A SECRET OF
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
By: Safir Senduk
From IndoExchange.com
A huge earning is usually considered for measuring the wealth of someone. However, why do so many people with huge income frequently end up running out of money in the middle or at the end of the month? What is the problem?
If you have a job now, do you remember the first one you ever had? Usually, the first experience on work is the most unforgettable experience.
Let's take an example. Anto was still living with his family until he got a job at the age of 23, as a clerk in a trading company. At that time, he had just graduated. Although he had to go through a probationary period, Anto was so excited when he knew that he would get his first salary. His salary was Rp 600,000, which he would receive on the 27th.
We can guess what he would want to do: he wanted to treat his family. He wanted to express his gratitude for getting a salary for the first time in his life, and he also wanted to show them that he was independent now.
Let's see: he received the salary on the 27th. On the 29th he took his family out for a meal in an all-you-can-eat restaurant, so each of them could satisfy their appetite. The pre-tax cost for one person was Rp 22,000, and after tax was Rp 24,200 per person. All of his family members were 7, consisting of his father, mother, one big brother and 3 annoying younger brothers. All was 6, plus Anto made it 7. It means that he had to pay the dinner bill of Rp 169,400. Which means, only 2 days after he received his salary, he had already spent 28% out of his salary for that month. So, he had only Rp 430,600 left for the rest of the month.
"No problem", thought Anto. "It's my own family that I treated, not other people. Besides, it's not every day I do that. Once a month is enough." Days went by. One week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks. "Hmm…that stuff in the mall looks pretty good. There is a very interesting looking shirt. Okay, it costs Rp 28,000. There's also this nice pair of trousers to wear for work. Very cheap, costs only Rp 65,000. It won't hurt to look stylish at the office". He then started buying things. "Okay", Anto thought, "one shirt and a pair of pants for this month. The rest of my salary would be used for transportation and food until the end of the month" .
What happened? On the 24th of the next month, just three days before his second-month payday, he had only Rp 50,000 left.
Anto started thinking. Okay...., such was because he spent most of his money to treat his family. Also this was his first time working. Within the coming months, his finance would be better.
The second month, he got his salary again. Still in the same amount. No raise yet. The difference was no more treating the family. Days and weeks went by. A few days before his third salary, he only had Rp 75,000 left.
Three months passed by, he was finally accepted as permanent employee. He got a Rp 150,000 raise to Rp 750,000. "Not bad", Anto thought. This meant that I would be able to "breath" and save a little. But strangely, a few days before even one month period ended, his still had only little money left. The sixth month, the seventh month, the eight month, although he got a raise, but he still ran out of money and could not put any into savings.
As a matter of fact, Anto is not the only one, whose income is under Rp 1m, with this problem. Even people with millions per month income still have trouble saving money.
What is really happening? Many people think that by getting a raise, they will not run out of money in the middle of the month and they can save for sure. Every month they hope that they will get a raise the next months. But after they really get a raise, they still run out of money.
It is clear that the solution here lies not on how big your income is. The amount of your income does not guarantee that you will not run out of money in the middle of the month. The size of your income does not guarantee that you will be able to save. The key here is not how much money you make, but how you manage your income so that it can be stretched in a one-month period.
There is no fixed way on the right method to manage your finance. However, based from experiences, there are several things that can help you manage your finance well each month:
1. Plan your income and outcome every month.
2. Carry out the plan strictly.
3. Have reserved fund.
4. Join insurance plan.
In the next number, we will discuss each of the approaches.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
article
Lectures and
Articles Online
Steve Farmer, Ph.D
Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti
Link to the Indo-Eurasian_Research List, moderated by Steve Farmer (Comparative History), Michael Witzel (Indology and Linguistics), Lars Martin Fosse (Indology and Linguistics), and Benjamin Fleming (Comparative Religion). The List currently has 875+ research members from over 30 fields (with hundreds of other onlookers). It focuses on premodern studies globally. Core members are located in South Asia, Iran, China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and the United States.
Updated 25 June 2008. Please note that articles and lectures below are organized topically, not chronologically.
Book-in-progress: Brains and History: The Evolution of Thought (the first book to integrate finds from neurobiology and global studies of the rise and fall of traditional religious and philosophical systems; the book should be finished by the end of 2008). See also Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486), a long case study of how religious and philosophical systems emerged globally in manuscript traditions. That study provided the initial data for the theoretical model described in my work. It includes a Latin edition and the first reliable translation of Pico's famous text.
