July Garden

And the goldfinches are back.

Mike Pence Defends His Choices

An exchange on the campaign trail in Iowa:

Questioner: If it wasn’t for your vote, we would not have Joe Biden in the White House. Joe Biden shouldn’t be there. And all those wonderful things you and Trump were doing together would be continuing, and this country would be on the right path. Do you ever second-guess yourself? That was a constitutional right that you had to send those votes back to the states. It was not like you were going to personally elect him. We all know by the number of votes that were there who won that election. You changed history for this country.

Pence: The Constitution affords no authority to the vice president or anyone else to reject votes or return votes to the states. It had never been done before. It should never be done in the future. I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s actually what the Constitution says. No vice president in American history ever asserted the authority that you have been convinced that I had. I want to tell you, with all due respect — I’ve said it before, I say it right now — that President Trump was wrong about my authority that day, and he’s still wrong.

So, you know, I'm no huge fan of Mike Pence, but he stood up for America on January 6, knowing he would pay a huge price, and he is still standing up for our constitution.

Redonda and its Kings

Redonda is a small island in the Caribbean, politically part of Barbados but closer to Montserrat. Nobody lives there now, but from around 1860 to 1918 it was the site of a major guano mining operation.

In 1929, British writer M.P. Shiel told a story about this island. Shiel had been born on Montserrat in 1865. He claimed that his father was fascinated by the unoccupied island and had himself proclaimed king of Redonda, passing this title on to his son when M.P. was 15. According to the fully embelished story, the kingdom was recognized by the British colonial office and M.P.'s ascension to the throne was attended by a bishop. This is not remotely plausible; for one thing, when M.P. Shiel was 15 guano mining was in full swing on the island, and far from being a forgotten spot it was valuable and bustling. Shiel was also a very dubious character who spent time in prison for molesting his 12-year-old stepdaughter.

Anyway, from 1929 on Shiel made much of being Redonda's king. Shiel had written a lot of bad novels with titles like Empress of the Earth and The Yellow Peril. His biggest success was The Purple Cloud, which wikpedia summarizes like this:

Shiel's lasting literary reputation is largely based on Notebook III of the series which was serialised in The Royal Magazine in abridged form before book publication that autumn as The Purple Cloud (1901). The Purple Cloud is an important text of early British science fiction, a dystopian, post-apocalytic novel that tells the tale of Adam Jeffson, who, returning alone from an expedition to the North Pole, discovers that a worldwide catastrophe has left him as the last man alive.

He was friends with many other writers of speculative bent and decadent morals, and he made some of them peers of Redonda.

After Shiel's death in 1947 the title of king passed to John Gawsworth, his literary executor, who billed himself King Juan I. Gawsworth was a poet and short story writer best known for his biography of Arthur Machen, another speculative and decadent British writer. Gawsworth also had a lot of fun with Redonda until he sank into pathetic alcoholism, creating great trouble for the future history of Redonda by selling the title to three different people, one of them the manager of his favorite pub.

None of whom ended up being the most widely recognized King of Redonda:

Yet when Gawsworth died in 1970, the crown became publicly identified with another individual, the novelist and publisher Jon Wynne-Tyson. "King Juan II" had assisted Gawsworth during his final, homeless years, and agreed to serve as his literary executor. He was surprised to learn that the job also entailed serving as king – or so he insisted when he was challenged by the pub manager. Wynne-Tyson did not campaign for the crown, but influential Redondan peers felt that his literary pedigree rendered him the most suitable sovereign for a fictionalizing fiefdom. The fact that he wrote most of his novels under pseudonyms was another advantage.

Wynne-Tyson went on to write a novel that drew on the Redonda myth,

So Say Banana Bird (1984), about a burnt-out English writer who is rejuvenated through his sojourn to the tiny Caribbean island of "Zafada," said to be ruled by a "down-market king."

And it still goes on. In 2007 the BBC produced a documentary about three rivals vying for the title of King in that year; this web page says that in 2021 there were nine claimants in Britain. The most widely accepted is the one appointed by Wynne-Tyson as his successor, the Spanish novelist Javier Marías (King Xavier). The more than 100 peers of Redonda have included Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Sayers, Alice Munro, and J. M Coetze. There are flags, stamps, a motto, an anthem. A new book about the kingdom appeared last year; the passages quoted above from the review of that book in the TLS. Among other discoveries, the author found several non-literary residents of Montserrat claiming that they were Redonda's king, including Bob the Bad, who had a gold crown painted on the roof of his BMW.

All in all it's quite a history to have sprung from a lie told by a creep.

Links 14 July 2023

Notre Dame de Reims

Biden announces that the US has finished destroying its chemical weapons stockpile and is now in compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

How Maria Vargas Llosa came to abandon socialism and turn toward liberal capitalism; Fidel Castro's arrests of his critics and general turn toward authoritarianism was a key event.

The history of titanium, which remained a research curiosity until 1951 when the US government got heavily involved. Useful link to have on hand next time some libertarian tells you governments never create anything.

Young people are fleeing Bhutan for Australia; at last count 1.4% of Bhutan's already tiny population had emigrated, almost all of them young adults.

