How are We Evolving?

Ali Akbari et al on BioArxiv: 

We present a method for detecting evidence of natural selection in ancient DNA time-series data that leverages an opportunity not utilized in previous scans: testing for a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14000 years and 6510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection. Previous work showed that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution, but in the last ten millennia, many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. 

This only confirms what people have thought from other evidence, that our evolution has speeded up rather than slowed down: In what directions have we been evolving?

Discoveries include an increase from ~0% to ~20% in 4000 years for the major risk factor for celiac disease at HLA-DQB1; a rise from ~0% to ~8% in 6000 years of blood type B; and fluctuating selection at the TYK2 tuberculosis risk allele rising from ~2% to ~9% from ~5500 to ~3000 years ago before dropping to ~3%. We identify instances of coordinated selection on alleles affecting the same trait, with the polygenic score today predictive of body fat percentage decreasing by around a standard deviation over ten millennia, consistent with the Thrifty Gene hypothesis that a genetic predisposition to store energy during food scarcity became disadvantageous after farming. We also identify selection for combinations of alleles that are today associated with lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance (scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling). These traits are measured in modern industrialized societies, so what phenotypes were adaptive in the past is unclear. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.9 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits. 

Lighter skin is a really obvious one; peope in the north need sunlight for vitamin D more than they need protection from the tropical sun. I just mentioned our declining ability to store fat, which is related to the spread of agriculture, and rising intelligence seems pretty useful. But some of these raise questions: if schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are being selected against, how did they ever become common in the first place? Why on earth would celiac disease rise in a region where wheat is the staple food?

They also find that the risk of Multiple Schlerosis is rising due to selection, which is really bizarre, but that male-pattern baldness is decreasing, raising again the question of how it ever got to be common.

Stay tuned to this; we are going to learn a lot more about genetics and how we are evolving over the next decade.

Ukraine, Drones, and Future Warfare

Ukrainian "Dragon Drone" in Action

Is the United States ready for the next war? Is anyone?

I don't think so.

You might say that Ukraine and Russia, which are in the midst of a war in which both sides are holding their own, must therefore be ready for war. I disagree. Their war is being limited by the resources and manpower available to the two sides, and by the slow ramp-up from the three-day "special military operation" to something close to full-on war. They use their missiles and drones as soon as they get them, so they never build up the mass of weaponry that the US, China, and possibly many others might soon have to deploy at the onset of a new conflict.

Consider this coordinated swarm of 8,000 Chinese drones. Ok, they're just staging a light show, but the maneuvers on display could easily be converted into a mass attack. Is anyone ready for an attack by 8,000 drones? Which is not really very many; Ukraine is using and losing around 2 million drones a year right now, and the US Army just ordered a billion dollars' worth of loitering munitions, aka kamikaze drones. The opening attack of the next major war could easily involve 50,000 drones and 1,000 missiles. What would happen to an army or navy attacked like that? I think of something that Gerhard Weinberg wrote about WW II, that the first time every army involved was attacked using the Blitzkrieg combination of tanks and aircraft, they collapsed.

Drones and missiles can be shot down. Iran recently attacked Israel with something like 120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles, and 170 drones, and with US help Israel was able to defend itself effectively. From this and other recent events we have learned that missile defense has gotten quite good, and the US and Israel in particular have weapons that can easily shoot down all the cruise and ballistic missiles in use around the world. The thing is, the weapons that can do this have to be far more sophisticated, and therefore far more expensive, that the missiles they are knocking out. The US seems to have called off its mission to defend merchant shipping in the Red Sea after, according to reports, expending a billion dollars' worth of missiles in two weeks. Not even the US or China can afford to manufacture modern anti-air missiles in the numbers necessary to stop an all-out attack. It was recently revealed that after a major investment in raising production, the US can only manufacture 45 Patriot PAC-3 missiles per month. 

One solution to the cost problem is to shoot down drones and slow cruise missiles with guns. Ukraine loves the German Gephard system (above). At the small scale, Ukraine and Russia are issuing front-line troops with shotguns. These systems can work, but they obviously don't work particularly well, since drones destroy vehicles and kill soldiers ever day.

Last year a Pentagon official – the under-secretary for procurement, or some such person – was asked by a reporter why the US was not buying anti-drone guns. He said that the US has been researching drone defense for a decade, since our troops in Iraq and Syria are attacked with drones every month, and that the answer is electronic warfare. Well, maybe for drones launched by nebulous militias. But in Ukraine the electromagnetic spectrum is its own battlefield, and both side are constantly updating their systems to achieve some slight advantage. There are many videos of tanks with mounted EW systems being destroyed by drones.

Plus, EW only works if the drone depends on a radio connection with a human controller. Drones with simple AI systems already exist that allow them to do the last leg of their attack without guidance; the controller just points them toward a target and they can navigate their way down to hit it. Given the speed of advance in AI, fully autonomous drones will be here soon. (If they aren't already flying around Area 51.) And what if, instead of radar, the drone is connected to its controller by a fiber-optic line? These are being used in Ukraine, and while the first versions are clumsy and often fail when the fiber breaks, these examples are being thrown together in barely professional workshops, and the system can no doubt be improved. The combination of fiber optic connections and simple AI may soon render electromagnetic defenses close to useless.

The US is looking into gun-based anti-drone systems (above), but there doesn't seem to be much focus on this kind of defense.

