Halfway down the Danube

Lint answers 2

I get more comments!

Andrew Reeves, sometimes I backtrack references, or check forward citations. Sometimes I do keyword searches. Sometimes I'll flip through online tables of contents. And sometimes, hell if I know where I got that.

I see there's a swell of interest in Hideyoshi's personal letters.

Okay, the article is available on JSTOR, "An introduction to the private correspondence of Toyotomi Hideyoshi," Adriana Boscaro, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 27, No. 4. (Winter, 1972), pp. 415-421.

They're largely written in kana (syllabary) and not kanji (characters), because they're mainly written for women and children, and this was viewed as the appropriate form at that time. Hideyoshi had some tics of expression, and I gather sometimes used a sort of affectionate pig-Latin. He deeply loved his mother; during the siege of Odawara, he wrote:

"Go to some place and thus amuse yourself -- and please, become young once more. I do beg you to do this."

He wrote letters to his wife and concubines to better navigate those complicated relationships, and for his young son Hideyori, nothing was too good for him: no painful moxabustion treatments, milk to help him grow, only his dad could kiss him on the lips.

The chronology is interesting: during the Korean debacle, Hideyoshi seems to have retreated within himself, writing about playing uribatake ("a pastime invented, so it is said, by Hideyoshi himself. It consisted of pretending to cultivate and then sell cucumbers") and funaasobi ("outings in a boat for the purpose of fishing, drinking and rocking to Nugent writing poetry").

His last personal letter was written to an unknown recipient, beginning "As I am ill and feel lonely, I have taken up the brush," and ending, "This one single letter is worth ten thousand letters written in normal circumstances." Two months later he died.

Syd Webb, it actually seems to be a very late survival of ancient Egyptian religious lore, which was transmitted through Gnostic texts to the hands of those very capable Irish monks. By the time of the Muslim conquest, the discontinuity was nearly complete; I only know of one possible survival of ancient Egyptian religious practice in Muslim Egypt (and not customs delinked from the old pantheon).

Bernard, what makes you think the Spanish solved the fat tails problem? It was a risk pool for ships in convoys under chartered military escort. Pro rata, but other insurance reduced the value you could claim by the amount of coverage. No actuarial tables, no nothing: some guy in Seville came up with the rate for each voyage, and wow did they go up in the seventeenth century.

Mike, whoa, slow down there Tex. The Conway and Kochen is a sweet recent result in quantum mechanics. The really brief version: "if we have free will, then so do elementary particles", and the logically equivalent version: "if elementary particles don't have free will, then neither do we" -- "free will" here meaning, "behavior not determined by the previous history of the universe".

The Derluguian is a review of a smart Marxist take on globalization. The Cucker and Smale does not have immediate psychological correlates. The De Vany and Walls, well:

We discover that box-office revenues are asymptotically Pareto-distributed and have infinite variance. The mean is dominated by rare blockbuster movies that are located in the far right tail. There is no typical movie because box-office revenue outcomes do not converge to an average: revenues diverge over all scales. The studio model of risk management lacks a foundation in theory or evidence, and revenue forecasts have zero precision.

Or, as they quote William Goldman, "nobody knows anything."

Some reading

Random Oscar thought: John Hawkwood : Giovanni Acuto :: Clint Eastwood : Corrado Astuto? His translation for Morricone was very cool. Anyway, I don't actually have a TV, so I know about this through my psychic powers. I do have a lot of books.

Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard. One of Wisconsin's finest novelists. A mill won on a bet over a twelve-point buck, the last two mill brothers killing every exotic bird in the aviary because they were making too much racket, but saving the corpses for taxidermy purposes, and getting the new Hmong Turkish guy to help out (who does a better job)? Classic Wisconsin.

The Pure Product of America: Isn't he Austrian? And what about the last hundred pages, the mad prince's monologue on forestry, family, and cognitive despair?

...

The Pure Product of America: Right.

The Emperor of the Sorcerers, volume 1, Budhasvamin. I found a few titles in the Clay Sanskrit Library at the Strand before Methodist Lent, hidden underneath some Arthuriana. They're not bad. This one is pretty good, in fact. It's taken from four Nepalese manuscripts, two from the twelfth century, collected and edited by a French scholar in 1908. One of the plot points involves the construction of an airplane to satisfy a queen's pregnancy cravings. No, really:

All the artisans stood aside and talked at length among themselves before speaking to Rumanvan in voices faltering with fear: 'We know of four types of machine: machines for water, stone, and dust, and those for pressing sugarcane. As for sky-machines, they are apparently known to the Greeks but we have not come across them.'

