The greater gift

I just forgot what I intended to write about. Luckily.

Could you imagine what our brains would be like, if we remembered all the clever ideas we ever had? What an incredible chaos there would be!

Forgetfulness is a much bigger gift to us from God than memory.

Headline spin and bias

Our opinions are usually based on facts to a reasonably large extent. I guess that at least 15% of our opinions come from evaluations of facts we hear. The rest is based on the subconscious desire to share opinions with people around us, the desire to oppose the opinions of people around us, and repeated unsubstantiated messages in media. It has been claimed that "the fourth estate", media, are important in forming our opinions, as they select which facts to give us.

At least as important is the way they present those facts.

One striking example of this is a story presented at sina.com and AFP. Both articles build entirely on a story from China's state news agency Xinhua (新华). They do not use any other sources. All the facts are the same. However, Sina's headline is Policeman killed in pursuit of riot leader. Read no further. You learn that a policeman is killed, the poor fellow. AFP's headline is Police kill Tibetan during gun battle in China: state media. Again, read no further. You learn that a Tibetan is killed by nasty Chinese police, the poor fellow. If you read both headlines you may end up very confused. Was a policeman killed or did he kill? It turns out both are true.

The two news sites slyly ignore the death of one or the other of the two victims in the headline. This conveniently twists the opinions of the casual reader, who reads headlines but not articles.

Svarabhakti

As I grow older there are a lot of things from the past that I forget. Some things disappear completely. Some things hang around like very thin threads that make me almost remember them, but not quite.

For many months, perhaps years, I have wondered about one word that has been bouncing around like a rubber ball in my brain every now and then. I did not remember exactly what it sounded like, so it was impossible to search for it on the world wide thingummy.

Today, finally, the word became clear enough for me to find it: svarabhakti.

In case you also go around and wonder what it is about, here is what I found out:

A svarabhakti is a vowel that is inserted between two consonants. One example would be if you pronounce blue really slowly: be-lueue. The e between b and l is a svarabhakti. In many languages a large number of words have svarabhakti, like German, Dutch, many Celtic languages and Icelandic. It is difficult to find an Icelandic text without any words with the suffix -ur, and the u in -ur is a hundreds of years old svarabhakti. The word maður used to be maðr, but the Icelanders gave up pronouncing the tricky consonant combination ðr and added the u to make things easier.

The word svarabhakti comes from Sanskrit. Svara (स्वर) means sound, vowel. The word bhakti (भक्ति ), on the other hand, belongs to those words that can mean about anything: devotion, fidelity, order, part and division. The logic of the full word is "a vowel that divides" [two consonants from each other].

Other words for the same thing are epenthesis (ἐπένθεσις, from επι, on + εν, in + θεσις, placement) and anaptyxis (ανάπτυξής, growth).

At least that's what the internet tells me. However, it is unable to tell me where and when in the past I had seen the word before.

The clear message

Occasionally one can hear people asking for a "clear message" to this or that person or country about this or that issue. Clarity is a nice thing. A clear summer day is much nicer than an unclear summer day. Clear vision is nicer than blurry vision. A clear mind is better than a confused mind.

So let's have a look at some of the clear messages given in history:

Serbian nationalists gave Archduke Ferdinand a very clear message the 28 June 1914.

Germany gave Poland a very clear message 1 September 1939.

Japan gave the US a very clear message the 7 December 1941.

George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a clear message 20 March 2003.

The results of these messages may not always have been what the sender intended, but they were undoubtedly clear.

Have I made myself clear in this blog entry? No? Good!

For a good cause - or two

A friend of mine lives in Lyon. He is sick of the continuous anti-Chinese bias in Western press, so he will join the boycott of Carrefour that some Chinese bloggers plan for the 1st of May. Carrefour is the target, as it is the most visible French retailer in China. So my friend will shop at Auchan instead the 1st of May. This may be tricky, as it is not yet clear if Auchan will be open on the 1st of May, which is a public holiday in France. Carrefour may not be open either, but my friend claims this will just diminish his temptation to abort the demonstration.

Just in case, he will go twice to Carrefour in advance, the 29th and 30th of April, to pile up things he usually buys there, so he will not risk missing anything the crucial day.

Note that this is a protest against the French insensitive handling of the crisis in Tibet and a protest against the biased Western press. At the same time, my friend is a big fan of Tibetan culture, so the weekend before the 1st of May, he will participate in a manifestation for Tibet - especially for momo (མོག་མོག་).

I do not know if my Lyon friend fully understands the issue, but we live in a democracy, so even people who do not understand things are allowed to say what they think.

