Election Afternoon 2024

Gorgeous day in Catonsville, headed for a near-record high. 

Perfect for walking the oblivious dog past the oblivious trees and flowers.

Volunteer chrysanthemum that popped up in the front steps. I'm going to try to transplant to the garden it once it is done blooming.

Interesting observation from Scott Siskind: 

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

Which reminds me of something I wrote about Carthaginian baby sacrifice:

The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?

Sometimes, as I have said, I get the sense that humans are capable of only a certain amount of happiness. When things seem on the verge of getting too good, some of us feel compelled to insist that they are actually terrible and then blow the whole thing up.

I mean, have you ever wondered why people won't believe in the moon landings despite millions of pages of evidence? I think their imaginations just can't encompass something so amazing. If they believed that humans had walked on the moon they might have to believe that we – we as we are, not we after some world-wrenching revolution – are capable of making life really good.

I think we are.

Khaybar

Khaybar is an oasis in northwestern Saudi Arabia, about 150 kilometres (95 mi) north of Medina. It has been inhabited for thousands of years.

Khaybar is well known among Muslims because it appears in the Koran. A town there mainly occupied by Jews was attacked by Muhammad and his followers in 628 AD, an event traditionally called the Battle of Khaybar. Above is a depiction of the battle from a medieval Persian manuscript.

Various online sources, including wikipedia, say that legends about the Jews of Khaybar endured for a thousand years. Some stories said they retreated into the desert and waged a long-term struggle against Islam from a hidden fortress. According, again, to less-than-perfect online sources, some medieval Christian crusaders tried to contact these Jewish tribes as possible allies.

Online material about Khaybar falls mostly into two categories: posts by those interested in Islamic history, and posts from volcanologists. This part of the Arabian peninsula has been volcanically active for most of the past 2 million years, leaving a vast landscape of cinder cones, lava fields, and the like. The last volcanic eruption was in the 7th century AD. The hills on which the various forts and settlements around the oasis sit are all volcanic features, and until recent times one of the region's exports was grinding stones made from the local basalt.

According to local tour guides, some of the old stone houses that appear in tourist photos were occupied into the 1970s. When, one assumes, oil money allowed the residents to move to air-conditioned digs in Riyadh.

Khaybar made the news this week because of a major publication from French archaeologists who have been exploring the site for years (news story, original article). They call themselves the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project, with the acronym AFALULA-RCU-CNRS. They say that have documented a Bronze Age town at a site called al-Natah dating to around 2400 to 1500 BC.

Plan of the settlement. Notice that this town is walled on only one side. That is because the walls actually extended around the whole oasis, running a distance of 14.5 km and surrounding an area of 1100 hectares. There is even a term for this kind of site, the Walled Oasis, and this article mentions two others in this part of Arabia. Obviously that water was very much worth protecting, especially considering that there were only about 500 people living in this town.

Reconstruction. Our archaeologists write:

The nucleated dwellings were constructed following a standard plan and were connected by small streets. By comparison with neighboring oasis centers, we suggest that Northwestern Arabia during the Bronze Age−largely dominated by pastoral nomadic groups and already integrated into long-distance trade networks−was dotted with interconnected monumental walled oases centered around small fortified towns. 

The ratio between the large size of the walled area and the small town raises lots of questions. The archaeologists say there may have been Bronze Age camps within the walled area, although they can't be certain of this. What we should probably imagine is that each oasis belonged to a tribe most of whose members were nomadic, with the walled oasis as their refuge in times of drought or war. 

What a fascinating glimpse of a very different world.

Links 1 November 2024

Moche Vessel in the Form of a Toucan, Peru, 100 BC to 500 AD

New theory about the origin of the wheel and axle points to copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains. (original paper, news story)

Every year NFL players eat around 80,000 Uncrustables (frozen crustless peanut butter & jelly sandwiches). (NY Times)

Where are the 7 million men "missing" from the work force? Many of them are disabled, or claim to be.

Sabine Hossenfelder on a new paper describing shapes that tile the plane or fill 3-dimensional space but have rounded corners and curved edges, 6-minute video.

Anti-tourism protests in Spain.

The rise and decline of the secretary. Via Marginal Revolution. I am old enough to have had bosses who had secretaries, but not to have ever had one myself. For about a year in the early 90s I had a boss whose only career goal seemed to be to get her own secretary, which she never achieved.

Keeping Alberta rat free.

Renaissance books with pop-ups.

Remarkable hoard of coins dating to the Norman conquest of England – half showing Harold, half William the Conqueror, mostly dating to 1066-1068 – has been purchased via the Portable Antiquities Scheme and will go on display in the British Museum.

Heterodox Academy tracks ideological attacks on academics from both the left and the right, and they say right now attacks from the right greatly outnumber those from the left, a reversal of the situation in 2020.

And Heterodox Academy on Indiana's new "Open Inquiry" law, supposed to prevent indoctrination of students by their professors. They object to it for the same reason I objected to Florida's similar law, because there is no way for professors to know what statements might get them into trouble. Vague laws are bad laws. HA goes into this topic at greater depth in this piece on a proposed Federal bill, which they like much better than the Indiana and Florida laws. I am happy to have finally stumbled on some serious discussion of these issues.

On Twitter/X, Josh Marshall says that all the Trump operatives under 30 came out of 4chan and got their tone from online troll culture.

The planning and construction of Poundbury, (then) Prince Charles' dream of an old-fashioned English town, which now has 4,100 inhabitants. (20-minute video)

Interesting new Bronze Age hoard in Scotland.

Review of what sounds like an interesting book on medieval Christian mysticism.

Tweet compiling a bunch of articles complaining that Halloween isn't as fun as it used to be, stretching back to 1903.

Short history of the origins of civilization. Mentioning this mainly because it starts with an argument that agriculture appeared around the world in the Neolithic because changes in the earth's tilt and orbit led to greater seasonality, that is, bigger differences between summer and winter. I'm not convinced, but it is intriguing. Also notes that large-scale food storage, perhaps a response to seasonality, preceded agriculture. Then goes on to say stuff I think is wrong, like that farming made our health worse; it may have made disease worse, by raising our population density, but the other changes attributed here to poor diet could equally be caused by self-domestication.

From a new paper outlining the history of nepotism in European intellectual life, by tracing father-son pairs: "Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable." Via Marginal Revolution.

British study finds that children born during British sugar rationing in the 1950s had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension as adults.

Turning AI loose on a large collection of Renaissance astronomy books. Interesting idea but I don't think they really learned much.

Global culture watch: Afro-French NBA star Victor Wembenyama dresses up for American Halloween in a costume based on a Miyazaki movie.

Detailed NY Times write-up of the battle in Mali in which the Wagner Group lost 46 mercenaries, including the man behind the popular Grey Zone Telegram channel. Basically, they got cocky and were lured into a trap by Taureg rebels.