The Sanskrit word for 'machine' or 'mechanism' is yantra, incidentally. It's best known now as a Tantric geometric design, like a mandala.

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, #1, Jeff Smith. This was very enjoyable. It's very hard to write (and draw) simultaneously both for eight-year-olds and for people who want to remember what comics were like as an eight-year-old. But I think Smith succeeds, and all the cool people in Brooklyn agree with me.

(I will admit I am a little unnerved by the corporate interest in Jeff Smith. I'm not sure why. Captain Marvel is a product; but getting kids to read is also a product, and education has been part of Bismarck's sausage factory for a long, long time.)

Avoid other Shazam! titles. They will make you unhappy. I blame Alan Moore.

Cleaning the sock drawer, Callaghan to Durand

Yeah, I'm only through the D's. Now you know why I'm using the blog for structure.

Callaghan - More evidence for Yok-Utian, a reanalysis of the Dixon and Kroeber sets

Cameron - A nativity poem of the sixth century A.D.

Carey - The political economy of poison, the kingdom of Makassar and the early Royal Society

Carey - The sun's night journey, a Pharaonic image in medieval Ireland

Carman - On the Pope's original intent, Las Casas reads the papal bulls of 1493

Carroll - Dating 'The Woman from Ancona', Venice and Ruzante's theatre after Cambrai

Cartmill - New views on primate origins (1992)

Cassidy - Machiavelli and the ideology of the offensive, gunpowder weapons in The Art of War

Catania and Remple - Asymptotic prey profitability drives star-nosed moles to the foraging speed...

Catford - Mountain of tongues, the languages of the Caucasus

Damn, what an unappealing mental image al-Mas'udi came up with.

Cavazzoni - Superionic and metallic states of water and ammonia at giant planet conditions

Caveney - New observations on the secondary chemistry of world Ephedra (Ephedraceae)

Cech and Bass - Biological catalysis by RNA (1986)

Celliers - Electronic conduction in shock-compressed water

Chambers and Lissauer - A new dynamical model for the lunar late heavy bombardment

Charnov - Optimal foraging, attack strategy of a mantid (1976)

Chenoweth - Melaka, 'piracy', and the modern world system

Chiu - The introduction of spectacles into China

Choi and Kim - Evolution of protein structural classes and protein sequence families

Christie - Javanese markets and the Asian sea trade boom of the tenth to thirteenth centuries A....

Christie - Money and its uses in the Javanese states of the ninth to fifteenth centuries A.D.

Christie - States without cities, demographic trends in early Java

Chung - The transformation of an overseas Chinese family - three generations of the Eu Tong Sen ...

Cleary - Towards an environmental history of the Amazon, from prehistory to the nineteenth centu...

Will B., this paper explains the primitivizing historiography about the Amazon as well as the pre-contact agricultural advances in the region. Terra preta and all that good stuff.

Coates - Plain of Jars

Cochran - The serpent bites the file, Byron and the Armenians

Cohen - The Chinese of the Panama Railroad, preliminary notes on the migrants of 1854 who 'faile...

'Failed', by which she means, 'were so depressed in Panama they turned to opium and suicide, nearly to a man'.

Cohen - The terminology of Mardi Gras

Conlan - The nature of warfare in fourteenth-century Japan, the record of Nomoto Tomoyuki

Connes - Noncommutative geometry

Conway and Kochen - The free will theorem

Cook - Potential impacts of biomass production in the United States on biological diversity (199...

Coplan - History is eaten whole, consuming tropes in Sesotho auriture

Covey - Combat orthopaedics, a view from the trenches

Creese and Bellows - Erotic literature in nineteenth-century Bali

Crowther - Philippine authoritarianism and the international economy

Cucker and Smale - On the mathematical foundations of learning

Dagley - Lessons from biodegradation

Dalby - Revenge and the law in traditional China

Daley - The Watermelon Riot, cultural encounters in Panama City, April 15, 1856

'Jack Oliver and his friends passed the time wandering between saloons and stores. They approached Jose Manuel Luna's fruit stand and asked how much wanted for watermelon. Luna responded that he wanted "a real [dime]." Oliver picked up a slice and after taking a couple of bites threw it on the ground in disgust and walked away. Luna demanded payment, and Oliver replied, "Don't bother me; kiss my ass," to which Luna rejoined, "Take care that here we are not in the United States. Pay me my real and it will be all right." Oliver said "he would pay with a pistol shot," and reached for his gun. Luna then defied him: "If you have your pistol, I have my knife."'

