Adrian Hester

(I posted something like this earlier, but it hasn't shown up, so it might have gotten lost.) This isn't germane to the question of whether or not it's moral to partake moderately of alcohol, but you and JMeganSnow both brought up an interesting side issue: Many people drink alcoholic drinks because they taste good. (For instance, I'm a whiskey and scotch man like you are, and also like good beers and wines. Other liquors, especially clear ones like rum, tequila, gin, and vodka, I simply don't like very much, though I do enjoy a martini or a gin and tonic once in a blue moon.) Their taste is pleasurable and they enhance a good meal. This is a different motivation than the desire to reach oblivion fast, which for me is symbolized by a barbaric custom I've seen advertised for several bars at one time or another called "Bladder Bust." The bar will serve 50-cent cups of beer, all you can drink, until someone goes to the bathroom. Apparently seniors at local frats will take up position in front of the bathrooms and physically prevent people from going inside--they have to go round the back of the building or to other places with public restrooms. Now that's drinking to get drunk; the whole point is a fast cheap drunk. And I shudder to think of the quality of beer you'd get for four bits a cup, but then I drink it for the taste.

You're the one dismissing all contrary anecdotal evidence a priori as flawed. It's presumptuous (among many other worse things) to attain consistency by dismissing the inconsistencies out of hand. How do you know all the normal, mentally healthy people around you are straight? Maybe dozens of them are gay and you just don't know it. And in any case, you've basically reduced yourself to saying that all the gays you meet are flamboyantly neurotic from the get-go, but all the gays I've met are repressing their disorders so well that after months or years of friendship or family interaction I still can't recognize it. That's no better than a Freudian therapist saying that no evidence of neurosis is a sure sign of repression of neuroses. "No true Scotsman" and all that, you know. You're the one complaining about all the dozens of crazy gay people you keep meeting.

Reminds me of the Christians who say that atheism can only lead to unhappiness. Point to a happy atheist and they'll say he's not really happy--it's only an illusion. Your argument's no better.

Don't be so presumptuous. I'm acquainted with dozens of homosexuals, friends with a few, and related to one, and none of them displays the characteristics you claim for all homosexuals. Sounds to me like you really need to meet a better class of people.

RNA, I thought. Apparently in the last five years or so it's been found out that long-term memories seem to be stabilized that way. One (or maybe more) of the proteins that stabilize synapses has a prion configuration that causes transfer RNA to produce more of the protein. There's an article about it here if you're curious.

Not really. Imagine English as it is, then imagine that there's a change in one of the sounds--say t comes to be pronounced d in the middle of words. Then morphemes containing t in the middle will come to contain d in its place: -ity, for example, will be pronounced -idy. All the words formed by compounding with it will change too: rapidity will become rapididy, for example. (Of course, for many Americans, including me, something like this has already happened, so that writer and rider are almost identical.) Mind you, there are other sources of words than word formation: You can borrow them from other languages, form new smaller words from larger words (to laze from lazy, for example), and even make up new ones, but words formed in these ways all use the sounds already existing in the language. (Except that very rarely foreign sounds are borrowed as well.)

I thought he might have been thinking of borrowing and the occasional creation of a word out of whole cloth, like Kodak. In other words, I think he was thinking of word creation when you said word formation, which is pretty much by definition the process of building bigger words out of smaller preexistent units.

For fossils, carbon dating's useless. (1) Fossils are made of minerals that have replaced the carbon compounds in the oprganims that were fossilized, and (2) they're so old that pretty much all of the carbon-14 would have decayed anyway; carbon dating can't be used for things older than about 60,000 years. For fossils you use other radiometric dating methods (potassium-argon dating, uranium-lead dating), which actually date the rocks around those containing the fossils. (They can only be used for igneous rocks; fossils are found in sedimentary rocks, so you date the igneous rocks above and below them to give a range for the age of the fossil.) Incidentally, you'll need to learn a bit of the nuts and bolts of dating if you want to argue with any creationist who actually tries to learn the standard arguments, because they have devised a couple of utterly false and incredibly stupid arguments against the validity of radiometric dating as such that are plausible if you don't know much about the subject. (False statements about the mathematics behind it, for example, and ad hoc claims that radioactive decay rates actually vary depending on external factors--which of course they claim scientists really know but refuse to admit because they're all godless communists bent on destroying the dignity of God's creation. If decay rates really were variable like that, someone would have figured out a way to get rid of radioactive wastes more readily than just isolating them while they decay.)

