In Praise of Obsessive Men

 In Praise of Obsessive Men, by Rosemary Hopcroft at Aporia.  It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is the side I lean to more, I pass it along.  

In short, there is evidence that men are more likely than women to obsessively focus on their chosen area to the exclusion of all else, and this often leads to extraordinary achievement. While the achievements often only benefit the achiever himself, in cognitively demanding areas like science they frequently have tremendous public benefits. Thus, it is likely that extraordinary achievements with the greatest public benefit come disproportionately from obsessive, high IQ men. They deserve our gratitude. 

However there are things worth mentioning that come from another side of the discussion. It is generally agreed that women are in general more attentive to social norms and better at social tasks. This, plus conscientiousness are the prime suspects why they do better at schools as they are designed in most places. I suspect we will find exactly what brain structures are affected by genes being turned on or off by hormones as early as conception, but that is a matter for another day.  For the moment, I stipulate that this is so. Women would thereby have more backup social systems, so that even if they have autism, it is less impairing, and less noticeable. This would explain why it is less often diagnosed.

Secondly, the overlap of symptoms with OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder makes diagnosis and research less reliable.  I think this is going to be wide open for the next twenty years, as genomic data becomes more available. When we say that something is polygenic, that is even more complicated than we think at first. If there is a variant which makes one 1% more obsessive, it is likely upstream or downstream of variants which make one 0.5% or 2% more obsessive, plus a bunch that are so similar that they also weigh in at about 1%. Each of those is surrounded by nearby SNPs that are similar to others in the population that have a tiny effect or magnifying effect, but most likely no effect at all, yet are along for the ride.  And our target gene is just along for the ride on some other trait near it on the chromosome which is also being selected for. It's all going to be ranges and percentages combined with a hundred other ranges or percentages elsewhere. Some of those are going to be autism, some OCD, some simply anxiety, not to mention a hundred other God-only-knows selection events. 

Funny thing.  The odds for things in genetics are going to turn out looking a lot like the odds for things in real life.  What a concept. Because all these conditions are Mendelian only in their extreme and more destructive versions, it is likely that many are going to be rather obsessed, somewhat obsessed, mildly obsessed, and this will be lessened by women who are more likely to say to themselves "This is just too much.  It costs too much socially" and back off. 

There is a further set of arguments which come from autists who declare that the supposedly scientific claims are weaker than advertised, which they often noticed because the internal experience of autists is ignored and dismissed in favor of that which is objectively measured. There is something to this, but that data is, well, polluted by a very high percentage of the self-diagnosed. When these are female, they borrow heavily from feminist perspectives that science/men/logic itself are antagonistic to women's wisdom. (Which is in turn complicated by women who are striving mightly to argue from an entirely objective and logical perspective. Sigh.)  I can only say that I take the point that the holes in the autism mainstream's position are real, but that does not prove that all opposition to it is correct.  

Destructive Bureaucracy

 David Foster put this up during my trip, but it got buried in my notes.  Sorry to be late.

The French Army in 1940 and the CDC in 2021, 

(And we know what happened to the French Army in 1940).  Mr Foster sees a parallel

I was reminded of this history in early 2022 by a sequence of posts at twitter. Joanna Masel, a theoretical biologist, says the CDC contacted her (following an NYT story) about an app she helped develop to notify people (anonymously) about possible covid-19 exposure. Her group put a very informal preprint on github nearly immediately, and a more formal one on medrxiv soon after. A CDC coauthor was added to shepherd it through MMWR, which is described as “CDC’s primary vehicle for scientific publication of timely, authoritative, and useful public health information and recommendations.”

The preproposal was rejected. Informal feedback was that they liked it but were so backlogged that a peer reviewed journal was likely faster. This initiated 6 months of clearance procedures needed for CDC coauthor to stay on paper.

What CDC staff spend a LOT of time on: rewriting manuscripts with meticulous attention to style guides. Eg, Methods must follow exactly the order they are used in Results, all interpretation must be in Discussion not in Results, etc. to a point truly unimaginable in my field. 

