Lorraine Christie

Contemporary artist, born 1967. Born in northern Ireland, she currently lives in America. Above, Have We Met?

47 Minutes

Patience

Sweet Surrender

I Meant To

If I Knew Why

I like these. I find it very striking that while Christie emphasizes romantic themes, she hardly ever shows anyone's face. She tries to convey emotion and even story by the relative positions of bodies, and subtle shifts in their angles. Sometimes it works, and I feel certain that I know something of the stories behind the spare scenes.

Sign Manipulation

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Republican Party is an Apocalyptic Cult

Mike Lofgren, long-time Republican congressional staffer who just retired, has this to say about his fellow Republicans:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. . . . .

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. . . .

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit.

I agree with every word of this, except that I think China has more prisoners than the US. I also agree with Lofgren about the root cause: the slowdown in the improvement of middle class living standards. Modern societies buy loyalty by making people constantly richer, and most Americans, depending on which numbers you believe, are either just holding their own or actually falling behind. Neither party is offering any solution to this problem, and this leaves undecided voters subject to easy manipulation about side issues.

The "government" is not the problem, or rather it is "the problem" only to the extent that WE are the problem, because our government is us. We tell it what to do. The government is how we, the people, act together. Certainly it happens that rich, well-connected insiders sometimes manipulate the government to advance their own interests, but that is only because the voters are not paying close enough attention. If voters are angry about "corruption," they should find out which politicians really are in the pockets of corporate interests and vote them out.

For 30 years now the Republican party has been spreading the myth that our government is somehow inherently corrupt and inefficient, and then acting to make it more corrupt and inefficient. For example, Republicans have been running up the deficit and then complaining that "the government" can't live within its means. As Lofgren explains, this works in the sense that it makes undecided voters disgusted about the whole system. We need to hold Republican leaders, not "government," accountable for their misdeeds.

Gladiator School

Model of a school for gladiators discovered using ground-penetrating radar at Carnuntum in modern Austria:

Thick walls surround 11,000 square meters (13,160 sq. yards) of the site, and the school and its adjacent buildings stretch over 2,800 square meters ((3,350 square yards).

Inside, a courtyard was ringed by living quarters and other buildings and contained a round, 19-square meter (23-square yard) training area — a small stadium overlooked by wooden seats and the terrace of the chief trainer.

The complex also contained about 40 tiny sleeping cells for the gladiators; a large bathing area; a training hall with heated floors and assorted administrative buildings. Outside the walls, radar scans show what archeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training

I couldn't find any GPR pictures of the ruins, but I did find this picture of a statue of Jupiter Dolichenus unearthed at Carnuntum.

Underground Soviet Submarine Base

This Ukrainian base was abandoned after the USSR collapsed, and now part of it is a museum. From English Russia. I was trying for a while to figure out what this looked like, and then it hit me: it looks like a post-apocalypse video game.

The Tripoli Offensive

Nicolas Pelham has a piece in the New York Review explaining how the Libyan rebels planned and organized their offensive on the capital:

Hatched in capitals across Europe and the Arab world, as well as in rebel operation rooms secretly organized in Libya itself, the military campaign took four months of planning. In May, exiled opposition leaders abandoned their jobs as lecturers in American colleges and established an intelligence-gathering bureau on Djerba, the Tunisian island across the border from Libya. Led by Abdel Majid Biuk, an urbane mathematics teacher from Tampa, Florida, the team interviewed four hundred Qaddafi security officers who defected following the loyalist defeat in Misrata; using Google Earth, they analyzed the colonel’s defenses. “We went through the whole city building by building to ascertain its fortifications,” Biuk told me on his arrival in Tripoli.

He passed the data on to a military operations room elsewhere on Djerba whose staff included representatives of NATO and Gulf allies as well as Libyan army veterans who had defected to the US and formed the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), an opposition group that led a series of aborted coups in the 1980s and 1990s, before branching into website campaigns. Under the eyes of Tunisian customs officials, they smuggled satellite phones, which are banned in Tunisia, in ambulances across the border into Libya, and set about supplying the rebels. . . .

