1,621 karma · joined October 2, 2007
Very hard to understand why that should be. Even the most scary conspiracy theorists would not claim that banks and govs try to force phone tech refresh... unless ... it is really about spyware bloat :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Silk_Museum
https://web.archive.org/web/20170907005855/http://en.chinasi...
It has complete royal robes ~1,000 years old, and a few damaged garments more than 2,000 years old IIRC.
If you are buying a 'silk' garment it is common to ask the shop-keeper to hold it to a cigarette lighter to prove it does not contain a synthetic petroleum-based fabric, such as polyester.
They also have to up the repetition rate from once a week to at least 1k /s.
Note that ASML lithography machines accurately dilate and irradiate molten tin droplets with lasers at ~ 50k /s.
https://www.asml.com/en/technology/lithography-principles/li...
The reality on the ground is just like any lucrative illegal activity, such as drugs: it is run by violent mafia cartels. The cartels bribe senior national politicians, terrorize/bribe local officials and threaten communities. Rival gangs often have shoot-outs in remote forest areas. Many poor/desperate young men who join the lumberjack crews never come back. The bodies will never be found.
The Kennet Long Barrow is similar age, shape and construction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Kennet_Long_Barrow
Similar barrows exist across southern England, and in the wider Atlantic coast region, from Spain to Brittany and Ireland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotswold-Severn_Group
The only unusual about King Arthur's Hall is the apparent absence of burial chambers.
- remove the exemption (or reduction) for Capital Gains Tax
- remove Income Tax relief for mortgage interest
- remove any exemption (or reduction) for Inheritance Tax
Not all these advantages exist in all jurisdictions.
Then there are other changes that could mitigate distortions, inequality and volatility:
- separate interest rates for residential mortgages, commercial property, consumption and productive investments (industry, infrastructure, education)
- separate institutions for these different credit markets, with different reserve ratios and other regulations
- promote sound(er) money, to reduce inflation, and reduce the necessity to protect wealth by asset investment
- break cartels of real estate agents and aggregators to reduce transaction costs
- streamline the planning process to enable more houses to be built, without delay and costs of excessive eco/nimby appeals
- level the playing field between landlords and renters (means different things in different local jurisdictions)
Finally, there are more radical combinations of these things, such as removing the claim of mortgage interest as a business cost for landlords, which would raise their corporate taxes and deter high leverage.
Low railings may be jumped by an agile adult, but they stop children, elderly, wheelchairs, pushchairs, suitcases or people with heavy shopping.
Divided highways may get (more) high fences in the central reservation to deter jaywalking - but of course the frustrated locals will eventually cut convenient holes.
There is one situation where some kind of enforcement is needed: crowds of people ignoring pedestrian signals, and flooding across crosswalks continuously. Then the traffic never gets a chance to move. Cars cannot safely crawl or nudge their way through the throng of people, who feel the protection of collective security.
One might argue that such large crowds are an indication that the road should be fully pedestrianized - perhaps by time-of-day, or only for specific shopping holidays (e.g. Black Friday, Xmas). The alternative for these peaks is often manual control of people and vehicles by a police/traffic/community officer, like a school crossing).
Perhaps there could be some critical crossings where there is a legally enforceable 'double-red' pedestrian signal.
If they made it to the Azores, it would only take one storm, or a bold adventurer (not in short supply), to take one or more boats to the central Americas. There are legends of white bearded men in central American myths.
The main site is large, and has strenuous climbs up to the High Altar, Treasury overlook, Acropolis and out to the Monastery. I recommend starting early when the site opens shortly after dawn, before the crowds of mid-morning, and the heat of the afternoon.
Here's the Monastery in the dawn with some poetic musings:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikhailfranco/8579438475/in/al...
From Aaron's Tomb, you can see the Monastery embedded in the side of the huge escarpment (sequence of zoom levels):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikhailfranco/8579748035/in/al...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.
I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.
If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.
Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.
Secondly, don't bring the resource back to Earth. Take it to the Moon, Mars, or orbital manufacturing facilities, to be used in further space exploration/colonization.
If you like Vonnegut, perhaps try the fiction of J.G.Ballard.
Empire of the Sun is rightly famous, it is autobiography - but read that too. If you are American, you might not know that other things happened at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor [Yes, it was 8 December 1941 in Hong Kong, but across the dateline, so contemporaneous. IIRC 8am Honolulu to 6am HK is +4 hours].
GBG has that dream-like Kafkaesque frustration of having a concrete objective, but not be able to achieve it, even though it should be simple and tangible.
However, in GBG it is all meta: the game is unspecified, the objective is unspecified, the adorable miraculous winning play is unspecified. It is meta-Kafka, which is incredibly doubly frustrating...
SPOLIER ALERT: then, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, a realization creeps over you - GBG is life.
Really a tremendous literary achievement.
SPOLIER ALERT - Then, slowly, and in the end, convincingly, you come to know he is writing about you the reader. That is a miracle of writing and time and space.
P.S. I think Catcher in the Rye also does that, if you are late teen, but is a far inferior work, and does not bear reading if you are past 20.
The importance of The Selfish Gene is to write a correct summary of the neo-Darwinian project. In the future (perhaps even now), it will be more famous for the coining of meme (in an appendix IIRC).
However, The Extended Phenotype is a remarkably original exposition of important (then) contemporary frontiers of Darwinism. It is a powerful idea, powerfully described.
It is certainly his most important original contribution to the literature. And a beautiful book. True and convincing. It will change your view of the world. There is no higher praise.
Loaded in Chrome. Various effects were annoying. Right click - load in new tab didn't work for linked articles. And no changed link colors to show which articles I'd read before. Fancy graphics break web conventions.
Secondly, there was literally no work for men to do, except fight. Another man is another mouth to feed and water. In the small scattered settled urban locations, in the few major oases, there was work (farming, building, digging irrigation channels, etc), but they had E. African slaves to do this, because they could be trusted (no hope of escape; all were castrated).
I got assigned the bug when one of the only two Archbishops in Britain tried to open an account.
Luckily, Field Marshal has slipped from normal use in the British military, but he should have also noticed Brigadier, Commodore, Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral and perhaps Ambassador.
I guess Second Lieutenant or Sergeant Major aren't pompous enough to offer their titles to buy s***f on the internet.
The behavior of the captured woman would be:
- do everything possible to ensure her young previous children are not killed, but accompany her in captivity;
- don't try to escape, which would probably be impossible anyway;
- don't fight or assassinate her new captor 'husband', it would mean certain death;
- try to make the enslaved relationship work as well as possible; please the new master;
- seek to have successful children in the new context;
- marry-up in the new society, if at all possible, such as on death of the first 'husband'.
Many women would have already had arranged marriages out from their home village, to a new husband in another location, even within the same tribe or society. They may never have seen their original family again.
They would be dominated by their new mother-in-law, and treated like a slave in the new extended household. Being captured and enslaved again was probably not so different - unless it was by different and abhorrent barbarians.
For example, China had arranged out-marriage of daughters, and many of their lives were totally miserable (e.g. foot-binding so they couldn't run away). But being captured by the Mongols was probably extremely unpleasant (I mean, they never washed :)
Assume: in ancient Arabia, life was very harsh; tribes survived by raiding each other; 100% of adult men would go on a raid; women do not fight; fighting was brutal and merciless; casualties were high; no male prisoners were taken; wounded were killed; then ...
The first raid is inconclusive and 20% of men die on both sides. Now there are 100:80 women to men.
The second raid is also inconclusive, with the same casualties. The ratio is now 100:64.
The third raid is a rout, a total victory. The victors again lose 20%, but all the losing tribe's men are killed, and all their women are taken.
The victors now have more territory, more camels, more date palms and more wells.
