Grundtvig's Church

Grundtvig's Church in Copenhagen, Denmark is a fascinating medley of medieval and modern forms.

The architect, Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, was chosen by competition in 1913. But World War I intervened, and the foundation was not laid until 1921. Most of the construction was done by 1926, but it was not finished until 1940.

Side view. The style of this building is described by various sources as "Expressionist." Wikipedia calls it "a rare example of expressionist church architecture," and, well, I guess it must be rare, since I can't remember ever having heard of expressionist architecture.

So:

The term "Expressionist architecture" initially described the activity of the German, Dutch, Austrian, Czech and Danish avant garde from 1910 until 1930. . . . The style was characterised by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms, sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel and especially glass.

Among the works said to be in this style are the Sydney Opera House and Le Corbusier's chapel at Notre-Dame-du-Haut. I know both of these well and admire them, but can't remember ever hearing them described as "expressionist."

Anyway it's an interesting building, although I prefer the simplified Gothic interior to the rather strange exterior.

The Regalia of Queen Puabi

The Penn Museum is redoing their Middle Eastern rooms, including the famous finds from the Royal Tombs of Ur. This is the regalia of Queen Puabi as they will now be displayed. If you go to the museum web site you can see old images of previous versions.

The headdress.

More.

The Land of Death

All cause mortality for white men. They're dying in Appalachia.

This is from the Atlas of United States Mortality, released in 1998 and one of our government's stranger creations.

That's for 1988-1992, but it has only gotten worse, as this more recent map shows. The gap in life expectancy between the longest- and shortest-lived counties is 20 years.

4,000-Year-Old Footprint from Ancient Ur

Left on a brick, now in the UPenn Museum.

I just read what I thought was a lame article arguing that people used to walk around on their toes, and that heel-to-toe rolling of the foot was a recent invention. But consider this evidence.

The Power of Polarization

Maybe badly polarized groups can accomplish things after all:

In this paper, we explore the effect of team political composition on performance through analysis of millions of edits to Wikipedia’s Political, Social Issues, and Science articles. We measure editors’ political alignments by their contributions to conservative versus liberal articles. A survey of editors validates that those who primarily edit liberal articles identify more strongly with the Democratic party and those who edit conservative ones with the Republican party. Our analysis then reveals that polarized teams—those consisting of a balanced set of politically diverse editors—create articles of higher quality than politically homogeneous teams. The effect appears most strongly in Wikipedia’s Political articles, but is also observed in Social Issues and even Science articles. Analysis of article “talk pages” reveals that politically polarized teams engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantively focused but linguistically diverse debates than political moderates. More intense use of Wikipedia policies by politically diverse teams suggests institutional design principles to help unleash the power of politically polarized teams.

“Higher Quality” basically translates to how well-developed the article is, with those infamous “stubs” as the lowest rung.

Holme Cardwell, Diana, 1862

Happy Solstice

Blessed be the waxing of the light.

Economists not Concerned about the End of Net Neutrality

The University of Chicago's poll of economists find that 44% support the repeal of Net Neutrality, 11% oppose it, and 36% are unsure.

Put me in the "unsure" category. I think nobody knows what will happen, and that if it does turn out to be very bad we can just bring the rule back. The various doomsday scenarios I have seen do not impress me. Nor this guy:

The arguments for the overwhelming importance of net neutrality I’ve heard didn’t make sense to me, and I would have thought that if there were good arguments they would have risen to prominence. . . .

If you think that repealing net neutrality is going to have effects that I would agree are clearly bad, I’d love to bet you about it. . . . I’d love to hear your concrete predictions about how the world will be worse as a result of the repeal of net neutrality. I’m willing to spend at least a thousand dollars betting on this topic.

Le Château du Hénan

This lovely castle was built between the early 14th century and the mid 16th, and then restored in the 19th. The oldest stone work you can see probably dates to 1426. It is located in Névez, at the mouth of the river Aven on the south coast of Brittany.  It was positioned partly for defense and partly to help enforce the lord's toll on salt shipped down the river.

Most of the pictures I have seen were taken from the river, since the castle is still in private hands.

But here's an alternate view.

And an old postcard.

