Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Del latitude xinput settings

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/688270/mouse-speed-too-fast

Put the following commands in a file (foobar.sh), make the file executable (chmod +x foobar.sh), and then run it.

#!/bin/sh
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 8
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Velocity Scaling" .8
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick" "Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration" 8


You can run this command on startup from the Startup Applications menu.

Friday, June 09, 2017

Lining or Oldstyle numerals in math typesetting?

The classic work,


has the following remarks in paragraph 95, p. 63:
Relative size of numerals in tables.-- André says on this point: "In certain numerical tables, as those of
 Schrön, all numerals are of the same height. In certain other tables, as those of Lalande, of Callet, of Houël, of Dupuis, they have unequal heights: the 7 and 9 are prolonged downward; 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 extend upward; while 1 and 2 do not reach above nor below the central body of the writing.... The unequal numerals, by their very inequality, render the long train of numerals easier to read; numerals of uniform height are less legible." (D. André, Des notations mathématiques (Paris, 1909), p .9).

Thursday, May 18, 2017

YAAC ("yet again about copyright")

Some sensible remarks from the Director of UofA's copyright office.  Importantly, the UofA relinquishes its rights to the copyright of work written by faculty members.  Faculty members own the copyright of their writings.

Monday, May 15, 2017

IBUS bug fix ... again (sigh!)

Further to https://cikitsa.blogspot.ca/2012/01/ibus-bug-fix.html, I found the same bug cropping up in Linux Mint 18.1, with IBUS 1.15.11.

Some applications don't like IBUS + m17n, and certain input mim files. For example, LibreOffice and JabRef.  Trying to type "ācārya" will give the result is "ācāry a". And in other strings, some letters are inverted: "is" becomes "si" and so forth.

Here's the fix.

Create a file called, say ibus-setting.sh with the following one-line content:
export IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=0
Copy the file ibus-setting.sh to the directory /etc/profile.d/, like this:
sudo cp ibus-setting.sh /etc/profile.d
Make the file executable, like this:
sudo chmod +x /etc/profile.d/ibus-setting.sh
Logout and login again.

Phew!

This fixes the behaviour of IBUS + m17n with most applications, including LibreOffice and Java applications like JabRef.  However, some applications compiled with QT5 still have problems.  So, for example, you have to use the version of TeXStudio that is compiled with QT4, not QT5. [Update September 2018: QT5 now works fine with Ibus, so one can use the QT5 version of TeXstudio with no problem.]

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Dvandva compounds of adjectives

Some discussions supporting the existence of this formation:
  • Speyer, Sanskrit Syntax, para 208
  • Whitney, para 1257
  • Burrow, The Skt Language, p.219

Thursday, September 29, 2016

What's the point of an academic journal?

Presuppositions

I find that I often read my academic colleagues' papers at academia.edu and other similar repositories, or they send me their drafts directly.  I am not always aware of whether the paper has been published or not.  Sometimes I can see that I'm looking at a word-processed document (double spacing, etc.); other times the paper is so smart it's impossible to distinguish from a formally-published piece of writing (LaTeX etc.).

Reading colleagues' drafts gives me access to the cutting edge of recent research.  Reading in a journal can mean I'm looking at something the author had finished with one, two or even three years ago.  In that sense, reading drafts is like attending a conference.  You find out what's going on, even if the materials are rough at the edges.  You participate in the current conversation.

In many ways, reading colleagues' writings informally like this is more similar to the medieval ways of knowledge-exchange that were dominated by letter-writing.  The most famous example is Mersenne (fl. 1600), who was at the centre of a very important network of letter-writers, and just preceded the founding of the first academic journal, Henry Oldenberg's Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (founded 1665).

What am I missing?


Editorial control

What I don't get by reading private drafts is the curatorial intervention of a board of editors.  A journal's editorial board acts as a gatekeeper for knowledge, making decisions about what is worth propagating and what is not worth propagating.  The board also makes small improvements and changes to submissions, required since many academic authors are poor writers, and because of the natural processes of error. So, a good editorial board makes curatorial decisions about what to display, and improves quality.

