Dandelions

by Peter Campion

After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.

Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.

It happens still. That desolating falling
shudder inside and then our neighborhood
seems only sprawling
loops... like the patterns eaten on driftwood:

even the home where I grew up (its smell
of lingering wood-smoke and bacon grease)
seems just a shell
of lathe and paper. But this strange release

follows: this tinge like silver and I feel
the pull of dirt
again, sense mist uncurling to reveal
no architecture hidden behind the world
except the stories that we make unfolding:

as if our sole real power were the power
of children holding
this flower that is a weed that is a flower.

In the Graveyard

I spent the morning at this charming little church, where, before we got rained out, I was making sure that unmarked graves aren't disturbed during the ongoing restoration. During the inevitable waiting around, I explored the graveyard.

I was much intrigued by these stones. Eddie -- you remember Eddie, right? Why does he need any further introduction? And grandma has been grandma for so long nobody even remembers her name. . . .

And then there is the mysterious case of Mrs. Windsor, who seems to have become a vampire.

Doctrine

If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men are ever subject.

--William Graham Sumner

Signs of a Future Robot Takeover

This is the Taranis, a stealthy drone aircraft from British Aerospace with intercontinental range and an "autonomous artificial intelligence system." You can tell just by looking at the thing that it is a threat to continued human rule of the planet. And consider the name: Taranis was a "merciless" Celtic god of thunder who was propitiated with human sacrifices. "At his altars they tremble," wrote the Roman poet Lucan. He was probably one of the gods for whom captives were burned in wicker cages.

Very bad omens. Very bad.

One is Afraid to Hope

CNN has a great video here of the new cap being placed over the blow oil well in the gulf, once you get past the annoying shaving commercial. Could this be the solution?

Like most people I have been trying not to think about this, since my worrying would achieve nothing, but I do check from time to time to see how bad things have gotten.

A Roman Canal

The Romans, they liked to build things, and with ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry, more and more of them are being discovered:

Scholars discovered the 100-yard-wide (90-metre-wide) canal at Portus, the ancient maritime port through which goods from all over the Empire were shipped to Rome for more than 400 years.

The archaeologists, from the universities of Cambridge and Southampton and the British School at Rome, believe the canal connected Portus, on the coast at the mouth of the Tiber, with the nearby river port of Ostia, two miles away.

It would have enabled cargo to be transferred from big ocean-going ships to smaller river vessels and taken up the River Tiber to the docks and warehouses of the imperial capital.

Until now, it was thought that goods took a more circuitous overland route along a Roman road known as the Via Flavia.

"It's absolutely massive," said Simon Keay, the director of the three-year dig at Portus, the most comprehensive ever conducted at the site, which lies close to Rome's Fiumicino airport, 20 miles west of the city.

"We know of other, contemporary canals which were 20-40 metres wide, and even that was big. But this was so big that there seems to have been an island in the middle of it, and there was a bridge that crossed it. It was unknown until now."

This newspaper article doesn't explain how this thing was dated, but this is what they say:

Work on the massive infrastructure project began under the emperor Claudius. It was inaugurated by Nero and later greatly enlarged by Trajan.

Portus is largely buried and much of it seems to be undisturbed, so many more discoveries may be made there in coming decades. That is, if Italy doesn't ban all future archaeology because they can't protect half of the things that have already been uncovered in the country.

Tin-Glazed Bowls from London

These three tin-glazed ("Delft") bowls, made around 1674, have just gone on display at the Museum of London. The seem to come from the home of an artisan, and they give us a good idea of the kind of decorations that an ordinary craftsman might have had in his home at the time:

Each is a unique piece, demonstrating the varying ambitions and skills of the pottery painters of the day. One is an Islamic-inspired tulip design; another, marking the marriage of NT to ET in 1674, imitates Chinese porcelain; and the last so ineptly attempts a blue and white Dutch painting that museum staff have named it "boy with colander on head tormenting meerkat with stick".

They were all made for show, not for practical use – beneath the fancy painted fronts, the original clay colour shows through the thin glaze on the backs – giving a striking insight into the kind of display a fairly modest craft worker's home might boast. This makes it more puzzling that they were all apparently dumped at the same time, not long after they were made.

"Did they go out of fashion?" Roy Stephenson, head of the archaeological collections at the museum, wondered. "Was there a kitchen disaster when somebody tipped the Welsh dresser over on top of themself, did it all go horribly wrong for them and did they get evicted – or did ET go off and leave NT so he didn't want the marriage bowl around as a reminder any longer?"

