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.
==
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.
==
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.
==
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.
==
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.
==
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.
==
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.
Was reading an absolutely fascinating account of two days in Istanbul from Michael Palin's book on his travels through New Europe.
Nowhere do history and geography merge as spectacularly as they do here, at the end of Europe and the beginning of Asia, where the Mediterranean meets the Black Sea. The great north-south, east-west corridors converge here and the city built on these low hills, by its various names of Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul, has been at the centre of world affairs longer than any other.
The location seems to heighten ordinary experience. Views seem more dramatic, departures and arrivals more significant, encounters more promising, awareness sharper. Istanbul always strikes me as a city with a foot in two distinct worlds and I can't imagine it ever jumping completely onto one side or the other.
As Orhan Pamuk says in his book on the city, 'Istanbul's greatest virtue is its people's ability to see the city through both Western and Eastern eyes.'
I set out across the Galata Bridge, my back to the great Ottoman and Byzantine monuments, heading up to Pera, once a colony of Genoese merchants. Fishermen line the bridge and flat-topped water taxis slide beneath it with inches to spare.
Check out Palin's travelogues some time if you haven't already.
To see what playing Carnatic music on a guitar looks like, check out this here video of Prasanna.
Samanth will be starting a new column over at the Mint called Raagtime. His first piece entitled "Change and Continuity" is absolutely lovely.
In my mind, for many years, the word “classical” evoked a vision of Ancient Greek or Roman statuary: pristine, stern, inflexible marble, the very literal example of being “set in stone.” The classical arts are popularly imagined to be just as unyielding, not to be sullied by any stray influences. An image that daunting can, and does, put people off; just as unfortunately, it can also be thoroughly misleading.
Carnatic music shows how a classical art can also be an open and pliant art, and how change and evolution can be the breath of life, rather than the kiss of death. There’s no doubting its classicism, of course. Many of the ragas in Carnatic music today derive from the musical “moods” of Tamil music from the first few centuries of the Common Era, and notable scholarship dates back to at least the 17th century. This is an old, old art.
But the quintessential Carnatic music concert today is a product of the times it has passed through. The violin, for instance, is an integral part of the ensemble today, but it was introduced into Carnatic music less than 200 years ago, when it rode the wave of European influences that crashed on Indian shores.
Other alien instruments have been accepted, even by relatively conservative audiences, with an alacrity that is both surprising and pleasing. U Srinivas began playing Carnatic music on the mandolin in 1978, and today he plays to a packed Music Academy, in a prestigious evening slot, during the December Season. Kadri Gopalnath plays Carnatic music on a saxophone as golden as his regulation kurta. R. Prasanna is so indelibly associated with his instrument that he is simply known as “Guitar Prasanna.”
For more, step over to the Mint's website.
Bonnie Blue Butler had the situation come up at work where they had to find a good way to translate the English word "guarantee" into Hindi. This was a real-world marketing problem, and eventually they decided to go with "gaaranti", the word "guarantee" transliterated into Hindi.
I discussed it with her and I think it was the right thing to do. Now, this may be a pedantic point, but I must assure you that Hindi does not lack for an equivalent to the word "guarantee". Noting that Hindi owes its roots to both Sanskrit as well as the Middle Eastern languages, there are two separate vocabularies and therefore there are at least two different ways to express the word 'guarantee' in Hindi. One equivalent is the word "zamaanat". Another equivalent is the Sanskrit-nisht word "prathyabhoot". The problem for the marketers, of course, is that neither set of words may be particularly accessible. Given the complex linguistic situation in South Asia, the transliterated English word "guarantee" is likely the best bet.
Noam Cohen writes in the New York Times on xkcd.
FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife ... please.”
Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog — it can be done, but the frog dies.
Friar Tuck writes in.
==
One small step for Sharon Stone.... err.. file under boneheaded stupidity.
Radiohead sings of the "karma police", called in to arrest those who upset Thom Yorke: "This is what you get when you mess with us." And Boy George warbles about a "karma chameleon", in a toxic relationship because he's not "so sweet" anymore.
Cause and effect, see. Actions have consequences.
And Sharon Stone, a convert to Buddhism, has claimed - to much criticism - that the earthquake that killed at least 68,000 people in China was bad karma for Beijing policy in Tibet. "I thought, is that karma - when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?" she mused at the Cannes Film Festival. .
Paulo Coelho is pirating his own books using BitTorrent. Be sure to check out the video linked.
Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.
So is Coelho just seeding torrents of his books? That’s just the beginning. He took it one step further and, as quoted above, set up a Wordpress blog, Pirate Coelho, where he posts links to free copies of his books on filesharing networks, FTP sites, and so on. He says it had a direct impact on sales:
Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…
In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online “piracy” and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books! It’s a must watch.
