More on that Possible Leonardo

In The New Yorker, David Grann looks closely at the man who says he found Leonardo's fingerprint on the "Bella Principessa." He seems to be a thoroughly unsavory character. And since I have never had much faith in fingerprint analysis, even when done by reputable scientists, I would say this leaves the question of authorship open.

Abandoned

Down in the bottom of this holler, at the end of a long, badly rutted gravel driveway, largely hidden behind the trees, is an abandoned farm. I would say the last residents moved away about a year ago. I spent the day there, checking the property out for the new owners.

What an utterly creepy place. It's like the set for a serial killer movie. Everywhere you look are weird signs of derangement and decay, a mix of the gross things you expect to find around an old farm and oddities that make no sense. The driveway is scattered with what look like vulture feathers, and the feet from the dismembered deer carcass lying next to a shed. One of the deer feet was covered by little orange and black butterflies.

The house itself has an old log core that probably dates to the late 1800s, with additions all around. The original part is on the right in this picture. About 40 years ago somebody moved in who showered the place with money and love, building additions, stables, sheds, and a concrete bridge over the little stream. The stream was dammed to make two little ponds, and the yard around the house was heavily landscaped. There is a row of corkscrew willows, rows of Norway spruces, a grove of birches, the biggest ornamental cherry tree I've ever seen, two Japanese maples, pear trees, a Russian olive, forsythia, and more. Sometime after that, things started to get weird.

"There used to be a little girl down there. Weird child -- never heard her say a word. Don't rightly know what happened to her, either. . . ."

From the front you can't really tell anything about the house's history because everything is hidden behind strange constructions. On closer inspection, these prove to be cages. The whole side porch of the house is a cage, made with wire mesh heavy enough to keep in a large dog. Next to the front door is this weird homemade thing, probably a bird cage. There is another large cage next to the walkway, the right size for a cockatoo or an injured owl. There were more cages and a couple of broken cat carriers in the back of the house.

Stepping into the house, the first thing I noticed was the buzzing sound. I thought, "flies on the corpse of the unburied last victim," but then I realized that it sounded more like bees. A few steps further in and the sound was so loud I was reminded of those X-Files episodes featuring giant hives that breed bees by the millions. But it wasn't bees, it was white-faced hornets. I never found the nest -- I think it was in the ceiling over the porch/giant cage -- but the house was full of hornets, flying around everywhere. Looking into the basement of the old house, I saw more hornets, and smelled skunk.

The farm has at least a dozen outbuildings. This includes a couple of nice stables, with signs that horses lived in them not long ago. The other buildings are mostly weird little sheds like these. They look like chicken coops or rabbit hutches, but some of them are full of stacked gerbil cages. In the basement of the biggest addition were more stacked cages. There must be a hundred scattered around the farm. Were these people hamster breeders? Dealers in exotic pets? Dealers in illegal, exotic pets? The farm would be the perfect for that. ("Psst, want to own an endangered species?") On one door is is a Visa/Mastercard sign.

About a hundred yards from the house across an overgrown pasture was a tiny house. From the outside it looked too small to live in, but through the broken window I saw evidence that they let their flower child friends crash here for a while.

All in all it was the weirdest place I have been in years. I spent a delightful day there with my crew, exploring and making up stories. Sometimes you want things to be orderly, sane, and beautiful, but sometimes a dash of chaos is more fun.

Rain Dance

One thing I have managed to teach my children, not to be afraid of the rain.

Total Eclipse at Easter Island, July 14

Sound Mind and Body?

From our friend Bundle Brent, one of the strangest wills ever, with clauses like:

Item: I give and bequeath Negro Cuff to the devil and himself as liberated from me and my heirs forever.
Item: I give and bequeath Negro Stephen to the Prince of Darkness and himself as liberated from me and my Heirs forever with three pounds a year for his travelling expenses in the Plutonian Regions to be paid out of my Estate during his life-

Imagine the scene when this was read out to the family!

Today's (Sort of) News

From The Onion:

Obama's Fifth Gulf Coast Visit Really Helps a Lot.

Boys, Girls, Mothers

This is probably too good a confirmation of our gender stereotypes to be true, but it's also too good to pass by in silence:

Male fetuses ignore their mothers' response to stress – unlike females, which are very sensitive to it.

The Politics of White Grievance

These days white conservatives like to complain that they are being discriminated against. Glenn Beck took the lead in this whining when he said America was turning "into the 1950s overnight, except the races are reversed."

