Yaroslav Gerzhedovich

Russian artist Yaroslav Gerzhedovich was born in Leningrad in 1970 and went through Russian art schools. He paints in acrylic. He lists as his influences all the things you would expect: Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch, the Symbolists, Tolkien, Umberto Eco. The Throne.

A Place where Dreams Burn

The Sailor and the Sea Queen

The Dream

Drive-In Movie

Castle of the Sea

Rainy Day, which is interesting in that it takes a mundane topic and somehow renders it dark and mysterious.

More works I have found without titles.

Roman Glass

Glass is an ancient technology, developed in the late Bronze Age in either Egypt or Syria. But once developed it remained very conservative for a thousand years, the same vessel forms in the same dark colors. The first major advance was the invention of glass blowing, probably around 100 BC, probably in Syria. Not long after that, glass-makers discovered that by adding Manganese Oxide they could make the product much more transparent, leading to a centuries-long struggle to produce truly clear glass. So the Roman Empire saw a great flowering of glass-making, with new colors, forms, techniques, and more.

The Getty has several of the most famous ancient glass pieces. Of this one they say:

The glassworker fused together glass canes in multiple colors to form a single gob. Inflating the gob resulted in vertical bands of alternating dark blue, purple, green, and white. If you look closely you’ll see the fluid gradations within each band of color—for example, a large band transitions from pure white into icy blue and then stormy blue as it begins to mix gradually with the adjacent dark blue glass. The effect is almost hypnotizing. 

Another Getty piece, a multi-sectioned bowl:

Like the color-band flask above, this bowl has alternating bands of color, but here a different technique achieved the striped effect. To make this bowl, the glassworker wound a trail of hot white glass around a purple glass gob. Marvering it (rolling it against a slab) fused the trail into the gob to create a smooth surface. After marvering, the glassworker partially inflated the gob into a one-part open mold, called a dip mold, whose interior had been carved to imprint the vertical ribs around the vessel’s body. The partially inflated gob was removed from the mold and fully inflated.

Notice the experimentation with different combinations of fusing different colored pieces, blowing, molding, painting, and more. As in this ribbed bowl, which was partially blown before the white piping was added, and then finished by being blown into a four-piece mod.

We even know the names of a few of Rome's most famous glass-makers; this piece is signed by Ennion, That's a Semitic name, so he was probably from Syria.

Painted "circus cups" found in a queen's grave in Denmark, 3rd century AD. Glass was an important Roman export, sold not only to barbarians but also to Persia and India.

Here's a Roman vessel from the 2nd century AD found in Afghanistan. The painting shows a gladiator.

Late in the first century BC another major invention was made, cameo glass, which was made by fusing lumps of white glass to a dark vessel and then carving the white glass into the finished shape. This is the famous Portland Vase, which in the 1700s was widely considered one of the most perfect works of classical art.

Many ancient technologies and art forms stagnated long before the classical world ended. But not glass; new glass forms were created right up until the fall of Rome and beyond. The "cage cup" was introduced in the 4th century AD.

Glass makers also learned that my mixing tiny particles of gold or silver into the mix they could create glass that takes different colors in different lights. This is the most famous example, the 4th century Lycurgus Cup.

Of course adding gold could only be done for the luxury market. But Roman glass makers got so good at making nearly clear glass that vessels like this cup could be mold blown by the thousands and sold to small merchants and the like. One outgrowth of this expertise in making clear, inexpensive glass was the first glass windows. We know the Romans had glass windows, but experts disagree vehemently about how many and how widespread the practice was; certainly window glass was nothing like as common as it would become in the later Middle Ages.

The variety of Roman glass is stunning, as is the number of vessels that survive.

Blocking the Sun in Texas

The latest in conspiracy mongering:

Conspiracy theories of outlandish proportions spread in far-right online spaces, including Telegram channels run by promoters of QAnon. . . .

The claims included the false allegations that the snow in Texas was fake and somehow engineered by President Joe Biden and that Bill Gates "blocking the sun" caused the bizarre weather.

Google search trends throughout the week demonstrate the scope of this misinformation. On Wednesday, "fake snow" was a top related-search-query for "Texas snow." On Thursday, "bill gates sun" was a breakout related-query, meaning that the searches grew by more than 5000%.

There is a smidgen of truth behind the Gates part, since he has given money to groups studying the use of artificial clouds to dim the sun and cool the planet. But as I have noted before, no one is actually doing experiments to make this operational. But it gets weirder:

One Telegram channel falsely purporting to be Thomas McInerney, a conspiracy theorist and retired United States Air Force general, referenced the bogus claim in a Thursday message to 164,460 subscribers. The post, which was forwarded to other channels and viewed more than 150,000 times, falsely claimed that the situation in Texas "was a planned attack." McInerney, a Trump supporter, has previously pushed the claim that COVID-19 was a "biological attack," but Defense News has reported that the account does not belong to the retired general.

So in that corner, the false General McInerney, a simulacrum of a conspiracy theorist, multiple layers of falseness and obscurity. And in this corner, the King of the Obvious:

On a Telegram channel popular among QAnon supporters, the idea that the Texas blackouts were "not a coincidence" also reached hundreds of thousands of viewers.

I mean, they weren't a coincidence; they were planned by ERCOT, which runs the Texas grid. So how is "this is not a coincidence" even a conspiracy theory? "We're just going to mutter something obvious in low tones and everybody will nod darkly."

The best part is of course the way the conspiracies cut against each other; on the one hand, the snow is fake, but on the other it was caused by a deliberate climate attack. It also seems puzzling that an Establishment devoted to spreading fear of global warming should engineer fake snow.

And this:

Another conspiracy theory spreading mostly on Facebook alleged that Biden had somehow manipulated the weather to cause the storm in Texas.

I mean, Bill Gates, maybe, but Joe Biden? Sigh.

Didn't take long for all the crazies to switch to Telegram, a robustly secret communication tool used worldwide; I read recently that 60% of all internet traffic in Iran is over Telegram.

As for the serious allegations about the crisis, I haven't commented because everyone is acting crazy. According to ERCOT, both natural gas plants and windmills failed in the cold, so the crisis wasn't "caused" by green energy, but on the other hand it is absolutely true that, as Tucker Carlson said, wind and solar power make the grid less stable. That is a solvable engineering problem but it is a problem that we mostly haven't solved yet, because we have massively under-invested in our power grid. But I also don't think it makes a lot of sense to blame ERCOT, because the only way they could fix the grid is by raising the price of power and building lots of new power lines, and nobody wants either one of those. It think it is also worth pointing out that Texas has a lot of windmills because they are promoted by an alliance of environmentalists and ranchers who make money hosting them on their land, and ranchers have always had a lot of influence in Texas.

So here we are. 

The Catacombs of Kom-el-Shoqafa

In 1900, so the story goes, a donkey fell through a hole in the ground and disappeared. This was in Alexandria, Egypt, where such events are far from rare, so the donkey's owner went to the museum and asked if someone could come check the site quickly so he could resume work. 

His work was never resumed. The donkey, if there was a donkey, had fallen into a great shaft 18 feet wide descending four stories into the earth. A spiral staircase runs around the outside of the shaft, separated from it by a wall. 

The staircase takes you down to this spectacular chamber with its weird mix of classical and Egyptian imagery. This seems to have been built in the 100s AD.

Around the central chamber are several smaller rooms, decorated with themes that include the mummification of Osiris (above) and the abduction of Persephone.

The original route to the catacombs themselves was blocked by rubble, so today you follow this tunnel dug by medieval grave robbers.

The catacombs themselves are plain, their paintings long faded. That is, the ones we can reach. There is another, flooded level beneath this one, but if one of those Archaeology as Adventure shows has ever sent people diving in to investigate I can't find a record of it.

What a strange and fascinating place.

Links 19 February 2021

John William Waterhouse, Study for The Lady Clare, 1900

Flu cases in the US this year are running at about 1% of last year's level. So imagine how much worse Covid-19 could have been if we had taken no measures.

Here's an interesting plan to get homeowners to agree to new development in their neighborhoods: give them control over the process, including the right to charge as much as they can get for their approval.

Volunteers race to save thousands of cold-stunned turtles washing up in Texas (NPR)

Ezra Klein interviews former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson about what is wrong with the Senate. (New York Times article; also available on Klein's podcast)

Futuristic design for a floating ocean research station wins architecture awards.

Matt Yglesias on Scott Alexander/Siskind, his blog, and the Rationalists

Underwater Photographer of the Year winners.

In Brazil, everyone is taking cocktails of anti-Covid pills, but nobody knows if they work. (Washington Post)

Kevin Drum bemoans the proliferation of bad faith arguments in our discourse.

