The Cuyahoga River, Then and Now

Fifty years ago this month, on June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. This was not the first time the river had burned; that seems to have been in 1868.

In fact most of the pictures you will get from Google if you search for "Cuyahoga River Fire 1969," like this one, actually show the more destructive fire of 1952. Nor was the Cuyahoga River the only one to burn like this; the Susquehanna, the Niagara, and the Chicago Rivers had all caught fire at various times, along with many harbors.

But the 1969 fire was the last. It was the last because of the Clean Water Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed. Now Cleveland, like so many other cities, is focusing its redevelopment efforts on its waterfront.

When I searched for images for this post I found a photoset of Cleveland's 22 best waterfront bars and restaurants.

And numerous ads for outfits that will rent you a kayak so you can paddle down the river.
You can even fish, if you want; the state has declared that catfish from the river are now safe to eat.

The city is celebrating the revival of the river with an arts festival called Cuyahoga50, culminating in Anniversary Week June 19-23.

We can fix the damage we have done to the world, if we put our minds to it. And if we do, we will be the biggest beneficiaries.

Albert Bierstadt - Sunrise On The Matterhorn - 1875

The Adaptive Power of Culture and our Fondness for Tradition

Anthropologist Joseph Henrich has a new book called The Secret of Our Success, and Scott Alexander has both a long review and a whole post of long quotations. Since Henrich is an anthropologist, you can easily guess what he thinks is the secret to human success: culture. Our brains, unaided, are pretty cool, but what makes us the dominant large species on the planet is our ability to accumulate and share knowledge.

I love this graph, which so nicely brings out what we are best at. At most cognitive tasks human toddlers are on par with apes, but when it comes to learning from others we blow away every other animal. This is what we do well: learn.

Learning of course has two sides, the learning and the teaching. Cultures all make concerted efforts to pass onto the next generation whatever they think is important. But how do they decide what is important? This is a fascinating puzzle. Some traditional knowledge strikes us as extremely useful, but other parts seem silly. One of Henrich's main arguments is that we preserve a lot of strange cultural rules and the like because it is very hard, in fact often impossible, for any single person to figure out which parts of the culture are important and which are not. Henrich has many illustrative examples, one of which concerns raising pigs. In the New Guinea highlands raising pigs is a supremely important activity, since the prestige of a community is tied up in how many pigs they can serve to guests at important feasts. In 1971 anthropologist David Boyd visited the village of Irakia and found the community immersed in a debate about how to fix their own lagging pig production. It is proposed, and eventually adopted that they should "follow the Fore," that is, adopt the pig-raising techniques of the Fore people, who have lately been very successful in this department. Here is the actual list of measures adopted by the village:

1) All villagers must sing, dance and play flutes for their pigs. This ritual causes the pigs to grow faster and bigger. At feasts, the pigs should be fed first from the oven. People are fed second.

2) Pigs should not be killed for breaking into another’s garden. The pig’s owner must assist the owner of the garden in repairing the fence. Disputes will be resolved following the dispute resolution procedure used among the Fore’.

3) Sending pigs to other villages is tabooed, except for the official festival feast.

4) Women should take better care of the pigs, and feed them more food. To find extra time for this, women should spend less time gossiping.

5) Men must plant more sweet potatoes for the women to feed to the pigs, and should not depart for wage labor in distant towns until the pigs have grown to a certain size.

We look at this list and think that some of it is highly relevant and some is not. But how do we know? The people of Irakia presumably know a lot more about raising pigs in New Guinea than any of us, so why do we think we know that, say, playing music to pigs does not help them grow? But anyway the point is that the Fore way of raising pigs was adapted en bloc because that is just how people work most of the time. The thousands of particular actions that make up something like hunting deer or growing potatoes or holding feasts are rarely scrutinized in themselves; they are part of the way, and if the way is good, if the way is working, then we keep doing all of them.

So when you ask, why do people cling to ideas that strike you as outmoded, from an anthropological standpoint the question answers itself: because cultures that passed on their ways of doing things survived, and those that did not have disappeared. You may think that you can reason your way to improvements, but this is a particularly modern outlook that would have seemed bizarre of most humans of the past, and anyway you are probably wrong. (See: communism, libertarianism, etc.)

Life, even in a neolithic village, is simply too complex for any person working alone to reason out a better way of living. So we evolved a very strong attachment to old ways.

I think the best way to see all the weirdness of the modern world is through this lens. We have created so much change, so fast, that clinging to old cultural ways no longer makes sense in many, many areas. This has unmoored us and left us floundering about, prey to ideologies that offer something solid to take the place of tradition. But this is illusion; the world is too complex for ideology, just as it is too complex for reliance on tradition. So we suffer from anxiety and rage and all the other modern diseases.

I should say that I think this picture is highly simplified; along with our general attachment to tradition we humans also have a thirst for novelty that is in some of us extremely strong. After all cultures do change, even the most traditional. But for most of our history they changed very slowly because that was the best guarantee of survival, and our poor brains, which evolved for the slow pace of peasant life, are at sea in this crazy modern world we have devised.

Another Lewis Chessman Turns Up

The set of the Lewis chess men in the British Museum has always seemed incomplete. It comes close to being four complete sets, but it falls short, for example there is only one knight. Since the circumstances of the discovery and original 1831 sale remain murky, people have long  wondered if there might be more of them out there somewhere:

A Lewis Chessman whose whereabouts, nay, very existence, were unknown for almost 200 years has been identified and will be sold at auction next month. Picture it: the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, April, 1831. There, on the inlet of Uig Strand, a hoard of 93 objects was unearthed under nebulous circumstances that quickly became more legend than fact. It was a collection of 93 chessmen, pawns and tablemen (circular game pieces), plus one random belt buckle. That’s enough for almost four complete sets of figure pieces. Most of them were carved out of walrus ivory, likely in Trondheim, Norway, in the 12th or 13th century.

Whatever the true story of their discovery, the Lewis Chessmen made their international debut at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1831. A merchant named Roderick Pirie was the first named owner. He sold them to an Edinburgh dealer for £30. That dealer sold 10 of them to antiquary and artist Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and 81 of them to Frederic Madden, Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum. Sharpe was able to acquire an 11th piece after his original purchase. Today, Sharpe’s chessmen are part of the collection of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The British Museum has a total of 82 of the original 93 pieces. . . .

And so to the present day:

For the first time a new Lewis Chessmen Warder has emerged. It was bought for £5 in 1964 by an Edinburgh antiques dealer. He did not realize the treasure he had found. It has been his family ever since, beloved, even revered as an artifact with almost magical properties. His grandchildren, who prefer to remain anonymous what with having hit the antiquities lottery and all, took it to Sotheby’s for appraisal.

Imagine that you're behind the appraisal desk at Sotheby's as a long line of people bring in ugly old paintings and fake jewelry and what all. And then somebody hands you one of the Lewis chess men. Gulp.

The piece will be auctioned off on July 2, but you have to assume that the government will declare it a National Treasure and allow the Royal Museum of Scotland to match the winning bid.

Now where are those missing knights?

Wandering around Hagerstown, Maryland

I found myself with some time on my hands today after a meeting in Hagerstown, Maryland, so I decided to explore.

It was a very pleasant hour but Hagerstown is the sort of place where a lot of government investment and some private creativity can't hide the underlying reality of another factory town where the factories have closed.

Old fire station.

Downtown.

I wandered uphill until I found the neighborhood of big Victorian houses I knew had to be nearby, but even they had seen better days.

Lovely park that surrounds an old Mill Pond.

But from there the stream disappears into this mysterious chasm, I suppose once part of the mill complex but now sitting incongruously in the middle of the street.

Cheerful urban renewal along an old rail line.

Housing for the elderly, in a place where they outnumber the young.

Butterfly sculpture and a hip restaurant. A friend of mine who lives nearby told me that two or three times in her life it has seemed like Hagerstown was going to take off and become a happening place, but then it has fizzled out.

Here is one urban renewal project I really love: Faces of Hagerstown. I saw these in several places. According to the sign, all were taken by volunteers during one month of 2017.

Ah, small town life.

Ivory Cow and Calf from Nimrud, Assyria

900-799 BC. In the Met.

RIP Murray Gell-Mann

I'm a week late on this one, but physicist Murray Gell-Mann passed away on May 24:

The 1950s and 60s were a Golden Age of particle physics, as accelerators produced a plethora of new particles with unpredictable properties. This presented a problem: There were too many of these new particles, which appeared in collisions without any evident rhyme or reason. They didn’t look anything like the kind of simple, elegant structure scientists expect from the laws of nature.

With a series of brilliant strokes, Dr. Gell-Mann revealed the secret pattern that made everything snap into place. His Eightfold Way, mischievously named after a Buddhist doctrine of liberation, made sense of the new particles that had been discovered and predicted ones that hadn’t been. The Eightfold Way is to elementary particles what the Periodic Table is to chemical elements. Ultimately, he proposed “quarks,” unobserved particles that are bound together in groups of two or three, to account for almost all of the new discoveries.

But that wasn’t all.

Dr. Gell-Mann was at the center of a whirlwind of theoretical activity. He showed how quantum mechanics allowed a particle to transform into a different particle and then back again. He demonstrated that the strength of particle interactions would depend on the energy with which they were colliding. With his colleague Richard Feynman, he explicated the symmetry structure of the weak nuclear force, one of the four forces of nature. He proposed a physical quantity — “strangeness” — that would explain why some particles lasted longer than others. He, along with Harald Fritzsch, hypothesized that there were force-carrying particles, which they called “gluons,” that hold quarks together. Each of these ideas has subsequently been triumphantly confirmed by experiment.

The creation of what we call the Standard Model was a group enterprise to which hundreds contributed, but Gell-Mann may have contributed the most.

He was also a world-class jerk:

He was fond of referring to people he didn’t think highly of as “ignoramuses.” He was the kind of language maven who would correct people on the pronunciation of their own names, and complain to servers at French and Spanish restaurants about misspellings on their menus.