Not sure that this is real, but it seems when you play trolley problem with ChatGPT4 it will save Elon Musk over the rest of humanity.

Hoard of Civil War-era gold coins found in Kentucky, possibly hidden to protect it from Confederate raiders.

A group of authors sues OpenAI and Meta, saying that their books were used to train those companies' AIs without their consent. (NY Times, ungated news story, plantiffs' web site) Which raises an interesting question, since I don't know how AI companies could turn their software loose to learn from the Internet without perusing some copyrighted content.

In Switzerland they call the warm wind that sweeps down from the mountains the Foehn, and some people say it leads to illness, anxiety, restlessness, and depression, as well as increased crime. It is just hysterical suggestion, or something else? Why is there worldwide folklore about the bad effects of certain winds?

The sea otter who harasses surfers and steals their boards, which it then rides: "that otter was shredding." (NY Times, NPR, Unofficial Networks) This otter was raised in captivity in a way aquarium biologists hoped would avoid acculturating it to humans, but it seems their methods still need some work.

Is silence a sound? These scientists showed that auditory illusions work just as well with silence as with sound, which they say suggests that your brain processes silence as a sound, not just an absence. (NY Times, original article)

The Astrolabium of Leonhard Thurneisser a 16th-century book that used rotating wheels to make astrological predictions. (This is Colossal; more at the Library of Congress)

Kevin Drum discusses a study that finds headlines have gotten much more negative over time.

Good photoset of rock art in the Amazon, but please ignore the text.

Short summary of a Nature article on the use of lidar to reveal small pyramid complexes in the Bolivian Amazon.

A claim that the Kushan script of central Asia, known mainly from rock inscriptions, has been deciphered, thanks in part to a short bilingual inscription.

Previous generations or Republicans tended to be respectful of the Pentagon and avoid imperiling the defence budgets over other issues, but the current wave of culture warriors doesn't seem to care. They have loaded this year's bill with provisions like a ban on military personnel taking time off for an abortion that will make it very difficult to pass. (NY Times; Politico)

Tyler Cowen explains Singapore's uncompetitive democracy, in which one party always wins the elections.

Modernism in a nutshell: bird-shaped house looks cool from the air, but the inside is just bland white surfaces, and despite the huge footprint it has only three bedrooms.

Dutch crows and magpies have been building nests out of anti-bird spikes.

100-second drone video of Iceland's newest volcano; the coolest part starts at the 1-minute mark.

Ukraine Links

Summary of a new Russian manual on countering Ukrainian combined arms attacks, very interesting both as to how Ukraine has been attacking and how Russia might respond. And from the same manual on minefields.

The US is supplying cluster munitions (in artillery shell form) to Ukraine. These have been very controversial because they scatter thousands of little bombs everywhere and the old ones had a dud rate of around 30%, leaving lots of trouble for later. The decisions seems to have been made because 1) the US has new versions with a claimed dud rate of less than 3%, and 2) the US doesn't have any other 155mm artillery shells to send and Ukraine desperately needs them.

Bloomberg published some calculations showing that Ukraine now has more tanks in the war than Russia. This claim was based partly on the Oryx data for visually confirmed losses, but one of the guys in Oryx rejects the conclusion and explains why here. There is a lot of utter nonsense on Twitter but I have been impressed by the quality of data and discourse presented by the best analysts.

"This appears to be a pretty accurate estimate of Russian KIA in Ukraine. Between 40,000-55,000 Russian soldiers KIA at the end of May 2023. If we add DPR - LPR KIA to their work, we are probably closing in on 65,000-70,000 total KIA." Twitter; Mediazona web site.

Awesome 90-second video from Ukraine's Intelligence Directorate, "Time of Retribution."

Another failed Russian assault near Avdiivka, where the front line has not moved more than a few hundred meters since 2014. Video here.

Overhead video of a Ukrainian assault with around a dozen armored vehicles.

More drone warfare lessons: "Quadcopter pilots are a key target priority nowadays. When you launch drones in the field, you eventually make (foot)paths to your location, back and forth across the field, that eventually converge at one point. The enemy will see this and will definitely strike that location. And if you are so stupid that you sit right exactly where the paths lead, you will die."

Amazing rant from Major General Ivan Popov, call sign Spartak, who says he was dismissed by the high command for trying to tell them how badly the soldiers at the front need help: "with the authorities, one had either to be cowardly or say what things are. . . . I drew attention to the most important tragedy of the current war, the absence of counter-battery fire." (Audio with subtitles.) (And a CNN story with more professional translation)

Popov's removal has unleashed a stream of nervous complaints from Russian milbloggers, who say Popov was right and Ukraine's tactics are working.

The ISW daily summary for July 13 is mostly about Popov's actions and what they imply about the conditions at the front, seems intelligent.

The count of Russian officers killed in Ukraine, as confirmed by funeral announcements and the like, has exceeded 2,500.

