> Thanks! I just didn't catch how funny that was when I first read it.
IIRC, I found that in a story linked from Linux Today. It was part of MS's "explanation" of why the big breakin that hit the news a few weeks back was not pinched out sooner. Or rather, one of the several versions of the "explanation".
As usual, as soon as they start spewing spin to convince the public that their poop doesn't really stink as much as your nose says it does, they inadvertantly say something that makes their poop sound even smellier than it would have if they had said nothing.
It really concerns me that MS' own security team would shrug of the continual creation of unauthorized accounts as being just another unexplainable quirk of the system. We're talking major confidence in the quality of their own products here.
Oh, well. In a few years they'll be out with the next iteration of their Great New Thing, and then we'll hear them tell us that it doesn't stink like W2K did, blah, blah, so we'll run out and buy the new one before word gets out about how unreliable it is.
> It's my experience that the number of women in hard science/engineering is, sadly, staying more or less constant.
FWIW, my alma mater currently has (estimated) 25% f/m in the freshman level CS classes, but only about 10% in the senior level classes.
That may represent a rapid change in demographics over the past three/four years, or it may represent a differential rate in the number who stay on track for four years. I don't know offhand how to tell the difference.
> Computer sciences:... spending a day in a classroom filling your head with the old stuff actually robs you of the time you need to learn the new stuff.
Good sir, I fear you have confused a degree in CS with a certificate from a trade school.
If they are teaching the right "old stuff", it's every bit as valid today as the "old stuff" they teach you in mathematics, chemistry, physics, or any other field of science.
> It's going to be fast. Very fast. At the moment, it isn't significantly faster than the P3 or the Athlon, but remember this is the first release of an entirely new core.
So, over the long haul, how did their past core compete with AMD?
AMD is beating them on the ground, today. AMD will continue to evolve as well. This release gives us no reason at all to believe that Intel has made a technicological comeback.
In order to do that, they need to quit releasing overpriced, overclocked crap and actually, well, actually make a technological comeback. Then they can brag all they want about how the big company with a huge bank account and unbounded name recognition beat the little guy after a mere year's effort. Or two years' effort. Or three...
> Germany would probably incinerate the machine. Or put in in a trash compactor. They're really touchy (maybe the word is ashamed) about the war, and go to great lengths to destroy anything that has anything to do with it.
That's odd. Today I saw that PBS special about the lost U-Boat, and it showed a German museum dedicated to the U-Boats, filled to the brim with information about the boats, the crews, and the histories. Also briefly shown was a German memorial to the U-Boatmen, complete with the names of the lost sailors, very reminiscent of the USA's Vietnam memorial.
> Judge Sidney Harris reprimanded Rambus for "blatant judge shopping"
Maybe they should get together with Katherine "the [state] Supreme Court has no jurisdiction" Harris, and compare notes about what does and doesn't work when shopping around for a sympathetic judge.
The FBI now runs a popular off-line search engine. Go to their site, type in a keyword such as haxor or kiddieporn, and then they will start raiding houses and searching the disks they find there until they get a hit. When they're done, they return the drives to their owners.
There is a general expectation that the overseas military ballot will strongly favor Bush. There is also an expectation that for some locales, such as Florida, the overseas civilian ballot will strongly favor Gore.
By expediting one batch and not the other, the USPS will induce a differential in what arrives in Florida by the Friday deadline. Wittingly or not, they may be influencing the outcome of the election.
> Maybe it's a problem to the linguists that Renfew's an anthropologist?
Interesting question.
First, let me point out that I'm not an authority on this. (I am at best an advanced amateur on the linguistic side.) My comment merely stems from observation of what actual authorities say, apparently very nearly unanimously.
Second, though I know much more about linguistics than I do about archaeology/anthropology, I am also a "fan" of those fields, and would be extremely reluctant to make any kind of blanket assumption that linguistic evidence trumps their evidence, or vice versa.
Third, I was vaguely aware that Renfrew was renowned in his field, and so perhaps I should have said more about that than I did. Also, I remember reading about Renfrew's IE hypothesis in Scientific American shortly after he first published it, and at the time I found it both sensible and appealing. It's just that now that I know more about it, I find it impossible to reconcile with the linguistic evidence. (Or, more accurately, I find that others better informed than myself find the reconciliation impossible.)
For people interested in that particular debate, I would recommend Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Mallory is an archaeologist. The book is one step removed from a popularizing account, in the same sense that Scientific American is a step removed from a popularizing account of science; if you are moderately intelligent, moderately well-read, moderately patient, and fairly interested in the subject matter, you should be able to master the book.
