Nabta Playa

This stone calendar in the Sudan may date to before 8,000 BC.

Partisanship

This great Gallup Poll shows that both Republicans and Democrats fear a government controlled by the other party.

Religion and Morality

I was just reading this essay by Frans de Waal, about morality and religion. Religious believers all seem to assume that there can be no morality without God; as Al Sharpton put it,

If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right or wrong? There is nothing immoral if there’s nothing in charge.

Imagine a toddler who always behaves well when his mother is in the room, but as soon as she leaves starts to color on the walls and throw things at the cat. If you ask me, a person who is only moral because he thinks God is watching is just like that toddler. I don't have any trouble refraining from hurting people, regardless of whether God is keeping track. The reason to refrain from hurting other people is that it is mean and nasty; why does God have to be invoked here? Which is not to say that my humanist morality is the same as a religious one. I have trouble with the notion of victimless crimes, for example; to me wrong always involves harm to somebody. I find the notion of kosher rules bizarre, and ditto rules about how to treat the flag. But I don't see any reason to think that religious believers are, on average, more moral than non-believers, and when I look around the world I see millions of believers committing crimes I can't imagine participating in myself

The Missing History of Cancer

People who study Egyptian mummies and other well-preserved ancient bodies find much evidence of malnutrition, arthritis, malaria, and other ancient scourges, but very little evidence of cancer. The term is from classical Greek, so the disease was certainly known in the ancient world, but it seems to have been quite rare. These days, by contrast, cancer is the second leading cause of death, and almost all people have some cancer in their bodies by the time they reach 70. Something about modern life causes most of our cancers. This is from a recent study that included both examinations of medical texts and the largest study yet of mummies:

Hundreds of mummies from all areas of the world have been examined and there are still only two publications showing microscopic confirmation of cancer. Radiological surveys of mummies from the Cairo Museum and museums in Europe have also failed to reveal evidence of cancer.

As the team moved through the ages, it was not until the 17th century that they found descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers and the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours have only occurred in the past 200 years, such as scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775, nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761 and Hodgkin’s disease in 1832.

Rosalie David on the University of Birmingham concludes, "Cancer is a man-made disease."

Caral Figurines

These figurines come from the Pyramid of La Huanca in the Peruvian site of Caral, said by its excavators to date to 3000 BC.

Por Bajin

Por Bajin is a medieval fortress on an island in a Siberian Lake, a part of the world now known mainly for how remote it is, and for the performances of the local shamans. Those are local Tuvan shamans above, blessing the start of the latest archaeological project.

What is this impressive fortress doing in the middle of this remote lake? Excavations, under the auspices of the Por Bajin Cultural Foundation, have shown that the site was occupied in the ninth century. It seems to have been an outpost of the Uighur Empire. The Uighurs are a Turkish-speaking people who have long lived in the borderlands of China, Mongolia, and Siberia. Now most of them live in China, where they complain of discrimination and some long for independence. Between 742 and 848 they had an impressive state of their own, and this seems to be a relic of that time. Of course, the politics of this are probably intense, and one has to wonder where the money came from to pay Russian archaeologists to dig on a site where the findings might create trouble for the Chinese. Vladimir Putin, we are told, once visited the site. Not to mention that if the inhabitants of the site were Uighurs, there architect seems to have been Chinese, since the reconstructed buildings (below) look as Chinese as buildings can be.

Still, a fascinating site, whatever use gets made of it in the 21st century.

Micro Houses

One of the signs of doom cited by that Martin Fackler article on Japan is the spread of "Micro Houses" -- "Micro" seems to the the Japanese word for them. I did a little googling and found a lot of articles and pictures about the phenomenon in design magazines. The tone of these, though, is very different from Fackler's. The design writers are fascinated by these structures, their style, their clever use of space, their environmental sensitivity. They remind me of the tiny houses one sees in some old US neighborhoods, like Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria around DC; these were built for servants or poor relations, but now they sell for millions to wealthy gay men. The building of tiny houses in Japan is not a sign of economic crisis, but of an artificial land shortage created by the blanket ban on building on agricultural land, coupled with the continuing desire of many successful Japanese to move out of apartments. The house above is built on a 344-square-foot lot, the one below on a 279-square-foot lot.

Here is one that has gotten a lot attention in the architectural press:

And here's another, part of an extensive slide show of micro houses in Osaka.

If these houses are signs of crisis, I would say Japan doesn't have much to worry about.