Thanking the Algorithm This Time

St Magnus Cathedral

We expect the attractive balance of the Renaissance and even slavish symmetry post Sir Christopher Wren* in our architecture and are surprised when it is repeatedly violated in earlier buildings. But they were as aware of it as much as we are, they just put it farther down their priority list. If you needed an alcove to put in a special chapel, you just put in an alcove on that side. If someone needed another alcove later they natural gravitated to the matching spot on the other side, but if they never needed one, that was no problem. They wouldn't move an altar a foot to the side, but if it needed to go to the 2/3 mark, that was pretty too. St Magnus in Kirkwall has got a few sections where they moved a wall in a foot or out a foot because of practical considerations. It's still solidly symmetrical, though

 

There's that ubiquitous red sandstone again, that they built everything from. It's a soft stone, so when they started using it for gravestones, families found that the were becoming weathered and unreadable.  Richer people started sending for more durable stone, even when the bones were interred indoors. Sometimes people would put up a wooden marker in anticipation of greater wealth later. I found this Memento Mori fascinating. It is much like a sign for a shop.

The sandstone stills shows signs of being painted over during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Whatever illustrations the Catholics had were now forbidden, to be replaced by plaques commemorating human beings or groups of them, which the Reformers considered Less Idolatrous. 

You get things like memorials to the war dead, which includes their family identifiers, including this one I found humorous. 

Much better than pictures of Biblical stories, sure.
 

A note on Saints and local gods: Learning two unrelated eras side-by-side can suggest associations you might not otherwise have had. When Orkney was Catholic, the center of its authority was in Rome, a place where few people had ever been. Being able to have your own bishop gave you a chance to send someone you knew to represent you among the great and the wise. The idea was echoed at royal courts as power consolidated and kingdoms grew larger. Having an earl who was married to one of the king's relatives gave you an avenue to be heard. This would have been even stronger before general literacy, but even now, we want someone of our own to advocate for us. God gave other tribes pictures, but to the Jews He gave the captions, rather forcing them to focus on words, which traveled better and were more universal. Yet we iz who we iz, and the Jews got idolatrous about the words themselves, and Christians gladly and self-righteously followed.  It's a step toward abstraction, but it's not foolproof. Jews had Kabbalah, pre-Christians had runes, and Christians dabbled in grammarye, leading to Baptists putting Bibles on secondary altars with a single light shining down on it. For all of them we must say "Not thus, but thank you for your assistance." Asking a saint to pray for you is not that different. When we destroy one idol we secretly build another.

Where was I? St Olaf, who is big in Norwegian thinking and thus in early Orkney, was a pagan convert to Christianity.  His statue in the Kirkwall cathedral has interesting symbolism. And there's that stonework again.

If you look at the serpent he is crushing, it has a human head. The face is in fact his own, representing the death of his old self, or perhaps the constant need to keep killing it.

The scratching is a mason's mark showing which person cut the stones in this section.  There is an identical mark from a very close time in the Cathedral of Durham in the north of England.

Neolithic Legos

As you can see from the second photo, the sandstone of Orkney looks like it could practically be split with few hands and put into place for building in a few minutes."Neolithic Legos," one of our guides called it. The first picture is of a rock structure thousands of years old, the last picture about a hundred, but you can see the second stories are remarkably like the old brochs. The first stories are as well, underneath the stucco-like coating and pebbling to create an extra barrier. It's stacked stones underneath, in nearly every building. Fences and outbuildings do not look like much of a change from Skara Brae or the Broch of Gurness. St Magnus Cathedral is built of much larger pieces of red sandstone, finished more finely, but it's the same thing as well.

Why would they change?  It's right there, it's easy, and it works. One downside is if you use it for standing stones it attracts lightning, which can also split it pretty quickly. The stone circles of Orkney have not held up as well as Stonehenge and Avebury for that reason. Still, 5,000 years is a good innings for any built structure, wouldn't you say?

Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast

This WSJ article is making the rounds, so most of you might have seen it, but I wanted to make sure it got noticed. Boomer Christianity is Dying Fast. The aging of the mainstream denominations, especially the leadership has been pointed out more and more frequently over the last twenty years.

This hasn’t always been the view of the Catholic Church. Mr. Thomas and his fellow activists are drawn to the imagery of the crusades. Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095 to a crowd that responded with cries of “Deus vult” or “God wills it.” That phrase is popular among nativists on social media. Which pope is the greater authority on the gospels, Urban or Leo? I don’t know. But a glance at Christian history shows that the current consensus among church leaders hasn’t always been so. Taking the long view, it is by no means a settled position among Christians that nationalism and militarism are “contrary to the gospel,” as Bishop Hudson-Wilkin put it 

I think bringing in Urban II is a bit of an overshoot, but point taken. There are ideas in church leadership which are treated as obvious but would not even be recognised in other eras of the faith. I always hesitate to begin an argument with "One would think..." because it carries a great danger of subjectivity, but one would think that the leader of an eternal church would ask him/herself whether his opinion owes more to his narrow slice of time than it should. I learned decades ago from CS Lewis that while it is true that all eras have their own biases and cannot be entirely objective, this is nowhere more true than among the moderns who insist this. The thing they preach loudest they seem to think themselves exempt from. He called it Chronocentrism and Chronological Snobbery, giving credit to Owen Barfield for alerting him to the illogic of it.

 Boomer Christians are alarmed and bewildered by a return to the faith of centuries past. They forget that the political priorities of their generation emerged from a very unusual historical moment. Their confident worldview was a gift from a different era. And it will, I fear, die with them.

Have some humility.

 

Welsh Men's Chorus

Just to keep the A capella going. I swear the whole country can sing.  

 

Amazing Marvin Gaye

Strong and solid.  I didn't know this version existed

 

The Ness of Brodgar

Orkney is one of the few places where any knobbed balls have been found in situ. None of the theories of what they were used for has been very persuasive, but they have been found many places in northern Scotland. One was found at the Ness of Brodgar in 2013, and a new one at this summer's dig. This Ness was a community structure between the major standing stones sites, containing houses, cooking areas, and workshops. It was only discovered in 2003 and usual, accidentally by a farmer plowing his field. Though it doesn't make for good tourist photographs, it is much more extensive than the stone circles themselves and tells us more about how the people lived.

A funny thing about experts.  We had international experts, even the decades-long chief archaeologists on some sites.  Because of this story I will not mention any names, though anyone determined could narrow it down to a few persons pretty quickly if they chose. In explaining about the Ness, our guide had a mind-numbing amount of detail at his fingertips and ability to offhandedly point things out that would only be noticed by people who had spent a lot of time at this.  Occasionally there would be another archaeologist in the group and they would talk shop in a manner that was almost incomprehensible. Sometimes they would double back and explain something to the rest of us, sometimes not. In summing up before the Q&A our guide mentioned that there was now some assurance that the very top layer before the site was abandoned not only had some artefacts from the Beaker People, but good evidence that they had used an inhabited the site.

I fancy there were murmurs of appreciation of this, but it may have been only me.  This is the moment of transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.  The Bell Beaker culture was the group that almost fully replaced the previous culture - the one that had actually built Stonehenge, Avebury, Newgrange, and the stone rings around us but were overwhelmed throughout Europe by the Indo-Europeans, the Yamnaya, the wildly violent Steppe tribes who were our ancestors. In most places the male lineages were completely replaced.  Orkney and eastern Scandinavia were two of the few places where that replacement occurred differently or not at all. That's another story, but the short version is that the incoming paternal lines did not replace the Orkney natives, while both groups of females persisted. As this occurred at the far end of their spread, where horses and carts were not the advantage on islands they had been previously, the resident males could mostly hold off the invaders. 

"Ah, this is the part I'm most interested in," I blurted, barely raising my hand to be called on. "The Beaker usually brought the practice of burial in mounds with them, but mound graves were already in place here.  Were they brought at an earlier date by a variation of these people from the Steppes? Are they influenced by Kurgans or completely unrelated?"

"What are kurgans?"

It was as if a mathematicians had said "Who is this Fourier chap you keep talking about?' or an astronomer had said "What do you mean, moons of Neptune?" I was almost too embarrassed to continue, suddenly worried that it was I who had been inhabiting some obscure backwater and thinking it important.  I was able to explain that they were the burial mounds of the Steppe people. He said briefly and generally that the Steppe people had been the Indo-Europeans and "come into" Europe, a rather mild description for complete replacement.  He didn't comment on the any relationship between the two types of mound, and I just dropped it.

All I can think is that the field is so specialised that the experts do not need or desire to keep up with the larger movements in their own area of study. It seems rather like economics, where Nobel winners sometimes seem to have no better grasp on larger issues than other educated people.

So I'm going to say, no, no relation, because if there were he would have been all over it, as obsessed as he was by Orkney information. 

Skaill House

Skaill House was already the seat of earls and bishops of Orkney (Some Graham and Watts Lairds, mostly) with some small archaeological importance when Skara Brae was discovered on its lands after a storm two centuries ago. The tumulus had been noticed, with the idea that "Someone should dig that up and see what's there someday," which describes half of Orkney. 

If you are interested in American East Coast domestic history, the displays start in the era of Williamsburg, VA and end at Newport, RI. You can see it and it just jumps out at you.  But because its earls and bishops in the UK, a lot of the enthusiasm by the presenters is about noble alliances and visits by the Queen Mum. If we weren't such a good match for Williamsburg and Newport here, it might not have interested us as much. Quite the cottage, though.  If you are there at Skara Brae anyway, it's a definite plus.

This is the place to mention that Orkney was a wonderful and valuable trip for us, but we have no need for a second visit. Maybe if I had to go into the witness protection program or something. 

Orkney has both outsized importance and is neglected

In Scotland, no one pays much attention to Orkney. It has only 22,000 people across the whole chain of islands.  It has almost 200,000 sheep, 100,000 cattle, and I didn't look up how many fish, but really, it's islands in the North Atlantic. It has several local brands of beer and scotch, including some specialty beers from bere, an ancient form of barley which is also used to make a very authentic bannock or other tourist bread. Though other parts of Scotland have different authenticities, you will notice that this does not differentiate it much from the Shetlands, the Western Isles, the Highlands, or Scotland in general. Scotch, not many people, sheep, necessary for tourists, otherwise rather a drain on resources. Orkney needs lots of ferries and small airports, and there is only so far you can cut back the safety regulations on those things.

OTOH, Orkney has outsized importance to Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age archaeologists, Viking historians, and WWII buffs. Standing stone in concentration are always a big deal. St Magnus and his cathedral are a big deal. Scapa Flow is a big deal. 

When you think about it, most places in the world are like this, of immense importance to some groups and no importance to others. The archaeology tourists always tut-tut about the farmers who are uncooperative with digs, not recognising their value. But really, why should they be?  They have crops, they have livestock, they have harvests and hard work. This is a potentially important Mesolithic site for the entire North Atlantic!  SO WHAT?  They're dead and gone. Go away and stop bothering the sheep. 

Rural New England farming. Historically important, but who cares? If it can't pay its own way with tourists...

Prairie family Bibles. Folk arts of the Ozarks. Almost everything with an historical designation that gets money or is untaxed means that we all pay for it.  It is a tradeoff scheme played by politicians. It is a sign of immense wealth when a country can do this. But it's got billions of dollars of mineral resources under it! So what, it's a park now, and sacred to Gaia, so you can't touch it. Why can't you have a park over here instead?  It's different. You are just an ignorant person who does not understand. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Does Georgism Work?

