Restoring a Map of New York

The Times has a nice article on a 1770 map of New York by British Lieutenant Bernard Ratzer, which the Brooklyn Museum discovered in its collection. It had lain unexamined for so long that they have no idea how they got it. The map was in terrible shape and had to be cut into strips before it could be unrolled, then extensively treated to remove a dark coat of varnish and other ills. But now, as you can see in this feature, it is revealed as an extraordinary work of eighteenth-century cartography.

Bog Bodies

Interesting news piece based on a new article about bog bodies:

Hundreds of these bog bodies have been found over the past two centuries. But who were they and why were they dispatched to the great beyond in mucky swamps? The theories range from executed deserters to witches to everyday people.

The Irish Countess of Moira back in 1783 launched scholarly explorations by suggesting that bog bodies were victims of Druid ceremonies. Others, citing the ancient Roman writer Tacitus, quickly saw them most likely as executed deserters. Arguments over individual finds have continued ever since the first look that year by the Countess at the Northern Ireland "Drumkeeragh" bog body, a woman dressed in wool clothes.

"Unfortunately the focus has been almost exclusively on the most spectacular finds, the mummified bodies," says archaeologist Moten Ravn of Denmark's Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, writing in the current Acta Archaeologica journal. Rather than arguing from just one body, Ravn suggests a survey of all the bodies might offer better clues to how they ended up buried in bogs.

Ravn says that only a few bodies are tied down or bear other marks of special status, and he thinks most of the bodies look like a cross-section of the Iron Age population.

There is nothing special about the range of 145 people in his survey, men, women, young and old.

Some were clearly placed in excavated holes lined with bark and cotton, buried with glass beads or gold jewelry in their mouths, a Roman custom. In Celtic myths, bogs and lakes were places of healing, Ravn suggests. "Is it possible that there was a wish to pass on these healing characteristics of the bog to a person who died a natural death so that the deceased could arrive healthy in the realm of the dead," he asks.

Overall, bog bodies are "not so easy to explain," Ravn says. The oldest one, the Koelbjerg woman, dates to 10,000 years ago. Others date to modern times, such as Johann Spieker, a falconer who died in 1828. "The reason that people were given their final resting place in the bog was not because of any one single tradition or one single ritual," Ravn concludes. "Some were due to accidents and others to murder. Some may have been sacrificed and others may have died of natural causes and were buried in the bog."

Picture shows a reconstruction of the clothes found on one Iron Age body in Ireland. I think I saw that exact skirt on several women in England.

It was recently pointed out to me that one interesting detail about Iron Age and Bronze Age bog bodies is that none of the men have beards -- except for Lindow Man, the one buried with a noose around his neck, which is another reason to think that he was a prisoner of some kind.

Cloning Mammoths

AFP:

Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.

The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

They plan to transplant a whole cell nucleus from a frozen mammoth into an elephant egg cell. This may not work, but if it doesn't, somebody else will succeed using DNA splicing technology. Those frozen mammoths contain all the DNA we could ever need, and mammoths and living elephants are probably closely enough related for cloning to work. My feeling about this is that it doesn't really matter if it a good idea or not, because somebody is going to do it, and from then on everything will depend on how life goes for the first few mammoths. If they thrive, we will have brought back the first of the thousands of species whose extinction we have caused, directly or indirectly. I think that would be a good thing.

Hasegawa Togaku

"Waves and Rocks," 17th century.

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal

Via Kevin Drum:

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs — from marijuana to heroin — but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking . . . . As the sweeping reforms went into effect nine years ago, some in Portugal prepared themselves for the worst. They worried that the country would become a junkie nirvana, that many neighborhoods would soon resemble Casal Ventoso, and that tourists would come to Portugal for one reason only: to get high. “We promise sun, beaches, and any drug you like,” complained one fearful politician at the time.

But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment . . . .

The numbers aren’t all positive. According to the latest report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the number of Portuguese aged 15 to 64 who have ever tried illegal drugs has climbed from 7.8 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2007....Heroin use jumped from 0.7 to 1.1 percent, and cocaine use nearly doubled — from 0.9 to 1.9 percent. In other words, said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, the changes in Portugal have had a somewhat expected outcome: More people are trying drugs. . . .

Hughes takes issue with Humphreys’s argument that drug use, in general, is increasing at a dramatic clip. What’s most relevant, she said, is not the percentage of people reporting using drugs at some point over some course of their lifetime, but the percentage of people reporting using drugs in the past year. “That’s going to be affecting the government and communities now,” she said. And here, the increase of Portuguese reporting illicit drug use is much smaller — up from 3.4 percent in 2001 to 3.7 in 2007.

I think a 0.3 percent increase in the proportion of the population using drugs would be a price worth paying for ratcheting down the drug war and increasing the number of people in treatment.

Imagining China

James Fallows offers this thought experiment:

If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, he said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now.

No Retirement

The world is no place of rest. I repeat, it is no place of rest but for effort. Steady, continuous undeviating effort. Our work should never be done and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time, when we shall wish for nothing more, and have nothing more to accomplish.

--Dr. Thomas Mutter, 1811-1859

Eodromaeus

Nearly complete skeleton of a tiny predator dinosaur, dating to 230 million years ago, near the origin of the form we all know from Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. News report here; technical comment here.

The Cubicle

I promised pictures of my cubicle once I had fully moved in, and here they are. I just finished decorating this morning, listening to mandatory corporate ethics lectures.

Pretty Music

Vienna Teng, "Blue Caravan." I just discovered her yesterday. Of course my goth daughter already knew her, especially her "My Medea."

Drunken Celts and the Archaeology of Iron Age Beer

Analysis of numerous barley grains from the Iron Age Celtic site of Eberdingen-Hochdorf, which dates to around 500 BC, suggests that they were waste from brewing. Archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika

bases that conclusion on a close resemblance of the ancient grains to barley malt that he made by reproducing several methods that Iron Age folk might have used. He also compared the ancient grains to malt produced in modern facilities. Upon confirming the presence of malt at the Celtic site, Stika reconstructed malt-making techniques there to determine how they must have affected beer taste. . . .

At the Celtic site, barley was soaked in the specially constructed ditches until it sprouted, Stika proposes. Grains were then dried by lighting fires at the ends of the ditches, giving the malt a smoky taste and a darkened color. Lactic acid bacteria stimulated by slow drying of soaked grains, a well-known phenomenon, added sourness to the brew.

Unlike modern beers that are flavored with flowers of the hop plant, the Eberdingen-Hochdorf brew probably contained spices such as mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane, in Stika’s opinion. Beer makers are known to have used these additives by medieval times. Excavations at the Celtic site have yielded a few seeds of henbane, a plant that also makes beer more intoxicating.

That detail about flavoring with henbane is intriguing, since henbane is a powerful psychoactive drug, regularly mentioned as one of the ingredients in Renaissance witch's salves. One Elizabethan herbalist wrote:

The leaves, the seeds and the juice, when taken internally cause an unquiet sleep, like unto the sleep of drunkenness, which continueth long and is deadly to the patient.

Another:

If it be used either in sallet or in pottage, then doth it bring frenzie, and whoso useth more than four leaves shall be in danger to sleepe without waking.

This may perhaps explain the extreme behavior of drunken Celts, as noted by Greek and Roman historians.

Tarantula Nebula

Click to enlarge.

Revolution in Tunisia

Tunisia's dictatorial President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, has fled the country, followed soon after by his Prime Minister. The report is that this happened because the army commanders refused to shoot protesters. Now the 77-year-old Speaker of Parliament has assumed the leadership, following the rules laid down in the Constitution, and has promised to hold quick elections.

It is a moment of great promise. A thuggish and corrupt regime has been overthrown by a mostly peaceful protest movement. Tunisia has one of the best educated populations in the Arab world, and close ties to France. People are saying that there is a chance for real democracy.

On the other hand the main grievance of the mostly young protesters was the lack of jobs, and free elections won't do anything to help with that. Tunisians may have won their freedom at last; but building decent lives remains a long and hard struggle.

