns of the principal
actors? • What factors influence success or failure? Are the actors aware of these factors? Do they have a strategy or pro- gram to deal with the factors?
• What are the prospects for success, and, more important, what are the implications for the actors, their broader con- cerns, the United States, and other countries?
• Where do the principal actors go from here?
The questions cannot—must not— be answered by restating the facts. The questions get at the processes and call out for generalizations, the essence of good finished intelligence.'
(
13:52 / 2012-07-15)
'the new analyst should be encour- aged to step into the policymaker’s shoes and ask himself: What do I want or need to know about this issue? The questions should flow from the intelligence issue; if they do not, the pur- pose of the paper is probably not clear. Using the Sino–North Korean issue as an example, a policymaker probably would want to know: Have warmer Russian–North Korean relations caused cooler Sino–North Korean relations, or is it more compli- cated than that? Are the Chinese concerned? What steps has Bei- jing taken to change the situation? Is the Chinese leadership divided on the issue? What would China like to have happen? What is Beijing doing about it? Is it working? What do the Chi- nese expect from the United States? ... The list also tells him what he should be looking for as he reads files; once that is done, it helps him identify intelligence gaps and write requirements. ... It gets the analyst thinking in terms of an audience, it heightens sensitivity to policy relevance, and it causes the ana- lyst to think in terms of something besides what happened.'
(
11:04 / 2012-07-15)
'An intelligence topic is a broad question of interest, such as Russian activity in the Third World. An intelligence issue is a development of something new and different that narrows the topic and gives a focal point to the paper. There is a simple test: an issue phrase conveys a sense of change or movement or activity; a topic does not.
Examples may help clarify this subtle, but important, distinction. Sino-Russian relations is an intelligence topic but is not an issue. The significance of China’s expanding economic relations with Russia for Western investors in China, or the implica- tions of the Putin succession for Russian policy toward China, are issues. Sino–North Korean relations is an intelligence topic; the improvement in Russian–North Korean relations and what it means for China is an intelligence issue.'
(
08:50 / 2012-07-15)
'The idea of going beyond the evidence is new for most analysts. ... Managers must retrain them to think in terms of “This is the sit- uation; these forces are at work; this is what it means.” This is a very difficult transition for many people. The other elements of intelligence writing can be learned. I am less sure about this one. It seems to go to the core of the thought process. People seem either to have the ability to do it, or they do not. Some are clearly uncomfortable with ambiguity and always seek a little more information before writing. Others draft but cannot move beyond the evidence or reach intellectual closure on an issue, perhaps because they are afraid of being wrong. In any case, the ability to think beyond the evidence and to explore the implications of a situation is the sine qua non of intelligence analysis.'
(
12:12 / 2012-07-14)
'because what people believe to be true is often more important than what is true, discovery of the facts alone is insufficient for and occa- sionally immaterial to the real job of analysis: thinking about the future. Students become analysts when they stop thinking in terms of what happened and start thinking in terms of what the facts mean.' ... 'the “art of intelligence” is iden- tifying the important data in the mountain of detail. While re- porters describe the situation, analysts characterize it by making meaningful generalizations that help the reader put events in perspective and think about them. Analysts reconcile conflicting information, isolate the principle in a sea of data, and recognize the exception that demands a reevaluation.' This is /all/ just "Everything is obvious, when you know the answer." This can't be the best way we have of dealing with geopolitical unknowns.
(
11:45 / 2012-07-14)
Academic vs. intelligence writing:
past vs. future; written for experts with no responsibility to act (no skin in the game) vs. for generalists responsible for lives; detailed and proof-laden vs. distilled; short on conclusions, long on summaries vs. begins with conclusions and long on implications.
(
08:24 / 2012-07-14)
"Mission One: The Job Is to Make Judgments about the Future. Mission Two: We Are the Interpreters of Foreign Cultures and Alien Problems. Mission Three: Our Job Is to Support Decisionmakers" ... "they are confused about what constitutes support. Supporting the policy- maker comes down to three related functions:
• Providing answers to specific questions, only some of which may be asked by the policymaker
• Providing a framework that allows the policymaker to un- derstand an issue and to process new information
• Where appropriate, to warn"
(
08:22 / 2012-07-14)
'The new analyst often has difficulty accepting the idea that we are less concerned about what actually happened than we are in determining the significance of the event for U.S. interests. Moreover, conditioned by college to search for “truth”—artistic and scientific—the new analyst is sometimes slow to believe that what people think is true is often more important than what is actually the fact.'
(
08:17 / 2012-07-14)
'About 15 years ago, I would have described myself as a scholar. Now, I’m a reporter. I’ve got 15 people trying to change my work into bullet points. Presumably, nobody has time to read anymore.' 'When I joined, it seemed that the word “analyst” was shorthand for “problem solver.” Now, it’s shorthand for “reporter.”'
(
06:21 / 2012-07-14)
"Our value-added is classified sourcing. Everybody has access to the Web and CNN." "All our customers are analysts these days. What we bring to the party is information no one else has."
(
05:58 / 2012-07-14)
'“Good” methods are simply those that survive, and then are passed on by “good” analysts to novice analysts. Unfortunately, “good” in both instances is not an objective measure. That is, there is no formal system for measuring and tracking the validity or reliability of analytic methods, because they are both perceived and employed within the context of idiosyncratic tradecraft.' Attempts to quantify the unquantifiable, like economists?
(
13:18 / 2012-07-13)
(1) I want my analysts to produce long-term products. I want them
thinking through their subjects. The decision makers want wellthought-out products, not just daily briefs.
(2) Our customers want current production. They never complain about
the daily products and, frankly, I doubt they have time to read the
longer stuff.
(3) My consumers like the bigger pieces. They like having the context
and broader picture. They don’t want to be spoon fed.
(4) I’ve never had a customer tell me they want more to read
(
12:42 / 2012-07-13)
It isn’t really official policy, but the reality is that sheer production
equals promotion. People talk about quality, but, in the end, the
only measurable thing is quantity.
(
12:41 / 2012-07-13)
After a while, sleep-deprived people more or less adjust to their new homeostasis, developing tolerance to the feelings of sleepiness that makes them unaware of their deteriorating alertness and performance. Accepting their new (suboptimal) normal, they compensate the negative effects by various drugs that include coffee and anti-depressors.
(
05:38 / 2012-07-11)
"The fastest foods are, apart from water followed by water-filled fruits, simple sugars followed by starch (carbohydrate), proteins and fats. Eating something that takes a long time to digest, followed by another food that would normally digest very quickly alone, forces the later to stay with the former to digest ... In such situations, the sugar and starch will ferment while protein putrefies, with inconveniences that range from uncomfortable feelings, tiredness, to serious diseases over the long-term"
(
15:02 / 2012-07-10)
"I practice such short intense workouts at random, when I feel like it. They last just a few minutes, but they essentially reboot my brain. After hours of intense concentration, there are times when you feel tired, or even exhausted. Actually, you are not and it is not rest that you need, because your body has not been really exercising. Your nervous system is tired, your body is clogged and your muscles and tendons are quenched by remaining in the same sedentary positions. You will acquire new energy and rejuvenate your system by these short intense workout sessions that I recommend strongly."
(
17:58 / 2012-07-06)
Didier Sornette wrote this after a lot of his other remarkable works. "I like particularly to perform about 50-100 sit-ups (you can start with 5 or 10 and then progressively scale up), being careful to have the full amplitude motion to work both on the back and on the abdominals. I perform variations with twisting to the right and to the left during the ascent. Again this is done with deep breathing synchronized with the motion. You will see your performance increase remarkable fast from day to day."
(
13:02 / 2012-07-06)
And in recognition of the Silk Road travelers whose journeys they depicted: Alexander of Macedon (356-323 BCE), Zhang Qian (fl. 140-125 BCE), Ban Chao (32-102), Faxian (337-422), Xuanzang (602-664), Benjamin of Tudela (fl. 1165-1173), Rabban Bar Sauma (1220-1294), Marco Polo (1254-1324), Ibn Battutach (1304-1369), Zheng He (1371-1435), Babur (1483-1531), Anthony Jenkinson (1529-1610), Aurel Stein (1862-1943).
(
17:56 / 2012-07-03)
Although interactive digital maps have become a widely used medium for communicating about history, no standards or guidelines have been developed for them, either for students or for professionals. I hope that this rubric will help initiate a conversation about digital map standards throughout the digital humanities community
(
17:55 / 2012-07-03)
Silk Road course using digital history methods. This class about the history of travel, exchange, and politics across Eurasia covered covers tens of thousands of miles of territory, many of the world’s religions, dozens of languages, and the entirety of human history from hominid migrations to contemporary conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan
(
17:54 / 2012-07-03)
1906--1909: "It is not generally known that the highlands of southern and western China, no less than the western and northern borders, contain power non-Chinese populations---some nomadic, others pastoral, but comparatively settled---who have never been conquered; indeed, all attempts to subdue them have resulted in disaster. Some dwell, as it were, in the Middle Ages, their conditions being purely feudal; others are clansmen, robbers, and rievers, like all highland peoples; others are still murdering barbarians, the descendants of the hordes that overran Europe and fell upon Rome, living the very life of those ancient hordes, save for the introduction of firearms. It was to visit these unknown peoples, reputed inaccessible and murders, that the D'Ollone Mission left France; to solve the problem of their origin and affiliations; to determine their route of entry were they invaders, and to examine the neighboring peoples for traces of their passage or for possible out-lying colonies; to discover whether they possess a literature, and to rectify the map of regions which had been charted only by the help of data supplied by Chinese travellers, &c. As the itinerary of the party lay out of the beaten track, so the narrative has the charm of the unfamiliar; its portraits of wily mandarins, mountain seigneurs, feudal castellans, Mongol wanderers, desert caravans, Buddhist monasteries, treacherous lamas, and last, but not least, the devoted missionaries of France, will linger long in the memory. Not the least interesting experience of Commandant D'Ollone was his visit to the Dalai-Lama."
