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February 11th, 2010
Okay world, this is part one of an infrequent series about the history of Ancient Egypt. I have often been told that my grandmother was an amateur egyptologist and earlier last year I thought I’d get back to my roots by reading some stuff about Ancient Egypt. The purpose of these blog posts is to try to force myself to clear out and deal with some uncertainties I have and things I’ve found difficult to grasp.
So then, let’s start.
Basically, Egyptian history is easy in the same way as English history is easy. At any moment in English history between the 11th and the 20th centuries you can be fairly sure that the King is either waging war against the French or is trying to get money to do so, or maybe both. England, or Britain is a known concept. These islands haven’t really changed that much. There used to be tensions between the English and the Scottish and going back a bit further between the Welsh and the English, and there still are some tensions between the Irish and the English, but not anywhere near as bad as it used to be. Throw in the establishment of the Church of England under Henry VIII and a brief period as a republic (Cromwell) and you’ve got a pretty good overview over British history right up to the start of the 19th Century.
Ancient Egyptian history is similar. Egypt always was the area of land irrigated by the Nile to the north of the rocky, shallow area known as the first cataract. Egyptian pharaohs were always fighting off half-hearted invasions from Libya to the West or Lebanon to the North East. In good times, the Sudan to the south of the first cataract (which was called Nubia) was part of the Egyptian empire, in bad times the pharaoh would send some soldiers to “conquer” it (which probably meant reestablishing trade routes). As well as this there’s a kingdom of Punt which is mentioned every now and then, and no one really knows where it was, and the Egyptians even attacked Mesopotamia (a Greek word meaning “the land between the rivers”, the rivers here being the Tigris and the Euphrates. The current name of this area is Iraq and is situated a long way to the north-east of Egypt) once or twice after they’d discovered things like horses and chariots.
So that’s the basic idea. One other important fact which really helps structure Egyptian history and tells us a lot about Egyptian life is that Egypt was actually divided into two countries. The first and the most traditional one was called Upper Egypt, and the second one which had more contact with other countries was called Lower Egypt. To understand this you have to have a look at the geography of Egypt. Egypt looks like a flower with a long stem. The stem is the Nile to the North of the first cataract up to the Lower Kingdom which starts where the Nile breaks up into smaller tributaries which flow into the Mediterranean. So the Southern bit (Upper Egypt) didn’t have as much contact with the sea-faring cultures and it also was quite a way away from new cultural influences coming in from the North-East (Lebanon, Syria, Mesopotamia, etc). Anyway, the important thing is that as long as the two lands were united as one, things went well, but every now and then, things fell apart (because of food shortage or invasion), and the lands fell apart and Egyptian history gets murky.
So let’s see a simple overview of Egyptian history:
1/ Old Kingdom. The Upper and the Lower Kingdom are united to one. This may have happened about 3000 years BC. The Old Kingdom lasted until about 2200 BC, when all over the Mediterranean civilisations collapsed. The current explanation is that there were a number of extremely bad harvests in a row and a lot of the population died of starvation. The Old Kingdom is famous nowadays mainly because of the pyramids, which were mostly built then.
2/ First intermediate period. In-fighting between the Upper and the Lower kingdom. Two different royal houses. Lasted about 100 years before Egypt was unified again under a ruler from the Upper Kingdom.
3/ Middle Kingdom. Lots of art and some temple building in Karnak and Luxor (right next to Thebes). Quite a short period, about 400 years. The end of this period appears to be quite unclear. At any rate sources tell of an invasion by a people known as the Hyksos from somewhere in Asia. However many consider the word “invasion” to be too strong and instead regard the Hyksos as being foreign settlers allowed in to help the building projects.
4/ Second intermediate period. At any rate, Thebes declared independence and the Upper Kingdom seperated from the Lower, which became ruled by the Hyksos. The Hyksos probably brought horses, composite-bows and chariots to Egypt. But generally they were unliked and thought of as irreligious foreigners. About 1600 BC Thebes had had enough and the pharaohs there kicked out the Hyksos and reunited Egypt.