The most beautiful is also the best preserved, the tulip bowl, but the marriage bowl provides the clue to the original owners. The crest in the centre – "three beasts with horns waiting to be turned into handbags" says Stephenson – is that of the Leather Seller's Company. The guild's 17th century archives survive, and record that one Nathaniel Townsend was admitted to the company in 1673.

Electric Cars and CO2 Emissions

Electric cars don't burn oil, but whether they reduce greenhouse gas emissions depends on how the electricity that powers them is produced. If the energy comes from burning coal, then the greenhouse emissions are greater from your electric car than from a gas-electric hybrid (e.g., a Prius). Scientific American has a neat application that allows you to see whether you would be helping the planet by driving an electric car in your state. In Maryland, an electric car would result in the emission of 6.1% more carbon dioxide than a hybrid.

What are Universities For?

Thoughtful essay by Nigel Biggar:

Let me inaugurate two of lines of thought. First, one valuable gift that the arts and humanities make is to introduce us to foreign worlds: worlds made strange by the passage of time; present worlds structured by the peculiar grip of unfamiliar languages; worlds alien to us in their social organisation and manners, their religious and philosophical convictions.

Introduction to these foreign worlds confers a substantial benefit: the benefit of distance from our own world, and thereby the freedom to ask questions of it that we could never otherwise have conceived. In foreign worlds, past and present, they see and love and do things differently. And in reflecting upon that difference, it might occur to us from time to time that they see and love and do things better. So, one precious contribution of the arts and humanities is their furnishing public discourse with the critical resources of an understanding of foreign worlds, resources vital for social and cultural and moral renewal — a renewal that deserves at least an equal place alongside scientific and technological innovation.

That's my first thought.

My second thought is this. The arts and humanities not only introduce us to foreign worlds, they teach us to treat them well. They teach us to read strange and intractable texts with patience and care; to meet alien ideas and practices with humility, docility, and charity; to draw alongside foreign worlds before we set about — as we must — judging them. They train us in the practice of honest dialogue, which respects the "Other" as a potential prophet, one who might yet speak a new word about what's true and good and beautiful.

A commitment to the truth, humility, a readiness to be taught, patience, carefulness, charity: all of these moral virtues that inform the intellectual discipline into which the arts and humanities induct their students; all of these moral virtues of which public discourse, whether in the media or in Parliament or in Congress, displays no obvious surplus. All of these moral virtues, without which this country and others may get to become a "knowledge economy", but won't get to become a "wisdom society".

More Dorset Maskettes

I was so intrigued by that newly discovered Maskette from the Dorset Culture of the Canadian Arctic that I did some searching for more images. I found this page at the Canadian Museum of Civilization site, which lists several more of these fascinating objects. The one above dates to AD 1000 to 1200 and it is thought by some to represent a Viking.

Some Guys Have All the Luck

Like the one who found a hoard of Roman coins buried in a field in Somerset, England:

A total of 52,500 bronze and silver coins dating from the 3rd century AD – including the largest ever found set of coins minted by the self proclaimed emperor Carausius, who lasted seven years before he was murdered by his finance minister – were found by Dave Crisp, a hobby metal detectorist from Devizes, Wiltshire.

Crisp first dug up a fingernail-sized bronze coin only 30cm below the surface. Even though he had never found a hoard before, when he had turned up a dozen coins he stopped digging and called in the experts, who uncovered a pot bellied pottery jar stuffed with the extraordinary collection, all dating from 253 to 293 AD – the year of Carausius's death.

Just giving them a preliminary wash, to prevent them from sticking together in a corroded mass as the soil dried out, took conservation staff at the British Museum a month, and compiling the first rough catalogue took a further three months.

How they got into the field remains a mystery, but archaeologists believe they must represent the life savings of an entire community – possibly a votive offering to the gods. A Roman road runs nearby, but no trace of a villa, settlement or cemetery has been found.

The British experts dealing with the hoard note that it weighs more than 300 kilograms (650 pounds), too large for one person even to carry it to its burial place. They also note that the time of its burial did not correspond to any particular crisis or invasion -- there was civil strife within Britain at the time, which produced a couple of usurping emperors, but no big battles, and we have no evidence of widespread purges. One of the experts speculates that it was a votive offering made by a whole community. I wonder if maybe it was the treasury of a would-be usurper, say an army commander who built up a war chest in preparation for his uprising but then was caught or assassinated before he got going, or else a rebel who was defeated so quickly that he didn't make it into our sources.