Upcoming lecture, 19 August 2008: The Neurobiological Origins of Religion: Implications for Comparative Mythology. Second Annual Conference of the International Association of Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the Netherlands (19-21 August). The paper presents the first testable neurobiological model of the origins of primitive religion. It presents evidence that anthropomorphic modeling of the world is a predictable byproduct of neural processing. This in turn suggests that primitive myth and religion predate the anatomically modern brain, pushing their dates reliably to before ca. 200,000 years BP. Tests of the model are proposed that involve studies of hyper-anthropomorphizing forms of synesthesia and various developmental disorders that disrupt the so-called social brain. (Parts of this paper are extracted from chapter two of my book-in-progress.)
New Project Description: S. Farmer, W. Zaumen, R. Sproat, and M. Witzel. Simulating the Evolution of Political-Religious Extremism: Implications for International Policy Decisions. Part of a long-term project to develop open-source tools that allow policy analysts and historians to build socio-cultural simulations without any formal programming. The first application of our tool set, described here, focuses on modeling the links between the emergence of modern communication networks and global expansions of political-religious extremism. The simulation architecture can be easily adapted via an intuitive graphic user interface (GUI) to model cultural developments of many other types. One use involves expansion of our earlier simulation designs that model the growth of premodern thought systems. On this topic, see Farmer, Henderson, Witzel, and Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Traditions. That paper is described and downloadable in the next section.
Top downloads:
Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization. EJVS 11-2 (13 Dec. 2004): 19-57. (Well over 100,000 downloads since publication.) See also on this article Science 2004 (306): 2026-9. The paper arose from unexpected theoretical predictions of the model noted above.
Steve Farmer, Neurobiology, Stratified Texts, and the Evolution of Thought: From Myths to Religions and Philosophies (Preprint, Harvard and Peking Universities joint conference on comparative mythology, 2006; Beijing, in press; a slightly different version will also appear in Cosmos 2008). The paper includes discussion of neurobiological and computer models of the growth of premodern religious and philosophical systems; it ends with a look at tests of the model involving, among other things, the so-called Indus script and controversies over recently discovered Chinese tomb texts, in particular the Guodian version of the Laozi (discovered 1993).
Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Michael Witzel, Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000 [2002]): 48-89. The first published paper ever to seriously link neurobiology and the evolution of religious and philosophical traditions; also the first published paper to question the old Indus-script thesis, dealt with in detail in Farmer, Spoat, and Witzel 2004 (see above).
Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, Michael Witzel, and Peter Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Systems. (Online adjunct of the article in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Dec. 2002.) The first computer simulations to attempt to model the evolution of traditional religious and philosophical systems.
Theoretical Conclusions, from Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems (1998), 91-6. Other book extracts on this page.
Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax, [cover story] Frontline 17 (19) (13 Oct. 2000): 4-11.
Steve Farmer, The First Harappan Forgery: Indus Inscriptions in the Nineteenth Century (2003).
Recent lectures:
- University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 28-30 August 2007. "Methodological Problems in Studies of the Global Distribution of Myths." Paper Abstract.
- Stanford University, 11 July 2007. "The Strange Case of the So-Called Indus Script: Distinguishing Writing from Non-Linguistic Symbols." Paper Abstract.
- University of California at Berkeley, 29 March 2007. Society of Ethnobiology. Steve Weber, Dorian Fuller, and Steve Farmer (Presenter: Steve Farmer). "Seed, Plant, and Farming Signs in the Indus Symbol System: New Methods for Studying Harappan Civilization. Paper Abstract.
Papers in set #1 below include articles on the so-called Indus script and on links between neurobiology and the evolution of human traditions. On a book currently in progress that covers both these topics, see the top of the page.
Papers in sets #2-4 below contain slide lectures, web pages, and other papers linked to Indus research.
Papers in set #5 below contain miscellaneous articles.
1.1-1.6. Papers on the so-called Indus script and comparative history (India, China, and the West)
1.2. Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization. EJVS 11-2 (13 Dec. 2004): 19-57. On my collaborators, see Richard Sproat (Computational Linguistics, University of Illinois) and Michael Witzel (Indology, Harvard University).
to Read a one sentence refutation of the Indus-script myth
$10,000 challenge from the authors to 'Indus script' adherents
1.3. A feature story on the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper appeared in the 17 Dec. 2004 issue of Science. See A. Lawler, The Indus Script: Write or Wrong? Science 2004 (306): 2026-9 (there is also an Italian version). There are errors in the story, but it does faithfully record the debate generated by our paper, which criticizes the script adherents cited in the article. For those criticisms, see our original paper. Another article on our paper appeared in Facts magazine (Switzerland) on 17 February 2005 (PDF, 600 K, Die Saubermänner vom Indus). Another appeared in Der Tagesspiegel (Germany) on 21 February (Wer die Zeichen zu deuten weiss). An abbreviated version of the latter appeared in Der Standard (Austria) on 18 February 2005. A TV documentary for German public TV (a bit sensationalistic) that covers part of our work was released in June 2008.
1.4. Talk given at the joint Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable in Kyoto, Japan, on 6-8 June 2005. Steve Farmer, Steven A. Weber, Tim Barela, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel. Temporal and Regional Variations in the Use of Indus Symbols: New Methods for Studying Harappan Civilization. Abstract.
1.5. Richard Sproat and Steve Farmer, Morphology and the Harappan Gods. In Inquiries into Words, Constraints and Contexts. Festschrift in the Honour of Kimmo Koskenniemi on His 60th Birthday. Preprint bound presentation version, Saarijävi, Finland, 2005. Online publication CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics, Stanford University, 2006.
1.6. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Michael Witzel, Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000 [2002]): 48-89. Special Issue: Rethinking the Correlative Cosmology of Early China (published December 2002). This paper includes the first cross-cultural study of so-called correlative systems (in China), bandhus (in India), and systems of correspondence (in the West). Hence the collaboration of one Western specialist, one Sinologist, and one Indologist in writing the paper. The first suggestion that that the Indus civilization was not literate was a prediction of the model developed here and in the next two papers.
1.7. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, Michael Witzel, and Peter Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Systems. (Online adjunct of the article in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Dec. 2002.) Discusses computer simulations of the rise and fall of fractal-like structures (multilayered mirroring cosmologies, scholastic hierarchies, Neo-Platonic and Neo-Confucian systems, etc.) characteristic of fully developed manuscript traditions.
1.8. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Peter Robinson, Commentary Traditions and the Evolution of Premodern Religious and Philosophical Systems: A Cross-Cultural Model. This theoretical paper, updated most recently in 2002, is based on an invited lecture Henderson and I gave at the University of Heidelberg in 1997. The paper presented our initial views of how multilayered hierarchies and similar scholastic structures were shaped cross-culturally in commentarial traditions. The theoretical framework is provided by mathematical models of nonlinear dissipative systems. Some but not all of the data presented here show up in 1.5 and 1.6. The paper contains the first public discussions of computer simulations of the evolution of premodern religious and philosophical traditions (work on this subject is being continued with Bill Zaumen, an MIT trained physicist formerly at Sun Microsystems).lThe first expence Magazine on 17
Files 2.1-2.5. Slide shows and lectures on the Indus symbol system
These slide lectures provide illustrations of the conclusions systematically presented in other articles (especially 1.2).
2.1. Sixth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 8 May 2004. The Mythological Functions of Indus Inscriptions: Eight Conclusions Arising from the Nonlinguistic Model of Indus Symbols. 3.6 meg pdf. Introduces new data on the magical origins, later ritual, administrative, and political uses, and sudden disappearance of the Indus symbols. Also gives prima facie evidence of human sacrifice in the Indus Valley.
2.2. University of Bologna, 15 January 2004: Harappiani analfabeti: Implicazioni teoriche delle ultime ricerche sulla più antica civiltà indiana. 3.5 meg pdf. An English adaptation of this Italian lecture, with some added slides, is found in 2.3.
2.3. The Illiterate Harappans: Theoretical Implications of Recent Studies of the First Indian Civilization. 4.2 meg pdf. A superset of slides made up for talks at Washington State University at Vancouver on 19-20 February 2004, combining materials from lectures 2.2 and 2.4.
