"Blindness" is being used in this context in a technical but generally accepted sense to mean vision so poor that you can't see the top letter on the eye chart with either eye. That's a grim state to be in, but most people who are "legally blind" like this are far from having no vision at all.
In particular, Macular Degeneration hardly ever leads to the total blindness you are referring to.
That doesn't mean it isn't a horrible crippling condition of course.
This is, I think, stem cell implantation subretinally for Geographic Atrophy, a.k.a "dry" macular degeneration. Potentially a big deal inasmuch as currently we have no treatment for this at all and it accounts for 90% of all macular degeneration.
It involves major invasive surgery: "outpatient procedure" gives a highly misleading idea of what's involved. It doesn't mean any more than that you could get away with not admitting the patient to hospital, not that you could ever do it anywhere except in an operating theatre.
Moorfields have lately developed a very bad habit of prematurely and misleadingly announcing "breakthroughs" in eye treatment, which I suspect is related to their own funding issues (they did this not long ago with some extremely misleading publicity about three patients with Leber's Amaurorosis they'd treated with gene therapy, not one of whom in fact showed measurable objective improvement in vision - not the impression the news reports tried to give.)
Peng Khaw BTW is not a retinal expert (though Lyndon da Cruz certainly is; he was also involved in the publicity about the gene therapy, interestingly.)
I'm sorry to say that I think this is the Moorfields spin machine in action.
I doubt whether it is ever possible to describe the response of a person already in the hands of the police to a question like this as "voluntary" in any meaningful sense.
"Voluntary" would be an innocent member of the public turning up spontaneously to the police station to give a DNA sample.
No different.
The issue is whether they are kept on file when you are subsequently found innocent.
Or do you suppose that the police never arrest the innocent?
Perhaps in your country...
The UK has a huge DNA database including large numbers of minors and people subsequently found innocent.
The much maligned European Court is protecting our liberties by declaring this illegal:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/04/law-genetic
Such a shame that the mother of democracies should come to this.
Be warned by our bad example
This is in fact the way things work now in the UK.
There is a pretend-independent government committee called NICE (yup) which decides which treatments are to be made available through the free-at-the-point-of-delivery government health service, the NHS.
They do indeed make heavy use of QALYs, "Quality-Adjusted LifeYears" in much this way.
Although the way NICE works in specific instances has led to a lot of very justified criticism, there seems to be no realistic alternative to something like this if you have a tax-financed system that the sick don't pay for directly. There just isn't enough money to do everything possible for every patient.
I don't know the right answer. I work for the NHS (as a retinal specialist too!) and have had endless grief getting funding for some treatments for my patients; on the other hand, I've worked in systems where the first question you have to ask is not "what does this patient need?" but "what can this patient afford?" and I prefer the former despite all its problems and stupidities.
Normal people don't go round always comparing the vision in their two eyes, and unless it happens very quickly, many people don't notice loss of central vision (only) in one eye.
They often come my way (I'm an eye surgeon) because they've just been on a routine visit to their optometrist, or just accidentally happened one day to cover the good eye and noticed a problem with the other one.
I see about twice as many people with the second eye affected by the first time they see a doctor as I do people who've notice a problem with just one eye.
BTW this technique won't enable a person to drive again; as someone rightly has pointed out already, you pay for the benefit to central vision by losing peripheral field, which would almost always be enough to stop you driving legally. But that doesn't mean it can't help a lot in other ways.
Grandparent was apparently just being sarcastic, but the idea is actually not stupid; you can indeed get telescopic "low visual aids", though there's no way physically of making them flat (hey, telecope!) and they tend to be impractical especially for the older age group who are much the most commonly affected. They tend to be more useful for younger people with retinal diseases not related to age.
The device described in the article is not in fact a new breakthrough concept; there are a number of similar devices out there already. Some just go for magnification; some try to divert light away from damaged central retina (macula) to normal peripheral retina. The trouble is that peripheral retina just isn't as sensitive even if it's healthy.
The actual surgery is not actually very difficult for a competent eye surgeon; it's just a variation, really, on the standard modern cataract operation involving an intraocular lens implant.
The clever part (as with a lot of surgery) is trying to decide who would benefit from the operation beforehand. If there's too much damage to the retina this won't help; if there isn't all that much, then the risks of the surgery may outweigh the benefit.
