Shot in the Rocky River Reservation, Rocky River, Ohio (USA)
© Nicolas Mertens, All Rights Reserved
Sit back and relax! This is not really a blog. It is just an opportunity for me to show off a few photos of mine, to write a few thoughts, or to present a few articles I found in the media. I think that nothing I present here is subversive but everyone is welcome to comment—subversively or not…
Milaukee County War Memorial Center: Eero Saarinen, arch., with mosaic murals by Edmund D. Lewandowski
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
I often wonder whether book reviews are good or bad for a writer, whether they will boost sales if the reviews are favorable or kill them if they are not. The truth, as far as I am concerned, is that book reviews have rarely influenced my purchasing decisions one way or another. In the case of Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I should say that book reviews have turned me off. Yet, it seems that the book has considerably impressed some reviewers. Early this month I read no less than three reviews: one by Michael Shermer in the October issue of Scientific American, another by Elizabeth Kolbert in the October 3, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, and the last one in the October 8, 2011, issue of The Economist.(1)
For what I read, Pinker—an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard—assembled a huge amount of data about human violence through the ages. From this data, he extracted various statistics that aim to prove that people are getting less and less violent. Curiously, Kolbert and Shermer begin their review with an account of Anders Behring Breivik’s shooting spree in Norway in July 2011. Kolbert’s account is too long and Shermer’s is too short. But never mind that. The whole of Kolbert’s review is too long. She deviates on too many tangents and at times loses tracks of what she was saying. All in all, however, she does not agree with Pinker’s conclusions and with the way he manipulates his data.
On the other hand, Shermer’s critique is wide-eyed. He seems to be in awe, but of what? Of Pinker’s statistics, or of the sheer size of the data? Hard to say, but I think that Mr. Über-skeptic left his skepticism in the closet when he read Pinker’s book, if he read it in its entirety.
As for the reviewer at The Economist, s/he seems more balanced than the other two, although s/he appears unable to formulate a clear opinion one way or another. It’s like, “I don’t really want to say anything bad, but I don’t want to say anything good either…” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Anyway, when I read these reviews, I remembered something that Leibniz said somewhere about the method of doubt, the Cartesian method: “Take what you need, and do what you should, and you will get what you want…”, which, no doubt, would apply to Pinker as well. After all, he’s a psychologist, right?
(How about that for a balanced blog entry?)
P.S.: October 28, 2011
Yesterday I saw the October 18 episode of The Colbert Report. I thought I was hallucinating. Is this a curse or what? There he appeared, Pinker, for a brief interview. Actually, this was not really an interview but more like a thrashing. Colbert did a number on him that was so fast and brutal, Pinker ended up looking dazed, not comprehending what had just happened to him. A quick search this morning showed that this is the third time Pinker appears on the show. Either he likes being bumped around or he simply think that bad publicity is better than no publicity. Anyway, it is the speed with which Colbert made fun of his “guest” that impressed me. I thought it was just what my attention span needed (see below, one of the comments :))
(1) As usual with The Economist, nobody gets a by-line.
In Gargamel’s Lab (thanks to Peyo and the Schtroumpfs for the inspiration :)
© Nicolas Mertens. All Rights Reserved.
There are lots of discussions these days about science and religion. In the process, many people who try to define what science is, what science does, or what counts as a scientific theory, seem to forget many early attempts at responding these questions. Karl Popper (1902–1994) is one of these early thinkers.
Popper contrasts scientific theories with what he counts as pseudo-scientific theories. In his mind, the Marxist theory of History, for example, or Freud’s psychoanalysis, or Adler’s individual psychology are all pseudo-scientific theories. What is wrong with the Marxist theory of History, for example? According to Popper, the basic claim of Marxist theory is the primacy of economy: social and political institutions, when they become an impediment to the progress of economy, are abolished and replaced. A related claim is that History proceeds by stages, from an egalitarian primitive community, to slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally communism (see the previous entry in this “blog”). In Popper’s view, all this is pseudo-scientific. Why? The theory was formulated in a period of capitalism in the middle of the 19th century, and predicted the advent of socialism through a revolution in capitalist countries, because capitalism was to become a hindrance for the development of the economy. But we can observe that things have not happened that way. Socialism has not emerged in those capitalist, industrialized countries, but instead in countries that had a somewhat feudal structure (Russia, China, etc.) Furthermore, the predictions offered by the theory are vague, and the theory does not say either when, or how soon, these predictions will be fulfilled, or how long it will take before the political and social institutions will become a hindrance to economic progress.
Is Popper correct? Is it correct to say that a theory is scientific just because it is empirically testable, or just because predictions can be derived from it? If these were the only criteria, then many theories we call scientific should be considered un-scientific. However, Popper does not claim that the only conditions for a theory to be scientific is to be empirically testable, or that it must have predictive power. After all, astrology is empirically testable. That one’s life is correlated with the positions of planets has been put forward and “evidenced” by many surveys. So, what is the additional requirement for an inquiry in any given field to count as science? What is the additional ingredient that, if it were present in astrology or in the Marxist theory of History, for example, would render them scientific?
Popper presents seven points, or conditions, to distinguish genuine scientific inquiry from pseudo-science. They can be divided into two parts, one that contains conditions (3) and (4), and another that contains the five remaining conditions. We have (in Popper’s own words; see the bibliography at the bottom of this entry):
(3) Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
This is to say that what distinguishes scientific theories is that they are empirically testable in the following, more exact sense: they are empirically falsifiable. The observable predictions that are derived from a theory provide the possibility of refuting the theory, namely its predictive failure, that is, the falsity of its predictions; thus, they show the theory to be false. Then:
(4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of theory (as people often think) but a vice.
This is more or less identical to point (3). Together, these two points show what distinguishes science from, say, the Freudian psychoanalysis, or Adler’s individual psychology. In the case of Adler, for example, his theory is not scientific because all conceivable observations, as Popper observed, are adaptable. Better said, Adler can accommodate the framework of his theory to any observation. Same with Freud. In other words, these theories are not refutable because no observations can count as evidence against them. In still other words, “good” tests must not attempt to prove a theory, but to disprove it. Popper’s five other considerations point to the above; in fact, they fine-tune the two previous ones. We have (still in Popper’s own words):
(1) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations.
(2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory—an event which would have refuted the theory.
(5) Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability; some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
Point (5) is practically a repetition of point (2), and point (6) simply elaborates on the same (Popper still speaking):
(6) Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
(7) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers—for example by introducing some ad hoc auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”
Popper ends his paragraph with this: “One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
The view of science of the sort held by Popper was commonly held until Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, where he argues persuasively, quoting evidences from the history of science. According to Kuhn, scientists do not proceed the way Popper claims they do, and science develops in cycles. Each cycle is composed of three stages: normal science, crisis, and revolution, but this is another story, maybe another future entry in this “blog.” For the moment, if you are interested in the philosophy of science, here is an excellent book, from which Popper’s conditions are quoted:
Klemke, E. D., Robert Hollinger, and A. David Kline. Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, revised ed. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988. This the indispensable introductory anthology for the philosopher of science. It contains the important texts on this subject by Popper, Thagard, Kitcher, Hempel, Carnap, Putnam, Quine, Kuhn, and many others.
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved. Concept and compositing: Doug Prout, art director at large.
More than any other political and ethical systems developed in the 19th century, the work of Karl Marx and his friend and associate, Friedrich Engels, has had and continues to have an enormous impact on the 20th century and beyond. Today, there are broadly two ways of looking at this impact.
On the one hand, the outlook developed by Marx and Engels is vilified and ridiculed with the same vehemence as it had been in the 19th century. There are plenty of conservative and reactionary magazines, books, political parties, and what not, that represent Marx and Engels as bumbling idiots who had no idea what they were talking about, and that systematically equate Marx and Engels’s work with the awful distortions that were applied in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. At the same time, these media clamor all the benefits of capitalism, that is, the economic system that Marx and Engels analyzed and condemned for various reasons.
On the other hand, there are lots of people, parties, and organizations that still believe that Marx and Engels are not “dead,” and that their work could still teach us something valuable about the ways we are presently doing business and about the ways we are using the work force. Given the present economic and, above all, social situations around the world, these people and organizations try to show that capitalism is not so glamorous after all, and that it profits only a handful of individuals. It seems that, in many respects, the relationship between the haves and the have nots is the same today as it was in the 19th century.
