Arne Maynard's Home in Wales

Garden designer Arne Maynard divides his time between a London flat and this house in Wales. He and his "longtime partner" bought a run-down place, part of which was built in the fifteenth century, and lovingly restored it. The house goes by the splendid name Allt-y-bela, which Lindsey Taylor of Gardenista says means, roughly, "hill of the wolf."

It seems perfectly cozy, just my kind of house.

As I write, the snow of our latest winter storm has just started falling in my yard. Normally I find storms exciting, but I have had about enough of winter for this year, and my mind turns toward flowers and gardens. Like the ones Maynard has planted around his house.

Besides the flowers there are fruits and vegetables in great plenty. Would that I had the room for something like this, and lived someplace where deer wouldn't eat everything. Spring, where are you?

Glacial Progress in Nuclear Fusion

Good news from the $5.3 billion array of giant lasers known as the National Ignition Facility -- after nearly five years of trying, it finally ignited! In two tests out of hundreds -- one in September, one in November -- they induced their balky fusion machine to produce more energy than was put into it. Just produce, mind you, not actually capture. The project leader, who revels in the name of Dr. Omar Hurricane, called this a "turning point." But then he more honestly backtracked and said, "This sounds very modest, and it is." Nobody has ever done this before in a controlled situation, so I suppose it is a technical feat, but that still leaves us about fifty technical feats short of a working fusion reactor.

Today's Fact about Bears

During its "epic period of late summer gorging," a grizzly may eat more than 50,000 calories each day and gain an average of 16 pounds a day.

The DNA of the Anzick Baby

Rumors have been flying around North American archaeology for months that study of the bones from the c. 12,800-year-old "Anzick baby" had produced a readable DNA sequence. Now the results have finally been made public:

Sequencing DNA from the 12,600-year-old skeleton of an infant found in central Montana, scientists have confirmed that early Native Americans descended from ancient Asians, not from Western Europeans, according to a study published in Nature today (February 12). This work, led by ancient DNA expert Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues, marked the first ancient North American genome to have been fully sequenced.

The male infant, “Anzick-1,” who was thought to have been between 12 to 18 months old when he died, was excavated in 1968 from a burial site. His skeleton is the oldest known specimen unearthed in North America belonging to the Clovis people, who populated the continent between 13,000 and 12,600 years ago. The boy was buried alongside 125 ancient artifacts including, antler tools. . . .

The results suggest that the Clovis population was genetically "basal" for American Indians, that is, the child was part of a small group of men who fathered all Native Americans other than a few late arrivals.

Anzick-1’s genome also suggests that modern Native Americans are direct descendants of the Clovis population. The ancient genome is similar to those of peoples from both North and South America, suggesting that a single founding population migrated into the Americas close to the time of the last Ice Age.

“So there is a continuity of contemporary Native American populations with this Clovis individual dating back 12,600 years ago,” said Brian Kemp, a molecular anthropologist at the Washington State University, who was not involved in the study.

Comparisons of the ancient boy’s genome with genomic data from native North, Central, and South Americans further revealed that some native North American populations may have diverged early in the history of the first American people. Additional North American genomes will be needed to trace the evolution of the people that gave rise to the modern populations of the Americas.

The researchers also showed that Anzick-1’s maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA is part of the D4a3a haplotype, a founding American lineage that is now only found in about 1.5 percent of modern Native Americans. The rare D4h3a haplotype was also identified in a 10,300-year-old specimen uncovered in Alaska in 2007.

This result is another powerful piece of evidence for the "Clovis first" theory, which holds that most Native Americans descend from the Clovis people, who in turn descend from a single band of Asians who crossed into North America around 13,500 years ago. Yes, there are lots of archaeological sites in North America with radiocarbon dates older than Clovis, and other hints of human presence going back 35,000 years. But if there were such people, they somehow remained quite obscure for thousands of years and then died out, leaving no detectable genetic signature in modern American Indians. All of which is possible under a variety of scenarios, just not very likely.

Commemorating World War I in Britain

In Britain, the government has set out to stage a "non-political" 100th anniversary commemoration of World War I that is already embroiled in controversy. The problem is that historians still don't agree on what was really at stake in the war, and therefore whether the sacrifice of a million British men was worth it. One school holds that Germany had embarked on a brazen effort to dominate the continent, simultaneously making war on France and Russia, along with various smaller countries that got in the way. Britain had to join the conflict to keep the newly enlarged and aggressive Germany from dominating Europe and thus the world. As Tory education secretary Michael Gove put it in a recent column,

Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage. The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war. . . . The ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified.

The response from the other side is, what outcome could possibly have been worse than the actual one? After four years of struggle that nearly bankrupted Europe and left 16 million dead, Germany was humiliated but not really defeated, leading directly to the rise of Hitler and thus to World War II, the worst event in human history. This is the view of many on the British left, who elide conservatives' retroactive support for World War I with their opposition to joining the European Union today. Tristam Hunt, who is the Labour Party's education point man, responded to Gove by complaining,

It’s all within a strain of anti-Europe, German-phobic thinking. . .. it’s a shame to let the politicians just frame this in terms of how we beat up the Germans.

But ant-war views are not only found on the left; perhaps the most famous historian taking this stand is Niall Ferguson, a Tory nationalist who thinks that by entering the war Britain broke its economy and insured its decline as a world power. Ferguson recently called the British entry into the war "the biggest error in modern history."

So good luck with that non-political commemoration.

The Mysterious Queen

The latest from India:

For the last six weeks, those living in India’s northeast states have been looking over their shoulders whenever they venture outside: Since Dec. 29, a tigress has killed 10 people, eluding determined hunters at every step of its murderous spree.

The 440-pound cat’s latest victim was a 50-year-old man mauled to death Sunday while gathering firewood in Uttarakhand state, in the country’s northeast corner. “The animal ate parts of the man’s leg and abdomen before being scared away by shovel-wielding villagers,” reports the Associated Press.

The day before, hunters cornered the big cat, which has been given the name Mysterious Queen. But it was not enticed by a trap baited with a live cow.

In the six weeks since killing its first victim—a 21-year-old man who was to be married the following day—the tigress’ trail of death has stretched nearly 80 miles, with attacks coming at intervals of between two and 16 days.

Officials believe the predator wandered from its home in the Corbett Tiger Preserve, which was established in the 1930s to safeguard endangered Bengal tigers.

A Street in Rennes

By French architect Raymond Cornon, done for a restoration project in 1965. More drawings by architects here.

Order without Authority, or, Bertrand Russell on Liberalism

The Liberal creed, in practice, is one of live-and-let-live, of toleration and freedom so far as public order permits, of moderation and absence of fanaticism in political programmes. Even democracy, when it becomes fanatical, as it did among Rousseau's disciples in the French Revolution, ceases to be Liberal; indeed, a fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible, as appeared in England under Cromwell and France under Robespierre. The genuine Liberal does not say, 'this is true,' he says 'I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best.' . . .

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions of the Council of Nicaea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the USSR the dicta of Marx on dialectical materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experiment is the right way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.

Locke, who first developed in detail the empiricist theory of knowledge, preached also religious toleration, representative institutions, and the limitation of governmental power by the system of checks and balances. Few of his doctrines were new, but he developed them in a weighty manner at just the moment when the English government was prepared to accept them. Like the other men of 1688, he was only reluctantly a rebel, and he disliked anarchy as much as he disliked despotism. Both in intellectual and practical matters he stood for order without authority; this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism. In the intellectual world it involves standards of evidence which, after adequate discussion, will lead to a measure of agreement among experts. In the practical world it involves submission to the majority after all parties have had an opportunity to state their case.

--Philosophy and Politics (1947)

Note that there is an important distinction between what Russell describes as 'Liberalism' and the opinions that are at the moment considered to be liberal in the U.S. If, say, you believe so strongly in predictions of climate change that you think opponents ought to be silenced as "denialists," you are not a Liberal in Russell's terms. Only polite disagreement is acceptable, unless the other side shoots first.

