The strange career of Robert Irwin, who battled with Edward Said about orientalism: "It was in my first year at Oxford that I decided to become a Muslim saint."
A claim that new fragments of Euripides have been discovered.
Ted Gioia on our ambivalence about love songs.
Via Tyler Cowen, a wedding in which the couple fight with light sabers instead of having a spotlight dance. (Twitter/X)
In Japan, like everywhere else, poor children and children of less educated parents do worse in school. Here's a news story on some Japanese efforts to close the gap.
Musket balls found near Concord's North Bridge may have been fired during the first battle of the Revolutionary War (NY Times, Park Service press release). That would be these shots:
By the rude bridge that standed the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the battled farmers stood,
And fired shot heard round the world.
Neil Gorsuch: "America criminalizes too much and punishes too much."
Last week Scott Siskind tried to take on the neo-Nietzscheans who think altruism is a mistake because it makes the world weaker. In the comments he got a bit of an education from Nietzsche scholars on what a vexed and complicated question this is. My view is that Nietzsche was a great critic but useless as a guide to how one should think or live; to the extent that he says anything positive about the future it is a series of poetic prophecies best considered as metaphors. Honestly the whole debate makes the weakness of the Rationalist movement very clear.
Skeptoid: no, medical error is not the third leading cause of death in the US.
Roman fort discovered in Wales. The clues were a straight section of old road and a strikingly rectangular field. Straight lines and neat rectangles, the signature of the Empire.
More on the amazing US presidential race: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Left a Dead Bear in Central Park." Allegedly, he tried to make it look like the bear cub had been killed by a bike. (NY Times)
In the early 1900s, thousands of Koreans moved to eastern Siberia to help the Russian empire develop the region; many more came after Japan conquered Korea in 1910. In 1937 Stalin, worried about such a concentration of foreigners, uprooted these colonies and scattered the people across central Asia. Now one fading city in South Korea has launched a program to bring hundreds of these people to Korea. (NY Times, wikipedia)
Ship likely sailed by the Barbary corsairs found on the Mediterranean sea floor.
More bones attributed to Homo floriensis, the mysterious hobbit people of Indonesia, are reported. With every bone the likelihood grows that this was a real species of miniature hominids, rather than deformed people or some kind of misidentification. (NY Times, CNN, original article)
Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution? I think this and all similar explanations are too narrow; I see the industrial revolution as part of a whole civilization's shift away from conserving the old and toward making everything new, which I think is related to the discovery of new continents and the flood of new knowledge coming into Europe.
Kevin Drum reviews a new study focusing on which actions by state governments helped save lives during the pandemic.
The 150-year-old banyan tree in Lahaina, damaged by last summer's terrible fire, seems to be recovering nicely.
Discussing "Billie Jean" with my sons – a pop dance hit about a paternity suit – we fell to talking about other songs where the tune is a bizarre fit for the lyrics. I offered "Step it out Mary," a rowdy Irish number about a young woman who drowns herself for love. Other suggestions?
A claim that carvings on one stela at Göbekli Tepe are a 365-day calendar, the oldest yet discovered (news story, article).
Anonymous email to Tyler Cowen about life in Minsk, Belarus, says Chinese goods have replaced everything blocked by western sanctions and life is going on fine.
The joy of holding Olympic equestrian events at Versailles. It was jealousy that the French president could hold events at Versailles that led JFK to build the White House rose garden. Which is nice, but doesn't really compare to one of the world's greatest stages.
Aftermath of a Ukrainian drone attack on an airbase at Morosovsk in Russia last week. One Su-34 jet destroyed, another probably damaged, and a large ammunition storage area obliterated in one of the biggest explosions of the war.
Back in December, Zelenskyy set Ukrainian manufacturers a goal of producing 1 million drones for the military this year. They have already met that goal. Zelenskyy says that 96% of the drones Ukraine uses are domestically produced. Ukrainian manufacturers are already looking forward to exporting drones worldwide.
Among the weapons North Korea has supplied to Russia are KN-23 tactial ballistic missiles. They are formidable on paper but Ukraine says about half of them have failed and crashed. Inspecting the wreckage, Ukrainian soldiers discovered that the steering bearings are taken from Toyota cars, not exactly built for the stresses of rocketry.
4 comments:
My nominee for tune-doesn't-fit-the-lyrics would be "Timothy," a cheerful little number about trapped miners who kill and eat one of their own.
Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution? I think this and all similar explanations are too narrow; I see the industrial revolution as part of a whole civilization's shift away from conserving the old and toward making everything new, which I think is related to the discovery of new continents and the flood of new knowledge coming into Europe.
As the ancient saying goes (in English, anyway...): "Necessity is the mother of invention."
European deep water sailing could have been invented centuries before it arose, but there was no impetus FOR inventing it. People could have built bigger ships, and stocked them with years worth of preserved foods, and even experimented with different designs to find ones best suited to sailing in deep ocean - but they didn't, because why would they?
So far as they knew, there was no significant land further out. So why go to all that trouble? Why spend all that money and all those resources? Why take the great risk of death, just to explore an ocean people already knew was vast and empty. Even if there was land somewhere on the other side, they knew it was at least months away by ship. What value could they possibly find in discovering such land, at such enormous cost? They had plenty of land already - and if you want to build ships to acquire more land, then build an invasion fleet to take land from your neighbors that you KNOW is desirable, rather than find extremely distant land which might be worthless for all you know.
Why didn't the Romans invent steam power? Strictly speaking, they did - just in undeveloped forms, such as the aeolipile. So why didn't they refine that further, and realize it could be used to perform labor, at the cost of fuel? Well... why would they want a complex and expensive mechanism to perform labor at the cost of valuable fuel, when slaves were plentiful, affordable, reliable, and could be fueled with mere bread instead of coal?
Etc, etc.
After more than a year of talk, American-made F-16 fighter jets are in Ukraine. (Twitter/X, ISW, BBC) Ukraine is speaking of them mainly as air defense weapons, and the ones seen flying over Odessa carried only jammers and air-to-air missiles. People on Twitter/X have been fantasizing about a major air raid on Crimea but so far that does not seem to be the plan.
Anyone who fantasized about air raids on Crimea doesn't have the first clue what the situation is and has been for Ukraine, or how modern war works.
Ukraine has suffered one major problem continuously through the war - lack of control over the skies. They've done what they could with ground based air defense, but you simply can't establish air superiority from the ground. You need fighters in the air for that.
Now that they finally have modern jet fighters, they are going to go about stabilizing the airspace as their top priority. They need to first make it virtually impossible for Russian planes to enter Ukrainian airspace. Then they need to make it similarly dangerous for Russian planes to operate in their OWN airspace (at least near the front lines), and to generally deplete the Russian capacity to field aircraft at all.
Only once that has been achieved can air superiority be achieved - and only once air superiority has been achieved can any meaningful air raids on enemy territory take place. You can't realistically go bombing targets in enemy occupied territory on any meaningful scale unless the enemy's capacity to intercept you has been substantially depleted.
Hence why they're flying the F-16s with air-to-air missile loadouts for now. Gotta clear the skies before they start hunting for ground targets.
Neil Gorsuch: "America criminalizes too much and punishes too much."
By the way, this link is broken. (Although I agree with the basic premise utterly.)
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