In view of this, I thought that I would develop in this blog (that-is-not-really-a-blog :) a small primer on Marx and Marxian principles. This blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, and this entry is longer than usual. However, if you are one of those who stumble here by accident, and if you are not too familiar with Marx, socialism, communism, and capitalism, I hope that this entry will give you something to think about, if need be, that it will open your mind, and that it will enlarge your horizon beyond what we get from the habitual anti-Marx propaganda.
Basic Background Definitions
Capital and Surplus Value
A capital may be money, the net worth of a business, a piece of land, a house, or any wealth whatsoever that produces an income and a profit. Surplus value occurs whenever labor power is being sold. Surplus value is usually appropriated by the owners of capital (the capitalists, i.e., what was then called the bourgeoisie). For example, suppose that a worker in a sweat-shop—whether in New Jersey, Guatemala, or anywhere else—produces 10 jeans per day. Two of these jeans will pay for the wages of the worker (this is variable capital); then, let’s say that three jeans pay to amortize or maintain the sewing machines, the building, and so on (which is fixed capital); so, the owner of the sweat-shop gets five jeans for nothing, which will not be given away for free to anybody, but sold or invested in one form or another by the owner in question. These five jeans represent the surplus value, which profits the capitalist, not the worker who produced it.
Now suppose that the sweat-shop owner hires 100 workers. In that case, the owner pays only 200 jeans in necessary labor, and 300 in fixed capital, and makes a net profit of 500 jeans. And so on. If the owner re-invests this profit in additional capital (which s/he does), s/he ends up accumulating huge profits that are disproportionate to the fixed and variable capitals. According to Marx and other social thinkers, this is simply exploitation of, and theft from, the workers.
Alienation
Marx connects alienation with consciousness, or human “nature.” According to him, human “nature” is strictly material, in the sense that it is defined by material production, and by extension, by economic forces and economic relationships. This means that human “nature” is variable, and will be different in different societies, and at different times. Thus a feudal person cannot possibly have the same nature, or personality, as a person of the capitalistic society, and similarly, a bum who lives in the Parisian subway cannot have the nature of a bum who lives on a California beach. This is to say, then, that human nature does not exist per se: for Marx and Engels, human nature comes into existence through human labor and the products of that labor—we are what we do.
Now, compare a tailor of the Middle-Ages with the laborers in today’s “sweat-shop.” The former expresses him/herself through his/her work, and s/he even owns the clothes s/he creates. But the latter manufacture objects from the design of someone else, and they do not own these objects. In other words, the workers become alienated from the product of their labor.(2)
This is not all: the workers become alienated from the act of production also. And this is because work—the act of production—does not define them anymore, because the workers work only to get wages, and because this process is not adopted freely by them but imposed on them for only one reason: survival.
Since there is a tremendous discrepancy in labor-value between the worker and the owner—the wages one earns and the profits the other makes are not proportional to the amount of work, or absence of work, involved—they both (the worker and the owner) become alienated from each other. In other words, this happens because workers and owners do not recognize their inter-dependence, and are forced to compete with each other. In the meantime, workers become alienated from other workers, and owners from other owners also.(3)
Furthermore and more importantly, everyone becomes alienated from oneself, that is, what Marx called one’s own species-being. This means that we all become alienated as members of the human species, and alienated from our own existence, that is, our essence. The workers see themselves as being merely the “appendage of a machine,” and the owner as the appendage of capital. We all lose sight of our potentials, particularly our potential to create and enjoy beauty. Moreover, each individual sees the others differently. Worse, each sees the others as enemies.
Finally, since the market of goods is not guided or controlled by human beings but by fluctuating irrational forces that exist outside of them, the product itself, when hitting the market, becomes alienated from everybody.
So, alienation is a negation, and Marx goes further. This primary negation leads to other negations. For example, the alienation from nature, the alienation from our body and our senses. It also leads to all the “isms” possible: nationalism, racism, classism, sexism, etc., and indeed, these “dogmas” are not natural to man, they are artificially created by alienation, a by-product of capitalism.
The Revolutionary and Self-Destructive Nature of Capitalism
As we can see from the above, it is not Marx and Engels who are the revolutionaries, but capitalism itself. Capitalism has created the largest class of society: the workers (what was called then the proletariat). At first the workers are grateful toward the capitalists for having a job. Then they become aware of their power: without the workers the factories, the bureaucracies, and so on (the corporations?), could not function. This is one of the major contradiction of capitalism: it does not allow any power to the workers, but the workers have in effect a tremendous power. This power, and the poverty into which the workers are maintained, result in resistance, strikes, struggle, etc.
The Class Struggle
The class struggle—induced by capitalism itself—is complex, and may take various avenues. However, according to Marx and Engels, only one of these is efficient.
Political Changes and Human Emancipation
The political emancipation of an individual is to become first of all a citizen of civil society. However, civil society is characterized by many ills such as inequalities, animosity, resentment, etc. This means that political emancipation does not solve alienation. However, beyond political emancipation is human emancipation. Political emancipation was exemplified by the French Revolution, giving political power to the bourgeoisie. Note that political emancipation is also the characteristic of crude communism: it gives political power to the State.
Human emancipation, on the other hand, brings species-consciousness and ultimately true communism. Species-consciousness is the ability to recognize our membership in the human species and our inter-dependency (that is, what Marx called our species-life). On the contrary, capitalism, by emphasizing our material life, destroys what makes us human, that is, social beings or species-being.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Capitalism is progressive, but it forces progress. It is a costly system that alienates everybody from everybody else and from everything; eventually, it self-destructs and creates socialism (crude communism). The social revolution is the logical and inevitable result of capitalism.
However, Marx and Engels thought that, once the revolution had been achieved, there would remain a number of people who would want to return to the old system. Therefore, socialism—or crude communism, that is, the period before true communism—would be characterized by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”(5) This would be a tactical necessity without which capitalism could not be completely eradicated. The dictatorship would have to be coercive. It would imply, for example, the abolition of property and inheritance, the imposition of work on everybody, and so on, not only to safeguard the gains of the revolution, but also because no system in power has ever given up its power willingly: so will it be with capitalism, and so will it be with socialism.
However, socialism has a goal. Through the continued abolition of classes, socialism’s goal is to bring about the association of the nations. After that, the true communist society would have no master/slaves relationships; everybody would become aware of his/her humanity; rational self-interest would make work pleasurable; and people would be free to develop their potential, not independently of each other, but in symbiosis with each other. In other words, while capitalism allows competition to flourish within a system of individualism, true communism allows individuality to flourish within a system of cooperation.
That’s it, folks! Not everything is rosy with Marx and Engels. But they clearly cannot be completely rejected. Next month, if I’m not too lazy, I will explain what another hero of mine—Karl Popper—had to say about the “scientific” value of Marx’s theories. For the moment, here are a few books you might like:
Marx, Karl. Capital. London: Penguin Classics, 1990. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. Translated by Ben Fowkes.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952. Translated by Samuel Moore, edited by Engels.
Marx, Karl. Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. This is the essential anthology of Marx’s writings, selected by the foremost authority on Marx and related works.
————————————————————————–
(1) Marx and Engels successfully get out of “utopian” theories (e.g., those of Thomas More, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and so on), and get into “practical” socialism. While they emphasize a political program that challenges the power in place, they also want socialism to be scientific. To achieve the latter, they combine theories and facts. Their work is scholarly researched, verifiable, and intellectually rigorous. Contrary to the caricatures presented by some media, Marx and Engels are not mad men jumping on revolutionary barricades with knives in their mouth and revolutionary booklets in their hands. Yet, the scientific claim has been successfully debunked by several people. I will explain that in a future blog-entry.
(2) Observe that alienation is not restricted to “sweat shop” workers and “sweat-shop” owners. For example, the same theory applies to corporate people, whether they are Chief Executive Officers, stockholders, or mail-room clerks.
(3) Again, consider whether this state of affairs applies only to 19th-century factories, or also to contemporary systems.
(4) Here also it might be interesting to consider whether or not our contemporary cults (not only those cults that involve all sorts of supernatural hocus-pocus, but also those that involve our favorite stars, our favorite TV programs, our favorite conspiracy and/or alien abduction theories, etc.) are also forms of escapism; and if they are, consider why we indulge ourselves so fanatically in such escapist behavior.
(5) Evidently, the word “dictatorship” cannot be understood in today’s terms. The dictatorship of the proletariat is in effect the dictates of a committee, not the autocratic whims of a petty tyrant.
Google/Panoramio: The Malfeasance Continues
A year after my Panoramio account was closed (on my request on April 24, 2010), it has suddenly been reopened/reactivated (on or around May 4, 2011). I did not ask for it, and I have not been notified of this. So, here are a few questions:
– Why has my account been reactivated although it was (supposedly) closed a year ago? I certainly did not reactivate it and I did not request it either.
