Tai Xiangzhou

Chinese artist, born 1968, who studied traditional calligraphy and painting restoration before emerging as a painter in his own right. He also earned his living for a while as a digital artist for CCTV. His first works to attract notice were very much in the old Chinese landscape tradition of shanshui hua, 'painting of mountains and water.' Some of the works even have traditional titles; this is Landscape in the style of Guoxi 2, 2011.

Landscape in the Style of the Yuan Dynasty, 2008.

Mind Without Discrimination, 2007. This is a fairly realistic portrayal of one of China's famous "scholar rocks," once a regular feature of monasteries and shrines.

Genesis, 2013.

Mountain Peaks on a Clear Day, 2013. Reviewers of this work commented on Tai's ability to preserve the Chinese tradition in the fullest sense, by continuing it.

But over the past few years his work has been evolving rapidly. This stormy image is from a 2014 show titled Knowing Heaven and Earth through Observation.

And in his 2015 show, Celestial Chaos, Tai has moved a long way into something that looks more science fiction than shanshui hua. I am not sure that I like these, but they are interesting, and it will be equally interesting to see where Tai goes next.

Sperm Whale Culture

National Geographic:

The ocean around the Galápagos Islands hosts thousands of female sperm whales and their calves that have organized into clans with their own dialects. (Mature males congregate in colder waters near the poles.) How these clans form has been something of a mystery until now.

A study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that culture—behaviors shared by group members—keeps these sperm whale clans together. Specifically, these deep-diving whales have a distinct series of clicks called codas they use to communicate during social interactions.

Sperm whales with similar behaviors spend time together, and they pick up vocalizations from each other. Scientists call this social learning. Whales that "speak the same language" stick together, giving rise to the clans that researchers have observed for more than 30 years.

The Perfect Biographer

Sean O'Brien on Robert Crawford's new biography of T.S. Eliot:

Crawford has no angle, no ill-disguised or gradually accruing dislike for his subject, nor any need to insert himself into the picture: his wish is to enable a greater understanding and enjoyment of the poems, which he admires almost to the point of idolatry. Perhaps he is too good for this world.

O'Brien's piece, in the August 14 TLS, has the peculiar distinction of being the only great review I have ever read of a literary biography. One is tempted to call this a great waste of talent and effort. I suppose, though, that a review in the TLS may end up being read by far more people than a scholarly article or literary novel. Certainly it gave me 20 minutes of pure pleasure.

I read reviews of biographies of authors because I am somewhat curious about what these biographies say, but not curious enough to actually read one; most authors, I find, lead pretty dismal lives. Eliot was no exception. Crawford on Eliot's marriage:

Like Auntie Vera in the Giles cartoons, some people are wedded to their ailments; Eliot and Vera seem to have married many of each other's too. Headaches, neuralgia, neurasthenia, insomnia, hypersensitivity, mood-swings, depression, anxiety, sexual and gynaecological problems, dietary issues, and a near-perpetual state of exhaustion: the Eliots could have been Viennese, so comprehensive and achingly modernist was their catalogue of symptoms. . . .

They suffered horribly, often at each other's hands.

This last reminded me of a line from Orwell, who said that Eliot's poetry "achieved the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it actually is." Maybe it was that bad for him.

More Pluto

It is going to take New Horizons months to beam all of the data from its Pluto flyby back to Earth, so the images are going to keep trickling out. Here are two new ones from this week, both large files worth clicking on.

Today's Campaign Absurdity

I keep thinking that Trump can't really win the primary, but then I look at the other candidates and think, but who else is there? Jeb Bush just brought out a tax plan even more nonsensical than Mitt Romney's, another in the long line of Republican plans to cut taxes, raise defense spending, and balance the budget. And then this from another of the mainstream favorites:

Scott Walker keeps showing up and it’s always terrible. Asked about the Syrian refugee crisis, the governor of Wisconsin said, “Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical.”

Tardigrades are Happening

Tardigrades are one of the wonders of nature that everyone interested in science discovers eventually. They are wonderful in many ways: they have been around for 530 million years, surviving all the mass extinctions that wiped out so many larger and more impressive creatures. They look enough like larger animals to have the nickname water bears, but weird enough to have an alien look. Alien bears.

And they are very hard to kill:

Confronted with drying, rapid temperature changes, changes in water salinity or other problems, tardigrades can curtail their metabolism to 0.01 percent of normal, entering a kind of suspended animation in which they lose the vast, vast, vast majority of their body water. They curl up into something called a “tun.”

Tuns can be subjected to atmospheric pressure 600 times that of the surface of Earth, and they will bounce right back. They can be chilled to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero for more than a year, no problem. The European Space Agency once sent tuns into space: Two-thirds survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the vacuum of space.

