Archpeeology

I'd apologize for the headline on this post, but hey - y'all know I am already obsessed with the archaeology of poo, so this one should be no surprise. Just thank me for not linking the headline punning about this discovery almost "whizzing" by ...

Anyway, so at last, at last, poo has met its match, so to speak. Article. Article. Article. Abstract, for the truly dedicated. Wheeeee!

Yeah, no pun intended. ("... or was it ... ?")


Edited to add: but wait, there's more. Not merely the salts indicating where urine was once deposited, but the stuff itself. Yes, I mean the story about the horse.

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Danger, Will Robinson! Plot bunnies ahead! But wow is this a GREAT mind-blower for Friday the 13th. The Atlantic on the possibility of truly ANCIENT civilization (... ?). Man, oh man, the fiction you could write riffing on this idea! OSUM. This appeals to me immensely, with my increasing thing about systems and scale ...

If you can fix this truth in your minds, namely, that the true use of books is to make you wiser and better, you will have both profit and pleasure form what you read.
--Sarah Fielding

Oh my gosh, what a splendid piece of YA literary history. Also, I love a teacher names Mrs. Teachum. I just like the word teachum, like hokum, absurdum, or bunkum but so much more appealing. Go make with the click.

And a little more from Smithsonian Magazine - e-cigs are using the same advertising gambits decades and even generations-since prohibited for combustible cigarettes. PLUS a back-to-school special ad, which I don't think the old school ever even tried. Stay classy, vape-producers!

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Have you ever found yourself feeling a kind of ... distrust, when you find out someone isn't a reader? Or special admiration, even a crush, on a writer? Even the smallest phrases can be great storytelling; I am able to clearly remember some of the things that have swept my heart away: Beloved Ex's calling me a wonderful bag of things. Humorous, sure. But ... "telling" in a way that was important to me. A girl who once said to me, I have a voice like rain and brownies baking. The friend who called me a flower-eyed waterfall. And Mr. X ... that time he said to me, "You use your wit and intelligence as if your appearance had no power, and the effect is devastating."

Why the self-aggrandizing intro, today? Well, READ on, my friends. On the evolution of storytelling. It keeps humanity alive, literally. And the best storytellers get the greatest rewards, in egalitarian communities. Hmm.

And now, a little consumer culture ...

Of all the people I have known in the 25-year SUV trend, I am aware of ONE who ever used their winch, and none who ever went offroading, or even camping. (In the 1970s, my cousins did have a proto-SUV, but they skiied and camped and hunted and used its immense capacity in full, though not every single time they drove it.) SUVs looked to my contrarian eyes like a Baby Boomer/yuppie fad from the start, and what rugged behavior I ever *have* seen with them seems to be confined to drivers imagining that "SUV" confers upon them not merely invulnerability but also immunity to the existence of others on the roads when it is snowy and/or icy. (Strangely, this does not appy to rain; everyone in this whole town seems to just *crawl* when there is rain, mist, or drizzle anywhere in a 50-mile radius. No matter what they drive.) Anyway, to the link, Batman: on SUVs, and the developing social structure in America, over the past 30 years. As always, there is room for quibbling here. But it's an interesting wider look at "trends" ...

The older I get, the more I LOVE investigative journalism. Doesn't matter when it's a couple or few years old; the detective stories hold up, and truly good writing never goes out of date. Here's a great piece about discovering provenance, and for my writer friends, stay tuned to the end - the bit about publishing a book is priceless.

Here is a joyous(-ish ...) stocking stuffer for you all! More demented cover fails with the Caustic Cover Critic, guesting over at the Australian Book Designers Association. Featuring: Jane AusTIN and Slash. You know you wanna click!

Voyager's Golden Record

Have you ever heard it?

Because talk about a click beyond. Please take this trip.

It is record of the gloriousness of our very planet, and the finest accomplishment of which humanity is capable. Not merely the sounds - all of which share some piece of Earth's magnificence - but the Voyagers, the record, the images. Sharing life.

