How about Amazon.Com?
Month: December 2004
Does Your TiVo Think You’re Gay?
How about Amazon.Com?
Banal Papal Headlines?
The Pertinacious Papist and patriarch of the Magnificent Blossers, Dr. Phil Blosser, has noted the kind of headlines that the pope is getting these days. He gives some examples:
- Pope urges protection of envirnoment (Nov. 10, 2002, Associated Press)
- Pope’s Christmas Message: End global violence (from 1998, CNN)
- Pope urges more human rights for Cubans (Dec. 3, 1999, Miami Herald)
- Pope praises continued efforts to eliminate land mines (Dec. 10, 2004, The Catholic News & Herald, Diocese of Charlotte, NC)
While all press is good press, are these really the kinds of headlines that we should be having about the pope, he wonders?
Why not headlines like these?
- Pope: Catholic fornicators playing Russian Roulette with Satan
- Pope to youth: live chastely or risk going to hell
- Pope’s Christmas message: repentance key to God’s mercy for even most wretched sinners
- Pope: Georgetown University no longer Catholic
"I See Dead People"
Y’know the Christmas episode of WKRP where Dr. Johnny Fever asks Jennifer (Loni Anderson) what she’s doing for Christmas and, embarrassed, she reveals that one of her businessmen boyfriends is flying the two of them to Bethlehem?
Johnny’s impressed response is: "Now that’s a down home Christmas."
Ever wonder what a down home Ramadan is like?–a Ramadan celebrated in Saudi Arabia? An American living over there tells us:
Watching [Night of the Living Dead], I remembered
something Mohammed had said on the advent of Ramadan, when we were
discussing the effects of the holy month of fasting on the Magic
Kingdom’s inhabitants.
"In four weeks," Mohammed said, with a wave of his arm, "You will see dead people. Everywhere you look, dead people."
He had a point. By the end of Ramadan most Saudis did seem more like reanimated corpses than living humans.
Saudis have their own peculiar way of observing Ramadan. During
Ramadan the Saudis flip their lifestyles from day to night. True, they
do abstain from food, water, and sexual intercourse, during the day.
What they deny themselves in the sunlight they more than make up for in
the dark. Most Saudis gain weight during Ramadan. Like camels storing
nourishment and water in the form of fat in their humps for long treks
across the desert, the Saudis gorge on food and drink during the night
for the perilous journey from dawn to dusk the following day.
Nightlife
in the heart of the Magic Kingdom during Ramadan is frenzied. Shops and
restaurants stay open until late in the morning. Some don’t bother
closing until just before sunrise. Stores are congested. Restaurants
are full. Traffic is bumper to bumper. There are Ramadan Special Offers
and Ramadan Sells and Ramadan Drawings and Ramadan Discounts everywhere
as stores vie for customers.
Aside from an occasional catnap before iftar (the first evening meal at sundown, when you break fast) and after suhoor
(the pre-dawn meal) no one bothers to sleep. Sleep can be postponed
until the weekend, when you can snooze all day long to your heart’s
content, which is exactly what the Saudis do. On Thursdays and Fridays
(weekend in this part of the world) during Ramadan the heart of the
Magic Kingdom becomes one massive necropolis. Streets are completely
empty. Shops are closed. Aside from police at checkpoints on the
lookout for terrorists it’s as though the entire city has been
abandoned.
One discernible impact of the lack of sleep during Ramadan is a
tremendous rise in traffic accidents. Driving in Arabia is dangerous
anytime of the year, but during Ramadan it is like playing Russian
roulette, only with cars instead of bullets.
Some of these accidents are caused by sleepy Saudis racing home to eat iftar.
This week the Arab News reported that road accidents were up
20 percent during Ramadan. Brigadier Saad Al-Ghamdi of the Jeddah
Traffic Department told the Arab News the accidents peak just before iftar.