2.4. Long Beach State International Conference on the Beginnings of Civilization on the Indian Subcontinent, 18 October 2003: 'Writing' or Non-Linguistic Symbols? The Myth of the Literate Indus Valley. 3.5 meg pdf. Most materials in this invited lecture are now incorporated, in updated form, in file 2.3. Conference Webpage.
2.5. Fifth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 10 May 2003. Five Cases of 'Dubious Writing' in Indus Inscriptions (1.6 megs). Presented the first detailed evidence that the Indus symbols did not encode speech. The statistical arguments developed here are superceded by materials presented in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004 (article 1.2), but much of the data here even now remains unpublished.
3.1-3.4 Additional background materials on the so-called Indus script
3.1. The First Harappan Forgery: Indus Inscriptions in the Nineteenth Century (1 meg pdf). A short essay on the origins of the Indus-script thesis, which Western researchers slipped in through the back door (along with some fudged evidence) in the 1870s and 1880s. Must reading for would-be 'decipherers'.
3.2. Walter Fairservis and the Indus Symbol Problem (webpage). In the late 1960s, the great archaeologist Walter Fairservis nearly became the first researcher to reject the old Indus-script myth, but then went through an odd conversion, and spent the last 20 years of his life trying to decipher the undecipherable. A cautionary tale.
3.3. Working files from online discussions of the Indus question. Parts but not all of these materials are incorporated in the articles and slide lectures noted above.
Recently discovered signs from Umm el-Marra: Linguistic or nonlinguistic? (Added 27 October 2006).
Perishable Indus "texts"? Another Case of Spurious Evidence (vs. Bryan Wells) u
What do highway signs have in common with the 'Dravidian' Indus-script model? A reductio ad absurdum of the most famous argument advanced by Indus-script adherents (small pdf file).
Statistical predictions concerning unique Indus signs (makes predictions concerning findings in the still unpublished third volume of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions). From 2003.
A look at some unpublished seals (looks at a few still unpublished seals that support these predictions).
Odd reconstructions of Indus inscriptions (reviews a strange 'reconstruction' of some Indus inscriptions by Fairservis that illustrates one way in which those inscriptions are commonly distorted).
More odd reconstructions (looks at three different 'reconstructions' [not so labeled] of a single inscription by Mackay, Parpola, and Mahadevan as another example of such distortions.
3.4. Abstract of a long unpublished paper: Steve Farmer, The Illiterate Harappans: New Light on India's Oldest Civilization. All the key arguments are now incorporated in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004 (1.2 above).
4.1-4.3. Papers on extreme Hindu nationalist manipulations of ancient history in India: The famous 'Horseplay in Harappa' incident (2000)
The following articles, accompanied by comments by Romila Thapar, Asko Parpola, Iravatham Mahadevan, Richard Meadow, and other researchers, can all be accessed through Horseplay in Harappa:
4.1. Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax, [cover story] Frontline 17 (19) (13 Oct. 2000): 4-11.
4.2. Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, New Evidence on the 'Piltdown Horse' Hoax, Frontline 17 (23) (24 Nov. 2000): 126-129. See also articles on pp., 122-26, collectively entitled A Tale of Two Horses.
4.3. Hindi translation of Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa, with a supporting editorial by Romila Thapar (New Delhi, 2001).
5.1. Miscellaneous
5.1. A biography (in French) of Pico's nephew-editor Gianfrancesco Pico, an extreme anti-syncretist who collaborated (with Girolamo Savonarola) in the posthumous doctoring of Pico's works, was recently published in France as Steve Farmer and Steven Vanden Broecke, Jean-François Pic de la Mirandole (c. 1470-1533), in Centuriae latinae II. Cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance (Genève: Droz, 2006). The paper was written in 2000.
I can provide an informal English translation of the work as a PDF: write me directly for a copy.
Go to book description of Syncretism in the West
Articles Online
Steve Farmer, Ph.D
Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti
Link to the Indo-Eurasian_Research List, moderated by Steve Farmer (Comparative History), Michael Witzel (Indology and Linguistics), Lars Martin Fosse (Indology and Linguistics), and Benjamin Fleming (Comparative Religion). The List currently has 875+ research members from over 30 fields (with hundreds of other onlookers). It focuses on premodern studies globally. Core members are located in South Asia, Iran, China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and the United States.
Updated 25 June 2008. Please note that articles and lectures below are organized topically, not chronologically.
