From Cavafy's Ithaka :
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Will Stutely writes in.
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Michael Witzel on David Frawley :
For, the past is an alien land. Rigvedic culture is not the same as that of modern Indians, just as little as modern Taiwan Chinese have the culture of Confucius or of the Shang realm. In India, the undeciphered Indus script has disappeared early in the second millennium BCE and many of the ancient subcontinental languages have disappeared, just as Sumerian, etc., from Mesopotamia. However, those of the ancient Panjab are still visible in the c. 4 per cent of non-Sanskritic loan words in the Rigveda (F.B.J. Kuiper, Aryans in the Rigveda, 1991). Largely, they represent a prefixing language ("Para-Munda", Witzel 1999), like the Austro-Asiatic Munda (Jharkhand, etc.) and Khasi (Meghalaya). This means, incidentally, that R. Nagaswamy's assertion (Open Page, July 2) that I support Parpola's claim for a Dravidian speaking Indus civilisation is wrong (EJVS 5-1, Witzel 1999). A Dravidian language substrate appears only in the later parts of the Rigveda. Contrary to Frawley's claim, the direct link to the Indus civilisation has thus been lost both in script and in language.
However, the archaic language of the Rigveda has been preserved by Vaidik Brahmins. But the Vedic language, like all others, did change, from the Rigveda to the Upanishads. Compare modern English with that of Old English of some 1000 years ago (fader ure, du bist in heofnum... "Our father, you are in heaven"). The Rigveda has many grammatical forms that had simply disappeared by the time of Panini. He and Sayana do not know, e.g., of the injunctive (e.g. han: Indro 'him han). The same kind of changes is found in the meaning of Vedic words (pace Frawley): brihat does not mean `big' but `high', pur not `city' but `small fort', graama not `village' but `wagon train, circled when resting', raajan not `king' but `chieftain', paapa not `sin' but `evil'. The same can apply to samudra: etymologically, it means nothing but a collection (sam) of water (udr-). This could be a pond, a lake, a confluence, and (later on) "the big pond' (as we call the Atlantic), the "ocean." Close study is required of the whole range of meanings in the Rigveda and of their context. We cannot simply plug in the desired result into the very formulation of the question, and then force each passage accordingly, as Frawley does consistently, without any countercheck. He simply feels that the `logical meaning' of a word suffices. To translate graama by `village' may seem `logical', but it will not fit the Rigveda, nor even the much later Brahmana texts! (W. Rau, Zur vedischen Altertumskunde 1983; Rau, in: M. Witzel, Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts. 1997).
I was reading a Tamil grammar book the other day, and it looks like Tamil has all the cases that Sanskrit has, and in the same order. Out of trivia such as this, a theory may be formed. Not a good theory, not a correct theory, but a theory. Most likely a terribly misinformed theory. One can't be too careful with the past, that "alien land."
Friar Tuck writes in.
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Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is an idiot.
They laugh when he says something clever or elliptical or cleverly elliptical, which is much of the time. As in, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, what do you read?
"Mind," he says. "And spirit."
His voice is soft and high, the tenor of young boys and old men. Though he sleeps sometimes two or three hours a night, he says, he doesn't get weary. (Well, actually, what he says while grinning is: "Do I look tired?") He favors expressions like "if mind is kite, breath is thread," and "knowledge should be used as soap, for cleansing."
Also, "truth is always contradictory."
Why is that?
"Truth is not linear, it is spherical," Shankar says. "So it has to be contradictory. Anything that is spherical is always contradictory."
Friar Tuck writes in.
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So Martti Ahtisaari did win the Nobel after all. Here is the Mission Statement for the Crisis Management Initiative from his website.
Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) is an independent, non-profit organisation that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable security. CMI works to strengthen the capacity of the international community in comprehensive crisis management and conflict resolution. CMI's work builds on wide stakeholder networks. It combines analysis, action and advocacy.
Marian Fitzwalter writes in.
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An NYTimes article on how to treat a "money disorder".
While it is difficult to pinpoint the number of patients or practitioners, experts in psychology and financial planning say the number of professionals offering to treat money disorders has multiplied in the last few years.
Although there are many self-help books on how to become rich, the fields of psychology and financial planning have been slow to link money and emotion. And money is still a great cultural taboo that is rarely discussed openly in this country, experts say.
“I’m still working on my money issues and I will be for a long time,” said Ms. Champeau
Marian Fitzwalter writes in.
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india may not have worked out for the ioc, but sport has worked out for india. india will probably not win much more than a medal or two in the olympic games, but organized sport in india has not been about the medals any way. organizations and institutions involved in sport in india have viewed the role of sport much more broadly. sport has been viewed not only as a means of promoting health, fitness, &c., but also as a way of working the cultural framework of the subcontinent.
the hold of weberian traditional authority in a country such as india cannot be easily discounted. war has been part of many of the traditions. the idea of sport as a means for peace has been pursued inside the indian political structure - if the constantly warring nation states in greece could be persuaded to project their superiority by means of sport, so perhaps could the different cultures of india. sport may thus substitute for the role that war has traditionally played in many of these cultures (imagine the shiites and the sunnis in iraq taking out their mutual antagonism in a game of rugby or soccer instead of what they are upto right now). let's pit "our" best against "their" best, and let us see who wins.
it takes off from the idea of the Olympic truce. the olympics in greece were a means by which the Greek nation-states dropped their mutual antagonism for a period of time - "wars were suspended, armies were prohibited from entering Elis or threatening the Games, and legal disputes and the carrying out of death penalties were forbidden". when the different cultures duke it out on a sports field - where it is all about points on a chart and the fight is merely symbolic - as opposed to a battlefield, then the worst aspects of war - killing, maiming, genocide - may be avoided. so far, sport has worked quite well for india.
Via Marginal Revolution, the "girl named Florida" problem.
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I've been reading Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. The book covers the Monty Hall problem, Bayes's Theorem, availability bias, the illusion of control and so forth. If these are unfamiliar, look no further for an entertaining account.
On the other hand, I can't say that I learned much I didn't already know. Nevertheless, I still enjoyed reading the book - it's well written and filled with interesting nuggets (Did you know that the great mathematician Paul Erdos refused to believe that you should switch doors?). If you teach probability theory or intro stats you will find lots of good examples to brighten up your lectures.
One problem did intrigue me. Suppose that a family has two children. What is the probability that both are girls? Ok, easy. Probability of a girl is one half, probabilities are independent thus probability of two girls is 1/2*1/2=1/4.
Now what is the probability of having two girls if at least one of the children is a girl? A little bit harder. Temptation is to say that if one is a girl the probability of the other being a girl is 1/2 so the answer is 1/2.