Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH and the KJV

I've been reading Thomas Costain's series about the Plantagenet kings of England on Internet Archive. I'm part of the way into the fourth book and suddenly came across information showing why KJV is absolutely the worst possible source for Documentary Hypothesis to rely on. WikiSource, LISTEN UP.

It seems that King James I did exactly what the forged Aristeas letter claims Ptolemy did to produce the Septuagint: divide the Jewish Bible into sections, assign them out to groups of scholars who supposedly knew Hebrew and Greek (which they didn't, as you know if you read my threads on Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek) and put them to work. Each "translator" produced his own work and then they agreed on what to use out of each man's translation. According to the Aristeas forgery the Septuagint scholars didn't have to do this last step because they all produced the same result. 

We don't know what sources Costain used, one of several problems with his work. We don't know if his source repeats urban legends that took root in the Aristeas letter. We do know that the KJV repeats one major error in Septuagint, creating a character out of a construct state phrase in Genesis 26. We do know it copies the Septuagint error in Isaiah 7 turning "young woman" into "virgin". We do know that it copies Stephen Langton's chapter divisions which split the narratives and create false impressions.

If anybody out there still thinks DH is worthwhile, you're just not paying attention. When I started posting about DH I frequently asked its fans to ante up sources. That was 8 years ago and I discovered more ammunition against it in the meantime. Start here and find out what you missed.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/07/fact-checking-torah-structure-of-torah.html

I'm just saying -- rethinking it

I loved the TV show Murphy Brown. It gave me lots of laughs. I found episodes on Internet Archive and one of them was a typical TV show let-down.

A high school graduate joins Murphy in her home and proceeds to be the teen from hell. She wants to be a journalist just like Murphy, but at the end, she says she doesn't want to go to college. Murphy has no experience with kids and freaks out.

The answer is to make the teen explain just how she plans to get to Murphy's level without college. "Jane" has no experience with professional writing. In her brief stay, she insists on doing anything she wants regardless of the effects on others. This includes smoking around a pregnant woman.

Murphy needed to explain to her that no news organization is going to pay an absolute newcomer for any job without evidence that they can do it. That's what college journalism is about: learning to write; learning to find and use sources; learning to present information effectively; learning which stories are important; learning to dig instead of give up. Her college class assignments and work on the college newspaper might get Jane an interview. Lacking them, she was dead in the water. 

Jane also needed to know that no story is news after its time. You have to beat the news cycle, not trail it. When your editor gives you a deadline, you have to meet it. No excuses. 

And you have to work in a people environment. If you walk into an interview with a non-smoker or somebody who gets sick from cigarette smoke, you can't light up. With coming bans on workplace smoking, Jane was about to hit a brick wall of employment.

The same thing faces high school kids now. AI is taking over scutwork. You have to come into an interview trained to do the job, and also explain why you can do a better job than AI. The most important thing is knowing how to back up your work with information, and AI is lousy at this, it will take any source that suits your keywords. That is why it lies to me on a regular basis and contradicts itself. If you don't understand how bad Wikipedia articles are and how this comes from the sources used in the articles, you will never be better than  AI.

Second, you have to deal with complexity. A recent article showed that using AI in customer service caused problems, it didn't fix them. It couldn't handle nuance or inflection, or customize answers, because it relied on information that didn't fit the situation. Using AI in online chat devolves into long transcripts because the AI can't actually understand the question, it can only deal with keywords.

It's the underlying problem of machine translation, which I think I've posted about before. Computer translation was promised in the 1980s and it has never happened because nobody has been able to program a computer to understand idioms. Idioms are phrases, the meanings of which go beyond the actual words. They are also used in a context, and computers cannot handle context. Actually, damned few humans can handle context, which results in those social media fuck-fests where people call each other names. At some point in the thread, somebody may say "read the thread".

Which doesn't solve anything either. Any time you walk into the middle of a conversation, you are dead in the water because you weren't there for the entire context. A counselor can tell you this; they come into the middle of a stressful situation and the only way to solve it is to make everybody go through the entire "conversation". Bear in mind that the parties have already gelled into their positions or they wouldn't need a counselor in the first place. Don't blame the counselor.

Because the counselor also has to deal with unreliable witnesses. Everybody tailors the story to favor themselves. It goes from being unable to understand language and so unable to understand what they said as part of the problem, to reshaping the narrative to suit themselves as time went on, to lying deliberately to make themselves look good. A counselor has to separate the noise from the signal.

AI can't do that and that's why it lies. Separating noise from signal is a matter of experience. High-schoolers tend not to have it; plenty of college graduates don't have it. I know of college professors who don't have it and pass urban legends because they can't tell they're false.

And most organizations that want to use AI are just as clueless. The companies that thought it would help them do customer service had no clue what went into customer service, and they have screwed up bigtime. A media outlet was bragging about going more to AI, which would result in publishing false information because of AI's inability to evaluate sources properly. A professor was bragging about using AI, which meant an idiot child was going to be running his college courses. It gets worse but I think you've seen enough.

