The pay is pretty low, all things considered. I guess Hawking is relying on his rock star status. Would be a helluva thing to put on your resume, though. "Maintained Stephen Hawking's cyborg interface."
Because we know the languages spoken in Mesopotomia at least as far back as 3000 to 4000 years ago; Sumerian and later Akkadian, with Hittite and related Indo-European languages to the north. The only one apparently native to the area is Sumerian. Akkadian most assuredly came from the Arabian peninsula (like the other Semitic languages) and the Hittite languages, like all the Indo-European languages, likely came from Eastern Europe.
In other words, even your more limited explanation is pure bunk. This is what happens when you try to forcefit a myth to modern understandings.
The Tower of Babel is a fanciful story. It has nothing to do with hating or loving the Bible, but with an understanding of Mesopotamian history. The only mystery language, so far as we can tell, is Sumerian itself, and that's mainly because it's an isolate, but it was there first and we know enough about the movements of peoples and languages in the area to know the Urheimats for the other major languages was most certainly thousands of miles away from any ancient Sumerian or Akkadian city.
In other words, the story is wrong, at least from a factual point of view. I don't think, however, it makes sense to insist that every story in the Bible be literally true. Do you?
I'm not sure whether your trolling or whether you are that big a fucking idiot. Odin was most assuredly present in the Germanic pantheon long before any major Germanic migrations to England. What you wrote is pure unadulterated bullshit.
I don't recall anywhere that Hitler was ever a Communist. He was given the job of penetrating some of the nationalist groups that were causing so much trouble in the 1920s, but in a sad bit of irony, did his job so well that he ended up taking over the National Socialists. His views were expressly anti-Communist, because he viewed the Bolsheviks as being a Jewish group.
They weren't compiled, they were made up. If you believe that, then you must believe the 8th century genealogies that claim the kings of Wessex were descended from Odin.
Sigh. I'm not talking about a brand new class of rich people, I'm talking about the people who were the power brokers in Germany prior to Hitler's rise. Come on people, this is pretty common fucking knowledge. Put away your "the Nazis were Commies" crap and read a fucking history book. Hitler came to power not because he promised people lots of money and government contracts, but because the power brokers in Germany, in particular Franz von Papen. Hitler achieved ultimate power by having Ernst Rohm and the other proper socialists in the Nazi party executed or imprisoned. When Ernst Rohm was shot in the chest in his jail cell, anything particularly socialist about National Socialism died. Hitler needed the co-operation of the wealthier classes of Germany, and he knew very well he wouldn't get that support, and ultimately the political clout to pass the Enabling Act without handing them Rohm, the SA and the other socialist agitators in the Nazi Party on a platter.
Which, people, is the polar opposite of how Mao came to power. The major industrialists and aristocrats in Nationalist China all scuppered off to Taiwan when Mao seized control of the mainland. The industrial classes you see today in China didn't come into existence until the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, after Mao's death and after the Cultural Revolution had run its course.
Anybody with even a modicum of knowledge of pre-War German history would see how moronic your statement was. I'm talking about the aristocratic and industrialist elements of Germany, not about some Nooveau Riche class created by the Nazis. Hitler became chancellor because of backroom dealing, in particular by Franz von Papen, who had gained Hindenburg's ear, and who was convinced that they could control Hitler (which they might have, if Hindenburg hadn't been tottering on senility by this point).
Even if I give you Babel-Babylon (and I no few scholars out there in the last century or so who are willing to make a definitive link), you still have to explain why the line drawn to the origin of language. Human language originated thousands of miles on another continent, and by the time the original zigurrat at Babylon was built, all the major linguistic families we know today were already in existence.
Either your a kook or your summary is pure shit. At any rate, finding a steal with a king standing next to the Babylonian ziggurat, while certainly of historical relevance, has nothing at all to say about the origin of language.
My understanding is that linguists consider these examples of false cognates. They do not represent surviving words from the progenitor language, but rather are due to the fact that they tend to be the simplest sounds a young child can produce. Largely because it seems highly unlikely that just two cognates survive from the mother tongue, and not more.
