I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct.

Not too much we can do about it though.

The great lakes are filled with species of fish we associate with salt water, however.

Steelhead, Salmon, Lampreys, Goby, Sturgeon, Cod (burbot), Drum

The article says a lot more about this.

I feel like I ought to note that there's no evidence of military activity (that I know of) in the IVC, but certainly evidence of violence: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/G_Robbins_Schug_Peaceful_2... . I wish it weren't the case, but it seems early Harappan scholars made the same error that early scholars of the Minoans did in concluding that the absence of evidence of violence implied the absence of violence itself. Of course, this doesn't mean that the IVC wasn't a relatively peaceful place compared with places like Sumer or Elam, like you said.

Military activity is not the only kind of violence.

I think evidence of military activity would involve obvious weapons and armor, which have generally been easy to recognize and easy to distinguish from e.g. hunting or ranching equipment. The paper linked notes a prevalence of head trauma, presumably with clubs. It doesn't suggest to me any pattern like religious sacrifice or criminal execution. So, the nature of the violence is hard to discern.

I agree, the EMR implementation/enhancements were a giant handout to consultancies, hospitals, maybe clinics that's now enshrined in law. It was a travesty and likely ended up costing more for lesser benefit. The effects were of course felt in impoverished areas more than in suburbia, as hospitals clinics and are poorer, consultancies are (almost) not existent. It was a grift -- even academia got in on the money training!

I'm sure the legitimate justice system can be misused alongside the others in various unethical ways.

A slippery slope: we've reached a point where, with some kickback, institutions like the media can nearly silence dissent from a manufactured truth to whatever end. A witch-hunt/moral crusade, leaving fame and fortune aside a bit, is a potential consequence of this dissent. The true believer can, has, and will silence, punish (or kill) a dissenter, as their mere voice and presence risks the crusade by humanizing the dissenter and threatening the discourse on which its built. Given that many of the crusaders are true believers, a sense of dignity seems to follow the process, thus the rush of the crusade's actions and the enrolment of more crusaders wishing for even greater truth and justice. I can see this rapidly spiraling out of control, with or without government support.

La lanterne? She's always been waiting.

I'd be phenomenally more shocked if they they didn't. I wish the article cited its sources, but I guess the PCM will help fill in the gaps. More evidence in support of the open publication of scientific articles.

Yes, but that's the good propaganda, violence, erasure, and censorship though. Promoting it protects liberal westerners from the complicated tasks of basic research, historical knowledge, critical thinking, and the potentially complex and appalling realization that states and their actions --even democratic ones, from the Melian massacre to extraordinary rendition-- exist on a spectrum of good and evil. Our good propaganda, ect. saves citizens a ton of intellectual effort which is clearly better spent somewhere else. Let freedom ring undulled by the complicated.

Honestly, this whole thing reminds me a bit of the Lusitania and the way England manipulated US opinion (not saying war wasn't justified). The US and UK governments denied the ship carried munitions for close to 100 years. It was a German attack on a peaceful vessel, period. The wreck was found in the 80s, and divers were told to be careful surveying the wreck given its cargo. Later, the cargo was of course revealed to be high explosives and tons of rounds of ammunition, making it fair game for U-boats and causing the deaths of thousands (?) of travelers as a result... best of all, the German government had published warnings of the risk of traveling into a war zone in American papers.

In short, take all news with a grain of salt. The good guys are usually the ones publishing.

Addendum: I do support the Ukraine whole-heartedly; I hope this results in a free Ukraine and a new Russia.

If you get a chance, listen to Dubliners, Joyce's collection of short stories, too, the last story is probably one of the best of 20th century English if not of all time.

Yeah, these are really common experiences and called afterimages or one of the other terms motioned in the thread. Certain tricks like looking at a bright source of light before shutting you eyes or even meditating, in my experience, can increase their intensity.

This is more to the general readership.

Well, no, he's discovered the difference between non-logographic orthographies that map spoken sound to graphemes at a close to one-to-one ratio (like Spanish or German where 'a' usually mean /a/ and those that don't, like English or Irish, assign one graph to a multitude of speech sounds. This is old news to most of you, but consider 'g' or 'sh' (which represents one phoneme). but 'g' can be alternately represent the sounds in Geronimo, good, through, gnat, tongue, and probably others I'm forgetting (ng). Plenty of other graphemes follow suit.

Analytical and synthethic languages alter meaning through predominantly differeent morphosyntactic mechanisms (and then meaning and pronunciation follow) Analytic languages are like Sanskrit or Turkish. Many changes in meaning come from altering the word by a suffix or the like or by phonemic alterations like vowel harmony (we still have a little of both in English perhaps) Analytic languages like Chinese, English, or French rely on (1) altering the word order to accomplish mostly the same thing. Again, it's a spectrum, and English has its fair share of analytic features. Synthetic languages might be a bit easier to learn, but any argument for the superiority of a single synthethetic language has to account for a plethora of typological features, like pitch, morphosyntactic alignment, pronunciation, pragmatics, elisions, clitics, particles, and so forth, that must be learnt. Any argument for the superiority of them as a whole runs into trouble at least at the point where languages seems to alternate between the two extremes.

To go off topic b/c its sunday and im bored: there is no strong deductive proof among linguists that words exist universally. I mean that many languages, especially the lesser-contacted ones, and especially those in North American, whose languages feature one l o n g word or two that convey the same meaning as ten in English. To a speaker of Mohawk the category 'word' has to have little use. As does syntax (but not morphology! This leads me to wonder how much the word is a written convention or limited geographically. We once assumed that there were at most three genders. Since then we've discovered languages with >7 and 0 genders (noun classes). Likewise, other languages have different parts of speech. Korean features a prominent topic-marker and a class of adjectives that occupy the the verb's position in the sentence and function like a predicate. They need that those words to make sense of communication; English speakers really don't. Is perhaps the word also a concept that some groups have need of and others do not.

On to the main topic, and particularly addressing the OP. Be careful not to confuse language with the script(s) they're written in. The to do not correlate beyond giving the an archeologist the ability to tell a logographic language from an alphabet. You project is cool when looking at various scripts from around the world. Secondly, be careful to claim, even in passing that rapidity/efficiency is superior. The Japanese nobility used to take eight seconds before beginning or continuing a conversation to allow for contemplation. The Ents had a similar convetion. There are benefits to the slow and inefficient. Clarity in speech is only one example.

Anyhow, an afternoon well spent.