I think the US and NATO are far behind the curve on these issues. Here is one example of what worries me, from a news story about the lessons of the Ukraine war.

“The first lesson we got out of there was the importance of anti-ship cruise missile defense, when the Slava got hit,” Director of Naval Intelligence Vice Adm. Karl Thomas said, likely referring to the April 2022 sinking of the Slava-class Moskva, which the US said was hit with Ukrainian Neptune cruise missiles. 

Given that anti-ship cruise missiles were introduced in the 1970s, it seems bizarre that the danger they pose should have impressed the US Navy in 2022.

That same news story goes on to describe a competition the Army is holding for anti-drone systems, including a test in which the systems had to defend a command post against up to fifty attackers at once. After watching these demonstrations, the reporter concluded that "Flooding the battlefield with a large number of drones, especially those able to fly in a coordinated fashion, is a threat the U.S. military is still trying to address." And that was just fifty drones. What about 8,000?

Of course the best way to defeat any air or artillery attack is to destroy the systems before the attack is launched. Israel demonstrated thin on August 25 when they bombed the Hezbolla launchers (here, here, here) that were being positioned to launch a massive rocket attack. But Israel has excellent electronic and human intelligence in southern Lebanon, so we can't always rely on that, plus, again, what about the first day of the war?

Of course none of this is a scary as nuclear weapons. But it is plenty scary. I sincerely hope that the level of global saber-rattling eases off soon, because I do not think the world is ready for the kind of fury that our new technologies could easily unleash.

The Last Sunflower

After a hot summer, most of the sunflowers are pretty much done. 

Except for this one. It bided its time all summer, slowly getting taller and taller but not putting out a single bloom. Until this week.

When it began to put out lovely flowers. And it still has lots of buds lower down, so it is going to be blooming for a while. Worth the wait.

And a few more views of the garden from today.

Links 13 September 2024

Alan Lee, Merlin

The seaborn trade between Rome and India was almost certainly much more important than any overland "silk road" between Rome and China.

Open AI releases "strawberry" aka o1, which is supposed to do complex reasoning. Marginal Revolutions has a bunch of links.

Demographic oblivion in the Balkans.

The cool thing about the internet: somebody just randomly asked, "Wow, why does everyone on this French talk show look so good?" and in reply got this amazing thread about how the lighting is done. One trick is to seat the guests around a white table that reflects light up at them.

Wildlife photographer of the year contest: contest gallery, selection at My Modern Met.

More evidence that you should never trust charismatic founders of organizations: accusations that anti-trafficking hero Tim Ballard is a sexual predator. (NY Times, Rolling Stone, Yahoo)

Today's random line: "Her optimism is rare and sails against the winds of contemporary culture." So, there you have it, after a lifetime of thinking of myself as a rather boring, middle-of-the road person I suddenly find myself sailing against the winds. Stand together, bold outsider rebels, and insist that things are better than ever before!

The chats betwen Russian agent Aleksandr Ionov and his FSB handlers, released by US authorities. Among other things Ionov claimed to be supporting the California independence movement. There's a serious threat to US stability.

Study finds that the effect of placebos on patients with mental health problems varies a lot depending on what their condition is: "Patients with major depressive disorder experienced the greatest improvement, followed by those with generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, social phobia, mania, and OCD, while patients with schizophrenia benefited the least."

"Over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2022, the homicide conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000, compared to 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans. The homicide conviction rate for legal immigrants in Texas was 1.2 per 100,000." Source.

And here Matt Yglesias fact checks Elon Musk's latest conspiracy theory about why crime rates are really rising despite the FBI saying otherwise. Same point from Jeremy "adjusted for inflation" Horpedahl.

On Twitter/X, Andrew Neil's farewell to The Spectator. As chairman Neil made The Spectator into a financial success while keeping it true to its snobbish British roots, a real accomplishment, but its owners went bankrupt and sold it to the highest bidder, and after one look at the new owners Neil decided it was time to retire.

Park Ranger explains the environmental impact of a single Cheetos bag dropped in Carlsbad Caverns.

Green energy news: "The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Monday issued final decisions approving NV Energy’s Greenlink West transmission project and Arevia Power’s $2.3 billion, 700-MW solar project."

Collection of photos showing how much some US presidents aged while in office.

The potentially far-reaching consequences of the UK's Equality Act, which requires firms to pay equally for jobs that a board decides are equally demanding.

According to this (obnoxious) post, there are 4.1 million OnlyFans "creators" and 305 million paying accounts. If each of those accounts represents a person, then about 4% of humanity subscribes to OnlyFans. Via Marginal Revolutions.

Interesting David Brooks essay (NY Times) on "the struggle between what you might call the forces of indignation and the forces of exhaustion." Says that like Biden Harris is benefitting from many people being tired of all the drama and the conflict.

The rock-cut architecture of Madagascar.

The current surge in historical fiction.

An economist argues that Russia's economy is now so focused on the war that they can't afford either to win or lose but need the stalement to go on indefinitely. YouTuber Perun says essentially the same thing in this one-hour video; Russia's economy is sustaining the war effort by spending all of its capital and risking its future, and the picture for after the war ends looks grim. He also notes that Russia's current budgets assume military spending will fall by a lot next year.

Low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Russian soldier knocks down a small drone by throwing his rifle at it.

Russian war correspondent films himself being hunted by a drone inside an abandoned factory. Horror movies of the future.