Scholars treat ancient texts with care. You can gleam a good deal about an ancient society even from the more fanciful and mythical writings. Take for instance the Vedas. Scholars have used them to do at least some reconstruction of ancient Indo-Aryan civilization; it's beliefs, social structure and economy, and just as importantly to extrapolate further and get some hints of the Indo-European progenitor society. Even the language of the texts; Vedic Sanskrit, was the first major inspiration that lead to formulation of the field of Indo-European linguistics.
So yes, you're right. Scholars look at ancient texts in various ways, and even where elements of the texts are fantastical, they can illuminate a considerable amount about the culture that developed them. But that doesn't mean scholars believe in Zeus, Vishnu or Yahweh.
The tower of Babel could refer to any of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and it's never been determined that it refers to the ziggurat of Babylon, or to another one, or is really not referencing any one in particular. The Book of Genesis never tells us, and it's later interpreters who associated it with the ziggurat of Babylon. By your logic, you can't say it doesn't refer to the Penis of Marduk.
And a global flood never happened. Never. Not once. Not ever. The flood as described in Genesis is physically impossible, and there is not one iota of evidence for it. Maybe it refers to a regional flood in Mesopotamia (they're common enough, and certainly there have been really big ones), but the idea that there was a flood so great it covered the mountain tops was long ago rejected. It did not happen.
The industrialists still got rich under the Nazi government. Whatever the Nazi party line in the 1920s and early 1930s might be, when Hitler got into power, he understood very well that he needed to get the industrialists and aristocrats on board. And as I mentioned elsewhere, any meaningfully socialist elements of the Nazi party were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives; in particular the leader of the SA and one of Hitler's most important early allies; Ernst Rohm.
The reference to the Tower of Babel and the whole origin of language line gives it away. Can you think of anyone besides of Christian Biblical literalist (except maybe a Muslim literalist or, if they exist in any quantity, a Jewish literalist) who would call an image of a ziggurat on a steal the "tower of Babel" or who would suggest that this is where languages came from immediately afterwards.
Sigh... This old canard again. The Nazis were most certainly socialists, and Hitler certainly espoused a socialist doctrine, but in reality he was simply pursuing power. He aligned himself with the socialist wing of the National Socialists right up until it became clear that he would need to cozy up to the industrialist and aristocratic classes in German society, and it is they that essentially decided to back Hitler as Chancellor.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
I'd like to add that nobody is quite sure if there was a mother tongue. The neural hardware for language may have existed for a considerable length of time prior to the first fully-formed languages, so you could have had different H. sapiens populations moving from proto-language to full language independently. If there was a single mother tongue, nobody knows what it sounded like.
Nobody actually knows any of that for sure. It is not generally accepted, it is conjecture, and as no linguistic link has been made between the "click" languages of southern Africa and any other language outside of the region, this is what most linguists would call a flight of fancy. We're talking about a discipline that largely rejects Nostratic due to insufficient evidence, so I don't think you'll find many linguists who would accept your account, and any linguist who did would be at the very margins of the discipline.
The submitter is an idiot. The whole "origin of language" bit demonstrates that well enough. WTF is wrong with Slashdot editors?
Ah well, I remember a time when every conman selling a perpetual motion machine could get a submission here, so maybe things haven't changed that much. Maybe next week we'll have an article on Noah's Ark being found, that would be about right if this is the standard.
The story is nonsense. By the time the ziggurat was built, pretty much all the language families known today were already in existence. The breaking up of languages very likely happened in Africa tens of thousands of years before the first mud bricks that were used to construct the Ziggurat were formed.
And no, it's not socialism, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It was, as another poster pointed out, a dictatorship, or more properly an absolute monarchy. It would be like calling the government of Louis XIV a socialist government.
This article is pretty blood suspicious. First of all, it isn't the Tower of Babel, it's the ziggurat of Babylon. The Babel story may indeed reference the ziggurat of Babylon, or not, but no serious scholar goes around calling it the Tower of Babel.