No, you misunderstand. Popper set up falsifiability as the criterion or definition of science. This (and certain of its consequences, as I mentioned in my earlier post) isn't good enough.

I agree with most of what you have posted here, but not the bit about writing. The oracle bone inscriptions are usually dated to between 1300 and 1100 BC, and monuments in Linear B are usually dated to around 1500-1200 BC. (Linear A, which dates to around 2000-1200 BC, was Minoan and thus might well not have been Greek.) And though Socrates is the obvious figure to compare him to, Confucius lived around the same time as the early Ionian philosophers.

Urf, I'm one of the last people to ask about military questions like that, especially on the nuts and bolts of different tactics and strategies. That said, I don't have a strong feeling either way. Chinese armies were defeated and Chinese states conquered by foreign invaders often enough throughout history, especially in periods when China was fragmented. My impression is that the various Chinese states focused so much on the threats the other Chinese states posed that their military techniques grew more and more inbred in order to defend against and prevail over the others, so that a foreigner with a well-trained army and different tactics, strategies, and techniques would have a great advantage. Alexander's era was just such a time. Add to that that Alexander was a masterful general, and I don't see any reason to think he would have been outclassed.

I'm not quite sure I get the point of your comment about the ban on firearms. The ban on firearms was a Japanese measure, not a European one; more precisely, it was one of the measures of the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, or his successor to pacify the country. Europeans had been quite happy to trade with the Japanese, including selling them firearms after 1543 or so. That was in the period that the Japanese called the Warring States period, when many local rulers built up large militaries and made war on their neighbors. The ones who succeeded in unifying Japan (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu), especially the last two, tried to demilitarize society--Hideyoshi led what was called the Great Sword Hunt in 1588, which aimed to remove weapons from the hands of the peasants; firearms were banned under the Tokugawa shogunate, though I don't remember at all well which year, before 1634 anyway, I think. Hideyoshi also invaded Korea as a first step to attacking China, apparently in part to unify all the local rulers in one great military exercise that would stop them fighting each other. (The war was ended by the Japanese immediately after Hideyoshi died in 1598.) The ban on firearms was one of a number of quite extraordinary measures Ieyasu and his successors took to freeze Japan in a pacified state isolated from the outside world--foreign trade with only the Dutch through Nagasaki and one or two other countries (China in particular, I think, and exports to Manila); banning Christianity and Nichiren Buddhism for contributing to social instability (in fact, Christianity was banned in part because it was seen as a threat to family values--the Christian injunction to abandon your father and mother and follow Christ did not go over well); a ban on most foreign learning; and mulcting the local rulers of much of their income and holding them and their families hostage, for example.