Algebra II, Data Science, Race, Equity, and Education

In California, the university system experimented for a few years with allowing high school students to take something called Data Science instead of Algebra II, but they have now ended the experiment, saying too many Data Science courses were "not rigorous." (NY Times, Chronicle) 

This move was made in response to a widespread protest by STEM educators that included an open letter signed by more than 400 California-based faculty.

We write to emphasize that for students to be prepared for STEM and other quantitative majors in 4-year colleges, including data science, learning the Algebra II curriculum in high school is essential. This cannot be replaced with a high school statistics or data science course, due to the cumulative nature of mathematics. 

In other words, students who take a data science course as an alternative to Algebra II in high school will be substantially underprepared for any STEM major in college, including data science, computer science, statistics, and engineering. Such students will need remedial math classes in college before they can even begin such majors, putting them at a considerable disadvantage.

The point seems to be that calculus is required most STEM majors, and you can't take calculus without Algebra II.

Which is kind of weird, because I honestly can't remember Algebra II at all, and I have never been sure that the sequential way we teach math in America is all that important. I suspect that something else is going on, which I will get back to.

People have been pushing statistics or "data science" as an alternative to algebra in high school for a long time now. For one thing, very few adults do algebra; I don't. But I sometimes do use statistics in my work, and I think I am not unusual. I suspect statistics is the most widely used kind of "higher" math in our world. For another, the existing math curriculum generates racial disparities at an extreme level. NY Times:

The push for data science is also complicated by the wide racial disparities in advanced math, especially in calculus, which is a prerequisite for most science and math majors. In 2019, 46 percent of Asian high school graduates nationally had completed calculus, compared with 18 percent of white students, 9 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of Black students, according to a 2022 study by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The numbers for who fails algebra are also pretty dire, and inability to pass algebra is one of the main academic reasons students can't finish high school. Algebra also regularly shows up as the thing students hate the most about high school.

So why not substitute a different kind of math class, one much more relevant to many people?

People have tried. But "data science" classes have been dogged from the beginning by accusations that they are "dumbed down," that they avoid any real math, that they are designed to enable people to graduate from high school rather than to teach them statistics. This is part of the complaint made by the California educators, that a perfectly valid concept is being misused to prop up graduation rates rather than to teach people mathematics.

But I think the real problem is somewhere else. People hate algebra because it is so abstract and seems arbitrary and useless. So maybe what algebra really teaches students is how to focus on complex mental work that is abstract and has no obvious utility. Maybe what students really learn by grinding through the traditional high school math sequence is a different way of thinking, one that is more abstract and less verbal than anything else one does in school, and completely without immediate relevance to your life.

I strongly suspect that what underprepared college students lack is not any particular concept they would have been taught in Algebra II, but practice in mathematical reasoning.

And this is not, to me, an isolated case. The kind of education practiced in American liberal arts colleges was all about developing higher order skills in contexts completely divorced from anything remotely practical. Sure, some students might end up in branches of science where they used math, but that was not really why they studied it and certainly not how it was taught. It was taught for its own sake. Why prepare people who would work in publishing by studying English literature, rather than focusing on contemporary bestsellers? Why let people who want to work in the State Department write theses on Renaissance history?

Because of the idea that a truly refined and educated mind understands things in a deeper and higher way, which anyone capable of such understanding can readily apply to whatever industry he or she ends up in. This kind of education is fading from prominence in most fields. But not, it seems, from math. Math educators still believe that understanding math, having a feel for math, being able to speak in the language of math is a deep thing that one should grasp in the abstract before trying to apply it to thermodynamics or population biology.

It may be that the math educators are right, and people who don't understand math are doomed to misuse it. It may also be that training in abstract systems like algebra really does shape minds in a way that can promote good thinking in many contexts. Hey, maybe there's something to the whole notion that a liberal education trains people to think in deeper and more interesting ways. 

Where this leaves us I don't really know. If grinding your way through four years of high school math is the only way to be ready for college science or engineering, then millions of American kids will just never have that option, and this will be especially true for poor kids. We have tried changing our approach to teaching math half a dozen times in my lifetime – New Math, Common Core, Data Science, etc. – and nothing seems to work. This just seems to be a kind of stratification we are stuck with.

RIP Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was a Czech writer and dissident whose life under Stalinism turned him against not just totalitarian politics but politics in general. His books explored freedom as a deeply personal experience, something found more in art, friendship or sex than in the public realm. Here is a passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I transcribed into my commonplace book many years ago:

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the parade.

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject.

Ivy League Education as "Laundering Privilege"

One of the Chapo Trap House guys – the podcast at the heart of the "Dirtbag Left" – recently said this about Harvard:

I mean, the entire Ivy League exists as a perpetuator of privilege, obviously, but also as a perpetuator of the fantasy of meritocracy, which is what justifies the privilege. All of these kids who are so brilliant just happened to be children of people who are in a similar social situation, but they went to Harvard — like Jared Kushner, for example!

Scott Sikind explains what he ment like this:

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

This intrigues me because it corresponds pretty closely to some things I saw at Yale. Most of the students were earnest, hard-studying children of doctors and professors, but there was a sprinkling of very wealthy scions of privilege; Georges Saint Laurent was in my class, as was Jodie Foster, and a guy they called Carr whose name was Carrington something the Fourth. I was told that another classmate met with her financial advisor every Tuesday, her stockbroker every Thursday, and flew to Paris on the Concored every other weekend. I had minimal interaction with such people, although I did once have a long, fascinating conversation with a Mexican millionaire who had been to Andover. I wonder what happened to him?

Anyway it's funny but when I think about diversity in college admissions what I actually think about is those people. I mean, I had met black people before, but until I went to Yale I had only the vaguest concept that really rich people existed. What did they think of being thrown into classes with people like my friends, earnest bourgois who thought getting A's was the most important thing in the universe?

There is a movement now that aims to demolish every sort of admission criteria except academic potential. From the right this movement takes hatred of racial quotas and from the left it takes hatred of legacy admissions and other perpetuations of hereditary privilege. And the goal is what, exactly? For elite schools to be filled entirely by hard-working middle class kids who think getting A's is the most important thing in the universe? Why?

Why does it matter so much to some people who goes to Harvard or Stanford? I suppose this is partly because a lot of journalists and so on went to those schools, and partly because they stand at some kind of pinacle of American something. Or are people like the Chapo Trap House guys really angry that somebody like Jared Kushner can go to Harvard? What difference does that make? If you are thinking that Kushner's minor role in American politics has anything to do with his Harvard degree, as opposed to his money and family connections, I suggest you reconsider. Has anyone ever heard Ron DeSantis mention that he went to Yale?

If you care about justice in America you should care about almost anything else more than who goes to Harvard: better elementary education for everyone, better high school education for everyone, better career preparation in community colleges, better remedial courses at state universities so more students can thrive there, more investment in the second- and third-tier state universities that take in lots of kids from working class families.

To get back to laundering privilege: one of the interesting things about the college admissions debate is that nobody, so far as I know, is out there defending legacy admissions and explaining why elite colleges actually like to admit millionaires' kids, which means that we don't really know what their plan is. Is it all about money? Maybe, but since Harvard in particular really doesn't need the money, I have to wonder. Is there maybe a social theory behind it? Like, millionaires are going to be prominent and powerful in America whether you like it or not, so part of our mission should be to shape them? That besides allowing smart kids to meet the rich, our model allows rich kids to meet smart kids and learn from them about hard work and excellence? 

I suppose this is what differentiates me from the Chapo Trap House guys: they see something weird and get mad about evil rich people; I see something weird and wonder what is going on that I don't understand.

New Game

I just received a message from a former colleague saying she had lost my work phone number, and could I please send it. Linked In offered the following pre-written responses:

Wow
Oh, wow.
Very nice.

And it occurred to me that this is the makings of a new game: try to tell a story or communicate something important using only the pre-made responses you receive from the chat program. It is permissible to try to bait the other party into making responses that might generate the lines you need. Emojis are also allowed.

What shall we call it? ChatWorld? SpyStory? Other thoughts?

New Urbanism on Goldsmith Street

Goldsmith Street is a development of 105 homes in Norwich, England. It was completed in 2019 and has drawn an extraordinary amount of attention. The architects, Mikhail Riches and Cathy Hawley, won the Royal Institute of British Architects' coveted Stirling Prize, and so many people have come to tour the little neighborhood that some residents have begun to complain: "“Yes we live in really nice places, but that doesn’t mean we are here to be gawped at."

The praise comes in a variety of forms. Socialists love it that this is real, old-fashioned council housing, built by the local government using public funds; "not a profit-hungry developer in site," as the Guardian put it. The tenants pay their rent to the local government and the rents can't be raised without a vote of the council.

Environmentalists love it that the buildings use passive solar heating to meet the world's most exacting green standards, the Passivhaus certification from Germany.

British traditionalists love it that the local council passed over a bunch of designs for concrete apartment blocks in favor of this townhouse community. The streets are not wide enough to meet contemporary standards, but the architects were able to get an exemption:

They took inspiration from the city’s Golden Triangle, a desirable neighbourhood of Victorian terraced houses. This provided a useful lesson on density: planning rules would usually require at least 21 metres between facing homes, to prevent overlooking, but these popular historic terraces were just 14 metres apart. The architects used the precedent to argue that this new neighbourhood could be just as humanely scaled, while fitting in more homes.

The result, one critic said, is "dense without being oppressive." 

The residents like the solid houses and low utility bills. The place was built with families and children in mind; cars are excluded from the inner streets and, the architects say, "Every home has car-free access to play."

The RIBA notes that there has been a lot of attention to detail:

Tireless work by the architects has kept the standard of workmanship up to a very high level. Social tenants get impressively high specification interiors – in both the end-of-terrace flats and the central terrace houses. Passivhaus detailing has nicely accommodated the mechanical ventilation Heat Recovery (MVHR) units in the interiors, and the services intakes have been intelligently controlled. Each dwelling has a range of providers’ services pre-wired, so that they can be connected on demand, without the need for a service providers’ to come in later and drill through vital vapour barrier lines.