And while I am on the subject of Bertrand Russell, let me offer my favorite saying of his:

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Today's Venetian Palace: Ca' Barbaro

Ca' Barbaro was built in two parts, the first beginning in 1425 and the second in the 1690s. The Barbaro family was a notable one and supplied Venice with a long string of ambassadors, naval commanders, and so on going back to the tenth century. But the house is actually more famous for a later period, when it belonged to the American Curtis family. Among their Gilded Age visitors were Monet, Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Henry James.

James wrote several well-known letters from this study, and he later used the house as the central setting in The Wings of the Dove. The movie was also filmed there, in part.

The library. Almost all the interiors of these palazzi were heavily redecorated in the 18th century.

The house also figures in John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels, which devotes a chapter to Patricia Curtis' painful decision to sell the piano nobile (main floor) of the palazzo.

The house has been tied up in the Curtis estate for some time and last year it was on the market; no idea if it was sold. Anyway, last March it was opened for tours, and one person who went along posted an account of the tour. He also posted the pictures above and below.

Of course, as Venice sinks the ground floors of these houses flood on a regular basis; below is an interesting photo of Ca' Barbaro during high water.

The Oji-Cree and the Pain of Modernity

The Oji-Cree live in central Canada, in "a cold and desolate land roughly the size of Germany." As Tim Wu explains, their lives have recently been upended by contact with the industrialized world:

For much of the twentieth century, the Oji-Cree lived . . . in tents during the summer, and in cabins during the winter. Snowshoes, dog sleds, and canoes were the main modes of transportation, used to track and kill fish, rabbits, and moose for food. A doctor who worked with the Oji-Cree in the nineteen-forties has noted the absence of mental breakdowns or substance abuse within the population, observing that “the people lived a rugged, rigorous life with plenty of exercise.” The Oji-Cree invariably impressed foreigners with their vigor and strength. Another visitor, in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of their “ingenuity, courage, and self-sacrifice,” noting that, in the North, “only those prepared to face hardship and make sacrifices could survive.”

The transformation of their lives began in the 1960s, with the construction of good roads and the arrival of electricity and television:

The good news is that, nowadays, the Oji-Cree no longer face the threat of winter starvation, which regularly killed people in earlier times. They can more easily import and store the food they need, and they enjoy pleasures like sweets and alcohol. Life has become more comfortable. The constant labor of canoeing or snowshoeing has been eliminated by outboard engines and snowmobiles. Television made it north in the nineteen-eighties, and it has proved enormously popular.

But, in the main, the Oji-Cree story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.

It's such a familiar story that it is easy to shake our heads and move on. But what if it really is true, as this and so many other stories imply, that the comforts of modern life are actually a terrible sickness?

Yes, I know the story is more complicated than that. Some Oji-Cree are doing fine -- at least that is the story with all the Indian groups I actually know something about. It is also possible to read the troubles of groups that have recently joined the West as rooted in the pain of their old existence: they overeat because they knew hunger so well, and drug themselves to treat pains they have known all their lives.

But I also wonder if the generally bad experience of people joining our world ought to warn us that something is wrong with our way of life. We don't see it because we are used to it, and can survive it because we have become inured. But the wrongness is still there. I think about this most when I ponder my sons' alienation from our economy and our educational systems; if these things made sense, in a fundamental human way, would young people find them so grim and intimidating?

Kiss Me, Ivar; or, Deciphering Coded Viking Runes

There are about 80 medieval Norse inscriptions which use an alternative sort of runes known as jötunvillur. Nobody has been able to read them, so of course there have been lots of wild theories about what these secret messages might say. Odin's prophecies? Political skullduggery?

But now K. Jonas Nordby, a graduate student identified by medievalists.net as a "runologist," has cracked the code.

