So far I've translated about 2000 pages out of ten languages that I don't speak. Here are my top three problems:
1. Though most of what I translate is technically in the modern form of these languages, the spelling isn't. If I actually spoke the languages, I could pronounce the words out loud and them figure out.
2. Some writers are overly flowery or just plain bad stylists. This often defeats the available grammar of my translation programs leaving me to bludgeon my way through in short phrases or even word-by-word.
3. Actual typos in the source material. I figure out the grammar part and start entering every possible variation I can into various dictionaries and none of them is a word. Finally, I realize they weren't minding their P's and Q's and everything is fine.
Bonus observation: About three years ago I noticed something odd about the way the long and short S was used in some documents. There two sets rules for their use. The difference centers on when to use the short S. In some pieces they would be using one set of rules and suddenly shift to a different set. At first I thought they didn't have enough pieces of long S type to do some sheets and shifted over to the rules that allowed more short S's for those sheets. Just last week I finally figured out what was really going on. I was reading a monthly journal that probably needed to be assembled and printed fairly quickly. The printer was a fairly large house and must have had more than one typesetter working in the shop with some of them using one set of rules and some using the other.
I'm writing this to avoid working on a Latin document that is rife with sin #2. Get back to work, John.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Monday, August 24, 2015
A tale of two skulls
In early December 1695, a
group of workmen were excavating some fine white sand from a quarry
between the villages of Burgtonna and Gräfentonna, in Thuringia. The
sand was valuable in a number of crafts, including filling
hourglasses, so the workers were careful in their excavations. You
probably know what happened next. They uncovered “some awful big
bones” and sent word to the castle to find out what to do with
them. Luckily for us, the lord of the land, Duke Fredrick II of
Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was an enlightened despot who was both a patron
of the arts and sciences and an avid collector. More than simply
ordering the workmen to save the bones for his collections, he had
them leave the bones in place and slowly uncover them. This modern
style excavation would be an under-appreciated milestone in the
development of paleontology.
What the diggers
discovered that day were a pair of feet and lower legs pointing
northward. The feet had five toes and short ankle bones. The
spectators thought they looked more like human feet than any animal
they knew. At that point, the weather turned nasty and the excavation
was halted until after the new year. In January, the work resumed.
Over a period of about two weeks, they uncovered the upper legs,
pelvis, a complete vertebral column with ribs, the upper limbs with
five digit hands or feet, and... a “hideous head” unlike anything
anyone had ever seen. To one side of the top of the skull were two
enormous, curved pieces of what appeared to be ivory. With the entire
skeleton nicely uncovered, the Duke made a special trip from Gotha on
January 23 to view it, bringing along a large retinue that included a
number of doctors from the university and his personal librarian.
The doctors, led by Johann
Christoph Schnetter, and the librarian, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, all
had a good laugh over the silly peasants who had thought the bones
were those of a giant. Although that would have been preferred
explanation of many educated men earlier in the century, very few
still believed that there had ever been giants other than the few
individuals named in the Bible. While the doctors and Tentzel agreed
on what the bones were not, they passionately disagreed about what
they were. Schnetter and the doctors believed they were the natural
formations that merely looked like bones while Tentzel believed that
they were the remains of a real elephant. Duke Fredrick chose not to
take sides. He ordered the doctors and Tentzel to each submit a brief
summarizing their arguments.
Today, most people would
look at the bones and say "any idiot can see that those are
fossils of some kind of elephant." Most would probably pick a
mammoth for that type of elephant. But, in the Seventeenth Century,
idiots and educated alike had only the vaguest idea what an elephant
looked like and even less idea what its skeleton looked like. The
educated were aware that the lack of data for comparative anatomy was
a problem, but there was nothing they could do about it. There
weren't enough elephants to go around.
