Paul Manship, The Four Elements

 Water

 Wind

Earth

Fire

These bronze panels were commissioned by architect William Welles Bosworth for the new headquarters of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Streets in New York. Up until this time Manship had focused on neoclassical work, but here he also employed imagery from Chinese and Indian art. Now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Geoengineering and Climate Change

Lots of people say, over and over, that climate change presents humanity with an existential crisis. Some of them think we need to take drastic action now, or else we're doomed; others think the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere means we are already doomed.

I have trouble taking all this doom-mongering seriously. Not that atmospheric CO2 might not end up creating a crisis; it certainly might. That is what the best science we have on the subject says, and the logic is pretty straightforward.

The reason I am puzzled by all the howls of anguish is that we know, or think we know, how to cool the planet. Lots of ideas have been proposed. Two of the best thought-out involve dumping minerals into the ocean to create giant algal blooms, which would soak up CO2 and transport much of it to the sea bottom, and spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere. Honestly we don't really know how well either of these would work, but the science that says they would cool the planet is exactly the same science that says CO2 is warming it.

It seems to me that if we are really facing a climate catastrophe, as I read almost every day, we ought to be trying everything we can think of. But we are not, and this is the puzzle I want to write about.

Nature recently published a little essay on this topic by two scientists who chaired a UN working group on geoengineering. Their task was to assess the state of the field and propose a framework for how geoengineering efforts should be regulated. The found that so little work has been done that there was nothing to assess, and since no work seems to be ongoing there isn't anything to regulate.

Storing carbon in the oceans sounds promising to some. The oceans are vast, and there could be fewer political trade-offs to deal with than on land. For example, fertilizing the water with iron would speed up the growth of phytoplankton and thus take up CO2, some of which would sink into the deep ocean as carbon when the organisms die. Another proposal is to spray seawater into the air to help form clouds that reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

Techniques such as these would need to be used on a massive scale to cap global warming at safe levels. For example, to mop up CO2 chemically, the entire Pacific Ocean would have to be sprinkled with one billion tonnes of powdered minerals similar to chalk. . . .

Little is known about the consequences. Scant research has been carried out for a range of reasons. The controversial nature of geoengineering divides researchers. And some research trials that have been funded have subsequently been abandoned, owing to a lack of rules for performing them and to conflicts of interest, such as patent applications. Even basic tests of equipment haven’t been done. . . .

This dearth of information is hampering the development of a global framework for regulating geoengineering research, despite more than a decade of debate. Researchers and policymakers need to know which negative-emissions technologies are worth investigating, and which will never work or are too damaging to pursue. The potential benefits and risks of the technologies need to be established before country leaders or companies decide to implement them prematurely.

Again, it's very puzzling. Are we in a crisis or not? If we are, why aren't we doing anything about it? It's a complicated question, but a big part of the reason is that research into geoengineering is strongly opposed by the same environmentalists who think climate change presents us with an existential crisis. The position statement of the Environmental Defense Fund, for example, says

Deliberate climate interventions such as albedo modification should not be undertaken for the foreseeable future as they present serious ecological, moral and geopolitical concerns.

I agree! Geoengineering presents all those questions. But if climate change is a catastrophe that is already upon us and may kill (as some say) a billion people this century, wouldn't that outweigh a quite a few ecological, moral and geopolitical concerns?

(For an example of a research project stopped by such objections, see here.)

Why would you both believe that atmospheric CO2 threatens the existence of humanity and oppose efforts to do anything about it? I think it is because for many environmentalists atmospheric CO2 is not really the problem. It is more like a symbol of the problem, or perhaps a single case of a very broad phenomenon that is the deeper problem. That broad phenomenon is humans messing with the planet. Environmentalists as a group are worried, not so much about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and how that might affect the climate, but by all the ways we are changing our home and all the ways that might be bad. Even if geoengineering worked, in that sense that it might undo the warming caused by all the CO2 we have pumped into the air, it would in the broader sense only be another way we are messing with the planet, which is the thing they want to put a stop to.

I think this is short-sighted. If the models are right and the planet is going to warm dramatically, we don't have time to prevent that by limiting our future CO2 emissions. Those are coming down as fast as I think will ever be feasible; despite what some environmentalists want, we are not going to junk our cars and turn off our air conditioners because of a vague future threat that nobody really understands. If atmospheric CO2 is an existential problem, geoengineering is the only feasible solution.