5/ New Kingdom. This was a great time to be Egyptian. Lots of stuff was built (Karnak, Luxor, valley of the kings …), lots of wars were fought (and the Egyptians won most of them). The Egyptian empire grew to its largest extent and lots of treaties and trade negotiations were established. This lasted upto about 1100 BC, when things turned decidedly pear-shaped. Current theories suggest bad harvests and bad flooding of the Nile (important for the irrigation of the farmlands) caused by some volcanic eruption. The whole thing fell apart.
6/ Third intermediate period. This refers to quite a long period (upto about 650 BC) where there is lots of stuff going on. Basically the land was divided into lots of different counties and religious states, and though there seem to have been some periods of stability, the land was not united, so we might as well call it an intermediate period.
7/ Late Period. This is traditionally dated up to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC). Egypt was united, but then was invaded by Persians (nowadays Persia is called Iran). Egyptologists often point out how sad and dismal this period was compared with the great and glorious past.
8/ Greek conquest and occupation followed by Roman conquest and occupation. Fall of the Roman empire etc. etc.
So that was a basic start to Egyptian history. In my next installment I’ll probably start naming some names (like Cheops, Rameses and Tutankhamum) and mentioning when they ruled. I may also start to talk about Egyptian religion, which appears to me to be just one great big mess at the moment.
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February 10th, 2010
One of the sentences you hear if you spend enough time in Germany is “Why do we still have to feel guilty for the Nazis? I wasn’t alive back then so it’s not my fault”. This is one of those things which annoy me because it is A. totally true and B. totally falacious.
Basically it is trivially true. I am of course not responsible for the actions of my parents or grandparents. But it’s also missing the point entirely. The point is that the Nazis who commited these terrible acts of violence were people just like most of us. We are mostly all capable of acts of violence to some extent and this is nowadays rarely a problem because we know it’s wrong and society tells us it’s wrong. But if we lived at a time which said that it’s perfectly okay indeed desirable to hate and harm others, how long would it take most of us to become one of them? Conversely, we all know the saying “first they came for the communists, but i didn’t speak out because i was not a communist …”. A lot of us would have been carted off to the deathcamps under the Nazi regime, I imagine i would have been, or I probably would have hidden who I was and become part of the problem. Believing that I would have had the moral courage to resist is illusory—it requires believing that of the 50-odd million population in Germany at this time almost all of them were morally weaker than I am.
So my point is this. We have to learn about the Nazi time and the acts of attrocities because they tell us something about who we all (or at least most of us) are. Most of us would either have gone along with the Nazis or been imprisoned and murdered for being undesirable. We are the Nazi officer taking pot shots at Jews, homosexuals, gypsies (and the rest of a very long list), just as we are the Jews and others who were gased, burned alive, shot in their millions. That is the lesson i think we should learn from this time. It’s not about guilt, it’s about learning something about human nature and learning how to nip it in the bud should it threaten to happen again.
As humans we are capable of the greatest acts of empathy and kindness, but we are also capable of acts of true terror and violence. Distancing ourselves from the horrors of the Nazi regime and saying “That was my parents or grandparents so it doesn’t concern me” is just burying our heads in the sand and not learning this bitter but vitally important lesson.
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February 10th, 2010
Hello world.
i’ve just been reading the excellent wikipedia article on the Monty Hall problem clickity, and there’s one thing which strikes me as being obviously wrong.
For those who don’t know it, here’s a short explanation of the Monty Hall problem. You are a contestant on a game show. But wait, it gets worse. The budget for this game show extends to three doors and one prize, by which i mean that there are three doors on stage (which you can’t see behind) and behind one of them is a prize. The game show host asks you to pick a door, saying that you will get whatever is behind the door. But that’s not all, no. The rascal goes on to open one of the doors you haven’t picked and reveals that there is nothing behind that door. So now you’ve picked a door and one of the doors you didn’t pick is now open, revealing that there was nothing hidden behind it. Then the rapscallion offers you the chance of changing your mind and instead choosing the other closed door. Would changing your choice increase your chance of winning?