– Why is it that a year after my account was (supposedly) closed there are still photos of mine being used by various websites?
– Does Panoramio reactivate “closed” account as an attempt to justify the usage mentioned above? In a previous entry in this blog I explained that, after my account had been closed and my photos presumably deleted and removed from Google/Panoramio’s servers, the links from the websites in question to my account and/or my photos in Panoramio lead to some kind of error messages. Now, with my account reactivated, the links have been reestablished, although only to the account, which presently contains only a graphic (shown above).
– Since my photos have not been removed from Google/Panoramio’s servers, will they—the photos—reappear in my reopened account? That would certainly allow the websites that use my photo to justify their usage since the links would lead to the photos in question also, not anymore to an error message. In other words, did Panoramio reopen my account to try to defuse what I wrote about the company in this blog and elsewhere?
– Concretely speaking, why has my account not been properly closed and why have my photos not been properly removed from Panoramio’s servers?
– Is it a Google policy, or is it mentioned anywhere in Google and Panoramio Terms of Service (TOS), that “closed” accounts will be automatically reactivated a year after they were closed?
– Is it another Google policy, or is it mentioned anywhere in Google and Panoramio TOS, that whatever you post in Google services, including Panoramio, becomes Google and Panoramio’s property for ever, even after a user’s account has (supposedly) been closed? To be sure, when you sign up with Google or any of its services, you agree in particular to Article 11 of the TOS:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
Etc.
Any normal person would think that, once an account has ben closed, Google would understand that the Content in question is not for Google to use anymore, but hey! why would any normal person believe that Google would play nice? And why would Google not play nice? What would it cost Google to be decent about these matters? They lose a customer. So what? What’s a customer among millions of others? What they gain, on the contrary, is opprobrium and bad publicity.
In the meantime, my Panoramio account has been reactivated/reopened without my request/consent. Is this yet another example of Google doing no evil? Or is it simply a miracle?
P.S.: I wrote Panoramio about this. I’m still waiting for a reply.
P.P.S.: A week after I posted this entry, I received this email from Gerard Sanz:
Hi Nicolas,
Sorry I did not reply before as I was on holidays.
I want to apologize for the inconvenience this bug has caused you. We were processing a purge of deleted account and we introduced a bug by mistake. This has been corrected already.
Many thanks for letting us know and best regards,
Gerard Sanz – Panoramio Community Manager
Panoramio Team – Google Switzerland GmbH
In other words, with this neat sleight of hand, my questions remain unanswered, thank you very much.
——————————————————————————————————————————————
P.P.P.S: I noticed yesterday, May 28, 2011, that all my photos that were used by several websites have disappeared from these sites. Only my name and the title of the photos remain, with links that lead nowhere. I don’t know whether this is the result of this posting or my messages to Panoramio. I suppose that—for the moment—the case is closed. In the meantime, I still don’t know whether my photos remain somewhere in Google or not.
Drilling for Oil in the Permian Basin Region. Shot somewhere between Lovington, New Mexico, and Odessa, Texas.
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
Today, I only want to direct the attention of anyone who is still interested in last year’s BP oil accident, and its aftermath, to an article written by Raffi Khatchadourian and published in the March 14, 2011, issue of The New Yorker: “The Gulf War: Were There Any Heroes in the BP Oil Disaster?” Unfortunately, the whole report is not available online unless you subscribe to the magazine. However, a useful abstract is available here.
Shortly after the accident, I grumbled about the onslaught of criticisms voiced by certain elements of the press and by certain members of government. Khatchadourian’s report—appearing almost a year after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig—is cathartic in many respects: the response to the spill was not as chaotic and mismanaged as it seemed at the time; at some point during the cleanup, about forty-seven thousands people were involved; sixty million man-hours were expended in the effort (“roughly nine times what it took to build the Empire State Building”); and corporate greed and political expediency were not necessarily the cause of a number of mishaps that occurred during this “war.”
The article has a few weaknesses. For example, the way President Obama is presented—as the guy who’s in charge, who goes to Louisiana, looks around, gives orders, and gets what he wants, including everyone’s admiration and unfailing fealty—is rather lame. But overall, the report is extremely instructive, well-balanced, and an eye-opener. I invite everyone to read at least the abstract (“Science vs. Politics in the BP-spill Cleanup”).
Lilita Meirans: A Bookworm @ Work
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
Cuturomics “is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture.”(1) OK. Seriously speaking. Imagine a group of researchers who created a database of words found in 5.2 million books—about 4% of all books ever published—and who then perform statistical analyzes that allow them to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. The books in question come from the ever-growing collection of books that Google is currently scanning, 15 million so far, more or less 12% of those ever published. The data set created by the authors consists of over 500 billion words in English (361 billion), French (45 billion), Spanish (45 billion), German (37 billion), Russian (35 billion), Chinese (13 billion), and Hebrew (2 billion). The database is available at Google Labs or at Culturomics.
What can we do with that database? For one thing, we can know how many times a word appeared in the books within a certain period of time, and infer with some degree of accuracy how the concept behind that word was important for people during that time, or how cultural trends affected the usage of that word. For example, the word “slavery”—used between 1800 and 2000—peaked in the early 1860s, dropped sharply afterward, and peaked again in 1955–1968, although not as much as during the Civil War.
We can also find out how grammar is changing. Consider the past tense of verbs, which is usually constructed by adding -ed to the infinitive: jump/jumped, walk/walked. But there are plenty of “irregular” forms: come/came, get/got, etc. By analyzing the database, we can find out when and where “irregular” verbs “regularized.” Verbs such as burn, smell, and spell regularized in the United States, but as everyone knows, the Brits cling to burnt, smelt, and spelt…
We can also detect censorship in various cultures. For example, the authors analyzed the impact of censorship on the cultural influence of several people in Nazi Germany: Chagall, Gropius, Picasso, and others. Think of words like “degenerate,” “undesirable,” etc.
One fun thing to do is to check how popular or famous a person is, or was, during a given period of time. I won’t comment on this. Just use Google Ngram Viewer and see how your favorite people rank against others!
The authors finish their paper with a graph showing the frequency of the word “God” between 1800 and 2000. It seems that usage of the word peaked around 1830 and steadily dropped until the 1970s. With tongue in cheek, the authors conclude that, “‘God’ is not dead but needs a publicist.”(2) This is funny. (Actually, the paper maintains a light touch throughout and is rather entertaining.) The graph, however, shows that usage of the word is slowly climbing after the mid-1970s up to 2000. It would be interesting to analyze the books that have been published since 2000, by religious people, anti-religion people, atheists, and the like. I suspect that the graph would show a drastic rise from 2000 to the present day.
Anyway, there is plenty to do with that database and all this is fantastic stuff. The Science paper, unfortunately, is unavailable online if you are not a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). However, for a start, here’s an abstract in http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176.short. And if you like it, you can get a better idea of the whole project at AAAS’s Gonzo Scientist: “The Science Hall of Fame.”
Enjoy!
(1) “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Jean-Baptiste Michel, et al., Science Magazine, 14 January 2011, p. 181. The paper was published online on 17 December 2010.
(2) “Quantitative Analysis,” p. 182.
Rural Life along the Road to Son Saura Beach
Shot in Menorca [Minorca], Spain
© Nicolas Mertens. All Rights Reserved.
Here’s a fun math problem, for a change. According to tradition, it was formulated by Isaac Newton. You will find several several versions on the web. Here’s one from the Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science, and Reading, where there are a couple of different ways of working it out. I present here a third possibility, but I know that everyone will find his/her own solution before reading this one…
On the one hand, three cows eat in two weeks all the grass on two acres of land, together with all the grass that grows there during these two weeks. Two cows eat in four weeks all the grass on two acres of land, together with all the grass that grows there during these four weeks. How many cows will eat in six weeks all the grass on six acres of land together with all the grass that grows there during these six weeks? Assume that the quantity of grass on each acre is the same when the cows begin to graze, that the rate of growth is uniform during the time of grazing, and that the cows eat the same amount of grass each week.
Let’s have c = cows, w = weeks, a = acres, and Q = quantity of grass eaten.
