The Dougnut: A sustainable economy is one that doesn't "grow".

Kate Raworth proposes a new economic model based on the ecological limits of the Earth. Sensible. Realistic. Humane. Therefore certain to be opposed by the pathetic "entrepreneurs" who believe that profit will somehow insulate them from the facts of biology and physics. Or the "libertarians" who believe that economic freedom mean being free to make as much money as possible.

Find a brief video here: The Doughnut Economy.

Wiki has an article, too: Doughnut (economic model).

Great photos

Great photos here.https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-53819803
One sample:

Doing Science

John Brockman, ed. Doing Science (1991) Brockman founded “The Reality Club”, an invitation-only assembly of scientists and other thinkers, whose apparent purpose was to think big-picture thoughts about science. Etc
      Each of the essays in this collection is worth reading. A couple that impressed me:
     Big Trouble in Biology, Lynn Margulis’s attack on Neo-Darwinism, which she characterises as a religion, and which she opposes mostly because it’s reductive, and fails to account for the dynamics of ecosystems. In the 30 years since her essay, biology has begun to shift its focus to ecology. Increasingly, the governing stance is that organisms exist not only as individuals, and as members of genetically defined breeding groups, but also (and I think primarily) as members of a network of interlaced feedback loops.
     “A network of interlaced feedback loops” is one way of describing chaotic systems, the subject of an essay by Ralph H. Abraham, Chaos in Myth. and Science. Abraham posits that science is informed by the same myths that inform and regulate all other aspects of our social systems. In Western mythologies, “chaos” is bad. The recent discovery of chaos mathematics and its applicability to ecosystems, the weather, human societies, etc, as well as a  still incompletely catalogued slew of physical systems, requires a restructuring of the mythologies in which Chaos figures a source of disorder, strife, and evil. Chaos must be seen as the partner of order.
     How to Tell What Is Science and What Isn’t, by Richard Morris, concludes that pseudoscience is crazy in the sense that its truth would require denying large swaths of what we know to be true. However, Morris hasn’t noted the difference between science as knowledge of what’s real (an ontological enterprise), and science as way of acquiring reliable, if limited, knowledge (an epistemological enterprise). Thus, “what we know to be true” is always tentative, which guarantees that pseudoscience will sometimes include notions that will eventually turn out to be true enough to count as science.
     A keeper. ****

Setting the Stage: Scenery for Model Railroads

Carl Swanson, ed. Model Railroader: Best of Scenery. (2020) Collection of articles, some revised, all well done, most brief and to the point. Model Railroader staff and the contributors have perfected the art of combining pictures with text to help the reader learn. Three stories show layouts with impressively plausible scenery. Throughout, there is the explicit and implicit advice to observe the world around you. Recommended. ****

Winners (Short Story Contest finalists)

 Michael Blackburn, Jan Silkin, Lorna Tracy, eds. Stand One. Winners of the Stand Magazine Short Story Competition. (1984) Just what it says, 13 stories by unknown writers, all good to very good. The first-prize winner tells of a Vietnam vet suffering from what we now call PTSD, told by his sister. The satire on ignorant law enforcers, venal TV personalities, and the fear engendered in uncomprehending neighbours and family arise naturally from the narrator’s naive and loving story. It’s a well-constructed story, but also a well-told one.

     Most of the rest are well-constructed, but not well told. Reading them, I don’t feel that the narrator felt compelled to tell me the story. For example, Hakanono, a satire on colonial attitudes, achieves its aim of showing the stupidity of assumed superiority, but in the end we care neither about the colonial administrators nor about the natives they despise. Well, I didn’t. And the suggestion of supernatural intervention didn't supply the frisson apparently intended by the author.

     The stories are very much of their time, relentlessly well-intentioned in their depiction of life's shadows. Most of the authors (and I suspect the editors, too) haven’t forgiven life for not fulfilling the promises of childhood. They haven’t yet seen that the loss of illusion is necessary to gain what little wisdom we can bear. ** to ****

A Brief History of English

Beginning of Canterbury Tales

The history of English has two main themes: first, the words (lexicon) come from many sources, and second, the grammar is fundamentally a simplified Germanic one, marked by an almost complete absence of grammatical gender. English is essentially a multi-layered creole.