Counter-argument: Many editorial boards don't do their work professionally. The extended "advisory board members" are window-dressing; the real editorial activity is often carried out by only one dynamic person, perhaps with secretarial support.  This depends, of course, on the size of the journal and the academic field it serves.  I'm thinking of sub-fields in the humanities.

Archiving and findability

A journal also provides archival storage for the long term.  This is critically important.  An essential process in academic work is to "consult the archive."  The archive has to actually be there in order to be accessed.  A journal - in print or electronically - offers a stable way of finding scholars' work through metadata tagging (aka cataloguing), and through long-term physical or electronic storage.  If I read a colleagues' draft, I may not be able to find it again in a year's time.  Is it still at academia.edu?  Where?  Did I save a copy on my hard drive?  Is my hard drive well-organized and backed up (in which case, is it a journal of sorts?)?

Counter-argument:  Are electronic journals archival?  Are they going to be findable in a decade's time?  Some are, some aren't.  The same goes for print, but print is - at the present time - more durable, and more likely to be findable in future years.  An example is the All India Ayurvedic Directory, published in the years around the 1940s.  A very valuable document of social and medical history.  It's unavailable through normal channels.  Only a couple of issues have been microfilmed or are in libraries.  Most of the journal is probably available in Kottayam or Trissur in Kerala, but it would take a journey to find it and a lot of local diplomatic effort to be given permission to see it.  Nevertheless, it probably exists, just.

Prestige

A journal may develop a reputation that facilitates trust in the articles published by that journal.  This is primarily of importance for people who don't have time to read for themselves and to engage in the primary scholarly activity of thinking and making judgements based on arguments and evidence.  A journal's prestige may also play a part in embedding it in networks of scholarly trust and shared but not known knowledge, in the sense developed by Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension and other writings).

Conclusion

At the moment, I can't think of any other justifications for the existence of journals.  But if editorial functions and long-term storage work properly, they are major factors that are worth having.

Further reading

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal#New_developments
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_communication
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Getting Xindy to work for IAST-encoded text

Update, 2021

January 2021.  Since writing about Xindy below in 2016, a new indexing program has been released, Xindex by Herbert Voß.  I now use xindex with this configuration file for IAST sorting.  My preamble says 

\usepackage[imakeidx]{xindex} 

\makeindex[name=lexical,
title=Lexical Index,
columns=3,
options=  -c iast -a -n, % nocasesensitive, noheadings
]

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

How "open" is "Open Access"

As the Open Access model becomes increasingly important for public knowledge dissemination, some agencies with vested interests have begun to complicate matters by introducing hybrid publishing models.  Some of these are not fully in the interests of authors or readers.

PLOS has a great discussion about the issues at stake, and they refer to the OAS brochure, which is provided in many languages.

The second page of this OAS brochure is very short, clear and helpful.  Recommended!


Friday, April 22, 2016

On the use of parentheses in translation

This deserves a fuller discussion; I'm just doing a quick note here, arising out of a conversation with Dagmar and Jason Birch.;

My thinking is influenced by my teachers Gombrich and Matilal, both of whom had a lot to say about translation, and by reading materials on translation by Lawrence Venuti and Umberto Eco (Mouse or Rat?).  There's a huge literature on translation, including specific materials on Skt like Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.

I wonder about the heavy use of parentheses by Indologists.  One does not see this in English translations from French, say, or German.  Or even Latin or Greek.  What are we up to?  I can distinguish several reasons for parentheses in English trs. from Skt. 
  • Fear.  We are asserting to the reader that we know what we're doing, and making our word-choices explicit.  This is a defence against the small voice in our brains that says "professor so-and-so won't accept a fluent, uninterrupted translation from me, seeing it as bad.  I'll get criticised in public."
  • Habit.  We see others doing it and absorb the habit.
  • Germanism.  Venuti has shown compellingly, in The Translator's Invisibility, how different linguistic audiences receive translations differently.  English readers and reviewers approve strongly of translations of which they can say, "it reads as naturally as if the author had written in English."  German readers are different, and want to experience a sense of foreignness in their translations; if a translation reads fluently in German, they feel there is some deception being carried out. Since so many translations from Sanskrit were done by Germans, English readers like us get used to the "German" presuppositions of the nature of translation, and simply carry on in that idiom.  See the attached Kielhorn example.  

