January Pieces Of My Mind #2

Dear rural uneducated unemployed man, I really can understand your sense of powerlessness, your anger, your suspicion of urban intellectuals and politicians and immigrants.

The success of right-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic is largely due to their ability to tap into this mentality by offering solutions that are simple, elegant, and wrong. Tell them that they aren't achieving the success they supposedly deserve because those other, undeserving people are getting the help instead.

The main difference in the US is that these right-wing parties also appeal to bias against US-born ethnic minorities. (Birthright citizenship applies to anyone born in the US regardless of the parents' nationality, something that isn't true in many other countries, including Germany.) Often these appeals are in coded language, but not always. Donald Trump, for instance, has been more explicit than most US politicians, and it is a major reason why as many support him as the polls indicate.

"One good basis for a marriage is a mutual sense that your spouse is out of your league."
-For some reason, this reminds me Swedish TV has new, fresh episodes of "The Simpsons" Poor Marge!

"Amazes me to think how varied and nutritious food we have in rich countries." The problem is actively avoiding high-enegry food.
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Fortunately, Sweden does not have much of the conditions needed for widespread anti-semitism, altough immigrants from Islamic countries often conflate belief in jewish religion with support of Israel. This has caused friction in the big cities, especially Malmö.

Grisly massacre site in Africa reveals one of the earliest wars https://www.newscientist.com/article/2074066-grisly-massacre-site-in-af…

How do we know it was one of the earliest wars?

This stuff that keeps being repeated like a mantra about how hunter-gatherers didn't have wars is a load of nonsense. No material goods, so nothing to fight over? Yeah, well how about for abducting wives? How about territorial disputes over hunting territory? How about because you just don't like 'them' and want them gone? Payback, revenge killings, which have a way of amplifying with time.

Oh no - it's the polar vortex thingy. Every time they revise the forecast, the predicted temperatures get lower.

Now they're predicting we poor sods in the New Territories might get an ice storm early next week. But "the urban areas should be spared". Oh well that's all right then.

"Trump still looking for last two horsemen of apocalypse" http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/donald-trump-still-loo…
The billionaire, who showed off his solid-gold scythe to cheering crowds begging for death yesterday, has admitted he is still missing key apocalyptic personnel.
He said: “Sarah Palin has just the qualities of belligerent, uninformed, self-justifying aggression that I need for War.

Inter-tribal warfare has been observed in chimpanzees and gorillas. Why would we expect it to be different for other hominids?

Then, as now, wars are often fought over resources: food, water, eligible females, and so on. We have to make sure that our tribe has enough, and if there isn't also enough for that other tribe, c'est la guerre.

Speaking of weather, John, it now looks like the big snowstorm expected to hit the mid-Atlantic region will miss my location entirely. Forecast amounts for my location have gone from >30 cm to zero. But Washington DC is under a blizzard watch. That's a town that basically shuts down when snow accumulations exceed 1 cm.

"This stuff that keeps being repeated like a mantra about how hunter-gatherers didn’t have wars is a load of nonsense."

Indeed. Check out Pinker on this. In The Blank Slate, three myths are deconstructed: the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he shows that violence has more or less been steadily declining throughout history (in relative terms, of course, the only ones which make sense here).

“Sarah Palin blames her son’s domestic violence arrest on Obama” http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/sarah-palin-blames-her-sons-domestic-vi…

Obama is one of those evil mind-contolling aliens the Scientologs worry about? I like joining a winning team, so I am totally supporting our new American/Kenyan/extra-terrestrial overlord.

Unfortunately, Phillip, Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' is complete nonsense, at least as far as his hopeless section on early prehistory is concerned. He is almost entirely unaware of the archaeological evidence he claims to summarise. Brian Ferguson produced a good clear critique of Pinker's 'research'.

#10 - Cite?

#10 - In any case, you have pulled the old bait and switch trick - Phillip was talking about a completely different book. Steve Pinker is world famous and a genius. And who the hell is Brian Ferguson? Why, he's a cultural anthropologist, of course. Other cultural anthropologists will no doubt fawn over his deluded outpourings. People with a functioning brain will go with Pinker.

Chimpanzee violence induced by contact with humans? You people really do make me laugh.

Australia was populated by hunter-gatherers with Pleistocene technology until really very recently, and there is lots of evidence that they engaged in frequent large scale inter-tribal warfare. This was the way it was when the first white settlers arrived, so it can't be blamed on them. In fact, forced abduction of women during violent raids was frequently a way to obtain wives.

