rd108

You're not explaining how the Sarasvati river evidence, which is radiocarbon dated, does not fully contradict your position.

Do you really believe, in good faith, that the most parsimonious explanation is that a small group of IE-speaking nomads entered India 500+ years after the Sarasvati was drying and population centers had been abandoned, then re-purposed the entire history of the "native" population, wrote themselves completely out of this re-purposing with no memory of where the nomads themselves came from, and then at least hundreds of years after that re-wrote the story of the desiccation of the river (in significantly evolved, non-Rig Vedic Sanskrit) to read as if it was occurring then, ~1000+ years after it actually occurred?

Occam's razor here is clear.

The Rig Vedic speakers were in India when the Sarasvati was a fully flowing river pre-3000 BCE, they documented the drying of the river in later Sanskrit texts, and the Rig Vedic IE corpus was created by at least 3000 BCE based on the radiocarbon dating of the Sarasvati's paleochannel.

Splitting the argument into two pieces is most concise:

1) Sarasvati river paleochannel radiocarbon dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit (<=3000 BCE)

I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330343 This is by far the strongest piece of evidence that the Kurgan model for IE language diffusion, which has Indo-European languages entering India circa ~1500 BCE, is grossly incorrect.

We now know the Sarasvati, the most prominent river mentioned in archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit texts, began to desiccate and disappear in 2600 BCE. That desiccation process is actually mentioned in later Sanskrit works like the Mahabharata, in Sanskrit that has significantly linguistically evolved.

There are hundreds of urban sites along the now-dried Sarasvati riverbed which have now been discovered, like Bhirrana, with cultural continuity back to 7500 BCE. But let's steelman the Kurgan model and assume there was a replacement of this advanced urban society's language by IE-speaking Steppe nomads, that left no archeological trace whatsoever. This still means that Indo-European languages were in India at least by 3000 BCE, making this the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world.

I would challenge you to explain how the Sarasvati paleochannel evidence doesn't completely break the Kurgan model. Even leaving aside the Sanskrit corpus which does not remember any migration or original homeland of the Aryans before India.

2) Anatolian languages (1800 BCE) The earliest hard chronology of Hittite is the Anitta text of the Kussara (1800 BCE). The linguistic analysis (such as it is, linguistics isn't the hardest science, much less so than radiocarbon dating) implies this IE branch diverged early. Like the dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit to at least 3000 BCE, it's likely the Hittite language was evolving for hundreds of years before this.

Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.

We do know there were widespread cultural and economic ties between India and the Middle East at least as far back as 3300 BCE. IVC seals and finely-wrought carnelian beads were discovered in the royal Sumerian tombs in Ur, and many texts described the thriving economic trade between these two regions. Indian DNA has been found in Syria in 2500 BCE. The Mittani in ~1500 BCE are an even clearer example, with Rig Vedic deities, a military elite, and a horse-training text that are distinctly Indo-Aryan, not even Indo-Iranian.

In other words, cultural and human diffusion from India to the Middle East was already happening hundreds of years before the first attested Anatolian IE language is found in the Hittite.

And we know it was happening in the other direction (east) as well. The Tarim Basim mummies had Indian genetic markers, implying the Tocharian branch of IE may have also arisen out of India.

The IVC culture had a bigger population than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It was an advanced and urbanized culture. There were major environmental shocks that caused mass migrations. There has been migration out of India from at least 3300 BCE to the common era with the Gypies / Romani.

Is it so hard to believe IE languages could have come from such a place?

I don't think it's fair to dismiss the OIT hypothesis as a Hindu nationalist thing. I wrote some more about it in a comment on this article, but it actually just seems like the most likely explanation given the evidence.

Arguing the archeology, genetics, and (grudgingly, it's barely a science) linguistics is totally fair but I'd like to see more open-minded debate on the data.

The Mitanni (1500 BCE) and the Tarim Basin mummies partially Indian DNA are important points to address, but the Sarasvati river dating has to force a dramatic re-think of how Indo-European languages spread.

This strengthens the Out-of-India hypothesis for Indo-European languages. The hardest evidence we have is the paleoarcheology of the Sarasvati river.

The peak flow of the Sarasvati was 10,000 BCE - 3000 BCE. Tectonic shifts and climate change caused the river to dwindle from 2600 BCE - 1900 BCE. From ~1900 BCE on the river fully desiccated and no longer reached the Arabian Sea.

We see hundreds of urban sites along the dried path of the ancient Sarasvati. For example, Bhirrana in northern India which has its earliest radiocarbon-dated layers at 7500 BCE.

There is cultural continuity between the early IVC sites (7000 BCE) and later (3000 - 2000 BCE) sites.