I'm not conceding anything; I'm explaining why the figures aren't necessarily outrageously inflated. You should be more specific then. Chinese scholarship includes work by scholars from Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, for example, who were western-trained and quite conscientious, and until the last generation were the forefront of Chinese historians; the best work in the PRC relies on their work (and the work of western scholars). Moreover, you haven't actually pointed to any scholarship or scholarly traditions as dishonest, near as I can tell, but instead are reacting to discussions you've had with people who might or might not be Chinese scholars. In any case, you haven't chosen the best example to make your case: Regurgitating figures for casualties or armies from the Warring States period is dishonest without discussing the special circumstances of the time or military practices, but the figures aren't likely to have been made out of whole cloth. (And I'll add that it would be doubly dishonest to imply that such armies were regularly fielded throughout most of Chinese history. The armies sent on expeditions outside China--to Korea or Vietnam, say, or into the steppes or to capture cities along the Silk Road--were much smaller; their size was bounded by the factors you've mentioned here of the need to support a trained, well-armed force.) Better examples would be the tendencies in history textbooks to project present boundaries of China into the past, to discuss peoples on the territory of modern China in terms implying that they were specially tied to the Han Chinese or that it was historically inevitable that they would become minority peoples in modern China, and to downplay foreign influences on Chinese culture (as in the period before the unification of China under the Sui and Tang, around 300-550 AD, when the states of north China were ruled by Turkic peoples). That doesn't disqualify historical scholarship in the PRC as irreparably tainted, however. I guess I wasn't clear enough that those were the total casualties for both armies, and remember the defeated army was massacred after surrender. It was a noteworthy figure precisely because it was so high. Again, the figure is likely exaggerated, but probably not grotesquely so. (For example, how would such figures be arrived at? Most likely by the number of peasants lost from the registration rolls, which would include a large number who deserted and made their way elsewhere, which seems to have been common enough in the period.) If I remember correctly, the armies typically fed off the lands they were attacking, which were usually in neighboring states. Iraq's irrelevant. Yes, and casualty figures of 20,000-60,000 were frequently recorded. Figures of over 100,000 were recorded only three or four times, I think. [sigh.] I didn't say that. What I said is that the population was probably comparable, by which I meant 50 million or so. The reason I pointed to the population of China over several centuries was to make the point that in such states population is limited by technology and does not grow exponentially. In any case, battles with casualties of 20,000 to 60,000 didn't happen every year or throughout all of ancient China. Probably more significant than deaths in battle would be the extent to which the wars disordered agriculture, but the period also disordered the old social structures that made the peasantry little more than slaves of the nobility--the nobility effectively liquidated itself as a class in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (when a state was conquered, the nobility would be reduced to commoner status or enslaved) and greater social mobility made it possible for peasants to move elsewhere for better conditions and to keep more of their produce (though the larger, more bureaucratic states in turn often bore down more heavily in taxation, and public works continued to eat up lots of labor). How these factors together affected population growth, I don't know.

Well, they're wrong. There was a core of heavily-armed warriors, but they weren't representative of the large armies in question. Yep. [sigh.] The rate of population increase in the past three or four centuries is unprecedented in world history. You might check out some of the estimates of world population for antiquity; the growth was very small between 200 BC and 200 AD, for example. And you might actually look at the graph linked to by Praxus of Chinese history over time. When there are no great advances in agricultural technology, the population of a premodern agrarian state like China doesn't grow exponentially. I've heard of rather smaller conservative estimates, such as 40 million, but they might well refer to a different century. Oh, please, that's utterly irrelevant. The geographical bases for that figure are completely different--the region around the city of Rome in the 5th century BC was very very much smaller than the entire Roman empire in the first century AD. In any case, what I'm critical of is your sneering dismissal of Chinese scholarship as such, which as near as I can tell is unfounded, and the reasoning behind it, which is faulty.