1. Calculate the quantity of grass that grows on each parcel. Let’s say that in 1 week a quantity Q grows on 1 acre:
1w 1Q 1a
So, on the 1st parcel, in 2 weeks, 3 cows eat 2 times the quantity Q multiplied by 2 since there are 2 acres:
2w 3c 2.Q.2 = 4Q
1w 3c 4.Q/2 = 2Q
1w 1c 2Q/3 (1)
Similarly, on the 2nd parcel:
4w 2c 4.Q.2 = 8Q
1w 2c 8.Q/4 = 2Q
1w 1c 2.Q/2 = 1Q (2)
Similarly, on the 3rd parcel (but this calculation is not necessary):
6w xc 6.Q.6 = 36Q
1w xc 36.Q/6 = 6Q
1w 1c 6Q/x
2. Let’s not forget the quantity of acres that the cows eat on each parcel:
2w 3c 2a
1w 3c 2a/2 = 1a
1w 1c 1a/3 (3)
Similarly:
4w 2c 2a
1w 2c 2a/4 = 1a/2
1w 1c (1a/2)/2 = 1a/4 (4)
3. The difference of acres eaten by 1 cow in 1 week is (3) – (4):
1a/3 – 1a/4 = 1a/12 (5)
And the difference of quantity of grass eaten in 1 week is (2) – (1):
1Q – 2Q/3 = 1Q/3 (6)
4. Since one cow is like another cow, these differences of grass eaten and areas of land are of identical value: (5) = (6)
1a/12 = 1Q/3, 1a = 4Q, Q = 1a/4 (7)
5. In other words, the grass that grows in each parcel equals the amount of acres shown below:
On the 1st parcel: 2.Q.2 = 2.(1/4).2 = 1a (8)
On the 2nd parcel: 4.Q.2 = 4.(1/4).2 = 2a (9)
On the 3rd parcel: 6.Q.6 = 6.(1/4).6 = 9a (10)
6. So, the exact quantity of acres that the cows eat is:
On the 1st parcel, 2a + 1a = 3a (11)
On the 2nd parcel, 2a + 2a = 4a (12)
On the 3rd parcel, 6a + 9a = 15a (13)
7. At this point we can rephrase the problem:
On the one hand, 3 cows eat in 2 weeks 3 acres of grass. On the other hand, 2 cows eat in 4 weeks 4 acres of grass. How many cows will eat in 6 weeks 15 acres of grass, assuming that the amount of grass is the same on the three parcels when the cows start eating and that the grass stops growing when they start eating?
We have:
On the 1st parcel: 2w 3c 3a
On the 2nd parcel: 4w 2c 4a
On the 3rd parcel: 6w xc 15a
So, using the 1st parcel, for example:
2w 3c 3a
1w 3c 3a/2
1w 1c (3a/2)/3 = 3a/6 = 1a/2
6w 1c 6.(1a/2) = 3a
And finally:
3a 6w 1c
1a 6w 1c/3
15a 6w 15.(1c/3) = 15c/3 = 5 cows
© Nicolas Mertens. All Rights Reserved.
The Packing Fairy
First of all, why do we have to open an “account” everywhere we go online these days? Not so long ago, when you wanted to buy something online, or subscribe to a magazine, it was enough to give an email address, a credit card number, and a physical address. Then, you just waited for your order to be delivered at your doorsteps. Easy. Today, the online stores tell you that opening an “account” will “facilitate your shopping experience” with them. They tell you that they keep your credit card number and your address, so that you don’t have to retype them every time you buy something. Big deal, really. When you want to buy something, you still have to fill that stupid form with your email address and a password, don’t you? And how many passwords do you have, nowadays? I bet at least a dozen. What kind of rigmarole is this? Call me paranoid, but I feel like these companies are doing more with these “accounts” than simply storing your data to “facilitate your shopping experience.” Which brings my second question: Why is it so hard to close your “account”? I don’t know either but I’m pretty sure that I would start getting an answer to that if I started getting a truthful answer to the first question. Anyway, today in this blog entry, I want to describe what happened to me recently with Amazon dot com. To make this narrative as short as possible, all emails I received from Amazon are quoted in the footnotes. They are interesting if only for their curious syntax. In any case, all this is rather petty and boring. I wrote this only to vent off a bit of frustration, not to create an edifying piece of information…
I placed an order with Amazon.com—for which I opened an account—sometimes in August 2010. The order was in the amount of $184.54, and was supposed to be fulfilled by an Amazon seller, Uncle Sammy. This was going to be an overseas shipment. Shipment, however, was stopped at the Spanish customs: an import fee had to be paid. It had never been mentioned during the checkout procedure at Amazon that such a fee might be required. Furthermore, the Spanish customs did not indicate the amount of the fee. So I declined. According to the Spanish customs, the package would be returned to the sender. I don’t know whether that happened or not. After an exchange of unpleasant emails with Uncle Sammy, I filed an A-to-Z Guarantee Claim with Amazon. I eventually got a refund of $47.00, meaning that I was losing $137.54 with this transaction. The amount of the refund is not clear. Why $47.00 and not $57.00, and why not a full refund? Mystery. After a series of email exchanges with Amazon, it became clear that a full refund was never going to be paid. So, I decided to close my Amazon account.
Now, if you want to close your Amazon account, there is no way you can do it yourself. You must fill a form and ask Amazon to do it for you.(1) My request was straightforward and I did not explain why I wanted to close my account: “Please, close my account. Thank you. Nicolas Mertens.” Within 24 hours I received an email that looked like an automated response. The message did not tell me that my account had been closed. It was instead some gibberish about what might happen if Amazon closed my account. The message contained also a link to where I should go in case I still wanted to close my Amazon.com account.(2)
So, I used the link in question and I asked once more to have my account closed. This time, however, I think that I made a mistake. I explained why I wanted to close my account and I also mentioned the order number that made me want to close the account: “My request to close my account was not an ‘inquiry.’ It was a request to close my account. There was a problem with the order referenced above. It was NOT RESOLVED satisfactorily. The reply to my email concerning the refund you provided indicates that the person who wrote that reply DID NOT read attentively my previous message about it. I lost $137.54 with this order. This is NOT ACCEPTABLE. To repeat: Please close my account. Thank you. Nicolas Mertens.” Once again the reply I received did not tell me that my account had been closed. It advised me instead to contact the seller to resolve the problem I had mentioned in my second request!(3)
Although it was becoming clear that Amazon was giving me the run-around, I sent the following email at cust.service03@amazon.com: “This is unbelievable. Do you people actually read what customers tell you? I explained in my original A-to-Z Guarantee Claim that I had an exchange of emails with Uncle Sammy. The exchange was unpleasant and discourteous on the part of that seller, and it didn’t solve anything. This is why I filed an A-to-Z claim with Amazon. Now you want me to contact Uncle Sammy again? Are you giving me the run-around?… I will not discuss this matter anymore. For the last time I’m asking you to delete my account. If you select to do it, fine. If not, too bad. Either way, I will never again place an order at Amazon. I lost $137.54 with this transaction… Sincerely, Nicolas Mertens.” This is what I got:
Dear Nicolas Mertens,
Your A-to-z Guarantee claim for order #102-0791091-3718662 was granted on November 23, 2010. [Etc.]“(4)
At that point I gave up. I went back to Amazon’s form to close an account. I said, “For the second time: Please, close my account. This is not an inquiry, it is a request. CLOSE MY ACCOUNT. Thank you. Nicolas Mertens.” I didn’t mention anything anymore about the bad transaction and the partial refund. Unbelievably, I got the same email I got the first time, only it was signed by someone else—another robot?(5)
So, once again I used the link provided, saying, “As I said, my request was not an inquiry. It was a request to close my account. To repeat: Please CLOSE MY ACCOUNT and stop giving me the run-around.” The day after I finally got a message telling me that my account had been closed.(6) Phew! How about that for building “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company”?
P.S.: When you do a Google Search for “Amazon Close Account,” there are dozens and dozens of returns. Lots of people claim to have closed their Amazon account but nobody says whether Amazon did it, or whether they got the same kind of runaround I got.
____________________________________________________________
(1) Be sure that you don’t have any outstanding order in your “account,” of course, and that you don’t owe any money. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=565164.
(2) The full content of the message is quoted below. I love the final statements: “I hope this helps. Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?”
Hello,
I want to make sure that closing your Amazon.com account won’t cause problems with any open transactions or other websites you might visit.
If you still want to close your Amazon.com account after reviewing the items below, please write back by visiting this link:https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/rsvp/rsvp-mi.html?q=acc1
Here are some things to keep in mind:
– If you use your Amazon.com log-in on other sites (e.g., Endless.com, Audible.com, etc.), you’ll also lose access to those accounts.
– Any open orders you have will be canceled.
– If you have a remaining Amazon.com Gift Card balance, you won’t have access to use the funds.
– Returns and refunds can’t be processed for orders on closed accounts.
– Your Amazon Payments account will be closed and can’t be reopened.