Between the end of the
Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, we have records of
exactly two elephants appearing in European Christendom. One belonged
to Charlemagne and the other to Henry III of England. This began to
change during the Sixteenth Century. After the Portuguese reached
India by going around Africa, they began bringing back elephants that
various Indian kings sent as gifts to their king. Manuel I sent one
of those elephants named Hanno to Pope Leo X. The elephant died soon
after. When Leo died he was buried with his elephant. The Portuguese
kings sent least four others to their fellow monarchs during that
century. In the Seventeenth Century, elephants were still rare, but
the owners began sending them on tours, both to show off their wealth
and to educate the population. Two elephants in particular influenced
the debate between the doctors and Tentzel.
The first was named
Hansken. After the Dutch East India Company beat the Portuguese out
of the India trade, one of their agents acquired a young female
elephant in Ceylon in 1637. Once in Europe, her owners taught her
some tricks and and sent her on a tour of the continent where she
performed before audiences in an approximation of modern circus acts.
After eighteen years on the road, she injured her foot in Italy,
developed an infection, and died in Florence on November 9, 1655. A
special mass was written for her. Grand Duke Ferdinando II was
obsessed with the new sciences and had most of the good parts of
Hansken removed before burying her. He had the skeleton mounted as
accurately as possible and had her skin stuffed with straw for his
collection.
Hansken, by Rembrandt. The British Museum.
There is no name recorded
for the second elephant. In June of 1681, a showman named Wilkins
brought an elephant to Dublin, Ireland and set up a booth near the
Custom House to show it. Early on the morning of Friday the
seventeenth, the booth caught fire and the poor creature was killed
before Wilkins could bring it to safety. Wilkins realized there was
still money to be made from his elephant if he could salvage the
skeleton and continue his tour displaying it. He arranged for a troop
of musketeers to be sent over to guard the corpse from souvenir
seekers while he set out to hire as many butchers as he could to
clean the bones before the smell became a public nuisance.
Late in the day, a doctor
named Alan Mullen heard about the elephant and rushed over to
negotiate with Wilkins. Mullen wanted to have an orderly dissection
with artists ready to make renderings of each part. Wilkins was
willing to let Mullen direct the work of the butchers, but insisted
they finish it in one day and dispose of the smelly parts before
Sunday when they would not be allowed to work. Mullen ordered the
butchers to start working immediately. They worked through the night
and through Saturday, completing the work before the Sunday deadline.
Mullen wrote up
descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s parts and sent an
account to Will Petty of the Royal Philosophical Society in London.
His examination was far superior to anything that been published in
Europe (in India, veterinary treatises on elephants had been
available for centuries). Petty had Mullen’s letter published as a
pamphlet. In the forty-two pages Mullen describes all of the major
organs and some of the muscle groups, but gives surprising little
space to the bones. This lack is made for by a trifold diagram of the
reconstructed skeleton, which Wilkins had managed to assemble and
take back on the road, and a separate drawing of the skull.
Mr. Wilkins' elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.
The Gotha doctors' belief
that the bones were natural mineral occurrences and not organic
remains was a peculiarly European idea. In most of the rest of the
world, people had very little problem believing that unfamiliar old
bones, even petrified and damaged ones, were organic remains.
Renaissance Europeans had a tradition, derived from Neoplatonic
philosophy, of a certain "power" in nature that allowed
spontaneous generation. Things might grow based on no visible cause.
Flies grow from poop, small pebbles appear in peoples' kidneys,
Scottish geese grow out of driftwood, and, as even we moderns know, a
crop of rocks grows in our gardens every winter. Another tradition,
derived from a number of philosophic sources, held that certain other
"powers" could give shape to growing things. This is why a
piece of agate might have a landscape in it, another might have an
image of the Virgin Mother in it, and other stones might be shaped
like bones.
The doctors organized
their arguments, Schnetter wrote them up, and they had them published
and distributed to great thinkers around Europe by St. Valentine's
day. The entire pamphlet is seven pages long and a sizable chunk of
it is dedicated to describing the discovery. They spend very little
space laying out the argument itself. They assume that most of their
audience is already familiar with the basic elements of it. The
largest part of the pamphlet is dedicated to citing contemporary
thinkers who might agree with them. Between these two parts, they
make a preemptive strike against Tentzel by explaining why the
supposed bones could not be an elephant. One point is that, while the
bones are not scattered, they are somewhat disarticulated. Each bone
is separated from the next by at least the thickness of a hand. A
second point is that the tusks appear to be hollow, not solid ivory.
What appears to be the most damning point is that the skull looks
nothing like an elephant. Why are the tusks up by the eyes and not by
the mouth where everyone knows they should be?
Tentzel wrote a short
response, which he submitted directly to the Duke (it still exists in
the Gotha archives, but I haven't seen it). He took more time writing
a full statement of his case and, by taking more time, was able to
prepare a full rebuttal to the doctor's argument. He had a special
advantage in preparing his case. As curator of the Duke' collections,
he had access to fossils and other curiosities that he could compare
with the bones. He had the bones themselves; the Duke had had him
collect as many of the remains as he could. By taking more time he
was able to interview the diggers and other witnesses to excavation.
And he had Mullen's pamphlet with its detailed drawings of the
skeleton and skull.
Tentzel's public
presentation appeared in the April issue of a journal that he wrote
every month called Monatliche Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde von
Allerhand Büchern (Monthly Conversations between Good Friends about
All Kinds of Books). It runs 108 pages with an illustration of the
skull. After a detailed description of the discovery, the fictional
friends of the title take sides. Caecilius and Passagirer take
Tentzel's position and Aurelius and Didius defend the doctors”.
Naturally, most of the space is given to the former.
Tentzel's skull. Monatliche Unterredungen... April 1696.
Mullen's pamphlet is
liberally quoted to show that the Tonna bones have the same
proportions as the Dublin ones. Tentzel admits that there is a
problem here; his elephant is twice as big as the Dublin one. He has
an answer to that problem. Among the observers he interviewed was a
Dutch sailor who had spent many years in India. The sailor informed
him that elephants keep growing. By the size of the tusks, he
estimated that the Tonna elephant must have been at least 200 years
old. Caecilius and Passagirer describe many other recent discoveries
of large bones and ivory described by reputable witnesses. When
Aurelius and Didius get their turn, to Tentzel's credit, they give an
accurate summary of the doctor's position rather than a parody of it.
They still lose the debate.
Along with his summary of
Mullen's pamphlet, Tentzel mentions Hansken and says he is writing to
some illustrious colleagues in Italy to get accurate measurements of
it. In July, he published a long letter in Latin to Antonio
Magliabechi, the personal librarian to Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici,
the brother of Grand Duke Ferdinando. Magliabechi was one of the
major figures of the Republic of Letters during that generation and
widely renowned for his disgusting personal hygiene. In his letter,
Tentzel repeated most what he had written in Monatliche
Unterredungen, leaving out the literary floutishes and defense of the
doctors' position. Magliabechi and his Italian peers enthusiastically
endorsed Tentzel's conclusions and sent the detailed information he
requested. Italian scholars, as opposed to those north of the Alps,
had no trouble accepting the presence of elephants on their lands.
First, there were the war elephants of Pyrrus and Hannibal. Later,
there were the many elephants brought by the Romans to be slaughtered
in the circuses for entertainment. Magliabechi and several others
wrote their own pamphlets and letters to journals.
As Northwestern Europeans
began to accept the presence of elephants on their lands, the
discoveries of Italian scholars were frequently cited to make the
idea easier to accept. However, in the long run this delayed the
acceptance of the idea of other, extinct, elephant-like species.
Tentzel had his own cautious approach to the responses of his Italian
correspondents. He was glad to have their endorsement for his
conclusion that the remains were elephantine in nature. However, he
distanced himself from the idea that the remains came from historical
times. In his Monatliche Unterredungen, piece, he had Caecilius and
Passagirer carefully go over various historical arguments and reject
them. This could not be Charlemagne's elephant because it died in
Northern Germany. This could not have been an elephant of Attila's
because he moved to fast to have used elephants. It could not have
belonged to some unknown merchant or returning crusader because no
one would have abandoned something as valuable as the tusks. The very
location of the tusks argued against human agency. Tentzel pointed
out that the clear layering of strata above the remains showed that
the ground had never been disrupted by human action.
