Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 261
June 22, 2018
What We’re Made Of
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A couple of days ago, while looking at the deep ancestry thing, I become somewhat confused about whether Portuguese had Yamnaya ancestry or not (the answer is probably, but like everything about Portugal, the answer is complicated.) From the region I come from, very probably, but again…
Anyway, let me state right up front my “down” on genealogy. When Dan’s dad got older (starting at about our age) he became obsessed with family genealogy. This made a certain sense, I suppose, since until...
June 21, 2018
Trekonomics – Work and what it means – by Amanda S. Green
Space. . . The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It’s five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. . . .
Those words inspired a generation of TV viewers to a new love of science fiction. At the time, our country had a thriving space program. People could imagine NASA one day doing what we saw the Federation doing...
June 20, 2018
Picking Your Story
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One of the best definitions of what a writer does is to extract narrative from random events. Okay, I guess that applies mostly to non-fiction writers.
Say you set out to write the biography of one of the English fighters in the peninsula during the Napoleonic invasions. You’ll find there’s not one narrative but at least four or five. And I don’t mean just that this guy looks completely different in his auto-biography, his mentions in his superiors’ biographies, or his friends memories of...
June 19, 2018
The Peacock Angel and the Place of Stories
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And in that Garden, where Adam and Even wandered dreaming, there was a peacock…
Wait, what?
In my deep dive for the origins of modern mankind, of modern civilization, of modern stories, I came across the bizarre idea that the Yazidis were devil worshipers. And then I realized they were self-declared Satanists. Sort of.
Like you, perhaps, I only knew the Yazidis as victims of the Daesh-bags. Their women were taken away and raped, and sold in slave markets for sex slaves, a portion of them w...
June 18, 2018
Oh, the Humanity
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So, in my deep dive into human origins (it’s all Francis Turner’s fault, really) and the origins of various groups in Europe I came across what seems now to be a more or less established fact: that modern Europeans are the result of a mix between Early European Farmers ( likely immigrated from somewhere near Anatolia, btw the group that Otzi belonged too. They looked, and genetically resemble modern Sardinians.) and the Indo European herder invaders, the Yamnaya.
The curious thing is that E...
June 17, 2018
Sorry and Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike
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*Sorry guys. I’m actually on the mend. At least today, for the first time in three weeks, I woke up with a clear head. But the overdue short story is still not finished, the house looks like Pompeii after the volcano, and I am trying to do three things at once, so I forgot this. I have a couple of books to promo, but they’ll get done next week. I just can’t do the finicky work right now. I’ll add them next week. For now, here’s the vignette, and I’ll be back tomorrow – SAH*
Vignettes b...June 16, 2018
This Is Not A Post
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*We apologize for the typos on this blog. Turns out that cartoon animals can’t spell. Also, Sarah is mostly blind and was doing this remote, on a small screen!
June 15, 2018
Being Human
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It is a part of my being sick that I get obsessed with the stupidest things. This time, and thanks to a friend who also went down that rabbit hole, I spent days reading about the earliest traces of civilization and the oldest signs of humanity on the land.
Since I also recently started reading Campbell’s comparative religion books, what struck me most was how much the “history of becoming human” has changed. We seem — now — to be talking of fully human creatures, or as human as any, far ol...
June 14, 2018
Owning stuff is soooo hard — Trekonomics 5 – by Amanda S. Green.
That sound you just heard was the sound of a book being planted against the far wall. I’ve managed to get through Shrillary’s rewriting of the 2016 election, Lenin’s pile of written excrement and more without doing so. Who knew something talking about Star Trek would be the first book I’ve thrown across the room in a very long time? I knew it was coming. From the first page of Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Tr...
June 13, 2018
Straw
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Most people have their heads stuffed with straw. Particularly people in power in any field. They don’t have to listen to anyone else, so they don’t. And because most people want to be heroes — and because unfortunately for the last fifty years at least people have been raised to want to “change the world” — they make themselves important villains to fight.
It’s particularly convenient when you can convince yourself you’re doing good in the world by doing well. I.e. it’s convenient to con...
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