He found that on a stick from the 13th century two men, Sigurd and Lavrans, carved their names both in code and in standard runes. For the jötunvillur code, one would replace the original runic character with the last sound of the rune name. For example, the rune for ‘f’, pronounced fe, would be turned into an ‘e’, while the rune for ‘k’, pronounced kaun, became ‘n’.

“It’s like solving a puzzle,” said Nordby to the Norwegian website forskning.no. “Gradually I began to see a pattern in what was apparently meaningless combinations of runes.”

And what did the first deciphered message say?

Kiss me.

Sigh. Sometimes the world should be a little more like a Dan Brown novel.

The North German Gothic: Stralsund and Stargard Szczeciński

As the Gothic style was passed from builder to builder and patron to patron across Europe, it changed. By the time it reached the shores of the Baltic Sea it had taken rather different forms. The German-speaking merchant cities who built these churches looked west toward the empire for their inspiration, but something of the plains and marshes of eastern Europe seeped into their architecture. Above, St. Mary's Church in Stralsund; below, St. Mary's Church in Stargard, now the Polish town of Stargard Szczeciński.

The foundation stone of Stargard's Marienkirche was laid in 1292, and it was completed as a parish church in 1350. But then it was enlarged twice in the fifteenth century, assuming its modern size in 1500. The final touches to the elaborate tower were not added until 1723. Like most churches in that part of the world it was built of brick. It was converted to Protestant worship in the sixteenth century, than back to the Catholic church after World War II.

The delight of this church is the nave, with its striking pillars and elaborate vaulting. The contrasting colors are a common element in the Gothic of the Baltic region.

The Stralsund Marienkirche was built in the thirteenth century, but in 1382 the tower collapsed, bringing down much of the church with it. It had to be rebuilt from its foundations. But this was done quickly, and it was open again by 1411. The original tower, said by tradition to have been the tallest structure in Christendom, was struck by lightning in 1647 and crashed to the ground.

The interior was gutted by a fire around the same time and the medieval decoration was mostly destroyed, but this vaulting is still quite cool.

And some painting ceiling survives in the chancel. I found these and others in a German book about the Gothic, and I am fascinated by their difference from the Gothic of other places.

The Wandering Librarian

Retired teacher Antonio La Cava travels the villages of Basilicata, Italy in his “Bibliomotocarro,” lending books to children. From 5election.

Stone Steps, Nikko, Japan

By Kosuke Okahara, part of a feature on visiting Nikko in the Times.

Is Obamacare Leading to More Part Time Work?

Derek Thompson takes on the claim that Obama's policies and especially his health care law are taking us toward an economy of part-time workers:

The first thing you would expect to see from a Part-Time America is that the number of part-time jobs added would rival the number of full-time jobs added. But in the last year, new full-time jobs outnumbered part-time jobs by 1.8 million to 8,000. For every new part-time job, we're creating 225 full-time positions.

And are part time workers making up a larger share of the workforce? No. Part time work is still more common than normal, but that has been true since 2008, and it is entirely a consequence of recession and high unemployment.

Imagination to Reality

From the wonderful blog of Futility Closet:

In composing a state map of New York in the 1930s, the General Drafting Company wanted to be sure that competing mapmakers would not simply copy its work. So the company’s founder, Otto G. Lindberg, and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, scrambled their initials and placed the fictional town of Agloe at the intersection of two dirt roads in the Catskills north of Roscoe.

Several years later, they discovered Agloe on a Rand McNally map and confronted their competitor. But Rand was innocent: It had got the name from the county government, which had taken it from the Agloe General Store, which now occupied the intersection. The store had taken the name from a map by Esso, which had (apparently) copied it from Lindberg’s map. Agloe had somehow clambered from imagination into reality.

