I'm no expert on Tennessee law, but looking at the Wikipedia article for the Tennessee State Constitution, there's no mention of any freedom of speech.
Incidentally, bonus points to those of you noticing that the Constitution of the United States of America applies to the *federal* government, whereas what we have here in TFA is a *state* government.
Duh, this will get slapped down harder than COPA, it has no chance of passing constitutional muster.
Yet, the phrasing of the First Amendment is quite clear:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So how does this work if it's *not Congress* that's making the law?
I've heard lots about how the Constitution constrains federal law (when it's actually being respected...). But after growing up in the US and paying attention more than many seem to, I confess I'm still quite ignorant about how the Constitution affects lawmaking at the state level -- though I suspect the answer is "not much".
Looking at the Wikipedia article for the Tennessee State Constitution, I note the lack of any specific provision for free speech, though there does seem to be an explicit freedom of the press. So one way around the law mentioned in TFA might be to claim that you're acting in some journalistic role.
Well, we should try to change insane laws. One of the quotes at the bottom of Slashdot recently mentioned that it's illegal to have your bathtub inside the house in one state (I think it was Virginia).
Of course most of us only pick and choose what parts of the law we want to obey, but the government should always act within the law IMO.
I certainly agree with you here. And upon reflection, it is precisely this selectivity of following and enforcing laws that has allowed this horribly unwieldy US legal system to develop. If *all* laws were enforced across the boards, the obsolete laws (and sometimes just plain silly laws, like the one about bathtubs in the house) would be immediately and glaringly apparent, making it much more likely that old and no-longer-appropriate laws would be revised or rescinded.
That said, in the real world of what is likely, I'm not all that sure how this could be implemented -- there is just so much inertia, and so many vested interests at work...
The US will get rid of its nuclear reactors only after nuclear weapons become obsolete. Remember, it's not about cost or the environment; it's about plutonium production.
And that's precisely why the cleaner, cheaper, and safer alternative of thorium-based nuclear energy has received so little attention in the US -- thorium fission doesn't produce anything that's easily weaponizable, making it largely irrelevant to US policymakers. Energy has been little more than a useful byproduct of US nuclear policy.
The reason I wanted multiple categorisations or tags is that some things do fall under more than one category. I'm a medical student, so I'll give you an example: Malaria. Does that come under:
Parasitic diseases
Blood-borne diseases
Diseases involving the liver
Tropical medicine
Block 3, where we first covered it?
I'm a linguist, not in medicine, but linguistics presents similar challenges of multiple categorization. One thing I've quite liked about The Brain is the ability to create both hierarchical (A contains B, C is contained by B) and sideways relationships (D is related to E, but I don't have to say how, or I can notate the link to describe the relation). These can also be redone on the fly, and this flexibility is wonderful when reorganizing things as you learn more about your problem space.
The Brain also allows many-to-one or many-to-many relationships, something that I don't think FreeMind allows. Using your example of malaria, it would be quite easy to create multiple higher-level topics/nodes/ideas such as "parasitic diseases" / "tropical medicine" / etc. and then have the "malaria" node be a child of all of the relevant ones.
A number of other mind mapping tools I've looked at in the past enforce a single-parent tree model that doesn't fit various kinds of semantic relationships very well, whereas the relations available in The Brain and the ability to choose any arbitrary node as the "root" node for viewing the model, or even the "root" node for overall organization, allows for a more organic web of association. I seem to recall that you can also tie two independent mind maps together, but I haven't tried that to date.
NB: I haven't bought The Brain just yet, but the demo impressed me, and this discussion has reminded me, so I think I will later today...
If you're interested in the mechanics of the history of the word, "wifman" used to mean "male person", which parallels "woman" much better, but is confusing next to "wife". "Were" (as in werewolf) was also a term used for a male human.
I've quite enjoyed your measured and rational writing style throughout this thread, but found I must respond to the above misunderstanding (possibly typo?).
The word woman comes from the older wif "woman, female" + man "person", as mentioned on Merriam-Webster's page, among others. This use of wif is mirrored in the modern German word Weib, likewise meaning "woman".
FWIW, another example of the use of were to mean "male person" is wergild, and it may also be useful to note that were is essentially the same word as the Latin vir, whence we get very male modern English words like virile.