The once huge estate now belongs to the state, including the fifteenth-century tide mill.

One approaches down this road. I started researching the castle because I saw a bad nineteenth-century painting of the place, which made me wonder, and I kept at it partly because I found so little. In France, it seems, a run-of-the-mill sixteenth-century castle is hardly worth a minimal wikipedia page, let alone a real write-up.

Department of Irony

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

– Joseph Stalin

The Hunter-Gatherer Romance

You may have seen several articles lately arguing that hunter-gatherers had it great and civilization was a terrible mistake. The idea seems to be in the air, partly because of the general dissatisfaction with our own civilization. Now William Buckner has a nice little article at Quillette attacking that whole line of analysis.

Much of this misguided romanticism can be traced back to a single article, Richard Lee's 1966 paper on the !Kung, which said they spend only 12 to 19 hours a week gathering food and only 40 to 44 hours a week on all their chores. This led Marshall Sahlins to call hunter-gatherers the "original affluent society." You still Lee's paper cited all the time, but really it is badly out of date:

Anthropologists Henry Harpending and LuAnn Wandsnider wrote, “Lee’s studies of !Kung diet and caloric intake have generated a misleading belief among anthropologists and others that !Kung are well fed and under little or no nutritional stress.” They note that “1964 may have been an unusually productive year for bush food,” and compare it with work describing the severe effects of the 1973 environment, “…people were starving, and weight loss and widespread social disruption occurred.” In 1986, Nancy Howell wrote that “…the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year.” In Hunter and Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert, George B. Silberbauer states that, “Undoubtedly Bushmen do succumb in years of very serious drought,” and describes how 37 individuals of another San population, the G/wi, died of dehydration during the drought of 1939. And in a 1986 article entitled “Ethnographic Romanticism and the Idea of Human Nature,” Melvin Konner and; Marjorie Shostak summed it up well, stating that, “Data on morbidity and mortality, though not necessarily relevant to abundance, certainly made use of the term “affluent” seem inappropriate.

The best numbers available suggest that life expectancy among the !Kung is about 36, which puts them around the average for pre-industrial societies. But they live in a desert with very low population density and little disease, and other hunter-gatherer societies have shorter lives: 27 among the Hiwi of Colombia and 21 among the Agta of the Philippine jungles. Some hunter-gatherers also have high rates of violence; over the course of the 20th century a man of the !Kung was much more likely to die from violence than a European, despite the World Wars. And, you know, they do so little work on their houses partly because they live in miserable huts that leak when it rains and provide little protection against dust storms.

I don't mean to say that civilization has been an unmitigated boon; obviously it has serious problems, from genocide to diabetes. But life among hunter-gatherers wasn't so great, either.

Lucas Cranach the Elder

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is putting on a show of full-length portraits, and I was struck by two works by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 – 1553). Cranach was a German Renaissance painter and printmaker who spent most of his career as court painter to the Electors of Saxony. Above is his portrait of Elector Henry the Pious. I find Cranach's work strangely uneven, but this may be because he was as much the organizer of a large studio as a painter. Many of his paintings exist in several different versions of varying quality; presumably some were copies by assistants of an original by the master, although one never knows. Looking at this, it seems clear to me that the master handled the excellent face; but who did the strange feet? The royal clothes of this period are simply astonishing.

Catherine of Mecklenburg.

Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther and painted him more than once. He personally went on his knees to Emperor Charles V to plead for lenience on Luther and the other Reformers.

My favorite Cranach portrait, Sibyl of Cleves, which I featured in one of my Faces compilations.

And one more, a detail from a religious scene.

Cranach also had one of history's coolest signatures, this dragon with a ring in its mouth.

Gettysburg, Snow Falling

Union artilleryman's view of the route of Pickett's Charge, which started from the distant tree line. Stone monument just over the wall marks the farthest point that the men of Pettigrew's North Carolina brigade reached before these guns blasted them out of existence. Since all the officers of the 1st Rhode Island artillery were by then dead or wounded it was a sergeant who told the gunners to hold their last rounds until the Rebels were only 20 yards away. "The gaps blown in their line," one gunner wrote, "were terrible to behold." The Confederates advanced not a step farther, not here or anywhere else, not then or ever.

If you wondered why I haven't been posting much lately, well, my Gettysburg thing is just one of the twenty-odd projects I'm juggling, scattered from South Carolina to Maine.

What Divides the Parties? Feminism

Peter Beinart:

Earlier this month, the research firm PerryUndem found that Democratic men were 25 points more likely than Republican women to say sexism remains a “big” or “somewhat” big problem. According to October polling data sorted for me by the Pew Research Center, Democratic men were 31 points more likely than Republican women to say the “country has not gone far enough on women’s rights.” In both surveys, the gender gap within parties was small: Republican women and Republican men answered roughly the same way as did Democratic women and Democratic men. But the gap between parties—between both Democratic men and women and Republican men and women—was large.

Since Trump’s election and the recent wave of sexual-harassment allegations, this partisan divide appears to have grown. In January, when PerryUndem asked whether “most women interpret innocent remarks as being sexist,” Republican women were 11 points more likely than Democratic men to say yes. When PerryUndem asked the question again this month, the gap had more than doubled to 23 points. A year ago, Democratic men were 30 points more likely than Republican women to strongly agree that “the country would be better off if we had more women in political office.” The gap is now 45 points.

Some of my female feminist friends are baffled and angered by the support of Republican women for candidates like Trump and Roy Moore. But it's an old story: tribe trumps gender. Remember that OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark thought she could win over black female jurors, but they all voted for acquittal.

How to Distinguish the Effect of Schooling from the Effect of Everything Else

Kevin Drum highlights some research that tries to measure the quality of school systems by separating out two variables: how well students are doing in the third grade, vs. how much they learn from the third grade to the eighth:

Third-grade scores are (probably) strongly influenced by poverty and home life, while growth from third to eighth grade is (probably) more influenced by the quality of schooling. They have little to do with each other.

I find it fascinating that the performance of students in the third grade is so weakly correlated with how much they learn over the next five years. Most of what I have read makes it seem as if genes, home life and neighborhood count for almost everything and the quality of schooling for little, but this measure makes it look like the quality of schools and teachers matters a lot. Schools vary a lot in terms of how much they teach third through eighth graders.

The study's authors write:

Grade 3 average scores are likely much more strongly influenced by early childhood experiences than the growth rates….Some caution is warranted in interpreting the average growth rates as pure measures of school effectiveness. Nonetheless, relative to average test scores (at grade 3 or any grade), the growth rates are closer to a measure of school effectiveness.

If we take the growth rates, then, as rough measures of school effectiveness, then neither socioeconomic conditions nor average test scores are very informative about school district effectiveness. Many districts with high average test scores have low growth rates, and vice versa. And many low-income districts have above average growth rates. This finding calls into question the use of average test scores as an accountability tool or a way of evaluating schools.

If this finding holds up, it very much does.

Tom Friedman Thanks the People of Alabama

Friedman is gushing:

Thank you to the majority of Alabamians for loving our country more than you hated Democrats. Thank you for voting as citizens, not as members of a tribe. Thank you for understanding that sending a credibly accused child molester to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate would not only have denigrated your state, it would have denigrated that whole legislative body. Thank you for seeing the decency of Doug Jones, even though he is a Democrat, and seeing the indecency of Roy Moore.

And most of all, thank you for sending a message to Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon that you are not as dumb as they think you are. That you see what they are up to — trying to use divisive tweets and racist dog whistles to get as many Americans as possible so aroused and inflamed that they won’t think about the real issues, they won’t think about the actual candidates, they won’t think about the national interest, or even their own self-interest, but just how much they dislike “the other” — and you’re not buying it any more.

God bless every one of you. Yours was a deeply patriotic act.

I do find it encouraging that even given our deep divisions, not everybody would vote for a yella dog of his own party over a saint from the other.

It probably helped Jones that Roy Moore has been making trouble in Alabama politics for a long time, so many voters have had time for their dislike of his shenanigans to harden.

Our Strange, Agenda-Free Radicalism

David Brooks:

We’re living in an age of radicalism.

But today’s radicalism is unusual. First, we have radical anger without radical policies.

Stylistically and culturally, Trumpian populism screams “blow it up” and “drain the swamp.” But Donald Trump’s actual policies are run-of-the-mill corporatist. The left-wing radicals talk a lot against the systems of oppression and an institutionalized injustice. But they are nothing like the radicals of the 1930s or the 1960s.

Today’s radicals do not want to upend the meritocracy, which is creating a caste system of inherited inequality. They don’t want to stop technical innovation, which is displacing millions of workers. They don’t have plans to reverse individualism, which atomizes society and destroys community. A $15 minimum wage may be left wing, but it’s not Marxist-Leninism.

The level of anger in America is indeed completely unrelated to the agendas of our political parties. A few years ago we had a screaming debate about taxes, accompanied by charges of "fascism" and "socialism," but the issue was really whether the top income tax rate would be 33% or 38%. Sometimes it seems like the loud rhetoric serves partly to hide the smallness of the actual differences between the parties.

So far as I can see there are no new ideas in our politics. Nobody knows how the meritocracy might be improved or what might replace it, and nobody has a plan for restoring the lost community solidarity that Brooks spends so much time bemoaning. Nobody knows what to do about the coming rise of robots and artificial intelligence. Nobody knows how to heal the rifts in our nation.

So we shout empty slogans and accuse each other of sin.

Philip Beesley, Astrocyte

Cross between a work of art and an experiment in material science.

Irish Genes

Ross Byrne et al. have just posted the pre-print of a new article on Irish genes, based on studies of the modern population. They find, first of all, that the Irish are clearly distinguishable, genetically, from the rest of Britain; the biggest division in their dataset is between the two islands. The Xes in the diagram above are representations of individual genomes arranged according to variation; the colors represent groupings in the data. You can see that the distance between the genomes, by variation, roughly maps out the British Isles. Note that while southern Britain is a long way from southern Ireland, northern Ireland and western Scotland overlap.

Close-up of northern Britain and Northern Ireland, with marks for two genetic types that were found in both region. This clearly shows mixing of these populations. It does not show, however, when the mixing took place. Some could be early medieval migration from Ireland to Scotland, some from the Scots migration to Ireland in the 16th century (the Ulster plantations), and some from the economic migration of Irish people to Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this study they used the genomes of people who lived in the same district as their grandparents, to exclude recent mobility, but that doesn't reach far enough back to catch people whose ancestors relocated in 1800 or 1848.

Cladogram showing how the various populations are related to each other. The authors think their data shows a strong "east-west cline," that is, the farther you get from London, the more different people's genes are from those of the bright red Anglo-Saxon heartland.

Note that Orkney is a serious outlier, quite different from England, Scotland, or Ireland. And this is not just because of the Vikings; even excluding their genes, Orkney still stands out.

The authors also found a lot of variation within Ireland. They knew that some of the difference between Dublin and Ulster and the rest of the island would be because of British immigration in recent centuries, so they worked to exclude that contribution from their calculations. The result is a map of variation that, once again, roughly maps out the island. Even more remarkable, it seems to map out the ancient division of Ireland into five kingdoms known as "fifths." So if you exclude Vikings, Ulstermen from Scotland and English who settled Dublin and Waterford, it looks like many families of rural Ireland have been in the same districts for 1,500 years.

Iraq Declares Victory over the Islamic State

Yesterday Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi went on television to make this announcement:

Dear Iraqis, your land has been completely liberated, and your towns and villages have been returned to the homeland. The dream of liberation became a reality. . . . Our forces fully control the Iraqi-Syrian border, and thus we can announce the end of the war against Daesh.

Of course there are still thousands of radical soldiers on the loose, so terrorism will continue. But considering that the Islamic State once controlled a third of the country, this counts as a victory for civilization.

A Skull from Colonial Delaware

European man of middle age from the Avery's Rest site in Delaware. The space in his teeth was worn by habitually smoking a clay tobacco pipe.

Peter Gardiner, Things on Fire

Peter Gardiner (born 1965) is an Australian artist who might have a bit of an obsession. Above, Swamp Lantern III, 2012.

House III, 2016

Untitled, 2016.

Lightning Study 2, 2017

Exotic Instrument, 2017