The origin of language nonsense reveals that this is clearly the creation of some Biblical literalist. The breaking of the tongues story from Genesis is myth. No linguist has seriously believed it in well over two hundred years, and pretty much everyone accepts that humans developed full language in Africa. The language Nebuchadnezzar spoke; Akkadian, was an Afro-Asiatic language, and those languages likely developed either in the Arabian Peninsula or in East Africa, most certainly not in Mesopotamia.
Come on Slashdot editors. What's next, an article about humans and dinosaurs living together, or Biblical Flood confirmation stories? Is this the low that the post-Taco era is going to sink to?
Secularism was basically invented by John Locke, who had a profound influence on the Founding Fathers. All this nonsense about accusing secularists and scientists (who are not the same thing at all) is pure bullshit. I suspect you know that, but because you have an ax to grind against a certain group of scientists, the best way to attack them is to invent lies about them, to make them look as biased and compromised as you are.
It might, but history suggests that it will go the way of other populist movements that have popped up from time to time, and be absorbed (or re-absorbed) back into one of the two mainstream parties. The mainstream parties control the electoral machinery, and as long as they do, third parties will, at the very best, play spoiler roles. Perot came closest, but even if he had, he would still have faced a Congress filled with Republicans and Democrats, and by and large, states run by either Republicans and Democrats, so none of the reforms necessary to wrest electoral control from political parties could have happened.
Maybe some day it will happen, because while the US still has one of the finest constitutions every written, it's political system is nearly two centuries behind most Westminster-styled nations, and the chief reason for this is that most of these countries have independent electoral regimes that are very explicitly built to be non-partisan. The idea of a politician or someone of open political affiliation being in charge of ballots, such as Katherine Harris in Florida during the 2000 election, is utterly alien to the electoral systems in Canada or Great Britain.
That leads to another difference. Since the Civil War, and despite substantial flip-flops in constituency, the US has been dominated by the same two parties, who have by and large maintained organizational coherence for that entire time. There hasn't been in generations any meaningful threat to party coherence, even the Tea Party while asserting independence, has ultimately defined itself as a fundamentally Conservative and fundamentally Republican movement. There is no Tea Party primaries, no Tea Party candidates, there are Republican primaries where Tea Party candidates have a good shot at winning because they remain, despite some rebel tendencies, within the GOP sphere of influence.
So wake me up when the Tea Party has its own primaries, puts forward its own candidates for major federal and state offices, and severs itself from the Republican Party. Until then, it's just simply a Republican faction.
Anybody who knew the history of science would know that damned few actual scientific theories have ever actually been thrown out entire. Even notions like the Cosmological Constant, inserted by Einstein to get rid of expansion, and declared by him to be the biggest mistake of his life, was soon enough resurrected. Perhaps you could give some examples of actual scientific theories that have reached consensus that have been thrown out. Steady state cosmology and pre-tectonic theories of continental formation, which are two groups of theories that were genuinely overthrown, never really reached any consensus, at least not for any length of time. Other theories, like Newtonian Mechanics, weren't thrown out but rather subsumed as a useful extrapolation of General Relativity at non-relativistic velocities.
Other theories were never really scientific; phrenology and Victorian racial theory come to mind. They did not survive even the shallowest sort of scrutiny. Go back much further than that and you enter eras when science as we know it doesn't exist, so consensus doesn't mean a helluva lot.
I can tell you this. While consensus alone should never be the qualifying requirement for a theory, if the overwhelming majority of scientists in any discipline agree at least in general on a theory, I'd give that theory considerable weight. As well, consensus is often a target for ambitious scientists seeking to make a name for themselves, so it's not like any theory simply reaches a state of consensus and then becomes dogma. Between new generations seeking to chip away at the previous generations' theories and peer review to at least force publishing scientists to dot their Is and cross their Ts, science has considerable checks and balances.
Of course, skeptics like you know that, and like your intellectual brethren, the Creationists, you attack the core principles of science themselves, seeing that as the only way to maintain debate, regardless of the cost, over AGW. You're no different than Michael Behe, really.
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The pay is pretty low, all things considered. I guess Hawking is relying on his rock star status. Would be a helluva thing to put on your resume, though. "Maintained Stephen Hawking's cyborg interface."
Because we know the languages spoken in Mesopotomia at least as far back as 3000 to 4000 years ago; Sumerian and later Akkadian, with Hittite and related Indo-European languages to the north. The only one apparently native to the area is Sumerian. Akkadian most assuredly came from the Arabian peninsula (like the other Semitic languages) and the Hittite languages, like all the Indo-European languages, likely came from Eastern Europe.
In other words, even your more limited explanation is pure bunk. This is what happens when you try to forcefit a myth to modern understandings.
The Tower of Babel is a fanciful story. It has nothing to do with hating or loving the Bible, but with an understanding of Mesopotamian history. The only mystery language, so far as we can tell, is Sumerian itself, and that's mainly because it's an isolate, but it was there first and we know enough about the movements of peoples and languages in the area to know the Urheimats for the other major languages was most certainly thousands of miles away from any ancient Sumerian or Akkadian city.
In other words, the story is wrong, at least from a factual point of view. I don't think, however, it makes sense to insist that every story in the Bible be literally true. Do you?
I'm not sure whether your trolling or whether you are that big a fucking idiot. Odin was most assuredly present in the Germanic pantheon long before any major Germanic migrations to England. What you wrote is pure unadulterated bullshit.
I don't recall anywhere that Hitler was ever a Communist. He was given the job of penetrating some of the nationalist groups that were causing so much trouble in the 1920s, but in a sad bit of irony, did his job so well that he ended up taking over the National Socialists. His views were expressly anti-Communist, because he viewed the Bolsheviks as being a Jewish group.
They weren't compiled, they were made up. If you believe that, then you must believe the 8th century genealogies that claim the kings of Wessex were descended from Odin.
The inscription does not say "tower of Babel".
Sigh. I'm not talking about a brand new class of rich people, I'm talking about the people who were the power brokers in Germany prior to Hitler's rise. Come on people, this is pretty common fucking knowledge. Put away your "the Nazis were Commies" crap and read a fucking history book. Hitler came to power not because he promised people lots of money and government contracts, but because the power brokers in Germany, in particular Franz von Papen. Hitler achieved ultimate power by having Ernst Rohm and the other proper socialists in the Nazi party executed or imprisoned. When Ernst Rohm was shot in the chest in his jail cell, anything particularly socialist about National Socialism died. Hitler needed the co-operation of the wealthier classes of Germany, and he knew very well he wouldn't get that support, and ultimately the political clout to pass the Enabling Act without handing them Rohm, the SA and the other socialist agitators in the Nazi Party on a platter.
Which, people, is the polar opposite of how Mao came to power. The major industrialists and aristocrats in Nationalist China all scuppered off to Taiwan when Mao seized control of the mainland. The industrial classes you see today in China didn't come into existence until the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, after Mao's death and after the Cultural Revolution had run its course.
Anybody with even a modicum of knowledge of pre-War German history would see how moronic your statement was. I'm talking about the aristocratic and industrialist elements of Germany, not about some Nooveau Riche class created by the Nazis. Hitler became chancellor because of backroom dealing, in particular by Franz von Papen, who had gained Hindenburg's ear, and who was convinced that they could control Hitler (which they might have, if Hindenburg hadn't been tottering on senility by this point).
Even if I give you Babel-Babylon (and I no few scholars out there in the last century or so who are willing to make a definitive link), you still have to explain why the line drawn to the origin of language. Human language originated thousands of miles on another continent, and by the time the original zigurrat at Babylon was built, all the major linguistic families we know today were already in existence.
Either your a kook or your summary is pure shit. At any rate, finding a steal with a king standing next to the Babylonian ziggurat, while certainly of historical relevance, has nothing at all to say about the origin of language.
There is nothing in the Bible associating Burj Babel with the Akkadian Bab-ilan. They may mean the same thing, or they may not.
My understanding is that linguists consider these examples of false cognates. They do not represent surviving words from the progenitor language, but rather are due to the fact that they tend to be the simplest sounds a young child can produce. Largely because it seems highly unlikely that just two cognates survive from the mother tongue, and not more.