The major reason why this sort of technique has not already become standard practice is because there aren't yet reliable ways of assessing beforehand which patients will benefit.
BTW the cost is steep but a lot less than a course of Lucentis treatment (the best current option for actual treatment, as opposed to rehabilitation). If it helps the patient retain their independence it would probably pay for itself.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about this sort of technology still, and the way reporters just regurgitate the manufacturers publicity handouts and proclaim a new "cure for blindness" causes a lot of grief to vulnerable people by cruelly raising false hopes.
(I'm an ophthalmic surgeon specialising in retinal diseases)
It's a specific disease, or rather family of diseases.
It's very common (by their eighties about 1 in 3 people has it) but it's *not* normal ageing.
Unfortunately many people, especially older people, do indeed think that losing vision as they grow older is just natural, and don't seek help; even a few years ago they weren't in fact missing out on much as treatment was pretty useless, but there's now a much more effective treatment (Lucentis) for the 10% of people with the most aggressive and damaging variant of the disease (so-called "wet" macular degeneration) and it's heartbreaking when people miss out on it because they don't realise that there's *always* a specific reason if your vision goes bad on you.
(I'm an eye surgeon specialising in this very area, and I spend almost half my work time on this disease every week)
Believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims) think their lives are a gift of God, and that it's not just up to them to decide that their life isn't worth living any more.
Sure, there are believers who fear death when you come right down to facing the real thing; but the flip idea that this study "proves" that believers are all really hypocrites doesn't actually explain why they would fight against death harder than unbelievers.
If you really do think that the explanation is that believers are afraid to die and face judgement, then you just haven't met many.
I don't think many of the comments are intended to be taken as more than on opportunity for abuse.
I don't thinks it's quite so simple.
What would count as "falsification" in this case?
How could any experiment with the fruit fly farm demonstrate "survival of the fittest", without circularity?
At the end of your experiment, you presumably have a population of fruit flies differing in some systematic way from the start population.
How do you assess whether this is a population of "fitter" individuals without simply appealing to the fact that they have obviously survived, so they *must* be fitter?
You need an independent criterion of "fitness" which you decide on before you start the experiment.
You can demonstrate "survival of the fittest" with breeding antibiotic resistance into bacteria for example [even then, a creationist could say that you haven't produced a new species.]
I agree that creationists seem very prone to miss the whole point of the scientific project, but their objections cannot be adequately met by ridicule. It just isn't the case that creationists are *all* either stupid or lying or both.
There actually *is* an issue with falsifiability and Evolution. Popper himself was not at all happy at his criterion for science vs non-science being hijacked by creationists in attempt to claim that the theory of Evolution was invalid; however he describes the theory of Evolution as a "metaphysical research programme", i.e. a (highly fruitful) source of scientific hypotheses, rather than in itself a scientific hypothesis; he certainly did not regard it as unscientific.
It's worth saying too that Popper's philosophical approach is far from being unquestioned in this area; many working scientists have noticed (for example) that the actual process of scientific research doesn't really go on as he suggests; his famous example of the bending of light predicted by relativity vs classical physics is actually quite exceptional. It's *not* typical for a productive theory to make a specific, falsifiable prediction which can be invalidated so conclusively that the theory must be obviously be abandoned.
Even in the Einstein/Newton case, it's an important fact that Newtonian physics is within its domain incredibly accurate and successful (Moon Landing!), so that any better theory needs to also explain the success of Newtonian physics (as it does, by reducing to it under most everyday circumstances)
Many people (about 10%) lack *stereopsis*, the ability to fuse to slightly different images from the two eyes so that the brain perceives depth.
But stereopsis is really just the icing on the cake of depth perception, and just as you say, people use all kinds of other visual cues to perceive depth, with the brain doing the processing subconsciously to a great extent.
Lack of stereopsis is so little a handicap that most people lacking it are unaware of the fact; orthoptists (the paramedical professionals who measure squints and treat amblyopia) have special tests to pick it up.
Everyone without a personal axe to grind is agreed that standards have declined - hell, university textbooks have had to be rewritten to match the lower standard of modern beginning students.
But the truly sinister aspect of this is not so much the decline in standards as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all.
It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.
I want a refund on my copy of "A New Kind of Science" before thinking about paying more money to the Wolfram organisation.
Much handwaving, little meat, astonishing arrogance.