Climate change remains, as I have always said, a serious potential threat to humanity and earth's other residents. But I will believe we are in actual crisis when people who worry about this issue start acting like we are.

Ancient Stoners

In 2013 Chinese archaeologists excavated a cemetery on the Pamir Plateau of western China that dates to around 500 BC. This is a dry, desert area and much wood was preserved.

Ten of the skeletons were buried with incense burners on a common pattern. These were wooden blocks, with a hollow dug into them that had been filled with rocks.

The braziers contained a burned residue that intrigued the archaeologists, so they submitted samples for analysis by gas chromatography to figure out what it was. The results came back with a high level of cannabinol (CBN), cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabicyclol (CBL), all of which come from cannabis.

THC, the active ingredient, does not survive for any length of time, but in modern plants the level of THC is closely correlated with the level of CBN. The level of CBN in these samples was highly elevated compared to what you would find in ordinary hemp being grown for fiber. So it looks like these folks had specially bred their plants to increase the THC yield. So they could get high more easily.

Based on what we know from Scythians at the western end of the Eurasian plain, at about the same time, cannabis was used ritually, both for funeral rites and to help induce shamanistic trance. But the line between ritual and fun has always been a blurry one.

The Problem with Governments Intervening in the Market

You may have heard that the New York State Assembly recently passed a law that re-invigorates rent control in New York. If you're not a conservative, you probably think that's a good thing, since rents in New York and other big cities have been soaring.

But rent control does not help everyone equally:

Manhattan renters get a steep discount from market rents in the same neighborhood: about $1,000 a month per apartment, up to nearly $2,000 a month in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In many less affluent working-class neighborhoods, regulated rents are no different than, or only slightly below, market rate rents in the same locale.

….In all of Manhattan, median regulated rents were 53% below median market rates in the borough. In Queens, 8.6% were below market rates; in the Bronx, it was 13.5%; and in Brooklyn it was 16.7%, the analysis found.

….More affluent renters also received a bigger discount from market rent. A typical renter with an income in the top quarter of all New York households paid about $1,650 in rent, compared with $2,700 in rent for a similar renter paying market rents, a discount of 39%. For a renter in the bottom quarter of income the difference was 15%.

White renters in rent-protected apartments benefited more than any other race group, the analysis found, with a discount of 36% from market rates, compared with 16% for black renters and 17% for Hispanic renters.

This is because landlords are entitled to a rent that will cover the expense of maintaining the building, the mortgage payments, and the like, and in a working class neighborhood their margin above that is just not very large. Renting to poor people is a rough business. So there is only so much the government can do to hold down rents.

That doesn't mean that rent control does no good for ordinary folks; a 10% discount may still be important for people on a strict budget. Rent control also keeps rents from rising rapidly should a neighborhood gentrify.

But the overwhelming share of the benefits flows to upper middle class folks in Manhattan, and even to millionaires.

You could easily end this problem by setting an income limit on benefiting from rent control. This hasn't been done 1) because it would just incentivize landlords to seek out rich tenants, and 2) because the upper middle class people who benefit from rent control scream bloody murder every time it is suggested.

Not that rents in New York are the crucial thing we should worry about, and who wins this struggle between rich landlords and rich tenants is of no great consequence for the republic. But it points to an important problem with regulation. In any democracy the people who are engaged wield disproportionate power, and in general it is the well-educated and well-to-do who are engaged. Poor people don't vote or organize or protest nearly as effectively, so it often happens that measures taken under the guise of helping them often help someone with more power at least as much.

This is why I think we should support programs like Social Security that help everyone; they help the poor more than they help anyone else, but because the middle and upper middle classes who control our politics also benefit, they have powerful defenders. Special interest provisions that (for example) only help New Yorkers lucky enough to have rent-controlled apartments do not impress me as particularly useful, or worth fighting for.

The Viking Ships of Roskilde

Roskilde Fjord is a narrow arm of the sea that extends 25 miles (40 km) into the Danish island of Zealand. It has a long maritime history, as you would expect.

Around 1070 AD Danes worried about attack from the sea sank five Viking ships in a shallow, narrow part of the Fjord near the town of Skuldelev, partially blocking the waterway. They were discovered in the 1950s and in 1962 a cofferdam was sunk around them and they were completely excavated.

After a long political wrangle it was decided to place the museum that would display them in the town of Roskilde, which is at the head of the fjord. Roskilde is closer to Copenhagen than Skuldelev and had better infrastructure and a less pristine waterfront, so in many ways it was a better site for a museum. I have been told, though, that in the end the choice came down to horse trading in the Danish legislature, something I'll come back to later.