Book-in-progress: Brains and History: The Evolution of Thought (the first book to integrate finds from neurobiology and global studies of the rise and fall of traditional religious and philosophical systems; the book should be finished by the end of 2008). See also Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486), a long case study of how religious and philosophical systems emerged globally in manuscript traditions. That study provided the initial data for the theoretical model described in my work. It includes a Latin edition and the first reliable translation of Pico's famous text.
Upcoming lecture, 19 August 2008: The Neurobiological Origins of Religion: Implications for Comparative Mythology. Second Annual Conference of the International Association of Comparative Mythology, Ravenstein, the Netherlands (19-21 August). The paper presents the first testable neurobiological model of the origins of primitive religion. It presents evidence that anthropomorphic modeling of the world is a predictable byproduct of neural processing. This in turn suggests that primitive myth and religion predate the anatomically modern brain, pushing their dates reliably to before ca. 200,000 years BP. Tests of the model are proposed that involve studies of hyper-anthropomorphizing forms of synesthesia and various developmental disorders that disrupt the so-called social brain. (Parts of this paper are extracted from chapter two of my book-in-progress.)
New Project Description: S. Farmer, W. Zaumen, R. Sproat, and M. Witzel. Simulating the Evolution of Political-Religious Extremism: Implications for International Policy Decisions. Part of a long-term project to develop open-source tools that allow policy analysts and historians to build socio-cultural simulations without any formal programming. The first application of our tool set, described here, focuses on modeling the links between the emergence of modern communication networks and global expansions of political-religious extremism. The simulation architecture can be easily adapted via an intuitive graphic user interface (GUI) to model cultural developments of many other types. One use involves expansion of our earlier simulation designs that model the growth of premodern thought systems. On this topic, see Farmer, Henderson, Witzel, and Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Traditions. That paper is described and downloadable in the next section.
Top downloads:
Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization. EJVS 11-2 (13 Dec. 2004): 19-57. (Well over 100,000 downloads since publication.) See also on this article Science 2004 (306): 2026-9. The paper arose from unexpected theoretical predictions of the model noted above.
Steve Farmer, Neurobiology, Stratified Texts, and the Evolution of Thought: From Myths to Religions and Philosophies (Preprint, Harvard and Peking Universities joint conference on comparative mythology, 2006; Beijing, in press; a slightly different version will also appear in Cosmos 2008). The paper includes discussion of neurobiological and computer models of the growth of premodern religious and philosophical systems; it ends with a look at tests of the model involving, among other things, the so-called Indus script and controversies over recently discovered Chinese tomb texts, in particular the Guodian version of the Laozi (discovered 1993).
Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Michael Witzel, Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000 [2002]): 48-89. The first published paper ever to seriously link neurobiology and the evolution of religious and philosophical traditions; also the first published paper to question the old Indus-script thesis, dealt with in detail in Farmer, Spoat, and Witzel 2004 (see above).
Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, Michael Witzel, and Peter Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Systems. (Online adjunct of the article in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Dec. 2002.) The first computer simulations to attempt to model the evolution of traditional religious and philosophical systems.
Theoretical Conclusions, from Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems (1998), 91-6. Other book extracts on this page.
Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax, [cover story] Frontline 17 (19) (13 Oct. 2000): 4-11.
Steve Farmer, The First Harappan Forgery: Indus Inscriptions in the Nineteenth Century (2003).
Recent lectures:
- University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 28-30 August 2007. "Methodological Problems in Studies of the Global Distribution of Myths." Paper Abstract.
- Stanford University, 11 July 2007. "The Strange Case of the So-Called Indus Script: Distinguishing Writing from Non-Linguistic Symbols." Paper Abstract.
- University of California at Berkeley, 29 March 2007. Society of Ethnobiology. Steve Weber, Dorian Fuller, and Steve Farmer (Presenter: Steve Farmer). "Seed, Plant, and Farming Signs in the Indus Symbol System: New Methods for Studying Harappan Civilization. Paper Abstract.
Papers in set #1 below include articles on the so-called Indus script and on links between neurobiology and the evolution of human traditions. On a book currently in progress that covers both these topics, see the top of the page.
Papers in sets #2-4 below contain slide lectures, web pages, and other papers linked to Indus research.
Papers in set #5 below contain miscellaneous articles.
