People, and Language

And the Colleges of the Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point.. . . Succeeding generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless, and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and the Winters. 

Bruges circa 1500, from a painting in the Town Hall, Bruges 

Stopping short of redesigning cities in order to make them more legible (a subject that we shall soon explore), state authorities endeav- 

The elective affinity between a strong state and a uniformly laid out 

The visual power of the baroque city was underwritten by scrupulous attention to the military security of the prince from internal as well as external enemies. Thus both Alberti and Palladio thought of main thoroughfares as military roads viae militaires). Such roads had to be straight, and, in Palladio s view, the ways will be more convenient if they are made everywhere equal that is to say that there will be no part in them where armies may not easily march. 

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Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Genes, Peoples, and Languages. New York Northpoint Press (2000). Duster, T., Backdoor to Eugenics. New York Rutledge (1990). 

Cavalli-Sforza LL. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. New York North Point Press, 2000. 

But there was another view of the West that of the native inhabi-(10) tants of the land. Their understandings of landscapes, peoples, and resources formed both a contrast and counterpoint to those of Jefferson s travelers. One of Lewis and Clark s missions was to open diplomatic relations between the United States and the Native American nations of the West. As Jefferson told Lewis, it will now be proper (15) you should inform those through whose country you will pass. .. that henceforth we become their fathers and friends. When Euro-Americans and Native Americans met, they used ancient diplomatic protocols that included formal language, ceremonial gifts, and displays of military power. But behind these symbols and rituals there were often (20) very different ways of understanding power and authority. Such differences sometimes made communication across the cultural divide difficult and open to confusion and misunderstanding. 

Object includes not only individual programming-language objects but also software components, programs, networks, relations, and records as well as hardware, people, and organizations—anything that presents a definable encapsulated behavior to the world around it or can be usefully thought of as such. 

Dr. Williams made this complicated story easy to understand and compelling to health scientists and the general public alike. His clarity of thought and language helped open up this field which had been dominated by Mendelian thinking for nearly one hundred years before the publication of Biochemical Individuality. In one of his lectures at which I was in attendance he responded to an inquiry as to why the RDAs were not sufficient to define a person s nutritional needs with the simple insight, "Nutrition is for real people. Statistical humans are of little interest."... 

These ideas are based, in my opinion, on an abuse of language. In autopoiesis, the notion of boundary has a more or less precise meaning. When, however, the net of processes is transformed into one interaction among people , and the cellular membrane is transformed into the limit of a human group, one falls into an abuse, as I expressly said. 

While still on the topic of words and language, I can t resist mentioning French playwright Antonin Artaud, who once said, All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar s teeth. I was never 100 percent sure as to what he meant by this, and many people considered him insane. Perhaps Artaud would agree with the observation my friends at work often make When people talk, what is actually communicated is often much less than what each party intended to communicate. ... 

The boundaries drawn between British and Dutch spheres in what the British called the Malay World were arbitrary. The peoples and histories in the space that came to be Malaysia were not fundamentally different from those that came to be Indonesia save for their more recent, immigrant quality. Indonesia had by far the more intractable assemblage of ethnies rooted in distinctive histories, languages and literatures. Yet it is Malaysia that has the complex federal system, while Indonesia remains, with China, the world s largest experiment in organising exceptional cultural diversity through a unitary state. 

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