Recently I watched a video posted by Alexander Unzicker, a no-nonsense physicist who often criticizes Big Science (along the same lines as Sabine Hossenfelder — my hero). But in this case (link below) I was surprised to see Unzicker play back a conversation between himself and ChatGPT, on the subject of the original discovery of neutrinos — where the onslaught of background noise demands very strict screening procedures and care not to show "confirmation bias" (because one wants so badly to be the first one to actually detect a neutrino, thirty years after Pauli predicted them). It is a LONG conversation, between Unzicker and ChatGPT, perfectly coherent and informative, one that I found very pleasant to listen to (he uses the audio option: female voice interleaved with his voice).
[VHM note: This conversation between Unzicker and GPT is absolutely astonishing. Despite the dense technicality of the subject, GPT understands well what he is saying and replies accordingly and naturally.]
One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction. Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter. They simply are fated / predestined to be together. They have an undeniable affinity for each other.
I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.). Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.
I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). Thanks to her for pointing me down this lovely rabbit hole!
The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.
"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)
I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.
First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.
Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.
Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.
[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences. One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source) He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)
—————
We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form. In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.
Parse that however you wish, we're plagued with them.
On an average day, I receive solicitations to write papers from them three or four times. Sometimes they offer me editorships or guest editorships for designated issues. Sometimes (but not often) they offer me money. All such e-mails immediately go in the trash, but they leave a bad taste and are unsettling.
What's really bad now is that, whereas they used to come from places I had never heard of, now the fake science sickness has infected some of our mainstream publishing houses.
A little over a year ago, Frank Jacobs published this admirable survey of a mysterious object that has perplexed and preoccupied us for the past week — The Mysterious Dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire, Big Think, Atlas Obscura (5/12/23):
The first of many of these puzzling objects was unearthed almost three centuries ago, and we still don’t know what they were for.
The first part of this series, "Indigo and cabbage", written the day before Thanksgiving in 2023, is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling posts I've ever made. This follow-up is even more of a delight, because here I get to introduce a new paper by anthropologist-linguist-textile expert Elizabeth J. W. Barber, and what a tour de force it is (see below).
Here I give an extended account of her scholarship, especially her early activities in the computer analysis of Chinese, because she was instrumental in helping to make that possible at its foundational stage.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in Archaeology and Greek in 1962. Her chief mentor was Mabel Lang from whom she learned Linear B and who advised her honors thesis on Linear A. In addition to Lang, Wayland wrote her thesis under Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Her thesis used computer indices of the Hagia Triada Linear A texts in an attempt to decipher its signs and symbols. The computer indices were made via punched cards, a method which was preceded by the work of Alice E. Kober on Linear B. She earned her PhD from Yale University in linguistics in 1968. Her doctoral study at Yale University was supervised by Sydney Lamb, under whom she wrote her dissertation, "The Computer Aided Analysis of Undeciphered Ancient Texts."
"Water", "water", everywhere — and it's pronounced differently wherever you go.
See the dozen or so US and UK phonetic and phonemic transcriptions and audio clips provided by Wiktionary here. The last of the US audio clips even has the trace of an initial "h", as some people pronounce "wh-" interrogatives.
——————-
From Marc Sarrel
I recently heard about an engraving that is attached to the Europa Clipper spacecraft, to be launched to the moon of Jupiter in October of this year. Europa likely has a large liquid water ocean underneath its shell of water ice. There is more liquid water on Europa than on Earth.
The vault plate features waveforms for the word “water” in 103 spoken languages, plus a symbol that represents the word in American Sign Language. If you scroll down a bit on the page, you can choose one of the languages, see the waveform and hear the spoken word.
I think this is a really compelling way to represent the common link between Earth and Europa.
This issue caused quite a hullabaloo more than a month ago and, during the runup to the national election that was going on at that time, it generated a lot of hot rhetoric. It's important to note that First Girls High School is an elitist, influential institution that is very hard to get into.
The debate over how much and what sort of Classical Chinese to include in the curriculum grew quite heated, so naturally I quickly wrote a detailed post on the subject, but then my computer crashed because of one of the many dreaded, hated "updates" that I have to endure for the sake of "security" (the bane of my life), and I lost my carefully prepared post on the Classical Chinese debate — same thing happened to the draft of my post on the Tokyo restaurant sign that supposedly "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people". It has taken me till now to find the time to reconstruct them.
