Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/25/2012 18:13 Comments ||
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#4
It's amazing how humble those heroes are/were. Perhaps the separation from Earth provided a better perspective as well as a deeper insight into God and man?
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/25/2012 19:15 Comments ||
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#5
RIP.
I remember watching Neil + the moon landing as child in late 1960's Guam - everyone in my family + neighborhood were glued to the simple but bulk black-n-white TV sets [andor radios] we all had back then to watch the US moon attempt from start to finish.
[An Nahar] Could the word for mother prove that Turkey was the birthplace of hundreds of languages as diverse as Hindi, Russian, Dutch, Albanian, Italian and English? Ummm... Prob'ly not...
Researchers using a complex computer model originally designed to map epidemics have traced the evolution of the Indo-European language family to find an answer in a study published in the journal Science. Proto-Indo-European isn't the same thing as Hindi or English, anymore than you're the same as your great-grandaddy 71 times removed...
Similarities between hundreds of languages spoken from Iceland to India have led to hot debates over where they originated and what their spread and evolution can tell us about early humans. "Hot debate" in the linguistics field means a paper every three or four years examining the use of the ablative...
The dominant theory is that the languages now spoken by some three billion people came from Bronze Age nomads who used horses and the wheel to spread east and west from the steppes north of the Caspian sea near what is now Ukraine around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Others argue that it was agriculture -- not the horse -- that helped spread the language. They trace the origins to Turkey around 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. Neolithic agriculture dates to the Catal Hüyük culture which, last I looked, dates to around 9000 B.C., give or take a few weeks. I think I read somewhere that there were earlier cultures in the Zagros mountains (present-day Iran) that were even older. Lots of people picked picked up on the seeds and goat-breeding idea, and a mere thousand years later the Natufians had stone ovens to bake bread and were building the first wall of Jericho. The horse, on the other hand, doesn't make an appearance until between 1750 and 1500 B.C., in company with the chariots. Prior to that people used onagers and donkeys and maybe even zebras. With the chariot and the horsie also appear typical Indo-European cultural traits, like a male-dominated pantheon. The Hittites showed up in Anatolia around 1750 B.C., driving chariots.
This latest study used a massive database of common words -- or cognates -- both modern and ancient to trace the roots all the way back to Turkey. I think I read somewhere that the Kurds show up in the area about the same time as the Kassites in Babylon, though they're not related.
"This is one of the key cases put forward for agriculture being an important force in shaping global linguistic diversity," said lead author Quentin Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Except that lots of people were agricultural prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. However, no Indo-Europeans, or even proto-Indo-Europeans, seem to appear in literature until the Hittite Old Kingdom shows up, knocking over Babylon and carrying off the statue of Marduk. I think the Luwians showed up about the same time, but since their language was closely related to Hittite nobody really talks about them much except for the fact that one of their major cities was Wilusa, which, as any linguist can tell you, is just about identical with Ilium, which is another name for Troy, where Helen lived for awhile.
The results build on archeological and genetic research which has suggested that early human migration helped spur the spread of agriculture, Atkinson said. Personally, not being an expert in the field, I lean more toward the idea of a central Asian origin, from which the Indo-Europeans expanded in waves, along with their horses or maybe it was sheaves of millet or barley or buckwheat or something. One of the linguistic curiosities of the Hittite and Luwian languages was their use of the dual case, as opposed to later languages like Latin and English, which refer to either one or many without dwelling too much on pairs. The Slavic languages, including Russian and Old Church Slavonic, also retain vestiges of the dual, as did ancient Greek and Scottish (though I don't think Irish) Gaelic and Gothic and Sanskit. And the older the IE language under study the more likely it is to put the verb at the end of the sentence. Tocharian, which was spoken around where the Turkestan mummies were found, had both the duel and the end of sentence verb.
"It wasn't just that all the hunter gathers were in Europe and looked over the fence and saw their neighbors were cultivating and started doing it themselves. There was a real movement of people," he said. Based on the use of the dual, I'd guess that one of the earliest waves of Indo-European migration involved the Celts and the Hittites, followed shortly by the early Greeks. That's also when the Mitanni showed up. The Aryans either shoved the Elamites and Turanians and Kassites and such out of the way or imposed their language and culture on them. Another bunch, the Vedic speakers, displaced the Harappan culture and spread into India, absorbing as they went. The Mitanni (Hanigalbat, to the Assyrians, who were tough guys back in those days) worshipped Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Nasatya and a few others who were perfectly recognizable to the Sanskrit speakers. The Mitanni were famous for their use of horses and chariots, the Hittites seem to have established their ascendancy by the same means, and both the early Iranians and the Vedics were big on them. Prior to the arrival of the Indo-Europeans on the scene there doesn't seem to have been much if any discussion of the horse or the chariot, and depictions from the Sumerian cultures show onagers and bullocks pulling clumsy-looking 4-wheeled carts.
"The languages suggest this is a movement of culture as well -- the hunter gathers weren't just picking up a plough, they were also adopting culture and the language." It's probably a lot more likely that worshippers of Indra and Varuna and Mitra arrived waving spears from their chariots and scared the sedentary locals into adopting their culture and language. I don't think anyone's ever documented hordes of farmers descending upon an area. That's more the characteristic of a nomadic people. When the Comanches, for instance, discovered the horse they abandoned their farmland in Kansas and adopted a mobile lifestyle, swarming west and south and displacing Kickapoos and Coahuiltecans and people like that.
Using methods originally designed by epidemiologists to trace the language makes sense because the similarities between the evolution of living creatures and living languages has long been understood, Atkinson said. "Darwin talks about it in the Origins of the Species and The Descent of Man, 'these curious parallels,' he calls them." Because of its association with "Aryans," I think, as well as the Cold War, the subject of the Indo-European migrations hasn't been systematically studied -- and most of what has been written is in Russian. I don't even subscribe to journals anymore, so what I think is probably way out of date, but I don't think the ancestors of Suppiluliumas were selling obsidian at Lake Van while the Sumerians were building prototypical hanging gardens. Given the evidence of Caucasian mummies (some with red hair, no less) in Turkestan, I'd expect they were busy ditching their onagers in favor of horses somewhere around the Pamirs. The usual argument against that is that "the fact that they were blond or red-headed doesn't mean that they were Indo-Europeans," since any dolt can learn to speak a language if he works at it. My answer to that is that if the guy you're talking to has red hair and freckles he's a lot more likely to be named O'Reilly or MacIntosh than Vladimir or Wong.
Biologists tracing the roots of a global pandemic will take samples in multiple locations, sequence the DNA and map how the virus has evolved through time by looking at how its genes have been modified. "Once they've got the family tree... they can trace back along the branches of the tree all the way back to the origin," Atkinson said in a telephone interview. "What we did was apply the same kind of approach to languages." Except that languages don't have DNA. They have cognates and inflection and that sort of thing. They can't be viewed in a vacuum, but have to be looked at in the context of whatever history is available. Homer's Greek refers to "undying glory" as kléos aphthiton and Sanskrit describes it as as śravo akşitam. Aphthiton/akshitam is even less of a stretch for cognates than is Wilusa for Ilium. Since horses do have DNA, I'll betcha it'd be a neat research project to trace it and see where the ancestors of the modern "Arabian" came from.
The team built a database of cognates such as mother, which is moeder in Dutch, ... a modern language related to German... madre in Spanish, ... a modern Romance language. It was mater in Latin... mat in Russian, I believe it's the same in Old Church Slavonic... mitera in Greek and mam in Hindi. People have been doing such things since about the time somebody noticed that "mater" and "pater" aren't all that different from "mother" and "father." When building such cognate tables it's best to look at the older languages and their grammars. Grammar changes more slowly than does vocabulary, hence the vestigial (and in some cases not so vestigial) dual case.
They then set about building a family tree for the languages which would capture them in space and time and account for the gains or losses of cognates. Wow. That's never been done before, has it?
"This is a major breakthrough," archeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom said in an accompanying article in Science. Colin seemingly isn't a linguist...
Not everyone was convinced. Really?I am just so surprised.
"There is so much about this paper that is arbitrary," Victor Mair, a Chinese language expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told Science. I believe the word for "mother" in Cantonese is "ma." The word for "father" isn't "pa," but don't let a good cognate go to waste. Add Chinese to the Indo-European group.
The Atkinson model relies on logical leaps about the rates of language change and how languages diffuse, Mair said, while the steppe hypothesis "is based heavily on archeological data such as burial patterns, which are directly tied to datable materials." In Homeric Greek the epithet of the Trojans was "breakers of horses." Nestor was "the Gerenian charioteer," though I've no idea where Gerenia was, if anywhere. Patroclus was "the horseman." Hector, Agamemnon, Atreus, Diomedes were also "breakers of horses." None of this doting on the horse shows up in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was originally composed about a thousand years before Homer lived. Hymns #152 and #153 of the Rig Vedas are devoted to the horse (with appearances by Indra, Mitra, and Varuna, among others), specifically concerned with the horse sacrifice.
Meanwhile, the goddess Demeter was "fair-haired," but not Swedish. Menelaus was "red-haired," "fair-haired," or "flaming-haired," though he didn't answer to "Mick."
