Faces

From the annual report of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey. All are from Mississippian or Hopewell Sites except for the second from the right in the top row and the far right in the second row, which are from historic pipe bowls.

Libya and Wall Street

In today's news, Libyan rebels support Occupy Wall Street. Don't worry, they wouldn't be able to overthrow Citibank without NATO aerial support.

Why Everyone Needs Health Insurance

From Gawker, in regard to the CNN-run debate last month:

Ron Paul, a medical doctor, faced a pointed line of questioning from Wolf Blitzer regarding the case of an uninsured young man who suddenly found himself in dire need of intensive health care.

Should the state pay his bills? Paul responded, "That's what freedom is all about: taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to take care of everybody—"

He never quite finished that point, letting the audience's loud applause finish it for him. So Blitzer pressed on, asking if he meant that "society should just let him die," which earned a chilling round of approving hoots from the crowd. Paul would not concede that much outright, instead responding with a personal anecdote, the upshot being that in such a case, it was up to churches to care for the dying young man. So basically, yeah. He'd let him die.

As it turns out, Paul was not speaking purely in hypotheticals. Back in 2008, Kent Snyder — Paul's former campaign chairman — died of complications from pneumonia. Like the man in Blitzer's example, the 49-year-old Snyder (pictured) was relatively young and seemingly healthy when the illness struck. He was also uninsured. When he died on June 26, 2008, two weeks after Paul withdrew his first bid for the presidency, his hospital costs amounted to $400,000. The bill was handed to Snyder's surviving mother, who was incapable of paying.

According to Snyder's sister, he couldn't get insurance because a pre-existing condition made the premiums too expensive. After Snyder's death, Paul posted a message on his web site noting that Snyder "sacrificed much for the cause of liberty." No comment on how, when he was really sick, he went to the hospital and was treated at other people's expense, or about what sort of care he might have gotten if he had been insured and been able to go to a doctor, or any of the other issues that make his case a perfect example of the limits of liberty and the need for a caring society to find a means of caring for everyone.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has Filed for Bankruptcy; or Has It?

In the annals of stupid government mismanagement, it is hard to beat the tale of the Harrisburg trash incinerator, a project so badly managed that it has led to a bankruptcy filing by the city council. The city lost a pile of money on their incinerator, built in the 1970s and operated until 2003. Instead of giving up, they decided to gut the building and install a completely new plant. They went with a new, small company that had never built anything so big, so inexperienced that they couldn't get a performance bond (insurance that they would really finish the project), a requirement that the city ended up waving, in defiance of every sort of normal procurement procedure. The small contractor was years late, never completely finished, and then declared bankruptcy, leaving the city with $125 million in bonds and no revenue stream to cover them. Bond Girl has the whole, sad story.

It gets even better, though, because when the city council filed for bankruptcy, the mayor refused to agree, and the two parties have hired lawyers and sued each other. According to the legal commentators at Bloomberg, the filing will probably be thrown out.

Which is why, you see, we need to get Washington off the backs of local communities and let them run their own affairs.

Maryland Renaissance Festival 2011

I took my two little ones and a passel of teenagers to the Renaissance Festival today. It was a gorgeous day, and I think everyone had fun. We did this several times when Robert and Mary were little, but I don't think we have gone since Ben was born. Above, the gang: Mary, niece Lydia, Lydia's boyfriend Mack, Ben, Clara.

Ben and Clara at the joust.

Some performers.

Chocolate covered cheesecake on a stick. One of the supreme foods.

The scene.

I left with the same feeling I used to have, that now it was time for the nanny to take the kids home so the grown-ups could drink ale and listen to bawdy songs. Not this time, though.

