Quotulatiousness

February 9, 2024

The (so-far limited) ability to read the Herculaneum Papyri may vastly increase our knowledge about the Roman world

Filed under: History, Italy, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the achievement of the three young researchers who were awarded the Vesuvius Challenge prize earlier this month, and what it might mean for classicists and other academics:

On Monday morning, Farritor and two other young Vesuvius Challenge notables, Youssef Nader and Julian Schillinger, were announced as winners of the grand prize. Nader and Schillinger had, like Farritor, already won Vesuvius Challenge prizes for smaller technical discoveries, and Nader had in fact been a mere heartbeat behind Farritor in producing the same “porphyras” from the same scan. After Farritor nabbed his US$40,000 “first letters” prize, the three decided to combine their efforts to net the big fish.

The result is a text that represents about five per cent of one of the thousands of scrolls recovered — and there may be more not yet recovered — from the Villa of the Papyri. The enormous villa was owned by an unknown Roman notable, but there are clues that one of its librarians was the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who lived from around 110 to 35 BC. Until his identity was connected with the library, Philodemus did not receive too much attention even from classicists. But the Vesuvius Challenge efforts have now yielded fragments of what has to be an Epicurean text — one which discusses the delights of music and food, and condemns an unnamed adversary, possibly a Stoic, for failing to give a philosophical account of sensual pleasure.

The recovery of dozens more of the works of Philodemus would be — one might now say “will be” — a world-changing event for the classics. We know Philodemus was close to Calpurnius Piso (101-43 BC), the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a likely owner of the doomed villa. He almost certainly had a front-row seat for the prelude to the end of the Roman Republic. We know he wrote works on religion, on natural philosophy and on history: even his thoughts on music and poetry would be of marked interest.

But nobody knows what else, what copies of older works, may be lurking in Philodemus’s library. At this moment antiquarians know the titles of dozens of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; we are missing major works of Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and Eratosthenes. We know that Sulla wrote his memoirs and that Cato the Elder wrote a seven-book history of Rome. Any of these old writings, or others of equal significance, may materialize suddenly out of oblivion now, thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge. It’s an impressive triumph for the idea of prize-giving as an approach to solving scientific problems, and the news release from the challenge offers a discussion of what the funding team got right and where the project will go next.

His Year: Julius Caesar (59 BC)

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published Jul 5, 2016
(more…)

QotD: “Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Thunderbirds Are Go!”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To break the BBC’s monopoly on viewing, Independent Television had been founded by Act of Parliament in 1955 as a network of fifteen regional television franchises funded by advertising. Alerted by TV Times, on that September Thursday in 1965, the nation’s children (including Your Humble Scribe) settled down to watch a man with a mid-Atlantic accent as he counted down a series of weird spaceships and aircraft with the sequence, “Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Thunderbirds Are Go!”

Although there had been earlier offerings from the same stable, such as Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Stingray, and others which followed, it was Thunderbirds that gripped my generation and has never really let go. Set in the future, the genre devised by Gerry Anderson focused on the heroic exploits of secret but benevolent organisations operating from remote or hidden bases on land, in the sky or on the moon. Equipped with advanced technology, their missions were to protect civilisation from aggression, accident and sabotage, countering devious, often extra-terrestrial opponents. It was his brother’s service in the RAF that gave Anderson a life-long fascination with flying machines. Thunderbird Field at Glendale, Arizona, where his older brother learned to fly, provided a name for the series.

In his future worlds, planet Earth is generally united under a world president, in contrast to the traumas of the recently passed world war. Each programme featured life-like puppets, filmed in what Anderson dubbed “Supermarionation”. They were tributes to his brother. It was on 27 April 1944 that these future television series were really born. Flight Sergeant Lionel Anderson never got to pilot Stingray or Thunderbird One, or fly an Interceptor from Cloudbase, for during the early hours of that April Thursday, his twin-engined Mosquito was hit by flak on a night intruder raid and crashed near Deelen in Holland. Now he and his navigator, Sergeant Bert Hayward, lie in the corner of a cemetery in Arnhem, “Mourned by his devoted parents and brother Gerald”, as the Commonwealth War Grave headstone reads.

