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August 27 Information
Audiobook for . . .
Hi I am searching desperately for an audio book version of:
I know that some e-readers like
Amazon Kindle have a text-to-speech function. It is a bit unnatural, as opposed to an actual audio book, but if there is nothing else, there is always that. --
Jayron3202:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Though it should be noted that — I believe — publishers can disable that functionality on a per-book basis at their whim. So it may not actually be an option. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
12:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Audiobooks are more common in fiction than in non-fiction - and especially more serious non-fiction - because there isn't a market for them. With a serious non-fiction book, people want to be able to mark it up, refer to footnotes, make copies, compare pages in chapters, etc. and that makes the audiobook format less appealing to readers. (I assume you're not looking for this book for a visually impaired person; if you are, check with your local "books for the blind" organization.) --
NellieBly (
talk)
05:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Questions about law in the Victorian period
I am currently writing a novel set in the Victorian era in Australia. I have checked out books on the subject and searched the Internet, but I can't find out particular information on the legal system of the time. First, what was the difference between murder and manslaughter then, if they differentiated it in the first place? And if they did, what was the difference in sentences? Also, when was the first time female lawyers appeared? Thank you for your help, I much appreciate it.
Southernlegacy (
talk)
01:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Prior to 1901, as I'm sure you know, Australia was a collection of
crown colonies. According to that article, each colony had its own independent legal system, largely based on
English Common law but adjustable according to local circumstances. I would expect that in most places, if not everywhere, the answer to your question about murder versus manslaughter would have been the same as for Common law. Regarding female lawyers I have no information, but it would surprise me if there were any during the Victorian era.
Looie496 (
talk)
03:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Doing some digging, I found some information on pioneering female lawyers.
Ethel Benjamin was New Zealand's first practicing female lawyer, and started practicing in the late Victorian era.
Mary Hall was an early American female lawyer, and she practised in the Victorian era (1880s-1890s). Canadian
Clara Brett Martin is noted as the first female lawyer in the British Empire, she started practising shortly before Ethel Benjamin. I can't find any information on who the first female lawyer in Australia would have been, but in other Anglophone countries it seems that there were a small handful of female lawyers in the late Victorian era. --
Jayron3205:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Why does the United States have relatively more shootings than most developed countries?
Ever since that
Colorado theater shooting last month, there has been a number of high-profile shootings, like
that one at a Sikh temple and
at the Empire State Building. But I was wondering – why? I know it's probably because of the lack of effective gun laws, but what are other possible reasons, especially psychological or political? While there are a few other countries like Canada that have more guns per people, murders and shootings aren't as common. In fact, I'm not aware of any developed country that has shootings as frequent as the US. Why does America have so many shootings in the first place?
Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew03:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Of course what counts as a violent crime varies from one country to another. As even the source for that paragraph in the US gun politics article (a report in the
Daily Mail - whose entire raison d'être is to convince the English middle-classes that the country has gone to rack and ruin) concedes "In Britain, an
affray is considered a violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured." The statistic in that article that is surely more relevant here, as the question is why does America have so many more shootings, is the homicide rate by firearm:- (from the same article) 3.0 per 100,000 people in the US and 0.07 per 100,000 people in the UK. If we compare
homicide rates (what counts as a homicide varies between jurisdictions but there is far less variance than the fairly nebulous term "violent crime"), the US has a homicide rate of 4.2, the UK 1.2, Canada 1.6, Australia 1.0, France 1.1, Germany 0.8 (homicides per 100,000 population). Further comparisons can be made at the homicide rate article, but to sum up, the US has a homicide rate that's 3 to 4 times higher than comparable countries.
Valiantis (
talk)
04:28, 29 August 2012 (UTC)reply
If you are referring to mass shootings, they aren't actually very common even in the US -- they are very salient because of all the news coverage they receive. Canada has only 1/10 the population of the US so it would be expected to have only a tenth as many even if all factors were equal. If you are referring to individual shootings, in the US the majority are related to gang violence, a problem that is considerably less severe in most Canadian cities.
Looie496 (
talk)
03:27, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The average murder related to gang violence usually is barely mentioned in the national American news media. But once a mass shooting occurs, IMO and relatively speaking, the national media sort of acts like the "
The sky is falling!" with all the coverage.
Zzyzx11 (
talk)
03:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(ec)The U.S. has a relatively higher
Gini coefficient than other countries, and the consequences of poverty are harsher. For example, access of the poor or even the middle class to serious health care generally comes at the cost of bankruptcy, and advanced procedures like transplants are notoriously kept unavailable. In those cases where welfare is still given, or in impoverished neighborhoods, conditions are such that prison ethics, complete with an intolerance for snitching and a low value on human life, hold general sway. To the poorest, prison seems so inevitable, and justice so unreliable, that it scarcely serves as a deterrent. National and international gangs and cartels are the adaptive response to the prevailing conditions, and prisons serve as their recruiting ground rather than suppressing them.
Wnt (
talk)
03:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That's a new one. The inavailability of kidney transplants causes gun crime! If you want to see the utter absurdity of leftist thought, look no further. Instead, try the
war on drugs (theft to support habits and gang turf disputes) if you want a rational explanation for the vast majority of gun violence in the US.
μηδείς (
talk)
04:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(You've yet again failed to place your comment following the one to which you are responding, and indent from it, so I've indented appropriately, in case you fix yours.) I agree that this is a tenuous link, but there was a movie made based on it: John Q.
StuRat (
talk)
10:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
So when you "awarded" IP 203 the "pedant award" without either signing it or indenting it, while I was being threatened with Nucular Jihad for assigning people one-character large stars, that was just a mistake, StuRat? Go jump in a lake.
μηδείς (
talk)
23:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
And how exactly does one indent a pic ? I just added the signature. Will you be correcting your mistake ? I wasn't involved in the stars at all, so why bring that up ? And now your resorting to
incivility, to boot ?
StuRat (
talk)
23:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The entire comment above was meant as a general one, not solely in response to Wnt, so I purposefully did not indent it and do not intend to. I suppose I should have put a smiley after the suggestion you jump in a lake, I didn't think using a phrase from looney toons would be taken as actively hostile.
μηδείς (
talk)
18:21, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I don't dispute the role of the War on Drugs in instigating crime, however ... aren't there anti-drug crusades in the other countries in this comparison? My feeling is that when life for the poor becomes so hazardous and squalid that prison hardly seems any worse, it loses its power to deter, even when it is used with unreasonable vindictiveness.
Wnt (
talk)
23:46, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Anti-drug crusades in non-American countries rarely involve killing people and seizing their assets.
μηδείς (
talk)
For the OP, avoiding as much of the debate as I can, you might be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by
Steven Pinker. I don't have it handy, so I don't know if he directly addresses the cause of the rate of gun violence in America, but he does deal with the cultural norms that affect violence, and the impact of history. There is also an important specific example covered that might have general relevance, that is, the evidence suggesting differences in the psychological makeup of Southerners and Northerners in their response to conflict. The distinction is based on an experiment that shows (or proves, or suggests) that Southerners are more responsive to antagonism, and Pinker claims this is linked to the frontier state that persisted for longer in the South. The implication seems to be (at least as a partial explanation, surely not the whole one), that the American colonies were driven by a frontier mentality that persists today and even has lingering psychological consequences. You can draw your own conclusions from this sort of evidence, because it's not my area, but you might find the book useful. I emphasise that this does not neutralise the evidence and explanations of others, and I'm sure you can get some other (possibly better) reading suggestions here too,
IBE (
talk)
12:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
French Wikipedia has a little more on her husband, see
fr:Achille Delmaet. It appears he was a photographer known for taking nude pictures, but otherwise I can't find much more. The French article
fr:Marie-Juliette Louvet also has a little bit more on the children, such as birth and death dates, but does not go into details. --
Jayron3206:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Can a full blooded African American can be as light or lighter?
(
edit conflict) What does "full blooded" mean? We're all
full-blooded Africans, but we have varying degrees of time since our most recent ancestors lived there. Also, comparisons require a second thing to compare to. As light or lighter than what? If you want to research the variations within black people, the article
Black people has some information to get you started. --
Jayron3206:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Im guessing he means that those who are not of mixed heritage (as in some who had the european slave owners' blood in them, or other more recent interracial marriages' offspring).
I would venture a guess to say it is possible, depending on where in Africa they came from (and by that, dont have mixed heritage with europeans or others). Ethiopians for example are considerably more lighter skinned than west/central or even southern africans. (though it sees some in the far south are lighter than the west and centre.)
Lihaas (
talk)
08:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
"About 30% of black Americans who take DNA tests to determine their African lineage prove to be descended from Europeans on their father's side, says Rick Kittles, scientific director of African Ancestry, a Washington, D.C., company that began offering the tests in 2003. Almost all black Americans whom Kittles has tested descended from African women, he says."[1].
Alansplodge (
talk)
10:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Just to get it out of the way — there is also
Albinism. It is also worth noting that there are numerous population groups in Africa. I presume you mean someone from sub-Saharan Africa, and not, say, North Africa. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
12:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You have to define the time of mixing arbitrarily. Don't forget Anthony and Cleopatra, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And of course the countless merchant crews trading gold and opium across the Mediterranean or along the ancient Suez Canal, or the many kingdoms which have moved from place to place along the Mediterranean shores in response to the demands of trade and the tides of war. People have been making booty calls over mid-sized seas for a very very long time. Of course, even aside from those such as the Egyptians and the Afar people whom one might say are mixed, there is also substantial variation among those within Africa - compare the images from
Bushmen, who I assume have little introgression of European genes, to a notably dark-skinned group of Africans such as the
Dinka people.
Wnt (
talk)
13:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Worthy of note is that culturally and by decent, Cleopatra was Greek. I'm not sure that any of her ancestors were natively Egyptian. See
Ptolemaic dynasty for a history of her ancestors. Certainly, they adopted Egyptian culture and the trappings of the Pharaohs, but if we're going by the somewhat arbitrary rules that you are what your ancestors were, then she isn't any more "African" than Anthony was. --
Jayron3214:31, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, since my point was that people on either side of the sea have been of mixed race for a long time, this doesn't seem like an objection.
Wnt (
talk)
23:48, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, no. Everyone is of mixed race. The North Africans like Qaddafi have been largely "white". They are at most (Mubarak) 1/4 or less "negroid". There's hardly any point in pointing out that, say,
Nefertiti was "black", even if you define
Oksana Baiul as pure white and
Hussain Bolt as pure black.
Charles Thompson , a friend of
Ernest Hemingway during his first East Africa safari ?
Hello learned humanitarians ! I saw in the german version of the article
Green Hills of Africa (§ "Überblick") that Hemingway hunted with a friend named Charles Thompson. Who may he be ? (there is a lot of them in "disambiguation"...) . Thanks a lot beforehand, t.y.