Of course this isn't gorgeous or anything like that, but it sure beats concrete apartment blocks, and the overall density works out about the same. We really can do better by our fellow humans if we put our minds to it.

The Kallerup Hoard

Back in 2019, archaeologists checking a Danish site where development is planned found this wonderful little two-faced bronze figurine, which was once mounted on top of a staff. Sensing that this was the top of a larger deposit, they removed the soil beneath it as a block and took it to the lab.

Where they ran a CT scan that revealed amazing things.

This ceremonial bronze ax is quite large, 30 cm (a foot) across.

Horse-head figurines as they are currently displayed. All of this material dated to the late Bronze Age, around 1000 BC.

This stuff was back in the news recently because the Danish government decided to display it in the local museum at Thisted near the discovery spot. But in Denmark even a local museum displaying only artifacts from the neighborhood can be quite extraordinary. The Thisted museeum already displays this gold arm band, which dates to the early Iron Age, 

and Denmark's best preserved Iron Age wooden spoon.

Links 7 July 2023

Bridget Tichenor, Los Encarcelados (The Imprisoned), 1965

Historical constants: "In 1951, a group of about 30 Japanese soldiers and sailors on Anatahan finally surrendered to the US Navy. The group had been larger but infighting thinned their ranks over the years after they learned how to make coconut wine and began to battle over the island's only woman."

In 1956, as Soviet tanks were rolling into Budapest, the director of the Hungarian news agency filed a dispatch saying "We are going die for Hungary and for Europe." In this fascinating 1984 essay Czech writer Milan Kundera asks what that says about the history and future of Europe, both the eastern nations that in 1984 longed to rejoin it and the westerners who no longer had any sense of what it meant.

Footnote from that Kundera essay: "One of the great European nations (there are nearly 40 million Ukrainians) is slowly disappearing. And this enormous, almost unbelievable event is occuring without the world realizing it."

Wonderful Bronze Age artifacts from Zhaigou, a recently discovered site in northern China.

Silver medusa medal found at Vindolanda along Hadrian's Wall.

Canada's population is booming, up 3.5% last year, entirely due to an aggressive program to recruit immigrants; overall fertility is only 1.4.

A claim that the US healthcare system is spending $250 million to $500 million a year treating pickleball injuries.

Completely bonkers video from the DeSantis campaign attacking Trump for being pro-gay and pro-trans.

From a NY Times story about a Finnish company that had to move its tire factories from Russia back into the EU: "We cannot just think in terms of innovation and efficiency. We have to think about security, too."

US religious conservatives like Josh Hawley keep making stuff up about the religion of the founding fathers, in this case attributing to Patrick Henry a statement about the US as a Christian nation that he never made. The refusal of people like Hawley to understand the eighteenth century is, to me, just part of  their complete misunderstanding of what the US is and always has been: a nation with a lot of Christians but not a Christian nation.

Income inequality in Mexico did not start under the Spanish but was already high under the Aztecs. And besides being rich, the Aztec elite might decide at any moment to cut your heart out.

Accused mass shooter says he was only trying to help fight gun violence.

This was written about the ongoing Twitter soap opera, but it reminds me of America after every election: "My Twitter timeline has turned into a bad Chekhov play: full of people constantly going on about how they’ve just got to get out of here and go somewhere else but never doing it."

Bronze Age royal tombs found in Cyprus.

The Crystal Prince, an amazing Copper Age burial excavated a few years ago at Valencina de la Concepción in Spain, may have been a woman. Which would be very cool, especially since all the other high-status burials from that site are also women. However this technique (Amelogenin peptide analysis) is new and many archaeologists don't trust it, so I am waiting for DNA.

Tyler Cowen dismisses Patrick Deneen's Regime Change, a book arguing that America is a disaster zone and blaming everything on the liberal elite: "What would an American passport auction for? . .  . I can think of a few historical elites who were slightly worse than those who go to Harvard and Yale."

Ukraine Links

Russian losses seem to be very high in this phase of the war. Mediazona's count of confirmed Russian deaths is up more than 1,200 over the last two weeks, and the Oryx count of vehicles is showing many tanks and artillery pieces destroyed. (In the week of June 24-30, 32 tanks, 48 armored vehicles, 15 artillery pieces, 7 rocket launchers, 7 helicopters and 2 SAM systems; the daily update for July 6 had 14 artillery pieces)

Papal envoy returns from Moscow after finding the same as everyone else: the two sides remain far apart on peace conditions. The Pope referred in his comments to "this war that seems to have no end."

Crazy overhead 30-second video of trench combat at very close quarters.

Remarkable short video of a Ukrainian night attack on Russian ammunition storage in Makeevka, with many Grad rockets. Real fireworks. And on Youtube for those not on Twitter.

Russian civilian makes a video of a train carrying T-55 tanks toward Ukraine, refers to them as "ancient like mammoth crap."

Why are Russian ammo dumps blowing up again, after Russia seemed to have solved the problem by moving them farther back? Brynn Tannehill has a theory, related to Thomas Theiner's theory of the whole offensive that I already wrote about.

Russian security forces leak photos found in Prigozhin's mansion, they show him dressed up in a bizarre variety of wigs and fake beards. And this. Off Twitter here. 

Why Ukraine wants cluster munitions.

Neural Nets and Mysterious Solutions

From a long NY Times story about AI in mathematics, I extract this:

Early during Dr. Williamson’s DeepMind collaboration, the team found a simple neural net that predicted “a quantity in mathematics that I cared deeply about,” he said in an interview, and it did so “ridiculously accurately.” Dr. Williamson tried hard to understand why — that would be the makings of a theorem — but could not. Neither could anybody at DeepMind. Like the ancient geometer Euclid, the neural net had somehow intuitively discerned a mathematical truth, but the logical “why” of it was far from obvious.

I'm sure you have all heard that neural nets can predict certain medical outcomes, like who will die of heart attacks, much more accurately than doctors, but, again, nobody knows how.

I have a strong sense that many things that happen in the world do so because of multiple variables interacting in subtle ways, at a scale that human minds may simply not be able to grasp. So one possible future for us and AI would be that AI could make predictions or find solutions concerning fundamental problems but in a way that leaves us as baffled as ever. For some things – weather prediction, disease treatment – that would of course be very useful, but for things that we would really like to grasp in a deep or intuitive way it might only add to our frustration. Suppose, say, that some AI system can predict very accurately what systems will be conscious, but can't tell us why and or identify the important variables? Suppose it generates a list of extra-solar planets likely to contain life? I can imagine a future in which scientists, unable to understand what AI is doing, run experiments on the AI, feeding it all different sorts of data in an attempt to understand, humanly, what matters and how the results are being reached. It sounds like a sci-fi story but it may end up being real.

Family in Roman Anatolia

In the valley of the river anciently called Hermos, which runs down to the Aegean Sea, the people of Roman times had two unusual habits. The first was putting up memorial stones to record their punishments by the gods:

Elsewhere people tended to thank the local gods for cures and miracles, but here there was a pronounced tendency to celbrate their vengeance. A repentant sinner – someone who had stolen a pig, perhaps, or poisoned a troublesome family member – would commission a record of the crime to be carved in stone, along with a sad story about he or she had been punished. . . . The stories recorded are often catastrophic, involving calamities such as the loss of livelihood the death of a spouse or child.

It seems that after consulting oracles, the sinner discovered that some past transgression had led to his or her current woes, and put up a stone commemorating the journey from crime through punishment to understanding.

Which is quite cool in itself. But as Peter Thonemann showed in a recent book, The Lives of Ancient Villages, reviewed in the May 19 TLS, these stories may reveal much more: local politics, attitudes towards the encroachment of Roman law, and in particular the structure of families. 

The second interesting local habit involved the inscriptions on their tombstones, which often listed the names and relationships of all the family members who took part in the funeral. Putting these two sources together, Thonemann was able to learn a great deal about family structure:

Perhaps unsurprisingly in the light of high mortality rates, blended families from remarriage feature prominently. . . . The stones frequently celebrate the affection that developed between stepchildren and their newly acquired step-parents or siblings. More surprising is the ubiquity of foster parenting. Whereas in modern Britain fostering is undertaken sparingly, in response to situations of crisis, here somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of families included at least one foster child. Mortality certainly played a role, in that neighbors or relatives naturally took in the children of parents who died. But in other cases at least one biological parent was still living and in the picture as a valued relative.

In a society where the poor sometimes sold their children into slavery, fostering often had an economic motivation, and Thonemann finds evidence that foster parents tended to have higher status than the biological parents of the children they took in. Indeed, acquiring numerous foster children seems to have allowed the prosperous to display both wealth and virtue. Some were celebrated as superparents, such as the man who counted thirty-eight foster children alongside his biological son and two daughters.

John Boswell long ago showed something similar about peasants in eighth-century Frankia, that the wealthier families often had extra children they seem to have taken in from their poorer neighbors, so this may have been a widespread pattern across Europe.

Apocalypse Watch

I just received an email invitation to a talk, "with refreshments and networking to follow."

Thomas Theiner on What is Happening in Ukraine's Offensive

Russian artillery piece destroyed by Ukrainian fire

Thomas Theiner is a retired NATO artilleryman who has been one of the most reliable guides to what is happening militarily in the Ukraine war. On the other hand he is viciously anti-Russian and his heart is clearly with Ukraine to a degree that might cloud judgment, so consider that in evaluating his take on Ukraine's summer offensive so far:

In Germany @derspiegel, @welt, @ntvde and in Austria @derStandardat write that "the Ukrainian Offensive has failed." That is wild nonsense.

This nonsense happens because all of them interviewed the same expert, who doesn't understand Ukraine's Offensive phases, of which there are at least 5, and we're barely in the middle of Phase 1 - Attrition & Interdiction.

The reason people don't consider Ukraine's Phase 1 a success comes from people being used to US/NATO wars, in which Phase 1 is purely air power. Phase 1 is meant to attrition enemy forces and interdict/disrupt their lines of communication. The West uses fighters, bombers and cruise missiles for that.

During the 1991 Gulf War 1,700+ coalition combat aircraft needed 37 (!) days and 100,000+ sorties to attrition the Iraqi forces enough to trigger the ground campaign. And 288 Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired at Iraqi targets.

During the 2003 Invasion of Iraq coalition combat aircraft flew 41,000 sorties and fired 802 Tomahawks at Iraqi targets. . . .

Ukraine doesn't have any of this air power; and so Ukraine is forced to replace fighters and bombers with GMLRS, Excalibur, Storm Shadow and drones.

So far, I am with Theiner; a comparison to Desert Storm/Desert Saber is unfair because of the enormous scope of the coalition air campaign, which nobody but the US can do. Since Ukraine hardly has an air force at all, they have to use different methods. Theiner describes their approach like this:

Whereas in US and NATO operations the sky is continuously swarming with fighters and bombers looking for enemy positions and vehicles to annihilate, all Ukraine has in the air are drones, which look for russian equipment, ammo points, command centers, logistic points, etc. but the drones can't bomb these objects.

Once a drone spots a target, the drone operator has to request mensuration, the results of which are then transmitted to either a M142 HIMARS or M270A1 MLRS launcher, which will enter the target's coordinates into a GMLRS rocket; or transmitted to a M777, PzH 2000, M109A6 or Archer howitzer, which will enter the target's coordinates into an Excalibur projectile; or the data is transmitted to the Ukrainian Air Force's 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade, which will enter the target's coordinates into a Storm Shadow...

Did you notice that all of these take time? Ukraine can only hit russian equipment that is static. Unlike Western fighters, which can hit the passenger seat of a driving car, Ukraine can only hit russian vehicles and objects that are static. A massive drawback.

Even worse: a US fighter jet can fly deep into enemy territory, and hit a dozen targets 500km behind the front, while Ukraine's range is limited to:

• Excalibur range: 40 km
• GMLRS range: 84 km
• Storm Shadow range: 500+ km, but only in limited numbers

Ukraine is massively handicapped by the time it takes to hit a russian target and by the range of its systems. (GLSDB will improve HIMARS range but the production line is not yet running...)

Now if you're russia, all you have to do it to park your heavy equipment outside of GMLRS range and Ukraine can't hit it.

Still Ukraine must attrition russia's heavy equipment before it can begin Phase 2 of the offensive... and the only way to do it is to bait russian forces into GMLRS and Excalibur range.

And Ukraine is doing this right now by attacking the russian lines with four of the ten brigades that have been readied for this Phase:

• 23rd Mechanized Brigade
• 31st Mechanized Brigade
• 37th Marine Brigade
• 47th Mechanized Brigade

All other brigades (i.e. 35th Marine, 68th Jaeger, etc.) are merely supporting these four brigades.

A further six brigades can be deployed for this phase. Now the Russians are in a dilemma: either bring their heavy equipment forward and risk losing it to GMLRS and Excalibur or leave their heavy equipment out of range and allow Ukraine an unexpected early breakthrough... well, the Russians decided to bring their equipment forward and Ukraine is hitting it relentlessly.

Still it is a far, far slower process than air power... and unlike in an air campaign Ukraine is losing troops and vehicles... and this has led to some analysts declaring the Ukrainian Offensive a "failure"... it is NOT. These "analysts" and "experts" just fail to understand the Ukrainian plan.

I find that this explains some otherwise puzzling actions that Ukraine is taking, for example their attacks north and souht of Bakhmut and seizing a small lodgement across the Dnipro by the Antonovsky Bridge at Kherson. According to Theiner those attacks don't have to go anywhere, they just have to scare the Russians enough to get them to bring artillery and tanks within range of Ukrainian weapons. If so, they are succeeding; the count of destroyed Russian artillery in particular has been rising rapidly lately.

Also, Theiner emphasizes that most of Ukraine's ground force is not engaged:

And they fail to understand that Ukraine gets stronger every day: Ukraine readied 35 (!) brigades for the offensive, by raising new units, splitting existing units, pulling units out of the front and refreshing them... and just 4 of 35 are in the fight now.

All the others are at the training grounds - training every day to improve their skills; AND incorporating the lessons learned in the offensive so far.

And every day troops return from training in NATO countries and Sweden; and new equipment arrives - the Offensive Guard brigades started out as light infantry... and are now getting tanks from Germany and Denmark, turning them into mechanized formations.

So many troops return from training in Europe that Ukraine recently formed three new brigades; and as the russians have stopped attacks in the South and along the Donetsk front, Ukraine recently pulled two elite brigades out of the front to freshen them up for the offensive. How can an offensive have "failed" if more than 90% of forces are still training for the offensive? . . .

Ukraine's Offensive has barely begun. And due to the lack of air power Phase 1 will take far longer than people are used to... but journalists need to come up every day with a fresh new drama. . . . Ukrain's victory if inevitable. We just need a bit of patience.

Could this work? I have no idea. It seems to me that part of Desert Storm's success was the psychological impact of the relentless bombing, the way anything that moved near the front lines was in danger of being blown to pieces within minutes. Would a grinding attack by artillery and rockets have the same kind of impact? The example of WW I seems to say not, and so far Russian troops have mostly been defending pretty well. 

