The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things.
If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0].
The abstract reads:
>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.
I had a look at that. The notion of a "collective brain" is similar to that of "civilization". It is not a novel notion, and the connections shown there are trivial and uninspiring.
I once took Amtrack from Chicago-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Antonio-Chicago. With side-trips to Madison WI, Vancouver and to Yosemite (via Green Tortoise company).
It was a 6 week vacation, the purpose was to travel and see the US. I enjoyed it very much!
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
This reflects an interesting development in Bay Area politics, which has global impact through tech companies.
A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area. Apple was famous for its anti-authoritarian "1984" ad, directed by Ridley Scott. Google proclaimed "Don't be evil".
I'm not sure quite what to make of the current trend of the dominant "technocrats", and their employees, from being liberal to supporting division within society.
But it does not seem conducive to a perpetuation of what made the Bay Area such a productive environment, from scientific, cultural and business perspectives.
> "A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area."
A few decades ago was before the meteoric internet and mobile web boom and the deluge of non-hackers with CS degrees and MBA types with dollar signs in their eyes that flooded into the tech industry. The hacker ethos turned from "information wants to be free" into "f--- you, pay me" in only a few short years simply because the old guard was diluted away to nothingness by so many newcomers.
> Apple was famous for its anti-authoritarian "1984" ad
Perhaps, but Apple’s corporate culture is (and has always been?) pretty command-and-control.
> A few decades ago, tech, science and liberalism were bedfellows in the Bay Area.
Digital Technology is a powerful tool to create uniformity (scale), force authority (control, predictability, sentiment shaping). Of course it can be used to fight against these, but digital tech leans very much in the direction of centralization and control if you ask me.
The "1984" ad is from... well duh, 1984. Apple was a small startup in a niche industry back then - fighting against centralization and control by building "a bicycle for the mind" that would push useful computation to the "edge" where it can be controlled by the user.
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."
For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1].
> For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect.
Not really, given that the article goes into detail about this in the first paragraph, with US data and graphs: "Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared."
Eyeballing the chart in the OP and the French data shows them to have a comparable pattern. While OP's data is horses per person, and the French is total number of horses, both show a decline in horse numbers starting about 10 years after widespread adoption of the motor vehicle and falling to 50% of their peak in the mid- to late-1950's, with the French data being perhaps a bit over 5 years delayed compared to the US data. That is, it took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be replaced.
The point isn't to claim that motor vehicles did not replace horses, they obviously did, but that the replacement was less "sudden" than claimed.
Yes, I considered that. Someone using a horse-drawn wagon to deliver goods about town would likely not consider buying a truck until the cart horse needed replacing.
The working life of a horse may be shorter than the realistic lifespan. Searching for "horse depreciation" gives 7 years for a horse under age 12, the prime years for a horse being between 7 and 12 yrs old, depending on what it is used for.
I'm willing to accept the input of someone more knowledgeable about working horses, though!
If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
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