Obsidian Wings archive

by liberal japonicus

I don't do a lot of linguistic-y talk here for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is way too easy for me to dive in the weeds and natter on about it. A second related point is that we all come to our language insights from different places and along different paths and it is too easy to dismiss someone's perspective it doesn't line up with yours. However, I thought that this popular article gave some interesting points about current work in the field of Indo-European linguistics, a field that I hadn't thought about for a while.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/a-new-look-at-our-linguistic-roots/

A graf from the article that I like is this:

“It’s something that, again, is surprising,” Olander says. “I think ‘surprising’ could be translated to ‘It probably means that their method is wrong.’”

If I were still attending linguistic talks, I would start using 'surprising' as a descriptor.

What the article doesn't touch on so much is the field of paleolinguistics. I assume that this is because generally, a lot of linguists consider those researching this topic a few fries short of a Happy meal, hence the mocking descriptor of 'long rangers', because they were really interested in long range comparisons. I believe that this started out as an insult but was picked up by those folks as a badge of honor. This Judith Kaplan post has this observation that explains why the article does this:

How human language originated (whether this had happened once or several times); how early language was structured and used; and how it diffused and diversified across the globe—these questions loomed large over the work of long-range comparative linguistics in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Through newspaper reports, public television programming, and interdisciplinary appropriations, they were formulated at the intersection of specialist and general concerns. Publicity was actively pursued by committed “long-rangers,” who found themselves marginalized in an academic world dominated by more circumspect goals.

Kaplan is a historian of science, and her site is worth a look if any of this interests you. More below the fold

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by JanieM

Preface: I’ve had a draft of this post rolling around in my head for a while. I picked some photos to go with it, then let it sit around some more. It’s just a little slice of life, and probably relevant to a number of us, but it also feels incredibly trivial in the light of wars, assassinations, the ongoing attempted destruction of American democracy, climate change, and anything else you’d like to add from the headlines. Then again, vaguely nodding toward the serenity prayer, life is quiet in my corner of the world right now, so on a day to day basis this is just one of the things I think about.

Open thread.

**************************

My to-do list includes several projects that are, in effect, endless, including the one where I try to get rid of all kinds of stuff I don’t need anymore. (Or never did.)

Some people tackle a project and don’t stop until it’s finished. Not me. I chip away at things and get them done eventually, but the very nebulousness and lack of urgency of this task makes the chipping away even more desultory than usual. I putter in my attic in spring and fall, when it’s not too hot or too cold up there. I purge no longer needed financial records once a year. I take boxes to the Goodwill now and then – mostly clothes and books.

Okay, mostly books.

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by JanieM

Rebecca Solnit has a long essay in the London Review of Books called In the Shadow of Silicon Valley. It opens with a meditation on driverless cars:

I’ve become somewhat used to driverless cars in the years they’ve been training on the city’s streets, first with back-up human drivers, and then without. They are here despite opposition from city officials, including the fire chief, and San Francisco recently sued the California state bureau that gave companies licence to use the streets as their laboratory. Firefighters have reported driverless cars attempting to park on firehoses; last June one such car prevented emergency vehicles from reaching victims of a shooting; the vehicles are apparently unequipped to assess these situations and respond by stopping. Direct communication isn’t an option: the only way to get a driverless car to do anything is to contact the company in charge of it.

In early October, a driverless car owned by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, hit a woman who’d just been struck by another car, and in the course of performing what was described as a rote ‘pullover manoeuvre’ dragged her twenty feet, mangling her badly and leaving her trapped under its wheels. The device was unable to detect that it was on top of a human and would not respond to rescuers, who had to lift the car off her. Cruise withdrew its 950 driverless vehicles, but Waymo, a company launched by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continues to send its cars onto the streets.

Driverless cars are often called autonomous vehicles – but driving isn’t an autonomous activity. It’s a co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road. Whether on foot, on my bike or in a car, I engage in a lot of hand gestures – mostly meaning ‘wait!’ or ‘go ahead!’ – when I’m out and about, and look for others’ signals. San Francisco Airport has signs telling people to make eye contact before they cross the street outside the terminals. There’s no one in a driverless car to make eye contact with, to see you wave or hear you shout or signal back. The cars do use their turn signals – but they don’t always turn when they signal.

Solnit's point about driving being a cooperative social activity is one I’ve never seen made before, yet it’s (semi-consciously) central to my own thinking about driving. For too many people driving is more like a competitive cage match than a cooperative problem-solving enterprise, but even then it’s a matter of humans participating with other humans. The cooperative use of cars is central to the whole notion of public roadways, and I have never seen the lack of it brought up before in discussions of the “wonders” of driverless vehicles.

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by JanieM

Maine folksinger Gordon Bok has an album called “Another Land Made of Water,” the name meant to evoke the Maine coast’s rocky, fir-trimmed bays and inlets, where water and land are magically interwoven.

My picture-taking habit has made me realize that inland Maine, where I live, is yet another “land made of water.” Everywhere you look there are lakes and streams, and since Mainers want access to the water for fishing, snowmobiling, and the like, public boat landings are plentiful. For me, the boat landings provide dandy places to park the car and take pictures.

Water has been a mixed blessing this year, Maine’s ninth rainiest on record. On the positive side, the rain helped create an unusual variation on fall color: the grass was such a deep emerald green that you might almost have thought you were in Ireland. It was especially lovely next to the autumn leaves, persisting late into the season and fading only after a couple of hard frosts.

