Paula Lieberman @ 64:[P]eanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, nearly all squash, most beans, duck, turkey, maize, are from the Americans.
I would say that I hate to nitpick, but honestly, I rather enjoy it.
Peanuts, much like coffee beans, are from Africa. As far as beans go, it's not exactly mostly New World. There are a lot of beans, so I'm not going to try and get an exact reckoning, but there are an awful lot of Old World beans --(broad beans, fava beans, chickpeas, peas, etc.) I'd say it's closer to half and half, whether you're counting by total species, or by total pounds consumed -- many of the New World beans are varieties of one species, the aptly named common bean.
And while it's true that most domestic varieties of duck descend from mallards, it's also the case that mallards are native to Europe and Asia, as well as to the Americas -- see BirdLife International's page about them.
As far as cultures turning back on technological progress, I'd be really cautious about assuming why it happened, how it happened, and if it happened. Looking at Roman shipbuilding, for instance, I can't come up with a point where progress stopped. The same applies to pottery, glass, and architecture; I'm not quite so knowledgeable about other sub-fields, but I'd have expected to come across at least one place where change was stopped, if the Romans were stopping technological development.
2: Sorry to disappoint, but this is one of the cases where the KJV isn't very far from the Hebrew text. I'd disagree a bit with the second and seventh line -- the second line should be something closer to "Judah has become his sanctuary, Israel his inheritance", and in the seventh, "tremble thou earth" simply isn't there -- it's just "Before the Lord of the sands of the Earth, before the God of Jacob."
But the landscape skipping and jumping is in the Hebrew, basically as the KJV has it. This isn't the first time that an archaic metaphor has tripped up a modern reader, of course, but it's really there.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
Tazistan Jen @ 57.
It's possible that I'm extra special grumpy this evening, because
both my router and my wireless mouse are acting up, leaving me,
ironically enough, to the mercy of recorded TV shows for most of my
amusement.
And yet, when I managed to get through to the essay, it seems to say
what I remember it saying: a lot of TV is really dumb, and
collaborative internet projects are really neat. And, honestly, it's
hard to argue with either of those premises. There's a hell of a lot of
dumb TV, and there are a great many interesting things being done on
the internet.
All the same, I think the framework in which he's assimilating those
ideas is fundamentally wrong. He sees our attachment to sitcoms as a
reaction to plenty, whereas the sitcom became a popular form during a
time of want. And I think that's a significant error. TV isn't where
people go to escape the possibility of having fun; it's where they go
to retreat from more stringent demands.
I don't think that anyone's trying to take the novels from my hands.
I don't even think that Shirky looks down on reading novels; he paints
TV as being a specific remedy to a specific problem. The problem being
that people would accomplish too much with their free time, and the
remedy that TV provides being wasting people's free time without
accomplishing anything.
I think that the logic of his arguments leads inescapably to the
valorization of any interactive activity over any passive consumption
of entertainment. And that's dumb.
In what context does "a screen that ships without a mouse ships
broken" not indicate a fundamental sense that interactive modes of
entertainment are superior to passive modes?
I'd go on in this vein, but I despair: If quoting three successive
paragraphs in their entirety is taking quotes out of context, and if
treating an explicit statement of a general principle as a statement of
a general principle is twisting the speaker's meaning, I'm not sure how
to reference my arguments in the text at all.
The frustrating thing about the essay is that I don't disagree with
most of Shirky's conclusions; I think that his argument goes off the
rails in a couple of places, and I think that he misses the opportunity
to talk about some really interesting stuff.
I mean, there wasn't a big media brute squad keeping him in that
basement, watching Gilligan's Island. He could have written novels or
fanzines or letters to various editors. Or, for that matter, he could
have been playing the piano, or playing ball or rolling a barrel hoop
along with a stick, or whatever kids did back then. He was watching
Gilligan's Island because it was the most attractive entertainment
option available at the time.
And I think it's really neat, the way ease of publishing and ease of
finding stuff is shifting things so that activities more productive
than watching Gilligan's Island are becoming attractive entertainment
options.
But I don't think that Shirky's essay really gets to the meat of
that. I think the "cognitive surplus" thing isn't defensible, except in
the broadest terms -- certainly, treating lots of free time as a 20th
century phenomenon shows a profound ignorance of history. I think the
idea that TV is uniquely useless to be at best foolhardy and at worst
pernicious, and it's very hard to miss that idea in the essay.
In short: No I'm not.
Here's the money quote, as far as I'm concerned:
At least they're doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost
get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my
blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had
an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those
things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it
was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big
surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be
an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in
your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to
do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of
kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an
invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things
it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your
computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do
that, too--is a big change.
It's not possible to read that as anything other than a condemnation of
non-interactive entertainment. Reading a novel -- any novel -- is worse
than grinding your way through a level or two on WoW. Watching a TV
show -- any TV show -- is worse than arguing about gun control on
Usenet.