Into this arena charges Ross Douthat, whose column "The Roots of White Anxiety" has been the most popular item on the New York Times web site for two days now. Douthat starts from an old claim of Pat Buchanan's, that America's universities discriminate against white Christians. As various liberals have pointed out (see here, here, and here), this is silly. Douthat is too clever and sane to defend Buchanan's broader claim, so he slides over to the claim that America's universities discriminate against poor, rural whites:

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

. . . cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

I don't think this is ridiculous, but I think Douthat leaves out a lot of context. It is true that university admissions are unfair, in the sense that universities routinely consider things other than how good a student you are. If they did not, their student bodies would be very different. Back when I was at Yale, I was told that if the university considered only grades and test scores 2/3 of the students would be Jews from greater New York and the rest WASPs from elite prep schools. Nowadays I suppose the top academic candidates are Jews and Asians. But the university aspires to be something other than just a haven for New York nerds; they want to place graduates in leadership roles all across America. They know, for example, that black students are much more likely to end up volunteering or running for office in poor black communities than white students, and they want to support the diversification of America's ruling elite, so they give points to black applicants. They know that most people end up living near where they grew up, and they don't want to be a New York school, so they give points for being from the rest of the country. They give points to people who have special skills in the arts or sports. Etc.

Now it is almost certainly true that a white kid from Iowa will have to have a more impressive record to get into an Ivy League school than a black kid from East Saint Louis. But he will have a much easier time than a Jew from Long Island. I suspect that I benefited from this arithmetic as a white kid from a small town in Missouri. I am willing to have a discussion about the merits of various types of affirmative action, especially the possibility that we ought to be using class rather than race to pick students for special treatment. But let's be clear that if elite universities admitted solely on the basis of academic qualifications, white Christians would not be the beneficiaries. Jews and Asians would.

A Note About Historical Causality

During this blazing hot summer, in the midst of an oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf, I have not noticed that public opinion is moving toward belief in global warming, or toward investment in alternative energy, or toward environmentalism more generally. Rather the opposite, I would say.

So the next time you read that some event caused some intellectual trend -- e.g., the Lisbon earthquake caused the Enlightenment to turn more negative, or the Tet Offensive caused the American people to give up on the Vietnam War-- don't believe it. The broader cultural impact of events, if any, depends on the circumstances.

The King is Dead

by Marianne Moore

“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers—at ease and tall. The king is dead.

More Supervillainy

Building submarines at secret bases in the swamps of Ecuador -- the world of cocaine barons gets more like Johnny Quest every day. And this submarine seems capable of diving to a depth of 20 meters.

Harpocrates

I stumbled across a news article this week that mentioned the discovery, in Britain, of an image of Harpocrates, "god of secrecy and silence." I confess that I had never before heard of Harpocrates, so I looked him up. Wikipedia:

In late Greek mythology as developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria, Harpocrates is the god of silence. Harpocrates was adapted by the Greeks from the Egyptian child god Horus. To the ancient Egyptians, Horus represented the new-born Sun, rising each day at dawn. When the Greeks conquered Egypt under Alexander the Great, they transformed the Egyptian Horus into their Hellenistic god known as Harpocrates, a rendering from Egyptian Har-pa-khered or Heru-pa-khered (meaning "Har, the Child") . . . .

In this way Harpocrates, the child Horus, personifies the newborn sun each day, the first strength of the winter sun, and also the image of early vegetation. Egyptian statues represent the child Horus, pictured as a naked boy with his finger on his mouth, a realization of the hieroglyph for "child" that is unrelated to the Greco-Roman and modern gesture for "silence". Misunderstanding this sign, the later Greeks and Roman poets made Harpocrates the god of Silence and Secrecy.

Note that our basic vocabulary of gestures seems to go back to ancient times. Raising the middle finger has been an offensive act since the Romans, and from this research on Harpocrates I discover that the "shhh" gesture of lifting the finger to the lips was also goes back at least to the 300s BC.