(
15:38 / 2012-07-03)
The Chinese general Kuo Kan helped the Mongols very much in Persia. He then went to put down rebellions in Georgia. Then, his armies were crucial for the Mongol destruction in Syria and Iraq. Only recently, they found the grave of General Kuo Kan in Azerbaijan where his armies reportedly retired and settled
(
07:42 / 2012-07-02)
When Kublai Khan conquered China, he "kicked out" and sent away all the former army, government officials, tax collectors, engineers, scientists, artisans, musicians and court doctors of the defeated Chinese Sung Dynasty. All these Chinese were sent to Hulagu Khan's (Kublai's brother) court in Persia. Kublai didn't trust the native Chinese, so he eliminated the elite and sent them away to distant parts of the Mongol empire. In return, he transported many soldiers from Turkestan (Central Asia), tax collectors, scientists and government officials (from both Turkestan and Persia), Armenian and Jewish merchants all into China to serve his court.
(
07:41 / 2012-07-02)
Pirooz requested only a simple burial and the Chinese emperor approved. The entire exiled court was in attendance along with the Chinese emperor. The Chinese emperor held Peroz's shaking hands. Pirooz looked west and said: "I have done what I could for my homeland (Persia) and I have no regrets." Then, he looked east and said: "I am grateful to China, my new homeland." Then he looked at his immediate family and all the Persians in attendance and said: "Contribute your talents and devote it to the emperor. We are no longer Persians. We are now Chinese." Then, he died peacefully. A beautiful horse was made to gallop around his coffin 33 times before burial, because this was the number of military victories he had during his lifetime. Pirooz was a great Chinese general and great Persian prince devoted and loyal to his people.
(
07:39 / 2012-07-02)
"The same inputs will give the same results for indi-
vidual IEEE 754 operations to a given precision on the
CPU and GPU. As we have explained, there are many
reasons why the same sequence of operations may not be
performed on the CPU and GPU. The GPU has fused
multiply-add while the CPU does not. Parallelizing al-
gorithms may rearrange operations, yielding di erent
numeric results. The CPU may be computing results in
a precision higher than expected. Finally, many com-
mon mathematical functions are not required by the
IEEE 754 standard to be correctly rounded so should
not be expected to yield identical results between im-
plementations." (Example of the last: sin.)
(
12:38 / 2012-06-27)
"the nal values com-
puted using IEEE 754 arithmetic can depend on imple-
mentation choices such as whether to use fused multiply-
add or whether additions are organized in series or par-
allel. These di erences a ect computation on the CPU
and on the GPU.
One example of the di erences can arise from dif-
ferences between the number of concurrent threads in-
volved in a computation. On the GPU, a common de-
sign pattern is to have all threads in a block coordinate
to do a parallel reduction on data within the block,
followed by a serial reduction of the results from each block. Changing the number of threads per block reor-
ganizes the reduction; if the reduction is addition, then
the change rearranges parentheses in the long string of
additions"
(
12:36 / 2012-06-27)
Just like CUDA operations, SSE operations are
performed on single or double precision values, while
x87 operations often use an additional internal 80-bit
precision format. Sometimes the results of a computa-
tion using x87 can depend on whether an intermediate
result was allocated to a register or stored to memory.
Values stored to memory are rounded to the declared
precision (e.g. single precision for float and double
precision for double). Values kept in registers can re-
main in extended precision. Also, x87 instructions will
often be used by default for 32-bit compiles but SSE
instructions will be used by default for 64-bit compiles.
(
12:33 / 2012-06-27)
At the time this paper is written (Spring 2011)
there are no commercially available x86 CPUs which
o er hardware FMA. Because of this, the computed re-
sult in single precision in SSE would be 0. NVIDIA
GPUs with compute capability 2.0 do o er hardware
FMAs, so the result of executing this code will be the
more accurate one by default. However, both results are
correct according to the IEEE 754 standard.
(
12:19 / 2012-06-27)
"Ibn Fadlan was unique of all the sources," says Noonan. "He was there, and you can trace his exact path. He describes how the caravans traveled, how they would cross a river. He tells you about the flora and fauna along the way. He shows us exactly how the trade functions
(
12:43 / 2012-06-25)
The Arabs, for their part, were eager to have caps and coats made of black fox, the most valued of all the furs, according to al-Mas'udi. Al-Mukaddasi noted that from the Rus one could obtain furs of sable, Siberian squirrel, ermine, marten, weasel, mink, fox and colored hare.
Other wares traded by the Rus, as inventoried by several Muslim observers, included wax and birch bark, fish teeth, honey, goat skins and horse hides, falcons, acorns, hazelnuts, cattle, swords and armor. Amber, the reddish-gold fossilized tree resin found along the Baltic shoreline, was highly prized in the East and became a mainstay of Scandinavian trade. Also valued in the East were the slaves that the Rus captured from among the Eastern European peoples
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12:43 / 2012-06-25)
The amount of Islamic silver reaching the region increased dramatically in the 10th century, when vast silver deposits were discovered in the Hindu Kush. This enabled the Khurasan-based Samanid dynasty to mint large numbers of coins and to become, numismatic evidence shows, the main supplier of dirhams
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12:41 / 2012-06-25)
Hundreds of Viking Age graves and buried hoards, it turns out, contain caches of still-gleaming Arab dirhams, "the coin that helped fuel the Viking Age," according to Thomas S. Noonan of the University of Minnesota
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10:44 / 2012-06-25)
We would in fact know little about these Rus, these Norsemen in the East, were it not for Muslim chroniclers, Ibn Fadlan, whose ninth-century Risala (Letter) is the richest account of all, kept a journal that details his encounters with the Rus along the Volga, as well as with many other peoples. A century later, al-Tartushi, a merchant from Córdoba, described a Danish market town, passing down to us a rare glimpse of the Norsemen in their domestic setting. Other accounts, such as al-Mas'udi's Meadows of Gold, written in 943, and al-Mukaddasi's The Best Organization of Knowledge of the Regions, composed after 985, were briefer in their mentions of the Rus
(
10:44 / 2012-06-25)
One of the very surreal, pleasing, and unexpected things about Google Earth is how it lets you visualize terrain as it is without buildings blocking. (Looking at the mountains that are Hong Kong and Kowloon from above the strait between them.)
(
16:11 / 2012-06-23)
And the Bachmann maps make me wonder at the evolution of villages and towns into boroughs and neighborhoods.
(
11:13 / 2012-06-21)
The Salem village map makes me ask for a histogram of nearest-village-distances.
(
07:33 / 2012-06-21)
Loop Mountain in Pennsylvania epitomizes the ridiculousness of the Shenandoah and Appalachian terrain. Start at the Potomac in Old Town Alexandria and go right up King Street and you hit that chain. They look so unnatural.
(
06:43 / 2012-06-21)
I'm sad that it's so hard to see the course of rivers through forest in satellite imagery.
(
06:37 / 2012-06-21)
"In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns" (in the description of Guldi's /Roads to Power/)
(
14:05 / 2012-06-20)
I would love topo maps (hachures) also of pre-industrial Rome and Athens and London, etc., and of course the Bachmann-style maps of Afro/Eurasia.
(
11:19 / 2012-06-20)
Second chapter at http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~bcr/relg415_02/teachingswt_ch02.pdf (first at http://www.davidrumsey.com/gis/ch01.pdf). This is very interesting to me for a couple of reasons. In the map of Salem and surrounding villages by its households (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/maps/uphamla1.jpg), the distances between properties and villages is fascinating. The story itself is captivating: "it was unclear how the church, state, and judiciary would now relate to each other. In this period of political uncertainty, town conflicts and personal animosities were allowed to play themselves out unchecked."
(
11:06 / 2012-06-20)
scholars explain how they have used GIS technology to organize historical research in a geographical context, explore evidence in new ways, map past places and events, and challenge long-standing historical interpretations
(
11:03 / 2012-06-20)
And about the "borderline fabrications": while a description of Timur's conquests is not meaningful history, parliament's new taxes or discoveries like Pasteur do trigger changes that historians can meaningfully analyze.
(
07:51 / 2012-06-22)
in the natural world we don't find this sort of explanation controversial. When we hear that a raging forest fire has consumed millions of acres of California forest, we don't assume that there was anything special about the initial spark. Quite to the contrary, we understand that in context of the large-scale environmental conditions — prolonged drought, a buildup of flammable undergrowth, strong winds, rugged terrain, and on so — that truly drive fires, the nature of the spark itself is close to irrelevant.
Yet when it comes to the social equivalent of the forest fire, we do in effect insist that there must have been something special about the spark that started it. Because our experience tells us that leadership matters in small groups such as Army platoons or start-up companies, we assume that it matters in the same way for the very largest groups as well
(
07:35 / 2012-06-22)
Do social movements ever "succeed"? In that the changes they trigger are the ones sought? I suppose the temperance movement, the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and others are ones for me to ponder.
(
07:34 / 2012-06-22)
it says at least as much about what we want from our social movements as it does about the way movements actually succeed
(
07:31 / 2012-06-22)
In a celebrated essay on Tolstoy's War and Peace, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin summed up Tolstoy's central insight this way: "the higher the soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history." According to Tolstoy, in other words, the accounts of historians are borderline fabrications, glossing over the vast majority of what actually happens in favor of a convenient storyline focused on the skill and leadership of the great generals
(
07:29 / 2012-06-22)
I am uncomfortable with people triumphantly realizing (intellectual teenage rebellion) that "simple" bacteria rule the world because bacteria today have descended from the same common ancestor as humans and over just as long a timespan. Modern Enterobacteriaceae may appear to be more similar to that common ancestor than humans are, but I bet there's some metric, biochemical or fractal or something, by which the concestor--Enterobacteriaceae distance is just as large as concestor--human.
(
06:27 / 2012-06-22)
Another aspect of this complexity--simplicity question is that descendants can appear to lose features that is in fact available in their genotype. The primal lifestyle has much to say about letting your ancestral phenotype out via primal diet and fitness, as epitomized by the photo of the marathon runner and his body-building identical twin.