I also have some Chinese friends living in Shanghai. They have obviously heard a lot about the proposed boycott the 1st of May, and they are completely aware of the consequences. Therefore they will exceptionally go shopping at Carrefour 1st of May, as it hopefully will not be as crowded as usual.

Democratic action against democracy

This is perhaps a cheap observation, but at the same time as the French propagate for democracy in China, the Chinese use the democratic rights they have to demonstrate against France for that same reason.

Side effect of fighting crime

The pirates who seized a French luxury yacht a few weeks ago have now been charged by a French court.

This is of course excellent news. The innocent civilian crew on the ship, who were all taken hostages, can now feel that they are better protected on future trips outside Somalia, and so can thousands of other sailors. Pirates will now know what awaits them if they attack French ships, and probably ships from other rich countries as well.

However, they are likely to face no worse consequences than before, if they attack Somali ships - and perhaps Eritrean, Yemenite, or ships of many other Arab and African nationalities. If the innocent crew had been North Korean or Cuban, would the French have taken so swift action to liberate them?

It is difficult to demand of the French or any other country to spend as much resources on protecting and liberating foreign nationals as their own. But, surely, it is an unfortunate situation.

Pirates outside Somalia now risk concentrating on ships from countries that are too poor to protect their nationals efficiently.

Kunlangeta - mon amour

This is a conditional truth: there are few people who are so nice to be with as psychopaths. A psychopath tries to manipulate you. He lies to you. He does everything for himself, even if he has to crush you. And he is really charming, when he does this.

The psychopath is like a glass of wine - it is very pleasant if you only know when to stop. You need to be able to back out, go away, hang up and cut off at any moment. And you need to be aware, to think of this at every instance: this is not just a glass of water; this is not a decent person. Keep the distance.

If you get to depend on a psychopath, you are toast.

Kunlangeta is allegedly an Inuit Yupik word for psychopath. It is mentioned by a Jane Murphy in an article in Science from 1976 to illustrate that there are psychopaths in all cultures. It is very easy to make that kind of vocabulary claims for small languages without being contradicted. There are less than 20,000 people speaking any dialect of Yupik, and it is unlikely that many of them are aware of all the clinical symptoms of psychopaths. How many of them will read that article from 1976 and verify or deny the claim? Let's not forget that one of the most ridiculous linguistic claims ever has been made for Inuit languages: that they should have hundreds of words for snow.

The same article claims that arankan is the Yoruba word for psychopath. However, Yoruba is a big language with more than 20 million speakers, and there are actually dictionaries available. The word simply means "malice" or "evil". It is hardly surprising that there is a word for nasty in Yoruba, and that does not prove that there are psychopaths in Nigeria. It is very likely that there are some there as well as elsewhere, but the mere fact that Yoruba has a word for nasty is no proof.

Nothing new under the sun - not this anyhow

A lot of the fiction we read, hear or watch are just variations of archetypal myths that have been around for thousands of years. Sometimes the myths are well documented. Sometimes they are less well documented.

As an example we can take a song from last week's Now Show on BBC 4. It was Mitch Benn who started off with a classical "serious" introduction mentioning the author Arthur C. Clark and a recent finding that there is methane on the planet HD 189733b, which is 63 million light years away.

He then starts singing with an introduction about watching the stars - a theme that has been around for thousands of years. Only at the fourth line comes a slightly hidden reference to what clearly will be the theme of the song.

We cast our eyes out to the stars
Lose dodgy home made probes on Mars.
Who would imagine, who could tell,
the first sign of life would be a smell?

Note that the reference is not in clear. The same message could have been given in much more explicit words, but to keep the tension, it is only the very last word that hints at what will come: smell.

Then comes a stanza where the message is very blunt. It is reasonable to assume that man has laughed at flatulence for ten thousand years, and conceivably hundreds of thousand years. A studio audience of 2008 is still bound to laugh at the mere mention of the word "fart" - something that triggers certain emotions in most us, be they laughter or disgust.

Something's farting way out there in space
Are they friendly, are they hostile?
search your heart and search your nostrils.

To further play on the motive of emotions, the listener is asked to "search his heart" and then in an anaphora also his nostrils. Asking the listener to search his heart, his emotions, is a theme that catches our attention, and it certainly has done so for thousands of years.

Something farting in some far off place
And they left a trace behind
a close encounter of the whiffy kind

Again, the "far off place" evokes the distant unknown. During the neolithic it may have been the next valley. For Moses the promised land. For Columbus India, and for Neil Armstrong the moon. To all of us, there is some distant place where we have not yet been.