I can't find anything about what Haropcrates meant to the Greeks and Romans who displayed his image. Probably people liked him for the same reason they were fascinated with "mystery" cults: their assumption, widely shared in our species, that truly important or divine information will not be public, but kept secret. I have always been fascinated by the way the Greeks and Romans liked to equate gods from different traditions with their own, giving us constructions like the temple of Zeus/Ra/Ahura Mazda. Or the image below, which seems to combine Harpocrates with Eros, perhaps as a statement about discretion in love:

In the Renaissance Harpocrates was rediscovered by the magi, who found in him an appropriate symbol of their own obsession with secrecy. They believed that there must be some secret, hidden knowledge that would reconcile the apparent conflicts between different religions and different schools of thought, kept hidden because of its potency. They also lived in real danger of persecution by the inquisition or other authorities for their heretical thought and as a result they were almost always elusive or allegorical in their writing. The image below connects Hermes Trismegistus, the pseudo-god of occult wisdom, with Harpocrates.

Transparent

Above, a larval jellyfish, and below, a young scorpionfish. From a collection of photographs of transparent animals.

Ten of My Favorite Nonfiction Books

Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch. Italian original 1983.

By exploring everything from Talleyrand’s sex life to African folk tales, Calasso tries to understand what went wrong with our civilization that led to Hitler and Stalin.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. 1971.

A panorama of everything strange and magical in Elizabethan England, from upper class astrologers to a peasant woman who foretold the future from the croaking of frogs.

James Gleick, Genius: the Life and Science of Richard Feynman. 1982.

This biography of Richard Feynman is a model of how to narrate the life of a thinker, and also to get at the reality of a man who created many different public personae. It includes a great section on how one gets to be thought of as a genius even among physicists. (One trick: only publish part of your work, so that when someone else does publish it, you can say, “I derived that result a few years ago but didn’t think it was very important.”)

Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin. 1985.

The argument of this book is not very convincing, but it is an amazing compendium of obscure Celtic lore and its relations to ancient myth and British history.

Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. 1975.

Morgan set out to answer the question of how Americans came to be slave-owning devotees of liberty, and in the process wrote the best book about seventeenth-century Virginia.

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 1985.

A remarkable narrative of this remarkable event, full of fascinating characters and situations.

Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: the Origins of Religion. 1970.

La Barre was both an anthropologist and a psychologist, and in this book he looked at how religions begin through the question of what religion is for: “material culture, technology and science are adaptations to the outside world; religion, to the inner world of man, his unsolved problems and unmet needs.”

Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. 1982.

My favorite exploration of what we now call “evolutionary psychology,” that is, the way the conditions of life among our distant ancestors influenced the way we think and act today. Konner is both a scientist and a humanist, the sort of man who explores both physiology and what it feels like to have a small child.

Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: a True Story of Men Against the Sea. 1997.

Journalism at its best, this little book explores the culture of New England fishermen, the physics of waves, and the heroism of some men in times of crisis, through the story of one storm and the people caught in it.

Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Italian original 1989.

When they were put to the torture, European peasants all told similar stories about flying to the witches’ sabbath on brooms or goats. Ginzburg asks where this vision came from, a question that leads him through medieval heresies to the most ancient myths of Eurasia.

Rock Cut Shrine

Somewhere in Asia, by Steve McCurry.

Cambodian Ruins

Part of a wonderful collection of photographs by Kenneth Parker.

Louisiana as a Petro State

Louisiana is America's petro state, with some of the same problems as Venezuela and Nigeria:

Americans may be torn up by the BP oils spill and its destruction of the Gulf of Mexico's natural habitat -- and torn up we should be -- but that habitat has not been pristine for decades. In many ways, Louisiana made its deal with the devil long ago.

And what a bad deal it was. Long before the oil spill, the state's embrace of the petroleum industry cast it under what economists call "the resource curse": the paradox that countries rich in minerals or petroleum tend to grow more slowly and have lower living standards than other nations. Simply put, Louisiana is the closest thing America has to a petro-state.

Instead of blessing Louisiana with prosperity, the oil industry fostered dependency, corruption and an indifference to environmental damage. Our Cajun sheikdom's oil and gas riches -- like those of the Niger Delta, the Orinoco belt in Venezuela and the Iraqi marshes -- also stunted its development, leaving it far behind states with fewer natural resources.

According to the Census Bureau and Harvard University health data, Louisiana ranks 49th among the states in life expectancy, has the second-highest rate of infant mortality, comes in fourth in violent crime, ranks 46th in percentage of people older than 25 with college degrees, and ties for second in percentage of people living below the poverty line.

Oil riches didn't create these problems, of course, but it is striking that they didn't ameliorate them.

Wealth that comes from the skills of the people is much better for any community than wealth that comes from what happens to be under the ground.

How you make your money matters.