(
06:21 / 2012-06-22)
Gould's image of the left wall of complexity is very memorable. I will echo my friend Drew Benedetti who may have been channeling Dawkins: if organisms (from bacteria to Douglas firs to humans) are vehicles for genes to reproduce, then complex organisms like humans are bacteria's way of getting off-planet.
(
06:15 / 2012-06-22)
"bacteria, fern, dinosaurs, dog, man". Gould explains how these increasingly complex organisms are just one hand of the complexity distribution, and why looking only at them misses the entire picture—the "full house". He explains that by any measure, the most common organisms have always been, and still are, the bacteria. The complexity distribution is bounded at one side (a living organism cannot be much simpler than bacteria), so an unbiased random walk by evolution, sometimes going in the complexity direction and sometimes going towards simplicity (without having an intrinsic preference to either), will create a distribution with a small, but longer and longer tail at the high complexity end
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06:02 / 2012-06-22)
I am not sure than any of the world’s other language families provide data allowing even a tentative reconstruction of an ancestor language reaching as far back into the past as PIE. Readers interested in language prehistory might enjoy looking at the samples and discussion of the earliest reconstructable form of Chinese, in my book Love Songs of Early China. But, though on a world scale Old Chinese is a very “old” language, and it is strikingly different from any modern Chinese dialect, it is nowhere near as old as PIE
(
08:22 / 2012-06-11)
Schleicher argued that the two domains were closer to one another than one might suppose. He urged that languages should be seen as true living organisms alongside plants and animals, not just metaphorically but in sober reality. In the event this idea did not survive, but it was the kind of “honourable error” which can sometimes be more intellectually interesting than the writings of other scholars whose ideas are not original enough to get rejected
(
07:06 / 2012-06-11)
What was the earliest ancestor of English like?
(“Say something in Proto-Indo-European”)
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07:05 / 2012-06-11)
Mallory and Adams point out for instance that the PIE word for “nine” seems to derive from the word for “new”; they suggest that “nine” may originally have been called “the new number”, implying that having a name for such a big number ranked for PIE speakers as a whizzy technological breakthrough. (In English, the pronunciation of these two words has developed rather differently, but notice that in German neun and neu are closer, and in French neuf has both meanings.)
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06:58 / 2012-06-11)
More than a hundred years ago, Eduard Hermann argued that PIE may have had no complex sentences: all utterances would have been strings of simple clauses, with no clause subordination. Instead of saying things like “When he saw the stone he wanted, he shouted out”, PIE speakers might have said things more like “He saw a stone. He wanted that stone. Then he shouted out.”
In the closing decades of the 20th century, this and similar ideas were widely rejected, not so much because of factual evidence but for ideological reasons. Many linguists wanted to think of all human languages as equal. They disliked the suggestion that languages could be ranked as more or less evolved.
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06:58 / 2012-06-11)
This is a special case, because the mother language was already a written language associated with a high civilization: consequently, many of us spent years of our lives learning it at school. In other cases, the mother language was not a written language, and we do not know what its speakers called it (if indeed they had a clear concept of their language as a namable thing alongside other languages)
(
06:10 / 2012-06-11)
The texts in these lessons were selected for the historical and cultural information they provide; they have not been simplified, but sections may be omitted. Each lesson series comprises a number of glossed texts (usually ten), each with a brief introduction identifying its author and the document from which it was taken, an English translation, and five Grammar points; other resources in each series include a Table of Contents and a Series Introduction, a Master Glossary of words covering all lesson texts, a Base Form Dictionary also spanning the texts, and an English Meaning Index to the glosses. Listed in order of [first] online publication:
Latin Online [2002] is designed to teach you to read Latin, or to improve your reading knowledge. After completing the course, you should be able to read any Latin texts. You may find it easier to use texts with translations, such as the Loeb Classics.
Classical Greek Online [2002], likewise, is designed to teach you to read classical Greek texts or to improve your reading knowledge. New Testament Greek Online [2003] includes some of the central N.T. passages; it is designed like Greek Online.
Old Church Slavonic Online [2003] is written in the same format with the same goals in mind. Seven OCS texts are taken from the New Testament; two of these (lessons 6, 7) parallel texts in our New Testament Greek series. Three non-Biblical texts, from other sources, are included for literary variety. An annotated bibliography, rather than being included as lesson points 46-50 in lesson 10 as in the Latin/Greek series, is listed separately; see the link at the bottom of the OCS Series Introduction page.
Classical Armenian Online [2004] is a collection of 5 lessons, with texts dated from the 5th to 7th centuries A.D. Again, the annotated bibliography is separate; see the link at the bottom of the Armenian Series Introduction page.
Old Iranian Online [2004] is a 10-lesson series in which two related languages are covered: Avestan (lessons 1-6), with texts from the 10th - 6th centuries B.C., and Old Persian (7-10), with texts from the 6th - 5th centuries B.C. Each language has its own brief annotated bibliography. For Avestan, two dialects are covered: "old" (lessons 1-4) and "young[er]" (5-6). A short list of works for Further Reading also appears at the end of the Series Introduction.
Old Norse Online [2005] is a 10-lesson series, with texts from the 9th - 14th centuries A.D. A separate annotated bibliography is included (see link at bottom of Series Introduction page).
Baltic Online is a collection of 7 Lithuanian lessons [2005] covering texts from the 16th - 20th centuries A.D., plus an additional set of 3 Latvian lessons [2007] covering texts from the 16th - 19th centuries A.D.
Hittite Online [2005] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the 17th - 12th centuries B.C. A short bibliography appears at the end of the Series Introduction.
Ancient Sanskrit Online [2006] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the Rigveda, dating perhaps from the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. A separate tabular index to Rigvedic passages covered in the series is included (see link at bottom of Series Introduction page). After this series was completed, an online version of the full metrically restored Rigveda text was prepared; it is transcribed in Unicode.
Gothic Online [2006] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the Gothic New Testament and from Skeireins, together dated in the 4th - 5th centuries A.D. Half of these texts (lessons 1, 4, 6, 7, 10) parallel texts in our New Testament Greek series.
Old French Online [2006] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the 9th - 13th centuries A.D. Grammar points 46-50, in lesson 10, comprise a short bibliography.
Old Irish Online [2006-07] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the 6th - 10th centuries A.D.
Old English Online [2007] is a 10-lesson series with texts from the 7th - 10th centuries A.D.
Tocharian Online [2007-10] is a 10-lesson series with a separate annotated bibliography; Tocharian texts are dated in the 6th - 8th centuries A.D. We believe this to be the first introductory Tocharian grammar published in English.
Albanian Online [2011] is a collection of 3 Standard Albanian lessons covering texts from the 20th - 21st centuries A.D., plus an additional pair of Geg lessons covering texts from the 16th & 19th centuries A.D.
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06:40 / 2012-06-11)
3) Case insensitivity eliminates bugs due to 'miscased'
identifiers.
4) The lack of reserved words in the language gives the
programmer complete freedom to choose identifiers.
5) The one statement per line principle (of course
continuation lines are allowed with a special syntax)
makes programs more robust.
(
12:03 / 2012-05-30)
For example, in FORTRAN 77 the programmer can generally avoid
learning about pointers and memory addresses, while these are
essential in C. More generally, in FORTRAN 77 the difference
between (C notation) x, &x, and often even *x is basically
hidden, while in C it's exposed. Consequently, FORTRAN 77 is
a much simpler language for people who are not experts at
computer internals.
Because of this relative simplicity, for simple programming
tasks which fall within its domain, (say writing a simple
least-squares fitting routine), FORTRAN 77 generally requires
much less computer science knowledge of the programmer than
C does, and is thus much easier to use.
(
12:02 / 2012-05-30)
The new intrinsic functions allow very sophisticated array
manipulations.
The new array features are suitable for parallel processing.
(
11:59 / 2012-05-30)
o Builtin complex arithmetic (arithmetic involving complex
numbers represented as having real and imaginary components).
o Array index-ranges may start and end at an arbitrary integer,
the C convention of [0,N-1] is usually inconvenient.
(
11:59 / 2012-05-30)
1-2 COMPARISON OF FORTRAN AND C
********************************
(Thanks to Craig Burley for the excellent comments)
The world of computing sometimes adopts silly fashions, too often
good companies and products fell from grace, and lesser ones gained
the upper hand. Some new examples for the uselessness of quality
are the MS empire and Compaq buying Digital Equipment Corporation.
It seems that the fashion winds (in the US, in the UK it seems to
be different) blows now in the numerical computing world towards
C and C++. This strange trend is probably driven by people who
are not experienced numerical programmers.
(
11:52 / 2012-05-30)
Repeating this test with real-only arrays (no imaginary component to go reaching for), and seeing that the inner-product "inorm" is still 1.9--6.2x faster than the multiply-sum-based ones ("dnorm" or "snorm") makes me think that separated storage is less important than whatever SIMD magic BLAS is doing under the hood for that inner product.
treal = arrayfun2mat(@(N) vec2time(100*(randn(N,1))), [1e2 1e3 1e4 1e5 1e6 1e7]');
(
08:15 / 2012-05-29)
This conversion between Matlab-Fortran-Matlab complex array types is explicitly shown in Mwrap (which I have now successfully used!).
(
06:32 / 2012-05-27)
(These observations were made upon discovering that I couldn't pack a Matlab complex array into a C++/STL vector of type complex, not without memcpying. I wonder at the impact of the overhead packing/unpacking Matlab complex arrays into proper complex arrays when it comes to FFTW/LAPACK/etc. calls. I predict that Matlab will sometime migrate fully onto the JVM or C++, but I expect it even then to present us programmers with just as many obstacles to its full exploitation (including cost!) due at least in part to its closed nature.)
