The Two-Faced Statue

Remarkable carved wooden statue by an unknown French artist, c. 1890. It depicts two characters from Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles and Margaretta.

Carved from a single sycamore log.

Amazing

Would Bigger Representative Assemblies Lead to Better Government?

Some folks these days are arguing that what we need is smaller legislative districts, so that legislators would have closer ties to their constituents. I have seen calls for a US Congress with 50,000 members.

Two economists, Veda Narasimhan & Jeffrey Weaver, realized that India's thousands of local councils provided a way to test this theory, since those councils have widely varying memberships. They find that the size of the council has zero effect on anything:

Political inclusion is widely believed to improve governance, motivating the creation of elected representatives for highly localized constituencies. This paper studies 1.2 million "hyperlocal" representatives across 150,000 local governments in rural India. Exploiting discontinuities that determine the number and identity of these representatives, we assess how expanded representation affects governance outcomes. We find precisely estimated null effects on core functions, including public project management, intermediation in access to benefit programs, alignment of policy with citizen preferences, equity of benefit allocation, and oversight of public finances. These findings highlight the limits of expanding political representation if representative capacity is weak.

Layered Defense in Ukraine, with Some Thoughts on the Battle

Via Perun's new video on the battlefield situation in Ukraine, an example of Ukraine's new approach to defense. Many of the barriers are intended to slow or stop light troops on motorcycles and SUVs; hung up the wire, they become easy marks for drones.

The traditional way to breach such a line would involve heavy use of armored vehicles, but Russia is running low on those and is reluctant is expose them to drone attack. Russian artillery fires are also way down, partly due to the drone threat, partly due to ammunition shortages. So Russia relies on glide bombs to blast gaps in these defenses. That is going very slowly, which is why Russian progress is so slow this year.

Perun accepts the evidence that Russian progress has slowed to near zero, and he gives credence to the argument that Russia is now losing more troops than it is recruiting. He notes that this doesn't necessarily project into the future, but says there should be "cautious optimism" that things have shifted Ukraine's way.

A Weekend at My House

Saturday started with my son Thomas and I replacing the porch steps.

A friend took me to the Expo Titanic exhibit, which was fun, especially the room where they simulate you standing in the crow's nest and spotting the iceberg.

And I spent time in the garden, at its late spring roses and peonies peak. All in all, a very fine weekend.

An Interesting Difference between Men and Women

"Would you marry someone less intelligent than you?"

Outright "no":

Women: 45%
Men: 8%

Women are nearly 6x more likely to rule it out entirely. The single largest gender disparity in our deep-question dataset.

— Jake Kosloski on Twitter/X

 

Links 15 May 2026

William Trost Richards, Tintagel, 1879

A list of common things we don't understand, including sleep and lightning (Twitter/X)

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Markus Brunetti's amazing church photographs.

Institute for Family Studies report lays out how rigid and afraid many American parents are about letting their kids leave the house. Crazy.

Scott Siskind on AI writing.

Pend architects found a way to wedge two pretty nice houses into a neglected alley space in Edinburgh. (Dezeen, architects's web site)

Ben Pentreath, photographic hymn to the Orkneys, magnificent.

Long, interesting review of Sven Beckert's Capitalism: a Global History.

An argument that European Economic Stagnation is Real. Summary on Twitter/X.

Shale gas (from fracking) has saved US consumers hundreds of billions. Summary at Marginal Revolution.

Medieval wax notebook found in German latrine.

Sarah Ainslie's portraits of people with their wardrobes.

Review of a new biography of Peter Matthiessen.

Summary of the hantavirus situation at Science News.

Perun against policymakers betting on prediction markets, one-hour video.

Advances in understanding whale "language", 15-minute video.

Why Postliberalism is a failure.

What Really Uses Water: Almonds vs. Data Centers

Via Brian Beal on Twitter/X.

David Reich on Bronze Age Genetics

In this interview with Dwarkesh Patel, genetist David Reich says that human genetic change was fastest between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. Changes associated with the Bronze and Iron Ages seem to have been far more dramatic than those that took place during the agricultural revolution:

In this part of the world—Europe and the Middle East—we are actually in a period of accelerated natural selection. One way to see this is to look at the enrichment pattern we’re observing, where immune traits are unusually associated with these selection signals. We could compare the last 5,000 years of our time period, what’s called the Bronze Age and further onward, to the previous 5,000 years. What we see is that this intensification of selection around immune traits, and similarly the intensification around metabolic traits, has accelerated over this time period.

It’s not like natural selection has been at the same rate over all places and times. It’s increasing over the time period we’re analyzing. Plausibly the whole time period has increased compared to previous periods. We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture. Almost everyone we’re analyzing are farmers or food producers in one way or another. Farming was invented for the first time anywhere in the world in the Middle East 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. The people who invented farming exploded into Europe after 8,500 years ago, spread across the continent, and expanded rapidly.

