joigus

Where can you see the error, please? The article is quite long... Yes, my favourite example are phrasals. The verb "look" is my preferred example: look into look after look down on look up to ... Completely different meanings. In Spanish those are fused: "comprender", "aprender", "desprender", "reprender", "sorprender"

Maybe an interesting book (I haven't read but I've heard about) in that regard could be Misquoting Jesus. When you take a religion to a different geographical region there are bound to be changes. That's what happened to Christianism: Sabbath --> Sunday (Apollo's cult by Constantine required that change;) drop circumcision and kosher, etc. I'm sure the Zoroastrians who wrote the Vedas were forced to similar changes when they passed from places like Kazakhstan to northern India.

Nice link. +1. One of the first imprints of sea animals strolling (or maybe hurrying) ashore is in so-called* Track Central, Kalbarri National Park, Australia. Silurian sea scorpions of the genus Eurypterid seemed to follow in the footsteps of other arthropods, Kalbarria. http://www.dmp.wa.gov.au/Trace-fossils-of-the-Tumblagooda-1667.aspx It's by no means sure that Kalbarria were the first animals, but those are the first traces I know of. Wonderful PBS documentary Australia's First Four Billion Years. * Non-official name, AFAIK.

+1. Very interesting. I find it amusing that in German spoons are boys, forks are girls, and knives are hermaphrodites.

Interesting. +1 Does Yanchilin's theory predict deviations from GR?

I don't know. It's been a while since I studied French. But what you say is definitely what I would expect.

There seems to be an insurmountable time gap with either John the Baptist or Jesus as possibilities. Lawrence Shiffman has argued very eloquently against that hypothesis IMO. His arguments rest on archaic Hebrew calligraphy, rather than 14C. He's convinced me, anyway, that it couldn't possibly have been anybody during the Roman invasion, but someone pre-dating that, during a Greek invasion scenario. Which makes it even more interesting along the lines that you're suggesting, because it would mean that religious leaders of small flocks fleeing Jerusalem's central authority and establishing a new brand of Judaism in the desert already was a relatively common phenomenon 100 years before. As you said: Leaders for time of hardship. This line of inquiry resonates with me, at least, because I think it's far more important to understand the appearance of religions based on the culture and the historical background than actually give a name or a biography, or finding the missing piece of the cross.

That's some rubbernecking for me to do.

That's one of the most fascinating features of English, which is, of course, a life-long project for me to understand. Another observation is: In English you have a sort of a nucleated but de-centralised structure of different authorities of several degree. Oxford prescriptions, Merriam-Webster prescriptions, etc. Quite different from Spanish, for example. That's at least my intuition of how it works and organizes itself, and interfaces. Maybe just coincidental, but this strongly parallels how the Protestant and the Catholic worlds have organised themselves throughout history. The Protestant, more multi-branched; the Catholic, more unified around a leader. It's only very recently that Spanish academies have clustered, so to speak, in a similar way.

Agree. Spot-on observation too. +1. As the Dead Sea Scrools seem to reveal Christ-like figures were already starting to appear (the Teacher of Righteousness) near the Dead Sea already 100 years before Christianity. Those were definitely times of distress for the Jews too.

Spot on. +1

It has been pointed out by Daniel Dennett that oral traditions become relatively reliable in preserving the fidelity of the message once the priestly class becomes numerous enough, society is more stable, and the chants and recitations acquire a form similar to what multiplexing is in Von Neumann's architecture of modern computers. The Brahmins playing the role of the neuron or the integrated circuit element. The Vedas have been recited for millennia by many generations of Brahmin after the Arians settled in northern India and Pakistan. IMO this multiplexing, helped by social stability, must contribute to the stability of the message too --whatever the initial amount of nonsense or altered-sense "bits" is in the initial message. But neither form is immune to the possibility of further additions, re-editings, and the like. Interesting case in point, what @Eise mentions: The Bible. It is well known today that the virgin birth of Jesus from Mary is a translation mistake from Hebrew to Greek that got stuck on the Septuagint. After that, the mis-translation was propagated with a high degree of fidelity. (Remember: multi-plexing and relatively high social stability for the priestly class.) But mis-translation it was. "Almah," the word for "young woman" was translated as "parthenos" (Greek for "virgin"), while the Hebrew "betulah" (the real word for "virgin") appears nowhere in the original, as corroborated against the Dead Sea Scrolls by numerous scholars. But the origins of the Vedas are shrouded in mystery. We do know that this kind of culture came from a people in distress, coming from the Andronovo region and in migration, because the course of their main rivers had changed (the Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi has made extensive excavations of the area.) That is the time when the oldest Vedas could have been more susceptible to change IMO. Following the Vedas we learn that they fought battles against the peoples already living in northern India and Pakistan. Did they lose some of their first documents and decide to re-write them in their minds or in texts? We don't know, or I don't know if we know.

