hillsboroughman

You make several good points. However I'm not sure if Bell Labs people were different from university people in terms of their academic background. All three, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were Physics PhDs, two of them from elite universities. I was trying to say that brilliant engineers do not disproportionately figure in the list of Physics Nobel prize. In fact they are hardly to be seen.

I wonder if they ever gave a Physics Nobel to a person who held a patent! People like Graham Bell never got recognized by the Nobel people. I get the impression that Physics Nobel prizes were more or less given only to University professors. They didnt seem to particularly care for people with grease on their hands

Awesome story. If black currants are so much richer than oranges in Vitamin C, why didnt the long distance sailors of the Age of Discovery, like the Portuguese going to India or the Spaniards going to the New World, not carry them? They only carried oranges. Puzzled.

A paywall prevents me from reading the story

Homeric Greek had only sporadic use of the dual. It was apparently a matter of metrical convenience. Classical Greek had all but lost the use of dual. Dual ws lost in Latin. Whereas in Mycenaean Greek, the dual number was mandatory for both verbs and nouns. Like in Sanskrit. It is well known that Miss Kober traveled at considerable personal expense (?) and effort to travel from New York to New Haven to learn advanced Sanskrit. I feel there is every reason to believe that Miss Kober already guessed Linear B encoded a form of archaic Greek and her triplets more or less spoke to this informed guess. Just my 2c

Very informative summary. A stupid question follows though, so request your patience. Did Michael Ventris really ask the question 'what if Linear B encoded some form of Greek'? Didn't Alice Kober already ask and answer this question, without seeming to do so. The fact that the underlying language was an inflected one and that it seemed to have singular, dual and plural forms for nouns etc - wasn't that enough? Was it academic carefulness that prevented Kober from proclaiming it was ancient Greek?

The modern cop novel was a formula popularized in England by Edgar Wallace already in the 1915-20 timeframe. His novels show great command of police procedure incl crime scene analysis, lab work, post mortem, ballistics, finger printing etc.. He is said to have written some 170 novels, not all of them were police thrillers. Later in life, he went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays.

I guess his earlier work is not very well-known in the US.

Just my 2c

Museums, as a concept, rest on a supply chain of plunder and pillage in the past and now increasingly, on theft, dubious commercial transactions etc.. No one can deny that local people and shady businessmen have been hand in glove with art collectors, dubious art historians and international smugglers, for thefts to happen on such a large scale.

The situation can improve if ordinary people feel within their hearts that museums by and large house stolen art from, usually, poorer countries. People should really stop visiting museums like the Met and LACMA. Otherwise they would just be encouraging past patterns of behavior.

> The main thing that kills penmanship is a lack of practice, like playing guitar.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a true American genius, develops the idea of writing from accounting for objects of common value like olive oil, wine, flour etc. She traces the development of literacy to an earlier phenomenon called numeracy - skill in counting and calls both literacy and numeracy as sources of power for the person who possessed those skills.

The following reference may be of help:

How Writing Came About. By Denise Schmandt-Besserat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Pp. xii+193; figures, notes, index. $19.95.

This book is a summary of her earlier two volume study called 'Before Writing'.

Hope this helps.

If Vikings imitated/emulated the Romans in their funerary practices, arguably they did the same in their living practices too. If that's the case, why are the Vikings persistently dissed, at least in popular culture, as uncouth, violent, hard drinking, fornicating barbarians?

As a resident of New Jersey, I feel for the Vikings.

It is true that ideals have decayed. US government did not retaliate strongly enough against the Tienanmen Square massacre back in 1989. Trade was much more important. Now US is critical of all the surveillance and other repressive things that the Chinese government does. But they missed the bus more than 20 years ago.

To take the story to its origin, President Nixon's presiding over the opening to China back in 1972 effectively killed the Tibetan resistance movement. As part of signalling their good intentions, the US withdrew all support to the Tibetan resistance movement from one day to the next. All the Tibetan freedom fighters fled overnight to India.

Now governments and media talk about human rights in Tibet. The opportunity to do something about it was lost long back.

Read 'The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong' by the Dalai Lama's older brother.

In the last 20 years, I did several jobs. The jobs I was happiest in were those where my boss was a loyal Costco shopper. I dont know if the two are connected.

This table pertains to the 72 main raga's (melodies/modes) of south Indian music. Each raga gets a number which completely determines its scale (of notes). The number is derived from a two syllable mnemonic for the raga using the katapayadi system.

Katapayadi system has also been used to construct tables of related entries whereby the position of an entry in the table (its row and column) completely determines its properties. See, for example, the paragraphs on 'Carnatic Music' in the wikipedia entry for the katapayadi system. This Carnatic Music arrangement dates to the 17th century.

Makes sense. Another dimension to this is that Minoan language does not appear to have had any resemblance to any form of Greek. The most ancient cultural artifacts from Mycenae seem to be of Minoan inspiration while Crete itself seems to have had intrusive Mycenean characteristics until it was completely supplanted by the Mycenean.

On a side note, it wouldn't do to assume the Chinese behavior is fundamentally irrational.

I dont know if anyone read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/27/china-to-limit...

A lot of the big drives that Xi is on seem to be simply to reduce cost per child for a family so they will have more children. Thats why they want to go after the after-school tuition industry. They want to go after the housing industry and now this Texas style restriction on reproductive rights. Of course everything Xi does is not motivated by a single objective. But the Chinese are laser focused right now on creating conditions which would increase their population.