Without water, “the damaging effects of freezing cannot happen,” Dr. Siddall explained. “It protects against heat because the water inside cannot turn into a gas that expands.” Even radiation needs water to do damage, he said. When cosmic radiation hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive form of oxygen that damages cell DNA. The tun doesn’t have this problem.

Right now tardigrades are hot, the stars of a new show on extremophile organisms at the American Museum of Natural History, subject of several blogs, and so on. They are tiny, half a millimeter or so long -- you can see them with the naked eye, but barely -- but very common and easy to find. There are societies of people who hunt for them and share pictures.

Some people even think they came from outer space, but although they might survive a crossing of interplanetary space that seems silly to me; they look weird, but biochemically they are identical to all other earth-based eukaryotic life. Our little home-grown aliens.

Never Enough

One nugget from the new biography of Donald Trump:

Trump begins each day with a sheaf of papers detailing where and how often his name has been mentioned in the global press.

Quitting Academia: Another One Bites the Dust

Oliver Lee Bateman is quitting his job as an assistant professor of history, and at Vox he writes about his decision. Bateman is a controversial character previously in the news as a champion of grade inflation, whose Rate My Professor page says things like:

Possibly the easiest course you could take at UTA. He seems all business but is in fact slack and easygoing.

and

He hates busy work and grading / feedback but is a big hand holder and esteem booster so everyone’s a winner with him.

So maybe his heart was never in the educational enterprise, despite what he says about his passion. But anyway he is a smart, interesting person who found himself turned so off by the reality of academic life at the University of Texas at Arlington that he is bailing out. He seems particularly bothered by his students' indifference to what he is teaching, and the first criticism he makes of the system is the same one I always make: too many people go to college. I was amused by this comment on online education:

this system does not offer a viable, sensible alternative for students; it just allows administrations to exploit the crisis in education to make even more money with even less effort or investment.

Reading Bateman's essay and various responses to it put me in a reflective frame of mind. It is no indictment of any system that some people hate it; somebody hates everything. So I suppose the question is whether the steady drumbeat of depressing stories on American academic life are representatives of a crisis, or just the usual froth stirred up by any big endeavor. I don't really know.

Words that Mean their Opposites

There has been some discussion on twitter of words that "reliably mean their opposites." Some suggestions:

humbled
nice
my friend
clearly
amicable
nonplussed
cordial
priceless
moot
literally
spry
sincerely
regretfully
honest
pal
sure
"fine" particularly when given as a one word answer
classy
transparent (with reference to government or corporate behavior)

Tyler Cowen asked if there is a word for these. There are some linguistic terms for words with two opposite meanings: antagonym, contranym. But that isn't the same as a word that people generally use ironically.

Homo naledi

Back in 2013 I wrote about the fascinating archaeological project under way at Rising Star Cave in South Africa. Gazing through a narrow crack in the back of the cave, explorers saw bones, including what appeared to be human bones, in a chamber beyond. Since the cave was in a national park, dynamiting the opening was out of the question. So South African anthropologist Lee Berger put out a call for people skinny enough to fit through a 7-inch crack, with experience in both caving and excavation. Amazingly, he found half a dozen young women who fit the bill. They began excavating in the cave, using a constant video feed to keep their middle aged bosses in the loop as to what was going on. All of this was chronicled on a blog at National Geographic, rather than the usual semi-secret arrangement designed to protect publication rights.

Now the team has published their main findings, and they are keeping to their open ethos by putting them up on eLife where anybody can read them.

They say the bones represent a new species, which they are calling Homo naledi --naledi is the local word for star, as in the name of the cave. This is likely to be controversial, since excavators always get excited about their finds and think they deserve to be a new species; on the other hand they have 1500 bones, which is an extremely large sample for any new fossil species.

There will also be controversy over whether this should be within the Homo genus, or Australopithecus.

There doesn't seem to be any good dating on these specimens yet. Geologists think the cave is no more than 3 million years old. Berger thinks the fossils come from near the root of genus Homo, which would make them as a guess more than 2 million years old.

The excavators think that this chamber was always accessible only through the narrow opening,  and that nobody ever lived there. The bodies were pushed into it through the crack, which the excavators think was done as an intentional burial rite. Which would push such behavior back more than a million years.

Stay tuned.

Today's Phrase

"Liberating women from aspirational narratives."

Because nothing oppresses like high expectations.

A thought that I find somehow true, puzzling, disturbing, and horrifying all at the same time.