Danks - Seasonal adaptations in arctic insects

Dauben - Ancient Chinese mathematics, the Jiu Zhang Suan Shu vs Euclid's Elements

Davies - Breton folklore

Davies - Prince Henry the navigator

de Callataÿ - The knot of the heavens

de Jong - The continental Asian element in the fauna of the Philippines as exemplified by Colede...

De Silva and Ghrist - Coordinate-free coverage in sensor networks with controlled boundaries via...

De Silva and Ghrist - Coverage in sensor networks via persistent homology

De Silva and Ghrist - Homological sensor networks

De Vany and Walls - Bose-Einstein dynamics and adaptive contracting in the motion picture indust...

De Vany and Walls - Uncertainty in the movie industry, does star power reduce the terror of the ...

Deift - Universality for mathematical and physical systems

del Rosario - The language of colonialism, the Philippines under two empires

Dempsey - A reconsideration of some phonological issues involved in reconstructing Sino-Tibetan ...

Deonna - The crab and the butterfly, a study in animal symbolism

Derbyshire and Pullum - Object-initial languages

Derluguian - A tale of two cities

Derluguian - Alternative pasts, future alternatives

Derluguian - Che Guevaras in turbans

Derluguian - Recasting Russia

Derluguian - Review, The Destruction of the Soviet Union, a study in globalization

Derluguian - The tale of two resorts, Abkhazia and Ajaria before and since the Soviet collapse

Derluguian - The unlikely abolitionists, the Russian struggle against the slave trade in the Cau...

It's his wife's thesis. Kind of large.

Derluguian - Under fond Western eyes - Review, Black Earth, a journey through Russia after the f...

Derluguian and Cipko - The politics of identity in a Russian borderland province, the Kuban neo-...

Derluguian and Derluguian - The other Mediterranean

Desai - An econometric model of the world tin economy, 1948-1961

Deuflhard - Mathematics in facial surgery

Dewar - Of nets and trees, untangling the reticulate and the dendritic in Madagascar's prehistor...

Diakanoff - Hurro-Urartian borrowings in Old Armenian

Diaz - The Spanish average system of insurance and loss prevention

And La Loca thought this was dull. Galleon... insurance!

Dieckmann - Renaissance hieroglyphs

Dietrich - Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness, the transient hypofrontal...

Dixon - Words for tobacco in American Indian languages

Djerassi and Silva - Sponge sterols, origin and biosynthesis

Doan - The legend of the sunken city in Welsh and Breton tradition

Dolgachev - Lectures on modular forms, fall 1997-98

Dowling and Secor - The role of hybridization and introgression in the diversification of animal...

Drake - Development of a descriptive language for Cheddar cheese

Dresbeck - The ski, its history and historiography

Cheddar, skiing, yes I know. Why don't I just tattoo the map of Wisconsin on my back.

Drewal - Performing the other, Mami Wata worship in Africa

Drucker - 'In the tropics there is no sin', sexuality and gay-lesbian movements in the Third Wor...

Duckworth and Seligman - Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adoles...

Duquette - Woman, power, and initiation in the Bissagos islands

Durand - Diagenetic modification of kerogens

Lint answers 1

I get letters!

Cosma: "Eurocentrism in the history of mathematics, the case of the Kerala School" has less explication of the mathematics than I would have liked. (The recent Pingree article in Daedalus is much better in that respect.) They go into detail how earlier European historians systematically belittled the accomplishments of Indian mathematics -- unsurprising but infuriating -- discuss current (lacking) presentations of the material, and propose a possible channel for the flow of Kerala mathematics to Europe in the early modern period, through the Jesuit presence in south India.

Their case that this actually happened, however, is in my opinion slight. Strong enough for the plot of a Tim Powers novel, but come on, people. It's not like the Jesuits didn't write letters. They would have had to, for this conduit to work. Dig something up in the archives, and we'll talk.

