Blocked on Twitter by ....

4. N.N. Taleb - For this tweet. Taleb had tweeted "I myself came to America because of its properties. Preserving them is my duty." My response was:

"I myself came to America because of its properties. Preserving them is my duty." -- i.e., openness to immigration :)

3. C. Christine Fair - for pointing out to her that Sikh dharma is in the "omkaar karma punarjanma" school (and not particularly Islamic).

2. Sadananda Dhume - I don't remember exactly why, but he was stupid and I was rude.

1. Sonia Faleiro

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky - pioneer Russian photographer

Photo shows the Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), p
osing solemnly for his portrait, taken in 1911 shortly after his accession.

Wiki:  Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky August 30 [O.S. August 18] 1863 – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.

Using a railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the U.S. Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of century-ago Russia.

The Library of Congress collection of Prokudin-Gorsky photographs is here. Enjoy!

Melancholy reflections

From this:

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Atlantic:

America, however, is an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.

Using masks to curb the propagation of an airborne virus that makes some people very sick and kills others is not seen as a simple obligation arising from being part of a society.

It is almost as though the demands of being ethical are considered to be a trespass upon freedom.

Which leads to the question - is freedom a means to an end, namely to lead an ethical life and live per one’s conscience; or is freedom an end in itself, and any kind of duty or obligation, no matter how necessary from an ethical perspective, is an encroachment on that freedom?

W.H.O. on alcohol

As a follow-up to this post from 2014, a poster from the World Health Organization.  The message is that much use of alcohol is harmful (and that by putting its ill-effects in numerous buckets, the harm is made to seem less).

In 2016, the harmful use of alcohol resulted in some 3 million deaths (5.3% of all deaths) worldwide and 132.6 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) – i.e. 5.1% of all DALYs in that year. Mortality resulting from alcohol consumption is higher than that caused by diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and diabetes. Among men in 2016, an estimated 2.3 million deaths and 106.5 million DALYs were attributable to the consumption of alcohol. Women experienced 0.7 million deaths and 26.1 million DALYs attributable to alcohol consumption.

Cherry Parfait - May 26 - June 2

Creeping Phlox - May 2

The permanent end of normal times.

Even just a few years ago, when mowing the lawn, I'd be making bees flee from their buzzing round the clover.  No pesticides, no herbicides in my yard, lots of nectar-bearing flowers, clover continuing to proliferate in the lawn - but where are the bees?  Oh, to be at the risk of a bee sting!

For that matter, where are the squirrels?  The "green acres" behind my house are empty; and not one squirrel shows up to eye the bird-feeders.   (What is new is a pair of chipmunks.).

My little pond got one froggy visitor last year.  None so far this year.

I think just like people in the red states seem oblivious of the COVID-19 virus, or at best, "oh, its just like the flu", humanity is sleepwalking through an ecological crisis; but will be suddenly woken up to the unsustainability of what it is doing.  Unlike our other crises, there is no November 3rd election day, or new vaccine or treatment that hold out the possibility of life going back to normal.

Tulips - April 8 - 10

Tulips - April 6

Tulips - April 4

Some kind of hyacinth - March 21

Crocus - March 10

Almost 300 tulips

This spring.

Crime is gentler in fiction

During this long lockdown I'm reading John Sandford's "Prey" series of novels, whose protagonist  Minneapolis-based criminal detective Lucas Davenport goes after the perpetrators of rather gruesome crimes.  "Rather gruesome" is an understatement, and so when I read the author's introduction to "Mind Prey", quoted below, I had a resurgence of my ever-increasing desire to secede from the human race.

Sometime after I finished Mind Prey, I was invited to give a talk about crime-fiction writing at a medical examiners' convention. As part of the deal, I got to sit in on the convention, which I did for a while. I left after an FBI presentation on serial killers because, quite frankly, my stomach wasn't strong enough to look at the pictures. 

I covered the crash of an L1011 airliner in the Everglades, with arms, legs and heads lying all over the place, saw perhaps a hundred or so surgeries in doing some occasional medical writing, including double amputations on accident victims and debridement of burn victims, and saw any number of shot people waiting for ambulances, without much problem. But what insane criminals do to people, especially women — that I can't look at, or write. When I deal with such subjects in the Prey series, I promise you that the violence is toned down. 

Far down.

On Emergent Phenomena

Bee has a blog post: "What is emergence? What does “emergent” mean?"  For whatever reason, 99% of my comments simply don't go through, so discussion over there seems impossible.  My thoughts on the subject are newly formed, and I'm putting them down here, so that I can get unstuck, and not because these ideas are right or have any merit.  So this post will likely be revised or even deleted.

This from Bee is as good a description of "emergent" as you can find:

Something is emergent if it comes about from the collective behavior of many constituents of a system, be that people or atoms. If something is emergent, it does not even make sense to speak about it for individual elements of the system.

There are a lot of quantities in physics which are emergent. Think for example of conductivity. Conductivity is the ability of a system to transport currents from one end to another. It’s a property of materials. But it does not make sense to speak of the conductivity of a single electron. It’s the same for viscosity, elasticity, even something as seemingly simple as the color of a material. Color is not a property you find if you take apart a painting into elementary particles. It comes from the band structure of molecules. It’s an emergent property.

It is in the discussion of weak and strong emergence that I drift away.  I think I get stuck on the "can be/cannot be derived".

Weak emergence means that the emergent property can be derived from the properties of the system’s constituents and the interactions between the constituents.....In physics the only type of emergence we have is weak emergence. With strong emergence philosophers refer to the hypothetical possibility that a system with many constituents displays a novel behavior which cannot be derived from the properties and the interactions of the constituents. While this is logically possible, there is not a single known example for this in the real world.

(Perhaps it is because I'm stuck on the notion of derivation as is done in mathematical logic.)

Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Pick any set of microscopic laws - the Standard Model of particle physics; or the Standard Model modified in any way, or one of the 10^500 universes of superstring theory.   Or make heat a fluid (Lavoisier's "caloric" was the context in which Carnot did his work).  The Second Law remains true in all these cases.   While as students of physics, we are indoctrinated with statistical mechanics as underlying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Law actually arises from very general considerations, with no assumptions at all about the microscopic physics, i.e., from the mathematical properties of Pfaffians and some mapping of mathematical concepts into physical concepts.  (Zemansky's 1965 Kelvin and Caratheodory--A Reconciliation indicates what I'm talking about).

The way I see it, the Second Law is true if heat is an invisible fluid and it is also true if matter is made of atoms and heat is simply the energy of random molecular motion.  So in what sense can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be said to derived from the properties of the system's constituents?   The Second Law is not only an emergent law, in some sense of the term "strongly emergent", it is so. It is a law that is true no matter what the underlying microscopic physics is, and thus can be "derived" from some axiom set including axiom A with some mapping of mathematical to physical concepts, but can equally well be derived from some other axiom set including the axiom (not A) with some other mapping of mathematical to physical concepts.

In this regard, I'm not sure the concepts of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence" are particularly useful.   An example is the never-ending debate of whether the phenomenon "consciousness"  is strongly emergent, or is explainable ultimately in terms of the brain and its cells.  Let's imagine humans, electronic/compute devices, Fred Hoyle's solar-system sized cloud all exhibit "consciousness".  Taking the Second Law of Thermodynamics as our exemplar, and assuming that a mathematical description of "consciousness" is feasible,  one has to concede the possibility that such a description is rather independent of the microscopic details.   If that turns out to be true, then the same problematic situation (at least to me) arises - how can such a description be said to be "derived" from the properties and interactions of the constituents of the conscious system?

The chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, etc., are a particular way because of the properties of their constituents, and would be different if e.g., the electron/proton mass ratio was different, or if the radius of the proton measured electron Compton wavelengths was much larger.  Derivation of the chemistry crucially depends on these properties.   That is one kind of emergence.   I'd place all the things described by the Wilsonian renormalization group in this category too.

A second kind of emergence is where the behavior of the system can be described independent of its constituents, e.g., as with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.    These are perhaps two useful types of "emergence", especially if we can find more laws of physics like the Second Law.

Dehydrated Elephants

Not Even Wrong noted the recent passing of mathematician Robert Hermann 1931-2020.

