The other day, Matt Arnold, a supporter of the planned language Lojban, reposted a message from Yanis Batura, another supporter of Lojban, here. Batura's message includes, among other things, the following observations:
The next year will be the 10th anniversary of the fundamental Lojban publication, The Complete Lojban Language (1). At present, still, there are no speakers in the world capable of fluent communicating in the language at advanced level in real time — without wordlists and saying ... ("uh") every thrice in a while.Why is it so? Why can't people get to this level as it is with other languages (natural and constructed, like Esperanto)?
It is obvious that something is missing in our Lojban universe that could help solving this problem. Yes — problem (not having fluent speakers is a problem for a famous language with a long history and an incredible amount of efforts by many supporters).
...
Besides, speaking practice (a critical requirement in mastering of spoken Lojban) is now only a dream for beginners. Why? Because there are no Lojban speakers. :) This restriction could have got eased by supplementary multimedia materials — if they had been.
...
Mastering Lojban requires a lot of work. It requires making tons of exercises, most of which are rather hard.
...
Lojban, which grew out of a schismatic variant of Loglan once known as Loglan-88, has been available to wannabe learners for a decade and a half now. Loglan, its elder sibling, suffers from a similar lack of fluent speakers, for which lack a somewhat different explanation was offered some years ago, by Brown, Burson, Handley, Kennaway, and McIvor in their article "An Unambiguous Grammar for Loglan, a Speakable Language", which appeared in the Loglanist occasional journal (primarily in English) La Logli 1996/1; p. 72, footnote 2.:
...because of the low geographic density of the loglaphone population, no true speech-communities have formed; so there are still no fluent speakers of the language ...
Batura mentions Esperanto, which I learned to speak (fluently) in the complete absence of multimedia supplements, tons of hard exercises (besides those I set for myself, of course) and any supporting speech community. The first fluent speakers of Esperanto had only "Dr. Esperanto"'s little booklet (originally in Russian, though it was later translated into a number of other languages) which today is conveniently known as the "Unua Libro". The "Unua Libro", published in 1887, also lacked multimedia supplements and tons of hard exercises; it consisted primarily of an explanation of the philosophy behind the language, a set of grammatical rules, a fold-out word-list, and a couple of pages of short samples of the language. There were also (pretty obviously!) no supporting speech communities at that time, and even today the Esperanto speech community exists only in diasporà, which I suspect is not what Brown et al. were talking about.
No, I really think that if proponents of Loglan or Lojban want to find a genuine explanation for why today, years after the languages first appeared, there are no fluent speakers, they are going to have to look elsewhere.
I wish I'd posted this a few days ago. Too late now ...
Today President Bush is meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Presumably President Bush is getting information about what al-Maliki will do next to solve Iraq's many problems. In practice, from what I know of Bush, he will be telling al-Maliki what to do next to solve Iraq's many problems. Of course, Bush's own record in this arena is not something to be particularly proud of; but, after all, who's in charge here?
Al-Maliki is himself in a tough position. Moqtada al-Sadr, arguably the most powerful Shiite (and therefore the most powerful figure) in Iraq today — he apparently has the largest single voting bloc in parliament, through his followers controls four key government ministries, and apparently is responsible for propping up al-Maliki — apparently told al-Maliki that if he went ahead with his meeting with Bush, which he has done, al-Sadr would pull his people out of the government. This, of course, put al-Maliki between a rock and a hard place: go ahead with the meeting with Bush and lose his keystone of support in the government, or cancel the meeting with Bush and demonstrate that he was nothing but al-Sadr's puppet.
There was a solution to this problem, of course. Laura Bush could have come down with a really bad cold, forcing the president of the United States himself to cancel the meeting. This would, of course, only have been a temporary solution to al-Maliki's problem, but it would at least have given him a little time to shore up his support at home.