– You’ll no longer have access to your Associates, Amazon Web Services, Corporate, Seller, Author Central, and/or Mechanical Turk accounts.
– If you have an Amazon Web Services account, please contact AWS customer support for assistance with closing your AWS account :https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/aws-account-and-billing
I hope this helps.
Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A38VAOIVPWN68F&k=hy
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A38VAOIVPWN68F&k=hn
Best regards,
Mohammed H
Amazon.com
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.http://www.amazon.com/your-account
—- Original message: —-
12/08/10 06:42:30
Your Name:Nicolas Mertens
Comments:Please, close my account.
Thank you.
Nicolas Mertens.
(3) Here’s the reply (with the habitual final statements, “Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?”):
Hello,
I am sorry for the inconvenience you may have experienced.
I’ve checked this order (#102-0791091-3718662) and found that you have placed this order for the item The Ultimate Oldies but Goodies Collection with uncle_sammy one of our registered third party sellers at Amazon.com.
Amazon Marketplace listings are created by sellers other than Amazon.com. When you buy an item at Amazon Marketplace, the individual seller processes and ship your order.
Since the seller fulfilled your order, uncle_sammy will be happy to help you with your refund question. Order assistance is provided by each seller based on their policies.
To contact the seller, visit the Order Summary in “Your Account” at the address below, click on the “Problem with this order?” button, then click the “Contact Seller” button to send an e-mail.https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/edit.html?orderID=102-0791091-3718662
Please give the seller 3 business days to get back to you.
Our A-to-z Guarantee offers reimbursement and protection for those rare cases when a buyer is unable to resolve an order issue with an Amazon Marketplace seller. You can read about the guarantee at our Help pages here:http://www.amazon.com/help/a-to-z-guarantee
It is always important for us to hear how customers react to all aspects of shopping at Amazon.com.
Strong customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the selection and service we provide, and we appreciate the time you took to write to us.
I’ve passed your message on to the appropriate department in our company.
Amazon.com provides oversight of Marketplace transactions. Credit card information is held on Amazon.com’s secure server, and is never shared with Marketplace sellers.
We stand behind seller transactions made on our website by offering customers the A-to-z Guarantee (http://www.amazon.com/a-to-z-guarantee).
If you need to contact us again regarding this issue, please contact us by e-mail or phone from any Help page on our web site.http://www.amazon.com/help
I hope this information helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
*****
WHERE CAN I FIND MORE INFORMATION?
More information on ordering from third-party sellers on Amazon.com is available in our Help pages:http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=537798
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=537794
*****
HOW DO I LEAVE FEEDBACK ABOUT MY BUYER EXPERIENCE?
If you wish to let other shoppers on Amazon.com know about your buying experience from a particular seller, you can leave feedback about your order. Amazon.com does keep track of ratings as a means of monitoring the performance of our third-party sellers and merchants. You’ll find everything you need to know about leaving feedback by going to the following URL:http://www.amazon.com/o/tg/browse/-/537774/
Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=AZ6II4TW7EIOW&k=hy
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=AZ6II4TW7EIOW&k=hn
Best regards,
Prabhakar C.
Amazon.com
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.http://www.amazon.com/your-account
—- Original message: —-
12/08/10 09:03:44 PST
NAME: Nicolas Mertens
COMM ID:
ORDER NUMBER: 102-0791091-3718662
COMMENTS:
My request to close my account was not an “inquiry.” It was a request to close my account. There was a problem with the order referenced above. It was NOT RESOLVED satisfactorily. The reply to my email concerning the refund you provided indicates that the person who wrote that reply DID NOT read attentively my previous message about it. I lost $137.54 with this order. This is NOT ACCEPTABLE. To repeat: Please close my account. Thank you.
Nicolas Mertens.
(4) Here’s the full reply:
Dear Nicolas Mertens,
Your A-to-z Guarantee claim for order #102-0791091-3718662 was granted on November 23, 2010.
In some cases, we’ve found that the product eventually arrives after a claim is reimbursed. If you’ve received this order, please let us know by replying to this e-mail and placing an ‘X’ in the box below. If you’re unable to place an ‘X’ in the box below, you’re welcome to reply to this message and confirm that the merchandise has been delivered. Your confirmation of receipt will provide us with authorization to withdraw the claim and recharge you for this order.
——————————————————–
* If the merchandise has not arrived, you do not need to reply to this message.
[ ] I would like to withdraw my A-to-z Guarantee claim for Order #102-0791091-3718662. If this A-to-z Guarantee claim has already been reimbursed to my payment method associated with this transaction, I authorize Amazon.com to recharge my original payment method.
——————————————————–
Here are the details of this order.
Order #: 102-0791091-3718662
Purchase Date: August 23, 2010
Purchase Amount: $184.54
Guarantee claim reason: Non-Delivery
This claim involves 1 item(s).
Item 1
—————
Product Name: The Ultimate Oldies but Goodies Collection
Quantity: 1
Best Regards,
A-to-z Guarantee Programhttp://www.amazon.com/help/atoz
(5) Compare with footnote (2):
Hello,
I want to make sure that closing your Amazon.com account won’t cause problems with any open transactions or other websites you might visit.
If you still want to close your Amazon.com account after reviewing the items below, please write back by visiting this link:https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/rsvp/rsvp-mi.html?q=acc1
Here are some things to keep in mind:
– If you use your Amazon.com log-in on other sites (e.g., Endless.com, Audible.com, etc.), you’ll also lose access to those accounts.
– Any open orders you have will be canceled.
– If you have a remaining Amazon.com Gift Card balance, you won’t have access to use the funds.
– Returns and refunds can’t be processed for orders on closed accounts.
– Your Amazon Payments account will be closed and can’t be reopened.
– You’ll no longer have access to your Associates, Amazon Web Services, Corporate, Seller, Author Central, and/or Mechanical Turk accounts.
– If you have an Amazon Web Services account, please contact AWS customer support for assistance with closing your AWS account :https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/aws-account-and-billing
I hope this helps.
Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A3MSCA53RHTMF7&k=hy
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A3MSCA53RHTMF7&k=hn
Best regards,
Dheena V.
Amazon.com
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.http://www.amazon.com/your-account
—- Original message: —-
12/13/10 07:22:07
Your Name:Nicolas Mertens
Comments:For the second time: Please, close my account. This is not an inquiry, it is a request. CLOSE MY ACCOUNT.
Thank you.
Nicolas Mertens.
(6) Here’s the message:
Hello,
Your account has been closed and I’ve unsubscribed your e-mail address … from our mailing list. Your account is no longer accessible to you or anyone else.
In addition to our large selection, one of the benefits we try very hard to offer our customers is convenience. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience you experienced in this case.
We’ve appreciated your business and wish you the best of luck in the future.
Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=bdqyyfdc3250663969
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=bdqyyfdc3250663969
Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.
To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.
Best regards,
Vinod.M
Amazon.com
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.http://www.amazon.com/your-account
—- Original message: —-
12/13/10 08:43:40 PST
NAME: Nicolas Mertens
COMM ID:
COMMENTS:
As I said, my request was not an inquiry. It was a request to close my account. To repeat: Please CLOSE MY ACCOUNT and stop giving me the run-around.
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
I command you, people: Happy Holidays!
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
Shot along the Brussels-Scheldt Maritime Canal (a.k.a. the Willebroek Canal).
Note: The smokestacks and coke plant on the right have been razed since I took this picture.
After four years of collaboration with Scientific American, Jeffrey D. Sachs carries his monthly column to the home page of the Earth Institute.(1) His last column for the magazine is a deeply sad affidavit of moral bankruptcy, the disturbing acknowledgment of “the world’s inability to face up to the reality of the growing environmental crisis.”(2) In this blog entry, I will simply quote Sachs, without commentaries:
– Every major goal that international bodies have established for global environmental policy as of 2010 has been postponed, ignored or defeated.
– In 2002 nations pledged… to slow significantly the planetary loss of biodiversity by 2010. This goal was not even remotely achieved… The U.S. signed the convention in 1992 but never ratified it. Ratification fell victim to the uniquely American delusion that virtually all of nature should be subdivided into parcels of private property, within which owners should have their way.
– This year was ushered in by the phony “Climategate” controversy…; the political right wing depicted some ill-considered language [in the leaked emails] as proof of a vast global plot. Independent reviews have since rejected the charges of scientific conspiracy, but the damage is done: the U.S. public once again swings toward disbelief in the basic science of human-induced climate change.
– … the world approaches or trespasses on various thresholds of environmental risk. With the human population continuing to rise by 75 million or more per year and with torrid economic growth in much of the developing world, the burdens of deforestation, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction, ocean acidification, and other massive threats intensify.
