Live in the Question

California Governor Jerry Brown is one of the most interesting people in America. Famously ascetic, he still keeps a spartan office and travels with no aides or security. He has no speech writers or “message people.” Once renowned for pie-in-the-sky projects, his main accomplishment during his current term has been balancing the budget. James Fallows, who has interviewed thousands of politicians, writes of Brown, “I have never encountered a politician more willing to talk with, as opposed to talk at, other people than Jerry Brown.”

Brown, says Fallows, likes to think out loud, and he actually listens to what people say in response: “I think as I speak,” he says:

“I find that a lot of people are more invested in position-taking than they are in the inquiry,” he continued. “Generally speaking, I am in the inquiry. I live in the question. People have so many positions, and usually the evidence is not strong enough for them really to be so confident in those conclusions. There are just a lot of things that are not certain.” He rattled off a list of decade-by-decade fads and gimmicks for “saving” America’s struggling school system, most recently No Child Left Behind and the “teacher accountability” movement. “The question you have to ask yourself is, if teacher accountability is really the whole key, how can it be that from Comenius”—a 17th-century European pioneer in education—“through John Dewey and Horace Mann, and going back to the Greeks, every­body missed this secret, and we figured it out just now? I’m skeptical of that—and of you, and Washington, and myself.” This was the “civilizational” outlook Nathan Gardels was referring to. Then, the practicality: “The world is so rich and diverse, and there is this technocratic imperative to impose rules, by small minds.” I realize that on the page this could look airy or pompous. In real conversation, Brown gives a convincing impression of weighing thoughts and evidence as he goes.

So, courtesy of Governor Brown, I finally have a succinct phrase that expresses my intellectual ideal:

I live in the question.

New Species

Eugenia petrikensis is a 2-meter tall shrub native to Madascar, one of National Geographic's top ten newly discovered species of last year.

Natriuretic Polypeptide b Makes You Itch

Science:

Scientists have known for a long time that sensory neurons called TRPV1 cells can detect itchy substances on the skin, says Mark Hoon, a neuroscientist at National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland. Because TRPV1 neurons also respond to hot and painful stimuli, however, it wasn't clear whether the neurons that respond to itch are unique, or if itch might simply be low-grade pain. That's made it difficult to develop treatments that target itch without affecting other sensory systems, Hoon says.

While analyzing molecules excreted by TRPV1 cells in search of anything that might be itch-specific, Hoon and his colleagues came across a small group of the neurons that produce natriuretic polypeptide b (Nppb), a hormone that regulates heart function and can also act as a neurotransmitter. "We wondered what those cells were doing," Hoon says. To find out, the team genetically modified mice to block production of Nppb in TRPV1 neurons, then injected the skin on their shoulders with a range of itch-inducing compounds, including histamine, an inflammatory molecule involved in immune responses, and the malaria drug chloroquine. Normally, these substances make mice scratch nonstop, but the knockout mice hardly scratched themselves at all after the injection, showing that Nppb was required to produce the sensation of itch, the authors report online today in Science. No other sensory systems appeared to be affected in the knockout mice, Hoon says.

A new way to block itching would be a real boon, especially to those people who itch so badly that they scratch themselves to pieces. But as usual this is just mice we're talking about, so it remains to be seen if this pathway is as important in humans.

How to Produce Reconstructed Drawings of an Archaeological Site

I have several times been asked exactly how I produce the reconstructed drawings of archaeological sites that have decorated my site reports over the years. So allow me to explain.

The drawings are made by a profession artist, John Poreda of Richmond, Virginia. He and I have worked on this sort of thing for years. I supply him with a variety of information and rough sketches, and he does the rendering. In every case the drawing is a guess, and some things about it are more likely to be true than others. I assume that the site followed the normal pattern, that is, our site looked pretty much like others of the same time, place, and socioeconomic status. This might be wrong, of course -- our site might have belonged to the local eccentric. But this is the best we can do.