In the Bronze Age, there was an intensification of how people lived, with much higher population densities. People were living more and more next to their animals and getting their diseases, and exchanging their diseases with the animals and with each other. This is a period of rapid change in how people are living, resulting in different biological needs of this population. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that in the context of these dramatic changes, the biology of the population might not be ideally adapted.

There might be what some people call an evolutionary mismatch, where you take a genetic variation that evolved in hunter-gatherers and put it into farmers or pastoralists, and it’s not exactly right. What you’re seeing is the DNA of this population, which descended from hunter-gatherers only 10,000 years ago, reacting to the shock of having been moved into an agricultural, Bronze Age, high-population-density, urban environment. A hypothesis is that what we’re seeing is the adaptation that occurs as a result.

One example:

One of the things we do in this work is look carefully at many of these positions in the DNA. . . . One of the things we see is that, while for the most part the signals of natural selection we detect are consistent with constant natural selection over time, in a handful of them we’re able to see that there’s been a reversal or a radical change in natural selection. Very often that occurs in the period between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, which is the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, a period of rapid population growth and rapid movement to intensive use of many technologies that were not used that way before.

An example of this is the TYK2 genetic variant that is a major risk factor for severe tuberculosis, which is the most important infectious disease killer in the world today. If you look at this major risk factor for tuberculosis, this variant rockets up in frequency from 8,000 or 6,000 years ago to maybe 9% or 10% in this part of the world. Then it rockets down in frequency in the last 3,000 years. In both cases, there’s very clear evidence of natural selection, in the first case to increase in frequency, and in the next case to decrease in frequency.

A possible reason is the spread of tuberculosis. It maybe becomes endemic in the population 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That’s potentially consistent with pathogen sequence data and other lines of evidence. And maybe this variant was protecting against something before then, but then tuberculosis became significant after that point, and it was so bad that it pushed in the opposite direction. That’s speculative.

An Ivory Casket, c 1350 AD

This ivory casket is in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It was made in France around 1350. The rest of the text comes from the online description.

This splendid casket is carved with scenes from romances and allegorical literature representing the courtly ideals of love and heroism. In the center of the lid, knights joust as ladies watch from the balcony; to the left, knights lay siege to the Castle of Love, the subject of an allegorical battle. 

The remaining scenes on the casket are drawn from well-known stories about Aristotle and Phyllis, Tristan and Iseult, and tales of the gallant, heroic deeds of Gawain, Galahad, and Lancelot. The box may originally have been a courtship gift. 

Corn Ethanol vs. Solar Farms

Andy Masley on Twitter/X:

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn.

Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now! 

Corn-based ethanol was always dumb and now it is even stupider.

A Visit to the Walters

Sunday I took a friend who had never been there to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. There I am above with a bust of Othello by Pietro Calvi, 1873.

We started in the Asian collection, wandering at random, our eyes seeking out striking objects like this hair ornament and wine pot.

Then we wandered through the medieval section, where there was much stained glass.

Love this Palmesel, or Palm Sunday Donkey (1350-1400), made to pulled through the streets of some German town in a Palm Sunday procession.

And then to the Renaissance, where the best stuff was portraits. Paolo Veronese, Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Deidamia, 1552

Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani, c. 1595

Same in the Baroque section. Giuseppe Ghislandi, portrait of a nobleman, c. 1700. He looks like a television star.

Unknown artist, Portrait of the Marchioness Angela Maria Lombardi, c. 1710.

We were getting weary so we went down to the first floor to see an exhibit of jewelry by Afrofuturist Douriean Fletcher, who did a lot of work for the Black Panther films. Great exhibit, with some beautiful stuff and some stuff that was weird in interesting ways. Loved it.

And then home.

Putin is Looking for a Way out of His War

Like Trump, Putin seems to be searching for a way out of the unwinnable war he started. Reuters:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on ​Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end, remarks that came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years. "I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters.

Exactly how that end would come about it unclear, since Russia still officially maintains its maximal war aims, which an undefeated Ukraine will never accept. As Noah Smith explains, this shows the limits of dictatorial wars of choice:

Ukraine never threatened Russia at all. The whole Russian cause in this war is based on the notion that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO and the EU was threatening Russia’s “sphere of influence.” But the idea of “spheres of influence”, while sometimes a good factual description of how powerful countries operate, is not a good moral principle. The idea that countries deserve “spheres of influence” is just the claim that powerful countries ought to dominate their weaker neighbors. In other words, it’s just imperialism.

Morality doesn’t field divisions, of course…or does it? Putin can pay desperately poor people to fight in his wars, or empty his prisons of criminals, or buy mercenaries, but can he persuade regular middle-class Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg to die for the glory of the New Russian Empire? Not really, no — which is why as soon as casualties get too high to replace without general mobilization, he starts to think about ending the war.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.

Mother's Day Flowers

Mother's Day

Remembering my wife Lisa, mother of my children, love of my life. Lisa's eulogy is here