The Kielhorn exemplifies another major problem, that Matilal used to talk about passionately.  If you read Kielhorn's tr. leaving out the parentheses, it's gobbledegook. Matilal said that if one has to use parentheses, then the text not in parentheses should read as a semantically coherent narrative.  This is because the Sanskrit is a semantically coherent narrative.  To present an incoherent English text is a tacit assertion that the Sanskrit is incoherent.  In which case, we should see parentheses in Sanskrit too.  Sometimes we do, as in Panini's mechanism of anuvṛtti, when parts of previous sutras are tacitly read into subsequent ones.  Anuvṛtti is doing similar work to that done by parentheses.  So Vasu's translation of Panini uses parentheses in a valid way, I would argue.
What are valid reasons for parentheses?  I would say that very, very rarely it is justified to put a Skt word in brackets when not to do so would be seriously confusing or misleading for the typical reader, or when the Skt author is making a tacit point.  "He incurred a demerit (karma) by failing to do the ritual (karma)."   Or, in the RV, "The lord (asura) of settlements has readied for me two oxen ."(Scharfe 2016: 48).

Then there's the psychology of reading. For me, this is one of the important reasons for not using parentheses or asides of any kind.  I've never articulated this before, so what follows may be a bit incoherent.​  When I watch my mind during reading, I absorb sentences and they create a sense of understanding.  It's quite fast, and it's a flow.  As I go along, the combination of this flow of sentences and the accumulation of a page or two of it in memory produces the effect of having a new meaning in my mind, of having understood a semantic journey shared with me by the author.  But when there are many parentheses, that flow is broken.  The reading becomes much slower, and I often have to read things several times, including a once-over skipping the parentheses.  This slow, assembly-style reading is not impossible, and one may gain something.  But one loses a lot.  What's lost is the larger-scale comprehension, and the sense of a flow of ideas.
What I find works for me as a reader and writer is to avoid the branching of the flow of attention while reading.  Branching is often done through parenthetical statements, -- and through dashed asides -- (and through discursive footnotes), but not citation footnotes.  In my mind, it's like travelling in a car and taking every side road, driving down it for two hundred metres and then coming back to the main road, and continuing just until the next side road, etc.  As a writer, I find it quite easy to avoid branching.  I do it by thinking in advance about the things I want to say, and then working out a sequence in which I want to present them so that the reader gets the sense of connection.  Cut-n-paste is very helpful.
I'm not sure whether the above is totally personal to me, or a widely-shared phenomenon.  I've never read anything about this topic.  I have read about eye-movements during reading, and the relationship of this to line-length and typeface design.  I should look around for material on the psychology of comprehension during reading.  There must be something out there.

Wendy Doniger, who writes well, said last year:
I sound out every line I write, imagining the reader reading it, and never imagining as the reader certain scholars, who shall remain nameless, who might be watching with an eagle eye, poised to pounce on any mistake I might make; no, I always imagine the reader as my father, on my side. I try to be that person to my students, who are otherwise vulnerable to an imaginaire of hostile reception that can block their writing, as it keeps some of my most brilliant colleagues from publishing. My father saved me from that.
-- Scroll.in "A Life of Learning"

References

  • Eco, U. Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation.  Phoenix Press, 2004
  • Garzilli, E. (Ed.) Translating, Translations, Translators from India to the West.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ., 1996.
  • Scharfe, H. "Ṛgveda, Avesta, and Beyond—ex occidente lux?"  Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2016, 136, 47-67.
  • Venuti, L. The Translator's Invisibility: A History Of Translation.  London, New York, Routledge, 1995

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Re: Against the petition against Pollock

A petition that started this business was posted on change.org.  I noticed it on 26 Feb.
The background causative issues include present government policies in India towards national culture, and the publication of the book by Rajiv Malhotra (USA) called The Battle for Sanskrit.  I haven't seen the book, but it appears to be an attack on Sheldon Pollock's scholarship.   Malhotra is a rich American who funds attacks on American scholars of Indian studies etc.