Tentzel's arguments appear
quite modern up to this point. His conclusion will appear less so to
most contemporary readers. Tentzel was quite firm in arguing that the
position of the remains was proof of the Noachian Deluge. This was a
special interest of his ans a topic he regularly returned to in
Monatliche Unterredungen. It's possible that his main interest in the
boned was that he saw them as proof of the Deluge. To him, the
northward orientation of the skeleton showed that it had drifted up
from the south. The neat layering of the strata above it was the sort
of deposition he expected from the receding flood waters.
Tentzel's argument that
the bones were the actual organic remains of an elephant had an
additional strength. As scientific communication moved from letters,
however widely distributed, to printed journals, with much wider
distribution, illustrations became much more important and accurate.
Perhaps the most important parts of Mullen's pamphlet were the
illustrations. Only a small number of living scholars had seen a live
elephant and only a very tiny number had seen a skeleton. Tentzel
took very conscious advantage of the importance of Mullen's skull
illustration.
The skull of Mr. Wilkins'
elephant. Falvey Memorial Library.
It took me a few looks to
understand this illustration. Why do the tusks look so short compared
to the profile? What's with that little hook at the end? I went back
to my sources on elephant dentition (it's a surprisingly complex topic.
Some day I'll write about it. I'm not sure how much the book needs).
My first thought was that it was the tusk core, but that's soft
tissue, not bone and, in any case, it doesn't have that hook at the
end. Then it occurred to me, we're looking at the tusks from the
tips. Most illustrations would tilt the skull to emphasize their
length. Mullen already showed their length in the full skeleton
profile. The tusks curve forward from the skull. A front-on view of
the skull dramatically reduces the apparent length of the tusks.
Tentzel's illustration
shows the same apparent shortness. By his own measurements, the tusks
should be longer that the skull. To emphasize the similarity with
Mullen's illustration, he portrayed his skull with the same
orientation. It lacked the drama that tipping the skull forward and
showing of the tusks would have had, but it strengthened his larger
argument that the Tonna remains were those of an elephant.
The majority of scholars
agreed with Tentzel about the remains being elephants though a
significant minority sided with a doctors. A small minority still
held out for giants. The great majority also agreed about the Deluge
being the cause of their deposition, though a small number had begun
to doubt the historical reality of a global flood. It would be
another century before they became a narrow majority.
The Tonna elephant would
be cited by proto-paleontologists for decades but their significance
would evolve over time. At first they were nothing more than an
argument for the organic nature of fossils. Later, as the debate over
mammoths developed, they would become an argument for the idea that
elephants had once lived far north of the tropics. Next, they would
be cited as a mammoth, rather than an elephant.
The remains are probably
gone now. If any parts are still in the Gotha collections, they are
no longer identified as such. That doesn't mean we can't identify the
species. In recent years, paleontologists have returned to the Tonna
quarries and worked the layer of white sand. They have dated it to
the late Eemian, the warmest period before the last ice age. The most
common proboscidean in that strata is the straight-tusked elephant
(Palaeoloxodon antiquus). This species was first identified in 1847.
It had a fairly wide range across Europe. Some of them wandered into
Sicily when the seas were low during the glacial maxima. There,
constrained by the limited resources of an island, they underwent a
process of dwarfing, eventually becoming Elephas mnaidriensis, the
cyclops skeletons I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Tentzel only published
Monatliche Unterredungen for one more year after his treatment of the
Tonna remains. The following January, he wrote a shorter piece
quoting the responses he had received from Italy. At the turn of the
century, he moved on to a new job with King of Saxony and briefly
published a new journal. During that time a second skeleton was found
at Tonna and he and Schnetter went at it one more time, but neither
added anything new to their arguments. The job with the King of
Saxony didn't work out and Tentzel died in poverty. Despite his
relevance during the next century, he has largely been relegated to
footnote status since. This appears to changing. He's had some
attention lately for his role as a science communicator. I'm doing my
best to see that he gets some attention for his science as well.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Please help Tessa and Marlowe
This is a plea to save my
ex from a financial death spiral. The short, short, short version is
that she needs about $3500 by the end of next week or she loses both
her car and her apartment.
Tessa lost her job soon
after the crash in 2008 and hasn't had a permanent job since then.
For a while, we tried to build a home business around soaps, lotions,
and scents that she made, but that never did more than break even.
She's an experienced technical writer and has been able to get short
contract gigs from time to time, but nowhere close to enough to live
on. When we split up, we divided what equity were able to get from
the house, but that didn't last very long. By last year, she was
pretty much completely broke. The one bright spot was that she was
enrolled in a computer programming course under a state program that
came with a modest living stipend. She was doing very well in the
courses and it looked things were finally bottoming out for her. Then
WellsFargo seized her stipend.
Like many people in her
position, she had been juggling her bills, sometimes having to choose
which bills would be paid that month and which would be skipped. She
closed the bank account from her business so that the card wouldn't
be a temptation. And she talked to their support people and thought
she had a verbal agreement to pay what she could, when she could.
They didn't remember it that way. After a few late and missed
payments, they called the whole amount due. A few months ago, when
her quarterly living stipend was deposited, they simply drained her
personal account. This is completely legal in the state of
Washington. Her rent check bounced and she didn't have any money for
groceries. This is why people hate banks.
When I found out about it,
I set up a GoFundMe account for her. Thanks to some very kind people,
we were able to cover about half of what she lost, the rent was paid,
and she was able to finish out the quarter. She graduated with flying
colors and glowing recommendations. But, that means the
stipends have stopped. She's had some short contract jobs and
unrelated office temp jobs, but not enough to keep her from falling
further behind. Her roommate doesn't make enough to cover both of
their bills. Last week, her car was repossessed and her current temp
job is in another town.
The world is full of these
stories. There's nothing that makes hers stand out from the crowd.
She's not a veteran. No one is forcing her to bake a cake. She's not
a cute kid with a horrible disease. Its not tied to popular culture
like a Tesla museum or new card game. I can't offer clever tee shirts
or fun prizes for donations. She's just another person who made some
mistakes and had far too many bad breaks. If it helps to make her
story more personal, here's picture of her cat.
I restarted the GoFundMe
account. There are more details of her fight with the bank there if
you're interested. We've made a couple hundred dollars this week. If
she already wasn't so far behind, that much each week would be enough
to get her by. But now her bills are being called due again. I would
completely cover her bills if I could, but I'm already homeless. At
this point in her life, she should be looking forward to retirement,
instead, she's staring into the void.
If you can, please donate.
If you can't, please share her story. Thanks.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
Flaming plagiarism from the skies!
I haven't done a good plagiarism story in a long time.
For the last couple of months, conspiracy and prophecy nuts have been fixated on mid-September as the time when something big is going to happen. They don't agree on the details, but a giant comet or asteroid hitting the earth has emerged as the favorite. Hunt online and you'll find dozens of blog posts and YouTube videos screaming that NASA has confirmed that a 2.5 mile-wide something is going to splash down into the Caribbean. And, as with the Mayan calendar and/or Niburu nonsense, NASA has finally had to issue a stop-being-silly press release.
I read the story about the press release in the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Toward the end of the short article, they linked to Huffington Post UK for details on one element of the conspiracy theory. I clicked through and found a slightly longer version of the same article. The first few sentences were so similar that I went back to the Mail to to see if they were both by the same writer. They're not. The HuffPo version is by Sara C. Nelson, the Mail version by Ellie Zolfagharifard. According to the timestamps, the HuffPo version went up thirteen hours earlier than the Mail version.
Take a look:
HuffPo: A gargantuan asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, with enough power to wipe out life as we know it.
The Mail: A massive asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and it is large enough to spell the end of humanity.
HuffPo: That’s the belief of an online community of biblical theorists who predict our collective demise will occur between 22 – 28 September 2015.
The Mail: This is the radical claim of an online community of biblical theorists who say that life as we know it will be wiped out between 22 to 28 September this year.
HuffPo: Though sources are dubious, chatter about the impending end of life as we know it has prompted Nasa to speak up.
The Mail: Despite their lack of credentials, the popularity of the prediction has now forced Nasa to speak up, dismissing the theory as unfounded.
HuffPo: Other similarly questionable sources cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 as being further evidence the Rapture is approaching.
The Mail: Some cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 is further evidence the Rapture is approaching, according to the Huffington Post.
HuffPo: At odds with talk of the Rapture, however, is the theory that the asteroid isn’t going to get us – but the CERN Large Hadron Collider will.
The Mail: Others have even predicted the events will be started by Cern's Large Hadron Collider.
HuffPo: One blogger points out: “The CERN logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle.”
The Mail: One blogger, said: 'The Cern logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle. The Cern collider looks like the all seeing eye or stargate we see so much of.'
I don't know the peculiarities of British news publishing or whether HuffPo and the Mail have some kind of arrangement that makes this possible, but, from my seat, it looks like a big steaming mess of plagiarism seasoned with a generous dose of chutzpah.
For the last couple of months, conspiracy and prophecy nuts have been fixated on mid-September as the time when something big is going to happen. They don't agree on the details, but a giant comet or asteroid hitting the earth has emerged as the favorite. Hunt online and you'll find dozens of blog posts and YouTube videos screaming that NASA has confirmed that a 2.5 mile-wide something is going to splash down into the Caribbean. And, as with the Mayan calendar and/or Niburu nonsense, NASA has finally had to issue a stop-being-silly press release.
I read the story about the press release in the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Toward the end of the short article, they linked to Huffington Post UK for details on one element of the conspiracy theory. I clicked through and found a slightly longer version of the same article. The first few sentences were so similar that I went back to the Mail to to see if they were both by the same writer. They're not. The HuffPo version is by Sara C. Nelson, the Mail version by Ellie Zolfagharifard. According to the timestamps, the HuffPo version went up thirteen hours earlier than the Mail version.
Take a look:
HuffPo: A gargantuan asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, with enough power to wipe out life as we know it.
The Mail: A massive asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and it is large enough to spell the end of humanity.
HuffPo: That’s the belief of an online community of biblical theorists who predict our collective demise will occur between 22 – 28 September 2015.
The Mail: This is the radical claim of an online community of biblical theorists who say that life as we know it will be wiped out between 22 to 28 September this year.
HuffPo: Though sources are dubious, chatter about the impending end of life as we know it has prompted Nasa to speak up.
The Mail: Despite their lack of credentials, the popularity of the prediction has now forced Nasa to speak up, dismissing the theory as unfounded.
HuffPo: Other similarly questionable sources cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 as being further evidence the Rapture is approaching.
The Mail: Some cite a meeting between French foreign minister Laurent Fabius and US Secretary of State John Kerry in May 2014 is further evidence the Rapture is approaching, according to the Huffington Post.
HuffPo: At odds with talk of the Rapture, however, is the theory that the asteroid isn’t going to get us – but the CERN Large Hadron Collider will.
The Mail: Others have even predicted the events will be started by Cern's Large Hadron Collider.
HuffPo: One blogger points out: “The CERN logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle.”
The Mail: One blogger, said: 'The Cern logo is 666, the sign of the beast in a circle. The Cern collider looks like the all seeing eye or stargate we see so much of.'
I don't know the peculiarities of British news publishing or whether HuffPo and the Mail have some kind of arrangement that makes this possible, but, from my seat, it looks like a big steaming mess of plagiarism seasoned with a generous dose of chutzpah.