Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
Ben Pentreath, solstice in Tuscany, wonderful photographs, plus more from the Orkneys.
The top post of the year at Marginal Revolution was "Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy," in which Tyler Cowen argued that everything Trump does should be considered first as a move in the culture wars. The rest of the top ten are here, much interesting stuff.
Pew finds that there is no mass conversion of young Americans to Catholicism or Orthodoxy; some are joining but an equal number are leaving. The headline of their article is, "Religion Holds Steady in America."
Ethan Mollick asks Claude to generate a fake witty Churchill quote. (Twitter/X)
Outstanding three part series on Turkish history from Austrian YouTuber Kraut: Hittites to Atatürk (1 hour 45 minutes), Atatürk to Abdullah Gül (1 hour 30 minutes), Erdogan and the Future (1 hour). One of the best works of history I have consumed this year.
CDC allows researchers to release data which includes both the number of Americans diagnosed with autism and the severity of their symptoms, and it shows that all the increase is in the sufferers with mild impairment, or no impairment at all. (Twitter/X, paper) Very strong evidence that the "rise" in autism is all about expanding the definition.
Photographer Rolfe Horn, featured here back in 2009, now has a web site with lots of images. Now he seems to work in color, but I still like his older, black and white stuff better, so that's what I linked to.
Manhattan's steam tunnels, which still heat a majority of the island's buildings, article that won one of David Brooks' Sidney Awards.
Large-scale study of isotopic ratios in bones from English skeletons finds, not separate Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions, but a continuous influx of foreigners throughout the early Middle Ages, with roughly 40% of burials in eastern England showing evidence of foreign birth from 400 to 1200 AD. This is a very weird finding and I am not sure what to make of it.
And another from Brooks, Adam Mastroianni on "Why Aren't Smart People Happier?"
Amazing blog post on the Roman mosaics of southern Spain.
Interesting essay on movies, monster-fucking, contemporary gender differenes, and the general messed-upedness of human sexuality.
One eight-year-old made the perfect Christmas gift for his economist father. (Twitter/X)
Wes Cecil on Daoism for the stressful modern world., 45-minute video.
The challenges of coding in the AI world (Twitter/X).
Another fabulous gift from Big Pharma: Trikafta, a drug mixture that promises many cystic fibrosis sufferers a normal lifespan. (Twitter/X, wikipedia, Pharmacy Times)
Annual letter from Dan Wang, whose two obsessions are computer tech and China. Very interesting on what the SF tech world is like and why he prefers finance guys to tech bros.
Annual NY Times piece on the year's best sentences, most of which are actually short paragraphs. Two examples. A.O. Scott: "Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris." David Brooks: "One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia."
This paper calculates large gains for students admitted to Texas universities at the bottom of their class, compared to similar students who were not admitted.
2025 LLM Year in Review (Twitter/X)
To get reliable electricity, Africans are turning more and more to Chinese solar panels. (NY Times) Cheap solar power will likely end up having a huge impact on the whole continent.
Austrian YouTuber Kraut, "Why Noam Chomsky is Garbage," focusing on Chomsky's denial of the Bosnian genocide, 40-minute video. I agree that when the US does something good, Chomsky's brain glitches and he begins to sputter with ever more disturbing lies. What a weird man.
For my usual ideosynchratic reasons I checked the wikipedia article on the Battle of the Tollense Valley, c. 1250 BC, a truly remarkable Bronze Age site in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. But the article hasn't been updated since 2017, and I had thought excavations were still ongoing. So I looked a little further and found this recent publication, which says that some of the Bronze arrowheads likely came from Bohemia, so this was some kind of inter-regional conflict. This article also has a good map showing how the finds are distributed along the river.
Brief year-in-review article about the space industry. Hundreds of companies compete in the launch and satellite business and new ones are founded every week.
To get people to adopt the pit bull mixes they have so many of, some shelters are branding them "Labrador Retrivers" or other innocuous breeds. (Twitter/X; some academic backup) And here on pit bull owners who promote intentional inbreeding. The author, a stats guy, started a monstrous thread about all of this when he was mauled by a pit bull that "just snapped" after never attacking anyone before. Happens every day in America. I get why gangsters like pit bulls, but the affection of what appear to be normal, middle-class women for the dogs they call "house hippos" mystifies me. Dog breeding matters: retrievers retrieve without being taught, pointers point without being taught, and fighting dogs fight whether you teach them to or not.