Scholars treat ancient texts with care. You can gleam a good deal about an ancient society even from the more fanciful and mythical writings. Take for instance the Vedas. Scholars have used them to do at least some reconstruction of ancient Indo-Aryan civilization; it's beliefs, social structure and economy, and just as importantly to extrapolate further and get some hints of the Indo-European progenitor society. Even the language of the texts; Vedic Sanskrit, was the first major inspiration that lead to formulation of the field of Indo-European linguistics.
So yes, you're right. Scholars look at ancient texts in various ways, and even where elements of the texts are fantastical, they can illuminate a considerable amount about the culture that developed them. But that doesn't mean scholars believe in Zeus, Vishnu or Yahweh.
The tower of Babel could refer to any of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and it's never been determined that it refers to the ziggurat of Babylon, or to another one, or is really not referencing any one in particular. The Book of Genesis never tells us, and it's later interpreters who associated it with the ziggurat of Babylon. By your logic, you can't say it doesn't refer to the Penis of Marduk.
And a global flood never happened. Never. Not once. Not ever. The flood as described in Genesis is physically impossible, and there is not one iota of evidence for it. Maybe it refers to a regional flood in Mesopotamia (they're common enough, and certainly there have been really big ones), but the idea that there was a flood so great it covered the mountain tops was long ago rejected. It did not happen.
The industrialists still got rich under the Nazi government. Whatever the Nazi party line in the 1920s and early 1930s might be, when Hitler got into power, he understood very well that he needed to get the industrialists and aristocrats on board. And as I mentioned elsewhere, any meaningfully socialist elements of the Nazi party were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives; in particular the leader of the SA and one of Hitler's most important early allies; Ernst Rohm.
The reference to the Tower of Babel and the whole origin of language line gives it away. Can you think of anyone besides of Christian Biblical literalist (except maybe a Muslim literalist or, if they exist in any quantity, a Jewish literalist) who would call an image of a ziggurat on a steal the "tower of Babel" or who would suggest that this is where languages came from immediately afterwards.
Sigh... This old canard again. The Nazis were most certainly socialists, and Hitler certainly espoused a socialist doctrine, but in reality he was simply pursuing power. He aligned himself with the socialist wing of the National Socialists right up until it became clear that he would need to cozy up to the industrialist and aristocratic classes in German society, and it is they that essentially decided to back Hitler as Chancellor.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
I'd like to add that nobody is quite sure if there was a mother tongue. The neural hardware for language may have existed for a considerable length of time prior to the first fully-formed languages, so you could have had different H. sapiens populations moving from proto-language to full language independently. If there was a single mother tongue, nobody knows what it sounded like.
Nobody actually knows any of that for sure. It is not generally accepted, it is conjecture, and as no linguistic link has been made between the "click" languages of southern Africa and any other language outside of the region, this is what most linguists would call a flight of fancy. We're talking about a discipline that largely rejects Nostratic due to insufficient evidence, so I don't think you'll find many linguists who would accept your account, and any linguist who did would be at the very margins of the discipline.
The submitter is an idiot. The whole "origin of language" bit demonstrates that well enough. WTF is wrong with Slashdot editors?
Ah well, I remember a time when every conman selling a perpetual motion machine could get a submission here, so maybe things haven't changed that much. Maybe next week we'll have an article on Noah's Ark being found, that would be about right if this is the standard.
The story is nonsense. By the time the ziggurat was built, pretty much all the language families known today were already in existence. The breaking up of languages very likely happened in Africa tens of thousands of years before the first mud bricks that were used to construct the Ziggurat were formed.
And no, it's not socialism, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It was, as another poster pointed out, a dictatorship, or more properly an absolute monarchy. It would be like calling the government of Louis XIV a socialist government.
This article is pretty blood suspicious. First of all, it isn't the Tower of Babel, it's the ziggurat of Babylon. The Babel story may indeed reference the ziggurat of Babylon, or not, but no serious scholar goes around calling it the Tower of Babel.
The origin of language nonsense reveals that this is clearly the creation of some Biblical literalist. The breaking of the tongues story from Genesis is myth. No linguist has seriously believed it in well over two hundred years, and pretty much everyone accepts that humans developed full language in Africa. The language Nebuchadnezzar spoke; Akkadian, was an Afro-Asiatic language, and those languages likely developed either in the Arabian Peninsula or in East Africa, most certainly not in Mesopotamia.
Come on Slashdot editors. What's next, an article about humans and dinosaurs living together, or Biblical Flood confirmation stories? Is this the low that the post-Taco era is going to sink to?
Secularism was basically invented by John Locke, who had a profound influence on the Founding Fathers. All this nonsense about accusing secularists and scientists (who are not the same thing at all) is pure bullshit. I suspect you know that, but because you have an ax to grind against a certain group of scientists, the best way to attack them is to invent lies about them, to make them look as biased and compromised as you are.
It might, but history suggests that it will go the way of other populist movements that have popped up from time to time, and be absorbed (or re-absorbed) back into one of the two mainstream parties. The mainstream parties control the electoral machinery, and as long as they do, third parties will, at the very best, play spoiler roles. Perot came closest, but even if he had, he would still have faced a Congress filled with Republicans and Democrats, and by and large, states run by either Republicans and Democrats, so none of the reforms necessary to wrest electoral control from political parties could have happened.
Maybe some day it will happen, because while the US still has one of the finest constitutions every written, it's political system is nearly two centuries behind most Westminster-styled nations, and the chief reason for this is that most of these countries have independent electoral regimes that are very explicitly built to be non-partisan. The idea of a politician or someone of open political affiliation being in charge of ballots, such as Katherine Harris in Florida during the 2000 election, is utterly alien to the electoral systems in Canada or Great Britain.
That leads to another difference. Since the Civil War, and despite substantial flip-flops in constituency, the US has been dominated by the same two parties, who have by and large maintained organizational coherence for that entire time. There hasn't been in generations any meaningful threat to party coherence, even the Tea Party while asserting independence, has ultimately defined itself as a fundamentally Conservative and fundamentally Republican movement. There is no Tea Party primaries, no Tea Party candidates, there are Republican primaries where Tea Party candidates have a good shot at winning because they remain, despite some rebel tendencies, within the GOP sphere of influence.
So wake me up when the Tea Party has its own primaries, puts forward its own candidates for major federal and state offices, and severs itself from the Republican Party. Until then, it's just simply a Republican faction.
Anybody who knew the history of science would know that damned few actual scientific theories have ever actually been thrown out entire. Even notions like the Cosmological Constant, inserted by Einstein to get rid of expansion, and declared by him to be the biggest mistake of his life, was soon enough resurrected. Perhaps you could give some examples of actual scientific theories that have reached consensus that have been thrown out. Steady state cosmology and pre-tectonic theories of continental formation, which are two groups of theories that were genuinely overthrown, never really reached any consensus, at least not for any length of time. Other theories, like Newtonian Mechanics, weren't thrown out but rather subsumed as a useful extrapolation of General Relativity at non-relativistic velocities.
Other theories were never really scientific; phrenology and Victorian racial theory come to mind. They did not survive even the shallowest sort of scrutiny. Go back much further than that and you enter eras when science as we know it doesn't exist, so consensus doesn't mean a helluva lot.
I can tell you this. While consensus alone should never be the qualifying requirement for a theory, if the overwhelming majority of scientists in any discipline agree at least in general on a theory, I'd give that theory considerable weight. As well, consensus is often a target for ambitious scientists seeking to make a name for themselves, so it's not like any theory simply reaches a state of consensus and then becomes dogma. Between new generations seeking to chip away at the previous generations' theories and peer review to at least force publishing scientists to dot their Is and cross their Ts, science has considerable checks and balances.
Of course, skeptics like you know that, and like your intellectual brethren, the Creationists, you attack the core principles of science themselves, seeing that as the only way to maintain debate, regardless of the cost, over AGW. You're no different than Michael Behe, really.
In other words, you're a sociopath that doesn't object to science providing it does not require you to actually do anything.