I was predisposed to agree with "The Better Angels of My Nature." But the first time I opened a copy I flipped to a page which reproduces two German woodcuts from a Hausbuch of 1484 with the captions "Saturn" and "Mars" and the gloss "look how crude and violent medieval life was! Here a peasant is slaughtering a horse next to a gallows while a pig sniffs at his bottom! There soldiers are looting and burning a village!"

I shuddered, put the book down, and walked away. Didn't his publisher have some hungry editor with a BA in Medieval Studies or Classics who could have explained some of the other, astrological, reasons those attributes would appear in those woodcuts, and why using a woodcut from 1484 as a standin for "the middle ages" does not work?

John, your comment is really quite baffling. When Phillip wrote "In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he shows that violence has more or less been steadily declining throughout history (in relative terms, of course, the only ones which make sense here)", which book do you think he was talking about.

Pinker may be a genius to you, but his knowledge of the archaeological evidence for prehistoric warfare is almost nil. For people who study warfare, Brian Ferguson is a well respected figure. His critique is at http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker's List - Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality (2013).pdf but given your views on cultural anthropology you may not want to be bothered with the actual evidence.

Trying again with the link: http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker'sList-ExaggeratingP…
If it doesn't work this time, hopefully anyone interested in the actual archaeological evidence can still find it.

#15 - All I get when I enter that URL is "Page not found", including when I type the full link into the search bar.

I did an author search in Google Scholar, but all I got was some drivel about chimpanzee violence being induced by human contact.

Phillip referred first to The Blank Slate, and he bolded "the noble savage", which was his whole (and correct) point.

So, Nick, all you have done is make an ad hominem attack on Pinker, without even explaining why.

OK, I have managed to find the "deconstruction of 'Pinker's List'". It's here, if this works:

http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/sites/fasn/files/Pinker%27s%20List%20-%20Ex…

My response - unconvincing. Basically I read it as saying that warfare, rather than just inter-personal violence, did not really show up until *complex* hunter-gatherer societies developed. Well, that's a bit of a no-brainer. Below a certain population density, war doesn't happen because there are not enough participants to take part. It needs a certain critical mass. otherwise it's just 'inter-personal violence', of which there is ample evidence in pre-history.

To extrapolate from that and say that "Humans are not hard wired for war. We have to learn it" is, in my view, just opinionating. And it is not even intuitive opinionating - you need to worship at the alter of Franz Boas to be even willing to entertain the thought. It is mistrust of and antagonism of 'the other' that is hard wired.

The intuitive, obvious thought is that war is just a ratcheting up of inter-personal violence as the number of available participants increases.

So why the need to deconstruct "Pinker's List" when it is a side story to the main point of the book? And what does the latest evidence do to that deconstruction? One thing it does - when conditions are favourable to preservation of remains, we find remains showing ample evidence of mass injury and killing.

It may be that the nature of ancient warfare, where the defeated were simply left to lie open to the elements, rather than being buried, is a good reason why more evidence of ancient warfare has not been found - simply because the remains have not survived. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I know of cases where evidence has been suppressed, for sake of expediency, which is why I have such an aversion to people who try to deconstruct Pinker.

John, ScienceBlogs has eaten one of my comments, so for now I will just suggest that you read the FAQ section of Matthew White's Necronometrics website, and gogle up what specialists in Chinese history have to say about his estimate of the death toll of the An Lushan revolt, then ask yourself whether Pinker's use of historical evidence sounds like the work of someone who respects expertise and data, or someone who just wants anecdotes to illustrate a story and does not care whether they are true.

OK, done that.

It looks to me like Pinker went to the most readily available source he could, which was White, who does seem reasonably trustworthy to me, at least in trying to do his best to get things right. It was only after publication that people started popping out of the woodwork to shoot at Pinker.

"does not care whether they are true" is a very heavy charge to make against any author, and I wouldn't do it if I was you - not unless I had actual evidence that it was true.

The fact is, no one knows what the actual loss of population was over any given period, including the historians who have cast doubt on the figure used. They don't have an alternative figure to propose that they can support as being more reliable.

Maybe Pinker was naïve and should have realised that the figure was too high to be possible. Maybe instead of trusting a source like White he should have omitted the event that, on the face of it, looked to him like the worst event in history. I don't know. But alleging that he didn't care whether it was true or false as long as it supported his argument is heavy, in the absence of positive evidence of intent. Me, I wouldn't do it.

But then, maybe you are in the camp that still thinks Tierney was right about Chagnon.

Synchronicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
-This is one of the things that might get otherwise clever people to believe in the paranormal. In reality, a good knowledge of statistics should be an antidote to giving mystical significance to an apparently uncanny coincidence.

One coincidence that happened this evening, for instance, is that I started to read a novel derived from the Sherlock Holmes narrative universe, and then Swedish TV shows an episode of (modern-day) "Sherlock" [the episode where he travels to 1890s England and solves a mystery, incidentally solving how (modern-day) Moriarty could survive shooting himself and then falling off the roof of a high-rise building].
If Sherlock Holmes had any connection with religion, I could start a cult on that, and a slice of toasted bread with an "image of Jesus" on it.
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"Amazes me to think how varied and nutritious food we have in rich countries."
Today's newspaper* had an article about how we actually eat better than the kings of the medieval era. Their food would have gotten monotonous after a while.

*Västerbottens-Kuriren

Chess is an abomination unto Nuggan!

" Saudi Arabia’s top cleric issues fatwa against chess" http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/saudi-arabias-top-cleric-issues-fatwa-a…
Oh, for fuck's sake, they are basing their theology upon a Pratchett novel!

Random late-night factoids:
-Immune booster drugs meant to kill tumors found to improve Alzheimer's symptoms in mice http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-immune-booster-drugs-meant-tumors…
-Study questions link between teen pot smoking and IQ decline http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-link-teen-pot-iq-decline.html
Also, Jeff Bezo's suborbital, curiously schlongmorph spacecraft has successfully returned to Earth and done a soft landing.

Possible undiscovered planets in the solar system
https://www.xkcd.com/1633/
The big field to the left in the logarithmic chart is "planets ruled out because I would be inside them"
Then comes "planets ruled out because I would have noticed them above my house"

Down to Celsius 3.3 here, and if we were ever going to have an ice storm, it happened last night while most people were asleep - a non-event, with some ice particles mixed with the rain. I think we are through the worst of it now.

But my thoughts go out to Eric - things don't sound great in the eastern USA. Hong Kong shivering in above-zero temperatures must be laughable to the people enduing the snow storms there.

Being immuno-compromised is one of the real downsides of cancer treatment - it leaves you open to all sorts of nasties, including necrotizing fasciitis. Being eaten alive by bugs that naturally live on the surface of the skin of your face just sounds too ironic for words, but it can happen all too easily...and fast. Immune booster drugs sound like a really good idea to me. I could care less about non-Alzheimic mice.

How does he know he would not be inside the planets? How does he know he's not?

Careful - one interpretation of schlongmorph could be dickhead.

John, you might want to wait a few days and then look back over this thread. I see some patterns in your posts that I recognize from other occasions when believers have discovered that experts disagree with their favourite source, from “it doesn't matter if the details are fudged because they have such an important message” to “those experts can't prove they are right so my guy's guess is as good as anyone else's!” to attacking the critic instead of the criticism (is there any possible way in which my view about a 20th century ethnographer could affect the strength of Pinker's evidence?) One useful case study is the comments to the Language Log post criticizing a chapter in a book by Malcolm Gladwell languagelog DOT ldc DOT upenn DOT edu/nll/?p=8123

I guarantee that a full professor at Harvard could find someone to sit down with him and explain the problems with interpreting Tang Dynasty census figures, or numbers in Greek histories and medieval chronicles, or why pigs, butchers, and gallows appear in a fifteenth-century illustration of Saturn. He could also afford to hire some research assistants to start with White's list, supplement it with work by specialists and in languages other than English, and give him an executive summary of the estimates and the problems with them. For what it's worth, the figure which White preferred when Pinker was writing his book was 10 not 36 million, and he quoted some of the historians who discuss the problem of using incomplete censi to estimate population https://web.archive.org/web/20110311130500/http://necrometrics.com/pre1… If Pinker had either quoted the smaller figure, or talked about the decline in census population and waxed poetic about millions of people being murdered, millions fleeing their homes, and millions breaking free from the central government, I think that historians of medieval China would have been friendlier to his book. My amateur understanding is that most specialists say that large numbers of Chinese died, but large numbers fled into the south beyond the reach of the census, and large numbers just dropped off the rolls as the government broke down, so the decline in census population has to be divided amongst all three factors.

I don't like being 'patterned' or psychoanalysed. Don't do it, or I'll pattern you publicly as a libeller. I have a screen shot of your libel, and don't think I won't do it.

Think instead about the fact that human populations are now at greater risk than they have ever been (except possibly during ancient bottlenecks when effective population sizes were small), and would be so even without climate change, due to urbanisation and the growth in the number of coastal mega-cities, their vulnerability to natural hazards, their lack of resilience, and their inability to recover from major disasters.

If you understand the meaning of the words 'hazard', 'vulnerability' and 'risk', that puts Pinker's 'Angels' into context.

This discussion is now over.

Play nice now, everyone.

"John, you might want to wait a few days and then look back over this thread. I see some patterns in your posts"

Ad hominem, Martin, not to mention patronising.

The long wordy heavily tilted arguments are just stupid (Pinker inserted a footnote about the uncertainty of the figure he used) and I'm not going to debate with a bunch of agenda-pushers.

Either you control the ad hominem stuff (it is after all your policy not to permit personal attacks - or didn't you spot that 'pattern' bullshit as a personal attack?) or I get nasty.

Either way, I'm done with it - I'm not going to waste my time trying to have an informed discussion with a bunch of cultural anthropologists. They're worse than Creationists.

"The hideout of the Black Death: Historical pathogens survived for more than 4 centuries in Europé" http://phys.org/news/2016-01-hideout-black-death-historical-pathogens.h…
It would be ironic if the disease hid out in a species of leech...

On the Eurasian steppe, the reservoir animal for Y. pestis is the marmot.

John@25: Nary a snowflake at my location, the action was all to the south of me. These storms often have a sharp northern edge to the snow accumulation; a track 100 km north of the actual track would have given us a significant snowfall. And even a 15 cm snowfall here would barely slow us down--people around here understand that snow happens in winter and are prepared to deal with it. In contrast, the Washington DC region is full of people who have no clue how to deal with even 1 cm of snow, let alone what they actually got.

I'll save my sympathy for the people in North Carolina who got an ice storm out of this system. I'll feel free to mock southerners who can't deal with snow. I do not mock their inability to deal with ice--we would have a hard time dealing with ice around here. I don't mind the snow so much, it's the ice I can do without.

I have yet to get my snowshoes or cross-country skis out of the garage. We simply haven't had enough snow on the ground to use these things. And there is nothing in the ten-day forecast that's likely to change that--the one significant snow event looks like it will have significant rain mixed with it, and that's not good for winter sports.

After weeks below -10 C, Stockholm is now in for a whole week above zero. Swedes are wimps.

I don't know about Stockholm, but in Fairbanks people freak out when it rains in the wintertime. In their case it's justified: the rain can melt the snow by the side of the road, and the water that flows into the middle of the road then re-freezes (average temperatures in Fairbanks this time of year are around -20 C, and temperatures below -50 C sometimes occur). Much infrastructure in interior Alaska assumes that in January there will be snow on the ground and below freezing temperatures.

Coastal Californians also freak out about winter rain, but for a different reason. There, oils build up on the roads during the dry season, and the first rains of the year make the road surface quite slick.

We don't freak out. We change our tyres twice a year and cover the roads with sand and salt.

I had an English boss who used to mock the hell out of his own countrymen, the way they freak and everything comes to a grinding halt when it snows there, as if it had never snowed in England before.

He was good at mocking most people, I might say. He said his favourite English newspaper headline was "Heavy fog over Channel - Europe isolated."

Best boss I ever had.

He did have his idiosyncrasies, though. He said he had never been to Scotland - he saw no reason to go there. His wife showed me a fabulous photo of him doing fieldwork in the middle of the Thai jungle somewhere, standing in a trial pit up to his ears in shit, wearing a bow tie.

As much as I hate snow, this could get me out there.

http://shanghaiist.com/2016/01/25/monkey_king_girls_on_slopes.php

Meanwhile, the largest human migration in history has just started, but most people around the world are blissfully unaware that it is happening - 2.9 billion people will travel across China to return to their ancestral homes for the 'Spring Festival' (i.e. Chinese New Year).

Viking fashion disaster http://satwcomic.com/viking-fashion-disaster

Miscellsaneous news: "Sweden is now 'third least corrupt' country on the planet" http://www.thelocal.se/20160127/sweden-is-now-the-third-least-corrupt-c…

New economic metric! http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3999
BTW, next time, SMBC will tick over # 4000!

Calling Birger Johansson. Calling Birger Johansson. Come in Birger Johansson. Do you want Fb friends or not, you Swedish lentil muncher?

I had no difficulty identifying the characters, but that unrealistically square jawline in the photo is still bothering me. It looks like some kind of horrible geometric growth. Yes, I realise it's the corner of a phone.

The 1994 M/S Estonia shipwreck taught all Swedes the word bogvisir, "bow visor". I use the term to refer to the remarkable chins found on all my family members.

"unrealistically square jawline" -I always assumed it was a bionic implant. Or that the photo was taken at the moment of morphing, during full moon.
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Fb is one of a million tech phenomena that are right at the edge of what I can learn to use. I have just logged in and looked for friends requests. Is yours recent?? I use a picture of a cat at my facebook precense, since it is more aestehetic than the Dilbert-lookalike reality.
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BTW hypothetical ninth planet is still *very* hypothetical. If it exists, it may be a failed core of a growing Neptune-lookalike "ice giant" ejected during the chaotic early time. Then diverted to a nearly circular orbit either by interacting with remaining gas, or with nearby stars in the primordial star closter from whence the sun came.

I haven't gotten into Facebook yet: it's one of those things that's been close to, but never quite met, my personal definition of "The value of having this outweighs the disadvantages of having this." The last entreaty I got to join Fb listed three potential "friends", only one of which was a legitimate connection (a distant relative who teaches English in Yokohama and married a local girl)--the other two were a furniture store and a self-described "sex Arab", both from Birmingham, UK, a city I have never visited.

Twitter, likewise, has never met that threshold for me. I am on LinkedIn. I also have an account on ResearchGate, although I haven't done much with the latter.

'Friending' Birger was recommended to me by Martin (I don't know if Martin knows that, or whether Fb just decided he was going to do it), and I always listen to Martin.

I might sniff you down one of these days, Eric. I have a large no. of contacts on LinkedIn, which I use only to stay in touch with people - it has never been any use to me for anything else.

And I promise I'm not a sex Arab.

I could think of worse places to live than Yokohama.

Yeah, I suggested you add Birger when he showed up on Fb.

I don't know why I bother with LinkedIn.

As far as I'm concerned we're all sex Arabs around here.

Meanwhile, my Fb friends have rocketed up to 15. Previously they had been trending steadily downwards as my own blood relatives decided they wished I didn't exist. Yeah, you bet they wish I didn't exist; bastardoes.

I'm only telling half the truth - my female cousins in Melbourne love me so much they always fantasised that I was their older brother. I feel much the same way about them - a lot better than what I got.

I just realised something mildly odd - my aunty, the mother of my beloved Melbourne cousins, is Swedish. I mean, she's Australian, but both of her parents were Swedish migrants to Australia. She's the best cook in the family, by a million miles.

Any idea where in Sweden?

None. I never thought to ask her.

She's elderly now, but her mind is still OK. My daughter has just flown down to Melbourne to do post-grad and will be meeting her for the first time - I will ask my daughter to ask her.

Meanwhile I will interrogate my favourite female cousin via electronic mail. She might know where her Swedish grandparents came from. If anyone will know, she will.

I will also ask what her maiden name was. I have heard it before - I do remember it was one of those .......son names.

I have heard back from my cousin. Sadly it was all a lie - a figment of my mother's delusional mind. I always thought she was off her head, and this is proof. My cousin was laughing, because all of her ancestors were British. She said the closest she comes to being Swedish is that she had a great great uncle who sailed on a Swedish sailing ship.

Now I am wondering just how many other things my mother told me that were just the product of a delusional mind. I did realise quite young that she wasn't quite right in the head, but hadn't realised she was that deluded.

Fortunately she didn't pass it on to me and I'm eminently sane and normal (twitch twitch).

Not my sister, though - she's a raving loony.

My ancestry is mostly Danish, but two of my great-grandparents were Swedish. My aunt, who was into genealogy, tracked down the relatives. IIRC, they are/were in the Sundsvall area.

I haven't been to that part of Sweden, only Stockholm and Uppsala (and of course the stretch of the E4 in between, which includes the Arlanda airport--the rail line was under construction at the time).

My first job in archaeology was on that rail line.

http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2012/06/15/20-years-working-in…