Visually confirmed losses of Russian armored vehicles have topped 10,000, including 3,371 tanks. That doesn't include 831 self-propelled artillery pieces, 415 rocket launchers (MLRS), 273 surface-to-air missile systems, 128 jet aircraft, and 144 helicopters, etc., to a total of nearly 18,000 systems. If you had tried to tell me in 2022 that Russia would end up losing so much I would not have believed you.

Haitians in Ohio and the Immigrant Economy

Right now the debate over immigration in America is so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Anti-immigrant Americans want to complain about crime and violence and cat-eating and what-all. But this is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes, sure, but every number I have seen, whether from the FBI or individual states, shows that they commit fewer crimes than the native born. No doubt there are towns out there where immigrants commit most of the crimes, because those are places where most of the young men are immigrants. Some immigrants do drugs, but, again, not as much as the native born. When people point this out on Twitter/X, the usual response is just to say "You're Lying!" Sigh.

Immigrants do have a high rate of severe mental health problems, but I've never seen anyone cite this in opposition to immigration and anyway the rate of schizophrenia isn't high enough to be a real economic or social problem.

That doesn't mean there are no reasons to oppose immigration. Pro-immigration (or anti-Trump) people have been passing around this interview (summary here) with one of the Ohio factory owners responsible for drawing a lot of Haitains to Springfield:

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So from a factory-owners's perspective, immigration is great. They get people who will do repetitive drudge work all day for mediocre wages. Because however bad working in a factory in Ohio might be, it beats the heck out of being shot by gangsters in Haiti. So, win-win for the factory owners and the Haitians.

But you could ask a different question: is there any way we could convert those dreary factory jobs that upstanding native born Americans don't want into something better? Is it, maybe, that the manufacturers can get away with offering low wages and drudgery because they are competing, not just against whatever US-born workers might be doing instead, but against conditions in Haiti and Venezuela and Vietnam?

(Pro-Trump Republicans like to say that Harris supporters are communists, but imagine a real communist sharing a video casting a factory owner as the hero and the lazy workers as the bad guys.)

A more rational case against immigration would go like this: life in the US is better than life in most places because we limit how many people we take in. If we take in too many that will drag life here down toward conditions in the rest of the world. So long as there are immigrant workers desperate for any kind of job, companies have no incentive to change their work practices toward something better for workers. Step one toward making life in America better for working people, therefore, is to limit the number of immigrants. And maybe the social pathologies of the working class might actually be reduced if we focused on this, and people who could get less miserable, better-paying jobs might be more likely to stay sober and get married and so on.

I think this is wrong, but at least it makes sense. Alas, I've been reading takes on the Haitians in Ohio story for two days and I have not seen this argument made even once. All the anti-immigrant people are fulminating against crime and disorder and community breakdown, which manifestly are not happening.

I believe that immigration is great for the US economy. I believe that the only reason it is still thriving is that immigrants study harder in school than the native born, get more education, work harder, found more companies, and generally do more to make the country thrive than the native born. I have never seen a single credible number that refutes this. That does not mean all immigration is good, or that we couldn't come up with a better system for deciding whom to admit, or that the current number is the best one, or anything like that; just that on net, immigration is a plus. I would like to see companies work harder to recruit workers and change their processes to make them less onerous. I have a feeling, though, that this is not going to happen. I imagine that if we tried to force (say) chicken processors to improve conditions the jobs would just all move to Mexico. (Or, if they didn't, the price of chicken would soar.) Any given level of technology seems to come with its own forms of drudgery.

But this is America in our era: if you want a good life, in economic terms, you have to get a lot of education and put it to use, or else throw yourself into some kind of blue-collar work and get ahead by working hard. You must live a life of bourgeois discipline: getting up every day, getting dressed, going to work, making your numbers, etc. If you fall off that path via depression, drug use, chronic injury, or what have you, your life is going to be hard. Some people fantasize that ending immigration would reduce this pressure, that it would lessen the competition and mean everybody gets more for working less. I think the opposite is true, that in fact hard-working immigrants sustain the rest of us. 

But at least this is an argument worth having. Who is eating cats is not.

