Study of whalebones from European archaeological sites shows that right and gray whales were once common in European waters but had been driven nearly to extinction in the north Atlantic well before the modern whaling era got under way in the 1600s. (NY Times, original article) Human impacts on the world did not begin in modern times.
The sex lives of the Shoguns.
More discoveries in the sunken city off the coast of Egypt, and more evidence that Graham Hancock-style theories about submerged Ice Age civilizations that archaeologists are too blinkered to discover are baloney. Incidentally the main reason people keep diving into Thonis-Heracleion when there are plenty of under-explored, undrowned ancient cities in Egypt is that it makes for great video.
The names of Assyrian dogs.
Another incoherent NY Times story about how big a problem it is that so many American children live with a single parent, but we shouldn't "blame and shame" or "stigmatize" anyone; instead we should "bolster parents' own capacity to thrive." These days my reaction to all such laments is, everybody knows about this problem, show me a real plan to help or go home.
Kevin Drum on the real villains in CO2 emissions: not oil companies, but us.
Burial of a Frankish warrior found in Germany.
A video titled "Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire" launched a viral explosion on TikTok in which men say they think about Rome "every day" or "constantly." I think I'm in the "every day" camp. (NY Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone)
Small hoard of gold found in Norwegian temple dating to around 550 AD. (Newsweek, with 30-second video; Heritage Daily)
NY Times story on elite runners and GPS-equipped-heartbeat-monitoring-etc watches. Some love them, but some have tried them and found them to be a distraction and a bore; one says they "drain the fun" from running. I mention this because I think in some ways we have reached peak tech, with as many people abandoning digital tools as adopting them.
Interesting Canaanite architecture from 1800 BC unearched in Israel.
Danish artist takes too literally the widespread sentiment that modern art is a scam.
Here's a story that one hears all too often these days: "Booted up my 16-yr-old high school laptop to open a WWII database that lives on a CD, works only on Windows 98, & exists no where else. The creator is dead. Need help to save the data from technological oblivion."
Donald Trump is talking in terms of allowing abortion nationally for some number of weeks; his numbers have been all over the place but the one he has mentioned most often is 15 weeks. Can he move Republicans on this issue? And what is wrong with America when the only prominent person trying to find a compromise on some issues is Donald Trump?
Scott Siskind's amusing review of The Alexander Romance, which, as I noted here, was the repository of many of medieval Europe's most fantastic stories.
In the category of "I can't believe I am reading this," a NY Times essay arguing that "Oppenheimer" is really about the trials of being a "girlie," defined as "women who treat Instagram stories an art form." The mind boggles.
To no one's surprise, "95% of NFTs are now worthless."
From Zambia, news of a wooden structure 476,000 years old. I would wait for confirmation before revising your theories of human cultural evolution.
The clay tablets from the Hittite capital Hattusas are written in several languages, mainly Hittite but also Hattian, Luwian, Palaca, etc. This is mainly because the Hittites like to record snippets of foreign language text in their own documents, for example the formal salutations of ambassadors or, especially, foreign invocations of their gods. I mean, if these gods had any power, it would be good to know how to adress them, right? So linguists have been pouring through the Hittite records in search of these remnants of otherwise forgotten tongues. German scholars have just announced the discovery of another, tentatively dubbed Kalašma, which appears to be another Indo-European language of the Anatolian group.
Alex Taborrok against pharmeceutical price regulation, saying new drugs actually save us money even when they are expensive. But the example he uses is Harvoni, a true breakthrough drug that cures Hepatitis C infection in most patients. What drives anger against Big Pharma is not actual breakthroughs but scammy moves like patenting reformulations as new drugs, refusing to sell drugs in convenient packages so some patients are forced to buy much more than they need, jacking up the price of drugs when competing products are taken off the market, and so on. I am all for rewarding real breakthroughs but pharmaceutical pricing is a rigged game and the government should not play along.
Ukraine Links
Interesting article arguing that Russia's defense in the south has been incoherent because the designer of their defensive lines, Surovikin, was sacked for being too unaggressive, and his replacement is not using the defenses in the way Surovikin planned, leading to very heavy Russian losses incurred defending front-line positions Surovikin intended to give up as part of a defense-in-depth.
Russian recruitment video in which soldiers in a trench discuss whether they want to buy property in Kyiv or Odessa after the war.
All you ever wanted to know about ATACMS, including how many exist.
Reuters and Forbes went exploring in the Russian Treasury's online budget portal and found that since the start of the war Russia has paid out $25.6 billion on compensation to families of deceased soldiers and $21 billion on compensation to the wounded. Based on published figures for the amount of the payouts, this translates to 372,093 killed and 508,474 wounded. This is far more than even Ukraine's estimates, and three times the Pentagon's estimate, so most likely much of this money has been stolen or diverted to secret projects. One the other hand, some people who have been trying to count how many soldiers Russia has sent, how many we know have gone back, and how many are still in Ukraine, are coming up with losses in the 750,000 range.
And another number: "Russia’s Ministry of Labour has requested 230,000 certificates for family members of deceased combat veterans." Also 936,000 certificates for combat veterans, which are supposed to go only to those who were actually in combat.
And one more number: in the first half of 2023, 15,000 Ukrainians have had limbs amputated. That's more amputees than the UK suffered in all of WW II.
Boris Johnson: "Do not believe for one second that these Ukrainian soldiers – or the wider population of Ukraine – could be persuaded somehow to lay down their weapons or do a deal with Putin. They are not fighting at our behest, and will not stop because we say so."
Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko on why a land for peace deal with Russia can't work.
To counter the newest threat in warfare, drones, Ukrainian soldiers are turning to their oldest weapons, water-cooled maxim machine guns, still built exactly as they were in WW I.
Claims of Ukrainian progress in Zaporizhzia, with armored vehicles past the obstacles of the main Surovikin line.
What happened to Russia's 72nd Brigade at Andriivka? Their commander was sacked after series of Telegram posts so gloomy that I might have fired him, too, but then Ukraine claimed to have surrounded the brigade, killed its new commanders, and forced the rest to surrender. (They also reported that when the Russians started to surrender Russian artillery began bombarding the whole town, attacking Russians and Ukrainians alike.) The former 72nd brigade commander posted on September 17 that "the enemy exaggerates everything, but there is no reason for joy," and noted that even he was not sure of the extent of the losses because he could not reach a single one of his former comrades. Someone on X called him "oddly self-aware for a Russian soldier."
3 comments:
And one more number: in the first half of 2023, 15,000 Ukrainians have had limbs amputated. That's more amputees than the UK suffered in all of WW II.
Beware survivor bias.
For one thing, medicine in the '40s was nowhere near as good as it is today, in addition to medical supplies being stretched so much more thinly. Inflict the exact same injuries on a soldier from each time period, and the modern soldier is far likelier to survive to BECOME an amputee, whereas the other is just listed KIA.
For another thing, modern soldiers are FAR better armored than their WWII counterparts - at least in the torso. Take a soldier from each time period, and detonate a grenade or an artillery shell in close proximity to them, and one of them is liable to have limbs shredded pretty badly but have their torso reasonably protected, while the other is liable to have shrapnel hit them in both the limbs AND in a vital organ, and die outright.
It should also be noted that WWII was much more a war of vehicles, as opposed to the War in Ukraine which is primarily an infantry war.
Survival tends to be quite binary when vehicles of war are lost - if a plane crashes, or a tank gets knocked out, or a ship at sea gets sunk, the two most common outcomes are for the vehicle to be lost so quickly or catastrophically that hardly any of the crew survive, or for it to get disabled in such a way that it's destruction is inevitable, but there's time for most of the crew to escape unscathed. Both tendencies cut against the likelihood of amputations resulting.
There's also the fact that the British military saw comparatively reduced land engagement during much of WW2 - they were pushed out of mainland Europe very early on, and they adopted a defensive posture against potential naval invasion, with combat shifting into the air and the sea. Similarly, their ongoing campaigns in the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, etc, were by their very nature heavily reliant on vehicles, rather than infantry.
(Also, many of the troops fighting in such locations were local colonial forces, whose losses would be counted separately from those of the British military proper. And at the same time, the far-flung nature of these colonial theaters of war made getting the wounded treated even more difficult.)
Palace Rendezvous: Rigid Rules Governed Sex Lives of Tokugawa Shōguns
Great headline
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