1.1-1.6. Papers on the so-called Indus script and comparative history (India, China, and the West)
1.2. Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization. EJVS 11-2 (13 Dec. 2004): 19-57. On my collaborators, see Richard Sproat (Computational Linguistics, University of Illinois) and Michael Witzel (Indology, Harvard University).
to Read a one sentence refutation of the Indus-script myth
$10,000 challenge from the authors to 'Indus script' adherents
1.3. A feature story on the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel paper appeared in the 17 Dec. 2004 issue of Science. See A. Lawler, The Indus Script: Write or Wrong? Science 2004 (306): 2026-9 (there is also an Italian version). There are errors in the story, but it does faithfully record the debate generated by our paper, which criticizes the script adherents cited in the article. For those criticisms, see our original paper. Another article on our paper appeared in Facts magazine (Switzerland) on 17 February 2005 (PDF, 600 K, Die Saubermänner vom Indus). Another appeared in Der Tagesspiegel (Germany) on 21 February (Wer die Zeichen zu deuten weiss). An abbreviated version of the latter appeared in Der Standard (Austria) on 18 February 2005. A TV documentary for German public TV (a bit sensationalistic) that covers part of our work was released in June 2008.
1.4. Talk given at the joint Harvard-Kyoto Roundtable in Kyoto, Japan, on 6-8 June 2005. Steve Farmer, Steven A. Weber, Tim Barela, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel. Temporal and Regional Variations in the Use of Indus Symbols: New Methods for Studying Harappan Civilization. Abstract.
1.5. Richard Sproat and Steve Farmer, Morphology and the Harappan Gods. In Inquiries into Words, Constraints and Contexts. Festschrift in the Honour of Kimmo Koskenniemi on His 60th Birthday. Preprint bound presentation version, Saarijävi, Finland, 2005. Online publication CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics, Stanford University, 2006.
1.6. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Michael Witzel, Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 (2000 [2002]): 48-89. Special Issue: Rethinking the Correlative Cosmology of Early China (published December 2002). This paper includes the first cross-cultural study of so-called correlative systems (in China), bandhus (in India), and systems of correspondence (in the West). Hence the collaboration of one Western specialist, one Sinologist, and one Indologist in writing the paper. The first suggestion that that the Indus civilization was not literate was a prediction of the model developed here and in the next two papers.
1.7. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, Michael Witzel, and Peter Robinson, Computer Models of the Evolution of Premodern Religious, Philosophical, and Cosmological Systems. (Online adjunct of the article in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Dec. 2002.) Discusses computer simulations of the rise and fall of fractal-like structures (multilayered mirroring cosmologies, scholastic hierarchies, Neo-Platonic and Neo-Confucian systems, etc.) characteristic of fully developed manuscript traditions.
1.8. Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson, and Peter Robinson, Commentary Traditions and the Evolution of Premodern Religious and Philosophical Systems: A Cross-Cultural Model. This theoretical paper, updated most recently in 2002, is based on an invited lecture Henderson and I gave at the University of Heidelberg in 1997. The paper presented our initial views of how multilayered hierarchies and similar scholastic structures were shaped cross-culturally in commentarial traditions. The theoretical framework is provided by mathematical models of nonlinear dissipative systems. Some but not all of the data presented here show up in 1.5 and 1.6. The paper contains the first public discussions of computer simulations of the evolution of premodern religious and philosophical traditions (work on this subject is being continued with Bill Zaumen, an MIT trained physicist formerly at Sun Microsystems).lThe first expence Magazine on 17
Files 2.1-2.5. Slide shows and lectures on the Indus symbol system
These slide lectures provide illustrations of the conclusions systematically presented in other articles (especially 1.2).
2.1. Sixth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 8 May 2004. The Mythological Functions of Indus Inscriptions: Eight Conclusions Arising from the Nonlinguistic Model of Indus Symbols. 3.6 meg pdf. Introduces new data on the magical origins, later ritual, administrative, and political uses, and sudden disappearance of the Indus symbols. Also gives prima facie evidence of human sacrifice in the Indus Valley.
2.2. University of Bologna, 15 January 2004: Harappiani analfabeti: Implicazioni teoriche delle ultime ricerche sulla più antica civiltà indiana. 3.5 meg pdf. An English adaptation of this Italian lecture, with some added slides, is found in 2.3.