We're in the hype quadrant of AI on Gartner Group's four-stage cycle. We're finding out who is absolutely clueless about how to do their jobs, as much as we're finding out that AI is an idiot child. 

I'm just saying....

Fact-Checking the Torah: the third clue

As part of the original thread, I wrote about the plagues of the Exodus which sound like the effects of a Plinian eruption, and tagged the date of the Exodus to 1628 BCE when Thera exploded in a cataclysm 20 times worse than the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius that is so famous.

More recently, I pointed to an occultation of the superior conjunction of Venus, something unheard of in a thousand years of Babylonian astronomical history. This pegged the Exodus as occurring in March 1628 BCE.

Nevertheless, people I got in touch with assured me that the Thera explosion occurred in June or July. But one of those people gave me the exact clue I'm writing about now.

In his book, Santorini: Volcano, Natural History, Mythology (https://archive.org/details/santorinivolcano0000frie/page/70/mode/2up), Walter Friedrich has a number of interesting photos, but none more interesting than the two on book page 69. The top one shows a pupa and the bottom an adult, of a parasite found on leaves buried in the stuff Thera put out when it blew up. 

So I looked up the life cycle of that parasite. Fethi et al. told me that the adults emerge in June or July and, if the weather be what it ought, there will be a second generation of adults who may survive the winter and lay eggs.

Fethi, Abbassi and Benzehra Abdelmajid and Achouche Abderrahim, “Study of the Bioecology of Aleurolobus olivinus Silvestri (1911) (Homoptera, Aleyrodidae) on olive Trees in Algeria,” November 2019 Bioscience Research 16(4):11

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338212224_Study_of_the_bioecology_of_aleurolobus_olivinus_silvestri_1911_homoptera_aleyrodidae_on_olive_trees_in_algeria

They lay eggs as soon in the spring as the olive trees show signs of activity. There are several pupa stages, so the pupa in the top photo could be part of the spring laying.

But obviously there are also pupae in late summer and early autumn. So the question is, whether the pupa in the photograph was left from the autumn generation, or is it evidence that Thera blew up in the spring?

The Fethi article doesn't give me much of a clue. It doesn't go into how fragile the pedicle is that attaches a pupa to a leaf. The adult that overwinters is alive and can hang onto that leaf for all it's worth so it has a chance to lay eggs in the spring. The pupa's pedicle is a perfectly passive attachment. Rain might dissolve it; wind might break it. 

Mr. Friedrich did not give me a link to the Fethi article. He didn't look into whether a pupa can overwinter, all he did was caption the photo to include the name of the parasite. 

This is one of the problems with academic work. It's myopic. Mr. Friedrich was satisfied to know that the parasite showed up when you used an electron microscope. He didn't think about what it meant that they found a pupa as well as an adult. It takes an inquiring mind to go that extra step. How many academics really have inquiring minds, and how many just do the research their department steers them to for whatever reason?

How many discoveries has humanity missed out on because people in universities don't really have inquiring minds? If you've read much of my blog, you know what I think. 

Knitting -- raglan sleeve armpits

If you've been reading this thread, you know that one of my mantras is "when you're done knitting you should be done." You should have a piece ready to wear unless you believe in washing and blocking first.

What I did on a recent jumper is inside out of what you do knitting bottom up with steeking at the armholes. You put the underarm stitches on a holder, then when it's time to work the sleeves, you pick up the underarm stitches, cut the steeking and use a crochet hook to pull yarn through the stitches next to the steeking, then work the sleeve.

For a top-down raglan, when you are ready to close the body, you cast on stitches for the underarms and put the sleeve stitches on holders. 

First, use the cable cast on for these stitches and make sure there are 10 for worsted, 12 for sport/DK and 14 for fingering.

When you finish the body, move the sleeve stitches from the holder to a circular needle.

Make a slip knot and put it on the working needle, then pull the last sleeve stitch over it. 

Use a crochet hook. Put it into the stitch under each cast-on stitch, pull the yarn to the outside and put it on the working needle. When you've picked up all the cast-ons, put the crochet hook between the last stitch and the first body stitch, put that on the working needle and then the first body stitch. Pass the last stitch over, put the body stitch back, and work the sleeve as usual.

Now you don't have to sew an underarm seam or close it with Kitchener stitch. All you may want to do is close up large or stretched stitches.

You only need this if your raglan increases haven't given you the right count of stitches in the body when you've done enough rows to reach the armpits. If you do have enough stitches, just cast on one, put the next sleeve or body stitch on the same needle, pass the cast-on over that, and keep knitting.

The PSSOs help close gaps.

When you do bottom up raglan, as far as I can tell, you will still have to close those armpits with Kitchener stitch. If you have an alternative, let us all know.