The massive influence of Japanese art in France, c. 1860-1900. Another indication of how Europe's ever increasing knowledge of the world inspired its own creativity. (NY Times)

Vox explains the "Free Britney Spears" movement, long article but then it's a tough topic; when is an adult not sane enough to be responsible for running her own life?

The Backchannel: famous old blog post from Freddie deBoer about all the left/woke people who agree in public with the latest explosion of outrage but write to him privately about their doubts.

Playing the world's oldest functioning musical instrument, an 18,000-year-old conch shell. Sounds, um, exactly like a modern conch shell.

What do men under 65 who have dropped out of the workforce do? 5+ hours a day in front of a video screen.

Facebook's "Supreme Court" (The New Yorker)

Those European glass beads found in Alaska are old, but probably 17th century and not pre-Columbus as the discoverers claimed. But still cool that Venetian beads made it to Alaska in the 1600s.

Interesting piece about Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave cut off from the rest of the country, that focuses on the never-finished brutalist disaster known as the House of Soviets. Some locals have come to love the ugly thing. (NY Times)

Is there a Planet Nine? Or could it be a small black hole?

When she was 15, Keira Bell decided she hated her body and wanted to become a man. She went to a clinic called the Tavistock Center, which gave her puberty blockers and male hormones; she also had a double mastectomy. At 23, she decided the whole thing was a mistake and sued the Tavistock Center for "not questioning" her 15-year-old self. Last month, she won her suit, with who knows what long-term consequences. She now says, "There was nothing wrong with my body, I just needed somebody to tell me I was fine the way I was."

Gettysburg in the Snow

Early on a dim morning, view of the line where Hancock's II Corps stopped Pickett's Charge.

66th Ohio Monument, with a view down the rough slope of Culp's Hill.

Another early morning shot, Gouverneur Warren standing guard over Little Round Top

Beaver dam on Plum Creek. Poor beavers are no doubt oblivious to the row their dam is going to cause between the natural and historical wings of the park staff.

View of Little Round Top from the Devil's Den, the first sight many Confederates got of their objective.

And of the Devil's Den from inside the 44th New York monument on the hilltop

View from Little Round Top in the afternoon sun. Behind Warren's statue you can make out the line of monuments marking the Union line on Cemetery Ridge.

On the second day the Confederates of McLaws' and Hood's Divisions attacked the southern end of the Union line. They pretty much destroyed the Union III Corps, but by the time they were ready to move on the Federals had already formed a second line on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge. To reach Little Round Top the Confederates advanced up the valley of Plum Creek, passing between the rocks of the Devil's Den and a hill called Big Round Top. Union artillerymen had had time to zero in on the spot where this gap was narrowest; one later said, "Once we had the range, we never missed." Confederates remembered this as the Valley of Death, or the Slaughter Pen.

Erecting the Boundaries of Science

In the mid 1600s Europeans began to get serious about natural philosophy, or, as we would say, science. They founded academies to study it, set up correspondence committees to share result across the continent, began publishing the first journals to report on their findings. Which raised a very important question: what was natural philosophy, and what was not?

The new discipline first of all required belief in a natural world that was in some way separate from things one might call divine or supernatural. Many theologians simply refused to accept this division, arguing that the whole universe from the throne of God to London to South America to the pit of Satan was entirely of the Almighty, and therefore all knowledge was theological knowledge. But the idea rapidly became entrenched that one could advance knowledge by setting that question aside and considering things like magnets or balls rolling down inclined planes from a strictly material perspective; God of course might decide to change things around, but since in practice he rarely did so, the assumption that he would not held sway.

But once people had divided the world into natural and supernatural it remained to map out the boundary between them. It was no easy task. For example one much debated question was whether life could be explained in entirely material terms or required something supernatural, some divine spark or elan vital, to separate it from inanimate matter. When you consider how far they were from being able to explain anything about how living organisms worked, it took a certain amount of hubris to assert that this was in fact an entirely natural question and therefore under the purview of the new societies. But many did assert this, and others held that while the ultimate mystery of life might be beyond science, science could still learn at vast amount about it. Like the question of how God operates in the world, the question of life's origin was set aside, and work pushed forward on understanding how seeds developed and what the organs of the body did.

One very interesting debate concerned alchemy. Alchemists considered what they did scientific in our sense of the word, meaning they were doing experiments aimed at understanding, and gaining power over, brute matter. Many of Europe's top scientists were alchemists, including Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. Nonetheless, alchemy was very quickly written out of Natural Philosophy. I think this was ultimately a matter of style. Alchemists wrote in a deliberately obscure way, using ancient, opaque terminology and exposition that amounted to misdirection, and to outsiders the whole business looked like mysticism. Plus, alchemists had been wrestling with the same problem (turning lead into gold) for 1500 years without making any discernible progress. So they were booted out of the scientific academies, and by 1750 alchemy had slid out of elite culture and into the realm of cranks.

Likewise witchcraft. Should scientists investigate the claim that certain fey old women could curse sheep to death? The English Royal Society was asked to do so, but refused. Organized science never took a stand about witchcraft in the early period but made their opinion fairly clear by resolutely refusing to get involved.

On the other hand, the notion that bodies could influence each other from a distance was brought back in. To Galileo this was the very definition of magic, so he rejected the idea that the moon could influence the tides. But experimental study of magnets showed that this absolutely does happen, and when Newton formulated his theory of gravity he simply asserted that while he could not explain how the force could cross vast distances, he knew that it did.

These questions are still with us; somewhere in the world right now two scientists are arguing about whether the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is science, or whether it is scientific to speculate that DNA arrived on earth from space. But they were especially acute in science's early days.

The Buffalo Creek Flood, Appalachian Stereotypes, and American Politics

On February 26, 1972, the Pittston Coal Company's coal slurry impoundment dam #3, located at the head of a valley in Logan County, West Virginia, failed. A federal inspector had rated it "satisfactory" just four days before. 

About 132 million gallons of coal-stained water poured down the hill and into Buffalo Creek. A black wave 30 feel tall raced down the valley, tearing through 16 small mining towns. About 5,000 people lived in Buffalo Creek Hollow. During the flood, 125 were killed, 1,121 were injured, and over 4,000 were left homeless. More than 500 houses were destroyed, and 44 mobile homes were carried away. Ralph Nader called it a "massacre."

As if things weren't bad enough, a professor from Yale then showed up and proceeded to write a semi-famous book about the disaster. Sociologist Kai Erikson was brought in as an expert witness by the survivors, who filed a class action lawsuit against Pittston Coal. He interviewed hundreds of people and the book he wrote, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

And a lot of people really, really hate it. The book paints the people of the hollow as "prisoners" of the coal companies, and Erikson spent dozens of pages wondering why they didn't just leave. One more recent academic writer complained that Erikson's coal miners and television snake handlers have come to define West Virginia. Everything in its Path is full of sentences like,

The people of Appalachia seem to be forever poised at some vague mid-point between ability and disability. 

And

In true Appalachian fashion, few people are ready to accept the responsibility of leadership.

Stephen Young, who wrote about a more recent mining dam collapse, insisted that these stereotypes are part of the problem:

He argues that stereotypes—particularly the “white trash” stereotypes depicting Appalachians as lazy, ignorant, and hopeless—allow for the continued exploitation of Appalachia by industry.

There are several interesting questions here. To what extent are these stereotypes true? West Virginia does have the highest rate of people claiming a disability in the US, at 19.1% of the workforce. It also has a terrible problem with opioid abuse. Maine, however, is not far behind on both counts, and it does not have West Virginia's reputation as the capital of hickdom.

Is "why don't people leave the poor counties in West Virginia" a question we should be asking? Or is it just an insult to people who have enough problems without our adding scorn?

You might be thinking, the Buffalo Creek disaster was a crime perpetrated by the coal companies, and that's where we should be putting our attention. Possibly so. But does anybody in West Virginia want coal mining to stop, or for coal companies to face tighter regulation? No. Coal mining in Appalachia has been declining since the 1950s, and the people there understand that tighter regulations would just make it disappear faster. West Virginia coal country went more than 80% for Donald Trump, who promised to relax environmental regulations and bring back coal. 

Liberal professors think it is stereotyping or "othering" that allows the exploitation of people in coal country to proceed, but the people who suffer the most from coal mining want very much for coal mining to continue. It isn't something outsiders are forcing on them. The other political issue West Virginia voters really care about is natural gas fracking, the state's one booming industry; they want more mining of every sort, and more of the tough, dangerous jobs that go with it.

What are we to make of that? Are they foolish? Or are we foolish for wondering why people would want to maintain their parents' way of life?

Video clip from a documentary about the disaster, 8 minutes.