May 17, 2013

HuffPost: "10 Awesome Latino Inventions"

From the Huffington Post:
A fury erupted when the Washington Post reported last week that Former Heritage Foundation researcher Jason Richwine argued in his Harvard doctoral dissertation that Hispanics are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs. 
Richwine’s dissertation parts from a fallacy. Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence. 
So instead of getting bogged down in Harvard-hosted debates over which race is the smartest and most deserving of U.S. citizenship, let’s take a moment to thank all these awesome Latino inventors who gave the world a bunch of great things!
Take a look at some of the great Latino inventors in the slideshow.

Prepare to be awed.

Seriously, I could come up with a more impressive list off the top of my head. If you are going to count Spaniards as Latinos, like the list does, about how "Cervantes, inventor of the novel?"

Heck, Joan Baez's Mexican-born physicist dad Albert Baez helped invent the x-ray microscope. (An interesting family -- more evidence for my theory that there were at least as many interesting Mexican-Americans in 1972 as today).

Wikipedia has a long list of prominent Mexican-Americans. It makes for interesting but underwhelming reading. I tried to find Wikipedia's list of prominent Italian-Americans, but it's so long that it's split up into numerous sub-lists in different spots.

150 comments:

x said...

so is this going to turn out like those "best black inventions" inventories which usually are bizarre laundry lists composed of objects that don't even seem conceivably possible to identify the inventors of, like "ear-rings" and "shoes", as well ascontraptions that some black guy may have had a hand in the development of/put a patent on, but usually long after the original was concieved and developed (traffic lights)?

Anonymous said...

This top 10 list makes me think Hispanic inventors are more or less a bunch of white guys.

Cail Corishev said...

Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined

When these people cut and paste this from each other's articles, do they even stop to think how stupid it is and what it means? Or do they just repeat it like a mantra, like a Catholic saying the Sign of the Cross before a prayer?

It doesn't matter whether race is "biologically determined" or determined by what time of the day you were born; it only matters whether it exists. If it exists, then it's possible (likely) that people of different races will tend to have different traits, and we can measure those and take them into account when setting policy -- as we spend millions to do with many government policies. If it doesn't exist, then why do we still have affirmative action and race-based scholarships?

I love someone's suggestion in another thread: immigration control proponents should say: "Fine. These people are hard workers who want nothing more than to work and pay taxes and contribute to our economy and society. Then here's my amendment to bar them from any form of affirmative action or other race/ethnicity-based preference. You're telling us they don't want that and don't need it, so prove it."

Anonymous said...

Latinos are so awesome that they have a continent and a half of their own that they can't wait to escape from to fall into the loving arms of Whitey's Welfare State.

Cail Corishev said...

This top 10 list makes me think Hispanic inventors are more or less a bunch of white guys.

That's the beauty of "Hispanic." As an ethnicity, rather than a race, it kinda is a social construct, so it can be stretched as far as necessary to pull in the right kind of examples.

Amazing that they would list the Pill as #1, since cheap, reliable contraception has probably done as much to destroy Western civilization as any other invention in history. What was that thing about them all being devout Catholics again?

Anonymous said...

MMMM, can't help but notice that the list (which is highly unimpressive) is stuffed to the gills with White guys....including Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Argentina when he was in his 40s.

Somehow, I don't quite think that Hungarian Jews are making up a significant fraction of the Hispanics flooding the USA.

syon

Unknown said...

QUOTE: "If you are going to count Spaniards as Latinos, like the list does, about how "Cervantes, inventor of the novel?"

********

Oh please. Don't drag Iberian culture into this debate!

Spaniards have nothing to do with 'Latino'.

Detective Club said...

Didn't Zorro invent the traffic light?

And I learned in school that Montezuma perfected Human Sacrifice.

Why wasn't my History teacher fired?

Detective Club of Jersey City.

Cail Corishev said...

so is this going to turn out like those "best black inventions" inventories which usually are bizarre laundry lists composed of objects that don't even seem conceivably possible to identify the inventors of, like "ear-rings" and "shoes"

Check it out; it's not even that good. As Steve said, there have to be better inventions from Hispanics than this. Heck, Cesar Millan may not have invented anything in the strict sense, but he's done more for civilization by teaching people how to handle their dogs (and children) than some guy who was "one of the first" to do something that some Americans had already done. I was hoping Cesar would be on the list for "inventing" the doggie treadmill.

Anonymous said...

I was a bit disappointed to see that cocaine didn't make the list. Nor, I note, did the poncho or the sombrero. No tequila either.

Hell, they even forgot the invention of fascinating facial hair (for women).

Very disappointing.

Unknown said...

I mistakenly thought the slide show for dumbest quotes about Latinos was the 10 best inventions. For awhile I thought they were going to claim that self-deportation was invented by a Latino because hey Romney's grandpa is Mexican. Probally would have been the funniest joke on Huffpost.

DYork said...

Some "Latino" sons of immigrants in comedy - Louis CK, Mexican Jewish immigrant father. Greg Giraldo son of Colombian immigrants and Harvard law grad. Both racially White European.

Both are/were 2 of the smartest stand up comedians.

But of course that isn't the point. The issue is race and the massive number of dumb, boring, uncreative mestizo troll people from Mexico and central America swarming into the US.

William said...

I'm sure Catherine of Aragon would be very suprised to learn that she was a Latino.

Lex Corvus said...

In this context, you might be interested in my recently launched blog, White Male Privilege. We are often reminded of this privilege, but what are its fruits? There are, as it happens, a great many.

Anonymous said...

Ted Williams a Mexican?

Marc Bulger and Jp Losman?

Many of these Mexican athletes listed on wiki are white of course, not Mestizo.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"Seriously, the white people here are delusional.

So Mexicans have lower iq's than other groups here. So what? Once you separate the Jewish influence from white accomplishments, the white race doesn't stack up very well."


Sure, just look at a list of White Gentiles: Isaac Newton, Darwin, Kant, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Galileo, David Hume, Virgil,...what a bunch of second raters!

Anonymous:"Iq scores for whites are inflated because white people lump everyone with the same skin tone together, so you end up thinking that an Irishman is equally as smart as a Jew because they are both white. They are not."

Has anyone on this blog said that the mean Irish IQ is equal to the mean Ashkenazi Jewish IQ?

As for the "lumping" effect raising overall White IQ, why don't Mestizo Hispanics and Blacks receive a similar "lumping" effect? Perhaps it's because they just don't have any high performing groups?



Anonymous:"Albert Einstein does not represent white people as a whole, he represents Jewish intellect."

Well, if you want to really narrow it down, he represents the German speaking Ashkenazi Jewish intellect. After all, he didn't have much in common with, say, Iraqi Jews,...


Anonymous:" The smartest of the non Jewish whites, Germans, probably have a lot of Jewish blood in them."

Well, there was certainly some degree of cross-breeding going on, but I don't recall any studies showing that a significant percentage of Gentile Germans have Ashkenazi ancestry.



Anonymous:"So ironically, white people are just like Mexicans are. A whole mass of people who aren't that talented or elite at anything, with a mestizo and pure blooded Jewish elite that skew the accomplishments for the masses."


Yes, dear boy, the elites are what we are talking about....but what have the Hispanic elites accomplished? Not much.

syon

Anonymous said...

"So Mexicans have lower iq's than other groups here. So what? Once you separate the Jewish influence from white accomplishments, the white race doesn't stack up very well. "

According to this list of the top ten scientists, it seems 2 are Jewish or part Jewish--Einstein and Bohr.

The rest I don't think have Jewish blood.

The list doesn't include Poincare, Watson, Faraday, Edison, Volta and many others.

http://listverse.com/2009/02/24/top-10-most-influential-scientists/


Anonymous said...

There were novels in antiquity, 1600 years before Cervantes. I'm talking about Petronius and those Roman-era Greek romance novelists. I strongly doubt that Cervantes can even be credited with reviving the novel during the Renaissance.

Hacienda said...

I don't consider actors, entertainers, business people, activists, organizers, athletes, 99% of scientitsts or artists to be "impressive". They are all "chores" and attention grabbers to be dealt with in the long run.

So reduce the accomplishment by ANY group by 99.9%.

candid_observer said...

"Sure, just look at a list of White Gentiles: Isaac Newton, Darwin, Kant, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Galileo, David Hume, Virgil,...what a bunch of second raters!"

Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.

Man in Black: You're that smart?

Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?

Man in Black: Yes.

Vizzini: Morons!

Steve Sailer said...

After Cervantes, the novel stayed invented.

Anonymous said...

Hacienda:"I don't consider actors, entertainers, business people, activists, organizers, athletes, 99% of scientitsts or artists to be "impressive". They are all "chores" and attention grabbers to be dealt with in the long run.

So reduce the accomplishment by ANY group by 99.9%."

That's what I was doing, cutting away the 99.9%, when I referenced Kant, Newton, Darwin, Dante, etc. Once one reaches that rarefied level, Hispanic mediocrity becomes all the more apparent.

syon

Dave Pinsen said...

Greg Giraldo was a lot funnier than Louis C.K. He was invariably the funniest roaster on those Comedy Central roasts. A real shame he died so young.

Louis C.K.'s stand up is pretty funny, but his F/X show isn't really funny. I know it won an Emmy, but watch most episodes without laughing out loud once.

stari_momak said...

"Once you separate the Jewish influence from white accomplishments, the white race doesn't stack up very well. "

Yeah, take out the Wrightsteins, Robert Goddardberg, Alexy Grahomovitch Bellsky, etc, ...what do you have left?

Ambacti said...

Did some googling for the lulz

Luis E. Miramontes - Probably Mestizo
Landell de Moura - Portuguese Brazilian
László Bíró - Hungarian Jew
Alberto Santos-Dumont - Father French, mother Portuguese Brazilian
Carlos Finlay - French/Scottish
Guillermo González Camarena - Sweet mustache = Spanish
Victor Leaton Ochoa - Spanish/Scottish
Narcís Monturiol i Estarriol - Catalan
Jose Hernandez-Rebollar - Probably light skinned Mestizo, though looks a bit Asian
Hércules Florence - Huffpo claims he is part Brazilian and part French. He was born in Nice in 1804, his father was a French tax collector and his mother was a minor French noblewoman. He arrived in Brazil as an explorer at age 20.

Seems legit, bring on the Mexicans.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:"There were novels in antiquity, 1600 years before Cervantes. I'm talking about Petronius and those Roman-era Greek romance novelists. I strongly doubt that Cervantes can even be credited with reviving the novel during the Renaissance."

Highly debatable as to whether Petronius's SATYRICON (not to mention the GOLDEN ASS and other novel-like works from the Graeco-Roman world)count as true novels and not merely as lengthy prose fictions. As you indicated in your post, there are strong "romance" elements in them.


As for who invented the novel*, that is a deeply contested subject. Jacques Barzun, a good judge of such things, had a preference for the anonymous LA VIDA DE LAZARILLO DE TORMES, but one need not take that as definitive.Even if Cervantes cannot be credited with actually inventing the novel, he can certainly be credited with writing one of the greatest novels.

*And, of course, one could also cite Lady Murasaki's TALE OF THE GENJI as the first novel, but that would plunge us into deep waters indeed. Interesting, though, that the Japanese should have a claim on so Western a form...perhaps further evidence of the peculiar similarities between Western Europeans and the Japanese, the two most liminal Eurasian peoples.

syon

Mark Plus said...

The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?

Anonymous said...

Interesting: by #3 they ran out of Awesome Latino Inventions and had to resort to non-Latinos (a Hungarian who moved to Argentina), to Latinos who didn't really invent (Santo-Dumont, 3 years late to the game), and to far-less-than-awesome inventions (like that goofy glove).

Steve is right: Latinos aren't bad, they're just stunningly mediocre. Half a billion people, one big "meh."

Anonymous said...

Amerindians' biggest contributions to civilization were the domestication of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, etc. Domesticated plants and animals are to a great extent products of the human mind. They rarely bear much resemblance to their wild ancestors. Their creation must have required patience, insight and organizational skills.

In comparison, it's hard to think of any plants or animals that were domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa and then took the world by storm. Coffee comes from Ethiopia, but Ethiopians obviously have some Caucasoid admixture. From Australian aborigines the world got nothing at all.

Gomez Addams said...

Over at Wikipedia's Famous Mexicans page, I noticed that a fair number of the well-known actresses were, ahem, adult film stars.

Anonymous said...

Here's a montage of all 10 of the awesome Latino inventors. Looks like a rather white group of guys.

SAM said...

The list of best Chinese inventions in the past 500 years would be no better.

Chinese have much higher IQs than Mexicans, and are 10 times more populous. .

Darwin said...

The inventor of norethindrone, the synthetic hormone used in the Ortho-Novum contraceptive pill, was George Rosenkranz, a Hungarian steroid chemist who fled the Nazis to Cuba and then to Mexico, and became the director of research and then the CEO of Syntex. Miramontes was a Syntex employee who worked with Rosenkranz. I was at the time legal counsel for Syntex and know the story well.

Anonymous said...

Iberians' biggest contributions to civilization were the discovery of enormous parts of the world and the creation of a global market. The Portuguese established the first global empire and the Spaniards quickly surpassed them. They sailed further than anyone had done before. That required courage, competence, organization and lots of other laudable qualities.

In the lefty worldview Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. were merely boring. In the same worldview Cortez, Pizarro, Magellan, etc. were freaking evil. In a sense Iberians got shafted by liberalism more than other Euro peoples. Their biggest contributions to civilization are openly vilified.

Anonymous said...

Best line from that Flava Flave roast was Greg Giraldo's line: "Flava Flave, how fucking skinny are you? You look like a skeleton wrapped in electrical tape!"

Though Louis CK is funny too. He's just painfully pc, even though he likes to pretend he edgy by saying "cunt" a lot.

Anonymous said...

Though I've always been confused about its meaning, after looking at that list, the phrase "exceptions that prove the rule" comes to mind.

Cail Corishev said...

Do they really think we are that stupid, or is this like Communist propaganda where everyone knew it was false and they forced you to accept it in order to humiliate you?

Both. It's also a sort of secret handshake. If you start your article with "race is a social construct," it's a signal to the right kind of people that you're the right kind of person, and they can trust that they can quote you or hire you without concern that you might utter something unacceptable.

Anonymous said...

http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4759

slumber_j said...

"From Australian aborigines the world got nothing at all."

My Anglo-Australian grandmother was given an Aboriginal name by her parents. So there's that.

Oh: plus the didgeridoo. Possibly the boomerang. The Walkabout?

Okay, yeah, not much.

Anonymous said...

MMMM, since a Hungarian like Biro counts as a Hispanic, does this mean that we can count Einstein as an Anglo?

syon

Anonymous said...

Here's a new twist on the relentless pro-immigration propaganda coming from the media: don't just let more immigrants in, kick Americans out!

"Give Them Our Huddled Masses

Why America should swap its retirees, patients, and students for skilled immigrant labor."

BY AADITYA MATTOO, ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN | MAY 17, 2013


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/17/immigration_skilled_labor_huddled_masses

"Immigration reform is back on the policy agenda. Can it help get the United States out of the economic pickle in which it finds itself these days? The global financial crises reinforced the long-term trend of stagnating incomes, shrinking wealth, and diminishing opportunities for the U.S. middle class. Both ends of the age spectrum have been hit: Today, only 45 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 24 are employed, while an increasing number of baby boomers are retiring with reduced savings and pensions. Meanwhile automatic budget cuts and future fiscal tightening will overwhelmingly affect the infirm, retirees, and students. High long-term growth, obviously, is one solution. But that's easier said than done. There's a more straightforward way to revive the U.S. economy and put money in people's pockets. To borrow from the 19th century U.S. politician Horace Greeley: Go South, Americans!"

Anonymous said...

Noticed the HuffPo commenters weren't buying the article's premise either.

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

cipher

Anonymous said...

Don't knock refried beans, man. You would've never thought to cook it twice.

El Guapo said...

For all you gringos who don't think Mexicans ever invented anything...

Juan Mendez of Juarez, Mexico invented the modern burrito c. 1910.

"Nacho" Anaya of Piedras Negras, Mexico invented nachos in 1943.

Monica Flin accidentally invented the chimichanga in a kitchen accident at El Charro in Tucson, AZ in 1922.

Jacobo Lozano Paez of Mexico City invented the worm in the mezcal bottle in 1950.

Don Carlos Arozco invented the margarita at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada in 1941.