Tunisia provided a conduit for fighters as well as arms. With Qaddafi’s continued control of the center of the country blocking access over land, Benghazi volunteers took a circuitous route, flying from Egypt to Tunis, before crossing the border at the Tunisian town of Dehiba into the Nafusa Mountains. By mid-August they had established five brigades each with its own mountain training base, and together formed a two-thousand-man battalion under Hisham Buhajiar’s command as well as that of Abdel Karim Bel Haj, a Libyan veteran of the Afghan jihad. Trainers included NFSL veterans. As they prepared the final stages of their assault, a host of Berber irregulars drawn from towns across the mountains jumped on board. Meanwhile, a collection of local traders, engineers, students, and the jobless from Misrata, battle-hardened by their seventy-day defense of their city, reassembled their brigades and prepared to join the attack on Tripoli from the east, by both road and sea.

Finally, the planners on Djerba divided Tripoli into thirty-seven sectors, and appointed local security coordinators to recruit, train, and arm local cells, using Muslim Brotherhood leaders to bless an armed uprising. . . .

On Saturday, August 20, as dusk descended and the mosques sounded the prayer call for breakfast, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, Qaddafi’s meek-seeming former justice minister who now heads the NTC, went on television to deliver an address. Before he had finished, the rebel flag was flying over Suq al-Juma and other Tripoli neighborhoods. Meanwhile, NATO forces intensified their bombardment of loyalist positions on the western outskirts of Tripoli, stretching to its limits their UN mandate to protect civilians. As the colonel’s forces abandoned their bases, they found themselves sandwiched between rebels sweeping in from the mountains and Tripolitans carving out their own enclaves. Challenged on multiple fronts, Qaddafi’s forces melted away.

Pelham notes that unlike the Americans, who had no plan at all for how to govern Baghdad once they took it, the Libyan rebels had a 70-page Tripoli Plan laying out how they would go about restoring order to the capital. He cautions, though, that "As in Iraq, the aftermath already looks like a more arduous task than the rapid military campaign."

Bacteria that Breathe Iron

I find that both science fiction writers and exobiologists have very limited imaginations when it comes to creating alien species. There are bacteria on earth that are more different from us than any creature I have encountered in fiction. Consider Geobacter.

Multicellular animals all get their energy by combining hydrocarbons or sugars with oxygen, using reactions that have the form:

Sugar + oxygen -> CO₂ + water

But there are bacteria that use metal ions instead of oxygen; they breathe metal. The metabolic reaction of the first species discovered, Geobacter metallireducens, has the form of

Acetate + Ferric iron (3+) -> CO₂ +carbonate + water + Ferrous iron (2+)

Over the past 20 years many other kinds have been discovered, including some that metabolize toxic metals like Chromium and Uranium and can be used to remove them from groundwater, since they convert them to less soluble forms.

So whenever I read about people who plan to search for alien life by searching for free oxygen, or who think that the only planets that might support life are the ones with oceans of water, I think, no, the universe is much more strange and diverse than that. Even the earth is much stranger and more diverse than that.

Early Fall Flowers

Today. The apparent coordination of the colors is fortuitous, since all my zinnias are mixed colors and my cosmos are all self-seeded.

Lots of Security Guards

According to the Washington Post, there are now 1 million security guards in America, twice as many as before 9-11. Most of them are guarding things that no terrorist would ever dream of attacking, like local government buildings, golf courses, and the offices of obscure companies. We all pay a high price for this baloney, in the form of higher prices for everything and much annoyance.

I suppose this does answer the question of what kind of work can high school graduates get with minimal training, but can't we come up with something that adds, at least minimally, to the common good? Like maybe more police?

The Best Thing for Being Sad is to Learn

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust and never dream of regretting.

--T.H. White, The Book of Merlin

Backyard Larping

Four of my children try out the new padded weapons, a few minutes ago. Robert has a spear, Clara a halberd, Ben and Thomas swords.

Turkish Tile

The Rüstem Pasha Mosque mosque in Istanbul, 16th century.

