Links 3 February 2023

Jordi Garriga Mora, The Minotaur (2007)

Writing in the age of AI: Roald Dahl's 1954 short story, The Great Automatic Grammatizator.

The Harpole Treasure, actually the burial of a Anglo-Saxon noblewoman from the 700s.

I recently stumbled on this long, interesting article on the black history of Maryland's Eastern Shore, written during the debate about the Confederate statue in front of the Talbot County courthouse. One thing that interests me about the region is that during the Civil War the white population was divided and sent more men to fight for the North than for the South. It was only years after the war, during Jim Crow, that the region's whites really went in for a Confederate identity; neo-Confederate nostalgia was stronger in the region than the Confederacy ever was.

Iron Age votive deposits found by metal detectorists in Poland.

Young men rate their own intelligence higher than young women, while for people over 65 it's the reverse. (Short Twitter summary, article) Everyone knows that young men are arrogant, but this study suggests we get over it. What's the story with women?

Vox explainer on Peru's political crisis.

Oh, to be an archaeologist in a place like Rome where you can find an ancient statue of Hercules during routine sewer maintenance.

The fascinating story of an underground Roman aqueduct near Naples, which was discovered by children and then explored by a group of amateur "speleo-archaeologists."

Clay tablets with side-by-side texts in Akkadian and ancient Amorite provide the first real chance for scholars to understand the barely known language of the Amorites, who came from Canaan but founded a kingdom in Mesopotamia. The text includes a list of Amorite gods with their closest Babylonian equivalents. The tablets were probably looted during the second Gulf War in the early 2000s and somehow ended up in an American collection.

Biotech company Colossal promises to bring back a woolly mammoth by 2027. We'll see; this prediction was made in 2022, which makes it just the latest in the 20-year history of "we will have a mammoth in five years" predictions. Their approach involves using CRISPR to edit elephant genes to get them very close to a woolly mammoth genome, not actually cloning a mammoth.

The ideal home for a former Cold War border guard.

Which countries have done best, economically, in the era of globalization since 1990? The winners aren't all in Asia.

English metal detectorists finds gold locket connected to Henry VIII and his first wife.

What to do when a bunch of upperclassmen turn your lower level college class into a dating service?

Short, time-lapse video of exoplanets orbiting a star 133 light years away. Discussion here.

Tyler Cowen wonders if AI Chatbots will evolve to please us, like dogs.

A company called Niocorp wants to mine Niobium deep under southwestern Nebraska. You might think that the old school farm folks of the area would oppose this, but it turns out they support it. Asked why, they say it is because of patriotism; they are convinced that the US needs rare earth metals in its rivalry with China. (NY Times, Niocorp web site.) Or maybe it's because mining is the sort of old school, tough guy activity people like that generally support, and patriotism is just a contributing factor that they can cite when asked by a reporter to justify their position.

Study of bones suggests the Vikings brought dogs and horses with them when they invaded England.

Astronomers provide more evidence that we don't understand the big structure of our universe.

Ukraine Links

Rob Lee on Twitter: "Russia is not playing for a tie. It is still seeking to seize more territory and to force other concessions on Kyiv."

Keeping track: NATO nations have now promised 321 main battle tanks to Ukraine, and around 120 should be delivered in the first wave.

Oryx reports that Ukraine is now visually confirmed to have lost more than 450 tanks since Russia began its invasion of the country on February 24. On the other hand,Ukraine has received 450 MBTs from NATO and is set to receive at least 100 more, besides having captured 546 MBTs.

The creator of Rybar, an important Russian military blog, says on television that the Russian VDV (airborn and air assault forces) had lost 40 to 50% of their men by September. When the war started there were 45,000 men in the VDV, which puts their loss at 18,000 to 22,500. The units that saw the heaviest fighting, like the 331st regiment, presumably took higher losses than that already grim average. These men don't all have to have been killed; these losses could include those who were captured and the seriously wounded or psychologically incapacitated. But anyway some of Russia's most elite formations have been ravaged.

Twitter thread from American milblogger DefMon, with his thoughts on what Ukraine should do going forward; he thinks that this winter they should be trying to damage Russian forces rather than advance.

Oryx on Russian tank production.

From artilleryman Thomas Theiner, a primer on how a NATO armored assault is supposed to work. And a follow up on supply, recon, etc. "Remember, too many supply trucks is always still too few supply trucks."

And on a historical note, Theiner reminds us that he published Russia's invasion plan on January 28, 2022, having obtained it from NATO military sources, and he wonders why more of the intelligence officers who denied this was happening haven't been fired. One thing his sources missed was the helicopter-born assault on Kyiv, which I thought was interesting because US intelligence definitely warned Ukraine that the attack was coming.

Short video of Ukrainian troops assaulting Russian trenches.

Good map showing the extent of Russian advances toward Bakhmut since the summer.