An article on Language Log on Hindi-Urdu :
Hindi and Urdu are variants of the same language characterized by extreme digraphia: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right, Urdu in a script derived from a Persian modification of Arabic script written from right to left. High variants of Hindi look to Sanskrit for inspiration and linguistic enrichment, high variants of Urdu to Persian and Arabic. Hindi and Urdu diverge from each other cumulatively, mostly in vocabulary, as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms, and in their highest -- and therefore most artificial -- forms the two languages are mutually incomprehensible. The battle between Hindi and Urdu, the graphemic conflict in particular, was a major flash point of Hindu/Muslim animosity before the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947.
As the article notes, there are multiple variants of Hindi and Urdu. Having learnt Hindi, I would mention that Hindi and Urdu as languages spoken as part of every day can be mutually comprehensible if the speakers choose their words carefully. There are, however, differences in script as well, and these differences make seamless communication harder. (For the problem of script, there is transliteration software available to transliterate English to Urdu and to Hindi.).
There is a prodigal visual difference between the Devanagari script (also called Nagari) used to write Hindi and the Perso-Arabic script ordinarily used to write Urdu. The Devanagari script of Hindi is"squarish,'' "chunky,'' "has edges'' -- conventional characterizations all -- written left to right, with words set off from each other by an overhead horizontal line connected to the graphemes and running from the beginning of the word to its end. The Perso-Arabic script of Urdu is "graceful,'' "flowing,'' "has curves,'' written right to left, with word boundaries marked as much by final forms of consonants as by spaces. The immediate visually iconic associations are: Hindi script = India, South Asia, Hinduism; Urdu script = Middle East, Islam. The graphemic difference between Hindi and Urdu is far more dramatic, for example, than the difference between the Cyrillic script of Serbian and the Roman script of Croatian.
Hindi and Urdu get more highly differentiated as we step up the High scale with each borrowing from distinct vocabularies. So High Hindi is quite different from High Urdu.
Common words like chai 'tea', milna 'to meet', and mashin 'machine' are the same in either Hindi or Urdu. Vocabulary diverges sharply as we move from Low to High. The Hindi words for 'south' and 'temperature' (as in weather) are dakshin and tapman, the Urdu words junub and darja-e-hararat. The sentence "Who is the prime minister at the moment?'' is ajkal pradhan mantri kaun hai? in Hindi, ajkal vazir-e azam kaun hai? in Urdu.
An Indian linguist has illustrated how far the styles deviate from each other by asking how the abstract expression "salvation's true path'' might be translated into Hindi and Urdu at different style levels and among different ethnic-social groups. Village people would render this as mukti-ki sacci sarak (Bazaar Hindustani). Pandits or educated Hindus would say mukti-ki satya upay (Highbrow Hindi). Cultured Muslims would translate the phrase as nájat-ki haqq rah (Highbrow Urdu). Indians who speak English as their second language might say salweshan-ki tru path. The only indication that these four "languages'' are in some sense variants of the same language is the genitive marker -ki. Words like satya and upay in the Highbrow Hindi rendering are from Sanskrit. Every single content morpheme in the Highbrow Urdu version is from Persian or Arabic. One sees how dramatically the character of a language is changed when the sources of borrowed words for new concepts are as far apart as they are in Hindi and Urdu: we might as well be dealing with different languages.
A minor point on diction would be in order here. Based on the Hindi that I have learnt, using the word "sarak" in that sentence would be inappropriate diction. "raah" (or maybe 'raastaa') would be my word of choice there. Quibbling aside, the article does make some very interesting comments : one, that Hindi and Urdu are two languages with digraphic differences; two, that digraphia can be a separative force; three, that there are high and low variants of Hindi-Urdu and that these language "diverge from each other cumulatively as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms"; four, that this digraphia may have been perceived as a somewhat divisive issue between the different religions in the Indian subcontinent; and five, that there were political differences of opinion regarding script as well.
Gandhi's comments on the topic have much good sense.
Gandhi's tendency overall was to minimize the role of script. In a 1918 speech he laid out his thinking:
Hind[ustani] is that language which is spoken in the north by both Hindus and Muslims and which is written either in the Nagari or the Persian script. [It] is neither too Sanskritized nor too Persianized .... The distinction made between Hindus and Muslims is unreal. The same unreality is found in the distinction between Hindi and Urdu ... . There is no doubt or difficulty in regard to script. As things are, Muslims will patronize the Arabic script while Hindus will mostly use the Nagari script.
Oooh, oooh. A seriously interesting article. Robert X. Cringely on why Moore's law might extend for another 15 years.
This extra chip heat comes generally from four sources. The first is simply reduced surface area; yes the voltage is lower, but if the ratio of old voltage to new voltage is less than the ratio of old surface area to new surface area from the previous product generation and manufacturing process, well then the chip simply has to get hotter, since it is dramatically smaller yet doing the same work. Voltages drop linearly while surface areas decrease as a far more rapid square function.