Sachs also asks what causes these failures. His answer:
First, the risks to sustainability are unprecedented in their global scale and have come upon society rather suddenly in the past two generations. Second, the problems are scientifically complex and involve enormous uncertainties… Third, although the problems are global, politics is notoriously local, which impairs timely, coordinated international action. Fourth, the problems are unfolding over decades, [but] politicians’ attention spans reach only to the next election and much of the public’s to the next meal or paycheck. Fifth, vested corporate interests have mastered the arts of propaganda, and [the corporations] can use their deep pockets to purchase deliberate misinformation to deceive the public.(3)
As I said elsewhere, business as usual… Oooops. I said I wouldn’t make any comment. Sorry.
——————————————————————————————————————
(1) Sachs is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (www.earth.columbia.edu).
(2) Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The Deepening Crisis,” Scientific American (September 2010): 17.
(3) Sachs’s full article can also be read online.
Shot somewhere in downtown Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
Photo © Nicolas Mertens. All Rights Reserved. I’d like to know who painted the mural.
Panoramio is one of Google’s photo-sharing “services.”(1) Its most interesting feature is that the shooting locations of your photos and copies of your photos appear in Google Earth. If you are not familiar with this, open Google Earth and activate the Panoramio Photos layer. Pretty soon, a bunch of small bi-color squares will appear. Click any one of them to see the corresponding photo.
Another of Panoramio’s features is that the site has an Application Programming Interface (API) that makes all the uploaded photos available to any website that wants to use them—for commercial purposes or not. Most websites that use this feature are touristic and commercial in nature. According to the API’s terms of usage, the websites cannot make copies of the photos and they cannot store these photos on their own servers. The photos obtained through the API must be linked to their respective pages in Panoramio, and the name of the photographer must be mentioned and linked to his/her collection in Panoramio. Photographers do not get royalties. If you are comfortable with this, and if you believe that “sharing” is synonymous with “giving away for free,” then by all means join and enjoy Panoramio. Just be aware that, when you join, you must agree to Google and Panoramio’s Terms of Services (TOS), which include the agreement that your photos may be used by external websites through the API. So before agreeing to anything, be sure to read the TOS.(2)
So far, so good. Things become considerably less pleasant when you decide to quit Panoramio.(3) First of all, there is no functionality to do so by yourself—as in flickr®, for example. You must ask Panoramio to delete your account via email. Somewhere in Panoramio’s Help files, there is this entry:
If you want to delete your account
To remove your Panoramio account and all your photos, send an email to delete@panoramio.com. In the body of the email, include your name and email account.(4)
Panoramio is fairly diligent with this. Within a day or two, you receive confirmation that your account and your photos have been removed. In Panoramio’s mind, however, it seems that “removed” does not mean “deleted.” After the confirmation email, sure enough your account and your photos are not accessible any more, BUT it is not clear at all that the photos have been removed and deleted from Panoramio’s servers. Indeed, weeks and even months after you ask for the deletion of your account, your photos continue to appear in the websites that got them through the API. The only difference is that the links to the photos and to your name take you to pages that say, “Photo Not Found–Photo with id xxxxxxxxxx has been deleted” and “User Not Found—There is no user with id xxxxxxxxxx.”
When you write Panoramio about this situation, Panoramio’s Community Manager (Gerard Sanz) tells you that, “Despite the pictures are marked for deletion, it needs some time until it propagates in our systems and they get deleted. If this delay is a problem for you, please send me the photo_IDs and I will accelerate this process, if not just wait and this will eventually happen.” If you were careful to keep a record of the photo IDs that you uploaded to Panoramio, send them and within a week or less, the photos disappear from the websites. If you didn’t keep a record of the photo IDs, I’m afraid that the deletion “eventually” does not happen, the photos remain forever on Panoramio’s servers, and by extension in the websites in question.
Now, when months after “removal” and/or “deletion” of your account, you continue to find several of your pictures in various websites, I would say that “propagation” looks more like “stagnation.” Here’s an example among 24 others (to date). And things become somewhat ugly with Panoramio because at this point, when you write to the community manager about this situation, you don’t get any response anymore, not even the courtesy of an acknowledgment. It’s like, your account has been removed/deleted, you don’t exist anymore. But your photos still exist on the servers. At this point, I say that Panoramio is performing theft and larceny on a global scale.
Morality of the story: Don’t get involved with Panoramio if you don’t want your photos to be used for commercial purposes and if you don’t want them to be lingering indefinitely on Google’s servers once you decide to quit the “service.” Above all, if you do get involved, and you don’t like it anymore, don’t expect Batman and Robin to come to the rescue…
(1) http://www.panoramio.com/
(2) In this respect, read my previous entry in this blog: Google’s Appropriation of Photographers’ Work and the Photographers Who Agree to It.
(3) I eventually quit Panoramio because I did not appreciate that over 100 of my photos were being used by the commercial websites mentioned earlier. In other words, I did not agree anymore with the Panoramio and Google TOSs.
(4) http://www.panoramio.com/help/username_password
Son Bou, Menorca [Minorca], Spain
© Nicolas Mertens. All Rights Reserved.
The June 18, 2010, issue of Science Magazine is dedicated to the state of Earth’s oceans.(1) The issue should be must-read for everyone on the planet but, unfortunately, although understandably, the online edition is available only to subscribers and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). However, most articles have a brief summary that is available to anyone, and portions of the magazines are also available once a free registration process has been completed.
In the meantime, here are excerpts from John A. Church’s editorial which, incidentally, shines for its clarity and absence of jargon:
The evolving disaster of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill reminds us that our welfare depends on a healthy marine ecosystem and that the oceans are vulnerable to human activities. The oceans sustain a vast wealth of biological diversity, deliver critical ecosystem services, supply valuable natural resources, and are a central component of the climate system… At the same time, ocean changes affect the terrestrial environment … [but] society has thus far failed to heed the clear warnings about continuing greenhouse gas emissions, making the need to adapt to climate and ocean changes unavoidable. This adaptation will become increasingly challenging for many people around the world… Environmental refugees will become a major social challenge. [Etc.](2)
What struck me in this editorial is the sentence, “society has thus far failed to heed the clear warnings…” I’m almost sure that with the word “society,” the author targets government people, “leaders,” politicians, corporate grandees, and the like, that is, individuals who are driven by the demands of profit and greed, and who believe also (I suppose) that their wealth shields them, or will shield them, from the unpleasantness present and future that scientists are talking about.
On the other hand, it’s possible that Church targets also society at large, its unwillingness to be better informed, to change its bad habits, and its failure to put pressure on its “leaders.” Yet, I wonder. I think that society at large is willing to be informed, and by extension is willing to modify its behavior. I don’t think that people make a conscious effort to remain ignorant. Give them a chance, and people will learn and make a conscious effort to learn more. But, if on the contrary you tell them that ignorance is bliss, then of course that’s what they will do: seek the path of least effort and the shorter route to the nearest junk-food joint. Which brings another article in the same issue of Science, Stuart Firenstein’s review of two movies: Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora and Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s Océans.(3)
In Agora, Amenabar tells the story of Hypatia, a 5th-century Alexandria scientist who was killed by a mob of Christian extremists. In this movie, for once, scientists are not portrayed as bumbling idiots or mad maniacs bent to destroy the universe. The search for reason and knowledge is depicted as being worthy an endeavor, but, yesterday as today, obscurantism—sustained by political and economic interests—wins. The film was produced in 2009 in Europe but it took a year to find a distributor in the USA. Why is that? Because, hey, the public is not interested in that sort of things, we are told, that sort of things is not what the public wants. What public? The US public? Once again, is it really true that the public—American or other—only wants bumbling idiots and mad maniacs? What the public wants is not the problem here. The public doesn’t want anything that is not presented to it. Did you ever hear the public clamoring for “sex, violence, and foul language,” for example? This brand of entertainment was presented to the public in incremental doses, and sure enough the public adopted it like it would have adopted anything else. You could just as well say that the public wants to be educated and entertained with quality material, and deliver. The public would take it as easily as it is taking the garbage it is being usually served. No. The problem is that some people want the public to remain in a torpor. Ignorance is bliss. It is also more manageable. And so the public is fed precepts such as, “Do not listen to the serpent that lurks in the tree of knowledge,” “The search for knowledge is bad and you know what will happen if you do listen.”