A Dorset Maskette

This walrus ivory maskette -- that's what archaeologists call amulets in the shape of a human face -- five centimeters long, was recently excavated from the Nuvuk Islands in Canada. It is about a thousand years old and derives from the Dorset culture, the people who preceded the Inuit in the arctic:

The Tunit made our country habitable. They built the line of boulder cairns that guide caribou to the river-crossings where they can be ambushed by hunters, and they furnished the rivers with fish-weirs.” – An Inuit story, from Ancient People of the Arctic by Dr. Robert McGhee

Today archaeologists believe that the “Tunit,” who are mentioned in Inuit stories, flourished in the arctic during ancient times, vanishing around the 14th century AD.

Archaeologists first encountered their remains in 1925 at a place called Cape Dorset on Baffin Island. They gave them the name “Dorset culture,” a term that is still used today.

The Dorset developed special technologies that allowed them to survive in the harsh arctic environment. They used harpoons and lances to hunt down walrus and other animals. They constructed semi-subterranean houses made of stone and sod, to shelter themselves from the elements. To improve their tool repertoire, they obtained pure iron from meteorite remains at Cape York in Greenland – pounding them with heavy rocks to remove flakes that could then be hammered into an edge.

Russia, 1905-1915

Early color photographs of Siberia and the Russian east, a fabulous collection. Top, the Emir of Bukhara; below, five women of Dagestan.

Light in the Dark

I was perusing some of Wordsworth's forgotten poems, most of them quite justly forgotten, when I stumbled across this:

EVEN as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp
Suddenly glaring through sepulchral damp,
So burns yon Taper 'mid a black recess
Of mountains, silent, dreary, motionless:
The lake below reflects it not; the sky,
Muffled in clouds, affords no company
To mitigate and cheer its loneliness.

This image of a single candle visible from miles away across a lake set me musing on how dark the world used to be on a moonless night. Especially in northern Europe with its heavy clouds and long winter nights, our ancestors lived much in the darkness. Beeswax candles were expensive, and ordinary folk made do with tallow that gave a dim, uneven, smoky glow, or even tried to work by the weak light of a banked fire. Whale oil lamps were such a huge advance that men sailed off on three-year voyages to the southern ocean, there to risk their lives hunting the sperm whale near to extinction for the precious fluid, one shipful of which made the owner rich. When coal gas lights first appeared in London and Paris they were hailed by poets with raptures about repeating the deeds of Prometheus. Now that we are used to such wonders some people worry about the effects of all this light on our sleep, and the way it pushes us to work around the clock, but for those who grew up in darkness, light was a powerful blessing.

Headless Corpses and Border Lies

Dana Milbank responds to the latest nonsense coming from anti-immigrant politicians in Arizona:

Jan Brewer has lost her head.

The Arizona governor, seemingly determined to repel every last tourist dollar from her pariah state, has sounded a new alarm about border violence. "Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded," she announced on local television.

Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they're also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.

But those in fear of losing parts north of the neckline can relax. There's not a follicle of evidence to support Brewer's claim.

The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona's border counties, and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer's press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply. . . .

Two months ago, the Arizona Republic published an exhaustive report that found that, according to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been "essentially flat for the past decade." For example, "In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes." The Pima County sheriff reported that "the border has never been more secure."

FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago -- yet Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reports that the violence is "the worst I have ever seen." President Obama justifiably asserted last week that "the southern border is more secure today than any time in the past 20 years," yet Rush Limbaugh judged the president to be "fit for the psycho ward" on the basis of that remark.

I should point out that this isn't limited to Arizona; violent crime in the US has declined by about half since 1991, but outside New York -- where politicians have made sure people know -- nobody believes it. A majority of Americans continues to tell pollsters that crime is getting worse.

The Black Guerrilla Family

Today's Baltimore Sun has some crime news that borders on the surreal. The story concerns the arrest of prison guard Alicia Simmons, who is accused of helping a prison gang called the Black Guerrilla Family by smuggling in drugs and money. She seems to have been a sort of crime groupie:

Simmons, 34, also was in possession of letters, inmate ID cards, debit cards and other correspondence linked to some of the city's most notorious criminals. There's a letter from Kevin Gary, the Tree Top Bloods member known for his tinted red contact lenses, and another from Isaac Smith, convicted in the firebombing of a North Baltimore community activist's home, that discussed Simmons being criminally charged.