But, of course, it didn't happen; Bush went ahead with the meeting despite the obvious damage to al-Maliki (that Bush goes to Jordan to meet with al-Maliki not only gives his own base something to grab hold of, but also gets him out of a United States turned annoyingly hostile to his Iraq adventure). But I still think it would have been a good deed — now missed.
Rocks fall from the sky. This is fact. It was not always so — two centuries ago the Academie Française pooh-poohed farmers, who claimed as much, as being ignorant and superstitious peasants. The peasants, however, were right. Rocks, on occasion, fall from the sky.
Usually they are small rocks. Usually they don't make it to the ground. If you go out some night when one of the really spectacular meteor showers is scheduled, you will see brilliant fireworks formed by grains of sand, perhaps the tiniest of pebbles, hitting our atmosphere at escape velocity or greater.
Sometimes they get a little larger and more spectacular. I've had the supreme good luck to see — quite accidentally! — three such marvels in my lifetime. One was the largest such meteor ever sighted over Great Britain. I was driving up Hughenden Valley, north of High Wycombe, on my way home one evening when I saw what I at first thought was the full moon. But the full moon would not have been falling in the approximate direction of the North Pole at a noticeable speed. The newspapers the next day were full of this heavenly phenomenon (of which a piece apparently impacted on a barn in Northern Ireland).
The second, which I saw late one night in May, 1975, streaked across the sky out of the west over Sacramento, California. It was green, of all things — not a forest green, nor the green we Esperanto speakers like to associate with hope (the word from which the language took its name), but an iridescent, poisonous green. It disappeared behind a line of trees and buildings to the east and then, apparently, exploded in a flash of green light that turned the sky bright as day for a moment. The Griffith Park Observatory, which may or may not have actually observed it, explained to the world that it was a falling rock (meteorite); having seen what I saw, I tended to discount the airline pilot's observation that, as the object rose out of the west, it was flashing red, white and blue ...
The third came down, also from west to east, one morning when I was driving to work in Milpitas, and crossed the sky directly ahead of me — whether a mile away or a hundred miles away, I never knew. I actually saw a piece break off and go plummeting down at a somewhat steeper angle. This one also got a lot of news on KCBS, the local news radio station. Wherever it was, though, it must have been pretty large; you rarely see breakoffs from a grain of sand.
Really big falling rocks are, fortunately, rare. I'm talking now about the ones that are yards across, or kilometers across. These can cause damage. Almost a hundred years ago such a rock came out of the sky over eastern Russia and apparently detonated while still above the ground. The explosion levelled hundreds of square miles of forest — you can see a similar, if smaller, phenomenon on the north slopes of Mt. Saint Helens in Washington, the result of its 1980 volcanic eruption. A little further back in time — say, sixty-five million years — an even bigger rock impacted the earth in the region of what is today Yucatan, with the apparent result that entire species — almost all the dinosaurs, apparently — went extinct. If a rock as large were to land on earth, with a similar speed, today, it's likely that all the larger mammals — say, any species with an average body weight over a few pounds — would also disappear. As you can guess, this includes humanity.
Of course, such large impacts are fairly rare. Barringer Crater in Arizona, the largest known remnant of such a fall in the United States, caused by a rock which would have annihilated a major city if it fell on it but would not have affected the survival of any species, major or minor, is around 50,000 years old. So large impacts don't happen often ... do they?
The Holocene Impact Working Group seems to believe that they do. They've been working with chevrons, great — and deep — swathes of sediment left behind when megatsunamis — great waves hundreds, not dozens, of feet high — raised by such impacts sweep over areas of land. They found four such chevrons in southern Madagascar, all pointed towards an area of the Indian Ocean where, in the depths, there seems to be an impact crater some eighteen miles across. And the interesting thing is that the chevrons seem to date not from the geologically distant past but from around 4800 years ago, a date not inconsistent with several "flood" myths that they've also been studying.