Plus there is the fact that while Ukraine is destroying Russian artillery and tanks, Russia is also destroying Ukrainian artillery and tanks. The visually confirmed numbers actually show greater losses for Ukraine in Zaporizhia, which I think is the main battleground. So a lot may depend on how quickly NATO can replace Ukrainian losses, and whether they can supply enough shells, especially guided shells and GMLRS missiles, to keep the pressure on.

I mentioned here before that several military commentators have compared Ukraine's attack to the Second Battle of el Alamein, when the British fought their way through a heavily fortified German line. But so far Ukraine's approach has been little like Montgomery's. Montgomery threw everything he had at a narrow part of the line until they punched through, the lead brigades losing 80 percent of their tanks; it was reported that Montgomery was willing to take 100% losses in his lead brigades to get through. Maybe the Ukrainian high command's approach is more sensible, and maybe, as some people have said lately, the amount of deadly firepower on a modern battlefield makes a tank-led charge at prepared positions all but impossible. But I remain unconvinced that Ukraine's military has either the means or the daring to decisively defeat Russian forces in the south.

One of those Stories

Old Bumblehead Trying on the Napoleonic Boots,
that is, French King Louis Philippe preparing for War,
by George Cruikshank, 1823

From a review of two books about satirical illustrators in 18th- and 19th-century Britain:

Cruikshank's son George became a prolific illustrator, widely loved, "kind, genial, honest," a temperance campaigner and veritable national treasure. Only after his death was it revealed that he had a secret second household and eleven children with a former maid, Adelaide Attree, to whom he left everything. His wife, Eliza, had known nothing.

Also this, about the career of the first of the major English satirical cartoonists, James Gillray, whose work was often quite cruel:

Far from disliking the fun that was made of them, famous people hoped to be included and they became collectors too. George Canning, at the beginning of his parliamentary career, was desperate for Gillray to cracature him. Nelson, after the Battle of the Nile, wrote to his wife asking her to send out Gillray's caricature of him.

Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the Queen"

The Book of the Queen is a collection of the works of Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) assembled in 1410-1414 for Isabel of Bavaria, queen consort of Charles VI of France, and produced under the author's supervision. (Harley MS 4431, ff 1r-177v) Some authorities think she did some of the scribal work as well. The contents include many of Christine's ballads and her retellings of the classical myths. Christine is an interesting character because she was one of the first if not the first European woman to support herself as a professional writer. In the first illustration (above) Christine presents the book to the queen. Nice bed.

Christine in her study. I am enchanted by this notion, an author commissioning illustrations that show herself at work.

Christine addresses Louis D'Orleans.

Christine travels with a group of courtiers who have amazing taste in hats.

And now some illustrations from the classical retellings. Here Queen Penthesilea leads her Amazons to aid the Trojans.

Andromeda being rescued from a monster by Perseus, riding on Pegasus.

Scary monster.

Venus with her followers.

Cerberus is no match for this doughty Hercules.

And the strangest version you will ever see of Narcissus gazing at his own reflection.

Educational Opportunity

One good result of the Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions has been some real talk about how little affirmative action ever meant to most students. In the NY Times, Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens have a piece pointing out that only a small fraction of college students attend colleges that admit fewer than 25% of their applications. The vast majority attend non-selective schools.

If we really want to talk about equality of opportunity for all Americans, these authors say, we should focus not on who gets into elite schools but how to make college better for the majority of students. So, this:

Less selective schools and the millions of students they serve each year deserve the same resources and attention to program quality found in selective institutions. Affirmative action never went far enough. Winning the admissions lottery to Harvard or a selective University of California campus must not be the only path to upward mobility through higher education. All colleges, especially those serving the most diverse student bodies, should be capable of providing outcomes of similar quality.

Ok. But how much would that cost? Arum and Stevens have some numbers: 

In our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.

So all we have to do is find $30,000 or so for each of the 15 million college students in the US. Hey, $450 billion a year, just small change, right? (If you're curious, the most authoritative-seeming number I could find for total higher education spending in the US is around $675 billion, about half of which comes from state and local governments.)

Oy. 

One reason I have long advocated for reducing the number of college students in the US is that I think that is the only way to improve the quality of instruction for the rest. But I have never been sure that it would work. It might instead lead to a spending death spiral, with legislators slashing spending because enrollments are decling and so on. 

I am also not sure that quality of instruction matters as much as Arum and Stevens want it to. I have a strong sense that the main reason students don't learn more in college is that they don't try very hard, and part of my plan has been that making it harder to get into college might motivate people a little.

But I am not optimistic about any of it. Societies get more of what they care about, and in America we just don't care enough about education to get high quality results for everyone.

Webb Tours the Gas Giants

That's the Difference

Images of what is said to be a Russian propaganda pamphlet, found in a trench by Ukrainian soldiers and uploaded to Facebook. The caption on every page says, "That's the difference."

You have to love the bathtub baptism with Hitler and Satan.