Sandy makes landfall

Sandy - 3

Wind patterns (http://hint.fm/wind/ ) (tx. to S.)

A static snapshot is below, but the animation on the original page is great.

Sandy - 2

Sandy - contd.

Cartoon.

Updates for Hurricane Sandy

Please read if you are in the North-East.

Hurricane Sandy headed towards New Jersey

Read about it here (dailykos.com)
More here.
Yet more.

Mitt Romney Style

If Romney was that cool, who knows, maybe I'd vote for him!
The original Korean hit:

On the origin of Indians - 6

The Saraswati river and its desiccation are described in the ancient Indian works. In the RgVeda Samhita, the oldest, it is a mighty river.  By the time of the Mahabharata, it has dried up.

The conventional theory is that the RgVeda Samhita was supposedly compiled by the newly arrived horse-and-chariot, Indo-European language bearing invaders/immigrants who imposed themselves and their language (Sanskrit) tracelessly on the indigenous population.  The RgVeda Samhita as per the Harvard Sanskritist and invasionist Michael Witzel has at most 4% of its 10,000 word vocabulary of non-Indo-European origin.  The comparable figure for ancient Greek is more than 30% - and the Indo-Aryans entered (and supposedly came to dominate) a much larger geographical area with a much larger population than ancient Greece. 

The evidence however is that the Saraswati dried up well before this migration/invasion took place!

Michel Danino has a newspaper article about the latest state of research.

Collapsing - the Unemployment Rate!

Gallup reports that the US unemployment rate is collapsing.

Binders Full of Women

One of the phrases of the second presidential debate (memorable to others; I didn't particularly notice it at time) was Romney's "binders full of women".

Romney talked about searching for qualified women to work for his Massachusetts administration - how his aides assembled "binders full of women" for him.  (It was, as usual, a Romney fib.  Prior to the 2002 election, a bipartisan women's group, MassGAP,  put together a listing of resumes of women who qualified for various state-level posts, and presented it to the incoming administration.)

People caught the "binders full of women" very quickly, within minutes setting up a Facebook page and internet domain.  There are some great illustrations here.  But what prompted this post was that the meme has spread to Amazon product reviews.

PIE - Mirage of structure - 3

Worth a look, this from Andrew Garrett: "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2006), pp. 139-151

 The technicalities all go soaring way over my head.   We have Mycenaean Greek, in the Linear B texts, from around 1400 BC, and then that culture collapses around 1200 BC and the next Greek works come from around 800 BC.  To quote James Clackson,  (Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction, 2007):

"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."

To quote Garrett:

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".

This idea that the language around 2000 BC around Greece was indistinguishable from PIE suggests a late date for PIE and weighs against the Paleolithic Continuity Theory. (Garrett's argument with respect to Renfrew's PIE-spread-with-agriculture theory is: "the model requires the unscientific assumption that linguistic change in the period for which we have no direct evidence was radically different from change we can study directly".)   On the other hand, don't forget Clackson's own metaphor, that conveys the idea that the PIE includes in itself reconstructions that belong to very different time periods, so what does it mean to be "indistinguishable from PIE"?

One more interesting thing is that Alinei has, to my reading, a very similar idea of how languages arose.
Mario Alinei, The Problem of Dating in Linguistic, "Quaderni di semantica" 25, 2004, pp. 211-232.

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.

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. 

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. 

PS: There is a simple answer to Garrett's argument : "the model requires the unscientific assumption that linguistic change in the period for which we have no direct evidence was radically different from change we can study directly".  Namely, linguistic change before writing follows different rules from linguistic changes after writing.

PIE - mirage of structure - 2

It was James Clackson (Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), published in 2007, who wrote this. which CIP does not find convincing.

