aomurphy
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
192
Submissions
48
Member since
Nov 7
Feel free to ask me anything.
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Zompist is a bit unusual these days: one guy working on one project (his Constructed World Almea) for over 40 years now, with 30 of those on the web. It's a beautiful relic of the early web. Most of the sites from my old "conlang" bookmark folder are dead now, but not zompist.com
Comment · 1 year ago
Pretty likely! You can often see ones that follow the same format in the same hand, but with different names subbed in. Presumably some people went to a specialist who then followed mostly the same format varying for your own needs (a bit like a lawyer today?). It's unclear what the proportion was, maybe there were lots of people who figured DIY was good enough.
I learned this in a college course, Wiki seems to cite a few sources for this as well, but they're all a bit old. Not sure what the latest research is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_tablet#CITEREFGager1992
Comment · 1 year ago
There's a very active historical debate about whether a schedule like this, often called "biphasic sleep", was more common in pre-industrial societies. There's a historian called Roger Ekirch who thinks it was, starting in his 2004 book "At Day's Close - Night in Times Past". There's a bunch of criticism of it, since the sources are a bit ambiguous, or if he's generalizing from Medieval England (his main focus).
Comment · 4 years ago
Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus...
Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions!
In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on state/federal land. You usually must make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn't interested in it.
I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it's hard to see this as worth doing.
Comment · 8 years ago
I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going to say is just a summary of this lovely paper by Haym Soloveitchik then at Yeshiva University: https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture-reconstru...
The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.
There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.
And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.
Comment · 8 years ago
This has been predicted in higher ed for the past ~2 decades. It's relatively easy to look at the number of students in the pipeline, and you can see there were two big peaks in the last half century: baby boomers in the 60s-70s, and their children in the 90s-2000s. They managed to keep the boom going a little longer in the late 2000s with increased international enrollment, but it's over now (peak enrollment was 2010).
the other big trend has been that colleges in the US are disproportionately concentrated in a broad arc from New England through the Midwest for historical reasons, but young people in the US are increasingly concentrated in the South and West. I suspect we'll see a die off of lots of the small colleges that really only appeal locally throughout those areas. It's going to be pretty painful, look at what happened with Sweet Briar, which just managed to stay open (and admittedly suffered from another big trend: the death of women's colleges).
The best source for all of this (as with most news about how universities are run in the USA) is the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Comment · 8 years ago
I'm not Swedish, but I find this area relatively interesting. The idea is fairly straightforward: Sweden's model created low income inequality between the poor and the rich, but did not create low wealth inequality. A large proportion of Swedish capital was controlled by 15 families, and most wealth his still controlled by a small inherited class (many descended from the old Swedish nobility), and 80-90% of wealth is passed down. We might think of Sweden's long period of dominance by the Social Democrats from the 1930s - 1970s as a sort of bargain between the lower/middle and upper classes: pay your workers well, ensure a strong welfare state, don't be too ostentatious and the lower class will let the upper class run their businesses as usual. One family, the Wallenbergs, controlled ABB, Ericsson, Electrolux, Atlas Copco, SKF, AstraZeneca and Saab. In the 70s they employed 40% of Sweden's workforce and were 40% of Sweden's stock market's worth.
https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wea...
For Socialists, this led to an obvious question: what should be done about this? Their solution: most of this wealth comes from ownership of Capital in Sweden's large firms (this is an important distinction between Sweden and Denmark - Sweden has many more large corporations). Workers represented by the trade unions would own a large share of capital and then redistribute the profits from capital back to the workers (and reinvest in the firm and in worker training and investment in new firs controlled by workers). I think this is a relatively interesting take on the idea of "worker controlled enterprises". A very leftist take on all of this is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...
Of course it didn't happen, as part of the larger global ant-left backlash beginning in the late 70s which took basically everyone by surprise (see also The Iranian Revolution, the American Evangelical movement, Likud, the rise of the BJP in India...).
It's still an interesting idea, I think made more interesting by the rise of index funds like Vanguard. Increasingly capital is controlled by a small group of massive investment funds whose goal is to do nothing. This has led to the half-joking idea that index funds are worse than Marxism. I'll let Mark Levine explain:
" Virtually no one that I talk to in or around the financial industry really believes the "common ownership of companies by mutual funds undercuts competition" theory. It just seems too attenuated: Sure, it might be in BlackRock's and Vanguard's interests if the companies they own don't slash prices to compete with each other, but it's not (usually) like they call up executives to tell them that. Plus "competition" is usually a more nebulous concept than price-cutting: It might be in shareholders' interests to keep prices high, but it is also in shareholders' interests to see more innovation and more competition on quality. If you own the entire economic pie, your interest is in growing that pie, not in keeping each company's slices the same. And the way the pie grows is through the normal capitalist processes of innovation and competition and creative destruction and so forth.
Still I am so desperately fond of this theory. What I love -- what is made so clear in Jacobin's discussion -- is how it wraps capitalism all the way around to socialism. Index funds are in many ways a perfection of financial capitalism: Not only are they the result of scientific finance (modern portfolio theory, the efficient markets hypothesis, etc.) replacing earlier and less rigorous forms of investing, but they also concentrate and align shareholders with each other, and corporate managers with shareholders, in a way that seems like it would be well suited to "ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic." And the result is something that both Marxists and also financial analysts think is quasi-communist, that "undermines the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place." What if Marx was right that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, but the way that it does so is through index funds? "
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... (this essay is also fun because he discusses the hypothetical "Best Planning Robot", a computer so good at allocating capital it finally solves all of Kantorovich's problems)
Anyways, all of this sort of suggests on silly idea: why not just wait until Vanguard controls most of the stock market and nationalize it? I don't think anyone believes this, but it's certainly something to think about.
Comment · 9 years ago
It's worth one day finding a printing press class and setting some type by hand. For one thing, what you'll produce is beautiful, and it really gives a sense of how much art, work, and mastery goes into type.
Comment · 9 years ago
Empirically, this does not seem to be the case. Labov at UPenn has been studying American dialect formation for the past ~50 years, and has found several ongoing changes. In some ways the Midwest is getting more divergent, with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
Many small dialects are disappearing, but others are becoming more divergent (out west). It's a mixed bag.
Comment · 9 years ago
This has an interesting perspective on why the number of CS grads in the US seems so cyclical. The author argues they aren't, and the 1980s crash was a capacity crisis, totally different from the 2001 dot-com bubble crash. He also argues that we are about to experience another capacity crash, as there are not enough CS PhDs who want to go to teaching, and therefore enrollment will be capped.
Comment · 9 years ago
Could you link to some of them?
Comment · 9 years ago
Yes, absolutely. I think LeGuin is the last "great" Utopian writer we've had. The Dispossessed is a beautiful work, and one that doesn't have a dark heart. It has bad parts, it might not last, but it's not Omelas. You're exactly right, Omelas is about how we the reader would choose.
Would you leave everything behind because of evil? Would you live with it?
Comment · 9 years ago
Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for a more up to date work.
Comment · 9 years ago
One of the best books on the subject is Prof. Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis". The first part is a discussion of how different American groups understood Slavery as Christians in antebellum America. Broadly, several strands can be identified
1) Southerners generally felt content to argue that Slavery was in the Bible, and thus Christian. That Roman and Hebrew slavery was wildly different than Southern Slavery, with race as the underlying factor was not generally mentioned. Roman Slavery was done on peoples of all sorts, and not generally passed down from family member to family member, and was not conceived of as part of a racial hierarchy. There was also a lot of nonsense about sons of Ham and such.
2) Northerners generally felt that the Bible was "in Spirit" against slavery, either broadly in the sense that one should not do it (but not necessarily seek emancipation violently), or actively as many Abolitionists read it. Interestingly, Northerners sort of gave up on the literal argument, and generally argued from broad principles of the New Testament. What could be Christian about owning other men? If all Christians are brothers, how can one justify such an institution as slavery?
3) African Americans read the Bible as not only "in Spirit", but also sought a lot of specific arguments. How could Slavery be Christian when it broke up Christian marriages between slaves? Encouraged the rape of black Women by often married white Slave owners? That banned reading, and thereby prevented Christian blacks from reading the gospel? There was a lot of discussion about how Biblical Roman Slavery differed from modern Southern Slavery - Roman slaves were not racialized, nor forbidden to read by law. One particularly interesting line of thought to me is the idea that Roman slavery and Hebrew slavery, since it was not based on race, and often came from debt implied that if what Americans in 1860 were doing was Biblical Slavery, then White Slavery must be legal. Obviously, this was refused by White Americans, so something must be different. This wasn't picked up by many Whites, but one of the few who did was John Gregg Fee a really interesting preacher in Kentucky who argued that slavery must be ended, lest eventually the majority must be slaves.
4) Catholics and European protestants had a wide variety of views, which honestly I don't remember well enough to summarize here. In general though, outside of America the issue wasn't as pressing, only Brazil legally had kept around Slavery in this period.
It's a good book, and definitely well worth reading. Not that long either.