Herman Cain and the Koch Brothers

Ah, the tentacles of those great vampire squids, the Koch brothers, are spread wide indeed. This AP story reveals that Herman Cain made the jump from retired pizza company executive to political candidate through his work with the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP):

AFP tapped Cain as the public face of its “Prosperity Expansion Project,” and he traveled the country in 2005 and 2006 speaking to activists who were starting state-based AFP chapters from Wisconsin to Virginia. Through his AFP work he met Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin Republican operative hired to lead that state’s AFP chapter in 2005 as he rebounded from an earlier campaign scandal that derailed his career. Block and Cain sometimes traveled together as they built up AFP: Cain was the charismatic speaker preaching the ills of big government; Block was the operative helping with nuts and bolts.

When President Barack Obama’s election helped spawn the tea party, Cain was positioned to take advantage. He became a draw at growing AFP-backed rallies, impressing activists with a mix of humor and hard-hitting rhetoric against Obama’s stimulus, health care and budget policies.

Block is now Cain’s campaign manager. . . .

Suddenly Cain's rapid rise makes a lot more sense.

Obama and Libya

Michael Hastings has an interesting piece in Rolling Stone about the Obama Administration's decision to intervene in Libya. Nothing really new in it, but it does given what looks like a nice summary of the process. The first interesting thing about the intervention is that the three insiders most involved in pushing for it were women. The first proponents were Susan Rice and Samantha Powers, both "liberal interventionists" determined not to allow a genocide on their watch, and they were soon joined by Hillary Clinton.

Another interesting point is that Obama, determined to avoid what everyone has criticized about the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Iraq operation, set up a working group to debate options and outcomes in Libya as soon as the revolution began. Contributions to this discussion were sought widely, including from administration opponents like Elliott Abrams. The upshot seems to have been that the downside to intervention was not really all that scary: many people had vague fears about intervening in yet another Muslim country, but there were no realistic scenarios that posed a big threat to the US. Among the opponents was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and most of the Pentagon brass, but in the final meeting Obama overruled their opposition:

According to one participant's summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don't compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there's a big "but" here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we've been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a "psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression." He concluded: "Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn't going to cut it. That's not how America leads." Nor, he added, is it the "image of America I believe in."

As I read this, the decisive factor seems to have been a desire to somehow support the Arab Spring. The movement for freedom in the Arab world has stalled in Egypt, and we could not figure out how to support it in Bahrain because we are essentially on the side of the Arab sheiks in their ongoing power struggle with Iran. In Libya we could support freedom at little cost ($1 billion so far, and no American lives lost), with the support of our key allies, and without much risk of a terrible outcome. So Obama decided to do it. As Bill Clinton put it when defending his intervention in Kosovo, "We can't do everything, but we should do what we can."

The Birth Recession

The number of births recorded in the US declined 7% from 2007 to 2010, from 4,316,000 to 4,007,000. The biggest declines were in Arizona and Nevada; only Alaska and North Dakota saw an increase.

Phoebe Cummings

Phoebe Cummings is a young British artist who makes installations out of unfired clay, many of them featuring organic forms. Above, "After the Death of the Bear."

From "Halfway."

"On Fallen Ground"

"Catching Shadows"

"Oasis"

Views of her studio. More here.

The Grand Re-Opening of Peirce Mill

I spent today in Rock Creek Park in Washington, helping with the celebration of Peirce Mill's restoration. The mill is running again, for the first time in 40 years. A band of volunteers rebuilt the wooden machinery of the mill, and the Park Service got stimulus funds to bring the building up to code and restore the landscape.

The first bags of grain to be ground were delivered by horse-drawn cart. Gorgeous horses.

This was my post for most of the day, next to the poster I threw together at the last minute. I had no idea where I would be, so I brought my poster rolled up. Fortunately I ran into a volunteer for the Friends of Peirce Mill, one of those bustling 60-something women who delight in making things go smoothly. She found me a board, an easel, and a roll of duct tape, which we used to attach the poster to the board, the board to the easel, and the easel to the table. (It was windy.) I had extended conversations without about 20 people about the archaeology of Rock Creek Park.