The war traumatised Gerry Anderson, whose Jewish grandparents had fled pogroms on the Polish–Russian frontier. He would complete his own national service in the RAF and experienced two more dramatic flying events. In 1948, he saw a Mosquito — his brother’s aircraft type — crash during an air display, killing many bystanders. Later a Spitfire came in to land without its undercarriage lowered. The helplessness he felt, and need for some divine intervention, such as that provided by the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (Stingray), International Rescue (Thunderbirds), Spectrum (Captain Scarlet) or Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation (UFO), provided more seeds for the future series, where the world was united and fought external foes. In German, the last was screened as Weltraumkommando SHADO, but the concept precisely echoed the UNIT organisation of Doctor Who.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s we were promised robots, space travel, lunar colonies and travel to Mars. Films, television series, science fiction short stories and magazines guaranteed it to the point of entitlement. Airfix plastic model kits, cardboard cut-outs on cereal packets, Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky diecast toys reinforced this expectation, underwritten by the real, manned Mercury missions of 1961–63, Gemini space launches of 1965–66 and Apollo craft of 1968–72. Gerry Anderson’s vision (shared by the American script writers of Star Trek, which debuted exactly a year after Thunderbirds on 8 September 1966) of a world government did not seem absurd to the young minds of 1965. It is partly the innocence of those years which touches us today. I, for one, still feel short-changed.

Peter Caddick-Adams, “Broadcasting anniversaries”, The Critic, 2023-11-04.

February 8, 2024

“Mwa-mwa-mwa”, they said

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray expands on the topic of yesterday’s post about the legacy media wanting you not to do your own research because it might lead to the “wrong” kind of answers:

I’m a hundred pages into a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I meant to spend last night reading it. But then I accidentally looked at social media.

For years, now, I’ve been watching as journalists and politicians connect a set of fact claims to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the evidence they’ve just given: This happened, and this happened, and this happened, and, trust us, all of that means this. It snaps your head back, because the statement about the meaning of the evidence is so ridiculous they can’t possibly have failed to notice. The news is frequently a series of bizarre interpretive non-sequiturs.

I wrote about a favorite example here, as an army of Barack Obama hagiographers described The Lightbringer’s glorious childhood in Indonesia. He went there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in 1966, during a massive purge of communists by the army that included a great deal of mass killing, and Obama’s biographers describe the future American president being a young child in a place where rivers were choked with corpses and soldiers marched prisoners through the streets. Then, casually, they conclude that his time in Indonesia was idyllic and warm, and Jakarta was the place where this wonderfully decent future leader learned the gentle values of civic engagement and democratic pluralism.

See also this example, from back in the days when I didn’t have many subscribers, discussing an op-ed piece that described the Freedom Convoy as a movement of anti-government radicals who wanted to live in a society with no rules at all and marched on Ottawa behind the banner of authoritarianism to implement their fascist agenda.

Over and over again, reading the “news” that these people write, you catch yourself muttering but you JUST SAID …

Fact claims don’t add up, categories clash, paragraphs self-refute, sentences start out insistently claiming X and then wander into a firm insistence upon Not X before the period arrives at the end. The great complex of global news and politics has the internal consistency and logic of the day ward at a mental hospital.

Last night we seem to have suddenly turned the knob on that machine up to eleven, BECAUSE HITLER IS IN MOSCOW TO DO AN INTERVIEW. The people who are proud that we’re fighting authoritarianism by arresting the leading figure of the political opposition and throwing him off the ballot are also very angry that Tucker Carlson is interviewing an autocrat, and they hate autocracy, so Tucker Carlson must be arrested and bankrupted and barred from returning to the United States, to stand up to authoritarianism. I had a moment last night when I sincerely wondered about the wisdom of paying attention, because the experience of hearing from The Responsible People™ became painfully hallucinatory.

The officials at the EU get to decide who counts as a real journalist and who gets ruined, to protect democracy. Ukraine is the brave and incorruptible vanguard of ideal democracy, by the way, and so pure it floats, like an ad for soap. Nothing bad has ever happened there, you Nazi, but now Satan Putin’s vampire fangs drip with innocent blood, and there’s absolutely nothing else to say about it, send cash.

Watching people like Bill Kristol and David Frum comment on real-world events now is like watching a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break at a bus shelter. The connection between fact and interpretation has become painfully severed. A whole layer of allegedly high-status people have gone barking mad. We need to arrest everyone who disagrees with us about politics or else we’re going to lose our system of open society to authoritarianism, and you really ought to smoke some of whatever we have inside this glass pipe.