Complaining about Spoiled Kids, Again

Nice article by Alfie Kohn in the Washington Post pointing out that people have been complaining about soft parents and their spoiled kids for over a century:

The revelation that people were saying almost exactly the same things a century ago ought to make us stop talking and sit down -- hard. So let's consider three questions: Are parents unduly yielding or overprotective? Are kids today unusually narcissistic? And does the former cause the latter?

Everyone has an anecdote about a parent who hovered too close or tolerated too much. But is it representative of American parents in general? Does research tell us how pervasive permissiveness really is? My efforts to track down national data -- by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as asking leading experts in the field -- have yielded absolutely nothing. . . .

What we do know about discipline is that corporal punishment remains extremely popular in this country. In a 1995 Gallup poll, 94 percent of parents of preschoolers admitted to having struck their children within the previous year, a fact that's not easy to square with claims that parents have become softer or more humane.

I think the big change in how parents treat their children took place in Victorian times; it was the Victorians who spread the modern idea that a family is more a temple of love than an economic or political unit. Since then we have had a slow trend from rural to urban living -- farm kids still do more chores than urban or suburban kids -- and toward more and more education. But otherwise I see little evidence for much difference between the generations.

Tiny Houses

A fad I would like to see catch on: tiny houses. Surely many of the people living in big American houses don't need all that space.

In Washington, the tiny alley houses that were built for servants have become a big thing with gay guys.

Butterflies

The butterflies always come later in the summer than I expect. They usually miss the first blooming of my butterfly bush, and I spend June and early July wondering where they are. But this week they have finally come, and my garden is swarmed by swallowtails.

Still no sign of a monarch, though, even though I have been letting milkweed grow wherever it sprouts.

A Face from the Tomb

A fragment of Mayan pottery from a royal tomb recently discovered in El Zotz.

Ideology and Taxes

As Paul Krugman points out here, and Matt Yglesias here, leading Republicans have lately been saying very strange things about taxation and the economy. Here is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on why he wants to extend the Bush tax cuts:

There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.

This is false. Either McConnell is lying, or he has completely lost touch with reality. (Thoughts?) Here is the data, from the Federal Reserve, showing that Bush's tax cuts led to a major shortfall of revenue compared to what had been projected before the election:
So the assertion that tax cuts raise revenue, a central plank of the conservative movement, is wrong.

What about the economic effects? I have no particular ideological conviction about what levels or taxation or spending lead to the best economy. (As opposed to, say, torture and free speech, about which I have very strong views.) So my approach is to look at the historical data and see what works. What I see is that the American economy has never been stronger than it was in the 1990s. Therefore, the levels of taxation and spending we had in the 1990s are at least compatible with rapid economic growth. Bush sold his tax cut with the idea that it would make the economy even better -- he talked about extending the boom into areas like urban slums and the rural south that had done badly in the 90s -- or at least keep the boom going. Actually, of course, the economy performed much worse after the tax cuts than it had before. I don't think the tax cuts were responsible for the problem, but this history shows that tax cuts are no magical formula for economic growth.

Once more I am impressed by how far modern conservatives have wandered from reality.

Maria de Tassis

Portrait by Anthony Van Dyck, 1629-1630. Is that feather a fan, or is it for something else?

Volcanoes and Squid

This deep sea squid, possibly a new species, was photographed during a recent expedition to a massive undersea volcano off Indonesia. National Geographic has lots of pictures.

Another Rumor of Poison

In my ongoing quest to find out what is behind the endless rumors of poison that run like a knotted, miscolored thread through the fabric of European history, I pass on this news item:

Scientists who exhumed the remains of several members of the Medicis, the clan that dominated the Florentine Renaissance, have conclusively dismissed the theory of family murders, solving a more than 400-year-old cold case.

Malaria, not poison as long rumored, killed Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his second wife, Bianca Cappello, according to research to be published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

The couple died a few hours apart in October 1587 after 11 days of agony. Their almost simultaneous deaths led to speculation that they had been murdered.

"It appears it wasn't poison. We carried an immunologic investigation and found evidence of the protozoan parasite Plasmodium falciparum. ... We are talking of the most deadly of the Plasmodium species that cause malaria," Gino Fornaciari, professor of forensic anthropology and director of the Pathology Museum at the University of Pisa, told Discovery News.

A Red Letter Day

Yesterday seems to have been a banner day for America, with the capping of the leaking oil well in the Gulf and the passage of a serious financial regulation bill. Yay us.

What is the Problem?

Gail Collins puts her finger on what's wrong with the current politics of grievance:

Palin been on a political roll — raising money, making some prescient picks in the Republican primaries. She’s got a hot “mama grizzlies” video out, in which she touts a new wave of conservative women, rising up to protest ... the bad thing. Palin is really, really vague about exactly what the threat is. (The closest she gets is “the fundamental transformation of America.”) But there’s really no need to be specific because, as she says in the video, “Moms kinda just know when something’s wrong.”

What is the complaint? What has Obama done that makes him like Hitler? Bailed out the banks? That was Bush. Threatened to take people's guns away? Um, no, he hasn't said one word about gun control during either his campaign or his administration. Health care? Lots of people oppose it in the abstract, but if you ask them about the particular provisions, most support them. Wall Street regulation? Who doesn't think that something should be done to prevent a repeat of the last crisis?

It makes no sense. People are upset about the recession, but Tea Partiers are enraged that Obama has tried to do anything about it (e.g., the stimulus bill). People are suddenly outraged about the budget deficit, after 8 years of soaring deficits under Bush; and the people most outraged about the deficit angry about the most important deficit reduction bill in decades, health care reform.

If people would only think -- but then they never do, do they?

A Little Justice

Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to settle complaints relating to those deals in which it sold bundles of mortgages to its customers while simultaneously betting against the securities it was selling.

This represents a novel way to fund government activity: bail out the banks that are in danger of failure and, once they are restored to profitability, recoup the money by fining them for sleazy deals.

Yves Klein

In the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl explains in one paragraph about French artist Yves Klein everything I hate about contemporary art:

Hanging in a gallery near the St. Rita piece, in a sumptuous retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C., is a drawing in which the word “humility” is repeated twenty times.

It’s not easy now to associate humility with the perpetrator of such audacities as monochrome paintings in a color he patented as International Klein Blue (it is ordinary ultramarine pigment, with a polymer binder to preserve its chromatic intensity and powdery texture), big pictures made by I.K.B.-smeared naked women pressing or rolling their bodies against canvases, and a heavily promoted Paris gallery show that consisted of exactly nothing (“The Void,” 1958). There was also the rigged photograph of himself apparently leaping from the second story of a building, with an expression of rapt confidence in continued flight (“Leap Into the Void,” 1960); a chamber-orchestra “symphony” that held a single note for twenty minutes, followed by twenty minutes of silence; paintings made with the aid of torches, or by exposing canvases to wind and rain; fountains combining water and fire; and assorted architectural ideas, including one for a city under a weather-deflecting roof of blowing air. Then, there were the Immaterials. For these works, a collector paid Klein a set price and was given a receipt for the sum. Klein then spent the money on gold leaf, which he strewed over water—most often, the Seine. At that point, the collector burned the receipt, consigning the work to mere memory.

Conservative critics sometimes say that what happened to art in the twentieth century was that it lost its soul, and substituted the artist's ego for the divine vision. The career of Klein suggests that this was not quite the problem, because he combined serious, lifelong Catholicism with an omnivorous hunger for spiritual enlightenment that took him into studies of Buddhism and the Rosicrucians. At least in some of his work he had a serious spiritual purpose. IKB was supposed to be the color of eternity, and his monochrome blue paintings were supposed to lead the viewer's mind up to heaven. I think Klein's work shows that the problems with contemporary art lie elsewhere than spiritual poverty: contempt for outsiders, excessive intellectualism, and a shift of focus from the work of art to the life of the artist as an ongoing performance piece.

The Swing

Here it is, about two weeks after I opened the box: the new swing. Assembling it should have taken about ten minutes, except that it was built by clumsy orangutans. The holes in the foot rests didn't line up with the holes in the upright pieces, so I had to redrill them, which was such a laborious task that it drained the battery in my drill, which is what stopped my momentum the first time. The resulting new holes are way too close to the old holes and they are bound to break through soon, but I thought that since it was just the foot rests it didn't matter too much. When I finally got around to recharging my drill and finishing the holes, I discovered that the bolts that attach the hand grips were too short. So I set it aside again until I got to Home Depot to buy new bolts, which I finally did tonight. Lisa did a little online searching and found lots of similar complaints from other buyers of this absurdity. The manufacturers offered to replace it for us, but I figured the new one was likely to have the same problems, and since is the one that goes with our swingset I didn't feel like trying another brand. And now that it is up, it seems to work fine.