Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 June 3

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June 3

Import quotas vs Trump tariffs

While some sources say that import quotas were also used alongside Trump tariffs, wouldn't it be more prudent and less controversial to apply solely import quotas instead of tariffs? Of course, assuming that the rationale is reasonable. Brandmeister^talk 14:21, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

It really depends on your untimate objective. Want to increase the price Americans pay? Levy a tariff. Want to be seen to do something without really making any difference at all? Impose a quota. DOR (HK) (talk) 15:27, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Well, no. Restricting supply through an import quota would have the effect of increasing prices, just as imposing tariffs will. (As long as the import quota is set below the current level of imports, at least; a steel quota set higher than the amount that American manufacturers want to import is purely cosmetic and would have no economic effect and dubious political efficacy.)

Imposing a quota would restrict the supply of imported steel, causing American buyers to bid up the price for that limited supply. As the price of imported steel got higher, it would start to make business sense to buy from less-efficient, more-costly domestic American steel mills. As the price for steel continued to rise (depending on the quota chosen, and the ability of the domestic steel suppliers to meet increased demand at any price point) domestic manufacturers would be forced to switch to other raw materials, develop work-arounds (like offshoring their manufacturing to other countries that still had access to less-restricted steel markets), or would be driven out of business.

There are quirky things that can happen in the short-term that will affect prices in complicated ways, but both tariffs and restrictive quotas increase the final price of manufactured goods. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 23:49, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Mainstream source for structure of the Bible?

I'm planning some automatic text mining/text analysis student projects, and I think the Bible would make an excellent subject - it's large, it has a complex history, and there is a good amount of scholarship about it. But here is my problem - I picked up much of my meta-knowledge on the Bible from OpenYale's courses and from Harvard's Hebrew Scriptures by Shaye Cohen, all during unorganised random Podcast listening. I now need a compact source, suitable for computer science students, that outlines some of the major questions about structures of the Bible (like the Documentary Hypothesis, the synoptic problem, the Authorship of the Pauline epistles and so on). One option might be Christine Hayes' "Introduction to the Bible", but I've not read it (yet), and I'd be happy for some good suggestions. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:24, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

What do you mean by "the Bible"? You'll need a careful definition. There are many different definitions. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 08:55, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Our article Biblical canon is quite good. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 08:58, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Indeed, it is. Thanks! As for "which bible", I was going with the KJV and the German Luther translation as available from Project Gutenberg (well, not in Germany right now, but I'll find those sources). The reason is simple pragmatism - those texts are easily and freely available. I don't want to open a theological can of worms... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:12, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Stephan Schulz, that sounds like an exciting project. A rare opportunity for CS students to learn some basic cultural literacy that will serve them well no matter what they think of it, it will make them think outside the box. Will you be using Python's NLTK or what? Would love to see syllabus. OK, you asked for it:

Two of the most widely used textbooks in America are renowned for their authors' careful writing - respectful of those with differing views - most definitely including no, don't know, can't know, and I know theological interpretations - but strictly secular and academic in their up-to-date and thoroughly well-cited presentation of current debates in historical-textual criticism as primary emphasis. Your students deserve better than Wikipedia, seriously. At least, you do. Check out two recently (last few months) revised editions, yours for the asking:

• Collins, John J. (2018). Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (3rd. ed.). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ISBN 978-1506445984. John J. Collins needs no introduction, he is the dean of his field, former president of Society of Biblical Literature, and general editor of the Anchor Yale Bible series. Request an exam copy and peruse here. Outline Study Guide shows in early chapters documentary hypotheses at play; Bonfiglio's full Study Guide is recommended to reinforce learning for keeps.
• Powell, Mark Allan (2018). Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey (2nd. ed.). Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic. ISBN 9780801099601. Mark Allan Powell is general editor of the Society of Biblical Literature's HarperCollins Bible Dictionary and chair of the SBL Historical Jesus Section. His beautiful (literally; with superb art) text's free online supplements number over 2034 pages of well-organized, discrete chapter section study guides and topical bibliographies, a one-of-a-kind text in itself. IntroducingNT.com links to both editions, supplements, professor's exam copy

Less than $100 for both - I know of no better educational bargain for a narrow CS major than a small investment in cultural literacy to go with their text mining prowess.