In that blog post, Peter Woit wrote:

Being ahead of your time and mainly writing expository books is unfortunately not necessarily good for a successful academic career. Looking through his writings this afternoon, I ran across a long section of this book from 1980, entitled “Reflections” (pages 1-82). I strongly recommend reading this for Hermann’s own take on his career and the problems faced by anyone trying to do what he was doing (the situation has not improved since then).

The reference is to Robert Hermann's book, "Cartanian Geometry, Nonlinear Waves, and Control Theory, Part 2", which you can read in Google Books. This is where I first encountered dehydrated elephants.  To quote:

Order in Chaos

The video at this tweet.

Sri Dakshinamurthy

Sten Konow: The Aryan Gods of the Mitani People

Recent findings in ancient human DNA are leading to narratives like the following, e.g., Tony Joseph in Outlook India, September 12, 2019:

And here is an equally unambiguous and clear statement from the study published in Science a few days ago, titled: "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia": "Using data from ancient individuals from the Swat Valley or northernmost South Asia, we show that Steppe ancestry then integrated further South in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, contributing up to 30 per cent of the ancestry of most modern groups".

So it is clear, without even a shadow of a doubt, that both the studies support the migration of Central Asian pastoralists who brought Indo-European languages to India, between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE.

For our purposes, let us stipulate that the genetic evidence of the handful of ancient individuals has been interpreted correctly to show a migration into India of Central Asian Pastoralists between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE.   The problematic assertion is this:  "who brought Indo-European languages to India, between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE."  

The only direct evidence of language in India from that era is of the Vedic language, of the Rg Veda and subsequent works.   The theory of Aryan Invasion/Migration is that these Central Asian pastoralists brought the Vedic language to India, and so the Rg Veda, if composed in India, must date to 2000 BCE - 1500 BCE or so.

The Rg Vedic hymns sing the praises of the mighty Saraswati river, and the geographical information in later texts of the drying/dried-up Saraswati plus modern science enables us to identify the ancient perennial river that the Saraswati must have been, and it last flowed 9000 to 4500 years before present. 

The Rg Veda places the Saraswati along with the Ganga, Yamuna and the rivers of Punjab and so the theory that the Vedic people transferred the name of some river outside of India to the river that was already desiccated when they arrived is hardly tenable.  Why they would not transfer the holy name of Saraswati to one of the great rivers they newly encountered is another mystery.   Totally far-fetched is the notion that the Vedic people took an older tradition from non-Indo-European inhabitants and translated it into their hymns.

Next, we have the treaty between the Hittites and the Mitani, found in the cuneiform library unearthed at Boghazkoi in Turkey which mention Vedic gods - specifically Indra, Mitra-Varuna and the Nasatyas.   The dates given via Egyptian and Middle Eastern chronologies for the Mitani treaty are 1375 BCE - 1350 BCE.   The lineage of the Mitani signatory, Mattiuaza (a.k.a. Shattiwaza) is known, via the cuneiform libraries,  to have extended at least four  generations prior, and his ancestor, Shuttarna I, son of (legendary?) Kirta is dated to early 15 century BCE.

So how did Indra, Mitra-Varuna and the Nasatyas make their way to ancient Mesopotamia around 1500 BCE?  The Aryan Invasionist postulates that these deities developed before the Aryans reached India and then some branch of the Aryans carried these gods to the Mitani lands and some other branch carried them to India.

 Norwegian Indologist Sten Konow, in his paper published in 1923,  argues persuasively that the Vedic gods were of Indian development.  Since I found it difficult to get hold of a copy of this paper, I imagine it is the same for others,  and so I present here a scan (link) and a transcript (link) of the paper.

 Konow like the other Indologists of his time, believed in the Aryan Invasion Theory.  His chronology seems to be an early Indo-European period, followed by a period of Aryan unity, when the ancestors of the Indian/Iranian Aryans ranged from perhaps the Volga to the outskirts of India; and lastly the Indian period, after the Aryans split into Indian, Iranian and possible other branches.  Konow argues that the Vedic gods as mentioned in the Mitani treaty are developments from the Indian period, and not from the period of Aryan unity.   Konow writes:

"As far as I can see, everything points to the conclusion that Jacobi was right in maintaining that the Mitani gods were Indian and not Aryan, so that we must, in fact, assume that the sphere of Indian civilization had, in the middle of the second millennium B.C., extended into Mesopotamia. The epoch of the Aryan conquest of India and the beginning of Indian civilization must consequently be relegated to a still earlier period, though we have no means of stating how long an interval we must assume between the Aryan invasion and the Mitani treaty. There is, however, one small detail which prevents us from thinking that this interval was quite short."
...
...

"I hope to have made it probable that these gods were Indian and not Aryan or even Iranian. If the conception of the Aśvins as groomsmen belongs to the later phases of the Ṛgveda period, as it seems to do, we must further draw the conclusion that the extension of Indo-Aryan civilization into Mesopotamia took place after the bulk of the Ṛgveda had come into existence. The oldest portions of the collection would consequently have to be considered as considerably older than the Mitani treaty. "

If you accept Konow's conclusion, this means there is simply not enough time for Central Asian Pastoralists to enter India between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE, with Indo-European languages and the precursor forms of Indra, Mitra, Varuna and Nasatyas; to develop the later forms of the deities, and then carry them to the Mesopotamia by 1500 BCE."

The modern Aryan invasionist/migrationist, as far as I know, conveniently doesn't address Konow's arguments.  It would be interesting to see a modern response to Konow.  It would also be interesting to see how the non-invasionist accommodates or dismantles Konow's arguments.

What are the possibilities that the Aryan invasions might entertain?

One could open a can of worms by casting doubt on the Mitani chronology.  One could also cast doubt on Konow's (invasionist) reading and interpretation of the Vedic literature. One might argue that developments in the Vedic pantheon were being contemporaneously being transmitted from northern India to Mesopotamia -- but in that case, one would have to rethink how language and Indo-European culture was transmitted, migrations and invasions are hardly necessary.

One might argue that the ancient human DNA is wrongly dated, and the invasion/migration that the genetic evidence indicated actually occurred a thousand years earlier.  But the geneticists are unlikely to have the eras so wrong. In any case, the Aryan invasionist won't want to give up the 2000 BCE-1500 BCE chronology in any case.

IMO, the most viable conclusion is that the Vedic pantheon was developed in India much before 1500 BC and migrated from India to the Mitani lands.   In which case the people that genetics says were migrating into India between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE did not introduce Indo-European languages to India, the Vedic language was already there.  This is not impossible, the Sakas around 200 BCE - 100 CE, and the English, 1700-1950 CE also carried with themselves Indo-European languages to India, but did not introduce them to India.   The Aryan invasionist can continue to postulate that the first entry of Indo-European language into India was via invasion or migration, but the evidence of the Mitani treaty is that this event has to be much prior to 1500 BC; and via the evidence of the Saraswati, prior to 2500 BC.

A point peripheral to the above, but of interest is that Konow argues on linguistic grounds that the dasyus/dasas mentioned in the Rg Veda as the enemies of the Vedic people were not speakers of Dravidian languages, but rather spoke in Kolarian tongues (the Austroasiatic language family in India).

Satellite Remote Sensing Techniques to Unearth the Lost Sarasvati River & its Palaeochannels

Dr. B.K Bhadra from ISRO presents detailed multi resolution satellite studies of the river Saraswati in northern Haryana. He discusses the specifics of the remote sensing techniques, including satellite imagery, used to study the paleo channels of the river and related analysis. In his present research, he focuses on high resolution optical and microwave satellite data in delineating the paleo channels in Haryana and Punjab as well as the Sarasvati delta structure in the Rann of Kutch to present an integrated map of the Sarasvati paleo channels. He presents material to show that paleo channels have also been validated through collateral ground data such as published maps during British and Mughal periods, as well as paleo geomorphic structures, hydrological parameters and radiometric ages of river sediments. By considering evidence from archaeology as well and the spatial distribution of the Harappan settlements, Dr. Bhadra presents how the entire course of the river Sarasvati has been delineated and the growth of Indus-Sarasvati civilization studied from these disciplinary perspectives.