(N.B.: Will Slashdot *ever* get around to supporting Unicode? This laziness is quite appalling for a purported geek site. The i in wif above should have a macron over it, but Slashdot refuses to render these, whether inserted as text: "", or as entities: "". Commander Taco et al should frankly be embarrassed that the best they can do for user input scrubbing is simply to remove anything outside of a small superset of ASCII.)
This site has swung so far to the extremes that I can hardly stand to read it anymore.
This, I think, is symptomatic of the polarization of the whole culture of the US. It's not discourse or discussion anymore, it's dispute. "You're with us, or against us!"
Sometimes a disagreement can be more than just black and white, but it seems there's a shrinking amount of room in the US for all the colors needed to accurately portray, and thus talk about, the world at large.
I had a graduating class of around 70 people. I knew them all, and had been to school with some of them since preschool.
This was in the public system in northern Virginia. Granted, my school was the oddball, but even so, the smaller class sizes were a major factor behind the more cohesive community we were able to build there. The county high schools had staggered hours too, so kids wanting programs that weren't available at our school could structure their class schedules so they could go to another school in the county to participate for that particular program (generally sports).
Talking with the people I grew up with, those of us who went to the smaller high schools (not just my own) generally had the better experiences. YMMV, of course.
My wife is a middle school teacher. She's taught in both public and private schools. She might only be in the classroom for roughly ten months of the year, but believe me, she works hard all twelve.
Summer break is not a vacation -- she's busy developing curriculum for the next year and keeping current as a teacher. She teaches English and history. She spends these months of non-classroom time reading voraciously, watching videos, going to conferences, and otherwise boning up on her profession and subject matter expertise, in addition to pulling together materials for specific curricular segments.
I can hear some complaints coming already, along the lines of Oh, sure, but why can't any teacher just use off-the-shelf materials, or at least recycle what they used before? How much has changed since last year? Surprisingly more than most people seem to think. For English, what was deemed the best practice for teaching grammar and mechanics, or writing skills, or reading comprehension, or what have you changes as teachers, researchers, and others learn what works and what doesn't. For history, new research is constantly changing, broadening, and expanding our understanding of what happened in the past. My wife has had to rework her "early man" unit extensively since she first began teaching it in order to include much new information that wasn't widely known even ten years ago, such as that Neanderthal did indeed interbreed with Homo sapiens in Europe, or that the Denisova hominin was a fully distinct third branch of humanity running around at the same time as Neanderthal and Homo sapiens that later worked its way into the gene base of the modern population of Melanesia.
Any teacher that doesn't keep abreast of the state of the art in the field grows stale, and threatens to become a liability to their students. It takes considerable time and effort to stay on top of the development of human knowledge, so much that it is not possible to do this and teach a full load at the same time. This makes summer break extremely important for teachers' professional development, and for the development of the materials for the coming school year.
Good teachers already *do* work hard for 12 months out of the year.
(Note that I'm not saying one thing or the other about the public/private debate, or about tenure in general. Some of what you say, I find I agree with. I only take issue with the apparent assumption in your post that all teachers are somehow slacking off during the summer break.)
According to some interpretations I've run across of Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology, particles of matter represent particles of intent. From this perspective, indeed, you can't have electrons without consciousness.
To put it in more religious terms better in line with the thought of the time, and to expand beyond Descartes logical fallacy: Deus cogitat, ergo sumus, or in this more doubting age, aliquid cogitat, ergo sumus -- "something thinks, therefore we is."
What dude means is without big media content, the internet is nothing. So he makes a statement that everyone can agree to, then he changes the meaning of one of the words for the rest of his argument. Terribly, terribly disingenuous.
Or, to put it in plainer terms, he's lying through his teeth. The most gifted liars are good at this -- at telling their lies bald-facedly in plain sight, and constructing their lies to rely on twisted words, getting people to agree to things that are diametrically opposed to their own best interests.
Aren't you eligible to file form 2555 and exclude your foreign-earned income? I was very happy about that when living and working in Tokyo. Or did Congress remove that exclusion? There was talk about that in 2006 or so, but I thought they decided to leave it be...
you're going to need to use the CLI, whether you're running a Linux distro, Mac OS, or even Windows.