Ditto with Oceans, the Disney-distributed version of Océans. I saw neither version, but, according to Firenstein, the two versions are quite different. It seems that the Disney version is once again based on the assumption that the public doesn’t want substance, only fluff. Thus, this version has suffered so many cuts that it is 13 minutes shorter than the French version, and it has an “insipid” narration that essentially tells the viewers what to think. Firenstein also hints at corporate imperatives, Disney having big interests in the theme-park business.
So, what’s the point of all this? The point is that through corporate greed, the world is gearing toward environmental disasters, and through corporate greed society at large is maintained in a state of indolence. The only difference between now and previous centuries, is that the opiates are more numerous and varied and of course the environmental damages are proportionate to the greed in question. There is a sea change on Earth but one thing remains the same: business as usual. Meanwhile, the “bumbling idiots” continue to shout at walls of ignorance and incomprehension.
Here are a few old articles that show how little progress we make—if any—toward amending our ways:
– From The New York Times, August 3, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/science/earth/03jellyfish.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=jelly%20fish&st=cse):
BARCELONA, Spain — Blue patrol boats crisscross the swimming areas of beaches here with their huge nets skimming the water’s surface. The yellow flags that urge caution and the red flags that prohibit swimming because of risky currents are sometimes topped now with blue ones warning of a new danger: swarms of jellyfish… From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets…
But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans… The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows…
These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come… [Etc.]
– From Science Magazine, December 19, 2008 (if you are a subscriber, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;322/5909/1773?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&andorexacttitle=or&andorexacttitleabs=or&fulltext=Acidification+of+the+oceans&andorexactfulltext=phrase&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=12/1/2008&tdate=12/31/2008&resourcetype=HWCIT,HWELTR):
Ocean Fizz. Acidification of the oceans driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide continues apace. The falling pH is bad news for sea creatures, from coral reefs to microscopic plankton. But the looming threat has yet to gain [wide public attention]… Look [in 2009] for a rising tide of studies confirming the pervasive detrimental effects of ocean acidification, although whether more science will grab the public’s attention is problematic.
– And that’s not all. Do you want to know about underwater landgrabbing, overfishing and failed policies, rising slime, islands of plastic in the Pacific Ocean that are as large as Texas, and so on? See the eye-opening special report on “Troubled Waters” in The Economist, January 3, 2009 (if you are a subscriber, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12798458 and http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12853926).
Business as usual.
(1) Science Magazine, 18 June 2010, “Changing Oceans,” http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol328/issue5985/index.dtl
(2) Science Magazine, 18 June 2010, John A. Church, “The Changing Oceans,” http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5985/1453
(3) Science Magazine, 18 June 2010, Stuart Firenstein, “Better Reception in Europe?”, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5985/1482
© Nicolas Mertens. All rights reserved.
Shot in New Mexico (USA), on the Jicarilla Indian Reservation
I’m not trying to minimize the catastrophic impact of the accident in the Gulf, but I find the government’s actions and the media attacks against BP—the Associated Press’s in particular—sickening. And this is without saying anything about the thousands of idiotic comments made by readers. First of all, criticism is easy. And two, accidents happen.
Yesterday, for example, the federal government announced criminal and civil investigations into the accident. Even if the accident was due to negligence or illegal activities, now is not the time for the government to make announcements that are essentially demagogic. Furthermore, how are criminal and civil investigations going to solve the problem?
Then, there are people like Governor Bobby Jindal who keeps clamoring that the efforts made by BP and the federal government are “too little, too late.” What do these people think BP’s engineers are doing? That they are sitting on their hands? In the meantime, BP’s stock went down, and with it much of the market. As if that is going to solve everything!
Finally, as long as we don’t change our ways, as long as we demand the oil companies to give us more oil, there will be other accidents of this type. What will we do then? Actually change our habits? I don’t think so… Which brings to mind: every day, there are thousands of car accidents of the road. And deaths. And pollution. How come nobody is suing the car companies for that?
Anyway, all this is somewhat simplistic. But posturing and demagoguery are even more simplistic, and they certainly don’t help. Please, let the BP people do what they have to do without harassing them. There will be time later for recrimination and lawsuits.
Dry Martini
©Nicolas Mertens, All Rights Reserved
Since 2004, Google has been scanning all books ever published and has made available—free of charge—portions of these scans through its “service,” Google Books. At first, Google did this without the permission of publishers and authors who, of course, raised hell. In fact, a consortium of publishers and the Authors’ Guild filed a lawsuit, which was resolved only in 2008 when Google agreed to pay a hundred and twenty-five million dollars to authors and publishers for the right to use their material. John Sargent, who was part of the publishers’ negotiating team, said that “… [Google] agreed that in order to have content you have to have a licence for it and pay for it, and that the rights holder shall control the content.”(1)
Today, Google declares on Google Books that, “Many of the books you can preview on Google Books are still in copyright, and are displayed with the permission of publishers and authors. You can browse these “limited preview” titles just as you would in a bookstore, but you won’t be able to see more pages than the copyright holder has made available. When you’ve accessed the maximum number of pages allowed for a book, any remaining pages will be omitted from your preview. You can order full copies of any book using the ‘Get this book’ links to the side of the preview page.”(2)
Now, if the settlement is eventually approved by the U.S. courts, Google will open yet another service, Google Editions: an online e-books store. This will constitute serious competition for Amazon and Apple, especially since Google has already scanned twelve million books and that no special device (Kindle or iPad, for example) will be required to read its e-books.
OK. All this is good news for writers. So, what’s my problem? Google will make another buck, the stockholders will be happy, and the authors and publishers will get their cut. Fine. What about the photographers? Google has another service, a photo-sharing service called Panoramio. Just upload your photos to the service and share them with your family, your friends, the world! It’s free! And you get to see them in Google Earth!
What is not immediately evident in this scheme, is that your photos—if they are any good—also appear in dozens and dozens of commercial websites that use the photos to illustrate whatever they sell: hotel reservations, travel arrangements, and the like. This is done through an Application Programming Interface (API) which, in effect, makes Panoramio a treasure chest of royalty-free images. So, what happened with Google’s agreement that “… in order to have content you have to have a licence for it and pay for it, and that the rights holder shall control the content”? Does this not apply to photographers and their work? To be sure, a number of people in Panoramio have complained that their photos are being used commercially and that they don’t get paid for it. In this respect, my beef is not with Google but with these whiners. Incredibly enough, those people who complain are also the people who, obviously, did not read the Panoramio and Google Terms of Service (TOS), to which they agreed when they opened a Panoramio or Google account—or a Picasa account, for that matter. See for example Section 11 of Google’s TOS:
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.(3)
See also “Policy questions and answers” in Panoramio Policies and Legalities:
A site that uses the Panoramio API can show photos that appear on Panoramio, free of charge.(4)
In other words, photographers who post their photos in any of Google’s services, relinquish their “rights” and “control” over their work, and they give Google “licence for it,” and Google does not have to “pay for it.” Amen. Have a drink, people, and read the TOS :)
(1) See Ken Auletta, “Publish or Perish,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010, p. 31. Also online at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta.
(2) http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=91570&hl=en.
(3) http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS.
(4) http://www.panoramio.com/help/policies_legalities#policy_qa.
Taula and Talaiot de Trepuco, Menorca [Minorca], Spain
© Nicolas Mertens, All Rights Reserved
Bill McKibben is at it again: warning us that we are messing up our planet and that if we don’t amend our ways, our life as we know it will collapse. Twenty years ago, it was with The End of Nature.(1) Now, it is with his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet, a title that appropriately enough sounds like Aaargh.(2) In Eaarth, McKibben argues for two points.
OK. Fair enough. Developing these arguments doesn’t hurt, of course, but it is pretty much Utopian and a waste of time. First of all, they are not new. For one thing, unlimited growth has been debunked since the 18th and 19th centuries, that is, since the rate of population growth started to increase exponentially, and since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, and the early socialists come to mind, but mentioning these people today is like uttering a vulgarity or farting in public. So, let’s not.
McKibben, however, duly invokes The Limits of Growth, a report published by the Club of Rome in 1972.(3) He merely repeats what the report said and the changes that it prescribed to avoid disintegration. Then he mentions the huge impact that the report had at the time, and how many people started to work on the report’s advices. And then McKibben finds amazing that everything slowed to a grind, and that people went back—with a vengeance, it seems—to methods and practices meant to promote growth again. This brings my second point: McKibben’s arguments are predicated on the old aristotelian assumption that people are rational, a concept revived in the 17th century (the Age of Reason, so-called), with the added idea of human perfectability. Although not everybody agreed with these ideas, they had so much impact that we still swear by them. Yet, it seems to me that the last 300 years show well enough that people are not so rational and not so perfectible. Today, to be sure, we are in a disastrous situation. But to ask people—as McKibben does—to mature (I was going to say, to grow up) and to change their lifestyle, is to ask them to be reasonable. And that, as I see it, is not possible. It has never been, if History proves anything, and I see no signs to believe that it will happen in the near or even distant future.
