Winter

Our first snow of the season fell yesterday. The picture above was take in Washington around 11:15 AM, from the M Street Bridge over Rock Creek. I was leaving work to head up to Hood to give my final exam, a 46-mile drive that took 2 hours in the snow, even leaving at 11:15.

The picture below was taken this morning in the woods near my house, where it was beautiful and still. I did not learn until I was nearly 30 how marvelous the woods can be in winter. One has to wear waterproof boots and warm socks, but with the right clothes a day like today -- new snow, 25 degrees Fahrenheit, no wind -- is the perfect time to walk in the woods. Coraline agreed. I wasn't sure she would, since she hates the rain, but she frolicked in the snow like a puppy.

No Amygdala, No Fear

Science News:

A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes, giggles in haunted houses and once, upon escaping the clutches of a knife-wielding man, didn’t run but calmly walked away. A rare kind of brain damage precludes her from experiencing fear of any sort, finds a study published online December 16 in Current Biology.

SM has an unusual genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease. In late childhood, this disease destroyed both sides of her amygdala, which is composed of two structures the shape and size of almonds, one on each side of the brain. Because of this brain damage, the woman knows no fear, the researchers found. . . .

Feinstein and his colleagues sifted through SM’s past, looking for instances when she should have been scared. SM said she never felt fear, even when threatened with a knife or a gun. The researchers gave SM an electronic diary that she carried for three months to record her emotional state. Fear didn’t make an appearance in the list of emotions. On a battery of questionnaires, SM wrote that she wasn’t afraid of public speaking, death, her heart beating too fast or being judged negatively in a social setting.

Which gives me another chance to note that public speaking regularly shows up in surveys as the thing Americans fear the most.

The Tax Cut Deal

So our country is running an enormous budget deficit and we have all sort of problems with health care and unemployment and aging infrastructure and all, and the only thing the two parties can agree on is cutting taxes. "So we'll make a budget compromise and cut taxes for both your people and our people." When was the last time a major, controversial bill passed the Senate 81-19?

As I have said, I am not stressed about the deficit in the short term, and I don't really mind this bill, but I think this performance bodes ill for our fiscal future.

The Striding Horned Figure

This proto-Elamite statuette from southwest Iran dates to about 3000-2800 BC. It is known as the Striding Horned Figure. Because of the weird clothes and the dead eagle draped over its back, people think it "may represent a supernatural intermediary between the earthly and spiritual worlds." Or it could be a human intermediary, that is, a shaman.

Department of No Surprises

The new White House review of our strategy in Afghanistan says that we are making sufficient progress to begin withdrawing troops next July, as the President promised we would.

The Tomb of Hecatomnus

Archaeology Magazine has posted its feature on the top ten discoveries of the year. One is the tomb of Hecatomnus, King of Caria in Asia Minor in the 4th century BC. Hecatomnus was the father of Mausolus, whose tomb was one of the Seven Wonders of the World and gave us the word "mausoleum." The sarcophagus was discovered by looters who tunneled under the the Temple of Zeus near Milas. They seem to have sold most of the objects from the tomb before they were caught trying to sell the sarcophagus (above).

I confess to being weirded out by the market in stolen antiquities. It seems to me that the whole point of owning a famous masterpiece is to show it off; whence comes the pleasure of owning a famous masterpiece that you have to keep in a secret vault? I know people keep legitimate art treasures locked away as investments, but isn't a stolen work a very risky investment? This speaks to me of minds deeply caught up in their own games, deriving pleasure from the act of keeping their guilty secrets. Do they laugh at the ignorant, innocent people around them who can't guess at what they keep hidden? Perhaps these people even sit on the boards of eminent museums where they mouth the usual platitudes about the crime of stealing culture and need for art to be accessible to the public, all the while grinning to themselves about their vaults of ill-gotten treasure.

Below, Mausolus himself, a statue in the British Museum.

Supernova Remnant SNR 0509-67.5

A giant bubble of rapidly expanding gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud; Hubble photograph. The more colorful image below was made by combining optical data from Hubble with x-ray data from the Chandra observatory; the colors are fake but you can still get a good sense of the bubble.

Mozart's 140 Deaths

I have a new hero, retired European civil servant, Lucien Karhausen, who takes a hilarious whack at the fantasists who have imagined 140 different causes for Mozart's death:

Many authors have favoured the hypothesis of an acute condition such as influenza; staphylococcal, streptococcal, or meningococcal infection; various septicaemias; scarlatina or measles; typhoid or paratyphoid fevers; typhus; tuberculosis; trichinosis; and so on. Postinfectious glomerulonephritis was first proposed by Barraud in 1905. Schoental, an expert in microfungi, thought that Mozart died from mycotoxin poisoning. Drake, a neurosurgeon, proposed a diagnosis of subdural haematoma after a skull fracture identified on a cranium that is not Mozart’s. Ehrlich, a rheumatologist, believed he died from Behçet’s syndrome. Langegger, a psychiatrist, contended that he died from a psychosomatic condition. Little, a transplant surgeon, thought he could have saved Mozart by a liver transplant. Brown, a cardiologist, claimed he succumbed to endocarditis. On the basis of a translation error of Jahn’s biography of Mozart, Rappoport, a pathologist, thought Mozart died of cerebral haemorrhage. Ludewig, a pharmacologist, suggested poisoning or self poisoning by drinking wine adulterated with lead compounds. For some, Mozart manifested cachexia or hyperthyroidism, but for others it was obesity or hypothyroidism. Ludendorff, a psychiatrist, and her apostles, claimed in 1936 that Mozart had been murdered by the Jews, the Freemasons, or the Jesuits, and assassination is not excluded by musicologists like Autexier, Carr, and Taboga.

This sort of post mortem diagnosis may be amusing dinner table conversation for medical enthusiasts both professional and amateur, but it has no validity as scholarship and people should stop paying attention to it. We will never know what killed Mozart, and I for one can live with that.

Ah, Americans and their Lawsuits

In one of my most favoritest lawsuits ever, a mother in California sues McDonald's for tempting her children to eat unhealthy food:

I object to the fact that McDonald's is getting into my kids' heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat... what kids see as a fun toy, I now realize is a sophisticated, high-tech marketing scheme that's destined to put McDonald's between me and my daughters... I want McDonald's to stop interfering with my family.

I sympathize with the poor woman, I mean, I have had to refuse to buy happy meals on dozens of occasions myself, and it has been a terrible burden on my family. I plan to file my own lawsuit against Star Wars: The Clone Wars for making Anakin the hero of his own series and thereby tempting my children toward fascism. Then I will sue all sorts of people for messing with my own mind by using beautiful women to sell things, and Ford for using the irresistible Mike Rowe to sell big, pretty trucks I don't want or need.

The Chinese Way

Via James Fallows, this line from an Economist piece of economic ties between China and Saudi Arabia:

Some firms would have been put off by the fact that non-Muslims are barred from working in Mecca, so China simply converted hundreds of railway workers to Islam.

The Spoils of Annuvin

Monks howl together, like a pack of dogs --
They shrink away from meeting the lords who know:
Is there one course of wind? One course of water?
Is there one spark of fire? Of fierce tumult?

Monks roll together, like the pups of wolves,
They shrink away from meeting the lords who know:
They do not know when night and dawn divide,
Nor wind, what is its course, nor what its onrush,
What place it ravages, nor where it strikes.
The grave and ground of the saint
Vanish into the other world.

--From a Welsh Manuscript of the 14th Century, attributed to the ancient bard Taliesin

Ardagh Chalice

Yes, I'm getting ready to teach "Celts to Vikings" in the spring.

Story Reading, December 1983

Yes, my undergraduate friends and I used to get together once a week to read each other children's stories. As I understand it, the institution still endures at Yale. This invitation was drawn by my friend Katya Reimann Gardner. It was on the bulletin board in my old office, and when I took it down for the move I thought I ought to preserve it for posterity.

I am a collector of such things, and much of my memory of my life resides in them.

Terrorists vs. Car Accidents

One of Matt Yglesias' readers looked up the statistics:

In the US, 583 billion passenger-miles were flown in 2008, the most recent year available (I think I can mix numbers from ’08 and ’09 without loss of generality). So if all that travel was done by car instead (obviously not feasible) with a fatality rate of 11.35 deaths per billion miles, we’d expect an increase of 6,617 deaths. In other words, terrorists would have to blow up 16 full 747′s a year (about one every three weeks) to make air travel as dangerous as car travel. I think that number gets at the point you were trying to make about the exaggerated scale of the threat of aviation terrorism.

Richard Holbrooke's Last Words

From the Washington Post:

Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family members said, his final words were to his Pakistani surgeon: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Well, somebody has to. I wonder who he meant?

Railguns and Budgets

The latest weapon to move from science fiction to fact is the railgun, which launches projectiles using electromagnetic pulses. The US Navy's new version has fired a steel shell at 5,500 feet per second (8,000 mph), which would send it 110 miles; apparently it set the world record for muzzle energy in a cannon. Of course, the gun is the size of a bus, but I suppose ships can carry big guns.

And this is a great use of taxpayers' money because our warships are constantly engaging in long-range artillery duels with the warships of our enemies.

Why I am Bullish on the American Economy

The American economy offers a lot of reasons to be gloomy: unemployment at 9.8%, the steady shrinking of manufacturing jobs, outsourcing, global competition, a huge "overhang" of personal and government debt, and so on. But the future looks good to me. In America, it is cool for young people to start their own businesses, especially around the point where technology and the arts come together. The dream of moguldom, or just of creative independence, drives tens of thousand of people to throw themselves into business projects. Many will fail, some will thrive, but all will contribute to the economic and creative ferment that is America. In the NY Times, Hannah Seligson chronicles young people who either couldn't get a job or didn't want one, and founded their own companies instead:

Still in debt, Mr. Gerber considered his career options. His mother kept encouraging him to get a “real” job, the kind that comes with an office and a boss. But, using the last $700 in his bank account, he decided to start another company instead.

With the new company, called Sizzle It, Mr. Gerber vowed to find a niche, reduce overhead and generally be more frugal. The company, which specializes in short promotional videos, was profitable the first year, he says.

Mr. Gerber, now 27, isn’t a millionaire, but he’s paid off his loans and doesn’t have to live with his parents (he rents an apartment in Hoboken, N.J.). And he thinks his experience can help other young people who face a daunting unemployment rate.

This sort of thing doesn't necessarily help laid off factory workers in Akron with obsolete skills, and I expect that things will remain grim for many such people. But the nation as a whole is not facing a gray future of stagnation and decline.

Excavations at Pella

Nice piece at Past Horizons on the excavations of the Bronze Age temple complex at Pella in Jordan (above). The first temple was build on the site in about 1900 BC. A massive temple with stone foundations was built at the site around 1600 BC, in the Syrian-Assyrian style (below).

Then after 1350 BC, when this area fell under Egyptian influence, the temple was redecorated with statues and cult vessels in the Egyptian style (below).

Indian Miniatures

From an Indian manuscript of around 1800, via Bibliodyssey.

It's Hard to Change People's Minds

This is from a very interesting interview with Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, responding to a question about the effect of sanctions on the Iranian people:

To the average Iranian citizen it’s tough to discern whether deteriorating economic conditions are due to international sanctions or domestic mismanagement.

While it’s difficult to make generalizations, I think sanctions often accentuate people’s existing political disposition. For government critics, it’s another example of the regime’s disregard for their general well-being. A very common refrain you hear among Iranians is, “they [the government] do whatever they want, and we [the people] suffer the consequences.”

For government supporters, however, the sanctions offer another reason to criticize so called “American arrogance”. I don’t get the impression that sanctions really compel people to change their political orientation.

I think this is true in general about people's political opinions -- rather than change their views in response to events, people interpret events in ways that reaffirm their own opinions.

O virga mediatrix

Alleluia! light
burst from your untouched
womb like a flower
on the farther side
of death. The world-tree
is blossoming. Two
realms become one.

--Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

J.K. Rowling and Hermione Granger

I wonder if I can get a rise of my readers with this:

Rowling’s adherence to the old English principle of blood-nobility—that weird but deeply held superstition that has caused countless English protagonists to discover that unbeknownst to them, they were peers of the realm all along—is in stark contrast to the biggest conflict depicted in the Potter stories, the blood purity conflict. The bad guys, Voldemort and crew, are race purists, anti-Muggle (meaning anti-human), which is to say that they are against any magical Muggles or intermingling of Muggle blood (“Mudblood”) and wizard blood. Yet Rowling’s heroes are all noblemen, with the exception of one: Harry Potter learns in the old-fashioned surprise way that his father was a fabulously rich wizard, and his godfather is a rich aristocrat, too; Ron Weasley is a nobleman of the purest blood, though poor. The sole pure-Muggle wizard of any consequence at all in these books is Hermione, the author’s personal projection of herself (there are two other minor pure-Muggle wizards, boys, both of whom are bumped off). So this story can be read pretty effectively as an explanation of why J.K. Rowling should be allowed to hang around with the nobility (she is smart, is why).

Maybe, incidentally, the reason no other woman as smart as Hermione appears in the books is that J.K. Rowling, like the Turk, can bear no sister near the throne. Her volcanic ego burns down everything in its path. Where the Twilight books are works produced from and for a state of sexual yearning and frustration, Rowling’s “wizarding world” is a fantasy place created for the benefit of Hermione Granger, for her infinite sagacity, foresightedness and teacher’s-pet-hood to be rewarded at every turn.

Copper Mountain Solar

The nation's largest photovoltaic power plant, the 48-megawatt Copper Mountain Solar facility near Boulder City, Nevada, has just been completed. It will produce enough power for 14,000 homes.

Firedog

Medieval firedog found in an Irish bog.

Angel Falls

Just an amazing picture.

Raising Graduation Rates

Towson University, a state school in suburban Baltimore, was once a sleepy place attended by kids who got rejected by other schools or wanted to stay close to home. Over the past twenty years, two successive presidents have been on a mission to make it into something better. They changed the name from Towson State and have invested a ton of money in new buildings, facilities, programs, and so on. I have always been dubious about this whole program, on the theory that the state is just pouring money into a scheme to draw better students who could just as well have gone somewhere else.

Today's Washington Post, though, has a feature that makes me think better of Towson's program. Once saddled with a miserable graduation rate, the school has raised their overall rate to 65%, and they have eliminated the gap between minority students and white students. This, I think, is an achievement of a different order than fielding a good lacrosse team or building a swanky student union. How did they do it? First, they changed their admission criteria:

Fifteen years ago, as a way to boost graduation rates, school leaders decided to emphasize high school grades as the dominant factor in admitting students. Internal research had convinced them that students who entered Towson with high GPAs tended to graduate, regardless of SAT scores, and that students with high test scores but low grades were more likely to drop out.

That is, they chose students who have a track record of making the effort, rather than those who seemed to have the ability but hadn't been making the effort. Second, they set up intensive programs for potential problem students:

The heart of the effort is a program called SAGE, or Students Achieve Goals through Education. Each year, nearly 200 entering freshmen from disadvantaged backgrounds are paired with mentors. They connect over the summer. The mentorship lasts through the crucial first year.

Mentors are trained to practice what director Raft Woodus calls "intrusive caring": gently but firmly prying into every aspect of the freshman's life, probing for problems.

"You have to eat every day. You have to study," said Herbert, a mentor. "I make sure they do it. I do it with them."

Minorities and first-in-their-family college students are steered into another program, Support for Student Success. Initiated by Caret, it offers an 11-week overview of every resource available to Towson students, along with exercises in team-building and study skills. Classes are taught by trained counselors.

Problems like the low graduation rate of minority students often seem intractable, but universities are finding that they can be improved with enough effort.

The Truth Wears Off, or Some Science Sucks

Jonah Lehrer has a very interesting article in the latest New Yorker about a scientific effect that has yet to be named, causing apparently robust results to wane over time. Most of the famous cases concern drugs -- when they first came out, anti-depressants seemed to have very pronounced effects on people who took them, but more recent studies find much smaller effects. Lehrer put some excerpts from the article on his blog, like this one on the new anti-psychotics:

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Some of the causes of this problem are well known. It is easy to imagine how drug trials end up weighted, in many conscious and unconscious ways, toward strongly positive results. But the effect has hit results in fields where the pressure to get the "right" result is much less prominent. Lehrer interviewed scientists who seem very conscientious and are mystified by the way effects they identified have declined over time, declines in some cases measured by their own experiments.

I am not surprised by any of this, because I am deeply skeptical of much current science. These statistical studies of subtle effects are just not very good science: they are too subject to manipulation, too dependent on the attitudes of the experimenters, too complex for anyone to understand the whole experimental design. The effects Lehrer describes prove this to me. After all, the effect of gravity is not declining, and matter is not getting less atomic. Real science doesn't go out of date. So if the effectiveness of medical treatments seems to decline, it is not necessary to speculate some squishiness in the world that renders the scientific method invalid. We simply need to realize that science, like everything else, comes in good and bad forms.

Three Hares

A weirdly wonderful medieval motif, known from western China to western England. People often ask what it means, but I don't know that it necessarily means anything. Some carvers may have copied it because they thought it was a clever design. Whatever meaning it does comes from its association with the more ancient triple spiral, shown below in an example from the neolithic tomb at Newgrange in Ireland.

Mapping Slavery

This map was prepared in 1861 by the US Coast & Geodetic Survey, based on the data in the 1860 census. It uses what was then a new technique in the display of quantitative information, by shading the map to show the percentage of slaves in the population of each county. Abraham Lincoln, a railroad man and a fan of new technologies, "loved the map and almost always had a copy on hand." You can peruse an interactive version of the map here.

Anyone who works with 19th-century American maps becomes a fan of the coastal survey, who produced the most accurate maps ever made of America before the advent of Lidar technology in the past two decades.

Senate Vote on Don't Ask, Don't Tell

What are the Republicans who voted against the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell thinking? Do any of them seriously believe that in ten years gay people won't be serving openly in our military? What is it that they gain from standing athwart the march of history yelling "Stop!"? Several of the no voters have said that they don't so much oppose the repeal as want more time to consider it. Since the normalization of homosexuality in America has been going on for forty years now, they might have had time to think this over by now.

I see nothing but spite and cowardice in this vote. These people are either venting their personal irritation at irreversible social changes -- irreversible in the short term, anyway -- or they are just afraid of having to answer questions from homophobic constituents. To these petty ends they are willing to sacrifice the careers of thousands of people who want to serve their country. It makes me sick.