I had never heard of it, but recognised the name once the history was given. This is a land value tax arrangement that seems to work well in theory.  It looks like it would "work" in terms of raising revenue in a fairer way than we do now, which is always the first question. But I have not considered how the system might be gamed - always the second question.  As I am apparently late to the party on this, it is likely that wiser others have thought about this, so I won't shoot from the hip. Does Georgism Work? Five Year Later. There are enormously cool graphics.

The focus is on legislation whereby states allow communities to institute LVT's. This seems both clever and cautious.  It puts the idea out there, where it hasn't been on the radar, doesn't make anyone do anything, and removes a barrier that communities trying to get the idea off the ground would undoubtedly have in selling the idea: How are we ever going to get the state to approve this? Discouragement and loss on inertia ensues.

Under this arrangement, city property pays more, rural pays less, suburbs in between depending on density. But in the city, this is an example from one place, in this case Spokane

From another section of the essay, there is this. 

In Part 1, Is Land A Big Deal?, I ran the “land isn’t a big deal” theory against several testable hypotheses. Among the findings was the fact that sky-high urban real estate prices were primarily driven by land appreciation, and that land was a large and steadily increasing share of bank loans.4 The article’s centerpiece was an original estimate of the total land value of the United States, which was much larger than many had expected. Although this estimate fell short of what a “single tax” would require, it was still large enough to convince many that LVT had been unfairly dismissed as a serious policy proposal. 

Followed shortly thereafter by this

 South Korea has the highest land value-to-GDP ratio in the entire OECD, in excess of 500%. To put that in perspective, the figures from my own estimates of the USA’s total land values—which surpassed many readers’ expectations—were a mere 200% of GDP. My first instinct was that Korean land values must reflect a temporary, anomalous bubble and would soon revert. However, long-run land value-to-GDP ratios over the last 50+ years have ranged from 400%, and current values aren’t even the all-time peak, which clocks in at around 600%. Prime land is just that valuable and scarce in South Korea.

Spam Names

I go to my spam folder to make sure no really mail has ended up there, and always marvel at the random names that are attached: Delilah Oaxaca. Giuseppe Pavlov, Amaziah Banks.  And that's not even counting the African names.

Further evidence that they are trying to snare people who have no clue, not those who will catch on after they've wasted a few emails. 

John Rae's Tomb

 This is the Hudson Bay explorer John Rae's tomb at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney

 Looks like his admirers gave him about at fine a sendoff as one can get.

The Street With Eight Names

The main shopping street in Stromness, second-largest town in Orkney, is called Victoria Street on GPS but has a strange history. It was not always continuous, but was a series of alleyways along the wharves, with houses, warehouses, and shops interrupting it. It is now about the width of a walkway at an outlet mall. 

 

It is a mile long, wonderfully charming for shopping, and if you expand that picture, you will get a bit more of Scots humor.

It is called the Street with Eight Names.  I could only find six on the day I was there: John, Victoria, Dundas, Alfred, South End, and Ness. 

King Arthur's Name

I don't think this is Bernard's best writing, but he does cram a lot of information about the real Arthur (and the denial of the real Arthur) into a small space. Again, he is coming from an historical linguist's perspective, which has often been shorted in the historical discussion. Even though he hedges with his "perhaps's" and "possibly's," the rather sudden emergence of boys named Arthur right after the most probable real Arthur of history suggests that people then did not regard him as legendary, but a real leader worthy of emulation and remembrance. The Origin of King Arthur's Name.

COOL MICROBES

Science news stories pop up from time to time telling us that microbes have been discovered that digest plastic or extract rare metals.  Yet somehow, we never hear about these again.  Are they all fool's gold, false alarms, mountains out of molehills?

No, we don't get to follow up on them because of where they fall in the regulatory chain. Works in Progress: The 1970s Law Holding Back Biotechnology. 

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin therefore took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. The next step could be to place FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But even putting the gene back into its original host, I. sakaiensis, triggers TSCA, ensuring that the reconstituted organism can’t be used. 

If you know more about this than I do, feel free.  Sometimes Works in Progress leaves out important points. 

