Tim Sample

 It's been a long time since I put up any Tim Sample.  I should look up the "Bert and I" recordings as well.

Waves of Native American Languages

 Four Waves of Migration From Siberia. Very similar to what we have seen before.

 Edward Sapir noted the n-, m- pronoun sequence over a century ago, but it fell out of favor because the "splitters" among linguists wanted there to be 150+ Native American language families and did not like seeing unifying similarities.

Even when they hit you in the face. The theory was that all the tribes were borrowing and influencing each other's pronouns in the interest of trade and communication. Except pronouns are among the most stable, long-lasting words in a language. Sapir and Joseph Greenberg believed their were three groups: Amerind, by far the largest and comprising most native languages, Na-Dene, which includes Navajo, Hopi, and the Athabaskan languages, and Eskimo-Aleut, arriving last and confined to the Arctic. The linguists who reject Greenberg most frequently do so because they (loudly and sometimes angrily) reject his technique of multilateral comparison in favor of the more traditional bilateral comparison used to identify language similarities and groups.

But the genetic evidence keeps building up year after year. So now it's up to four waves, but the first one does not seem to have clear influence. The drums are beating.

I admit that I have some nagging memory of Johanna Nichols and some controversy, which didn't show up in her Wikipedia page. Also, timelines for language relationship have been bouncing around a fair bit lately, so the sequence may matter more than the numbers.

Emotional Support Llamas

My weather channel tells me that Portland Airport brings in emotional support llamas for anxious travelers. I think I would find that llamas in the airport increased my anxieties myself. I'm betting there are plenty of children who would rather not share their space with llamas as well.

Plagiarism

So Sam Payne at Brigham Young was sent a paper to review in his area of specialty - and discovered that the paper was 100% plagiarised from his own paper in 2021. He reported this, but the journal Proteomics published it anyway. When he went on X, other scientists reported that the same thing had happened to them.

The authors of the new paper are all from the I M Sechenov First Moscow State Medical College.

HT: Science Fictions 

Chip

Is "Chip" used as a nickname for a son instead of "Junior," as in Chip off the old block? I have seen it twice in an Appalachian context, but that's a very small sample size. Both were named after their father and called Chip, though.

Cultural Appropriation

I have written a decade ago that accusations of cultural appropriation are about snobbery, not protecting cultures. We show that we know how the dish is prepared back in Nepal, or what this dance means in Namibia, or what an earring means in Nauru - and you don't, you benighted fool.

Listening about the exchange of elite goods in the Iron Age today, I was struck by a similar pattern.  First, a foreign good would be given and received solely as a marker of status.  It should you had a wide reach, and wide knowledge. Kings exchanged gifts as a favor to each other, so that they could show them off. Yet as trade increased, a few things started happening.  The expensive pottery influenced the style of the local pottery. Other people desired to get some inferior version of the foreign pattery if they couldn't get the best kind. In a generation the original gift was not fully unique, and in two generations it might even be a bit common.  I was reminded of the objects the sea captains brought back from distant lands to the ports of Boston and Portland, and how they populate the small museums of various towns in New England. Ornate letter-openers, doll-costumes, or intricate knives from Rio, or Rangoon, now mostly valuable because they are 200 years old, not because they are from a distance.  We have such things in abundance now, but they were treasures then. They have become much less valuable. 

And she feeds you tea and oranges, that come all the way from China. Well, we've all got lots of stuff from China now, which is different even from 1966. The tea in question was Constant Comment, by the way, which was created in NYC in 1945, so, bit of a letdown there.

So to with the treasures from other cultures that are information.  If you know about tlayudas, that used to be a big deal.  But now that there are Oaxacan restaurants in the US, for status you now need to know the real way they cook tlayudas in Oaxaca to be one up on the others in your circle. Your status object is now not a piece of pottery, but information.  This is much harder to protect, and other people knowing the good stuff cheapens your precious object. You have to cry "Sultural Appropriation" to slow them down and keep your leverage. The accusation is a specific version of a larger general case about showing off your foreign connections.

Shredding the Meat

Journalists and the 100,000,000 independent journalists of social media are a bit tired of complaining about Biden and Trump.  Harris and Vance are fresh meat and people are looking for clicks.

Cookies

If you go down to the "Opinions" post below and read the comments, you will see that this has become a cookie blog.

Compound of Three Cubes

I have written about the compound of three cubes, the most difficult question on the Mega Test, and of course used by MC Escher at one point, in "Waterfall," which was on  lot of dorm walls when I was in college.

Ganzir just sent me this, so I will pass it along.

Good Luck!

Ganzir also tells me that this interior space is a Rhombicuboctahedron

Childless Cat Ladies

I had lunch with three guys from my St. Paul's summer in 1970 today.  A fourth was missing.  He had said "I'm sorry I have to cancel, but it's my wife's 100th birthday, and these things are important to her." Two of the men started to say "Well, maybe she likes to celebrate her birthday often - I mean, my wife does..." but Gary laughed "No. This is absolutely a dig, and I hope he doesn't say these things in front of her. How does he get away with this?  Would you say something like that?"

"Do I look suicidal?"

"I had a friend at my old church who used to say '...and this is my first wife, Betsy,' which seemed ill-advised to me.*"

"Phil has survived seven cancer diagnoses, so maybe he doesn't sweat the small stuff now."

"That could be."

The point being that even if things are flat true, or meant to be funny, or to capture a general truth arguendo or whatever, they still might be spectacularly stupid to say out loud. Vance, if you expect us to follow you into battle, could you give us more evidence that you thought this one through?  DC journalists are not going to ask you for evidence or numbers or research - they have little idea what those things are.  But folks around here are, and I say "So how are you going to measure this? How many cats  is the cutoff?  What about one child long grown and five cats now? What if she wanted children? What about dog moms? What about men with cats? JD, how the hell are you going to back this up with any evidence that will hold up for five minutes? Thanks a bunch."

There are ways and places one can bring out the information as well.  A comedian could say "Remember when you used to stay with your grandmother and she would bring you over to see her friends? The ones who didn't have any children of their own but had cats all over and they would make cooing noises over you and then ignore you, so they could sit down and she could complain about everything that was wrong in her life?" (A real comedian would be much funnier, yes.) Presenting it that way allows people to take an "if the shoe fits" approach, and even some childless cat ladies might smirk and think "Actually, I do have a couple of friends like that." The generalisation doesn't include everyone, nor was it intended to. You could technically say that Vance's comment wasn't intended to include everyone either, but it's too far over the line to give more than grudging acknowledgement of that.

Oddly, I believe there is something in there, and I was talking about a related subject with my brother yesterday. What with one thing and another, information has filtered back to me over the last year about older lesbians from two groups: women I used to work with (and I often knew both of them) and couples who are friends or siblings of the um, childless cat ladies that I know. I offered the opinion that they might be sadder than straight women I know of similar age, especially when widowed.

He disagreed, which I knew he would regardless of the data, because he is honor bound to make sure that any DEI group is just as happy, honest, or smart as the boring whitebread mainstream conservative culture. But I am so used to this that I can still get useful info by listening to what arguments he appeals to. And he did actually give some qualified agreement, relating it to the support of their general communities.  He lives in western mass and worked in theater, so he knows way more lesbian couples than I do. And he is in a place more supportive of such than nearly anywhere in the country. So he wasn't seeing them as any worse off than other older people.  That could very well be so. Community might matter.

It is very hard to tell what is up from FB. Older women are traveling together, or eating at restaurants and everyone looks cheery, but then in their other posts you see that they are Great Deplorers of others. What's the reality? Well, we likely won't ever know. I walk miles in my 55+ community and have chitchat with people on their porches, or in their yards, or also walking.  Attitudes leak out. Or you hear about childless cat ladies from other friends who don't see them much anymore because they have become difficult, or reclusive. Or you meet with two CCL's in a group of retired social workers for lunch and they do tell you how hard their lives are, and how upsetting so many things in the world are, and how they really do prefer cats to people.

Men and women complain differently. While some men are boisterous and want everyone present to know what they think about Trump or Biden, most drop their voices a bit to complain.

And of course I always knew the grim underside from mental health, of people deeply unhappy and largely unnoticed, with her sister coming in to try and talk sense into her for the thousandth time; and from my wife's extensive prayer list, which always includes someone having great difficulty with their elderly mother. There's a lot of loneliness out there. And it may be my prejudices overruling the real data, but I think it really is worse for childless cat ladies.

One more thing.  Vance also criticised them for not caring about the future of the country.  But some of the ones I'm talking about were teachers, or social workers, or other professions oriented to the future of others.  Maybe it is true that they no longer care much about the future of the country except in abstract and symbolic senses, like making sure that Trump doesn't "take over," or something**. But I think they get some credit for what came before, even if they are deplorers of things now.

*Steve McAuliffe used to say that about his wife Christa.  Then she blew up in the sky in the Challenger disaster.  Which is why husbands shouldn't say things like that.

**It can go the other way.  I know at least two childless cat ladies who are big Trump fans.  But usually...

Opinions

 I have had it with people who disagree with me.  They're wrong.  They should go away.

Room To Move

I was not a blues fan until late in my adolescent listening career, but I did know to listen to John Mayall.  I don't think I'm enough an authority to know what to pick, but I like this.

Stop Looking At Each Other

 Sherry Ning at Pluripotent, Stop Looking At Each Other:

We often compare social media to Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984, but here’s what’s different about our telescreens: our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others. There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviors.