Maybe it's something to do with this: -------------------------------------------- "The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making." Douglas Noel Adams Last Chance to See (1990) --------------------------------------------- A round of rep points for @MigL, @md65536, and @Markus Hanke for clarifying many aspects of the OP and the follow-ups.

@Phi for All and @Dord. I agree with your practical POV. @Strange's is, as I understand, very much the same. I would love to drop the distinction and use it in a freer way. It's just that some of my students are going to face Cambridge exams and sometimes I have to curb my offhand ways and try to remind myself of the rigour, which I tend to forget. For example, we're supposed to use either British English or American English, but I can't help mixing some expressions, both in pronunciation and spelling. schedule, figure, route, ... colour/color, etc. It's enough to make you nuts. I love split infinitives. How else could I, boldly go where no man has gone before? I think some language police people are spoiling all the fun in language. They're like chaperones.

If not word by word, this is exactly what I was going to say argument by argument, but in the last moment refrained from doing so. You got epsilon naught and mu naught completely wrong. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. One or the other can be re-absorbed in the system of electric units. The only thing that really has an invariant meaning is their product, \[\epsilon_{0}\mu_{0}=c^{-2}\] You really must go back to basics and learn EM. Pun unintended, but comes in handy.

Actually, \[\alpha\overset{{\scriptstyle \textrm{def}}}{=}\frac{e^{2}}{4\pi\epsilon_{0}\hbar c}\] is a definition, not an equation. Definitions are not equations. Before there was an h bar there was no alpha, and electric charge could not be expressed as a dimensionless number. In the CGS Lorentz-Heaviside system of electric units this is obvious, and it had the dimensions of M1/2L3/2T-1. You might as well "determine" pi from "your equation." You're going in circles. A minimum baggage of history of physics is necessary in order not to say nonsense. There's much more nonsense in what you say, but time is limited.

Yes, you're right. It's not mentioned explicitly on the wiki article. This is what you said. You implied it was only about having a wish and saying it to God. Taoism and Buddhism have no god. But they have moves.

I see. Well, yes, I quite agree with that. But your comments are more about meaning, and refer to the word "believe" as a verb. My problem was with the word "belief" as a noun, and was a rather simple-minded grammatical question. Thank you.

The study seems to be cross-cultural, and it includes T'ai chi and yoga, for example. Some forms of Buddhist practice also involve running, clapping hands, stopping, sitting, etc.

Then your starting position of whether the universe is fair (to us?) is confusing me. Is that meant as a figure of speech? I also think the distinction @zapatos has made about "special" and "preferred" is relevant. +1 I do not believe in mysteries; there's not mystery in science, but I do believe in puzzles in science. The fact that conscience has appeared in this part of the universe when, in cosmological terms, the surface of last scattering is about to disappear behind the kinematical horizon to such DeSitter observers as ourselves (experimental fact) is a puzzle. I can refer you to cosmologists who enjoy the prestige I lack, and share the same puzzlement. Maybe it's not something to be kept on the front burner of cosmology, so to speak, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Whether that is causally related to the appearance of conscience, which has been falteringly suggested, is another matter; but an apparent --repeat, apparent-- element of serendipity I think cannot be denied. Maybe it's some kind of mirage or illusion (mind you: Nature sometimes presents these to us; like the illusion of design in organisms, that's to be dispelled by the theory of evolution.) But in that case, it's well worth some scientific discussion IMO.

Chaos has to do with local instability plus ergodicity. It's a stronger condition, or set of conditions, than just unpredictability. It involves mixing among different trajectories. Example: A simple 1-dimensional repulsive force has trajectories that are unstable. It would give Liapunov exponents that characterize it as unstable, and thus, unpredictability in the sense of high sensitivity to initial conditions. But such system is not ergodic and, as such, it's not chaotic. Trajectories keep ordered in 1-dimensional foliations for arbitrarily long times. 1-dimensional linear dynamical systems don't display chaotic behaviour. It's a combination of sufficient degrees of freedom and/or non-linearity. Enough DOF is sufficient to bring about chaotic dynamics. Non-linearity is also sufficient. Chaotic systems though, may have regimes that locally restore some kind of ordering: attractors. Some of them have regions of the phase space (space of dynamical states) were families of trajectories seem to converge. In that sense, they are so rich in behaviour as to present some kind of loose ordering, even though they are chaotic. Quantum mechanics does not display chaos, but it does present behaviours reminiscent of their classical chaotic counterparts. These behaviours are in correspondence to chaotic attractors, and are called quantum "scars." It is only in that sense, AFAIK, that people talk about quantum chaos.

+1. I think I speak for most everybody here (although I cannot be sure) if I say that there seems to be a kernel of anthropocentrism in your argument. Am I right? That's what's making me uncomfortable, anyway. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

No. The "fundamental concept of free will" is what I thought you were thinking. You said you weren't, but it keeps coming back. My apologies. I think I finally dodged the bullet. Eise is more involved in that forum, from what I've seen.

Please, stay away of ad hominem.