I have to riff off the original, I think.
***
While working on an archaeological dig in Winchester, England, I was visited by my best friend/adopted sister, who was in Oxford for the summer, studying Shakespeare. She and I went for a walk out of town to the monastery of St. Cross, where, to this day, you can ask the porter for the wayfarer's dole, and be given a piece of bread and a small cup of beer. (We opted for water instead, being teenagers and -- even now, years later -- not inclined toward beer.)
And on the grounds of that monastery, there is a courtyard, and in the courtyard is an enormous old tree, and around that tree is the best grass in all the world: thick and soft and emerald green. My sister and I exchanged wordless looks, and half a second later we were both flat on our backs in the grass, staring at the perfect blue sky, with the tree arching above our heads, enjoying a rare, perfect, English summer day.
Yikes. Let me add my best wishes to the flood of others, for a full and speedy recovery.
I'm hoping to leverage the fact that All Knowledge is contained in the Making Light comment threads, and especially All Knowledge about publishing.
For my website, I've taken a stab at creating a glossary of business terms related to publishing -- contract terms, production terms, etc. The kind of things it might behoove an author to know. But I know the list is incomplete both in its entries and in the definition thereof, so I thought I'd poke my head in here and say, if anybody has some time to spare, I'd be most grateful for additions, corrections, and clarifications. (F'rinstance, my current definition of "offset printing" is weak sauce incarnate.)
Related question, that I've been wondering about for a while: does anyone have an idea why my Technorati watchlist has become utterly useless? When I go to that page, it invariably, for months now, says there are no items in my searches -- even when I know new things with those terms have been posted. For a while I was just retyping in whichever ones I felt interested in, and getting my results that way, but now even that fails. The most recent posts it pulls up are a month or two old, when I myself could point to half a dozen within the last week.
I've essentially given up on using it, but I do miss the convenience, so if there's a way to fix that, please clue me in.
Aw, man! Due to teaching commitments on my collaborator's part and an ongoing house move on mine, neither one of us is going to be there, though for a while we thought we could make it. Our paper will be there without us, though -- the dungeon and the covenant (aka D&D and Ars Magica) as alternate neomedieval conceptions in RPGs.
What have we all learned from this, children?
Don't leave bowling balls on the rear deck of your car.
(And, y'know, the seatbelt thing.)
#15 and #18 -- I see I'm not the only one who remembers that story (which was, god knows why, inflicted on me in an otherwise very satisfying summer course on sf short fiction when I was twelve).
I know I shouldn't judge a person by one short story, but when I started reading this post, my hindbrain was not remotely surprised.
Saw one this afternoon:
My country invaded Iraq and all I got was this expensive gas.
What, he never worked out how to say, "Oh my god, there's an axe in my head"?
JESR -- could be; like I said, domestication isn't my field of specialty (and neither are pigeons). I just wanted to clarify the term a bit, since it's the focal point of much of this thread.
"Domestication" means more than taming, exploiting, or even slightly modifying. I'm not educated enough on the subject to talk about the scale of change necessary for us to call an animal a domesticate, but it involves fairly substantial morphological and behavioral modification of the original species. I don't know if pigeons would count, regardless of their exploitation (a value-neutral word, btw, if anybody's bothered by it; just means we're making use of them).
I seem to recall hearing that nobody knows quite what to do with the Ainu language. I mean, people have theories as to where it came from and what it's related to, but none of them look any more plausible than the others, so it might as well have been imported by aliens for all linguists can tell.
But that might be an old story; there could be more recent research that would make me a liar.
Rob -- sorry, but that quote gives me hives. Hominid bone structure wandered back and forth between gracile and robust over a period of a couple million years, and took on its current configuration many, many tens of thousands of years before we ever started domesticating plants and animals (with the one outside possibility of dogs). Many enormous changes happened when we took up agriculture and pastoralism (among them increases in infectious disease, social inequality, malnutrition, and interpersonal violence), but if he thinks that's one of them, I don't know what book he was reading.
I'm actually not as big a fan of that book as I wanted to be. In every place where I knew the subject matter, I found myself wincing at cute, cartoony comments that were not really all that accurate.
Lisa -- but even if that's true, there's no reason to connect it to changes in human cranial capacity. I haven't heard any suggestions that dogs were domesticated in the same area that anatomically modern humans evolved, with their 10% smaller brains, and certainly those humans didn't evolve out of the bigger-brained Neanderthals. (Whether or not there was any cross-pollination between the two groups later is a different question, and pretty debatable.) There would need to be compelling evidence for, not just the earlier domestication of dogs, but for their domestication in that region of Africa, before you could draw any kind of parallel between the two changes in cranial capacity.
Also, the overkill hypothesis is weakened if the Clovis people weren't the first to arrive in the New World -- which is by no means proven, and the evidence for it is still scattered and in question, but the amount of scattered-and-in-question evidence continues to grow, while the ice-free-corridor model continues to look less and less pat.
Peter -- the impression I've gotten from the archaeologists around me is that most blame climate change, with humans being the straw that broke the camel's back (and the mammoth's, and the short-faced bear's, and the dire sloth's, and all the rest), instead of putting the primary blame on hunting. Those who still argue for overkill do as you suggest, and postulate mammoth as a "keystone species" whose disappearance did in all the rest, too. The difficulty there is still the paucity of evidence for mammoth-hunting (there's even one suggestion, iirc, based on the clustering of the evidence, that there was only ever one Clovis group that did it). Additionally, there were megafaunal extinctions in the Old World around the same time, and nobody ever tries to blame those on hunting.
Clark (#131) -- I'm on a trip right now, so I'm not in a position to answer you properly, but assuming I recalled the information correctly, it came from an exhaustive article written by a pair of archaeologists who undertook the task of examining the evidence for predation from Every. Pleistocene. Site. in North America. (Which is scantier than you might think, but still a big task.) If I'm wrong about them being the most frequently hunted, then I'm not far off, since I recall them specifically discussing it in contrast with mammoth predation (by way of debunking the "Clovis mammoth hunters killed off all the megafauna" argument). And there were plenty of other hunted species that survived, too.
Woot! I'm too lazy to delete the above, but I just discovered the syllabus is available to me through the magic of the Internets. The article in question was "Clovis Hunting and Large Mammal Extinction: A Critical Review of the Evidence," by Donald K. Grayson and David J. Meltzer, Journal of World Prehistory 16(4). I can't access the article online, I'm afraid, so I can't double-check my point, but if you want to read up on all the relevant evidence, knock yourself out. They go through every one of the Pleistocene extinctions, species by species, and compare it with species that didn't go extinct.
Lisa (#127) -- I'm not aware of any reduction in human brain size around the time of dog domestication (generally accepted as ~15kya, though that number could change). Neandertal brains were larger, but even if dogs were domesticated early enough for that to have happened around the time the Neandertals went extinct, there would be no likely connection between the two.
As for the difference between dog and wolf, well, are we talking chihauhua or Great Dane? <g> I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think domesticated species may, as a general rule, have smaller heads than their wild counterparts. And certainly we've bred particular lapdog types to be little, cute, and dumber than a sack of nails.
John (#118) -- Mann acknowledges that very point (in his discussion of the Amazon), and you're right; it is a potential problem. It shouldn't be, since "this landscape was managed by people" is not the same thing as "this landscape's ruined already; let's trash it some more," but the way our environmental debate has been framed (around the notion and valorization of pristine wilderness) does mean that the opposition might try to capitalize on the change in view.
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