Laputan \La*pu"tan\, a.
Of or pertaining to Laputa, an imaginary flying island
described in Gulliver's Travels as the home of chimerical
philosophers. Hence, fanciful; preposterous; absurd in
science or philosophy. ``Laputan ideas.'' --G. Eliot.

definition from the Exploding Dictionary

The natural Love of Life gave me some inward Motions of Joy; and I was ready to entertain a Hope, that this Adventure might some Way or other help to deliver me from the desolate Place and Condition I was in. But, at the same Time, the Reader can hardly conceive my Astonishment, to behold an Island in the Air, inhabited by Men...

Scholars decipher a stunning find, an unknown canon in an ancient dialect.

Through some stunning finds over the last decade, researchers studying early Buddhist manuscripts at the University of Washington and at the British Library are confirming a longstanding hypothesis that an ancient tradition of Buddhist literature existed in Gandhari, a dialect of Prakrit, an early Indic language that developed from Sanskrit.They are confident that that canon may soon take its place next to the four other great traditions of Buddhist texts: the living traditions of Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan, and the ancient, fragmentary one of Sanskrit. The Gandhari canon may prove to be a crucial link in understanding the way Buddhism moved northward along the Silk Road, into Central and East Asia, even as it largely died out in India, where it was born in the fifth or fourth century BC.  [link]

Finnish archaeologists challenge conventional ideas of Essean civilisation

Probably more has been written about the scrolls found at Qumran on the Dead Sea than about any other archaeological artefacts. A million visitors a year used to visit the place where they were found - at the time that tourists still dared visit Israel. Qumran is quite worth all of the attention it has received. More than 2,000 years ago the place was home to a community known as the Esseans, whose members are known by name from a number of literary sources. The community left behind objects, ruins, a large cemetery, and writings written on leather, papyrus, and metal. "The combination is a unique treasure in the whole world, but so far research has been one-sided", says Finnish archaeologist Kenneth Lönnqvist.

Most research has focused on the writings - especially those with characteristics linked with Christianity. The interest among theologians derives from the fact that the approximately 1,000 scrolls include parts of the Old Testament, and texts that interpret them. Some of the texts have appeared in a number of thick volumes, published in the Oxford University series Discoveries in the Judean Desert. However, little of the archaeological discoveries has been published, or even adequately researched. This can be seen at a French Biblical and archaeological school maintained by Dominican monks in Jerusalem. The school holds much of the material found at Qumran, as well as a number of studies on it. Of the approximately 3,500 titles in the library, 100 involve archaeology. Of these about 20 are scientifically valid, and less than ten of those are important. Lönnqvist points out that many of the latter group do not seem to have been written by professional archaeologists.

Astronomers announced today the discovery of the largest object in the solar system since Pluto was named the ninth planet in 1930. The object is half the size of Pluto, composed primarily of rock and ice, and circles the sun once every 288 years.

Named Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-o-ar), the object resides in the Kuiper belt, a region of the sky beyond the orbit of Pluto and about 4 billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. The Kuiper belt is chock full of remnants from the planet-formation era of the solar system. [link]

Frequently Asked Questions About Quaoar

What is Quaoar?

Quaoar is a newly discovered Kuiper Belt object, found in June 2002 by Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown at Caltech in Pasadena. It's the largest Kuiper Belt object currently known, half the size of Pluto, and 1.6 billion kilometers (1 billion miles) further away than Pluto.

How big is Quaoar?

Quaoar is about 1250 km in diameter, roughly the size of Pluto's moon Charon. Nothing larger has been found in our solar system since Pluto was discovered in 1930. It's huge, in fact, if you took the 50,000 numbered asteroids and put them together, it would be smaller than Quaoar.

Here's a picture of Quaoar compared to some other Solar System objects, courtesy the Hubble Space Telescope graphic designers.



How was Quaoar found?

First of all, we are looking for objects like Quaoar because we think there may be a lot of objects like it that are undiscovered, and maybe even objects bigger than Pluto. We spent about 7 months looking for it with a semi-automated telescope, the Oschin Telescope at Palomar, California. It has a mirror diameter of 48 inches (1.2 meters), which is large compared to amateur telescopes (typically ranging from 0.1 - 0.3 meters in diameter), but small compared to most professional telescopes (1 - 10 meters in diameter). Although the mirror isn't very big, the Oschin Telescope has a huge field of view for its size, about 3 square degrees. That's about the same amount of sky area as 12 moons in each picture.

thanks to Dave Hodges for the link

Francisco Varela's work was ground breaking and influential in a wide range of fields including biology, pschology, management theory and non-linear dynamics. In his final years he concentrated on immunology but his earlier work in cognition can be clearly seen in his choice of paradigms for viewing the immune system. Just as a he challenged the view of the mind as a black box with inputs and outputs (essentially the computer model of the mind), he also challenged the traditional military defence model of the immune system. He saw the immune system as a cognitive network, one that is about maintaining the body's molecular identity, its autonomy and therefore its life. Francisco Varela died in May of last year.

The Immune System Our Second Brain

by Fritjof Capra

One of the most revolutionary aspects of the emerging systems theory of life is the new conception of mind, or cognition, it implies. This new conception was proposed by Gregory Bateson and elaborated more extensively by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in a theory known as the Santiago theory of cognition

The central insight of the Santiago theory is the identification of cognition, the process of knowing, with the process of life. Cognition, according to Maturana and Varela, is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living systems. In other words, cognition is the very process of life. It is obvious that we are dealing here with a radical expansion of the concept of cognition and, implicitly, the concept of mind. In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life - including perception, emotion, and behaviour - and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system.

At the human level, however, cognition includes language, conceptual thought, and all the other attributes of human consciousness. The Santiago theory of cognition, in my view, is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and will thus have the most far-reaching implications. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life - the process aspect and the structure aspect. At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure are inseparably connected.

Thus, for the first time, we have a scientific theory that unifies mind, matter and life. Let me illustrate the conceptual advance represented by this unified view with a question that has confused scientists and philosophers for over a hundred years: What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? Neuroscientists have known since the nineteenth century that brain structures and mental functions are intimately connected, but the exact relationship between mind and brain always remained a mystery. In the Santiago theory the relationship between mind and brain is simple and clear. Descartes' characterisation of mind as the "thinking thing"(res cogitans) is finally abandoned. Mind is not a thing but a process - the process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure.