(
06:42 / 2012-05-24)
I believe this is explains why finding the length of a vector can take very different times: it might have to do with cache:
vnorm = @(x) sqrt(sum(abs(x.^2)));
dnorm = @(x) sqrt(dot(x,x));
snorm = @(x) sqrt(sum(conj(x).*x));
inorm = @(x) sqrt(x'*x);
vec2time = @(vec) cellfun2mat(@(fn) timeit(@() fn(vec)), {@norm, vnorm, dnorm, snorm, inorm});
t = arrayfun2mat(@(N) vec2time(100*(randn(N,1)+1j*randn(N,1))), [1e2 1e3 1e4 1e5 1e6 1e7]');
Then,
>> t/min(t(:))
ans =
2.2338 1.8605 2.6836 1.3369 1
2.4967 7.7018 4.2216 2.7488 1.1086
19.079 45.823 17.597 16.995 2.432
197.93 422.47 180.88 177.18 8.1796
1872.8 3899.8 1729 1726.1 279.67
19067 40718 17068 17376 2705.4
>> bsxfun(@times, t, 1./min(t,[],2))
ans =
2.2338 1.8605 2.6836 1.3369 1
2.2521 6.9475 3.8081 2.4796 1
7.845 18.842 7.2356 6.9881 1
24.198 51.649 22.113 21.661 1
6.6963 13.944 6.1823 6.1718 1
7.0477 15.051 6.3089 6.4227 1
(The second-to-last and third-to-last (penultimate and antepenultimate) columns show that the function-call and input checking overhead is minute. (The source code of =dot= is available, try =open dot=.) That the first (built-in =norm=) and these antepenultimate and penultimate columns are so similar suggests that =norm= effectively does a sum-of-conjugated-squares.)
*All* but the last column operate on the complex-valued argument element-wise, and therefore have to fetch the real and imaginary parts of an element from distant parts of memory. That the last column (using the inner product) is so much smaller than the rest might indicate that it has been optimized to *not* fetch both real and imaginary parts, but rather to separately operate on the entire real vector and the entire imaginary vector, before summing the results.
$(a+j b)'*(a+j b) = a^2 + b^2$ for real numbers $a$ and $b$, so =x' * x = a'*a + b'*b= where =x = a + 1j*b=. In other words, rather than each elemental operation involving fetching a real and an imaginary scalar from "pr" and "pi" respectively (per the documentation snippet), the simpler operation of "pr" separately from "pi" might make much better use of CPU cache by avoiding distant memory fetches.
(
06:22 / 2012-05-24)
MATLAB stores complex numbers differently than Fortran. MATLAB stores the real and imaginary parts of a complex number in separate, equal length vectors, pr and pi. Fortran stores the same complex number in one location with the real and imaginary parts interleaved
(
05:49 / 2012-05-24)
That and how good an ecosystem player is, i.e., if it can be called from R, Matlab, Python, C, etc., and if it can in turn call functions written in these.
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05:39 / 2012-05-24)
I know every single one of those terms and I want it. The only thing I'd want that's not listed here is a proper module system.
(
06:12 / 2012-05-23)
We never want to mention types when we don’t feel like it. But when we need polymorphic functions, we want to use generic programming to write an algorithm just once and apply it to an infinite lattice of types; we want to use multiple dispatch to efficiently pick the best method for all of a function’s arguments, from dozens of method definitions, providing common functionality across drastically different types. Despite all this power, we want the language to be simple and clean.
(
06:07 / 2012-05-23)
We want a language that’s open source, with a liberal license. We want the speed of C with the dynamism of Ruby. We want a language that’s homoiconic, with true macros like Lisp, but with obvious, familiar mathematical notation like Matlab. We want something as usable for general programming as Python, as easy for statistics as R, as natural for string processing as Perl, as powerful for linear algebra as Matlab, as good at gluing programs together as the shell. Something that is dirt simple to learn, yet keeps the most serious hackers happy. We want it interactive and we want it compiled.
(
06:06 / 2012-05-23)
It also helped the orthodox medical profession establish itself as such, since one way for any profession to gain recognition is to claim special status in tax law
(
06:52 / 2012-05-20)
Their promises to cure made them popular with people from every social class: short-sighted Queen Anne even knighted her quack tailor-cum-oculist William Read
(
12:19 / 2012-05-17)
Quacks with no formal training in medicine began to capture public imagination – and hope – from the 17th century onwards
(
12:19 / 2012-05-17)
The campaign to abolish the window tax also gave the emerging medical profession, which was seeking to establish itself as a respected professional body, a new role in fiscal policy
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12:02 / 2012-05-17)
“But, in fact, tax shapes so much of what we do. The way we live. Our behaviour and how we as a society interact. Every major revolution in the 19th century, the Boston Tea Party, the French Revolution, was caused by tax. Tax is absolutely there, when pretty much anything happens.
(
12:23 / 2012-04-29)
Not just the 19th century, taxation is a valuable prism to look at the last two millennia! I am not interested in historical politics, but geography and trade and taxation and philology. And miscegenation.
(
05:40 / 2012-04-24)
“But, in fact, tax shapes so much of what we do. The way we live. Our behaviour and how we as a society interact. Every major revolution in the 19th century, the Boston Tea Party, the French Revolution, was caused by tax. Tax is absolutely there, when pretty much anything happens.
(
05:34 / 2012-04-24)
Can't believe I didn't clip this yet. This is the map coverage and labeling and projection that captured my cartographic passion.
(
09:20 / 2012-05-19)
This map (available in both labeled and blank versions) provides an introduction to some of the most prominent physical features of the areas inhabited by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Major bodies of water include: the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea. Major rivers include: the Ebro, the Rhine, the Elbe, the Danube, the Dnepr, the Don, the Volga, the Ural, the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile. Major mountain ranges include: the Pyrenees, Alps, Carpathians, Taurus, Caucasus, Zagros and Atlas. Deserts include: Sahara, Libyan, Nubian, Syrian and the Rub al’ Khali (“ Empty Quarter ”). A different version of this map, with the major regions labeled, is listed separately as Europe, North Africa and West Asia: Regions.
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09:19 / 2012-05-19)
In the end, the audience blind taste test proved Soma correct: by a solid two-to-one margin, Brooklyn’s cookie eaters prefer fake cinnamon and artificial vanilla. I am bizarrely proud to say that I was in the minority that liked the taste of the “naturally” flavoured cookie more; I’d speculate that that’s not due to a particularly sophisticated palate, but rather because I grew up in cassia-free England and have never developed an American love for strong cinnamon flavours.
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06:52 / 2012-05-10)
Cassia has the benefits of being both cheaper and more potent (it actually contains more cinnamaldehyde, the essential oil that gives cinnamon its characteristic flavour, than its verum cousin), and has thus usurped true cinnamon’s flavour note in everything from Yankee Candles to Cinnabon. In Europe, however, only true cinnamon can be sold as cinnamon, and cassia must not only be labeled as such, but also accompanied with a health warning about the anti-coagulant effects of coumarin, one of the other flavour compounds it contains
(
06:50 / 2012-05-10)
A reduction of grape juice, boiled in lead pots to create lead acetate, defrutum consumption has superseded lead-lined viaducts as one of the leading factors in the Roman Empire’s decline, at least for some historians
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06:37 / 2012-05-10)
the sweet cream was perceived as being slightly sweeter when eaten from a copper or zinc spoon than a gold or stainless steel spoon, while the salty cream tasted saltier
(
06:22 / 2012-05-10)
If one Japanese asked another, "Are you tired?" the likely answer will be, "Not specially," or at most, "A little," but certainly not a forthright, "yes, I am." The social point of this kind of behavior in Japan is to appear undemanding, flexible, or non- egotistical, all of which are desirable qualities. Asked to make choices, such as, "Will you have black (coffee) or white?" or "Will you eat or bathe first?" good manner in Japan dictate that first response should be, "Either is fine." The questioner is then likely to follow up with, "Which do you prefer?" so that the respondent is forced to make a choice
(
13:32 / 2012-05-07)
The complicated system of speech levels makes it possible to show different degrees of respect or self-deprecation, and the choice of inappropriate levels can sound very offensive. It is even possible to be rudely over-polite. Verb ending vary and some common words, such as "go", "come", and "speak", have completely different forms according to the degree of being used and the location of their use. It is virtually impossible to have a conversation without making a decision about the appropriate level to use (Hendry, 2003)
(
13:28 / 2012-05-07)
Japanese is a sexist language, differentiating between male and female vocabulary, expressions, and accents. The male language is supposed to be coarse, crude, and aggressive, while the female language is expected to be soft, polite, and submissive. Even at the level of self-identification, the male expressions for "I", boku, ore, and washi, differ from their more formal and refined female counterparts, watashi and watakushi (Oatey, 2000)
(
13:27 / 2012-05-07)
in at least the following situations Japanese prefer to use Yamoto Kotoba: 1. When a Japanese yearns to embrace something with fond memories for him, he uses Yamoto Kotoba. In contrast when he brims with ambitious or masterful feelings, he uses borrowed words; 2. When the soul of a Japanese is touched directly at a time of inner serenity, he will use Yamoto Kotoba. But his use of borrowed words increases when he thinks intellectually, or distances himself from things; and 3. Yamoto Kotoba comprises the complete lexicon for poetry written in the traditional forms, but borrowed words are preferred in scholarly treaties
(
13:14 / 2012-05-07)
The basic structure of the Japanese language has remained almost unaffected by either Chinese or English. By sheer accident Chinese and English have become languages in which word order determines meaning ("The cat sees the mouse" or "The mouse sees the cat"), but Japanese has remained a strictly agglutinative language in which the concluding word, which is a verb or adjective, ties onto itself subsidiary elements that specify such things as tense, mood, politeness, and whether the sentence is causative, passive, negative, or a question. Chinese and English are structurally so alike that a person speaking in English words with Chinese word order can produce perfectly understandable Pidgin English. A similar combination of Japanese word order with either Chinese or English words would make only gibberish. For example, the simple verb kaku, "to write," can be expanded through agglutination into kakaserarenakattaraba, "If (he) had not been caused to write," or dozens of other forms that would defy direct translation into Chinese or English.