...and the world would never be the same.

Dr. M.L.K. said...

Modern scholars generally AGREE that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined.

The French government definitely proved it by suppressing it.

Anonymous said...

Hey Steve,

You may find this of interest:

Strong men more likely to have right-wing views

Hacienda said...


That's what I was doing, cutting away the 99.9%, when I referenced Kant, Newton, Darwin, Dante, etc. Once one reaches that rarefied level, Hispanic mediocrity becomes all the more apparent.

---------------

Yes. You brought out the "juggernauts". That will put them in their place.

Anonymous said...

"Part Barzilian, part French" -yeah, how are those student loans working out for you guys? Is "Barzil" technically considered latino? If so, is Macau? Angola? Goa or Malacca?

Luis Alvarez counts; he was pretty good.

Anonymous said...

So when liberals hector us for opposing immigration, they say we don't like brown people. When they want to point out the great benefits of immigration, they primarily feature the accomplishments of white people.

Who are really the racists here?

Gin Monter said...

He is not an inventor but, José Raúl Capablanca from Cuba was chess champion of the world from 1921-1927. He is known for his endgames and his extreme simplicity of play.

Anonymous said...

In addition to Rosenkranz (a Hungarian Jew, Carl Djerassi (1/2 Sephardic and 1/2 Ashkenazi) was also involved with the synthesis of the "pill" hormone and is listed on the patent. Miramontes was a 26 yr. old undergraduate research assistant - while he put in many hours of grunt work at the lab, I doubt that he could have come up with this invention on his own. So he is sort of the Matthew Henson to Rosenkranz's Peary, but of course in our time he is the one who is lauded the most. From "no man is a hero to his valet" to "the valet is a hero, the Man is not."

I don't know why Rosenkranz and Djerassi didn't get credited as "Latinos" while Biro did - I guess it was easier just to give sole credit to Miramontes, who is, out of the whole group of 10, just about the only one who looks to be a real Mestizo that resembles the guy who cuts your lawn.

Anonymous said...

It's a lame list. It simply highlights what a vast intellectual wasteland Central and South America have been. Somewhat on topic:

VENEZUELANS SCRAMBLING TO FIND SCARCE TOILET PAPER

http://tinyurl.com/aelat74

Anonymous said...

This is hilarious. As the commenter who posted the photo montage above points out, these are all white guys (and some of them didn't even invent the things they were credited with in the HP piece).

There was a Phil Donahue episode way back when where Phil is trying to show that "Hispanics" have the right stuff when it comes to Nobel Prizes, and one of his researchers compiled a list of Spanish-surnamed people who've won Nobels.

You get the punchline -- Phil didn't know it but they were all as white as, well, Phil Donahue (e.g. google image search Physics Nobelist Luis Alvarez to see the whitest white man you've ever laid eyes on).

Another really white group, which Steve should do a post on, is the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It's cracker central baby!

Chief Seattle said...

10 Latino inventors and not one female?

Excuse me while I eat my peanut butter sandwich.

Mr. Anon said...

"The Contraceptive Pill
Thank Mexican Chemist Luis MIramontes for co-inventing the first oral contraceptive pill, patented in 1956."

If true, it's an example of a prophet finding no honor in his own country. Mexico could use some contraception.

What about the inventors of bouncing shock absorbers and UV running lights for cars? Surely, they should be on the list of great mexican inventors.

Mr. Anon said...

"Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined,....."

Stupid scholars, perhaps. How could race be anything other an biologically determined?

And if race is just a fiction, how do we - as white men - know whom to oppress? Do we just walk up to some random stranger on the street and ask: "Excuse me, sir, but I wish to opress some negroes. Are you a negro? And, if so, may I oppress you today?"

David said...

Octavio Paz was the big deal down here for decades. I read a bit of him. This quote from Wikipedia is typical of his writing:

"There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot."

If you dip into the writings of Mexican literary figures, that's the kind of stuff you find.

Paz was puffed internationally for decades and won the Nobel, but it's hard to see what his real significance was other than the fact that he was a Mexican who wrote.

Perhaps there is a better explanation of his fame. Like nearly all other Mexican literary icons of the XX Century, he was a communist.

(Interestingly, in his dotage he declared that the Zapatistas should be killed and that he didn't much care for the Sandinistas, either.)

I read an odd, sad article about how younger Mexican poets should rebel against the dead hand of the late Paz - that he's crushing their free expression from the grave and that this must stop.

Brazilian said...

"The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?"

They imported Africans in large scale and settled them in the Portuguese mainland in the 16th/17th century... The africans integrated, but with bad results to the portuguese intellect.

ben tillman said...

Many of these Mexican athletes listed on wiki are white of course, not Mestizo.

Or Jewish. People with names like Marc Bulger and Losman tend to be Jewish.

ben tillman said...

The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?

The people who did most of those things were Jewish. The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.

Luis E. Miramontes - Probably Mestizo

Probably Jewish.

Though Louis CK is funny too. He's just painfully pc, even though he likes to pretend he edgy by saying "cunt" a lot.

He's Jewish.

ben tillman said...

I have no idea what you're talking about. I followed the link, and there were no Hispanic inventions to be found - just some random pictures.

Anonymous said...

Sure, just look at a list of White Gentiles: Isaac Newton, Darwin, Kant, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Aristotle, Plato, Dante, Galileo, David Hume, Virgil

And in the other corner, we have... Einstein,

and...

...

...

...

Perry Farrell?

Anonymous said...

What is the exact definition of "Latino"? Don't google it, just think about it ...

If I move to Uruguay tomorrow, do I automatically become Latino?

Anonymous said...

http://www.naijaurban.com/40yearold-mother-sleeps-son-pregnant/

end kinsexphobia

Anonymous said...

They forgot the Chapalupa.

RD said...

Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence.

Ah, so blacks are a mere social construct. As are whites, Asians and the rest.

There is absolutely no genetic difference between these groups whatsoever.

No discernible differences at all.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

All the "scholars" - i.e. Boasian anthropologists - say that race is not grounded in biology, so race must not be real.

Anybody who disagrees is a racist.

Thanks for clearing that up, HuffPost.

Darkseid said...

They listed former NBA player Mark Aguirre as a "Mexican American". He happened to be BORN in Mexico but was raised in Chicago.

Drunk and sunburnt English tourist said...

The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?

I bought and read a brief history of Portugal whilst on holiday there. The Portuguese invested heavily in R&D and had a sort of 'brain trust' advising the King. They did a lot of R&D on navigation and ship design and it paid off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Portugal_%281415%E2%80%931578%29
A constant exchange of cultural ideals made Portugal a centre of knowledge and technological development. Due to these connections with Islamic kingdoms, many mathematicians and experts in naval technology appeared in Portugal. The Portuguese government impelled this even further by taking full advantage of this and by creating several important research centres in Portugal, where Portuguese and foreign experts made several breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics, cartography and naval technology. Sagres and Lagos in the Algarve become famous as such places.

What happened to them?

According to the book I read, if I remember rightly, imperial overstretch leading to disastrous military defeat at the battle of Alcácer Quibir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alc%C3%A1cer_Quibir
A weakened Portugal was then overtaken by European competitors who copied her inovations and successes.

Anonymous said...

@ Mark Plus "The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths...What happened to them?"
Somewhat OT, but this question occurred to me re. the ancient Greeks. They pioneered so much, but nothing much since 200 AD (See Hart's 'Understanding Human History'). Of course, they were conquered by the Turks from 1453, but what happened in between?

Anonymous said...

I think that list may have the opposite effect.

Anonymous said...

Granted, this is akin to killing a mosquito with an atomic bomb, but...Here are 10 awesome Anglo inventions:

1. The transistor: (USA), Bardeen,Brattain, and Shockley.

2. The aeroplane: (USA)the Wright Brothers

3. The lightning rod: (USA) Benjamin Franklin

4. The condenser (critical improvement on the steam engine): James Watt (Scotland)

5. Phonograph: Thomas Edison (USA)

6. Liquid Fuel rocket: Robert Goddard (USA)

7.Polio Vaccine: Injected (Jonas Salk), oral (Albert Sabin)(both USA).