The brain, moreover, is by no means the only structure involved in the process of cognition. In the human organism, as in the organisms of all vertebrates, the immune system is increasingly being recognised as a network that is as complex and interconnected as the nervous system and serves equally important co-ordinating functions. Classical immunology sees the immune system as the body's defence system, outwardly directed and often described in terms of military metaphors -armies of white blood cell, generals, soldiers, etc.

Recent discoveries by Francisco Varela and his colleagues at the University of Paris seriously challenging this conception. In fact, some researchers now believe that the classical view with its military metaphors has been one of he main stumbling blocks in our understanding of auto-immune diseases such as AIDS. Instead of being concentrated and interconnected through anatomical structures like the nervous system, the immune system is dispersed in the lymph fluid, permeating every single tissue. Its components - a class of cells called lymphocytes1 popularly known as white blood cells - move around very rapidly and bind chemically to each other. The lymphocytes are an extremely diverse group of cells. Specific molecular markers, called "antibodies" distinguish each type, sticking out from their surfaces.

The human body contains billions of different types of white blood cell, with an enormous ability to bind chemically to any molecular profile in their environment. According to traditional immunology, the lymphocytes identify an intruding agent, the antibodies attach themselves to it and, by doing so, neutralise it. Recent research has shown that under normal conditions the antibodies circulating in the body bind to many (if not all ) types of cell, including themselves. The entire system looks much more like a network, more like people talking to each other, then soldiers looking out for an enemy. Gradually, immunologists have been force to shift their perception from an immune system to an immune network.

This shift in perception presents a big problem for the classical view. If the immune system is a network whose components bind to each other, and if antibodies are meant to eliminate whatever they bind to, we should all be destroying ourselves. Obviously, we are not. The immune system seems to be able to distinguish between its own body's cells and foreign agents, between self and non-self. But since, in the classical view, for an antibody to recognise a foreign agent means binding to it chemically and thereby neutralising it, it remains mysterious how the immune system can recognise its own cells. Varela and his colleagues argue that the immune system needs to be understood as an autonomous, cognitive network which is responsible for the body's "molecular identity". By interacting with one another and with the other body cells, the lymphocytes continually regulate the number of cells and their molecular profiles. Rather than merely reacting against foreign agents, the immune system serves the important function of regulating the organism's cellular and molecular repertoire. From the perspective of the Santiago theory, this regulatory function is part of the immune system's process of cognition. When foreign molecules enter the body, the resulting response is not their automatic destruction but regulation of their levels within the system's other cognitive activities. The response will vary and will depend upon the entire context of the network. When immunologists inject large amounts of a foreign agent into the body, as they do in standard animal experiments, the immune system reacts with the massive defensive response described in the classical theory.

However, this is a highly contrived laboratory situation. In its natural surroundings, an animal does not receive large amounts of harmful substances. The small amounts that do enter its body are incorporated naturally into the ongoing regulatory activities of its immune network. With this understanding of the immune system as a cognitive, self-organising and self-regulating network, the puzzle of the self/non-self distinction is easily resolved. The immune system simple does not and needs not distinguish between body cells and foreign agents, because both are subject to the same regulatory processes.

However, when the invading foreign agents are so massive that they cannot be incorporated into the regulatory network, as for example in the case infections, they will trigger specific mechanisms in the immune system gig mount a defensive response. The field of "cognitive immunology" is still in Its infancy, and the self-organising properties of immune networks are by no means well understood. However, some of the scientists active in this growing field of research have already begun to speculate about exciting clinical applications to the treatment of auto immune diseases.

Future therapeutic strategies are likely to be based on the understanding that auto immune diseases reflect a failure in the cognitive operation of the immune network and may involve various novel techniques designed to reinforce the network by boosting its connectivity. Such techniques, however, will require a much deeper understanding of the rich dynamics of immune networks before they can be applied effectively In the long run, the discoveries of cognitive immunology promise to be tremendously important for the whole field of health and healing.

In Varela's opinion a sophisticated psychosomatic ("mind-body') view of health will not develop until we understand the nervous system and the immune system as two interacting cognitive systems, two "brains" in continuous conversation.

This exercise is actually quite interesting if you know a little bit of programming. Languages that range from ultra terse to ultra verbose are all here. That means the standards like C++, Javascript, Perl, Java and Python, plus the older ones that are still in common use C, Lisp, COBOL and Fortran. There are various defunct ones as well like Algoland BCPL and some intentionally obfuscated and damned nearly unusable ones like ZT, Unlambda and Brainfuck. And finally some that date from before computers were even invented like the Turing Machine and Babbage's Analytical Engine. Plenty to explore here, see how that favorite language of yours compares.[link]

Thanks again Dave.

Human and animal likenesses, a knife, and a sundial are among the "geoglyphs," or giant figures etched into the earth and discernible from the sky, most recently discovered in the Peruvian desert.

Peruvian archaeologist Johny Islas and German colleague Markus Reindel have identified new etchings made by the ancient Nasca people in the desert valleys of Palpa, about 460 kilometers (290 miles) south of Lima.

After five years of work, the scientists were able to identify more than 1,000 new geoglyphs.

The Nasca, whose culture flourished from around 200 B.C. to the middle of the seventh century A.D., made many of their etchings near the city of Nazca.

But the glyphs identified by the two archaeologists in Palpa, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of the city, predate the geoglyphs previously discovered and appear to mark the beginning of that civilization. [link]

Sensation: Cities Found on the Moon!

We still come across publications trying to find an answer to the following question: Are we alone in the universe? At the same time, the presence of reasoning beings has been detected close to our home, on the Moon. However, this discovery was immediately classified as secret, as it is so incredible that it even might shake the already existing social principles, reports Russia's newspaper Vecherny Volgograd.

-- Pravda


Pravda means "Truth" in Russian but its readers have always known this to be a bit of a euphemism. Still, its interesting to watch this former propaganda organ of Soviet Union transform itself into a tabloid. In retrospect this seems like such an obvious move, I guess its only a matter of time before it gets snapped up by the likes of Rupert Murdoch or perhaps even Mark Day.