One of the most overhyped books I've ever actually been suckered into buying.
I found particularly offputting W's treatment of important parts of his own thesis (computational completeness of some automata) as commercial secrets
Our system is different from the US in that medicine here is a first degree (well, tenchically two simultaneous first degrees) and not postgraduate entry usually.
The nearest equivalent of your premed is the subjects we take in our last school years.
I took the very usual combination of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I liked Chemistry least by a long way.
Chemistry turned out to be the only one of the three that I ever really used at medical school.
(It may seem odd that it wasn't biology, but you relearn all the relevant stuff in much greater depth at medical school, whereas competence in chemistry is assumed at the start)
In fact, it's the "okla" part that means "people", and the "homa" part that means "red".
"homo" is Latin, not Greek, for "person".
You can easily find lookalikes between the words of any two languages taken at random. The more leeway you allow in variations of vowels and consonants, and the more vagueness you permit in the meaning correspondence, the more purely coincidental lookalikes you can come up with.
Scientific comparative linguistics, in contrast, works by establishing sound-by-sound correspondences matching across lots of different words, eventually making it possible to deduce the earlier common form that has developed into the two different languages being compared.
For example, it's no coincidence that the words for "man" are similar in French, Spanish, Italian and Rumanian:
homme, hombre, uomo, om
because all the words are descended from Latin "homo", just as all the languages involved are modern descendants of Latin.
In the case of the Latin-derived languages, the original ancestor language is a known, written language, but you can compare other languages and reconstruct hypothetical ancestor languages, like "Primitive Germanic", the unwritten ancestor of English, German, Swedish etc.
The key to doing this scientifically and rigorously is to find systematic correspondences among lots of different words.
Unfortunately outside of linguistics, most people are unaware that there even is a scientific study of how languages have developed historically and how they are really related to one another. Many lay ideas about this are based on chance resemblances or general similarities of structure.
I've always had a soft spot for K&R, and found it very useful when first learning C after having played a lot with Basic.
But I very much agree it would be a bad first programming book: it presupposes you know how to program, but don't know C yet.
But then, I agree with practically everybody above that C is not a good place to start with programming, anyway.
Best to start with something that does a lot more hand-holding, and then come to C/C++ when you want enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot, i.e. when you're ready for a language in which you can do anything the hardware can do.
At some point every programmer needs to learn C at least a bit, even if they never write a non-trivial program in it, because it's the best way to get to grips with what's really going on at ground level. Even if you never use an explicit pointer, you need to understand the concept, for example, and C is good for that.
Fair question. I was being pretty vague.
I don't really have any specific facts in mind (though I could think of quite a list that could do with being "common knowledge" but aren't - given that you're posting on./ I know you could too).
What I had in mind was, partly, more to do with the culture of science: Feynman's "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". The whole approach of getting out and finding out how things are, and being prepared to ditch cherished hypotheses if it turns out to be necessary.
I also was moaning (to get back on topic) about the fact that science, in this very broad sense, is still regarded by our mainstream culture as being in some way a fringe interest - suitable for people who are into that sort of thing, sure, but not something you could reasonably expect a typical politician or journalist to be interested in.
I don't mean that there aren't many other things about our culture abundantly worth celebrating and pursuing; just that it seems a bit odd that a culture so very dependent on the fruits of science should still think of science as for geeks.
There isn't any straightforward answer to that question, because the language never suddenly altered: it's a question of gradual changes accumulating from generation to generation. Nobody stopped speaking Latin - it altered over the centuries from the language of Caesar to the language of Dante to the language of Sophia Loren.
Elsewhere in the Latin-speaking parts of the Empire people kept on speaking Latin too; but because of the political fragmentation of the Empire, and the distances involved in a society where the fastest mode of travel was a horse, the language changed differently.
Eventually people from the old province of Gaul, now occupied by the Franks, and the people of Spain, and the people of Italy, were speaking so differently that they couldn't understand each other: at that point you're talking about distinct languages, instead of different dialects of popular Latin.
The trouble with this criterion is that it's not clearcut - even today Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese with a bit of practice and effort, for example. Moreover for centuries people regarded their own way of talking regional, somewhat changed Latin as just being "bad Latin", and when they wrote anything down would try to write the language of previous centuries, rather than how they actually spoke.