"Reconstructed PIE is a construct which does not have an existence at a particular time and place (other than in books such as this one), and is unlike a real language in that it contains data which may belong to different stages of its linguistic history. The most helpful metaphor to explain this is the ‘constellation’ analogy. Constellations of stars in the night sky, such as The Plough or Orion, make sense to the observer as points on a sphere of a fixed radius around the earth. We see the constellations as two-dimensional, dot-to-dot pictures, on a curved plane. But in fact, the stars are not all equidistant from the earth: some lie much further away than others. Constellations are an illusion and have no existence in reality. In the same way, the asterisk-heavy ‘star-spangled grammar’ of reconstructed PIE may unite reconstructions which go back to different stages of the language. Some reconstructed forms may be much older than others, and the reconstruction of a datable lexical item for PIE does not mean that the spoken IE parent language must be as old (or as young) as the lexical form."

You can verify the quote at books.google.com, the page on which this is written is visible.

I suppose that James Clackson is some kind of crank,  a few meters from flat earthism and evolution denial, and presumably despite that, is hired by Jesus College, Cambridge.

Anyway, here is an example, via Alinei, that may hold.  There are two classes of words in for wheel in the Indo-European languages, one in the "kyklos" class and the other in the "rota" class.  I believe there is an argument to be made that the "kyklos" wheel refers to the solid wheel, which was invented long, long before the spoked wheel "rota".   In particular, in Sanskrit, the cognate of rota, ratha, means chariot, not wheel - and this may be an argument that this, in Sanskrit,  is a loan word.

So, did PIE have both the solid wheel (~3500 BC) and the spoked wheel (~2000 BC)?   It is entirely feasible, I believe, even within the conventional model,  that PIE dispersed with the solid wheel only, and the word for the spoked wheel spread by diffusion along with the new technology.

This example illustrates the point-

 "In the same way, the asterisk-heavy ‘star-spangled grammar’ of reconstructed PIE may unite reconstructions which go back to different stages of the language."

Or else one can say that what is 1500 years between friends!

I'd guess that Clackson has examples in his book which illustrate his point.  

PS:  CIP's post

My reply:  No, it does not mean devaluing the evidence.
It means understanding that comparative linguistics has overreached a bit; it has no good absolute dating method - only a relative chronology; and the main constructions it arrives at can stand with relatively few adjustments (even if the absolute chronology is greatly changed.)

The reason that I devalue the horse-chariot dispersal theory of Indo-European languages is that it requires torturing the most ancient Indian texts to accomodate that theory.  It requires torturing the archaeological evidence as well.   It requires torturing the emerging genetic evidence as well.  The two candidates that are left are the Renfrew demic dispersion theory (that IE spread with agriculture) and the Paleolithic continuity theory.  The problem with the Renfrew theory is that PIE doesn't contain common words for farming, and it too violates the archaeological continuity of cultures  observed in Europe and elsewhere.   I'm not sure, but it may be consonant with the genetic evidence.

PIE - mirage of structure

Someone named Naso comments on the blogpost here:

An excellent image for this is offered by James Clackson, my old supervisor, in his 'Indo-European Linguistics'

"Reconstructed PIE is a construct which does not have an existence at a particular time and place (other than in books such as this one), and is unlike a real language in that it contains data which may belong to different stages of its linguistic history. The most helpful metaphor to explain this is the ‘constellation’ analogy. Constellations of stars in the night sky, such as The Plough or Orion, make sense to the observer as points on a sphere of a fixed radius around the earth. We see the constellations as two-dimensional, dot-to-dot pictures, on a curved plane. But in fact, the stars are not all equidistant from the earth: some lie much further away than others. Constellations are an illusion and have no existence in reality. In the same way, the asterisk-heavy ‘star-spangled grammar’ of reconstructed PIE may unite reconstructions which go back to different stages of the language. Some reconstructed forms may be much older than others, and the reconstruction of a datable lexical item for PIE does not mean that the spoken IE parent language must be as old (or as young) as the lexical form."

See, the whole thing is a 'mirage of structure'! That's what models in historical sciences are. In the absence of time machines, that's the best we can do. 