The Proa FAQ

Just to clear up a few misconceptions; Polynesians in general and Tahitians, Tongans, Samoans and Fijians never used the proa configuration. Their outrigger canoes have distinct bows and sterns (and very nice ones too with plumb or clipper bows and long overhanging sterns).

A Tahitian canoe (as you can see on any postcard from Bora Bora) sails with the ama to windward or to leeward. There is a long balancing plank opposite the ama for the crew to prevent the very non-buoyant ama from diving.

Proas are found almost exclusively in Micronesia (like Satawal). I've been very fascinated with proas for over thirty years and in my Pacific cruising era, tracked down and examined every one I could find. There's a 60' Marshallese proa here in Auckland at the maritime museum now and it would be hard to conceive of a more ruthlessly functional sailing machine. The humbling part is that they had no metal to put in the canoe or to use for tools.

Particle physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg takes a cold hard look at Stephen Wolfram's new and much touted book, A New Kind of Science particularly its self-proclaimed revolutionary importance. For Complexity theory to be interesting scientifically, says Weinberg, it still needs pursue the same goals as the "traditional" sciences, that is, to uncover the laws which reveal Nature's inner simplicity.

He stakes his claim in the first few lines of the book: "Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation...."

Usually I put books that make claims like these on the crackpot shelf of my office bookcase. In the case of Wolfram's book, that would be a mistake. Wolfram is smart, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship at age twenty-two, and the progenitor of the invaluable Mathematica, and he has lots of stimulating things to say about computers and science. I don't think that his book comes close to meeting his goals or justifying his claims, but if it is a failure it is an interesting one.
Wolfram goes on to make a far-reaching conjecture, that almost all automata of any sort that produce complex structures can be emulated by any one of them, so they are all equivalent in Wolfram's sense, and they are all universal. This doesn't mean that these automata are computationally equivalent (even in Wolfram's sense) to systems involving quantities that vary continuously. Only if Wolfram were right that neither space nor time nor anything else is truly continuous (which is a separate issue) would the Turing machine or the rule 110 cellular automaton be computationally equivalent to an analog computer or a quantum computer or a brain or the universe. But even without this far-reaching (and far- out) assumption, Wolfram's conjecture about the computational equivalence of automata would at least provide a starting point for a theory of any sort of complexity that can be produced by any kind of automaton.

The trouble with Wolfram's conjecture is not only that it has not been proved—a deeper trouble is that it has not even been stated in a form that could be proved. [link]

A rare mummified dinosaur has been discovered in Montana--the first found anywhere in the world in 70 years. "Leonardo," a duckbill-type dinosaur, was fossilized in a unique way that preserved features of its skin and muscle, and even its last meal.



[link]

Also:
Brachylophosaurus Dinosaur - Leonardo discovery: Judith River Dinosaur Institute

IndiaExpress.com simply refuses to be outdone by Pravda.

NASA discovers bridge of Ramayana period

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space shuttle has imaged a mysterious ancient bridge between India and Sri Lanka, as mentioned in the Ramayana. The evidence, according to experts is in the Digital Image Collection.

The bridge, which was discovered only recently, was named as Adam’s Bridge. It is made of a chain of shoals, 30 km long, in the Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka. The bridge reveals the mystery behind it. The bridge's unique curvature and composition by age reveals that it is man-made. Legend as well as Archeological studies have it that the first signs of human inhabitants in Sri Lanka date back to the primitive age, about 17,50,000 years ago. And the bridge is almost equivalent.

Update: Actually there's a tad more to this, Adam's Bridge (or Rama's Bridge) really exists and is a

...chain of shoals, c.18 mi (30 km) long, in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. At high tide it is covered by c.4 ft (1.2 m) of water...According to Hindu legend, the bridge was built to transport Rama, hero of the Ramayana, to the island to rescue his wife from the demon king Ravanna.

And NASA really did image it (in the mid 1990's). The original story appears to have been lifted from the real Pravda wannabe VNN who in turn lifted it from INDOlink.

[link]

Ann Gibbons

Archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists struggle to understand the origins of the bold seafarers who settled the remote Pacific Islands

Polynesia, with its dramatic volcanic islands rising out of the South Pacific, was the last area of the world to be settled by people. The fossil and archaeological trail shows that humans first set foot in Fiji only 3000 years ago, then sailed on within 500 years to Samoa and Tonga, and later reached Easter Island, Hawaii, and the fringes of remote Oceania, exploring a realm stretching 4500 kilometers. But just who was in those outrigger canoes has long been a mystery. Even Captain James Cook mused about the islanders' origins on his last voyage from 1776 to 1780, noting the resemblance of language, customs, and appearance among the tall, fair Polynesians on such far­flung islands as New Zealand, Tahiti, and Easter Island. And he proposed his own theory that they had come from Malaysia or somewhere in the islands of Micronesia, such as the Marianas or Caroline Islands, where they had "affinities with some of the Indian tribes."

From such observations, Europeans such as French voyager Jules­Sebastien­Cesar Dumont d'Urville got the idea that these islanders could not be the descendants of the generally shorter, dark­skinned Melanesians living in islands of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. In 1832 Dumont d'Urville classified the people of the Pacific into three groups: Polynesians ("many islands"), the diverse Melanesians ("dark islands"), and Micronesians ("little islands"). This superficial classification stuck­­even though the geographic terminology eventually changed­­and ever since, many researchers have looked beyond the Melanesians of Near Oceania for the ancestors of the Polynesians who populate Remote Oceania (see map).

For example, until recently many geneticists and linguists have looked to the "express train" model. In this view, the ancestors of Polynesians came from Taiwan, where farmers speaking Austronesian languages set sail 3600 to 6000 years ago, largely bypassing the indigenous Papuan­speaking people of Melanesia as they swept out into the Pacific and left behind a trail of distinctly decorated pots.

Although this model was often touted as an interdisciplinary synthesis, in fact it is no favorite of archaeologists, many of whom have for years preferred a more "integrated" model, with at least some mixing between Melanesians and Austronesian speakers from Southeast Asia (a vast area that ranges from the coast of southern China to the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines). And now a flurry of studies of the Y chromosomes of Polynesians also favors the "slow boat" model, in which the ancestors of Polynesians originated in Asia but moved slowly through Melanesia, with time for genetic mixing among the peoples before the colonization of the rest of the Pacific. But even as these different kinds of data begin to point the same way, researchers are still groping for a true synthesis of the archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data. Each discipline tends to frame ideas in its own way, and at the moment each data set tends to favor a different homeland for the original voyagers. "I have to write a review myself of the spread of early farmers, and it's very difficult," says archaeologist Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra. "It's the genetics that is causing headaches."

Read on...

[link]

Surprising observations of a star swiftly orbiting the cloudy heart of the Milky Way Galaxy have verified with near certainty the existence of a central black hole, a theoretical object that still eludes direct detection.

Astronomers watched the star for a decade, tracking two-thirds of its path around the galactic center. No object has ever before been seen so close to the center of any galaxy, nor has any other object previously been observed making more than a small fraction of its orbital trek around a galaxy.

"We could not believe our eyes," said Thomas Ott, an MPE researcher who co-led the study along with Schoedel and MPE director Reinhard Genzel. "We suddenly realized that we were actually witnessing the motion of a star in orbit around the central black hole, taking it incredibly close to that mysterious object."

[link]

D², anonymous but self-described as "a fat young man without a good word for anyone", sure writes a brilliant blog.

His latest post contains a great backgrounder on this year's joint-winner of the Nobel prize for economics, Daniel Kahneman and the current (sorry) state of economic modelling.

Orthodox economic modelling is still largely based static models which ignore time as an essential component. They do this to keep their mathematics tractable and fudge the time component by modelling people's expectations of future returns and folding that back into the present. Earlier models (which still dominate much thinking in economics) are based on the notion that these expectations are always "rational". That is, for large populations, individual errors in judgement tend to cancel themselves out.

In the popular imagination this leads us to the vulgar maxim that the market is always right but more recent expectation modelling, like that by Kahneman, denies that you can just assume this kind of error cancellation. Rational expectations models have now been largely discredited in academic circles and more recent work uses psychological techniques and laboratory data to build models about how people make imperfect judgements and how this faulty knowledge affects their expectations.

D² goes on to point out that while this in itself is valuable research, the whole raison d'etre of expectation modelling is still about ignoring time and about keeping the mathematics nice and tractable. The problem is that reality is never quite as simple as that.

The real work that needs to be done is in attacking the fundamental assumptions of "expectations" modelling in economics. I mentioned above that Samuelson's assumptions underlying the Law of Iterated Expectations were "innocent-looking", which they are, but they're actually extremely restrictive. Importantly (and this is a topic I've harped on about before), they're only valid for expectations of *ergodic* processes.

What the hell is an "ergodic process" when it's at home?

Ergodicity is a statistical property. A data generating process is "ergodic" if the data that it generates is "well-behaved" in the sense that you can take a sample of it and that sample will be in some way representative of the whole. Imagine a random number generator, spewing out numbers, and yourself sitting in front of it, writing the numbers down. After 1000 numbers, you calculate the mean of the observations. If the random number generator is driven by an ergodic process, you now have a decent estimate of what the mean will be after 10,000 observations. With ergodic stochastic processes, collecting more data gets you a better and better estimate of what the underlying parameters of the process are, as the "noise" cancels itself out in some statistically well-defined way.

But imagine if you were in front of the machine, and you kept on collecting more and more data, but the average after 1000 numbers was completely different from the average after 10,000, which was nothing like the average after 100,000 and so on. Imagine further that it *never* settled down, no matter how much data you collected. That would be a strongly nonergodic process; over time periods of around a week to a month, lots of weather data appears to be nonergodic, which is why medium term weather forecasting is so difficult. It's clear here that to talk about "expectations" of the future states of a nonergodic system are meaningless; people might have opinions about the future, but there aren't the solid linkages between these views and the actual data which one would need to call them "expectations". Certainly, there isn't enough to support the trick used by economists in using the expectations operator to make dynamic processes static so that they can be modelled tractably.

So what? Well, so this:

Most processes which are characterised by positive feedback are nonergodic

Most economic processes of interest are subject to significant, destabilising positive feedback

Go read the whole post and while you're over there go read the whole blog and it's archives as well. There's plenty of great stuff there too.

An objection to the memetic approach to culture

Richard Dawkins defines "memes" as cultural replicators propagated through imitation, undergoing a process of selection, and standing to be selected not because they benefit their human carriers, but because of they benefit themselves. Are non-biological replicators such as memes theoretically possible? Yes, surely. The very idea of non-biological replicators, and the argument that the Darwinian model of selection is not limited to the strictly biological are already, by themselves, of theoretical interest. This would be so even if, actually, there were no memes. Anyhow, there are clear cases of actual memes, though much fewer than is often thought. Chain-letters, for instance, fit the definition. The very content of these letters, with threats to those who ignore them and promises to those who copy and send them, contributes to their being copied and sent again and again. Chain-letters don't benefit the people who copy them, they benefit their own propagation. Moreover, some chain-letters are doing better than others because of the greater effectiveness of their content in causing replication.

Once the general idea of a meme is understood - and especially if it understood fairly loosely -, it is all too easy to see human social life as teeming with memes. Aren't, for instance, religious ideas, with their threats of hell for unbelievers and promises of paradise for the proselytes, comparable to chain-letters, and in fact much more effective in benefiting their own propagation, come what may to their human carriers? More generally, aren't words, songs, fashions, political ideals, cooking recipes, ethnic prejudices, folktales, and just about everything cultural, items that get copied again and again, with the more successful items managing to invade more minds over longer periods of historical time, and to recruit those minds to further their own propagation? If this were so, if culture were made of memes in Dawkins's strong sense, then the study of culture could - and arguably should - be recast as a science of memes or "memetics". The Darwinian model of selection could be used, with proper adjustments, to explain the properties, the variety and the evolution of culture, just as it explains the properties, the variety, and the evolution of life.

The question is whether the claim that culture is made of memes is a true one. Several objections have been made to this claim. In his "foreword" to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999), Richard Dawkins responds to the simplest and most serious objection: "that memes, if they exist at all, are transmitted with too low fidelity to perform a gene-like role in any realistically Darwinian selection process" (Dawkins 1999: x).1 I want here to discuss Dawkins's responses, and, in so doing, develop a different fundamental objection to the meme model.

In 1900 a sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of an ancient merchant ship off the tiny island of Antikythera near Crete. The corbita, dating from the first century B.C., was heavily laden with treasure of all kinds, original bronze life-size statues, marble reproductions of older works, jewelry, wine, fine furniture and one immensely complicated scientific instrument.
The Antikythera mechanism was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox with dials on the outside and a complex clockwork assembly of gears inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a handle on its side, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. The device has been estimated to be accurate to 1 part in 40,000.

The bronze gearing, remarkable enough on its own right, also contains a further innovation that would not be reinvented until the 19th century, the differential gear. The differential was used to calculate the phases of the moon by subtracting the moon's motion from that of the sun's. This level of sophistication allows us to say without fear of exaggeration that the Antikythera mechanism was an early kind of analog computer.

The device is also thought by some to have been able to model the motion of the five planets using the epicyclical model of planetary movement around a fixed earth devised by Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus of Rhodes (later superceded by the heliocentric model of Copernicus).

It's been said that the Antikythera mechanism actually dropped and sank twice. The second submersion came after a comprehensive analysis of Antikythera mechanism was done by Derek de Solla Price (see Scientific American June 1959 and Gears from the Greeks: the Antikythera Mechanism: a Calendar Computer from ca. 80 B.C. 1975). Since then surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to what is surely the most exciting relic of advanced ancient technology that we have in our possession. After one hundred years, our estimation of the scientific and technology of the ancient Greeks needs to be be seriously revised.

"Suppose a traveller carried into Scythia or Britain the orrery recently constructed by our friend Poseidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon, and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night, would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being?"
– Cicero

[link]

A first century ossuary recently discovered in Israel could be the oldest archaeological link to Jesus of Nazareth. The Aramaic inscription on the box reads simply (from right to left):

"James (literally Jacob), son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

A rather more convinced (although, I might add, not necessarily more convincing) version can be found over at Biblical Archaeology Review.

first spotted over at the Collaboratory

Fixing the image - the early days of photography

In 1780, an eccentric Frenchman, Professor Charles, a builder of hot-air balloons and a lecturer in physics at the Sorbonne had already made elementary photographs on paper impregnated with silver chloride by casting through sunlight the silhouette of a man. In this way, the image of the silhouette was engraved in white on the paper, but after a few moments the light started to have an effect on it again until it made it disappear. Researchers from the principle European countries embarked on a mission to see who would be the first to come up with a solution to the problem. James Watt in Scotland, the inventor of the steam engine, was one of them. But the weak images on silver solutions that he obtained with the camera obscura, disappeared very quickly. Wedgwood, and later Humphry Davy, persevered further, but still had no success. On these experiments Humphry Davy wrote:

"What is needed is to somehow prevent the light parts of the drawing being affected by daylight. If this were achieved, the process would be as useful as it is straightforward. Up until now you have to keep the copy of the drawing in a dark place. This drawing can only be viewed in the dark and for a short time. I have tried in vain all possible means to prevent the colorless parts from going black with light.

"As for the images produced by the camera obscura, undoubtedly they did not get enough light for me to obtain a clear drawing with the silver nitrate. Nonetheless this is where the research interest lies. But all attempts have been useless."

It did not occur to Davy that the silver nitrate emulsion was not sufficiently sensitive to record the images that were being produced inside the camera.

In 1805, in Ciudad Real, now known as San Cristóbal de las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico–which was then part of Guatemala–Don Enrique Martínez, a chemistry and festive firework enthusiast, experimented with the camera obscura and a silver chloride solution applied to a metal plate. The local historian, Don Prudencio Esponda, describes Martínez's experiments in the following way:

"With his mysterious dark box, the learned professor Martínez has managed to retain a replica, similar to a very beautiful drawing of the front of the temple of Santo Domingo, on a metal plate impregnated with chemical products which he invented. When he removed the above-mentioned replica from the dark, from the aforementioned box, he rubbed it with a compound of lime juice and other vegetable juices. In this way, the image lasted for some days during which the most important residents of the town could admire it."

Don Enrique Martínez could not continue his interesting experiments, as in January 1806 he died in a terrible explosion accidentally set off in his firework factory. Nevertheless it was unlikely that even if he had continued to live, despite having made remarkable discoveries, that these should have become known, given that the distant province in which he lived was totally isolated from the important cultural centers.

In 1822, Necèphore Niepce, a French chemist, succeeded in making the first permanent image employing silver iodide. Using a camera obscura bought from a manufacturer called Chevalier he achieved, after an eight-hour outside exposure, the image that from then on is known as the Set Table.

source: From the Camera Obscura to Cinema - Carlos Jurado

In 1826 Nicéphore Niepce began photographing the world outside - starting with the view from his study window.



Point de vue pris d'une fenêtre du Gras à Saint-Loup-de-Varennes

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For decades, people have used computers to model present-day realities and fantasies. Engineers and scientists design cars and predict the weather with them, while video gamers have propelled the game The Sims, which allows the design of simulated human lives to play out on a screen, to become the best-selling computer game of the 21st century.

Now Tony Wilkinson, Research Associate and Associate Professor in the Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, along with colleagues spanning the sciences and humanities, wants to apply this technology to ancient Mesopotamia. If the simulations work as desired, his team will be able to test how and why the first civilizations were born, lived and died.

Wilkinson is a Briton whose soft-spoken manner is belied by the ambition of his project. “It will be a bit like Sim City, but real,” he said. The difference between the Oriental Institute project and a computer game lies not just in the sophistication of the model, but the fact that the database is history itself, and the results will be a new window into its causes. “We’ll run the model to see if we can grow Mesopotamian cities and test the results against archaeological data,” Wilkinson noted.

Read on...

From a nice FAQ found over at zompist.com

A language family is a group of languages that have been proven to have descended from a common ancestral language. Branches of families likewise represent groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor. For example, English, Dutch, and German have a common ancestor which we label Proto-West-Germanic, and thus belong to the West Germanic branch of Germanic. Icelandic and Norwegian are descended from Proto-North Germanic, a separate branch of Germanic. All the Germanic languages have a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic; farther back, this ancestor was descended from Proto-Indo-European, as were the ancestors of the Italic, Slavic, and other branches.

Not all languages are known to be related to each other. It is possible that they are related but the evidence of relationship has been lost; it's also possible they arose separately. It is likely that some of the families listed here will eventually turn out to be related to one another.

The Indo-European Family


Non-Indo-European Families

There are many New Guinean language families; some linguists group them all together as "Papuan" but this too is controversial. There are 26 families of Australian languages; the largest is Pama-Nyungan.

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Before the rise of Rome, the Italian peninsula was a patchwork of languages and nations. Most famously, perhaps, were the Etruscans a people who developed the largest and most powerful pre-Empire civilization and who spoke a non-Indo-European language that is today only partially understood. To the mountainous North were encroaching Celtic tribes and to the South, coastal enclaves of Greek colonists. The rest of the peoples that inhabited Italy spoke numerous tongues that included Messapic, Rhaetic, Venetic, Picene, Umbrian and Oscan. Latin began as a minor Indo-European language and was restricted to only a small area of coastal Central Italy under the control of the Etruscans but it soon broke free to become the language of the Roman Empire and later provide much of the vocabulary of Western Europe's languages.

Víteliú was the Oscan term for the Italian peninsula. This name is probably connected with the word for "calf" (seen in Latin vitulus and Umbrian vitlu ), and was originally applied to the Greek colonies in Italy. Gradually, the word came to refer to the entire peninsula, and was adopted by allied Sabellian tribes to foster a sense of nationalism during the Italic revolt against Rome. A form of the ancient word survives in the modern name Italia.

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]

Sardonic \Sar*don"ic\, a. [F. sardonique, L. sardonius, Gr. ?,
?, perhaps fr. ? to grin like a dog, or from a certain plant
of Sardinia, Gr. ?, which was said to screw up the face of
the eater.]

Forced; unnatural; insincere; hence, derisive, mocking,
malignant, or bitterly sarcastic; – applied only to a laugh,
smile, or some facial semblance of gayety.

Where strained, sardonic smiles are glozing still, And
grief is forced to laugh against her will. –Sir H. Wotton.

The scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody
ruffian. –Burke.

{Sardonic grin} or {laugh}, an old medical term for a
spasmodic affection of the muscles of the face, giving it
an appearance of laughter.

A plant from Sardinia? Greek origin? Hmmm, or maybe we could turn to the classical sources...

from The Phoenicians and the West - Politics, Colonies and Trade - Maria Eugenia Aubet, Cambridge University Press

The classical sources attribute frequent holocausts of children to the Carthaginians in order to emphasize the harsh and cruel nature of these people and their Phoenician forefathers. 'The Phoenicians, and more especially the Carthaginians, when they want some important project to succeed, promise to sacrifice a child to Cronos if their wish is fulfilled'. Clitarch and Diodorus also tell us that the sacrifice took place in front of a bronze statue of the god, with arms outstretched over a blazing hearth; the child slid down over the arms and fell. It seems that the victims were covered with a grinning mask and that is why, according to Clitarch, they died laughing and hence the term 'sardonic' (Sardinian) for a sarcastic smile.

In 665, the forces of Duncanthrax vanquished the Antharian Armada at the famous battle of Fort Griffspotter. The island-nation of Antharia was, at the time, the world’s premier sea power, and this victory gave Duncanthrax undisputed control of the Great Sea and put the superb ship-building facilities of Antharia at his disposal. (The conquest of Antharia also gave Duncanthrax possession of Antharia’s famed granola mines. Unfortunately, no one in Quendor liked granola.)

Within months, Quendor’s navy was returning from voyages with tales of a magical land on the distant eastern shore of the Great Sea. Duncanthrax was incensed that this vast land existed outside his dominion, and spent many nights storming the halls of his castle bellowing at his servants and advisors. Then, one day, he had a sudden inspiration: assemble a huge fleet, cross the Great Sea and conquer the lands on the eastern shore. Not only would he extend his empire, but he’d finally have a market for all that useless granola.

As Duncanthrax’s invasion swept across the new lands, he made a startling discovery: huge caverns and tunnels, populated by gnomes, trolls and other magical races, all of whom loved granola. Even as Duncanthrax conquered this region, his imagination was inspired by this natural underground formation. If these caverns and tunnels were possible in nature, so might they be formed by humans! Duncanthrax realized that by burrowing into the ground he could increase the size of his empire fivefold or even tenfold!

The Frobozz Magic Construction Company (the forerunner of the modern industrial giant FrobozzCo International) was formed to undertake this project in 668. For the remaining 20 years of Duncanthrax’s reign, cavern-building continued at a breakneck pace. The natural caverns in the eastern lands were expanded tremendously, and new caverns and passages were dug in the western lands, chiefly in the vicinity of Duncanthrax’s castle, Egreth. By the time of his death in 688, Duncanthrax ruled virtually all territory in the known world, above and below ground.

from the The Great Underground Empire: A History by Froboz Mumbar and here's a map.

Okay, got that? Good. Time to play Zork.

and of course if you get really stuck you can always cheat...

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This post began originally as a response to a question posted by Jaquandor over at the Collaboratory.

Despite being touted as the Next Big Thing for nearly a decade, micropayments as a way for paying for online content has stubbornly refused to materialize. Many companies have tried but systems like FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent have all failed to catch on. The reason, according to Clay Shirky, is because people will always prefer simple pricing models (such as flat-rate subscriptions) over pay-as-you go models. This becomes even more so when the value of the item being purchased is very low as is the case with micropayments.

It's not that a viable system for paying content authors is impossible, it's just that micropayments ain't it. Deep down nobody really likes being Nickeled-and-Dimed to death.

Who could haggle over a penny's worth of content? After all, people routinely leave extra pennies in a jar by the cashier. Surely amounts this small makes valuing a micropayment transaction effortless?

Here again micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?

Beneath a certain price, goods or services become harder to value, not easier, because the X for Y comparison becomes more confusing, not less. Users have no trouble deciding whether a $1 newspaper is worthwhile - did it interest you, did it keep you from getting bored, did reading it let you sound up to date - but how could you decide whether each part of the newspaper is worth a penny?

Was each of 100 individual stories in the newspaper worth a penny, even though you didn't read all of them? Was each of the 25 stories you read worth 4 cents apiece? If you read a story halfway through, was it worth half what a full story was worth? And so on.

When you disaggregate a newspaper, it becomes harder to value, not easier. By accepting that different people will find different things interesting, and by rolling all of those things together, a newspaper achieves what micropayments cannot: clarity in pricing.

The very micro-ness of micropayments makes them confusing. At the very least, users will be persistently puzzled over the conflicting messages of "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."

More...

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James, brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55), while well known to ancient writers has for most of the last two millenia been a rather neglected figure. He's not anywhere near as famous as his Mum certainly or even his Dad nor as famous as 'first pope' Pete or that shonky salesman Paul, nope, James sure doesn't get much airplay. At least that was until an ossuary purported to bear his inscription showed up recently. If proven authentic, this would be the first ever archaeological evidence ever found for the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. Suddenly James is in the news so who exactly was this dude?

As leader of the mother church in Jerusalem, James was the key proponent of a brand of Christianity that retained strong ties to Judaism and was suspicious of growing gentile influences within the movement. These "Jerusalem Christians" continued to worship in the temple and carefully observed the law of Moses, practicing a form of the religion, says James D. G. Dunn, professor of divinity at the University of Durham, England, that "we today would scarcely recognize–Jewish Christianity, or perhaps more precisely, a form of Jewish messianism."

But the keeping of Jewish traditions became an increasingly contentious issue as Christian missionaries began winning more and more gentile converts. According to the New Testament book of Acts, some Jerusalem Christians insisted that gentile converts be circumcised and compelled to observe Jewish laws–requiring, in effect, that to become a Christian one needed to first become a Jew. The issue became so divisive that leaders of the pre-eminent gentile church in Antioch (modern Antakya, in Turkey) sent Paul and another missionary to Jerusalem to meet with James and Peter. Ultimately, the Jerusalem leaders agreed that non-Jews had no obligation to obey Jewish laws, removing a major obstacle to conversion.

"The weight of history." Turbulence in Jerusalem would soon make the issue moot. The Jewish historian Josephus records James's execution as a heretic, at the instigation of the temple's high priest in A.D. 62. Eight years later, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, in response to a Jewish revolt. Any Christians still in the city were dispersed into Syria and beyond. Meanwhile, the thriving gentile church continued to spread throughout the Roman Empire. James, says Painter, had "struggled to maintain the messianic faith in Jesus as a viable faith for Jews," but "the weight of history crushed him and his tradition." The fate of that tradition and the legacy of James, says Painter, were "bound up with Christian Judaism, and with its demise his fate was sealed."

Only a month after scientists working at CERN had announced that they had produced cold antimatter hydrogen, another group also working at CERN have reported that they have been able to study the internal states of the new atom. Hydrogen is the simplest atom in nature consisting of a single proton accompanied by a single electron. Similarly an anti-hydrogen atom consists of an single anti-proton (a particle like a proton but with a negative charge) accompanied by a single positron (the positively charged counterpart to the electron). The two types of atoms have the same mass and the same amount of charge but with the opposite sign.

The earlier experiment which had produced anti-hydrogen could only detect the presence of the atom at the moment when it annihilated itself by coming in contact with ordinary matter. When matter and antimatter come in contact they combine and convert themselves into a flash of pure energy which can be detected by sensors. The disadvantage with this method of detection is that it is indirect and a number of factors can contribute to producing false results.

The new experiment in contrast can unambiguously identify the presence of anti-hydrogen in a process called field ionization which works as follows:

Having formed in the center of the enclosure, neutral anti-atoms are free to drift in any direction. Some of them annihilate but others move into an "ionization well," a region where strong electric fields tear the H-bar [anti-hydrogen] apart. Negatively charged antiprotons not in the company of a positively charged positron cannot reach the well.

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positrons enter here
	positron trap
	rotating electrode
	Cold anti-hydrogen formed here
	anti-proton trap
anti-protons enter here

For the first time scientists have been able to peer inside an atom made entirely of antimatter, to get a glimpse of its internal structure. The ATRAP Collaboration of scientists (from Harvard University, the Forschungszentrum Jülich, CERN, the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik in Garching and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and York University) work at CERN. This collaboration includes scientists who first observed high velocity antihydrogen atoms, who developed the techniques for accumulating cold antiprotons, and who have made the most accurate studies of hydrogen atoms.

ATRAP uses antiprotons from CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, and positrons from a radioactive source, to produce cold antihydrogen. The antiprotons are dramatically slowed and cooled, then accumulated using techniques developed by ATRAP and its predecessor. The positrons are slowed, cooled and accumulated using techniques developed by ATRAP members. The antihydrogen forms in a nested Penning trap, a device developed by ATRAP scientists to allow the gentle collisions of antiprotons and positrons needed to form cold antihydrogen.

The new method used by ATRAP to detect the antihydrogen atoms provides a signal only in response to an antihydrogen atom – there is never a background of false signals. ATRAP is now able to detect more antihydrogen atoms in an hour than the sum of all antimatter atoms ever reported. The paper refers to actual observations of a sample of more than 1400 cold antihydrogen atoms.

With substantial numbers of antihydrogen atoms there is hope that eventually enough atoms will be created to allow lasers to probe for any tiny differences between antihydrogen and hydrogen atoms. Such measurements would test fundamental theories of physics, and might even provide some information about the mystery of why our universe is made of matter rather than antimatter. With cold antihydrogen atoms, whose temperatures are within a few degrees of absolute zero, the scientists hope to eventually be able to use special magnets to capture the precious atoms for the precise studies. The detected atoms are nearly cold enough to be captured, though no trapping of antimatter atoms has yet been attempted.

Antihydrogen atoms are the simplest of antimatter atoms. Hydrogen, the simplest matter atom, has an electron in orbit about a proton. Replacing the proton with its antimatter counterpart, the antiproton, and the electron with its antimatter counterpart, the positron, would change hydrogen to antihydrogen. The particles and the antiparticles have the same mass, and the same amount of charge, but opposite sign of charge. When a particle and its antiparticle collide they “annihilate” – both disappear and release energy. Current physics theories predict that the antihydrogen and hydrogen atom would have the same properties. If an antihydrogen atom is put near a battery, the positive charge of its positron is attracted towards the negative terminal of the battery, while the negative charge of its antiproton is attracted to the positive terminal of the battery. If the battery has a high enough voltage, the strain on the atom will pull the atom apart. If the positron and antiproton are far apart in the atom, then a very small voltage will pull the atom apart. If they are closer together, more voltage will be required to disassemble the antimatter atom. This is the basic idea used by ATRAP scientists to probe the antihydrogen atom. They are able to get a first glimpse of the atom’s states, that is, about how closely the antiproton and positron are spaced, by seeing which voltages applied within their apparatus cause the antihydrogen to come apart.