(
05:59 / 2012-05-07)
Thus the Japanese who excel in borrowing, adapting and, often, improving on what they borrow, are also skilled in keeping tabs on what is traditionally Japanese and what is not
(
07:34 / 2012-05-02)
I Was staying in an Altai Cossack village on the frontier of Mongolia when the war broke out, 1,200 versts south of the Siberian railway, a most verdant resting-place, with majestic fir forests, snow-crowned mountains range behind range, green and purple valleys deep in larkspur and monkshood. All the young men and women of the village were out on the grassy hills with scythes; the children gathered currants in the wood each day, old folks sat at home and sewed furs together, the pitch-boilers and charcoal-burners worked at their black fires with barrels and scoops, and athwart it all came the message of war.
At 4 A.m. on July 31st the first telegram came through, an order to mobilise and be prepared for active service. I was awakened that morning by an unusual commotion, and, going into the village street, saw the soldier population collected in groups, talking excitedly. My peasant hostess cried out to me, "Have you heard the news? There is war." A young man on a fine horse came galloping down the street, a great red flag hanging from his shoulders and flapping in the wind, and as he went he called out the news to each and every one, "War! War!"
Horses out, uniforms, swords! The village feldscher took his stand outside our one Government building, the volostnoe pravlenie, and began to examine horses. The Tsar had called on the Cossacks; they gave up their work without a regret and burned to fight the enemy.
Who was the enemy? Nobody knew. The telegram contained no indications. All the village population knew was that the same telegram had come as came ten years ago, when they were called to fight the Japanese. Rumours abounded. All the morning it was persisted that the yellow peril had matured, and that the war was with China. Russia had pushed too far into Mongolia, and China had declared war.
The village priest, who spoke Esperanto and claimed that he had never met anyone else in the world who spoke the language, came to me and said:
"What think you of Kaiser Wilhelm's picture?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Why, the yellow peril!"
Then a rumour went round, "It is with England, with England." So far away these people lived they did not know that our old hostility had vanished. Only after four days did something like the truth come to us, and then nobody believed it.
"An immense war," said a peasant to me. "Thirteen powers engaged — England, France, Russia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, Albania, against Germany, Austria, Italy, Roumania, Turkey."
Two days after the first telegram a second came, and this one called up every man between the ages of 18 and 43. Astonishing that Russia should at the very outset begin to mobilise its reservists 5,000 versts from the scene of hostilities!
Flying messengers arrived on horses, breathless and steaming, and delivered packets into the hands of the Ataman, the head-man of the Cossacks — the secret instructions. Fresh horses were at once given them, and they were off again within five minutes of their arrival in the village. The great red flag was mounted on an immense pine-pole at the end of our one street, and at night it was taken down and a large red lantern was hung in its place. At the entrance of every village such a flag flew by day, such a lantern by night.
The preparations for departure went on each day, and I spent much time watching the village vet. certifying or rejecting mounts. A horse that could not go fifty miles a day was not passed. Each Cossack brought his horse up, plucked its lips apart to show the teeth, explained marks on the horse's body, mounted it bareback and showed its paces. The examination was strict; the Cossacks had a thousand miles to go to get to the railway at Omsk. It was necessary to have strong horses.
On the Saturday night there was a melancholy service in the wooden village church. The priest, in a long sermon, looked back over the history of Holy Russia, dwelling chiefly on the occasion when Napoleon defiled the churches of "Old Mother Moscow," and was punished by God. "God is with us," said the priest. "Victory will be ours."
Sunday was a holiday, and no preparations were made that day. On Monday the examination of horses went on. The Cossacks brought also their uniforms, swords, hats, half-shubas, overcoats, shirts, boots, belts — all that they were supposed to provide in the way of kit, and the Ataman checked and certified each soldier's portion.
On Thursday, the day of setting out, there came a third telegram from St. Petersburg. The vodka-shop, which had been locked and sealed during the great temperance struggle which had been in progress in Russia, might be opened for one day only — the day of mobilisation. After that day, however, it was to be closed again and remain closed until further orders.
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08:35 / 2012-04-30)
They [Romans] deliberately choose as tax collectors men who are absolutely ruthless and savage, and give them the means of satisfying their greed. These people who are mischief-makers by nature, gain added immunity because of their "superior orders," obsequious in everything where their masters are concerned, leave undone no cruelty of any kind and recognize no equity or gentleness . . . as they collect the taxes they spread confusion and chaos everywhere. They exact money not only from people's property but also from their bodies by means of personal injuries, assault and completely unheard of forms of torture.
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07:43 / 2012-04-24)
Negative epithets commonly used of tax collectors by Greeks and Jews along with stories involving tax collectors appear in greater detail in the Jewish tradition. It is this tradition that helps to explain why tax collectors had such an "appalling reputation for extortion, rapacity and merciless hounding of their victims."39 Pollux (2nd century A.D.) in his Onomasticon collected a list of epithets that emphasizes the brutality, greed, and lack of any feelings of human mercy characteristic of private tax collectors that helps explain this negative tradition as something more than mere dislike associated with paying taxes
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07:42 / 2012-04-24)
Working for the hated Roman authorities explains some of the animus found in Christian and Jewish authors. Because Jesus admonishes the tax collector seeking baptism to "exact no more than your rate,"33 we can conclude that their evocation of universal hatred stems in part from demanding of taxpayers more than they actually owed.
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07:41 / 2012-04-24)
Jesus suggests the following: "If your brother does something wrong, go have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you: the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to sustain any charge. But if he refuses to listen to these report it to the community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a pagan or a tax collector."
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07:38 / 2012-04-24)
For the Romans, the struggle between the class of people who provided government services (the Equestrians) and those with the greatest political power (the Senatorial class) is really a history of the rise of the Roman Republic and its acquisition of an empire
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07:36 / 2012-04-24)
Lacking an extensive state bureaucracy, antiquity was reliant on private individuals for help in performing what we consider to be government functions, such as providing supplies necessary for the military or collecting revenue
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07:34 / 2012-04-24)
Franklin's pamphlet reveals a level of experience with private individuals who perform government functions and don't operate fully subject to the safeguards we presume that government provides (the norm in the premodern state)
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07:34 / 2012-04-24)
It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass.
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05:26 / 2012-04-21)
Related things appear in very early records; and they are found universally, wherever there is language. We are therefore obviously confronted with a variant of the problem that the archaeologist encounters, or the comparative philologist: with the debate between independent evolution (or rather invention) of the similar; inheritance from a common ancestry; and diffusion at various times from one or more centres. Most debates depend on an attempt (by one or both sides) at over-simplification; and I do not suppose that this debate is an exception. The history of fairy-stories is probably more complex than the physical history of the human race, and as complex as the history of human language. All three things: independent invention, inheritance, and diffusion, have evidently played their part in producing the intricate web of Story. It is now beyond all skill but that of the elves to unravel it. Of these three invention is the most important and fundamental, and so (not surprisingly) also the most mysterious. To an inventor, that is to a storymaker, the other two must in the end lead back. Diffusion (borrowing in space) whether of an artefact or a story, only refers the problem of origin elsewhere. At the centre of the supposed diffusion there is a place where once an inventor lived. Similarly with inheritance (borrowing in time): in this way we arrive at last only at an ancestral inventor. While if we believe that sometimes there occurred the independent striking out of similar ideas and themes or devices, we simply multiply the ancestral inventor but do not in that way the more clearly understand his gift.
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17:22 / 2012-04-19)
Of course, I do not deny, for I feel strongly, the fascination of the desire to unravel the intricately knotted and ramified history of the branches on the Tree of Tales. It is closely connected with the philologists' study of the tangled skein of Language, of which I know some small pieces. But even with regard to language it seems to me that the essential quality and aptitudes of a given language in a living monument is both more important to seize and far more difficult to make explicit than its linear history.
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17:04 / 2012-04-19)
Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.
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16:56 / 2012-04-19)
Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.
A real enthusiast for cricket is in the enchanted state: Secondary Belief. I, when I watch a match, am on the lower level. I can achieve (more or less) willing suspension of disbelief, when I am held there and supported by some other motive that will keep away boredom: for instance, a wild, heraldic, preference for dark blue rather than light. This suspension of disbelief may thus be a somewhat tired, shabby, or sentimental state of mind, and so lean to the “adult.” I fancy it is often the state of adults in the presence of a fairy-story. They are held there and supported by sentiment (memories of childhood, or notions of what childhood ought to be like); they think they ought to like the tale. But if they really liked it, for itself, they would not have to suspend disbelief: they would believe—in this sense.
Now if Lang had meant anything like this there might have been some truth in his words. It may be argued that it is easier to work the spell with children. Perhaps it is, though I am not sure of this. The appearance that it is so is often, I think, an adult illusion produced by children's humility, their lack of critical experience and vocabulary, and their voracity (proper to their rapid growth). They like or try to like what is given to them: if they do not like it, they cannot well express their dislike or give reasons for it (and so may conceal it); and they like a great mass of different things indiscriminately, without troubling to analyse the planes of their belief. In any case I doubt if this potion—the enchantment of the effective fairy-story— is really one of the kind that becomes “blunted” by use, less potent after repeated draughts.
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16:53 / 2012-04-19)
” ‘Is it true?’ is the great question children ask,” Lang said. They do ask that question, I know; and it is not one to be rashly or idly answered. But that question is hardly evidence of “unblunted belief,” or even of the desire for it. Most often it proceeds from the child's desire to know which kind of literature he is faced with. Children's knowledge of the world is often so small that they cannot judge, off-hand and without help, between the fantastic, the strange (that is rare or remote facts), the nonsensical, and the merely “grown-up” (that is ordinary things of their parents' world, much of which still remains unexplored). But they recognize the different classes, and may like all of them at times. Of course the borders between them are often fluctuating or confused; but that is not only true for children. We all know the differences in kind, but we are not always sure how to place anything that we hear. A child may well believe a report that there are ogres in the next county; many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country; and as for another planet, very few adults seem able to imagine it as peopled, if at all, by anything but monsters of iniquity.
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16:49 / 2012-04-19)
I had no special “wish to believe.” I wanted to know. Belief depended on the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or by the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of the tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in “real life.” Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded.