SabeanTablet

From Yemen, first century BCE to first century CE. For sale at Artemis Auctions. It describes a dedication to the chief Sabean god. A translation:

1 Nawf'athat son of Bayd/Bid/
2 of the tribe of Fayshan, citizen of
3 the town of Shu'ubum has dedicated
4 to Almaqah(u), lord "of the temple" of Awwam
5 this bronze statue
6 for his well being and for the
[7 well being...]

Mini Fusion

I already wrote about Lockheed's plan for a mini fusion reactor, and lately I have seen other schemes popping up in the science news. The latest is from Tokamak Energy, a privately funded startup company setting up shop near London. Tokamak Energy was founded by scientists from the nearby, government-run Culham Centre laboratory, a major fusion endeavor, so these are not crazies from the woods any more than Lockheed's engineers are.

I wonder, what is driving all of this? The people involved say it is new science, for example new calculations that show the potential efficiency of fusion reactors is independent of the size. This means that research can progress on washing-machine-sized reactors that are vastly cheaper and quicker to build than the giant machines in government labs. But that doesn't necessarily mean that small reactors will work; after all, the giant machines still don't work, either, so just scaling them down doesn't solve the many problems.

Is this just the same old fusion mania, with the added excitement of being able to work on a small machine with a staff of a dozen, instead of in a giant bureaucracy? Or do these people understand something new about fusion that the rest of the world does not?

Your Heart Aches

If you've wondered why I haven't said anything about the refugee crisis in Europe, it's because I don't have a clue. I do not believe that nations have an obligation to take in outsiders until their own national ways and habits are swamped. When you consider the problems that European countries already have with their African and Middle Eastern populations, I don't think you have to be a nationalist xenophobe to wonder about the wisdom of admitting millions more. The scale of the problem is gigantic -- people have praised Germany's "generous" offer to taken in more than 100,000 refugees, but at least 4 million Syrians have fled their country, and 7 million more have left their homes and become "internally displaced." There are millions more refugees from other wars, other disasters.

Tom Friedman:

Your heart aches for the Syrian refugees flocking to Europe. And Germany’s generosity in absorbing so many is amazing. We have a special obligation to Libyan and Iraqi refugees. But, with so many countries melting down, just absorbing more and more refugees is not sustainable.

If we’re honest, we have only two ways to halt this refugee flood, and we don’t want to choose either: build a wall and isolate these regions of disorder, or occupy them with boots on the ground, crush the bad guys and build a new order based on real citizenship, a vast project that would take two generations. We fool ourselves that there is a sustainable, easy third way: just keep taking more refugees or create “no-fly zones” here or there.

Will the ends, will the means. And right now no one wants to will the means, because all you win is a bill. So the world of disorder keeps spilling over into the world of order. And beware: The market, Mother Nature and Moore’s law are just revving their engines. You haven’t seen this play before, which is why we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead.

I am even less sanguine about a military solution than Friedman, and anyway in the short term intervention would only create more refugees. I would also be happy to see the United States admit a few hundred thousand Syrian and Iraqi refugees, but given the current political climate that seems undoable. You can wish that Americans weren't so charged up about immigration, but they are, and in a democracy they can't be ignored.

Realistically, a whole generation of Syrians is going to grow up in refugee camps, and I don't think there is anything else to be said or done.

Macedonian Wreath

This is the Macedonian gold funerary wreath that the Getty Museum returned to Greece in 2007 after admitting that it had been looted. It dates to the 4th century BC and likely belonged to one of Alexander the Great’s relatives. The Getty called it a “lavish miniature garden.”

Quantity Time

Lovely essay by Frank Bruni on why there is no substitute for being together a lot:

There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence.

We delude ourselves when we say otherwise, when we invoke and venerate “quality time,” a shopworn phrase with a debatable promise: that we can plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed hour.

We can try. We can cordon off one meal each day or two afternoons each week and weed them of distractions. We can choose a setting that encourages relaxation and uplift. We can fill it with totems and frippery — a balloon for a child, sparkling wine for a spouse — that signal celebration and create a sense of the sacred.

But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t. We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them. . . .

Couples move in together not just because it’s economically prudent. They understand, consciously or instinctively, that sustained proximity is the best route to the soul of someone; that unscripted gestures at unexpected junctures yield sweeter rewards than scripted ones on date night; that the “I love you” that counts most isn’t whispered with great ceremony on a hilltop in Tuscany. No, it slips out casually, spontaneously, in the produce section or over the dishes, amid the drudgery and detritus of their routines. That’s also when the truest confessions are made, when hurt is at its rawest and tenderness at its purest.

I know how my 80-year-old father feels about dying, religion and God not because I scheduled a discrete encounter to discuss all of that with him. I know because I happened to be in the passenger seat of his car when such thoughts were on his mind and when, for whatever unforeseeable reason, he felt comfortable articulating them.

More here.