Arapaima (
talk)
09:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I just read at Nature News that even 8000 to 9500 years ago, Turkey was apparently an innovator, producing the
Indo-European languages.
[3] Numerous animals were apparently domesticated there (even if nailing down the details is beyond my patience at the moment). My impression is that the prominence of Ancient Greece depended substantially on people from Turkey, under their control at the time, which then passed to Roman control with the same results, even becoming the core of the empire, before finally becoming part of the Muslim world, where they continued to remain preeminent, with technology far outstripping Europe, for example. And yet, somehow, the
Ottoman Empire declined, advances in civil liberties were rebuffed, there was military and scientific stagnation, and they became the "sick man of Europe". Is there any systematic explanation for the change - a climate alteration, a change from land to sea shipping, some objective phenomenon that can explain why a country goes from perpetual preeminence to obscurity? Or is it all just random fluctuation?
Wnt (
talk)
13:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I believe it has to do with the dominance of religion over science. Similarly, when Christianity dominated over science in Europe in the Middle Ages, there was stagnation there, as well.
StuRat (
talk)
13:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I can sort of see this argument, but I'm not sure how much of this is fact and how much fiction. Islam did not prevent
Jabir ibn Hayyan from becoming the first alchemist, indeed, inventing much of chemistry including ironically enough the distillation of alcohol.
Avicenna was free to use wine for various medicinal purposes two centuries later. True, these were Persians, living in
Umayyad and
Abbasid Caliphates ruled from Syria and Iraq, but I'll partially ignore that as much of the political territory was shared and it's not that much of a distance. Can you say for sure that religious fanaticism became more pronounced in the past few centuries?
Wnt (
talk)
13:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
StuRat's answer is, unfortunately, one that is completely ignorant of actual history. Islam was the preeminent language of learning during the so-called Middle Ages. Religion was not the reason that Europe lacked "science" during the Middle Ages (the Church was more or less the only benefactor of higher education and learning in Europe during that time and poured huge resources into astronomical research). StuRat is speaking about bad clichés and nothing more. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
14:01, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Did you really want to say " Islam was the preeminent language of learning " not "Arabic was..." or "Islam was the ... vehicle of learning"?
OsmanRF34 (
talk)
15:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
If you disagree with somebody, prove them wrong, don't just call them ignorant, without proof. That just makes you look bad. And spending money on research is great, unless you constrain your researchers to keep any discoveries which run counter to your doctrine secret (like heliocentrism).
StuRat (
talk)
14:25, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You don't seem to understand my argument. Neither Christianity or Islam is inherently anti-science. However, at times, both developed an anti-science attitude. These are the times when those cultures stagnated. Now, as to why those religions had such attitudes at times and not others, that's more complicated. Having a single religious leader (like the Pope) who dominated all secular leaders was a factor in Europe. After the
Reformation, the power of the Pope was reduced, allowing for more freedom for those with ideas that ran counter to The Church, including scientists, especially in Northern Europe.
StuRat (
talk)
14:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That's a good explanation for an elemenary school class maybe, but fortunately not really at all how things actually worked. See, I don't know,
science in the Middle Ages for one thing. (I don't know what else to say because I know I've corrected you on this point numerous times in the past, and I'm sure many others have too, but if you don't care, then all we can ask is for you to stop repeating it...)
Adam Bishop (
talk)
14:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I'm going to have to back Adam Bishop on this regarding Christianity and Science in the Middle Ages. The general regression Europe experienced (in many areas, not just learning) had to do with environmental factors mostly unrelated to religion, and likely a lot more to do with demographic factors. Foremost was the de-urbanization that occured: the number and density of cities declined dramatically after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, and cities are known to be the home of innovation.
This article in
Scientific American magazine contains a good overview, but there's been a lot of studies, especially recently, on this topic, and there is a direct correlation between urban life and technological and cultural advancement. It would follow, then, that if people are abandoning the cities, technology and learning are going to take a hit. Furthermore, Europe in the middle ages experienced a sharp and shocking decline in population, especially those areas which had formerly been part of the Western Roman Empire, owing to widespread famine, and the
Black Death. Certainly, advancements were made and Europe did advance in some areas during the time period, but that was largely in spite of the environment that people were living in, which given the historical context one would easily predict a few steps backwards. Of final note, the Catholic Church was, in many ways, the major force for what knowledge was preserved, since often the only literate people were the clergy, and they spent a lot of time copying ancient texts (not just the Bible, but also secular and pre-christian works) and many of the major scientific minds of the age were Christian clergy, including
Roger Bacon and
Robert Grosseteste and
William of Ockham, all of whom had a profound influence on the development of modern science. --
Jayron3215:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Some points:
1) What caused people to move out of cities ?
2) Europe was in decline long before the Black Death, so it's population decline was not the driving factor.
3) Of course many of the scientists at the time were religious people, since there was very little opportunity for anyone not involved in The Church to pursue such studies, and they would risk running afoul of religious doctrine.
StuRat (
talk)
18:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Europe's population decline preceded the black death by some time. It should be noted that there were actually two population collapses, one at the end of the Roman Empire time, and one during the Late Middle Ages. The so-called
High Middle Ages featured a population boom. See
Medieval demography, which specifically mentions deurbanization. There are lots of possible explanations as to why the cities depopulated so much during the middle ages. Cities have advantages and disadvantages. One of the key issues is that large urban populations need armies to defend them; the pull out of the Roman legions out of many of areas coincided with the deurbanization, that is not a coincidence as cities are hard to defend and also an attractive target for raiders, being a concentration of wealth. Agricultural production also declined, perhaps due to poor soil management or climatic changes, and less food means that the cities can't support as many people. Plagues also tend to have a much greater effect on the cities: they breed plagues due to close proximity of people. The population curve would be somewhat W shaped, with a steep decline at the end of
Classical antiquity and a steep rebound at the
early modern period. In between, the population remained somewhat stagnant, with a bit of a hump in the curve around the 1100s and 1200s. The reason for point #3 is still deurbanization: with the abandonment of the cities, the Church became the only place which was wealthy enough and with enough training to maintain knowledge and learning. The Church didn't cause deurbanization, it had very little to do with it. --
Jayron3220:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I bet both deurbanization and depopulation were due to losing the Roman system of water engineering (aqueducts and such), which brought in clean water and removed sewage (although they didn't treat it). By comparison, dumping sewage in the streets was a recipe for disaster. But then the question becomes, why was this technology largely lost after the Romans ?
StuRat (
talk)
22:37, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Rome underwent a quick decline in population when the grain deliveries from Egypt and the province of "Africa" (i.e. current-day northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria) were cut off...
AnonMoos (
talk)
04:03, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I didn't write my response to you (StuRat), really — I wrote it for anybody out there uninformed enough not to realize that you were just being ignorant. I know better than to give you actual book references, and am highly dubious that you will bother to actually learn anything new that goes against your pre-held beliefs, but hey, go ahead and prove me wrong! Start out with
Islam_and_science#History and see where you get. Maybe check out the
Islamic Golden Age. There's a lot you appear to know nothing about, so it's unclear to me exactly where to start. Try looking at
Catholic Church and science, focusing on the middle ages. (Of course, real historians don't even like to use the category
Middle Ages, but let's set that aside for now.) There are lots of variables involved in the relationship between Islam and science, but any potential issues relating to Islam and science — which frankly are unlikely to apply to Turkey anyway, which you may or may not know is one of the most "progressive" Islamic republics in the Middle East — are extremely recent. But anyway, there are some nice references. Feel free to back up your own knee-jerk opinions with a few while you're at it. You may have areas of expertise, StuRat, but you have shown again and again on here that the study of history is not one of them. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
15:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You apparently are too ignorant to know about the
Galileo affair. Note that for every scientist who was put on trial by The Church for opposing their doctrine, many more were either warned quietly and backed off, or choose never to say or print anything publicly which The Church might find offensive. So, the cases that actually came down to a trial are but the tip of the iceberg. For example "Copernicus delayed publication of his book, perhaps from fear of criticism—a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III" (from
Catholic Church and science). Then we have
Catholic_Church_and_science#Gessner. Also see
List of authors and works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In the Muslim world, we have the destruction of the
Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din. Most relevant to the OP is why the
Islamic Golden Age came to an end: "...in addition to invasion by the Mongols and crusaders and the destruction of libraries and madrasahs, it has also been suggested that political mismanagement and the stifling of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in the 12th century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a part." In the case of
The Crusades, here we have a case of Christianity stifling Muslim science.
StuRat (
talk)
18:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That ignores the fact that Galileo did not live in the Middle Ages, he lived during the Protestant Reformation, and the political milleu surounding him was very different than the middle ages. This does not excuse what the Church did to him, which was without question inexcusable, however inexcusable is not a synonym for unexplainable, and understanding what happened to Galileo necessitates understaning the political landscape of early 17th century Europe, which was some half a millenium after the time period we're talking about. Connecting the dots between the loss of learning in the middle ages and what the church did to Galileo belies a complete misreading of history and a huge conflation of unrelated issues. The 1600s were NOT the 1100s. It should also be noted that the Church's efforts against Galileo were largely impotent; learning and technological advances when unabated despite their efforts, while in the middle ages, when Church clergy was at the vanguard of scientific advances some 400 years earlier, and showed no doctrinal objections to sceintific study AT ALL, Europe was moving backwards. There just isn't any evidence that there was any causal relationship between church doctrine that was hostile to science (which again, occured in the early 1600s during the Protestant Reformation and must be understood in that context) and the much earlier decline of European civilization and learning that occured after the fall of the Western Empire. It is wrong to make that connection chronologically, and it doesn't bear out with the actual facts of the history. --
Jayron3220:19, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There's also the tendency of The Church to keep scholarly works in Latin, Greek, or other classic languages, making them inaccessible to the vast majority. But perhaps it's what they didn't do when they were dominant that's more to the point. For example, there was no universal education until secular authorities became preeminent. So, their policies assured a small educated elite and ignorant masses, which doesn't lead to rapid development.
StuRat (
talk)
22:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I think it's a fair enough criticism that the Church may have had the means to spread learning farther than it did; however I think you overestimate its role. Considering the demographic, economic, and environmental events in Europe between 500-1500, any efforts a small smattering of monks may have had could have amounted to pissing in the ocean. You can be correct that the Church centers of learning remained inwards looking and did not disseminate what they knew to the general population, but I don't think that made much of a difference one way or the other. --
Jayron3222:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Why wouldn't it ? The Renaissance was somewhat kicked off by a rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks, etc. If that knowledge had been widespread earlier, perhaps we would have gotten an earlier Renaissance. As I noted previously, Roman water engineering principles would have been quite valuable.
