Guerrilla Flower Beards

Belgian florist Geoffroy Mottart puts these on public monuments in Brussels. More at This is Colossal.

Muse

Marble, 97 cm tall. Roman, c. 200 CE. In the Getty.

Inuit and Denisovans

Anthropologists have long been curious whether the Inuit have genetic adaptations that help them survive in the Arctic. Now scientists have the genetic tools to find answers to this question, and studies of the Inuit genome under way. So far two parts of the genome have been found in which Inuit differ from the rest of us. One contains genes that govern how we metabolize fat, and it may help Arctic people survive on a diet heavy in seal and whale blubber. (Across the world there is a lot of variability in our digestive genes; our famous ability to survive almost everywhere is largely cultural but it does have a genetic component.) The second area of difference, newly announced, is in two genes that regulate the storage of fat and its distribution across the body. This variant, say the discoverers, seems to come from the ancient humans known as Denisovans after the Siberian cave where they were discovered.

Because our knowledge of the Denisovan genome is far from perfect, and this particular gene variant has not been much studied in modern humans, the authors say this is not certain. But it makes sense. Fully modern humans evolved in Africa, and the leading theory about why some genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans survived in Eurasian people is that they helped them adapt to the cold. The people of cold places do store fat differently than those from the tropics. So if these two genes do come from the Denisovans, that would be another support for the theory.

Original article here.

Augsburg's Prophets in Glass

Augsburg Cathedral in southern Germany holds what are said to be the oldest stained-glass windows in Europe, dating to the late 11th Century. Others disagree and say they date to after 1132, but even if they are twelfth century they are still very early.

There are five early windows in the south clerestory, featuring King David (top), and the prophets Jonah (above), Daniel, Moses, and Hosea.

Trump Voters for Planned Parenthood

One poll taken this season showed that 48%  of Trump voters opposed defunding Planned Parenthood, and only 47% supported it. Wondering how this happened, Planned Parenthood convened several focus groups of voters to ask them how they made their decisions. Slate has a report:

Some of the men were less supportive of Planned Parenthood than indifferent and opposed defunding it because it seemed like a misuse of political energy. . . . The women, however, tended to be strongly protective of the organization. Several of them had relied on it, which isn’t surprising; Planned Parenthood has cared for as many as 1 in 5 American women. “You feel safe when you’re in the Planned Parenthood lobby, because the people around you are dealing with similar things,” said a recent college graduate in the Trump-only focus group in Milwaukee. “Despite what people think because of the media, they’re there to help a woman make good choices for her body,” said a mother of four in Harrisburg.

In Phoenix, two middle-aged women in the Trump-only focus group said they wouldn’t support him for re-election if he signed away funding for Planned Parenthood. “It’s a deal-breaker,” said an earthy 58-year-old in a plaid work shirt. “It will rob women of basic fundamental rights. I’m talking about female health care, which includes abortion. Which includes birth control. I think birth control is the greatest gift that they gave for womankind.” Added a 44-year-old, if Trump attacked Planned Parenthood, “I’d be pissed off as hell.”

This leads to an obvious question: If these women think defunding Planned Parenthood is a deal-breaker, why did they vote for a candidate who promised to do exactly that? After all, in a September letter addressed to “Pro-Life Leaders,” Trump pledged to strip Planned Parenthood’s federal funding unless it stops performing abortions. But many of the people in the focus groups didn’t know he’d made this assurance, and those who did didn’t take it seriously. It seemed as if Trump’s lasciviousness, which Clinton hoped would disqualify Trump with women, actually worked in his favor. The focus group participants couldn’t imagine that Trump would enact a religious right agenda. “He’s probably paid for a few abortions himself,” said the 58-year-old in Phoenix, eliciting a roomful of laughs.

It is an important fact of American politics that many voters have conservative temperments and find conservative leaders more congenial, but are liberal about key issues. The is especially true about Social Security and Medicare. But there are other issues where many Americans who consider themselves conservative often take what might be considered the liberal position: abortion, equal pay for women, gay rights, raising the minimum wage, protecting the environment, not getting into foreign wars. The fight over the transgender bathroom bill in North Carolina seems to have hurt the Republican candidate for governor, who ran well behind other Republicans in the state. Part of that is probably because the state government badly mishandled the bill, leading to it becoming a much bigger deal than most people want it to be, but certainly there was no groundswell of support for the governor on the issue.