The reference to a "close encounter of the whiffy kind" uses the ancient method to create a bond between singer and audience by referring to common knowledge. In this case, it is of course a reference to the Steven Spielberg film from 1977 with a title alluding to a close encounter of the "third" kind. (For those who have forgotten, according to dr. Josef Allen Hynek, an encounter with aliens of the first kind is sighting. An encounter of the second kind is one with evidence for the encounter. An encounter of the third kind is contact. Dr. Hynek did not comment on whiffy encounters, as far as I can tell.)

The next stanza is probably the weakest one, and it does not follow known narrative archetypes very much. The mention of a distant place is just a repetition. The "gas giants" do not refer to any known mythical organism, and it does not clearly define the nature of such an organism. The stanza is probably perceived by most as a far fetched attempt to get more out of the gas theme without actually adding much of a message.

Something's farting way out there in space
it's hitherto unknown to science
someone's letting off gas giants.

The final stanza evokes an imaginary reality - a "what if" statement, just like man has probably done for thousands of years. Here Mitch Benn launches the thought that aliens may use olfaction as a major method of communication. It is of course far fetched, as smell does not transport very quickly over large distances. But it is nevertheless a possible means of communication for beings who stay close, like insects using hormones to call each other's attention. Even humans use hormones for sexual communication, but we are usually unable to consciously recognise the smell of hormones, even though we subconsciously use the information when selecting our partners.

Something's farting at the human race,
but we mustn't get irate.
It might just be how they communicate.



Ironically the whole theme of the song is incorrect. Methane is a gas that does not constitute a major part of flatulent gases, and it is in fact odourless. A fairly big part of the methane in the atmosphere admittedly comes from mammal flatulence, but most of the emitted gas in a flatus is nitrogen. The smell of flatulence mostly comes from sulphuric compounds, skatole and indole.

Factual accuracy is of course not needed in order for a fictional work to be appreciated. The lack of factual accuracy is very likely also a fictional theme that is thousands of years old.

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur

Conspiracy theories are often used to explain things that do not have any simple explanation - at least not simple enough for the speaker. Or they can be used to replace an explanation that does not fit one's ideas of what the world should be like.

Here is one theory for example: The present riots in Tibet are started by the Taiwanese government. The reason is that the riots will badly affect the Chinese stock market, which will go down, thus slowing down the economic development and inflation, which long term is good for the Chinese economy. It is in the interest of the Taiwanese to have a neighbour with a healthy economy, as that is good for their export market.

Is that a likely theory? Of course not. But all the steps individually are logical, even though the sum of them is ridiculous.

For most events in the world, it is easy to make up a "theory" like that, which may explain what you do not understand.

However, a lot of things happen without anyone wanting them. Some examples:

The first World War, 1914-1918, was in no one's interest. The state leaders who started it thought it would be a short affair, but no one had anticipated the importance of the Chauchat and other machine guns, the air forces or the tanks. In 1914 no one could have anticipated the Russian revolution or its consequences for the rest of the 20th century. It was development that happened on its own, without any conscious decision taken by any single individual. The entire war was just one big blunder.

The Russian revolution in itself was a strange case of things happening without anyone understanding its consequences. The members of the first polite bureau during the October revolution 1917, the people who kicked it off, were Lev Kamenev (Лев Борисович Каменев), Nikolai Krestinsky (Николай Николаевич Крестинский), Andrei Bubnov (Андрей Сергеевич Бубнов), Grigory Sokolnikov (Григорий Яковлевич Сокольников), Leon Trotsky (Лeв Давидович Троцкий), Josef Stalin (იოსებ სტალინი, Иосиф Сталин) and of course Vladimir Lenin (Владимир Ильич Ленин). Out of these all but Lenin were killed off by Stalin in different ways. In other words, five out of seven initiators were killed due to the event they had themselves started. Out of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Communist Party Congress, which confirmed Stalin's power, more than half were later arrested by him, and most of them died. Clearly, they had no idea what they were doing - just like so many decision makers today.

When Osama bin Laden (أسامة بن لادن‎) and al-Qaida (القاعدة) blew up the World Trade Center in 2001, they cannot possibly have had any idea what the effect would be. They could not know if the American response would be bigger understanding for Islamic issues with American policies, the deposition by the Americans of the Saudi government or mass conversion to Islam. Neither could they have predicted the irrational attack on Iraq, which, as we know now, was completely unrelated to al-Qaida. Here we had a case of an irrational action from al-Qaida that was followed by an irrational action by the USA.
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In spite of this the world moves forward. The state of affairs was well put by the Swedish 17th century statesman Axel Oxenstierna. His son doubted his own abilities in taking on an important diplomatic mission. Axel Oxenstierna replied:

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?

Or in English:

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is ruled?