And that, my dears, is as neat a demonstration as can be why it is dangerous for amateurs to run about thinking for themselves, when there are perfectly good professionals available to do their thinking for them.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2012 00:39 ||
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Posted by: Barbara ||
08/25/2012 9:44 Comments ||
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#3
My favorite linguistic theory is that Latin so over-developed and extended applications of its ablative case that disgusted barbarians, attempting to master it, simply gave up & use the ablative for EVERYTHING, which then created the Romance languages, where all nouns tend to end in "o" or "a".
#4
This theory tends to take credit for any language that might have borrowed a common word from another which is somewhat dodgy. English borrows from everyone, thus every other language can claim the birthplace of English. Is bonsai common? What about Siesta? Certainly common enough that teens don't need to look either up.
#6
English doesn't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. - James Nicoll
#2
"police haven't notified all of her family," Okay, which family members were not at the wedding? Am I missing something? I would think the important ones to notify would have been within yelling range.
Angola has extradited 37 Chinese nationals, accused of extortion, kidnappings, armed robberies and running prostitution rings.
They allegedly targeted other Chinese, kidnapping businessmen for ransom and sometimes burying victims alive.
They lured women to Angola, promising well-paid jobs, but then forced them into prostitution, Chinese police said.
Tens of thousands of Chinese live in Angola, and Chinese state-run firms have large interests in the country.
China's Ministry of Public Security said a special police team was sent to Angola in July to help investigate criminal gangs.
The ministry said the officers had helped their Angolan counterparts break up 12 gangs and free 14 victims, most of whom were thought to be women forced to work as prostitutes.
The 37 suspects arrived at Beijing airport in handcuffs with balaclavas covering their faces. They are due to be tried in China.
Mineral-rich Angola is China's biggest trading partner in Africa, with some $24.8bn (£15.7bn) in 2010.
Well, they just might. At least some of the older folks that remember the good things associated with European Colonialism.
I know in India, the older folks that were born when British rule was still very much in force, will admit quietly, that they miss that time. My FIL, before he passed at the ripe old age of 90, (about a year ago) would reminisce fondly about how much BETTER things were under British administration.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
08/25/2012 19:50 Comments ||
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James Backstrom, Dakota County Attorney, said it was "ridiculous" for Britain to allow Shawn Sullivan to remain in the UK by going against an extradition agreement between the two nations.
Sullivan, 43, has been wanted in the US since 1994 on suspicion of molesting two 11-year-old girls and having unlawful sex with a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota.
Lord Justice Moses and Mr Justice Eady rejected a plea to return Sullivan to the States on the grounds that the use of a treatment programme known as "civil commitment" would be a "flagrant denial" of his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
spit
Oughtn't we send them the rest of our paedophiles, then, as a prophylactic measure to protect their European rights?
In the meantime, Britons Gary McKinnon and Richard O'Dwyer are fighting attempts to have them extradited to the US to face allegations of computer hacking.
Mr Backstrom claimed the decision not to extradite Sullivan could mean the alleged victims may never get justice.
"I am frustrated and disappointed with the decision," he said. "We are great allies with Britain but they are refusing to honour our extradition agreement and that is very disappointing.
#2
it will be interesting how long it takes to get that plant up and running after kicking the capitalists out of venezuela. some of those parts are tough to come by.
Three people were killed and five injured when an eight-lane suspension bridge in northeast China collapsed early on Friday, only nine months after it opened, state media said.
The bridge, part of an airport expressway in Harbin city, only opened last November after two years of construction that cost 1.9 billion yuan ($300 million), China News Service reported.
A 320-foot section broke off when four heavy trucks drove onto the bridge, plunging them to the ground and crushing them, said a CCTV news reporter at the scene. The bridge was designed to handle up to 9,800 vehicles per hour.
Two people were killed on the spot, a third died later, and five remain in hospital for treatment, the report said, adding that authorities were investigating the cause of the accident.
#1
They're selling us a bridge for San Francisco Bay, right? Doesn't sound promising, though considering who some of the Bay Area residents are, I guess we could get lucky.
#4
Doesn't mean the design was poor. Could be that the 'cousin of an in-law' was awarded the welding, rivets, concrete or other materials concession (kind of like they do in Chicago). QC would then be a non-existent item.
TW's 'fly ash' comment is probably not far from the truth in this case.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
08/25/2012 8:14 Comments ||
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#5
A 320-foot section broke off when four heavy trucks drove onto the bridge,
Don't forget the other culprits. We do have weight limitations and weight stations for a reason. Doing a tactical move in Korea, had to do a recon to check the max load on bridges [spacing between vehicles included] and overhead clearances.