The ATRAP scientists avoid any false signals of antihydrogen because when they take apart an antihydrogen atom, they capture the antiproton in a device called a Penning trap. They then hold the antiprotons as long as they wish, until after all the noise associated with the collisions that form antihydrogen has died away. These antiprotons are then allowed to collide with matter, whereupon their annihilation causes flashes of light in surrounding detectors that can be easily and reliably be counted. In other experiments, there are often false noise signals generated that cannot be distinguished from real signals. Even if the average number of false signals can be estimated for such experiments, one never knows for sure which individual signal is real.

The ATRAP scientists are quite sure that the antihydrogen atoms are created when two positrons collide with one antiproton in a process called “three body recombination”, in part because they had predicted that this process would produce antihydrogen atoms at a high rate. They believe that the rate is likely increased because they use the lowest temperature and best vacuum ever used for such experiments.

In a second paper (submitted to Physical Review letters and now being considered for publication), ATRAP reports an even more efficient method for producing antihydrogen, in which antiprotons are driven into repeated collisions with cold positrons. The production rate is high enough that for the first time a distribution of antihydrogen states is measured.

ATRAP, and its neighboring experiment, ATHENA, both use antiprotons from CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator to produce cold antihydrogen. ATHENA uses more positrons, and deduces the existence of cold antihydrogen atoms from observations of the simultaneous annihilations of antiprotons and positrons when antihydrogen atoms annihilate upon hitting matter. ATRAP provides the first glimpse inside antimatter atoms, observes cold antihydrogen atoms with no noise background at all, and observes more antihydrogen atoms than ever before. Both teams accumulate extremely cold antiprotons using techniques that were developed by ATRAP and its predecessor. Both also use a nested Penning trap, a device developed by ATRAP scientists to allow the gentle collisions of antiprotons and positrons needed to form cold antihydrogen.

Given the strong start, the future for precise studies of antihydrogen now seems bright at CERN. ATRAP scientists caution that they still have many experiments to do, much apparatus to design, many techniques to invent, many students to train, and many night shifts to work before there is a precise comparison of antihydrogen and hydrogen. Encouraged by the success they are eager to move forward.

Antimatter Power: Reaching for Deep Space

The other method involves allowing positrons and antiprotons (the mirror twins of normal electrons and protons) to clump together into antiatoms of antihydrogen. It might sound anti-rational, but that would make them easier to store.

"(There's a device called an) Ioffe trap which supposedly should be able to build and hold the antihydrogen," says Howe. Either way, Howe expects the stored material would most likely take the form of tiny crystals, or "nanosnowflakes" of antihydrogen.

Plus another backgrounder on matter vs anti-matter:

Antimatter Not As Tough As Matter -- Thus We Exist

And, finally, a diagram of a Penning trap, the device that is used to store and cool charged anti-matter particles such as anti-protons.

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Lake Titicaca, a sweeping expanse of brilliant blue water high in the Andes at an altitude of 12,540 feet, is shared by Peru and Bolivia. The world's highest navigable lake, it attracts flocks of visitors a year to see its floating reed islands, Aymara-speaking Indians and Inca ruins.

According to tradition, the Inca sun god, Manco Capac and his sister, Mama Ocllo, sprang from Lake Titicaca to found the city of Cusco and the Inca dynasty that held sway over a swathe of Latin America from Colombia to Chile for more than three centuries until the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

But Villavicencio said the discoveries -- made in the past two weeks by a team of navy divers and oceanographic experts -- were not the vestiges of a lost underwater world.

"There are studies that show that the lake used to be ... around 66 to 98 feet lower, and that was where ancient Peruvians built," he said.

As well as the algae-covered pre-Inca ruins, the divers also found a stone platform on which fragments of ceramics and bits of llama bones were recovered.

"Everything suggests it was a place where offerings were made, a sacred site," Villavicencio said.
Archeologists consulted by the expedition said they could be remains of the Tiahuanaco culture, which flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries, and was known for its stone work.

Poking 10 feet out of the middle of the lake, the team also found what they dubbed the "mystery rock" that measures 66 feet across.

A stone statue in the shape of a llama was found on the rock, which divers nicknamed after seeing how lightning always struck it during storms, Villavicencio said.

Casket Linked to Jesus Damaged on Way to Toronto

One of the cracks runs through the latter part of the inscription "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus,".

The ossuary is valued at about $2 million, [the owner] was described as being upset about the damage...

As you would.

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The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters. How should we go about it?

Japanese style

One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do. For instance, we'd write "work" as , and "ruler" as . Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. "gung-ho" would be , and "tycoon" as .

You can already see that this is going to be tricky. We've just given two readings, for instance-- /wrk/ and /gûng/-- and two as well-- /rulr/ and /kun/.

Proper names will be a problem as well. Again, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names already have hanzi forms-- e.g. for the name of the bodaciously cute singer Faye Wong-- but for English names we'd have no better recourse than to spell things out using the nearest Chinese syllables. For instance, Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.

Chinese style

Maybe there's a better approach. Instead of using hanzi directly, let's invent a new system-- we'll call it yingzi, "English characters"-- that would work for English exactly as hanzi works for Chinese.

The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning. So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi. (If we were creating a syllabary, by contrast, we'd write all three with the same symbol, the one for /tu/.)

Does that mean we need a completely separate symbol for each of the thousands of possible English syllables? Not at all. We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme.

Little pictures

You've been reading for half a page and are probably wondering why I haven't yet talked about pictograms. When do we get to draw little pictures?

Well, now's the time. Let's draw pictures. For instance:

horse	mount	king	man	child	bug	sun	moon	tree

When the pictures are abstract we can call them "ideograms", but they still represent particular English morphemes:

one	un-	per

Some of our pictures will be kind of clever. For instance, woods repeats the yingzi for tree, while east is a little picture of the sun rising through the trees. guilt is a picture of a man inside an enclosure.

Let's not go crazy, however. We only need a thousand or so, and we'll restrict ourselves to fairly simple, one-syllable words. We'll derive the vast majority of our yingzi from this basic stock of pictures.

more...