StuRat (
talk)
22:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The social, economic, and environmental conditions present when the Renaissance happened enabled people the leisure time, especially in the Urban centers of Italy initially, and then in other urban centers, to study the ancient classic texts. You're still putting the cart before the horse. --
Jayron3223:04, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
But many of those social, economic, and environmental conditions were a result of a lack of ancient knowledge. Knowledge and social, economic, and environmental conditions are interdependent, not simply cause and effect.
StuRat (
talk)
23:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Except the renaissance didn't result in clean water coming to the cities again. It wasn't by reading Aristotle and Livy and Cicero that people stopped shitting where they drank. It wasn't until people like
Joseph Aspdin developed
portland cement that building materials aproached the type of concrete that the Romans used to build the aqueducts, and engineers like
Joseph Bazalgette started building sewerage containment and transport facilities, and that came in the 1800s. Those men worked in the UK, but similar developments occured in other major cities at around the same time.
Water supply and sanitation in the United States confirms that even in the U.S. people didn't figure out it would be a good idea to seperate human fecal waste from water supplies until the 1880s or so. Again, if you're going to hang your hat on clean water supplies as being the key allowing urbanization, it neither was a result of studying classical learning, nor did it come about prior to the regrowth of cities. Look Stu, myself and several others have presented actual facts from the historical record to back up our position. You've asserted a lot of things, but haven't presented a single bit of evidence that your notions are correct. You can't just assert stuff as reality without any evidence, and especially when evidentiary-based counterarguments are presented. --
Jayron3200:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
But how was the Roman knowledge of building cement lost ? Was it in one or more of the many libraries destroyed by religious conflict ? If so, we might have had decent sanitation far earlier. And yes, once it became the norm to have a total lack of sanitation, then you not only had the lack of technology to overcome, but also tradition.
StuRat (
talk)
00:38, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Practical knowledge like mixing concrete isn't something that's preserved in libraries. How many contractors do you know today that go to a library to figure out how to mix concrete? The knowledge wasn't lost because libraries were destroyed or people stopped reading the books therein. Lots of knowledge gets lost because it is procedural knowledge that is passed from person-to-person, and when the people who know how to do something stop teaching it to others, the knowledge gets lost. Without people living in cities, there wasn't a need for concrete mixers and building on that scale. People living in mud huts don't have much use for such knowledge. Concrete is an almost purely urban technology: no cities, no need for concrete. The decline in urbanization caused the knowledge of how to build good cities to decline as well: without the legions to defend the cities, people left them. Without people in the cities, there was no need for the sort of monumental building, including aqueducts and sewers, that cities needed. When people returned to the cities some thousand years later, they had to relearn all of that stuff from first principles because no one had been doing it for a thousand years, not because someone burnt a book. --
Jayron3204:43, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, actually it was described in
De Architectura by
Vitruvius. Anyway...what does any of this have to do with anything? There isn't even a coherent argument happening here, much less anything that has to do with the original question.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
12:45, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Galileo got in trouble mostly because he was a dick about it (insulting the Pope, etc). Also, the crusades had absolutely nothing to do with stifling Muslim science. I'm not even sure how that would have worked. Do you have an example of this? If anything the crusades facilitated introducing Muslim science into Europe, from another direction (since it was already happening in Spain and Sicily). The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was far more destructive than anything the crusades ever did (well, akin to the crusader sack of Constantinople, anyway...but that had no effect on Muslim science either, heh).
Adam Bishop (
talk)
19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
As stated above, by the destruction of libraries, institutions of learning, etc. And, more subtly, during a religious war resources will go to armaments and religious indoctrination, not science (with an exception for sciences having immediate military applications).
StuRat (
talk)
19:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Sincerily I have not a final answer about that. Major religions seem all to have begun more or less in revolutionary ways, obviously restricting freedom of though or at least, of expression. But my remark concerned only indoctrination. --
Askedonty (
talk)
09:07, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Nonsense. These were Hellenic and Byzantine libraries written in Greek, not Turkish, and not Arabic, and institutions that had been co-opted by the Turks, who happened to chose Islam as more suited to their military lifestyle than Christianity. Is there evidence that any of these institutions were targeted for destruction by the crusaders, rather than collateral damage?
μηδείς (
talk)
19:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Or...destroyed at all, even. The Jewish library in Jerusalem (or was it Ascalon?) suffered from the initial crusader invasion, but I don't think they did much damage to Muslim institutions anywhere.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
20:00, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The Crusaders were a minor footnote in the history of Islam; the Levant was never the center of Islamic culture during the 1000-1300 period when the Crusades were active, and they never held much territory or any significant population centers aside from Jerusalem. Islam's major cities (Alexandria, Damascus, especially Baghdad) remained out of Crusader hands. It would be like the Russians invading and capturing coastal Oregon and Washington and perhaps Seattle, and then claiming they had somehow had a hand in destroying or hastening the destruction of the U.S. The Crusaders were an annoyance at worst. The real damage to Islamic culture and learning came from the East and not the West; the
Siege of Baghdad (1258) by the Mongols (already mentioned) was far more significant. That would be like the Russians nuking New York. --
Jayron3222:58, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It's not "random fluctuation" but it's not necessarily some external factor that causes it. Take a look at the
Ottoman Empire page. There's a lot going on in the world between 1299 and 1922. The Ottomans fell behind in several key areas: exploration, resource exploitation, industrialization, war-making, and empire consolidation (which is hard no matter how prosperous you are, especially at a time when ethnic nationalism was on the rise). I don't think there's any one, single, external factor that accounts for it, unless you want to count "the rise of Europe" as an external factor. (What accounts for the rise of Europe? A lot of things. Unimpeded access to the resources of the New World didn't hurt, though.) --
Mr.98 (
talk)
14:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(ec) One thing to realize is that the
Turkic peoples originally lived in Central Asia, and only migrated to Turkey around the 11th century AD. They have nothing to do with the ancient Anatolians, who lived there originally. Furthermore, the emergence of a language is not a sign of civilization. Some very 'primitive' tribes have amazingly complex languages. We don't have any preserved writing from these early periods (before c. 3000 BC); the Nature article is based on computer models, not archaeology. That's not to say that the ancient Anatolians were not a 'great people', they're just completely unrelated to modern Turkey. Regarding the Ottoman Empire, see Mr.98's comments above. -
Lindert (
talk)
14:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(
edit conflict)x4 Um, there's a big problem with the OPs question and some of the answers given. The patch of dirt currently occupied by the Turkish people was not occupied by the Turkish people 8000 years ago, or even 2000 years ago. Or even their ancestors. The ancestors of the modern Turkish people are not Indo-European people, so the fact that the people who spoke the
Proto-Indo-European language may have come from there has no connection to the modern nation of Turkey. Turks come from a very different part of Asia, and migrated into the current place we call Turkey during the middle ages, long after PIE, see
Turkish_people#Origins. So, if we are trying to figure out what is different between the Turkish people today and the people who lived in what we now call Turkey some 8000 years ago, it helps to note that those people aren't the ancestors of modern Turks. Secondly, the predominant explantion for the origin of PIE is that it originated in the
Pontic-Caspian steppe, basically what is now the extreme southeastern corner of Europe where it meets the (somewhat arbitrary boundary) with Asia. The origins of the language in what is now Turkey is but one explanation, and does not appear to be the one held by the majority of scholars, and even if it were true, the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago. The article
History of Anatolia has some good information on the various peoples who have called that place home. Thirdly, speaking a language that later evolves into other languages isn't really an innovation: that would imply that there was something about PIE that made it better than other languages at the time and that innovation lead to it being spread or something like that. What causes a language to spread has a lot more to do with politics and factors unrelated to the quality of the language itself. --
Jayron3214:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Jayron32 -- there was not anything approaching a complete population replacement in Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). A number of the pre-1071 inhabitants of Anatolia were heretics or quasi-Manicheans who were not too attached to Orthodox Christianity as officially defined at Constantinople in the first place. Also, the classic Islamic missionary "Sufi bait-and-switch" was employed -- the first wave of Islamic missionaries that most ordinary people in villages would have encountered would have been itinerant Sufis, who would have promulgated a form of Islam as a joyful religion which imposed very light demands; all the Shariah legalism etc. didn't come along until a later phase... As for the Pontic-Caspian steppe, see the Kurgan Hypothesis comments below...
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:56, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There almost never is a "complete population replacement", and it didn't happen over night, but over time the dominant culture and the dominated population can start to assymilate. The important bit isn't how fast, or in what manner, Anatolia when from the Hellenistic sphere to the Turkish sphere, the point is that it did unquestionably did happen, and culturally and linguistically there is still more connection between the ancient Turkic peoples who lived elsewhere at the time cited (9000 BC) than with the people who lived in Anatolia at that time. The point is the land we call Turkey hasn't always (or even long, comparitively speaking) been Turkish, but rather had been of a distinct and unrelated culture until the middle ages. --
Jayron3219:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There certainly has been a dramatic cultural transformation, but you said "the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago" -- and even if there had been a complete population replacement after 1071, this would still be unlikely according to
Most recent common ancestor mathematics, and given what actually did happen after 1071, it's not factual... By the way, from ca. 600 AD to 1071 AD, Anatolia was kind of the center of gravity of the Greek-speaking world (more so than Greece proper, which was partly overrun with Slavic-speakers).