She also had inmate identification cards in the names of Johnny "J.R." Butler and Calvin "Turkey" Wright, recently convicted for running a violent east-side drug ring connected to at least two killings; and Ronnie Thomas, better known as "Skinny Suge," the producer of the infamous "Stop Snitching" videos.

As if that weren't weird enough, consider this detail about the gang she is accused of helping:

The Black Guerrilla Family is described by the DEA as the largest and most powerful prison gang in the state, with a presence in every facility and a top-down paramilitary structure that encouraged extortion and violence to further its goals. Already, the case has revealed how leaders used a handbook called the "Black Book" to spread its message while placing members to work with city school children and violence intervention programs as a front for recruiting.

Not just your average prison gang, the BGF has a revolutionary agenda, a lawcode written in Swahili, pamphlets that spread its message of violent, pan-African solidarity, and at least one member who is paid by the city to teach kids to stay away from gangs and violence.

The 36 Situations

French George Solti (1868-1926) drew up this list of the "36 Dramatic Situations," intended to be a complete categorization of all possible literary encounters. It was a revision of an earlier list by Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), of which Goethe once remarked, "Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi."

1. Supplication
   • a Persecutor; a Supplicant; a Power in authority, whose decision is doubtful.
2. Deliverance
   • an Unfortunate; a Threatener; a Rescuer
3. Crime pursued by vengeance
   • a Criminal; an Avenger
4. Vengeance taken for kin upon kin
   • Guilty Kinsman; an Avenging Kinsman; remembrance of the Victim, a relative of both
5. Pursuit
   • Punishment; a Fugitive
6. Disaster
   • a Vanquished Power; a Victorious Enemy or a Messenger
     
7. Falling prey to cruelty/misfortune
   • an Unfortunate; a Master or a Misfortune
8. Revolt
   • a Tyrant; a Conspirator
9. Daring enterprise
   • a Bold Leader; an Object; an Adversary
10. Abduction
    • an Abductor; the Abducted; a Guardian
11. The enigma
    • a Problem; an Interrogator; a Seeker
12. Obtaining
    • (a Solicitor & an Adversary who is refusing) or (an Arbitrator & Opposing Parties)
13. Enmity of kin
    • a Malevolent Kinsman; a Hated or a reciprocally-hating Kinsman
14. Rivalry of kin
    • the Preferred Kinsman; the Rejected Kinsman; the Object of Rivalry
15. Murderous adultery
    • two Adulterers; a Betrayed Spouse
16. Madness
    • a Madman; a Victim
17. Fatal imprudence
    • the Imprudent; a Victim or an Object Lost
18. Involuntary crimes of love
    • a Lover; a Beloved; a Revealer
19. Slaying of kin unrecognized
    • the Slayer; an Unrecognized Victim
20. Self-sacrifice for an ideal
    • a Hero; an Ideal; a Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed
21. Self-sacrifice for kin
    • a Hero; a Kinsman; a Creditor or a Person/Thing sacrificed
22. All sacrificed for passion
    • a Lover; an Object of fatal Passion; the Person/Thing sacrificed
23. Necessity of sacrificing loved ones
    • a Hero; a Beloved Victim; the Necessity for the Sacrifice
24. Rivalry of superior vs. inferior
    • a Superior Rival; an Inferior Rival; the Object of Rivalry
25. Adultery
    • two Adulterers; a Deceived Spouse
26. Crimes of love
    • a Lover; the Beloved
27. Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one
    • a Discoverer; the Guilty One
28. Obstacles to love
    • two Lovers; an Obstacle
29. An enemy loved
    • a Lover; the Beloved Enemy; the Hater
30. Ambition
    • an Ambitious Person; a Thing Coveted; an Adversary
31. Conflict with a god
    • a Mortal; an Immortal
32. Mistaken jealousy
    • a Jealous One; an Object of whose Possession He is Jealous; a Supposed Accomplice; a Cause or an Author of the Mistake
33. Erroneous judgement
    • a Mistaken One; a Victim of the Mistake; a Cause or Author of the Mistake; the Guilty One
34. Remorse
    • a Culprit; a Victim or the Sin; an Interrogator
35. Recovery of a lost one
    • a Seeker; the One Found
36. Loss of loved ones
    • a Kinsman Slain; a Kinsman Spectator; an Executioner

There are, indeed, only so many stories that can be told; and yet the number of stories is infinite.

