Villa Borghese

The Villa Borghese in Rome is an art museum in a 17th-century palace, and it is surrounded by 200 acres (80 hectares) of gardens that are now a public park.

The villa was built for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who was the nephew of Pope Paul V and Bernini's main patron. That's him above, as Bernini rendered him.

The architect of the villa was Flaminio Ponzio, but he is said to have worked from sketches by Borghese himself. At the time this was a vineyard at the edge Rome, and Borghese used it as a summer retreat and to house such of his art collection as would not fit into his apartments at the Vatican.

Quite a palace, no? Those Baroque Romans were a bit over the top some times. But what an art collection.

There must be a dozen Berninis, including some very famous ones.

Plus Borghese was one of the big early collectors of Caravaggio, and owned some wonderful works. Directly above is David with the Head of Goliath, with the severed head as a self-portrait. Maybe Scipione Borghese was a lousy priest and a horrible person – I have no idea – but there is absolutely no faulting his artistic taste.

Later Borghese's continued collecting, so the museum has some great 18th-century works including multiple Canova's. They also once had several famous works from ancient Rome that had been dug up on their properties, but Napoleon stole the best ones and they are now in the Louvre.

Outside is the wonderful park and gardens. Directly adjacent to the villa is the remaining formal garden in the style of the 17th century, sometimes called The Garden of Bitter Oranges. John Evelyn visited the estate in 1644 and described it as "an Elysium of delight" with "Fountains of sundry inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water."

But other than that small portion around the villa gardens were remade in the early 1800s into the English Romantic style, with lakes and follies and winding paths.

And lots and lots of sculpture.

Which brings me to this image. Over the years some of the oldest and most valuable marbles in the garden were moved to the museum and replaced with copies, and then in the 1990s all the rest were replaced. The originals were just put in storage, until some clever person at the museum figured out this unusual way of displaying the lot of them, a sort of half storage room half exhibit.

Nineteenth-century monument to Goethe, who loved this spot.

More views of the park. The Borghese's had long let the public wander the gardens for most of the year, so it was something of a public park even before 1902 when they sold this estate to the Italian government.

Some of the pines celebrated musically by Respighi.

Today this is a very touristy sort of place, where you can eat Italian ices while touring by bicycle or Segway. But thousands of Romans come here, too. This is one of the models of the great public park, copied all around the world. And deservedly so.

Jang Jirak and Korean Nationalism

When Japan annexed Korea in 1910 many strident Korean nationalists went into exile. Among them were aristocrat Yi Hoe-yeong and his five brothers, who fled to a remote town in Manchuria and set up a military academy disguised as a neo-Confucian school. Only one of the brothers survived to see the rebirth of Korea in 1945, Yi Si-yeong, who became South Korea's first vice president.

One of the graduates of that hidden military school was Jang Jirak, who ended up fighting with the Chinese communists. There he ran into American journalist Helen Foster Snow, who interviewed him in 1937 and wrote a long article about him. Jang said to her:

All Koreans wanted only two things, really, though they differed in how to achieve these: independence and democracy. Really they wanted only one thing: freedom – a golden word to those who know it not. Any kind of freedom looked divine to them. They wanted freedom from Japanese oppression, freedom in marriage and love, freedom to live a normal, happy life, freedom to rule their own lives. That is why anarchism had such appeal. The urge toward a broad democracy was really very strong in Korea. This is one reason we did not develop a strong, centralized system of political parties. Each group defended its right to exist and its right to free expression. And each individual fought to the end for his own freedom of belief. There was plenty of democracy among us – but very little discipline. . . .

Nearly all the friends and comrades of my youth are dead, hundreds of them: nationalist, Christian, anarchist, terrorist, communist. But they are alive to me. . . . They failed in the immediate thing, but history keeps a careful accounting. A man's name and his brief dream may be buried with his bones, but nothing that he has ever done or failed to do is lost in the final balance of forces. That is his immortality, his glory or shame. Not even he himself can change this objective fact, for he is history. Nothing can rob a man of a place in the movement of history.