North American newspaper economics

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, History, Media, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses some of the issues ailing Canadian and American newspapers which are not easily solvable (government subsidies, as attempted in Canada, just turn the recipients into an underpaid PR branch of the governing party … not a good look in a democratic nation):

“Newseum newspaper headlines” by m01229 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

So, as a little corrective, a quick jaunt through what actually ails American journalism. The concentration is upon the big newspapers because that’s where the problem is worst. The conclusion is that it’s gonna get a lot, lot, lot, worse too. Because the industry is facing a base economic problem that it’s not willing to actually face up to. Or, at least, all the journalists writing about it aren’t — there’s the occasional sign that some of the business side of the equation grasp it.

[…]

Before Y2K American newspapers were segmented along geographic lines. The size of the country, the lack of a long distance passenger railroad network, meant that this was just so. If you’re printing a daily paper then you’ve got to deliver it daily. On the day it’s meant to refer to as well. If Chicago is 1,100 miles (no, I’ve not looked it up but that’s within an order of magnitude of being right, which is better than many newspapers manage with numbers) from New Orleans then the same newspaper is going to find it difficult to print and deliver to both markets. Add in the fact that trains take a week to traverse that distance, passenger trains – anyone who has ever travelled Amtrak will say it feels that long at least — included.

You could not and therefore did not have national newspaper (USA Today, with satellite printing plants, was an attempt to deal with this and slightly earlier than our cut off date but doesn’t change the basic story) distributions. What you had was a series of local and regional monopolies. Each one centred on a large population centre and serving the area around it that could be reasonably reached by truck overnight. Chicago and Cincinnati, not 1,100 miles away from each other, did have entirely different newspapers.

By contrast, and just as an example, the British newspaper market was national from pre-WWI. We simply did have overnight at worst passenger rail that covered the country. Partly it’s a much, much, smaller place, partly the passenger rail system was just different. So, printing overnight (and some maintained separate Scottish editions and plants) meant that those papers that came off the press in London at 8pm were on sale in Glasgow at 8 am, those that came off the press in London at 4 am were on sale in London at 8am. That’s not exact but it’s a good enough pencil sketch.

Cincinnati newspaper(s) served Cincinnati. Chicago, Chicago and New Orleans the area of New Orleans. There simply wasn’t a “national press” in the US in that British sense.

OK. But this also meant that American newspapers were much more like a monopoly in their local area than anything else. Network effects still exist even before computer networks after all. The most important of which was the classifieds.

As with Facebook, we’re all on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. So, if we’re to join a social network we’re going to be on Facebook where everyone else is — except those three hipsters who are where it isn’t cool yet. This applies to classifieds sections. Folk advertise in the one with the most readers, the widest market. Readers buy the one with the most ads in it, the widest market. You advertise the bronzed baby shoes, unused, where there are the most people looking for bronzed baby shoes, unused.

So, the dominant paper will suck up the classifieds in any particular market. Classifieds, fairly obviously back in the days of prams, cheap used cars, waiters’ jobs and so on being geographically based.

No, this is important. A useful pencil sketch of American newspaper revenues pre-Y2K was that subscriptions produced some one third of revenues. They also, around and about, covered print costs and distribution. They were, roughly you understand, about a face wash in fact.

Display ads produced another one third and classifieds the final one third. Classifieds were also wildly profitable — no expensive journalists to pay, no bureaux, just a few women waiting to get married on the end of the phone line.

The lead-up to the Russo-Ukrainian War

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Founding Questions, “El Barbudo” has a guest-post on the situation in Ukraine, including a lot of background to the outbreak of full-scale combat with Russia’s “Special Military Operation” strike that was intended to decapitate the Ukrainian government and capture Kyiv in February, 2022:

Britain’s Ministry of Defence regularly posts these situation maps through their Twit-, er, I mean “X” account. This is the most recent one from 2024-02-02.

One framing point: the Russians are fighting a conventional, industrial war, for real-world (economic, territorial and national-security) objectives. The Ukrainians are fighting a proxy information war — large-scale armed propaganda, if you will — where the primary purpose of battlefield action is to feed political-warfare objectives, and thereby maintain western support. Seen from Kyiv, the centre of gravity (the thing from which Ukraine draws its strength and freedom of action) is western support — making narrative (as seen from the west) central, while the media is enlisted as a conduit for narrative warfare. Hence, through a western media lens, what you’re seeing is carefully curated to influence rather than inform. (Nothing new here — I defer to the historians, but I think Paul Fussell made this point about World War Two. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a dead Ukrainian soldier, intact or otherwise.)

What that means is that battlefield defeats can be managed, as long as the narrative — the core of the war, as western sponsors see it and as the Ukrainians therefore are forced to see it — can be maintained. What’s causing the current crisis is not so much the death, destruction or loss of territory (though those are real). It’s that the mismatch between rhetoric and reality has finally reached the point that people are noticing.

[…]

Ukraine has been at war with Russia in some fashion since 2013, with violence first spiking into the open in February 2014. The Ukrainians call the 2014-2022 period the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) but it involved fairly heavy fighting — against Russian-backed separatist militias in the east, and internal to Ukraine among various factions including, yes, the Banderite nationalists (“neo-Nazis”) beloved of Russian media and Canadian parliamentarians alike, though they’re less prominent now (mainly because a lot of them are dead).

We should also note how this arose — first Russia and the U.S. forcing Ukraine to give up its nukes in 1994, then NATO expansion after Bosnia, and (publicly acknowledged) US interference in Russia’s 1996 election to ensure Boris Yeltsin got re-elected, creating a sense of threat in Moscow. Then Kosovo 1999, Bush and Putin’s failed attempt to make nice after 9/11, Estonia, Georgia, the Reset Button of 2009 and betrayal over Libya in 2011. (Hillary promised no ground troops or regime change, persuading then-president Dmitry Medvedev to abstain on the UN Security Council Resolution that authorised the intervention, only to renege on all counts then laugh on live TV when she found out Gaddafi had just been sodomised to death with a bayonet).

All of which infuriated the Kremlin, and confirmed the West was not “agreement-capable” (they have euphemisms in Moscow too) leading them to intervene in Syria to support the Assad regime. Then came the Ghouta gas attack of September 2013 — in which Obama failed to enforce his own Red Line, and John Kerry had to beg Sergey Lavrov (Russian foreign minister) to save us from the consequences of our own weakness … which convinced Russian leaders we were not only threatening and untrustworthy, but also weak. More great work there.

Russia’s seizure of Crimea followed, four months after the red-line debacle. It was clearly a result of Russian hatred and contempt. (Oderint dum metuant — the hatred was long-standing; what was new was the realisation, after Ghouta, that they had nothing to fear). Crimea was also a reaction to a US-backed revolution in Ukraine (Euromaidan), and the operation’s popularity should have made it clear that Ukraine is seen by Russians, of all political orientations, as integral to their identity, along with Belarus. No Russian politician could tolerate western advisers or weapons in Ukraine … which was the policy pursued after 2014. (There’s a chicken-and-egg security dilemma here. The west was reacting to perceived aggression from Russia, which was reacting to perceived western aggression. Both sides saw themselves as innocently defensive, and the other as aggressive.) [NR: Emphasis mine.]

Putin, by Russian standards, is a relative moderate on Ukraine — he frequently gets panned by war bloggers, retired generals and divers chickenhawks for being soft on the west, not prosecuting the war hard enough. If the neocons got their way and he was regime-changed, his replacement would likely be far worse for their interests — someone like, say, Nikolai Patrushev. Putin gets painted as Hitler in the media, but this is an artefact of the Alinskyite approach American political/media players take to any conflict: first freeze the target (no negotiation is possible) then personalise the enemy via an individual leader (Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Saddam, Gaddafi, Kim etc), then paint that leader as irrational and evil (without limits, restraints or goals except to be evil). From that point, it’s good versus evil, any means necessary, war as moral imperative. Putin is the latest foreigner to get this treatment, Trump the latest domestic equivalent. Trump’s greatest foreign policy crime, in fact, may have been his willingness to treat Putin, Kim, Xi, MBS etc. as rational actors worthy of respect (for Trump values of “respect”) rather than moral pariahs. This has hilarious consequences when people previously given the pariah treatment (Maduro, MBS, the Taliban) need to be rehabilitated via creative retconning so the narrative can keep rolling.

Anyway, from 2014 to 2022 the war was pretty static, with a few bigger battles (Debaltsevo the main one), artillery exchanges and trench warfare: a foreshadowing of how things are today, though without the massive tech acceleration we’ve seen since February 2022, and far fewer casualties.

Trump’s people have suggested Putin was frightened of him, which is why Russia didn’t invade during Trump’s term. There may be some truth to that (Trump after all reversed Obama’s prohibition on lethal aid) but it’s more likely the Russians just saw Trump as dangerously unpredictable, a decision-maker who never fully controlled his own government, especially on Ukraine (see Impeachment #1). The Russian way of war involves predicting an adversary’s reaction to provocation, then doing just enough, ambiguously enough, to achieve a fait accompli without triggering a response. This goes back to Trotsky and Tukhachevsky in the 1920s, but when your adversary is Trump, it becomes impossible to predict the trigger or the reaction if you piss him off. (Qasim Soleimani says hi). There was also one particular battle in Syria in February 2018 where US SOF killed some large number of Wagner guys by refusing to play their little games, and when the Russians complained Trump basically said it served them right.

Once Trump was gone — with Washington in disarray after January 6th — the Russians sensed an opportunity, and began building up around the Ukrainian border from April 2021. Then in August, when we covered ourselves in glory during the Great Kabul Pants-Shitting, the Russians probably thought they had the measure of Biden — who they knew of old — and decided we were so flaccid they’d get away with a lightning move against Kyiv, “Crimea 2014 on steroids”. (PS: when neocons start overtly asserting, in their in-house journal, that “the Afghan withdrawal did not trigger the Ukraine invasion” you know it’s true — even if the Russians hadn’t already said as much, in as many words.)

So, the Russians tried Crimea on Steroids in February 2022 — and their plan failed by breakfast on D Day, triggering the protracted war of attrition we have now. The reasons were partly bad luck for the leading Russian air-assault units attempting to seize the airfield at Hostomel outside Kyiv, partly good initiative by U.S. and U.K. trained Ukrainian SOF and territorial defence guys, partly over-compartmentalisation on the Russian side — key players were kept out of the loop for OPSEC reasons, and the invasion was mostly planned by political hacks with limited military understanding. (Why should we have the monopoly on that?) This video is a decent open-source account of that happened.

Beretta 1915: The first of the Beretta pistols

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 22, 2016

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm — the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the Great War. In response to a need for something cheaper, Tulio Marengoni of the Beretta company designed the Model 1915, a simple blowback handgun chambered for the 9mm Glisenti cartridge.

Only 15,300 of the Model 1915 pistol were made, because even they proved to be a bit more than the military really needed. One of their most interesting mechanical features is a pair of manual safeties — one on the back of the frame to lock the hammer and one on the left side to block the trigger. This proved a bit redundant, and the gun overall was rather large and heavy. In 1917 a scaled-down version in .32 ACP (7.65mm) was introduced which would be produced in much larger numbers. The 1915/17 would also omit the rather unnecessary hammer safety.

It is important to note that while the 9mm Glisenti cartridge is dimensionally interchangeable with 9×19 Parabellum, pistols designed for the Glisenti cartridge should never be used with standard 9×19 ammunition, as it is nearly 50% more powerful than the Glisenti specs, and doing so will quickly cause damage (and potentially catastrophic failure).

QotD: Partisan media

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Conservative media is mainly designed to provide its readers with information. But liberal media is designed to give its readers permission to think certain thoughts. It’s not so much that the Politico article was informing democrats about certain uncomfortable Biden facts for the first time, although that is certainly true.

The article was more significant because it signaled to democrats that now acceptable to talk about Biden lying and about his being mixed up with all these sketchy characters.

Jeff Childers, “ONE YEAR ☙ Monday, November 6, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS”, Coffee & Covid 2023, 2023-11-06.

February 7, 2024

“China is a food-obsessed society”

Filed under: Books, China, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If your initial reaction to the headline is to assume this is because of the amazingly unsettled history of mainland China over the last several hundred years and the totally understandable fear of famines, I’m with you, but we’d both be wrong, as John Psmith explains:

One sunny December morning years ago, Jane and I were on holiday in the South of China. Far from the city, a little temple had been hewn out of a seaside grotto so that it partially flooded when the tide came in. We stood inside and gazed up at a statue of 觀音, “Guan Yin”, the lady to whom the temple was dedicated. Her legend originated in India, where she was known as the bodhisattva Avalokitasvara, but she’d been absorbed and appropriated by Chinese folk religion many centuries ago, and in this statue there was no trace to be found of her South Asian origins. A minute or two into our reverie, a local came over to us and, seeing that we looked out of place, helpfully explained in unaccented English, “This is one of the most important Christian goddesses.”

The Chinese are almost as bad as the Romans were about pilfering the deities of their neighbors, so you really can’t blame them when they occasionally get confused about who they stole them from. As with goddesses, so with food: earlier that day a different helpful local had steered us towards a restaurant specializing in “Western cuisine”. The menu listed steaks “French style”, “German style”, and “Barbecue style”. Soup options included minestrone and borscht, both of them with the surprise addition of prawns. Their pride and joy, however, was their breakfast menu which included roughly seventy different varieties of toast. The chef told me that there were restaurants in Europe and America that did not have so many kinds of toast, and beamed with pride when I nodded gravely. One of the diners, delighted to see real living and breathing Westerners in her local Western restaurant, told me: “The thing I love about this place is that it’s so authentic.”

This “Western” restaurant may sound ridiculous to you, but it’s only as ridiculous as most of the “Chinese” restaurants you’ve encountered in the West. First of all, there’s no such thing as “Chinese” food. China is a country, but it’s the size of a continent, and it boasts a culinary diversity which exceeds that of many actual continents. Second, the dishes you encounter in the average Chinese restaurant over here bear about as much resemblance to real Chinese food as the seventy varieties of toast and the barbecue steaks do to French cuisine. “American Chinese food” is an interesting topic in its own right, and there are some good books about it, but now that I’m through the mandatory throat-clearing you have to do when writing about Chinese cuisine for a Western audience, I’m never going to mention it again.

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be.1 We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow,2 but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is … The Meat-Shaped Stone.3 A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

    1. Ferran Adrià, the legendary chef of El Bulli, once said that Mao was the most consequential figure in the history of cooking because: “[Spain, France, Italy and California] are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the pre-eminence of Chinese cooking by sending China’s chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn’t done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.”

    2. I once tried searching Google to find out whether Eskimos really have a lot of words for snow. The top results were all places like BuzzFeed and the Atlantic denouncing this as an outmoded racist stereotype … followed by a Wikipedia article patiently explaining that no it’s actually true.

    3. The Meat-Shaped Stone is not some weird aberration. The runner-up most valuable items in the museum are a piece of jadeite carved to look like a cabbage and a very fancy cooking vessel.

A disturbing proportion of scientific publishing is … bullshit

Filed under: Economics, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall on a few of the more upsetting details of how much we’ve been able depend on truth and testability in the scientific community and how badly that’s been undermined in recent years:

The Observer tells us that science itself is becoming polluted by journal mills. Fools — intellectual thieves perhaps — are publishing nonsense in scientific journals, this then pollutes the conclusions reached by people surveying science to see what’s what.

This is true and is a problem. But it’s what people publish as supposedly real science that is the real problem here, not just those obvious cases they’re complaining about:

    The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.

    The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying ­fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young ­scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of ­falsified work to be published.

Indeed, an actual and real problem:

    The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.

    Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.

Quite. But the problem is worse, much, much, worse.

Let us turn to something we all can agree is of some importance. Those critical minerals things. We all agree that we’re going to be using more of them in the future. Largely because the whole renewables thing is changing the minerals we use to power the world. We’re — to some extent, perhaps enough, perhaps not enough — moving from using fossil fuels to power the world to using rare earths, silicon, copper and so on to power the world. How much there is, how much useable, of those minerals is important. Because that’s what we’re doing, we’re changing which minerals — from fossil to metallic elements — we use to power the world.

Those estimates of how much there is out there are therefore important. The European Union, for example, has innumerable reports and task forces working on the basis that there’s not that much out there and therefore we’ve got to recycle everything. One of those foundational blocks of the circular economy is that we’ve got to do it anyway. Because there’s simply not enough to be able to power society without the circular economy.

This argument is nads*. The circular economy might be desirable for other reasons. At least in part it’s very sensible too – if it’s cheaper to recycle than to dig up new then of course we should recycle. But that we must recycle, regardless of the cost, because otherwise supply will vanish is that nads*.

But, folk will and do say, if we look at the actual science here we are short of these minerals and metals. Therefore etc. But it’s the science that has become infected. Wrongly infected, infested even.

Here’s the Royal Society of Chemistry and their periodic table. You need to click around a bit to see this but they have hafnium supply risk as “unknown”. That’s at least an advance from their previous insistence that it was at high supply risk. It isn’t, there’s more hafnium out there than we can shake a stick at. At current consumption rates — and assuming no recycling at all which, with hafnium, isn’t all that odd an idea — we’re going to run out sometime around the expected date for the heat death of the universe. No, not run out of the universe’s hafnium, run out of what we’ve got in the lithosphere of our own Earth. To a reasonable and rough measure the entirety of Cornwall is 0.01% hafnium. We happily mine for gold at 0.0001% concentrations and we use less hafnium annually than we do gold.

The RSC also says that gallium and germanium have a high supply risk. Can you guess which bodily part(s) such a claim should be associated with? For gallium we already have a thousand year supply booked to pass through the plants we normally use to extract our gallium for us. For germanium I — although someone competent could be a preference — could build you a plant to supply 2 to 4% of global annual germanium demand/supply. Take about 6 months and cost $10 million even at government contracting rates to do it too. The raw material would be fly ash from coal burning and there’s no shortage of that — hundreds of such plants could be constructed that is.

The idea that humanity is, in anything like the likely timespan of our species, going to run short in absolute terms of Hf, Ga or Ge is just the utmost nads*

But the American Chemistry Society says the same thing:

    * As ever, we are polite around here. Therefore we use the English euphemism “nads”, a shortening of “nadgers”, for the real meaning of “bollocks”.

As the media now tell us, it’s dangerous to do your own research and you should just trust them about everything

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Friedman has some timely tips on how you might go about determining the truth of an assertion offered in the legacy media or online source of undetermined trustworthiness:

Following up the claim you come across an article, perhaps even a book, which does indeed support that claim. Should you believe it?

The short answer for all of those examples, some of them claims I agree with, is that you should not. As I think I have demonstrated in past posts, claimed proofs of contentious issues are quite often wrong, biased, even fraudulent.

More examples from previous posts, here or on my old blog:

An estimate of the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide calculated with about half the total depending on the implicit assumption of no progress in medicine for the next three centuries.

A factbook on state and local finance that deliberately omitted the most important relevant fact that readers were unlikely to know.

A textbook, in its third edition, with multiple provably false claims.

The important question is how to tell. There are three answers:

1. Read the book or article carefully, check at least some of its claims — easier now that the Internet provides you with a vast searchable library accessible from your desktop — and evaluate its argument for yourself. Doing this is costly in time and effort and requires skills you may not have; depending on the particular issue that might include near-professional expertise in statistics, history, physics, economics, or any of a variety of other fields. I have taught elementary statistics at various points in my career, both in an economics department and a law school, but gave up on a controversy of considerable interest to me (concealed carry) when the statistical arguments got above the level I could readily follow.

2. Find one or more competent critiques of the argument and see if you find them convincing. This is the previous answer on easy mode. You still have to think things through but you don’t have to search out mistakes in the argument for yourself because the critic will point you at them, with luck offer evidence.

There are three possible conclusions that that exercise may support: that the argument is wrong. that it might be wrong, that it is probably right. The way you reach the last conclusion is from the incompetence or dishonesty of the critique; I am thinking of a real case.

John Boswell, a gay historian at Yale, argued that both the scriptures and early Christianity, unlike modern Christian critics of homosexual sex, treated it as no worse than other forms of non-marital intercourse. What convinced me that Boswell had a reasonable case was reading an attack on him by a prominent opponent which badly misrepresented the contents of the book I had just read. People who have good arguments do not need bad ones.

Of course, there might be other critics with better arguments.

An entertaining version of this approach is to find an online conversation with intelligent people covering a wide range of views and follow discussions of whatever issues you are interested in. With luck all of the good arguments for both sides will get made and you can decide for yourself whether one side, the other, or neither is convincing. Forty years ago I could do it in the sf groups on Usenet, which contained lots of smart people who liked to argue. Five years ago I could do it in the comment threads of Slate Star Codex. Currently Data Secrets Lox works for a few controversies but the range of views represented on it is too limited to provide a fair view of most.

The comment threads of this blog are at present too thin for the purpose, with between one and two orders of magnitude fewer comments than the SSC average used to be, but perhaps in another few years …

3. Recognize that you don’t know whether the claim is true and have no practical way of finding out, at least no way that costs less in time and effort than it is worth. This is the least popular answer but probably the most often correct.

The Magician Who Fooled the Nazis (and all of us)

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

World War Two
Published 7 Nov 2023

Military deception is tricky. Sometimes you need to destroy a crucial piece of war industry or make an entire harbour disappear. Who do you call for this sort of job? Well, someone who knows a thing or two about tricking the eye. You need a professional magician. You need Jasper Maskelyne. But is there more to this illusionist than meets the eye?
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QotD: Indoctrinating children into progressive worldviews

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

    I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

    This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy”. QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness”, or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.

February 6, 2024

On gender issues, “Progressives may even find themselves — dare we say? — on the wrong side of history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch that’s visible to freeloaders, the editors discover to their horror that they have to weigh in on the gender fracas:

So to be clear, we really don’t have any problem with Alberta restricting elective gender-related surgeries on minors under the age of 17. While we are rather concerned about the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones among minors, we also suspect that trying to ban these drugs for absolutely everyone under a certain age represents an overreach by the state.

Also, bluntly, we don’t think that in an ideal world, the state should be involving itself in most of this stuff at all. We want to exist in a country in which sports leagues, doctors, schools and teachers can be trusted to make sensible, evidence-based decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Take sports, for example: does a rec-league pickleball tournament need to have the same rules around trans participation as a competitive women’s rugby league? And do we really want any state regulation bulldozering over the people who are actually on the ground, and best understand the physical and cultural realities of that sport?

Or take puberty blockers.

Should we really be treating a 12-year-old who has displayed severe and crippling gender dysphoria since the age of three with the same treatment protocol as a depressed 14-year-old boy who comes into the gender clinic for the first time attached to a Munchausen-by-Proxy mom documenting every moment of her child’s transition for TikTok? Do we want politicians in Edmonton writing the precise rules that will be faithfully applied in both those situations?

Sigh.

We understand how we got here. Any discussion around trans issues is now highly insane; in a hyper-polarized, borderline hysterical moment, we actually can’t trust our institutions to possess the requisite reserve and dispassion needed to make credible and defensible decisions. These institutions are, or are perceived to be, too ideologically captured to be trustworthy.

For an example that just happened to cross our path today, take this quote from Dr. Simone Lebeuf, a pediatrician in Edmonton who specializes in gender-diverse youth. In it, she notes that restricting puberty blockers to children over the age of 15 effectively makes the treatment useless, as they would be administered at an age well past the onset of puberty.

“It’s done. The window has passed,” the doctor told City News. “And we really look at puberty blockers as an option for kids to have some space and time to make decisions about their future selves and who they might want to be as adults. Their puberty is not benign, it is not a nothing process to go through. The physical changes with puberty are permanent.”

Right off the bat, a statement like this ought to raise eyebrows, and not only because it’s a talking point we’ve already heard dozens of times on TikTok. This doctor — a physician who is actually treating children — is conflating the harms caused by artificially delaying a natural process with the apparent harms caused by the biological process itself. That logic is not sound. There is a clear difference between, say, permanent loss of sexual function and bone density caused by interfering in the natural course of puberty, and the harm of allowing a child’s body to grow an Adam’s apple despite that individual feeling like a woman.

Secondly, Dr. Lebeuf isn’t addressing the core concern with puberty blockers, above and beyond their physical side effects. The majority of children who present with gender dysphoria are not trans. Most of them turn out to be simply gay — a fact they discover via the process of growing up and sexually maturing. By delaying or denying a gender dysphoric child the opportunity to experience normal puberty, critics of these treatment protocols fear that a doctor may be preventing the very process by which gender dysphoria would resolve itself without medical intervention. Most — certainly not all, but most — gender dysphoric children would otherwise grow up to be at ease with their natal sex. But once kids start with the puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, this process of medical transitioning may be psychologically self reinforcing, pushing physically healthy minors into pursuing more and more unnecessary and invasive interventions with serious lifelong consequences.

In short, puberty blockers are not magic cures for gender dysphoria. They might be appropriate for some kids with lots of supports and monitoring. But they could be disastrous for others, and we have no foolproof way to know in advance which kids will fall into what camp.

This stuff is complicated, and it’s made more so because it’s difficult to study objectively in ideologically captured environments dominated by activists on all sides who muddy the waters with emotionally charged rhetoric, and confuse good science with bad. If you want to understand why people are turning to Danielle Smith instead of the Alberta Medical Association to address their fears, quotes like the one above are a prime example.

And, by the way, we include “The Media” writ large as having failed on this file. The lack of skepticism and neutrality that the media has demonstrated on even the most maximalist and unpopular positions on gender and sexuality has — to our mind — significantly contributed to the radical decline in its collective credibility.

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 1 – What Makes the Greeks Special?

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 1, 2024

This first lecture in the course makes a case for the Greeks as the exceptional people of the Ancient World. They were not saints: they were at least as willing as anyone else to engage in aggressive wars, enslavement, and sometimes human sacrifice. At the same time, working without any strong outside inspiration, they provided at least the foundations for the science, mathematics, philosophy, art and secular literature of later peoples.
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