#6
I've read other articles (this is something like the fourth major bridge to collapse in the last year) that indicate the bridges are not "over-engineered" which could be the result of shoddy design. The Chinese can design and build great things, but they can also cut corners.
#12
Doesn't mean the design was poor. Could be that the 'cousin of an in-law' was awarded the welding, rivets, concrete or other materials concession (kind of like they do in Chicago). QC would then be a non-existent item.
TW's 'fly ash' comment is probably not far from the truth in this case.
It's possible that everyone in on the contract who could cut corners did, figuring that he'd be safe, because everyone else would make his component to spec. I'm sure lots of contracts have some honest contractors leavened with dishonest ones. I suspect bridge collapses occur only when every contractor is dishonest. It should be interesting to see which one ends up being the fall guy.
#13
It's also possible that all the contractors were up to snuff but due to insufficient design review or bad placement, soil erosion, etc., that just wasn't enough.
#15
It's possible that everyone in on the contract who could cut corners did,
The mountains are high and the emperor is far away, as the saying goes. Not an international trade expert by any means, but from what I hear, this is pretty much business as usual in China.
#16
You're correct, Thing. We b*tch about 'soil studies' being so drawn out and tedious, but in this case those (and the resulting caisson design based on conditions encountered) were probably slim to non-existent.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
08/25/2012 18:12 Comments ||
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#17
Based on the view in the photo at the link, it does appear to be an upper support structure and/or pier failure.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
08/25/2012 18:18 Comments ||
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#18
there is no reason for a failure other than criminal ineptitude and/or criminal theft. Designs are required to have a minimum 2.5 - 3 factor of safety. Any major project would have adequate site investigations to eliminate "unforeseen site conditions".
It's either incompetence or theft by supplying substandard materials. The Chinese build some great structures, and their designers are world-class, often trained here. It's just a matter of whether specs are met and material supplied is proper and installed per plan. Absolutely no excuses
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/25/2012 19:02 Comments ||
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#19
FG: The Chinese build some great structures
Can't speak to the current ones, but their 7th century forebears were certainly no slouch in that regard, if the 1100-mile Grand Canal is anything to go by.
#20
And yet China remains absolutely positively categorically undeniably unequivocally....@etc. "you betcha" certain about THREE GORGES DAMS + RELATED.
[An Nahar] A Pak holy man who handed over a young Christian girl to police on blasphemy charges after she burned papers containing Koranic verses said Friday what she did was a "conspiracy" to insult Moslems.
Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, the imam of the mosque in the poor Islamabad suburb of Mehrabad, insisted he had saved the girl, Rimsha, from mob violence by handing her to police but said the incident arose because Moslems had not stopped local Christians' "anti-Islam activities" earlier.
Rimsha was tossed in the slammer Into the paddy wagon wit' yez! and remanded in jug for a fortnight last Thursday after being accused of burning pages from a children's religious instruction book, which were inscribed with verses from the Moslem holy text.
The youngster reportedly suffers from Down's Syndrome and her treatment has prompted outrage from rights groups and concern from Western governments, but Chishti insisted she was fully aware of what she was doing.
"The girl who burnt the Koran has no mental illness and is a normal girl," Chishti told Agence La Belle France Presse.
"She did it knowingly, this is a conspiracy and not a mistake. She confessed what she did."
Under the Islamic republic's strict blasphemy laws, insulting the prophet Mohammed is punishable by death and burning a sacred text by life imprisonment, though rights groups say the legislation is often abused to settle personal vendettas.
Chishti claimed the local Christian community had previously caused antagonism by playing music in services at their makeshift church during Moslem prayer time and said burning the pages was deliberate.
"They committed this crime to insult us further. This happened because we did not stop their anti-Islam activities before," he said.
"Last Christmas, they played musical instruments and there was vulgarity in the streets during our prayers time. I warned them but they did not stop."
During his sermon at Friday prayers Chishti told worshippers it was "time for Moslems to wake up" and protect the Koran.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2012 00:42 ||
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#1
There is a threat. We cannot let political correctness get in the way of that threat, Walsh said to one speaker. If you dont believe the threat exists, I respect your opinion, but you and I will never agree.
"Plus you are either an idiot or a liar", he thought to himself.
#3
Perhaps next time he won't modify his meaning to just Radical Islam because clearly the radical part is ignored as redundant by many of Mohammed's followers.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A Pak 
The youngster reportedly suffers from Down's Syndrome and her treatment has prompted outrage from rights groups and concern from Western governments, but Chishti insisted she was fully aware of what she was doing.