Anyway the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde was eventually built, and it looks like a wonderful place. The ships were minutely studied during preservation. They were dated by tree rings, the wood was identified as to tree species and sourced using chemical analysis, the greatest experts on Viking ships studied the remains to reconstruct what the ships might have looked like. Here is the vessel known as Skuldelev 1, which was built around 1030:

Skuldelev 1 is large ocean-going cargo ship from Sognefjord in western Norway. The ship is built of heavy pine planks, and has a rounded form that gives it a high loading capacity and great seaworthiness on the North Atlantic. It is repeatedly repaired with oak near the Oslo Fjord and eastern Denmark.

The ship is about 60 percent preserved. It was about 52 feet long and 16 feet wide (16 x 4.8 m), with a draft of 3.3 feet (1 m). It would have had a crew of six to eight men. It probably sailed around the North Sea for many years before it was sunk.

Skuldelev 2 is the most famous of the ships, a great war vessel that has been reconstructed as the Sea Stallion of Glendalough:

Skuldelev 2 is a war machine, built to carry many warriors at high speed. With a crew of 65-70 men, it was a chieftain's ship, like those praised in ancient scaldic verse and sagas. Tree-ring analysis of the timber show that the ship was built of oak in the vicinity of Dublin around 1042. . . . The long, narrow shape of the ship and the enormous sail allowed at great speed. And the manning of 60 oars made it possible to keep the ship moving even without wind. 

The ship was only 25% preserved, which makes me doubt the reconstruction a little, but there is no doubt that this was a magnificent ship. It was about 100 feet long (30 m), which made it the largest longship ever found, and 12.5 feet (3.8 m) wide.

The reconstructed Sea Stallion made a great voyage from Dublin to Roskilde that was entirely filmed, with wonderful results if you have any interest in this sort of thing. I showed some of this to my students last time I taught the Vikings.

Skuldelev 3 is the best preserved of these ships and the smallest, a Danish oak vessel built for carrying cargoes around Denmark or possibly in the Baltic Sea. It is 75% complete and would have been 46 feet (14 m) long and 11 feet (3.3 m) wide. It was built around 1040.

Skuldelev 5 is another longship but smaller than the Sea Stallion. Traces of the shield rack survive along the sheerstrake, showing that it was equipped for war. (Yes, Vikings really did hang their shields on the sides of their ships, at least when rowing into battle.) It is about 50 percent complete and would have been 57 feet (17.3 m) long and 8 feet (2.5 m) wide. It was built in Denmark around 1030. The builders used some recycled wood in the construction, which was fairly unusual; none of the other Skuldelev ships were built that way.

Skuldelev 6 is a fishing boat, built in the Sognefjord area in western Norway. It was then deepened by adding planks in each side, perhaps so it could serve as a cargo vessel on the run to Denmark. It is 70 percent complete and was built of pine, birch, and oak. It was: 37 feet (11.2 m) long and 8 feet (2.5 m) wide.

So that is the five original ships for which the Roskilde museum was built, all on display in both their archaeological and reconstructed forms. (Reconstruction of Skuldelev 5)

But then in the 1990s the museum decided to expand and build a harbor for its reconstructed vessels, so it could offer sailing tours of the fjord. Nobody thought much about what might be on the bottom of the harbor next to the museum, I mean, this was a more developed area and therefore more disturbed than at Skuldelev, and the fjord had already yielded up five Viking ships, so what were the odds that more might be found? So they set about driving pilings into the harbor mud. After a bit they realized that they were driving them through not one, not five, but NINE more Viking ships that happened to be lying on the harbor floor right next to the world's only Viking ship museum. A museum that had been placed, you will recall, in a location chosen by a legislative committee for reasons (whatever they were) that had nothing to do with the hope of finding more ships.

These ships were fragmentary and had been further damaged by driving pilings through them, not to mention that the Danish government was already a bit exhausted by paying to analyze and reconstruct the first five ships, so analysis has taken a long time. The only one of these nine you are likely to hear about is Roskilde 6. Roskilde 6 was another great warship, at 120 feet (36 m) even longer than Skuldelev 2 and currently the longest Viking ship known. It was built around 1030. It is also decently preserved; the entire 3-section keel survives, and it is 105 feet (32 m) long.

And that, my friends, is the story of the Viking ships of Roskilde Fjord. So far anyway; who knows how many more are buried in the fjord's sticky mud?