Now connect this with the vast corpus of Sanskrit works, particularly archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit. We know the Sarasvati was described as perennial and large river reaching the sea in those works.

Later Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata, with language features implying hundreds or thousands of years of linguistic evolution, describe the river dwindling and eventually disappearing "underground".

This means Rig Vedic Sanskrit was being used in parallel with the extremely large and advanced urban society in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), which was larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, at least in 3000 BCE.

The drying of the Sarasvati, which is known to have preceded vast migrations from the northwest Indian subcontinent to the northeast Gangetic plain, may have well forced climate-change migrants north into Central Asia, Mesopotamia and the steppes as well in the gradual lead-up to the Sarasvati's full collapse.

The current idea that Indo-European language entered India ~1500 BCE is completely incorrect, and oddly there's been no attempt to re-formulate the Indo-European language origins theory to match the data.

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When companies centralized and controlled app downloads, they did it primarily to make more money. Now their greed ends in the loss of real human rights. When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution, and the effects on society in the U.S. and abroad will be continue to ripple for years to come.

It's like Obama was fond of reminding tech CEO's when they'd start pontificating on leadership... “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

“Sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences … then I think those suggestions are terrific."

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Power laws show up in many systems, as the 80-20 Pareto rule, graph theory's "scale-free network", even electromagnetism and gravity.

Connectomics has been using graph theory for a while, but this is cool. Seems like more algebraic topology methods will percolate in (hah!) over time.

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This is similar to how the cortex routes information through the 6 cortical layers - a cortical column. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column)

The best way to cheaply remove CO2 is to plant more trees. The simplest solution is still the best: it requires no new technology, can scale itself when the trees reproduce and is eminently accessible to all sorts of people, all around the globe. As an added benefit, some trees can even give fruit... which are delicious.

Apparently the high frequency alone did not effect brain activity unless coupled to audible or "low frequency" sounds.

I wonder if the two frequencies interact to form beat frequencies or complex wave superpositions in the audible range. That would jive with this description of the Japanese researchers' instrument:

"Traditional gamelan music of Bali Island, Indonesia, a natural sound source containing the richest amount of high frequencies with a conspicuously fluctuating structure, was chosen as the sound source for all experiments."

Alpha brainwaves, which were seen when both high and low frequencies were combined, correlate with being "relaxed and alert". Interesting findings.

The PLOS paper brings up that question, too. Overlapping fields of PRF proposed: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

I think the concept is that the apparent "acceleration" of distant galaxies is really just their time being slowed down relative to our frame of reference. I wonder if this contradicts the idea of a Big Bang too. It seems like ALT is a superset of Special Relativity while explaining some physical phenomenon more cleanly.

Here's original article http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

This is my old lab! I'm turning these neuroscience findings into consumer products now-- using biosensors for meditation tracking and biofeedback. http://www.brainbot.me Check it out if you're interested, but full disclosure- this is my company

Just got bit by Delaware's corporate name-check service. It only runs during EST business hours. I just want to query a database to see if a name is already taken, thank you..

Congrats Basis!

this uses heart rate, not brain activity

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well said!

Uber, Lyft and its ilk are half innovative, efficient tech services and half hypercapitalist scavengers employing workers while avoiding paying those pesky benefits, worker's compensation or damages to a dead six year old's family.

Goodbye, hacker news

From: What_is_the_goal_of_Silk_Road.txt

It is interesting to hear your perspective Kandra. Stick around a while and hopefully you can get to know everyone better and even become a part of the community that has formed here. As far as non-drug items go, it's not that surprising. This is a niche market for things you can't get more easily from places like amazon, ebay, and retail shops. There is an added cost to doing things the way we do, and at least for the time being, you're going to be able to get legal goods more cheaply and easily from these other places. Eventually, we may win out because of our advantages over these other markets (e.g. vendors don't have to pay taxes on their profits from sales here). From what I've seen, despite some problems like attracting scammers, the market has only gotten better as more people have joined in. More buyers means more competition among sellers in the form of excellent customer service, low prices, and quality goods. More sellers means an expanding array of offerings, which attracts even more buyers. So far, this is the virtuous circle that has driven growth here IMHO. More people and a diversity of opinions is a good thing, and I would be hesitant to lump our diverse community into two opposing categories. By and large, there is much more cooperation and camaraderie than conflict and I'm generally impressed with the level of discourse. Maybe you have a point, though. There very well could be a place for multiple similar markets that cater to different folks. In fact I hope that is the case. I'd rather Silk Road be the leading market in a growing industry, than trying to take on the establishment alone

God bless you, Michael Eisen. May the force be with you