The Rolleiflex 2.8D
17 hours ago
Partly collected thoughts.
One should strive to see the world and prioritize injustices free of pure self-interest - caring about grave abuses that are unlikely to affect us personally is a hallmark of a civilized person - but we are all constructed to regard imminent dangers to ourselves and our loved ones with greater urgency than those that appear more remote. Ignoble though it is, that's just part of being human - though our capacity to liberate ourselves from pure self-interest means that it does not excuse this indifference.From here, by Glenn Greenwald.
It’s strange to think that the housing crisis that caused the financial meltdown most negatively affects the one age demographic that didn’t own a home.The young adults who graduated during the past several years of economic mess are the so-called lost generation, unable to start a career, a family. Looking for stable, full-time employment.
CIP pointed out the the Caltech core curriculum is revised down from five terms each of math. and physics, to three terms each. There appear to be a variety of reasons.The transition from high school to college presents problems for all students, but for some students it is particularly challenging. At Caltech, many newly admitted students lack the background in mathematics that is necessary to succeed in Ma 1a. Unfortunately, few of them are even aware that their background in mathematics is deficient. This is not their fault. The mathematics curriculum in high schools is less rigorous than it was even a few decades ago. In conversations with Caltech students who have struggled with freshman mathematics, most report that they were star math students in high school, which of course is a major reason why they were offered admission to Caltech in the first place. Many of them, however, have never seen mathematics as it is taught at Caltech.
Those who struggle in Ma 1a usually continue to struggle in the rest of the core mathematics classes. They earn relatively low GPA’s during their first two years or so at Caltech, and when they graduate their GPA’s are significantly lower than those of other students. And not all who struggle with freshman mathematics succeed; such students are also less likely than their counterparts to graduate from Caltech. The students often report that, in the end, they have also not learned very much math, as too much of the material was beyond their ability to comprehend at the time it was presented. Currently Caltech attempts to assist such students in a number of ways but this assistance may be too little, too late.
In order to understand the specific reasons why many of our freshman struggle in Ma 1a, the undergraduate Academics and Research Committee conducted an online survey that asked a series of specific questions about the difficulties they encountered in Ma1a. From the survey results, the most common area of weakness that students identified was that of formal reasoning, writing proofs, and common proof techniques. The results thus corroborate what most people connected with Ma 1a have known anecdotally—that many Caltech freshmen, though computationally skilled, struggle with basic proof concepts. Moreover, a corollary obstacle to students thriving in Ma1a is that, because it is a “calculus” course, students feel like they should be mastering the topic with ease. They are thus reluctant to go to classmates, TA’s, or professors when they encounter difficulties.
She wasn’t just into guns. She was apparently stocked up for when the economy collapses and when everyone’s on their own with their guns.That area of Connecticut is apparently an enclave of such people, we are told.
But the gist is that over recent years the town of Newtown, CT. tried to place some limits on the rise of what might be called extreme gun-owning and shooting in the community. It wasn’t a fight between gun-owners and non-gun-owners but traditional gun owner and hunters versus people shooting close to other people’s homes, shooting at unlicensed firing ranges, firing military style weapons, even firing into explosives.
In short, the opposition of the extreme gun owners and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the country’s second largest gun-rights organization, which happens to be located in Newtown) prevented anything from happening.Newtown was not (yet) a typical US town.
Which is why pediatricians have to be so nosy. They ask all sorts of personal questions, delving into family diets and discipline and urging caution around swimming pools and street crossings. They remind parents to make their kids wear helmets when biking and stay in booster seats even when big kids complain they’re too babyish. They also ask whether parents keep guns at home and whether they’re stored safely — with the ammunition and the firearm kept separately in locked cabinets, the key tucked away from children.But the N.R.A. took offense, and in Florida, the state of some of the craziest Republicans that the N.R.A. has in their pocket, they had a law passed in 2011, that penalizes physicians from inquiring about gun ownership. A doctor could lose his license and face a fine of upto $10,000. The Florida Medical Association originally opposed the legislation, and then caved, and supported the bill.
“Despite the State’s insistence that the right to ‘keep arms’ is the primary constitutional right at issue in this litigation, a plain reading of the statute reveals that this law in no way affects such rights,” wrote U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke. “A practitioner who counsels a patient on firearm safety, even when entirely irrelevant to medical care or safety, does not affect nor interfere with the patient’s right to continue to own, possess, or use firearms.”Just how insane the N.R.A. and the politicians it has in its pocket should be evident by now. The N.R.A. does have members who seem sane, (e.g., here ) but because they do not reign in their organization, they are culpable for its insanity, and the insanity of gun violence in the U.S.A.
Indeed, the internal war in J&K, when scaled, does not begin to approach the levels of criminal violence present in those US metropolitan areas best known for their murder rates. The ‘death count’ in Jammu & Kashmir for 2003 stood at 836 civilians, 1,447 militants, and 380 security personnel. If this violence is aggregated (2,663), which is unorthodox but certainly presents the worst possible statistical picture, it scales out at 24.5:100,000 population. This would place Jammu & Kashmir between Memphis (24.7:100,000) and Chicago (22.2:100,000), in the 2002 murder rankings when examining American cities with populations greater than 500,000, well off the pace established by the likes of Washington, DC (45.8:100,000) or Detroit (42.0:100,000).Think about it, it really opened my eyes: the level of violence that led to fears of the break-up of India is tolerated as a normal phenomenon in the US of A. A national emergency it is not!
Year
|
Federal Receipts
Percentage of GDP
|
Federal Outlays
Percentage of GDP
|
Median Household
Income
(inflation-adjusted
dollars)
|
2000
|
20.9
|
18.4
|
$54,481
|
2001*
|
20.4
|
19.1
|
$53,646
|
2002*
|
17.5
|
19.0
|
$53,019
|
2003
|
16.4
|
19.9
|
$52,973
|
2004
|
16.3
|
19.8
|
$52,788
|
2005
|
17.6
|
20.2
|
$53,371
|
2006
|
18.5
|
20.4
|
$53,768
|
2007
|
18.8
|
20.0
|
$54,489
|
2008
|
17.7
|
20.9
|
$52,546
|
2009
|
14.9
|
25.0
|
$52,195
|
2010
|
15.1
|
24.1
|
$50,831
|
2011
|
15.4
|
24.1
|
$50,054
|
2012
|
15.8
|
22.8
|
|
... state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. Today, navigating the regulatory red tape constitutes 25 percent to 30 percent of the total cost of solar installation in the United States, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and, as such, represents a higher percentage of the overall cost than the solar equipment itself.
Many people were stopped in their tracks by the story. Was it possible in London, in a building of flats, for a person, an attractive woman, to fade into oblivion, so that no one thought to ask, "Where’s Joyce?" For nearly three years? So many people live alone in a big city, and some are old, less vivid, and without next of kin. They may be missing before they’re gone. But Joyce Vincent did not seem to fit that description. A tremor of anxiety, a fear of societal malfunction, went through London. It seemed like a warning, a measure of the times.
Two years ago, an overweight nutrition professor at Kansas State University went on a diet that was low in calories but consisted mostly of Twinkies and other junk food. In two months, he lost 27 pounds, lowered his bad cholesterol and raised his good cholesterol. His point was that for weight loss, calories mattered more than the actual content of the diet. Twinkie lovers rejoiced, but the nutrition world put its collective head in its hands.
The men who persecuted Deeyah in Norway and Britain were every bit as prejudiced and violent as neo-Nazis, but as it happens, they rallied under the banner of radical Islam rather than the swastika. A tiny difference, you might think. A mere trifle. But that tiny difference made all the difference in the world. No one came to Deeyah's defence. Not liberal-left or compassionate conservative politicians. Not the BBC or liberal press. Not Amnesty International or the "concerned" artists who take up so many leftish causes. No one cared. To defend an Asian woman from unprovoked attacks by Asian men was to their warped minds a racist or Islamophobic act. Unprotected and unnoticed, Deeyah slunk off to live in an anonymous suburb of Atlanta, and begin the long task of pulling herself together.
Devdutt refutes this narrow vision. He defines a myth as ‘subjective truth’. Any belief which someone subjectively holds potentially classifies as a myth. Equally, he critiques the standard Western assumption that scientific knowledge is rational and all other traditional knowledge, including mythological, is non-rational. As he sees the world, all beliefs are fundamentally irrational at their root. It’s just that the Western scientific view of the world has become so dominant, or ‘hegemonic’ in the jargon used by cultural theorists, that everyone assumes by default that this is the only correct way to view the world and all other ways must be inferior and irrational. Devdutt turns this idea on its head and argues that the apparently secular capitalism of the West in fact is a thinly veiled descendent of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian mythological traditions that have dominated Western civilization.
While this is a controversial hypothesis, the close relationship between economic and political ideologies on the one hand and religion on the other shouldn’t be. After all, it was Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who famously theorized that capitalism could arise in northern Europe because of the spirit of thrift and discipline embodied in the Protestant work ethic. Devdutt in a sense is taking Weber head on by suggesting, to the contrary, that capitalism really is only a disguised version of Protestant Christianity and not a logical outgrowth of it.
...Indologists in the panel ignored the book’s challenge to their guild, viz. that unlike specialists in any other field, they actively desired and worked for the demise of their subject, Hinduism.
The Blue Brain project represents an essential first step toward achieving a complete virtual human brain. The researchers have demonstrated the validity of their method by developing a realistic model of a rat cortical column, consisting of about 10,000 neurons. Eventually, of course, the goal is to simulate systems of millions and hundreds of millions of neurons.
In a more intuitive language, the Riemann zeta-function is capable of fitting any arbitrary smooth function over a finite disk with arbitrary accuracy, and it does so with comparative ease, since it repeats the performance like a good actor infinitely many times on a designated set of stages. - from here.
I hit upon the idea of ignoring the academic journals and looking instead at what economists like John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, and others said in newspaper interviews and articles for popular publications. Recently computerized databases made such investigation far easier than it previously had been.Read the whole thing.
After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion.
At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.
I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.
Having worked before at the intersection of Hollywood and history, helping a tiny bit with a respectable movie about the Cuban missile crisis called “Thirteen Days,” I approached the new movie “Lincoln” with measured expectations. I had seen how a film could immerse viewers in onscreen time travel without messing up the history too much. But that was the most I hoped for.
“Lincoln,” however, accomplishes a far more challenging objective: its speculations actually advance the way historians will consider this subject.
The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, makes two especially interesting historical arguments.
....The first is to explain why the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was overwhelmingly important to Lincoln in January 1865. .... {The second explains the course of the secret negotiations to end the war.}
I wasn't the first to notice it, Chance News, which reviews news with statistics or probability concepts, notesODDS OF BECOMING A TOP RANKED NASCAR DRIVER: 1 IN 125 BILLIONODDS OF A CHILD BEING DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM: 1 IN 88
(There are only about 7 billion people in the world, so if there are only two “top ranked drivers” then the odds are only 1 in 3.5 billion or so.)PS: The 1 in 88 odds of autism is in the news, e.g., here (LA Times). Please note that it is one of those "if you look you will find it" cases. Utah and New Jersey which screen extensively for autism, have rates of 1 in 47 and 1 in 49 respectively. Alabama, which does little, has a rate of 1 in 208.
GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?This creature aspires to be President of the United States!!!!!! Only in America!
Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.
Boehner to Diane Sawyer on Repealing Obamacare – “Well, I think the election changes that. It’s pretty clear that the president was reelected, Obamacare– is the law of the land. I think there are parts– of– the healthcare law that– are gonna be very difficult to implement. And very expensive. And as– the time when we’re tryin’ to find a way to create a path– toward a balanced budget—everything has to be on the table.”
Sawyer: But you won’t be spending the time next year trying to repeal Obamacare?
Boehner: There certainly may be parts of it that we believe– need to be changed. We may do that. No decisions at this point.
His follow-up Tweet – @SpeakerBoehner ObamaCare is law of the land, but it is raising costs & threatening jobs. Our goal has been, and will remain,#fullrepeal.
"Garrett draws up a set of features which could be assumed for Proto-Greek on the basis of the later Greek works....for Greek, there is the advantage that the features assumed for Proto-Greek can actually be compared with a language of the second millenium BC, Mycenaean Greek. We know that Mycenaean cannot be equated with Proto-Greek, since it has undergone some changes shared only with some later Greek dialects, and so it must be later. Yet all of the distinct morphological features and many of the distinct phonological features, which are assumed to be distinctive for Proto-Greek can be shown not to have take place at the time of Mycenaean. Wherever later Greek dialects have made innovations in morphology from PIE, Mycenaean Greek appears not to have participated in that innovation. In other words, the distinctive aspects of the later Greek dialects (which they all share) arose across a number of varieties which already were distinguished one from another. It is not possible, using the shared morphological innovation criterion, to construct a unified invariant entity such as "Proto-Greek" which is distinguishable from PIE......if we had more evidence for other IE languages other than Anatolian contemporary with Mycenaean, we might not be able to separate out what was 'Greek' about Mycenaean from its neighbours. The Greek sub-group was only truly formed in the period after the Mycenaean when convergence between the different dialects of Greek took place, in part related to social changes coupled with a strong sense of Greek ethnic identity."
In sum, especially if we allow that at least a few post‐Proto‐Greek changes must already have affected Mycenaean before its attestation (it is after all a Greek dialect), detailed analysis reduces the dossier of demonstrable and uniquely Proto‐Greek innovations in phonology and inflectional morphology to nearly zero. Proto‐Greek retained the basic NIE noun system, verb system, segment inventory, syllable structure, and arguably phonological word structure. In all these areas of linguistic structure, Greek was not yet Greek early in the second millennium. But if so, it hardly makes sense to reconstruct Proto-Greek as such: a coherent IE dialect, spoken by some IE speech community, ancestral to all the later Greek dialects. It is just as likely that Greek was formed by the coalescence of dialects that originally formed part of a continuum with other NIE dialects, including some that went on to participate in the formation of other IE branches.