The female to male ratio is 100+100:51
Of course, you can reduce the casualty rate and increase the number of raids, but something like that could be quite close to historical reality.
However, you have to be careful with terminology. There is no inertial frame co-moving with the photon. All we can say is: as a massive particle gets faster relative to an observer's frame, the time it experiences relative to the observer's frame becomes shorter, and in the limit, as it approaches the speed of light (but never reaches c), the experienced relative time approaches zero (but never reaches 0).
This is well explained by Don Lincoln on the Fermilab YT channel:
Do photons experience time?
Consider constant force acting on a mass initially at rest, for time t producing final velocity v and distance travelled x.
F = ma [Newton's 2nd Law]
v = at = (F/m)t, so mv = Ft [momentum transfer is force times time]
x = (1/2)vt [area under v-t curve: triangle formula]
E = Fx = F(1/2)vt = (1/2)v(Ft) = (1/2)mv²https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/03/asteroid-tha...
Some nice maps and seismic sections in the paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn3096
It seems possible that the Nadir Crater (9.5N 17W) is 'half way' between Shiva (2.5S? 55E) and Chicxulub (21.5N 90W) with (+12N +72W) step between them - making some wild assumptions about Shiva's location 65m years ago, when India was near the Reunion Hotspot:
https://socratic.org/questions/where-was-india-65-million-ye...
So one asteroid splitting into 3+ pieces, of different sizes, but roughly the equal separation? Like Shoemaker-Levy 9?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9
We (Homo Sapiens) have genetic adaptations for speech, so it seems likely (but unproven AFAIK), that some Ur proto sound communication immediately fractured on migration, with isolated groups diverging rapidly, such that languages were not mutually comprehensible. Languages are cultural, so mutate much faster than genes. It seems unlikely that genetic adaptations for speech could evolve independently in different populations of our species.
So my expectation is that all languages could be described as creoles, and only the length of isolation since last contact and exchange is in question.
Some might call this purity, but it should not be called that, because it hitches a ride to genetic purity, and we know where that leads. Also pure does not mean best. It just means most unchanged, which often means less successful and more brittle. Creoles are antifragile.
It is often the case that creoles are more useful (successful) than pure languages. Creoles occur at points of contact, trade, exchange, invasion, colonization, enslavement, expansion and diffusion. Development and populations tend to benefit in those situations, so creoles are probably more likely to be useful and survive.
English is not the simplest language. It is certainly a mongrel, if not an academically verified creole. English does not have a standard. Famously, the first serious and comprehensive modern dictionary (OED) documented actual usage, not imagined correctness.
By contrast, French, and most European languages, have a state-sponsored Academy to rule how the language should be used [1]. Central planning never works. English has evolved through many epochs of tribal conflict, invasion, conquest, colonization, trade, economic success, diasporas, intellectual influence, literature and modern media.
Ironically, it is more of a lingua franca than French. Notice how English beautifully and flexibly adopts a foreign phrase for a foreign pidgin trade language, which did not include English :)
Many distant historical languages only survived by fervent religious preservation, rather than practical usefulness. Vernaculars diverged, as expected. Latin and Sanskrit come to mind. Priests self-perpetuated their influence, by ensuring they were the only people educated in an obscure dead language, who could read and interpret holy books. A nice rent-seeking grift if you can keep it going for 2,000 years (Catholic church; 500 years earlier for Protestants).
So the more interesting question does not involve the word creole, but instead asks: what are the current languages with the longest period of isolation?
[1] Not coincidentally, the law is the same. English Common Law says you can do anything reasonable, until someone complains, then judges resolve the case, and it becomes a precedent in the common law. But the French have a top-down Napoleonic Code, which tries to describe everything that's forbidden. Needless to say, thanks to the war-mongering megalomaniac Little Corsican, most of Europe has the same legal framework (and also drive on the right, because of Napoleon+Hitler - a remarkable double-punch combination).