Miscellaneous topics in science, philosophy, language, history:
Granny SmithGranny Smith (1799-1870) lived only a couple of years after discovering some sports from a discarded French crab apple in her garden in Sydney. It was cultivated by local orchardists for the next twenty years, and in the 1890s was taken up by a wider public.I have to disagree with TAFKAH above: it is the perfect snacking apple... provided that it is crisp and sharp; and alas it all too often isn't. A floury Granny Smith is a travesty of what it should be. I resent seeing the supermarkets full of Pink Lady apples airfreighted in from New Zealand, or Washington state, when I live so close to Kent, the garden of England. Why don't we get more English varieties on English shelves? It's one of the few fruits we can do well. But Granny Smiths all the way from South Africa: fine by me! Wherever they come from, I'll have them. Yum. Maria Ann Sherwood was born in Peasmarsh in Sussex in 1799, and married an agricultural labourer Thomas Smith. They, their five surviving children, and numerous other people from the Peasmarsh area emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 aboard the Lady Nugent, arriving in Sydney on 27 November. They worked until by 1855 they could afford to buy land of their own, in Eastwood, now part of the City of Ryde, one of Sydney's municipalities, but then an orcharding district. These days there is a Granny Smith Memorial Park to mark where the farm boundary was. Mrs Smith is possibly Eastwood's most famous inhabitant. In 1868 a local grower and his son, called Edwin Small, were asked by Maria Smith to identify a seedling apple variety she had found on her farm. Small was interviewed for an article in the Farmer and Settler in 1924, which is where this story of the famous apple's discovery was first recorded. Granny Smith died on 9 March 1870, her husband in 1876, and their two sons sold their blocks in 1880 and 1892. In 1890 the variety known as Smith's seedlings was exhibited; under the name Granny Smith's seedlings it won a prize in 1891; and its fame began to spread. In 1895 the New South Wales government began to use it for large-scale cultivation and export. There is an annual Granny Smith Festival in Ryde each October. Most websites just take in each other's washing telling the basic story, but the definitive place to look is the City of Ryde's site, which has a picture of the lady herself. I was rather startled to find this in the Google results: "In November, the Granny Smith mine in Australia began processing...", and to then find it linked to wallaby production. But on closer inspection it's just a gold mine. J.L. AustinBritish philosopher, 1911-1960, one of the great intellectual figures of the 20th century. With Ludwig Wittgenstein he revolutionised our understanding of reality by demolishing metaphysics by the rigorous practice of analytic philosophy, which starts from ordinary language, analyses its description of a situation, then shows that confusion arises from applying the language in a way it was never intended for. However, he never cliamed that ordinary language was the final or sole arbiter of problems.He was highly influential in his teaching, but left only three books: How to Do Things With Words and Sense and Sensibilia (and a pun is a pleasant thing to do with words), and the Collected Papers of what he had contributed to journals. John Langshaw Austin, his full name, was educated at Shrewsbury School and was in the Signals Corps during the War. For recreation he enjoyed playing the violin, and was very fond of Bach. He believed in taking things to their logical conclusion. Although he did not believe in certain current theories such as that of sense data (Sense and Sensibilia is a demolition of that idea, associated with the logical positivists), he was willing to phrase problems in terms of rival theories, on their own grounds, instead of claiming he couldn't understand what they were talking about. His colleagues included A.J. Ayer and his students included Isaiah Berlin, whose recollections in his book Personal Impressions give a vivid portrait of Austin, among others. Berlin mentions one occasion when they decided to discuss some contemporary idea (the doctrine of qualia), and give a joint presentation, arguing for and against. Berlin presented the case for. Austin listened carefully, then opened his own presentation by saying that it seemed to him that what Berlin had said was complete nonsense. Thereupon Berlin realised it was not going to be simply a polite seminar, but a fight to the death: his own. J.L. Austin's usual opponent in his classes, however, was the dogged A.J. Ayer, and often the others were largely observers to a logical battle between the two, with Ayer infuriated by the calm and relentless demolitions and dismissals from Austin. This went on for many years, starting in 1936 when Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic appeared, and Austin after expressing great admiration began tearing it down in long walks with Berlin. He coined the terms illocutionary force and perlocutionary force, which have gained wide acceptance in describing the consequences of a speech act.
mummy wheatWheat that came from an Ancient Egyptian tomb. In the nineteenth century it was widely believed that this could grow again if sown. Botanists always insisted it was impossible, but the story persisted.It is definitely not true, but then again it's not a self-evidently silly idea either. After all, if it's actually inside the mummy, within or attached to the bandages, it could be preserved in much the same way many of the human tissues were; and if it's outside, in the sarcophagus or in corners of the tomb, it's still been resting in a very stable, temperature-controlled environment. Egyptology took off with Napoleon's expedition to the Nile in the late 1700s, and later the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone and thence of the whole language. Tourists and collectors brought back all sorts of Egyptian artefacts. No doubt the mummies had an especially gothic fascination, and it was natural to apply the idea of bringing the dead back to life to the grain that came with the corpses and sarcophagi. There was also a biblical antecedent: Pharaoh's dream that he related to Joseph, with seven ears on one stalk of corn being interpreted as seven years of bumper harvests. In fact, most so-called mummy wheat was modern varieties or varieties that did not exist in Ancient Egypt; or a completely different crop. (The appearance of maize among the new crop must have been a dead giveaway, though these days it would still give comfort to those who fancy mystical ancient links between the Egyptians and the Mayans.) Crafty local guides would have realised they were onto a good thing hiding ("planting") some sowable corn in their patches of pyramid just before the European visitors arrived. A more innocent explanation for some seeds that did exist in modern Egypt was the straw used for packing the shipments overseas. In one case, a gardener in England admitted that he had added good new grain to what his master had raised (brought back by an impeccably eminent Egyptologist), to avoid disappointing him. Recent experiments show that seeds can survive for a while; over a century, anyway, and in cool, dry conditions with little fluctuation of temperature. Experiments at Kew Gardens showed that a constant 16°C could preserve one in a thousand seeds for more than 200 years. But even deep inside the stillness of the Pyramids, temperatures went much higher than that, and grain would be destroyed internally in a much shorter time.
New Caledonian crowCrows are among the most intelligent of birds, and a number of animals have been reported as using tools. Mostly this is just a twig to dig things out, or a leaf to scoop things up. Most animal tools, that is, don't require much more forethought than picking up a readily-available object and using it in an obvious way.But the New Caledonian crow, Corvus moneduloides, shows planning and craft unknown in any other animal but humans and our most recent ancestors. They hunt out particular kinds of plant and work careful, repeated patterns on them, like Homo erectus shaping an Oldowan flint. And they make hooks: even chimpanzees don't use hooks. They came into the news in 2002 with reports of two birds, Alex and Betty, in an Oxford laboratory. Here they showed inventiveness in conditions never experienced in their New Caledonian forest home: Betty discovered the properties of wire and braced one end against a solid object and twisted the other with her book, in order to hook a bucket of food out of a clear plastic well. There are movies of this at the Research Group address below. A bird that can master the ideas of hooks, wires, and buckets is a menace let loose in a building: a small child, after all, is more likely to try sticking its pudgy finger into an electrical socket than to rip the gaffer tape off the toddler-proof socket, rip the toddler-proof socket off the live socket, and experiment with a specially made poking tool. Betty and Alex, as far as I know, survived, with constant vigilance from the harassed experimenters. But if, as I did, you heard this news and thought these were specially trained in clever tasks, think again. Their discoveries were spontaneous and repeatable. Given a long clear well with food at the bottom and a choice of different-length twigs, they didn't guess, they chose one that fit. And the way they use twigs back on New Caledonia, and on the smaller Maré in the nearby Loyalty Islands, is not just as a simple digger or spear, but as a fishing line. One of their food items is the grub of a longhorn beetle. Having dug their way down to where the grubs are lying in a tree, the crows irritate them with the end, the grubs grasp the intruder with their sturdy mandibles, and the crows haul them out for dinner. In the wild they make three different kinds of hook, by seeking out particular plants with just the right rigidity in their leaf ribs or pliant twigs, and snipping away the unwanted bits. They can work on their own moulted feathers, or on found materials like cardboard, which they can strip into usable pieces. Their most impressive tool is the stepped pandanus leaf. This leaf is an eminently tough strap, with edges covered in reverse barbs. The crows cut out a tapered tool from one side, to give themselves maximum leverage in wielding it, leaving the other side with all its hooking power. To cut diagonally across the fibres would require a Stanley knife and a steel ruler (give them time), so they snip parallel, stepped pieces off to approximate a diagonal cut. They appear to do this perfectly every time: since the discarded pieces are found in abundance, it is clear they don't waste time in practice. The evidence of the pandanus "flakes" also shows that they have a very strong bias to cutting with the right side of their beak. In fact, the New Caledonian crow has the strongest lateralisation of the brain of any creature apart from humans. The parallel between these two social, tool-making, right-handed animals is intringuing. The specialised left hemisphere confers our ability to do complex sequential tasks: and the planned tool-making of Corvus moneduloides is one of the most complex so far discovered.
New Scientist, 17 August 2002 noughtNought is the more colloquial term for the figure zero or the number nothing, though both are widely used, except in the US, where zero is the only common one.Well, that's the theory. When I started looking at where I actually say nought and where I say other things, I found it was quite mixed. The following are the observations of a British speaker, for whom "nought" is usually the most natural word. I believe they are generally applicable for most non-American forms of English.
Nought, zero, and ohAs the name of the figure, all three of these words are used, zero being the most formal and oh being the least formal.0.2 is said "nought point two", while 0.02 is said "nought point nought two". I don't think we say "oh point...", but we can leave off the leading zero and write it .02 and say it "point oh two". We could more formally use zero instead of nought or oh in any of these places. When someone asks how many there are, and there are none, you say "none" of course, but if you were going to name it emphatically as a number, you'd say "nought". In telephone numbers it's always "oh". The London area code of 020 is always said "oh two oh" - I don't think I could use zero or nought there. To curb hyperinflation you might cut three noughts off the currency. You inflate your budget tenfold by adding a nought on the end. That is, the nought is the actual figure "0". These can also be called zeroes. So the game of noughts and crosses (elsewhere called Tic-Tac-Toe) is always named with "nought", never zero or oh. A car can accelerate from nought to sixty in such-and-such a time. Neither of the others is said. Because nought sounds like eight it's not used over official broadcasts, like police and Seaspeak: so army operations are codenamed things like Bravo Two-Zero. Hawaii Five-O has "oh". We talk about the zeroes of a function, like the Riemann function. (Note on plural: British usually zeroes, American usually zeros.)But the infinite cardinality is aleph nought, not aleph zero. (The American term for this is aleph null.) We only ever say the zeroth power of a variable, or the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics: we can't say nought-th or oh-th. But in an polynomial equation we don't always add the "th" or the word "power". So, just as x4 is often spoken "x to the four", not fourth, so I think I'd say x0 as "x to the nought". (Never "x to the oh".) Dialectally, the word ought is also used, but I'm not familiar with the dialects that say it, so I'll comment no more.
Nought, naught, and nowtThere's the very similar word naught, with an A, which also means "nothing". Obviously with two words with the same pronunciation and almost identical spelling and meaning, the spellings get confused, but here's the official difference. These days, nought-with-an-O means nothing the number, whereas naught-with-an-A means nothing the amount of effect or result."It all came to naught." -- "All that work was for naught." -- "Set at naught." -- "Naught availeth." -- It's quite an archaic word really. But we could also write "set at nought", I suppose. (Fowler writes that it's "a matter of convenience only, & by no means universally recognized.") Shakespeare makes a pun in Richard III: the wicked Richard of Gloucester is teasing the gaoler Sir Robert Brakenbury about the King's mistress, Jane Shore:
Glo. We say that Shore's wife hath a pretty foot,Here Richard puns on "having nothing to do with" and "doing naughty things with". (The modern spelling switches from O to A but I can't be certain Shakespeare wrote it that consistently.) -- And the bit about betraying is because they both know the King is shagging her but can't say it publicly. Although nought-meaning-zero is rarely used in America, my dictionary (and other nodes here) tells me it tends to be written with an A when it is. In England there's a dialectical form "nowt" (rhymes with "out"), widely understood, meaning "nothing" or "none" or "no-one", as in the common expression of resigned amazement, "There's nowt so queer as folk". The word naughty actually comes from naught, via an intermediate sense of "worthless". Ultimately they're all the same word, and the Old English is ná-wiht, that is "no wight". That's wight as in Tolkien's barrow-wights, a wight being an obsolete word for a creature. Here endeth my brief history of nothing.
Petra KellyPetra Kelly was perhaps the world's most prominent campaigner on environmental issues, one of the most recognised champions of the Green Party, of opposition to nuclear power, of human rights, of non-violence, and of civil disobedience against the military-industrialist complex.She was born on the 29th of November 1947, Petra Karin Lehmann, in Günzburg. Kelly was her stepfather's name, an Irish-American. When she was 13 they moved to the USA, she studied at the American University in Washington, and she took part in liberal and radical USA causes: opposition to racial discrimination and the Vietnam War, and the election campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. She was named "Most Outstanding Foreign Woman student". Returning to Europe in 1970, she took part in similar "green" and "multicoloured" movements, culminating in the foundation of the Green Party. She was elected to the European Parliament and then to the Bundestag of West Germany when in 1983 the Greens reached the 5% threshold. She worked for many international peace and reconcilation movements, including that for justice in Tibet, and for the Basques who had been bombed by the Germans in 1937. She became the world-famous spokesperson for every cause dear to everyone's heart. A private tragedy informed another of her causes. In February 1971 her ten-year-old sister Grace had died of cancer. Petra Kelly created a foundation to help with childhood cancer. The greatest tragedy is her death. She had had several lovers, all father figures, including one high up when she had worked as a researcher in Brussels. For some years her partner had been General Gert Bastian, who had originally fought for Nazi Germany, then been a right-winger, then gradually shifted to be a support of the Greens, and of disarmament, and a potent speaker in their cause. He was married, but they were very much in love. She repeatedly said how dependent she was on him. He was twenty-five years her senior and had recently been having severe health problems. On 1 October 1992 she died, and Gert Bastian died, a single bullet through each of their skulls. They were found a long time after. The forensic evidence suggested he had shot her once, close up, then killed himself, awkwardly. Some people tried to suggest bizarre conspiracies. But the most likely, I suppose, is that he knew he was dying, and he knew she could not live, could not survive, could not function, without him. So he... See the Petra Kelly archive pornocracyPorno- is the Greek root for whore, prostitute; and pornocracy is one of those words you stumble across in a dictionary and wonder whether there could ever been a period in any country's history when it was ruled by whores. (That is, real whores, not common or garden politicians.)It was not just any country, but the Papacy, at a particularly low point in its history. Sergius III got himself elected Pope by one faction in Rome in 898 but a rival faction prevailed and John IX got in. John lasted till 900, Benedict IV lasted till 903, and two rival popes Leo V and Christopher emerged then. This was Sergius III's big chance, and he deposed both of them and had them strangled. No, we haven't come to the low point yet. Pope Sergius III lived until 911. One of his leading supporters Theophylact had a 15-year-old daughter Marozia, who was Sergius's lover. Their son in later years became Pope John XI, reigned 931-936. Actually all this was pretty much standard fare for the Popes of those days. Mistresses and nepotism were nothing. The bit that galled church historians and made them dub this and the following decades the pornocracy was not that, nor that Theophylact was effective civil ruler of Rome, but that his wife Theodora and daughter Marozia were said to use sex freely to wield power. Personally I think the hypocrisy is the low point. Or another candidate is the Cadaver Synod, just before, in 897, when Stephen VI accused his predecessor but one, Pope Formosus, of crimes against church law and put him on trial. This involved digging up the corpse and putting it in the dock, finding it guilty, dragging it through the streets, and flinging it in the Tiber. Anyway, Stephen lasted one year and was then strangled. They got through another two popes that year.
Proto-GermanicA language spoken in prehistoric northern Europe, which gave rise to the Germanic language family, including English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. It was never written, and is reconstructed by linguists from its descendants and by comparison with more distant branches of the Indo-European family, such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. It is sometimes called Primitive Germanic.By about the first century it was splitting into three branches. These might represent dialects within Proto-Germanic. They are the North, East, and West Germanic. North Germanic has the earliest writing, a few runic inscriptions from the 300s; this branch gave rise to Old Norse, the language of the sagas, and to the Scandinavian languages. East Germanic is also early, in the form of the Gothic bible, which however was written in what is now Bulgaria, the Goths having migrated far and wide from their original home in Scandinavia. Gothic and the East Germanic branch are extinct. West Germanic includes English and German; some Old English texts date from the 600s. Between them we can work out what their common ancestor was like. The main phonetic difference between Proto-Germanic and other Indo-European languages is the change known as Grimm's Law, stated by Jacob Grimm in 1822. Where Latin or Greek has d, Proto-Germanic had t; where Latin or Greek has t, Proto-Germanic had th, and so on through a whole range of other consonants -- read about it in Grimm's Law. One example is tooth compared to Latin dent-, Greek odont-. In some cases Grimm's Law didn't apply. Some of these made sense easily -- after s the change didn't take place, e.g. stand = Latin sto --, but other exceptions had to wait till 1877, when Verner's Law was proposed. This showed that the Grimm's Law change was altered by a subsequent one if the accent was on the following syllable. This discovery gave a depth of history to Proto-Germanic. In Proto-Indo-European, as also in early Greek and Sanskrit, and still in a few modern languages like Latvian and Slovenian, accent was a variable pitch that could be on any syllable. It was clear that this was true of early Proto-Germanic, and allowed Verner's Law to apply. Then, another major phonetic shift occurred: Proto-Germanic took on a stress accent on the first syllable. This is generally the case with modern Germanic languages. One possible influence for this is Uralic languages, its neighbours up there in the north. The most familiar Uralic language is Finnish. They have initial stress. There was certainly interplay between Germanic and Uralic at a very early period. Finnish borrowed words like kuningas 'king' and rengas 'ring'. These still contain the ancient ending -az (there was no Z in Finnish so they borrowed it as S). This ending corresponds to the familiar Latin -us and Greek -os. In Gothic it had lost its vowel and become -s, e.g. fisks 'fish'. In Old Norse it had changed to -r, e.g. konungr. Only in the earliest runic inscriptions do we see the original ending. It disappeared in all other branches, e.g. Old English cyning, German König. The change of short O to A, illustrated in that ending, is the most prominent vowel change between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic: Latin octo = German acht 'eight'. But confusingly, long A changed to O, e.g. Latin frater = brother. Grammatically, Proto-Germanic reduced the Indo-European tenses to just two, present and past. It then innovated an entirely new series of so-called "weak" past tenses, with a d ending, of unknown origin. This is where we get our walk - walked. Elaborations like making compound tenses with "will", "have" etc. arose later. A huge amount of Germanic vocabulary is of unknown origin. As much as one third of it hasn't got any cognate in other Indo-European branches, including very common words like sea, earth, blood, hand, evil, little, sick, bring, run. In the prehistoric period in (perhaps) Scandinavia when Proto-Germanic was formed, the speakers' neighbours were Saami and Finns, maybe some Slavs, to the north and east, and Celts to the south, but none of those language families explains the huge amount of new material. There must have been some substrate language which has completely disappeared from history. Some people have suggested calling this Folkish, because the word folk is one of the unexplained ones. Note that German is not especially close to the ancestor; English is in no way descended from German (Deutsch). They are parallel descendants in the Germanic group (German name Germanisch, which means more like Teutonic).
Much of this refreshed in my mind from: W.B. Lockwood, Indo-European Philology, Hutchinson, 1969. Proto-Indo-EuropeanPeculiarities include syllabic nasals, laterals, and rhotics, even rare long ones, which developed a vowel in all descendants except some Slavonic; and apparently three sounds of unknown quality, called laryngeals, which disappeared in all descendants but changed surrounding vowels as evidence of their existence.Proto-Indo-European or PIE's wider affinities are unknown, but by some linguists it is linked with Etruscan and/or Afro-Asiatic and/or Finno-Ugrian. (This is the Nostratic theory.) The grammar resembles that of Sanskrit or Lithuanian more than any other descendant, and for this reason it is sometimes absurdly claimed that a modern Lithuanian could understand Sanskrit. They are, I'm afraid, far too different. But archaic features they share are locative and instrumental cases, a dual number, and tones. Most other IE descendants have lost some or all of these. For example, with ekwos, the masculine word for "horse", giving rise to the familiar Latin equus and Greek hippos, and to Sanskrit asvah. This is an o-stem, like most masculines, meaning that -o- runs through the declension, between the stem and the ending:
Nominative ekw-o-s The nom., voc., and acc. singular are obvious to anyone who knows a bit of Latin or Greek, but some other cases have travelled a great deal to get to their classical form: e.g. Greek gen. sg. -osyo > -ohyo > -oyo > -oo > -ou. As Muke discusses below, there was a series of labiovelar consonants including kw, but it is noteworthy that ekwos doesn't contain this. It's a sequence k-w, as shown by the fact that in the satem language Sanskrit the k shifts to a sibilant, and the w separately changes to v. It's unknown where the case endings came from originally. If they were just postpositions (as in Japanese ga and o and ni), why are the plural endings not recognisably formed from the same singular marker plus a plural element (as in an agglutinative language like Turkish)? These fused or analytic case markings are rare outside IE. It's also unknown how the gender system came about, because although males belong to masculine and females belong to feminine, all other words are scattered unpredicyably through masculine, feminine, and neuter in the way that makes such a pain for people studyng most modern European languages. One idea is that the -om of the neuter is originally the accusative ending, because neuter things don't usually actively do anything (see animacy hierarchy) so don't need a subject ending.
Voltairine de CleyreThe leading female anarchist in America, little known now but a prominent figure in the 1890s and 1900s. Her upbringing in a convent made her an atheist, and she opposed marriage in all its forms. She did not espouse a particular view of economics except that people should rely on individual enterprise rather than government; and could not be coerced into accepting a prevailing economic model. As well as an orator and writer for her cause, she was also a poet.I had never heard of her until tonight, chancing on her name in an essay by Bernard Levin about her more famous compeer Emma Goldman, and I was fascinated by her name. As Levin said, it's like something out of Amanda McKittrick Ros. But it's real. Her father was French, and in his early years a freethinker, so he named her after Voltaire. She was born on 17th November 1866 in the small town of Leslie in Michigan. They lived in poverty. Her father recanted his freethinking, returned to the church, and packed little Voltairine off to Ontario to be educated and with luck become a nun. She hated the hypocrisy of the place and of the Church, ran away several times, and was fixed in her own freethinking. From the age of 19 she lectured on free thought in Chicago. She heard Clarence Darrow speak and flirted with socialism. In 1886 the Haymarket Massacre occurred, when police were killed at a protest meeting and retaliated with force. The execution of the alleged ringleaders on flimsy evidence shocked her and led her into discovering anarchism. She experimented with the various flavours of it, in terms of how the economy was to be managed, but finally developed her own doctrine of choice and non-coercion, "anarchy without adjectives" as it had been called. She spent most of her time thereafter in Pittsburgh, writing and speaking, preaching toleration and pacifism, having a number of unsatisfactory love affairs, all this shaping her published views and the influence she would have. The one lover who treated her as a true intellectual and moral equal, Dyer Lum, committed suicide in 1893. I have noded her best-known essay, Anarchism and American Traditions. Voltairine de Cleyre died on 6th June 1912, at the age of 45, worn out with illness and suffering. She is buried in Waldheim Cemetery near the Haymarket martyrs, whom she had commemorated in verse. In 1914 the anarchist Alexander Berkman brought out a commemorative Selected Works. A biography by Paul Avrich entitled An American Anarchist appeared in 1978. When I first came across her name and it inspired me to node, I doubted I would find anything on the Web, but a search throws up many detailed articles and archives on her specifically, including her essays and poetry.
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