Uh, yeah, precisely. You're claiming them to be bogus accomplishments. You obviously know very little about ancient China. Now, the period in which such large armies are described was the Warring States period, c. 463-222 BC. In the preceding period, the Spring and Autumn Period, 722-481 BC, China was divided into a bit over a hundred states which fought among themselves and congealed into seven or so large ones by the beginning of the Warring States period. There was a large change in military service over the same time. In the Spring and Autumn period, the military power of a state was measured by the number of war chariots it could field--a very powerful state was said to have 1,000 chariots. Each chariot was accompanied by, it would appear, somewhere between 10 and 30 foot soldiers; in the earlier part of the Spring and Autumn period, military service was filled by a class of military professionals led by members of the aristocracy (basically, descendants of relatives of earlier kings of each state). In the Warring States period, the number of war chariots for a powerful state stayed at about the same level, but cavalry and large-scale infantry had become much more important. The foot soldiers were not heavily-armed hoplites, they were peasants conscripted on the off-season and armed with spears and long swords, and what had formerly been short campaigns decided by one or two battles developed into wars lasting several years that ebbed and flowed with the seasons and were very bloody, often involving prolonged sieges. You have to remember too that China had a very large population. The oldest surviving census in world history is the Chinese census of 2 AD, which gives a population of around 60 million (broken down by locality, so that it's possible to get a very detailed picture of the population distribution of China at the time). The population during the Warring States period, two to three centuries earlier, must have been comparable. Moreover, China was bureaucratized by the Warring States period; the entire population was registered and tax and labor services set on the basis of those registers. In one state, Wei, the population was divided into about a hundred counties (xian), each containing 10,000 households or about 50,000 people, for example (and so a total population of perhaps 5 million), and it wasn't one of the largest states. Moreover, much of the male population was liable to conscription--all males over 15 (state of Qin) or under 60 (state of Chu), for example. By the end of the Warring States period, the scale of wars had increased stupendously and war was ever-present as the various states vied for supremacy. It's in that context that you find large armies. The figures are likely exaggerated, but probably not too much so. For example, a war in 260 BC that resulted in the defeat of the state of Zhao is credited with casualties of 450,000 (the largest number of casualties recorded for the Warring States period, I believe), but you have to keep in mind that the entire Zhao army fighting the state of Qin was massacred after surrender, and Qin had had to mobilize its entire manpower. If you're curious about all this, I'm relying on the discussion in Cho-yun Hsu's Ancient China in Transition: An Analysis of Social Mobility, 722-222 B.C., Stanford 1965, pp. 65-71, a standard work. (Hsu is probably more familiar to Americans as Immanuel C.Y. Hsu.) This is common knowledge among Chinese and western historians of China alike; it's not just Chinese patriotism. That's why I was wondering what source you were using for your claims that armies of 800,000 are inconceivable for China at that time. Well, it turns out you don't have any, you're just speculating. You assume that the situation in China must have been identical to that in Greece and Rome, but it wasn't--the population was probably larger, the social structure was very different, and the armies were recruited differently (in China by seasonal mass conscription of peasants, in the Roman Empire by a standing army of paid professionals). Then from this one single speculation you go on to condemn Chinese scholarship as such--and you don't give any sources for your claim that Chinese historical scholarship is lax and sloppy and driven primarily by ethnic pride. That's why I asked which accomplishments usually claimed for ancient China aren't really so. I'm not talking about the mindless repetition of 2,000-year-old figures from patriotic Chinese websites, nor out-of-context factoids in popular books or propagandistic pamphlets--I've encountered some of that myself and certainly know it exists--but bogus claims widespread in contemporary Chinese scholarship. If it's so unconscientious, surely you can give us some choice examples. (I don't think this yet requires a new thread, but if the moderators want to separate it off, I have no objections.)

(Split from another thread (link) ) What, pray tell, are some of these bogus accomplishments? And what conscientious scholarship are you relying on that invalidates so much of what passes as Chinese scholarship as feel-good stories?

No reason I can think of, except curiosity. Couldn't find my copy of it. Turns out Wiki has a substantial list of Macedonian words; search under "ancient Macedonian language" if you're curious. Dumb typo. Russian zub.

Legends of Arthur started among the Welsh; he was a war leader who defeated the Saxons. (Britain was Roman province until the withdrawal of Roman armies in 410. For a generation or so after that it was governed by a Celto-Roman elite. Around 452 Saxons were enlisted as mercenaries, and over the next couple of centuries they and other Germanic peoples, the Angles and Jutes, settled throughout much of modern-day England.) There are a number of distinct legends wrapped around Arthur, but if you look at the earliest ones, he seems to have been a leader who fought successfully against the Saxon invaders; later the stories of earlier Roman and Celtic figures were associated with him. It was only after 1066 that Arthur was made into a figure for all the British (Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, who was more a novelist than a chronicler).

No. I was relying on what I remember from, I think, Sihler's New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. I'll check later today. A few dozen or a couple hundred words were recorded in Greek sources, on Macedonian coins, and so on. In any case, I remember the words danos 'death' (cf. Attic thanatos) and kombous 'molars' (Attic gomphous 'nails' (acc.), cognate with Russian zuba 'tooth,' for example). These show that Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirates became voiced stops and PIE voiced stops became voiceless word-initially in Macedonian. Whether Macedonian was a dialect of Greek or a distinct language is a matter of debate, but I gather the majority view is that it was a Greek dialect.