The Japanese Economy

The NY Times is running a weirdly dark article on Japan by Martin Fackler, full of passages like

“Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago.

and

But perhaps the most noticeable impact here has been Japan’s crisis of confidence. Just two decades ago, this was a vibrant nation filled with energy and ambition, proud to the point of arrogance and eager to create a new economic order in Asia based on the yen. Today, those high-flying ambitions have been shelved, replaced by weariness and fear of the future, and an almost stifling air of resignation. Japan seems to have pulled into a shell, content to accept its slow fade from the global stage.

It is true that the Japanese economy has hardly grown since 1991 -- the US economy has roughly doubled since then -- but on the other hand the population is about the same size, too, which means that on average Japanese are just as rich as they were during the bubble years. They don't feel as rich because they don't expect things to get better in the future. During 140 years of rapid economic growth the Japanese got used to imagining wealthy futures for themselves and their country. What they are experiencing now is not a decline in their living standards, but a decline in their dreams. This seems to hurt many people quite a lot. To judge from interviews in this article and other places, many Japanese adults feel grim about their lives, and many young people have shunned business careers for lives spent playing games and loafing. Even more, it hurts the public mood, which everyone agrees is sour and dark in Japan. The modern world is all about economic growth, and without it the whole rationale for our system starts to collapse. One thing we know about economic growth is that it has been tied all along to population growth -- while an economy is growing the growth feeds on itself, but nobody is sure how the process gets started, and the push provided by demand from a growing population may be a big factor. As population growth grinds to a halt across the developed world, we are seeing that our economic model doesn't work especially well in stasis.

I have no particular insights into Japan, except to suggest that they might revive their housing market by opening new land to development, sacrificing some subsidized rice farmers in the process, and maybe rediscover Buddhism. I do, though, have two words of advice for Americans worried that the US will follow Japan into stagnation: immigration and education. Immigration is what will, for the foreseeable future, keep the US from following Japan. Especially important are the visas and green cards we grant to highly skilled people, and to university students. Inventive immigrants have always driven our economy, and we should extend that welcome to as many as want to come. Since WW II the other thing driving our economy has been our universities. Besides turning out a mass of educated people far greater than what any other nation has to draw on, they attract thousands of talented and moneyed foreigners to the US. We should make it easier for them to come, and easier for those who graduate to stay.

Or, we could start thinking about how to enjoy a world without growth.

Cairo

I've been reading about Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and the Ohio come together. I used to live in southern Illinois, so I know that Cairo is pronounced Kay-ro, and that it is located in a place called Little Egypt because it was the land between the rivers. With such a terminologically confused start, the town probably was not ever destined for great things. But it had some success as a river town, and in the 1920s it had 15,000 inhabitants. After that it entered an era of slow decline.

Then came the Civil Rights movement. Cairo was always a southern town in a northern state, its soil in Illinois but its soul in Tennessee. Its white leaders took a rock hard stand against integration. In 1967 there was a bloody riot, and many houses and businesses were burned. Black leaders then organized a boycott of white-owned businesses that wouldn't hire black employees. They kept it up for three years, from 1969 to 1972. But rather than integrate, dozens of businessmen packed up and moved elsewhere. What was left was something like a ghost town. Now Cairo has only 3,000 inhabitants and a 26% poverty rate, and it has become a common stop for travelers seeking the forgotten backwaters of America. Here is blogger John Henion:

My first impression of Cairo was that it seemed like a nice place but I was glad I didn’t live there. I was ready to leave. And then I drove one block over.

Right on the levee of the Ohio River was what I can only describe as a modern day ghost town. It was as if a prosperous little downtown area with high-end hotels, restaurants, supper clubs and streets lined with ornate lamps had been abandoned overnight.

Strangely, it was beautiful.

I couldn’t resist. I had to snap some photos. I found a dilapidated old hotel and got my camera out. While I was working on my composition, there wasn’t another soul or sound around. But this silence was suddenly interrupted by a low rumble and a horrible scraping noise. I looked over my shoulder to see a slow moving truck emerge from an alley with a lawn chair crumpled and dragging underneath it. Instead of getting out and dislodging the lawn chair the driver just carried on, business as usual. That is, he carried on until he decided that what was important enough to interrupt this progress was calling out to me, “You’re supposed to take pictures of something pretty, fucker!”

At first I figured my new friend, this lawn-chair-scraper-guy was just bored and thought it would be funny to shout at me, the only other soul on this stretch of nothingness. But I’d later learn that there might be more to his commentary than meets the eye. . . .

Nathan Kirkman of TIME:

What's left, after decades of white flight and economic stagnation, is an expanse of abandoned buildings, bulldozed lots and forgotten history. . . . "I describe this town in three words," says Preston Ewing Jr., Cairo's unofficial historian and former president of the local NAACP chapter: "poor, black and ugly."

Stephanie Zimmerman:

The Elias Ace Hardware in Cairo is open, but the Shell is closed. The Washateria is open, but the CutMart has closed. There is no McDonald's, no Burger King, no Arby's. There is no recreation center, no bowling alley, no movie theater. The Spirit House — for liquor — is open, but the Christ Temple — for souls — is closed. Churches are for sale, prices reduced. The Martin CME Temple on Poplar Street is available, its public auction sign nailed to a dead tree stump.

Congregating in the streets is now the recreational pastime. At 24th and Sycamore, a former swimming pool is permanently filled with concrete and grown over with weeds, the city's response to court-ordered integration.

It's a sad story of the America we don't like to think about, where industrial decline and racism combine to destroy places and lives.

Kentucky Radio

Tim Murphy listens to the radio as he drives across Kentucky:

On one end of the dial, an evangelist is crusading against, of all things, the WE show Bridezillas. Turn the knob a bit, and there's country, more country, some Top 40, and Glenn Beck, talking up the New Black Panther Party and Goldline (remember, kids: gold isn't an investment; it's an "insurance policy.") And then, just like that, we hit "The General Store." "The General Store" is Craigslist, if Craigslist were just one giant free-for-all hosted by a middle-aged woman named Renee. . . .

The progression of callers transcends the conventional limits of diversity: One man calls up with a 350-pound whole-blood boar for sale—and an electric guitar. Someone else has a two-bedroom mobile home for sale, and a golden retriever named Rusty. Or rather, he had a golden retriever named Rusty, before he went missing around the Fourth of July—has anyone seen him? Dogs tend to get loose around the holiday, what with the fireworks and all, volunteers Renee, helpfully trying to make sense of the tragedy.

There are Bushmaster rifles, used pickup trucks, two pieces of wood that might work well for a chicken coop or something like that, eight pairs of children's pants and eight pairs of shirts. One woman calls in to ask about a living room set that another woman mentioned last week. She doesn't remember the phone number that was given, and the host isn't much help—it was last week, after all—but our caller leaves her number anyway, "in case she's listening." It's just like Craigslist, right on down to the missed connections.

Chilly Saturday

It was a bit brisk at Ben's soccer game this morning.

RIP Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot was a British mathematician best known for his work on fractal geometry; he died yesterday at the age of 85. A fractal is a shape that becomes more and more complex the closer you look at it. The most famous example is the Mandelbrot Set, a shape of infinite complexity defined by a simple equation: , where C is the set of complex numbers; if Z in this relation does not tend toward infinity, the number is in the set. The more you magnify this fabulous shape, the more detail you see.

The most interesting real-world consequence of fractal geometry is that the length of a line depends on the scale at which you measure it. If you measure the coastline of Britain on a world map, you get one number, but as you look at the coast on maps of higher resolution you see more and more small features -- inlets, peninsulas, rocks -- that you missed in the global view, and the length of the coastline keeps getting longer. Mandelbrot pointed this out in a famous article titled, "How long is the coastline of Britain?" In my experience it is impossible to persuade even most archaeologists that this is true; people want something like the length of the Mississippi River or the surface area of a person's skin to be a number that is independent of the scale of your map or the length of your ruler. But the world is not like that. As Mandelbrot told the NY Times a few years ago,

Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible. The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.

Mandelbrot had a knack for getting the attention of people who had only a little interest in math, and it is typical that the equation to which he put his name is not only mathematically interesting but gorgeous.

The World of Kublai Khan

Great online exhibit of treasures from Yuan Dynasty China.

Toad Hall

War Looms in Sudan

Sudan is another country whose borders were drawn by colonial administrators for purposes that had nothing to do with the well-being of people living there. That boundary lumps together two large groups of people who hate each other, and the arrangement has never worked well. At the time of independence, the leaders of southern tribes agreed to join Sudan on the condition that it if they were unhappy there would be a referendum on independence for the south in five years. Southerners were unhappy, but the northern government blocked the referendum. This led to decades of low-level strife and finally to civil war. The 2005 peace deal ending the civil war specified that the long-deferred referendum would be held in January, 2011. But the northern government has refused to do anything concrete to make the referendum happen, and they have just announced that the referendum must be delayed. If they stick to this, civil war is very likely to break out again.