8. The cyclotron:Ernest Lawrence (USA)

9. The telephone: Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland-Canada-USA) and Elisha Gray (USA)

10. Percussion cap revolver: Samuel Colt


I dunno, these seem slightly more....awesome than the Hispanic ones..

syon

Anonymous said...

What about those Mexican Pointy shoes?

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=mexican+pointy+boots&client=safari&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=snyXUaqFFe-viQe_jYCwDA&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=672

garyinfh said...

Not much of a list, particularly inasmuch as most of the "inventors" turn out to be, well, white. But all in all, way better than the SuperSoaker.

Anonymous said...



I will see your lousy telefono and raise you with:

Tortilla machine - Everardo Rodriguez, (1904)

Take that, whitey! Badaboom!

I learned this from the Huff Po comments. And the guy wasn't joking.

Anonymous said...

Cyclotron? We don' need no steenkin' cyclotron.

Anonymous said...

In the Wiki for Mexican Americans, no one looks indio until you get to the "activists" section.

Anonymous said...

#1 Latino invention: Conquis are 'people of color'.

Now, that is a social/political construct and invention.

Cail Corishev said...

If I move to Uruguay tomorrow, do I automatically become Latino?

You also have to speak Spanish and change your name to something that sounds Latin-y.

Look at it this way: we just elected a pope named Bergoglio, who was born in Argentina to Italian parents (his father was an Italian immigrant and his mother was born in Argentina to Italian parents). So he's full-blooded Italian, and looks it. As pope, he took the name of an Italian from Assisi.

Yet he was immediately heralded as the first Latino pope, the first Hispanic pope, and the first South American/Western Hemisphere pope. They backed off on the Latino/Hispanic stuff after it became obvious how silly that was, but you still hear it sometimes, and at first everyone just assumed that "Catholic south of the US border" == St. Juan Diego.

Cail Corishev said...

http://www.naijaurban.com/40yearold-mother-sleeps-son-pregnant/


Wow, these people are just oozing vibrancy. Get them a pair of American visas, stat!

Mark Plus said...

The Irish have a reputation as a bit on the slow side for white people. But even then they contributed quite a lot to Western civilization, and not just in literature and philosophy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irish_inventions_and_discoveries

The Irish also benefited from proximity to the better connected English and Scots people on the neighboring island, and the fact that the two populations have intermarried, or at least interbred, for generations. (The Scots-Irish men in Ulster probably fathered their share of bastard kids on Irish women, despite the religious barrier to such associations.)

The Brits could have ruled Ireland better than they did, but even bad British governance often works better than the alternatives; and the more capable Irish men benefited from it by having access to the resources, intellectual stimulation and markets which made their contributions possible.

Anonymous said...

The Portuguese "mingled with the blood of Africa" as Senator Bilbo said.

Pat Boyle said...

More "social construct" nonsense.

I've been looking in to this idea. The first thing I noticed was all the Marxism. Richard Lewontin, an unabashedly Marxist, invented this idea around the Fst statistic in population genetics. He had had a career of with Stephen Jay Gould (another Marxist) of trying to reconcile Darwin with Marx.

These two are sort of modern Lysenkos. They were also responsible for such Marx friendly notions as "punctuated equilibrium" (periodic revolution not continuous evolution) and "spandrels" (adaptations are disparaged to open up room for random drift).

Lewontin's analysis is basically a straw man argument. That's why it's referred to as Lewontin's Fallacy. It isn't considered meaningful among population geneticists but it has taken root in the Marx friendly academic fields of sociology and cultural anthropology.

It is a very appealing idea for the intellectual. It allows him to express an idea that no normal person who relied on their own senses would ever credit. It is a nonsense notion that is clearly at odds with reality - and that's the point. Catholics believe in the Trinity - nonsense math but it unites the faithful against the outsiders.

I want to thank Jared Diamond for this insight into the power of religious beliefs in nonsense. They are not mere mistakes. They are nonsensical for a reason. They separate the believers from the damned.

Albertosaurus

Svigor said...

@ Mark Plus "The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths...What happened to them?"
Somewhat OT, but this question occurred to me re. the ancient Greeks. They pioneered so much, but nothing much since 200 AD (See Hart's 'Understanding Human History'). Of course, they were conquered by the Turks from 1453, but what happened in between?


The (eastern) Roman Empire?

Anonymous said...

Bring me the head of Marco Zuckerbergez.


http://youtu.be/HPaUPU9xdgM

Anonymous said...

There are great Anglo inventors.

But you could also make a list of Arab Muslim scientists and intellectuals that is quite impressive as well.

Remember that innovation and invention are exponential. Meaning that there was more innovation in the last 20 years than the last 100 years combined. So there are a lot of Anglo scientists of great accomplishment because the last 200 years the Anglo world was on top economically. No doubt that whichever people dominate the world economy for the next 50 years will blow past the accomplishments from the last 1000.

A core component of innovation comes from surplus. If a society is rich enough, that society has time to quit working for survival and more time to work on making things better.

Smarter societies aren't necessarily the richest, as things like natural disaster and political systems play a role. In the Anglo world a lot of the accomplishments stem from the fact that for this time period Anglo countries just had more surplus and more time to invent.

Remember that during this time period the Anglo world was conquering and enslaving other people which gave the Anglo elite time and means to invent things. All the gold from the America's went to subsidize Europe while the red man was just trying to survive.

Pat Boyle said...

This argument is so dumb I don't know where to start. I'll just deal with the idea of Hispanics for now.

We call them Hispanics but what does that mean? Does it mean that they have descended from people who lived in Spain? Historically Spain was populated by the Celto-Iberians. These were an off shoot of the the Central European Celts.

Spain was a Roman colony before Gaul. For hundreds of years the Spanish fought the Romans and Roman influence. We don't know much of this history because Marius wasn't the author Caesar was.

But Spain of course came into the Roman orbit and was completely Romanized. Seneca and his whole family were from Spain.

So Spain is in the mainstream of white Western European civilization just as much as France or England and more than Germany.

France became more Germanic with the arrival of the Goths and Spain became a little more Berber when the Arabs invaded, but in general Spain and the Spanish are just another West European nation.

The status of Hispanics has nothing to do with Spain except that many Spaniards in the New World interbred with the natives. If you want to gauge the contribution of Hispanics you should ignore the Caucasian fraction. The white part of Hispanics is not different enough from other European ancestry to explain much of anything.

Let's consider Amerindian inventions. To do that we need to look at Amerindians before 1492.

Cavalli-Sforza divides humans into about five major races. What was the level of invention among these various races in 1491 before they got all mixed up?

Let's consider the ability to build a square cut stone wall. Among the Asians the Ming Dynasty was rebuilding the Great Wall of China. Lots of square cut stone blocks in that. Caucasians had built the Gothic cathedrals at Notre Dame and Amiens. Again plenty of square cut stone. The Caucasians in India had constructed Vedic Hindu temples that are roughly equivalent to the Gothic Christian cathedrals of Europe.

But in Australia there were no stone walls or huts of any kind. In Africa there was Great Zimbabwe - the only stone monument site in black Africa - but it remains unclear if it was inspired by the Arabs or if it was developed by the local native blacks. In any case Zimbabwe is not made of cut stone. It is just made of piled rough rocks. The transition from piled stone to cut stone is so far back in human pre-history no one knows how to date it.

Piled stone is all over Northern Europe in places like New Grange and Stonehenge. But almost contemporaneously the Egyptians were build the pyramids.

So we have high culture where there are East Asians and Caucasians and almost no culture among sub-Saharan blacks and Australoids. What about the Indian cultures the Spanish encountered?

Again the Amerindians had plenty of cut stone houses, temples and monuments from Tenochtitlan to Machu Pichtu. The Spanish were deeply impressed with the architecture of the Aztecs. The Portuguese who met Africans about this same time were appalled by their lack of architecture.

So Amerindians were intermediate in their accomplishments. No wheeled vehicles, no arch, no metal working but they were above the cut stone horizon whereas the Australian aborigines and Africans were not.

In terms of historical development the Amerindian civilizations were about 2,000 year behind the West or the East. That's not bad. Africans were maybe 40,000 years more primitive than the white explorers they first encountered in the fifteenth century.

Albertosaurus

eah said...

Did the list include piñatas and low-riders? The slideshow was taking too long to load.

Billy Chav said...

Comments at HuffPo are refreshingly skeptical.

On a side note, being a comments moderator at HuffPo has got to be the ultimate Cathedral drone job.

Anonymous said...

Octavio Paz's
The Labyrinth of Solitude was a brilliant exposition of Mexican character and culture.

Anonymous said...

"So Mexicans have lower iq's than other groups here. So what? Once you separate the Jewish influence from white accomplishments, the white race doesn't stack up very well."

There is one pretty significant achievement you're overlooking, dope. Whites created all the societies everyone else in the world aspires to emulate or join.

Anonymous said...

The people who did most of those things were Jewish. The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.

Elaborate.

Mr. Anon said...

OT - Another iSteve theme: Things that shouldn't happen in a modern technological society - train collisions:

Trains Collide in Connecticut

Anonymous said...

A ladder that can scale any fence?

history buff said...

"So Mexicans have lower iq's than other groups here. So what? Once you separate the Jewish influence from white accomplishments, the white race doesn't stack up very well.
"

Jews do tend to be very smart with language and all things related, but in the sciences and math they are not much above what one would expect statistically from people with an IQ average in the high-average range (110-115, same as Germans and Poles, btw) If Europeans had waited for the Jews to invent modern civilization, we'd still be riding ox-carts and arguing whether Plato or Aristotle had the better hypotheses. No other civilization, for example, invented perspective--the quality of 3-D expressed in European paintings. It is virtually unknown outside Europe, and even in Europe, only seen after the 15th c., by which time the nature of physicality had already been bombarded with questions and theories.

But really..Are you serious or are you trying to be funny? On the chance that you are serious, I'll try and take you seriously. Do you know anything about the development of modern, technological society in the last 2000 years? Jews were not even much involved in academia and invention until the 19th c. By then Europeans had invented soaring cathedrals, the printing press, guns, re-invented Chinese porcelain since the Chinese wouldn't give away the secret,
clocks, automatons, navigational clocks, the steam engine, the industrial revolution, higher mathematics, electricity, the automobile, the air plane ... I could go on. In the the 20th century, we have space travel (mostly German, not Jewish), nuclear energy, modern surgery and medicine (most discoveries from the 19th and early 20th c. were not Jewish), computers, the internet, and on the negative side, weapons of mass destruction. Although slavery was a weirdly disjunctive part of American history, most peoples have had slavery. Whites were the first to totally condemn it on humanitarian grounds and fight a war with a million casulaties in the collective effort to end it. No other race has had the ideal of dying for another as did many of the Union soldiers. Yea, I know all about the complex reasons for the Civil War; but the Battle Hymn of the Republic was their official marching song.

Jewish immigrants to America (and even western Europe for that matter) came to a civilization that owed little to them directly, and nothing to them in its actual formation. They were given, for the most part, full rights as citizens in a country built by Christians. Limited university space? So build you own. Nobody stopped them. The Irish got dirtier treatment than the Jews, if only because most of them arrived in a rougher era.

Europe did not really need the Jews. The Jews needed Europe--Muslims granted them the right to practice their religion, but after th 12th c., stagnated so much intellectually that Sephardic Jews had little to complete with and no forum for intellectual action. I am not detracting from their contributions which are considerable for their numbers. I know it's not pc to say, but Europe has been doing ok developmentally--ex ceeding the U.S. in some respects--since WWII. Still, I do think Jews contributed to creating a more interesting civilization. They have the intelligence to live in a civilized manner. They enhance an urban environment especially. It's because they care so much about language and the human psyche, Sort of like Shakespeare. smile.

a Newsreader said...

Anonymous said: "Though I've always been confused about its meaning, after looking at that list, the phrase "exceptions that prove the rule" comes to mind."

Indeed, but since most people don't understand probability and statistics, they probably won't snicker at the list.

Here are some iSteve posts about the exception that proves the rule:

Link 1
Link 2

Mr. Anon said...

I suppose one could include Luis Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics, and co-author of the impact-extinction hypothesis:

Luis Alvarez

If having a spanish grandfather makes you "hispanic".

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYWEMX7juPw

How about moving boat over mountain?

Anonymous said...

Mexicans invented nothing. How do I know this? The teacher in STAND AND DELIVER said Mayans invented ZERO.

Rohan Swee said...

Remember that during this time period the Anglo world was conquering and enslaving other people which gave the Anglo elite time and means to invent things. All the gold from the America's went to subsidize Europe while the red man was just trying to survive.

Uh, who wasn't "conquering and enslaving other people", in this or that period, including the red man? (Was all that gold being set-aside for industrial projects that had to be cancelled when the Europeans showed up and stole it?) Some groups managed to use the resultant material surplus and leisure from all that conquerin' and enslavin' a little more productively than others, no?

Anonymous said...

How can you guys ignore the greatest inventor of the 20th century - the Japanese genius Momofuku Ando? His creation saved generations of young people from hunger and (even worse) poverty. When combined with beer, and occasional pizza, this invention has sustained graduate students over many decades.

Anonymous said...

All the gold from the America's went to subsidize Europe while the red man was just trying to survive.

What would the red man have done with the gold?

ben tillman said...

I will see your lousy telefono and raise you with:

Tortilla machine - Everardo Rodriguez, (1904)


Mariano Martinez & the frozen margarita machine. Pretty cool.

David said...

>being a comments moderator at HuffPo has got to be the ultimate Cathedral drone job<

The worst part is, it's probably an "internship" ( = slave labor)!

JSM said...

"Meaning that there was more innovation in the last 20 years than the last 100 years combined."

You've got to be joking. Between 1893 and 1993, we got the discovery of x-rays (setting the stage for modern diagnostic imaging) discovery of radioactivity, quantum mechanics, controlled powered heavier than air flight, atomic energy, television, space flight, organ transplants, invention of CT scanners, MRI scanners, fax machines, personal computers, in vitro fertilization, cell phones, supercomputers, cloning and the first developments by the military that ultimately resulted in the today-ubiquitous internet.

The past 20 years, 1993 to 2013, got us...some refinements in the above tech, some cool digital animation starting with Toy Story and..facebook.

NOTE: We CANNOT, in America, unlike 1968, get humans to Low Earth Orbit but that we hitch a ride with the Russkies.

So....wherrrrre's that exponential innovation?
Where's the fusion energy we were supposed to have by now?
Where's our 200-year lifespans?
Where's the Mars colonies and asteroid mines?
Dude, where's my flying car?

NO. The dudes who lived 1880 to 1980, who went in one lifetime from riding horse-drawn wagons to flying the friendly skies of United, THOSE guys witnessed all the amazing new tech stuff. THEY invented the future. Us alive today? Pfffttt.

Peter Wong said...

"And, of course, one could also cite Lady Murasaki's TALE OF THE GENJI as the first novel, but that would plunge us into deep waters indeed. Interesting, though, that the Japanese should have a claim on so Western a form...perhaps further evidence of the peculiar similarities between Western Europeans and the Japanese, the two most liminal Eurasian peoples."

Most other literary traditions scorn the novel as trivial and profane - the Tang Dynasty essayist Han Yu, for example, was criticized by his peers for composing fictitious prose narratives on the sly.

I would characterize the novel as an exclusively let alone characteristically Western literary genre prior to the modern era - China's Ming and Qing Dynasties were both host to a flourishing tradition of narrative prose fiction.

Today, however, the popularity of the novel is the chief reason the dismal condition of contemporary literature. Modern belle-lettrists, ivory tower and averse to such conventional niceties as plot or characterization, use the medium as little more than a hollow, onanistic style exercise.

Oeter Wing said...

"But Spain of course came into the Roman orbit and was completely Romanized. Seneca and his whole family were from Spain.

So Spain is in the mainstream of white Western European civilization just as much as France or England and more than Germany."

Albertosaurus oddly omits mention of several centuries of Moorish occupation - Spain was home to the Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who wrote in Arabic. Thus the popular phrase - African begins at the Pyrenees.

Anonymous said...

I guess what I don't understand is why the folks, or maybe folk no one answered that question, who can't move on from the USS Liberty seem to have had no problem embracing Russia as their Shang-ri La. I seem to recall the Russians shooting down a KAL plane and basically saying tough. No fog of war no nothing just typical thug violence. But for some reason we are supposed to weep for the Russians when NATO extends to far east for their liking. I say lets be mad about one incident or be mad about neither.

hmm said...

"The Irish have a reputation as a bit on the slow side for white people. But even then they contributed quite a lot to Western civilization, and not just in literature and philosophy:
"
The Irish outside Ireland have the same average iq as any other white people. Within Ireland much the same applies to them as applies to any other country that still has a heavily rural population, like the Balkans. When predicting average IQ, race trumps just about everything, including nationality. I have noticed that English IQ is about 100, while Germans and Poles (no jokes please), average about 107-109. I'm not sure what to make of that.
In any case, one of the two inventors of the prosthetic dolphin tail was Irish; the other was Yugoslavian. Hollywood turned both these white guys into a black one. Morgan Freeman of course, who makes a mint playing unlikely to impossible majic blacks, with plenty of white people to write his roles.

Anonymous said...

So Steve decries the political correctness and censorship when Richwine gets attacked but he censors my comments to the board.

Your slipping Steve!

Anonymous said...

If the 6 million Jews in America were low IQ Mexicans, whites would still be running this country, and conservatism would be much stronger.

Anonymous said...

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1261720.ece

vell vell

outsourced editor said...

Anybody notice the comical typo in that Huffington intern's linkbait slideshow (changing the first period to a colon highlights the hilarity)?

"Richwine’s dissertation parts from a fallacy: Modern scholars generally agree that 'race' is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence."

SpellCheka said...

According to their guest worker composing that blog post: Mr. Hércules Florence (he of the photograph) was "part Barzilian"--that sounds less Hispanic/Lusitanic, rather more like a Tbilisi soccer club.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

""The people who did most of those things were Jewish. The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.""

Elaborate."

To elaborate, he's making it up.

Anonymous said...

One of the things that may be getting lost here is that it's not that Hispanics are unusually bad at inventing but that the peoples who are good at inventing make up a very short list.

bjdubbs said...

This is OT, but an interesting case of hybrid vigour:

Shinichi Mochizuki, the mathematician who allegedly proved something called abc, has a parent named Anne Mochizuki and was graduated from Phillips Exeter. His photo definitely looks caucasippon.

James Kabala said...

It hardly counts as an invention since it involved no technical know-how, and it involves a medium often regarded as pernicious rather than beneficial, but the most long-term significant idea conceived by an American (naturalized) Hispanic in the twentieth century was undoubtedly "TV should be filmed rather than live, and the tapes should be saved for future syndicated broadcast."

Anonymous said...

NOTE: We CANNOT, in America, unlike 1968, get humans to Low Earth Orbit but that we hitch a ride with the Russkies.

We've been using the Russians recently because it's cheaper, not because we can't do it. An America based company called SpaceX will be able to do it cheaper than the Russians soon.

Anonymous said...

Prince Henry the Navigator was a great-grandson of Edward III of England (therefore a great-great-great-grandson of Edward I). It really isn't that hard to keep this straight.

Anonymous said...

Peter Wong:"Most other literary traditions scorn the novel as trivial and profane - the Tang Dynasty essayist Han Yu, for example, was criticized by his peers for composing fictitious prose narratives on the sly."

Well, yes....the disregard for narrative prose fiction is one of the reasons why the novel was such a late development...




Peter Wong:"I would characterize the novel as an exclusively let alone characteristically Western literary genre prior to the modern era - China's Ming and Qing Dynasties were both host to a flourishing tradition of narrative prose fiction."

Again, this all depends on how tightly one defines the novel (e.g., is MOBY DICK a novel or a prose romance?). Certainly, an argument can be made for the novel-like qualities of Chinese prose fictions like JIN PING MEI,but there is an element of strain in the process. Plus, we just do not see the kind of artistic takeoff that occurred in the West from 1500 to 1800, when the novel emerged in its canonical form.



Peter Wong:"Today, however, the popularity of the novel is the chief reason the dismal condition of contemporary literature."

It is?

Peter Wong:" Modern belle-lettrists, ivory tower and averse to such conventional niceties as plot or characterization, use the medium as little more than a hollow, onanistic style exercise."


Well, perhaps, but this has more to do with the temper of the times than with the genre itself.

syon


Anonymous said...

Jewish supremist? It is just the truth.

What is not mentioned is the significant antisemitism that Jewish people faced in many Anglo cultures in the past. So while Jews always had a tremendous impact, it was suppressed every chance Anglos had.

David said...

>The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.

>Elaborate.<

The idea is that Columbus was a Marrano. A falsehood, "elaborated" (so to speak) by our commenter already.

Anonymous said...

Shinichi Mochizuki, the mathematician who allegedly proved something called abc, has a parent named Anne Mochizuki and was graduated from Phillips Exeter. His photo definitely looks caucasippon.

He doesn't look half caucasian at all.

JSM said...

"We've been using the Russians recently because it's cheaper, not because we can't do it. An America based company called SpaceX will be able to do it cheaper than the Russians soon."

Yeah. And we'll have flying cars any day now, too.

You've inadvertently reinforced my point. *We* currently cannot get Americans to the Space Station. We do *not* currently have, built and ready to fly, a way to get the astronauts to the space station.
If SpaceX does manage to build a lifter, that'll be great. But we cannot do it at present -- we have no vehicle. Have to thumb a ride with the Russkies.
Embarrassing.

JSM said...

I forgot my link:

NASA can't get it up:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4286324/nasa-delays-commercial-crew-launches-extends-russia-contract


"NASA has not had the ability to send astronauts to the International Space Station since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and that's not going to change anytime soon. A plan to replace the shuttle by paying for rides on commercial spacecraft from SpaceX, Boeing or several other private companies has been delayed from its original 2015 anticipated start date due to budget cuts, NASA announced today. Instead, NASA has extended a contract with the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), paying another $424 million to allow US astronauts to fly aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft through 2016, and to return them or provide rescue services through 2017."

And this:
"Although this type of contract extension with Russia is far from new (NASA has signed extensions for Russian space transportation services several times since the original contract was inked in 2009), the move is a blow to NASA and its commercial crew partners."

So despite all the hope and hype about space launches by private enterprise, in reality here we are extending our hitchhiking contract with the Russians, AGAIN.

Hm...a cold-eyed appraisal says the exponential curve trend of innovation is going in exactly the opposite direction you claim.

Anonymous said...

Mark Plus, the continued strength of the Roman Catholic Church happened to them. Michener wrote about the Church's extreme influence in Portugal back in the Sixties.

Portugal still has the lowest college graduation rate in Western Europe. My mother's father, an intelligent and curious man even at the end of his life when I knew him, left the Azores at age 15 and came to America with his uncle when his father forced him to leave school at age 13.

David Davenport said...

You've inadvertently reinforced my point. *We* currently cannot get Americans to the Space Station. We do *not* currently have, built and ready to fly, a way to get the astronauts to the space station.

If SpaceX does manage to build a lifter, that'll be great. But we cannot do it at present -- we have no vehicle. Have to thumb a ride with the Russkies


Compare to:

SpaceX Aiming for Manned Mission in 2015


SpaceX Aiming for Manned Mission in 2015

By Damon Poeter January 10, 2013 10:44am EST 10 Comments

SpaceX is aiming to conduct crewed missions to low-Earth orbit as early as 2015, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based aerospace firm has so far only launched its unmanned Dragon capsule into space to place satellites in orbit and last October, in a first for a private company, to resupply the International Space Station in partnership with NASA.

This week, SpaceX project manager and former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman said manned flights conducted by the company could come more quickly than many industry watchers anticipated. Reisman, speaking at a NASA press event at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, said SpaceX was hoping to send a capsule carrying its own hand-picked astronauts—not the U.S. space agency's—on a three-day demonstration flight in low-Earth orbit, the Sentinel reported.

Reisman quipped that SpaceX is "not selling tickets" for the proposed Dragon test flight, so "don't call our toll-free number."

...

Meanwhile, Boeing, one half of SpaceX competitor the United Launch Alliance (ULA), is planning to conduct its own manned demo flight for NASA in 2016, according to the newspaper. Robert Stevens, the outgoing CEO at Boeing's ULA partner Lockheed Martin, made news late last year when he criticized SpaceX as inexperienced in conducting space missions and misguided in trying to operate on the cheap relative to the ULA.

SpaceX co-founder and CEO Elon Musk fired back, saying his company was able to underbid the ULA for contracts like its recently won deal to conduct trial missions for the U.S. Air Force because it used more advanced technology than the two aerospace giants' joint venture.

...

Anonymous said...

"Jewish supremist? It is just the truth.

What is not mentioned is the significant antisemitism that Jewish people faced in many Anglo cultures in the past."


Ah, but what if it's a pretty fairy tale to inspire the children and you are mistaken? A mistaken fantasy like the notion that antisemitism is "what is not mentioned", when, if you pay attention, you notice is mentioned whenever possible. Do you think it could be that there is a signficant problem, but you've got it backwards?

Also, the Anglo culture is not perfect, but you can name a lot of cultures that have been less hospitable to Jews. Not that there's any thanks in it, apparently.

Anonymous said...

" Modern scholars generally agree that “race” is a social construct and is not biologically determined, therefore it can’t determine intelligence."

Dogs are a sociological construct too.

There's no biological difference between a wolf and a chihuahua.

Mankind didn't create dogs by tinkering with their DNA;changing their environment and selectively breeding for the best traits-that's preposterous- he just said "Poof! You're a dog!". Differences between things happen by magical incantation now.

Anonymous said...

SpaceX HAS reached the ISS; it happened a year ago Sunday. They, like NASA, have been cautious and haven't yet sent a manned mission.

SpaceX is the name player right now, but the Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic team, as well as Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, are in the hunt.

Notice something about these companies: Bezos, Musk, Branson. I see rich guys wanting their orbital resorts and data/tax havens far beyond the reach of the earthbound taxman, right out of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Cail Corishev said...

It's always hard to tell where an industry would be without government involvement, and of course we can't go back and try it the other way.

The Internet, for instance, was built on technology that was primarily done and funded by the military. On the other hand, government control of it kept private-sector competition at bay for a while. When people first started creating private Internet service providers (ISPs) in the early- to mid-1990s, technically you couldn't connect to the Internet backbone if you were using it for commercial purposes. Some connected anyway and lied; others thought we would have to build a completely separate commercial backbone. If you were an investor at the time, what do you do -- invest in a new backbone that might become obsolete if the regulators changed their minds? Invest in an ISP that might get closed down because it was allowing commercial traffic on the non-commercial net?

Things didn't take off until Congress opened the whole thing up so that people could safely make money on it. Then, after decades of slow but steady progress in government-funded labs, the technology exploded from all the private development.

So I'd guess that space travel would be the same way: we wouldn't have gotten to the moon in 1969 without lots of government funding. But we might be on Mars by now on the strength of private funding and innovation if government hadn't maintained a monopoly over space for so long.

Peter Wong said...

"Certainly, an argument can be made for the novel-like qualities of Chinese prose fictions like JIN PING MEI,but there is an element of strain in the process."

The Jin Ping Mei isn't really that highly regarded in Chinese literary circles.

Dreams of a Red Mansion and The Three Kingdoms are considered the apogee of the genre from that era.

I also think The Scholars , written during the Qing Dynasty, is pretty amazing for its time.

I stand by my comments about the novel - it's an extremely difficult literary genre, and in the modern era is used as a vessel for purple prose.

Peter Wong said...

"Plus, we just do not see the kind of artistic takeoff that occurred in the West from 1500 to 1800, when the novel emerged in its canonical form."

Your dates are off - I would say the key period of development for the novel started and ended later than the years you cite.

Cervantes doesn't start writing until the early 17th century, for example. Novels written in the 1700's in English and French - stuff by Rousseau and Sterne - still haven't achieved a full state of maturity.

I would say the 1800's are the definitive period in the development of the novel as we today define it - you have Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert etc.

ben tillman said...

Mark Plus:

The Portuguese showed some cognitive strengths in the 15th and 16th Centuries. They innovated in navigation, ship engineering and map-making (all mathematically oriented endeavors), and their sailors pioneered long-distance ocean voyages. They don't have much of a reputation for cognitive efficiency now, however. What happened to them?

Ben Tillman:

The people who did most of those things were Jewish. The exploration of the new world was largely a Jewish project that used Jewish technology.

Anonymous:

Elaborate.

Mr. Anon:

To elaborate, he's making it up.
----

That's an uncharitable and frankly ignorant reply.

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1428

Portugal’s quest to become the world’s most advanced naval power did not begin with John II. About eighty years before Columbus set sail for America, the third son of John I, who would become known as Henry the Navigator, established a navigational research center and seamanship school at Sagres, a remote cape at Europe’s most southwestern point. As governor of the Order of Christ (formerly Knights Templar), Prince Henry trained his knights to become navigators whose mission was to expand the kingdom and to spread the Christian faith. For the project’s scientific and technical advances, Prince Henry relied on the kingdom’s top mathematicians, astronomers, cartographers, and inventors of navigational instruments, most of whom were Jews. Year after year, Prince Henry documented and analyzed the information collected by his explorers as they braved the uncharted waters of the Atlantic Ocean on secret fact-finding missions, setting the stage for Portugal’s rise as a global power.

The Jews were later expelled from Portugal:

Manuel’s decision to end more than eleven centuries of Jewish life in Portugal proved to be a monumental blunder. By outlawing the practice of Judaism and cleansing his realm of Jews, the king essentially exported one of his greatest assets to his competitors. Soon the Dutch and British acquired enough knowledge of navigation and trade to eclipse Portugal as the dominant power in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

That's the technology part of it. As for the rest, Columbus came from a family of conversos; he was of Jewish descent.

His voyage was not financed by the crown; it was financed by two Jewish Conversos and another prominent Jew: Louis de Santangel, Gabriel Sanchez, and Don Isaac Abrabanel.

Columbus's navigator, interpreter, and doctor were all Jews and at least two more of his crew were conversos who had converted the day before departure. One of the ostensible purposes of the voyage was to find a new home for expelled Jews.

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1428

Shortly before Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492, John II of Portugal furnished the admiral with an indispensable nautical almanac authored by his royal astronomer, Rabbi Abraham Zacuto. The almanac’s astronomical tables provided a critical corrective to the imprecision of the astrolabe, the instrument navigators depended on to calculate a ship’s location according to the position of the sun. John II’s Jewish physician, Joseph Vecinho, who had served on the Portuguese commission that ruled Columbus’s plan “an illusion” (because he knew that one could not reach India by sailing west), translated the almanac from Hebrew into Spanish and, at John II’s behest, gave it to Columbus.


Etc. I'm not going to spend any more time on this in an old thread.

Anonymous said...

Peter Wong:"Your dates are off - I would say the key period of development for the novel started and ended later than the years you cite."

Well, as with so much where the novel is concerned, dates are quite debatable. I started at 1500 because that shows the line of development that precedes Cervantes (for example,things like LA VIDA DE lAZARILLO DE TORMES).

Peter Wong:"Cervantes doesn't start writing until the early 17th century, for example."

Sure, but Cervantes was not operating in a vacuum...


Peter Wong:" Novels written in the 1700's in English and French - stuff by Rousseau and Sterne - still haven't achieved a full state of maturity."

Highly debatable.Many scholars would assert that that the 18th century saw the full flowering of the novel (e.g., Harold Bloom is fond of citing CLARISSA as the greatest novel)



Peter Wong:"I would say the 1800's are the definitive period in the development of the novel as we today define it - you have Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert etc."

Certainly a fine list of authors, but were their contributions as seminal as the work of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, etc?

syon

Anonymous said...

Peter Wong:"The Jin Ping Mei isn't really that highly regarded in Chinese literary circles."

I wasn't basing my argument on its aesthetic standing with Chinese critics;I was basing my argument on its novel-like qualities.

Peter Wong:"Dreams of a Red Mansion and The Three Kingdoms are considered the apogee of the genre from that era."

Impressive pieces of narrative art, but I cannot classify the DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER and the ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS as true novels. They are definitely novel-like, though...And one must always bear in mind the the hazy borders of the genre. Some critics, I'm sure, would gladly call argue for their status as true novels.



Peter Wong:"I stand by my comments about the novel - it's an extremely difficult literary genre, and in the modern era is used as a vessel for purple prose."

Again, though, is the genre to blame for these shortcomings, or is it a manner of the temper of the times?

syon

Mr. Anon said...

"ben tillman said...

That's the technology part of it. As for the rest, Columbus came from a family of conversos; he was of Jewish descent."