Acemoglu: let me post their abstract here:

Botswana has had the highest rate of per-capita growth of any country in the world in the last 35 years. This occurred despite adverse initial conditions, including minimal investment during the colonial period and high inequality. Botswana achieved this rapid development by following orthodox economic policies. How Botswana sustained these policies is a puzzle because typically in Africa, "good economics" has proved not to be politically feasible. In this paper we suggest that good policies were chosen in Botswana because good institutions, which we refer to as institutions of private property, were in place.

Why did institutions of private property arise in Botswana, but not other African nations? We conjecture that the following factors were important. First, Botswana possessed relatively inclusive pre-colonial institutions, placing constraints on political elites. Second, the effect of British colonialism on Botswana was minimal, and did not destroy these institutions. Third, following independence, maintaining and strengthening institutions of private property were in the economic interests of the elite. Fourth, Botswana is very rich in diamonds, which created enough rents that no group wanted to challenge the status quo at the expense of "rocking the boat". Finally, we emphasize that this situation was reinforced by a number of critical decisions made by the postindependence leaders, particularly Presidents Khama and Masire.

I'm interested in the Botswana/Lesotho comparison, since the two nations have common recent cultural roots, less historically divergent than New Englanders and Virginians.

Haematoxylin: an important biological stain, made from an obscure dye wood. The amount of trial and error which went into discovering these things is astonishing.

Tempskya: it's a Cretaceous fern which converged to a tree, but with a trunk made from many multiple intertwined stems and roots.

Anguizola: it's less interesting because it's early. The Silver Roll workers slipped down the memory hole. Some info on strikes and racial clashes, some boosterism.

Arthur and Polak: much less interesting than it sounds. Autonomous design programs discover that modules are useful. Tempted to delete it.

Martin Wisse: yeah, most of them are. You might need institutional access.

Intermarriage: Mike, haven't you been reading the blog? The practical upshot in your case is that your children will be much more likely to be heterogamous themselves, the way (say) Will Baird's family has for the last two hundred years. I don't think Bisin et al. do a convincing job disentangling the effects of geographic localization, in part because their data set is so coarse-grained. (It's a bad sign when you can determine sample sizes from a rate table.)

Forward Surgical Teams: in my humble opinion, a more important military concept than "fourth generation warfare" or "the three-block war".

Omnia vanitas

For the life of me, I can't remember what happened the last time I was at the Soho Grand.

Cleaning the sock drawer, Bahn to Byler

I gave up book-buying for Methodist Lent.

Again, if anyone sees something they want my opinion about, ask.

Bahn - Paleolithic weaving, a contribution from Chauvet

Bailey and Crandall - Random generators and normal numbers

Baker - Ayutthaya rising, from land or sea

Bakker - An early vocabulary of British Romani (1616), a linguistic analysis

Bakos - HAT-P-1b, a large-radius, low-density exoplanet transiting one member of a stellar binar...

Balbi - Voyage to Pegu, and observations there, circa 1583

Banerjee - The (mis)allocation of capital

Banerjee and Duflo - Growth theory through the lens of development economics

Barb - Antaura, the mermaid and the devil's grandmother, a lecture

Barzilai - A genotype of exceptional longevity is associated with preservation of cognitive func...

Bauer - An Early Eocene gecko from Baltic amber and its implications for the evolution of gecko ...

Baumeister - Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology, rea...

Bawa - Plant-pollinator interactions in tropical rain forests

Beattie - Floral evolution in viola

Beaulier - Explaining Botswana's success, the critical role of post-colonial policy

Beckwith - Thomas Jefferson 'Stout' Jackson, Texas strongman

Dotty Dumpling's Dowry, an excellent hamburger place in Madison, Wisconsin, used to have a picture of this gentleman hanging on the wall. I had always assumed he was an early Badger football hero. Not the case: he was a record-setting strongman on the carnival circuit. Also, he was one of the five or six Anglos in south Texas in the early twentieth century who actually gave a damn about Mexican-Americans.

Beekley and Watts - Combat trauma experience with the United States Army 102nd Forward Surgical ...

Bell - The development of categorical logic

Bellin and Fleury - Planar and braided proof-nets for multiplicative linear logic with mix

Bender - Chance CVC correspondences in unrelated languages

Benitez - Evidence for nearby supernova explosions

Bernstein - Wrestling with Wal-Mart, tradeoffs between profits, prices, and wages

Bertomeu Sánchez - Mateu Orfila i Rotger (1787-1853), science, medicine and crime in the ninetee...