Here's a question for all you folks who supported the US invasion of Iraq: should we intervene? By blowing up the northern air force and sending some drones and an attack helicopter squadron to the south, and a brigade of troops to guard their bases, we could probably guarantee southern independence. (Nobody doubts they will vote for independence.) I mean, the main tactic of the northern army in the civil war was to send bands of raiders on horseback to attack southern villages, and we shouldn't have much trouble stopping that. If you think we should use the US Army to do good in the world, why not?

I think, of course, that this would be a terrible idea. It would turn a question about the self-determination of peoples into another question about getting the US out of somewhere, embitter the people of north Sudan against us, draw radicals from across the Muslim world to Sudan and further corrupt its politics, spawn another generation of suicide bombers, cost us billions, and guarantee that the north will never accept whatever boundaries emerge. I can see the temptation to do good, but my instinct is that descending into the bush with high-tech weapons and limited understanding will only lead to more violence and more hate.

Victorian Cabin

A do-it-yourself Victorian getaway house, made from a hunting cabin.

The Education We All Need

Sign on the Shanti Ashram, Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Midvinterblot

A 1915 illustration of a pagan Swedish midwinter ceremony.

Thought

Margaret Philpot to the Tea Party:

Someone needs to remind them that this is America. The government is elected by the people. Questioning your government is patriotic. Hating your government, one the other hand, is simply a form of self loathing.

King Herod's Private Theater Box

Has been excavated in Herodium.

Pity the Poor Cat People

This most annoying thing I have read this year is this little plea for understanding by Sloane Crosley, titled "Cat People are People, Too." Nothing from Sharron Angle or Glenn Beck or even Karl Rove has sent the tendrils of hostility curling up my spine like this awful ode to pity. So of course it is the "most e-mailed" thing on the NY Times web site.

The basis of the complaint is this:

For as long as I can remember, New York has been set on total canine default with feline being the deviant strain. In other words, if nothing goes wrong and you are, by all accounts, normal, you’d be interested in petting any mutt that crosses your path. Like we do, dogs live their lives on display; they are flashy creatures, status symbols. Their breeds are well-publicized and subject to trend, their owners bear a resemblance to them and vice versa. It’s why cat people compliment their cat’s personality when they say it’s doglike but a dog owner would never flatter their dog by calling him catlike.

OH MY GOD WE ARE SO PUT UPON AND OPPRESSED FOR PREFERRING CATS TO DOGS!!! People think we are weird! It's so unfair!

Oh, you know, dog people have places to go and stores that cater to them and everything, else, while we get slighted at every turn:

For a city that allows for all kinds of passions and interests, we have so remarkably few hot spots of feline tribute. All one needs for confirmation is to wander into the Union Square Petco. A pet store is a celebration of dogs’ existence and an explosion of options. About cats, a pet store seems to say, “Here, we couldn’t think of anything else.”

Poor cat people! They have nothing to buy!

And then comes the slide from "we just want to be treated equally" to "besides, cats are really better in every way":

Even now, I am a bit hesitant to extol Mabel’s many virtues. And they are many. To wake up with her belly-up and demanding affection is to have your heart explode with the kind of joy that compels some people into a life of large-scale oil painting. Alas, I am loath to cheapen her existence and dignify the city’s anti-cat stance by creating a dog-like defense for her.

Why, oh why, are people like this? What do they have to see every word of praise for one kind of life as criticism of every other kind? Why does every positive statement about dogs grate on cat owners and make them want to band together and entertain each other with soliloquies about the glories of waking up next to a soft, furry belly? Why does praise of urban life irritate suburbanites, and vice versa?

There are lots of kinds of people and lots of ways to live. Nobody else's choices have anything to do with you. Honestly. They're really not snidely putting you down when they talk about how much they like their own homes and jobs and hobbies and pets. Well, possibly some of them are, but they're just jerks and you can safely ignore them. Quit worrying about what everybody else does and whether you are in the minority or whether you are cool or whether the people who think they are cool are into something else and all the rest of that high school crap. Live the way you want, and that makes you happy.

For the record, I own two cats and one dog. I like them all fine.

Doubts About that Earth-Like Planet

I thought the discoverers of Gliese 581g were over the top in their claim that the planet probably has life, but now some other astronomers have come forward to say that the whole thing is over the top:

A group of Swiss astronomers announced yesterday at the International Astronomical Union’s annual meeting in Turin, Italy, that they couldn’t detect the “goldilocks” exoplanet found by U.S. researchers a few weeks ago. That news of that planet, dubbed Gliese 581g, generated much excitement, since researchers said it was only three times the size of Earth, and it appeared to lie in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface.