Political Ads

Here in NH, the ads against both Pappas and Sununu for Senate are unfair and manipulative.  My method of spotting who is fighting fair to discern who is closest to the truth is breaking down this year. I have the inertia of liking Sununu a lot because he can do simple math and has been honorable, while disliking Pappas, who is a lightweight.  But that's the past, and the negative ads this time around don't have much between them.

AI and Homework

Another graph that doesn't quite means what it looks like.  The students who regularly used AI might be different than those who do the work more on their own. Put simply, they might not be as smart to begin with.

Appropriateness of a Gift

At Skara Brae there was a small wet, depressed area in the interior. Water collects there and people had thrown coins into it. There seems to be an internal sense that we have that when you go to an old place or a sacred place that some gift must be given. No one makes us do this, we just do. It is a gift to the ancestors or spirits of a place. It may be a propitiation, but I think it is just an instinct that seems appropriate to many of us.   Even saying it brings luck or grants a wish, as with a fountain is not all that different. I've never had the least interest in the custom, but in that setting and reading about ancestor worship and nature spirits all week I suddenly got it for the first time. I still didn't leave a coin,  but I had a nice conversation about it with some young men.

Orkney Scotch

 

If you look at the middle of the top section, you will see that it includes a scotch that is about 128 proof.  I am told that any strength over 90 has the alcohol interfering in the taste, but I only know what read in the papers. I have no expertise here. I liked the Deer Sound just fine and stuck with that.

I had a quick one at The Bothy, the pub on the back side of the hotel, and watched a man put a single drop of Grand Marnier into his single malt. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't keep that liqueur on hand, so I can't report on that for you.

Weather, Ocean, Wind

We debated whether to go out and back on the ferry at all, because it was raining and visibility was poor. But we did want to see a seastack, the Old Man of Hoy, so we hopped aboard. Everything cleared in ten minutes, which is typically quick for Orkney. It was 50-60 degrees 24/7 with occasional rain while we were there, always windy. The sea changed color twice more during our 1 hour trip.

This is Ward Hill. I wish I could capture the mood of this more dramatically, but it is my sons who are the photographers. We saw the seastack at a distance only. 

 

Southern Rock Early On

 I shrugged at the time, but came to like them in retrospect

 

Assistant Village Idiot Illustration

The point of being the Assistant Village Idiot is to learn to not make things overly complicated. I'm still working on that. 

 

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, MD out camping on holiday

"Watson, what do you see?"

"A thousand bright stars Holmes, more than I ever remember seeing."

"What do you conclude from that?"

Watson pauses doubtfully. "That we are but a small part of the universe.  It goes on at infinite distance while we on this small sphere are barely noticeable. It is humbling to think that all our wars, governments, literature and accomplishments have no meaning around any of those stars. Why? What do you conclude?"

"That someone has taken our tent." 

Tourists

A woman asking her husband at St. Magnus Cathedral (built in 1137)

"Do you know how old this is?" 

"About 5000 years ago...

Uh, maybe it was only 1000." 

 

Up the street at a restaurant, an expensively-dressed couple. He mentions Cambridge rather loudly.

"You have to have fish, because you have been on a long journey."

"But don't you think it has to do with the type of fish? You've said that one should have fish for the digestion after a journey, but I find that's only for Mediterranean fish." 

"That could be, they swim differently." 

 

 

The Bravest Man We Ever Knew

 Just up, by Madeleine Kearns at The Free Press: The Bravest Man We Ever Knew. Stunning.

Dovie described his body as “a straitjacket” even in the best of times, yet somehow amid the prison of his circumstances, he relished whatever simple pleasures broke through: a glass of iced tea or Kentucky bourbon, a butterfly landing close enough for him to take a picture. He would frequently text us photos he’d taken while out on strolls. “Exquisite weather today,” he’d say. “I got almost 12 hours of sleep in,” he once texted, after a long stretch of disrupted nights from pain: “Wonderfully rejuvenating.” He adored the many children in his life and would break into huge smiles when sharing videos and pictures of his nieces. His attitude was often like that of the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, who, from the confines of her Nazi-occupied Dutch ghetto, once wrote: “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.” 