Jang Jirak was eventually executed in one of the Chinese Communist Party's frequent purges.

–Michael Breen, The New Koreans: the Story of a Nation. 2017. p. 150

Ouch

Robert Surcouf was a successful French privateer of the Napoleonic period, who was offered naval commissions but refused them because he preferred privateering. His most famous exploit was taking the British East Indiaman Triton, a ship much larger than his own; realizing that he was outgunned, Surcouf boarded the Triton and his men took it by force, killing ten of its crew. This ended up in a painting by Léon Trémisot (above). Surcouf was eventually awarded the Legion of Honour by Napoleon.

But these days Surcouf is most famous for a single line, which is about as well attested as such things ever are:

When a British captive officer challenged Surcouf with the words "You French fight for money while we fight for honour", Surcouf replied "Each of us fights for what he lacks most."

John Ioannidis Takes on Nutritional Science

John Ioannidis, the world's leading skeptic of large statistical studies in science, has an opinion piece in the JAMA in which he shreds nutritional science. Excerpts:

Some nutrition scientists and much of the public often consider epidemiologic associations of nutritional factors to represent causal effects that can inform public health policy and guidelines. However, the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiology is difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The field needs radical reform.

In recent updated meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies, almost all foods revealed statistically significant associations with mortality risk. . . .

Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort studies represents life span–long causal associations, for a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, nonexperts presented with only relative risks may falsely infer that eating 12 hazelnuts daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single mandarin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life. Conversely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expectancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than smoking. . . .

These implausible estimates of benefits or risks associated with diet probably reflect almost exclusively the magnitude of the cumulative biases in this type of research.

The science of diet is just very, very hard:

Individuals consume thousands of chemicals in millions of possible daily combinations. For instance, there are more than 250 000 different foods and even more potentially edible items, with 300 000 edible plants alone. Seemingly similar foods vary in exact chemical signatures (eg, more than 500 different polyphenols). Much of the literature silently assumes disease risk is modulated by the most abundant substances; for example, carbohydrates or fats. However, relatively uncommon chemicals within food, circumstantial contaminants, serendipitous toxicants, or components that appear only under specific conditions or food preparation methods (eg, red meat cooking) may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual’s genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

And besides the possible bad effects of all this on people worried about their diets, there is also a larger concern:

Nutritional research may have adversely affected the public perception of science.

No kidding.

Today's Unsurprising University News

Appointing a diversity officer has no effect on the diversity of the professors hired.

Combat and Prayer

Some conventional wisdom confirmed:

Learning to cope with man’s mortality is central to the teachings of the world’s major religions. However, very little is known about the impact of life-and-death trauma on religiosity. This study exploits a natural experiment in military deployments to estimate the causal effect of traumatic shocks on religiosity. We find that combat assignment is associated with a substantial increase in the probability that a serviceman subsequently attends religious services regularly and engages in private prayer. Combat-induced increases in religiosity are largest for enlisted servicemen, those under age 25, and servicemen wounded in combat. The physical and psychological burdens of war, as well as the presence of military chaplains in combat zones, emerge as possible mechanisms.

Is a decline in the amount of death the average person experiences a major driver of secularization?

Isis

Roman, probably 2nd century AD, from Naples.

In the White House

Reince Priebus on White House decision making:

When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.

Donald Trump on Reince Priebus:

He’s like a little rat. He just scurries around. You don’t even have to pay any attention to him.

That was while Priebus was Trump's chief of staff.

Those are from Woodward's new book, via the Times.

Open Access Science

European science news:

Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years. . . .

The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication. The papers would have a liberal publishing licence that would allow anyone else to download, translate or otherwise reuse the work. “No science should be locked behind paywalls!” says a preamble document that accompanies the pledge, called Plan S, released on 4 September. . . .

As written, Plan S would bar researchers from publishing in 85% of journals, including influential titles such as Nature and Science.