AnonMoos (
talk)
04:00, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I should clarify then. The people that live there certainly have genetic ancestors that lived in Anatolia. Culturally, however, there is little trace (except a few Turkified names of older Greek origin)) of the former culture of the area. Your point about it being a Greek land from 600-1000 is very relevent to my point. It wasn't Turkish in culture in any way. Indeed, parts of Anatolia remained Greek even after the Seljuks moved in;
Trebizond and
Nicea were Greek for several centuries after Manzikert. However, by the time that the Ottomans became the "Old man of Europe", Anatolia had (excepting perhaps some pockets along the Ionian coast) become mostly Turkish. The point is that if one is trying to figure out what happened to the Turkish culture in Anatolia that was different than some distant point in the past, Turkish culture didn't arrive in Anatolia until the middle ages. --
Jayron3204:36, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well the Ottoman Empire isn't Turkey. This question makes it sound like you're asking what went wrong with Turkey today, rather than the Ottoman Empire. As for the latter, a number of reasons. Firstly, size. It was too large to be able to administer for centuries. Eventually, you got lazy kings and ineffective bureaucracies. This led to outside parts of the empire becoming their own independent territory, such as in the Balkans, or falling to another empire, such as the Safavids. Shifts in government also destablizied the kingdom, as well as new war technology in the hands of other countries. Hope it helps. --Activism123414:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
No, the Ottoman Empire was Turkey. Contemporary documents frequently called it "Turkey", both internally and externally, and the modern nation of Turkey is a direct successor state to what was the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, it controlled lots of non-Turkish lands, because that is what Empires do, but as the hegemony within the Empire was Turkey, it is common and correct to think of it as the Turkish Empire. In the same way that the Austian Empire is a predecessor state to the modern country of Austia, or that the Holy Roman Empire is a predecessor state to Germany, or that the Soviet Union is a predecessor state to modern Russia, it is fine to think of the Ottoman Empire as a predecessor state to modern Turkey. The Sultans were Turks, the language of government was Turkish. It was Turkey with a bunch of dominated territories tacked on as the "empire" part. Yes, they are not identical, any more than Russia is identical to the Soviet Union, but neither are they entirely unrelated states, as though the modern nation of Turkey winked into existance in 1923 with no connection to the former Ottoman Turkish Empire. --
Jayron3214:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Perhaps, but the question posed by the OP would've been clearer to just say the Ottoman Empire which denotes a different time period and territories than Turkey does. --Activism123419:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Not exactly. The Turkish (as opposed to Iranian or Arabic or Maghrebi or Bulgarian or Greek) part of the Ottoman Empire, covers roughly the same extent as the modern state of Turkey, and that region and that culture dominated the Ottoman politics. There was not an equal partnership between ethnicities within the Ottoman empire. --
Jayron3219:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
What went wrong with Turkey? arbitrary break #1
Wnt -- regarding one of the premises of your question, it's been noticeable for a while now that very few actual linguists support the
Anatolian hypothesis, and I really don't see that dramatically changing anytime soon, despite the latest study reported in the news (a study which was not conducted by linguists, you'll note). Linguists are much more likely to be convinced by the
Kurgan hypothesis (or slight modifications and elaborations of the Kurgan hypothesis). As for Turkish backwardness, such backwardness did not begin to be conspicuously visible to either Europeans or to the Ottomans themselves until after the events of 1683 (the failed
Siege of Vienna) -- before 1683, the Ottomans won more than they lost. Some historians would say that the Ottomans didn't decline much at all in absolute terms, but they failed to keep pace with European developments, and so declined in relative terms. Many people in Muslim lands were somewhat contemptuous of "infidels", and didn't think there was much to be learned from non-Muslims. One warning sign was that while Europe was enthusiastically adopting the invention of printing with movable metal type, before the 18th century such printing was allowed in the Ottoman empire only if it was in a script other than Arabic, and intended for a non-Muslim readership...
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:44, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Wow - I never expected to get so many intriguingly detailed answers. Of them, the strangest is the notion that the modern-day Turkish people are of a different race (and culture?) than those living there pre-1100. There's a lot of history in these articles, so could someone do me a favor and explain how on Earth that happened? But the universal censorship described in this last one best fits my ideological preconceptions of what it would take to destroy a nation so thoroughly - can you elaborate?
Wnt (
talk)
18:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I have to chime in with Jayron and AnonMoos on the very weak support for the Anatolian Hypothesis among linguists. The latest study is based on a statistical analysis with suspect premises. And it has no actual tie to archeological evidence. The 9000 year date, were it true, could have occurred anywhere. There is nothing actually tying it to Anatolia. The Kurgan hypothesis matches detailed linguistic data with strong archeaological evidence. See J P Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans.
μηδείς (
talk)
19:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Wnt, it is fascinating, isn't it? Basically before 1100, the territory of modern Turkey was known as Anatolia, and had been part of the Byzantine Empire, and earlier the Roman Empire, for well over a thousand years. For a few centuries before that it was largely Greek (to simplify things a bit). Some famous ancient Greeks were from there - Herodotus, and a lot of the Greek scientists/philosophers for example. Anyway, between 1000 and 1100, Turkic nomads from further east in central Asia had started moving west, pushed out of where they were previously living by other Turkic groups (including, ultimately, the Mongols). They settled in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. These were the Seljuk Turks. The Byzantines weren't altogether happy with that, but the Seljuks defeated them in a battle in 1071 and conquered most of Anatolia. They didn't completely replace the Greek population, but they ruled the territory, and their successors a few centuries later were the Ottomans.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
19:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
To be fair, all of those languages had gone extinct some centuries (or in some cases millenia) before the Turks moved into Anatolia. --
Jayron3205:11, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, perhaps, and I suspect so as well. But your claim is based on negative evidence. The OP would do well to read the articles I have linked to. Various Indo-European Anatolian languages the family of which I have already linked to, and Hellenistic Greek, were probably current when the Altaic Turks invaded.
μηδείς (
talk)
05:18, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Which ones, other than Greek, were spoken in Anatolia during the centuries leading up to, and covering the time period, when the Turks moved in? Other than Armenian and the Caucasian languages along the eastern edges of what might be called Anatolia, all of the languages you cite above don't seem to be attested in Anatolia at that time: the
Anatolian languages article you cite notes that they had all gone extinct quite a long time before the Turks arived, to be replaced almost completely by Greek, I also don't see any specific Afroasiatic languages listed that were extent in Anatolia during, say 100-1000 AD, excepting maybe Hewbrew used by any Jewish populations; though I suspect that most, if not all, Jewish people living in Anatolia at that time were fully Hellenized. --
Jayron3205:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
We agree there is no evidence that those languages or their descendents were actively being spoken at the time of the Ottoman invasions.
μηδείς (
talk)
18:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It's not unheard of that groups of people move from one place to another. I would compare it to Australia or North America: 500 years ago there were 'no' whites there, and now they are the majority population, having supplanted the original population.
V85 (
talk)
15:26, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I recognize these examples - but I'd always regarded them as a rare aberration, the result of populations coming into contact after thousands of years of separation, so that disease resistance, agriculture, metallurgy, and military technology all conspired to harm native populations of Australia and North America. For a country to be completely overrun and replaced by a neighbor it has been in contact with - well, it happens, for example in South Africa, or in the steppes of Asia, but I thought this was typical of nomadic civilizations where moving was relatively easy. For a place like Anatolia to be replaced - that's something different.
Wnt (
talk)
15:14, 30 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There's a business in New York that's closed on weekends.
Is it normal for people sitting to get
towed throughout the US or only in New York? Here in NZ they only do it with motorised vehicles. If it's a person sitting on the ground or steps you may be asked to move on, served with a trespass notice, or worst case scenario arrested, but never towed....
Nil Einne (
talk)
18:28, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It depends on how big the person who needs to be moved is. I've seen some people that need a tow truck to move around. --
Jayron3218:31, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Are there any academic fields that study volunteerism? I know political science has a lot of insights on civic engagement and sociology has some on social groups, but does any field scientifically investigate things like outcomes of volunteers, reasons people volunteer, etc in a social scientific manner like causation studies? I'm sorry I cannot be more specific here.--
108.23.47.101 (
talk)
18:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You are right on track. Each social science is probably studying it from a different perspective: economical, sociological, psychological, and so on.
OsmanRF34 (
talk)
19:03, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Also in your Business and Economics Faculty: Political science (Kropotkin & Mutual Aid), Labour history (solidarity), Industrial Relations, Organisational Studies, Human Resources management.
Fifelfoo (
talk)
22:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Sociology in its Form as 3rd Sector Studies. Any sector of sociology active in the realm of
civil society-theory / contemporary cultural theory as well as philosophical schools around that topic (e.g.
Jürgen Habermas via
Gramsci for the Neo-Marxists.), political science insofar it considers
civic engagement as pertinent to the object of discussion.
Network theory insofar as volunteer groups may be the source of weak ties. Economics were already mentioned. Literature of interest might be:
Jeffrey Alexander The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2006) Psychology I do not know wherefore I cannot attest to the involvement in volunteer studies. --
Abracus (
talk)
12:25, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I just ran across a U.S. government document from the 1970s in which
HUD defined fair rents for each county in the country for different types of housing units. Each county had an entry for housing units of 0 bedrooms, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, and 4 bedrooms, with separate lines for with-elevator and without-elevator. What kind of housing unit would be defined as having 0 bedrooms? Is this just some bureaucratic designation for what everyone else would call a 1-bedroom unit? Or did HUD care about places that really weren't housing at all?
2001:18E8:2:1020:C2:8653:9179:E109 (
talk)
18:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, a studio apartment has no bedroom. You find them in major city centers. A one-bedroom in Manhattan means a closet you can sleep in with a combined living room/kitchen. A studio has a combined living room/kitchen/sleep space.
μηδείς (
talk)
19:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
In the UK, at least, it is very common for a studio apartment to be listed as "0 bedrooms", so I agree that is almost certainly what they mean. --
Tango (
talk)
20:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, it seems to be a matter of definition. If a bedroom is "any room which is designed to contain a bed, among other uses", then a studio has 1, while if it's "any room which is designed primarily to contain a bed", then a studio has 0.
StuRat (
talk)
22:24, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Note the trendy practice of using old businesses as homes. Such a home may have an elevator to take you to your floor, which is a huge open space, with no separate bedroom.
StuRat (
talk)
19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
0 bedroom apartments are what we would call a "bachelor's suite" in Canada. The number usually refers to the number of separate bedrooms, something a government studying adequate housing for families might be interested in. --
NellieBly (
talk)
02:13, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but the American (and UK?) system of counting the bedrooms always confuses me. In Sweden, and I assume at least some other places, you count the number of rooms. So, a studio is a one room apartment, and what you'd call a 3 bedroom apartment, we'd call a "4-roomer". /
Coffeeshivers (
talk)
22:16, 31 August 2012 (UTC)reply
We would also call a three bedroom apartment a 4-room apartment, uness it had a full living room and a full kitchen, in which case it would be a five-room apartment. What confuses you?
μηδείς (
talk)
03:45, 1 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Canadian Equalization Formula
Doe anyone know the exactly how fiscal capacity is calculated for the purposes of federal equalization payments in Canada? I know (50% of) actual revenues from natural resources are used. For the rest of the categories (personal income taxes, business income taxes, consumption taxes, and property taxes and miscellaneous), "fiscal capacity" is used. Fiscal capacity is defined to be the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates. Does anyone know how this calculation is actually done? Finding the tax rate is relatively straight forward, but how is the tax base calculated?
Eiad77 (
talk)
21:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Page 40 of
this document has some information, although it doesn't go into full details. This is the sort of arcane stuff which only a handful of economists at the Ministry of Finance fully understand. You may need to contact them directly to get more precise references. --
Xuxl (
talk)
09:51, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. Incidentally, that document is from before the most recent changes to the equalization formula in 2008, so it is slightly out of date.
Eiad77 (
talk)
11:10, 29 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the
current reference desk pages.
August 27 Information
Audiobook for . . .
Hi I am searching desperately for an audio book version of:
I know that some e-readers like
Amazon Kindle have a text-to-speech function. It is a bit unnatural, as opposed to an actual audio book, but if there is nothing else, there is always that. --
Jayron3202:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Though it should be noted that — I believe — publishers can disable that functionality on a per-book basis at their whim. So it may not actually be an option. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
12:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Audiobooks are more common in fiction than in non-fiction - and especially more serious non-fiction - because there isn't a market for them. With a serious non-fiction book, people want to be able to mark it up, refer to footnotes, make copies, compare pages in chapters, etc. and that makes the audiobook format less appealing to readers. (I assume you're not looking for this book for a visually impaired person; if you are, check with your local "books for the blind" organization.) --
NellieBly (
talk)
05:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Questions about law in the Victorian period
I am currently writing a novel set in the Victorian era in Australia. I have checked out books on the subject and searched the Internet, but I can't find out particular information on the legal system of the time. First, what was the difference between murder and manslaughter then, if they differentiated it in the first place? And if they did, what was the difference in sentences? Also, when was the first time female lawyers appeared? Thank you for your help, I much appreciate it.
Southernlegacy (
talk)
01:11, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Prior to 1901, as I'm sure you know, Australia was a collection of
crown colonies. According to that article, each colony had its own independent legal system, largely based on
English Common law but adjustable according to local circumstances. I would expect that in most places, if not everywhere, the answer to your question about murder versus manslaughter would have been the same as for Common law. Regarding female lawyers I have no information, but it would surprise me if there were any during the Victorian era.
Looie496 (
talk)
03:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Doing some digging, I found some information on pioneering female lawyers.
Ethel Benjamin was New Zealand's first practicing female lawyer, and started practicing in the late Victorian era.
Mary Hall was an early American female lawyer, and she practised in the Victorian era (1880s-1890s). Canadian
Clara Brett Martin is noted as the first female lawyer in the British Empire, she started practising shortly before Ethel Benjamin. I can't find any information on who the first female lawyer in Australia would have been, but in other Anglophone countries it seems that there were a small handful of female lawyers in the late Victorian era. --
Jayron3205:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Why does the United States have relatively more shootings than most developed countries?
Ever since that
Colorado theater shooting last month, there has been a number of high-profile shootings, like
that one at a Sikh temple and
at the Empire State Building. But I was wondering – why? I know it's probably because of the lack of effective gun laws, but what are other possible reasons, especially psychological or political? While there are a few other countries like Canada that have more guns per people, murders and shootings aren't as common. In fact, I'm not aware of any developed country that has shootings as frequent as the US. Why does America have so many shootings in the first place?
Narutolovehinata5tccsdnew03:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Of course what counts as a violent crime varies from one country to another. As even the source for that paragraph in the US gun politics article (a report in the
Daily Mail - whose entire raison d'être is to convince the English middle-classes that the country has gone to rack and ruin) concedes "In Britain, an
affray is considered a violent crime, while in other countries it will only be logged if a person is physically injured." The statistic in that article that is surely more relevant here, as the question is why does America have so many more shootings, is the homicide rate by firearm:- (from the same article) 3.0 per 100,000 people in the US and 0.07 per 100,000 people in the UK. If we compare
homicide rates (what counts as a homicide varies between jurisdictions but there is far less variance than the fairly nebulous term "violent crime"), the US has a homicide rate of 4.2, the UK 1.2, Canada 1.6, Australia 1.0, France 1.1, Germany 0.8 (homicides per 100,000 population). Further comparisons can be made at the homicide rate article, but to sum up, the US has a homicide rate that's 3 to 4 times higher than comparable countries.
Valiantis (
talk)
04:28, 29 August 2012 (UTC)reply
If you are referring to mass shootings, they aren't actually very common even in the US -- they are very salient because of all the news coverage they receive. Canada has only 1/10 the population of the US so it would be expected to have only a tenth as many even if all factors were equal. If you are referring to individual shootings, in the US the majority are related to gang violence, a problem that is considerably less severe in most Canadian cities.
Looie496 (
talk)
03:27, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The average murder related to gang violence usually is barely mentioned in the national American news media. But once a mass shooting occurs, IMO and relatively speaking, the national media sort of acts like the "
The sky is falling!" with all the coverage.
Zzyzx11 (
talk)
03:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(ec)The U.S. has a relatively higher
Gini coefficient than other countries, and the consequences of poverty are harsher. For example, access of the poor or even the middle class to serious health care generally comes at the cost of bankruptcy, and advanced procedures like transplants are notoriously kept unavailable. In those cases where welfare is still given, or in impoverished neighborhoods, conditions are such that prison ethics, complete with an intolerance for snitching and a low value on human life, hold general sway. To the poorest, prison seems so inevitable, and justice so unreliable, that it scarcely serves as a deterrent. National and international gangs and cartels are the adaptive response to the prevailing conditions, and prisons serve as their recruiting ground rather than suppressing them.
Wnt (
talk)
03:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That's a new one. The inavailability of kidney transplants causes gun crime! If you want to see the utter absurdity of leftist thought, look no further. Instead, try the
war on drugs (theft to support habits and gang turf disputes) if you want a rational explanation for the vast majority of gun violence in the US.
μηδείς (
talk)
04:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(You've yet again failed to place your comment following the one to which you are responding, and indent from it, so I've indented appropriately, in case you fix yours.) I agree that this is a tenuous link, but there was a movie made based on it: John Q.
StuRat (
talk)
10:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
So when you "awarded" IP 203 the "pedant award" without either signing it or indenting it, while I was being threatened with Nucular Jihad for assigning people one-character large stars, that was just a mistake, StuRat? Go jump in a lake.
μηδείς (
talk)
23:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
And how exactly does one indent a pic ? I just added the signature. Will you be correcting your mistake ? I wasn't involved in the stars at all, so why bring that up ? And now your resorting to
incivility, to boot ?
StuRat (
talk)
23:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The entire comment above was meant as a general one, not solely in response to Wnt, so I purposefully did not indent it and do not intend to. I suppose I should have put a smiley after the suggestion you jump in a lake, I didn't think using a phrase from looney toons would be taken as actively hostile.
μηδείς (
talk)
18:21, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I don't dispute the role of the War on Drugs in instigating crime, however ... aren't there anti-drug crusades in the other countries in this comparison? My feeling is that when life for the poor becomes so hazardous and squalid that prison hardly seems any worse, it loses its power to deter, even when it is used with unreasonable vindictiveness.
Wnt (
talk)
23:46, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Anti-drug crusades in non-American countries rarely involve killing people and seizing their assets.
μηδείς (
talk)
For the OP, avoiding as much of the debate as I can, you might be interested in The Better Angels of Our Nature by
Steven Pinker. I don't have it handy, so I don't know if he directly addresses the cause of the rate of gun violence in America, but he does deal with the cultural norms that affect violence, and the impact of history. There is also an important specific example covered that might have general relevance, that is, the evidence suggesting differences in the psychological makeup of Southerners and Northerners in their response to conflict. The distinction is based on an experiment that shows (or proves, or suggests) that Southerners are more responsive to antagonism, and Pinker claims this is linked to the frontier state that persisted for longer in the South. The implication seems to be (at least as a partial explanation, surely not the whole one), that the American colonies were driven by a frontier mentality that persists today and even has lingering psychological consequences. You can draw your own conclusions from this sort of evidence, because it's not my area, but you might find the book useful. I emphasise that this does not neutralise the evidence and explanations of others, and I'm sure you can get some other (possibly better) reading suggestions here too,
IBE (
talk)
12:17, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
French Wikipedia has a little more on her husband, see
fr:Achille Delmaet. It appears he was a photographer known for taking nude pictures, but otherwise I can't find much more. The French article
fr:Marie-Juliette Louvet also has a little bit more on the children, such as birth and death dates, but does not go into details. --
Jayron3206:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Can a full blooded African American can be as light or lighter?
(
edit conflict) What does "full blooded" mean? We're all
full-blooded Africans, but we have varying degrees of time since our most recent ancestors lived there. Also, comparisons require a second thing to compare to. As light or lighter than what? If you want to research the variations within black people, the article
Black people has some information to get you started. --
Jayron3206:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Im guessing he means that those who are not of mixed heritage (as in some who had the european slave owners' blood in them, or other more recent interracial marriages' offspring).
I would venture a guess to say it is possible, depending on where in Africa they came from (and by that, dont have mixed heritage with europeans or others). Ethiopians for example are considerably more lighter skinned than west/central or even southern africans. (though it sees some in the far south are lighter than the west and centre.)
Lihaas (
talk)
08:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
"About 30% of black Americans who take DNA tests to determine their African lineage prove to be descended from Europeans on their father's side, says Rick Kittles, scientific director of African Ancestry, a Washington, D.C., company that began offering the tests in 2003. Almost all black Americans whom Kittles has tested descended from African women, he says."[1].
Alansplodge (
talk)
10:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Just to get it out of the way — there is also
Albinism. It is also worth noting that there are numerous population groups in Africa. I presume you mean someone from sub-Saharan Africa, and not, say, North Africa. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
12:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You have to define the time of mixing arbitrarily. Don't forget Anthony and Cleopatra, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. And of course the countless merchant crews trading gold and opium across the Mediterranean or along the ancient Suez Canal, or the many kingdoms which have moved from place to place along the Mediterranean shores in response to the demands of trade and the tides of war. People have been making booty calls over mid-sized seas for a very very long time. Of course, even aside from those such as the Egyptians and the Afar people whom one might say are mixed, there is also substantial variation among those within Africa - compare the images from
Bushmen, who I assume have little introgression of European genes, to a notably dark-skinned group of Africans such as the
Dinka people.
Wnt (
talk)
13:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Worthy of note is that culturally and by decent, Cleopatra was Greek. I'm not sure that any of her ancestors were natively Egyptian. See
Ptolemaic dynasty for a history of her ancestors. Certainly, they adopted Egyptian culture and the trappings of the Pharaohs, but if we're going by the somewhat arbitrary rules that you are what your ancestors were, then she isn't any more "African" than Anthony was. --
Jayron3214:31, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, since my point was that people on either side of the sea have been of mixed race for a long time, this doesn't seem like an objection.
Wnt (
talk)
23:48, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, no. Everyone is of mixed race. The North Africans like Qaddafi have been largely "white". They are at most (Mubarak) 1/4 or less "negroid". There's hardly any point in pointing out that, say,
Nefertiti was "black", even if you define
Oksana Baiul as pure white and
Hussain Bolt as pure black.
Charles Thompson , a friend of
Ernest Hemingway during his first East Africa safari ?
Hello learned humanitarians ! I saw in the german version of the article
Green Hills of Africa (§ "Überblick") that Hemingway hunted with a friend named Charles Thompson. Who may he be ? (there is a lot of them in "disambiguation"...) . Thanks a lot beforehand, t.y.
Arapaima (
talk)
09:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I just read at Nature News that even 8000 to 9500 years ago, Turkey was apparently an innovator, producing the
Indo-European languages.