Basically the answer is yes. The best method i have found of making this clear is to imagine that instead of 3 doors and 1 prize, the game show had 1000 doors and one prize. Your random choice of a door is only going to be right one in a thousand time. That means that 999 in a thousand times, the prize will be behind one of the doors you didn’t choose. Now the game show hosts opens all the doors you didn’t choose apart from the one with the prize behind it. We know that the chance that the prize is behind the door you initially chose is one in a thousand. There is only one other door which hasn’t been opened. The prize must be behind either the door you initially chose or this other shut door. Therefore the chance that the prize is behind the other shut door is 999 in a thousand.
This seems pretty clear, and i bet we’d all get quite suspicious watching the host go down a long line of doors opening every single one apart from the one you initially chose and, looky here, one other. Our intuition would tell us that something is amiss here.
This is the standard way of playing the Monty Hall problem, but there are other ways. For example, we could say that the host only offers you the chance of changing if your initial guess was right, in which case you shouldn’t change. Or maybe the host only offers you the chance of changing if your initial guess was wrong, in which case you should change.
But let’s consider one other thing that the wikipedia article singles out, namely “”Monty Fall” or “Ignorant Monty”: The host does not know what lies behind the doors, and opens one at random that happens not to reveal the car (Granberg and Brown, 1995:712) (Rosenthal, 2008).”. Here the wikipedia article states that changing your choice wins the car half the time, which is obviously wrong. To see why it is obviously wrong, consider the situation with 1000 doors. Here you pick one door, so the chance that you picked the door with the prize behind it is one in a thousand. Then the host goes along the long line of doors opening them all apart from the one you chose and one random door. In so doing he discovers that there is no prize behind any of the doors he opened etc. etc.
This is of course quite unusual. in 998 times out of a thousand you would not expect the host to open all the doors apart from the one you chose and one other randomly selected one without revealing the prize. But given that we have such a case (and that is how i read the description by wikipedia), you should 999 times out of a thousand change your choice. There is no description about what happens in the extremely probably case that the host reveals the prize while opening the long line of doors. Do you get to try again? Have you lost? is the prize removed and hidden behind another door at random?
As long as these questions are not cleared up, there is no way of knowing how best to procede.
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October 14th, 2009
for those of you who don’t know what squeak is, it’s an implementation of smalltalk-80 by programmers at apple. for those of you who don’t know what smalltalk is, smalltalk is a pure object-oriented programming language. for those of you who don’t know that a pure object-oriented programming language is, i’d recommend going to read some stuff on wikipedia.
smalltalk should appeal to me. it is pure, totally pure. everything is an object. even the source code and object definitions are objects (lots of reflection). numbers are objects too (not like in boring java). it is a long way away from C, a language that i both love (because it thinks the way you think computers think) and hate (because of huge bugs in its syntax—how many meanings does * have again?). smalltalk also has things like closures, which allow the equivalent of first-class functions. so i should love it.
it has very simple, very well-defined, clear and concise syntax. just like scheme, you don’t need much experience to be able to look at a piece of code and have a good idea what it’s going to do. precedence rules are simple, just like in scheme, and unlike any C-style language–(*struct).var anybody?–and it has a proper assignment operator, just like scheme again, and just unlike any C-style language i know of.
actually i was reminded of this point recently when talking to a friend of mine. he’s just started studying physics in halle (a town in the old east of germany), and he has a programming course where he’s being taught object-oriented programming in C#. i kid you not. leaving the utter stupidity of teaching students a language with such patent and copyright concerns on one side for a second, i found it quite amusing to have to explain to him the difference between a=b; and a==b. in particular he found b=b+1; to be obviously wrong and the whole idea of doubling an equals sign to be very strange. one compares this with scheme (set! a b) and (eq? a b) or smalltalk a:=b and a=b (which is also a bit dodgy in my book), and you really can’t blame him for being confused. and c-style languages are full of this crap!
