Quote of the day: everything from RandomEtymology

For random etymology, see this account on Reddit. While only a few days old and so there are no guarantees that this novelty account (a user account based on a single theme) will last, there is already enough information written by the user that it's worth keeping an eye on.

One example:

Uninspired is the negative form of inspired, a word that comes to us from the Latin inspiro ("to breathe"), with the key root being spiro ("breath"). Latin borrowed that from the Greek, and it ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European root -spei. The English word breath derives from a different PIE root, namely -bher, "to boil".

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Serbians etc. sound to Bulgarians like they aren't sure what happened.

I like this:

Tense system also isn't that big of a deal. The only think I can think is that when listening to other Slavic languages, including Serbian, their past simple tense is the same as our past renarrative mood which we use for things we did not witness or are not sure happened. So when I listen to Serbian, it always sounds like they aren't sure about what happened.

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Quote of the day: why Hitler is rarely subtitled

A discussion is taking place on Reddit right now about why Hitler is rarely subtitled in English, something I remember seeing a lot now that the thread has brought up the subject, but never really consciously noticed before. A particularly good summary of this is written here, which you can also see below.

One other Hitler word that never gets translated into English is Führer (never leader). Old newspapers also often called him Herr Hitler (instead of Mr.), another subtle way of making Germany feel more foreign.

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Human civilization = chance, lots and lots of tinkering, and a bit of inspiration

I was browsing a few forum threads the other day when I came across this quote from Robert Green Ingersoll:

Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of “inspiration.” It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge — that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized.

The religious part aside, I have to disagree on what makes up civilization. Human societies are built mostly by chance and a ton of tinkering, and what we live in is by and large just the result of this...and we by and large are loath to change it. Consider the number 60. Why are there sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour? Why, that's from the Babylonian number system, over 5000 years old. We haven't bothered to change that.

What about seven days in a week? Seven is an extremely awkward number to have for a workplace. Many complain that five days of work followed by just two days of rest is too much, but then again the only other real option is 4/3, which is already approaching a 50/50 split. Nine days would make much more sense: six days on and three days off per week, with multiplication and division much easier (it's not a prime number).

Ever notice that the Latin days of the month don't match up with their numbers? September = 7th month, October = 8th month. Why does February have 28 days? Because Augustus is no less great than Julius and his month needed 31 days too, so February got the shaft.

Why do people still believe that incentives are good for business even though the evidence shows that they have the opposite effect? Because 'common wisdom' doesn't agree, and the actual evidence just feels wrong.

Why doesn't English have a pronoun for both he and she? Because language is inherited and few are interested in actually looking at the inheritance itself and making a change or two. They would prefer to write out the awkward he or she every time.


Just about anything one can think of is a result of this - chance and a certain amount of tinkering, but very rarely does one find anything that is completely original. When something is completely original there is usually a great deal of opposition. Korean Hangul was created by a king (well, he gave the orders to his scribes to create it), but even he couldn't get people to use it as the common script during his lifetime and it wasn't until after WWII that it really became the one and only script used in both Koreas.


In the end, however, I'm glad that we have this resistance to change, as frustrating as it may be from time to time when trying to promote a new idea. If humans had a tendency to always go with the most efficient, sleek and original designs we would have a much harder time following our own history and languages, as change would just be far too rapid to accurately trace. It's nice to look at Proto-Indo-European and see many characteristics of modern languages even there, and to have candles in the house to light every once in a while even though their practical use in most cases has long since expired.

But perhaps the best thing about this stubbornness is that even it is open to change in some cases, and once such a change has taken place (hopefully a change for the better) it is liable to last for a long time. Those that understand this and are able to enact the change they want to see end up with a legacy. And then of course sometimes there's just a lot of luck where one taps into this without even realizing it: Wikipedia began kind of as a fluke, and now the idea of a world without it is unthinkable. Imagine going back to Encarta now -- it would never happen.

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Quote of the day: Washington Irving on civilized life vs. native human character

Here's an interesting quote I found in book today that also happens to have a German translation on the right, by Washington Irving. A bit reminiscent of Fight Club, don't you think? Or rather, the other way around.

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow-men, he is constantly acting a studied part. The bold and peculiar traits of native character are refined away or softened down by the leveling influence of what is termed good breeding; and he practices so many petty deceptions and effects so many generous sentiments for the purposes of popularity that it is difficult to distinguish his real from his artificial character...society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiting verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.