Oh joy, another Greek patriot bashing Slavs. The ancient Macedonians appear to have spoken a divergent dialect of ancient Greek and were culturally distinct from the Greeks proper, though the Macedonian kings adopted elements of Greek culture and spread it throughout the areas conquered by Alexander the Great. Slavs settled in the region of Macedonia starting around 550-600 AD and have been there since. They call themselves Macedonian and speak a divergent dialect of Bulgarian; Greeks don't like that and insist on calling the region FYROM (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia) and if I remember correctly Greece has threatened military action if they call themselves simply Macedonia. GreekGoddess is arguing in a huff just like all the foul-mouthed denizens of soc.culture.greek and its ilk against...against...well, I'm not sure who she's arguing against, probably some shadow on the wall.

A typical rhetorical ploy among cranks and hacks. What box? I've paid you the respect of taking your ideas seriously and trying to figure out how they hang together and what evidence you could provide for them, and, alas, they came up lacking. They fly in the face of pretty basic physics and well-known astronomical knowledge and have illogical implications, and I pointed these out to you in detail. So now what am I supposed to do, scrap my critical faculties and put my reason on hold--and why, because it might be exciting? That's your best answer to reasoned criticism, don't be so details-oriented, scientific, and rational? Don't focus on the details and just go with the flow while it all hangs out? "Crawl out of your box" is a confession of intellectual bankruptcy and a sneering insult at my intelligence and integrity. Perhaps instead you should crawl back in your hole.

But the source of the charge would be entirely different. You're positing a positive charge due to emissions from the Sun. You have no evidence for this charge even existing, whereas it's clear that the interior of the Earth is molten, from which fact the theory of planetary magnetism you're tilting against immediately follows. So are you now claiming in addition that the interior of the Earth is not molten? Perhaps you should bone up on the basics of gyroscopic motion. An impulse applied to a rotating rigid body causes changes in the orientation of the axis of rotation (precession, etc.) relative to an inertial field, not relative to the body itself. In short, the axis of the permanent magnet you've posited would move along with the axis of rotation. Why should I bother? You haven't shown the need to assume its existence. Why use oversimplified models like that when you have the actual equation for the magnetic field of a rotating charged sphere?

I'd say a more important factor (which among other things led to the spread of the Ottomans) was the Mongol conquest, which was horribly destructive. As one example, the great poet Rudaki (the first major Persian poet after the Arab conquest) was recorded as having written 100,000 lines of poetry, though another poet said he actually wrote 13 times that. However, very little of it survives (only a thousand lines or so) because the rest was destroyed by the Mongols. (His oeuvre might even have made up some of the manuscripts they fed to their horses.)

Heh, you must have added to this just as I was replying to it. I'd say the decline long predated the Ottomans. In general, Islamic learning flourished when there were rulers willing and able to patronize it, just as in other premodern states. One precondition for this was a fairly honest bureaucracy with regular pay that didn't press too hard on the taxpayers, rule centralized enough not to lead to frequent civil wars among local underlings jockeying for power, and rulers who weren't the figureheads of tribal or ethnic factions. It also required a love of high culture, or at least a desire on the part of the ruling elite for the glory of supporting high culture, and thus the fruits of peace and prosperity. The earlier Abbasids managed this (certainly before the introduction of Turkic mercenary armies in the mid-800s), as did the Umayyads in Spain, the Samanids in eastern Persia, and the early Seljuks. Also some of the early Ottomans (to some extent anyway). However, as in all premodern states there was a strong tendency to decentralization, to the rise of mercenary armies, to corruption (such as the rise of hereditary estates in lands meant to support officials only when in office) and vast economic despoliation, and to religious fundamentalism attacking worldly knowledge. These all hampered the preservation and spread of scientific knowledge and the ideas of antiquity.

I'm not sure of your point here. Yes, many Jews fled persecution to Mesopotamia and Persia, and that's where the members of the old Academy of Plato went too for a short while when it was closed under Justinian, but that had nothing to do with Islam; they fled to the Sassanid empire, which was officially Zoroastrian and by and large tolerated other religions. (Though not Roman Catholicism, which was the state religion of the enemy, Rome; and there were persecutions from time to time of Judaism and Nestorian Christianity.)