The prehistoric peoples (who settled the islands 5,000 years ago or earlier) as far as we know left no traces in the English language. Then there were the Britons, a motley crew of miscellaneous Celtic tribes. These were conquered by the Romans, whose language had some influence on the Celtic dialects, mostly in place names. They built forts and roads, and romanised the indigenous people. Many place names date back to the Roman occupation, for example London (from londinium), and names ending in -chester, -cester, or -caster (from L. castellum).

From about 450 AD, several northwest European peoples invaded the Island. First came the Angles and Saxons, followed by the Danes and the Norwegians. The Anglo-Saxons brought their languages with them, and adopted or adapted some words and place names from the Celts they displaced or enslaved. For example car (originally from Latin), the Avon, Salisbury (Salis- from Celtic Sorvio, a personal name, plus Anglo-Saxon burh, a fortified settlement), and many other place names in southwestern England. The Danish and Norwegian invasions affected the northern and eastern Anglo-Saxon dialects, which are still distinct from the southern and midland dialects that became the language of the court. Anglo-Saxon as written is a jumble of dialects that are mutually intelligible enough that they form a language.

In 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy conquered England and brought Norman French with him as the language of government and trade. Over the next couple of centuries, the existing Anglo-Saxon dialects and Norman French blended into what we now think of as Middle English. By 1400, it was not only a practical language but a literary one: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) in his Middle English, London-centric dialect. It became the source of modern English, which in vocabulary is basically Anglo-Saxon with an overlay of French, and a grammar regularised and simplified as Anglo-Saxon and French speakers mashed up their languages into a mutually intelligible creole. Hence cow, bull, cattle for the animals, beef for their meat. Anglo-Saxon houses and fields made up French real property. French and English shared a plural ending -s, which became the near-universal way of making plural nouns, and gender survived only in the third person pronouns and some feminine suffixes.

During the Roman era and throughout the Middle Ages, Latin and Greek words were adopted into the vernacular all over Europe. In English, that produced “church”, “bishop” and “bible”, for example. During the Renaissance, English speakers, like other Europeans, adopted many more Latin and Greek words. By the later Middle Ages, scholars had developed the habit of using Latin and Greek terms when writing in their local languages, and still do so today.

In 1473, Caxton brought printing to England. During the 1400s and 1500s, Middle English was evolving into Early Modern English (the language of Shakespeare). Printers wanted standard spelling (and to some extent also standard vocabulary) to widen the market for their books. Thus, English spelling became standardised at a time when its pronunciation changed rapidly. The result is the most inconsistent spelling system in the world: each of the main streams of language that make up the Modern English lexicon has its own spelling system.

Here's the Lord's Prayer in Anglo-Saxon:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gylta
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice 

Note on pronunciation:
There are no "silent letters".
Anglo-Saxon "þ" is pronounced "th" as in "thin";
Anglo-Saxon "ð" is pronounced "th" as in "this";
The vowels are pronounced as in "pat, pet, pit, pot, put";
"y" like "ee" in  "beet".
"æ" is a vowel about halfway between "pat" and "pet";
both vowels in double vowels are pronounced;
"c" before e and i is pronounced like "ch"  in "chin",
otherwise like "k"

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice (note: the old english "þ" is pronounced "th")

Read more at: https://www.lords-prayer-words.com/lord_old_english_medieval.html

 

Hong Kong should be independent

Hong Kong

From a NYT piece by Samuel Chu, who is a U.S. citizen, a pro-democracy activist and wanted by the Hong Kong police.

I had violated Article 38 of the new law, which states: “This Law shall apply to offenses under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”

This law violates all standards of international law. No country may extend its jurisdiction beyond its borders without a treaty. (A treaty is a mutual recognition of some limited jurisdiction.)

I think the Chinese Government has over-reached. It has violated the treaty which granted it jurisdiction over Hong Kong. It has violated international law with this unilateral claim to jurisdiction outside its borders.

I think the citizens of Hong Kong have every right to protest this law, to agitate against it, and to advocate democratic freedoms for Hong Kong. If the Chinese Government is unwilling to accept these rights, then Hong Kong citizens have the right to secede.

I support the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. I oppose the Chinese Government’s attempt to reduce and eliminate Hong Kong citizens’ rights and freedoms. I advocate for the independence of Hong Kong as a sovereign state.

Oh dear, it seems I may have broken the law. So under article 38, the Chinese Government will have to issue an arrest warrant for me.