About time, I would say. Scientific journals were founded to speed the distribution of scientific results, but now they spend most of their energy trying to limit access. I think this is especially annoying when the money for the research comes from the government; when the taxpayers pay for science, they have a right to read the results.

Knausgaard on Fate

In the last volume of his 3,600-page autobiographical novel, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on hearing from an old friend who appeared in the first volume:

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. . . . But what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate.

James Camp comments:

The transformation of the arbitrary into the inevitable, of the insignificant into fate: There is no more beautiful statement in all of My Struggle of its great theme. In its long, wandering sentences, in which so much that is unalike is swept up and suspended, the grammar seems to stretch to accommodate this contradiction: that details mean both nothing and everything.

How to Make Big Decisions

Interesting essay in the Times by writer Steven Johnson about research on decision making. First piece of advice: consider multiple alternatives.

One important insight that has emerged from this research is the importance of generating alternatives to any course of action you are considering. In the early 1980s, a business school professor named Paul Nutt set out to catalog real-world decisions. . . .

The most striking finding in Professor Nutt’s research was this: Only 15 percent of the decisions he studied involved a stage where the decision makers actively sought out a new option beyond the initial choices on the table. In a later study, he found that only 29 percent of organizational decision makers contemplated more than one alternative.

This turns out to be a bad strategy. Over the years, Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.

Considering multiple alternatives is the heart is the Environmental review process under NEPA, which requires you to generate multiple alternatives (including the "no action" alternative) and forecast the impact of each on the environment, traffic, neighborhood cohesion, historic properties, etc. I have taken several courses on this process and every instructor has his or her own fund of stories about projects that failed because the planners did not consider alternatives.

Second piece of advice: imagine failure. Many experts recommend a narrative approach to decisions, that is, telling yourself a story about what will happen if each choice is made.

The psychologist Gary Klein has developed a variation on this technique. He calls it a “premortem.” As the name suggests, the approach is a twist on the medical procedure of post-mortem analysis. In a post-mortem, the subject is dead, and the coroner’s job is to figure out the cause of death. In a premortem, the sequence is reversed: “Our exercise,” Dr. Klein explains, “is to ask planners to imagine that it is months into the future and that their plan has been carried out. And it has failed. That is all they know; they have to explain why they think it failed.”

In Dr. Klein’s experience, the premortem has proved to be a much more effective way to tease out the potential flaws in a decision. A whole range of bad cognitive habits — from groupthink to confirmation bias — tends to blind us to the potential pitfalls of a decision once we have committed to it. It isn’t enough to simply ask yourself, “Are there any flaws here in this plan that I’m missing?” By forcing yourself to imagine scenarios where the decision turned out to be a disastrous one, you can think your way around those blind spots and that false sense of confidence.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Bath, England

Bath is the only UNESCO World Heritage town in Britain, because of its dense accumulation of Roman, Medieval, and Georgian wonders.

The place started as a holy spring in Celtic Britain, sacred to the goddess Sulis. The Romans took over the baths and built their own temple, equating Sulis with Minerva. Early on, perhaps in the 60s AD, the Romans stabilized the soft ground around the spring by driving dozens of oak piles into the mud; these held up the Roman bath complex and still contribute to its survival.

The complex evolved over the centuries, reaching its height in the 300s AD.

Now the place is a historical site with an attached museum that has some great artifacts, including this bronze head of Sulis/Minerva and the temple pediment with its image of either (take your pick) Medusa or Helios. Although you can no longer bathe in the precious Roman pool, there is an adjacent modern facility where you can take the waters in a rooftop pool.

The town slid into obscurity after the Romans withdrew, and we next hear of it when a Benedictine abbey was founded there in late Anglo-Saxon times. The Normans built a huge Romanesque church on the site, but they neglected to drive enough oak piles into the soil and the thing started falling in on itself not long after it was finished in the 1260s.

When Oliver King became bishop of Bath and Wells in 1499 the church was a ruin, so he decided to tear half of it down and rebuild the nave into a smaller church in the fashionable perpendicular Gothic style. Among his personal touches was the famous ladder with angels going up and down between heaven and earth, which he saw in a dream.

Entrance, with statues of Saints Peter and Paul, to whom the monastery was dedicated.

Alas Bishop King's timing was bad, and the church was still unfinished when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1537. This great building became the church for a parish that could not afford to keep it up, let alone finish it, and so it gradually decayed again.

But then came the Victorians, who decided that the church must be restored, by which they meant turned into their vision of what a medieval church should have been like. Between 1864 and 1874 architect Sir George Gilbert Scott directed a "restoration" that was controversial even at the time for its lack of historicity. Scott replaced the old wooden ceiling with this spectacular fan vaulting. He also added the pinnacles – that's the little towers at the end of the flying buttresses – because, well, shouldn't it look like that?

But that's jumping ahead, passing over Bath's great era of prosperity in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This was the Bath of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney and a few thousand contemporary romance novels of the "Regency" sort. Also the Sally Lunn who invented the bread. This is part of the Circus, a housing development designed by John Wood the Elder and built in the 1750s.

The old Holburne Hotel, now the Holburne Museum, with attached "pleasure garden." All you need to know about contemporary Bath is that the Museum holds gin tastings in the garden, featuring "an array of artisanal and flavored gins."

The Royal Crescent, also designed by John Wood and built between 1764 and 1776. Where Darcy would have rented a house, I suppose.

More Georgian buildings.

Hats. Is this what a woman wears to an outdoor gin tasting in the art museum garden?

Famous and controversial statue of King Bladud, which is dated 1699 but probably does not date to then.  Bladud is a character from Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain, one of the main sources of the myths of King Arthur. According to Geoffrey King Bladud discovered the healing spring in 836 BC; the myth grew from there and by the 18th century it included the story that Bladud's whole herd of pigs was cured of leprosy by wallowing in the warm mud by the spring.

Bath might be the place in Britain where you can get closest to the Romans, besides all the other wonderful things about it, and I very much wish I were headed there this week instead of back to work.

Ancient Chinese Dragons

Dragons are very ancient in Chinese art, going back to the Neolithic; in fact they are one of the clearest signs of cultural continuity from the middle Neolithic to modern times.

Some web sites say this is the oldest depiction of a dragon in Chinese art, dating to around 4500 BC. This burial at Yangshao in Henan province is an adult male, surrounded by a dragon and a tiger made of clamshells. In China you can still buy everything from a chair to a placemat that features a dragon paired with a tiger.

Dragons became common in the later Neolithic,after 3500 BC. Or perhaps I should say that surviving dragons become common, since that was the period that saw the first flouring of Chinese jade carving. This form is called in Chinese the "pig dragon." The more open shape at the top of the post dates to the same period.

In the Chinese Bronze Age, otherwise known as the Shang Dynasty, c. 1540-1040 BC, the older forms were elaborated.

You can see the distinctive ornamentation of Shang bronze work in this dragon-shaped dagger.

Shang jade ax ornamented with dragons.

During the first millennium BC the older forms developed into the classic Chinese dragon we still know. At that time the dragon was also fixed as one of the Four Animals of the cardinal directions. In China dragons were always associated with both water and the sky and thus with rain, and that becomes clear in the texts of the Warring States period (465-221 BC).

"Emergent Cloud Dragons" of the Eastern Zhou (771-221 BC), carved in white jade.

A bronze chariot fitting of the Western Zhou, c 1050 to 771 BC.

A roofing tile and a white jade piece of the Eastern Zhou, both c 400 BC.

This silk scroll comes from a tomb of the Warring States period; it depicts a sorcerer riding a dragon up to heaven.