2.3. The Illiterate Harappans: Theoretical Implications of Recent Studies of the First Indian Civilization. 4.2 meg pdf. A superset of slides made up for talks at Washington State University at Vancouver on 19-20 February 2004, combining materials from lectures 2.2 and 2.4.
2.4. Long Beach State International Conference on the Beginnings of Civilization on the Indian Subcontinent, 18 October 2003: 'Writing' or Non-Linguistic Symbols? The Myth of the Literate Indus Valley. 3.5 meg pdf. Most materials in this invited lecture are now incorporated, in updated form, in file 2.3. Conference Webpage.
2.5. Fifth Harvard University Indology Roundtable, 10 May 2003. Five Cases of 'Dubious Writing' in Indus Inscriptions (1.6 megs). Presented the first detailed evidence that the Indus symbols did not encode speech. The statistical arguments developed here are superceded by materials presented in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004 (article 1.2), but much of the data here even now remains unpublished.
3.1-3.4 Additional background materials on the so-called Indus script
3.1. The First Harappan Forgery: Indus Inscriptions in the Nineteenth Century (1 meg pdf). A short essay on the origins of the Indus-script thesis, which Western researchers slipped in through the back door (along with some fudged evidence) in the 1870s and 1880s. Must reading for would-be 'decipherers'.
3.2. Walter Fairservis and the Indus Symbol Problem (webpage). In the late 1960s, the great archaeologist Walter Fairservis nearly became the first researcher to reject the old Indus-script myth, but then went through an odd conversion, and spent the last 20 years of his life trying to decipher the undecipherable. A cautionary tale.
3.3. Working files from online discussions of the Indus question. Parts but not all of these materials are incorporated in the articles and slide lectures noted above.
Recently discovered signs from Umm el-Marra: Linguistic or nonlinguistic? (Added 27 October 2006).
Perishable Indus "texts"? Another Case of Spurious Evidence (vs. Bryan Wells) u
What do highway signs have in common with the 'Dravidian' Indus-script model? A reductio ad absurdum of the most famous argument advanced by Indus-script adherents (small pdf file).
Statistical predictions concerning unique Indus signs (makes predictions concerning findings in the still unpublished third volume of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions). From 2003.
A look at some unpublished seals (looks at a few still unpublished seals that support these predictions).
Odd reconstructions of Indus inscriptions (reviews a strange 'reconstruction' of some Indus inscriptions by Fairservis that illustrates one way in which those inscriptions are commonly distorted).
More odd reconstructions (looks at three different 'reconstructions' [not so labeled] of a single inscription by Mackay, Parpola, and Mahadevan as another example of such distortions.
3.4. Abstract of a long unpublished paper: Steve Farmer, The Illiterate Harappans: New Light on India's Oldest Civilization. All the key arguments are now incorporated in Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel 2004 (1.2 above).
4.1-4.3. Papers on extreme Hindu nationalist manipulations of ancient history in India: The famous 'Horseplay in Harappa' incident (2000)
The following articles, accompanied by comments by Romila Thapar, Asko Parpola, Iravatham Mahadevan, Richard Meadow, and other researchers, can all be accessed through Horseplay in Harappa:
4.1. Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa: The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax, [cover story] Frontline 17 (19) (13 Oct. 2000): 4-11.
4.2. Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, New Evidence on the 'Piltdown Horse' Hoax, Frontline 17 (23) (24 Nov. 2000): 126-129. See also articles on pp., 122-26, collectively entitled A Tale of Two Horses.
4.3. Hindi translation of Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, Horseplay in Harappa, with a supporting editorial by Romila Thapar (New Delhi, 2001).
5.1. Miscellaneous
5.1. A biography (in French) of Pico's nephew-editor Gianfrancesco Pico, an extreme anti-syncretist who collaborated (with Girolamo Savonarola) in the posthumous doctoring of Pico's works, was recently published in France as Steve Farmer and Steven Vanden Broecke, Jean-François Pic de la Mirandole (c. 1470-1533), in Centuriae latinae II. Cent une figures humanistes de la Renaissance (Genève: Droz, 2006). The paper was written in 2000.
I can provide an informal English translation of the work as a PDF: write me directly for a copy.
Go to book description of Syncretism in the West
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