Beutler - G6PD deficiency

Bilson-Thompson - Quantum gravity and the standard model

Binstock - Postscript, Alois Riegl in the presence of 'The Nightwatch'

Bisin - Religious intermarriage and socialization in the United States

Bjørk - Exploring the Galaxy using space probes

Blackmon - Back to the USSR, why the past does matter in explaining differences in the economic ...

Blau - A macrosociological theory of social structure

Blau - Heterogeneity and intermarriage

Blau - The hierarchy of authority in organizations

Blench - The Austronesians in Madagascar and on the East African coast, surveying the evidence f...

Blockmans - Logistics of warfare in central Italy, 1527-1530

Blute - Discrete quantum causal dynamics

Boone - Incarnations of the Aztec supernatural, the image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europ...

Booth - Hitting apartheid for six, the politics of the South African sports boycott

Borovik - Mathematics under the microscope, notes on cognitive aspects of mathematical practice ...

Borschberg - The seizure of the Santa Catarina revisited - the Portuguese empire in Asia, VOC po...

Boscaro - An introduction to the private correspondence of Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Botev - The ethnic composition of families in Russia in 1989, insights into the Soviet 'National...

Botev - Where east meets west, ethnic intermarriage in the former Yugoslavia, 1962 to 1989

Boursot - The evolution of house mice

Boutin - Molecular tools to study melatonin pathways and actions

Bouzy and Cazenave - Computer Go, an AI oriented survey

Bovens - The rhythm method and embryonic death

Bowd - The republic of ideas, Venice, Florence, and the defence of liberty, 1525-1530

Bowman - 'Legitimate commerce' and peanut production in Portuguese Guinea, 1840s-1880s

Mae Aurelia Correia and Caetano Nozolini, Portuguese Guinea's fun couple! I was reading a wire service story about traditional matri-dominant wedding customs on islands off the west African coast. While not fully matriarchal -- anthropologists have yet to find a traditional society that was -- it's closer than most. And what do you get when you combine that with nineteenth century African history? You got it: African woman slave traders. Nozolini was her half-Italian husband.

Bragg - Visual-kinetic communication in Europe before 1600, a survey of sign lexicons and finger...

Brannon - The representation of numerical magnitude

Bresnahan - Competition and collusion in the American automobile industry, the 1955 price war

Bressoud and Propp - How the alternating sign matrix conjecture was solved

Briffa - Influence of volcanic eruptions on Northern Hemisphere summer temperature over the past...

Bromm and Larson - The first stars

Brown - Reading Indian music, the interpretation of seventeenth-century European travel-writing ...

Brown - The technology and application of free-space power transmission by microwave beam (1974)

Brown - Three themes in the work of Charles Ehresmann, local-to-global, groupoids, higher dimens...

Brown and Porter - Category theory, an abstract setting for analogy and comparison

Brunini - Origin of the obliquities of the giant planets in the mutual interactions in the early...

Bryer - The Pontic Greeks before the Diaspora

Bullock - The stability of climate on Venus (PhD thesis, 1997)

Bullock and Grinspoon - The recent evolution of climate on Venus

Butskhrikidze - The consonant phonotactics of Georgian

Byler - Pacifying the Moros, American military government in the southern Philippines, 1899-1913

You know, applying the American experience in the Philippines to current American escapades is a really dumb idea... unless what you're really interested in is killing strangers. If so, why not just get a van?

Cleaning the sock drawer, Abu Shouk to Bagnold

In my newfound Copious Spare Time (TM), I have discovered I have accumulated nearly 1.4 gigabytes of unsorted academic papers on my hard drive.

Fortunately, I still have some aspirin left over from my last job.

To structure this task, I'm going to list all the papers here in alphabetical order by author, starting with the A's. If anyone sees something they want my opinion about, ask. I might answer! No really.

Abu Shouk - A Sudanese missionary to the United States - Satti Majid, 'Shayk al-Islam in North A...

Filled with amazing things. A Illinois Catholic priest in the 1900s, who declared himself the prophet Elijah, preached the destruction of Islam, and got into a prayer contest with an Ahmadi missionary where the loser would go insane and die? Oh yes. A nickel on who lost that bet.

Acemoglu - An African success story, Botswana

Adams and Otte - Did Indo-European languages spread before farming

Adelaar - Malay influence on Malagasy, linguistic and culture-historical implications

Aiken and Lu - The evolution of bookkeeping in China, integrating historical trends with Western...

Alba and Golden - Patterns of ethnic marriage in the United States

Albery and Knowles - Evolution of enzyme function and the development of catalytic efficiency

Alder - Diversity and function of adaptive immune receptors in a jawless vertebrate

Alder - Diversity and function, supporting online material

The key word here is "jawless". Used to be thought that only the jawed vertebrates had immune systems that could learn from experience. Turns out the lampreys have their own, and very different, adaptive system.

Allison - Haematoxylin, from the wood

Almeida and Joseph - Eurocentrism in the history of mathematics, the case of the Kerala School

Medieval Keralan mathematics are amazing. Was there a cultural area that wasn't knocking on calculus's door?

Amar - The scarlet dye of the Holy Land

Anderson - Crossing the Luzon Strait, archaeological chronology in the Batanes Islands, Philippi...

Andrews - Notes on the genus Tempskya (1943)

Andrews and Kern - The Idaho Tempskyas and associated fossil plants (1947)

The Tempskya was one weird plant.

Anguizola - Negroes in the building of the Panama Canal (1968)

Aronson - In harm's way, infections in deployed American military forces

Arthur and Polak - The evolution of technology within a simple computer model

Ashby - Principles of the self-organizing system (1962)

Babbitt and Gerlt - Understanding enzyme superfamilies

Baez - Exotic statistics for loops in 4d BF theory

Baez - Recursivity in quantum mechanics

Baez and Lauda - A history of n-categorical physics (draft)

Bagnold - A further journey through the Libyan desert (1933)

Bagnold - A further journey through the Libyan desert, continued (1933)

Bagnold - A further journey through the Libyan desert, discussion (1933)

Bagnold - An expedition to the Gilf Kebir and 'Uweinat, 1938 (1939)

Bagnold - An expedition to the Gilf Kebir and 'Uweinat, 1938, discussion (1939)

Bagnold - Early days of the Long Range Desert Group (1945)

Bagnold - Journeys in the Libyan desert 1929 and 1930 (1931)

Bagnold - Journeys in the Libyan desert 1929 and 1930, discussion (1931)

Bagnold - Journeys in the Libyan desert 1929 and 1930, late question (1931)

Bagnold - Journeys in the Libyan desert 1929 and 1930, map, notes (1931)

Bagnold - Review, The last of the Zerzura legend

Bagnold - The Libyan Desert (1936)

Bagnold would have tamed a sandworm with his bare hands had one been so foolish to cross his path. Instead, he used a car. The Mars Rover people still use his stuff.

Sweep the kitchen

Links and other miscellanea.

Armenia will have its next Parliamentary elections on May 12. Incredibly, these have been scheduled on the same day as Eurovision! I foresee much channel-surfing that night.

I am enjoying Dr. Vector. Probably because he's obviously enjoying himself.

I have seen and handled many common snapping turtles, and I can tell you that they are meanest creatures on the planet, and that legends of their ferocity usually come nowhere near the truth. I raised one from a hatchling to sexual maturity (carapace length of about 8 inches) and when it was younger it would frequently kill fish that were bigger than it was. The speed and power of the bite and the turtles' willingness to use it on anything that moves could hardly be exaggerated. They are my favorite living tetrapods.

Dr. Vector likes taking things apart. Like us, he has a small child.

Dr. Vector led me to Bad News Hughes. His latest post takes us to a Renaissance Faire:

“So is this going to be the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire?” she asks.

“Is this the... Wait, what?” Man, that’s a stumper.

“Is this the Renaissance Faire or the Medieval Faire? Is there a difference?”

“Is there a... Look, Becca, the Faire combines many ostensibly disparate eras, including the Renaissance, Medieval times, the days of yore, the days of Conan, the Dark Ages, the Pirates of the Caribbean, albums by Tool and the Insane Clown Posse, the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, World of Warcraft, Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the Legend of Zelda, shitty new age Celtic music, the bleachers at a NASCAR race and, finally, all those attention whores in your high school drama club. You can’t be all hung up on authenticity or classification. You just have to wander through the crowds, wide-eyed and innocent, enjoying the swirling, festive mélange of totally made-up cultures. And also you have to eat one of those giant turkey legs, so I can take a picture and use it to make jokes on the Internet.”

I've been posting a lot over at the Fistful. It seems to come in waves. I have no idea why. My recent posts are here.

Old-time radio! Now I want to look some of these up. It seems like someone would have a library of sound files...

