The American Revolution as Part of the Enlightenment Crisis

British historian Richard Whatmore has a new book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis, and Ritchie Robertson reviewed it in the February 2 TLS. Reading this review reminded me of things about the American Revolution that I wish more Americans understood, especially the ones who seem to think it was just a power grab by devious slave owners.

While many Europeans were feeling both politically and culturally bullish in the mid 1700s, others were worried. People like David Hume feared what would happen when the soaring Enlightenment rhetoric about freedom and equality collided with aristocratic political systems and the realities of government. (Those who lived long enough saw these fears confirmed in the course of the French Revolution.) They were also worried about economic changes. The economies of Britain and France were growing because of global trade, and global trade was enmeshed in the colonial mercantile system and the brutialities of the slave plantations. This was, they thought, horribly corrupting, not to mention the exact opposite of Enlightenment calls for peace and human rights. The acts of the British East Indian company were denounced in the British Parliament, and outside the establishment more radical thinkers were even more hostile. Numerous books were written, and speeches given, calling for Britain and France to withdraw from "war and empire", embrace peace and free trade, give up trying to dominate foreign people, and focus on gradually improving conditions at home. Robertson:

One achievement of Whatmore's book is to document the actue sense of crisis that, as he says, inspired political observers with a variety of dire forebodings. Britain's wealth depended on colonies; these were enlarged and defended by wars, which demanded ever more taxation and indebtedness. Hume imagined several ways in which this cycle might be broken. One was national bankruptcy; another waas that the landed interest might accept defeat by France rather increase the national debit or that colonial revolts, combined with an economic crisis, might inspire riots at home, which would be quelled by official violence. In a letter of 1768, quoted by Whatmore, he indulged in a semi-serious flight of fancy:

Oh how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc'd to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, the third of London in ruins, and the rascally Mob subdu'd. I think I am not too old to despair of being Witness to all of these things.

Here Hume seems incongruously to join hands with Thomas Paine, who foretold the imminent collapse of funding by credit in 1796. . . . Others denounced reliance on colonies not only because it was exploitative, but because oppression overseas must rebound on the mother country. 

This is Catherian Macaulay, a radical historian who crossed swords with Hume:

The conquests of foreign nations are dangerous triumphs. . . . it never fails of subjecting the conquerors to the same measure of slavery which they have imposed on the conquered.

The American Revolution took place amidst this turmoil. American intellectuals like Jefferson and John Adams wanted to withdraw America from what they saw as a corrupt system of global exploitation. They very much feared that some British corporation would do to them what the East India Company had done in Bengal. They saw the mercantile system the way many people now see the military industrial complex, as a machine that ginned up wars for its own interest and cared not how many died or were oppressed so long as profits could be made.

Which is not to say that the American revolutionaries were pure and noble, only that they were responding to fears about global economic changes that parallel those of many contemporary leftists who think the revolution was a mistake.

The Strange Case of Martin Šmíd

On November 17, 1989, there was a student demonstration in Prague. This was the height of the turmoil in the Warsaw Pact: the Berlin Wall had fallen two weeks before, and the Czechoslovak government would fall just two weeks later. About 3,000 students marched to Prague's National Cemetery to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of a Czech hero killed by the Nazis. While they were milling around at the cemetery gate, somebody started shouting, "To Wenceslas Square," the hearth of the city. So the marchers changed directons. Just before they reached the square, their path was blocked by riot police. Eventually some of the police attacked and beat the protesters, and around 120 were arrested. 

This is where the Czechoslovak Revolution enters the murky, looking-glass world of Kafka and Švejk, spiced with a hint of John le Carré. Rumour travelled fast in Communist capitals and it was generally believed, certainly more so than the official media. Within hours, the word was that the prone body seen lying on Narodni Street was that of a mathematics student, Martin Šmíd. It was spread mainly by the dissident Charter 77 activist Peter Uhl, who daily provided information from the opposition underground to journalists from the West. Uhl had been told about the death by a woman calling herself Drahomira Dražská, who claimed to be an old friend of Šmíd. Uhl immediately told Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America, which reported the death of Martin Šmíd as fact. There was a public fury throughout Czechoslovakia. The regimed denied that anybody had died in the 'riot' and the next day managed to produce two Martin Šmíds, both of them alive. One, who had been at the demonstration, appeared on nationwide TV breathing and talking. It did little good. Nobody believed the regime's denials.

That weekend huge spontaneous demonstratione erupted in Prague on an unprecedented scale. An archway on Narodni Street where many of the police beatings had taken place was turned into a shrine visited by scores of thousands of people. Someone had painted a cross on a wall nearby and passers-by lit candles. "The news about that death changed everything, not just for us, but for our parents' generation," said Dasha Antelova. "They had been silent since 1968, terrified of what they could lose. But not they were as enraged as we young people were."

But it was all a fake. Nobody had been killed on November 17. After the government had been overthrown in the "Velvet Revolution," people started looking into what had really happened. A new rumor spread, that the whole thing had been cooked up by a faction of the Communist Party who wanted to overthrow the old hardline leaders and replace them when Gorbachev-style reformers. That would not have been surprising, since coups of exactly that type had recently taken place in East Germany and Bulgaria. One of the people who believed and spread that rumor was a Hungarian journalist named Victor Sebesteyn, whose book 1989 I am reading and from which this comes. Sebesteyn's account continues:

The plan was the brainchild of General Alois Lorenc, head of the StB [Czech KBG], and a small group of Party reformers who looked at events in Poland and Hungary and thought the only way of maintaining their own positions was to find a means of negotiating from strength with a divided opposition. At the same time, the other essential step in the operation – codenamed Wedge – was to infiltrate the dissident movement and find opposition figures willing to do a deal with reform Communists. . . . A key player was Lieutenant Ludvik Zífčak, a young StB officer who, under orders, had infiltrated the student opposition underground. In a classic 'provocation', he was one of the leaders of the main march to the National Cemetery and one of the students shouting at the top of his voice "To Wenceslas Square." He knew there would be a trap when the students arrived. He kept his head down as far as possible when the violence began. He lay on the ground and pretended to be dead. Drahomira Dražská, who subsequently disappeared, was another agent. She had orders to pass on the news to Uhl that a student had died.

The new Czech parliament eventually convened a committee to look into the matter, and they were unable to confirm the story. But the version they put out, that Drahomira Dražská had cooked up the whole thing by herself, has never persuaded most Czechs.

One of the things I find fascinating about 1989 is the way, in that crazy time, small sparks could set off big explosions. For example, the poor wording of the East German spokesperson whose announcement of a proposed plan to loosen travel restrictions convinced thousands of hearers that the border was open, leading to the breaching of the Berlin Wall just 12 hours later. In Sebesteyn's version, an attempted coup by a communist faction instead launched the protests that overthrew the whole regime. But what if it really was just a mad story dreamed up by an obscure woman who wanted to feel like she was playing some part in history? What if Drahomira Dražská's lie launched the revolution?

David Reich on Indo-European Genetics

Some updates on what the science is telling us, from this lecture, on YouTube. First, Yamnaya – the Ukrainian people who spread Indo-European languages across Eurasia – took form around 4000 BC. They mainly migrated from the east, from the Don River basin and the northern Caucasus, but interbred with local hunter-gatherers. They were not numerous, only a few thousand people. They lived around the lower reaches of the Dnipro River.

Then around 3600-3400 BC they exploded in numbers, a "classic founder event." (Founder events are when a few people reach a new environment where they multiply enormously, like the New England Puritans or the first French Canadians.) Around 3500 BC is when we first get good evidence for wheels, and Yamnaya skeletons show evidence that they rode horses. So it looks like the Yamnaya had by 3500 BC perfected both horse riding and cart-building and launched themselves onto the steppes as nomadic herders. They were very successful and soon there were hundreds of thousands of them.

Then around 3200 BC they launched themselves into the world so rapidly that their expansion "broke the connection between geography and genetics." All the samples shown on the map above are just Yamnaya, genetically from the same population.

One of the big remaining questions in all of this is where the first Indo-European languages arose. Reich points to the North Caucasus as the likely homeland. 

The Republican Party as Trump's Personal Machine

Peter Wehner in the NY Times:

Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine. Unlike normally functioning parties and their political machines, like Tammany Hall, Mr. Rauch said, a personal political machine is dedicated to the interests of an individual and that individual’s family, loyalists and operatives. It accepts only one person as leader and requires submission to that person. Today, Mr. Trump is that person.

Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics. Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office. By contrast, a personal machine is willing to lose elections rather than share power with other leaders or factions. It puts the leader ahead of the party, and it would rather the party lose elections than the leader lose control.

“Because a personal machine puts loyalty ahead of electability, it must resort to authoritarian and anti-democratic measures like coercion and intimidation to preserve its hold on the party,” Mr. Rauch said. “It may physically threaten those who do not play ball. And it will use propaganda and the party organization to build up the leader as the one and only true expression of the party. That’s why Trump’s Republican Party is a cult of personality.”

The Birth Pangs of the AI Revolution

As companies move to use AI for routine tasks, they are finding that this sometimes creates more work for their human employees. I already mentioned here that companies are hiring more translators; some people are claiming that this is because editing AI-generated text is more time consuming that just making the translation yourself. Forbes is running a story with this headline:

77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds

Part of the problem is that firms are just telling their employees "use AI to speed up your work," without telling them how. But how to use AI efficiently without loss of accuracy is actually a difficult problem that requires some high-level thought to sort out. Sometimes the whole workflow model needs to be changed.

And this:

In tech, especially programming, we're finding that a large swath are getting their code generated in like 5 minutes where it'd take them like 3 hours to write it but they're now spending much longer debugging said code because it's crap and they didn't write it.

I actually just had a conversation with one of sons about this next question, specifically whether laying out an progress tree for a game mod should be called "programming." I say it should be:

Programming is 95% understanding the problem + formulating a robust solution then 5% sitting down to write the actual code.

At the moment AI can only do that last 5%. That will probably change, but it might not change fast.

Let me tell you sometime about running a novel with lots of dialogue through a grammar checker. . . .

Maine Part II

Thursday was fogged in. This was the scene on top of Parkman Mountain. Still  had a great hike, cool and pleasant.

Kayaking was out of the question, with visibility down to maybe 100 yards.

This morning in Bar Harbor. And tomorrow we head home.

Holding the Early US Together

From Tyler Cowen's interview with historian Alan Taylor:

COWEN: A very general question. You’ve written about this in a number of your books, but many early commentators, especially in Britain, in Canada, even in America, some of the Founding Fathers, they were very afraid the American republic was going to collapse. It was too large, too chaotic, some thought too democratic. What exactly did they get wrong, the people who thought that? What did they fail to see? Because those arguments did not sound crazy at the time, right?

TAYLOR: No, they didn’t sound crazy at the time. They weren’t crazy to worry about it, in that the United States did fall apart in 1860 to 1861. And it took an enormous effort, very expensive effort in terms of lives and money to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They had spent a long time ever since 1776 worrying about what actually did happen in 1860 to 1861. You could say, “Yes, they fended it off for 90 years.”

There’s a recurrent sense of crisis within the American republic through much of that period of time, because there’s just fear that some region within the country would be growing too powerful, or there’s a recurrent fear that the country is getting too large. You’re getting Americans that now live on the Pacific coast. It was an open question whether those American states would spin off and create their own country. A lot of things still seem to be possible.

It’s also important to remember that the form of government that they were gambling on, a republic, had not worked very well in the past in Europe. It had never been tried on this geographic scale. They don’t yet have the confidence that their institutions will be durable. Surviving the Civil War is an enormous confidence booster that the United States will hold together, despite its great internal diversity and despite its geographic scale. Before that success in the Civil War, that confidence was absent.

Links 26 July 2024

Bronze trinket shaped like a man’s head.

Thailand, Ban Chiang Culture, 1st millennium BC

NASA releases 25 x-ray and composite images to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Chandra X-Ray telescope.

How bad is the historical record? And is anything about history "objective"? Should we just throw it all over and admit we're telling stories that reinforce our own politics?

Mike Pence posts a completely unremarkable message praising Biden for stepping down, gets savagely attacked by the MAGA crowd for the treason of praising Biden for anything.

Interesting post by Alex Tabarrok about the Japanese effort to translate western technical books in the 19th century.

Scientists claim to see signs of ancient life in Mars rocks.

Thread on Twitter/X about anthropologist James C. Scott's (Weapons of the Weak, Seeing Like a State) unfinished book on rivers. Seems like a fascinating project.

Spitalfields Life visits London's Highgate Cemetery.

Tyler Cowen interviews historian Alan Taylor, much about the American Revolution and the evolution of Canada.

Strange claim that much oxygen in the ocean is being generated by chemical reactions on the sea floor. I am skeptical.

New gene editing technique discovered, claimed to be better for some purposes than CRISPR. (Technical article, news piece, thread on Twitter/X.

Scott Siskind links to some reviews of a book called Bad Therapy and says, "I think both ignoring/repressing trauma and exaggerating/spotlighting trauma are potentially dangerous, and that someone needs to invent the art of successfully navigating the space between them (I don’t think mainstream psychiatry has this art, though it does have pieces of it)." I wrote about this here.

Alex Tabarrok has some updates on the crisis in Cuba, including a claim that 10% of the country's population has fled in recent years.

Delightful post on Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in East London.

The amount of coal shipped to US power plants fell by 8% in 2024, is down more than 55% since 2010.

Deep Mind at the Math Olympiad (NY Times, Google, MIT Technology Review)

Shipwreck full of champagne found in the Baltic.

Biden's programs have indeed set off a factory-building boom in the US.

The Creative Photo Awards.

Move in the US Congress to ban octopus farming.

From Scott Siskind's book review contest, a description of a bonkers web site called Real Raw News that tells the story of how Donald Trump has continued to rule America from behind the scenes. The main focus is on the secret trials of Trump opponents at Guantanamo Bay. Seems like a sick revenge fantasy for Trumpists, not recommended for liberals with blood pressure issues. On the other hand, the author says that RRN is the most passive conspiracy theory in history, since it tells its readers they don't have to do anything because Donald Trump is already in charge behind the scenes, killing their enemies; "Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent." But the real meat of the review is to ask, if some people believe this already with no evidence, how many will believe it when AI can make convincing videos of everything it claims to be happening?

World Population Prospects 2024

The latest from the UN. Key points:

1. The world’s population is expected to continue growing for another 50 or 60 years, reaching a peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, up from 8.2 billion in 2024. After peaking, it is projected to start declining, gradually falling to 10.2 billion people by the end of the century.

2. One in four people globally lives in a country whose population has already peaked in size. In 63 countries and areas, containing 28 per cent of the world’s population in 2024, the size of the population peaked before 2024. In 48 countries and areas, with 10 per cent of the world’s population in 2024, population size is projected to peak between 2025 and 2054. In the remaining 126 countries and areas, the population is likely to continue growing through 2054, potentially reaching a peak later in the century or beyond 2100.

3. Women today bear one child fewer, on average, than they did around 1990. Currently, the global fertility rate stands at 2.25 live births per woman, down from 3.31 births in 1990. More than half of all countries and areas globally have fertility below 2.1 births per woman, the level required for a population to maintain a constant size in the long run without migration.

4. The population of China is likely to fall by more then 200 million by 2054, that of Japan by 21 million, that of Russia by 10 million. In percentage terms the biggest declines will be in the Balkans, where Albania, Moldova, and Bosnia are all likely to lose more than 20 percent of their people. By 2100 China's population may fall by 55%.

5. The UN expects a "rebound" in birth rates in countries where fertility has fallen below 1.4, but not up to replacement level; perhaps up to 1.8. They say this has been observed in some countries already. However, this won't slow population decline, since the declining number of potential mothers means the population would fall even if fertility rose back up above 2.

6. Most of the growth in global population will happen in sub-Saharan Africa; growth will also continue in a few other countries (Yemen, Afghanistan, central Asia). Latin America and East Asia are already shrinking; Europe and North America would be, except for immigration.

And note that many demographers think these projections understate fertility decline, which they think is accelerating almost everywhere.

Carbon Dioxide and Global Greening

Climate change is really complicated. From the Yale School for the Environment, here's an article on how rising carbon dioxide concentrations are so good for plants that some deserts are greening even without increased rainfall:

Southeast Australia has been getting hotter and drier. Droughts have lengthened, and temperatures regularly soar above 95 degrees F (35 degrees C). Bush fires abound. But somehow, its woodlands keep growing. One of the more extreme and volatile ecosystems on the planet is defying meteorology and becoming greener.

And Australia is far from alone. From Africa’s Sahel to arid western India, and the deserts of northern China to southern Africa, the story is the same. “Greening is happening in most of the drylands globally, despite increasing aridity,” says Jason Evans, a water-cycle researcher at the Climate Change Research Centre of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

What is going on? The primary reason, most recent studies conclude, is the 50-percent rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere since preindustrial times. This increased C02 is not just driving climate change, but also fast-tracking photosynthesis in plants. By allowing them to use scarce water more efficiently, the CO2-rich air fertilizes vegetation growth in even some of the driest places.

How to Get Published in Security Studies or History

Francis J. Gavin takes on academic writing. Security Studies:

For the security studies crowd, academic writing was too often crafted like a terse but bold legal brief, with the key points presented in outline form, the argument simple, sharp, and often combative. “The long-held conventional wisdom about subject X, offered by the leading and misguided school of thought/methodology/paradigm, is embarrassingly wrong. My powerful, parsimonious theory upends what we thought we knew about war/conflict/street cleaning/circus clown management. The article will proceed in three parts. The first will demonstrate why the collective brainpower of the competing paradigm/methodology has been so breathtakingly mistaken for so long. Part two will lay out my all-powerful theory, mention canonical strawman texts that are oft cited but never read, while burying key caveats in long, discursive footnotes. Part three will provide an overly simplistic historical sketch based on a large data set that aggregates a disparate array of events that have little to do with each other but will be fitted neatly into a 2×2 matrix. I will conclude by emphasizing how embracing my one-size-fits-all conceptual lens and powerful, novel methodology/theory will transform the discipline and lead to smarter policy, less stupidity, and brighter teeth and fresher breath.” 

And History:

The style of writing in scholarly history journals was much different. Articles often started with an obscure, strange story from the past that that would “illuminate a puzzle” and “expose lacunae” by exploring a previously unstudied event, person, or group of people, phenomena, or household commodity that no one had ever bothered to investigate before. “The fact that all the bakers in this small, 17th-century French village were left-handed and subsisted only on salted beet roots may seem curious, even inexplicable to us today, but in truth it revealed something important about the powerful if hidden hegemonic sociocultural, socioeconomic, and neo-colonial structures that formed the foundation of the early modern world.” The article would then highlight a previously undiscovered archive, a “treasure trove” of diaries or municipal records, or uncollected trash that “sheds new light” even as it “problematizes, decenters, and complicates” our understanding of key parts of the world. It would conclude by saying that the history we thought we knew was more complex, more nuanced, and began much earlier than we once thought, while declaring that more research — indeed, a whole subfield — should be devoted to explaining this once-obscure issue or group.

Maine 2024 Part 1

My son Ben on Beech Mountain, our traditional first hike.

Tidepooling. Sadly we didn't find much this year. In the past this spot was wonderful (see here and here) but over the past two years we have found very little.

And from Wednesday's little hike over Flying Mountain to an isolated beach.

Republican Disunity

The Republican Party has unified around Donald Trump. But do they agree about anything else? As Julius Krein explains in the NY Times, the policies being floated are all over the place:

We saw plenty of evidence of this throughout the Republican convention and in the party platform. Speakers on the first day alone ranged from anti-union, pro-free-trade, low-taxes Senator Ron Johnson to Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, who excoriated Amazon, Uber and other giant corporations for exploiting workers and selling out national interests.

The party’s official platform offers divergent planks without any attempt to reconcile them. Commentators have already highlighted a number of apparent contradictions: Tighter labor markets resulting from a crackdown on illegal immigration and “the largest deportation operation in American history,” coupled with more tariffs, would, at least in the immediate term, seem to conflict with the goal of lowering inflation. According to some analysts, including at times Senator Vance, the call to “keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency” might inhibit the goal of turning the United States into a “manufacturing superpower.”

Since 2016, pundits and politicians have divided the Republican Party into pro-Trump and anti-Trump, or populist and establishment, factions. These factions are said to have fundamentally different constituencies (the party’s working-class base versus major donors, corporate lobbies and establishment institutions) that pursue fundamentally different ends (MAGA nationalism versus global neoliberalism). 

I keep saying this: I would agree that over the past 25 years (at least) US policy has favored the wealthy and well-educated over factory workers and the like, but I don't see that anybody has a clear policy to turn this around, and I know Trump doesn't have a clue. Biden has been trying, with very limited success. Trump will try to clamp down on immigration, but his economic policy is otherwise likely to be either completely chaotic or boilerplate Republicanism.

Not, mind you, that the Democrats are particularly unified, either.

UPDATE: Here's a great example of what I'm talking about, an editorial in the WSJ from last Friday: 

Do Republicans want to rein in the regulatory state or unleash it? It's hard to tell these days, and the contradiction comes into sharp focus in J.D. Vance's embrace of Lina Kahn, Elizabeth Warren's favorite regulator who runs the Federal Trade Commission. . . .

The WSJ's complaints are that Kahn has been too aggressive in opposing corporate mergers and tried to ban non-compete clauses for workers, two things Vance has supported.

What I Think

Zack Beauchamp:

By dropping out of the 2024 race, President Joe Biden did what we all want our politicians to do: He put his country over his career. . . . In a country where many think politicians won’t do the right thing, Biden did (even if he exhausted all other options first).

I think Biden can now look forward with pride to his (likely short) retirement, and that pleases me. So I'm going to celebrate this moment of people doing the right thing and democracy working as it is supposed to before girding myself for a depressing election.

NY Times Readers Poll on the Best Books of the Century

Among those not cited by the professional reviewers are:

2. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
3. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
31. Madeleine Miller, Circe
56. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
67. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
86. Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

Let's start with All the Light We Cannot See. I enjoyed this book but I understand why the professionals didn't rate it highly: it's just very sentimental, and these days "sentimental" is about the worst thing a critic can say about a work of art. Art is supposed to be tough and insightful, to call out evil and oppression, not gloss over the world's pains. (My sister wrote a whole book about this phenomenon.)

Same goes for A Gentleman in Moscow., which I liked but from one perspective very much glosses over the horrors of 20th-century history.

I didn't like Circe as much, but I thought it was ok (much better than e.g. Lincoln in the Bardo) and many women loved it. But it struck a lot of people as weak and sappy, and, again, our artistic world despises the weak and sappy.

Some of you may laugh at The Hunger Games, but I would put it in the same category as Dune, a book that resonates very deeply with a certain sort of teenager. It's basically an anti-utopia in which the evil government forces young people to fight it out with each other in a savage competition for resources, with zero regard for what the young people actually need or want. Many, many teenagers have found it to be a perfect metaphor for our educational system, and it was long the favorite book of my most rebellious son.

I loved Piranesi, and absolutely think it belongs on this list. But then the list was almost devoid of fantasy (unless you count N.K. Jemisin), so this isn't surprising. 

Interesting that nothing by Haruki Murakami made either list.

Links 19 July 2024

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest, 1913

I'm leaving for a week in Masachusetts and Maine tomorrow, so any posting will likely be imited to scenery. See you when I get back!

Using AI to find deposits of valuable metal ores. (NY Times, CNBC, company web site) Computer programs that model subsurface features and try to locate valuable stuff (especially oil) are ancient, going back to the 1960s, but the claim is that these new AI systems are a major improvement.

Amazingly detailed drawings of buildings and cities by Benjamin Sack.

"The Nuclear Company, a new startup, has ambitious aims of spurring the construction of fleets of new nuclear power plants in the U.S."

The rattlesnake livestream, a camera pointed at a rock outcrop in Colorado where dozens of rattlesnakes have been hanging out. In the interest of science, of course.

Kevin Drum confirms that color is indeed disappearing from the world of automobiles; gray, black, and white are the top choices. And I hate it. If my next car has to be gray I'm going to have it repainted orange.

"Inside your skull, your brain hums along with its own unique pattern of activity, a neural fingerprint that’s yours and yours alone. A heavy dose of psilocybin temporarily wipes the prints clean."

If you want an introduction to Foucault's thought, I recommend this 46-minute lecture from Michael Sugrue. Concludes by asking if Foucault's radical skepticism undermined his own ideas as much as it undermined everything else, says that Foucault's followers "delegitmize the discourses of others without inquiring in a satisfactory way into the foundations, or lack of foundations, of their own discourse."

In New York, a move is under way to make air conditioning a right of all tenants, just like heat. (NY Times) Tell me again about how we were richer in the 1960s.

Another array of prize-winning buildings that swamp me with indifference.

Do "museums of other people" have a future? 

And from the same article: Did you know that the return of Benin bronzes from the US to Africa has been opposed by the descendants of slaves, who claim that it was the sale of their ancestors that provided the wealth displayed in the bronzes and therefore they should belong to African Americans, not Nigerians?

China's "Psychoboom".

Interesting: "Constellation Energy is in talks with the Pennsylvania governor's office and state lawmakers to help fund a possible restart of part of its Three Mile Island power facility."

Thefts of valuable metals, especially copper, are becoming a major problem in America. (NY Times, FBI, LA Times)

An economist reviews Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, a novel about a department store that I mentioned before.

The Stegosaurus skeleton known as Apex sold at auction for $44.6 million, a new record for a fossil.

Quick post about a Chinese historical drama that seems to focus on the budgetary problems of the Ming Empire.

The problem with running the national park at Pompeii is that you can't dig even a little hole for an air shaft without hitting something like the tomb of a military official under Augustus.

How well immigrants do in the US depends a lot on how they got here: willing migrants who pay their own way do great, but refugees have traditionally lagged, especially when they came from war-torn countries. But now even Cambodian and Hmong migrants who came to the US after the disaster of the Vietnam war earn more than native whites. Just because refugees have a tough time for the first few decades doesn't mean they won't be a benefit in the long run.

Restoring the marble floor of a Roman villa, under water.

Scott Siskind, who lives in the Bay Area, put up a mildly interesting post about homelessness last week. He argued that it is useless to say “we should do something about mentally ill homeless people” without specifying what it is you want to do, "something most of these people never get to." This inspired an explosion in his comment section from people who, it seems, want to send the Cossacks to saber the homeless into the ocean. Lots of people in SF are mad as hell about the homeless; I have an old acquaintance who lives out there and when I talked to him a few years ago I came away thinking that he would vote for Lenin if the Bolsheviks promised to clear the homeless out of his neighborhood. And now Siskind has responded, arguing that "I WOULD BE REALLY TOUGH!!!" is still not an actionable policy, just a way of saying "do something" with all caps.

This week's music is the St. Markus Passion by Nikolaus Matthes, often hailed as the greatest Baroque work of the 21st century. Hard to believe it is only five years old.

Royal United Services Institute report on tactical lessons from the Israeli offensive in Gaza, full of fascinating observations like this one: "The evidence from Gaza suggests that high-rise buildings are of limited military value. . . . Above a certain height, the streets become dead ground." Summary on Twitter/X.

And another RUSI report, this one on Ukraine's failed offensive in 2023. Short summary on Twitter/X. And here is an excerpt on the defense of Bakhmut.

Human Figures from Venezuelan Cave Paintings

No reason, these just came up. All from this article. The triangular people above may be female. None of these figures have scales, and I cannot find any statement in the article of how big these things are.

These are glossed as "decorated dancers from Period 4." Fascinating outfits. The periods are strictly stylistic; this article makes to attempt to put dates on them.

These are arranged by period, with the most recent on top. What delightfully weird little things.

House of Neptune and Amphitrite

The House of Neptune and Amphitrite in Herculaneum is remarkably well preserved, with a second floor and even some surviving woodwork.

Like this balcony.

Front entrance.

The house is not particularly large, only 227 square meters (2440 square feet), and the atrium (front courtyard) is nothing special.

The real wonder of the place is the rear courtyard, which had a fountain, a pool, and a remarkable array of art.

The house takes its name from this mosaic. 

This is a nymphaeum.

Details of the nymphaeum.

Paintings.

Even the stone walls employed decorative patterns.

Plus there is this object a sketch on marble, now in the museum in Naples, which is said to have come from the house.

Truly an amazing place.

Remarkable Pehistoric Children's Cemetery Found in Norway

Truly amazing announcement from the Norwegian Historical Museum:

In the autumn of 2023, our archaeologists investigated traces of the past outside Fredrikstad. They were surprised to discover more than 40 circular stone graves.

The archaeologists discovered circle after circle made of meticulously placed stones. The circles were approximately one to two meters wide. The stones were laid closely together, just like cobblestones in a street. Several of the graves had a large stone in the center. Beneath these, the archaeologists found remains of pottery and burned bones. After examining the bones, experts could announce the biggest surprise: almost all the graves belonged to children, except for two graves for adults on the outskirts of the burial site.  

Most of the children were 3 to 6 years old, a few even younger. The graves date to between 800 and 200 BC, the transition between the Bronze Age and Iron Age. The area has other signs of having been spiritually significant, including a lot of rock art, with several of the boat carvings that archaeologists think represent the ship that carries the sun across the sky.

Archaeologists have not found many graves of young children from prehistoric Europe. Some of those that have been found are in domestic settings, like, under the house floor. This is the only children's cemetery I know of from this period. What does it mean? It looks to me like these children were special in some way. How?

The dark side would be that these children were sacrifices. Ancient Europeans were not in the habit of giving their sacrificial victims such elaborate burials, but one can't rule out a cult in which the children were treated in some very special way before their deaths, like those offered by the Inca on top of Andean mountains.

But they could have been special in some other way that we don't understand, because this site is nothing like anything we have seen before, and it would be rash to claim we know what went on here.

Pro-War Russia, Succinctly

From the website of the Tsargrad TV network, on the latest Russian attack on a Ukrainian hospital:

Such enemies [Ukrainians] cannot be considered human. We must recognize this — simply and terrifyingly: there are no humans on the other side. Not a single person. Our missiles do not kill people. Not a single person. There are no humans out there.

If we do not accept this as a given, if we do not forbid ourselves from considering them as humans, from pitying them, and from saving them — we will weaken ourselves. We will limit our ability to save our children. We will hinder our path to Victory.

Links 12 July 2024

Earrings from southern Italy, gold and carnelian, 2nd century BC

Kevin Drum reviews the new Republican Party platform.

Tyler Cowen provides an excellent summary of why Trump is winning. And note that by marital status, the most pro-Trump group is divorced men.

Narco-pentacostalism in Brazil.

Alice Munro and the sad fact that many writers are lousy people.

The NY Times lists the 100 best books of the century. Top ten: 1) Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend; 2) Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (a history of black migration to the north); 3) Hillary Mantel, Wolf Hall (my personal number one by far), 4) Edward Jones, The Known World; 5) Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections; 6) Roberto Bolaño, 2666; 7) Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; 8) W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; 9) Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; 10) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. I'm already listening to one I got off this list and have plans to get to two more, which makes the exercise valuable to me at least.

No, really, stop with the "discovery" of "the labyrinth" on Crete. Just stop. The number of people who have embarassed themselves over this one makes me sad. Shut up about Atlantis, too.

The discovery and development of laughing gas.

Sabine Hossenfelder, Why I am Embarassed to be German, 11-minute video. (Because Germany is falling behind technologically, due to bad political choices.)

Three short posts from The Smell of Water, aka Teeside Psychogeography: Howl Moor on a rainy day, a little discourse inspired by finding a fossil of the type once called a "fairy loaf," and a black and white photoset from a trip to London.

Longish essay on attempts to create a logic machine, from Ramon Lull to LLMs.

Sports-based language imperialism: besides all the other reasons English has spread around the world, there is the fact that so many popular sports were invented in Britain or the US: soccer, rugby, cricket, basketball, volleyball, baseball. On my mind because I watched some of the highlights from the France vs. Germany basketball game, and among the English words used by the German commentators were: turnover, steal, and one, no look, staredown (mit dem staredown), NBA, rebound, high-low (das high-low spiel), possession, fast break, and line-up. Even when the words were German, the phrasing was American basketball: Gute hilfe ("good help"), Ballbewegung ("ball movement"), and so on. 

Peter Gray trashes Joathan Haidt's book arguing that screen time and the internet are damaging teen mental health, says there is "very little evidence for such effects." Gray blames school.

Tyler Cowen's conversation with Brian Winter, mainly about South America.

Impessive baskets by Native American weaver Jeremy Frey.

DNA and other analysis of human bones found in an underground cistern at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá says the victims were mostly young boys aged 3 to 6. They came from the surrounding community, and the 64 identified individuals included two sets of identical twins. The twin sacrifices may represent the Hero Twins of Maya myth. (WSJ, Arizona Free Press)

On Christopher Marlowe: "The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told."

Ten years ago, the population of starfish on the west coast of the US collapsed due to a still mysterious condition known as sea star wasting disease. This led to an explosion of sea urchins, which eat kelp, and so to a decline in kelp. Vox describes the efforts biologists are making to bring the starfish back.

Depressing piece in the NY Times about elevators in the US, which due largely to regulation are much more expensive than in Europe, and therefore we have fewer of them. Kevin Drum has a summary. 

Southeast England is one of the world's richest regions; why is the north so much poorer? Can anything be done about it?

Smithsonian covers Pablo Escobar's hippos from the "menace to the environment" angle.

This week's music is Cassandra Jenkins, a semi-ethereal folk-ish pop-ish singer, somewhere in between Emylou Harris and Enya. Petco, Delphinium Blue, Hard Drive.

Claim on Twitter/X that Russian organized crimed has metatastized since the war began, up 76% by official government figures and possibly much worse. The need to ramp up smuggling obviously helps them, as does the focus of the police on other issues.

Mediazona and the BBC, who publish the most widely respected estimates of Russian casualities, now say that 120,000 Russian military personnel haved died in the Ukraine war. That's more than twice as many deaths as the US suffered in Vietnam and eight times as many as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan. At least 20,000 of the Russian dead were criminals, but that still leaves a lot of others, including many officers. Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine has verified 6 major generals, 94 colonels, 244 lieutenant colonels, 473 majors, 716 captains, and more than 2,000 lieutenants.

And the 400,000 (so far) wounded Russian soldiers will be a major drain on the state and society for decades.

Notes for Speakers

1.  Show up ten minutes early and learn how to operate the projector before the session starts. That way you won't spend two minutes fiddling with the thing before summoning the AV tech from the back of the hall to come down and do it for you, thus throwing away your first three minutes and guaranteeing that you will run late. This fumbling also makes your audience feel embarassed on your behalf, which I assume is not your goal.


2. Know what your first sentence will be. That way the first thing out of your mouth won't be "UMMMM," which is was for two of the four speakers in the session I just sat through.


3. Don't repeat yourself. If you find yourself saying, "Again. . . ." just stop. You only have 20 minutes and you, at least, seem to think you have a lot to tell us. After all, this session of four 20-minute papers went 33 minutes over. 

Ian McEwan, "Atonement"

I just finished listening to Ian McEwan's Atonement, which, by coincidence, just landed at number 26 on the NY Times list of the best 100 books of the 21st century. I didn't get it. It has lots of lovely sentences and impressive paragraphs but I found the story to be a big nothing.

(I wonder, why didn't the Times wait until 2025? Did they want to get ahead of all the other people who might bring out their own lists at the quarter century?)

The novel consists of four long scenes. In the first, set in 1935 at the country house of a wealthy English family, there is an event, with repercussions, during which one person does something very bad. The middle two sections cover the World War II years, and end with a scene that makes it seem like the damage has been undone. Then we skip to 1997 when the author of the very bad deed reveals that she has written the whole thing and "actually" things transpired in a different and more depressing way. 

This did not move me, it irritated me. What do you mean, "actually" happened? This is all made up. You want some kind of credit for facing the reality of your own creation? For fixing crimes in the meta-story that you invented in the story? For attempting to fool your readers, and then confessing to your lies? It's all a lie!

Wouldn't make any list of good books I was drawing up, and I find it baffling that so many people like it so much. Certainly doesn't belong ahead of A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Goldfinch, Savage Detectives, or a bunch of other books the Times ranked below it.

Amazing Roman Dagger from Germany

Haltern am See is a German town nowhere near the sea. It sits instead on the Lippe River, a tributary of the Rhine navigable by boat some distance to the east. Just outside the modern town are the remains of a Roman fort that dates to around the year zero. The fort was placed so that it could easily be supplied from the river.

Yes, I know there was no year zero. Why are you such a pedant?

The site has been subject to excavation for decades, and archaeologists think it was built during the Roman attempt to conquer Germania between 12 BC and 16 AD. As you can see, the gate has been reconstructed.

There are reenactors, and others.

This was a large complex of buildings, as shown on a model in the local Roman museum.

Most of the archaeological finds at the site have come from a large cemetery.

Nearby is this strange statue, which seems to be titled Der gescheiterte Varus. Not sure how one would render the failed Varus in idiomatic English. Perhaps The Defeated Varus, or Varus Haunted by Failure? Or maybe the intent is, Varus' Zombie Stalking the Dreams of Augustus?

The find I want to write about was made in 2019. It came, not from a formal grave, but from a ditch. As you can see, it included not just the Pugio itself but a nearly complete belt. Nobody knows what it was doing in the ditch. It emerged from the ground as a lump of rust and metal that took 18 months to dissect and conserve.

But what an amazing object it is.