At the top is Poreda's drawing of the Sarah Whitby house in Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC. Sarah Whitby was an African American from North Carolina who migrated with her family to Washington after the Civil War. The drawing was based on three sources: the archaeology, a rental from the 1890s that mentions the house, and a series of drawings that a Smithsonian artist named DeLancey Gill made of the houses of black migrants around Washington in this time period. One of these drawings is above. The archaeology of this site showed a stone-lined cellar hole measuring about 10 by 12 feet (3x3.5 m). The large number of nails showed that the house was frame, not log; some pieces of roofing tin showed that at some point it acquired a tin roof. The archaeology indicated a one-room house, but the rental said that the house had two rooms. I interpreted this as indicating an original single-room house with an addition. To highlight this, I asked Poreda to represent the addition with a different roofing material. My instructions in this case otherwised consisted of a measured floor plan and a bunch of the DeLancey Gill drawings, from which Poreda made the reconstruction.

Above is Poreda's reconstruction of the Luke Cannon Plantation in the Prince William Forest Park, ca. 1800. Comparing this with the Whitby reconstruction you can see that I have to specify how close or distant the view is to be. In this case I opted for a distant view, taking in the whole hilltop where the site was located. I did this partly because we had information on some of the other buildings of the farm, including the foundations of the barn and kitchen and some stones and nails where the stable is shown. I also opted to de-emphasize the house itself because we had only the foundation and little information on what it would have looked like otherwise. For a reconstruction like this I send Poreda a measured plan of the whole site that include topo lines showing the slope of the ground.

For most of the buildings we do, I send Poreda a sketch like this one indicating how I want them to look. Sometimes I also send photographs of standing buildings of the same type, so he can see where I get my ideas. The Luke Cannon facade was copied from a standing Virginia house of this period, I forget which.

The Prince William County Poorhouse, 1795. This reconstruction was based on the foundation and chimney base of the larger building, a statement in the record of the Overseers of the Poor that the site included the poor house itself and an unspecified number of "cabins."

Here you can see the site plan of the McKean-Cochran Farm in Delaware, which had two period of buildings, and then the reconstruction prepared for the earlier period. For this drawing I supplied Poreda with a measured plan of all the building footprints and sketches of each structure. The house, barns, and well were based on archaeological data. The kitchen indicated in the 1797 tax record was not found, so presumably its traces were destroyed by later construction or plowing. I added the kitchen in the place where I suspect it was, based on nails and soil chemistry, and then for good measure added one of the miscellaneous sheds that we know were all over these farms. That last is a judgment call. I did not do so for the Luke Cannon Plantation, which no doubt had other structures and so was messier than the reconstruction indicates. But when you make stuff up you never know how close you are to being right.

Images courtesy of the National Park Service and the Delaware Department of Transportation.

Obama Anguishes over his own War on Terror

Obama's War on Terror speech was one of his worst. When you don't really know what you want to say, or are ambivalent about what you should do, it is hard to speak coherently. The incoherence of the speech reflected Obama's conflicting impulses. Scott Wilson:

The speech was a mix of defensiveness and contrition over the choices he has made — all of which, he argued, have been preferable to the alternatives. . . .

After four years of alarming intelligence reports and attacks that were prevented and those that were not, Obama sounded like a former constitutional law lecturer who sees the nation and its security challenges in more shades of gray than he once did.

Obama is in a box largely of his own making. I think he is leery of the powers claimed by the Bush administration and maintained by his own, but on the other hand he is very worried about being, or being seen as, "weak on terror." I suspect he worries that a major failure against terrorists would bring the Republicans back to power and undo all of his other accomplishments. He also wants our foreign and military policies to be based on consensus, and he is not willing to oppose the defense and intelligence establishments. The bottom line is that while he said Congress might want to look at limiting the President's powers at some time in the future, he does not want anyone to limit his own.

Politicians are people whose profession is politics, so of course they usually see things in political terms. The political reality here is that most Americans are still much more scared of terrorists than of government overreach, and they don't care how many foreigners we kill in pursuit of our own safety. So only a very bold politician would roll back the security state while there is still any chance of a major terrorist attack. Obama is not a bold politician. He is both by nature and by political strategy a seeker of consensus. He also has a powerful desire to keep very tight control on these policies, as we see in his extravagant claims for secrecy and manic leak hunts. Andrew Sullivan was impressed by Obama's

Niebuhrian grasp of the inherent tragedy of wielding power in an age of terror

but I find that I don't much care. What he feels is immaterial; only what he does matters. However much Obama frets on the constitutionality or morality of his actions, he is going to keep fighting his secret and illegal war.