Frozen Tombs of the Altai

In central Asia, where Russia, Mongolia, and China come together, is the rugged wilderness of the Altai Mountains. In the high valleys of the Altai are meadows where the ground is permanently frozen. These high meadows were sacred sites from the Bronze Age into medieval times, and they are dotted with monuments. Among the people who held these cold meadows holy were the horse-riding nomads of the Iron Age we call the Pazyryk Culture, and between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC they buried many of their shamans and war leaders in mountain tombs. In the 1920s Russian archaeologists began excavating these remarkable tombs. All of the tombs had been at least partially looted, so they yielded few of the golden treasures that made the Scythian tombs of Ukraine so famous. But they contain other wonders. Because they have been frozen since the burials were made, the preservation is remarkable, and the tombs have yielded many rare objects of cloth, felt, leather, and wood. Many of them are now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

The Pazyryk people were related to the Scythians, their contemporaries of the western steppe, and much of their art resembles Scythian art. The difference between the two cultures is mainly in the outside influences; whereas the Scythians were much involved with the Greeks, the people of the Altai had trading connections with the Chinese, and you can see Chinese influence in some of these objects. I already posted some items from these tombs, including reconstructions of the elaborate horse clothes and renderings of the tattoos found on one chieftain's body, and about a recent study of the bones from one cemetery showing how many of them died violent deaths.

A bridal with human faces carved in wood.

Carpet fragments. We think that the interiors of Scythian tents, like those of later nomads, were hung with many carpets, so these small pieces help us imagine their world.

A highly decorated shoe.

A censer, used for burning hemp seeds.

A wooden table.

A staff finial in the shape of a stag.

Another Triumph for the American Health Care System

From ABC News:

A 24-year-old Cincinnati father died from a tooth infection this week because he couldn't afford his medication, offering a sobering reminder of the importance of oral health and the number of people without access to dental or health care. . . .

Kyle Willis' wisdom tooth started hurting two weeks ago. When dentists told him it needed to be pulled, he decided to forgo the procedure, because he was unemployed and had no health insurance. When his face started swelling and his head began to ache, Willis went to the emergency room, where he received prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medications. Willis couldn't afford both, so he chose the pain medications.The tooth infection spread, causing his brain to swell. He died Tuesday.

The Republican approach to controlling health care costs depends on pushing more of the burden onto the people making the decisions. As you can can see from this example, there are very high human costs. You can sit back self-righteously and complain that Willis was stupid, but he was sick, unemployed, and probably worried near to death about money. His death was a tragedy directly caused by our stupid health care system. Not to mention the social costs, since the death of young parents has gigantic consequences for all of us in terms of how the children will grow up and turn out.

High Steel

The Times sent photographer Damon Winter up the new World Trade Center tower to photograph the men erecting the steel frame; slide show here.

The pictures have a very 1930s feel because the process of building steel-framed skyscrapers has changed very little since it was invented. Cranes lift the steel; men guide it into place; another crew attached the bolts and partially tightens them; the "plumb crew" checks to see that the building is going up straight; and then the bolts are tightened down.

I look forward to getting here. I look forward to working my ass off. I look forward to sweating. And I look forward to finishing this building. I plan on staying all the way to the top.

--High steel worker Christopher Marron

The Bamboo Cutter

Said to be the oldest known Japanese narrative, this tale dates to the 9th or 10th century:

One day a bamboo cutter found a beautiful girl named Kaguya-hime inside a bamboo stalk. He took her home and raised her as his daughter.

As she grew up the fame of her beauty spread, until five princes asked for her hand. Kaguya-hime, not wanting to marry any of them, set five impossible tasks for her suitors; when they all failed, she was able to remain with her foster parents. After this, the Emperor of Japan came to see the beautiful girl and, falling in love, asked her to marry him. He, too, was refused. However, in her 20th summer she began fall into fits of melancholy when the moon was full. Eventually she revealed that she was one of the moon people, and that it was time for her to go home.

The emperor placed guards around her house, but the moon people sang them to sleep and put a robe of feathers upon Kaguya-hime's shoulders that caused her to forget her earthly memories. Climbing up the slopes of Mt Fuji the party returned to the heavens where Kaguya-hime became an immortal moon maiden.

I'm Not Commemorating 9-11

I will not be doing anything, on this blog or elsewhere, to mark the tenth anniversary of 9-11. I say, enough already.

The obsession with 9-11 has been a worse catastrophe for our country than the attack itself. Our fear of attack and lust for revenge became political and moral poison eating away the nation's soul. They enabled Bush to launch his disastrous invasion of Iraq, in which more Americans died than on 9-11 (not to mention 100,000 Iraqis), and they led to our embrace of torture, which I regard as the worst thing to happen to America in my lifetime. Fear of terrorism still horribly distorts our foreign and domestic policies, giving us airport patdowns of feeble old ladies, a Cuban prison that we can't seem to close, and the wasting of the hundreds of billions on dubious security measures and anti-terrorist programs. Plus the maudlin sentimentality makes me ill.