This guy worked next to me all day, building a stone wall with the help of kids aged 3 to 10. He was the Leonardo of building stone walls with kids. He was unbelievably patient, let the kids do almost everything, and somehow ended up with a beautiful wall much better than I could have done by myself.

War

No war can be won without young men dying.

--Pvt. David Webster, 101st Airborne Division, in a letter home just before D-Day

From Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers.

Webster was one of those young men with ideas about war. He wanted to do it the hard way, to have the full combat experience. A Harvard graduate, he enlisted as a private and refused all attempts to send him to officer's candidate school, sticking it out to an end as a private in an airborne infantry company.

David Hume's Tomb

The tomb of Scottish philosopher David Hume in Edinburgh, recently restored by Edinburgh World Heritage:

The mausoleum was designed by his friend the famous architect Robert Adam, matching the philosopher’s wish that on his death a "Monument be built over my body ... with an Inscription containing only my Name and the Year of my Birth and Death, leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest."

This is typical of Hume, whose outstanding intellectual virtues were modesty and fairness. No writer has ever been better at summarizing the best arguments of his opponents, and he managed to keep an open mind about far more things than most people can. His famous skepticism was also moderate, and even while attacking other writers he still looked for insights in their work. I regularly peruse small chunks of his books because of the way he explores ideas and tries out all sides of a problem, always seeming very sensible and down to earth. (I confess that I tire quickly of abstraction, though, so I can't read more than ten pages at a time even of philosophers I like.) He did lack imagination -- his essay on tragedy is remarkably stupid, because he simply could not understand why people enjoy seeing heroes destroyed by fate. He would no doubt have been mystified by horror movies. His political writing is limited because he did not see that industrialization was going to radically change the agrarian, aristocratic world of old Europe. But then how many people did?

Hume saw very clearly through the fog of obfuscation that surrounds most philosophy and theology, which he summarized like this:

Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself.

If he did not, in the end, do much better at systematizing than Plato or Aquinas, at least he understood the limits of his own understanding.

For an interesting view of Hume's religious thinking, see this essay by Simon Blackburn.

Why Americans are Fat

The Washington Post has a useful "5 Myths" feature demolishing many of the conspiratorial stories used to explain rising obesity, especially among poor people: it's not because of a corporate plot to sell junk food, or because people don't know that what they are eating is bad for them. So why is it?

1) Evolution. Our ancestors passed through many famines, and as a result we are equipped with strong urges to eat whenever there is food available.

2) Availability. Food that tastes good is available all around us, in great variety, and it is cheap. When you look into what hunter-gatherers eat you discover that while they find lots of good stuff in some seasons, there are times of the year when they subsist on barely edible crap, like mongongo nuts, cassava or dried salmon. No wonder they didn't get fat. But for us, there is always something close by that is tasty and that we are not sick of.

3) Desk jobs. Most jobs no longer require much physical activity. Most Americans now work at desks or behind counters, and much factory work is less physically taxing than it used to be. So is building houses. And housework -- washing clothes by hand was laborious. I have read that just the reduction in the calories expended at work accounts for most of our weight gain since 1950. Also, since most people now have cars, we walk a lot less.

4) Stress and unhappiness. So why are poor people fatter? Because their lives are more miserable. Searching for something to make themselves feel better, they eat. When you are worried about how to get the car fixed when you have no money and can't get to work to earn any because your car is broken down, life is tough. A jolt of fat and sugar can give you the energy to cope, for a while. And this explains why upper class people are thinner. Recall that exercising self-control is a tiring activity. Poor people are drained by their tough lives, so they have less mental energy for not eating donuts.

I don't think anything else is needed to explain our problem.

DNA from Amphorae and Ancient Greek Trade

Analysis of DNA from ancient wine jars turned up some stuff other than wine:

Archaeologist Brendan Foley of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts and geneticist Maria Hansson of Lund University, Sweden, retrieved DNA from nine amphorae — the storage containers of the ancient world — from sunken ships dating from the fifth to the third centuries BC.