Did you hear about the "forge your own boarding pass" episode last year? Here it is.

My favorite part is where he explains whey airlines like the Photo ID. I remember those ads! You used to be able to buy people's airplane tickets from them. "New York to London, March 31st, male." A whole grey market, gone with the wind.

Meta-geekery is when a geek does something geeky about geekery. Like categorizing the twelve levels of comic book fan agreement. (And, you know, there are exactly twelve.)

Note that the person committing metageekery here is female. I find that encouraging.

I like this quote a lot:

Tyranny starts as a habit; it has the tendency to, and generally finally does develop into a disease. I believe that habit may coarsen and stultify the very best of men, reducing them to the level of brutes. Blood and power make a man drunk: callous coarseness and depravity develop in him; the most abnormal phenomena become accessible, and in the end pleasurable to the mind and the senses. The human being and the citizen perish forever in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes practically impossible for him," - Dostoevsky, "Memoirs from the House of the Dead.

I've seen the beginnings of this process up close, on a very small scale. (In my past as a political attorney.) "Habit may coarsen and stultify, yes indeed.

A German does something amazing:

Paragliding 2005 World Cup winner Ewa Wisnierska, 35, was lifted to 32,612 feet by a storm that apparently killed a Chinese paraglider in eastern Australia on Wednesday. The pilots were preparing for the 10th FAI World Paragliding Championships next week, event organizer Godfrey Wenness said.

He Zhongpin, 42, died during the same weather system, apparently from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold, Wenness said. His body was found 47 miles from his launch site.

Wisnierska described Friday how she attempted to skirt the thunderstorm and when that failed, repeatedly attempted to spiral against its powerful lift.

She said she could see lightning around her and decided her chances of survival were "almost zero."

She said she radioed her team leader at 13,123 feet.

"I said, 'I can't do anything,'" she told reporters at a news conference. "'It's raining and hailing and I'm still climbing — I'm lost.'"

Officials and Wisnierska's ground team used global positioning and radio equipment to track her altitude as she soared well beyond the 29,000-foot plus height of Everest, the world's tallest peak. Wenness said she went from 2,500 feet to the maximum in about 15 minutes.

She lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her glider flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times, he said.

She regained consciousness at about 1,640 feet and landed safely, but had ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite on her face.

The last few hundred feet of Everest are known as the "death zone". Wisnierska was up about 3000 feet higher than that. She was not wearing special protective clothing.

More details here and here. An earlier interview with Ms. Wisnierska here. "I have fun living like a bird!"

Via James Nicoll, I see we missed a naked-eye nova. It peaked at around third magnitude (medium bright star) and has now faded to under fifth magnitude (you can barely see it). Statistically speaking, I have about one chance in three of living to see a nova, and maybe one in twenty of living to see a supernova. (There was Supernova Shelton in 1987, but I was on the wrong side of the planet for that.)

To bring this back down to earth, here's a depressing little post about Lake Sevan here in Armenia.

But since I'd hate to end on a depressing note, here's a webcomic: Questionable Content. Yes, cute twentysomethings talking endlessly about relationships: it's a guilty pleasure. But they're so cute.

Links, quotes, odds and ends. What've you got?

Talking about the weather

Okay, posts about the weather are boring.

Still, there is a point in there. Two points. One, Armenia is weird. You have long, furnace-like summers; mellow pleasant autumns; short but brutal winters; and stormy, rainy springs.

There's no close American equivalent to this. There's no part of the United States where you'd have two feet of snow on the ground for weeks at a time, but also have a growing season that allows brandy grapes and good tobacco. It's a Mediterranean climate, but pushed inland and several thousand feet up a mountain side.

(And, you know, it's not bad. I don't much love winter, but climates without it seem... a little lacking. So a winter that is serious but short is a decent compromise.)

Two, when you live in the former Soviet Union, weather is a little more in your face.

First, there's the house. So far this winter we've had a total freeze with ruptured pipes, a flood caused some days later by one of those pipes belatedly melting, and electrical problems caused by the flood. The heating system (Soviet era boiler, Iranian electrics) randomly shuts itself off every day or two, and someone has to go out to the shed in the yard to switch it back on. The roof leaks in a couple of places, and melting snow trickles in.

We're not complaining. We live better than most in this country. I'm just saying that when the weather gets extreme, we sit up and take notice faster than the average urban American.