I would extend this to say that a lot of programs in Windows, and a lot of little fixes that people have to do, have already been made into little downloadable programs that the user can just double click on. These programs make the necessary changes to the registry and run the various CLI programs. Linux not being as popular as Windows, this multitude of one-click fix patches isn't available.
Fair enough. But there's no reason such one-click patches couldn't be made available -- and, indeed, a number of the fixes listed on the Ubuntu forums consist of such solutions (either "download the script from [some URL]", or "copy the code below into a text editor, save as.sh, and double-click", or some similar variation). It's simply a matter of meeting a need.
Oh please! I can make that into a little.reg file and go "See this thing? Go clicky clicky and reboot" and its done, period, the end.... Then remove the shell or mod them down so you can NOT use them! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without CLI Linux falls down like a house of cards.
While I understand your point, and your frustration about the state of the various GUI environments for Linux, I really don't think that comparing a.reg file (and thus the Windows Registry) against the various Linux shells illustrates the shortcomings you think it does. For one, any CLI script could very well be turned into exactly the kind of clicky clicky executable file you mention -- with the added benefit that a Linux distro probably wouldn't need to be rebooted. Putting your metaphorical shoe on the other foot, I could just as easily say:
Then remove the registry or mod it down so you can NOT use it! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without the registry Windows falls down like a house of cards.
If the CLI in and of itself is such the charlie foxtrot, why is it that Windows has been adding more and more CLI functionality with each iteration?
You should NEVER need CLI on a modern OS. The fact that Linux can't live without it just shows how far behind it is in the desktop arena. Embedded and server its great, desktop is shit.
I assume here that by "modern OS" you mean "modern desktop OS", yes? If so, it's easy enough to run a desktop Linux distro without ever touching the CLI -- Ubuntu and Canonical have seen to that, among others. But if you really want to get in there and get your hands dirty with some power user customizations, sure -- you're going to need to use the CLI, whether you're running a Linux distro, Mac OS, or even Windows.
The fun thing about this misspelling / misuse of yours here is that it works both ways -- both as the word you wrote, "wreaks", meaning to avenge upon or inflict, as in wreaks havoc, and as the word you likely intended, "reeks", meaning to smell extremely strongly, as in reeks of ripe and runny cheese.
At least, that's rather what this review read like to me.
Can we make it part of the FAQ that there are some rules for writers of book reviews? On second thought, we only need one rule:
Don't assume the reader knows what the !@#$%^& you're talking about.
Indeed. What's this stuff about the DoD? What's the big deal about RM? Just reading "records management" makes me think it's about a database, which is kind of old hat. Or is it about record retention rules and auto-expiring data? I dunno.
Hm, forgive me then, it appears I misunderstood your use of "putative" to mean that the existence of the relationship itself was in doubt, possibly due to your mention of "fringe" earlier in your post. And I have had people argue with me that Korean and Japanese are completely unrelated, and that any similarities are purely accidental -- which strikes me as precious close to dogmatically delusional, or ideally just woefully misinformed. I thus wasn't sure at first how to interpret your post; after posting my reply, I read further down the thread, and I now see you've got your head firmly attached, and where it belongs, not stuck anywhere dark and unpleasant.:)
I've read that Old Japanese probably had seven or eight vowels as opposed to the five in modern Japanese, as referenced over on the Wikipedia article. The distribution of apparent vowels and how they seem to have been used is viewed by some as evidence of vowel harmony, which later disappeared as the language lost vowel sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no expert on Tennessee law, but looking at the Wikipedia article for the Tennessee State Constitution, there's no mention of any freedom of speech.
Incidentally, bonus points to those of you noticing that the Constitution of the United States of America applies to the *federal* government, whereas what we have here in TFA is a *state* government.
Cheers,
Duh, this will get slapped down harder than COPA, it has no chance of passing constitutional muster.
Yet, the phrasing of the First Amendment is quite clear:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So how does this work if it's *not Congress* that's making the law?
I've heard lots about how the Constitution constrains federal law (when it's actually being respected...). But after growing up in the US and paying attention more than many seem to, I confess I'm still quite ignorant about how the Constitution affects lawmaking at the state level -- though I suspect the answer is "not much".