On the other hand I did not sense any desire to fight wars with Iran or Syria, and there were some lines that might be interpreted as arguments against such wars. So I am back to my usual position on Obama's foreign policy: I don't really like it, but it could be a lot worse.

Bexarotene Reverses Alzheimer's-Like Symptoms in Mice

Having achieved the technical marvel of mice that get Alzheimer's disease, scientists have been treating them in various ways to see if they can reverse the damage they caused. Actually the mice don't exactly get Alzheimer's, which is a human disease. But thanks to genetic engineering the brains of these mice express human Apolipoprotein E4, APOE4 for short, which is associated with Alzheimer's in humans. As a result their brains fill up with "plaques" like those in human patients, and their memories get very bad.

One of the compounds that has now been tried on the demented mice is Bexarotene, which is an approved cancer drug:

Bexarotene is a compound chemically related to vitamin A that activates Retinoic X Receptors (RXR) found everywhere in the body, including neurons and other brain cells. Once activated, the receptors bind to DNA and regulate the expression of genes that control a variety of biological processes. Increased levels of APOE are one consequence of RXR activation by bexarotene.

Got that? However it works, researchers have reported that bexarotene removed plaques from mouse brains. Now a group headed by Rada Koldamova of the University of Pittsburgh has found that bexarotene reversed the mice's memory loss.

Which is very cool, but these are transgenic mice, not people, and more often than not treatments that work in mice don't work in us. But sometimes they do.

In the Garden

Roses and peonies, the glories of late spring.

The World is Complicated

The insistence that the complex is only a mask for the simple was one of the plagues of the twentieth century.

--Timothy Snyder

The Apocalyptic Fantasy World of the Angry Neocon

Jennifer Rubin, in launching a broadside against the President's speech on terrorism, says some astonishing things. I find it hard to believe that the Post actually printed this column, it is so morally bankrupt. But let me try a measured rebuttal anyway. In response to a line about the eventual "end" of the war, Rubin wrote,

Wars don't end. They are won or lost.

This is factually false; I would be willing to bet my house that most wars in history have ended without a clear-cut victory for either side. Worse, it is morally outrageous, because it ignores the possibility of a negotiated end to any conflict. No, in Rubin's black and white world, all wars must continue until one side surrenders. Or, her preferred outcome, until one side is all dead, a point I'll come back to.

After Obama notes that hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Vietnam, Rubin says,

Plainly the man has been traumatized by Vietnam. He defines conventional war as bad because we tragically lose men. The problem with Vietnam is that we didn’t win and wasted lives; with Iraq, Obama threw victory away.

Rubin seems not to notice that Obama was talking about Vietnamese deaths, not American; she immediately concludes that Obama must have been worried about American soldiers, since nobody else is worth mentioning. Even so, she would be willing to write off all those American deaths as no "problem" if we had won the war. How can she say this? We may sometimes end up thinking that defeating a terrible enemy like Hitler is worth massive loss of life, but to shrug off hundreds of thousands of deaths as "no problem" is the very definition of evil. Besides, the only way we could have "won" the Vietnam War was by achieving a military stalemate and then persuading the North Vietnamese to accept a negotiated settlement, an approach Rubin rules out. There was no way for us to force a North Vietnamese surrender.

And then to Iraq. We fought a war there to install a democratic government. Then that democratically elected government asked us to remove all our troops from its sovereign territory. We did so. That is "throwing victory away"? What does Rubin think Obama ought to have done, overthrown Maliki's government? Or declared war on him? The neocons are constantly complaining that Obama "pulled out" of Iraq, but he did not. The Iraqi government that we installed with so much loss of blood and treasure ordered us out. Does that give her no pause?

Rubin moves on to grotesquely exaggerate the threat posed to us by Islamic terrorists. Obama said that there had not been a "large scale" terrorist attack on American soil since 9-11. Rubin:

Is Boston not large-scale enough for him? Does Fort Hood not count?

Let me ask this: if the Boston bombing was a "large scale" attack, what would a small scale attack be? To Rubin America is "in danger" and has been "repeatedly attacked." In fact we are, collectively, in next to no danger at all from terrorists. The number of Americans killed by terrorists since 9-11 is tiny, and their threat to our nation or our "way of life" is exactly zero. But Rubin makes it sound as if we were all afraid to leave our houses for fear of al Qaeda.