Flowers Love the Rain

My main flower bed after today's rain, looking just the way I imagined when I started digging it five years ago.

Worry of the Day

"Light pollution" is disruptive to many animals. A report from a convention on the problem:

Researchers presenting their work at Edmonton added further examples of species affected by brightness in various ways. Some, like the turtles and migrating birds, become visually bewildered, whereas others, such as voles, can have their circadian or seasonal rhythms disrupted by artificially lengthened days, leading to rising levels of stress hormones.

Speakers also showed evidence that frogs and snail larvae grow at different rates under natural and artificial light. Beach mice on bright shorelines may have to restrict the areas in which they forage, to avoid predators. Salamanders, too, are reluctant to leave their hideaways at night under the glare of artificial light, and certain bats won't fly in bright areas, which limits and lengthens their commutes to food.

Yesterday

Excavating a test unit near an old cellar hole in the mountains of central Maryland.

Lady Rain

What a glorious sight to wake up to after a month of heat and drought. And this isn't a passing shower or a quick storm but a gentle all-day soaking, what some farmers used to call a "lady rain."

Sperm Donor Fairy Tales

A few weeks ago I wrote:

The offspring of sperm donors seem to have conflicted views about the process. . . . But two-thirds think they have a right to find out the identity of their biological fathers, and to try to form a relationship with him. I consider this a bizarre fantasy born from the same part of the brain that writes fairy tales.

I suppose other people were thinking along the same lines, because we now have the first big-budget film devoted to sperm donor children who seek out their father. It's a comedy called "The Kids are Alright," by Lisa Cholodenko, and it features Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple whose teenage children find out that a rogue played by Mark Ruffalo is their biological father. Critics seem to like it.

M78

Click to enlarge.

Unintended Consequences

Our attempts to impose sanctions on Iran are being undermined by . . . our friends the Iraqi Kurds.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I just finished listening to Paul Theroux's latest travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), and I liked it a lot. His first travel book was The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), the narrative of his train trip across Asia. He wrote the book when he was 33, and 33 years later he tried to retrace his steps. I like the new book better than the first one. Back then Theroux was a flamboyant jerk who owed a lot of his popularity to his sarcasm, but at 66 he is more thoughtful. In the new book he is more positive about many things and much less narcissistic, much kinder to the people he meets, but on the other hand he has a deep gloominess about the future of our increasingly crowded planet.

Fixing Problems Without Blame

James Bagian is a former astronaut, aeronautical engineer, and safety expert whose latest job is trying to reduce medical errors in VA hospitals. In this Slate interview with Kathryn Schulz, he explains the different perspective he brought from the engineering world:

How does the healthcare industry compare to engineering and aeronautics when it comes to dealing with human error?

Not favorably. Much of my background is in what's called high-reliability industries—the ones that operate under conditions of high hazard yet seldom have a bad event—and people in those fields tend to have a systems perspective. We're not terribly interested in what some individual did. We want to know what led up to a bad event and what changes we need to make to reduce the likelihood of that event ever happening again.

When I got into healthcare, I felt like I'd stepped into an entirely different world. It was all about, "Let's figure out who screwed up and blame them and punish them and explain to them why they're stupid." To me, it's almost like whistling past the grave. When we demonize the person associated with a bad event, it makes us feel better. It's like saying, "We're not stupid so it won't happen to us." Whereas in fact it could happen to us tomorrow.

I appreciate that attitude, but some things really medical errors, right? Bad outcomes don't only happen because a certain piece of information was unknowable or a certain event was unforeseeable. Sometimes doctors just write the wrong prescriptions or operate on the wrong body parts.

That's true, but if at the end of the day all you can say is, "So-and-so made a mistake," you haven't solved anything. Take a very simple example: A nurse gives the patient in Bed A the medicine for the patient in Bed B. What do you say? "The nurse made a mistake"? That's true, but then what's the solution? "Nurse, please be more careful"? Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. Some are better than others, but nobody's perfect. You need a solution that's not about making people perfect. So we ask, Why did the nurse make this mistake?" Maybe there were two drugs that looked almost the same. That's a packaging problem; we can solve that. Maybe the nurse was expected to administer drugs to ten patients in five minutes. That's a scheduling problem; we can solve that. And these solutions can have an enormous impact. Seven to 10 percent of all medicine administrations involve either the wrong drug, the wrong dose, the wrong patient, or the wrong route. But if you introduce bar coding for medication administration, the error rate drops to one tenth of one percent. That's huge. . . .