Looking at the Wikipedia article for the Tennessee State Constitution, I note the lack of any specific provision for free speech, though there does seem to be an explicit freedom of the press. So one way around the law mentioned in TFA might be to claim that you're acting in some journalistic role.
Cheers,
Well, we should try to change insane laws. One of the quotes at the bottom of Slashdot recently mentioned that it's illegal to have your bathtub inside the house in one state (I think it was Virginia).
Of course most of us only pick and choose what parts of the law we want to obey, but the government should always act within the law IMO.
I certainly agree with you here. And upon reflection, it is precisely this selectivity of following and enforcing laws that has allowed this horribly unwieldy US legal system to develop. If *all* laws were enforced across the boards, the obsolete laws (and sometimes just plain silly laws, like the one about bathtubs in the house) would be immediately and glaringly apparent, making it much more likely that old and no-longer-appropriate laws would be revised or rescinded.
That said, in the real world of what is likely, I'm not all that sure how this could be implemented -- there is just so much inertia, and so many vested interests at work...
Cheers,
Upholding the law is sane.
The law itself may not be sane in some places, due to the real world changing over time.
I'm still undecided about this kino.to issue, but your comment here piqued my interest.
If a law itself is insane, how is it sane to uphold such a law?
It would seem to follow that an insane law would thus be insane to follow. Else we're all just mindless nutters.
Cheers,
The US will get rid of its nuclear reactors only after nuclear weapons become obsolete. Remember, it's not about cost or the environment; it's about plutonium production.
And that's precisely why the cleaner, cheaper, and safer alternative of thorium-based nuclear energy has received so little attention in the US -- thorium fission doesn't produce anything that's easily weaponizable, making it largely irrelevant to US policymakers. Energy has been little more than a useful byproduct of US nuclear policy.
Cynically,
The reason I wanted multiple categorisations or tags is that some things do fall under more than one category. I'm a medical student, so I'll give you an example: Malaria. Does that come under:
I'm a linguist, not in medicine, but linguistics presents similar challenges of multiple categorization. One thing I've quite liked about The Brain is the ability to create both hierarchical (A contains B, C is contained by B) and sideways relationships (D is related to E, but I don't have to say how, or I can notate the link to describe the relation). These can also be redone on the fly, and this flexibility is wonderful when reorganizing things as you learn more about your problem space.
The Brain also allows many-to-one or many-to-many relationships, something that I don't think FreeMind allows. Using your example of malaria, it would be quite easy to create multiple higher-level topics/nodes/ideas such as "parasitic diseases" / "tropical medicine" / etc. and then have the "malaria" node be a child of all of the relevant ones.
A number of other mind mapping tools I've looked at in the past enforce a single-parent tree model that doesn't fit various kinds of semantic relationships very well, whereas the relations available in The Brain and the ability to choose any arbitrary node as the "root" node for viewing the model, or even the "root" node for overall organization, allows for a more organic web of association. I seem to recall that you can also tie two independent mind maps together, but I haven't tried that to date.
NB: I haven't bought The Brain just yet, but the demo impressed me, and this discussion has reminded me, so I think I will later today...
HTH,
If you're interested in the mechanics of the history of the word, "wifman" used to mean "male person", which parallels "woman" much better, but is confusing next to "wife". "Were" (as in werewolf) was also a term used for a male human.
I've quite enjoyed your measured and rational writing style throughout this thread, but found I must respond to the above misunderstanding (possibly typo?).
The word woman comes from the older wif "woman, female" + man "person", as mentioned on Merriam-Webster's page, among others. This use of wif is mirrored in the modern German word Weib , likewise meaning "woman".
FWIW, another example of the use of were to mean "male person" is wergild , and it may also be useful to note that were is essentially the same word as the Latin vir , whence we get very male modern English words like virile .
(N.B.: Will Slashdot *ever* get around to supporting Unicode? This laziness is quite appalling for a purported geek site. The i in wif above should have a macron over it, but Slashdot refuses to render these, whether inserted as text: "", or as entities: "". Commander Taco et al should frankly be embarrassed that the best they can do for user input scrubbing is simply to remove anything outside of a small superset of ASCII.)
Cheers,
This site has swung so far to the extremes that I can hardly stand to read it anymore.
This, I think, is symptomatic of the polarization of the whole culture of the US. It's not discourse or discussion anymore, it's dispute. "You're with us, or against us!"
Sometimes a disagreement can be more than just black and white, but it seems there's a shrinking amount of room in the US for all the colors needed to accurately portray, and thus talk about, the world at large.
Cheers,
I had a graduating class of around 70 people. I knew them all, and had been to school with some of them since preschool.
This was in the public system in northern Virginia. Granted, my school was the oddball, but even so, the smaller class sizes were a major factor behind the more cohesive community we were able to build there. The county high schools had staggered hours too, so kids wanting programs that weren't available at our school could structure their class schedules so they could go to another school in the county to participate for that particular program (generally sports).
Talking with the people I grew up with, those of us who went to the smaller high schools (not just my own) generally had the better experiences. YMMV, of course.
Cheers,
My wife is a middle school teacher. She's taught in both public and private schools. She might only be in the classroom for roughly ten months of the year, but believe me, she works hard all twelve.
Summer break is not a vacation -- she's busy developing curriculum for the next year and keeping current as a teacher. She teaches English and history. She spends these months of non-classroom time reading voraciously, watching videos, going to conferences, and otherwise boning up on her profession and subject matter expertise, in addition to pulling together materials for specific curricular segments.
I can hear some complaints coming already, along the lines of Oh, sure, but why can't any teacher just use off-the-shelf materials, or at least recycle what they used before? How much has changed since last year? Surprisingly more than most people seem to think. For English, what was deemed the best practice for teaching grammar and mechanics, or writing skills, or reading comprehension, or what have you changes as teachers, researchers, and others learn what works and what doesn't. For history, new research is constantly changing, broadening, and expanding our understanding of what happened in the past. My wife has had to rework her "early man" unit extensively since she first began teaching it in order to include much new information that wasn't widely known even ten years ago, such as that Neanderthal did indeed interbreed with Homo sapiens in Europe, or that the Denisova hominin was a fully distinct third branch of humanity running around at the same time as Neanderthal and Homo sapiens that later worked its way into the gene base of the modern population of Melanesia.
Any teacher that doesn't keep abreast of the state of the art in the field grows stale, and threatens to become a liability to their students. It takes considerable time and effort to stay on top of the development of human knowledge, so much that it is not possible to do this and teach a full load at the same time. This makes summer break extremely important for teachers' professional development, and for the development of the materials for the coming school year.
Good teachers already *do* work hard for 12 months out of the year.
(Note that I'm not saying one thing or the other about the public/private debate, or about tenure in general. Some of what you say, I find I agree with. I only take issue with the apparent assumption in your post that all teachers are somehow slacking off during the summer break.)
Cheers,
What qualifications are required to get into the military?
Yah, but in many cases, a soldier messing up means missing the target and *not* killing someone. Almost the opposite of fraudulent medicine.
Cheers,
http://spacetrawler.com/2011/05/24/
Cheers,
Brrr. A guy could catch his death of incompetent philosophy here.
FTFY
Wouldn't that be philosophistry?
Cheers,
According to some interpretations I've run across of Gottfried Leibniz's Monadology , particles of matter represent particles of intent. From this perspective, indeed, you can't have electrons without consciousness.
To put it in more religious terms better in line with the thought of the time, and to expand beyond Descartes logical fallacy: Deus cogitat, ergo sumus, or in this more doubting age, aliquid cogitat, ergo sumus -- "something thinks, therefore we is."
Cheers,
What dude means is without big media content, the internet is nothing. So he makes a statement that everyone can agree to, then he changes the meaning of one of the words for the rest of his argument. Terribly, terribly disingenuous.
Or, to put it in plainer terms, he's lying through his teeth. The most gifted liars are good at this -- at telling their lies bald-facedly in plain sight, and constructing their lies to rely on twisted words, getting people to agree to things that are diametrically opposed to their own best interests.
Cheers,
...within the cloisters of BoingBoing...
I agree with your overall point, but this particular turn of phrase got stuck in my head as some allusion to an odd religious porn flick.