My Weight Loss Story

Even on Substack, that supposed last bastion of intellectualism, there is a genre of weight struggle reporting that is pure anecdote with forays into generalisations they believe are helpful scientific information.  These are always by women, but men figure prominently in the comments right out of the gate, telling their weight-loss story. If anything, the men are even more declarative that their experience is generalisable, implying you are just a shirker who doesn't really want to lose weight if you don't do as they did. I think there is plenty of room for everyone to cram their pre-existing sexual stereotypes into this data. You are all entirely correct, even when you contradict each other.

It may do some good for bonding and networking.  There is exchange of medical advice which is usually better than nothing but overlooks a great deal.

This one finds she loses weight every time she goes to Europe, which is of course absolute proof that European eating habits and patterns of exercise are better than ours. It must be the cheese.  Or the town centers. Or their laid back attitudes. Or less processing and more grocer's markets. Or the medical care!  They pay less attention/more attention to everyday complaints, which is the key. The very quickly, all the people who have never had any problem with weight and attribute that to their superior discipline and character (wo)mansplain that to everyone.

I learned long ago - as far back as 2025 - that actual research and evidence are unrecognised, and you are chided for not seeing that these people are just trying to help by sharing their personal experience. They sound exactly like the teachers who insisted that I could have better penmanship or better artistic presentation of my 6th-grade projects if I only cared. Or music/art/gym teachers, same, ignoring neurology. Just try this one weird trick. 

Tomb of the Eagles

There was a special showing of The Tomb of the Eagles as part of the Orkney Archaeology Conference we were attending.  We had to walk out on farm roads between the barley fields ripe for harvest, which was fun in itself.  It is on the southern coast of South Ronaldsay, looking across at the Scottish mainland. My wife went inside to see the chambered cairn.  It is good to have guides, because much of what they point out is not complicated, and you see it instantly when they put your attention on it.  The entrance to the cairn faces the water and is up on a hill. The natural features were enhanced to make it look more impressive when viewed from the sea. A good thing to notice, that they were not trying to hide this important place from enemies but displaying it to them as a sign of power and control over the area. The tombs of ancestors were an implied claim to the territory in perpetuity. 

Yet from other angles it presents differently, and the current thinking is that it was used for different purposes by different groups, possibly not even related. From the opposite side it looks like the far end of a ritual center where bones of the ancestors were brought. Even the name seems to come from a thousand years later, as the presumed totem animal eagles only arrive at a much later date.  There is also a Tomb of the Otters that may be contemporaneous. 

They were digging some test trenches off to the side, and the two archaeologists, plus a third one being quoted, agreed with some discussion that in the top picture, the upper find showed possible evidence of human enhancement, the other one showed no such signs, and the trench in the bottom photo showed definite signs of human enhancement of the natural features.  They even very nicely pointed out and explained why they thought so. I nodded thoughtfully.

 

This is your cue to nod thoughtfully as well, even stroking your chin if you choose.

The Dystopian Imagination

 Theodore Dalrymple reviews the 20thC dystopias and their comparisons to reality 25 years ago in City Journal. I remembered the essay, though forgetting it was his. I mentally added a few other dystopias to the discussion, including That Hideous Strength. Rob Henderson linked to this, for which I am grateful.

 The totalitarian world Orwell describes in 1984 is thankfully today more a historical curiosity than a serious threat, except in an Islamist version. Yet, many of Orwell's ideas, like those of Huxley, remain pertinent, even though the threat of Stalinism has passed, for Orwell warned us about undesirable trends that arose from the condition of modernity as much as from Stalinism. His fears arose not just from his intuitive grasp of Stalinist states and his knowledge of communist conduct during the Spanish Civil War but from his experiences with the BBC's bureaucracy during World War II, where he witnessed firsthand the potential of the modern mass media to mislead and manipulate.