He said, "I have no idea why people are behaving so differently in
Ramadan even though they are supposed to respect the spirit of the holy
month by being patient and tolerant. This happens every Ramadan despite
our continued warning. Motorists tend to speed more than usual and lose
their concentration while driving."
The article when on to
say that, "the increased number of accidents has led the Traffic
Department in cooperation with charity organizations to provide a very
light iftar meal to motorists by traffic lights to calm them down."
You’ll be seeing dead people.
“I See Dead People”
Y’know the Christmas episode of WKRP where Dr. Johnny Fever asks Jennifer (Loni Anderson) what she’s doing for Christmas and, embarrassed, she reveals that one of her businessmen boyfriends is flying the two of them to Bethlehem?
Johnny’s impressed response is: "Now that’s a down home Christmas."
Ever wonder what a down home Ramadan is like?–a Ramadan celebrated in Saudi Arabia? An American living over there tells us:
Watching [Night of the Living Dead], I remembered
something Mohammed had said on the advent of Ramadan, when we were
discussing the effects of the holy month of fasting on the Magic
Kingdom’s inhabitants."In four weeks," Mohammed said, with a wave of his arm, "You will see dead people. Everywhere you look, dead people."
He had a point. By the end of Ramadan most Saudis did seem more like reanimated corpses than living humans.
Saudis have their own peculiar way of observing Ramadan. During
Ramadan the Saudis flip their lifestyles from day to night. True, they
do abstain from food, water, and sexual intercourse, during the day.
What they deny themselves in the sunlight they more than make up for in
the dark. Most Saudis gain weight during Ramadan. Like camels storing
nourishment and water in the form of fat in their humps for long treks
across the desert, the Saudis gorge on food and drink during the night
for the perilous journey from dawn to dusk the following day.Nightlife
in the heart of the Magic Kingdom during Ramadan is frenzied. Shops and
restaurants stay open until late in the morning. Some don’t bother
closing until just before sunrise. Stores are congested. Restaurants
are full. Traffic is bumper to bumper. There are Ramadan Special Offers
and Ramadan Sells and Ramadan Drawings and Ramadan Discounts everywhere
as stores vie for customers.Aside from an occasional catnap before iftar (the first evening meal at sundown, when you break fast) and after suhoor
(the pre-dawn meal) no one bothers to sleep. Sleep can be postponed
until the weekend, when you can snooze all day long to your heart’s
content, which is exactly what the Saudis do. On Thursdays and Fridays
(weekend in this part of the world) during Ramadan the heart of the
Magic Kingdom becomes one massive necropolis. Streets are completely
empty. Shops are closed. Aside from police at checkpoints on the
lookout for terrorists it’s as though the entire city has been
abandoned.One discernible impact of the lack of sleep during Ramadan is a
tremendous rise in traffic accidents. Driving in Arabia is dangerous
anytime of the year, but during Ramadan it is like playing Russian
roulette, only with cars instead of bullets.
Some of these accidents are caused by sleepy Saudis racing home to eat iftar.
This week the Arab News reported that road accidents were up
20 percent during Ramadan. Brigadier Saad Al-Ghamdi of the Jeddah
Traffic Department told the Arab News the accidents peak just before iftar.
He said, "I have no idea why people are behaving so differently in
Ramadan even though they are supposed to respect the spirit of the holy
month by being patient and tolerant. This happens every Ramadan despite
our continued warning. Motorists tend to speed more than usual and lose
their concentration while driving."The article when on to
say that, "the increased number of accidents has led the Traffic
Department in cooperation with charity organizations to provide a very
light iftar meal to motorists by traffic lights to calm them down."
You’ll be seeing dead people.
R'lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!
I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.
One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.
I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:
Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.
So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.
UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:
BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!
R’lyeh RevealedRE-LOCATED!
I’ve been going back and re-reading some of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories–which I haven’t read in years, so long that I’ve forgotten almost everything about them except the shapes and names of some of the monsters in them.