In zivilisierten Leben, wo das Glück, ja geradezu die Existenz des Menschen von dem Ansehen bei den Mitmenschen abhängt, spielt man ständig eine einstudierte Rolle. Die starken, hervortretenden Eigenschaften ursprünglicher Wesenart sind verfeinert oder gemildert durch den zähmenden Einfluss dessen, was man eine gute Herkunft nennt; und man vollführt so viele kleine Täuschungen und versucht so viele edle Gefühle zum Zwecke des Beliebtseins hervorzurufen, dass es schwierig ist, das wahre Wesen von der Maske zu unterscheiden...die Gesellschaft ist wie ein Zierrasen, in dem jede Unebenheit geglättet, jedes Unkraut ausgejätet und angesichts dessen das Auge vom gefälligen Wachstum einer samtenen Fläche erfreut ist; wer jedoch die Natur in ihrer Wildheit und Vielfalt erforschen will, muss in den Wald eintauchen, muss die Schlucht ergründen, muss der Strömung widerstehen und sich der Klippe stellen.

And that Fight Club quote if you don't feel like searching through the others to find it:

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Exoplanet news roundup

There has been quite a bit of exoplanet news over the past few days so here are a few stories in a single post. Given how many candidates have been put forth by Kepler (700 or so) as well as the other 400 or so that the Kepler team itself is now investigating, perhaps in a short time every story on exoplanets will have to contain news on much more than one in a manner similar to asteroid discoveries of today. WISE alone discovers a few dozen every single day.

First of all we have the discovery of a fourth planet around Gliese 876 with a mass similar to that of Ouranos (Uranus). Now the Gliese 876 system we know about looks like this:


Much more interesting than this though is this new technique developed that will enable Earth-like planets to be discovered much more easily. It's a technique called a nulling inferemoter that uses observations from four telescopes to completely cancel out the light from the star, making planets orbiting it that much easier to see.

This article on exoplanets has a line I consider to be quoteworthy:

After all, anthropocentric belief is not that appalling, if we regard ourselves as part of the nature along with whatever we find. As the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted, "We are in the universe and the universe is in us."

This is a question that comes up every once in a while - "doesn't thinking about the vastness of space make a person feel small and insignificant?" The full quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson is:

"The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars. "

Finally, an article here on brown dwarf stars and habitability. This is a crucial subject since it's very likely that we'll find one or more of them in our neighborhood, closer even than Alpha Centauri.

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How Michael Collins felt as he circled the Moon out of radio contact with Earth

Today's quote of the day comes from here, the Wikipedia page on Michael Collins (the third astronaut on Apollo 11 who went with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

During his day of solo flying around the Moon, Collins never felt lonely. Although it has been said that "not since Adam has any human known such solitude", Collins felt very much a part of the mission...During the 48 minutes of each orbit that he was out of radio contact with Earth, the feeling he reported was not loneliness, but rather "awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation".

At the time when the US was just beginning to take its first steps on the Moon it probably felt almost as if one were founding something akin to the United Federation of Planets (not in scope, but coolness) and if there's one part of the White House's new plan for space that needs to be criticized it's that not only does it ignore the Moon but also is a bit too nuanced and uninspirational to give astronauts and supporters of space exploration that kind of feeling.

Mind you, I've said before that I don't think the US will seriously be able to ignore the Moon for too long, as nations from Russia to China and others begin to explore the Moon and NASA's mission for just a flyby to Mars is still two decades away. One event that could serve as a wake up call for this would be a launch by China of astronauts to the Moon and back (i.e. to the Moon, one or more orbits around it and then back home), which would be a distance the US hasn't achieved since the early 1970s, in spite of the fact that technically missions like that have been done before. Eventually the US will have no choice but to make a decision to either continue toward a path that will eventually lead to a Mars flyby (20 years away), or join with the rest of the world in exploring the Moon.

An op-ed from yesterday here talks about the same subject.

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25 things we could do on the Moon

Here's a pretty detailed comment from a user on Reddit on just how useful the Moon is to us. Often the idea of colonizing the Moon is derided by those that haven't really given much thought to just what can be accomplished up there compared to either here on Earth or in LEO. Idea #13 is particularly interesting as it involves something not strictly scientific - many religions rely upon the phases of the Moon, and a cathedral or some sort of outpost there would provide accurate information on the phases of the Moon that otherwise have to be estimated from the Earth.

The most interesting aspect for me in the first few years would be seeing the effect of 1/6 gravity on humans over the long term, since we know that astronauts can stay in zero g for over two years without any adverse effects on health (as long as the astronaut is exercising regularly), but we simply have no idea what partial gravity would do. Even Mars-first proponents should be interested in this since if humans are capable of long-term residence on the Moon without any ill effects then Mars' gravity would be no problem either.

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Quote of the day: propaganda from the Iranian government on Neda Agha Soltan's death

Quote of the day:

Somewhere in hell Goebbels is face palming.

Context here.

Just in case you're not sure what a facepalm is, it's a term coined thanks to Captain Jean-Luc Picard whenever he would famously cover his face with his palm due to frustration. Here's one, the video gives another.



