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.

Immigration in Order to Keep Things the Same

I had not looked at it this way, but Arcotherium over at Aporia points out that countries sometimes use immigration to avoid change and dynamism rather than create it. Industries don't have to modernise practices and equipment if they can import cheaper labor and keep doing it the old-fashioned way.  He mentions American agriculture, but there are worldwide examples and more industries in the US that evade change with immigration. He calls it Mortmain Migration: Immigration as an agent of stasis. 

But often the industry changes anyway, and we have a host of new immigrants who do not have other useful schools to adapt to American live, having grown up elsewhere.

 Rather than a rational system designed to favor the national interest or any other goal, Western immigration systems are accreted over time by blindly following the local incentive gradients that special interest lobbying creates. For such lobbying to matter, the special interests must have power and influence—which are the province of incumbents, not challengers. And it is declining incumbents (who have long since conquered their niche and ceased to innovate) that focus most organizational attention and resources on lobbying. Hence we should not be surprised to find that much Western immigration is designed to preserve declining incumbents.

The Bills

 

I have always loved the harmony in this one.

King Ludd

Something different from Scott Alexander, who traces an obscure Romano-British Celtic god to...

To half the mythology you've ever heard of, from Lovecraft to Harry Potter  to the fictitious leader of the Luddites.  And a special guest appearance.

In 1929, an archaeologist digging at the Temple of Nodens had some questions about the etymology of the god’s name, and asked Oxford to send a linguist. Oxford dispatched a young philology professor with an encyclopedic knowledge of European mythology, who spotted a connection that had evaded previous scholars: Nodens appeared to be the same figure as the Irish god-hero Nuada of the Silver Arm. Nuada was king of the Tuatha de Danaan, a race of immortals who sailed from the north on ships that were clouds and made war against the then-inhabitants of Ireland, the Fir Bolg. He fought bravely, wielding his all-powerful Sword of Light, but in the climax of the battle, the Fir Bolg champion cut off his right arm. This caused some temporary trouble (the laws of the time prevented a one-armed man from being king), but his people were skilled at magic and metalworking, so they made him a new arm of silver, hence his epithet. He ruled for some number of centuries, a golden age of crafting and wonder-working, until the Tuatha de Danaan were invaded in turn (this was a theme; our source for these stories is a medieval manuscript called The Book Of Invasions). The new invaders banished Nuada’s people to the hills and forests, where they became the sidhe aka fae aka fairies. 

White Liberals Don't Like White People

Presumably they like other liberal white people, but not whites in general. This is unprecedented, does not occur among other groups, and increases as leftism increases. Cremieux has an amazing set of graphs on this one. The data is almost too clean. Sometime between 2012-2016, white leftists decide they don't like (do they hate?) other white people, with a corresponding rise in how much they like everyone else.  We can explain disliking that so many other white people voted for Trump, but deciding that Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have suddenly improved does not have a clear explanation. In what way do they think that black woman 2020 is an upgrade over black woman 2000? Without knowing their motives clearly, it seems that hating badwhites has become their overriding motive. 

I would be very curious what the numbers are for Jews, who seem to have had an increasing split over the last decades. I have said, oversimplifying, that for many Jews liberalism has become their real religion, and the last two decades have not contradicted that. I do very much wonder if October 7 has created a shift in either direction.

Wordsum

Wordsum is about the shortest IQ test you can find.  It is approximate, but it holds up, even under scrutiny. 

The Wordsum test is highly g-loaded and is a suitable proxy for intelligence, even if it would be nice to have a broader, more reliable, and less range-restricted test score.

Cremieux Recueil tests Wordsum to illustrate this indirectly.  It's good to know, but I noticed what he uncovered in the previous reckoning about the tetriles (I thought it was deciles) of Wordsum scores and political affiliation. It shows one of those things you are not supposed to notice.

2015 Links

Coming Down the Home Stretch

Team Colors 

Gandalf Quote  I had this on my work bulletin board for years.  It is a comfort when the lack of lasting effect is common to one's job.

The Church of Frederickism 

Community Vs Communism with a thoughtful comment by Texan99

The demographics of suicide, with disturbing comments by clinicians. As the numbers for males over 45 are still high, their explanations haven't aged well.

This was fun to recall 

 

The Man Who Lost His Wife - Again

I do admire the humor of the Scots.  I mentioned to the woman covering one of the gift shops at a prehistoric site that my wife seemed to be no longer in evidence in either the shop or the exhibit.

"Are you trying to find her, then, or are you hoping to leave her here?"

"Well, I've always left with her eventually, but sometimes it takes considerable effort." 

"Perhaps some sort of tracking device would be helpful." 

Bringing Something For the Festival

Standing stones in Orkney do not all come from the same quarry, and they are not erected identically, even in a single circle. They were probably not even all erected at the same time. The Ness of Brodgar, the ritual, working, and living area between the two main sites shows that there were repeated festivals, with cattle being dominant in what was slaughtered and eaten. So it looks like various groups from around the island all brought something to the party, and likely competed over this, because it seems to be Best Stuff. 

It looks like each group brought a honking big stone once in the lengthy building period, and that was probably competitive as well. Quite the potluck.

To accomplish something this difficult takes a lot of people a lot of time, and they have to be spared from other work, like food and shelter. We used to think that this always meant that the leadership was highly organised.  All over Britain evidence is emerging that sometimes it was the people, in non-hierarchical fashion, who were organised. It's hard to say, obviously, but some impressive structures were put up by groups with no evidence of slavery or even much hierarchy.

Neoracists

John McWhorter is a favorite liberal of many conservatives because of articles like this. It's an excerpt from his new book.

 Many will see me as traitorous in writing this as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or, not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that I am calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also realize: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when written by a black person, and consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write it.

Cf 1984 

Recent Links

 The Aztecs were even worse than you thought. Maybe I should just stay up on cultural stuff by reading the Psmiths.

The majority black accent in NYC was exactly the same as whites in the early 1800s.  John McWhorter with fascinating stuff, as usual. 

David Foster brings back the memory of Lewis Vs Haldane immediately postwar. Not only here, but in all the summaries of Lewis's thought by any opponent (I exempt Elizabeth Anscombe), whether direct or indirect, there is a whiff of assuming he must be a bit dim because he was a Christian. For this reason alone, they often misunderstand him in favor of thinking he believes something that is their stereotype of Christians. 

Infiltrating Conservatism  I hear both things, that these groups are rising in influence and power, and that they are bogeymen that the left holds up as propaganda.

Just bury your trash I believe aluminum cans are worth recycling, and corrugated cardboard breaks even.  But that is only what I heard over a decade ago. This article looks at some other comparisons.