When the President says we should dismantle "networks that pose a direct threat to us, " Rubin rejoins, "Has he given up on networks that pose an indirect danger to us?"

Rubin holds out no hope that we can ever reach a settlement with Islamic extremists, or persuade them that we are not their enemies. They are not, she insists, motivated by any rational impulse we might engage with:

In fact, the ideology is one that instructs them to murder all non-believers, whether we are at war or not. The jihadists don’t act out of misguided defensiveness, but out of evil impulse.

Which means, I suppose, that we must stay on a war footing until every Islamic extremist in the world is dead. Since there have been violent Islamic extremists for about 1400 years now, this is unlikely to happen soon.

Rubin and the rest of the angry neocons live in a mad world full of deadly enemies that can never be deterred or placated, only killed. The only way to survive in this world, they think, is to make our nation a fortress and wage constant war against any potential enemy that might pose even an "indirect threat" to us. Their fear has made them insane, and we must never again let them get control of our government.

Another Reason to Stay Out of Syria

Tom Ricks asks why the US would want to step into the middle of a fight with Al Qaeda on one side and Hezbollah on the other.

"Terrorism" is a Word with a Meaning

I was just musing on this because the British PM said that the murderous machete assault on a British soldier outside his barracks in London might be "an act of terror."

This follows on the ridiculous political theater in the US over when President Obama said the Benghazi attack was "an act of terror" and whether he lied about when he said it.

Because the Benghazi attack was not terrorism at all, and neither was the London attack. Terrorism is a word with a meaning. It means attacking civilians as a way to spread fear and thereby accomplish some political goal.

In Benghazi, members of a radical Islamic militia attacked a heavily armed CIA compound. They had no interest in killing civilians; they wanted to kill CIA agents. That's not terrorism, that's war. I suppose what PM Cameron meant was that the machete attack was intended as a political act, but that doesn't make it terrorism. Terrorism means attacking civilians, not soldiers.

We have turned the meaning of this word into a political symbol. If you call every sort of attack on Western interests "terrorism," that somehow means you are standing tough against Islamic extremists. Really it just means you don't know English very well.

Ani Reimi-Orsa

Finnish digital artist who does a lot of concept stuff for games. Many more at colorred.com. Above, October, 2012.

A Quest for Something, 2011.

Gallows Tree, 2012.

Abandoned Church, 2012.

Underlords' Chasm, 2012.

The American Prairie Reserve

I used to fantasize, in my eco-fanatic youth, about wiping away the farms from a Nebraska-sized swath of the American west and letting the prairie grow back. Since at the time our government was paying farmers billions of dollars a year not to plant crops, it seemed to me that if we just let a few hundred thousand square miles revert to nature we would help the buffalo, the farmers, and the taxpayers all at once.

Now an organization called the American Prairie Reserve has set out to do just that -- although on a somewhat smaller scale. Their goal is to acquire a million acres of prairie land (400,000 ha) in Montana that would connect 2 million acres of existing Federal reserves into a giant prairie ecosystem.

They have already acquired 274,000 acres. They are working to restore these lands to their natural state, undoing the damage caused by a century of cattle ranching. Most of the money comes from billionaires who just think this is a cool thing to do.

I think this is a terrific way for billionaires to spend their money.

Dorothy as Scientist

We need to follow the data just like the yellow brick road, to the truth.

-- Dr. Samuel Klein

And from the same article:

We're scientists. We pay attention to data, we don't try to un-explain them.

--Dr. Robert Eckel

Light and Storm

Light breaking through storm clouds, Patagonia, Chile. By Feliciano Ripa. From National Geographic.

Blaming Liberals for Inequality

George Packer has an essay in the New Yorker wondering why all the social progress of the past 40 years had not led to greater economic equality:

We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation. Like almost everything else, the new inclusiveness divides the country into winners and losers. It’s been good for those with the education, talent, and luck to benefit from it; for others—in urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa—inclusiveness remains mostly theoretical. It gives an idea of equality, which makes the reality of inequality even more painful.

Samuel Goldman thinks this is "historically and politically obtuse." To him, one of the main explanations for the rise in inequality is the shift in the left's focus from the economic empowerment of the working man, mainly through the union movement, to the rights of women, minorities, and gays:

The transformation of equality from an economic ideal to a social principle is important for understanding what’s wrong with Packer’s second claim. In our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are far from “unrelated”. Rather, social inclusion has been used to legitimize economic inequality by means of familiar arguments about meritocracy. According to this view, it’s fine that the road from Harvard Yard to Wall Street is paved with gold, so long a few representatives of every religion, color, and sexual permutation manage to complete the journey. Superficial diversity at the top thus provides an moral alibi for the gap between the one percent and the rest. Did it have to be this way? Packer suggests that it does not, noting that social and economic equality progressed together for a while before diverging in the ’70s. But that divergence was not simply an accident. Rather, it was a predictable result of the takeover of Democratic Party by the New Left, which was far more interested in sexual and cultural revolution than in representing unfashionably conservative workers.

This shift on the left drove socially conservative working men out of the Democratic Party, created the "Reagan Democrats," and catapulted economic conservatives into power, where they set about attacking the welfare state and the unions.

This is hardly an original idea -- What's Wrong with Kansas? comes to mind -- and I think there is something to it. The shift of the Democratic Party toward feminism, environmentalism, affirmative action, and now gay rights has alienated many culturally conservative working class people. To the extent that this choice had to be made, I think the Democrats made the right one. Institutionalized racism was a crime that had to be ended. I am not happy with the way feminism has played out, but ending the legal restrictions on what women can do was equally important. Somebody had to stand up against the poisoning of the planet.

But while I do think the choice of the Democratic Party to fight for women's and minority rights rather than unions played a part here, it was far from the only thing happening. Manufacturing employment in the US has collapsed because of technological changes that have nothing to do with government policy. It just takes fewer worker to make a car or a ton of steel. Part of the background to Reagan's victory was the Rust Belt decay of the 70s, the spread of boarded-up factories and abandoned mills, and the sense of decline bred by those images. Globalization has been fed by new technologies, too, from containerized shipping to the internet.

And what about straightforward resistance to the changes the Democrats promoted? Patriarchy was a good deal for men, so of course some of them resist dismantling it. Segregation benefited white people, especially poor white people. Since 1960 the power of white men has decreased a great deal; of course this has driven some toward conservatism. So I think it is cheap to blame liberals for inequality, as if there was some other course they could realistically have pursued that would have led us down a different path. Conservatives didn't have to fight against women's rights, or use their new power to attack workers.

The question I wonder about is the connection between the "do your own thing" individualism of the 60s and the "every man for himself" libertarianism of our time. Goldman thinks this is obvious, and that hippie rebels slid easily into being selfish corporate titans. There certainly are people who did exactly this. But "do your own thing" was only one strand of the counterculture, which also included strong communitarian and anti-materialistic tendencies.

Did the attack on the patriarchal family and other traditional structures have to lead to libertarianism and inequality? Rod Dreher thinks so:

Many of us, both liberals and conservatives, pine for the relative economic equality of the postwar era, but very few of us — not even among us conservatives — would be willing to accept the trade-offs in personal liberty that the era demanded. As Goldman indicates, a lot of the New Deal economic stuff depended on a culture that was far more unified than we are today.

Is is true that only a strongly unified, culturally homogenous society will support a generous welfare state? Will only companies where the executives all wear identical suits and belong to the same country club invest in their communities? That was the model of the 1950s -- can we have the good parts without the bad? David Brooks has been obsessed with this question for years, and he is very pessimistic:

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Will only people bound together by strong social structures support each other? Can we do our own thing while still caring how our neighbors are doing?

Can we have freedom and equality, or do we have to choose between them?

Let Me Take You

Let me take you as people take foreigners by the hand to visit a strange town, through the hidden wonders of this great city of the Universe.

--Basil of Caesarea, alias Basil Ouranophantor, Revealer of the Heavens

The House of Savoy

From an illuminated history of a great noble house, ca. 1580. Now in the Walters Museum. Via BibliOdyssey.

Depression and Our Internal Clocks

Severe depression has long been linked with disruptions in daily cycles -- depressed people are more likely than others to sleep at odd hours, sleep to little or too much, suffer from insomnia, wake not knowing what time it is, and so on.

Now a study of the brains of recently deceased people, 34 with clinical depression and 55 without, showed differences in activity at the genetic level:

After determining how long after sunrise each person’s death was, the team looked at what genes were turned on in six brain regions, gathering a total of 12,000 records of gene activity. Among nondepressed people, patterns were pretty predictable. One gene’s activity, for example, consistently peaked at sunrise, another's at midday, Li says. But in the depressed brains, gene activity seemed uncoupled from time of day. Their patterns of activity also weren’t as predictable.

Nobody knows which way the causality flows: maybe depressed people have trouble keeping on schedule, or maybe a disrupted schedule contributes to depression. But the connection is real.

Temple Grandin takes on Simplistic Brain Science

Temple Grandin, America's most famous autistic scientist, has a new book out about her condition. She spends much of it attacking simplistic views of the brain. She, for example, suffers from panic attacks and has an enlarged amygdale, a brain region associated with fear:

Even when researchers do think they’ve found a match between an autistic person’s behavior and an anomaly in the brain, they can’t be sure that someone else manifesting the same behavior would have the same anomaly. Part of the title of a 2009 autism study in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders captured the situation succinctly: “Same Behavior, Different Brains.” In other words, just because you’re prone to extreme anxiety doesn’t mean your autistic brain has an enlarged amygdale…. Conversely, when researchers find an anomaly in the brain, they can’t be sure that that anomaly will have the same behavioral effect in a different brain. Or any effect, for that matter.

Neurologists have a habit of scanning the brains of someone with neurological symptoms, finding a lesion,and assuming that the lesion is causing the symptoms. But since scans of perfectly healthy people also show lesions, there is no real reason to think this is true.

I particularly appreciated this take down of  fMRI imaging, which I think tells us very little about what is going on in our brains:

Neuroimaging also requires subjects to keep their heads still. In recent years, several studies reported that short-range connections in the brain weaken as children grow older, while long-range connections strengthen. Neuroscientists considered this news to be quite a significant advance in understanding of the brain’s maturation process. Unfortunately, a follow-up study by the authors of the original studies showed that the supposed changes in the brain’s development disappeared once they took head movement into account. “It really, really, really sucks,” the lead investigator said. “My favorite result of the last five years is an artifact.”

At least he admitted it.

Grandin does the same thing with hype about "autism genes." Early studies found genetic abnormalities in autistic patients, and this led to a lot of excitement about a genetic cause. But the more studies people do, the more different abnormalities they find, and most of the abnormalities are unique.

"We really don't know" is a frustrating thing to hear over and over again, but much of the time it is all that truthfully can be said.

Justinian's Plague was Yersinia pestis

The Old View, held by grandfatherly conformist historians, was that the disease Europeans called the Plague, or the Bubonic Plague, or the Black Plague, was one disease throughout history. In this decidedly retrograde theory, people who lived a long time ago were trusted to identify diseases, and it was assumed that this knowledge was somehow preserved in the medical community from 1348 down to the discovery of the plague bacillus (Yersinia pestis) in 1894.

Various bold rebel iconoclasts popped up every so often to say that this couldn't be true. Not that they had any very good reason for thinking this, they just knew that whatever the grandfatherly conformists taught must be wrong. Therefore they published articles arguing that past plagues were really measles, or typhus, or a hundred other things.

But now we have the technology to extract DNA from ancient skeletons, and we have learned that when people die of a disease their bones and teeth are full of bacterial DNA from the disease that killed them. So we can check to see what plague victims died of. And lo and behold, the grandfatherly conformists were right: the Black Death was the plague was Yersinia pestis. Take that, bold rebel iconoclasts.

But what about the Great Plague of 541-542, the Plague of Justinian? (It wasn't his fault, he just happened to be emperor at the time.) There wasn't much evidence on this one either way, just a supposition by small-minded, conservative, Occam's Razor sort of people that since Eurasia knows of only one disease that could wipe out half the population of a country, Justinian's Plague was likely to be that disease, too. Exactly the sort of logic that enrages revisionist crusaders, who mocked this mercilessly. But now we have data on this pestilence, too. The latest result comes from an unusual Bavarian cemetery of about the right date, where as many as three skeletons had been dumped into a single grave. It has the look of a plague cemetery. Examination of the skeletons produced lots of of Yersinia pestis.

What do you say now, bold rebel iconoclasts? Will you admit that sometimes the Old Establishment view is right? Could it be that you are not smarter than everyone who came before you?

Hmph.

Tornado

Above, one of the tornadoes that touched down across Kansas and Oklahoma Sunday and Monday.

Scenes of the devastation in the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, where at least 24 people were killed.

The Moore tornado.

The Last Pagans Plead for Tolerance

God has made diversity a common attribute of the nature of men, so that all should be duly disposed to piety but the mode of their worship should depend on the will of each. Remember, Lord, that the Author of the universe rejoiced in this diversity. . . . This is a law against which no confiscation, no crucifixion, no death at the stake has ever yet availed. You may maim and kill the body, but the mind will escape you, taking with it freedom of thought and the right of the law as it goes, even if it is subjected to force in the language used by the tongue.

--Themistius to Emperor Jovian

There cannot be only one way to so great a secret.

--Symmachus on the removal of the pagan altar from the Senate House.

Musical Instruments around the World

From an auction of "ancient and tribal" musical instruments at Live Auctioneers. Above, thumb piano or lamellophone of the Songye tribe, Congo region of Africa, late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Two whistles from Veracruz, Mexico, 600 to 900 CE.

Tibetan trumpet, eighteenth century.

Moche jaguar-head trumpet, ceramic, 300 to 500 CE, Peru. Estimate $6,000 to $10,000.

Iron jingle from Nigeria, late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

Maya ceramic bell, 500 to 800 CE.

Three-note flute, Bamenda peoples, Cameroon, early twentieth century.

Slit drum and beater, Sepik River, New Guinea, early twentieth century.

Apple and the Low Standard

Apple's tax scam:

Apple used a “complex web” of offshore entities — with no employees or physical offices — that allowed it to pay little or no taxes on tens of billions it earned overseas, according to a Senate investigation unveiled Monday. Between 2009 and 2012, the company shielded at least $74 billion in profits from U.S. tax laws by setting up subsidiaries in Ireland under a special arrangement, the report said. While the practice of using foreign operations to avoid U.S. taxes is legal and common among multinationals, Apple’s scheme was unprecedented in its use of multiple affiliates that had no semblance of a physical presence. . . . One of Apple’s Irish affiliates reported profits of $30 billion between 2009 and 2012, but because it did not technically belong to any country, it paid no taxes to any government. Another paid a tax rate of 0.05 percent in 2011 on $22 billion in earnings, according to the report. The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent.

Their defense:

Apple does not break any tax laws.

It would be unfair to single out Apple for condemnation. They are only doing what international companies all over the world are doing. The world's corporate leadership has decided that there is no such thing as ethics, or citizenship, or even common decency. There is only the law. As long as they can't be prosecuted, they think, they have done no wrong.

Cinderella's Slipper

Hubble photograph of Galaxy J082354.96, which Phil Plait has dubbed Cinderella's Slipper.

Steven Colbert as Philosopher

From his Northwestern graduation speech in 2011

After I graduated from here, I moved down to Chicago and did improv. Now there are very few rules about improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is you’re in the scene too. So hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading, you’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life. Even when it might look like you’re winning…

In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself.

Via Andrew Sulllivan.

The Archaeology and History of Rock Creek Park

The report I co-wrote about the history and archaeology of Rock Creek Park is for sale now from the National Park Service, for $20.95.

This was a wonderful project, and it we found everything from amazing prehistoric Indian sites, going back to 3,000 BCE, to tenancies still occupied when the park was founded in the 1890s.

One of the surprises was bullets and shell fragments from what we now call the Battle of Fort Stevens, during Early's raid on Washington in 1864. The NPS used to tell people that all of that battlefield had disappeared under the expanding city, but not so: some heavy fighting took place within Rock Creek Park.

We found this sad record of a failed relationship on a tree at one of our Indian camp sites. I kept putting this picture in all of our reports, and other people kept taking out. I wonder if it will be in the printed version? The last part says "11-24-03 Her actions and lies reveals the sad truth."

So if you are really interested in the history of the Washington, DC area, or know somebody who is, think about one of these. All of the profit goes to support the National Parks.