So what type of propaganda is so obvious as to provoke such a reaction? This one. The Iranian government has decided to try another tactic, creating a video claiming that Neda first took a bottle hid in her left hand, lay down and spread blood over her face, after which she was taken away by the men around her where she was then shot in the back by them.

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Quote of the day: how to be a modern Renaissance man

Here is a quote I first read a month back, one that is quite applicable to the movie Avatar and the reaction to it. It's from a thread on Reddit where the question was how to be a modern Renaissance man (a well-rounded person, skilled in just about everything and with an overall understanding of how the world works). What needs to be avoided on the way to the top though is a kind of snobbery that accumulates over time. Or in other words:

Don't forget more banal pursuits like sports or celebrity gossip. A Renaissance man can converse about Homer, a homer or Homer Simpson.

Exactly.

So what does this have to do with Avatar? Well, the movie just happens to benefit two fields that Page F30 has a lot of content on, namely space and constructed languages (auxlangs). Simply put:

- Avatar is set in the Alpha Centauri system (Alpha Centauri A) and we're on the verge of being able to discover planets and moons of just about our own size. Thanks to Avatar there are millions more people thinking and talking about this subject than they would without the movie.

- The Na'vi on Pandora speak a language that has its own grammar and vocabulary (i.e. it can be learned by anyone that puts in the effort) and since its release many people have begun trying to learn it. Thanks to Avatar there are thousands of people trying to learn a constructed language. And if they are willing to learn that, they will certainly be willing to consider the idea of an auxlang as well.

So these new "adherents" need to be engaged. Many who have been wowed by the movie have begun seriously thinking about space and constructed languages for the first time...and the wrong approach to take with them is a kind of moody snobbery that one sees from old hands in the field. On the space side it is expressed by "Eh, they're just fanboys and they're never going to do anything practical like writing a letter to their member of Congress for more funding", and on the auxlang side it is expressed by "meh, the language's grammar hasn't even been published yet", "They're just fanboys and will get tired of it soon", "I didn't like the movie so therefore I don't want anything to do with it".

This is an unproductive attitude to take. How many of us were born auxlangers? (besides denaskuloj) How many of us were born knowing how funding for NASA worked and how to get action from one's member of Congress? The answer is none; it is always some friend, some book, some TV program or other event that gets a person interested in a subject, and looking down on those that have not yet had the good fortune of hearing just why space needs to be explored and why auxiliary languages are worth learning is never a good idea.

Good politicians are a good example of this. Pick your favourite politician, the most honest and hardworking one you know. Americans might choose someone like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, Canadians might choose someone like Preston Manning or Garth Turner or maybe even Giles Duceppe. Depends on your political preference. But what makes a good politician a good politician is this: they never tire of explaining their message. Watch a dozen or so speeches by a good politician and you will begin to see a trend, that they have a message that is imparted every single time they give a talk, and they don't mind explaining it over, and over, and over, and over again. We'll go with Ron Paul as an example but feel free to substitute him with anyone else you admire.

Ron Paul was first elected in 1976 and is still a member of Congress, and he'll still sit down with anyone that asks and explain why he sees limited government, low taxation and a non-interventionist foreign policy as the best way to run a country. Now imagine how far he would have gotten if he had chosen back in the 1970s to mope about how nobody understood his message. Thanks to his tireless engagement with anyone that is willing to listen, he is now a powerful force in politics instead of a bitter old man. Anyone with a message needs to understand this, and avoid the snobbery and exasperation that seems to claim so many.

As the late Don Harlow put it, promoting an auxlang (in his case Esperanto) is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Rome wasn't built in a day. Build it and they will come (and if they don't come, sulk!) is not the right approach.

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Quote of the day for 24 December 2009

Today's quote of the day comes from here and has to do with Iran, and this incident in particular where a crowd forcibly stopped the public execution of two people convicted of theft. So what happened after that? Well, the two people that were freed were recaptured a few hours later and those that aided them are now going to be punished. Here's where today's quote comes in.

The caveat at the beginning is very important though - if the will is there then governments can completely squelch out dissent, but this usually requires a virtual closing of all borders and a severing of relationships with all but a few countries (North Korea).

On a related note, here's a nice article from last year from BBC featuring an interview with the recently deceased Ayatollah Montazeri. "Welcome to your house", he greeted the reporters as they arrived at his residence.

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Quote of the day for 23 December 2009

Here's something I've been meaning to do for a while: a quote of the day whenever someone says something better or more succinctly than I could. It's quote of the day but not necessarily a daily quote, so it won't necessarily be a daily feature.

Today's quote comes from here, and to read a related post of mine on the subject see here.

That's right, only $400 million to send a boat to Titan. In other words, you can send a boat all the way to Titan with just 8.2% of the yearly GDP of the tiny tiny country of Montenegro.

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