(Personal aside, reason for interest: I grew up with a computer programming, nuclear physicist father and a wordy theologian mother and have searched for years for books of this quality, ones we could all have agreed on as being exemplary for clarity, fairness, and authority. These books remind me of many a lively Sunday dinner with the requisite priest and village atheist at the heads of our table.;) -- Paulscrawl (talk) 04:53, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. No syllabus yet - the plan is to have 3 smart students do their half-year projects exploring what is possible in this space, thus developing the experience to turn this into a regular semester lecture/project series. I'm currently doing the write-up, which is why I'm looking for good sources. I can post a link when it's reasonably done (luckily, I wrote it in English, since we do get some international exchange students). So far, the plan is to primarily use TensorFlow (because Deep is cool, and I need to attract the students ;-) and scikit-learn to see if we can learn/discover known (or strongly suspected) divisions in the bible - my canonical example is to see if we can recover the original source language split (essentially Hebrew or Greek) from the German or English translation by simple clustering. But thanks a lot for the link to NLTK - that may come in handy! To be honest, I'm more like the village atheist, but that does not mean I don't appreciate the interesting history of religion. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:50, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Hmmm ... using KJV I'd bet use of "and" might be highly indicative of Hebrew/Greek split. Sounds like fun. Been meaning to get into Tensor Flow, but NLTK and SciKit are challenging enough for me so far.

By way of contrast, you might show students what Deep needs to beat: manually dicing, labeling, and splicing data by specifying statistical procedures, as done with a recent book, Abakuks, Andris (2014). The Synoptic Problem and Statistics. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall. ISBN 9781466572010.. Open data and R code (click title) to explore Marcan priority. Fascinating stuff. Not so much fun to use R.

One more thing: NLTK incorporates a good deal of scikit-learn, so not either/or as my mother's priest would say ad infinitum, but both/and. Sigh. Very well documented and made for the task. Here is a little third-party tutorial on one way to simply import NLTK corpus, conveniently including KJV, and go to town with word vectors: Tutorial part X -- Paulscrawl (talk) 08:57, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Blue not a color to ancient peoples??

Internet sites say that to ancient people, blue was not just another color. Any meaning of this?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:20, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

In modern English, "not just another color" would imply that it was a special color - like saying Pele was not just another soccer player. And if you Google-Image "ancient painted pottery" you'll see a number of examples of blue-painted pottery from thousands of years ago, so it's clear they were aware of the color. I think we would need to see the paragraph that contains your comment, to have a better shot at understanding it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:26, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

The Google search to ancient people, blue was not just another color gives lots of relevant sounding results but I'm not examining it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:41, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

You are probably thinking of theories such as those advanced by Gladstone in Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age that ancient peoples did not perceive blue the same way as we do. It is clear that some ancient languages (and a few modern ones) do not have a blue-green distinction. In other words, a single word was used for both "blue" and "green". By extension, the colors and analogies used to describe objects in ancient texts sometimes feel very odd to modern readers. For more recent discussion see linguistic relativity and the color naming debate. Also, as described in blue, pigments and artwork involving blue colors do appear in antiquity, though not in all parts of the world as blue pigments were harder to find or produce than many other colors. Dragons flight (talk) 15:53, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Had started on a longer post, and edit conflicted with Dragons flight's post which covered most the first part. This New York Times article discusses Homer describing the sea as purple, This Science Alert article discusses linguistic relativity's application to color theory, and this Atlas Obscura article discusses that in relation to traffic lights in Japan.

I don't have a source, but I recall an argument that idea of the rainbow having seven colors makes more sense if you understand "indigo" as covering what we call "purple," "purple" as what we call " dark blue," and "blue" as what we'd call "teal" or "cyan." And again, can't find them, but there were a couple of articles I read a couple of months ago (not this one) that discussed this idea in relation to the ancient Greek and medieval concept of race as well. They drew comparable conclusions to the article I did find, but more explicitly pointed out that Homer's and Wolfram von Eschenbach's references to skin color cannot be read as science (characters skin color could change, mixed-raced characters were born with "beautiful spots" from both parents), or even nationalistic (unless all pre-modern nations were even more multiethnic as Toronto or Los Angeles), but only makes sense when read as purely symbolic (and not in a "this color bad, this color good" way, but more like "this color represents this emotion/virtue/unfaultable state, this color represents this other emotion/virtue/unfaultable state"). Ian.thomson (talk) 16:24, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Had started a longer post; edit conflicted with Thomson, including FWIW... If you mean "blue was not a color in ancient times," then kinda--in some areas, they didn't have a name for blue. Names for colors usually start with black, white, red, and go from there, with many languages ending up with ten to a dozen basic color names. Color names are often metaphorical: "like the sky / fire / sea / etc" then the name for that thing and that color diverge. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/column-colors-get-names Here's a readable article which links to its academic research. It might provide some insight.