Mallory apparently wrote the book partly, or perhaps even primarily, as a response to the controversy stirred up by Renfrew. However, the book is not written as a polemic. IIRC he mentions Renfrew explicitly only a handful of times (though he consistently disagrees with him in those mentions).
One very likeable thing about Mallory is that he does not feel compelled to produce a Grand Unified Theory That Explains Everything. He simply surveys the evidence and does the best he can with it. Metaphorically speaking, he proves some interesting lemmata, but finds himself unable to combine them into a theorem. More on Mallory near the end of this post.
[The following is for the benefit of any lurkers; I don't want you to think I'm trying to lecture you on topics that you probably understand better than I do.]
There is an interesting tension between linguistics and archaeology. I do not think of it as animosity, because I honestly think workers in both disciplines would really like to be able to use each other's work as orthogonal evidence to support a good theory. (Notice the current article's citation of both archaeologists {Renfrew,Gimbutas} and lingiusts {Ruhlen}.)
Unfortunately, this collaboration does not always work in practice.
There is a very appealing, albeit very naive, temptation to assume that a population of humans can be associated with a culture (what archaeologists study) and a language (what linguists study) in a 1:1:1 fashion. However, this is not necessarily the case.
The disconnect between population and language can be illustrated easily by looking at who speaks English in the modern world. Any notion of "the English speakers" as a meaningful genetic designation goes right out the window, since you can find native speakers of English who have biological ancestors hailing from every corner of the world. (To put it bluntly, look at the correlation between skin color and speaking English. But any other designation of a population on the basis of speaking English is not going to be very informative either, beyond the fact that they all do speak English.)
The disconnect between population and culture was well illustrated by an archaeology professor I once had. About a generation ago there was a rapid replacement, throughout most of the industrial world, of beverage containers made from tin-plated iron, by beverage containers made from aluminum. Unfortunately for any naive theories, this cultural horizon was not associated with any sort of population replacement, invasion, intrusion, or even fresh contact with another culture. It was simply an in situ development. The difference is hard, perhaps impossible, to detect rigorously simply on the basis of archaeological analysis.
So regarding the naive 1:1:1 relationship, you cannot say with certainty that either half holds absolutely, let alone the whole thing. Any attempt to map archaeology onto language, or vice versa, is going to have to rely on a chain of inferences only as strong as its weakest link.
Now back to Mallory. He reports on a very nice archaeological analysis by Gimbutas (also cited in the Science article, and well regarded by historical linguists) that makes a plausible chain of inferences between the Kurgan culture of the steppes and the speakers of an early IE dialect, probably ancestral to the Indic, Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic sub-families of IE (represented respectively by modern Hindi, Farsi, Lithuanian, and Russian, plus many other languages both living and dead).
Some would like to derive the entire IE language/population/culture from that Kurgan culture, but Mallory balks at that. (And IMO with good reason.)
The problem arises when you step back and look at western Europe. There, you can make an equally plausible chain of inferences to derive the speakers of the language(s) ancestral to the Celtic family (Irish, Welsh, etc.) from the Hallstadt culture, and arguably even back to the Urnfield culture.
So far, so good. The problem arises because nobody, whether linguist or archaeologist, seems willing to derive the Hallstadt/Urnfield culture from the Kurgan, or vice versa. So to preserve a unified early IE culture, which would seem to be a well-justified desire in principle, you would have to derive both the western European and the steppe culture from a single earlier culture. I'm not aware of anyone who would even posit a suggestion, except perhaps Renfrew. (And I say "perhaps" because I'm not sure even he would derive the Kurgan culture from an Anatolian antecedent. No one else that I know of seems interested in doing so, and at any rate Renfrew's posited common ancestor would be so far back in time that it stretches belief that the languages of western Europe would have remained so transparently related to the languages of western Asia well into the historical period.)
Despite many efforts to pin down "the IE homeland" over the last couple of centuries, the problem seems to be beyond solution with the knowlege we currently possess. At any rate that's my take on it.
I don't pretend that the above in any way disproves Renfrew, because frankly, I don't even remember the details of his model. I do stand by my assertion that, so far as I have observed, historical linguists almost universally reject his model. However, as suggested by tesserae, it is not hard to imagine that archaeoligists would subscribe to Renfrew and universally reject conflicting claims from linguists (though Mallory does not seem to fit that pattern).
caveat lector: the the sake of brevity, I have included some gross simplifications in the "facts" above. If not already so far off topic, interesting and sometimes critical comments could be made about Gimbutas and Ruhlen as well. Also, as the saying goes, "Your spelling may vary."
> Plus, this election, just like that crooked one in the 60s, features.... a Daley!
I don't think anyone is denying that the big Democratic party machines in Texas and Chicago were corrupt. What's missing is the relevance in the current case.
> The whole idea of peering at a spoiled (improperly marked) ballot and determining "intent" surely seems like this kind of stuff the road to hell is paved with.
For better or for worse, there is ample legal precedent for it. After all, the voters' "intent" is the ultimate imperium in a democracy.
Perhaps you'll sleep better for knowing that certain safeguards are taken, such as the proceedings being conducted by representatives from both parties, the proceedings being open to the public, etc.
Honestly, people only have a problem with this when it means their man is going to lose on an accurate count.
> Even Nixon conceded defeat under much shadier conditions (previous Daley) than this.
Not everyone agrees with this. First, not everyone agrees that Nixon could have garnered enough votes even if all the acknowledged problems had been corrected, and second, Nixon's people did pursue things in court for months, contrary to the myth about his noble concession.
Also, as I posted last week, if Nixon really had won, what gave him the right to throw away the true wishes of the voters just to look like a noble man?
> Someone once said that anyone who wants to be President bad enough to fight to get there, shouldn't be trusted with the office. Gore is certainly disqualifying himself on those grounds.
I'm inclined to agree, though I find it odd that Gore's is the only name you mention in the present context.
> And these dolts on Florida thinking they get a do-over!
The circuit judge to whom the contest is presented
may fashion such orders as he or she deems necessary to ensure that each allegation in the complaint is investigated, examined, or checked, to prevent or correct any alleged wrong, and to provide any relief appropriate under such circumstances.
Emphasis mine.
Also, there are ample legal precedents for revotes, at least in other circumstances.
Some say that The Congress's constitutional right to set the day for general elections means that a revote on a different day would be unconstitutional. IANAConstitutionalLawyer, but that interpretation seems to be problematic, at best.
For instance, if a category 5 hurricane hit southeast Florida on election day, would anyone seriously argue that the US Constitution disenfranchised half the state's population for that year's vote, due to their own bad luck?
And what about absentee ballots? No one is insisting that they be received on the day designated by The Congress. Or perhaps they should be filled out, rather than received, on the designated day? Is anyone checking?
Or what about jurisdictions that allow early voting. Mine does, and I did. Is my ballot lying uncounted in a dumpster somewhere right now? Should it be?
I don't at all think a revote is a forgone conclusion, and in fact I don't really expect one, but it's a very head-in-sand approach to laugh at the idea as though it were impossible.
They did. Now they're arguing about whether the cat was dead or alive.
[Side note:]
In the gedankenexperiment, why doesn't the cat itself count as an observer? If only humans can serve as observers, wouldn't that leave animals living in a bizarre world of uncertainty when no people were around?
On the other hand, if we let the cat be the observer and the poison acts fast enough, the cat could die before it registered an observation, and even I would concede that a dead cat can't be an observer. But the live cat could. So you'd have an odd asymmetry where the observation could be made in one direction, but not in the other (since that would kill the observer). Could you exploit this to force the particles to behave in a non-random way? Your housecat stands in for Maxwell's Daemon?
> In these countries when no party has a clear majority, days or even weeks pass before a viable coalition can be formed and in the meantime they have no government.
That should keep the anti-big-government types happy in the USA, too!
> Finally, even if a court does agree that the ballot was confusing, there is legal precedent at the appeals level in Florida for saying "tough luck" anyway.
FYI, the text of the re-filed lawsuit (now apparently a single state case rather than a scattershot of separate state and Federal suits) can be found at ABC's Website.
There are a couple of sideshow stories that are not getting much media attention. Here is a selection of the (IMO) more interesting ones:
The Blacks who heckled Jesse Jackson in Florida Monday turn out to have been bussed in from elsewhere, and will not say who paid their fare. (See the story in Salon.)
David Boies is now on Gore's legal team. (Briefly mentioned at Yahoo!.)
A Floridian voter, claiming to be an independent (yeah, sure) but peeved at the Bush campaign's attempt to intervene in what he considers to be Florida's internal affairs, has filed suit in a Federal district court in Florida, seeking to have the 32 electoral votes from Texas declared invalid, since for Texan voters the Bush-Cheney ticket does not meet the constitutional requirement that either the presidential or vice-presidential candidate must be an "inhabitant" of another state. The plaintiff makes much of the legal distinction between "resident" and "inhabitant", the latter apparently being a more demanding definition. (Sorry, but I cannot find this link anymore. If you have seen it, please post it.)
> Fact: According to the Secretary of State's office, there is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. This view has been contested by hundreds of Florida voters. The final decision on the legality of the ballot is likely to be made in court, as long as this issue could have an effect on the election.
According to the Jurist site, a paper ballot must have a spot for marking the voter's choice to the right of the candidate's name, and a machine ballot must conform to the form of a paper ballot "as nearly as practicable".
\methinks the courts are going to have to weigh in on the meaning of "practicable".
The same site also mentions that Florida officials have said that the ballot is perfectly legal, but then again Florida officials have been saying lots of things that the courts will eventually have to rule on.
Finally, even if a court does agree that the ballot was confusing, there is legal precedent at the appeals level in Florida for saying "tough luck" anyway. (But will they say the same thing in a presedential election?)
> Is Bush and Gore trying to prove that the only thing you need to become president is a good lawyer? Can you sue to become president?
I guess I'm an anti-alarmist. For better or worse, the courts are the final arbiters of law and procedure in the USA. When an election is this close, the courts are exactly where it belongs.
And though the courts are not completely above politicising the situation, I still have faith that their decisions will be much less politically motivated than, say, Florida's Attorney General (activist Democrat) or Secretary of State (activist Republican).
> Who really believes that a recount is anymore accurate than the original tally?
You may be interested to know that a recount law was enacted in Texas in 1997, with bipartisan support in the state legislature and a willing signature from GWB. That law says that in the event one party wants a recount by machine and the other a hand recount, then the recount shall be by hand. I think if you had asked anyone at all eight days ago, everyone would have agreed that a hand count is the most accurate. (Machine recounts are generally preferred due to considerations cost and speed.)
A side note, which you probably do not want to hear, is that hand counts can detect the voter's intent in cases where a machine count cannot. There is plenty of legal precedent for this notion. (And also, IIRC, a direct mention of the voter's "intent" in the Florida Statutes. Sorry; I read big blocks of it last night, and am not up to reading it again.)
> Out of the 6 million votes in Florida, how hard do you think it would be for Gore supporters to mysteriously come up with 2000 votes in Gore's favour?
Whence the a priori assumption that the Democrats are more able to cheat than the Republicans are, or that they will prove to be better at it? Are you aware of the procedures used in hand recounts?
> His ruling on the 5pm deadline is basically: "Yeah, she [the Secretary of State] can ignore late results...but not arbitrarily"
I found the ruling quite surprising, since the Florida Statutes clearly give voters right up until the moment of statewide certification to register their contest or protest of the election. The implication of the judge's ruling seems to be that yes, you could register your {pro,con}test of the election right up until 4:59 this afternoon, but that the SoS could completely ignore it at her discretion, since there would not be time left to read it, let alone do anything about it.
I vote the "work of great cowardice" explanation. Notice also that five (count 'em, five!) judges have already recused themselves from the Butterfly Ballot Suit, so that that extremely hot potato(e) is now in the hands of a sixth. I don't think anyone in the judicial system wants to have his/her resume saddled with having single-handedly selected a president.
And of course, the Florida SoS must be the squirmingest person in the USA right now. I wouldn't want to have her job under the current circumstances.
As always, the most technically useful link for all this is the Jurist site. You can also find interesting articles (and opinions) at Salon, including stories that the mainstream press is virtually ignoring.
Notice that you have 2 biological parents, 4 biological grandparents, 8 biological great-grandparents, and so forth, for 2^N ancestors at the Nth preceding generation. This number grows exponentially.
Meanwhile, population has been growing geometrically (exponentially?) as well, but in the opposite direction in time.
So at some point, the number of your posited (great*)grandparents must exceed the human population of the earth at that time.
For example, take 30 generations ago, a nominal 25 years per generation, and assume no non-human input, then you can calculate that you needed about a billion (28*great)-grandparents a mere 750 years ago, when the world's human population was surely much less than one billion. Another ten generations back and you would have needed a trillion (38*great-grandparents), still a mere 1,000 years ago.
That's right, folks. We're all inbred like the veriest Ozark Hillbillies.
Humor aside, I wonder whether any biologists here can tell us something quantitative about the rate of the, erm, call it "biofeedback", in a modern human's genes, and how that rate compares to other species, such as chimps.
FWIW, the paper by Colin Renfew that the authors cite (reference #3) is almost universally rejected, nay, despised, among people with the faintest clue about the prehistory and interrelationship of the various languages in the Indo-European family.
> In eighth grade, when I first wrote this, I was very interested in higher dimensions, and I tried to learn to visualize in four dimensions; I never really succeeded
Write your congressman about legalizing LSD, so the next generation of eighth graders won't suffer the disadvantages your generation did.
> "Florida state officials stated...." This is the conclusion as to whether or not the ballot was invalid on the link you gave.
Florida state officials are saying lots of things this week. The more interesting question is, which of those things will hold up in court?
The page also gave a link to the actual text of the law, so Slashdot readers (and Florida's judges) can develop their own opinions about how well the sayings of the Florida state officials are supported by the laws of the State of Florida.
Slashdot Mirror
> Thanks! I just didn't catch how funny that was when I first read it.
IIRC, I found that in a story linked from Linux Today. It was part of MS's "explanation" of why the big breakin that hit the news a few weeks back was not pinched out sooner. Or rather, one of the several versions of the "explanation".
As usual, as soon as they start spewing spin to convince the public that their poop doesn't really stink as much as your nose says it does, they inadvertantly say something that makes their poop sound even smellier than it would have if they had said nothing.
It really concerns me that MS' own security team would shrug of the continual creation of unauthorized accounts as being just another unexplainable quirk of the system. We're talking major confidence in the quality of their own products here.
Oh, well. In a few years they'll be out with the next iteration of their Great New Thing, and then we'll hear them tell us that it doesn't stink like W2K did, blah, blah, so we'll run out and buy the new one before word gets out about how unreliable it is.
> It's my experience that the number of women in hard science/engineering is, sadly, staying more or less constant.
FWIW, my alma mater currently has (estimated) 25% f/m in the freshman level CS classes, but only about 10% in the senior level classes.
That may represent a rapid change in demographics over the past three/four years, or it may represent a differential rate in the number who stay on track for four years. I don't know offhand how to tell the difference.
> Computer sciences: ... spending a day in a classroom filling your head with the old stuff actually robs you of the time you need to learn the new stuff.
Good sir, I fear you have confused a degree in CS with a certificate from a trade school.
If they are teaching the right "old stuff", it's every bit as valid today as the "old stuff" they teach you in mathematics, chemistry, physics, or any other field of science.
> It's going to be fast. Very fast. At the moment, it isn't significantly faster than the P3 or the Athlon, but remember this is the first release of an entirely new core.
So, over the long haul, how did their past core compete with AMD?
AMD is beating them on the ground, today. AMD will continue to evolve as well. This release gives us no reason at all to believe that Intel has made a technicological comeback.
In order to do that, they need to quit releasing overpriced, overclocked crap and actually, well, actually make a technological comeback. Then they can brag all they want about how the big company with a huge bank account and unbounded name recognition beat the little guy after a mere year's effort. Or two years' effort. Or three...
> Finally, Coinbox® will take postage for Outlook items: ...
> Regular e-mail: 33 cents
>
I'm sticking with AOL 7, because of their special bulk rate for mass mailings.
> Germany would probably incinerate the machine. Or put in in a trash compactor. They're really touchy (maybe the word is ashamed) about the war, and go to great lengths to destroy anything that has anything to do with it.
That's odd. Today I saw that PBS special about the lost U-Boat, and it showed a German museum dedicated to the U-Boats, filled to the brim with information about the boats, the crews, and the histories. Also briefly shown was a German memorial to the U-Boatmen, complete with the names of the lost sailors, very reminiscent of the USA's Vietnam memorial.
> Judge Sidney Harris reprimanded Rambus for "blatant judge shopping"
Maybe they should get together with Katherine "the [state] Supreme Court has no jurisdiction" Harris, and compare notes about what does and doesn't work when shopping around for a sympathetic judge.
The FBI now runs a popular off-line search engine. Go to their site, type in a keyword such as haxor or kiddieporn, and then they will start raiding houses and searching the disks they find there until they get a hit. When they're done, they return the drives to their owners.
> November 17 is the deadline for absentee ballots sent from overseas to arrive.
And the occasion for more inequality in the process.
According to Salon, the USPS is expediting delivery of absentee ballots from overseas military posts. It is not doing so (because it cannot) for absentee ballots from overseas civilian sources.
There is a general expectation that the overseas military ballot will strongly favor Bush. There is also an expectation that for some locales, such as Florida, the overseas civilian ballot will strongly favor Gore.
By expediting one batch and not the other, the USPS will induce a differential in what arrives in Florida by the Friday deadline. Wittingly or not, they may be influencing the outcome of the election.
> Maybe it's a problem to the linguists that Renfew's an anthropologist?
Interesting question.
First, let me point out that I'm not an authority on this. (I am at best an advanced amateur on the linguistic side.) My comment merely stems from observation of what actual authorities say, apparently very nearly unanimously.
Second, though I know much more about linguistics than I do about archaeology/anthropology, I am also a "fan" of those fields, and would be extremely reluctant to make any kind of blanket assumption that linguistic evidence trumps their evidence, or vice versa.
Third, I was vaguely aware that Renfrew was renowned in his field, and so perhaps I should have said more about that than I did. Also, I remember reading about Renfrew's IE hypothesis in Scientific American shortly after he first published it, and at the time I found it both sensible and appealing. It's just that now that I know more about it, I find it impossible to reconcile with the linguistic evidence. (Or, more accurately, I find that others better informed than myself find the reconciliation impossible.)
For people interested in that particular debate, I would recommend Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Mallory is an archaeologist. The book is one step removed from a popularizing account, in the same sense that Scientific American is a step removed from a popularizing account of science; if you are moderately intelligent, moderately well-read, moderately patient, and fairly interested in the subject matter, you should be able to master the book.
Mallory apparently wrote the book partly, or perhaps even primarily, as a response to the controversy stirred up by Renfrew. However, the book is not written as a polemic. IIRC he mentions Renfrew explicitly only a handful of times (though he consistently disagrees with him in those mentions).
One very likeable thing about Mallory is that he does not feel compelled to produce a Grand Unified Theory That Explains Everything. He simply surveys the evidence and does the best he can with it. Metaphorically speaking, he proves some interesting lemmata, but finds himself unable to combine them into a theorem. More on Mallory near the end of this post.
[The following is for the benefit of any lurkers; I don't want you to think I'm trying to lecture you on topics that you probably understand better than I do.]
There is an interesting tension between linguistics and archaeology. I do not think of it as animosity, because I honestly think workers in both disciplines would really like to be able to use each other's work as orthogonal evidence to support a good theory. (Notice the current article's citation of both archaeologists {Renfrew,Gimbutas} and lingiusts {Ruhlen}.)
Unfortunately, this collaboration does not always work in practice.
There is a very appealing, albeit very naive, temptation to assume that a population of humans can be associated with a culture (what archaeologists study) and a language (what linguists study) in a 1:1:1 fashion. However, this is not necessarily the case.
The disconnect between population and language can be illustrated easily by looking at who speaks English in the modern world. Any notion of "the English speakers" as a meaningful genetic designation goes right out the window, since you can find native speakers of English who have biological ancestors hailing from every corner of the world. (To put it bluntly, look at the correlation between skin color and speaking English. But any other designation of a population on the basis of speaking English is not going to be very informative either, beyond the fact that they all do speak English.)
The disconnect between population and culture was well illustrated by an archaeology professor I once had. About a generation ago there was a rapid replacement, throughout most of the industrial world, of beverage containers made from tin-plated iron, by beverage containers made from aluminum. Unfortunately for any naive theories, this cultural horizon was not associated with any sort of population replacement, invasion, intrusion, or even fresh contact with another culture. It was simply an in situ development. The difference is hard, perhaps impossible, to detect rigorously simply on the basis of archaeological analysis.
So regarding the naive 1:1:1 relationship, you cannot say with certainty that either half holds absolutely, let alone the whole thing. Any attempt to map archaeology onto language, or vice versa, is going to have to rely on a chain of inferences only as strong as its weakest link.
Now back to Mallory. He reports on a very nice archaeological analysis by Gimbutas (also cited in the Science article, and well regarded by historical linguists) that makes a plausible chain of inferences between the Kurgan culture of the steppes and the speakers of an early IE dialect, probably ancestral to the Indic, Iranian, Baltic, and Slavic sub-families of IE (represented respectively by modern Hindi, Farsi, Lithuanian, and Russian, plus many other languages both living and dead).
Some would like to derive the entire IE language/population/culture from that Kurgan culture, but Mallory balks at that. (And IMO with good reason.)
The problem arises when you step back and look at western Europe. There, you can make an equally plausible chain of inferences to derive the speakers of the language(s) ancestral to the Celtic family (Irish, Welsh, etc.) from the Hallstadt culture, and arguably even back to the Urnfield culture.
So far, so good. The problem arises because nobody, whether linguist or archaeologist, seems willing to derive the Hallstadt/Urnfield culture from the Kurgan, or vice versa. So to preserve a unified early IE culture, which would seem to be a well-justified desire in principle, you would have to derive both the western European and the steppe culture from a single earlier culture. I'm not aware of anyone who would even posit a suggestion, except perhaps Renfrew. (And I say "perhaps" because I'm not sure even he would derive the Kurgan culture from an Anatolian antecedent. No one else that I know of seems interested in doing so, and at any rate Renfrew's posited common ancestor would be so far back in time that it stretches belief that the languages of western Europe would have remained so transparently related to the languages of western Asia well into the historical period.)
Despite many efforts to pin down "the IE homeland" over the last couple of centuries, the problem seems to be beyond solution with the knowlege we currently possess. At any rate that's my take on it.
I don't pretend that the above in any way disproves Renfrew, because frankly, I don't even remember the details of his model. I do stand by my assertion that, so far as I have observed, historical linguists almost universally reject his model. However, as suggested by tesserae, it is not hard to imagine that archaeoligists would subscribe to Renfrew and universally reject conflicting claims from linguists (though Mallory does not seem to fit that pattern).
caveat lector: the the sake of brevity, I have included some gross simplifications in the "facts" above. If not already so far off topic, interesting and sometimes critical comments could be made about Gimbutas and Ruhlen as well. Also, as the saying goes, "Your spelling may vary."
How can you patent something that you discover rather than invent?
If Ug had patented the color of the daytime sky 30K years ago, would the rest of us have to pay a fee to view it?
I don't think anyone is denying that the big Democratic party machines in Texas and Chicago were corrupt. What's missing is the relevance in the current case.
> The whole idea of peering at a spoiled (improperly marked) ballot and determining "intent" surely seems like this kind of stuff the road to hell is paved with.
For better or for worse, there is ample legal precedent for it. After all, the voters' "intent" is the ultimate imperium in a democracy.
Perhaps you'll sleep better for knowing that certain safeguards are taken, such as the proceedings being conducted by representatives from both parties, the proceedings being open to the public, etc.
Honestly, people only have a problem with this when it means their man is going to lose on an accurate count.
> Even Nixon conceded defeat under much shadier conditions (previous Daley) than this.
Not everyone agrees with this. First, not everyone agrees that Nixon could have garnered enough votes even if all the acknowledged problems had been corrected, and second, Nixon's people did pursue things in court for months, contrary to the myth about his noble concession.
Also, as I posted last week, if Nixon really had won, what gave him the right to throw away the true wishes of the voters just to look like a noble man?
> Someone once said that anyone who wants to be President bad enough to fight to get there, shouldn't be trusted with the office. Gore is certainly disqualifying himself on those grounds.
I'm inclined to agree, though I find it odd that Gore's is the only name you mention in the present context.
> And these dolts on Florida thinking they get a do-over!
From The 2000 Florida Statutes, Title IX, Chapter 102, Contest of Election, item #8, re remedies for contested elections -Emphasis mine.
Also, there are ample legal precedents for revotes, at least in other circumstances.
Some say that The Congress's constitutional right to set the day for general elections means that a revote on a different day would be unconstitutional. IANAConstitutionalLawyer, but that interpretation seems to be problematic, at best.
For instance, if a category 5 hurricane hit southeast Florida on election day, would anyone seriously argue that the US Constitution disenfranchised half the state's population for that year's vote, due to their own bad luck?
And what about absentee ballots? No one is insisting that they be received on the day designated by The Congress. Or perhaps they should be filled out, rather than received, on the designated day? Is anyone checking?
Or what about jurisdictions that allow early voting. Mine does, and I did. Is my ballot lying uncounted in a dumpster somewhere right now? Should it be?
I don't at all think a revote is a forgone conclusion, and in fact I don't really expect one, but it's a very head-in-sand approach to laugh at the idea as though it were impossible.
> Someone look in the box already!
They did. Now they're arguing about whether the cat was dead or alive.
[Side note:]
In the gedankenexperiment, why doesn't the cat itself count as an observer? If only humans can serve as observers, wouldn't that leave animals living in a bizarre world of uncertainty when no people were around?
On the other hand, if we let the cat be the observer and the poison acts fast enough, the cat could die before it registered an observation, and even I would concede that a dead cat can't be an observer. But the live cat could. So you'd have an odd asymmetry where the observation could be made in one direction, but not in the other (since that would kill the observer). Could you exploit this to force the particles to behave in a non-random way? Your housecat stands in for Maxwell's Daemon?
> In these countries when no party has a clear majority, days or even weeks pass before a viable coalition can be formed and in the meantime they have no government.
That should keep the anti-big-government types happy in the USA, too!
> Finally, even if a court does agree that the ballot was confusing, there is legal precedent at the appeals level in Florida for saying "tough luck" anyway.
FYI, the text of the re-filed lawsuit (now apparently a single state case rather than a scattershot of separate state and Federal suits) can be found at ABC's Website.
> Fact: According to the Secretary of State's office, there is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. This view has been contested by hundreds of Florida voters. The final decision on the legality of the ballot is likely to be made in court, as long as this issue could have an effect on the election.
According to the Jurist site, a paper ballot must have a spot for marking the voter's choice to the right of the candidate's name, and a machine ballot must conform to the form of a paper ballot "as nearly as practicable".
\methinks the courts are going to have to weigh in on the meaning of "practicable".
The same site also mentions that Florida officials have said that the ballot is perfectly legal, but then again Florida officials have been saying lots of things that the courts will eventually have to rule on.