so here i am making an impassioned plea for smalltalk and scheme, but i don’t use smalltalk at all. smalltalk and squeak get so much quite obviously right where languages like C++, perl, python, C# etc. just quite obviously are horribly wrong. thinking about it, i can only think of two usable languages with c-style syntax, javascript and ruby, one of which is an implementation of scheme and the other an implementation of smalltalk. but i’m still quite suspicious of squeak, mainly because it’s been designed by apple programmers (which makes me worry about patents and copyright laws) but also because of performance concerns. the thing is, if my scheme program gets slow, it’s my fault. and if it isn’t, well i can program some helper functions in C and compile them to be accessible from guile. if my squeak application runs slow, finding problems in a vm is too much work for lil’ ol’ me, and thirdly, i’m not yet convinced by object-oriented programming, but that’s another blog post.
however, the pharo project seems to be clearing up my first concern here, so when that’s settled down a bit, i’ll give it a whirl. the pharo project can be found here. i particularly like the snazzy logo. don’t underestimate the importance of a snazzy logo!
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August 30th, 2009
well, i’ve been thinking about 9/11 a bit recently and somethings have caught my eye.
just to make it clear now, i’m not going to write about what i think happened. i really don’t see much point in doing so. anybody who has made up their mind is unlikely to be convinced by anything i would write and anybody who hasn’t should go to more reputable sources than my blog to find information. what i want to write about is how the official version and the various unofficial versions were sold.
as with many contentious points (to which i would add the 9/11 attacks and i imagine even the strongest adherents of one version would acknowledge that adherents of other versions exist), reasons to support the various views do superficially appear plausible. the official version is supported by a wealth of corroboratory evidence about flight training and ticket booking and in-flight transcripts and cell-phone calls. of course it is not without gaps—it’s very difficult to find evidence without gaps for anything—and the unofficial versions tend to come up with additional evidence to dispute the official version. the comparative strength of this evidence is not something i wish to write about here.
what i do find interesting is how the cases were made. here all parties seemed to make some huge blunders. those against the official theory could have said “well, have a look at this and tell me what you think. do you know any scientists who could look at it and give me their opinion?” or something of that nature. instead their view was painted as “the american government is totally corrupt and has just killed 3000 citizens and the americans are too stupid/loyal/scared to do anything about it”. it is quite hard to imagine a moderate, undecided american who could hear that statement without getting a bit defensive. to the same extent, supporters of the official version came out with some equally ill-advised rhetoric along the lines of “if you’re not for us, you’re against us”, so placing the undecided or the suspicious in an uncomfortable position.
in general i’m a fan of conspiracy theorists, if not of the theories they support. in my mind, a healthy democracy needs people who challenge the status quo and these people and the evidence they bring need to be heard. at the same time, however, and mainly because they are challenging the status quo, the conspiracy theorist needs to spend a lot of time and effort getting their facts right and doing this through good science.
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May 18th, 2009
A friend of mine, Niko, has just written a blog posting about the horrors of relational databases. and very right he is too.
i would however want to say a few words to explain how it got that way. to start with, databases must have just been better card index systems. they promised to solve problems like concurrent access to data that had traditionally been kept at one place. this was possible (provided the word concurrency could be defined to everybody’s satisfaction), because computers are good at that sort of thing. actually a system of mirrors hanging from the roof in the public library would maybe have also allowed concurrent access to information about which books are currently available and which aren’t.
back in those days of course, being a librarian and knowing how best to index and find books was a real skill. it still is of course. just nowadays instead of having a clever librarian with the ability to perform one operation a second, we have a pretty stupid one with the ability to perform many operations a second. but i digress.
so databases were used to store information. because the real world likes to store information in little one dimensional (more or less well hashed) hunks, relational databases did a great job of modelling this. things really went pair shaped when two things happened:
- object-oriented programming came into fashion
- databases started being used to store program state
now objects can have very complicated internal relationships. relational databases are not good at storing internal relationships. to start with, you need lots of tables and then you need lots of inner joins to actually get information out of them. and updating a relationship can take a long time, if lots of objects are effected or, alternatively, relationship tables need to grow according to the square of the number of lines in the tables. and all those inner join … on … having … where … etc. take a lot of time.
so object-databases are good at storing state in modern programs (and that includes most webpages). only if you really would use a card index system to store this information irl should you consider a relational database.