One of the oldest fully three dimensional renderings I have seen is this earthenware piece from from the Six Dynasties period, 221-589 AD. During this later period the sources start to give the fully developed folklore of the dragon, which included a lot of numerology:

The dragon traditionally has 117 scales comprising 81 yang and 36 yin (9×9 and 9×4). The number nine is frequently associated with dragons – nine being the highest single digit number. Nine represents the sky in the I Ching (Book of Changes) and dragons are often shown in groups of nine. 

The sequence below is a great illustration of the continuity that fascinates me. The first is Shang, the second Han (180 BC to 221 AD), the third Ming (1368-1644 AD). In the later periods these were used in Daoist rituals that were probably the direct descendants of rituals practiced in Neolithic times:

Echoes of the Teacher Strikes

News from the Oklahoma primaries:

Starting with West Virginia in late February, a number of Republican-majority, right-to-work states have seen strikes by public-school teachers, and the teachers have, by and large, gained significant concessions from state legislatures. These strikes have, not surprisingly, energized the Left, and especially the rising socialist Left. Interestingly, though, they’ve also revealed cleavages among Republicans. In May, for example, Travis Brenda, a socially conservative public-school teacher in rural Rockcastle County, Ky., bested a rising-star Republican incumbent in a GOP state-senate primary. What was the issue that propelled him to victory? Teacher pay, of course.

Which leads me to Oklahoma. . . . Basically, the Oklahoma state legislature tried to meet some of the teachers’ demands after a statewide strike. Most Republican legislators decided to get behind legislation that would boost teacher pay. However, 19 legislators voted against the bill, presumably out of concern about its fiscal consequences. Now, after the GOP primary runoff earlier this week, it is assured that 15 of them won’t return to the legislature next year, as CNN reports. Some chose to retire from office, others were term-limited, and then, most notably, eight of them lost their primaries to opponents who were more solicitous of the interests of public-school teachers.

As in Kansas, South Carolina, and Louisiana, Republican voters and legislators have found that there are real limits to what hard core conservative policies can achieve. Conservative rhetoric still thrives on the right, but at the state level moderate policies are back in fashion.

Vanilla, Libertarianism, and the Joneses

The soaring price of vanilla has led to interesting times in northeastern Madagascar, where much of the world's vanilla is grown. High prices for their main crop have enriched many in this region, leading to a flood of new motorbikes and "vanilla mansions" like this one.

The high price has also led to a destructive crime wave, as thieves steal vanilla pods from the vines, sell the stolen pods to crooked dealers, and pay off the police to look the other way. This has led some small growers to painstakingly mark every single pod with their initials or some other personal symbol, to make it harder for thieves to sell their crop. It was news of this marking that first got me interested in the problem; imagining doing this for every one of the thousand or ten thousand pods that provide your whole annual income.

Of course the unreliability of the police has led some growers to take the law into their own hands:

Not only does Mr. Oclin patrol his plot of about 3,000 vanilla vines, he pays three men to stand guard every night during the four months before the summer harvest.

The men are armed with double-pronged fishing spears and clubs, plus Mr. Oclin’s rifle. Each night, a vigilante group patrolling local plantations stops by with a half-dozen men armed with clubs and machetes.

“Every vanilla plot will be guarded,” Mr. Oclin said.

With little public trust in a corrupt police force and justice system, mob justice often prevails when a suspected thief is caught.

In April, a local militia captured a thief with a little over three pounds of freshly picked vanilla. He was beaten with sticks until he collapsed, then hacked to death with machetes, according to residents. It was just one of dozens of similar “vanilla murders” over the past two seasons.

Like all such gangs, these vanilla vigilantes will eventually suffer from corruption and uncontrolled violence; just wait.

And in another all-too-predictable outcome, the sudden influx of wealth has ended hunger in this region but created new social problems instead:

Mr. Lomone said he was concerned about the boom’s effect on local culture, with people doing whatever they can to get rich quick.

“Now in Madagascar, it’s not a problem of poverty to eat, but of social poverty,” he said. “It’s about the competition to keep up with others making fast money. It’s not good. We can’t keep going like this.”