My response to the petition was posted to the INDOLOGY forum on 27 Feb.:
Some media responses:

Friday, February 05, 2016

Babylonians used geometrical methods, 350-50 BCE

"Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph" / Mathieu Ossendrijver

Science  29 Jan 2016:
Vol. 351, Issue 6272, pp. 482-484
DOI: 10.1126/science.aad8085

Abstract

The idea of computing a body’s 
displacement as an area in time-velocity space is usually traced back to 14th-century Europe. I show that in four ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Jupiter’s displacement along the ecliptic is computed as the area of a trapezoidal figure obtained by drawing its daily displacement against time. This interpretation is prompted by a newly discovered tablet on which the same computation is presented in an equivalent arithmetical formulation. The tablets date from 350 to 50 BCE. The trapezoid procedures offer the first evidence for the use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy, which was thus far viewed as operating exclusively with arithmetical concepts.



BBC Report

Sophisticated geometry - the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes - was being used at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought, a study suggests.
Research shows that the Ancient Babylonians were using geometrical calculations to track Jupiter across the night sky.
Previously, the origins of this technique had been traced to the 14th Century.
The new study is published in Science.
Its author, Prof Mathieu Ossendrijver, from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, said: "I wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of science use this method."

For the rest of the BBC report, see:

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Primitive Man

Greater lack of cultural values than that found in the inner life of some strata of our modern population is hardly to be found anywhere.

-- Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (2ed, 1938), p.198.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Cranial surgery on Bhoja

Bhojadeva Bhiṣajām


The king cleansed his head at a tank, but a baby goldfish (śaphara-śāvaḥ) got into his skull.  Physicans couldn't cure the pain, so the king prepared to die, and banished all the physicians from the kingdom, throwing their medicines into the river.
Indra told the Aśvins about this, and they went to the king's court, disguised as brahmans.  They make the king unconscious with moha-cūrṇa and took his skull out and put it in a skull-shaped basin.  They removed the fish and threw them into a dish.  They reassembled his skull with glue, and woke him up with a reviving medicine (sañjīvanī) and showed him the fish.

Saradaprosad Vidyabhusan (ed.) भोज-प्रबन्धः श्रीबल्लाल विरचितः The Bhoj-Prabandha of Sree Ballal (With English Translation) (Calcutta: Auddy & Co., 1926), pp. 222-228. 
See also the tr. by Louis Gray in the AOS series, New Haven, 1950.

The Bhojaprabandha Ballāladeva of Benares, apparently 16th century (so not to be confused with Ballālasena the father of Lakṣmaṇasena, ruler of Bengal). 

Cleverness and Goodness are a rare combination in a person

From the भोजप्रबन्धः बल्लालसेनेन विरचितम् 

मनीषिणः सन्ति न ते हितैषिणो
हितैषिणः सन्ति न ते मनीषिणः |
सुहृच्च विद्वानपि दुर्लभो नृणां |
यथौषधं स्वादु हितञ्च दुर्लभम् ||५८||



Wisdom is knowledge together with goodness. -- S. Wujastyk

Friday, December 11, 2015

Linux Mint swapfile

Getting the swap file working in Linux Mint.  Using LVM

sudo /sbin/mkswap /dev/mapper/foobar [e.g., mint--vg-swap_1]
sudo swapon -a

Monday, December 07, 2015

Brandolini's Law

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Research funding in Canada

Funding sources

See also

Friday, January 23, 2015

Canada tops the list of yoga interest worldwide

According to Google's metrics on search trends, the keyword "yoga" is searched for more in Canada than in any other country in the world.  And within Canada, the top "yoga" locations are Vancouver and then Calgary.