More on Amy Chua and "Extreme Parenting"

The New York Times has two features today commenting on Amy Chua's WSJ article. In one they asked six "experts" to comment, and you can read their responses here. Many of the themes we covered in our discussion come up, but the one thing these writers emphasize that we did not is Chua's belief that parents can control their children's lives:

It’s hard to accept that by bringing a child into the world we’re creating a hostage to fortune. Amy Chua’s child-rearing manifesto . . . presumes that we can prevent our kids from hurt, harm and disappointment. It’s a fantasy of control and protection.

Second and more interesting is this review of her book. It seems that the WSJ excerpted the most inflammatory section, as you would expect. But there is more to the story:

Born to Chinese parents who were raised in the Philippines and attended MIT, Ms. Chua, 48, graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law, where she was an executive editor of the Law Review. She confesses in her book that she is “not good at enjoying life,” and that she wasn’t naturally curious or skeptical like other law students. “I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.”

She was determined to raise her daughters the way she and her three sisters had been raised — which, she said, left them adoring their parents. By her account, her elder daughter, Sophia, complied, excelled and played piano at Carnegie Hall. But the younger, Lulu, rebelled. At the turning point of the memoir, Lulu, then 13, begins smashing glasses in a Moscow restaurant and yelling at her mother, “I HATE my life, I HATE you.”

She told an interviewer that her first draft included a lot about the parenting conflicts between her and her more laid-back husband, but he never thought she was getting his side right, so she decided to leave most of it out.

Ai Weiwei in the Rubble

Of his own studio, demolished by Chinese authorities. Amy Davidson commented that Weiwei's art "takes many forms, including what he considers the performance art of his quixotically confrontational dance with the Chinese government."

War on Meth Not Achieving Much

Just back from signing my name to buy a box of sudafed, I see that one of Andrew Sullivan's readers sent in this:

In 2006, I worked for the subcommittee in the House of Representatives that was the principal oversight body of the federal drug war. We were the ones responsible for the Combat Meth Act (inserted in the renewal of the Patriot Act), which federalized the restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales.

The thinking was that there seemed to be a real chance of truly ending meth production and consumption - a rare, total victory in the war. The precursor chemicals needed to make meth were produced only in Germany, India and China, and if those exports could be reliably controlled, restrictions on pseudoephedrine sales here could mean the end of the meth problem entirely. Apparently, the precursor chemicals are still finding their way to Mexico and the U.S.

Undoubtedly, the new law led to a noticeable decline of local "mom-n-pop" meth labs - dangerous productions sites that produced five pounds of toxic waste for every pound of meth. As usual, emotion was a big part of the arguments for it, with stories and pictures of redneck mobile homes or motel rooms polluted with chemicals, and men in biohazard suits carrying out children and hosing them down.

But, as with everything done in the drug war, we were just squeezing the balloon. That same year, we were in Mexico City and met extensively with government officials regarding the meth problem. At that time, they firmly denied that any meth was being produced there, much less exported to the U.S. Today, of course, all must admit that meth has now become a significant product of the Mexican cartels, and thus a driver of the horrible violence south of the border. Not only that, the "crystal meth" they send north is much more potent than what was normally produced locally.

In the end, we squeezed domestic production, and thereby created a tremendous opportunity for the cartels that they are ruthlessly exploiting.

Opposition to the drug war does not indicate a cavalier attitude to the destructive power of addictive substances (like, you know, alcohol). It is simply an honest recognition that there are limits to what big government can achieve, as well a recognition that the costs of prohibition far outweigh its alleged benefits.

People want drugs. Our moral outrage at the wreckage they cause is not a sufficient reason to criminalize their use. Alcohol prohibition taught us that. We should legalize (or at least, decriminalize, as Portugal has done with great success) and regulate production, and pour into rehab all the money we save by no longer caging casual users.

The Lament for Cynddylan

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight,
there burns no fire, no bed is made.
I weep a while, and then fall silent.

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight
No fire is lit, no candle burns.
Except for God, who will keep me sane?

Cynddylan’s hall: it pierces me
To see it roofless, fireless.
My lord is dead, but I am alive.

Cynddylan’s hall is dark tonight,
without a fire, without songs.
Tears wear away the cheeks.

Cynddylan’s hall is desolate tonight,
Where once I sat in honor.
Gone are the men who held it, gone the women.

Cynddylan’s hall: its roof is dark
since the English brought down
Cynddylan and his gold-torc’d men.

Welsh poem, perhaps dating to the 8th century. It describes the death of Cynddlan, king of a British realm centered on Wroxeter, who fell fighting against the Saxons around AD 656.

The Warren Cup

The Warren Cup was kept in the British Museum basement for decades because it was "too shocking" to display in public. Found in Syria or Palestine and made within a few decades of AD 1, it depicts scenes of homosexual sex. By ancient standards it is not particularly graphic, but the subject was just too horrid for the tastes of the mid 20th century. Not any more, though, and the cup is being loaned to the University of Notthingham to go on display as part of an exhibit about Roman sexuality.

EPA Blocks New Mountaintop Coal Mine

From Mother Jones:

The Environmental Protection Agency has dealt a death blow to a proposed plan to dump strip mining waste in West Virginia, making what could prove to be a landmark move against mountaintop removal coal mining. Agency officials said Thursday that has revoked a Clean Water Act permit for the controversial Spruce No. 1 coal mine, a focal point for years in the battle between environmentalists and the coal industry. The agency concluded that allowing the mine's owners to dump waste into a nearby waterway would cause "irreversible damage" to water and the environment in the surrounding region.

"The proposed Spruce No. 1 Mine would use destructive and unsustainable mining practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian communities and clean water on which they depend," EPA's assistant administrator for water, Peter Silva, said in a statement. The agency said that, after more than a year of discussions with Mingo-Logan Coal Company, the company "failed to produce an agreement that would lead to a significant decrease in impacts to the environment and Appalachian communities."

As originally proposed, this would have been the biggest coal mine in American history, so this is no small project. "Mountaintop removal" coal mining depends on dumping the waste into surrounding valleys, obliterating the stream headwaters and replacing them with heaps of rock that leach acid into streams further downhill. If this is illegal under the Clean Water Act, that will be a huge blow to coal mining in West Virginia.

How to Act Presidential

Barack Obama:

Their actions, their selflessness, also pose a challenge to each of us. It raises the question of what, beyond the prayers and expressions of concern, is required of us going forward. How can we honor the fallen? How can we be true to their memory?

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations – to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health systems. Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.

Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding. In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.” Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.

So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together. . . .

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here – they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation’s future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.

Blackbeard's Sword?

This ornamented sword hilt has recently been recovered from the wreck of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge.

History and Memory

Gordon Wood has written an interesting essay that takes off from Jill Lepore's book on the Tea Party to examine our relationship with the past. Here he ponders the relationship between the critical thinking of professional historians and folk memory:

Perhaps not in America, but in other nations some intellectuals have come to believe that historical scholarship over the past generation has more than fulfilled its role of destroying memory, and they have reacted with alarm. In France the power of critical history-writing in eroding memory became serious enough in recent years that historian and editor Pierre Nora was provoked into publishing his seven-volume Lieux de Mémoire—Realms of Memory—much of which has appeared in English translations.

Modern critical history-writing in the Western world, Nora claimed, has broken the “ancient bond of identity” with “memory.” The “conquering force of history,” said Nora, has called “into question something once taken for granted: the close fit between history and memory.” History has now clearly become the enemy of memory. “Memory,” wrote Nora, “is always suspect in the eyes of history, whose true mission is to demolish it, to repress it.” Because critical historians had been so successful in disenchanting the history of France, in reducing its past to a cold and critical contextualism in which no living memory could survive, Nora believed that something had to be done to reverse the process. His project was designed to revive many of those sites that evoke the collective memory of the French people. So he and his collaborators wrote essays on everything they could think of as vital elements of French memory—Joan of Arc, Versailles, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Bastille Day, the “Marseillaise,” the Dictionnaire Larousse, the Tour de France, Verdun, and so on.

Nora believed, as does the English historian David Lowenthal in his Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996), that this kind of collective memory is essential for any society. Memory, or what Lowenthal calls “heritage,” may be, like the Tea Party’s use of the Founding, a worthless sham, its credos fallacious, even perverse; but, wrote Lowenthal, “heritage, no less than history, is essential to knowing and acting.” It fosters community, identity, and continuity, and in the end makes possible history itself. “By means of it we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong.”

I agree that memory is essential for action. Without a sense of what has happened it is impossible to think meaningfully about what ought to be done. Consider that history's most successful revolutionaries, the Marxists, based their actions on a carefully worked-out theory of history. And consider again that the Marxist vision of history was wrong, and their revolutions led to disaster. I suspect few of my readers know that American labor unions have funded a lot of archaeology at places like squatter camps and the sites of the coal field wars, which they do because they know that support for their causes in the present depends on people knowing their version of history.

The problem with the Tea Party is not just that they have an antihistorical relationship with the past, it is that their imagined past encourages them in dubious directions: toward hatred of immigrants, distrust of non-white people, belief that markets can achieve things that have always been done (if done at all) by governments. They are hardly the only ones to do this sort of thing. Most people like to view history tribally, picking out people in the past to identify with and then celebrating their victories, explaining away their defeats, denying their atrocities, and making them seem much more like us than they ever were. If critical, professional history can show that all virtue does not reside in anti-government white men, and that government has done a great deal of good, that strikes me as a positive thing. I am not sure, though, that it is every possible to convince believers of anything, no matter how much evidence you bring.

My personal politics are very much bound up with my vision of the past. I see human history as enormously various and diverse, with wickedness and virtue spread thinly across all societies; I see that all societies have their strengths and their sins; I see that oppression of the lower class is the norm, but that oppressed people nonetheless get on with their lives and many find happiness. I see that violence, conflict, hypocrisy and lies are the norm, but real catastrophes like World War II are few and far between. I see that things change, and that what seem like eternal truths in one age are swept away by the next. I see little evidence of justice, but much for resilience and creativity.

My reading of history leaves me with a suspicion of all extreme rhetoric and all claims that anyone knows the "solution" to a major problem. I can be stirred by bold rhetoric, and I admire heroic characters like Abraham Lincoln. But I prefer to vote for pragmatists who understand the complexity of the world and the limits of what can be achieved. I like politicians who know that purity is a dangerous fantasy, that everything is a compromise, that nobody ever gets everything he wants. What irks me most is any claim that the situation or the answer is "simple."

I doubt that my sort of understanding of the world will ever be shared by the majority. Most people react strongly against complexity and long for simplicity, especially in politics. Most people want to see things in moral terms, and to be for the good and against the bad. The mixed-up reality of history is not what most of us want to see, and politicians who have a clear and simple vision will always have an advantage.

Homelessness and Head Injury

One doctor's unscientific take, but still interesting:

One of the jolting realizations that I had while researching this column is that anybody could become like a homeless person — all it takes is a traumatic brain injury. A bicycle fall, a car accident, a slip on the ice, or if you’re a soldier, a head wound — and your life could become unrecognizable. James O’Connell, a doctor who has been treating the most vulnerable homeless people on the streets of Boston for 25 years, estimates that 40 percent of the long-term homeless people he’s met had such a brain injury. “For many it was a head injury prior to the time they became homeless,” he said. “They became erratic. They’d have mood swings, bouts of explosive behavior. They couldn’t hold onto their jobs. Drinking made them feel better. They’d end up on the streets.”

Like I Said about that Great Pacific Garbage Patch

From Discovery News:

It's been called the Great Garbage Patch and "the most shocking thing" Oprah has ever seen: a massive island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean that, according to many reports, is twice the size of Texas, outnumbers plankton, and has killed millions of sea birds.

But many of those claims, according to a new analysis, are huge exaggerations. Others are downright false.

Plastic is definitely a problem in the oceans, both for animal life and the environment, said Angel White, a microbial oceanographer at Oregon State University in Corvallis. But there are not floating towers of milk jugs, toilet seats and rubber duckies swirling in the middle of the ocean.

Instead, the majority of plastic in the sea consists of confetti-like specks that are spread out widely and nearly impossible to see with the naked eye.

A Christmas Vigil in Cairo

The news from Egypt, where many Muslims oppose Islamic terrorism:

Egypt's majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist and preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

To Uranus?

Top scientists in the European Space Agency are floating a proposal to send a spacecraft to orbit Uranus. A good way to spend half a billion dollars? Better than many other ways to spend it, certainly.

Electricity from Rice Husks

David Bornstein reports in the Times about a new Indian business that provides electricity to poor villagers in Bihar by gassifying rice husks. As Bornstein explains, the moral of the story is that big innovations at the cutting edge of technology are not needed to solve many problems, just endless tinkering with technologies already on hand.

Tlaltecuhtli

A massive relief depicting the monstrous Aztec earth goddess on display in Mexico City, part of a major exhibit on the late Aztec state, one of the few pieces of Aztec stone sculpture that stills bears some of its original color. Not a pleasant deity:

Tlaltecuhtli was thought to swallow the sun every night and regurgitate it back out in the morning. She was also thought to swallow the hearts of victims sacrificed to her, so it was common to carve images of her on the bottom of stone boxes in which the hearts and blood of sacrificial victims where placed after being ripped from their bodies.

Chinese Parenting

Amy Chua is kind of scary:

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

. . . Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

The Real Problem with Right Wing Rhetoric

As Conor Friedersdorf explains, the real problem with-wing right rhetoric isn't the tone, no matter how inflammatory, it's the lying:

I don’t think that Sarah Palin bears any responsibility for the shooting in Arizona. . . . I don’t have any problem with her poster putting various Congressional districts in cross-hairs. It’s a commonly used visual metaphor, for better or worse, and the substance being communicated is basically that the GOP wants to take back or “target” certain seats. The “tone” is arguably extreme, but what’s being said, the ultimate message, is perfectly acceptable: beat these people at the polls.

In contrast, Palin’s remarks about death panels communicated an untruth: the notion that Barack Obama’s health care reform effort sought to empower a panel of bureaucrats who’d sit in judgment about whether an old person’s life would be saved or not. That is the sort of thing we ought to find objectionable, even if the substance is communicated in the most dry language imaginable, because were it true, radicalism would be an appropriate response. “They’re going to start killing old people? We’ve got to stop this!”

Since Barack Obama took office, prominent voices on the right have called him an ally of Islamist radicals in their Grand Jihad against America, a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist, a man who pals around with terrorists and used a financial crisis to deliberately weaken America, an usurper who was born abroad and isn’t even eligible to be president, a guy who has somehow made it so that it’s okay for black kids to beat up white kids on buses, etc. I haven’t even touched on the conspiracy theories of Glenn Beck. The birthers excepted, the people making these chargers are celebrated by movement conservatives – they’re given book deals, awards, and speaking engagements.

If all of these charges were true, a radicalized citizenry would be an appropriate response. But even the conservatives who defend Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, D’Souza, McCarthy, and so many others don’t behave as if they believe all the nonsense they assert. The strongest case against these people isn’t that their rhetoric inspires political violence. It’s that they frequently utter indefensible nonsense. The problem isn’t their tone. It’s that the substance of what they’re saying is so blinkered that it isn’t even taken seriously by their ideological allies (even if they’re too cowardly, mercenary or team driven to admit as much).

They’re in a tough spot these days partly because it’s impossible for them to mount the defense of their rhetoric that is true: “I am a frivolous person, and I don’t choose my words based on their meaning. Rather, I behave like the worst caricature of a politician. If you think my rhetoric logically implies that people should behave violently, you’re mistaken – neither my audience nor my peers in the conservative movement are engaged in a logical enterprise, and it’s unfair of you to imply that people take what I say so seriously that I can be blamed for a real world event. Don’t you see that this is all a big game? This is how politics works. Stop pretending you’re not in on the joke.”