If you mean "blue was a special color in ancient times," yes it was: painters and dyers would have valued it very highly. It wasn't easy to get blue from nature in a form that would be brilliant and stable. (In fact, we're still looking for new blue dyes and pigments today.) I wouldn't be surprised if there were sumptuary laws on wearing blue cloth at one point or another--that might be something you could look into for your studies. Temerarius (talk) 16:31, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Ultramarine "Ultramarine. Originally this pigment was made by grinding a semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, and purifying it by a complex and difficult process, thus removing all the grey rock with which it is usually associated. Genuine or lapis ultramarine is a rich, deep ‘true blue’ of practically uniform hue. It has been found in Assyrian and Babylonian relics but only as a decorative or precious stone. Its European use as a pigment began in the twelfth century; it has always been one of the costliest and most precious of painting materials. Lapis lazuli occurs in Persia, Afghanistan, China, Chile, and a few other countries; it is more often found in the form of blue particles and veins scattered through a grey rock than in the solid pieces which are used in jewellery and ornaments. Investigators believe that lapis is the sapphire of the Bible and other early writings, including those of Theophrastus and Pliny. Since 1828, the ultramarine of commerce has been an artificial product made by heating clay, soda, sulphur, and coal in furnaces; the colour of the resulting compound is attributed to colloidal sulphur. Best grade ultramarines are produced in a wide variety of shades, from that of the true ultramarine blue to imitation cobalt and turquoise shades which are comparatively greenish. The pigment called green ultramarine is a rather dull colour with properties the same as those of ultramarine blue; it is produced during the manufacture of the blue, and may be considered unfinished ultramarine blue; it is not widely used. All pure ultramarine pigments and variations are equally permanent, but many inferior and reduced grades are made for industrial uses. Ultramarine is semi-transparent; it works poorly in oil, where it tends to yield stringy instead of buttery pastes. It is entirely permanent for most uses, including high temperature processes, but is easily affected and bleached by very weak acids and acid vapours; the same is true of the native lapis. After several independent discoveries concerning the nature of the product and the method of its manufacture, it was first produced commercially in France by Guimet in 1828, and the pigment was used by artists in Paris. In the same year the process was published by Gmelin in Germany."[1] Bus stop (talk) 16:59, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

See Tzitzit, and especially the section "Color of the strings". Tzitzit were coloured blue-violet with a special dye, not just any shade of blue. The composition of the dye was lost in antiquity and today tzitzit are simply left white out of respect for not being the correct shade. Akld guy (talk) 20:10, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

See Blue–green distinction in language and also this. Matt Deres (talk) 20:59, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Not that ancient. Working in the Congo I had to learn one of the local languages - which had words for black, white, red and yellow. If you wanted to say "blue" you had to use a phrase which translated literally as "the colour of the sky" - while for "green" you used "the colour of the water you cooked manioc leaves in." Wymspen (talk) 21:10, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Similarly in Swahili: black, white, red are true adjectives; for other colors there are constructions like "of the color of [substance]". Curiously, one of the substances is buluu; I don't know if that word has an independent meaning. —Tamfang (talk) 23:33, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

The Mishna in Brachot records that being able to tell the difference between blue and green is a distinguishing aspect of first light, and therefore the time for morning prayers. The saying is attributed to Rabbi Eliezer. He lived at the end of the first century CE, but (simplifying greatly) his approach to Jewish law was to pass on only ancient tradition and not innovation or law based on deductive reasoning. As such, we can assume that in his day, he's citing an old tradition of blue/green differential. That makes it pretty ancient. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:12, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

Oh of course, the Old Testament is full of references to colours, including blue and green. Early verses of Exodus 25 is a great example of blue. As a note, you may find Rashi's interpretation of Genesis 33 surprising. I'm not sure Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber would have called the show Joseph and the amazing very very green coat. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 21:33, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

It should be noted that color is a continuous variable, and the assignment of specific names to colors is dependent on culture and language. That is, there is no such thing as "blue" that all human observers (with normal color perception) would agree on. For example, modern Russian has separate words for two colors, while English speakers would call both of them blue. CodeTalker (talk) 22:08, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

We have an article about that as well: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate. Matt Deres (talk) 22:27, 3 June 2018 (UTC)

This is definitely not a RS suitable for use in our articles, but it (and some of the comments) rather demolishes the canard presented by the question. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 08:54, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

I really don't think that's helpful. When it's said that a given group didn't recognize the colour blue, it is not meant that those people gawked at the sky and stammered empty words when attempting to describe the colour; it's meant that they made no distinction between blue and some other colour (usually green) and this lack of formal distinction affected their ability to recognize it as distinct in other contexts. We do precisely the same thing today, just in smaller areas of colour hue. Consider that "pink" is a very distinct colour - just about anyone can name it, even from an early age. Yet red is the only primary/secondary colour that has a paler hue with such a well defined name. Terms for similar pale hues certainly exist, but they're not anywhere nearly as universally recognized (lavender, melon, chartreuse, etc.). If you want to couch it in stereotypical gender roles, consider the frustration many heterosexual couples go through as the female attempts to explain to the male that "salmon" is not the same as "orange" and "navy" is not the same as "blue". Matt Deres (talk) 13:06, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

It is worth pointing out Anna Wierzbicka's position that as some languages do not have a word or concept of "color" itself, that it is not a semantically primitive term, see Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate.John Z (talk) 08:22, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Not mentioned yet is that Lazarus Geiger analyzed ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and "found no mention of the word blue" and "the first society to have a word for the colour blue was the Egyptians, the only culture that could produce blue dyes."^[2] —2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 02:50, 9 June 2018 (UTC)