The second reason chips -- especially microprocessors -- are getting hotter is the demands of keeping various clocks in sync. Using synchronous logic, some significant percentage of transistors is required simply to keep all the clock signals aligned on a 400 million transistor chip. Asynchronous -- clockless -- logic can do away with the need for that extra, power-wasting circuitry, as I wrote about in this space many years ago (it's in this week's links). As such companies including Sun and Intel are trying to make more and more of their chip circuitry asynchronous, but that is a long and crooked path toward chips that consume no power at all in the milliseconds they aren't being used.
But the greatest producers of heat are relatively new on the scene: two forms of current leakage that are especially prevalent at feature sizes substantially below 100 nanometers. The smaller we go the tougher it gets.
The first type of current leakage is called "gate leakage," which is a quantum effect in which electrons mysteriously migrate through materials they aren't supposed to be migrating through. Gate leakage is active, meaning it takes place only when the chip is actually running. Any leakage consumes power and creates heat without doing usable work, so of course we hate it unless, like I did with my old PDP-8, you are relying on your computer to heat your house.
Cute post. Moving pictures that are actually still :
http://netmath.blogspot.com/2008/01/trigonometry.html
It has been snowing billions and billions of blistering snowflakes out here. The whole place is covered in white. It is just a different kind of beauty. A breathtakingly beautiful b school covered in billions and billions of snowflakes from a billowing blizzard. Pictures at some later point perhaps.
I went with Bill Scadlock (of guest post fame) yesterday to see Elizabeth : The Golden Age. My vote was for The Kite Runner, but since that meant waiting an extra three hours, we decided to check out Elizabeth instead. The plan appeared jinxed from the beginning. Bill forgot to bring his wallet. Then, my first credit card failed to work. Finally, we made our way to the T only to be stuck in the subway for an incredible 45 minutes. We had to run the last fifty yards to the theater.
But in the end, it was not for naught. I got a welcome break from preparing for exams. Two comments : (the movie sucks) first, it is almost anachronistic to expect to see a historical movie which aims towards historical authenticity (the movie sucks); second, and I might as well say it plainly, the movie was not only non-historical (the movie sucks), but also at times non-logical. In a word, it was awful.
While at the theater, I reminded him that he needs to fulfill his promise to oblige our readers with a guest post, something he said would be possible only after he was back "from the land of the Austragonians" (Bill was recently in Sydney). Here is a speedy guest post by Bill. Written as only Bill can.
=================================================
Choultry points to some comments by Martin and to Wikipedia's "List of Indian Monarchs". Wikipedia just got back from its celebration of the 750th anniversary of American Independence, folks, and may be a little the worse for drink,, so please bear with W.Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.
Folks, There are two separate things on that new and improved Wiki page, one, a list of historical kings and another, a list of kings from mythological sources. both the lists have been merged into one. beeeeautiful. One list was arrived at after careful study by students of history while the other was arrived at by people who had little historical training writing before they could spell B-L-O-G. Perhaps there is a real cause for concern here in merging these two lists.
it is not just that these are very different kinds of lists. the point of contention is that this is really a matter of Enlightenment values. the question is - should we be accepting facts on the basis of faith alone? and if we do, on the basis of which faith? and how, then, do you resolve all the contradictions and inconsistencies that arise? to be sure, There may be historical elements that may be gleaned from the Puranas, etc.. And this is not intended to say that there is no element of truth in the religious texts. In fact, IIRC, the connection between Chandragupta and Sandrakottos came via the Puranas. But, the Puranas are not history. There is really no point in pretending otherwise.
***
One of the more interesting spins that I have heard on vegetarianism came from a guru who laid it out in terms of his biological theory of matter. There are, I was told, five elements that "life depends on" : the earth, water, air, ether and fire. The bones, I was informed, were made up of earth. What got me cracking up was the contention that brain matter, or the mind, was made up of "space". I have always been really interested in vegetarianism. I was vegetarian once, and a lot of my friends are vegetarian. Rationales for a vegetarian diet range from religious reasons to ethical ones to politicophilosophical ones. Among my friends too, motivations for vegetarianism and veganism seem to range across the spectrum. A friend of mine turned vegan after reading "A Diet for a New America". Another turned vegan because of his Berkeley-acquired political beliefs. Many of the vegetarians I know are vegetarian for religious and ethical reasons, but many of them have remained vegetarian because they just never acquired a taste for non-vegetarian food.
There have been some new arguments about vegetarianism in terms of minimizing land use. The argument is that a low-fat vegetarian diet is more efficient in terms of land use than a typical non-vegetarian one. This line of reasoning is, no doubt, sound. New research conducted in the state of New York has, however, indicated that while "a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficent in terms of how much land is needed to support it", it may possible that in certain cases the efficiency of a vegetarian diet may be improved. The numbers quoted are applicable only to the state of New York. The argument, however, might be fairly globally applicable.A low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency, Cornell researchers suggest.
This deduction stems from the findings of their new study, which concludes that if everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet, the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. With today's high-meat, high-dairy diet, the state is able to support directly only 22 percent of its population, say the researchers.
The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay.