Interesting Terry Eagleton piece about the reign of literary theory, review of a book by Frederic Jameson. What was that about, anyway? Eagleton says it was at attempt to continue through other means a radical tradition that had failed politically.
The tomb of Idi, a high official's daughter of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
Study finds that universal pre-K does not help children academically but it does raise their parents' income.
Painting Deng Xiaoping out of Chinese history (Twitter/X)
Spitalfields Life on The Doors of Old London.
Kevin Drum on the income level of the poorest 20% of Americans.
What one fifth-century Bavarian woman wore hanging from her belt. (Compare here)
Oliver Cromwell's pocket watch.
The oldest known example of a Scythian-style royal burial, in a mound surrounded by sacrificed horses, has now been found in Siberia, c. 800 BC. The discoverers say this proves Scythian culture originated in Siberia, but then those discoverers are Russians, and their country is at war with Ukraine where most people think the Scythians arose.
Politics and Hindu festival in Kolkata, where the murder of a female doctor has roiled the city.
Lostwave, the search for forgotten songs.
A conversation with Sally Rooney on loving the conventions of the novel. I liked this because I believe, as I have often said, that the novel is the formal expression of bourgeois life and bourgeois sentimentality and makes no sense in other cultural contexts.
Rah rah post from the president of a space firm on the great future for research and manufacturing in orbit. I don't believe it, but it might be true and if so it would be important.
2024 Epson International Pano Awards.
Construction Physics explains that port automation is complicated and it is not clear that more automation would make US ports better. Via Marginal Revolution.
Sabine Hossenfelder says using AI for coding is not working well so far, 7-minute video.
This weird little article says work will go forward on a 5th-century BC shipwreck off Sicily from which bars of orichalcum have been recovered. Ok, but what is orichalcum? This is not a simple problem. Many modern authorities think it was an alloy of copper and zinc, that is, a kind of brass, but the classical Greeks also had another word for brass, and Plato makes orichalcum out to be a particularly valuable metal, which brass is not. So other authorities think the word refers to platinum. Fortunately this much better article tells us that the metal bars from the shipwreck are "75-80% copper and 14-20% zinc, with traces of nickel, lead, and iron," which is an entirely normal composition for brass. Which makes me think the investigators just decided to call their bars "orichalcum" to get some free press coverage.
Jeffrey Lewis ("arms control wonk" on Twitter/X) says the October 1 missile attack shows that Israel cannot afford to shoot down every Iranian missile and chose to prioritize other targets over defending air bases. Israel's Arrow missiles work but they cost about $4 million each and Israel has a limited supply. (Presumably the F-35s and other highly valuable planes scrambled away from the airfields when word of the attack came, which was hours in advance.) The twelve SM-3 missiles the US fired in support represent a whole year's production of that missile; the cost of various versions is $10 to $30 million.
Ramzan Kadyrov declares blood feud (really) against three other Russian politicians.
Twitter/X post about the crash of a new, large Russian drone, a Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B. Claimed as a stealth platform but US military guys say, after looking at the rivets on the fuselage, it would not be very stealthy at all. It was shot down by a Russian fighter, perhaps because control had been lost; video of the shootdown here.
3 comments:
Ramzan Kadyrov declares blood feud (really) against three other Russian politicians.
The story is utterly WILD, and I feel the link you provided doesn't really do a good job explaining the situation.
So it all starts with Tatiana Kim, an ethnic Korean woman, who founded an Amazon-like company in 2004. To found the company, she got funding from her husband Vladislav Bakalchuk, who is of Chechen ancestry.
Twenty years later, her once small business has succeeded to the point that she's the richest woman in the Russian Federation, but she and her husband have long been estranged. She wants to sell off the company, but Bakalchuk is against the idea and tries to fight her on it. In fact, he's so against it that he calls up his friend / associate / fellow Chechen, Kadyrov, to ask him to apply whatever leverage he can to help. This leads to Kim filing for divorce and pushing on with the sale.
Bakalchuk takes armed Chechen goons to the headquarters of her company, and a shootout occurs which results in the deaths of two security guards - both ethnic Ingush.
It is important to note that there is a lot of historical conflict between the Ingush and the Chechens, who share a linguistic tree and whose North Caucasus homelands neighbor each other. The tensions stretch back centuries in various forms, but recent history is especially pertinent. When the USSR broke up, the joint Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic also broke up - the Chechens fought to break away from Russia, while the Ingush were loyalists who helped the Russians try to stop them. So lots of bad blood there.
But even more recently, in 2018, Kadyrov made a crooked deal with a corrupt Ingush politician to conduct a "land-swap" in which Ingushetia handed to Chechnya a large expanse of valuable land in exchange for a similar amount of remote, largely worthless mountain terrain. Not only was the deal struck behind the backs of the Ingush people, who protested once they found out, but it also was ceding land that has been part of a long-standing border dispute that directly resulted from the breakup of Chechnya and Ingushetia in 1992.
Anywho, Kadyrov is mad that Kim and her company (largely run by her extended ethnic Korean family) are selling, and that his friend Bakalchuk (a fellow Chechen) isn't in charge of the company and its profits, and so he's claiming that the murder charges against Bakalchuk and his goons (who shot dead company security guards who wouldn't let them enter the head offices) are fabricated.
And so we reach the blood fueds, against an Ingush politician and two Dagestani politicians (who have more or less the same kind of historical ethnic conflict with the Chechens). It's pretty clear that Kadyrov is throwing a racist tantrum.
That said, Kim herself is no innocent angel - her company is extremely shady, and she has ties to (and the favor of) Putin and his regime.
Effectively, the whole thing is a corporate / mafia turf battle. Putin himself okayed the sale of Kim's company, but he's also not going to interfere with Bakalchuk and Kadyrov's efforts to stop it, even at gunpoint. So there's sure to be a lot more behind-the-scenes maneuvering, and there are decent odds someone high-profile is going to wind up dead in the end.
Lostwave, the search for forgotten songs.
For some years now, I've been offering my skills / knock for online digging and research to help my friends find things like this.
Old songs, old movies, old television shows, old video games... fragments of memories, vague and murky from decades of neglect... I have my friends try to recount every detail they can bring to mind, no matter how small... I make notes, begin searching, present and discard preliminary results, refine the search... sometimes we get lucky and we get a hit fairly quickly, other times it becomes a background project that I peck away at every now and then for months, sometimes years.
Perhaps amazingly, most of the things we look for we find. I'd say less than 10% are things we never track down.
I've made extensive use of "crowd-sourcing" and relying on the fact that these sorts of lost media memories are actually quite common, and enough other people go around asking for help finding the same (or similar enough) things, so there's a collective pool of knowledge to draw from, if you know where to look for pockets of information.
I've also made extensive use of modern translation software to help broaden the search pool and make connections across language barriers. (The amount of late 20th century "Western" media that can ultimately be traced back to Japan in some form or other is kind of astounding, for example.) Whenever I hit a dead end on the English internet, I start fishing around in other languages, and usually it's enough to glean some detail or clue that eventually gets me somewhere useful.
And, of course, one of the most vital resources is the modern ease of finding diehard hobbyists and enthusiasts. The number of small mysteries I've solved by finding and contacting tiny local museums or private collectors dedicated to extremely narrow and limited subjects is kind of stunning.
I've identified songs by tracing audio samples within them that were taken from historical interviews of local residents of obscure foreign towns. I've identified films based on completely non-famous landmarks that appeared in them which no longer physically exist, but which some local newspaper contributor had documented and preserved the records of. I've identified unknown family relatives based on photographs containing vintage household appliances, and cross referencing information from expert enthusiasts (made available on ancient, long-neglected Geocities websites and the like) to narrow down exact dates of manufacture and sale.
It's all a strangely soothing endeavor, and the emotional payoff when we conclusively positively identify something is unlike anything else I've ever experienced. It's a unique sort of sense of accomplishment which I find utterly indescribable. It's satisfying on a level I can't even comprehend, much less put into words.
Anywho, all of that is to say, I'm glad there's growing awareness of (and terminology for) these kinds of things. I feel like this kind of search, and the curiosity that fuels it, is profoundly human and universal, and has tremendous potential to bring us together and make the world a better place.
@Verloren
That's very, very cool.
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