The recent Pirates of the Carribean movie involves a game of Liar’s Dice:
Each player is given five dice and cup to roll and hide them with. Players make successively higher declarations regarding the results of all the dice remaining in the game, e.g. “there are ten sixes”. However, someone can always contest the bid. When that happens, all the dice are revealed and either the bidder or the caller loses dice, depending on who was correct. The last player with dice is the winner.
The famous Megadeath in Mexico after the Conquistador’s arrival may not have been caused by Old World diseases:
When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of “megadeath.”
[...]
There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed.Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information — details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives — just didn’t add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. “For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent,” Acuña-Soto says. “Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly.”
The Aztecs had no written language but managed to use “colorful and evocative pictographs” to keep voluminous records on animal skin, agave fiber, or bark paper. Most of that information was destroyed by the Spaniards, but some of it was recaptured by curious priests.
The census data from the time of the Spanish invasion were so good that Acuña-Soto found he could track the movement of epidemics from village to village across the country. Friar Juan de Torquemada, a Franciscan historian writing in 1577, described the wake of cocolitzli in typical detail:
It was a thing of great bewilderment to see the people die. Many were dead and others almost dead, and nobody had the health or strength to help the diseased or bury the dead. In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches…. It lasted for one and a half years, and with great excess in the number of deaths. After the murderous epidemic, the Viceroy Martin Enriquez wanted to know the number of missing people in New Spain. After searching in towns and neighborhoods it was found that the number of deaths was more than two millions.Medical historians insisted that the cause of all this affliction could only have been a European disease. But Acuña-Soto says, “The more I read of the cocolitzli, the more I realized that the descriptions of the disease and its spread did not fit any recognizable epidemiological paradigms.”
Francisco Hernandez, personal physician to Philip II of Spain, was named Proto-Médico de su magestad de todas las Indias — “surgeon general of New Spain” — in 1576, and he went on to learn five Indian languages, to interview many Indians, to autopsy victims of the 1576 epidemic, and to write down his observations — in 50 volumes. Philip II died just before the books arrived back in Spain, and his son found the project too expensive to publish, so the manuscript disappeared for 400 years, until it resurfaced around 1950 in the Hacienda Library in Madrid.
The “new” information on the disease painted it as quite different from any Old World disease:
The fevers were contagious, burning, and continuous, all of them pestilential, in most part lethal. The tongue was dry and black. Enormous thirst. Urine of the colors of sea-green, vegetal green, and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale. Pulse was frequent, fast, small, and weak — sometimes even null. The eyes and the whole body were yellow. This stage was followed by delirium and seizures. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery. The blood that flowed when cutting a vein had a green color or was very pale, dry, and without serosity…. Blood flowed from the ears and in many cases blood truly gushed from the nose…. This epidemic attacked mainly young people and seldom the elder ones.
It sounded much more like a hemorrhagic fever — like Ebola, Marburg, or Lassa.
Acuña-Soto checked the written records:
Acuña-Soto saw that each of the cocolitzli epidemics appeared to be preceded by several years of drought. He also found that the epidemics didn’t happen during the drought. They appeared only in the wet periods that followed. That was the crucial clue he had missed: It was raining when people got sick.
Then he had tree-ring expert corroborate those years of drought and rainfall — which required finding some of the few old Douglas fir trees left in central Mexico:
The evidence from the Douglas firs shows that during the 16th century central Mexico not only lacked rain but also suffered the most severe and sustained drought in 500 years, one that encompassed nearly the entire continent. Moreover — here was Acuña-Soto’s smoking gun — the tree-ring records show wet interludes setting in around the years 1545 and 1576, the years of the cocolitzli.With the climate data in place, Acuña-Soto could piece together a convincing explanation of those epidemic years. Cocolitzli had been caused by a hemorrhagic fever virus that had lain dormant in its animal hosts, most likely rodents. Severe drought would have contained the population of rodents, forcing them to hole up wherever they could find water. Initially, only a small percentage may have been infected, but when forced into close quarters the virus was transmitted during bloody fights. Infected mother rodents then passed the virus to their young during pregnancy. When the rains returned, the rodents bred quickly and spread the virus — through their urine and feces — as they came into contact with humans in fields and homes. Once infected, humans transmitted the virus to one another through contact with blood, sweat, and saliva.
But why did this New World disease hit the Aztecs so hard while leaving the Spanish largely unaffected?
Hemorrhagic viruses affect human populations that are already stressed, Acuña-Soto says. “The natives were poor and probably near starvation and living in unsanitary conditions where the rats would congregate. They also worked in the fields, where they’d be exposed to the rat droppings. The Spanish made up the upper classes.”
In Waiting for the Tommies, George Kerevan reviews Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916, by Christopher Duffy:
As a consequence of the long intermarriage of the British and German royal families, upper-class Germans knew upper-class Britain quite intimately during the decades before the First World War. Families and businesses were intermingled and it was common for young Germans to attend school or university in Britain. In turn, the British were in awe of German high culture, its literature, music and science. British universities were even persuaded to import that strange German innovation, the research degree or PhD. As a result, many German army officers spoke perfect English and had a deep working knowledge of British society — or thought they had. They were not impressed by what they saw. Upper-class Germans thought the English had become debased by Celtic and Jewish influences, and by a selfish concentration on commerce as opposed to heroic Wagnerian values and a love of science and the arts for their own sake.So the Germans entered the First World War with contempt for the decadence of British culture. When the first British troops taken prisoner in 1914 sportingly tried to shake hands with their captors, they were beaten up for their pains. The Germans disdainfully characterised this British national characteristic as “sportsidiotsmus” — meaning they were unserious and ignorant.
The Prussian military believed the French and Russians were brave and worthy enemies, while the Brits were only in it for the money. Ordinary rank-and-file Germans were taught to believe the British started the war out of jealousy and were paying the French and Russians to encircle the Fatherland.
The Germans assumed that the disillusioned British deserters they interrogated were typical Tommies:
One German report on 35 British soldiers captured at Ypres on 12 February 1916 sums up the received Prussian wisdom: “crooked legs, rickety, alcoholic, degenerate, ill-bred, and poor to the last degree”. Another intelligence report referred to the “poor little men of a diseased civilisation”.
Thus, the Huns were shocked by the tenacity of the British army — and by the high technology they brought to the war.
David Owen explains how NYC is the Greenest City in America:
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however, the color scheme would be reversed.
How Manhattan got so remarkably dense:
New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out — a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward.A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together, thereby increasing their accessibility — a point made forty-three years ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said, “The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste.
Rare Whales Can Live to Nearly 200, Eye Tissue Reveals:
Scientists have looked into the eyes of rare bowhead whales and learned that some of them can outlive humans by generations — with at least one male pushing 200 years old.“About 5 percent of the population is over a hundred years old and in some cases 160 to 180 years old,” said Jeffrey Bada, a marine chemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
But scientists had another, simpler way of guessing how old some whales could get:
George examined several whales killed during an annual Inupiat hunt and found stone harpoons imbedded in their flesh.According to the Scripps Institution’s Bada, “Stone harpoons rapidly disappeared when Europeans went into the Arctic. … That was around 1860, 1870.”
Please enjoy the photo of a polar bear feasting on a bowhead whale carcass left by Inupiat hunters.
Warner Bros.’ The Cute Character explains, visually as much as verbally, that “cuteness is based on the basic proportions of a baby + expressions of shyness or coyness.”
From Jack the Ripper identified:
Private handwritten notes by the man who led the hunt for Jack the Ripper naming the chief suspect were given to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum yesterday.Chief Inspector Donald Swanson kept quiet for years but in retirement, frustrated that the murderer had escaped justice, could not resist scribbling notes in the margin of his boss’s memoirs, naming the man that they both believed had become the world’s most famous serial killer.
The man he named was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-Jewish hairdresser living in Whitechapel, East London, who was eventually committed to a lunatic asylum, where he died.
According to Swanson the police were so convinced that Kosminski was the killer of at least five prostitutes in the 1880s that they organised a secret identity parade at a police rest home. The witness was a Jew who was said to have refused to give evidence.
In What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage, Amy Sutherland explains how to apply the same techniques used by animal trainers to one’s spouse:
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
[...]
On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an “incompatible behavior,” a simple but brilliant concept.Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn’t alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.
At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I’d set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I’d done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.
Historically, it was always easier to supply an army on the move, because the army “lived off land” — meaning it took what it wanted from the locals.
Military Logistics: A Brief History notes that that all changed with the Great War:
The First World War was a milestone for military logistics. It was no longer true to say that supply was easier when armies kept on the move due to the fact that when they stopped they consumed the food, fuel and fodder needed by the army. From 1914, the reverse applied, because of the huge expenditure of ammunition, and the consequent expansion of transport to lift it forward to the consumers. It was now far more difficult to resupply an army on the move, while the industrial nations could produce huge amounts of war matériel, the difficulty was in keeping the supplies moving forward to the consumer.
How To Build a Solar Generator explains that “affordable solar power using auto parts could make this electricity source far more available”:
During a stint in the Peace Corps in Lesotho in southern Africa, Matthew Orosz, an MIT graduate student advised by Harold Hemond, professor of civil and environmental engineering, learned that reflective parabolic troughs can bake bread. Now he plans to use these same contraptions to bring power to parts of Africa baked in sun but starved for electricity. His solar generators, cobbled together from auto parts and plumbing supplies, can easily be built in a backyard.The basic design of Orosz’s solar generator system is simple: a parabolic trough (taking up 15 square meters in this case) focuses light on a pipe containing motor oil. The oil circulates through a heat exchanger, turning a refrigerant into steam, which drives a turbine that, in turn, drives a generator.
The refrigerant is then cooled in two stages. The first stage recovers heat to make hot water or, in one design, to power an absorption process chiller, like the propane-powered refrigerators in RVs. The solar-generated heat would replace or augment the propane flame used in these devices. The second stage cools the refrigerant further, which improves the efficiency of the system, Orosz says. This stage will probably use cool groundwater pumped to the surface using power from the generator. The water can then be stored in a reservoir for drinking water.
The design uses readily available parts and tools. For example, both the feed pump and steam turbine are actually power-steering pumps used in cars and trucks. To generate electricity, the team uses an alternator, which is not as efficient as an ordinary generator, but comes already designed to charge a battery, which reduces some of the complexity of the system. And, like power-steering pumps, alternators, including less-expensive reconditioned ones, are easy to come by.
As a result, the complete system for generating one kilowatt of electricity and 10 kilowatts of heat, including a battery for storing the power generated, can be built for a couple thousand dollars, Orosz says, which is less than half the cost of one kilowatt of photovoltaic panels.
Keira Knightley has created a bit of noise by noting that her image has been digitally enhanced in promotional materials and on magazine covers.
I thought we’d established that this is standard operating procedure by now.
From Peruvians shear vicunas in annual roundup:
Hundreds of villagers march side by side across the wind-blasted Andean plain, closing in on their prey: herds of nervous, fast-moving vicunas — the smaller, wilder cousins of llamas and alpacas.Chanting and shaking a long rope with colorful streamers, the participants encircle the shaggy-coated animals in a ritual that was known to the ancient Inca, but nearly abandoned in the 20th century.
For decades, poachers seeking the world’s most valuable wool simply shot vicunas rather than struggle to trap the elusive animals that can run 30 miles an hour, and by 1964 their numbers had dwindled to just 12,000.
But today, vicunas are captured, shorn and released. The main event is Peru’s national chaccu — an annual roundup that is both a renewed expression of indigenous culture and a triumph for an international campaign to save the once-endangered animals.
Big questions and big numbers examines economic models:
Both kinds of model share a debt to Leon Walras, a 19th-century French economist. Walras was adamant that one could not explain anything in an economy until one had explained everything. Each market — for goods, labour and capital — was connected to every other, however remotely. This interdependence is apparent whenever faster car sales in Texas result in an increase in grocery shopping in Detroit, the home of America’s “big three” carmakers. Or when steep prices for oil lead, curiously enough, to lower American interest rates, because the money the Saudis and the Russians make from crude is spent on American Treasury bonds. This fundamental insight moved one economist to quote the poetry of Francis Thompson: “Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.”Such thinking now comes naturally to economists. But it still escapes many politicians, who blindly uproot flowers, ignorant of the celestial commotion that may ensue. They slap tariffs on steel imports, for example, to save jobs in Pittsburgh, only to find this costs more jobs in the domestic industries that use the metal. Or they help to keep zombie companies alive — rolling over their loans, and preserving their employees on the payroll — only to discover they have starved new firms of manpower and credit. Big models, which span all the markets in an economy, can make policymakers think twice about the knock-on effects of their decisions.
Tyler Cowen cites this excerpt:
But how plausible were the numbers? Twelve years on, economists have shown little inclination to go back and check. One exception is Timothy Kehoe, an economist at the University of Minnesota. In a paper published last year, he argued that the models “drastically underestimated” NAFTA’s impact on trade flows (if not on jobs). The modellers assumed the trade pact would allow people to buy more of the goods for which they had already shown some appetite. In fact, the agreement set off an explosion in the exports of many products Mexico had scarcely traded before. Cars, for example, amounted to less than 1% of Mexico’s exports to Canada before the agreement. By 1999, however, they accounted for more than 15%. The only comfort economists can draw from their efforts, Mr Kehoe writes, is that their predictions fared better than Mr Perot’s. A low bar indeed.
I don’t know if I’d describe The Amazing Screw-On Head as a “hilarious send-up of Lovecraftian horror and steampunk adventure,” but it certainly held my attention.
The animated show — or pilot of a proposed show — is based on the comic, which I was not aware of, by Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, and it feels very Hellboy — only weirder.
James McCormick reviews Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire:
The pattern of cross-frontier influence that gradually stimulated the political evolution and predatory habits of the Germanic tribes (over the course of several centuries) seems all too familiar to us in a world that had seen globalization of cell phones and AK-47s in the last fifty years. It is easier to loot and destroy than build, and the Romans ultimately could not protect what they had spent centuries developing. Persians, Goths, and Huns became a relentless and effective external pressure … and for the West, the incursions into Gaul, Spain, and especially North Africa, removed the economic resources needed for military strength.