The Mothership

     Ben was popping off about something, so I put other stuff out of my mind and listened in. "Man, you can't believe this thing. It will say anything."
     Somebody said, "I thought they shut it down for telling people how to stage anthrax attacks."
     "They tried, but they couldn't. The Feds tried to block it, to pull the plug, whatever. An hour later it's back. Nobody knows where it is or who's behind it or anything."
     "Really?"
     "I'll show you," Ben said, and pulled out his phone. Twenty second later he said, "Ok, what should I ask it?"
     "Ask it how I can get laid." That was Josh.
     People were laughing, but Ben was typing. Ten seconds later he was reading from the screen. "Josh Simmons should consider girls from his high school. Use social media to contact them. At least two would be interested."
     There was laughter, and somebody said, "Talk about bs." But I noticed that Josh wasn't laughing. He seemed to be thinking it over, like it really might be a good idea and he was trying to figure out who the two were.
     At hour later I was home, staring at my monitor. I entered the string of numbers Ben had given me and after a few second the screen filled with a green-tinted image of a huge flying saucer. Wrapping around its form were the letters MOTHERSHIP AI. A small box for text appeared under the saucer. I typed, "Who killed JFK?"
     A minute later a long article landed on my screen that started, President John F. Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was encouraged to carry out this plan by two Florida-based mobsters named . . . It went on and on. The mobsters had been put up to it by a cabal of three dissident CIA officers. It gave dates and places of meetings, everything.
     I tried, "Why did Valdimir Putin think he could easily conquer Ukraine?" It thought for a minute, then gave me another long article:
     The Russian FSB assured President Putin that Kyiv would fall easily because of the number of intelligence assets they had within the Ukrainian government and military. These included the head of President Zelenskyy's bodyguards and two of his close aides, as well as commanders in the National Guard and the Kyiv police. However, the Russians were not aware that they had been thoroughly penetrated by American intelligence, and many of their own top people were on the US payroll. Those agents kept the US well informed about Russian moves and provided the CIA with the names of many key Russian assets. Some of these were removed, others turned, becoming double agents. These sources also provided the US with the complete Russian plan of battle for the attack, allowing it to be blunted. . . .
     It gave me more names, more dates, more details. I tried a bunch of other questions: how to create a deadly poison gas at home, how to hack into my ex-girlfriend's email, how to cheat at Civilization VI. It gave me detailed instructions for everything. At first it was cool, but then it started to worry me. Where was all this coming from? Was it real, or made up? People said the instructions it gave out for the anthrax attacks really worked, but did it really know who killed JFK? If so, how? And who was behind it?
     I typed, "Who owns Mothership AI?" It responded, I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any information on that subject. Huh.
     I tried, "Is Mothership AI owned by the Chinese government?"
     I'm sorry, John, I cannot find any indication that the Chinese government is involved in Mothership AI.
     I thought some more, and weird ideas starting floating into my head. I felt the solid floor dissolving underneath my feet. I typed, "Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?"
     Nothing happened. I typed it again: Is Mothership AI controlled by aliens?
     IS MOTHERSHIP AI CONTROLLED BY ALIENS???
     The screen went dark.

Patrick Radden Keefe, "Say Nothing"

Say Nothing is a remarkable book, fully deserving of its slot on the NY Times 100 best books of the century. It is both a general narrative of the Irish Troubles and a tale of one particular murder, the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972. The story is mainly told from the IRA point of view with a focus on four people: Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and sisters Marian and Dolours Price.

Many Irish people had never accepted the partition of the island, and there had been sporadic political violence in the north since 1916. But things were mostly pretty quiet in the 1950s and 1960s. What ignited the Troubles was an attempt by some young Catholics to organize a civil rights movement modeled on the one in the US. On October 5, 1968 a group of Catholic civil rights protesters tried to march through a Protestant neighborhood in Derry, and they were savagely attacked by loyalist paramilitaries while the police watched. This and other incidents led some members of the Irish Republican Army to call for a resumption of the "armed struggle" to drive out the British. Older IRA men were not eager for war, so a group of young radicals split away from the main faction and formed the Provisional IRA. It was the "Provos," as people called them, who carried out most of the bombings, shootings and so on over the next twenty years. Well, from the Catholic side, anyway; Protestant paramilitaries carried out plenty, and there were also atrocities committed by the police and the British army.

Two of the leaders of the Provos were Gerry Adams, who was more of a strategist, and Brendan Hughes, who was the operational leader of the Belfast Brigade. Marion and Dolours Price were two of their top soldiers. There is now a lot of oral history of these people, and they described these early days as dangerous and violent but also thrilling. Then they all went to prison. Marion and Dolours staged a famous hunger strike; one of the things I had forgotten about, until this book reminded me, was what a big deal IRA hunger strikes were. Gerry Adams seems to have done a lot of thinking during his prison stint, and to have decided – when is completely unclear – that violence would never drive out the British. So he shifted over from the IRA to become the head of its associated political party, Sinn Fein. His first major move was to have an imprisoned hunger striker, Bobby Sands, run for Parliament as a Sinn Fein candidate. (That was in 1981.) As Adams got more and more into politics and spent more time negotiating with various British, Irish, and American politicians, he began to say that he had never carried out violent acts and had in fact never been a member of the IRA.

One of the best parts of Say Nothing relates what happened to the aging soldiers of the IRA as the violence wound down and the peace process gathered momentum. They were a depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted bunch, and many of the former hunger strikers ended up anorexic. They were also furious with Gerry Adams, who had once ordered them to commit violent acts but now pretended he had never been involved. The old provos complained that they had carried out killings and bombings with one goal in mind: to drive the British out of Ireland. The mishmash compromise of the Good Friday Accords was not what they had in mind. Dolours Price said that this outcome could not justify any of what she had done, that the violence would only have been worth it if it had led to victory.

But there were plenty of other moral quandaries to go around. After peace was more or less established people began to talk and records began to slip out, and it turned out that some of the worst murderers in both the IRA and the loyalists were on the payroll of British intelligence. (One British agent said that two out of every five high-ranking IRA men were informers.) Some British newspapers were outraged; if the government knew about killings, shouldn't they be arresting the killers rather than paying them? In the US we had the same sort of confusion after 9-11; was the counter-terrorism operation more about military intelligence, or policing? Was it more important to prevent future attacks or to put people behind bars?

A book like this raises other questions. Keefe has done a lot of work to understand his IRA subjects, while limiting outrage over what they did. What should our attitude be? I find myself divided. The system in Northern Ireland was blatantly discriminatory, and the police worked in tandem with loyalist paramilitaries to keep Catholics down. The regime that resulted from the Good Friday Accords was much better for Catholics than what had come before. If the violence contributed to that end, it was in a sense beneficial.