It's a stupid thing to say, but then, "It's better to do something
than to do nothing," is an obviously retarded general principle. Is it
really better to drive a nail through your head than to sit quietly for
a bit? It looks a bit like reductio ad absurdum, but when the general
principle is explicitly stated, I'm not even reducing it.
The history is wrong, as well; using that product of interactive
culture, wikipedia, I discover "The story arc of Andy's romance (and
subsequent problems) with the Harlem beautician Madame Queen entranced
some 40,000,000 listeners during 1930 and 1931, becoming a national
phenomenon." At the time, the population of the US was about 120
million. The popularity of the sitcom isn't a product of post-war
plenty; it's a product of the Great Depression.
It goes back further; sitting and listening to people telling
stories has always been a popular way to spend free time. Changing
technologies have changed the way in which people sit around and
listen, and it would certainly be possible to write a sensible essay
(or, for that matter, give a sensible talk) about how the internet is
turning a lot of one-to-many media into many-to-many media. But this
one isn't it.
I'm entirely willing to agree with Greg London @29 that time spent
on wikipedia is in a lot of ways equivalent to time spent watching TV.
But that's not the point that Shirky is making.
On the other hand, Randolph Fritz @28, you seem to have the end of
an argument without the first part. If I were to say, "since the US
consumes over nine billion pounds of cheese a year, given the amounts
consumed, it's pretty clear that a lot of cheese is used as a sedative,
and that it is overused," you'd think I was mad.
In order for the argument to stand, you need to show that cheese is
used as a sedative, and that the amounts consumed as a sedative are too
high, against some sort of standard. I'm willing to believe that's the
case, with either cheese or TV, but again, it's not the argument that
Shirky is making.
I kinda lost the ability to follow the speech given after hitting one of those "somone on the internet is WRONG" moments.
Sitcoms weren't a post-war innovation. Before TV, there was radio,
and it hooked people just as throughly, with plotlines and jokes that
were just as inane, or just as clever. And before radio there were
penny-dreadfuls, and the explosion of novels in the late Victorian
period.
What strikes me is that he's arguing that there's something
fundamentally immoral about narrative fiction. Or, if not immoral, that
consuming narrative fiction is a less worthy activity than arguing on
wikipedia. Or playing World of Warcraft.
Now, WoW isn't my drug of choice, but honestly, I've played my share
of video games. And there isn't nearly as much "pretending that you're
an elf", as there is "killing the same type of monsters over and over
until you level, or the item you want drops." There are better video
games and worse video games, but there are better or worse books and TV
shows.
I'm foursquare in favor of constructive hobbies. And I think that a
lot of stuff that's thought of as unconstructive is actually far more
constructive than it appears. But I really don't see that TV is really
at fault when people aren't more constructive. Or radio, or books.
Sometimes, what you have energy for is to consume careful crafted
entertainment. Or godawful entertainment, for that matter.
Also, he needs to learn more about the industrial revolution.
Oh, man.
I mostly knew him online, and I'm going to miss him here and on lj.
As inadequate a word as it is, condolences.
Aw, man. There was a Bartons store on 181st when I was growing up. I couldn't have been much older than four or five when it closed, but I can still remember it pretty well -- when one of my sisters would take me to the library, we'd stop there on the way back, and get one chocolate bar, which we'd split.
Good times.
Re: C. Wingate @ 112
Biblical Archaeology Review is a decent popularizer of what's going on in the field of Near Eastern Archaeology, plus or minus -- there are occasional articles that just don't speak to scientific or historical interest of any sort, but that's going to happen in any magazine of that genre.
The thing about BAR is that. . . well, if, on a dig, an attractive girl wearing an abbreviated outfit finds something interesting, someone is bound to say something along the lines of "get the photographer -- there's our BAR shot." There's one image that I recall (I think it was on a Bethsaida excavation report?) where the girl was wearing a string bikini top, shorts that were maybe four inches wide, a floppy hat, and workboots. I mean, if that's your thing, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's a little strange to see it that consistently in a serious journal.
I can't suggest any sort of alternative, and it's not really an all pervasive problem -- there aren't that many pictures of that sort in any given issue. It's just that sometimes I think the art director would like to change the name of the magazine to Juglets.
Jim at 232: See CE at 165. He might not represent SFWA, but he does seem to say that he's sitting on a relevant SFWAn committee. And when you get a lawyer who's a member of SFWAs copyright committee, replying to points made in a lawyer letter to SFWA, it's not unreasonable to assume that there's some sort of representation in place.
On the other hand, when the VP of SFWA tells you that he sent a DMCA takedown notice, it's not unreasonable to assume that he's speaking for SFWA, and sent a DMCA takedown notice, so I suppose it's best to avoid jumping to conclusions of this sort.
Heresiarch @51: The problem I have is that the format of wikipedia gives articles that haven't had much in the way of input borrow the authority of better articles. They're on the same page, they're in the same format, they've often been cleaned up by the same copy-editors.