It is not possible unless something cataclysmic happens. Perhaps. People do not change of their own volition. They change when change is forced upon them, not by the power of an enlightened government, not by the power of reason, but by the forces of nature. Even at that point, I’m not sure that people actually change. Civilizations have gone the way of the dodo because of some calamity drawn upon them by some mismanagement of their own. Then new civilizations came up, slowly, and possibly with good intentions. Then people reverted to their old nasty habits.
In other words, we will not mature, we will not change our bahavior. We are headed toward very bad years, perhaps centuries. But one thing seems certain: there will be enough people to start over again. That’s why our insane population growth, after all, is not so insane. We are simply acting out our instinct for survival…
(1) Bill McKibben. The End of Nature. New York, NY: Random House, 1989.
(2) Bill McKibben. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet. New York, NY: Times Books, 2010. The book is due for release on April 13, 2010. Excerpts are already available in various places, in particular in the April issue of Scientific American, of which an abstract is available here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=breaking-the-growth-habit.
(3) Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, 1972. The report has been updated twice since then. See Beyond the Limits (1993) and Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004). See also Graham Turner’s 2008 paper, “A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” which finds that the 1972 study and predictions can be observed in today’s economic and societal breakdowns (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO]).
If you want to see in Google Earth (GE) where the photo was taken, copy these coordinates 39.873556, 4.265409 and paste them in GE’s “Fly to” text box.
Portrait of Herbert Spencer by Elliott & Fry,
now at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Last year was Darwin’s year: he was born in 1809 and his master work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life—to give its full title—was published in 1859, 151 years ago. These were causes for celebrations. I hoped that some scholars would have taken these festivities as opportunities to note that Darwin’s work did not come out of the blue. Many people in the 19th century, and even before, sought alternatives to the creation of species by God. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is one important example. See for example his Philosophie zoologique which, coincidentally, was published in 1809.(*) There are other examples; they all proposed theories and commentaries that were more or less flawed, but all contributing somehow to now-familiar ideas such as natural evolution, transformism (a better word for evolution), natural selection, struggle for existence (Malthus), survival of the fittest (Spencer), and so on.
Among these, Herbert Spencer is my favorite. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I’m impressed by the sheer size of his work (I’m not a Spencer scholar!), which was enormous and varied, concerned with biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics and politics, and more. Or perhaps because his work is based on specific socio-political and socio-biological principles and leads to an ethic of conciliation between social coöperation and individual liberty. Or perhaps because he spelled out his beliefs in anti-interventionism in the development of nature, the survival of the fittest, the rejection of man-made laws, the organic aspect of society, the evanescence of government, population pressure, and so on. Or perhaps because Spencer has been much maligned.
After the considerable success of his Synthetic Philosophy, published in various tomes between 1862 and 1896, Spencer’s fame slowly evaporated. Xenophobia, chauvinism, jingoism, unbridled colonial expansion, war, state interference, bureaucratic tyranny, collectivism, welfare, social services, imposed professional standards, public education, abdication of the individual’s responsibilities, they all drowned Spencer’s identification of peace with progress. At the same time, his individualistic liberalism was attacked by Thomas Hill Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and others. The rationality and respectability of human beings—that is, the upholders of contractual rules meant to regulate the individual for the common good—fell into disrepute. What is worse, some people took some of Spencer’s ideas—and some of Darwin’s as well, although the latter never extrapolated from his theory any social and/or political scheme for human beings—to develop what is known as Social Darwinism. Some people have even claimed that Spencer was the father of Social Darwinism or that he created the Social Darwinist model.
I think that it must be emphasized that Spencer’s evolutionism and Social Darwinism are not, properly speaking, racist doctrines. However, the accent on the struggle for survival opens an easy door to racist interpretations. It is easy to replace the word “species” with “race,” and “individuals of a specific species” with “individuals of a specific race.” This is what Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and other Counter-Enlightenment thinkers did not hesitate to do, asserting that the white race was superior to the yellow race, and the yellow race superior to the black race, and that this was a pattern of nature that should be respected in society also. Naturally, it was enough for a number of opportunists to transform this theory, or at least to combine it with elements of socialism and “Nietzscheite” misreading, thus forming such political ideologies as eugenics and national socialism; it still is… (**)
Despite several waves of admiration from far away places (Andrew Carnegie, Mutsu-Hito, enthusiastic Indians and Arabs, etc.); despite the fact that evolutionism became extremely popular in the USA when The Principles of Sociology started to appear in 1872 in Popular Science Monthly (the magazine launched by Edward L. Youmans, specifically to publish Spencer’s Study of Sociology); that evolutionism found a powerful proponent in William Graham Sumner, a professor of social and political sciences at Yale; that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1902; and finally, despite the academic honors offered him at home (professorships, presidencies, honorary degrees, etc.), Spencer’s last years were a slow descent into sadness, infirmity, and pessimism. With the misinterpretations and misuse of his theories and their literary obsolescence, it is possible that Spencer lost of faith in his own work. He died on December 8, 1903; he was eighty-three years old. His remains are interred at Highgate Cemetery, where his tomb faces an effigy of Karl Marx.
Lats year was Darwin’s year. I hoped that it would have been an opportunity to rehabilitate Spencer with some strong scholarship, to recognize that his enormous work—however flawed it may have been—contributed to the advancement of science. As Stanislav Andreski remarked somewhere, and judiciously so, “an author of an influential error is also a figure of importance.” There was a good start in that direction in the January 9, 2009, issue of Science. See Peter J. Bowler’s article in that issue, an abstract of which can be found here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5911/223. Although it was essentially about “Darwin’s originality,” the author duly mentioned Spencer without bias. After that, nothing. Is Spencer really dead, buried, and forgotten?
(*) The full title is Philosophie zoologique, ou Exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux; à la diversité de leur organisation et des facultés qu’ils en obtiennent; aux causes physiques qui maintiennent en eux la vie et donnent lieu aux mouvements qu’ils exécutent; enfin, à celles qui produisent les unes le sentiment, et les autres l’intelligence de ceux qui en sont doués.
(**) Today, for example, pop evolutionary psychology—or Pop EP, a branch of theoretical psychology—uses evolutionary principles to support claims about human nature. Some scholars argue, however, that these grand claims lack solid evidence. In this respect, see David J. Buller’s article, “Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology,” in the January 2009 issue of Scientific American, an excerpt of which can be found here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=four-fallacies.
Shot in Boston, Massachusetts (USA)
© Nicolas Mertens, All Rights Reserved
I. M. Pei and Henry N. Cobb, architects.
This magnificent building has also a fascinating story. Read it in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower.
If you want to see the shooting location of this photo in Google Earth (GE), copy these coördinates 42.348544, -71.075294 and paste them in GE’s “Fly to” box.
Shot in Menorca [Minorca], Spain
©Nicolas Mertens, All Rights Reserved
The talaïots are megalithic monuments that were built during the Bronze Age, which occurred in Menorca between 1,600 and 200 BCE. Due to their resemblance to various structures in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, several authors believe that the talaïotic culture—so-called—originated in the eastern Mediterranean. There are about three hundred talaïots on the island, and also a great number in Mallorca.
The word talaïot comes from the Arab atalayi, sentinel, but the exact purpose of these structures is unknown. All talaïots are not the same and their location varies from place to place. On the average, their diameter is around 15 meters (~49 feet), although some are much smaller, and others twice as big. Sometimes they are located on top of a hill, overlooking a wide horizon, hence the idea of being observation/vigilance towers. Sometimes they are part of a village’s fortified wall; in that case, they could have been defense towers. Sometimes they are located inside a village. Some have a fairly large room located toward the top; was it a storage room? And others have a small room located toward the bottom; which suggests a funeral function.
As far as I know, the best compendium of prehistoric architecture in Menorca and Mallorca is that of J. Mascaró Pasarius’s Corpus de toponímia de Mallorca, six volumes, of which volume 5 and parts of volume 6 constitute the more affordable Prehistoria de las Balears (Palma de Mallorca: Gráficas Miramar, 1968).
If you want to see the shooting location of this photo in Google Earth (GE), just copy these coördinates 39.848625, 4.217025 and paste them in GE’s “Fly to” text box. You’ll see that this is not a quiet neighborhood for the talaïotic ghosts!