Do you punish people for failing to report serious medical issues?

No. In theory, punishment sounds like a good idea, but in practice, it's a terrible one. All it does is create a system where it's not in people's interest to report a problem.

Lesbian Life in Small Town Mississippi

Margaret Wheeler Johnson follows up on the case of Constance McMillen, whose school canceled the prom rather than let her attend with her girlfriend:

Though McMillen has suffered plenty throughout her ordeal, much of her life is proof that the South is changing culturally as well as legally. This spring, she casually mentioned to radio host Michelangelo Signorile that she is not the only lesbian in the family. Denise McMillen, her mother, who is 37 and lives in southern Mississippi, has openly dated women since her 20s and raised Constance's 15-year-old younger sister with her partner, Elsa. Her mother is not a gay activist, unless that is what living openly makes you. She works as a waitress and manager at the Whistle Stop Café in Wiggins, Miss., sells Mary Kay cosmetics on the side and refers to herself as a small-town girl. . . .

And Constance herself is the kind of young woman a state entirely mired in bigotry can't produce. Though she doesn't belong to a church, McMillen describes herself as an "open-minded Christian" and a strong believer in monogamy, which she expresses in a distinctly evangelical way. "Actually, I have a promise ring from my girlfriend, and I'm pretty sure that within the next year she's going to propose. Of course, we wouldn't get married until she's 18." One male student once asked McMillen's girlfriend, "How can you be redneck and gay at the same time?" which seems tantamount to proof that the woman in front of him had that figured out. McMillen would like to live in Los Angeles when she gets older, but that is due in part to many, many hours spent watching the L Word. Her girlfriend says she doesn't want to come because she can't hunt there.

No, You Can't See the Great Wall from Space

Not with the naked eye, anyway. NASA:

It has become a space-based myth. The Great Wall of China, frequently billed as the only man-made object visible from space, generally isn't, at least to the unaided eye in low Earth orbit. It certainly isn't visible from the Moon.

With the zoom lens on an ordinary digital camera you can see parts of the wall, but also lots of other human-built things, like airports, dams, and the like.

Money and Babies

I just stumbled on this graph, which makes the relationship between income and total fertility -- the number of babies a woman has in her lifetime -- very clear. The data comes from the UN, and most experts think it is pretty reliable. The 2.33 line is one estimate of the replacement rate that would hold populations steady in the long run, but that is based on infant and child mortality rates for the world as a whole now. For advanced countries, the replacement rate is around 2.05, which happens to be the total fertility rate in the US and Iceland. All other European countries are below replacement, along with Brazil, Chile, China, Japan, both Koreas, and Burma. Very high birth rates of more than 4 children per woman are now only found in Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq.

The Old Bailey Online

The complete records of London's main criminal court from the years 1674-1913 are now online. You can learn a lot about daily life from thousands of cases like this:

Lawrence Simpson , of the Parish of St. Sepulchres, was indicted for privately stealing a Hat and Wig, value 20 s. from the Person of Christopher Longwood the 25th of May last. The Prosecutor depos'd, that as he was going down Cow-Lane , about Eleven a-Clock at Night, he stopp'd to make Water. and his Hat and Wig were snatch'd off from his Head, he turn'd and saw the Prisoner running, he pursu'd the Prisoner, and saw him throw it into the Sheep pens, but he overtook him, and apprehended him. Nehemiah Richardson confirm'd the former Evidence, and that the Hat and Wig were found in the Sheep-pens, where the Prisoner had thrown them. The Prisoner deny'd the Fact, and call'd a great many to his Reputation, who gave him a good Character. The Jury acquitted him.

This is one of the first settlers in western Maryland, who shows up along the Potomac near Antietam in 1736:

James Spurgin was indicted for Felony and Burglary in breaking open the House of Mary Fletcher, and taking thence a Camblet Coat 2 pair of Plush Breeches 23 Coats and Waistcoats,&c. The Prosecutor deposed that between 4 and 5 in the Morning a Man came and knockt at her Door, and ask'd if she had lost any Goods, whereupon she went with him to the Watch-house, (where the prisoner was and had the Coat and a pair of Breeches on him) and own'd her Goods. There being no proof of the Burglary the Jury acquitted him of that, and brought him in Guilty of Felony only, Transportation.

There doesn't seem to be any mechanism within their search engine for checking variant spellings of names, so you'll have to do that yourself.