Cheers,
Aren't you eligible to file form 2555 and exclude your foreign-earned income? I was very happy about that when living and working in Tokyo. Or did Congress remove that exclusion? There was talk about that in 2006 or so, but I thought they decided to leave it be...
Cheers,
you're going to need to use the CLI, whether you're running a Linux distro, Mac OS, or even Windows.
I would extend this to say that a lot of programs in Windows, and a lot of little fixes that people have to do, have already been made into little downloadable programs that the user can just double click on. These programs make the necessary changes to the registry and run the various CLI programs. Linux not being as popular as Windows, this multitude of one-click fix patches isn't available.
Fair enough. But there's no reason such one-click patches couldn't be made available -- and, indeed, a number of the fixes listed on the Ubuntu forums consist of such solutions (either "download the script from [some URL]", or "copy the code below into a text editor, save as .sh, and double-click", or some similar variation). It's simply a matter of meeting a need.
Cheers,
Oh please! I can make that into a little .reg file and go "See this thing? Go clicky clicky and reboot" and its done, period, the end. ... Then remove the shell or mod them down so you can NOT use them! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without CLI Linux falls down like a house of cards.
While I understand your point, and your frustration about the state of the various GUI environments for Linux, I really don't think that comparing a .reg file (and thus the Windows Registry) against the various Linux shells illustrates the shortcomings you think it does. For one, any CLI script could very well be turned into exactly the kind of clicky clicky executable file you mention -- with the added benefit that a Linux distro probably wouldn't need to be rebooted. Putting your metaphorical shoe on the other foot, I could just as easily say:
Then remove the registry or mod it down so you can NOT use it! I bet the machine won't even make 6 months, and you sure as hell won't be updating the thing, because without the registry Windows falls down like a house of cards.
If the CLI in and of itself is such the charlie foxtrot, why is it that Windows has been adding more and more CLI functionality with each iteration?
You should NEVER need CLI on a modern OS. The fact that Linux can't live without it just shows how far behind it is in the desktop arena. Embedded and server its great, desktop is shit.
I assume here that by "modern OS" you mean "modern desktop OS", yes? If so, it's easy enough to run a desktop Linux distro without ever touching the CLI -- Ubuntu and Canonical have seen to that, among others. But if you really want to get in there and get your hands dirty with some power user customizations, sure -- you're going to need to use the CLI, whether you're running a Linux distro, Mac OS, or even Windows.
Cheers,
I hear they need bodies to fight the flooding along the Mississippi. No no... not labor... just the bodies...
But, sandbags don't keep sneaking off for a quick beer.
Whoa, what kind of morgue do you work in? Or maybe the local brewery makes up some really special ale...
Cheers,
But this whole plan wreaks.
The fun thing about this misspelling / misuse of yours here is that it works both ways -- both as the word you wrote, "wreaks", meaning to avenge upon or inflict, as in wreaks havoc, and as the word you likely intended, "reeks", meaning to smell extremely strongly, as in reeks of ripe and runny cheese.
</linguistic_pedant_hat>
Cheers,
That was supposed to be tl&c;dr.
At least, that's rather what this review read like to me.
Can we make it part of the FAQ that there are some rules for writers of book reviews? On second thought, we only need one rule:
Indeed. What's this stuff about the DoD? What's the big deal about RM? Just reading "records management" makes me think it's about a database, which is kind of old hat. Or is it about record retention rules and auto-expiring data? I dunno.
tldr
(too long and confusing; didn't read)
Cheers,
Hm, forgive me then, it appears I misunderstood your use of "putative" to mean that the existence of the relationship itself was in doubt, possibly due to your mention of "fringe" earlier in your post. And I have had people argue with me that Korean and Japanese are completely unrelated, and that any similarities are purely accidental -- which strikes me as precious close to dogmatically delusional, or ideally just woefully misinformed. I thus wasn't sure at first how to interpret your post; after posting my reply, I read further down the thread, and I now see you've got your head firmly attached, and where it belongs, not stuck anywhere dark and unpleasant. :)
Cheers,
I've read that Old Japanese probably had seven or eight vowels as opposed to the five in modern Japanese, as referenced over on the Wikipedia article. The distribution of apparent vowels and how they seem to have been used is viewed by some as evidence of vowel harmony, which later disappeared as the language lost vowel sounds.
Cheers,