In practice, therefore, investigators of the early history of French or Italian start talking about "Old French" etc rather than "Vulgar Latin" when they first see written documents in which the authors are no longer trying to write like their ancestors but are trying to write in a way that could be understood by a contemporary who hadn't made a study of the old Latin. But this lagged a long time after the actual spoken language(s) had changed radically.
The letter "h" is very common in Spanish and French spelling, of course.
The sound like English "h" is absent in standard Parisian French and Castillian Spanish.
"Mute" "h" has never been pronounced in the whole history of French as an independent language; it's found in words like "homme", "herbe" because mediaeval scribes carried over the "h" from the Latin "homo", "herba", in which the "h", originally pronounced as in English, had ceased to be pronounced for centuries before there was a separate French language, so the scribes were used to it as a silent letter, just a matter of traditional spelling, like "k" in English "knee".
"Aspirated" "h" is also completely silent in Modern standard French, but a few centuries ago it was pronounced as in English, and still is pronounced in some dialects. This "h" comes from words borrowed from other languages, mainly Frankish, the language of the Germanic conquerors of Roman Gaul. There are quite a lot of these words in French, eg "haricot" "bean" "hair" "hate". Even though it is just as silent in standard French as "mute" "h", words beginning with it behave as if they begin within a consonant in French:
l'homme "the man" but
le haricot "the bean"
Some Spanish "h" is like French "mute" "h", just a spelling convention based on Latin:
hombre from homo (actually from accusative hominem)
But also, in Spanish, original initial "f" became "h" in most words inherited direct from Latin:
hijo from filius "son"
hacer from facere "do, make"
but eventually this "h" also ceased to be pronounced!
The American pronunciation is the original one, with "h" silent as in "hour", and present in the spelling because of smart-alec scribes who knew that the words were ultimately derived from Latin "herba" and "hora", and were also used to "h" being silent in lots of words.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's incorrect.
"Blindness" is being used in this context in a technical but generally accepted sense to mean vision so poor that you can't see the top letter on the eye chart with either eye. That's a grim state to be in, but most people who are "legally blind" like this are far from having no vision at all.
In particular, Macular Degeneration hardly ever leads to the total blindness you are referring to.
That doesn't mean it isn't a horrible crippling condition of course.
IAAO too ...
This is, I think, stem cell implantation subretinally for Geographic Atrophy, a.k.a "dry" macular degeneration. Potentially a big deal inasmuch as currently we have no treatment for this at all and it accounts for 90% of all macular degeneration.
It involves major invasive surgery: "outpatient procedure" gives a highly misleading idea of what's involved. It doesn't mean any more than that you could get away with not admitting the patient to hospital, not that you could ever do it anywhere except in an operating theatre.
Moorfields have lately developed a very bad habit of prematurely and misleadingly announcing "breakthroughs" in eye treatment, which I suspect is related to their own funding issues (they did this not long ago with some extremely misleading publicity about three patients with Leber's Amaurorosis they'd treated with gene therapy, not one of whom in fact showed measurable objective improvement in vision - not the impression the news reports tried to give.)
Peng Khaw BTW is not a retinal expert (though Lyndon da Cruz certainly is; he was also involved in the publicity about the gene therapy, interestingly.)
I'm sorry to say that I think this is the Moorfields spin machine in action.
Criminals are often scum.
Arrested people are often innocent.
I doubt whether it is ever possible to describe the response of a person already in the hands of the police to a question like this as "voluntary" in any meaningful sense.
"Voluntary" would be an innocent member of the public turning up spontaneously to the police station to give a DNA sample.
No different. ...
The issue is whether they are kept on file when you are subsequently found innocent.
Or do you suppose that the police never arrest the innocent?
Perhaps in your country
"Voluntary?"
The UK has a huge DNA database including large numbers of minors and people subsequently found innocent.
The much maligned European Court is protecting our liberties by declaring this illegal:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/04/law-genetic
Such a shame that the mother of democracies should come to this.
Be warned by our bad example
This is in fact the way things work now in the UK.
There is a pretend-independent government committee called NICE (yup) which decides which treatments are to be made available through the free-at-the-point-of-delivery government health service, the NHS.
They do indeed make heavy use of QALYs, "Quality-Adjusted LifeYears" in much this way.
Although the way NICE works in specific instances has led to a lot of very justified criticism, there seems to be no realistic alternative to something like this if you have a tax-financed system that the sick don't pay for directly. There just isn't enough money to do everything possible for every patient.
I don't know the right answer. I work for the NHS (as a retinal specialist too!) and have had endless grief getting funding for some treatments for my patients; on the other hand, I've worked in systems where the first question you have to ask is not "what does this patient need?" but "what can this patient afford?" and I prefer the former despite all its problems and stupidities.
That's very true.
Normal people don't go round always comparing the vision in their two eyes, and unless it happens very quickly, many people don't notice loss of central vision (only) in one eye.
They often come my way (I'm an eye surgeon) because they've just been on a routine visit to their optometrist, or just accidentally happened one day to cover the good eye and noticed a problem with the other one.
I see about twice as many people with the second eye affected by the first time they see a doctor as I do people who've notice a problem with just one eye.
BTW this technique won't enable a person to drive again; as someone rightly has pointed out already, you pay for the benefit to central vision by losing peripheral field, which would almost always be enough to stop you driving legally. But that doesn't mean it can't help a lot in other ways.
Grandparent was apparently just being sarcastic, but the idea is actually not stupid; you can indeed get telescopic "low visual aids", though there's no way physically of making them flat (hey, telecope!) and they tend to be impractical especially for the older age group who are much the most commonly affected. They tend to be more useful for younger people with retinal diseases not related to age.
The device described in the article is not in fact a new breakthrough concept; there are a number of similar devices out there already. Some just go for magnification; some try to divert light away from damaged central retina (macula) to normal peripheral retina. The trouble is that peripheral retina just isn't as sensitive even if it's healthy.
The actual surgery is not actually very difficult for a competent eye surgeon; it's just a variation, really, on the standard modern cataract operation involving an intraocular lens implant.
The clever part (as with a lot of surgery) is trying to decide who would benefit from the operation beforehand. If there's too much damage to the retina this won't help; if there isn't all that much, then the risks of the surgery may outweigh the benefit.
The major reason why this sort of technique has not already become standard practice is because there aren't yet reliable ways of assessing beforehand which patients will benefit.
BTW the cost is steep but a lot less than a course of Lucentis treatment (the best current option for actual treatment, as opposed to rehabilitation). If it helps the patient retain their independence it would probably pay for itself.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about this sort of technology still, and the way reporters just regurgitate the manufacturers publicity handouts and proclaim a new "cure for blindness" causes a lot of grief to vulnerable people by cruelly raising false hopes.
(I'm an ophthalmic surgeon specialising in retinal diseases)
No.
It's a specific disease, or rather family of diseases.
It's very common (by their eighties about 1 in 3 people has it) but it's *not* normal ageing.
Unfortunately many people, especially older people, do indeed think that losing vision as they grow older is just natural, and don't seek help; even a few years ago they weren't in fact missing out on much as treatment was pretty useless, but there's now a much more effective treatment (Lucentis) for the 10% of people with the most aggressive and damaging variant of the disease (so-called "wet" macular degeneration) and it's heartbreaking when people miss out on it because they don't realise that there's *always* a specific reason if your vision goes bad on you.
(I'm an eye surgeon specialising in this very area, and I spend almost half my work time on this disease every week)
Believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims) think their lives are a gift of God, and that it's not just up to them to decide that their life isn't worth living any more. Sure, there are believers who fear death when you come right down to facing the real thing; but the flip idea that this study "proves" that believers are all really hypocrites doesn't actually explain why they would fight against death harder than unbelievers. If you really do think that the explanation is that believers are afraid to die and face judgement, then you just haven't met many. I don't think many of the comments are intended to be taken as more than on opportunity for abuse.
I don't thinks it's quite so simple. What would count as "falsification" in this case?
How could any experiment with the fruit fly farm demonstrate "survival of the fittest", without circularity?
At the end of your experiment, you presumably have a population of fruit flies differing in some systematic way from the start population.
How do you assess whether this is a population of "fitter" individuals without simply appealing to the fact that they have obviously survived, so they *must* be fitter?
You need an independent criterion of "fitness" which you decide on before you start the experiment.
You can demonstrate "survival of the fittest" with breeding antibiotic resistance into bacteria for example [even then, a creationist could say that you haven't produced a new species.]
I agree that creationists seem very prone to miss the whole point of the scientific project, but their objections cannot be adequately met by ridicule. It just isn't the case that creationists are *all* either stupid or lying or both.
There actually *is* an issue with falsifiability and Evolution. Popper himself was not at all happy at his criterion for science vs non-science being hijacked by creationists in attempt to claim that the theory of Evolution was invalid; however he describes the theory of Evolution as a "metaphysical research programme", i.e. a (highly fruitful) source of scientific hypotheses, rather than in itself a scientific hypothesis; he certainly did not regard it as unscientific.
It's worth saying too that Popper's philosophical approach is far from being unquestioned in this area; many working scientists have noticed (for example) that the actual process of scientific research doesn't really go on as he suggests; his famous example of the bending of light predicted by relativity vs classical physics is actually quite exceptional. It's *not* typical for a productive theory to make a specific, falsifiable prediction which can be invalidated so conclusively that the theory must be obviously be abandoned.
Even in the Einstein/Newton case, it's an important fact that Newtonian physics is within its domain incredibly accurate and successful (Moon Landing!), so that any better theory needs to also explain the success of Newtonian physics (as it does, by reducing to it under most everyday circumstances)
You're far from being alone.
Many people (about 10%) lack *stereopsis*, the ability to fuse to slightly different images from the two eyes so that the brain perceives depth.
But stereopsis is really just the icing on the cake of depth perception, and just as you say, people use all kinds of other visual cues to perceive depth, with the brain doing the processing subconsciously to a great extent.
Lack of stereopsis is so little a handicap that most people lacking it are unaware of the fact; orthoptists (the paramedical professionals who measure squints and treat amblyopia) have special tests to pick it up.
My favourite is the Wirt Fly:
http://www.sussexvision.co.uk/wirtfly.htm
I've known perfectly capable eye surgeons who lacked stereopsis.
Everyone without a personal axe to grind is agreed that standards have declined - hell, university textbooks have had to be rewritten to match the lower standard of modern beginning students.
But the truly sinister aspect of this is not so much the decline in standards as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all.
It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.
I want a refund on my copy of "A New Kind of Science" before thinking about paying more money to the Wolfram organisation.
Much handwaving, little meat, astonishing arrogance.
One of the most overhyped books I've ever actually been suckered into buying.
I found particularly offputting W's treatment of important parts of his own thesis (computational completeness of some automata) as commercial secrets
I'm a UK-qualified doctor.
Our system is different from the US in that medicine here is a first degree (well, tenchically two simultaneous first degrees) and not postgraduate entry usually.
The nearest equivalent of your premed is the subjects we take in our last school years.
I took the very usual combination of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I liked Chemistry least by a long way.
Chemistry turned out to be the only one of the three that I ever really used at medical school.
(It may seem odd that it wasn't biology, but you relearn all the relevant stuff in much greater depth at medical school, whereas competence in chemistry is assumed at the start)
"Oklahoma" is from Choctaw.
In fact, it's the "okla" part that means "people", and the "homa" part that means "red".
"homo" is Latin, not Greek, for "person".
You can easily find lookalikes between the words of any two languages taken at random. The more leeway you allow in variations of vowels and consonants, and the more vagueness you permit in the meaning correspondence, the more purely coincidental lookalikes you can come up with.
Scientific comparative linguistics, in contrast, works by establishing sound-by-sound correspondences matching across lots of different words, eventually making it possible to deduce the earlier common form that has developed into the two different languages being compared.
For example, it's no coincidence that the words for "man" are similar in French, Spanish, Italian and Rumanian:
homme, hombre, uomo, om
because all the words are descended from Latin "homo", just as all the languages involved are modern descendants of Latin.
In the case of the Latin-derived languages, the original ancestor language is a known, written language, but you can compare other languages and reconstruct hypothetical ancestor languages, like "Primitive Germanic", the unwritten ancestor of English, German, Swedish etc.
The key to doing this scientifically and rigorously is to find systematic correspondences among lots of different words.
Unfortunately outside of linguistics, most people are unaware that there even is a scientific study of how languages have developed historically and how they are really related to one another. Many lay ideas about this are based on chance resemblances or general similarities of structure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics
Amen to that - I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu for exactly that reason, despite years of RedHat happiness.
...
And no, I'm not ESR
I think it depends on where you're starting from.
I've always had a soft spot for K&R, and found it very useful when first learning C after having played a lot with Basic.
But I very much agree it would be a bad first programming book: it presupposes you know how to program, but don't know C yet.
But then, I agree with practically everybody above that C is not a good place to start with programming, anyway.
Best to start with something that does a lot more hand-holding, and then come to C/C++ when you want enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot, i.e. when you're ready for a language in which you can do anything the hardware can do.
At some point every programmer needs to learn C at least a bit, even if they never write a non-trivial program in it, because it's the best way to get to grips with what's really going on at ground level. Even if you never use an explicit pointer, you need to understand the concept, for example, and C is good for that.
Fair question. I was being pretty vague. I don't really have any specific facts in mind (though I could think of quite a list that could do with being "common knowledge" but aren't - given that you're posting on ./ I know you could too).
What I had in mind was, partly, more to do with the culture of science: Feynman's "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". The whole approach of getting out and finding out how things are, and being prepared to ditch cherished hypotheses if it turns out to be necessary.
I also was moaning (to get back on topic) about the fact that science, in this very broad sense, is still regarded by our mainstream culture as being in some way a fringe interest - suitable for people who are into that sort of thing, sure, but not something you could reasonably expect a typical politician or journalist to be interested in.
I don't mean that there aren't many other things about our culture abundantly worth celebrating and pursuing; just that it seems a bit odd that a culture so very dependent on the fruits of science should still think of science as for geeks.
There isn't any straightforward answer to that question, because the language never suddenly altered: it's a question of gradual changes accumulating from generation to generation. Nobody stopped speaking Latin - it altered over the centuries from the language of Caesar to the language of Dante to the language of Sophia Loren.
Elsewhere in the Latin-speaking parts of the Empire people kept on speaking Latin too; but because of the political fragmentation of the Empire, and the distances involved in a society where the fastest mode of travel was a horse, the language changed differently.
Eventually people from the old province of Gaul, now occupied by the Franks, and the people of Spain, and the people of Italy, were speaking so differently that they couldn't understand each other: at that point you're talking about distinct languages, instead of different dialects of popular Latin.
The trouble with this criterion is that it's not clearcut - even today Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese with a bit of practice and effort, for example.
Moreover for centuries people regarded their own way of talking regional, somewhat changed Latin as just being "bad Latin", and when they wrote anything down would try to write the language of previous centuries, rather than how they actually spoke.
In practice, therefore, investigators of the early history of French or Italian start talking about "Old French" etc rather than "Vulgar Latin" when they first see written documents in which the authors are no longer trying to write like their ancestors but are trying to write in a way that could be understood by a contemporary who hadn't made a study of the old Latin. But this lagged a long time after the actual spoken language(s) had changed radically.
Yes, I was not very clear.
The letter "h" is very common in Spanish and French spelling, of course.
The sound like English "h" is absent in standard Parisian French and Castillian Spanish.
The details in French are that there are two sorts of written "h", traditionally called "aspiré" and "muet", "aspirated" and "mute".
"Mute" "h" has never been pronounced in the whole history of French as an independent language; it's found in words like "homme", "herbe" because mediaeval scribes carried over the "h" from the Latin "homo", "herba", in which the "h", originally pronounced as in English, had ceased to be pronounced for centuries before there was a separate French language, so the scribes were used to it as a silent letter, just a matter of traditional spelling, like "k" in English "knee".
"Aspirated" "h" is also completely silent in Modern standard French, but a few centuries ago it was pronounced as in English, and still is pronounced in some dialects. This "h" comes from words borrowed from other languages, mainly Frankish, the language of the Germanic conquerors of Roman Gaul. There are quite a lot of these words in French, eg "haricot" "bean" "hair" "hate".
Even though it is just as silent in standard French as "mute" "h", words beginning with it behave as if they begin within a consonant in French:
l'homme "the man" but
le haricot "the bean"
Some Spanish "h" is like French "mute" "h", just a spelling convention based on Latin:
hombre from homo (actually from accusative hominem)
But also, in Spanish, original initial "f" became "h" in most words inherited direct from Latin:
hijo from filius "son" hacer from facere "do, make"
but eventually this "h" also ceased to be pronounced!
Anomalous trithium?
The American pronunciation is the original one, with "h" silent as in "hour", and present in the spelling because of smart-alec scribes who knew that the words were ultimately derived from Latin "herba" and "hora", and were also used to "h" being silent in lots of words.
The British version arose as a spelling pronunciation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_pronunciation