One of the stories I reread is The Call of Cthulhu, which is a lynchpin of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
For those who may not know (and this is forbidden knowledge, remember), Cthulhu is an evil alien entity who is presently asleep in the sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific Ocean and who is destined to wake one day and basically kill everybody. Oh, and an evil cult worships him and is trying to wake him up again.
I was intrigued by the fact that The Call of Cthulhu gives the exact latitude and longitude of R’lyeh:
Latitude: S 47° 9 Min.
Longitude: W 123° 43 Min.
So–in an age of MapQuest–plunked the numbers into MapQuest, which promptly spit back the following map, revealing the exact location of the sunken city of R’lyeh where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.
UPDATE: Down yonder an alert reader pointed out that the original map showed R’lyeh on the wrong side of the international date line. Turns out I had failed to enter a minus sign for the West longitude. Here’s the correct map:
BEWARE! HIC SUNT DRACONES!!!
Bad Law, Good Law
It’s obvious that what laws a country has have an impact on its economy. If you make it hard to get a business license, fewer people apply, there are fewer business licenses, less business, and thus the economy suffers.
Recent history also demonstrates that certain large-scale systems are better for the economy than others. Capitalism good. Communism bad. (Also, Fire bad!)
The logical thing to do, Mr. Spock would tell us, would be to plug as many legal and social variables as you can shake a stick at into a database and do regression analysis on them to find out which laws and social factors correlate with the success of an economy.
Who’s going to do that?
Not the politicians who make laws. They’re too busy selling economic snake oil to voters in the form of election promises.
Not lawyers. They’re too busy being lawyers to do economic analysis.
Economists? Yep. They’re the boys for the job.
And so that’s what’s happened.
Four economics sometimes referred to by their last name initials as LLSV (which sounds like a nucleotide base-pair sequences except for the fact that none of those letters represent nucleotides) have constructed such a database, regression analysis-ed it, written some papers, done further research, and in the process become the most-cited economists in the last decade (which is pretty great shakes for econmists).
Some of the things they have found seem obvious, like:
When shareholders have more rights, people are
more likely to invest in markets, because they have more protections
against dishonest executives. When creditors have more rights, they are
more likely to lend money, which spurs markets to grow. And when
countries are free from corruption, investors put more money into them.
The LLSV scholars weren’t the first to recognize that shareholder and
creditor rights spur economic growth, or that corruption stunts it, but
they were the first to connect these conditions to a country’s legal
system and to do so using cold, hard numbers.
But some of the things that they found went is rather surprising directions, like:
The regressions showed that the measures that
indicate high investor and creditor protection or low corruption
connect to common law origin. . . . The
measures that represent low protection and high corruption connect to
civil law origin.
"What does that mean?" you may be asking yourself.
It means:
[C]ountries that come from a French civil law
tradition struggle to create effective financial markets, while
countries with a British common law tradition succeed far more
frequently.
Now, that sounds like a nicely uncontroversial theory, right? Nobody’s going to be upset about a claim of this nature.
Oh, and one post script:
[T]he French government, for obvious reasons [is] the
most elegant and persistent defender of civil law. Initially, the
French government ignored LLSV’s findings. Then it dismissed them.
Starting last summer, it began funding research through its Ministry of
Rights and Justice into what the country can learn from LLSV.
Latin Study Tool Creation?
A reader writes:
Hi Jimmy,
I’m a big fan of yours. There are certainly a lot of vocabulary
resources for NT Greek, but I’ve never seen a Latin vocabulary
frequency list for the Vulgate (in book form, any way). Do you know
of one?
I’m afraid I don’t, but would love to have one.
For those who may not know, a word frequency list is a list of which words are most common in a given text or language. These lists are invaluable study tools for people trying to learn a language because, by studying the most common words first, you will be able to speak or read the language much quicker.
For example, if you were learning English, you would be advised to start by learning words like "the," "is," "house," and "blue" rather than words like "triumphalistically," "absquatulate," "boll-weevil," and "chartreuse." If you focus on learning the latter kind of words first, it will be a looooong time before you start understanding ordinary sentences.
People in recent years have created word frequency lists for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic part of the Old Testament and the Septuagint (if I am not mistaken) and a whole bunch of other texts. They have made learning these langauges much easier.
Unfortunatley, I don’t know of one for the Vulgate. If anyone out there does, please use the comments box to tell us!
Barring that, I should mention that a few years ago I took some steps toward creating such a word frequency list for the Neo-Vulgate (New Testament, if I recall correctly) but was unable to finish the project. I still have the files, and they could be converted into such a list (and into something even more useful), but I don’t have the time to complete it myself. I’d need help.
The problem is that Latin is a highly inflected language, meaning its words change form a lot. The frequency list that I have is of inflected forms, which is no good for learning–at least not the way traditional courses work. To convert it into a usable list, a person (or group of persons) or a computer program would have to go down the list and uninflect the words (that is, put them back into the dictionary form students need to memorize) and then combine the resulting word totals.
This is something that could be done by machine. In fact, I already know of a program that will parse Latin words for you, and part of that means giving the dictionary form of the word. It would be possible to largely automate the process–likely using the parsing program I already know about–but I don’t have the programming skills needed to pull the pieces together.
If someone (or someones) out there do and would like to take a crack at this, use the comments box or e-mail me.
Incidentaly, it would be possible to use the list to create something even more useful–a morphologically tagged Neo-Vulgate. This would assign a code to each word of the Vulgate New Testament that contains its parsing information. Such things already exist for the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew & Aramaic Old Testament, and they are useful for people trying to figure out hard word forms. Nothing like it exists for the Vulgate (so far as I know), but with the right programmer and a couple of people who speak Latin, it would be possible to construct one far more easily than in the past.
Either of these two projects could also lead to other helpful learning tools that exist for Greek and Hebrew but not for Latin.
If anyone out there would be able and interested in helping out with any of this, lemme know!
Killing Time
HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE ABOUT THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN ALBERT EINSTEIN AND KURT GODEL.
It starts as a rare look at the personalities and personal side of these two great thinkers–as well as many other names familiar from 20th century science.
Among the things it mentions, Einstein liked ice cream cones, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was Godel’s favorite movie, and Alan Turing killed himself by eating a poisoned apple.
But the article moves into theoretical waters, noting the disagreement between Einstein and Godel on the one hand and Werner Heisenber on the other. The subject of dispute: quantum mechanics. (And, frankly, I’m with Einstein and Godel on this one: I’m very suspicious of a lot of the interpretations of reality that are alleged to fall out of quantum mechanics.)
Where the piece ends up, though, is with a long-forgotten piece of collaboration between Einstein and Godel. The author summarizes it this way:
Einstein saw at once that if Gödel was right, he had not merely
domesticated time: He had killed it. Time, "that mysterious and
seemingly self-contradictory being," as Gödel put it, "which, on the
other hand, seems to form the basis of the world’s and our own
existence," turned out in the end to be the world’s greatest illusion.
In a word, if Einstein’s relativity theory was real, time itself was
merely ideal. The father of relativity was shocked. Though he praised
Gödel for his great contribution to the theory of relativity, he was
fully aware that time, that elusive prey, had once again slipped his
net.But now something truly amazing took place: nothing. Although in the
immediate aftermath of Gödel’s discoveries a few physicists bestirred
themselves to refute him and, when this failed, tried to generalize and
explore his results, this brief flurry of interest soon died down.
Within a few years the deep footprints in intellectual history traced
by Gödel and Einstein in their long walks home had disappeared,
dispersed by the harsh winds of fashion and philosophical prejudice. A
conspiracy of silence descended on the Einstein-Gödel friendship and
its scientific consequences.
Until Stephen Hawking took up the subject again.