Then one gets a book like "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction" by Robert S.P. Beekes, and he has a whole chapter 3 "The Culture and Origin of the Indo-Europeans":

3.1 The culture of the Indo-Europeans

Reconstruction provides us with a PIE vocabulary.  It is fair to assume that the things which the reconstructed words represent also actually existed.  If there should be a PIE word for 'snow' then the Indo-Europeans would have known what snow was.  And if they had a word for 'plow' they must have had or know some kind of plow, too.

The 'mirage of structure' is ignored.  What happened to "stars are all not equidistant from the earth"? What is the evidence that "snow" and "plow" are "equidistant" stars?

Laryngeals and PIE

Once linguists noticed that Sanskrit, Latin and ancient Greek were related (this observation dates to the 18th century) they came up with the idea of the Indo-European family of languages and began to try to construct the ultimate parent language from which all these languages ultimately derive, a hypothetical language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

The reconstruction derive from finding cognate words in two languages, finding a regular pattern of difference (e.g., Vedic-Avestan:  Sindhu-Hindu, Sapta-Hapta, Soma-Hoama, etc. all suggest a s -> h sound change).  These changes are directional (i.e., one form precedes the other) and are postulated to follow laws.

In order to explain certain patterns, the linguists came up with the idea of "laryngeals".  What are laryngeals? (Robert S.P. Beekes, in "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics", emphasis added)

The proto-language would have had, then, three phonemes, E,A,O. De Saussure called the three phonemes 'coefficients sonantiques' (sonantic elements), because he compared them with (the sonants) i,u,r etc. in ei/oi/i etc. Later on they were called laryngeals, because it was suspected that they had once been laryngeal (and/or pharyngeal) consonants. There are now mostly reconstructed as *h1, *h2 and *h3, h being a cover symbol for 'consonant of unknown phonetic nature but probably of velar, pharyngeal or glottal articulation place'.

......
......
The theory was launched in 1878 when de Saussure was only 21 years old! It took, however, until after the Second World War before the theory began to acquire general acceptance. Its consequences have been very far-reaching. It is certainly the most important single discovery in the whole history of Indo-European linguistics.

The * in *h1, *h2, *h3 is to remind one that these are reconstructed sounds, they are not actually attested anywhere.   The key thing to notice is that no-one knows how *h1, *h2, *h3 sounded, except that they were sounds from the back of the throat.

With that background, you may find "Two Indo-European Widows" amusing.

PS: please look at this too.

In the final part of the article, Manczak asks himself why it is that the Laryngeal Theory has been so successful among linguists. According to him, there is a general lack of validity criteria in historical linguistics. (p. 31): "le terme "critères de verité" n'est jamais employé par les linguistes, bien que les linguistes soient unanimes pour dire que la linguistique est une science". The important thing is the 'authority' behind the theory, not the validity of the theory itself. (p. 32): "Comme les linguistes croient en l'infaillibilité des autorités, ils détestent ceux qui osent critiquer les autorités et adorent ceux qui approuvent ou développent les idées des autorités". ***

Why is this important?  The reason that the genetic information I've cited in my "Origin of Indians" series of posts is looked at so skeptically is because the prevailing linguistic theory is that horse-and-chariot bearing people from Central Asia starting some 5000-4000 years ago, spread out over Asia and Europe carrying the Indo-European languages with them.  These invasions or migrations were never substantiated by archaeology.  But the archaeology only attests to cultural continuity and  cannot say anything about languages except where written records exist, and most of the hypothetical Indo-European expansion happened without leaving written records.

So the effort has been to find genetic evidence for these migrations, and unfortunately for the linguists, it is not just India, but Europe also that indicates that most of the people today are descended from people who were there since the Paleolithic age.  The example of Scandinavia is discussed here.

If you have come this far, there is the main thesis of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, put it on your reading list.

*** Google translations: "the term "criteria of truth" is never used by linguists, although linguists are unanimous in saying that linguistics is a science",  "As linguists believe in the infallibility of the authorities, they hate those who dare to criticize the government and love those who approve or develop the ideas of authorities".