It's that format that gives them an undeserved confidence, or at least, that gives them the appearence of confidence. And, at least in the field of archaeology, there's an awful lot of absolute gibberish borrowing what authority that wikipedia has; I challenge anyone with a working knowledge of the field to spot fewer than three hilarious, glaring errors in the Bronze Age entry -- hell, there are at least two whoppers in the sentence, "The precious copper was also imported by sea routes to the great kingdom of Mesopotamia."
The thing about wikipedia is not so much that it's wrong, though it often is, it's that it's wrong with such confidence. I was willing to deal with that when there was a sense of fun to the thing; now, it's lost the humor, but retained the flaws.
I think part of why wikipedia gets that tone of unjustified confidence is the way that stupid articles get numerous layers of cosmetic edits, which make them look less stupid, without actually improving the content. Wikipedia's insistance on print sources magnifies that effect -- people might be willing to track down online sources when cleaning up an article, but aren't going to have the time or energy to track down books, many of which might be hard to find or non-existant.
I realize that I'm blathering at great length on an only tangentially related subject, but it's something that's been on my mind, and hey -- tangentially related is the best kind of related.
To continue blathering:
Before I started this, I thought to myself, "hey, wikipedia isn't very good on archaeology; let's see if I can find a bad article or two as an example." The first thing I looked for -- Blanche Garde -- doesn't actually have a page on wikipedia. The second -- Terra Sigillata -- has an article flawed in exactly the way I described earlier.
It's reasonable to redirect Terra Sigillata to Samian Ware, as it does tend to get called that in English.
A cursory google with the term "Eastern terra sigillata" will demonstrate that the idea that Terra Sigillata was first made in the first century AD is profoundly stupid. It also didn't originate in Arrezio -- terra sigillata probably first appeared in Pergamon some time before 180 BCE. The timeline given for terra sigillata in the article is a lot closer to that of African red slip ware, though that continues on until around the seventh century, if I'm not mistaken. And it doesn't appear outside of Africa in any great quantities until the second or third centuries.
It's interesting to watch the history of the article. In some cases, the flagrantly wrong assertions tend to be introduced in edits with poor grammar and ideosyncratic word choices, but those get smoothed away, leaving only the wrong information behind. In other cases, there's a bunch of reasonably correct information included with the stupidity.
In short, when you're trying to do serious research, you're much better served starting with google. There'll be clues in the sites you find that tell you how seriously you should take assertions made. On the other hand, if you want episode capsules of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 1970s, wikipedia is the place to go. At least for now; the current climate in wikipedia indicates that they'll be taking that stuff out sooner or later.
To be entirely fair, Individ-ewe-al @ 118, there is a word in Biblical Hebrew, "Eloha", which is used to mean God, in the singular, and "Elohim" is used as a plural from time to time.
But that's a bit nit-picky. Eloha is extremely uncommon in Tanakh, and Elohim is used as the singular pretty much throughout. In fact, Elohim is used as the singular for non-Jewish Gods in the Prophets (1 Sam. 5:7, Judges 11: 24 -- if it was the singular form, there wouldn't be a yud, and 1 Kings 18:27 has it meaning Baal without any ambiguity.)
This tragedy was caused by (too many/too few guns). If only there were (more/fewer) guns on the campus, it would have been avoided. American society needs to be (more/less) tolerant of possession of firearms, and carry of firearms in public places.
Wait, that was strange. I'm now getting a first page of results saying 4,450 hits (it had been 4,750 before), but it's only showing 12 of them.
Am I the only one getting this?
Strange.
Searching google for "he loved her. He really loved her" gets eight hits.
Using the search "loved her. He really loved her" gets almost 5,000 hits, most of which seem to be fiction, and most of which seem to contain the full phrase.
It may be that google is on to you.
106: Yes. Yes they do.
Rehoboam is a hard word to spell. Because it's Rechavam, and the King James transliterations are just crazy. (I'll admit to have confused Isaac and Jacob because Jacob was just too far away from Yaakov, and I was sort of reaching for whatever English word came to mind.)
My personal problems in this area are sufficiently wide and broad that it'd take far too long to go through them all. I will admit to tacking on an extra l at the end of just about every word that ends with "ful", and some words that don't. Also, I habitually misspell "assassin" as "assassain". You can imagine how much of a problem that is for someone who writes fantasy.
What's interesting to me is how rarely sapphire is misspelled. Pph isn't a combination that shows up that often, but people generally seem to get it right.
Dave Luckett 25: Generally, the gibberish is to get through the spam filters, and the payload is carried as an attachment (most typically an image, or images, which have stock spam or suchlike.)
When I got the negative feedback thing, I thought it had to do with an online writing workshop I'm in, as I've left reasonably harsh crits up there. I'm not sure what that says about me.
You have to admire the way Japan is trying to turn a depressing situation into something hilariously depressing.
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