(It's true in the summer, too. The house has no air conditioning, which is mostly no big deal, but for a few weeks in July and August it does get pretty stifling. Fortunately it's dry heat, but still.)

Second, there's the infrastructure. The roads are not in great condition and the winter has turned up some truly savage potholes. One of them destroyed a tire on our car last week... Claudia drove into it by mistake and, bam, tire blown. Side roads don't get plowed and they turn into sheets of ice.

It makes getting around much slower. You think twice before going out for a quart of milk or something. It's not like we're in a cabin in Siberia or something, but it definitely changes your lifestyle. So the weather is a topic of some interest here.

That said, okay, enough weather for a while.

What do you want to read about?

Oh, screw it

I can't take any more. I can't.

It's spring.

Oh, it's not actually spring. Not as such. No flowers yet. No leaves.

But it's been over freezing almost every day for two weeks now. The mountains of snow are almost gone; there are just a few scabs of white left. They're being replaced by seas of mud, but never mind that now.

This morning, walking Alan to the bus, I heard a bird I hadn't heard before. I don't know what bird it was. Some small passerine... the call was a low, melodic, whoo-wheet-wheet. I didn't know the bird, but I understood what it was saying. "Howdy! Howdy! I'm just back from the Horn of Africa! Any neighbors? Am I the first? This is my tree now! Howdy!

I'm laying down. Winter here was nasty, it was cold, we had lots of snow, but it is over.

[Claudia, over my shoulder: "No... don't even say that!"]

Yes, normally I never do this sort of thing. I don't call spring until, oh, mid-May or so. Not until I have to mow the lawn. For the second time.

But it's the Caucasus and, I don't know, I'm just tired.

Screw it.

It's spring!

Drip, drip, drip

It's been a warm week.

"Warm" is a relative term, of course. But most days it gets up to 5 degrees, or 40 Fahrenheit.

So the snow is melting. But since there is a lot of snow, it's taking a long time to melt. Mud and slush everywhere. Then after dark it all freezes again -- mornings are slippery.

Sunday afternoon, I took the boys on a stroll through the Vernissage. (That's the big Yerevan flea market.) They enjoyed it very much, in part because the heavy foot traffic had turned it into a frozen swamp, with puddles of icy water and slush everywhere. Splash, slosh, splash.

-- Is this the end of winter? Or just a warm spell before the Caucasus turns on us?

How would I know?

But after a month of heavy snow and bitter cold, I'm not complaining. There are worse things than a little slush.

Free time!

Genghis: We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?

Subotai: A fleet horse, the open steppe, falcons at your breast, and the wind in your hair.

Genghis: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!

Genghis: That is good. Carlos?

Carlos: What is best? With few words, to have your enemies crush themselves, and pay you for the privilege.

Genghis: Consulting is nice work. And you, the Greek.

Pindar: Ahem. Water is best!

Genghis: ...

Pindar: Also, bling and victory!

Genghis: All right then.

Super Bowl XLI predictions.

... it's the final minutes of the fourth quarter in Miami. The score is 6-6: the Colts have scored two field goals off of two Rex Grossman interceptions; the Bears have scored three safeties off an increasingly rattled Peyton Manning.

(At an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, certain people have been vocalizing the melody to the song "Yakety Sax", originally recorded by Boots Randolph and made famous by Benny Hill.)

Before the Colts return to the field, on the sidelines one sees Peyton Manning in a furious argument with Colts coach Tony Dungy. Peyton takes off his helmet and stomps away, sulking like Achilles.

Dungy has decided. It is the time of Jim Sorgi.

The Vinatieri extra point is good.

Final score: Colts 13, Bears 6.

Update: Well, he did it. I thought it couldn't be done, but he did it. He is truly the man. Unbelievable. Prince actually put together a worthwhile halftime show.

In other news, much Yakety Sax was vocalized during the game. Manning played a workmanlike game -- the driving rain prevented the Colts from airing it out -- and the Bears' defense performed really well for a unit that had to be out there for three quarters.

But the Most Valuable Player of the game really has to be Rex Grossman, who made the Colts' victory possible. Had the Bears a competent quarterback, Chicago would be completely insufferable, and I am sure Tony Dungy will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about it.

But, as the saying goes, The Bears Still Suck.

One-Hoss Shay! One-Hoss Shay!

Brett Favre will return to the Packers.

(Obscure reference explained here.)