On the origin of Indians - 5

Some attention may be paid to this:

Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within haplogroup R1a, European Journal of Human Genetics (2010) 18, 479–484; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2009.194; published online 4 November 2009

available here:

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v18/n4/full/ejhg2009194a.html

From the point of view of genetics, the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory is dead as a doornail. 

Quotes follow beneath the fold.

(PS: mid-Holocene = 7000-5000 years ago).

Our Scientific Congressmen - 3

America prides itself on being the world-leader in science and technology.

Ahem!

Missouri Representative W. Todd Akin, who sits on the House Committee of Science, Space and Technology:

“In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change you know. Who in the world wants to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways?”

 PS: W. Todd Akin is more well-known for this:

In an August 19, 2012 interview aired on St. Louis television station KTVI-TV, Todd Akin, the U.S. Representative for Missouri's 2nd congressional district and a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Claire McCaskill, was asked his views on whether women who became pregnant due to rape should have the option of abortion. He replied:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Animation: Obama campaign pitch

Via dailykos: Lucas Gray, animator for the TV show The Simpsons, did this

Our Scientific Congressmen - 2

America prides itself on being the world-leader in science and technology.

Ahem!

California Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who sits on the House Committee of Science, Space and Technology:

“Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?”

Our Scientific Congressmen

America prides itself on being the world-leader in science and technology.

Ahem!

Georgia Representative Paul Broun, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.

Romney vs Romney

Hunter nails y'day's debate

Here.

Summarizing the debate: The only memorable sound bite of the evening was that Mitt Romney had promised to fire a television bird. On policy matters, we learned absolutely nothing, and due to constant (and, truly, egregious) misstatements any non-politically-inclined person who tuned in could probably count themselves as actually less informed on the discussed issues than if they had not tuned in at all. On style both participants were one small notch above dreadful—if the Romney face budged from his trademark, grimacing smirk during the entire evening, I must have missed it, and the president often appeared to be debating as if Mitt Romney was not in the room at all. As for policy differences—the presumptive reason for having these excruciating but necessary things in the first place, unless we have now abandoned that notion, too—those were not only not in the room, they may not have even made it into the same state.

Romney tries the Gish Gallop

Romney tried the Gish Gallop in the Presidential debate yesterday, and some people were impressed. For how long, is the question!
On Social Security:  (he lied)
On subsidies to clean energy: (he lied)
On health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions: (he lied)
On cuts to Medicare: (he lied)
On taxes: (he lied)


So by now you should now what the Gish Gallop is:

The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time.

PS: via Digby
At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes Romney’s Successful Debate Plan: Lying Mitt Romney's debate performance: 'Mostly fiction' The First Debate: Mitt Romney's Five Biggest Lies Romney lied about pre-existing conditions during debate Debate Debrief: Romney vs. The Truth Romney's big Medicare lie takes center stage in debate

How Private Equity Works (Bain Capital, etc.)

 I'm no financial expert and can barely read balance sheets.  But it seems to me in the case of Guitar Center,  an underperforming company was loaded with debt, and was sucked dry.  Per dailykos.com, it is struggling to make its interest payments.

Beginnings:

The Guitar Center story began in 1959 when Wayne Mitchell purchased a small appliance and home organ store in Hollywood, California. By 1961, he'd changed the name of the company to The Organ Center. In 1964, Joe Banaran, President of the Thomas Organ Company, approached Wayne in search of an outlet to sell a new line of guitars and amplifiers, called Vox.

The timing was right, and Wayne saw the chance to seize a new retail opportunity. He was in the midst of relocating his original Hollywood Organ Center location to a new site, and he agreed that rather than closing down the old store, he would stock it with Vox guitars and amplifiers. Wayne named the store The Vox Center. By the late sixties, it had become evident that the future of musical instrument retailing lay in guitars and amps, not organs, and The Vox Center was re-christened The Guitar Center.

Bain Capital buys Guitar Center, June 2007