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16:48 / 2012-04-19)
But the land of Merlin and Arthur was better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable. I never imagined that the dragon was of the same order as the horse. And that was not solely because I saw horses daily, but never even the footprint of a worm. The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faerie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie. I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. (Footnote: This is, naturally, often enough what children mean when they ask: 'Is it true?' They mean: 'I like this, but is it contemporary? Am I safe in my bed?' The answer: 'There is certainly no dragon in England today,' is all that they want to hear.) But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril. The dweller in the quiet and fertile plains may hear of the tormented hills and the unharvested sea and long for them in his heart. For the heart is hard though the body be soft.
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16:46 / 2012-04-19)
For this precise reason—that the characters, and even the scenes, are in Drama not imagined but actually beheld—Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot), an art fundamentally different from narrative art. ... Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.
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16:39 / 2012-04-19)
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.
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16:32 / 2012-04-19)
Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.
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16:30 / 2012-04-19)
Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into “contact with real life.” He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not.
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16:09 / 2012-04-19)
In the preface to the Lilac Fairy Book he refers to the tales of tiresome contemporary authors: “they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple-blossom. . . . These fairies try to be funny and fail; or they try to preach and succeed.” But the business began, as I have said, long before the nineteenth century, and long ago achieved tiresomeness
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14:02 / 2012-03-29)
Willowbrook Hepatitis Study
In 1955, at an institution for mentally retarded children in Staten Island, New York, a study was initiated to determine the natural history of viral hepatitis and to test the effectiveness of gamma globulin as an agent for inoculating against hepatitis. Children were deliberately infected with a mild form of hepatitis.
The investigators defended the study by stating that most new children would become infected with hepatitis within their first 6-12 months at the institution. Although permission was obtained from parents, the parents were not fully informed of the possible hazards involved in the study. There is evidence that the parents were led to believe that the child would not be enrolled at the school unless the parents signed the consent form.
Ethical concerns: exploitation of a vulnerable group of subjects, withholding information about risks, coercion or undue pressure on parents to volunteer their children. [Munson]
Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Study
In 1963, live cancer cells were injected into senile patients without their knowledge as part of a study of immunity to cancer. Since the investigators believed that the cells would be rejected, the researchers did not inform the patients or seek consent because they did not want to frighten them.
Ethical concerns: lack of informed consent, use of a vulnerable group of subjects. [Levine]
San Antonio Contraception Study
In San Antonio, Texas, a number of Mexican-American women participated in a 1971 study to determine side effects of an oral contraceptive. The women came to a clinic seeking contraceptives. Unbeknownst to them, the study was designed so that half the women would receive oral contraceptives for the first half of the study, then switched to placebo. The women initially receiving placebo were placed on the oral contraceptive for the second half of the study. Ten of the 76 subjects became pregnant while using placebo.
Ethical concerns: lack of informed consent, use of a vulnerable group of subjects, risks to subjects outweighed benefits. [Levine]
Tea Room Trade Study
The study planned first to obtain information about homosexual practices in public restrooms and then to conduct further investigation on the men who took part in the acts. The researcher went undercover and gained the confidence of the men by acting as a "look out." The researcher identified 100 active subjects by tracing their car license numbers. A year after he completed the initial study of direct observation of homosexual acts the researcher distributed a "social health survey" throughout the communities where he knew the subjects lived.
Ethical concerns: use of a vulnerable population, reinforced image that social scientists use deception casually in research, lack of informed consent. [Warwick]
Obedience to Authority Study (Milgram Study)
The purpose of this study was to determine response to authority in normal humans. The researchers told recruited volunteers that the purpose was to study learning and memory. Each subject was told to teach a "student" and to punish the students' errors by administering increasing levels of electric shocks.The "student" was a confederate of the researcher who pretended to be a poor learner and mimicked pain (no real shocks were administered by the subjects) and even unconsciousness as the subject increased the levels of electric shock. The investigator told subjects who asked to withdraw from the research that the subject had to complete the experiment and continue to administer the shock. Sixty-three percent (63%) of the subjects administered lethal shocks; some even after the "student" claimed to have heart disease. Milgram debriefed subjects and reported that many believed the experience to be positive. However, Milgram also noted that many subjects were profoundly disturbed by their capacity to inflict harm.
Ethical concerns: The Milgram study raises ethical issues based on deception, undue influence, and debriefing. There is controversy over whether Milgram's work was unethical. Although not the standard at the time, an independent review and approval would probably have lessened the criticism that Milgram's work faced.
The Public Health Service (PHS) Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (1932-1972)
Initiated by the Public Health Service, this study was designed to document the natural history of syphilis in African-American men.
At the time the study began there was no known treatment for syphilis. Hundreds of men with syphilis and hundreds of men without syphilis (serving as controls)
were enrolled into the study. The men were recruited without truly informed consent. They were deliberately misinformed about the need for some of the procedures. For example , spinal taps were described as necessary and special "free treatment."
Even after penicillin was found to be a safe and effective treatment for syphilis in the 1940s, the men were denied antibiotics. The study continued to track these men until 1972 when the first public accounts of the study appeared in the national press. The study resulted in 28 deaths, 100 cases of disability, and 19 cases of congenital syphilis. [Levine]
Ethical concerns: lack of informed consent, deception, withholding information, withholding available treatment, putting men and their families at risk, exploitation of a vulnerable group of subjects who would not benefit from participation.
(
06:06 / 2012-04-20)
The contrast between this page's presentation of the Anglo-Saxon invasions versus the Danish, then Norman, invasions might be for facetious reasons.
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10:14 / 2012-04-19)
The first factor that tended to make English change rapidly is the arrival in England, over a period of a couple of hundred years from the 850s onwards, of a fairly large number of people who spoke Old Norse, and the arrival over a period of another couple of hundred years of a bunch of people who spoke Old French. This wouldn't have made much of a difference if these people had simply assimilated to the English-speaking population, but they didn't, they maintained their own languages and probably even insisted on them
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10:13 / 2012-04-19)
The germanic migrants displaced, enslaved, or mingled with the previous celtic inhabitants of the island and their language became the socially dominant tongue except in Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland. The descendants of the germanic migrants referred to their ancestors as Angles and Saxons
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10:12 / 2012-04-19)
In contrast, Icelandic, a language quite similar to Old English in many ways, has undergone very little change, so that Icelandic children read the Viking sagas in school without need for much adaptation or special apparatus such as glossing
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07:33 / 2012-04-19)
If you have no curiosity about the past, no interest in language, no taste for experiencing cultures that are different from your own, and if you find stretching your mind to meet new challenges unpleasant, then you will almost certainly be unhappy with this course
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07:31 / 2012-04-19)
In the area of colour perception, Athanasopoulos (2001) showed that Greek L2 users of English had a different perception of the colour 'blue' from monolinguals; Athanasopoulos, Sasaki and Cook (2004) claimed that Japanese L2 users of English distinguished between two ‘blue’ and two ‘green’ colours differently from monolingual native speakers
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08:54 / 2012-04-18)
the core concept is the L2 user – ‘any person who uses another language than his or her first language (L1), that is to say, the one learnt first as a child’ (Cook, 2002, p. 1). L2 users can be airline pilots communicating with the control tower in an L2, opera singers singing in another language, reporters for CNN, children translating for their parents in medical consultations, Samuel Beckett writing in French, refugees in camps, diplomats in embassies… In other words they are as diverse as any other arbitrary collection of human beings and probably outnumber the monolingual native speakers of the world
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08:44 / 2012-04-18)
the day of the native speaker teacher may be over; the NS teacher is not a good model of an L2 user who has got there by the same route that the students will take and ceteri paribus does not have the appropriate experience or insight into the students’ situation; ‘in the new rapidly emerging climate native speakers may be identified as part of the problem rather than the source of a solution’ (Graddol, 2006, p.114)
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08:43 / 2012-04-18)
For languages like English and French, however, the need is often to speak to fellow L2 users: English is a useful lingua franca for much of the globe
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08:38 / 2012-04-18)
The crucial point is basing the target on what learners are going to be, L2 users, not on what they can never be, monolingual native speakers of the L2. L2 users have distinctive uses for language such as translating and code-switching: they can do more with language than any monolingual. While some L2 users may need to speak to native speakers of the L2, they rarely need to pass as natives, even though this may still be a personal goal for many
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08:38 / 2012-04-18)
The traditional view of language teaching going back to the late 19th century had insisted that the L2 was learnt in isolation from the L1: the model was always of complete separation. Hence, despite their other differences, teaching methods from the Direct Method to the audiolingual method to task-based learning were united in ignoring the first language already present in all the learners’ minds invisibly in the classroom.
Yet, despite the official advice from the authorities to minimise L1 use, teachers continued to make use of it while teaching, while harbouring feelings of guilt
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08:37 / 2012-04-18)
So what happens if someone speaks two languages or has two cultures? Perhaps the thinking style is so engrained in their minds that they continue to use the same style after acquiring a second language. Perhaps they switch, thinking in one style or another depending on situation. Or perhaps they have some merged intermediate style that is neither the first nor the second but something in between – an ‘intercognition’ if you like. Raising this question has led to a new wave of research comparing the thought processes of L2 users and monolinguals. As well as contributing to SLA research, this may also provide a way of tackling the culture versus language divide by seeing whether a change of language without a cultural change leads to a change of thinking
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08:36 / 2012-04-18)
it became clear that the L1 in the mind of an L2 user was by no means the same as the L1 in the mind of a monolingual native speaker. Though it is hard to make value judgements, many of the changes were to the benefit of the L2 user, such as helping L1 reading development (Yelland et al, 1993), raising the standards of L1 essays (Kecskes & Papp, 2000) and increasing creativity (Lambert, Tucker & d'Anglejan, 1973)
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08:34 / 2012-04-18)
So the term ‘L2 user’ often became preferred to ‘L2 learner’ since it allows the person to achieve a final state rather than to be a perpetual ‘learner’ always on the way to native speaker status but doomed never to get there
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07:50 / 2012-04-18)
Cook (1999) asked why, if the L2 user’s interlanguage is independent, it should be measured against the native speaker? In second language acquisition research it was common to speak about the learner as a failure for not being like a native speaker
(
07:50 / 2012-04-18)
Category I (“World Languages”): Languages closely cognate with English:
Afrikaans (23 weeks)
Danish (23 weeks)
Dutch (23 weeks)
French (24 weeks)
Italian (24 weeks)
Norwegian (23 weeks)
*Portuguese (24 weeks)
*Romanian (23 weeks)
Spanish (24 weeks)
Swedish (23 weeks)
Category II (“Hard Languages”): Languages with significant linguistic and/or
cultural differences from English. This list is not exhaustive:
Albanian
Amharic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Belarussian
Croatian
Czech
*Estonian
*Finnish
*Georgian
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
*Hungarian
Icelandic
Kazakh
*Khmer
Kurdish
Kyrgyz
*Lao
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malayalam
*Mongolian
Nepali
Pashto
Persian (Dari, Farsi,Tajiki)
Polish
Russian
Serbian
*Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Tagalog
*Tamil
*Thai
Turkish
Turkmen
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
*Vietnamese
Xhosa
Zulu
Category III (“Superhard Languages”): Languages that are exceptionally difficult
for native English speakers:
Arabic
Cantonese
Mandarin Chinese
Japanese
*Korean
Other languages:
German (30 weeks)
Indonesian (36 weeks)
Malay (36 weeks)
Swahili (36 weeks)
Tetum (36 weeks)
* Language names preceded by asterisks are typically somewhat more difficult for
native English speakers to learn to read and speak than others within the same
category
(
10:20 / 2012-04-17)
The Foreign Service Institute characterizes languages into three general categories:
• “World”: generally the Western European languages that are closely related to English, e.g., French, German, Portuguese, Swedish;
• “Hard”: languages more distant from English, e.g., Albanian, Finnish, Hindi, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese; and
• “Superhard”: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
In summary, full-length world language Basic courses are 23 or 24 weeks long (German is 30 weeks) ... “Hard” language courses are 44 weeks ... Full “superhard” language courses with an S-3/R-3 goal are 88 weeks, with the second year usually taken at an FSI overseas school.
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10:15 / 2012-04-17)
"Full-time advanced language training in superhard languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean) is offered at FSI field schools"
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10:11 / 2012-04-17)
changing world demographic/ economic/ ecological circumstances suddenly - and for most people including Adam Smith unexpectedly - made a number of related investments economically rational and profitable: in machinery and processes that saved labor input per unit of output, thus increasing the productivity and use of labor and its total output; increasing productive power generation; and increasingly productive employment and productivity of capital. This transformation of the productive process was initially concentrated in selected industrial, agricultural, and service sectors in those parts of the world economy whose comparative competitive POSITION made -- and then continually re-made -- such Newly Industrializing Economies [NIE] import substituting and export promoting measures economically rational and politically possible
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20:16 / 2012-04-15)
Europeans collectively and its entrepreneurs individually had to attempt to increase their penetration of at least some markets, and to do so either by eliminating competition politically/militarily or by undercutting it by lowering its own costs of production, or both.
Opportunity to do so knocked when the "Decline" began in India and West Asia, if not yet in China
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20:09 / 2012-04-15)
Microeconomic analysis of world-wide supply-and-demand relations and relative economic and ecological factor prices can show how they generated incentives for labor and capital saving and energy producing invention, investment and innovation, which took place in Europe
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19:13 / 2012-04-15)
all these real goods that were produced by non-Europeans became cheaply, indeed nearly freely, available to Europeans; because they had and were able to pay for them with their American supplied money. Indeed, this silver - also produced by non-Europeans - was the only export good that the Europeans were able to bring to the world market.
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13:56 / 2012-04-15)
Politically, the expansion was manifested and/or managed by the flourishing Chinese Ming/Qing, Japanese Tokugawa, Indian Mughal, Persian Safavid, and Turkish Ottoman regimes
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13:50 / 2012-04-15)
1500 was not a significant date for most of the world's population and for the dynamic of the world economy based in Asia. Its new 'departure' if any was around 1000 AD in Song China, and again in 1400 when another world economic expansion began in East, Southeast, South, West and Central Asia
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13:49 / 2012-04-15)
It was the renewed economic expansion that started in East, Southeast and South Asia in 1400 and reached Europe by 1450 which attracted Columbus and Vasco da Gama in 1492 and 1498
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13:46 / 2012-04-15)
"I think nothing but mythology prevents our realizing quite how little the development of the intellect need have had to do with that of technology during all but the most recent stage of human history" (cited in Adams 1996:56-57). All serious inquiries into the matter show that this "stage" did not begin until the second half of the nineteenth century and really not until after 1870, that is a full two centuries after the beginnings of the industrial revolution itself. More recently, Shapin (1996:140) concludes that "it now appears unlikely that the 'high theory' of the Scientific Revolution had any substantial direct effect on economically useful technology in either the seventeenth century or the eighteenth." Also Robert Adams (1996) reviews any and all relations between technology and science, including the "seventeenth century scientific revolution" and finds on at least a dozen occasions (ibid: 56, 60, 62, 65, 67, 72, 98, 101, 103, 131, 137, 256) that scientists and their science made NO significant visible contribution to new technology before the late nineteenth century.
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13:40 / 2012-04-15)
the development of technology, like all economic development, was a world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy/system itself
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13:28 / 2012-04-15)
this competitiveness in manufacturing also rested on productivity on the land and in transport and commerce. They supplied the inputs necessary to supply raw materials to industry, food to workers, and transport and trade for both, as well as for export and import
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10:46 / 2012-04-15)
this competitiveness in manufacturing also rested on productivity on the land and in transport and commerce. They supplied the inputs necessary to supply raw materials to industry, food to workers, and transport and trade for both, as well as for export and import
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10:46 / 2012-04-15)
The two major regions that generated and export surplus and were most "central" to the world economy were India and China
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10:46 / 2012-04-15)
In the structure of the world economy, four major regions maintained built-in deficits of commodity trade: The Americas, Japan, Africa and Europe
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10:45 / 2012-04-15)
Janet Abu- Lughod (1989) outlined a "thirteenth century world system" with some "regional" patterns, which persist in the world economy through the eighteenth century. She identified three major - and within each of these some minor - regions, in eight mutually overlapping regional ellipses that covered Afro-Eurasia in her account of the world economy. These included regions centered - going from west to east - on Europe, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, as well as Inner Asia. All of these regions continued to play more or less major, but not equal, roles in the world economic division of labor and system of "international" trade, despite the addition of an Atlantic ellipse in the sixteenth century
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10:25 / 2012-04-15)
That is, most received economic and other history not only neglect and/or distort especially the Asian parts of real world [economic] history. Nor does it only fail in its total disregard of the whole world economy, which is more than the sum of its Asian, African, American, and European parts. Perhaps even more significant is that thereby Eurocentric history and social theory cannot even account for or explain the fundamentals of European and Western [economic] history itself. For it neglects even to inquire into how the structure, dynamic, and transformation of the world economy also shaped the [economic] history of Europe and the West itself - and quite fundamentally so, as it appears if we only trouble to look.
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09:47 / 2012-04-10)
"three regions and their people remained in close and uninterrupted contact throughout the classical era" since 1500 BC
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12:54 / 2012-04-09)
Marxists may claim to devote more attention to how the economic "infrastructure" shapes society; but they show no awareness of how one "society" is shaped by its relations with another "society" and still less of how all societies were shaped by their common participation in a single world economy
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07:52 / 2012-04-09)
Thus, White Jr. (1962), Hall (1985) or Baechler, Hall and Mann (1988) find the rest of the world deficient or defective in some crucial historical, economic, social, political, ideological, or cultural respect in comparison to the West. The claim is that presence in "The West" of what was allegedly lacking in "The Rest" gave "us" an initial internal developmental advantage
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07:39 / 2012-04-09)
Marx preferred to follow Montesquieu and the Philosophes like Roussseau and also James Mill, who had instead "discovered" "despotism" as the "natural" condition and "model of government" in Asia and of "The Orient." Marx also remarked on "the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia." He also attributed to them and to the Ottomans, Persia and China, indeed to the whole "Orient." In all of these, Marx alleged the existence of an age-old "Asiatic Mode of Production." He alleged that in all of Asia the forces of production remained stagnant and stationary until the incursion of "The West" and "capitalism" woke it of its otherwise eternal slumber.
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05:47 / 2012-04-09)
Adam Smith also recognized Asia as being economically far more advanced and richer than Europe in still in 1776.
"The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China.... Even those three countries [China, Egypt and Indostan], the wealthiest, according to all accounts, that ever were in the world, are chiefly renowned for their superiority in agriculture and manufactures.... China is a much richer country than any part of Europe" (Smith 1937: 20,348,169).
Already by the mid-nineteenth century, European views of Asia and China in particular had drastically changed. Dawson (1967) documents and analyzes this change under the revealing title The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization. Europeans changed from regarding China as "an example and model" to calling the Chinese "a people of eternal standstill." Why this rather abrupt change?
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05:42 / 2012-04-09)
I am also reminded of Asma: 'As a prescientific way of thinking, folk religion is not /opposed/ to science but rather is a primordial version of it' (/The Gods Drink Whiskey/, 2006). Replace "folk religion" there with inventors' storification of exploitable natural phenomena.
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20:02 / 2012-04-15)
Kuhn might be underestimating the importance of stories, i.e., completely unscientific explanations of natural phenomena that aids inventors.
