Fragment from a Dream

In the dream I was on a small ship crowded with refugees from some planetary catastrophe. We were raising a new sail that also generated solar power, something we had obtained with great trouble at our last port of call. As it caught the wind and the sun shone on it someone drew out an old, worn book and read from it:

She booms.
She is the essence of our hopes, and the center of our faith that we are the meaning of the world.

The Bardo Palace, Tunis

Idly surfing architecture sites like I sometimes do, I stumbled across this 1899 image of the throne room in the Bardo Palace, Tunisia. Fascinated by the combination of traditional Islamic architecture and European decoration, I started searching for more information about the Palace.

It seems that the Bardo is a medieval palace complex that was long a favorite residence of the Ottoman Beys (governors) of Tunisia, much renovated and enlarged in the nineteenth century. Above, the Tribunal Chamber.

And the last of the three 1899 images I found, the Lion Steps.

Today the palace is a popular museum. Hard to say how much it has been altered in recent decades, but it still retains that bizarre mix of medieval Islam and the modern west. What is up with the cannons over that door?

There are certainly are some lovely spaces. But I miss the crazy accumulation of chairs, clocks and so on in the 1899 pictures.

On the other hand the museum contains what looks like a magnificent array of ancient artifacts, especially Roman statuary and mosaics.

And then there are these gravestones from the infamous tophet at Carthage. According to the museum, the one below is a representation of the Carthaginian pantheon.

Looks well worth a visit.

The Bronze Age Forest of Cardigan Bay, Wales

Ferocious winter storms have stripped away the sand and peat that had covered these trees since they stopped growing around 2500 BC. They are part of what was once known as the Forest of Borth before it disappeared beneath the waves.

The Frozen Lakes

From NASA's Earth Observatory.

When a War Drags on for Twelve Years. . . .

Back in 2001, just about everybody in America supported intervening in Afghanistan. My position at the time was that while I didn't expect it to go very well, I understood that it was inevitable -- the Taliban were sheltering people who had made war on America, and we were not going to stand for that. But when you let a war drag on for more than a decade with no resolution, even a war that started with clear and defensible motives, eventually even Americans will turn against it.

What we should have done, I think, is make some kind of big push in 2004-2005 to get the Taliban on the run and then "declare victory and get out." But we didn't, and now we are going to pull out of a nation on the edge of civil war, collapse, and a Taliban return to power.

The Strange Whine of the Conservative Business Owner

I was amused by this bit from Dave Weigel's piece on the campaign of Texas Senator John Cornyn:

A little while later, a trucking company owner named Darrin Forse went on a tear. “You get people to come in and apply for jobs,” said Forse. “First thing they ask is, ‘What’s it gonna pay?’ The government’s giving them whatever they want anyway. A lot of them come up and sign a card and say, ‘OK, I can get another free check and whatever else.’ That’s what’s happened. They’re getting their insurance for nothing, and here we are, the working people.”

The nerve of those people, asking how much a job pays before they take it! I bet Darrin Forse loves work so much he takes on new clients every day without asking how much they intend to pay him.

It is certainly true that the existence of a government safety net makes people less willing to take miserable, badly paid jobs. The solution for business owners is to pay people more and make their jobs less miserable. After all, their competitors are hiring in the same labor market, so it shouldn't keep them from making money.

Fall Colors around a Pommeranian Lake, Poland

By Kacper Kowalski. From National Geographic.

The Right Time

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

--Henry James

Wolves and the Yellowstone Trophic Cascade

Fascinating video on the far-reaching effects of re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone. The wolves killed some deer and elk and chased the rest away from the river valley bottoms, which caused the vegetation to regrow along the river, encouraging many other animal species and reducing erosion.

More evidence, I would say, that too many deer are a disaster.

Medication for ADHD: Short Term Gains, Little Long Term Impact

Give some kids Adderall, and they seem transformed. Formerly fidgety or lost in daydreams, they seem to focus and pay attention. Surely this ought to have a huge impact on their lives, or at least their careers in school. But no:

For most people with ADHD, these medications — typically formulations of methylphenidate or amphetamine — quickly calm them down and increase their ability to concentrate. Although these behavioural changes make the drugs useful, a growing body of evidence suggests that the benefits mainly stop there. Studies indicate that the improvements seen with medication do not translate into better academic achievement or even social adjustment in the long term: people who were medicated as children show no improvements in antisocial behaviour, substance abuse or arrest rates later in life, for example.

Many studies have shown that stimulants help students with ADHD for a year or so, helping them do more work and get better grades, but then the effect fades:

In the early 1990s, as rates of stimulant prescriptions were beginning to climb, the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, funded a study to compare different treatments for the disorder. Known as the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD, or MTA, the study randomized 579 children aged between seven and ten with ADHD to receive one of four treatments: stimulant medication, behaviour therapy, medication and behaviour therapy combined or whatever care they had already been receiving.

After 14 months, the groups treated with medication alone and medication plus behaviour therapy showed greater improvements in core ADHD symptoms than the other two groups. For academic achievement, only the group receiving medication and behaviour therapy combined outperformed the group receiving regular care. By three years in, the four groups had become indistinguishable on every measure. Treatment conferred no lasting benefit in terms of grades, test scores or social adjustment. Eight years later, it was the same story. “Nothing we did could tease out and say there's a long-term effect,” says Swanson, who was one of the lead investigators on the MTA.

Katherine Sharpe has an interesting essay exploring why that might be. Some people think the cause is inadequate medical follow-up; kids stop taking the drugs or don't get the right dose or what have you. But another explanation is that while it looks like kids are learning more, they really are not:

In the 1970s, two researchers, Russell Barkley and Charles Cunningham, noted that when children with ADHD took stimulants, parents and teachers rated their academic performance as vastly improved. But objective measurements showed that the quality of their work hadn't changed.

This is more evidence that the real problem is not the students, but the strange expectation that 7-year-old boys will sit still all day.

Modern Rustic: Fitch Bay Cabin

Fitch Bay Cabin is the private residence of two Canadians, photographer Jean Longpré (who took these pictures) and Rosalie Clermont. I think this is delightful, with a clean, modern feel but also plenty of comfort and charm. More here.

Interesting Moments in Religious History

On Crete, during the Middle Minoan period:

Fires and massive earthquakes brought the first palace period to an end  in the eighteenth century BC. Phaistos had to be totally reconstructed. At a sanctuary on Mount Jouktas, a priest, a priestess and a young man gathered to propitiate the earth-shaking gods; the young man was sacrificed, but then the roof collapsed, burying those who vainly offered up his life.

--David Abulafia, The Great Sea

Top, the peak sanctuary at Mount Jouktas; below, one of the victims crushed by the falling building. The young man on the altar was found lying in the fetal position, and among his bones was a large bronze knife. More here.

For Profit Education Stinks

Allegations against for-profit schools for fraud of various kinds continue to pile up. The latest are made in a lawsuit by former employees of Premier Education Group, which owns a string of small colleges:

“I saw students who never should have been there, students with whopping gaps in learning abilities and major psychiatric problems who were just not capable of doing the work,” said Ms. Amaya, an administrator at Harris’s Linwood campus, and then at its Wilmington, Del., campus, from 2009 to 2011. “The bosses were always like, ‘Stop asking why they’re enrolled, just get them to graduation however you can.’ ”

Her charges are part of a federal lawsuit filed by seven former employees against Harris and its parent company, Premier Education Group, which owns more than two dozen trade schools and community colleges operating under several names in 10 states. The suit contends that while charging more than $10,000 for programs lasting less than a year, school officials routinely misled students about their career prospects, and falsified records to enroll them and keep them enrolled, so that government grant and loan dollars would keep flowing.

All of this is well known to anyone paying attention, a group that unfortunately does not include the students of these colleges:

Students at for-profit schools often do not realize that cheaper alternatives exist through public community colleges and trade schools. A study published this month found that the majority of people who had attended for-profit colleges and trade schools did not understand the distinction, learned of their schools through advertising and did not consider any other schools.

This is straight-out exploitation of the poor and ignorant, the people who most need our help, and also theft of Federal education dollars. The Obama administration has been trying to crack down on these schools, but in the current legal and moral climate they thrive like weeds.

A Roman Commander's Gold Unearthed in Germany

Some time last year a German relic hunter stumbled across a hoard of Roman gold while metal detecting illegally in a national forest, but when he tried to sell it he was caught by the police and talked into coughing up the rest of the treasure.

The heart of the treasure is these gold ornaments, which archaeologists think were once sewn onto the robe of a very high ranking Roman. The finds date to the late Roman period, probably the fifth century. The come from the southern Rhineland, within Rome's old borders.

These silver figurines probably adorned an elaborate curule chair of the sort used by an emperor while on campaign.

And there was this exquisite silver bowl.

Crazy Ants vs. Fire Ants

Until now, fire ants have been the unchallenged invasive menace of the American south, sweeping all insect and most other foes before them. But now they have a rival, the raspberry or tawny crazy ant. Crazy ants are a nightmarish species; rather than being formidable as individuals, they come in such huge numbers that they simply overwhelm opposition. John Mooallem:

They arrived at Mike’s house a few months after he first saw them at the cardiologist’s office. One day his air conditioning stopped working. A musty smell seeped from the vents in his living-room floor. So he powered up his Shop-Vac to clear them. By the time he was done, he’d sucked out five gallons of ants.

Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.

Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.

“They literally come in waves of just millions,” Mike told me. (One Texas A&M entomologist confessed, “You figure these stories are laced with hyperbole, but when you get in there, it’s unreal.”)

Crazy ants reached Texas in 2002, and they are spreading rapidly. Nobody knows how to stop them. They come from South America, where their range overlaps with that of fire ants, so the two species have been battling for millennia. In this struggle the crazy ants have a secret weapon, which is that they are immune to the neurotoxin which is the fire ants' main weapon:

A crazy ant’s headlong charge into a mass of fire ants almost always results in it being smeared with venom. But once covered in the neurotoxin, these ants perform a systematic and ritualized behavior. First, an ant stands on its hind legs and curls up its abdomen, touching its mandibles to a small gland at the tip of its body called the acidopore. The ant then runs its front legs through its mandibles and grooms itself fastidiously.

It looks like the ant is covering itself with a secretion from its own body as a response to the fire ant's venom. To determine whether this behavior actually counteracts the venom’s effect, the researchers ran a controlled test. They used nail polish to seal the acidopore of one group of crazy ants, and simply sham-treated a second control group. After coming into contact with fire ant venom, the crazy ants with the sealed acidopores—which could not secrete any chemical defenses—had a survival rate of just 48 percent, whereas 98 percent of the control group survived. Clearly, something originating from the acidopore was increasing the survival of ants covered in venom.

By testing crazy ant secretions, the researchers found that the life-saving substance was actually formic acid from the crazy ants’ own venom. So far, it's unclear exactly how this chemical detoxifies fire ant venom. It’s possible that formic acid denatures the enzymes that enable neurotoxins to enter cells. . . .

So you can stop worrying about fire ants, because crazy ants are wiping them out. Worry about crazy ants instead.

Skellig Michael

Skellig Michael is a small island off the southwest coast Ireland that was occupied by monks from around 650 until some time in the 11th century.

The island is steep and rocky, with no anchorage, so it is difficult to reach in rough weather.

The main monastery is this small group of stone beehive huts, clinging to the side of the hill.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature is the small monks' graveyard.

But for monks who wanted an even more ascetic existence, even rougher shelters were built high on the top of the ridge. An amazing place, and amazing to think that for generations people went there, seeking God.

Mountain Lion, Los Angeles

Caught in a camera trap set by Steve Winter.

Today's Castle: Liscarroll, Ireland

Liscarroll Castle in County Cork was built in the thirteenth century by the De Barry family, one of the great Norman clans of medieval Ireland. It seems to have been built pretty much all at once, to a consistent plan.

The basic structure is a rectangle measuring 240 feet by 120 feet (74x37m) with a round tower at each corner and a large rectangular entrance tower.

The walls were 30 feet (9m) tall and are still quite impressive.

The hall must have been a wooden structure within the courtyard. The cows are a nice touch. Wandering around great stone ruins in places like rural Ireland or the Scottish Highlands, I am sometimes struck by the thought that these half-deserted villages once mattered. Seven hundred years ago the wealth of the world was in places like these, in their fields and farms and in the hands of tillers, spinners, and weavers.

Now there are only the cows, and tourists who live and work someplace else.

Liscarroll's brush with history came in 1642. During what we call the Irish Confederate Wars, between England's new Puritan state and the old-fashioned Catholic nobles of Ireland, it was besieged by Irish army forces under the command of Lord Mountgarret. The castle's defenders surrendered after a siege of just 13 days, and then must have felt very silly because on the fourteenth day the Earl of Inchiquin arrived with reinforcements and defeated the Irish army at the Battle of Liscarroll. This was a bloody affair with no tactical subtlety, just a lot of hacking and slashing until 1500 men were dead. The Irish army captured the castle again in 1646, with an army of 5000 led by Lord Castlehaven. After the wars the castle was granted to the Earls of Egmont,a branch of the Perceval family, and it remained in their possession for many years.

And then it was abandoned and embarked on a new career as a picturesque ruin.