A Weekend at My House

Saturday started with my son Thomas and I replacing the porch steps.

A friend took me to the Expo Titanic exhibit, which was fun, especially the room where they simulate you standing in the crow's nest and spotting the iceberg.

And I spent time in the garden, at its late spring roses and peonies peak. All in all, a very fine weekend.

An Interesting Difference between Men and Women

"Would you marry someone less intelligent than you?"

Outright "no":

Women: 45%
Men: 8%

Women are nearly 6x more likely to rule it out entirely. The single largest gender disparity in our deep-question dataset.

— Jake Kosloski on Twitter/X

 

Links 15 May 2026

William Trost Richards, Tintagel, 1879

A list of common things we don't understand, including sleep and lightning (Twitter/X)

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Markus Brunetti's amazing church photographs.

Institute for Family Studies report lays out how rigid and afraid many American parents are about letting their kids leave the house. Crazy.

Scott Siskind on AI writing.

Pend architects found a way to wedge two pretty nice houses into a neglected alley space in Edinburgh. (Dezeen, architects's web site)

Ben Pentreath, photographic hymn to the Orkneys, magnificent.

Long, interesting review of Sven Beckert's Capitalism: a Global History.

An argument that European Economic Stagnation is Real. Summary on Twitter/X.

Shale gas (from fracking) has saved US consumers hundreds of billions. Summary at Marginal Revolution.

Medieval wax notebook found in German latrine.

Sarah Ainslie's portraits of people with their wardrobes.

Review of a new biography of Peter Matthiessen.

Summary of the hantavirus situation at Science News.

Perun against policymakers betting on prediction markets, one-hour video.

Advances in understanding whale "language", 15-minute video.

Why Postliberalism is a failure.

What Really Uses Water: Almonds vs. Data Centers

Via Brian Beal on Twitter/X.

David Reich on Bronze Age Genetics

In this interview with Dwarkesh Patel, genetist David Reich says that human genetic change was fastest between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. Changes associated with the Bronze and Iron Ages seem to have been far more dramatic than those that took place during the agricultural revolution:

In this part of the world—Europe and the Middle East—we are actually in a period of accelerated natural selection. One way to see this is to look at the enrichment pattern we’re observing, where immune traits are unusually associated with these selection signals. We could compare the last 5,000 years of our time period, what’s called the Bronze Age and further onward, to the previous 5,000 years. What we see is that this intensification of selection around immune traits, and similarly the intensification around metabolic traits, has accelerated over this time period.

It’s not like natural selection has been at the same rate over all places and times. It’s increasing over the time period we’re analyzing. Plausibly the whole time period has increased compared to previous periods. We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture. Almost everyone we’re analyzing are farmers or food producers in one way or another. Farming was invented for the first time anywhere in the world in the Middle East 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. The people who invented farming exploded into Europe after 8,500 years ago, spread across the continent, and expanded rapidly.

In the Bronze Age, there was an intensification of how people lived, with much higher population densities. People were living more and more next to their animals and getting their diseases, and exchanging their diseases with the animals and with each other. This is a period of rapid change in how people are living, resulting in different biological needs of this population. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that in the context of these dramatic changes, the biology of the population might not be ideally adapted.

There might be what some people call an evolutionary mismatch, where you take a genetic variation that evolved in hunter-gatherers and put it into farmers or pastoralists, and it’s not exactly right. What you’re seeing is the DNA of this population, which descended from hunter-gatherers only 10,000 years ago, reacting to the shock of having been moved into an agricultural, Bronze Age, high-population-density, urban environment. A hypothesis is that what we’re seeing is the adaptation that occurs as a result.

One example:

One of the things we do in this work is look carefully at many of these positions in the DNA. . . . One of the things we see is that, while for the most part the signals of natural selection we detect are consistent with constant natural selection over time, in a handful of them we’re able to see that there’s been a reversal or a radical change in natural selection. Very often that occurs in the period between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, which is the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, a period of rapid population growth and rapid movement to intensive use of many technologies that were not used that way before.

An example of this is the TYK2 genetic variant that is a major risk factor for severe tuberculosis, which is the most important infectious disease killer in the world today. If you look at this major risk factor for tuberculosis, this variant rockets up in frequency from 8,000 or 6,000 years ago to maybe 9% or 10% in this part of the world. Then it rockets down in frequency in the last 3,000 years. In both cases, there’s very clear evidence of natural selection, in the first case to increase in frequency, and in the next case to decrease in frequency.

A possible reason is the spread of tuberculosis. It maybe becomes endemic in the population 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That’s potentially consistent with pathogen sequence data and other lines of evidence. And maybe this variant was protecting against something before then, but then tuberculosis became significant after that point, and it was so bad that it pushed in the opposite direction. That’s speculative.

An Ivory Casket, c 1350 AD

This ivory casket is in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It was made in France around 1350. The rest of the text comes from the online description.

This splendid casket is carved with scenes from romances and allegorical literature representing the courtly ideals of love and heroism. In the center of the lid, knights joust as ladies watch from the balcony; to the left, knights lay siege to the Castle of Love, the subject of an allegorical battle. 

The remaining scenes on the casket are drawn from well-known stories about Aristotle and Phyllis, Tristan and Iseult, and tales of the gallant, heroic deeds of Gawain, Galahad, and Lancelot. The box may originally have been a courtship gift. 

Corn Ethanol vs. Solar Farms

Andy Masley on Twitter/X:

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn.

Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now! 

Corn-based ethanol was always dumb and now it is even stupider.

A Visit to the Walters

Sunday I took a friend who had never been there to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. There I am above with a bust of Othello by Pietro Calvi, 1873.

We started in the Asian collection, wandering at random, our eyes seeking out striking objects like this hair ornament and wine pot.

Then we wandered through the medieval section, where there was much stained glass.

Love this Palmesel, or Palm Sunday Donkey (1350-1400), made to pulled through the streets of some German town in a Palm Sunday procession.

And then to the Renaissance, where the best stuff was portraits. Paolo Veronese, Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Deidamia, 1552

Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani, c. 1595

Same in the Baroque section. Giuseppe Ghislandi, portrait of a nobleman, c. 1700. He looks like a television star.

Unknown artist, Portrait of the Marchioness Angela Maria Lombardi, c. 1710.

We were getting weary so we went down to the first floor to see an exhibit of jewelry by Afrofuturist Douriean Fletcher, who did a lot of work for the Black Panther films. Great exhibit, with some beautiful stuff and some stuff that was weird in interesting ways. Loved it.

And then home.

Putin is Looking for a Way out of His War

Like Trump, Putin seems to be searching for a way out of the unwinnable war he started. Reuters:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on ​Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end, remarks that came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years. "I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters.

Exactly how that end would come about it unclear, since Russia still officially maintains its maximal war aims, which an undefeated Ukraine will never accept. As Noah Smith explains, this shows the limits of dictatorial wars of choice:

Ukraine never threatened Russia at all. The whole Russian cause in this war is based on the notion that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO and the EU was threatening Russia’s “sphere of influence.” But the idea of “spheres of influence”, while sometimes a good factual description of how powerful countries operate, is not a good moral principle. The idea that countries deserve “spheres of influence” is just the claim that powerful countries ought to dominate their weaker neighbors. In other words, it’s just imperialism.

Morality doesn’t field divisions, of course…or does it? Putin can pay desperately poor people to fight in his wars, or empty his prisons of criminals, or buy mercenaries, but can he persuade regular middle-class Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg to die for the glory of the New Russian Empire? Not really, no — which is why as soon as casualties get too high to replace without general mobilization, he starts to think about ending the war.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.

Mother's Day Flowers

Mother's Day

Remembering my wife Lisa, mother of my children, love of my life. Lisa's eulogy is here 

Links 8 May 2026

Silver coin from the Macedonian kingdom of Syria, 305-295 BC

Why ChatGPT started talking about goblins all the time.

People are retiring later across the developed world, which will help a lot to keep pension schemes solvent.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Construction Physics explains how an oil refinery works.

Data from the General Social Survey finds that poor people who go to church regularly are happier than rich people who never go. (Twitter/X)

Interesting NY Times feature on the old Ukrainian skydiving plane that now has more than 200 drone kills (5-minute video at YouTube.)

Islands as focuses for utopian and other schemes.

Perun on the situation with the Iran war during the cease fire, one-hour video.

Why is northern Italy so much richer than southern Italy?

Study finds that banning cell phones in schools may raise student well-being but has little if any impact on academic performance.

The extraordinary jaws of the pelican eel, two short videos (YouTube, Facebook)

Noah Smith on development economics.

Remarkable Hellenistic and Roman finds in Alexandria, Egypt.

Yet another Viking hoard found; one can hardly keep up with all the discoveries.

Some of the weird stuff in the Smithsonian basement.

Exotic Pets in Roman Berenike

Berenike is an old port on the Red Sea in southern Egypt. The site had long been known, and serious archaeology began in 1994. I have a general post about the site and two others on interesting religious discoveries (statue of the Buddha, cool shrine with headless falcons). Now there is an interesting article out about the town's pet cemetery:

To date, the burial ground, located on a small sandy hill in the foreground of the city, has yielded almost 800 burials spread over an area of 127 m2. Cats (Felis silvestris catus) were by far the most dominant species, accounting for 88.2% (688 individuals). The second most abundant species in the cemetery were dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), 54 individuals (7%) having so far been recorded. The third important taxonomic “component” in Berenike were monkeys from the Cercopithecinae sub-family (35 individuals). These included two identified genera of macaque species (Macaca), and a representative of the Chlorocebus species, the grivet. Monkeys accounted for 4.5% of the total number of burials. The zooarchaeological data, that is, age at death, sex, morphology, and pathological changes, clearly indicate that the animals buried in this cemetery were companion animals: brought in, cared for, fed, and well treated.

All of the monkeys found in the Berenike cemetery were female and young, which are said to make the best pets. They came from both India and sub-Saharan Africa. The monkeys seem to have died young because of nutritional deficiencies – hard to get good food for tropical forest monkeys in the Egyptian desert – and possibly also the drinking of salt water.

Also very interesting was that many monkeys were buried with grave goods. No dogs were so honored, and only 3 percent of cats. But 40 percent of the monkeys received burial offerings that included copper and iron collars, sections of iridiscent shell, clasps that were presumably part of leather or cloth collars,, and a woven basket containing some greasy material.

And then there were combined burials, like this one:

In this case, a young grivet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops) appears to have embraced in its arms a young cat (3–6 months old). The kitten was facing the monkey and clutching its body. A wooden clasp next to the grivet’s body was most likely part of a body harness/ collar that the monkey had worn. Similar remains of collars, made of various materials, were discovered in many monkey and cat graves in Berenike.

Another monkey was buried in an iron collar, immersed in oil.

Fascinating people, the Romans.

Marta Osypińska1, Piotr Osypiński and Iwona Zych, "A centurion’s monkey? Companion animals for the social elite in an Egyptian port on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd c. CE." Journal of Roman Archaeology 38 (2025).

Erica Reid, "Ghost Man on Second"

My dad had too few kids to field wiffle ball, so
he introduced me to the Ghost Man. Suppose
I found myself stuck at second base
when it came my time to bat: The Ghost Man
could take my place, continuing my parade
around the bases

                            Of all the ghosts
my parents left to me, this Ghost Man
serves me best — see the hurled ball
pass right through him, watch him score
a shred of glory in my name. Long after dusk
has eaten the Midwestern backyard
barely large enough to hold this game,
years after the players have gathered
the Frisbee & pie plate bases & have gone
their separate ways, the Ghost Man runs —
is still running — through the diamond-
shaped cycle that I taught him: toward & away
from home, toward & away from home.

From Ghost Man on Second, 2024

Links 1 May 2026

Door in the Alhambra

A few more lines of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles found in an Egyptian papyrus. We remember Empedocles as a natural philosopher but he seems to have been more of a charismatic religious figure who dabbled in physics; he claimed to be a god, and legend says he threw himself into Mount Etna to prove his divinity.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Noah Smith, why shoplifting is bad.

Interesting article on Viktor Orban and American post-liberalism.

Robin Hanson on the factors that make your beliefs unreliable.

Ukrainian military innovation: problems encountered in the field can lead to engineered solutions in seven days, and "The cost per kill today is $1,000, down from around $60,000 in 2022."

An ancient tourist knickknack from Hadrian's Wall found in Spain.

The sound of science fiction.

Charlotte Perkins Gillman, The Yellow Wallpaper, a famous work of psychological horror, 36-minute audio.

An ecological and economic model of What Happened to Haiti.

Photographs of old architecture in east London by Paul Anthony Gardner.

Linocuts by Mexican artist Eduardo Robledo.