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May 9th, 2009
there’s something very weird about apache, php/perl/python/whatever, and *sql as a web server.
let’s say you have an internet site like ebay. there are many hundreds of connections at any one moment. each page call results in opening, reading and parsing a session file and then opening a connection to a database and getting the results of a few database queries (quite possibly with long sql statements). then you have to chuck all the stuff together and stir it around a bit and send it back to the client. then you have to write out the session to disk again.
now let’s say the web server has to do that 100 times a second.
at least, that’s what the basic idea is. as it is, no web server actually does this again, or the operating system saves it from itself. the database is almost certainly held in ram, so is the session cache. apache can also cache parts of often used pages, if i remember correctly.
but the basic idea stands. it is quite possible that your session has to be read from disc or that your database query requires stuff to be read from disc (that quite apart from the snake oil sql databases sell).
so why not keep the php (or whatever) instance running all the time with your objects in its cache? why not have an object cache with a root object like this:
$root=new Object();
foreach ($sessids as $sessid) {
$root->sessid=new Object();
}
but what is the difference between the information stored in the database and the information stored in the session cache? well the database just contains objects which should be shared among all sessions, so you could also add a
$root->shared=new Object()
to the root object.
then you can save
$root->shared
to disk every now and then, to guarantee persistence in case the server crashes.
of course, i’m not the first person to have thought of this. the seaside folks already do this in their product. maybe i’ll write something similar for ruby/python/php at some stage, because it would make life so much easier.
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May 9th, 2009
hi everybody 
i’ve just started looking at the prelude of the 4th english suite by j.s. bach. it’s an interesting work and i thought i’d share some of my thoughts.
firstly the basic structure of the piece. like the prelude of the second english suite (and to an extent the third, which is rather more episodic in character), the basic form is ABA. interesting is the brevity of the A section, which amounts to 19 (20) bars. the piece has a total length of 108 bars, meaning that the B section is more than three times as long as the A section.
the two sections have different melodic styles. the A section is more like the first theme of a sonata, with a rising melody. here the counterpoint rarely consists of parallel thirds or sixths. instead bach stresses the major beats as being harmonic, with the remaining space between the beats being filled with 16th notes or dotted rhythms which rarely result in parallel movement. the B section is different, starting as it does with a new theme made of 8th notes in parallel thirds.
most melodic ideas in the piece work as leading phrases. both themes of the counterpoint in the A section lead into the first beat of a bar. the first theme in 16th notes consists of a rising 15 note lead in followed by two 8th notes establishing the tonic. the second theme (which follows directly and acts as a counterpoint for the first theme) is a melodically static theme made of dotted rhythms with some decoration (mordants and trills). harmonically, apart from one interrupted cadence before the full cadence at the end of the section, there is no hint of a minor key in section A.
section B starts with a reduction in pace. whereas in section A the 16th notes had melodic significance, here they are used in an alberti fashion, resulting in movement as 8th notes. this is also a falling melody. the effect is of a second subject in sonata form, traditionally described as feminine. another idea in section B, and probably the most attractive idea by first listening, is made by the repeated 8th notes chords with suspensions and accompaniment by broken chords. these establish a strong half note speed for harmonic progressions. this impression is reinforced with a further melodic idea bach introduces (found at the end of bar 28 up to the start of bar 31 in the treble), which bach harmonises with half note speed harmonics resulting in strong suspensions on the 7th with (delayed) upwards resolution. the first few times this comes it moves upwards. later bach inverts it to great harmonic effect.
oops, gotta go. maybe i’ll continue this later.