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19:00 / 2012-04-15)
"Francis Bacon enumerated a triumvirate of great medieval inventions--the compass, gunpowder, and printing--as a crucial source of the special character of his own time... It ought not, I think, occasion surprise that, until the last century or two, the factors which have promoted the development and spread of ideas, and thus of science, have done little or nothing to advance technology. Francis Bacon invoked the great medieval inventions in order to deplore the fact that learning had played no part in their creation. That invocation was part of his call for a new, more useful, more powerful science. Two centuries later, however, the men who wrote on the science of the steam engine were repeating Bacon's lament. Was it not deplorable that these vastly important machines had been invented and improved by untutored craftsmen with little or no understanding of what they were doing? Perhaps we should not trust the scientist's evaluation of the crafts. Perhaps the men responsible for the development and dispersion of innovation in agriculture, metallurgy, and the chemical crafts did possess a developing system of general ideas which guided their work, ideas which were unrecognized by the scientist because they seemed so strange. But if technology possessed such an idea system, it has left no trace in written records or elsewhere. Once discovered, a process in which change may have played an overwhelming role, technological innovations were embodied in artifact and local practice, preserved and transmitted by precept and example. Migration and industrial espionage, not manuscripts or printed books, were the determinants of both the rate and route of diffusion. Though I freely admit exceptions, I think nothing but mythology prevents our realizing quite how little the development of the intellect need have had to do with that of technology during all but the most recent stage of human history."
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18:51 / 2012-04-15)
Comment
Thomas S. Kuhn
Possessing little knowledge or competence in either demography or economics, I am in no position to comment on the central portion of Professor Dovring's paper. Fortunately, I feel no call to do so, for I very much doubt that it can be faulted. No refinement of data or analysis is likely to set aside his basic conclusions. If the time intervals analyzed are made long enough to eliminate local fluctuations, accelerated rather than linear growth, whether of population or productive capacity, has characterized man's life on earth since at least the conquest of fire. Only historical myopia can account for the view that an increasing tempo of change dates only from the Industrial Revolution, that our current condition is, with respect to the existence of acceleration, essentially new
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18:41 / 2012-04-15)
This perception of history as a human interaction was not only to be seen on a synchronic level, but also in a diachronic way. There you would become aware that what we call culture of our present times consists of many layers. One good illustration of this sentiment was becoming aware of the fact that a particular site was considered to be auspicious by people who had chosen this site at different times for their Zoroastrian, Manicheistic, Buddhistic, and/or Muslim saints. Such a moment is a realization of the divisive nature of our disciplines, because when you learn about such a site from written academic material, the information is divided between religious studies, between different languages, and the books would not only be on different shelves but also in different libraries, and sometimes even in different countries. Well prepared guidebooks for tourists are an exception, yet even such guidebooks cannot convey to you the colors, the aroma, or the tune of the region.
Another good example of our outlook would be given by the plant athemisia, which is woodworm in English. In the steppe regions of Asia it has a different name in each language (erim, jusan, yavshan, polin, haozi). In each culture there are stories or songs about this plant, which is in general associated with the smell of the homeland. Varieties of the same plant also are used for treatment in Chinese medicine (moxa), in the culinary art to give special flavor (tarragon), or in alcoholic drinks (vermouth and absinthe).
If we learn about this plant from academic sources, we learn about it in relation to a specific use and do not think about it any further. However, for the peoples of the steppe regions (also for the Bedouin in the North African desert), it is a symbol of the open country which is their homeland. Although this plant is very important for the people concerned, we do not learn about its existence or its importance for the people from the written historical material. This is because the material is mostly written by members of sedentary cultures rather than steppe people, and also because the aroma of a region is not an academic issue.
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05:35 / 2012-04-10)
From a present-day perspective, nearly all the experimental results discussed above seem to have been artifacts. Inquiry into the effects of alcohol on reproduction involved new skills in breeding, pharmacology, and behavior analysis. No one involved in these studies had adequately mastered any of these skills, much less all of them. The inhalation method gave to the animals doses that were only minimally replicable; in most cases the animals were not genetically standardized, and breeding protocols were ad hoc; and, most essential for a multigenerational study of health, conditions of care varied significantly over time... Recognizing the existence of these problems should not, however, lead us to dismiss the experiments as empty vessels into which biased scientists poured their preconceptions. ... This paper has sought to show that biologists' beliefs about alcohol and reproduction changed significantly from 1910 to 1930 as a consequence of a definite sequence of experimental and political transformations, and that a very singular outcome resulted. Understanding these processes - in particular, the path that led to Hanson's liquidation of the problem - is crucial to appreciating the strength and longevity of the consensus that alcohol was reproductively innocuous
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08:34 / 2012-04-02)
In American Prohibition (late 1910s, early 1920s), "Scientists working on alcohol and reproduction were in a position similar to that of the distillers and brewers: they could either start fresh in a new enterprise, or do what they could to extract residual value from their depreciated assets"
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07:50 / 2012-04-02)
How Did the Effects of Alcohol on Reproduction Become Scientifically Uninteresting?
Philip J. Pauly
Journal of the History of Biology
Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1-28
Published by: Springer
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4331376
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07:48 / 2012-04-02)
(I mention Joel Salatin thinking of Taleb on the mistaken notions about the arrow between theory and practice.)
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14:17 / 2012-04-01)
None of the approaches in this paper, or a couple of its cited works that I read, questioned the usefulness of academics, scientists (natural or social), or politicians in the pursuit of the public good. People like Joel Salatin don't seem to figure in the academic vocabulary (except as marginal demagogues, perhaps).
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11:30 / 2012-04-01)
'Sarewitz contends that when we face significant political disagreements, there will generally be enough complexity in the available scientific evidence that different political groups can interpret the available information in ways that serve their interests. Thus, Sarewitz argues that we would do well to focus more on having productive debates about values and less on trying to obtain decisive forms of knowledge. Nevertheless, while it is important to be reminded that knowledge is not always helpful, there are certainly many cases in which it is helpful. Moreover, even if scholars like Sarewitz are correct that we should be paying more attention to disputes about values, our values do not exist in a vacuum; they are influenced by our scientific understanding of the world and of ourselves (Lacey 1999). Thus, by collecting some forms of knowledge and not others (and making some forms of knowledge salient to powerful decision makers rather than others), we can either consciously or unconsciously advance some political interests and value orientations rather than others'
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11:18 / 2012-04-01)
I found this when looking for ways ignorance of agriculture hamstrings historians and archaeologists.
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06:40 / 2012-03-31)
Scholars working in science and technology studies (STS) have recently argued that we could learn much about the nature of scientific knowledge by paying closer attention to scientific ignorance. Building on the work of Robert Proctor, this paper shows how ignorance can stem from a wide range of selective research choices that incline researchers toward partial, limited understandings of complex phenomena. A recent report produced by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) serves as the paper’s central case study. After arguing that the forms of selective ignorance illustrated in cases like this one are both socially important and difficult to address, I suggest several strategies for responding to them in a socially responsible manner.
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06:39 / 2012-03-31)
This reminds me 100% of Taleb's observation that every idea modern academics trot out was more completely and more aesthetically studied by the ancients. This is the same problem that Pyrrhonian skeptics.
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06:40 / 2012-04-01)
This paper thus confronts a well-known empirical prob- lem. In areas as diverse as climate change, nuclear waste disposal, endangered species and biodiversity, forest man- agement, air and water pollution, and agricultural biotech- nology, the growth of considerable bodies of scientific knowledge, created especially to resolve political dispute and enable effective decision making, has often been ac- companied instead by growing political controversy and gridlock. Science typically lies at the center of the debate, where those who advocate some line of action are likely to claim a scientific justification for their position, while those opposing the action will either invoke scientific uncertainty or competing scientific results to support their opposition.1
A significant body of literature both documents and seeks to understand this dynamic (see, e.g., the admirable synthe- sis by Jasanoff and Wynne, 1998). This literature is char- acterized, for example, by the understanding that scientific facts cannot overcome, and may reinforce, value disputes and competing interests (e.g., Nelkin, 1975; Nelkin, 1979; Collingridge and Reeve, 1986), that scientific knowledge is not independent of political context but is co-produced by scientists and the society within which they are embedded (e.g., Jasanoff, 1996a), that different stakeholders in envi- ronmental problems possess different bodies of contextu- ally validated knowledge(e.g., Wynne, 1989), and that the boundaries between science and policy or politics are con- stantly being renegotiated as part of the political process (e.g., Jasanoff, 1987; Jasanoff, 1990).
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06:38 / 2012-04-01)
So Lomborg and his critics share the old-fashioned idea that scientific facts build the appropriate foundation for knowing how to act in the world. How, then, are we to understand the radical divergence of the supposedly science-based views held by opposing sides in the contro- versy?
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06:36 / 2012-04-01)
1 List of Volumes
1.1 Volume I: Prolegomena, Egypt, Mesopotamia
1.2 Volume II: Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, minor nations of Western Asia
1.3 Volume III: Greece to the Peloponnesian war
1.4 Volume IV: Greece to the Roman conquest
1.5 Volume V: The Roman Republic
1.6 Volume VI: The early Roman empire
1.7 Volume VII: The later Roman Empire
1.8 Volume VIII: Parthians, Sassanids, and Arabs, the Crusades and the Papacy
1.9 Volume IX: Italy
1.10 Volume X: Spain and Portugal
1.11 Volume XI: France, 843-1715
1.12 Volume XII: France, 1715-1815
1.13 Volume XIII: France, 1815-1904; Netherlands
1.14 Volume XIV: The Netherlands (concluded), the Germanic empires
1.15 Volume XV: Germanic empires (concluded)
1.15.1 Austria-Hungary (concluded)
1.15.2 The History of Modern Germany
1.16 Volume XVI: Scandinavia, Switzerland to 1715
1.17 Volume XVII: Switzerland (concluded), Russia and Poland
1.18 Volume XVIII: England to 1485
1.19 Volume XIX England, 1485-1642
1.20 Volume XX: England, 1642-1791
1.21 Volume XXI: Scotland, Ireland, England since 1792
1.22 Volume XXII: The British colonies, the United States (early colonial period)
1.23 Volume XXII supplement: Australia and New Zealand
1.24 Volume XXIII: The United States (concluded), Spanish America
1.25 Volume XXIV: Poland, the Balkans, Turkey, minor Eastern states, China, Japan
1.26 Volume XXV: Index
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05:52 / 2012-03-31)
, or browse the InstAldebrn code repository.
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