...

When you chat with a stranger in real life, it’s usually one-on-one and they get to know you as much as you get to know them in real time. They spend as much attention on you as you spend on them. Social media relationships are parasocial — by definition, abnormal — because one million people are “getting to know” one person and that one person must pretend they are friends with one million people.

Most bloggers have this temptation at (ahem) a reduced level. I wonder if the 100 people who eventually read each post in a month are affecting me in ways I do not see and might want to look at harshly. My daughter-in-law has a million followers on TikTok and over all platforms, she may hit two million. I have no idea how this affects her, and neither does she.

I think different generations, different personalities, and both sexes get into trouble about this in different ways.  Those of us who grew up without social media are immune to a lot of these temptations and always will be.  With CS Lewis, I am thankful for temptations I am spared, because I don't do that well with the ones that do come to me. My father, who had many vices and knew it, once said to me "I'm glad I didn't grow up in this era, because I might be pushing a needle and spoon if I had."

Thanks to Rob Henderson for the link

Universal Basic Income

Well, this is sort of depressing but similar to what we have seen before.

Megan McArdle on X

I'm a UBI skeptic and this is worse than I'd have predicted: $1,000 a month reduces work and increases leisure. Minimal effect on schooling, job quality or other human capital investment. Hard to imagine selling UBI on data like this.  (Announcement here) (Study here)

Sarah Miller on X

The cash generated big improvements in stress and mental health, but they were short-lived. By the second year of the transfer, treatment and control reported similar rates of stress and mental health, and we can rule out even small improvements. (with graph)

Sarah Miller on X again

Mirroring what we see for mental health, the transfer generated large but short-lived reductions in food hardship/food insecurity; even by year 2, no significant difference across treatment arms. (graph)

We saw something similar in educational interventions like Head Start or whatever this year's new educational fad is. Scott Alexander has looked at educational interventions and concludes that gains are temporary and large findings are a result of selection bias (referencing Fredrik deBoer).

We saw something similar in criminal justice interventions. Good initial results that level off and become indistinguishable from controls fairly quickly.

You might tuck this thought into the back of your brain whenever you see the evaluation that some intervention "didn't scale up." It may not be the scaling, it may be that the effect wears off.  I knew a psychiatrist who claimed that Prozac usually wore off in a few years and you had to switch to something else. (Referring to depression, not OCD) We adjust to the new normal and our core personality reasserts itself.

"Tiny Ash Cannon" a text thread of mine that includes some you know, suggests that this is similar to the happiness studies about making more money. We just adjust our explanations to another level.

Theory of Mind Again

Those of you who are aspie/on the spectrum or who are close to someone who is, do you find that being able to see the person they want to understand, either on film or especially live, entirely offsets the impairment (for those who have an impairment - I don't think all aspies do)?  I think that for empathy the answer looks close to yes, that the nonverbal cues are sufficient; but for understanding strictly cognitive states, those cues only make up some of the ground.  Or perhaps merely hearing or reading about those states start them in a deeper hole in understanding than would be true for neurotypicals.

Hot Tuna

I admit I had forgotten about them.  I had never bought an album of theirs, only hearing them in the dorm.

They were a Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen project that went on for years.(Hey, I see they still tour.) Kaukonen was a part of the debate at the time of who was the greatest lead guitarist, with Hendrix and Clapton and a few others.

The fiddle player is Papa John Creach, who played with, well, everyone cool.

"$10M for the Big Guy."

So Biden is not going to actually enjoy all this money. Pudding isn't all that expensive. Huh.

Ecclesiastes 2:18  I hated all for which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who comes after me.

Who will get to enjoy this wealth?

Butchering Argentine Armadillos

Anthropic cut marks is the phrase used to describe evidence of butchery of armadillo-like creatures 21K y/a. This would be 30% older than previous finds, well before the prevailing theories of just a few years ago would allow.

At one level we might ask So what? Yes, all true knowledge has some value, but this would seem to be well down the list.  If the were pre-Clovis humans in the New World, they didn't leave more than a fragment of genes and no culture. They are not us, not even proto-us.

Well, we have a current narrative of extinction of megafauna being primarily due to hunting by man, despite the somewhat desperate attempts of some to prove it was climate change. We see it in the New World, in Australia and nearby islands, on Madagascar - pretty much everywhere. 

But here comes an example of the arrival of humans without mass extinctions. (Okay, they got this one and it is extinct now, but...generally.) So the story doesn't always have to play out that way. Why not in this case?

Assassination Conspiracy

 You'd think that a good conspiracy would be better organised.

Fugitives

At pub night I used a line that I could have sworn they were sick of by now, but they had never heard it. I described us a Fugitives from the Law of Averages. 

Okay, now that I'm looking at it it's not as funny as I thought.  Free to all takers, though.