We need to bury this episode and move on. If the families of the victims want to mark the day, then by all means they should, but they have no right to drag me into it. The "never again" posture has become an excuse for everything from warrantless wiretapping to beating helpless men to death in secret prisons. I want no part of it. I prefer the risk of more terrorist attacks to the sick mixture of self-righteous victimhood, aggressive bullying, and security theater that has overtaken America in the past decade. The right way to mark 9-11 is to forget both the terrorists and the memorialists and do the most normal thing you can think of.

Suing the Banks

The US government filed suit for fraud against 17 big banks yesterday, alleging that they misrepresented the riskiness of $200 billion worth of securities bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

According to the court filings, those firms and others “falsely represented” the quality of the loans that were bundled into securities and sold to investors and “significantly overstated the ability of the borrower to repay their mortgage loans.” The result, the suits claim, were investments that were far riskier than the banks led taxpayer-backed Fannie and Freddie to believe, and the securities ultimately were worth a fraction of their original value.

Of course the irony of this is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are involved in more than half the mortgages sold in the US, so if anybody ought to have understood the risks involved in sub-prime mortgages, it should have been them. So I think the claim made in the paragraph above is false. The fraudulent element was the overselling of the financial wizardry behind the bundling. The banks told their customers that even if the bundles included some dubious loans, the risk was magicked away by bundling them with enough good loans, thereby allowing investors to get the returns of the sub-prime market without the risks. Big financial players ought not to have been fooled by that, either, but many were.

I support these suits anyway because I think there has to be a statement made about crazy bank practices. Republicans are determined to gut any new regulations, so I think the best way to control the big banks in the future may be the fear of lawsuits.

To Create Jobs, Invest in Infrastructure

Matthew Slaughter:

There is a crucial connection between potholes and unemployment. America's crumbling infrastructure is eroding America's competitiveness in the global economy by eroding America's ability to attract and retain global corporations and their high-productivity, high-wage jobs.

This was not always so. Over much of the 20th century, America's strong infrastructure investment was a major factor attracting global corporations headquartered in other countries to invest and create jobs here. Rising U.S. standards of living were fueled by a strong infrastructure system that facilitated the growth of companies in America, both global and domestic alike: transportation systems to move people and products, electrical systems to power plants and offices, communications backbones to drive computers and creativity. By 2008, the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies employed over 5.6 million Americans -- nearly 2 million in manufacturing -- and exported $232.4 billion in goods. That's 18.1% of America's total.

Today is very different. America's decaying infrastructure costs the typical American worker hundreds of hours in lost productivity. It also costs companies time and efficiency in moving their products around -- and also out of -- the country. This decay is particularly stark for global companies, whose executives are witness to the dynamism of emerging economies like China and India that present them with ever-widening choices for where to grow jobs and investments around the world.

Note that Slaughter was on Bush II's Council of Economic Advisors, so it's not like he is a socialist. The economic retrenchment being demanded by most Republicans right now is exactly what we do not need, and it would both deepen the recession in the short term and hurt our economic future.

Gaddafi in Revolt

It strikes me that Muammar Gaddafi may find it much more congenial to be a guerrilla commander than he ever did to be dictator. Wasn't he just born to hide in the hills and issue violent communiques?

Gaddafi asked his supporters to continue what he called "struggle against foreign aggression" and said those against him were divided. . . . "Let there be a long fight and let Libya be engulfed in flames." He said the "balance of power is now levelled as all tribes are now armed".

Listening to his speeches, he seems to have thought that he was fighting a partisan war against the capitalist world for his whole career, and now he really is. I wonder how good he will be at it.

Pirates of 18th-Century Belize

Archaeologists have been digging at a site called "Barcadares" in Belize, 15 miles up the Belize River from the sea, occupied around 1720 by a gang of wastrels who divided their energies between illegal logwood cutting, poaching, and piracy:

Their living conditions were rustic to say the least. There were no houses, and the men slept on raised platforms with a canvas over them to keep the mosquitoes out. They hunted and gathered a good deal of their food.

Capt. Nathaniel Uring, a merchant seaman who was shipwrecked and spent more than four months with the inhabitants, described them in the book The Voyages and Travels of Captain Nathaniel Uring (reprinted in 1928 by Cassell and Company) as a "rude drunken crew, some which have been pirates, and most of them sailors."

Their "chief delight is in drinking; and when they broach a quarter cask or a hogshead of Bottle Ale or Cyder, keeping at it sometimes a week together, drinking till they fall asleep; and as soon as they awake at it again, without stirring off the place." Eventually Captain Uring returned to Jamaica and, in 1726, published an account of his adventures.

So, you might wonder, what sort of stuff do archaeologists find at an outlaw camp? And the answer is, the same sort of stuff you find at any other site in the Caribbean occupied by Europeans. Lots of tobacco pipes, for example.

And European pottery.

And case bottles, which were used for rum, among other things, which sounds pirate-like, but everybody in the 18th-century drank rum and you find case bottle fragments everywhere.

The lesson is -- with a pedant like me, after all, there is always a lesson -- that people's material culture is mostly determined by their civilization, not their occupations. Looking at the artifacts from any post-medieval archaeological site, the thing you can immediately tell is what period it dates to. Just a glance at the artifacts from this pirate's den tells me it dates to 1710 to 1740, based on my experience with tenant farms in Virginia and Delaware. The second thing you may pick up is how rich the people were; but I emphasize the "may," because the artifacts don't always show this, and your best clue is the size of their houses. You will find it very hard to tell, from the archaeology, the race, gender, or ethnicity of the people who lived at your site, or their occupation, religion, politics, or even whether they were outlaws. Think about contemporary American criminals; they live in the same kind of houses and apartments as law-abiding people, and while they may have particular tastes in things like cars and clothes, those tastes overlap with the tastes of insurance agents. They may identify with outlaws of the past, but their material lives are radically different from those of 19th-century gangsters or 18th-century pirates.

This is both the strength and weakness of archaeology. It shows you plain as day how greatly all human lives are dominated by the material circumstances and basic expectations of our civilizations. And it misses vast amounts about our mental and emotional worlds.

Elephant Mask

Hillary Clinton on Libya

From the Secretary's remarks, yesterday:

Well, this is my ninth trip to discuss the current crisis in Libya, and each time I have urged that our partners stay focused on the ultimate objective of helping the Libyan people chart their way to a better future. And today, that future is within their reach. All of us are inspired by what is happening in Libya.

Six months ago, Libyans stood up to demand fundamental rights and freedom. And when Qadhafi met their peaceful protest with violence, the Libyan people refused to back down. While their struggle is not over, the Libyan people are taking back their country. Libya’s transformation is largely the result of their own courage and their resilience in the face of very difficult days. The sacrifice that the Libyan people have been willing to make in order to obtain freedom and dignity has been extraordinary.

But the United States and our international partners are also proud of our own contributions. . . .

Today, the international community must maintain the same sense of resolve and shared responsibility. We know from experience that winning a war is no guarantee of winning the peace that follows. That is why even as we sought to protect civilians and pressured Qadhafi to step down, we have supported the Libyans as they laid the groundwork for a transition to democracy that is just, inclusive, and sustainable.

Another Day in the Field

Spent the day helping to excavate a nineteenth-century farm site in Delaware. The site belonged to a free black preacher from the 1840s on, one of the founders of what was for a while a thriving little black community.

The field was full of these charming mushrooms, sprouted, I suppose, because of the dousing the state got from Irene.

Found this interesting button.

But a more typical haul from one of our plowzone test units looks like this.

Being Fair to Creationists

It bugs me that defenders of evolution regularly misunderstand what it is that creationists do and don't believe in. So they say things like this:

If on the other hand the word “evolution” in the statement “I believe in/accept evolution” refers to the observable data on whether evolution ever happens, this is also a conflation of the workings of faith with those of science. You can take a colony of drosophilia and let them fly through a maze, putting sugar at the end of a right fork in the maze and nothing at the left. In a few days, the flies who tend to turn right and get the sugar will be outbreeding those who tend to turn left and pretty soon you will have a colony of right-turning flies. At that point, you don’t “believe” that natural selection can happen, you have directly observed it as a fact. You don’t have faith in this context any more than you have faith that water turns to steam if you heat it to 100 degrees Celsius.

But most creationists have no problem with the scenario described. They accept, for example, that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics. They prefer to call this "adaptation" rather than "evolution," but they accept that species can change in response to changing circumstances.

What they deny is that this process can change an amoeba into an eagle. They accept change within "kinds" -- this is apparently the Biblical term of art -- but deny that one kind of animal can change into another kind. Some think that species are immutable, while others go farther up the taxonomic ladder and think maybe one kind of mammal could change into another kind, but not into a slime mold.

So if you want to attack creationism, evidence that right-turning flies can turn into left-turning flies won't help you. The kind of change that creationists don't believe in cannot be directly observed. So you have to do the work of marshaling the evidence for profound, long-term change, and for the non-reality of categories like species and genus, and so on.

Baburnamah

A 16th-century Persian manuscript containing the memoirs (probably ghost written) of the conqueror Babur, from BibliOdyssey. Click on the images to enlarge. Above, the Fall of Samarkand.

The Siege of Isfarah.

Babur and his men on a raft during their journey from Kunar to Atar, during one of his campaigns in Hindustan.

Babur visits a Hindu temple.

Animals of Hindustan.

Castle of Love, Foxes and Monkeys Edition

From the margins of a 13th-century manuscript, via Got Medieval.

Talking with the Taliban

Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, released a long statement Monday in which he praised Taliban military success and then confirmed that Taliban representatives have negotiated with the US:

Most significantly, Omar confirms that his lieutenants have already started negotiating with the United States. He refers to “contacts which have been made with some parties for the release of prisoners,” a stark contrast with the Taliban’s consistent and frequent denials that secretive talks with their adversaries are under way. Omar downplays the prisoner discussions as short of a “comprehensive negotiation,” but also signals that the Taliban of 2011, if returned to power, won’t be the old Taliban of the 1990s that “monopolize[d]” political power. Conspicuously, Omar doesn’t claim that the U.S. has to stop fighting before additional negotiations can proceed.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who’s covered the Taliban since its inception, considers the statement something of a watershed. “By acknowledging that there have been contacts with the Americans, Mullah Omar is sending a clear message to his fighters that future political talks are a possibility,” Rashid writes,”while signaling to the Americans that he may eventually be prepared to broaden the scope of the dialogue and those already participating in it.”

Seen in that light, Omar’s boasts of Taliban military success could be a rhetorical gambit allowing him a face-saving way to negotiate: having fought to an advantageous position — after all, the Taliban were routed between 2001 and 2005 — the Taliban now seek to consolidate their gains through diplomacy, ending a long, bloody war on favorable terms.

Aztec Surveying

Like many other imperialists, the Aztecs like to have a good idea of what they had conquered. So they compiled large, detailed surveys of their lands, which they recorded in scrolls that included both counts of every household and little maps of every farm. Two of these documents survive, the Codex Vergara and the Códice de Santa María Asunción. They survive because, after the conquest, Aztec landowners produced them to challenge what they thought were unfair tax assessments by their new Spanish overlords. The Codex Vergara is in the news this week because some mathematicians used the survey, along with archaeological mapping of an area where the ancient field boundaries are still visible, to test the accuracy of Aztec surveying. They found that 85% of the values given in the Codex are within 10% of the values they calculated, better than Spanish surveyors did until the 19th century.

The two things that drove mathematical progress in ancient civilizations were land surveying and astronomy.

What is "Infrastructure" Anyway?

Well, it's a lot of things, including roads, train tracks, sewers, and the power grid. Why did 5 million people lose power during Hurricane Irene? Sometimes because trees fell over and broke the lines leading to their houses. But some people lost power because a tree fell over and broke a line somewhere else and so flummoxed the grid that big sections of it shut down. There is a way to prevent much of that called "smart grid technology." For around half a trillion dollars we could install smart grids across much of the country, which might cut the loss of power in storms in half. Since power failures cost the US economy around $100 billion a year, spending $500 billion to cut that number in half would pay for itself in ten years. Smart grids can also make much better use of some kinds of renewable power, which enter the grid somewhat differently than power from conventional plants.

And here's a more radical idea: bury the power lines underground. It's expensive, but buried lines can't be cut by falling trees, and wouldn't it be great to live in a world where every view isn't cluttered with telephone poles and power lines?