It didn’t take long for some cold water to be thrown on the astronomical community and the space-loving public. Presenter Francesco Pepe and his colleagues claim that it will be years before the data is clear enough to see such a planet: “We do not see any evidence for a fifth planet … as announced by Vogt et al.,” Pepe wrote Science in an e-mail from the meeting.

I suppose those claims triggered the skeptical impulses of a lot of people.

A Different Kind of College Experience

Dan Edelstein, a French professor at Stanford, compares a Stanford education to what he received in Switzerland:

I cannot help contrasting this situation with my own experience as a student, at a public university in Switzerland. I paid the equivalent of $35 a semester in tuition; halfway through my studies, the price was raised, after much protest, to $300. It was a fairly bare-bones experience: our professors were world class, but there was zero support for students. We had no advisers, no writing center, no extracurricular activities, no dorm – we didn’t even have a graduation ceremony. Because the cost was so low, however, we had remarkable freedom – freedom to take as many seminars as we wanted, to space out our exams, to try out new subjects, and more generally, to take as long as we wanted. I spent six years as an undergraduate, the norm at the time (although you could technically graduate in four).

I have been wondering why all colleges seem to be caught up in the race to draw students with more and better facilities and programs. Why don't some colleges try offering a Swiss-style alternative, with a bare-bones experience at a lower price? Obviously in the US that price would be a lot higher than $300 a semester, but I read that 70% of the cost of college is for things other than instruction. It ought to be possible, it seems to me, to offer academic instruction at a college level for half the usual tuition. Most students might choose a place that offers a richer experience anyway, but surely some would appreciate quality teaching at a lower price.

Let's Not Reconsider

Matt Yglesias, just back from Israel, responds to a video urging Americans to reconsider Columbus Day:

When you think about it, though, part of what’s great about America is that political dialogue in this country isn’t dominated by calls to reconsider Columbus Day or any kind of deep effort to ponder the meaning of being a nation founded on ethnic cleansing and slavery. That’s not to say that we don’t still grapple with the consequences of those events or that mainstream white America couldn’t stand to grapple harder with them. But unlike in some countries I’ve visited recently, it’s perfectly possible to probe an American for a while about his political views without being treated to a lengthy ax-grinding historical narrative.

Absolutely. I think that a lot of things about contemporary American culture are the result of past horrors like slavery and the Indian wars, but I agree with Yglesias that too much worrying about the past makes for bad politics in the present. No amount of apology will undo those harms, and what we know about human character and success tells us that focusing too much on past oppressions only exacerbates ethnic tensions and makes it harder for the children of the oppressed to succeed. I am aware that as a member of the most privileged ethnic group in world history I open to accusations of bias on this, but I am not talking about me. I am a historian, and I spent a lot of time pondering past injustices. I read about them for pleasure. My experience with black political and business leaders is that they don't want to hear about slavery and would rather celebrate stories of black success, if they want to deal with the past at all. Which many don't. So while I wouldn't personally participate in a Columbus Day "celebration," I think we should all celebrate living in a world where nobody much cares.

A Cache of Spear Points

In my office we have a little project to take some old artifact collections from a naval facility on the Potomac River below Washington and prepare them for permanent curation. Glancing through the report on an excavation done in 1992, I found the above very faded photo of a cache of stone tools. The cache was found in a large shell midden site along the river, with some pottery of a type called Pope's Creek net-impressed that dates to about AD 1 to 500. Intrigued, I dug the artifacts out of the box and took some pictures.

This little pile of quartz tools is important because of how most archaeology in this part of the world is done. Most of our sites are shallow. Dig on any bluff overlooking a river and you will find prehistoric artifacts, sometimes a lot of prehistoric artifacts. But how do you know how old they are? On an upland site where the surface is stable or eroding, artifacts from the past 13,000 years all end up mixed together in the topsoil. This is why archaeologists love sites that are, as we say, stratified, or layered. You find such sites on river floodplains, where the river dumps sand or silt after ever flood, gradually burying artifacts deeper beneath the ground. On a stratified site, everything from the same layer is about the same age, and it is older than what is above it and younger than what is below it.

Alas, in this part of the world we don't have many stratified sites. To figure out how old what we find in unstratified, near surface sites is, we depend on datable artifacts. Some kinds of stone tools were only made at one time in the past, so we can tell just by looking at them approximately when they were made. The interesting thing about the tools in this collection, which must have all been made within a few years, is that most archaeologists would probably date them to two different periods. Specimens 97-3, 97-6, and 97-10 are good examples of the type called Calvert, which dates to the same time period as the Pope's Creek pottery found nearby; 97-1 could be put into the same type, although if it were found alone most people would probably call it something else. Specimens 97-2 and 97-4, though, are not Calvert points. I suspect that almost every Middle Atlantic archaeologist who looks at them will think the same thing I thought, that they are Bare Island points dating to before 2500 BC.

The moral of the story is that the identification of stone tools is not an exact science. The dates we put on sites by looking at a few spear points or potsherds are guesses. For some point types, or some combinations of artifacts, our guesses can be very good, and it is very likely that we are right. But it is never certain. Ancient Indians were perfectly capable of making a stone spearpoint or knife in an unusual way if they felt like it. Our knowledge of the distant past is not really very good, and we should treat all of it as provisional, subject to revision when we get better results from better sites.

Ants

Wonderful essay by biologist Deborah Gordon explaining why ant behavior is not much use in explaining human societies:

Understanding how ant colonies actually function means that we have to abandon explanations based on central control. This takes us into difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We are deeply attached to the idea that any system of interacting agents must be organized through hierarchy. Our metaphors for describing the behavior of such systems are permeated with notions of a chain of command. For example, we explain what our bodies do by talking about genes as “blueprints,” unvarying instructions passed from an architect to a builder. But we know that instructions from genes constantly change, as genes turn off and on in response to local interactions among cells.

Ant colonies, like genes, work without blueprints or programming. No ant understands what needs to be done or what its actions mean for the welfare of the colony. An ant colony has no teams of workers dedicated to fighting or foraging. Although it is still commonly believed that each ant is assigned a task for life, ant biologists now know that ants move from one task to another. How does an ant decide which task to do and when to do it?

Colonies are regulated by networks of interaction. Ants respond only to their immediate surroundings and to their interactions with the other ants nearby. What matters is the rhythm of interactions, not their meaning. Ants respond to the pattern and rate of their encounters with each other, as well as to the smells they perceive in the world.

The most important thing to note about ants is how profoundly alien they are to us. We have trouble imagining beings that are really different from ourselves. In Star Trek, the aliens just express different sorts of humanity. Lots of people seem to think that their dogs are just like them. Contemplating ants ought to introduce us to a kind of highly organized life that we have to stretch our minds to grasp. Most people, though, would rather use ants as metaphors for hard work or totalitarianism, instead of appreciating the very different world they inhabit.

The Bronze Age in the Caucasus

Russian archaeologists have announced the discovery of a group of bronze age sites in the Caucasus mountains that they ascribe to a new culture. The sites were found by aerial photography and some of them have been investigated by test excavations. They seem to date to the 16th to 14th centuries BC. There has been some speculation on the net about Stone Henge-style monuments, but so far as I can tell this is based on circular features in some of the photographs that have not been identified as anything in particular. The thing above looks to me like a fortified village.

The Delaware Senate Debate

In Delaware, a face off between the always fascinating -- in a clinical sort of way -- Christine O'Donnell, and Chris Coons, a man so wonkish he thinks "Ms. O'Donnell is not familiar with how bond ratings work" is a cutting insult. Ah, America.

O'Donnell is getting a lot of traction from her "I'm an ordinary person just like you" routine. In the debate she emphasized this over and over:

I don’t have a trust fund, I didn’t come from a privileged background. I paid my own college education. I have worked hard to get to the position that I am in.

I do understand the appeal of this, especially after a decade in which foreign policy "experts" dragged us into two pointless wars and financial "experts" nearly destroyed global capitalism. But I prefer my outsiders to have some idea what it is about the system that they don't like. Last night O'Donnell was not able to name a recent Supreme Court verdict that she disagreed with, and her response to a question about Afghanistan was "when we withdraw from Iraq, we need to make sure that there are benchmarks in place." Clueless people can't fight the system, they simply become the tools of manipulative insiders.

Old Japan

Amazing slide show at the Smithsonian of a walk along a historic road in Japan.

Hauntings

From 1763-1843, this mill was haunted by the Headless Peddler of Peddler's Run, and as such should not be disturbed.

Our friend Bundle Brent has a great collection of Maryland ghost stories up on her blog, including one she stumbled across in the course of researching a property for her job.