Finally, even if a court does agree that the ballot was confusing, there is legal precedent at the appeals level in Florida for saying "tough luck" anyway. (But will they say the same thing in a presedential election?)
> Is Bush and Gore trying to prove that the only thing you need to become president is a good lawyer? Can you sue to become president?
I guess I'm an anti-alarmist. For better or worse, the courts are the final arbiters of law and procedure in the USA. When an election is this close, the courts are exactly where it belongs.
And though the courts are not completely above politicising the situation, I still have faith that their decisions will be much less politically motivated than, say, Florida's Attorney General (activist Democrat) or Secretary of State (activist Republican).
> Who really believes that a recount is anymore accurate than the original tally?
You may be interested to know that a recount law was enacted in Texas in 1997, with bipartisan support in the state legislature and a willing signature from GWB. That law says that in the event one party wants a recount by machine and the other a hand recount, then the recount shall be by hand. I think if you had asked anyone at all eight days ago, everyone would have agreed that a hand count is the most accurate. (Machine recounts are generally preferred due to considerations cost and speed.)
A side note, which you probably do not want to hear, is that hand counts can detect the voter's intent in cases where a machine count cannot. There is plenty of legal precedent for this notion. (And also, IIRC, a direct mention of the voter's "intent" in the Florida Statutes. Sorry; I read big blocks of it last night, and am not up to reading it again.)
> Out of the 6 million votes in Florida, how hard do you think it would be for Gore supporters to mysteriously come up with 2000 votes in Gore's favour?
Whence the a priori assumption that the Democrats are more able to cheat than the Republicans are, or that they will prove to be better at it? Are you aware of the procedures used in hand recounts?
> His ruling on the 5pm deadline is basically: "Yeah, she [the Secretary of State] can ignore late results...but not arbitrarily"
I found the ruling quite surprising, since the Florida Statutes clearly give voters right up until the moment of statewide certification to register their contest or protest of the election. The implication of the judge's ruling seems to be that yes, you could register your {pro,con}test of the election right up until 4:59 this afternoon, but that the SoS could completely ignore it at her discretion, since there would not be time left to read it, let alone do anything about it.
I vote the "work of great cowardice" explanation. Notice also that five (count 'em, five!) judges have already recused themselves from the Butterfly Ballot Suit, so that that extremely hot potato(e) is now in the hands of a sixth. I don't think anyone in the judicial system wants to have his/her resume saddled with having single-handedly selected a president.
And of course, the Florida SoS must be the squirmingest person in the USA right now. I wouldn't want to have her job under the current circumstances.
As always, the most technically useful link for all this is the Jurist site. You can also find interesting articles (and opinions) at Salon, including stories that the mainstream press is virtually ignoring.
Notice that you have 2 biological parents, 4 biological grandparents, 8 biological great-grandparents, and so forth, for 2^N ancestors at the Nth preceding generation. This number grows exponentially.
Meanwhile, population has been growing geometrically (exponentially?) as well, but in the opposite direction in time.
So at some point, the number of your posited (great*)grandparents must exceed the human population of the earth at that time.
For example, take 30 generations ago, a nominal 25 years per generation, and assume no non-human input, then you can calculate that you needed about a billion (28*great)-grandparents a mere 750 years ago, when the world's human population was surely much less than one billion. Another ten generations back and you would have needed a trillion (38*great-grandparents), still a mere 1,000 years ago.
That's right, folks. We're all inbred like the veriest Ozark Hillbillies.
Humor aside, I wonder whether any biologists here can tell us something quantitative about the rate of the, erm, call it "biofeedback", in a modern human's genes, and how that rate compares to other species, such as chimps.
FWIW, the paper by Colin Renfew that the authors cite (reference #3) is almost universally rejected, nay, despised, among people with the faintest clue about the prehistory and interrelationship of the various languages in the Indo-European family.
> In eighth grade, when I first wrote this, I was very interested in higher dimensions, and I tried to learn to visualize in four dimensions; I never really succeeded
Write your congressman about legalizing LSD, so the next generation of eighth graders won't suffer the disadvantages your generation did.
> Not only is Harold Ebeling a professional astronomer, he's a committed vegetarian.
Surely then he realises that both beeves and broccoli are merely the carcassas of dead supernovae?
> "Florida state officials stated...." This is the conclusion as to whether or not the ballot was invalid on the link you gave.
Florida state officials are saying lots of things this week. The more interesting question is, which of those things will hold up in court?
The page also gave a link to the actual text of the law, so Slashdot readers (and Florida's judges) can develop their own opinions about how well the sayings of the Florida state officials are supported by the laws of the State of Florida.
> Then you add in the 3r337 h4x0rz and you are in for a world of hurt
1337 v073 k1dd135 ?