The researchers found grape DNA — as would be expected for containers of wine — in only five of the nine jars, and olive DNA, possibly from olive oil, in six of them. Other 'hits' included DNA from legumes, ginger, walnut and juniper and from herbs such as mint, thyme and oregano.

As this science gets better, it will tell more and more things about the past -- like that the jars often assumed to have been full of wine or oil might have held other things. I would note, though, that the herbs could have used to flavor olive oil, and juniper to flavor wine, so the data don't prove as much diversity in trade goods as these guys want.

Still Looks Pretty Good in Libya

Dan Serwer:

In a trip to Libya this month, just weeks after Muammar Qaddafi’s fall, I found peace coming fast to Tripoli, despite continued resistance in several Libyan towns. Ten days ago, families with children mobbed Martyrs’ square, where Qaddafi once held forth, to commemorate the hanging 80 years ago of Libya’s hero of resistance against the Italians, Omar Mukhtar. Elementary schools opened last week. The university will open next month. Water and electricity are flowing. Uniformed police are on the street. Trash collection is haphazard but functioning.

Why this rapid recovery in a country marked by four decades of dictatorship? Why does Libya seem on track while Egypt seems to have gone off the rails?

Libya has at least three important advantages: good leadership and clear goals at the national and local levels, careful planning and adequate resources.

I was interested in this statement about the importance of senior revolutionary leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil:

Libyans believe Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who leads the National Transitional Council (NTC), is uncorrupted and uninterested in continuing in power. He has pledged not to seek future office. He has visited the liberated cities to celebrate the single goal of freeing Libya from the Qaddafi regime. . . .

I think the personal decisions made by revolutionary actors have a huge impact on what happens afterward, and that this is the main thing making such situations unpredictable. The best scenario for Libya is that Jalil in fact steps aside and is much praised for this, setting a precedent that other Libyan leaders will follow. But if he tries to hold on to power, or if some other leader tries to grab it, things could get ugly very quickly. The modesty of George Washington's ambition was one of the crucial things in American history.

Monogamy vs. Polygamy

David Hume compares:

The advocates for polygamy may recommend it as the only effectual remedy for the disorders of love, and the only expedient for freeing men from that slavery to the females, which the natural violence of our passions has imposed upon us. By this means alone can we regain our right of sovereignty; and, sating our appetite, re-establish the authority of reason in our minds, and, of consequence, our own authority in our families. Man, like a weak sovereign, being unable to support himself against the wiles and intrigues of his subjects, must play one faction against another, and become absolute by the mutual jealousy of the females. To divide and to govern is an universal maxim; and by neglecting it, the Europeans undergo a more grievous and a more ignominious slavery than the Turks or Persians, who are subjected indeed to a sovereign, that lies at a distance from them, but in their domestic affairs rule with an uncontroulable sway.

On the other hand, it may be urged with better reason, that this sovereignty of the male is a real usurpation, and destroys that nearness of rank, not to say equality, which nature has established between the sexes. We are, by nature, their lovers, their friends, their patrons: Would we willingly exchange such endearing appellations, for the barbarous title of master and tyrant?

In what capacity shall we gain by this inhuman proceeding? As lovers, or as husbands? The lover, is totally annihilated; and courtship, the most agreeable scene in life, can no longer have place, where women have not the free disposal of themselves, but are bought and sold, like the meanest animal. The husband is as little a gainer, having found the admirable secret of extinguishing every part of love, except its jealousy. No rose without its thorn; but he must be a foolish wretch indeed, that throws away the rose and preserves only the thorn.