The HIWG (also known as the "Band of Misfits", a name probably first applied by their detractors, but one that they've picked up and run with) needs more study before they can really say something for sure — for instance, a deep-sea study of the newly-discovered Indian Ocean crater. But the evidence looks interesting. And proof that civilization-destroying, if not species-destroying, events occur every few thousand years rather than every few million is something that we really need — so that we can be ready if it happens again, as, sometime or another, it surely will.
I see that Iran, Iraq and Syria are planning to hold a summit before Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki meets with President Bush in Jordan next week. More power to them!
Yesterday one radio announcer, reporting the "news" (which, when we're talking international news, has always been at least as much opinion as neutrally presented, unopinionated news), reminded her listeners that we should never forget that Iran has its own "selfish" agenda in the Middle East, and we should be on the lookout for it.
Well, duh!
Would someone be so kind as to point to a nation — any nation — in the world that does anything without having its own selfish agenda?
Please don't point to the United States. We have a lovely myth that our foreign policy is largely based on altruism. That is obviously not true today (it would be difficult to argue that we kicked Iraq into painful little pieces out of a pure spirit of altruism), and it wasn't even true for the prototypical example on which we base the myth, the Marshall Plan of the late forties, which was implemented in order to prevent the Soviet Union from taking over Western Europe by fair means or foul (the Communists were, at that time, expected to win major national elections in Italy and France; visits of American warships, guns run out, to major Italian and French ports were, of course, purely coincidental).
In any case, I would hope that no one reading this would expect the governments of Iran and Syria — and Iraq, for that matter — to do something out of the kindness of their hearts. Governments have no kindness in their hearts. For that matter, they have no hearts.
Big news! Representative Charles Rangel of New York, the new Democrat chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, wants to reinstate the draft.
Most people think "draft" is a four-letter word. Actually, I'm not in principle opposed to the idea; a tour in the military is just what many young people need to steady them down before they take the terrifying leap out into the real world.
However, before a draft is reintroduced, I'd like to insist that it be universal in nature. Students who plan to go directly from high-school to college could get one, count them, deferment for a maximum of four years; then they would have to serve (or earlier, if they flunked out). People who claim medical exemptions ... couldn't; the military would be required to find jobs for them to do within the constraints of service. There would be no more five-consecutive-deferments-and-then-never-served individuals who could later become ragingly hawkish vice-presidents and insist that they are more patriotic than those who did serve but fail to support their aims.
The biggest problem with a general draft is that it would provide cannon fodder to every crazed president who got a hair up his hind end and decided to invade some small country to convert it to what we may laughingly describe as "democracy". In fact, the main problem with Congressman Rangel's proposal is his argument justifying it. Rangel says: "There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way." Well, we knew that our kids from our communities — the ones who had volunteered for military service — were going to be placed in harm's way in Iraq, and that doesn't seem to have stopped anybody from placing them there. Well, maybe if we're talking about the Bush kids and the sons and daughters of senators and congressmen ... but, short of the genuinely universal draft that I suggest above, we all know very well that those kids aren't going to serve; and even with a universal draft, we can be fairly sure that they will be assigned to REMF jobs and never hear a shot fired in anger.
What I see in a draft, with the current administration in power (and lots of potential later administrations, of various political stripes), is the ability to place a lot more kids in harm's way, in a lot of different places at the same time, for the purpose of enforcing some ideological daydream. I think that Rangel can come up with better arguments, if he's willing to work at it; this one just doesn't fly.
My generation's arguably most popular president, John F. Kennedy, once said, with respect to the national economy, that "a rising tide lifts all boats." In other words, everybody enjoys the fruits of an improved economy.
Well, the analogy might be a little off. It may be that a rising tide lifts all well-cared-for yachts, but it doesn't do a lot of good for the rowboat that's been careened on the beach with a hole in the hull; in fact, if you leave that boat there for the rising tide to drown, the inevitable ebb may pull it back into the sea, where it will be lost forever, or perhaps returned on a later tide as a collection of battered boards.
Or perhaps the analogy isn't off at all. An improving economy, as measured by the stock market or the unemployment figures, isn't of much use to those who don't own stocks or who don't even have jobs. Even those who have rather menial and low-paying jobs may be suffering, because part of the "improving economy" can be measured by the galloping inflation in the healthcare and college-tuition segments, thus ensuring that the less-well-to-do have less access to health care and that their children are not going to get the education they need to advance.
And, of course, there's the question of where the money goes. I've been hearing figures recently that indicate that worker productivity in the United States has increased significantly over the past few years. I've also seen figures that indicate that that productivity increase is not reflected in the average worker's paycheck. Where does that extra productivity go? The same place that two-thirds of all worker productivity has always gone — into company profits and CEO salaries (and golden parachutes).
Many Republicans, in the recent elections, hoped that the average voter would vote the economy. Of course, I've always been of the belief that voters vote the economy only when it's in the doldrums, and pay no attention to it when it's doing well. That would explain the major Democratic gains. But they would also be explained by the assumption that, to some extent, the average voter — who is also the average worker — did vote the economy — the economy of the drowned rowboat that the average Republican voter, secure on the deck of his well-cared-for yacht, doesn't see.
I see that President Bush is visiting Vietnam. Vietnam, while still under an authoritarian communist dictatorship, has made great strides, economically speaking. The country has been at peace now for almost thirty years — since its short border war with the Chinese and its invasion of Cambodia to expel the Khmer rouge government, both back in the late seventies — and one may suppose that the local citizenry, whatever gripes they may have (and, being human, I'm pretty sure that they have a lot of them), can at least get up in the morning fairly confident that they will still be around come evening. Heck, next year's Internacia Junulara Kongreso (International Youth [Esperanto] Congress) is going to be held in Hanoi.
President Bush takes the opportunity to remind us of the lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War: "We'll succeed unless we quit."
This raises two basic questions: what is Bush's definition of "success" and what sort of grades did he get in his history classes at Yale? (Or: did he even study history at Yale?)
If our purpose in Vietnam was to leave behind us a relatively peaceful country, economically successful, then I would argue that we succeeded only when we quit. Of course, if we wanted a country reduced to chaos, with hundreds of thousands dying every year from war, then quitting did indeed cost us our chance of success — as it no doubt will in Iraq.
Recently, I read two science-fiction novels, both of which treated of future competition/conflict between the United States and China.
Travis Taylor's Warp Speed, apparently a first novel, has an American renaissance-man scientist developing a totally new means of space travel. The Chinese steal this technology and use it to launch a kinetic-missile attack on the United States; but our hero, being smarter than the Chinese, figures out how best to use this technology and essentially destroys China as a nation.
Veteran John Varley gives us Red Thunder, apparently inspired by Robert Heinlein's sixty-year-old boys' novel Rocket Ship Galileo. When it becomes apparent that the Chinese are going to beat the United States to Mars, a group of young people in Florida use another new technology to build their own space ship and in turn beat the Chinese to Mars.
So ... two books in which we beat the Chinese, as is only just and right. And how do we do this? Easy! We use a whole new technology, a deus ex machina created by the author to let us win. In other words, magic.
I have nothing against using magic to defeat an enemy. You can still find a few people in esoteric circles in Great Britain who will claim that they participated in the great magical working that turned Hitler back from his intention to implement Operation Seelöwe and invade the island; if this is what actually happened, more power to them. But I prefer my magic to be really magic, and my technology to be really technology; and both these books are using a form of "magic" which is more like a prestidigitator pulling a rabbit out of a hat — except that we start out with no rabbit and no hat to pull it out of.
It is a little disconcerting to find what may not yet be a trend in science-fiction, the idea that if we are going to come out ahead in a competition with the Chinese we must depend on the technological equivalent of magic. Is there no other way?
(Otherwise, the approaches to this competition by Taylor and Varley are quite different. Taylor's Chinese, being not only evil but also stark staring mad, launch an unprovoked attack on their largest trading partner, and thus guarantee, one way or another, their destruction. Varley's Chinese on Mars, faced immediately after landing with a bunch of American kids in a super dune buggy, take this in good part, and everyone — with perhaps one or two exceptions — gets along just fine.)
The title says it all.
(Well, maybe not quite all. I could have said "Get out and vote Democrat tomorrow". But I guess I'll leave it as is.)
Tuesday we in California will get to vote on a number of initiatives. Two among them are particularly hotly contested. Proposition 86 would add heavily to the tax on cigarettes; the new state income would be passed through to, among others, hospitals that have to treat the results of nicotine addiction (e.g. heart disease, lung cancer and emphysema) and programs to treat nicotine addiction. Proposition 87 would impose a severance tax on oil companies for oil extracted in California, would ban them from passing on this tax to end-users in the form of higher gasoline prices, and would use the money in the search for alternate energy sources (solar, wind, the like).
As you may suppose, the opposition to Proposition 86 is primarily funded by tobacco companies and that to Proposition 87 by Big Oil (most notably California-based Chevron).
One of the more interesting counterarguments to these initiatives is that they would mandate the installation of new bureaucracies in state government. Horrible! As we've known for many years, bureaucracy is a recipe for disaster. Or ... is it?
Do you know what the difference is between having a bureaucracy and not having a bureaucracy?
If you have a bureaucracy in place and you need help from the government, you dial them and they put you on hold for twenty minutes, with Muzak playing the background, while they finish their lunch or their card game or their discussion about who is dating whom tonight. Eventually they will get back to you, about the time you've worn out your teeth by grinding them together.
If you don't have a bureaucracy in place and you need help from the government, you dial them ... and nobody answers. Nobody will ever, ever answer.
Which of these would you prefer?
More than 53 years ago, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in Sing-Sing prison for their part in revealing nuclear secrets to our dangerous (and, according to the trial judge, terrorist) enemy the Soviet Union.
I doubt whether times have changed. If, for instance, I were to post on the WorldWide Web engineering details (with explanations conveniently written in Arabic, for use by evil Islamofascists everywhere) about the construction of nuclear devices, I suspect that I would very shortly be pacing up and down in a narrow little cell, wondering whether or not my lawyer could get bail granted (he couldn't!) and what my trial judge would say at sentencing (one thing for certain: it would not be "Go, and sin no more!").
Of course, I'm not the President of the United States.
The President, at the urging of certain Republican members of Congress, apparently has the right to post such nuclear secrets for all to read, in the hope that the documents concerned (which come originally from Iraq) will somehow prove his 2003 case that the invasion of Iraq was justified by the fact that they were about ready to drop bombs on American cities (remember Condi Rice's "smoking gun" = "mushroom cloud"?). The IAEA apparently pointed out that the documents posted contained sensitive materials; the administration ignored them. John Negroponte, head of the US intelligence establishment and not known as an opponent of rampant Republicanism, urged the President not to have this material posted; the Great Decider ignored him. Only when the New York Times, once again proving the Liberal Bias of the Media, published a story about the website and its contents did the President have the documents removed. Which, of course, is closing the barn door after the horse is already on a plane to Waziristan; even if every government in the world has not already copied those documents onto its own thumb drives (1GB version now available at Fry's for $25), almost certainly automatic web robots have copied and filed the documents in several thousand other places on the web, as a matter of routine.
The sad fact is that while the engineering details remain, for many countries (and perhaps some private organizations such as al-Qaida), extremely useful — at least in pointing out what dead-ends to avoid in their nuclear research — the political value of the documents is at best antique. The documents relate to a 1980s program that ended in the early 1990s. The documents were first made available by the Iraqi government to the IAEA in 1991, and again in 2002; they show nothing about what Saddam Hussein may or may not have been doing in early 2003 (building atomic cannons out of aluminum tubing? buying uranium from Niger?). Posting these documents to the internet was an exercise in futility, from the political point of view. From an engineering viewpoint, they constitute the sort of treason for which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed.