An argument that there are so few bones on battlefields of the Napoleonic period because of "grave robbing on an industrial scale."
Vietnamese businesswoman sentenced to death for $44 billion financial fraud.
Unusual Neolithic monument discovered in France. (English, French original at INRAP.)
Also at INRAP, another medieval rural house site with an extensive network of underground tunnels and rooms. Sometimes historical archaeology can surprise us; I am not aware of any documentary evidence for underground medieval refuges, but half a dozen or so have now been explored.
Awesome commercial for an Indian steel company, wonderful blending of the old and new Indias.
Sabine Hossenfelder on how she failed at academic science and now thinks most of it is bullshit. (13-minute video) Many scientists are finding the long march through graduate school to grant-funded post-doc to winning your own grants to be soul-sucking, but I've never seen a promising plan to make things better. Meritocracy has costs.
Mattel introduces a new version of Scrabble that is less competitive, aimed at Gen Z buyers who, it seems, don't like competitive games.
Perun on the "terrifyingly rapid" evolution of drone technology in Ukraine, 71-minute video.
The Vindelev Treasure was found by a Danish metal detectorist in 2020. It consists of 23 gold pieces dating to between 385 and 500 AD, some incorporating Roman coins. The History Blog has some analysis, with huge photos.
Norway announces a huge increase in defense spending, directly aimed at Russia, includes purchasing five or six new warships and five new submarines.
News from Japan: "In sobering move, booze makers shift to milder beverages." Weird article but it seems young Japanese don't drink as much as their elders and distillers are having to adapt.
Archaeologists claim to have found a fortified hilltop settlement to which some Mycenean people fled as their civilization was collapsing, around 1100 BC.
Sales of electric rickshaws continue to soar in India. For some kinds of vehicles, electric power is already clearly better; it won't be long before gasoline-powered buses and delivery vans are nearly extinct.
In the US, the curve relating fertility to income is now U-shaped: total fertility is around 2.1 for the poorest families, goes down to around 1.6 at $200,000 a year, but then rises back up; the group with the highest fertility is families making more than $1 million a year. I wonder how much of that is driven by athletes?
The sort of thing we talk about over dinner in my house: why are the words for "butterfly" in the Romance languages so different? (mariposa, papillon, farfarelle, etc.) Possible explanations here and on Quora here. The guy on Quora notes that 1) a lot of the words have a fluttery sound with repeated consonants, and 2) the etymologies for many of these words relate to how the insect features in local folk culture, which has often overridden ancient names. Butterfly comes from a belief that they drank butter, or possibly (Jakob Grimm said) a belief that witches changed into butterflies and stole butter in that form. "Dragonfly" is the same, lots of diverse names based on folklore, like the Swedish trollslända, "troll's spindle." Love the Middle English adderbolt. The internet is terrible in some ways but on the other hand you can sometimes whip out your phone and find, within a few minutes, two really smart people discussing the problem on your mind.
A claim that some skeletons found in European Neolithic sites represent people killed via a cruel strangulation method used by modern Mafiosi. The authors think this was human sacrifice.
Rereading Benedict Anderson's famous 1983 book about the rise of nationalism, Imagined Communities, in the light of nationalism's recent resurgence. Anderson was a Marxist whose main goal was to explain how socialist states could fight each other, which 19th-century Marxist theory held to be impossible, but this reviewer finds it still relevant.
Archaeologists find a fox skeleton buried with a bunch of people at a 1500-year-old site in Patagonia, speculate that these foxes were companions of humans. (NY Times, original article)
In 1931, Henry L. Stimson made a remarkably accurate prediction about the course of World War II.
That's from this Noah Smith piece arguing that we could well be in the lead-up to World War III right now, with Ukraine and various Middle Eastern conflicts playing the part of the Spanish Civil War and Japan's seizure of Manchuria. I think this is a legitimate fear but I am betting against it.
Excavations in Pompeii have uncovered a new banquet hall with frescoes.
Interesting piece by Charles Blow on the racial divide over the OJ Simpson trial (NY Times): "It’s not that most Black people thought him innocent or another Rosa Parks. For them, it was the system itself that was on trial. The question wasn’t whether the justice system would work equally in the service of justice but whether its inherent and inveterate injustices would also be applied equally."
And Kevin Drum reprints something he wrote at the time: "Yes, OJ was guilty and got off. So have lots of white guys. But that's missing the point. Why did the jurors unanimously believe it quite plausible that the LAPD planted evidence and lied on the stand?"
Also from Drum, a quick summary of the Cass Review of gender care for British teens, which says there is no high quality evidence about any of the issues involved.
Our theories hold that massive elements are created when giant stars go nova, but analysis of the debris ejected from the brightest nova observed by modern astronomy finds no massive elements.
From this review of the mystery of general anesthia I found this technical article, which puts forward a mathematical model of anesthesia and suggests that tests on people who are undergoing general anesthesia might be a great way to understand consciousness in general.
And Kevin Drum reprints something he wrote at the time: "Yes, OJ was guilty and got off. So have lots of white guys. But that's missing the point. Why did the jurors unanimously believe it quite plausible that the LAPD planted evidence and lied on the stand?"
ReplyDeleteBecause any and all conclusions presented by a jury MUST be unanimous, Kevin.
Now, yes - clearly the jury had zero trust in the police, which is indicative of one of our longstanding societal ills that gets treated like the elephant in the room.
But the unanimity of the jury itself is in no way demonstrates or emphasizes that fact, because a jury is REQUIRED BY LAW to be in total agreement, otherwise it's declared a hung jury and the case will (virtually always) have to be retried entirely.
I swear, for as smart as he sometimes seems to be, Drum is routinely extremely stupid.