The Dream

A 20-something person I vaguely know posted this retirement plan yesterday in a WhatsApp forum dedicated to something high tech and digital:

I would like to have a rose/lavender farm and raise goats and sheep to make cheese, learn how to spin yarn and knit.

Flag of the 127th US Colored Infantry Up for Auction

This wonderful flag is up for auction at Morphy Auctions this week. The 127th US Colored Infantry was an African American Civil War regiment, one of 11 raised in Pennsylvania immediately after the government authorized black soldiers. All of these regiments were mustered in and trained at Camp William Penn, which was set up outside Philadelphia on land belonging to Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott. The regiment was attached to the Army of the James in 1864 and did its part in the Siege of Petersburg, then joined the epic march to Appomattox; the rapid flank march of the Army of the James blocked any possible retreat for Lee's Confederate army, forcing their surrender.

The flag was designed and painted by Philadelphia portraitist David Buster Bowser, the son of a runaway slave. Buster did the flags for all 11 Camp William Penn regiments, but this is the only one known to survive. The motto, We Will Prove Ourselves Men, tells you a lot about why African Americans volunteered to serve in the war. Other Bowser flags bore the mottoes "'Rather Die Freemen, Than Live To Be Slaves," "Let Soldiers in War Be Citizens in Peace," and "Sic Semper Tyrranis," the last accompanied by an image of a black Union soldier bayoneting a Confederate.

The estimate is $150,000 to $250,000. I hope the purchaser is a museum; the auction house's announcement practically begs the Smithsonian to buy it.

UPDATE

The flag was bought by the Atlanta History Center.

The Bleak View from the Modern Language Association

Former academic Stephen Marche attended this year's meeting of the Modern Language Association and found it unutterably grim, a depression driven by the news that the number of English majors has fallen by half in 15 years.

The most common response to the humanities crisis at the MLA was lament. At the many, many panels devoted to decline that I attended, many, many academics bemoaned their state, confessing to profound spasms of guilt and despair, and exploring “the larger cultural devaluation of the humanities”. But in a way they revel in their irrelevance. I attended a special session called “Game the Name: Crafting the title of your book or dissertation”, led by Professor Wendy Belcher of Princeton. The session’s description made a startling claim: “Your book’s title is the only part of your book that most scholars will read”. Which is both correct and insane. This is a profession in which people write whole books to have the titles appear on job applications. The measure of a title’s value is the number of times it is cited. Titles with colons are cited more regularly. Titles with question marks are cited less regularly. You want searchable keywords in your titles: periods rather than dates, topics rather than abstractions. Puns and unclear allusions are to be avoided.

Every rising academic needs this sort of advice. There are hundreds of applicants for every position, which means that only those who assiduously play the academic game have any chance at a tenure-track job.

Hyksos Headband

Headband with Heads of Gazelles and a Stag Between Stars or Flowers,ca. 1648–1540 B.C., now in the Met.

During the late twelfth and then the thirteenth dynasty, late in the Middle Kingdom, people from western Asia established themselves among the Egyptian inhabitants of the eastern Nile Delta, especially at a place later called Avaris (now Tell el-Dab'a). A multicultural mix was thus established that culminated during Dynasty 15 in the rule of a line of kings now known as the Hyksos (from the Egyptian phrase "rulers of foreign lands") who resided at Avaris but dominated a good part of northern and middle Egypt, while the south remained under the indigenous Dynasty 17 of Thebes. The northern "Hyksos" culture combined Egyptian and Middle Bronze Age Levantine traditions. This diadem, with animal heads alternating with flowers, has Near Eastern affinities and is typical of the commingling of artistic styles.

This black and white photo is clearer.

Detail.

Spending on Education Won't Reduce Inequality

Nick Hanauer used to think that the way to reduce inequality in America, and fix many other problems, was to improve our schools. He calls this "educationism." But after a decade of activism he has decided that this is backwards, and that we need to focus on reducing inequality first:

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

I'm all for more and better education, but I think Hanauer is right that this won't fix our society's problems.

Dillon Marsh, Seed

Part of a series of macro photographs of "hitchhiker" seeds from South Africa. Via This is Colossal.

The Temple Doors of Lopodunum

The German town Ladenburg, east of the Rhine on the Necker River, is an ancient place. In Roman times it was called Lopodunum, and the residents paid for a public inscription announcing that Trajan had declared the place a civitas in 98 AD.

Twice during the Third Century Crisis, around 230 and then around 260, Ladenburg was sacked by barbarians. After the second sack it was abandoned for a century, only to be refounded by Valentinian in 369 and then abandoned again around 400. Just before that second sack the citizens of the town buried an unusual treasure under the stones of the Forum: the elaborate bronze hardware from an impressive set of doors, most likely from the town's principle temple.

This looks like a door knocker to me but all the sources insist that it is a door pull. The manufacture of these items is usually dated to the mid second century AD, most likely in Gaul.

Handle in the shape of a mythical beast.

Bust of a god, generally said to be Apollo.

The door hardware as displayed in the Lobdengaumuseum; that must be originals on the right and reproductions on the left. What an utterly weird thing to discover in a Roman frontier town.

But wait – there is another weird bit of Roman history in Ladenburg, the Jupiter Pillar. This is not such an unusual item; dozens are known, all of them from Roman towns in northern Europe. They have a common form: a square base with reliefs of four gods, a column with four heads in the capital, and then on top Jupiter riding down a giant. What makes this one unusual is that it has an inscription saying that when they first sacked the town the Alemanni threw the pillar in a well. When the barbarians had retreated some local grandee paid to have the thing restored and re-erected, along with the inscription extolling his civic virtue.

But when it was found in the nineteenth century it was in a well again.

The Singer's Grave at Trossingen, 580 AD

For decades people in the small German city of Trossingen had known that their downtown was an early medieval graveyard, and they had gotten used to burials turning up when pipes were laid or cellars dug. In 2001 archaeologists were investigating the site of a proposed underground parking garage when they found another grave. This was given the number 58. It had been dug deep and its lower levels seemed to be waterlogged, so the whole thing was removed as a single piece and taken to the University of Freiburg. There it was excavated carefully under laboratory conditions.

The grave was extraordinary. The conditions had destroyed things that often survive on other sites, especially bone and metal, but preserved wood. Like this bed, which measured 210 by 55 cm (6 feet 10 inches by 1 foot 10 inches). Thanks to all the wood, the grave has been tree-ring dated to 580 AD.

And this remarkable chair, a design that could have been made in nineteenth-century America. I am going to assume that this is a Roman design, since other very traditional furniture designs go back to Rome, but I don't really know because I haven't seen a Roman chair quite like this. This chair required a lot of labor to make and you sometimes hear it referred to as a "throne," but it is only 90 cm tall (2 feet 11 inches), the size of an elementary school desk chair. Maybe it sat on top of an earthen platform?

Canteen, which contained what is claimed, based on pollen analysis, to be the world's oldest beer made with barley and hops. (This is also in the group at the top of the post.)

Shield, diameter 80 cm (2 feet 7.5 inches). Notice the reverse preservation; the metal boss in the middle is gone, but the ash boards survive. The shield was covered with rawhide that left only traces.

Lance.

The most extraordinary find at Trossingen was a nearly complete lyre, one of the best preserved musical instruments ever to come from an archaeological site.

The lyre is decorated on both surfaces. This is a loud instrument, intended for public performance.

You can hear a reconstruction played here.

The grave was within the Merovingian Kingdom, in an area occupied by a tribe called the Alemanni. Obviously we don't know how many other noblemen might have been buried with wooden musical instruments, since they would not have survived, but it is fun to imagine that this fellow was a great wonder, an aristocrat who sang of his own family rather than paying someone else to do it.

Christi Belcourt

Christi Belcourt is a Métis artist and environmental activist much of whose work is directly tied to particular events or causes.

The rest of the texts is from the artist's statement on her web site.

Everything I do in my life is my love for the earth and my awe of it all. How is it possible we are even alive? The great power and mystery surrounds us every minute of every day. Everything – the plants, insects, winds, stars, rocks, animals, us – is a giant web of pure spirit. Nothing is separate from anything else. The spirit world surrounds us at all moments and is present in all things. If its possible we live in a planet surrounded by stars, then nothing is impossible. 

My heart overflows with love for the beauty of this world. The mystery of this planet and this universe is too vast and too powerful to even begin to understand. All I know is that all life, even the rocks, need to be treated with respect.

The sacred laws of this world are of respect and reciprocity. When we stop following them, we as a species are out of balance with the rest of the world.

This wondrous planet, so full of mystery, is a paradise. All I want to do is give everything I have, my energy, my love, my labour – all of it in gratitude for what we are given. I’ll never be able to give back enough. My love for this world overwhelms me. My love for this world, and my love for everyone and everything is what drives me.