But the Asiatic manners are as destructive to friendship as to love. Jealousy excludes men from all intimacies and familiarities with each other. No one dares bring his friend to his house or table, lest he bring a lover to his numerous wives. Hence all over the east, each family is as much separate from another, as if they were so many distinct kingdoms. No wonder then, that Solomon, living like an eastern prince, with his seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines, without one friend, could write so pathetically concerning the vanity of the world. Had he tried the secret of one wife or mistress, a few friends, and a great many companions, he might have found life somewhat more agreeable. Destroy love and friendship; what remains in the world worth accepting?

100,000 Year Old Paint

Until recently the oldest evidence of art was about 60,000 years old, and seemed to coincide with a general increase in the complexity of human societies: larger settlements, more complex shelters, growing populations. Some archaeologists took this data so seriously that they imagined a "Paleolithic Revolution" focused on the invention of symbolic behavior. One theory even had it that the underlying event must have been the invention of language.

I never took these ideas seriously. The first dates of such things keep being pushed backward by new research, so I figured the 60,000 barrier would be crossed eventually, and I think that language is so fundamental to human nature that it must have existed in its full form among the very first humans.

Now there is really good evidence of "symbolic behavior" around 100,000 years ago, in the form of a small workshop for making "paint" from ocher:

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint. These cave artisans had stones for pounding and grinding colorful dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ocher. This was blended with the binding fat of mammal-bone marrow and a dash of charcoal. Traces of ocher were left on the tools, and samples of the reddish compound were collected in large abalone shells, where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.

Ocher seems to have fascinated people partly because it is sort of reddish brown in its natural form but turns blood red when you put it in a fire. We know that some modern stone-age people think of red ocher as a symbol of blood and hence life, and this association seems to be very ancient.

Note that the caves where the paint-mixing gear was found don't containing any paintings on the walls. Might just be because the traces have disappeared, but it might be because, as many have speculated, the first human art was painting on our own bodies.

Free Market Lemonade

Dani Rodrik:

Markets are the essence of a market economy in the same sense that lemons are the essence of lemonade. Pure lemon juice is barely drinkable. To make good lemonade, you need to mix it with water and sugar. Of course, if you put too much water in the mix, you ruin the lemonade, just as too much government meddling can make markets dysfunctional. The trick is not to discard the water and the sugar, but to get the proportions right.

In Which I Agree with Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann on Fox News this morning:

For my tax plan, I take a page out of one of my great economists that I admire, Ronald Reagan. And under my tax plan I want to adopt the Reagan tax plan. It brought the economic miracle of the 1980s. Why not go with what works? I want to reinstitute the Reagan tax model from the 1980s.

Good idea! Of course, that would mean a huge tax increase, since Bush II's cuts were much bigger than the modest tax increases of the 1990s. Today the top tax rate is 35%; In 1981, Reagan cut the top rate from 70% to 50%. It was cut again to 38.5% in 1987, in the context of a deal that eliminated lots of loopholes and deductions. The overall burden, that is, the percentage of GDP taken by federal taxes, was also higher under Reagan.

I bet that if someone tried to explain this to Bachmann, she would deny it. American conservatives seem united in their belief that taxes are way too high now, and that everything was better under Reagan.

Rejected New Yorker Cartoons

A collection of the best cartoons rejected by the New Yorker.

The Cain Mutiny

The results of the latest nationwide poll of likely Republican primary voters:

Herman Cain 27%
Mitt Romney 23%
Rick Perry 16%
Ron Paul 11%
Newt Gingrich 8%
Michele Bachmann 5%
Jon Huntsman 3%

All the pundits say Cain can't possibly win the nomination, but who knows? Maybe we'll have the first ever Presidential race between two black nominees! I think Cain's candidacy is some sort of publicity stunt and that he would be utterly shell shocked if he ended up as President, but then who on this list really is a serious candidate? Only Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Perry has lost 2/3 of his voter support in a month of bumbling around like an idiot, and Romney, despite his growing support from Republican office-holders and money men, can't break 25% in a primary poll and obviously does not connect with the Republican base. I suppose they would vote for him any way over Obama, but what a weird outcome if the season of the Tea Party ends with Republicans nominating a man from Massachusetts best known as a health care reformer. Certainly the rise of first Bachmann, then Perry, and now Cain shows that many Republicans are in an anyone but Romney mood.

My interpretation of this mess is that it is hard for a remotely honest person who really wants to lead the country to say things Tea Party voters want to hear. Since what they believe is nonsense --e.g., the recession was caused by government spending, we should have let the banks fail, Obamacare is an attack on our fundamental liberties -- only a lunatic like Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann sounds good to them. Even a say-anything-to-get-elected panderer like Romney can only meet them half way. As so often in American politics they face a choice between a principle-free political operator (Romney) and a nut job (Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Paul, Gingrich). My money is on the principle-free operator. But we'll see.

Bosco Verticale

No pipe dream this, but actually under construction in Milan. Designed by Stefano Boeri, whose web site says this:

Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a project for metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity without expanding the city into the countryside. Bosco Verticale is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city. . . .

The first example of a Bosco Verticale composed of two residential towers of 110 and 76 meters height, will be realized in the centre of Milan, on the edge of the Isola neighbourhood, and will host 900 trees (each measuring 3, 6 or 9 m tall) apart from a wide range of shrubs and floral plants. . . .

The Bosco Verticale is a system that optimizes, recuperates and produces energy. The Bosco Verticale aids in the creation of a microclimate and in filtering the dust particles contained in the urban environment. The diversity of the plants and their characteristics produce humidity, absorb CO2 and dust particles, producing oxygen and protect from radiation and acoustic pollution, improving the quality of living spaces and saving energy. Plant irrigation will be produced to great extent through the filtering and reuse of the grey waters produced by the building. Additionally Aeolian and photovoltaic energy systems will contribute, together with the aforementioned microclimate to increase the degree of energetic self sufficiency of the two towers. The management and maintenance of the Bosco Verticale’s vegetation will be centralised and entrusted to an agency with an office counter open to the public.

I think these look very cool, but I have to wonder if it will really be possible to maintain them. Looking at these pictures I imagine these buildings in twenty years, most of the trees dead, sad clusters of weeds and a few ailanthus sticking out from the balconies. So they had better prepared to invest a lot in taking care of these.

Antietam: the Poffenberger Farm

Today was a miserable rainout; these are from Monday. The Joseph Poffenberger farm is at the northern edge of the battlefield. There was no fighting here, but Federal troops massing here in the early morning were shelled by Confederate artillery. The farmhouse and washhouse were built around 1800. The barns are in the same places as the antebellum barns but I think they have been rebuilt.

Love these stone piers.

Drug-Induced Mysticism for the Dying

Dr. Stephen Ross has some interesting and very old ideas about the relationship between medicine and spirituality:

The sicker patients get, the more they want their physicians to talk to them about spirituality, meaning, and beliefs. The problem is that physicians aren’t educated to have these discussions; there’s a huge gap between what patients want and what we’re able to provide them. Even among physicians who believe in God, the majority don’t have such discussions with their patients. Whether they don’t have enough time or adequate training, they end up leaving these matters to the chaplaincy. But patients want to have these discussions with their physicians. As for the relationship between religion and spirituality and health outcomes, studies show that it is mostly positive but somewhat inconsistent. Spirituality has been associated with positive outcomes in a variety of medical illnesses and mental illnesses, including substance abuse. As an addiction psychiatrist, I’m used to the construct of spirituality in Alcoholics Anonymous and other spiritually based interventions for addictive disorders.

Rationalists sometimes wonder why sick people visit faith healers, since there is no evidence that such people can cure diseases. Here is the answer: sick people visit faith healers because they want to talk about their illnesses in a spiritual way. Coldly rational studies show that people who are optimistic about their lives are more likely to recover from severe illnesses, as are people who have emotionally powerful spiritual or religious lives. Many patients experience illness as a spiritual crisis. Ross wants to offer medicine in a spiritual context, which is exactly what shamans and witch doctors have offered for a hundred thousand years. The purely medical component of modern medicine works better, but that is not the whole picture. Many patients, especially those facing death, want something more.