Prefab Affordable Housing by Richard Rogers

These prefabricated homes were recently built for homeless people in Mitcham, a neighborhood in Merton, London.

They were designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, but whoever did the work senior partner Richard Rogers has been out claiming credit. They are built in a factory and just stacked up on the site, an operation that takes only a week from start to finish. Rogers says they can be built for 30,000 to 35,000 pounds per unit, or about $50,000. Which is pretty good, although when architects throw around these numbers you never know if they include stuff like site prep, sidewalks, utilities, stormwater control, and the like.

They aren't wonderful, but I have seen much worse, and as Rogers says there is a real housing shortage in southern England. If these can be built cheaply in older urban areas, that's a lot better than nothing. I should note that while many people have prejudices against manufactured ("prefab") housing, that is unjust; there are advantages to making things in a factory, and properly made manufactured houses are just as strong and long-lasting as the "built" kind.

John Dickson Batten

John Dickson Batten (1860-1932) was an English artist, illustrator and printmaker. I have been able to find only a few images of his paintings online, although I gather he did many. This is Snow White, 1897.

Details.

The Garden of Adonis, 1887.

What you can find online is many of Batten's book illustrations. Seven of his books are here. This is from The Arabia Nights.

From Celtic Fairy Tales.

Indian Fairy Tales.

The Book of Wonder Voyages.

A color plate from The Arabian Nights.

The Family.

Krugman on Trump

Paul Krugman's latest is titled "Trump is Right on Economics." Trump, he notes, is leading the Republican field despite his adherence to certain policy ideas -- universal health care, raising taxes on the rich -- that are supposed to be anathema to "the base." Maybe, says Krugman, they are really only anathema to the donor class:

So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he’s given credit for being? Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be. It’s when it comes to his rivals that appearances can be deceiving. Some of them may come across as reasonable and thoughtful, but in reality they are anything but.

Mr. Bush, in particular, may pose as a reasonable, thoughtful type — credulous reporters even describe him as a policy wonk — but his actual economic platform, which relies on the magic of tax cuts to deliver a doubling of America’s growth rate, is pure supply-side voodoo.

And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions.

The thing is, we didn’t really know that until Mr. Trump came along. The influence of big-money donors meant that nobody could make a serious play for the G.O.P. nomination without pledging allegiance to supply-side doctrine, and this allowed the establishment to imagine that ordinary voters shared its antipopulist creed. Indeed, Mr. Bush’s hapless attempt at a takedown suggests that his political team still doesn’t get it, and thinks that pointing out The Donald’s heresies will be enough to doom his campaign.

But Mr. Trump, who is self-financing, didn’t need to genuflect to the big money, and it turns out that the base doesn’t mind his heresies. This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics.

I doubt it will have any long-term impact, actually; the donor class is too important within the Republican Party for them to be sidelined in this debate.

But maybe Trump's campaign instead has a different lesson, on the ability of billionaire egotists to defy conventional wisdom in a way that party men cannot. Maybe the power of such people to act outside the usual rules, and thus to shake up moribund systems, goes at least a little way toward justifying their existence.

Unemployment is Down, but Wages Still Aren't Rising

The National Employment Law Project put together the wage data for the most common occupations in America, and they show that since 2008 real wages are down for all of them. Above, the ten most common occupations in the highest quintile of income; below the ten most common occupations in the bottom quintile. With the Chinese economy tanking and Europe struggling, I expect the U.S. economy to be headed downward soon, which will mean that the past six years of economic growth will still leave wages and family incomes lower than they were before the last recession. It's a depressing pictures and it does a lot to explain the success of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Pacific Hurricanes

NASA composite image from last week showing Hurricanes Kilo, Ignacio, and Jimena. At one point all three were Category 4 storms, the only time there have been three such storms in the Pacific at once since satellite tracking began.

Old Words

Attaskt with bringing obscure words back into use, we begnawed the matter, scratching our bubukles as we did so. Fellow researchers congreed that the conspectuity was immoment. Incorpsing our plantage in mistempered account book, we were rewarded with oppugnancy, against which we offered no propugnation. Reprobance has seldom made us so rubious.

--TLS back page, August 7. The words are all said to have been coined by Shakespeare, and come from To Be or Not to Be by Liz Evers.

To Mount Holyoke Again

Spent the past two days driving my daughter Mary up to Mount Holyoke for her senior year. It was a pleasant trip; no traffic to speak of, good company (on the way up, anyway), lovely weather. We listened to Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings, which is uneven but has some very good and creepy stories.

Arrival.

Mary's dorm.

If, as people often say, Mount Holyoke looks like Hogwarts, then the basement where Mary lives is very Slytherin.

Dim, blurry photo of basement room, where her college adventure continues.