That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa. It's funny that jews never mentioned these things in the past. All of a sudden, every other great person from the age of discovery was jewish. I bet they were all homosexual too. And Black. And, as Woody Allen once quipped: "Shakespeare: Was he actually three women?"

From the introduction of your source: "In his well-researched novel,......"

It all smacks of convenient historical revisionism to me. Ever consider the possibility that your source just made this stuff up? And it's not as if jews have to coopt persons of great accomplishment, as there were plenty of jews who were very accomplished indeed.

Anonymous said...

"That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa."

Back in the Cold War it was odd how the Soviets were always discovering that Ivan Somebodysky had flown an airplane before the Wright brothers, etc.. There's no end to it, it seems...

Peter Wong said...

"Many scholars would assert that that the 18th century saw the full flowering of the novel (e.g., Harold Bloom is fond of citing CLARISSA as the greatest novel)"

Bloom is as fatuous blowhard. I truly pity a man who expends the vast majority of his mortal hours studying a topic, yet at the end of his life still fails to comprehend ahead.

I would call Dreams of a Red Mansion, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Scholars proper novels.

"
Sure, but Cervantes was not operating in a vacuum..."

Agreed - he was parodying prose romances.

"Certainly a fine list of authors, but were their contributions as seminal as the work of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, etc?"

No - but that's why I said they were definitive exponents of the genre, as opposed to seminal pioneers.



ben tillman said...

That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa.

How is that supposed to be relevant? Why couldn't conversos move from Spain to Genoa? Why couldn't a Jew convert in Genoa? That's a ludicrous response.

Anyway, it appears that he was descended from conversos, not that he personally converted.

There are countless sources that back up the fact that Columbus was of Jewish descent, including his own writings.

As for your sneering reference to "historicsl revisionism", there are obvious reasons why someone would conceal his Jewish background in 15th-century Spain, and there are similarly obvious reasons why that background might be omitted from contemporaneous accounts.

Anonymous said...

Hi, about this "Columbus was a Secret Jew in a Jewish Conspiracy" idea (I don't think it would have made any real difference to history if he was, many European powers were going places with or without him), it seems this is one of those "the Chinese circumnavigated the world first", "Oxford wrote Shakespear", or "Vikings planted Runes in Chicago" things. Based on a recent book by a Georgetown Linguistics professor, "Christopher Columbus: The DNA of his writings", Estelle Irizarry.

The author claims analysis of Columbus's writing reveals him to be a crypto-Jew, using characters, such as the slash symbol, presumed to only be used by crypto-Jews from some parts of Spain. Here's a hostile take on the thesis, from http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/scholar-casts-doubt-on-claims-that.html

"One of the key pieces of evidence was the explorer's use of a slash symbol - similar to the ones used in Internet addresses - that Columbus employed to indicate pauses in sentences.

...

Dr. Diana Gilliland Wright confirms that the slash symbol was used in other places outside of western Spain. Wright, who is an expert in Italian history in the late Middle Ages, says, "the virgule is a very common marker for pauses in sentences" among Venetian documents from the later half of the fifteenth century.

...

Dr. Wright also casts doubt on Irizarry's belief that Columbus' spelling inconsistencies can also be a clue to his origins. "Spelling in the 15th century was extremely fluid," she says, "and it is normal to find in official Venetian documents and records three different spellings of the same name, even when it was the name of a person known to the writer of the document. I cannot see that variation in spelling can be used to demonstrate anything but that the writers didn't have my spelling teacher.""


I dunno, sometimes things are what they seem. It's also all too easy to look at a few writings from way back when and then connect the dots in any fashion that fits.

Anonymous said...

About what happened to Portuguese innovation... I wouldn't be so sure the Portuguese are punching below their weight... if you count Brazil as Portuguese, which I'd argue that you probably should.

If you've flow commuter airlines, or lately any airlines, chances are you've flown on an airliner made by Embraer. There are very few countries in the world, only a handful, that make commercially successful airliners. The Chinese and Israelis don't. Embraer has been one of the few growing aircraft manufacturers in the world.

There was a time when the US was easily the world's breadbasket superpower. US farmers could feed the whole world if needed. The government paid farmers not to plant. But lately US ag has had to go head-to-head with Brazilian ag. Why? Homegrown Brazilian ag research has opened up a huge chunk of southeastern Brazil to farming. This land was previously cerrado, unfarmable savanna:

"The miracle of the cerrado", The Economist, Aug 26th 2010.

"Assessing Brazil’s Cerrado agricultural miracle", ScienceDirect, Volume 38, February 2013, Pages 146–155.


A primary player in this was a low-key government ag research institution, Embrapa: "Embrapa: The Engine Behind Brazil's Miracle", Farm Futures, May 03, 2011.

But these Brazilians are not who are are talking about when we talk about US immigration from Mexico.

Mr. Anon said...

"ben tillman said...

""That's pretty impressive for Columbus to have been a converso, given that he was an Italian from Genoa.""

How is that supposed to be relevant? Why couldn't conversos move from Spain to Genoa? Why couldn't a Jew convert in Genoa? That's a ludicrous response."

No, it isn't a ludicrous response. He could have been a Turk I suppose. Or a Chinaman. The historical account we have of him is of him being a Christian Italian from Genoa, not a converso from Spain.

"Anyway, it appears that he was descended from conversos, not that he personally converted."

Based on what? The novel you cited. A Novel? Here's a clue: a novel is a piece of fiction.

"There are countless sources that back up the fact that Columbus was of Jewish descent, including his own writings."

A subsequent poster addresses your contention that "his own writings" make him out to be jewish. Sounds like your case is exeedingly weak.

"As for your sneering reference to "historicsl revisionism",...."

My reference was sneering because your contention is ridiculous. Cherry-picked sources written by highly interested advocates is not evidence, especially in the face of a long and established historical tradition.

Here is a book that claims that all the monuments of the ancient world were built by a sophisticated, globe-girding, Atlantean civilization:

http://www.grahamhancock.com/library/fotg.php

I guess it must be true, because it's in a book. How could I possibly conclude otherwise?

ben tillman said...

I dunno, sometimes things are what they seem.

But Columbus doesn't "seem" to be anything. He's dead. And all the evidence points to Jewish ancestry.

ben tillman said...

No, it isn't a ludicrous response. He could have been a Turk I suppose. Or a Chinaman. The historical account we have of him is of him being a Christian Italian from Genoa, not a converso from Spain.


What the hell does Spain have to do with this? I never said he was from Spain.

And what does an account of him being a Christian have to do with anything? Converts to Christianity are Christians.

There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent.

A subsequent poster addresses your contention that "his own writings" make him out to be jewish.

No, you ignoramus, the other commenter addressed an entirely different argument. But you don't care. You're a bigot. Your mind is made up. And you'll go through life wrong about this and undoubtedly many other things.

Mr. Anon said...

"ben tillman said...

"What the hell does Spain have to do with this? I never said he was from Spain."

You said "converso". That implies spanish descent, does it not.? Nobody ever claimed spanish descent for Columbus until some jews tried to hijack his biography for thier own revisionist, supremicist fantasy.

"There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent."

Which is why you quoted.......a novel.

"But you don't care. You're a bigot. Your mind is made up. And you'll go through life wrong about this and undoubtedly many other things."

I don't have time to revisit every established historical fact to satisfy the vanity of people who are unhappy with the history of their own ethnic group to the extent they feel the need to purloin that of other groups.

Your claims are no more credible or interesting than those ridiculous charlatans who claim that blacks invented the mop.

ben tillman said...


"There are countless sources backing up the fact that Columbus is of Jewish descent."

Which is why you quoted.......a novel.


I didn't quote a novel, you lunatic.

ben tillman said...

I don't have time to revisit every established historical fact to satisfy the vanity of people who are unhappy with the history of their own ethnic group to the extent they feel the need to purloin that of other groups.

That's a lie. You have time to defend things you know nothing about. You must also have time to investigate things you know nothing about.

Your arguments are profoundly stupid and disingenuous. You are intentionally suppressing the truth.

Mr. Anon said...

"ben tillman said...

I didn't quote a novel, you lunatic. "

Bullshit, asshole. The link you provided cited a novel.

Suppresing the Truth? You really are an unbalanced loon, aren't you.

Telebrands said...

Good post. The list of inventions here seems to span all genres. Thanks for posting.