retrac

You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc.

> just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.

You're not the only person to have had this insight. Modern pedagogy often emphasizes using ancient languages spoken aloud, conversationally. We read Latin aloud in class, and our textbook had Latin dialogues to act out in class. We used the reconstructed classical pronunciation. We were graded on our pronunciation. Mostly as a token though and our teacher allowed some leeway, because it is after all a dead language. (I found it hard to drop some of the church Latin "ch" for "k".)

With the exception of the Aeneid, all the epic poetry of antiquity was originally oral poetry later written down, and it is obviously meant to be read aloud. The Iliad, Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, the Chinese Classic of Poetry. All were meant to be read aloud in performance, and probably they were set to song.

Modern editions usually use modernized spellings. There are no breathing marks in the oldest manuscripts; they are a classical innovation (circa 400 BC) several centuries after Homer was first written down (600 BC or earlier). Though most of Homer as we receive it today is through medieval manuscript copies, and copyists often "corrected" the spellings just like we do today.

Using either spaces or miniscule letters, is anachronistic for both classical Latin and Greek. They only had a single case in antiquity and didn't usually mark word boundaries.

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trajan_inscription_duoton... (Latin as typically carved in stone)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herculanean_Rolls_-_... (Greek as typically written on papyrus)

A symmetric cipher is: ciphertext = data XOR key. XOR is reversible: plaintext = ciphertext XOR key.

If the key is a set of truly random numbers the same size as the ciphertext, then this is a one-time pad, and it is truly secure in the information theory sense. Nothing other than knowing the original randomly selected key values can decode the ciphertext.

But of course, it's hard to come up with terabytes of random numbers at the drop of a hat, and to share them securely with the other party. So symmetric ciphers use pseudo-random generation techniques, to iterate through many pseudo-random keys based on one original key. With PRNGs the "randomness" may have patterns and that is the opening for a break in the crypto.

Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.

I recently learned that most of the western zodiac constellations have names which are Mesopotamian in origin, the same as in the Sumerian star catalogs thousands of years ago. Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Gemini, Cancer. Or in English: the Bull, the Lion, the Scorpion, and the Goat-Horned, the Twins, and the Crab.

To the Akkadians and Sumerians they were, literally translated: the Bull of Heaven, the Lion, the Scorpion, the Goat-Fish, the Twins, and the Crayfish.

There was some process of transmission there, maybe via Aramaic, now mostly lost to history. Until quite recently the extent of the Mesopotamian influence was not recognized, even though the ancient Greeks themselves grudgingly acknowledged the Persian (i.e. Babylonian) roots of their own learning; the same origin as 12 hours in their day and 360 degrees in their circles.

A few of the traditional Arabic names of the stars are also calques from Akkadian ("heart of the scorpion", among others). This also hints at a process of transmission, which is now elusive.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)

The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.

There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.

You know how people learn Ancient Greek to study Homer in the original language?

Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.

Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:

> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")

The ş is probably an affricate like ts, š is sh, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate. (Edit: fixed ş / š)

It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")

> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")

> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)

Emphasis should be placed on "everything we call culture and civilization". There is a thought experiment that might help. Imagine we had a time machine, and no scruples, and we could go back and pluck babies from the past to experimentally raise them in modern American families. I'm pretty sure Gould would have argued that babies from 40k years ago would grow up to be behaviourally indistinguishable from modern humans.

Quebec has a larger grid and lower rates due to its abundant hydroelectricity.

Ontario's relatively high costs are from the supply mix which is about 50% nuclear, 30% hydro, 10% wind, 10% gas.

Residential kWh as delivered is currently (no pun intended) about 12 US cents which is a bit high if you're used to Midwestern or Alberta coal but those in California are probably envious.

We're in a prolonged guerilla conflict in Canada. We are winning but the end is not in sight yet.

In Ontario every year the Ministry of Forestry distributes several million doses of rabies vaccine for wildlife. The goal is to immunize the majority of skunks, foxes, raccoons and the like, particularly in populated areas.

They air drop edible pellets with the live rabies vaccine; they are labeled "do not touch do not eat" because it can vaccinate most susceptible mammals, including humans.

I think a reasonable definition of "novel" is a long-form work in prose, that tells narrative stories, often looking at individual families and characters and their development over time. In that sense, novels are not that novel and there are novels preserved from classical antiquity, India's golden age, and medieval China.

Hot sauna is often cautioned against for those with existing cardiac or vascular problems, with some reason.

The US ambassador to Iceland made an inappropriate comment about Iceland being the 52nd state and was summoned by Icelandic President to explain. A poor joke, apparently.

One almost wonders if the US admin is actively trying to get one of its ambassadors declared persona non grata.

It's not a history book or even all that much a book about Lisp, despite its name, but Lisp in Small Pieces incidentally covers a lot of Lisp history. The book at its core is about implementing compilers and interpreters. It starts with something close to the McCarthy meta-evaluator, and the rest of the book iteratively elaborates on why the naive meval is not a practical programming language, somewhat mirroring the evolution of historical Lisp implementations in the process.

It dates to the early 90s so it doesn't touch on Clojure or anything recent. The bibliography and citation is excellent.

> Literature about Lisp rarely resists that narcissistic pleasure of describing Lisp in Lisp. This habit began with the first reference manual for Lisp 1.5 [MAE+62] and has been widely imitated ever since. We'll mention only the following examples of that practice: (There are many others.) [Rib69], [Gre77], [Que82], [Cay83], [Cha80], [SJ93], [Rey72], [Gor75], [SS75], [A1178], [McC78b], [Lak80], [Hen80], [BM82], [CH84], [FW84], [dRS84], [AS85], [R3R86], [Mas86], [Dyb87], [WH88], [Kes88], [LF88], [Dil88], [Kam90].

https://www.amazon.ca/Lisp-Small-Pieces-Christian-Queinnec/d...

Speech is not the same as writing. It is not interchangeable. It's not easy to compose writing aloud. Speech is a poor interface for manipulating words like that. Have you ever seen something like an ex tempore speech or panel discussion or radio interview transcribed in writing? It can be almost incomprehensible.

They are different processes. You do want to see the words laid out. And you want to point at them. Drag them around. Drag and drop.

> The 3 generations that spent their entire life behind a PC in the 20/21st century will be seen as crazy as the soldiers who spend all day underground to click a button inside a missile silo.

our hunched backs and strained eyes are noble signs of the craft which go back thousands of years

the remains of Ancient Egyptian scribes show neck vetebrae wear and repetitive strain type injury to the wrist and thumb

edit: for the curious https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63549-z

I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I can build with Claude that I could not build myself with my current level of CS knowledge, assuming I had infinite focus and time. In my hands it can go as far I could anyway, and no further. (But it is faster!) My experience bears that out so far.

I have hearing aids with a deep-learning based noise reduction and speaker isolation/clarity features. So about 14 hours a day. Or have we moved the goal posts again?

I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual.

It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.

Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)

I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?

No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.

Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.

That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...

I find significance in the shuffling and enjoy it. Always overhand. And very thorough; I have a perhaps overmechanistic view but I suspect effective divination requires true randomness in the information theory sense.

From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.

Both Latin and Chinese have been modified by the technology used to write them.

When carved in stone the lines are much straighter. When written with brush or pen they became semi-cursive. When printing was introduced, they became grid-like and regular.

What westerners who are passingly familiar would think of as the standard Chinese typeface - the strict square grid with straight-line characters - arises in part from printing technology. Easy to carve that into wood blocks, and easy to line up the slots into a grid.

Latin was similarly morphed to fit into the realities of printing in the 1500s. And is still being morphed. Notice how numbers 123... are in-line and at the same height as the letters. That's a very modern convention, typewriter and computer influence on our orthography. Traditionally digits were more likely to appear as subscript, off-centre.

I mean a couple of those involved got the Nobel prize.

They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...

> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.

It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had the 'levelling' thing. There have been attempts but it has strongly resisted by parents. [1]

I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.

When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...

> I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML

You're probably under-weighing this factor.

The average programmer looks at SML syntax and cannot make, pardon the expression if you will, heads or tails of it.

Indeed, I'd argue the average programmer still considers recursion an advanced topic.

For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output.

When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.

However, when I described the desired passes and their types:

    collectDefines :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], Map Text Text)
    
    runLitPool :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], [(Text, LitKey)])
    
    evalExpr :: Text -> Map Text Text -> Either AsmError Int

etc. It was almost one-shot. About 20 minutes until I was happy. Assembles all the test programs correctly. Code is mediocre in many places. But it would have taken me weeks to implement.

> Can you take fluticasone permanently?

This is a surprisingly controversial question.

I've known more than one person who claims something to the effect of becoming addicted to Flonase. Like now they have to take it only to feel like how they felt before they started taking it.

Rebound inflammation when stopping use is a real effect with long-term use of corticosteroids and can, at least briefly, be worse than the initial symptoms were.

As someone with multiple mild inflammatory disorders I've always been afraid to use steroids consistently lest I have nothing effective when things are worst.

when pigeons are navigating their brainwaves oscillate around 150 - 200 Hz

a 60 fps computer display for pigeon vision is like a sequential slideshow it's much too slow to blur into what they would perceive as motion

many species of birds when they switch posture the motion is so fast it is imperceptible to the human eye it's like switching from one still frame to another

humans have perhaps 1/10th the temporal granularity that pigeons have

this leads me to the conclusion that if birds have a subjective experience it has a very different tempo than for humans or indeed most mammals

We may never truly know when writing was invented.

There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example.

And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia.

There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD.

The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been?

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...