The Ripley Scroll

George Ripley (c. 1415-1495) was an English priest and noted alchemist, one of several fifteenth-century figures who were rumored to have created the philosopher's stone and turned lead into gold. (Nichoas Flameau was another.) He left England as a young man to study alchemy in Germany and then spent about twenty years in Rome, working for the papacy. In 1477 he returned to England and became a canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire. About twenty copies of his scroll survive, all made in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The scroll purports to be an allegorical account of how to make the philosopher's stone. You can read a description of the scroll here that explains some of the symbolism. This is the Yale copy, which I found at BibliOdyssey.

Detail from a very large version of this scan. Below, a sample of Ripley's allegorical verse.

Of my blood and water I wish
Plenty in all the World there is
It runneth in every place
Who it findeth he hath grace

In the World it runneth over all
And goeth round as a ball
But thou understand well this
Of the worke thou shalt miss

Therefore know ere thou begin
What he is and all his kin
Many a name he hath full sure
And all is but one Nature

Thou must part him in three
And then knit him as the Trinity
And make them all but one
Lo here is the Philosophers Stone

Sorry the scroll doesn't look quite right; I had to cut it into pieces and it was hard to make them line up exactly; but then the leaves in the scroll don't line up perfectly anyway.

Erdogan, Gulen, and Turkey's Troubles

If you are at all curious about what is happening in Turkey, with protests and riots and so on, I recommend Suzy Hansen's long article in the Times. She explains that Turkey is run these days by an alliance between the AKP, the center-right political party headed by Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, and a Muslim religious and social movement headed by Fethullah Gulen:

Erdogan welcomed the movement’s international influence and media support. With its endorsements, he achieved real gains. He sidelined the military. He moved Turkey’s laws significantly toward European Union norms. The economy flourished, as he pushed privatization and investors from abroad poured money into the country. The A.K.P. built hospitals, roads, bridges and luxury shopping malls. Turkey had been so dysfunctional, and so undemocratic, that many of these initiatives were necessary.

Eventually, however, they seemed like a power grab. Around 2007, the A.K.P. and Gulenists in the judiciary and the police force put hundreds of journalists and former military generals on trial, charged with being members of a Kemalist “deep state.” Much of the evidence appeared to have been manufactured by Gulenists. At the same time, many Turks were beginning to believe that the intelligence wing of the police force was wiretapping the phones of journalists and businessmen. Erdogan himself bullied the corporate owners of media outlets, and hundreds of journalists were muzzled or fired. And in 2010, a referendum on the Constitution revamped the judicial system to favor the judges affiliated with Erdogan and Gulen. Instead of reforming the state, the A.K.P. appeared to be capturing it.

A big part of the problem is that Turkey's opposition is too fragmented and too troubled by past scandals to mount much of a challenge to Erdogan; a well-organized opposition could have beaten Erdogan in 2010.

The background to the current crisis is that Erdogan and Gulen have fallen out. Gulen has denounced the violent tactics Erdoan has used against protesters, and it is Gulenists who have aired corruption charges against Erdogan's close associates. Erdogan would almost certainly lose an election held today -- that is, if anyone can be found to run against him.

I am sure all of this is very stressful to live through, but I think that in the long run it is making Turks more and more involved in their government, and I hope that eventually the current protests will be seen as a bump in the road toward real Turkish democracy.

Marrakech Motorbike Maidens

In today's look at our endlessly fascinating species, I give you the Motorbike Maidens of Marrakech, Morocco. Pictures by British-Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj (more here). Not all women who cover their heads are oppressed by the patriarchy.

And an account of the phenomenon:

After my first encounter, I could not get enough of the female motorbike riders in the city. With a population of over 1 million people, this third largest city of Morocco is rumored to have 1 million motorbikes - and it seemed like so indeed. Everywhere one goes, one sees everybody riding a motorbike in Marrakech. It is almost surreal, vibrant and powerfully projects an unending sea of motorbikes, with the female bikers making it extra colorful. The female bikers were everywhere and they were just as empowered or aggressive bike drivers as the men. . . . I could not find anyone to provide a satisfactory answer as to where this culture of women riding motorbikes in Marrakech originated. Most just pointed out that it has always been that way.

Plus one unposed photo from the set that accompanies that article: