Debating Climate Change

One thing about scientists is that they hate to be told what to think. Many scientists have a skeptical approach to all knowledge (Richard Feynman: "nothing is known absolutely"), and they regard all assertions that X or Y is certain as inherently dubious. Nothing raises the hackles of a certain sort of scientist like telling them, "you must believe this because the evidence is irrefutable."

Some of these people are pushing back hard against the assertion that human-caused global warming is a "fact." From the Wall Street Journal:

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

And:

many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job. 

Global warming alarmists have indeed engaged in all sorts of dirty tricks, from trying to keep anti-global warming papers out of the journals to gaming the job market to make warming critics unemployable. They probably think that this is necessary, given the great wealth and political power of the fossil fuel industries and their allies. But it is wrong and it is only hurting their cause.

The good news is that scientists are a hard lot to bully, and in modern science the side with the data almost always wins in the end. The bad news is that modeling the climate is very, very hard, and we won't really know if our CO2 emissions will lead to a climate disaster until after it occurs.

John Singer Sargent in Italy

Most of these were painted on one trip in 1910. Above, The Olive Grove.

 Florence, Torre Galli, 1910.

 The Loggia, 1910.

Torre Galli, Ladies in a Garden, 1910.

Venice, 1906.

Fobe House, by Agence Guilhem Eustache

In Marrakech, Morocco, 2007. Only 1800 square feet of living space, great views of the mountains, high modern style. Not very comfortable, but quite striking, and maybe what the owner wants on his vacations is an ascetic experience of desert beauty.

 

 

 

Newt Gingrich and Saul Alinsky

Long ago, Barrack Obama worked with radical agitator and community organizer Saul Alinsky. Most people have forgotten about this, but Newt Gingrich keeps bringing it up; in his South Carolina victory speech, he said, "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."

But as Philip Klein points out in a terrific essay, it is really Newt who is a follower of Alinsky:

In his seminal 1971 work, Rules for Radicals, left-wing community organizer Alinsky laid out his method for instigating change. Many of the tactics he spoke about -- such as exploiting resentment and pitting oneself against the establishment -- have become a central part of Gingrich's strategy for securing the Republican presidential nomination. . . .

Gingrich's clashes against the establishment are classic Alinsky. "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy,'" Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals. He went on to reveal that, "Today, my notoriety and the hysterical instant reaction of the establishment not only validate my credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation."

Though Gingrich has spent several decades profiting from being part of the Washington establishment, the fact that he's been attacked by so-called "elites" has become self-validating.

And the way he scolded CNN moderator John King in last Thursday's South Carolina debate followed Alinsky's 13th tactical rule, which states: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Alinsky argued that a faceless target such as City Hall, or in this case, the mainstream media, isn't as powerful of a target as individual person. And by "freeze it," he meant that whoever the target is shouldn't be allowed to pin the blame on somebody else. . . .

After weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich's campaign was on life support. So he resorted to unleashing an aggressive attack against Mitt Romney's wealth and career at private equity firm Bain Capital. Many prominent conservatives and Republicans pounced, seeing it as an attack on capitalism itself. Even Rudy Giuliani, somebody who has had harsh words for Romney (his opponent in the 2008 GOP presidential race), likened Gingrich's tactics to Alinsky's.

But though they angered many on the right, the attacks undermined Romney's electability argument -- which had previously been his main asset in the GOP nomination battle.

The Tea Party and Criminal Justice Reform

I noted here before the support some American conservatives are giving to criminal justice reform, moving away from a "nothing but punishment and plenty of it" approach to crime. After the State of the Union Speech, Dave Weigel got a chance to ask NAACP president Benjamin Jealous about it:

Slate: Ron Paul answered a question about his old newsletters by saying he was the most anti-racist candidate: He wanted fair criminal justice reform. Did you buy it?

Jealous: We've found common cause with libertarians across the South, for years. In Texas, Ron Paul's state, we've passed a dozen progressive criminal justice reforms last year, working with the Tea Party. In South Carolina we got one-to-one on crack versus powder, which we couldn't get Congress to do when Democrats controlled it. In Georgia, we just pushed through the biggest review of criminal justice policy in the entire country, again, working with a Tea Party governor and Tea Party supporters. Criminal justice reform is, if you will, the big silent agreement in this country. It's ideas like treatment instead of incarceration appeal from libertarians to liberals alike, to progressives and conservatives alike.

If you divide the Tea Party, it divides into three groups: The libertarians, the fiscal conservatives, and the social conservatives. And when you go them and say rehab is seven times more effective than prison, they pay more attention. The pot-smoking wing pays attention. The Christian conservatives, who are very involved in prison ministry, already know it. So Ron Paul has a point that policies he is promoting, on criminal justice reform, are policies that need to be discussed and would have a positive impact on the black community.

I find this extremely encouraging.

Politics and Petty Score Settling

There is a large genre of stories about politicians who keep score of everything, tracking every favor, compliment and slight over a whole career, and read every news story about themselves to find out which reporters are friends and which are enemies. Now there is such a story about Obama and Arizona governor Jan Brewer. Brewer was part of the delegation that greeted Obama at the airport when he arrived in Phoenix this week. They ended up having what observers described as a "heated exchange," with the Governor pointing her finger at the President. According to Brewer, they were talking about her book, Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure the Border. In this book she described a conversation she had with Obama in June, 2010, in which, she said, he "lectured" her. Obama remembered, and when she suggested that they meet again to talk about immigration policy, he noted “that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book." She asked him if he had read the book and he said that he had "read the excerpt."

I seems to me that the President should have better things to do, but I guess that is just the kind of person who goes into politics.

Dementiaville: Back to the 1950s

From the Independent:

Its detractors may end up dubbing it "Dementiaville", but Switzerland is brushing aside a debate raging among geriatric-care experts with plans to build a mock-1950s village catering exclusively for elderly sufferers of Alzheimer's and other debilitating mental illnesses. The newly approved €20m housing project is to be built next to the Swiss village of Wiedlisbach near Bern and will provide sheltered accommodation and care for 150 elderly dementia patients in 23 purpose-built 1950s-style houses. The homes will be deliberately designed to recreate the atmosphere of times past.

The scheme's promoters said there will be no closed doors and residents will be free to move about. To reinforce an atmosphere of normality, the carers will dress as gardeners, hairdressers and shop assistants. The only catch is that Wiedlisbach's inhabitants will not be allowed to leave the village.

A similar pioneering, yet controversial, approach to geriatric mental care is already under way in Holland, where the Hogewey nursing home for dementia sufferers was set up in an Amsterdam suburb in 2009. Its residents pay €5,000 a month to live in a world of carefully staged illusion. Markus Vögtlin, the Swiss entrepreneur behind the Wiedlisbach scheme, visited Hogewey before launching his own project and is full of enthusiasm for the Dutch approach. "People with dementia are often restless and aggressive, but at Hogewey they were relaxed and content," Mr Vögtlin told Switzerland's Tages-Anzeiger newspaper. He said that his plan to house dementia sufferers in 1950s- style houses with front gardens was designed to increase patients' sense of security. He said they had difficulty remembering what was happening at present but usually had firm memories of the past. 

Now we know what to do with John Boehner and his Republican colleagues when they retire.

Habima Fuchs

Out in the World, 2008

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (2008) is a terrifically fun book. It was a genius idea, to write about medieval social history in the guise of a travel guide for modern visitors, and Mortimer has done a good job with it. Mortimer is a historian with several other books on fourteenth-century England to his credit, including a biography of his own ancestor Roger Mortimer, the rebel against Edward II. He knows a lot about the period and, just as important, he really loves it. Reading some historians I wonder why they study what they do, since they seem to find it so dry, but Mortimer's books ooze with enthusiasm for his subject. He loves the literature, the architecture, the chronicles, the characters, and much more, and he seems to spend as much of his mental time in the fourteenth century as he does in the twenty-first. This makes him just the man to write this handy guide.

Mortimer tells you what you will see as you travel across fourteenth-century England: the fields, the forests, the villages, the towns, the cities, the cathedrals, the castles. He tells you what you are likely to eat and drink, what you should wear to blend in, how you should greet strangers of various sorts, where to shop, and how you should go about haggling over prices. (You will have to haggle.) He describes the several sorts of houses you might stay in. He describes the changes taking place over the course of the century, for example in clothing and housing, so there is no assumption that medieval England was a static world. My favorite part was about accommodations, explaining where you will stay as you travel (much more likely a private home or a monastery than an inn), what the beds will be like, what you might be fed, and what you will pay or should offer as a present to your host.

Mortimer is as accurate as anyone can be, covering so many topics for a popular audience. I disagreed with a few points, but on the whole the quality of the history is very high. I even liked his brief account of policing and justice, which is my academic specialty and which I think most textbooks badly mishandle.

If you ever have occasion to describe a scene from medieval life to anyone -- as a writer, as a teacher, as a raconteur -- you should have a copy of this book.

Captain Beechey's Vertebrates

The zoology of Captain Beechey's voyage / compiled from the collections and notes made by Captain Beechey, the officers and naturalist of the expedition, during a voyage to the Pacific and Behring's Straits performed in His Majesty's ship Blossom, under the command of Captain F. W. Beechey ... in the years 1825, 26, 27 and 28, by J. Richardson ...

 From BibliOdyssey.

Newt's French Role Model

Famous photograph of the funeral of French President Francois Mitterrand in 1996. His wife Danielle is in the center in the white scarf, between one of her sons and her two granddaughters. Second from the right is Mitterrand's longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot, and next to her is their illegitimate daughter. On the far right is the other legitimate son.

If Romney's people can't get any traction by calling Gingrich a sleazeball, perhaps they could score points by pointing out that the domestic arrangement he wanted  is quintessentially French.

X Isn't About Y

Robin Hanson:

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

Retirement is Bad for Your Health

People like to think that if they could retire early and relax, they would live longer. "The stress of my job is killing me," they think. But for most people this is not so. On average, the earlier people retire, the earlier they die. This is partly because sick people tend to retire earlier than healthy people, but studies that have tried to take this effect into account still find that working longer makes you live longer. A study of thousands of Shell Oil Company employees who retired from the company between 1973 and 2003

found that those who retired at 55 died younger, on average, than those who retired at 65. The effect held even for those who retired at 55 but were still alive at 65, making it somewhat less likely that they retired early because of failing health. Likewise, a study of more than 16,000 Greeks published in 2007 found that retirees were 51 percent more likely to die during the follow-up period than employed people of the same age. It excluded those who had been previously diagnosed with serious illnesses.

Of course some people live for a long time while retired, but they are mostly the ones who find something else to do instead of just playing golf and napping.

Ordos Museum by MAD Architects

Now here's a striking building. The Ordos Museum is part of a building boom in this city of 1.5 million in China's Inner Mongolia province. Chinese architects Ma Yansong and Qun Dang, who call themselves MAD, covered the building in polished metal tiles that are intended to resist the region's frequent sandstorms.

Ordos is a political project of the Chinese government, who are offering the mainly non-Chinese inhabitants of Inner Mongolia development and modernization to distract them from any desire for independence.

The museum is supposed to promote Mongol and Uighur culture, but in the pictures I have seen it looks mostly empty. Perhaps the contents will come later, but right now this looks more like an exhibition of modernist originality and technical savvy than a monument to nomadism. Love this entrance.

I don't know anything about these architects, but on the basis of this building I predict big things for them. They have seen the future -- the slick, modernist version, anyway -- and brought back a stunning report.

Worth a Thousand Words

The Weirdly Besieged Attitude of Conservative Americans

The Economist's summary of remarks by one of New Gingrich's warm-up speakers at a South Carolina rally last week:

Mr Gingrich put "the academic left, the elite media and left-wing Democrats" on notice that his campaign was "about the end of their dominance of power" in America.

I ask you, in what universe do the academic left and left-wing Democrats hold a dominance of power? I know a fair number of academic leftists, and they are all in despair over America's future, which they see as dominated by giant corporations and their political pawns, war-mongers, massive violations of civil liberties, and resurgent sexism. And when did they ever dominate power?

It's an insane notion, and yet it is widely shared among conservatives. I can only think that it represents an underlying bewilderment in the face of constant social and economic change: the world refuses to hold still, and that must be somebody's fault. Academic leftists are about as powerful in America as Eskimos, but change is rapid and real, and that just plain scares a lot of people.

A Stylish Habit

Via Andrew Sullivan, this is the habit that Julia Sherman designed for a new order of nuns.

Hereditary Political Tendencies

Retired President Eisenhower on Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, in 1967:

He has been on so many sides of so many questions that one begins to wonder just where he does stand. He sounds like a man in a panic. And a man who panics is not the best candidate for President.

The Helix Nebula

Photographed in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory.

Polling What Matters to Americans

The Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation have been polling Americans about what matters in their lives, and they turned up some interesting numbers. They asked "how important is this to you" about a range of matters, and got these responses:

	Very Important	Somewhat Important	Not very Important	Not at all Important
Being successful in a career	54	33	7	5
Having enough free time	57	37	4	2
Being married	51	24	15	10
Living a religious life	52	26	11	10
Having children	65	17	8	8
Being wealthy	12	41	35	11
Being respected by others	67	28	3	2
Being is a good romantic relationship	56	30	8	6
Being close with your family	88	9	1	1
Living a healthy lifestyle	77	22	1	1
Being physically attractive	16	48	26	10

You can see how seriously to take what people say is important to them by looking at that "living a healthy lifestyle" line; 99 percent of Americans say it's important, but how many are doing it?

What stood out for me is that number for "being respected by others," which comes in ahead of career, free time, religion, and marriage. This really is essential to human life, and one of our top goals ought to be to maximize the amount of respect and dignity in our society.

Read farther down into the survey and you find that 24% of white men worry about being discriminated against, which pretty much explains the support for Newt Gingrich's campaign.

Gingrich as an Outsider

According to this morning's Times, the Republican primaries are

shaping up as a proxy battle in the fight between the Republican Party’s establishment wing — in favor of Mr. Romney — and a grass-roots insurgency that, for now at least, seems to be coalescing around Mr. Gingrich as a no-holds-barred opponent to President Obama in the fall. 

The notion of New Gingrich as an outsider is puzzling at first, since he is a former Speaker of the House who used his connections to make a fortune in Washington consulting. And yet in another way it does make sense. Gingrich got started as an angry back-bencher always willing to denounce the Democrats in harsher terms than anyone else, and when the election of Bill Clinton made Republicans really angry, Gingrich was there to lead them to control of the House in 1994. That was his peak moment; once he was in power, his indiscipline and his self-righteous preening made it hard for him to govern. His House colleagues were maddened by his dishonesty and his constant shifts of position, and they eventually fired him. He was by then as hated as any man in Washington.

Republicans are really angry again, so Newt is back, seeking again to lead them. Anger was always his strong suit; what he does best is channel rage into respectable-sounding rhetoric. Being roundly hated in official Washington only adds to his outsider glamor. So Republicans who mainly want a leader who will express how angry they are with Obama, Washington, the economy, and the ongoing weakening of white power are flocking to support him.

The conventional wisdom is that Americans won't support an angry man for President. Deep red Republicans may delight in Gingrich's venom, but pundits say his intemperance will turn off the apathetic middle of the country and hand the Presidency back to the Democrats. I wonder. Certainly there is a lot of anger in America, and I can imagine laid off factory workers in Ohio giving Gingrich more support than Romney. I find the man to be more of a circus freak than a potential leader, but I am not the average American, and I only get one vote. One thing I will say is that Gingrich would need bad news, and plenty of it, to fuel his campaign; if the economy keeps improving and there are not new terrorist attacks or wars, his schtick will be marginalized, and Obama will coast.

Gothic Mourners in Richmond

For all my Richmond friends and readers, the exhibit I wrote about back in May of sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless of Burgungy (1371-1419) will be at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts from January 21 to April 15.

Newt!

Hammered by the Republican establishment after his first surge, and driven back to fourth place in Iowa, Gingrich is back, winning an impressive victory in normally crucial South Carolina. I'm afraid, though, that it can't last. The attack dogs of the Republican machine will turn their teeth on Newt again, and the Congressmen who once worked with him will be back on the airways reminding everyone what a dangerous creep he is, and this will put people off him as it did in Iowa. But at least he has made the nomination fight interesting.

Speaking of establishment criticism of Gingrich, here is a gem from Joe Scarborough:

If New Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room.

David Bromwich has a piece in the NY Review about the emptiness of Gingrich's political books, which are full of gems like, "you should only get disability if you really deserve it." Lately his main enemy has been "secular socialism," which he seems to think is 1) Obama's political program, and 2) a major threat to American civilization. The old lefties who run the NY Review must find it strange that while they spend their days mourning that the Democrats no longer support socialism, Republicans constantly attack the Democrats for espousing it. The notion that Obama is a dangerous leftist would be laughable if so many Americans didn't believe it. I wonder if Newt does. Does he think that Obama is a secret socialist who longs in his heart to nationalize the banks and send their executives to Guantanamo? Or that his sort of moderate center-leftism is the leading edge of some dangerous idea?

My money is still on an Obama-Romney election, but I suppose we'll see.

The Boneyard from Space

The "boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Airzona, seen from space. The boneyard holds more than 4,400 surplus aircraft.

Václav Havel Confronting Death

Toward the end of his memoir of his time as President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, To the Castle and Back, Václav Havel wrote that we was spending a lot of time straightening his house, and he wondered why he cared:

I have only one explanation: I am constantly preparing for the last judgment, for the highest court from which nothing can be hidden, which will appreciate everything that should be appreciated, and will, of course, notice anything that is not in its place. I'm obviously assuming that the supreme judge is a stickler like me. But why does this final evaluation matter so much to me? After all, at that point, I shouldn't care. But I do care, because I'm convinced that my existence -- like everything that has ever happened -- has ruffled the surface of Being, and that after my  little ripple, however marginal, insignificant and ephemeral it may have been, Being is and always will be different from what it was before. 

All my life I have simply believed that what is once done can never be undone and that, in fact, everything remains forever. In short, Being has a memory. And thus, even my insignificance -- as a bourgeois child, a laboratory assistant, a soldier, a stagehand, a playwright, a dissident, a prisoner, a president, a pensioner, a public phenomenon, and a hermit, an alleged hero but secretly a bundle of nerves -- will remain here forever, or rather not here, but somewhere. But not, however, elsewhere. Somewhere here.

Presidents Try to Keep their Campaign Promises

Does it matter that Mitt Romney has promised to be a hard-right President if he is elected? Lots of people in both parties seem to think that no matter what he is promising now, he will serve in office as the moderate he used to be. But history suggests otherwise:

Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argues that the evidence on this point is clear: “Presidents usually try to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign.”

We can all think of exceptions, of course. George H.W. Bush told the country to read his lips — a turn of speech that’s always confused me, incidentally; is lip-reading really so much more accurate than listening? — and then he raised taxes anyway. But such betrayals are not the rule.

Bernstein relies on two studies from the 1980s to make his point. In 1984, Michael Krukones published “Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Predictors,” and found that “about 75 percent of the promises made by presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Jimmy Carter were kept.” In 1985, Jeff Fishel published “Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance,” which argued “that presidents invariably attempt to carry out their promises; the main reason some pledges are not redeemed is congressional opposition, not presidential flip-flopping.”

The current President is keeping the trend:

Politifact.com has tracked more than 500 promises Barack Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign. It found he has kept 161, passed a compromised version of another 50, and has either been rebuffed by Congress or is making progress toward another 239. In only 56 cases — about 10 percent — has Obama actually broken a promise, and in the biggest of those cases — ending the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 — there’s a good chance the promise will be kept when the tax cuts expire at the end of this year.

So odds are that Mitt would try to pass some of the very scary tax and spending cuts he has promised.

Fu Baoshi: Traditional Chinese Painting in an Era of Revolution

Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) was one of the most important painters of China's revolutionary era and one of Mao's favorite artists. You can perhaps see why in Heaven and Earth Glow Read, 1964 (above), which fuses a traditional Chinese eye with Maoist iconography.

 

On the other hand Fu, who had been an apprentice in a decoration shop, went to Japan in 1933-35 to study art, and everything I have read points to Japanese influences on his style. Considering that Japan was already occupying Manchuria in 1933, and that most Chinese people with any sort of Japanese connection were purged after 1945, it is interesting to me that Fu was able to remain prominent; after the Revolution he was one of the leaders of the Federation of Chinese Artists. Above, some of the many Fu works I have found online without title or date.

Like any Chinese artist of traditional bent, Fu Baoshi was a scholar as much as a creator. He was an expert on Tang Dynasty painting, and some of his landscapes have the feel of that era. I haven't been able to find titles or dates for these. Fu did many others like them, and you can see more here.

This is an interesting work, based in the most traditional Chinese way on a line from a classic poem, but rendered with a more spare and Japanese sensibility. Crows in a Willow, 1944.

 

I like this painting very much: Landscape of the Four Seasons, 1950.

 

Fu also did paintings in this dark, brooding style, and I would like very much to know if these were done before or after those Tang-like scrolls. But I can't find dates for any of them, and only a title for the one on top, On a Lake, I Listen to the Sound of Rain.

This is a jarring image: Electric Towers, rendered in the style we associate with imperial tea houses. It also sums up Fu Baoshi's project, of becoming a modern artist while staying true to the ancient traditions of Chinese art. I think he succeeded brilliantly.

19 Percent of Americans Will Believe Anything

According to this poll, 19% of Americans think President Obama is Muslim, including 35% of Republicans, 16% of Independents, and 9% of Democrats.

Winter at Last

Looking out the window this morning at a yard covered with white, Clara said, "It's Christmas Day!"

Actually the white is mostly ice, more crunchy and slippery than fluffy and fun. But at least something other than rain finally fell.

The Staffordshire Hoard in Washington

Yesterday I slipped over to the National Geographic museum in Washington, DC to see part of the Staffordshire Hoard. It is a not a large exhibit but it is well put together, with some excellent videos explaining what we know and don't know about the hoard. Even though I have spent plenty of time staring at photographs of these objects, it was still exciting them in person.

I found myself most impressed by the fine filigree work on some of the pieces. These designs are made with gold wire, some of it less than a millimeter thick, arrayed in complex designs. Without my glasses I could not even see these designs, and this got me wondering who did it and how.

Was this work mainly done by boys, like the finest lace was once made by young girls? Was goldwork a profession for the myopic? One of the experts in the exhibit videos speculates that maybe doing this work from the age of seven made the artisans short-sighted.

The wire was made by twisting and rolling sheets of gold, and this gives it the bumpy appearance.

However these objects were made, and by whom, they are a beautiful reminder of how noble men once equipped themselves for battle, with gold and gems as well as spears and shields.