On the negative side this year were the storms and floods…

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by JanieM

(This was drafted and ready to go when lj's post went up on Christmas Eve. I would have used it as a comment, but I wanted to include some pictures.)

Christmas got diluted for me this year, what with car problems, illness (not mine and not serious, but hampering), the birth of another grandchild (a reason for rejoicing, but also a time sink 😊), storms and floods and a mass shooting to sap my energy.

So – I have lights in the windows, gifts wrapped, and a bit of celebratory food to make, but for the first time in my life, and I hope the last, no Christmas tree. I didn’t even get time to go cut some pine branches to bring that lovely scent into the house. (Maybe I still will.)

As always, though, I’ve enjoyed the light displays in public places and other people’s windows and yards, because for me, light is basically what this time of year is about. The season of increasing darkness in late fall always slows me down, so maybe it makes sense that this turning of the year cheers me up, despite the months of brutal weather yet to come.

Sending best wishes to everyone here for a new, improved year in 2024, personally and politically. Plus, thanks to all of you who hang around here continuing the conversation.

Open thread.

(Pictures below the fold.)

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by JanieM

Report from my neighborhood, nineteen days later –

Flags are still flying at half-staff in Maine. I see them everywhere as I drive around the countryside, and I try not to cry. Twice a week I drive through the town where Robert Card shot his last victim – himself; it's not hard to imagine that he, like so many people, had to struggle with mental illness in a harsh, uncaring culture that would rather worship billionaires than take care of the ill and unlucky among us.

Similarly with every news article about the massacre, its antecedents, and its aftermath. I still cry. I don’t know when this will stop, and it makes me wonder how the families and friends of the victims of an event like this ever … I won’t say get over it, because I don’t see how they can … but at least pick up their lives and start moving forward again.

News articles are full of blather. Are there enough mental health resources? Did the police, or the army, or social services, screw up the handling of Card in the months before the shootings? Is Maine’s “yellow flag” law flawed? (Duh.) Was the manhunt mishandled?

On and on and on. It’s like we (the collective American “we”) have built a huge Rube Goldberg machine to avoid having to deal with the one part of this mess that's relatively straightforward, if not easily solvable, human nature being what it is. That part is the fact that this country allows private citizens to own weapons of mass murder, which apparently no one can stop them from taking to schools, bowling alleys, and places of worship to gun people down by the dozen.

I have a friend who works with a lot of gun owners, who, to a man (yes) say that they don’t care how many kindergartners are murdered, they will never give up their guns, or support any tighter restrictions on the private ownership of weapons of war.

…

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by liberal japonicus

A science thread. Below the fold is a youtube video. A little background, Toyota, despite having an early lead in electric vehicles because of its development of the Prius, it refused to go all electric and has been beaten out by other companies, notably Honda. Toyota argued that going all electric was not a solution, though a lot of this came out after Toyota got beat up in the market place, leading shareholders to express their disappointment.

For those of you who aren't link readers, a few grafs from the Slate article

How did Toyota end up gagging on the electric-car revolution’s dust? Not by making a careless business oversight, but through methodical decisions that came from the top. And worse: The company has paired this lack of innovation with aggressive attempts to protect its position as the world’s most valuable car company by stopping electric vehicles from taking hold more broadly.

[…]

A generation ago, Toyota was ahead of most automakers in researching and deploying clean-energy tech, and it gradually electrified some of its biggest models while expanding its fleet of hybrids, both plug-in and not. Yet, as the ever-warming atmosphere and the ever-boiling chargers-versus-gas-pumps battles demonstrate, there’s a key difference between electrifying and going fully electric. Toyota’s focus on the former at the expense of the latter may have made sense previously thanks to its domination of the hybrid market, but as those sales plummet, it increasingly looks like a mistake.

[…]

Toyota head Akio Toyoda, heir to the family dynasty that launched his company nearly 100 years ago and current chair of the powerful Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, has consistently pooh-poohed EVs while doubling down on his beloved hybrids. That’s not to say he dismisses all energy innovations—his company loves it some hydrogen, though its fuel-cell fleets haven’t quite taken off. But to hear it from him, an all-EV transition would be as apocalyptic as a future in which we don’t attempt to clear up transportation emissions. When the Japanese government considered a California-style future ban on gas cars in late 2020, Toyoda went off at a JAMA press conference, denouncing EVs as a bunch of hype while warning that expanded use would lead to lost jobs and reduced power capacity. Toyoda’s successful pushback was in step with EV-related remarks he’s made over the years as the voice of both JAMA and Toyota. In 2021: “Carbon is our enemy, not the internal combustion engine.” In 2022: “Playing to win also means doing things differently. Doing things that others may question, but that we believe will put us in the winner’s circle the longest,” referring to his company’s bearishness on EVs. Last month: “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority. That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.” (all links are from the article)

While I'm just an interested observer, whenever I hear people in power talking about a silent majority, I retch for a few moments. This is compounded by the people who pop up and talk about how going all electric is a woke thing and good on Toyota for standing up to the EV mafia. FFS.

Anyway, the video seems to be another shoe dropping (I would say the other, but that implies that there is only one shoe, but the world has shown us that there is an infinite supply of shoes to be dropped) which is Toyota's new ammonia based engine.

Now, maybe I'm just stuck in my position, but given what is known about ammonia, I'm still thinking that this is just another group of people trying to keep power by employing whatever they can to stop change. But that's just my first reaction, maybe I'm just not seeing it, hence the post, which could be about anything science-y. Knock yerselves out.

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