[3] Numerous animals were apparently domesticated there (even if nailing down the details is beyond my patience at the moment). My impression is that the prominence of Ancient Greece depended substantially on people from Turkey, under their control at the time, which then passed to Roman control with the same results, even becoming the core of the empire, before finally becoming part of the Muslim world, where they continued to remain preeminent, with technology far outstripping Europe, for example. And yet, somehow, the
Ottoman Empire declined, advances in civil liberties were rebuffed, there was military and scientific stagnation, and they became the "sick man of Europe". Is there any systematic explanation for the change - a climate alteration, a change from land to sea shipping, some objective phenomenon that can explain why a country goes from perpetual preeminence to obscurity? Or is it all just random fluctuation?
Wnt (
talk)
13:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I believe it has to do with the dominance of religion over science. Similarly, when Christianity dominated over science in Europe in the Middle Ages, there was stagnation there, as well.
StuRat (
talk)
13:28, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I can sort of see this argument, but I'm not sure how much of this is fact and how much fiction. Islam did not prevent
Jabir ibn Hayyan from becoming the first alchemist, indeed, inventing much of chemistry including ironically enough the distillation of alcohol.
Avicenna was free to use wine for various medicinal purposes two centuries later. True, these were Persians, living in
Umayyad and
Abbasid Caliphates ruled from Syria and Iraq, but I'll partially ignore that as much of the political territory was shared and it's not that much of a distance. Can you say for sure that religious fanaticism became more pronounced in the past few centuries?
Wnt (
talk)
13:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
StuRat's answer is, unfortunately, one that is completely ignorant of actual history. Islam was the preeminent language of learning during the so-called Middle Ages. Religion was not the reason that Europe lacked "science" during the Middle Ages (the Church was more or less the only benefactor of higher education and learning in Europe during that time and poured huge resources into astronomical research). StuRat is speaking about bad clichés and nothing more. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
14:01, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Did you really want to say " Islam was the preeminent language of learning " not "Arabic was..." or "Islam was the ... vehicle of learning"?
OsmanRF34 (
talk)
15:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
If you disagree with somebody, prove them wrong, don't just call them ignorant, without proof. That just makes you look bad. And spending money on research is great, unless you constrain your researchers to keep any discoveries which run counter to your doctrine secret (like heliocentrism).
StuRat (
talk)
14:25, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You don't seem to understand my argument. Neither Christianity or Islam is inherently anti-science. However, at times, both developed an anti-science attitude. These are the times when those cultures stagnated. Now, as to why those religions had such attitudes at times and not others, that's more complicated. Having a single religious leader (like the Pope) who dominated all secular leaders was a factor in Europe. After the
Reformation, the power of the Pope was reduced, allowing for more freedom for those with ideas that ran counter to The Church, including scientists, especially in Northern Europe.
StuRat (
talk)
14:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That's a good explanation for an elemenary school class maybe, but fortunately not really at all how things actually worked. See, I don't know,
science in the Middle Ages for one thing. (I don't know what else to say because I know I've corrected you on this point numerous times in the past, and I'm sure many others have too, but if you don't care, then all we can ask is for you to stop repeating it...)
Adam Bishop (
talk)
14:50, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I'm going to have to back Adam Bishop on this regarding Christianity and Science in the Middle Ages. The general regression Europe experienced (in many areas, not just learning) had to do with environmental factors mostly unrelated to religion, and likely a lot more to do with demographic factors. Foremost was the de-urbanization that occured: the number and density of cities declined dramatically after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, and cities are known to be the home of innovation.
This article in
Scientific American magazine contains a good overview, but there's been a lot of studies, especially recently, on this topic, and there is a direct correlation between urban life and technological and cultural advancement. It would follow, then, that if people are abandoning the cities, technology and learning are going to take a hit. Furthermore, Europe in the middle ages experienced a sharp and shocking decline in population, especially those areas which had formerly been part of the Western Roman Empire, owing to widespread famine, and the
Black Death. Certainly, advancements were made and Europe did advance in some areas during the time period, but that was largely in spite of the environment that people were living in, which given the historical context one would easily predict a few steps backwards. Of final note, the Catholic Church was, in many ways, the major force for what knowledge was preserved, since often the only literate people were the clergy, and they spent a lot of time copying ancient texts (not just the Bible, but also secular and pre-christian works) and many of the major scientific minds of the age were Christian clergy, including
Roger Bacon and
Robert Grosseteste and
William of Ockham, all of whom had a profound influence on the development of modern science. --
Jayron3215:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Some points:
1) What caused people to move out of cities ?
2) Europe was in decline long before the Black Death, so it's population decline was not the driving factor.
3) Of course many of the scientists at the time were religious people, since there was very little opportunity for anyone not involved in The Church to pursue such studies, and they would risk running afoul of religious doctrine.
StuRat (
talk)
18:48, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Europe's population decline preceded the black death by some time. It should be noted that there were actually two population collapses, one at the end of the Roman Empire time, and one during the Late Middle Ages. The so-called
High Middle Ages featured a population boom. See
Medieval demography, which specifically mentions deurbanization. There are lots of possible explanations as to why the cities depopulated so much during the middle ages. Cities have advantages and disadvantages. One of the key issues is that large urban populations need armies to defend them; the pull out of the Roman legions out of many of areas coincided with the deurbanization, that is not a coincidence as cities are hard to defend and also an attractive target for raiders, being a concentration of wealth. Agricultural production also declined, perhaps due to poor soil management or climatic changes, and less food means that the cities can't support as many people. Plagues also tend to have a much greater effect on the cities: they breed plagues due to close proximity of people. The population curve would be somewhat W shaped, with a steep decline at the end of
Classical antiquity and a steep rebound at the
early modern period. In between, the population remained somewhat stagnant, with a bit of a hump in the curve around the 1100s and 1200s. The reason for point #3 is still deurbanization: with the abandonment of the cities, the Church became the only place which was wealthy enough and with enough training to maintain knowledge and learning. The Church didn't cause deurbanization, it had very little to do with it. --
Jayron3220:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I bet both deurbanization and depopulation were due to losing the Roman system of water engineering (aqueducts and such), which brought in clean water and removed sewage (although they didn't treat it). By comparison, dumping sewage in the streets was a recipe for disaster. But then the question becomes, why was this technology largely lost after the Romans ?
StuRat (
talk)
22:37, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Rome underwent a quick decline in population when the grain deliveries from Egypt and the province of "Africa" (i.e. current-day northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria) were cut off...
AnonMoos (
talk)
04:03, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I didn't write my response to you (StuRat), really — I wrote it for anybody out there uninformed enough not to realize that you were just being ignorant. I know better than to give you actual book references, and am highly dubious that you will bother to actually learn anything new that goes against your pre-held beliefs, but hey, go ahead and prove me wrong! Start out with
Islam_and_science#History and see where you get. Maybe check out the
Islamic Golden Age. There's a lot you appear to know nothing about, so it's unclear to me exactly where to start. Try looking at
Catholic Church and science, focusing on the middle ages. (Of course, real historians don't even like to use the category
Middle Ages, but let's set that aside for now.) There are lots of variables involved in the relationship between Islam and science, but any potential issues relating to Islam and science — which frankly are unlikely to apply to Turkey anyway, which you may or may not know is one of the most "progressive" Islamic republics in the Middle East — are extremely recent. But anyway, there are some nice references. Feel free to back up your own knee-jerk opinions with a few while you're at it. You may have areas of expertise, StuRat, but you have shown again and again on here that the study of history is not one of them. --
Mr.98 (
talk)
15:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You apparently are too ignorant to know about the
Galileo affair. Note that for every scientist who was put on trial by The Church for opposing their doctrine, many more were either warned quietly and backed off, or choose never to say or print anything publicly which The Church might find offensive. So, the cases that actually came down to a trial are but the tip of the iceberg. For example "Copernicus delayed publication of his book, perhaps from fear of criticism—a fear delicately expressed in the subsequent dedication of his masterpiece to Pope Paul III" (from
Catholic Church and science). Then we have
Catholic_Church_and_science#Gessner. Also see
List of authors and works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In the Muslim world, we have the destruction of the
Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din. Most relevant to the OP is why the
Islamic Golden Age came to an end: "...in addition to invasion by the Mongols and crusaders and the destruction of libraries and madrasahs, it has also been suggested that political mismanagement and the stifling of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in the 12th century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a part." In the case of
The Crusades, here we have a case of Christianity stifling Muslim science.
StuRat (
talk)
18:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
That ignores the fact that Galileo did not live in the Middle Ages, he lived during the Protestant Reformation, and the political milleu surounding him was very different than the middle ages. This does not excuse what the Church did to him, which was without question inexcusable, however inexcusable is not a synonym for unexplainable, and understanding what happened to Galileo necessitates understaning the political landscape of early 17th century Europe, which was some half a millenium after the time period we're talking about. Connecting the dots between the loss of learning in the middle ages and what the church did to Galileo belies a complete misreading of history and a huge conflation of unrelated issues. The 1600s were NOT the 1100s. It should also be noted that the Church's efforts against Galileo were largely impotent; learning and technological advances when unabated despite their efforts, while in the middle ages, when Church clergy was at the vanguard of scientific advances some 400 years earlier, and showed no doctrinal objections to sceintific study AT ALL, Europe was moving backwards. There just isn't any evidence that there was any causal relationship between church doctrine that was hostile to science (which again, occured in the early 1600s during the Protestant Reformation and must be understood in that context) and the much earlier decline of European civilization and learning that occured after the fall of the Western Empire. It is wrong to make that connection chronologically, and it doesn't bear out with the actual facts of the history. --
Jayron3220:19, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There's also the tendency of The Church to keep scholarly works in Latin, Greek, or other classic languages, making them inaccessible to the vast majority. But perhaps it's what they didn't do when they were dominant that's more to the point. For example, there was no universal education until secular authorities became preeminent. So, their policies assured a small educated elite and ignorant masses, which doesn't lead to rapid development.
StuRat (
talk)
22:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I think it's a fair enough criticism that the Church may have had the means to spread learning farther than it did; however I think you overestimate its role. Considering the demographic, economic, and environmental events in Europe between 500-1500, any efforts a small smattering of monks may have had could have amounted to pissing in the ocean. You can be correct that the Church centers of learning remained inwards looking and did not disseminate what they knew to the general population, but I don't think that made much of a difference one way or the other. --
Jayron3222:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Why wouldn't it ? The Renaissance was somewhat kicked off by a rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks, etc. If that knowledge had been widespread earlier, perhaps we would have gotten an earlier Renaissance. As I noted previously, Roman water engineering principles would have been quite valuable.
StuRat (
talk)
22:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The social, economic, and environmental conditions present when the Renaissance happened enabled people the leisure time, especially in the Urban centers of Italy initially, and then in other urban centers, to study the ancient classic texts. You're still putting the cart before the horse. --
Jayron3223:04, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
But many of those social, economic, and environmental conditions were a result of a lack of ancient knowledge. Knowledge and social, economic, and environmental conditions are interdependent, not simply cause and effect.
StuRat (
talk)
23:26, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Except the renaissance didn't result in clean water coming to the cities again. It wasn't by reading Aristotle and Livy and Cicero that people stopped shitting where they drank. It wasn't until people like
Joseph Aspdin developed
portland cement that building materials aproached the type of concrete that the Romans used to build the aqueducts, and engineers like
Joseph Bazalgette started building sewerage containment and transport facilities, and that came in the 1800s. Those men worked in the UK, but similar developments occured in other major cities at around the same time.
Water supply and sanitation in the United States confirms that even in the U.S. people didn't figure out it would be a good idea to seperate human fecal waste from water supplies until the 1880s or so. Again, if you're going to hang your hat on clean water supplies as being the key allowing urbanization, it neither was a result of studying classical learning, nor did it come about prior to the regrowth of cities. Look Stu, myself and several others have presented actual facts from the historical record to back up our position. You've asserted a lot of things, but haven't presented a single bit of evidence that your notions are correct. You can't just assert stuff as reality without any evidence, and especially when evidentiary-based counterarguments are presented. --
Jayron3200:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
But how was the Roman knowledge of building cement lost ? Was it in one or more of the many libraries destroyed by religious conflict ? If so, we might have had decent sanitation far earlier. And yes, once it became the norm to have a total lack of sanitation, then you not only had the lack of technology to overcome, but also tradition.
StuRat (
talk)
00:38, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Practical knowledge like mixing concrete isn't something that's preserved in libraries. How many contractors do you know today that go to a library to figure out how to mix concrete? The knowledge wasn't lost because libraries were destroyed or people stopped reading the books therein. Lots of knowledge gets lost because it is procedural knowledge that is passed from person-to-person, and when the people who know how to do something stop teaching it to others, the knowledge gets lost. Without people living in cities, there wasn't a need for concrete mixers and building on that scale. People living in mud huts don't have much use for such knowledge. Concrete is an almost purely urban technology: no cities, no need for concrete. The decline in urbanization caused the knowledge of how to build good cities to decline as well: without the legions to defend the cities, people left them. Without people in the cities, there was no need for the sort of monumental building, including aqueducts and sewers, that cities needed. When people returned to the cities some thousand years later, they had to relearn all of that stuff from first principles because no one had been doing it for a thousand years, not because someone burnt a book. --
Jayron3204:43, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well, actually it was described in
De Architectura by
Vitruvius. Anyway...what does any of this have to do with anything? There isn't even a coherent argument happening here, much less anything that has to do with the original question.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
12:45, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Galileo got in trouble mostly because he was a dick about it (insulting the Pope, etc). Also, the crusades had absolutely nothing to do with stifling Muslim science. I'm not even sure how that would have worked. Do you have an example of this? If anything the crusades facilitated introducing Muslim science into Europe, from another direction (since it was already happening in Spain and Sicily). The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was far more destructive than anything the crusades ever did (well, akin to the crusader sack of Constantinople, anyway...but that had no effect on Muslim science either, heh).
Adam Bishop (
talk)
19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
As stated above, by the destruction of libraries, institutions of learning, etc. And, more subtly, during a religious war resources will go to armaments and religious indoctrination, not science (with an exception for sciences having immediate military applications).
StuRat (
talk)
19:47, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Sincerily I have not a final answer about that. Major religions seem all to have begun more or less in revolutionary ways, obviously restricting freedom of though or at least, of expression. But my remark concerned only indoctrination. --
Askedonty (
talk)
09:07, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Nonsense. These were Hellenic and Byzantine libraries written in Greek, not Turkish, and not Arabic, and institutions that had been co-opted by the Turks, who happened to chose Islam as more suited to their military lifestyle than Christianity. Is there evidence that any of these institutions were targeted for destruction by the crusaders, rather than collateral damage?
μηδείς (
talk)
19:57, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Or...destroyed at all, even. The Jewish library in Jerusalem (or was it Ascalon?) suffered from the initial crusader invasion, but I don't think they did much damage to Muslim institutions anywhere.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
20:00, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
The Crusaders were a minor footnote in the history of Islam; the Levant was never the center of Islamic culture during the 1000-1300 period when the Crusades were active, and they never held much territory or any significant population centers aside from Jerusalem. Islam's major cities (Alexandria, Damascus, especially Baghdad) remained out of Crusader hands. It would be like the Russians invading and capturing coastal Oregon and Washington and perhaps Seattle, and then claiming they had somehow had a hand in destroying or hastening the destruction of the U.S. The Crusaders were an annoyance at worst. The real damage to Islamic culture and learning came from the East and not the West; the
Siege of Baghdad (1258) by the Mongols (already mentioned) was far more significant. That would be like the Russians nuking New York. --
Jayron3222:58, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It's not "random fluctuation" but it's not necessarily some external factor that causes it. Take a look at the
Ottoman Empire page. There's a lot going on in the world between 1299 and 1922. The Ottomans fell behind in several key areas: exploration, resource exploitation, industrialization, war-making, and empire consolidation (which is hard no matter how prosperous you are, especially at a time when ethnic nationalism was on the rise). I don't think there's any one, single, external factor that accounts for it, unless you want to count "the rise of Europe" as an external factor. (What accounts for the rise of Europe? A lot of things. Unimpeded access to the resources of the New World didn't hurt, though.) --
Mr.98 (
talk)
14:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(ec) One thing to realize is that the
Turkic peoples originally lived in Central Asia, and only migrated to Turkey around the 11th century AD. They have nothing to do with the ancient Anatolians, who lived there originally. Furthermore, the emergence of a language is not a sign of civilization. Some very 'primitive' tribes have amazingly complex languages. We don't have any preserved writing from these early periods (before c. 3000 BC); the Nature article is based on computer models, not archaeology. That's not to say that the ancient Anatolians were not a 'great people', they're just completely unrelated to modern Turkey. Regarding the Ottoman Empire, see Mr.98's comments above. -
Lindert (
talk)
14:18, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
(
edit conflict)x4 Um, there's a big problem with the OPs question and some of the answers given. The patch of dirt currently occupied by the Turkish people was not occupied by the Turkish people 8000 years ago, or even 2000 years ago. Or even their ancestors. The ancestors of the modern Turkish people are not Indo-European people, so the fact that the people who spoke the
Proto-Indo-European language may have come from there has no connection to the modern nation of Turkey. Turks come from a very different part of Asia, and migrated into the current place we call Turkey during the middle ages, long after PIE, see
Turkish_people#Origins. So, if we are trying to figure out what is different between the Turkish people today and the people who lived in what we now call Turkey some 8000 years ago, it helps to note that those people aren't the ancestors of modern Turks. Secondly, the predominant explantion for the origin of PIE is that it originated in the
Pontic-Caspian steppe, basically what is now the extreme southeastern corner of Europe where it meets the (somewhat arbitrary boundary) with Asia. The origins of the language in what is now Turkey is but one explanation, and does not appear to be the one held by the majority of scholars, and even if it were true, the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago. The article
History of Anatolia has some good information on the various peoples who have called that place home. Thirdly, speaking a language that later evolves into other languages isn't really an innovation: that would imply that there was something about PIE that made it better than other languages at the time and that innovation lead to it being spread or something like that. What causes a language to spread has a lot more to do with politics and factors unrelated to the quality of the language itself. --
Jayron3214:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Jayron32 -- there was not anything approaching a complete population replacement in Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). A number of the pre-1071 inhabitants of Anatolia were heretics or quasi-Manicheans who were not too attached to Orthodox Christianity as officially defined at Constantinople in the first place. Also, the classic Islamic missionary "Sufi bait-and-switch" was employed -- the first wave of Islamic missionaries that most ordinary people in villages would have encountered would have been itinerant Sufis, who would have promulgated a form of Islam as a joyful religion which imposed very light demands; all the Shariah legalism etc. didn't come along until a later phase... As for the Pontic-Caspian steppe, see the Kurgan Hypothesis comments below...
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:56, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There almost never is a "complete population replacement", and it didn't happen over night, but over time the dominant culture and the dominated population can start to assymilate. The important bit isn't how fast, or in what manner, Anatolia when from the Hellenistic sphere to the Turkish sphere, the point is that it did unquestionably did happen, and culturally and linguistically there is still more connection between the ancient Turkic peoples who lived elsewhere at the time cited (9000 BC) than with the people who lived in Anatolia at that time. The point is the land we call Turkey hasn't always (or even long, comparitively speaking) been Turkish, but rather had been of a distinct and unrelated culture until the middle ages. --
Jayron3219:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There certainly has been a dramatic cultural transformation, but you said "the people who live there now are not the decendants of those who lived there 8000 years ago" -- and even if there had been a complete population replacement after 1071, this would still be unlikely according to
Most recent common ancestor mathematics, and given what actually did happen after 1071, it's not factual... By the way, from ca. 600 AD to 1071 AD, Anatolia was kind of the center of gravity of the Greek-speaking world (more so than Greece proper, which was partly overrun with Slavic-speakers).
AnonMoos (
talk)
04:00, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I should clarify then. The people that live there certainly have genetic ancestors that lived in Anatolia. Culturally, however, there is little trace (except a few Turkified names of older Greek origin)) of the former culture of the area. Your point about it being a Greek land from 600-1000 is very relevent to my point. It wasn't Turkish in culture in any way. Indeed, parts of Anatolia remained Greek even after the Seljuks moved in;
Trebizond and
Nicea were Greek for several centuries after Manzikert. However, by the time that the Ottomans became the "Old man of Europe", Anatolia had (excepting perhaps some pockets along the Ionian coast) become mostly Turkish. The point is that if one is trying to figure out what happened to the Turkish culture in Anatolia that was different than some distant point in the past, Turkish culture didn't arrive in Anatolia until the middle ages. --
Jayron3204:36, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Well the Ottoman Empire isn't Turkey. This question makes it sound like you're asking what went wrong with Turkey today, rather than the Ottoman Empire. As for the latter, a number of reasons. Firstly, size. It was too large to be able to administer for centuries. Eventually, you got lazy kings and ineffective bureaucracies. This led to outside parts of the empire becoming their own independent territory, such as in the Balkans, or falling to another empire, such as the Safavids. Shifts in government also destablizied the kingdom, as well as new war technology in the hands of other countries. Hope it helps. --Activism123414:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
No, the Ottoman Empire was Turkey. Contemporary documents frequently called it "Turkey", both internally and externally, and the modern nation of Turkey is a direct successor state to what was the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, it controlled lots of non-Turkish lands, because that is what Empires do, but as the hegemony within the Empire was Turkey, it is common and correct to think of it as the Turkish Empire. In the same way that the Austian Empire is a predecessor state to the modern country of Austia, or that the Holy Roman Empire is a predecessor state to Germany, or that the Soviet Union is a predecessor state to modern Russia, it is fine to think of the Ottoman Empire as a predecessor state to modern Turkey. The Sultans were Turks, the language of government was Turkish. It was Turkey with a bunch of dominated territories tacked on as the "empire" part. Yes, they are not identical, any more than Russia is identical to the Soviet Union, but neither are they entirely unrelated states, as though the modern nation of Turkey winked into existance in 1923 with no connection to the former Ottoman Turkish Empire. --
Jayron3214:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Perhaps, but the question posed by the OP would've been clearer to just say the Ottoman Empire which denotes a different time period and territories than Turkey does. --Activism123419:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Not exactly. The Turkish (as opposed to Iranian or Arabic or Maghrebi or Bulgarian or Greek) part of the Ottoman Empire, covers roughly the same extent as the modern state of Turkey, and that region and that culture dominated the Ottoman politics. There was not an equal partnership between ethnicities within the Ottoman empire. --
Jayron3219:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
What went wrong with Turkey? arbitrary break #1
Wnt -- regarding one of the premises of your question, it's been noticeable for a while now that very few actual linguists support the
Anatolian hypothesis, and I really don't see that dramatically changing anytime soon, despite the latest study reported in the news (a study which was not conducted by linguists, you'll note). Linguists are much more likely to be convinced by the
Kurgan hypothesis (or slight modifications and elaborations of the Kurgan hypothesis). As for Turkish backwardness, such backwardness did not begin to be conspicuously visible to either Europeans or to the Ottomans themselves until after the events of 1683 (the failed
Siege of Vienna) -- before 1683, the Ottomans won more than they lost. Some historians would say that the Ottomans didn't decline much at all in absolute terms, but they failed to keep pace with European developments, and so declined in relative terms. Many people in Muslim lands were somewhat contemptuous of "infidels", and didn't think there was much to be learned from non-Muslims. One warning sign was that while Europe was enthusiastically adopting the invention of printing with movable metal type, before the 18th century such printing was allowed in the Ottoman empire only if it was in a script other than Arabic, and intended for a non-Muslim readership...
AnonMoos (
talk)
16:44, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Wow - I never expected to get so many intriguingly detailed answers. Of them, the strangest is the notion that the modern-day Turkish people are of a different race (and culture?) than those living there pre-1100. There's a lot of history in these articles, so could someone do me a favor and explain how on Earth that happened? But the universal censorship described in this last one best fits my ideological preconceptions of what it would take to destroy a nation so thoroughly - can you elaborate?
Wnt (
talk)
18:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I have to chime in with Jayron and AnonMoos on the very weak support for the Anatolian Hypothesis among linguists. The latest study is based on a statistical analysis with suspect premises. And it has no actual tie to archeological evidence. The 9000 year date, were it true, could have occurred anywhere. There is nothing actually tying it to Anatolia. The Kurgan hypothesis matches detailed linguistic data with strong archeaological evidence. See J P Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans.
μηδείς (
talk)
19:22, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Wnt, it is fascinating, isn't it? Basically before 1100, the territory of modern Turkey was known as Anatolia, and had been part of the Byzantine Empire, and earlier the Roman Empire, for well over a thousand years. For a few centuries before that it was largely Greek (to simplify things a bit). Some famous ancient Greeks were from there - Herodotus, and a lot of the Greek scientists/philosophers for example. Anyway, between 1000 and 1100, Turkic nomads from further east in central Asia had started moving west, pushed out of where they were previously living by other Turkic groups (including, ultimately, the Mongols). They settled in Mesopotamia and Anatolia. These were the Seljuk Turks. The Byzantines weren't altogether happy with that, but the Seljuks defeated them in a battle in 1071 and conquered most of Anatolia. They didn't completely replace the Greek population, but they ruled the territory, and their successors a few centuries later were the Ottomans.
Adam Bishop (
talk)
19:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
To be fair, all of those languages had gone extinct some centuries (or in some cases millenia) before the Turks moved into Anatolia. --
Jayron3205:11, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, perhaps, and I suspect so as well. But your claim is based on negative evidence. The OP would do well to read the articles I have linked to. Various Indo-European Anatolian languages the family of which I have already linked to, and Hellenistic Greek, were probably current when the Altaic Turks invaded.
μηδείς (
talk)
05:18, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Which ones, other than Greek, were spoken in Anatolia during the centuries leading up to, and covering the time period, when the Turks moved in? Other than Armenian and the Caucasian languages along the eastern edges of what might be called Anatolia, all of the languages you cite above don't seem to be attested in Anatolia at that time: the
Anatolian languages article you cite notes that they had all gone extinct quite a long time before the Turks arived, to be replaced almost completely by Greek, I also don't see any specific Afroasiatic languages listed that were extent in Anatolia during, say 100-1000 AD, excepting maybe Hewbrew used by any Jewish populations; though I suspect that most, if not all, Jewish people living in Anatolia at that time were fully Hellenized. --
Jayron3205:30, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
We agree there is no evidence that those languages or their descendents were actively being spoken at the time of the Ottoman invasions.
μηδείς (
talk)
18:10, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It's not unheard of that groups of people move from one place to another. I would compare it to Australia or North America: 500 years ago there were 'no' whites there, and now they are the majority population, having supplanted the original population.
V85 (
talk)
15:26, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I recognize these examples - but I'd always regarded them as a rare aberration, the result of populations coming into contact after thousands of years of separation, so that disease resistance, agriculture, metallurgy, and military technology all conspired to harm native populations of Australia and North America. For a country to be completely overrun and replaced by a neighbor it has been in contact with - well, it happens, for example in South Africa, or in the steppes of Asia, but I thought this was typical of nomadic civilizations where moving was relatively easy. For a place like Anatolia to be replaced - that's something different.
Wnt (
talk)
15:14, 30 August 2012 (UTC)reply
There's a business in New York that's closed on weekends.
Is it normal for people sitting to get
towed throughout the US or only in New York? Here in NZ they only do it with motorised vehicles. If it's a person sitting on the ground or steps you may be asked to move on, served with a trespass notice, or worst case scenario arrested, but never towed....
Nil Einne (
talk)
18:28, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
It depends on how big the person who needs to be moved is. I've seen some people that need a tow truck to move around. --
Jayron3218:31, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Are there any academic fields that study volunteerism? I know political science has a lot of insights on civic engagement and sociology has some on social groups, but does any field scientifically investigate things like outcomes of volunteers, reasons people volunteer, etc in a social scientific manner like causation studies? I'm sorry I cannot be more specific here.--
108.23.47.101 (
talk)
18:20, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
You are right on track. Each social science is probably studying it from a different perspective: economical, sociological, psychological, and so on.
OsmanRF34 (
talk)
19:03, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Also in your Business and Economics Faculty: Political science (Kropotkin & Mutual Aid), Labour history (solidarity), Industrial Relations, Organisational Studies, Human Resources management.
Fifelfoo (
talk)
22:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Sociology in its Form as 3rd Sector Studies. Any sector of sociology active in the realm of
civil society-theory / contemporary cultural theory as well as philosophical schools around that topic (e.g.
Jürgen Habermas via
Gramsci for the Neo-Marxists.), political science insofar it considers
civic engagement as pertinent to the object of discussion.
Network theory insofar as volunteer groups may be the source of weak ties. Economics were already mentioned. Literature of interest might be:
Jeffrey Alexander The Civil Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2006) Psychology I do not know wherefore I cannot attest to the involvement in volunteer studies. --
Abracus (
talk)
12:25, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I just ran across a U.S. government document from the 1970s in which
HUD defined fair rents for each county in the country for different types of housing units. Each county had an entry for housing units of 0 bedrooms, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, and 4 bedrooms, with separate lines for with-elevator and without-elevator. What kind of housing unit would be defined as having 0 bedrooms? Is this just some bureaucratic designation for what everyone else would call a 1-bedroom unit? Or did HUD care about places that really weren't housing at all?
2001:18E8:2:1020:C2:8653:9179:E109 (
talk)
18:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, a studio apartment has no bedroom. You find them in major city centers. A one-bedroom in Manhattan means a closet you can sleep in with a combined living room/kitchen. A studio has a combined living room/kitchen/sleep space.
μηδείς (
talk)
19:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
In the UK, at least, it is very common for a studio apartment to be listed as "0 bedrooms", so I agree that is almost certainly what they mean. --
Tango (
talk)
20:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Yes, it seems to be a matter of definition. If a bedroom is "any room which is designed to contain a bed, among other uses", then a studio has 1, while if it's "any room which is designed primarily to contain a bed", then a studio has 0.
StuRat (
talk)
22:24, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Note the trendy practice of using old businesses as homes. Such a home may have an elevator to take you to your floor, which is a huge open space, with no separate bedroom.
StuRat (
talk)
19:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
0 bedroom apartments are what we would call a "bachelor's suite" in Canada. The number usually refers to the number of separate bedrooms, something a government studying adequate housing for families might be interested in. --
NellieBly (
talk)
02:13, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but the American (and UK?) system of counting the bedrooms always confuses me. In Sweden, and I assume at least some other places, you count the number of rooms. So, a studio is a one room apartment, and what you'd call a 3 bedroom apartment, we'd call a "4-roomer". /
Coffeeshivers (
talk)
22:16, 31 August 2012 (UTC)reply
We would also call a three bedroom apartment a 4-room apartment, uness it had a full living room and a full kitchen, in which case it would be a five-room apartment. What confuses you?
μηδείς (
talk)
03:45, 1 September 2012 (UTC)reply
Canadian Equalization Formula
Doe anyone know the exactly how fiscal capacity is calculated for the purposes of federal equalization payments in Canada? I know (50% of) actual revenues from natural resources are used. For the rest of the categories (personal income taxes, business income taxes, consumption taxes, and property taxes and miscellaneous), "fiscal capacity" is used. Fiscal capacity is defined to be the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates. Does anyone know how this calculation is actually done? Finding the tax rate is relatively straight forward, but how is the tax base calculated?
Eiad77 (
talk)
21:29, 27 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Page 40 of
this document has some information, although it doesn't go into full details. This is the sort of arcane stuff which only a handful of economists at the Ministry of Finance fully understand. You may need to contact them directly to get more precise references. --
Xuxl (
talk)
09:51, 28 August 2012 (UTC)reply
Thanks. That's what I was afraid of. Incidentally, that document is from before the most recent changes to the equalization formula in 2008, so it is slightly out of date.
Eiad77 (
talk)
11:10, 29 August 2012 (UTC)reply