Again, I think that a lot of Americans support Republicans only because they have never been able to enact the agenda they sell to the billionaires who fund them. If they ever did succeed in privatizing Social Security and overturning Roe vs. Wade, a lot of Americans might have to reconsider their choices.

Today's Place to Daydream about: China's Huangshan Mountains

The Huangshan Mountains are in eastern China, south of the Yangtze River. This wild, rugged area, close to major centers of population, has been a tourist site since at least the 8th century. The name of the place, which means Yellow Mountain, was settled in 753 by imperial decree.

The mountain range is about 160 miles (260 km) long. The tallest peaks are around 6,000 feet (1,800 m).

Chinese painters have been working in these mountains since the Tang Dynasty. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a whole school of painting named after the mountains, from which these three come.

Detail of Mei Qing, Strolling in a Misty Valley, 17th c.

Numerous temples and monasteries have been built in the mountains.

The Bridge of the Immortals, probably the most famous view in the mountains.

There is a national park in the mountains, and plenty of other tourist infrastructure: trails, hotels, and even a cable car that carried you up to one peak. But because the range is so large, other areas are relatively unspoiled.

In the more heavily visited areas, each notable tree and rock has a name. Things like Feilai Shi (Rock Thrown from Afar) and Mengbi Shenghua (Flower Blooming on the Tip of a Brush). The one at the bottom is Monkey Watching the Ocean.

One of the famous sites of the mountains is the view of the clouds from above. This has inspired thousands (literally) of poems, and it was often described as the Huangshan Ocean.

Two wonderful images by Australian photographer Ilya Genkin. More here.

Seems like a wonderful place. I loved my trip to China and one day we hope to take our daughter back. Perhaps we could go here.

Your Holiday Good News: an Ebola Vaccine

A major trial has just been completed of the Ebola vaccine that has been in development by an international team for a couple of years now, and the results are impressive:

The vaccine was tested in a trial involving nearly 12,000 people in Guinea and Sierra Leone during 2015 and 2016. Among the 5,837 people who got the vaccine, no Ebola cases were recorded. By comparison, there were 23 Ebola cases in the control group that had not gotten the vaccine.

“This trial, confirming the 100 percent efficacy of the rVSV Ebola vaccine, is a simply remarkable outcome,” Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said of the research. “We’ve shown that by working collaboratively, across international borders and sectors, we can develop and test vaccines rapidly and use them to help bring epidemics to an end.”

And remember vaccines don't have to be 100% effective to prevent epidemics. So it seems likely that Ebola is finished as a major health threat, unless war or some similar catastrophe leads to a complete public health breakdown.

This is fascinating:

When they launched the trial in 2015, the number of Ebola cases in Guinea had already declined, and there were too few cases to run a meaningful traditional randomized study (giving the vaccine to a randomly selected group and comparing it with a control group that doesn’t get the vaccine). So the researchers had to be creative. They decided to try something called “ring vaccination,” a public health method used to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. It involves immunizing the immediate contacts — friends, family, housemates, neighbors — of a person who falls ill with a virus to create a protective ring around them to stop transmission.

As soon as a new Ebola case was diagnosed, the researchers traced all their contacts for a total of 117 clusters (or “rings”), each made up of about 80 people. They then randomized the rings of people to get the vaccine either right after their friend or family member had been diagnosed or after a three-week delay.

Their preliminary results were so positive that the researchers changed the trial design so that everyone got the vaccine immediately, including children.

Sometimes human cleverness amazes me.

Sports Cars and Money Management

Via Tyler Cowen, a wonderful piece of economic research:

We find that hedge fund managers who own powerful sports cars take on more investment risk. Conversely, managers who own practical but unexciting cars take on less investment risk. The incremental risk taking by performance car buyers does not translate to higher returns. Consequently, they deliver lower Sharpe ratios than do car buyers who eschew performance. In addition, performance car owners are more likely to terminate their funds, engage in fraudulent behavior, load up on non-index stocks, exhibit lower R-squareds with respect to systematic factors, and succumb to overconfidence. We consider several alternative explanations and conclude that manager revealed preference in the automobile market captures the personality trait of sensation seeking, which in turn drives manager behavior in the investment arena.

Tutankhamun’s Throne

Back

Front.

Detail.

Edvard Munch and Jasper Johns

In Richmond over the weekend I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibit that my sister the art history professor wanted to see: Jasper John and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss and the Cycle of Life. This is an exhibit that makes an argument. Jasper Johns (born 1930) started out as one of those 20th-century rebels who had only two aims, to 1) become a famous artist, 2) by doing things nobody had done before. (Edvard Munch, Madonna, 1894)

For years in the 1970s Johns did almost nothing but these crosshatches, with the aim of creating images that were memorable but would defy the sort of Freudian interpretation people had used with Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock; that would be, so far as possible, absolutely meaningless. (My sister finds these paintings "hilarious." Puzzling, these professors.)

But in the 1980s when the AIDS crisis hit Johns felt that he needed a completely new approach to art to express his reaction to the unfolding holocaust of the New York gay community. He turned to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), bringing elements from Munch's works into his paintings and even reusing some of Munch's titles. So, ok, fine, it's interesting that when he needed inspiration even one of the most iconoclastic 20th-century painters turned to art history. And the exhibit conveys that behind 20th-century art was a whole lot of intellectual ferment. But if you don't like the art, what's the point? And basically I just don't like Jasper Johns. Like, he painted about fifty images of this same can with the brushes arranged exactly the same way. And no, it doesn't mean anything, on purpose.

(Actually I liked one Johns work in the show, this one: Hatteras, 1963. The arm that seems like the hand of a clock represents the arm of a sailor who drowned in a famous wreck, of whom nothing was seen but his arm reaching out of the water. But mostly it was crosshatching and coffee cans.)

What I liked about the show was the chance to see lots of stuff by Edvard Munch, most of which I had never seen before. Be honest, what of Munch's have you seen, other than The Scream?

But Munch was an interesting artist in the Symbolist vein who made a whole lot of paintings and lithographs. For starters The Scream (1895) is part of a series depicting various bad emotional states: Anxiety, Melancholy, Despair, and this one, Jealousy. Munch came from just the sort of background you would imagine. His mother and one of his sisters died of infectious diseases, which his father, a fundamentalist, said was God's punishment for the family's sins. So of course he ended up obsessed with sex and death. According to Munch, the idea for The Scream came to him when he was returning from a visit to the mental hospital where his surviving sister was a patient:

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence ... shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.

Portrait of Hans Jaeger, 1889,

The Sun, 1895.

Self-portrait (1895 – note the severed arm, one of the motifs Johns copied)

Self-portrait in Shadow, 1912.

The Sick Child, one of many different versions of this image. It's dark, yes, but what did you expect? My favorite Munch is the one at the top of the post, Madonna, which I find hits a sweet spot between creepy and pretty.

Vampire, 1893.

And Starry Night, 1922-24.

Real and Unreal

When I saw this photograph on the front page of the Times yesterday, I assumed it was from a TV show. I was startled to discover that this is an actual photograph of the assassin who killed Russia's ambassador to Turkey, right after the deed, with the dying man on the floor behind him. He is shouting "Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!" to the cameras that had been recording the ambassador's speech.

The assassin, Mevlut Mert Altintas, was part of the security detail for the event. It's a disturbing sign of how the Syrian war and the Erdogan regime's response to it may lead to even more conflict and chaos in Turkey. Nobody yet knows if the assassin was part of any organized group, or, if so, which one, since there are several different groups in Syria and Turkey that would be happy to assassinate Russians.

But it also disturbs me that my first reaction on seeing this photograph was to think of television. I suppose that is partly because this was taken through a TV camera that was recording the ambassador's speech; part must also be the way the handsome assassin is dressed, just like a TV assassin would be. The gesture also seems more stage than reality.

I worry a little about my mind when it has been filled with so many images of staged violence that real violence looks staged to me.