And he couldn't stop bragging about his own brilliance. But for that last one, maybe we should forgive him.

Chimps Eating Crabs

New article in the Journal of Human Evolution by Kathelijne Koops et al.:

The significance of aquatic food resources for hominins is poorly understood, despite evidence of consumption as early as 1.95 million years ago. Here we present the first evidence of a non-human ape habitually catching and consuming aquatic crabs. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) in the rainforest of the Nimba Mountains (Guinea) consumed freshwater crabs year-round, irrespective of rainfall or ripe fruit availability. Parties of females and offspring fished for crabs more than predicted and for longer durations than adult males. Across months, crab-fishing was negatively correlated with ant-dipping, suggesting a similar nutritional role. These findings contribute to our understanding of aquatic faunivory among hominins. First, aquatic faunivory can occur in closed forests in addition to open wetlands. Second, aquatic fauna could have been a staple part of some hominin diets, rather than merely a fallback food. Third, the habitual consumption of aquatic fauna could have been especially important for females and their immature offspring. In addition to providing small amounts of essential fatty acids, crabs might also be eaten for their micronutrients such as sodium and calcium, especially by females and young individuals who may have limited access to meat.

Video here. Notice that the chimps are grubbing under rocks in a very small stream, so this is not what many people would expect under the category of "fishing."

Din Lligwy

Din Lligwy is a walled settlement on the Isle of Anglesey in Wales, dating to Roman times.

The complex contains two round houses and at least four rectangular buildings; it measures about half an acre (1850 square meters).

The limestone walls of the structures stand in places five feet (1.5 meters) tall, which may be close to their original height.

The site was excavated in 1905-1907 by the Cambrian Archaeological Society, and as it happens the original 1908 article reporting their discoveries is online. The most interesting thing about the plan above is all the features marked H, which were small stone-lined hearths perhaps used for smithing or smelting iron.

Among the finds were more than a hundred sherds of Romano-British pottery, as well as some imported from Gaul, and quite a big of slag, that is, the waste from smelting iron. The sherds dated the site to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.

Other artifacts included spindle whorls, loom weights and a birdbone flute. A couple of small flint artifacts were found, and numerous waste flakes from working flint. It is important to remember that even in Roman times, when iron and bronze tools were common, people still used stone for many tools; this actually continued into the 20th century in poor rural parts of Europe and the Middle East.

Besides being a center for iron working, this was probably the residence of a local chief:

Jacquetta Hawkes in A Guide To The Prehistoric And Roman Monuments In England and Wales, says of this site that: “Within a stout enclosure wall, there is a group of houses, two of them circular, but the rest rectangular in plan and all spacious, splendidly built and almost intact. Nearly all the walls show a massive construction with an inner and outer facing of large slabs and a packing of smaller stones. Din Lligwy shows signs of having buildings of more than one period, but it is known to have been inhabited during the Roman occupation down to the fourth century A.D.; it must surely have been the stronghold of some chieftain of unusual standing—one would like to think that the lord himself lived in the larger round house, a place quite worthy to rank as a Celtic palace.”

Since the inner diameter of that larger house is 21 feet (6.4 m), you can see that Celtic chiefs did not live in very luxurious homes.

Look closely at the larger version of the site plan above and you can see that the site once had walls enclosing a larger area. This, along with scattered finds of pre-Roman artifacts, suggests that the site existed in earlier times, but if so hardly anything has been learned about it.

People say it is a wonderfully evocative site, so think about a visit if you ever find yourself on Anglesey.

The Fall of Icarus

The Fall of Icarus has long been a favorite subject of painters. There are several different ways of depicting the story. Most dramatic is a close look at the moment when the wax began to melt and Icarus began his fall. This is Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of Icarus, 1636.

Merry-Joseph Blondel, The Sun, or, the Fall of Icarus, 1819, on the ceiling of the Louvre.

Marc Chagall, The Fall of Icarus, 1975.

Réne Milot, The Fall of Icarus, which nobody seems to give a date for since Milot is still alive and working.

Several artists have elected to focus on Icarus' broken body. This is Herbert Draper, Lament for Icarus, 1898.

Vlaho Bukovac, Icarus on the Rocks, 1897

Another tradition shows Daedalus helping Icarus into his wings. Anthony Van Dyke, Daedalus and Icarus, c. 1620.

Andrea Sacchi  Daedalus and Icarus, c 1645

Frederic Lord Leightton, Daedalus and Icarus, 1869

And then there is the strange tradition of the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which you just paint a landscape and then stick a tiny Icarus in a corner somewhere. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted several of these.

Including this one with a burning town. Was this just done because history paintings sold better? The dealer says, "Great painting, but we need a historical tie-in; could you put Icarus in the corner?"

And this tradition is still with us; here we have a version that contemporary illustrator Becca Stadtlander did for a greeting card company. I have to ask: for what kind of event would the Fall of Icarus be an appropriate image? Sorry for your loss, but remember it happened to ancient heroes too! Or would it be, Next Time Maybe You'll Learn to Control your Hubris?