Russian horse cavalry vs. Ukrainian drones. (Twitter/X)
A Russian infantryman throws snowballs at a drone. (Twitter/X)
7 comments:
Large-scale study of isotopic ratios in bones from English skeletons finds, not separate Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions, but a continuous influx of foreigners throughout the early Middle Ages, with roughly 40% of burials in eastern England showing evidence of foreign birth from 400 to 1200 AD. This is a very weird finding and I am not sure what to make of it.
The English Channel isn't a terribly huge barrier to travel. What's so surprising about the idea that mainlanders went to England at a fairly steady pace, even outside of notable periods like the Danelaw, etc?
Boat travel wasn't just restricted to armies and rulers. Ordinary people had boats, and could just... sail to England if they wanted to, either for trade, or to find work, or because they had family there who settled in prior generations, or whatever else.
Your local fishing village in Frisia keeps getting caught up in local military squabbles or raids? As a fisherman, you might decide to relocate to the other side of the channel and live in East Anglia for a few seasons, until local conflicts died down. But maybe by that time, you get married, start a family, and have a better life, so why go back?
Or perhaps you're a farmer whose home was destroyed, so you flee across the channel. Or perhaps you're a criminal looking to escape the law. Or perhaps you're a merchant sailor from the Baltic looking to retire and your kinsman has invited you to come live with him. Or perhaps... etc...
You could have sailed reliably from Stockholm to London with relative ease, following coastlines the entire way and avoiding deep water sailing entirely. As long as you had a decent boat, even a very small one, you could simply sail when the weather was good, and stop more or less whenever you needed to at any of the countless coastal settlements along the way.
So I looked a little further and found this recent publication, which says that some of the Bronze arrowheads likely came from Bohemia, so this was some kind of inter-regional conflict.
Or... perhaps someone involved in the conflict went traveling first, ran low on arrows while over the mountains in Bohemia, bought / stole / found / etc some new arrows (made in the local style), and then returned and used them?
Or... perhaps someone involved in the conflict was mercenary from Bohemia, and brought their own local gear.
Or... perhaps someone from Bohemia had immigrated, and brought some of their own local equipment when they did, and when a conflict occurred they pulled it out and used it.
Or... perhaps such a Bohemian émigré instead went to their local smith and ordered some arrows custom made in the style they personally preferred.
Or countless other explanations which don't involve the conflict being inter-regional, based on a grand total of only three individual arrowheads at the site.
The author, a stats guy, started a monstrous thread about all of this when he was mauled by a pit bull that "just snapped" after never attacking anyone before. Happens every day in America. I get why gangsters like pit bulls, but the affection of what appear to be normal, middle-class women for the dogs they call "house hippos" mystifies me. Dog breeding matters: retrievers retrieve without being taught, pointers point without being taught, and fighting dogs fight whether you teach them to or not.
From all the studies I've seen, pit bulls do not seem to bite people any more frequently than other large breeds. Golden retrievers "just snap" and bite people too, you just don't hear about it in the news.
Part of the perception issue might be that good data on dog bites is actually very hard to find, and it's deeply non-standardized. Try getting police report statistics on it, and you'll find that there's a lot of differences in recording, reporting, and defining what constitutes a "bite", an "attack", et cetera. Likewise, what constitutes a "pit bull" is deeply nebulous - as you allude to, involving the prevalence of mixed breed specimens.
What is NOT in question, however, is that race and racism plays a massive part in the perception of pit bulls as dangerous. You yourself, John, talk about "gangsters" keeping pit bulls - despite the fact that the vast majority of pit bulls are owned by normal people and families. Think on why that is, and the media's role in the perception you hold.
There is a grain of truth nestled in things. Pit bulls are somewhat popular in poor urban neighborhoods, in part because of their reputation, often for the purpose of home defense. When you live in a bad neighborhood, and the police respond to crime slowly if at all, you tend to take your own safety into your own hands. Toward that end, buying a dog that many people find intimidating makes perfect sense to deter break-ins and theft.
Likewise, unlike other breeds commonly used for such purposes, pit bulls are relatively small and dense for their size and power, and don't require access to a lot of land. You can keep a pit bull in an apartment SO much more easily than you can keep a German Shepherd, a Dobermann, mastiffs, etc. They are a lot less high strung, they don't need to be run or worked to keep their energy levels down... they're generally low maintenance.