.......
If this framework is appropriate for IE branches generally, we cannot regard IE ‘subgroups’ as sub‐groups in a classical sense. Rather, the loss or ‘pruning’ of intermediate dialects, together with convergence in situ among the dialects that were to become Greek, Italic, Celtic, and so on, have in tandem created the appearance of a tree with discrete branches. But the true historical filiation of the IE family is unknown, and it may be unknowable.We cannot check whether Garrett is right about IE branches in general, because in Greek we have the unique situation of having sufficient texts from two eras. That is why "it may be unknowable".
As I have already pointed out, written languages imply, by the very fact that they are expressions of dominant groups, the existence of dialects of subordinate groups, which, though not attested, are nevertheless as real as the invisible face of the moon. Precisely because a written norm represents one of the geovariants or sociovariants promoted to the dominant norm, it reveals, ex silentio, other norms, which remain necessarily excluded from written evidence, with the possible exception of some traces surviving in the chosen koiné (common language).
From the structural point of view, then, the appearance of a written language is also direct testimony of the emergence into 'history' of the elite group which has seized power, and indirect testimony of the loss of power by other groups, in regard to whom the new 'literates' assert themselves as the owners of the surplus product, as ideological leaders and as rulers. Each written language represents, accordingly, a cluster of dialects, still without voice, but in fact rightly present within the framework of the new social relations consecrated by the written language.
We must, therefore, bear in mind that these dialects do exist, although we do not see them, and we must take them into account in our theoretical interpretation. Since, for example, some IE languages appear in the Mediterranean basin in their written form in the 2nd millennium, two conclusions can be inferred from that fact alone:
(a) in the areas where there is definite evidence of written languages we may be sure that the sociolinguistic stratification already reached Gordon Childe's 'urban' level;
(b) in other areas, where the Metal ages cultures appear, we may assume that social stratification was already at a considerably advanced stage.
There is, besides, another factor which should be taken into account. As I have already noted, written norm is usually not equivalent to a 'pure' geovariant, but it is a koiné, implying an admixture of elements from other geovariants (borrowings, morphological variants, and the like).
Mycenean Greek, for example, is regarded, as we have already seen, as a koiné. Even in the modern world we can notice this intermingling in the process of the formation of a new written language - in the case of Basque and Catalan, for example.
The formation of a written koiné implies, in short, three different innovative aspects:
(1) a koiné, precisely because it is a mixture of one dialect with elements of other dialects, represents a novum which did not exist previously; in other words, a written norm, being a 'mixture', is as a rule more recent and less genuine than the norms of the subordinated groups which have remained completely or partly in the dark;
(2) the elements of other dialects accepted by the koiné become levelled with the dominant system and lose some of their traits;
(3) other geovariants do not cease to exist at the moment a koiné is established, but they become, or revert to, 'dialects', with the only difference that from that time on they undergo the levelling influence of the new dominant language.
In the light of these considerations, the earliest written attestations of European languages, either classical or mediaeval, cannot not seen as monolithic expressions of undifferentiated ethnic groups, from which all that comes 'after' must be mechanically derived. Inverting the traditional hierarchy, the first written norms must now be seen as the most fortunate representatives of a dialectal continuum which despite the successive levelling has survived to the present day, and which is the only source of our knowledge of the hidden face of the moon.
Just as in the Middle Ages the earliest attestations of the dialects destined to become national norms are combined with attestations of numerous other dialects, which prove that the modern dialectal continuum actually existed already at that time, and probably also in the preceding centuries (for which geolinguistic evidence is much scarcer), so Scandinavian runes, Irish oghams, Gothic, Norren, old Slavic, and so on, must be interpreted as the mixed and most fortunate geovariants of a dialectal continuum equally rich and articulated as the modern one. They must not be seen as its matrices, nor, obviously, as unique offshoots of reconstructed proto-Germanic, proto-Celtic and proto-Slavic.
In fact, whatever appears after the emergence of the written language did not come after, but was pre-existent to the written language. According to this new view, the current dialects are not derivatives of the ancient written languages, as traditionally thought, but developments, in the course of subsequent millennia, of those earlier geovariants which were parallel with and pre-existent to the written languages. And the new dialectology, according to this view, becomes an integrating part of the renewed historical linguistics, as the study, as it were, of the hidden face of the moon, that is of the speeches of those social groups which became subordinated to the new elites in the Metal ages, but which were obviously pre-existent to the Metal age itself.
Clackson's constellations, Alinei's hidden face of the moon - I love these metaphors, and the way they illuminate the meaning of the PIE reconstruction.In the case of a written language there is, then, only one birth to register in addition to the birth of the written language as such, and that is the birth of the dominant group. The ethnic group, or its part subjugated by the dominant elite, is millennia older than these events.