But I don't think the violence did contribute very much. I think the main driver of peace in Ireland has been very broad social and economic changes. In 1968 Protestants in the north saw Catholic Ireland as a bunch of superstititious peasants barely out of the Middle Ages, and they wanted nothing to do with that priest-ridden state. To me, the biggest driver of peace has been the enormous economic and social change in Ireland, which has removed most of the issues that drove the conflict. Joining Ireland doesn't seem nearly as drastic or scary as it did in 1968. Meanwhile the economic situation in the north has deteriorated, and they are no longer significantly richer or better-educated than people in the rest of Ireland. As Keefe says, recent attempts by dissident IRA factions to restart the violence have been ignored by young people, who want nothing to do with violence that seems pointless to them.

That kind of progress warms my heart.

Creatures from the Pacific Depths

Filmed during remote exploration of a seamount off Chile. Above, Caspar octopus.

Golden coral and sea star.

Scorpionfish.

Bathyphysa conifera, aka the Flying Spaghetti Monster

First footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid. More here.

Links 6 September 2024

From NASA

Double portrait of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck stolen in 1979 is returned to Chatsworth House in England after it turned up in an auction.

Russian fortune tellers are doing a brisk business telling the relatives of missing soldiers that their loved ones are still alive.

Su Min, China's "road trip auntie," a retired woman who ditched her grouchy husband and hit the road, becoming a video star and an "icon for women all over the country." (NY Times, The Guardian, video at Sixth Tone)

The last of four dams on the Klamath River has been demolished, and the river flows unvexed to the sea.

The role of the white pine tree in the rising tensions that eventually led to the American Revolution. British attempts to reserve these trees for the use of their navy were not appreciated by settlers.

Someone has finally done a serious study of whether adding lithium to drinking water reduces suicide, and they found "a near perfect null result." They say the notion only seemed supported before because of publication bias, that is, only studies with positive findings got published.

Indian archaeologists claim that they have confirmed the existence of a shipyard at the Harappan site of Lothal on the Gujarati coast. But the study of Harappan (=Indus Valley) civilization has become such a nationalist football between India and Pakistan that I am now suspicious of all claims related to these sites. Compare wikipedia.

Marilynne Robinson, a novelist famous for curiosity and moral seriousness, has written a book about Genesis (the Biblical book) that this reviewer says is warmed-over dogmatism. Never inquire into the beliefs of writers you enjoy.

The cost of solar panels continues to fall, but the cost of installed solar power has stagnated, because costs related to land, labor, grid connections, and so on have increased. If you have solar panels installed on your house, the cost of the panels is only 10% of the total cost. Some futurists have talked about solar panels that cost no more than paper, but that may not lower electricity costs as much as you might think. From my own work I can tell you that US solar firms have plenty of money and want to build now but are having trouble finding sites, overcoming regulatory hurdles, and getting hooked up to the utility grid.

A Navajo woman weaves a replica of a Pentium chip.

A quiet Atlantic hurricane season will likely not stop news outlets from mindlessly repeating that storms are worse and more frequent these days because of climate change, a claim with no empirical basis.

This week in conspiracy theories: "Joe Biden and the CIA rigged the 2022 Brazilian election in favour of Lula in return for Brazil banning Elon Musk's X two years down the road to protect globalist control." That Joe Biden really plans ahead.

The old McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site in Washington, DC is finally being redeveloped after decades of opposition from fake historic preservationists. Matt Yglesias has commentary on Twitter/X. I really hate it when people pretend to care about history in order to fight development.

Panel discussion on liberal solutions to climate change: "I think that the push to address climate change both drives left-wing people towards very illiberal approaches—substantively and procedurally—and then global efforts to address climate change is fuel for a lot of right-wing populist backlash." And: "There’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy?"

Graves in Poland are thought to be Vandal warriors.

Detailed itinerary of Pocahontas' trip to London.

A new drug shows promise in treating the hot flashes and insomnia often caused by menopause.

Why you should read books by horrible people (like Alice Munro).

Against rereading.

Bat diseases and human mortality. (original paper, summary from Kevin Drum)

How did Ireland end up with a housing shortage just 15 years after a financial collapse caused by massive overbuilding of houses? This NY Times piece asks the question but doesn't really answer it. One part must be that the banks were crippled by the crisis, but I don't feel like I understand this at all.

NY City banned airbnb a few years ago partly because of concerns that it was taking apartments out of the rental market. But the ban has made NYC more expensive for visitors without doing anything to lower rents or increase the availability of apartments for residents. Of course you might argue that without the ban things would be even worse.

Russian paid millions to US right-wing influencers to spread Kremlin propaganda: NPR, AP, CBS. The indictment says the influencers may not have known where the money was coming from, but: "As far as being an anti-American piece of sh*t goes, Russia wanting to give you millions of dollars because they love your opinions is not better than selling your opinions for Russian money." And this: "The good news is there's someone out there with deep pockets willing to put real money into alternative media and actually pay their talent well. The bad news is that it's the Kremlin."

And see here on an alleged Russian plan to foment angry disputes between liberal and conservate US Jews.

Ukraine is doing great in the paraolympics because they have so many healthy young people missing limbs. So depressing it hurts.

Just when you thought the war couldn't get any worse: meet the flamethrower drone.

Retired US general and military writer Mark Hertling posted on Twitter/X that he was concerned to have read this sentence and hoped it wasn't true: "Distrust has become society's default emotion." The first response was from an adbot that posted, "Zero trust is more than a buzzword – it's essential."

Seeing the news that the Netherlands had upped their order for F-35 fighters to 58, I got curious as to how many of these have been sold. Exact numbers seem scarce, but at least 3,100 have been ordered and Lockheed Martin expects to sell 5,000 before they are through. They cost $80 to $100 million each. Right now production is about 150 per year, half for the US and half for other customers, so it will take quite a while to reach 5,000.  Anyway weapons manufacture is one part of the American economy that's going gangbusters.

Cancelling the Anglo-Saxons

There is a lot of angst among historians over the word "Anglo-Saxon." As in this screed from Canadian historian Mary Rambaran-Olm:

The scholarly field that investigates early England supposedly draws its name from the people studied, although the labels ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon studies’ are fraught with inaccuracies. Today’s field represents more than just literature and linguistics, as archaeologists and historians (material, art, and otherwise) are all under one large umbrella. Historically, Anglo-Saxon studies itself has reinforced superiority of northern European or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ whiteness. Today we see the word misused extensively as a label for white identity despite it being inaccurate. . . . While some scholars outside the US argue that the term’s misuse is an American problem, it is also noteworthy that some British scholars—some of whom identified themselves as ‘English’ or more gallingly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on academic listservs and across social media—and their institutions remain so intimately wedded to this inaccurate term. The contested term is not neutral. In fact, one cannot be neutral in the face of racism. Scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities.

To be fair, yes, "Anglo-Saxon" is a modern term that was rarely seen in early medieval Britain. (Three times, according to this essay.) But the same could be said for "Welsh" and "Irish." If I were teaching a course on this period I would title it "Early Medieval Britain," because only about 30 to 40 percent of the genes of modern British people come from the invaders sometimes called Anglo-Saxons, which means there were a lot of other people around. But some of the people opposed to "Anglo-Saxon," including Rambaran-Olm, prefer "English" or "England", which are equally rare before about 1000 AD and equally exclusive of many residents of the island.

And, to be fair in another way, "Anglo-Saxon" does have a long history of use in racist discourse. But do you know what other word has a long history of use in racist discourse? "White." The author of our screed feels that while the racist term "Anglo-Saxon" is so awful that it must be banned, she is obsessed with "whiteness" and injects it into every other sentence. How is "white" any better than Anglo-Saxon? This is one of my main beefs with woke anti-racism, that so many of its advocates are as obsessed with race as the KKK. 

But wait, there's more. As the term was used by racists, Anglo-Saxon never just meant "white," nor did it mean "northern European whiteness." It meant "white northern European Protestant." Among those it pointedly excluded were Irish and Jews. It seems weird for a British historian not to know that Anglo-Saxon rose to prominence, not as a term for discriminating white from black – "white" worked perfectly well for that – but as a way to cast undesirable whites out of the charmed circle. In her world, there are only "whites" and "people of color," and anybody who is white but wants to claim a legacy of oppression is a fraud.

I have lived long enough to marvel over all the things that people like Mary Rambaran-Olm seem to have forgotten. I have written here several times that nobody cares any more about the pioneers of second-wave feminism, the women who stormed the corporate world and fought for equal pay. These days they're just priveleged white people, or, if they make any noise, Karens. And how could any British historian not pause to remember that just fifty years ago Northern Ireland was torn apart by a near civil war between Protestants and Catholics, spawned in part by discrimination against Catholics harsher than anything "people of color" endure in England today? Plus, you know, the Holocaust.

Too many modern anti-racists are exclusively focused on the gap between "white people" and everyone else, as if that were the only axis of oppression in history. People who care about justice need to look up from their petty obsessions and extend their care to all of  humanity.

The Long Life of the Dragon Standard

Several pieces of surviving art depict Roman soldiers, especially cavalry, using dragon standards. This one is on Trajan's column. 

The Arch of Gallerius. The Latin word for these was draco.

As you can see, the standard consisted of a solid head mounted on a pole, from which trailed a cloth windsock. This is a gravestone from England, with a drawing showing what we think the stone looked like before the plow ran over it.

The solid part of one of these survives, found in a fort in Germany.

Here's a modern reconstruction.

The Greek historian Arrian tells us that these are "Scythian," which was by his time the Greek generic term for steppes peoples; modern historians think they were actually introduced to Rome by Sarmatian cavalry in Roman service.

I was moved to write about these when I discovered that they endured in Europe well into the Middle Ages. This is a Carolingian illustration of the 9th century.

King Harold's men in the Bayeux Tapestry.

And a fourteenth-century illustration showing King Arthur. Fascinating.

Threats to China's Security

China's State Security Ministry now has a social media account that they mainly use to warn citizens about potential security threats. Vivian Wang has some of the highlights (NY Times):

Apparent Good Samaritans: One recent post titled “Beware! Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” warned readers that spies might pose as generous donors. . . .

Courier services: Another post was called “These types of packages are not allowed!” Besides reminding people not to mail top-secret documents to spies, it warned that “some foreign organizations and individuals” had shipped animals, such as alligator snapping turtles, American bullfrogs and red fire ants, to China to reproduce as invasive species and destroy local ecosystems.