That said, since they ARE popular in poor urban neighborhoods, there is the unfortunate knock-on effect that struggling poor people are more likely to be bad dog owners, largely due to their lack of resources and the stresses of their lives. They are not only more likely to improperly train and control their animals, they are also more likely to actively abuse and mistreat them.
And I can tell you from a lifetime of experience with dogs - including the "nice" breeds like retrievers - the number one way to get a dog to bite people is to abuse and mistreat it. I've seen retrievers "just snap" in exactly the same way as pit bulls. It happens all the time. But retrievers are seen as expensive dogs for white people, and pit bulls are seen as cheap dogs for black people. Ask yourself why the news reports the bites of one SO much more frequently than the other, when the available data doesn't actually show a major difference in bite frequency.
Follow up on pit bulls, found this fantastic video by Vox, "How pit bulls got a bad reputation":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2MxfG8IIgI
Does a very good job of displaying how pit bulls spent more than a century being considered good, reliable, safe dogs perfect for families and small children - and then the perception changed in the 1970s.
The man who pretty much invented the modern pit bull in the 1890s kept breeding them even after one of his killed his nephew.
Pitbulls used to be called “Nanny Dogs” They were bred to be gentle, until the dog fighters started breeding for aggression.
The man who pretty much invented the modern pit bull in the 1890s kept breeding them even after one of his killed his nephew.
How interesting, since "pit bull" is not a single breed, but a category of dog like "hound".
There are four recognized pure breeds; a fifth partially recognized pure breed; and the countless modern mixed breeds who all get called "pit bulls" despite many (or most?) of them not having ANY meaningful percentage of those five pure breeds in their ancestry and merely looking sort of "pit bull shaped"...
...plus the originating breeds of Old English bulldogs and Old English Terriers, and the crossbreed "bull and terriers" mixes of those two from which "pit bulls" in general (that is, the five actual breeds) are believed to have been derived.
This anonymous anecdotal man of yours must have been rather busy, breeding all those different forms of dogs, in very different places, in very different decades.
In all seriousness, of course, it would appear you are referring to the case of John. P. Colby - who did, indeed, contribute significantly to the development of the American Pit Bull Terrier specifically. But there are a few inconvenient details that need addressed.
First, Colby was only one of several contributors to the breed, and only promulgated one specific bloodline - which, although famous, accounted for only a fraction of the breed's genetics. More specifically, this bloodline came from a very specific dog named "Pincher", who served widely as a stud, but not THAT widely - and with inherently limited effect. It's vital to remember that by the time you get six generations away from a sire, even in perfectly documented pedigree breeding, a dog has 256 separate ancestors.
But here's the wrinkle - Pincher started his stud work in 1889, and could not have continued for more than a handful of years, given the nature of dog breeding - let us say, optimistically, 1899 at the latest.
The incident you refer to involving the death of Colby's nephew occurred in 1909, and the dog involved is (as far as I can tell from a brief bit of searching) totally unidentified. It could NOT have been Pincher himself, as he would be well dead by then. It could perhaps have been one of Pincher's descendants - but it just as equally could have been an entirely unrelated dog, sharing no bloodline or genes or even breed at all with Pincher. Mr. Colby bred many kinds of dogs, and not all of them were pedigree animals, nor themselves went on to be breed and contribute their genes to further generations.
We also lack any and all pertinent details to the incident. News reports of the time blatantly sensationalize it, for obvious reasons of selling more papers, but there don't appear to be any details of what actually caused the incident. We also don't know if the attack was unprovoked, or if it perhaps was.
Either way, it hardly matters. We know that young children can and do display gleeful cruelty towards all kinds of dogs, because they are too young to understand, and in so doing provoke attacks upon themselves. And we also know attacks against infants and children occur without any provocation at all - but again, with all kinds of dogs, including "safe" breeds. Golden retrievers kill infants just the same as "pit bulls".
And again, there are no good statistics showing any one breed bites more, or kills more, than any other breed. Ask the experts. It has been explained time and again by the people who actually study these issues - there aren't actually any good dog bite statistics available. The data available is simply bad, and cannot be used to draw and reasonable conclusions.
In fact, virtually the ONLY good data we have is related to breed specific legislation, where locale municipalities banned certain breeds or categories of dogs entirely - and those bans, universally, failed to have any impact on reported numbers of incidents.
Post a Comment