Ross has begun to study giving psychedelic mushrooms to some of his dying patients. He is excited about the results:

In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist, I’ve seen some profound things. Here I’ve seen decreased death anxiety, decreased depression, greater integration back into daily life, improved family function, and increased spiritual states. Half of our patients had classic mystical experiences, and the other half probably had near-mystical experiences. ... I think psilocybin is a safe treatment modality that can potentially be a paradigm change within psychiatry and very helpful to dying patients. . . .

In another case, we treated a 50-year-old man who worked on Wall Street. Although he was raised Catholic, he had no connection with any meaningful parts of the religion. He was a nonspiritual person. He was diagnosed four years ago with metastatic colon cancer and was told he had fourteen to sixteen months to live. He felt an enormous fear of death and of leaving his wife. He had a birthing experience during his psilocybin session. He was lying down on the couch and reported that something was passing through him. He behaved as if he were in the OB/GYN’s office. Holding the therapist’s hands and putting his legs up as if he were in stirrups, he cried, “Something is passing through me.” And then it came out, and he said, “Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s a cocoon. It’s so warm in here. It’s a cocoon filled with pure love. I’ve never felt anything like it.” Then he had this experience of feeling connected to a transcendental force. Coming out of the experience, he said, “I know I’m going to be okay now. I know I’m going to be okay. I’m ready to go, God. No, no, no—I’m not ready to go. I still have more to do, but now I know it’s going to be okay.” He described an orgasm of the soul and a resolution of his fear of death. Three months later, this nonspiritual man developed a daily mindfulness-based meditation practice, and he reads voraciously about spirituality. He feels better, but unfortunately his disease is progressing. Though he is dying, he continues to say, “I know it’s progressing, but I also know I’m going to be okay.”

I find this fascinating. Suppose Ross is right, and giving psychobilin to cancer patients causes some of them to have mystical experiences that make them feel better about themselves and less afraid of death. Is that a straight out good thing, or does it smack of manipulating the vulnerable toward certain beliefs?

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Walking the Antietam Battlefield

I learned something yesterday about the Battle of Antietam just by walking around. I walked up a ridge that is supposed to have been a Federal artillery position, thinking I would get some kind of panoramic view of the battlefield. But as the picture above shows, the most striking think about this artillery position is that you can't really see much of anything from here. I walked half way across the battlefield and saw only more of the same. The battlefield is a rolling landscape of small ridges and hills, all about the same height, none of them giving a broad view. It struck me that this must be one reason why the battle was such a confused mess: nobody could see what was going on more than a hundred yards away.

Kraken? Hints of a Giant Triassic Octopus

Paleontologist Mark McMenamin was wondering about the famous Ichthyosaur remains from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada, where nine 45-foot (14 m) specimens of the species Shonisaurus popularis have been found. Why did so many die together? Perhaps, others had thought, they were beached after a deadly red tide. But the rocks suggest they died in deep water, and there were other problems:

"It became very clear that something very odd was going on there," said McMenamin. "It was a very odd configuration of bones."

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

"Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. "I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart. . . . "

But could an octopus really have taken out such huge swimming predatory reptiles? No one would have believed such a tale until the staff of the Seattle Aquarium set up a video camera at night a few years ago to find out what was killing the sharks in one of their large tanks. What they were shocked to discover was that a large octopus they had in the same tank was the culprit. The video of one of these attacks is available on the web to anyone who uses the search terms "shark vs octopus."

"We think that this cephalopod in the Triassic was doing the same thing," said McMenamin. Among the evidences of the kraken attacks are many more ribs broken in the shonisaur fossils than would seem accidental and the twisted necks of the ichthyosaurs. "It was either drowning them or breaking their necks."