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April 12th, 2009
ah, that be a tale of woe, that be. such high hopes dashed on the rocks of oblivion in the sea of forgetfulness. not that one should consider it strange.
truth be told, there was always a certain tension in the air at dellideastorm.com. the hippie piece free-love give-GNU/linux-a-chance crowd was always going to have problems with the powers-that-be. so it’s not surprising that dell decided to dump the (perceived) democracy. the method they took turned out to be simple.
they started by merging threads and deleting the odd post. but the community just wrote more threads and posts. by this stage the astroturfers were out en force from microsoft et al., but most just looked ridiculous. the solution to the embarrassment of dellideastorm.com was fiendishly simple. one day the site stopped setting a cookie allowing automatic logging in and firefox stopped automatically filling in the username/password fields (don’t ask me why). then, anybody who wanted to answer a post or check for recent activity had to log themselves in.
this is of course extremely tiresome in the long run. with the result that most people didn’t bother, and the site soon fell by the wayside. dell’s ubuntu offerings are on the other hand still going relatively strong, though dell seems to be happy staying with ubuntu 8.04 (the long-term-support version) rather than offering the later 8.10 version.
that i can live with. there is so much going on with the linux kernel atm, it may be worth dell waiting for btrfs or even linuxfs before updating the operating system. but a sign of life would be appreciated.
what i do appreciate is that dell has actually used a good gnu/linux distribution (rather than some attempt to find the worst possible distribution as other OEMs are want to) for its foray into free software. this is particularly important for netbooks, and it’s great to see ubuntu smiling up at me from a dell mini 9 or 12 or whatever is available.
so long live dell for giving it a good shot. i hope they will continue to offer ubuntu for a while to come, but a lot of it will have to do with the balance of power after windows 7 has been out for a few months. make no mistake, dell’s poor market showing and the shock of vista made dell desperate to find new ways to build a community. if dell has a good year and windows 7 isn’t as terrible as vista, things could change again for the worse.
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April 11th, 2009
It’s strange how the death of someone you’ve never met can make you think about life. Take Dave Arneson for example. I never met him, I never even really knew he existed, but he had a pretty large effect on the people in my social circle. His creativity and dedication to his creativity changed a lot of things and helped make the world a better place.
It’s the creativity I find interesting. I can be pretty creative myself: I’m a pianist, singer, composer, writer, programmer, artist etc. but i never seem to be able to stick to anything for long enough to really make my mark.
A case in point. I’ve just been to a piano course with the great Muriel Levin (much recommended, by the way) and her son, Richard Calder (a great musician) in a nice old stately home turned private school called Riddlesworth Hall. While I was there I played the piano a lot and sung and composed a lot too. I managed to get my voice going and I performed one of the songs I wrote 2 years ago. Then i started writing a piece for Violin and Piano, which was going really well, but I didn’t have time to finish it during the course. Then I came back to the house where I’m staying and I haven’t done anything since. My enthusiasm for composing and music just died as soon as I walked in the door. Now I try to somehow get through the days while deadening myself with canned culture so much, that I don’t curse myself for my lacking creativity.
I should be painting pictures of half-naked people or tall buildings. I should be hearing and writing out tones for violin and voice. I should be practising and recording Bach and Beethoven. I should be doing something. All of the talent and ability in the world is as nothing if you don’t actually do anything, and I have spent the last few days since returning from the course being annoyed and distracted by every noise.
It’s very difficult to let yourself go and be creative if you know that somebody will start talking at you any moment. To be creative I really need solitude. It’s difficult to experience the beauty of the first flowers of spring if you know that your father’s false whistling of bad marketing jingos of the 60s and 70s could pierce any stillness you had.
I wonder how the great composers of the past used to manage that. Did Bach have the ability to just shut off his ears and ignore the outside world? Was beethoven so grumpy that nobody dared disturb him while he worked? I’d be a lot happier if i could just have my little flat in paris and no distractions. Maybe I could finally do my talent justice and become a great artist. Who knows? But I have to try.
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