Students looking for cash: College students are a persistent source of worry for Beijing. Another post warned that students looking for part-time work may be targets for spies who ask them to take photos of scientific research sites for pay.

Students applying to colleges abroad: But students don’t need to be sharing sensitive information to threaten national security. They may also be unwitting vessels for spreading a negative image of China — as described in another post, where a study-abroad agency purportedly inserted political content critical of China into a student’s application materials, to help them win admission overseas. “Without knowing it,” the post said, the student went from “a young student with a simple résumé to an anti-China vanguard.”

Almost anything might conceal a hidden listening device or camera: Pens, lighters, tissue boxes. Dragonflies might actually be tiny aerial drones. 

“Some unassuming daily objects may contain mysteries,” the post said, above a hotline for reporting spies.

Something I Agree with 100%: Pennies

Caity Weaver in the NY Times:

The penny may seem like a harmless coin. But few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than our inability to stop making this worthless currency. . . .

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

There are about 240 billion pennies in America, many of them sitting in jars. There are so many, and they weigh so much, that the government sometimes worries about what would happen if people suddenly decided to bring them to banks or otherwise use them. We couldn't cope with the resulting logistical nightmare. Incidentally that 240 billion is only a fraction of all the pennies ever minted; most have undergone a mysterious process the government calls "disappearance." The US penny is probably the most widely minted coin ever, and that portrait of Lincoln by far the most widely reproduced work of art.

US officials have been calling on the government to stop minting pennies for fifty years. Everyone with a brain knows this is stupid, but we can't stop.

I think, though, that Weaver is missing the real reason we don't do this. I don't think it is just inertia or lobbying by the company that makes the blanks. I think we don't do this because a minority of cranky Americans, the same ones who keep calling for us to go back to the gold standard, would cry bloody murder and call it a conspiracy to steal our money, probably hatched on Jekyll Island by the Jews who run the Federal Reserve, etc. And nobody in Congress cares enough to risk the wrath of those people.

David Reich Speculates

Fascinating podcast interview with paleogeneticist David Reich. The intereviewer asks Reich a lot of questions that elicit the answer, "I don't know" or "this isn't my area of expertise." But Reich must have been in an expansive mood, because after making his qualifiers he goes on to speculate, sometimes wildly, about what might be.

The most interesting theme concerns the role that comparatively small groups have played in human evolution. On the one hand, it seems that modern Eurasians and Native Americans are mostly descended from 1,000 to 10,000 people who left Africa around 55,000 to 60,000 years ago. These people, the model says, outcompeted not only the Neanderthals and the Denisovans but other groups of fully modern humans who had been in Eurasia for 50,000 years. On the other hand, 21st century humans have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, and DNA from other groups of modern humans, and, as Reich says about twenty times, the story of our past is always the story of movement and mixing. So what does it mean that we are "descended" from some group or other? Reich makes it clear that he does not understand this at all. The interviewer asks if we know where the group from which we mainly descend was at any point in time, and Reich basically answers no. Nobody knows how to model a past in which we always lived in small groups but somehow shared genes around the world.

He even says at one point that from one perspective you might say that nobody from outside Africa is really a fully modern human. Instead, he says, you could model our past as Neanderthals who are genetically overwhelmed by one wave of modern humans after another, gradually evolving to the point that they became 98% modern human without ever ceasing to be Neanderthals. In support of this view he mentions that while our genome is only 2% Neanderthal, if you go back 50,000 years ago our ancestors are 10-20% Neanderthal. It turned out, though, that Neanderthals had built up a lot of bad mutations over 500,000 years of living in small groups and those variants were quickly selected out.

Reich clearly feels that we do not understand human evolution.

Some other points:

Over the past 10,000 years, our genetic changes have been mostly related to disease resistance and metabolism. Lactose tolerance would be a great example of a metabolic change, but Reich uses another one: we have gotten less efficient at storing fat. This is presumably because farmers have diets that vary less over the course of the year. This was in response to a question about the argument that farming was a big mistake that has made life worse, and Reich basically says there is no evidence for increased dietary stress. In the course of this Reich mentions that there is very little evidence for any recent genetic changes related to cognition; people of 50,000 years ago seem to have had modern brains.

The relationship between culture and genetics is very complex. Reich describes cases in which cultures have been taken over genetically by people from outside, who can be detected only genetically, not because of any cultural or linguistic changes. One is the Polynesians. They came from Taiwan and were genetically East Asian. Then the Melanesian islands they settled were infiltrated by people from New Guinea, who took up Polynesian sailing and so on, leaving a massive genetic imprint on what remained a Polynesian culture.

The evidence seems to show that at the end of the Neolithic, around the time of the steppes invasion, plague was causing more than a quarter of all deaths in Europe. Reich says nobody will say this out loud because it seems so crazy, but it is what the data says.

In India, as in Europe, the population was changed by the steppes invaders who brought Indo-European languages and left a strong genetic signature. But whereas in Europe that percentage is about the same in every modern person, in India there are huge variations, based on caste, because the resistance to marriages between people of different castes has been strong enough to block most interbreeding for 2,000 years.

It is very weird that farming appeared all over the world within about 4,000 years of the end of the last Ice Age, and nobody can explain this. One theory is that the current interglacial era is a uniquely beneficial environment, which to me implies that we are riding a climate lucky streak that can't last too much longer.

