For those of you with an interest in linguistics, here are some very enjoyable podcasts on the development of English. Someone in a ChicagoBoyz comments thread, I think, referred me to Episodes 28-30 for the incidental political history that was included in them, concerning the time we usually associate with King Arthur.
I've been watching the Starz series "Outlander," a time-travel yarn about an woman who leaves post-WWII England, via a McGuffin that doesn't matter, and lands in Scotland just before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. As I get older I find it more and more difficult to follow movie dialogue, especially BBC productions with regional accents, but for some reason I never have trouble with thick old-fashioned Scots accents, maybe because I've listened to so many old ballads. I could listen to that accent all day. (The show throws in a lot of Gaelic, too, of which I don't speak a word beyond "slainte," but it sounds incredibly romantic.) Anyway, the point is that the Frisian described in Episode 28 of the linguistic podcasts sounds an awful lot like a mashup between Cockney- and Scots-flavored English.
Song of Brynhild
So, among Viking-oriented friends this week (of whom I have a surprising number), the big news was a study that showed that half of the Viking invaders of England were female. This contradicts long held beliefs among scholars of the graves of early Viking invaders, because the grave goods are only very rarely female brooches and dresses, and almost always are swords or other weapons. Scholars assumed that this meant that the person in the grave was a man.
On studying the bones themselves, however, it turns out that lots of those buried with weapons turn out to have been women.
I see that our old friend Lars Walker is not impressed with the study. He cites a rebuttal, and comments:
The importance of the finding goes beyond that there were women among the earliest settlers, though. It is that women were not restricted to the roles that our scholars assumed they were restricted to filling.But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.They'll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made.
We have plenty of reason to doubt that women fought in the field as part of Viking armies, both in terms of the written evidence from the early sagas, absence of mention of it from the surviving Anglo-Saxon records, and of course the physical facts of Viking-age combat. On the other hand, there is ample evidence in the sources of women who were trusted with the defense of homes, and homes being established in an invaded land will of course need especial defense. For that matter, the prominent role of women in the population of Northern Europe, and their affection for weapons even as wedding gifts, was remarked as far back as Tacitus' Germania.
What I think is important to take away from this study is that what scholars were certain about for generations about the rigidity of female gender roles simply wasn't so. Many women built their lives around an image of themselves with a sword, not a brooch, and their contemporaries accepted this so much that they honored them in death with the marks of the life they had chosen. We are the ones who assumed they wouldn't, or couldn't, do that. Best not to repeat the mistake, which was more a relic of 19th-century attitudes than a careful reading of the writings of our ancestors.
War Dogs
Seriously? We don't make it a point to bring home military dogs when they're retired from active duty?
Culture and freedom
David Foster's site, ChicagoBoyz, linked me to a site called askblog, including this quotation:
[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa. Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.Another interesting post at the same site described a conservative tendency to arrange issues along a civilization/barbarism axis, while progressives tend to think in terms of an oppressor/oppressed axis.
I Imagine This Works Well
"Soldierfit," a workout plan based not on boot camp -- that's been done, and never very successfully -- but on the military life post boot camp. Assigning you an "NCO" to check on you every 30 days and chew you out for bad habits is probably somewhat effective, if you stay with the program.
Of course, it's a gimmick. You could always walk away, unlike the real military. Nevertheless, the structure probably would help a lot of people. One of the things I try to do for a few of my closest friends, not here on the internet but the ones I have in the physical world, is to keep in touch with them about their priorities and check on their progress regularly. Obviously I wouldn't impose myself if they did not wish it, but several of them have said that they like knowing they will have to account for their progress on a regular basis. It sometimes gives them that push to go to the gym, to write an extra chapter on their novel or dissertation, or whatever else they may be working on that is important to them.
That said, talking about what you're trying to do feels like accomplishing something -- and it's not, it's just talking. You have to hit that balance where what we are going to talk about is your accomplishment, so there'd better be one!
Of course, it's a gimmick. You could always walk away, unlike the real military. Nevertheless, the structure probably would help a lot of people. One of the things I try to do for a few of my closest friends, not here on the internet but the ones I have in the physical world, is to keep in touch with them about their priorities and check on their progress regularly. Obviously I wouldn't impose myself if they did not wish it, but several of them have said that they like knowing they will have to account for their progress on a regular basis. It sometimes gives them that push to go to the gym, to write an extra chapter on their novel or dissertation, or whatever else they may be working on that is important to them.
That said, talking about what you're trying to do feels like accomplishing something -- and it's not, it's just talking. You have to hit that balance where what we are going to talk about is your accomplishment, so there'd better be one!
Baby steps in medicine
Twenty-five years ago there was great hope that advances in the understanding of the genetic underpinnings of cystic fibrosis heralded a cure in the near future. That early hope was dashed, but medical researchers keep making small, concrete advances, many of which can hugely open up the life of teenagers and young adults suffering from this disease. It may not be too long before we can refer to middle-aged people suffering from it. It was not so many years ago that only a lucky child could survive it to the age of six.
Umberto Eco on Charlie Brown
An unlikely review, recently made available by the New York Review of Books. (H/t: The Paris Review.)
His review is harmed, I think, by his omission of Marcie.
His review is harmed, I think, by his omission of Marcie.
Untapped Potential, or, the Rage of the Blank Slater
There's something Marxists, modern feminists, and militant atheists have in common...with each other but not with me. It ties back to the pernicious myth of the tabula rasa.
Nineteenth-century socialists, going back at least to Charles Fourier, sometimes had the notion that the human race, the whole of it, was full of enormous untapped potential...and that all it needed was the right arrangements (as envisioned by the socialists themselves) to unlock it, 'til they turned the seas to lemonade and freed the poles of ice (which in Fourier's mind was a good idea). The Leninist idea of the "New Communist Man" is the same idea...we could unlock this amazing, untapped potential, if only these wicked social arrangements (or the incomplete progress of the Revolution) weren't holding it back.[1] I think, if I believed that, I would have to be outraged at the abundance we were missing for no reason.
(I'm identifying the idea with blank-slatism, and it is tied to it, but Fourier wasn't a full-fledged blank-slater since he did believe in different human temperaments, and I remember one modest Marxist suggesting that the "New Men" after the Revolution wouldn't all have the same brilliance...just that the average would be "a Goethe, a Freud, or a Marx" while the geniuses would be beyond description. But the central conceit of huge potential, being held back by evil forces, was there.)
Reality is different. The human race has evolved rapidly in recent times, and the things we can do now are awe-inspiring...but intellectual ability is largely inherited, and not every person or every group of persons inherits the same amount. My own experience teaching doesn't suggest that each student's mind is just waiting to be molded to genius level. The idea of enormous untapped genius just waiting to be awakened all over the place doesn't make evolutionary sense, either. In denouncing wild claims about talking apes, Noam Chomsky managed to say something wise:
Limited brain power, with some men's far more limited than others', is not an arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race, but that will take hard work, and the day is not today.
So much for socialists and intellectual power; now on to modern feminism and pleasure. In 1928, Margaret Mead informed the world that it simply wasn't so, that she'd found a world in Samoa where girls could and did sleep around as much as possible...with no bad effects at all; in fact the society came off as peaceful and happy as a dream of Fourier. Her account wasn't quite that one-sided and her debunkers are said to have exaggerated too much as well...but the idea entered Western consciousness. And from that, I think, proceeds the feminist rage at "slut-shaming" or the stigmatizing of "sex work." If girls can really have it all, the desires of the moment and the deeper desires of their biology, why should anyone be telling them "no"? All we need is just a little conditioning, shouting down those dupes of the Patriarchy, and then we can live the life of this calypso song. Who wouldn't be outraged at all we'd been missing?
Reality is different. Her most trenchant critics may have exaggerated, but Mead was wrong (or "Not Even Wrong") about Samoa. From the dawn of history through the 1920's, I think almost all the human race understood there was something wrong with heavy promiscuity, especially for women.[2] These fine folks at the University of Virginia found that as the number of the wife's previous sexual entanglements goes up, the quality of the marriage goes down. (The correlation is much weaker for men; the marriage is less likely to be top-quality if he has a child by someone else, but the researchers didn't find a significant relation to his number of prior sex partners.) My own observation, and the customs of every people I've read about, suggest that a woman with a "past" becomes a less attractive as a potential wife...so that families worldwide would fight, kill, or even sue over a daughter's seduction. It's so widespread as to make me think it's hardwired into human nature. The Christians wouldn't be surprised that following the Commandments made the husband and wife happier, and even an observant secular (unseduced by Mead) might get the idea by reading about foreign cultures or watching the lives around him.[3]
The agonies of frustrated youth are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race. But that will take hard work, if it's worth doing at all, and the day is not today.
Looking at religion from the outside...there's not a one of them that'll convince you it's true by simple argument and evidence (I greatly disappointed one of my pals when the "miracle of Fatima" did not turn me to Catholicism). Religion gets hold of people at another level entirely. Read scriptures by "plain meaning" and you'll find the central parts vacuous or outright barbaric. (As Christians and Muslims sometimes do about each other's.) Joshua's conquest of Canaan at God's command -- complete with commands to slaughter and subjugate -- looks as false an excuse as the Hamas Charter's claim that Palestine is fiqh and meant for Muslims alone. Now the believers have provided millennia of commentary, and even the scriptures have passages that are far more beautiful and subtle, but if you don't believe them they look like layers of pearl on top of a very nasty core of grit--not the work of a divine being. If you think a religion is just a set of factual propositions that people are convinced of, then religion in general, or at least the one you like least, looks like a simple con-job if not a demon's creed. How amazing that so many millions could fall for this...and how superior you must be to have seen through it. How tempting to end up like John Derbyshire's atheist father...watching the crowds at St. Peter's on television, and yelling at the screen, "You bloody fools!"
Reality is different. You no more comprehend a religion from reading its scriptures and apologetics than you comprehend marriage by reading your state's case law on the subject. Chances are, if you're an unbeliever, you're just missing an instinct your fellowman has...and as I commented here, that gives you little reason to be smug. I only tried the Book of Mormon once--I was really stunned that an intelligent person could think it was for real--but I have known too many intelligent Mormons (and liked every single one I've met, plus the one who writes my favorite webcomic, not to mention that extremely decent fellow I voted for the year before last) to dream I'm so far their superior.
The absurdities of religion (or, if you're religious, the absurdities of the other fellow's religion) are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society. It's not arbitrary even if it's obviously wrong, because it's feeding a real human need. The content can change, and maybe in a way that's better for the human race, but that takes time and agony. (some people can scratch their religious itch without believing the contents of any faith, but it's uncommon, and most quite understandably feel no need to leave the faith they've already got). The churches and mosques of the world are not crammed with "bloody fools" just waiting for, or else unable to understand, the five-minute explanation that'll turn them away once and for all.
Blank-slate ideas about plastic human nature lead to fantasies of abundant untapped potential. They lead also to the idea that our greatest frustrations can be talked or trained away, and from both places they lead to pointless rage.
[1] This is doubtless why the so-called "definitive answer" to The Book of Soul Destroying Blasphemy, by Abdul al-Hazred and the Foul Fiend Flibbertigibbet, is by an red-diaper Marxist (with, apparently, no more than Marx's level of commitment to accuracy when reporting the writings of others).
[2] Common sense suggests that men who get around too much are lacking something...like self-control and judgment...that makes for a good husband (there's also a remark here that compulsive womanizers, like drunks and heavy gamblers, proved likelier to break in the stress of battle). I do not think anyone should be brought up to sleep around freely, but I am talking about instinctive, emotional consequences here...and as far as I can tell these are not made equal between the two sexes, but fall harder on women.
[3] A few oddball thinkers (Fourier among them) had the idea that sexual frustration was unnecessary, and the right social arrangements could eliminate it. (I wonder if the Utilitarian Utopia of Brave New World -- where "everyone belongs to everyone else" -- was inspired by him.) But as far as I can tell they really were odd, and seen as such.
Nineteenth-century socialists, going back at least to Charles Fourier, sometimes had the notion that the human race, the whole of it, was full of enormous untapped potential...and that all it needed was the right arrangements (as envisioned by the socialists themselves) to unlock it, 'til they turned the seas to lemonade and freed the poles of ice (which in Fourier's mind was a good idea). The Leninist idea of the "New Communist Man" is the same idea...we could unlock this amazing, untapped potential, if only these wicked social arrangements (or the incomplete progress of the Revolution) weren't holding it back.[1] I think, if I believed that, I would have to be outraged at the abundance we were missing for no reason.
(I'm identifying the idea with blank-slatism, and it is tied to it, but Fourier wasn't a full-fledged blank-slater since he did believe in different human temperaments, and I remember one modest Marxist suggesting that the "New Men" after the Revolution wouldn't all have the same brilliance...just that the average would be "a Goethe, a Freud, or a Marx" while the geniuses would be beyond description. But the central conceit of huge potential, being held back by evil forces, was there.)
Reality is different. The human race has evolved rapidly in recent times, and the things we can do now are awe-inspiring...but intellectual ability is largely inherited, and not every person or every group of persons inherits the same amount. My own experience teaching doesn't suggest that each student's mind is just waiting to be molded to genius level. The idea of enormous untapped genius just waiting to be awakened all over the place doesn't make evolutionary sense, either. In denouncing wild claims about talking apes, Noam Chomsky managed to say something wise:
It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.Give a prize to that villain. The human brain as it is costs a lot of energy to maintain; humans, like other creatures, evolved in a world where getting enough to eat was a real challenge; maintaining a massive store of brainpower they weren't even using would be an evolutionary absurdity, even without the idea that Man was waiting for a bunch of socialists to teach them to use it.
Limited brain power, with some men's far more limited than others', is not an arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race, but that will take hard work, and the day is not today.
So much for socialists and intellectual power; now on to modern feminism and pleasure. In 1928, Margaret Mead informed the world that it simply wasn't so, that she'd found a world in Samoa where girls could and did sleep around as much as possible...with no bad effects at all; in fact the society came off as peaceful and happy as a dream of Fourier. Her account wasn't quite that one-sided and her debunkers are said to have exaggerated too much as well...but the idea entered Western consciousness. And from that, I think, proceeds the feminist rage at "slut-shaming" or the stigmatizing of "sex work." If girls can really have it all, the desires of the moment and the deeper desires of their biology, why should anyone be telling them "no"? All we need is just a little conditioning, shouting down those dupes of the Patriarchy, and then we can live the life of this calypso song. Who wouldn't be outraged at all we'd been missing?
Reality is different. Her most trenchant critics may have exaggerated, but Mead was wrong (or "Not Even Wrong") about Samoa. From the dawn of history through the 1920's, I think almost all the human race understood there was something wrong with heavy promiscuity, especially for women.[2] These fine folks at the University of Virginia found that as the number of the wife's previous sexual entanglements goes up, the quality of the marriage goes down. (The correlation is much weaker for men; the marriage is less likely to be top-quality if he has a child by someone else, but the researchers didn't find a significant relation to his number of prior sex partners.) My own observation, and the customs of every people I've read about, suggest that a woman with a "past" becomes a less attractive as a potential wife...so that families worldwide would fight, kill, or even sue over a daughter's seduction. It's so widespread as to make me think it's hardwired into human nature. The Christians wouldn't be surprised that following the Commandments made the husband and wife happier, and even an observant secular (unseduced by Mead) might get the idea by reading about foreign cultures or watching the lives around him.[3]
The agonies of frustrated youth are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society, but an inescapable reality...it might someday be changed if we can re-engineer the human race. But that will take hard work, if it's worth doing at all, and the day is not today.
Looking at religion from the outside...there's not a one of them that'll convince you it's true by simple argument and evidence (I greatly disappointed one of my pals when the "miracle of Fatima" did not turn me to Catholicism). Religion gets hold of people at another level entirely. Read scriptures by "plain meaning" and you'll find the central parts vacuous or outright barbaric. (As Christians and Muslims sometimes do about each other's.) Joshua's conquest of Canaan at God's command -- complete with commands to slaughter and subjugate -- looks as false an excuse as the Hamas Charter's claim that Palestine is fiqh and meant for Muslims alone. Now the believers have provided millennia of commentary, and even the scriptures have passages that are far more beautiful and subtle, but if you don't believe them they look like layers of pearl on top of a very nasty core of grit--not the work of a divine being. If you think a religion is just a set of factual propositions that people are convinced of, then religion in general, or at least the one you like least, looks like a simple con-job if not a demon's creed. How amazing that so many millions could fall for this...and how superior you must be to have seen through it. How tempting to end up like John Derbyshire's atheist father...watching the crowds at St. Peter's on television, and yelling at the screen, "You bloody fools!"
Reality is different. You no more comprehend a religion from reading its scriptures and apologetics than you comprehend marriage by reading your state's case law on the subject. Chances are, if you're an unbeliever, you're just missing an instinct your fellowman has...and as I commented here, that gives you little reason to be smug. I only tried the Book of Mormon once--I was really stunned that an intelligent person could think it was for real--but I have known too many intelligent Mormons (and liked every single one I've met, plus the one who writes my favorite webcomic, not to mention that extremely decent fellow I voted for the year before last) to dream I'm so far their superior.
The absurdities of religion (or, if you're religious, the absurdities of the other fellow's religion) are not the arbitrary imposition of a wicked society. It's not arbitrary even if it's obviously wrong, because it's feeding a real human need. The content can change, and maybe in a way that's better for the human race, but that takes time and agony. (some people can scratch their religious itch without believing the contents of any faith, but it's uncommon, and most quite understandably feel no need to leave the faith they've already got). The churches and mosques of the world are not crammed with "bloody fools" just waiting for, or else unable to understand, the five-minute explanation that'll turn them away once and for all.
Blank-slate ideas about plastic human nature lead to fantasies of abundant untapped potential. They lead also to the idea that our greatest frustrations can be talked or trained away, and from both places they lead to pointless rage.
[1] This is doubtless why the so-called "definitive answer" to The Book of Soul Destroying Blasphemy, by Abdul al-Hazred and the Foul Fiend Flibbertigibbet, is by an red-diaper Marxist (with, apparently, no more than Marx's level of commitment to accuracy when reporting the writings of others).
[2] Common sense suggests that men who get around too much are lacking something...like self-control and judgment...that makes for a good husband (there's also a remark here that compulsive womanizers, like drunks and heavy gamblers, proved likelier to break in the stress of battle). I do not think anyone should be brought up to sleep around freely, but I am talking about instinctive, emotional consequences here...and as far as I can tell these are not made equal between the two sexes, but fall harder on women.
[3] A few oddball thinkers (Fourier among them) had the idea that sexual frustration was unnecessary, and the right social arrangements could eliminate it. (I wonder if the Utilitarian Utopia of Brave New World -- where "everyone belongs to everyone else" -- was inspired by him.) But as far as I can tell they really were odd, and seen as such.
Department of Missing the Point
You can't blame a mother of a fallen son, in a way. Poor boy loved speed, he wasn't to blame. If only the driver had been looking further down the road, before he made that turn.
He was going 97 miles an hour at the time of the accident. I've gone faster than 115, through traffic, on a bridge where motion was constrained. If I'd have been killed doing it, no one but me was to blame.
Catechism 2290: "Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others' safety on the road, at sea, or in the air." I've made my own confession on this point, I'm not too proud to admit.
He was going 97 miles an hour at the time of the accident. I've gone faster than 115, through traffic, on a bridge where motion was constrained. If I'd have been killed doing it, no one but me was to blame.
Catechism 2290: "Those incur grave guilt who, by drunkenness or a love of speed, endanger their own and others' safety on the road, at sea, or in the air." I've made my own confession on this point, I'm not too proud to admit.
You Can't Stay Here
I'm at a conference in a wicked city. Mrs. W. is visiting #2 Stepson in a wickeder one. Here's a song about how decent men behave at times like this.
"The rhyme's not rich, the style is crude and rough" - but I wish there were more such songs.
"The rhyme's not rich, the style is crude and rough" - but I wish there were more such songs.
Malthus was a chump
From "The Age of Global Warming," about Malthus's 1798 prediction that the human population would grow exponentially while the food supply would grow only arithmetically:
Plants and animals, including humans, convert carbohydrate to hydrocarbons (fatty acids) to store energy efficiently. In using fossil fuels, mankind unlocked a store of energy used by plants and animal[s] [that had been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years] and, from the time of the Industrial Revolution, started to apply it on an industrial scale.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was becoming the world's first industrialised econom. The Promethean Revolution was underway.
If Bacon was the prophet of man's material liberation through the advance of science and technology, Malthus was its Jeremiah--prophesying that mankind's future was to be trapped in an agrarian past which the Promethean Revolution was already making history.
If ever there was an inflection point in the economic hisotry of mankind, this was it. It was a spectacularly inapposite moment to the be writing a treatise on economic development and population based on the assumption of the static technological endowment of pre-industrial societies when industrialisation was taking mankind out of the Malthusian trap.A little over 200 years later, it turns out that the food supply is capable of growing geometrically, while mankind with access to birth control nearly stops growing at all.
An Interview with Farage
A name likely to become more familiar to Americans, Nigel Farage leads the UK Independence Party.
Adams: You’ve seen the comments by the government that they were going to withdraw the passports of folks in ISIS who are Brits . . .UPDATE: It's a trap!
Farage: . . . That’s not what they said at all. They said they’d like to do something. I said two weeks ago, we don’t want these guys back in Britain. Once again, Cameron just mirrors everything I say because he realizes the public agree with me. He worded it beautifully, he’s brilliant. He said he would like to take away their passports, knowing full well that the European Court of Human Rights won’t let us do it.
More Shorts from the War on Thinking Things Through
The Economist has published and instantly withdrawn a review of a book on slavery. Those who remember our reparations discussion will understand that I am sympathetic to the claims of the book about the facts, which the Economist panned as "advocacy" because "[a]lmost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains." Still, what we just witnessed was not a debate about the accuracy of the facts, nor even the accuracy of the portrayal of the people as victims or villains. A 'debate' of this brevity is a shouting-down of an unwelcome viewpoint, not a discussion of its merits.
Meanwhile in England, a woman is beheaded in her garden:
Meanwhile in England, a woman is beheaded in her garden:
Some residents claimed last night that the suspect was a local man who had converted to Islam last year, but those claims could not be verified. Detectives said they had ruled out terrorism.Detectives are quick with that conclusion, it seems to me. It may be a one-man act of terror, or it may be a crazy with a machete. But wouldn't you like, in the interest of knowing the truth of why the victim was murdered, to take a day or two to investigate before you rule things out?
"A Forecast of When We Will Run Out of Each Metal"
Not really that, of course, as the author makes clear.
Still, it's the kind of exercise that xkcd would have enjoyed putting together -- only without the clever ALT text.
In my opinion, there are two caveats that are always worth considering when looking at something like this.In a sense every economic good is limited, more-or-less scarce. On the other hand, many things can substitute for one another: perhaps organic carbon for the kind of metallic wire we have used to conduct electricity for so long.
1. “Reserves” are an engineering number that are based on economic viability. Technically speaking, there are small concentrations of gold everywhere. It is just not usually viable to mine 0.1 g/t gold. When we will “run out” of each mineral in this chart is based on current reserves and prices. If the gold price doubles, then suddenly it is economic to mine more.
2. This chart is a reminder that something has to give. Either prices are going to have to go up, or new amazing discoveries have to be made to keep prices down. It’s basic economics, and either way it seems that there are many opportunities in the mining industry for investors and speculators on both fronts.
Still, it's the kind of exercise that xkcd would have enjoyed putting together -- only without the clever ALT text.
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