Of course, it's the perfect Triassic crime because octopuses are mostly soft-bodied and don't fossilize well. Only their beaks, or mouth parts, are hard and the chances of those being preserved nearby are very low. That means the evidence for the murderous Kraken is circumstantial, which may leave some scientists rather skeptical. But McMenamin is not worried.

"We're ready for this," he said. "We have a very good case."

In the Fields

Antietam, yesterday.

Agriculture and Historical "Revolutions"

Some interesting data was just published on a culture called the Western Basin Tradition, a group that lived along the western margins of Lake Erie, including northwestern Ohio, eastern Michigan and southwestern Ontario, from A.D. 900 to 1600. These people lived after maize farming had been introduced into eastern North America, but the pattern of their sites suggests that they continued to live as mobile hunter-gatherers: lots of small sites rather than a few big villages. Yet analysis of the bones from a cemetery of this culture, carried out by Christopher Watts and his colleagues at the Royal Ontario Museum, showed that they actually ate a lot of maize. So these people adopted agriculture without settling down.

This has inspired some thinking about the "Neolithic Revolution" that I think is way overblown:

Western Basin people somehow incorporated intensive maize agriculture into their lives without substantively altering their traditional way of life. This upends the conventional model that the adoption of agriculture inexorably leads to social transformation.

The Neolithic Revolution, it appears, was not an inevitable consequence of the adoption of agriculture. People had a choice in how they would accommodate technological innovations such as agriculture.

But these results really challenge nobody's understanding of anything. When a culture adopted agriculture, the transition to settled life and all the rest of it was often drawn out over centuries. Where you see an abrupt break in the archaeological record, that usually means hunter-gatherers have been replaced by invading farmers, rather than instantly changing their whole way of life. (In fact Western Basin people had been replaced across much of their range by village building people well before 1600.) Even the "settled, agricultural" Indians encountered by the Europeans in the 17th century still had many hunter-gatherer ways and traditions. Here is John Smith's classic account of the Indians he met around the Chesapeake Bay:

In March and Aprill they live much upon their fishing, weares; and feed on fish, Turkies and squirrels. In May and June they plant their fieldes; and live most of Acornes, walnuts, and fish. But to mend their diet, some disperse themselves in small companies, and live upon fish, beasts, crabs, oysters, land Torteyses, strawberries, mulberries, and such like. In June, Julie, and August, they feed upon the rootes of Tocknough, berries, fish, and greene wheat.

It is strange to see how their bodies alter with their diet; even as the deare and wilde beastes, they seeme fat and leane, strong and weak.

So there is nothing unusual about people planting corn while remaining mobile and depending heavily on wild foods. That is probably how most hunter-gatherers who adopted farming lived. Eventually, of course, most people changed their ways. Probably they settled down because of rising populations and increasing conflict over land, that is, indirectly as a result of other things caused by farming, rather than just to hang out by their fields. In fact some farmers never really settled down: the ones we call slash and burn (swidden) agriculturalists wandered around their forest homes for millennia, and some are still at it.

History is not neat, and events do not have the same effects every time they occur, in every circumstance. But the adoption of farming was still one of the most important changes in human history.

Thought about Book Reviews

Reading a book review is like reading about a restaurant in a city you’ve never been to, and have no plans to visit.

--Elizabeth Gumport, Against Reviews

Antietam Furnace

I spent the day at Antietam. In the morning, while I was waiting for my crew to show up, I drove down to the hamlet of Antietam Furnace. This is at the mouth of Antietam Creek, a dozen houses surrounding the bridge and the old iron furnace.

The furnace. This one was built in the 1870s, replacing an earlier one; the first was build around 1765.

Wonderful flower garden by the old furnace manager's house, now a restaurant.

A cute old house in town.

Heron on the Potomac River, seen from the creek mouth.

But I've seen the furnace before, and for me the highlight of this visit was the amazing garden just up the road at Potomac View Farms.