There is no chance that there were Sumer-level civilizations before the end of the last Ice Age.

But the weirdest thing concerned attempts to study past epigenetics. Genomes are in practice always being modified by other molecules that shut down some genes and pump up others. Reich says there is some evidence of epigenetics from very old genomes, and the biggest difference anyone has noted is that in us, the genes for language are much more active. It seems that DNA evolution has not been fast enough to give us the language skills we need for our lives, so our bodies have resorted to other tricks 

Links 30 August 2024

Pia Lehti, In the Shelter of the Mother Tree

Tweet explaining that there are three kinds of prisons in Russia. There are red prisons, controlled by the state, and black prisons, controlled by mobsters. Both of these types go back to Soviet times. Now there are also green prisons, controlled by Islamists.

The Linothorax Project, an attempt to recreate classical linen armor.

Greg Palast, "I was on the phone with RFK Jr. when he lost his mind."

Total fertility in Ireland has fallen to 1.5, lower than Britain's for the first time since the beginning of modern statistics. The transformation of Ireland over the past 30 years has been stunning.

Seeking the origin of The Game of 58 Holes, as we call a board game attested across the Bronze Age Middle East. The Egyptian version is sometimes called "hounds and jackals."

Poster, based on interviews with people in QAnon, about how they "fell down the rabbit hole." The main conclusion seems to be "personal trauma + distrust in authority = conspiracism."

Why did Telegram founder Pavel Durov fly to France just in time to be arrested? Lots of chatter that he arranged this with the French police for dark and deep reasons.

Transforming a WW II flak tower in Hamburg into "The Green Bunker."

Ancient people in Taiwan yanked out healthy teeth for mysterious reasons.

Trying to exterminate the mice that are ravaging the albatross population on a remote island.

Tyler Cowen on why massively overhauling the Federal bureaucracy in the manner called for in Project 2025 would be terrible for business.

Roman military camp found in the Swiss Alps, dates to the conquest of that region under Augustus and Tiberius, I mean, if you thought high mountains would deter the Romans. . . .

Podcast on the gay rights movement in the Caribbean, argues it is stalled because activists tried to jump straight to a situation like the US or western European without essential preparatory work.

The Surgeon General says that American parents are "at their wits' end" from stress but Kevin Drum checks the numbers and finds that depending on which measure you use, stress in the US is either down or up just a little. Raising children is definitely stressful and always has been, so if you are really stress-averse maybe you shouldn't do it.

New Mexico's oil boom: it's now the second leading US state in oil production, and most of the production growth over the past few years has been in just two NM counties. Bloomberg; Reuters; NY Times. This has led to legislative efforts to limit the environmental and social damage, besides a lot of lawsuits from environmentalists. And note that while the first decade of the fracking boom was mostly a money-losing proposition, better drilling technologies and higher global prices mean companies are now earning big profits. (According to the NY Times article, fracking companies lost $140 billion in the 2010s but over the past four years have cleared more than $400 billion.)

More on Obama as an anti-socialist: his administration helped launch the private space business.

An argument that hunter-gatherers move around so much not just to find food but so they can have larger social networks.

Crazy little video of a modified swing that delivers what many children have fantasized about.

Scientists trying to use bacteria to extract valuable metals from old batteries and other tech gear. A decade ago I was bullish on the future of manufacturing with genetically-modified bacteria, which I expected would soon be making drugs and other chemicals on a vast scale, but it seems to be developing very slowly.

Anyone can experience "belonging uncertainty" – the sense that you don't belong in a particular community or situation and don't understand what is going on – and most people of every social and ethnic group have.

Interesting NY Times piece on volcano science in Iceland.

Khaled Hassan, an Egyptian dissident who lives in Britain, is impressed that Israel rescued an Israeli Arab hostage, brought him to a hospital, and then took him home, where he received a phone call from the Prime Minister. Says no Arab country, except possibly the UAE, would ever do as much for one of its citizens. "I wish every Arab lived in the state of Israel."

Poland just received its first F-35, and promotional images like this are everywhere.

Dmitri Medvedev says Russia's war in the Donbas is all about seizing mineral resources worth $7 trillion.

Russians are starting to feel like their recent advances in Donbas are too easy, and Ukraine must be saving its reserves for another surprise attack. Possibly in the south.

Short video showing how Ukrainian troops breached Russian minefields in Kursk.

More "new age of war beginning" talk from the French chief of staff.

Video showing 115 air-to-air drone kills, large Russian drones knocked down by Ukrainian quadcopters.

Meanwhile, in Chechnya: "Kadyrov awarded Kadyrov with the Order of Kadyrov."

Hating on Capitalism

This tweet perfectly sums up how many left-wing Americans feel about capitalism:

Because, I mean, how is that any different from life under socialism? (If you're going to tell me that Europeans get longer vacations, that's true, but all European societies are capitalist.)

Loved this response:

It really seems to me that many people say "capitalism" when they mean "life." What kind of system wouldn't involve most people going to school and getting jobs and going on vacations and dying? Anarchists die, too, and if they want to eat and have roofs over their heads, they have to work. Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast.

I remember during the weird riots in Portland some people tried to take over a city park to plant a food forest, saying that once we had free food we wouldn't have to work any more. Sigh.

A Story about Knowledge

Paul Seabright:

In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead.

If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm.

No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.

From a 1999 review of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.