Here, the official tracks, courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory archive (not created by JPL).





Also, we need to make t-shirts that say, "Out there, our concepts of velocity become provincial." (Meanwhile, every sound on the record is provincial! Though some might disagree about The Laughing Man.)

Here is MIT's unofficial copy; for those of you who know what HiFi means, it brings with it the enjoyable pops and cracks of the albums we played on those. Which has an Earthling charm of its own.

PBS's as-usual wonderful special on the 40-year-old Voyager twins.

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Surface tension linguistics - how cities and bubbles build dialects. This is an article about population centers and the creation of dialects; fascinating research for *most* writers, I might say.

A very cool look at developmental spelling science, because there is NO SUCH THING as too many linguistics links, and kids' brains are neato.

Can you imagine a policy that prohibits white girls, many of whom are born with straight hair, from wearing their hair straight? Absolutely not!

White readers: imagine having your hair policed. It's all but inconceivable to you, right? The politics - and systemically discriminatory policieis - of hair. For anyone who finds themselves distracted by braids - the problem is not the hair: it is your perception of the person whose hair it is. It is you.

Okay, a lighter note. Now imagine a world without windshield wipers! Well, that's messy. Score one for the woman who invented them - thank you, Mary Anderson! "She didn't have a father; she didn't have a husband and she didn't have a son. And the world was kind of run by men back then."

Kind of.

History! Now that we've had time to cool off about the U.S. election (or not), how about a look at another electoral upset that was so profound it ended an entire type of democratic process? The fact that ostracism is still practiced - just not with pottery - doesn't lessen the interest of this story! Courtesy of Gary Corby.

And a click beyond worth a little blurb all its own here in Collection-post town, a little further reading in Gary Corby's blog took me to the Met's FREE ONLINE DIGITAL BOOK COLLECTION. Holy drooling reading/history/art nerd Heaven! FREE BOOKS, y'all! Available to read online (Google Books), for download to PDF, or print-on-demand. A look at the very first title displays a good, clear digital copy, too. So: free and clear. Literally. (So many puns...)

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A "well-healed" amputation and a prosthetic toe (no actual heel present) - on the most ancient prosthesis ever found in-situ. Or in-sitoe, if you like to draw out the punnery. So many chortles, so little time while reading this cool post from The History Blog.

An illustrated guide to writing PoC for the white author. Perspectives, and more perspectives! I think "cudnt spel to sieve her lyfe" is the perfect detail. Nicely done indeed, with a lot of Teh Funnay too. Fair warning, though: there are a LOT of tasty links here in addition to the observations and comics!

Just who gets to play in which cultural sandboxes?

"Columbusing." I guess this is what the kids are calling it now. Back in the 80s, all people said about this kind of thing was, "I remember my first beer." I remember when our year-younger-than-we-were friend discovered feminism for me and another friend. (I remember the phrase recency illusion as well.) ... and now I feel a little conflicted, because I was in the mood for Mexican for dinner, and my mom has a few "things" about PoC from south of the US border ...

I don't see what humanity has done over those 200 years that would make anyone have a softer view of humanity.

Need some more for your TBR? Well, I sure do. This revisitation of Frankenstein - now with a new revenant of a very different sort added to the old Monster - looks absolutely stunning, and maybe more terrifying than ever for some people. This may be my "I need 37 copies of this" release this year. Even just the interview is so beautiful and striking, linguistically. Voice, kids. Voice.

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Ever notice how hard it is to find a supermarket in a city's downtown? But easy to find a McDonald's or other fast food? It's not just a happy coincidence.

There's a fast-food restaurant within walking distance in many low-income neighborhoods, but nary a green leafy vegetable in sight.

Do you know who Maggie Walker was? Find out here and especially here - it's nice to see her getting some attention.

A brief history of children sent through the mail. Bees, bugs, and babies, y'all. Thanks, Smithsonian Magazine, I am well and truly squicked. (And how many of you are now wondering what the weight limit on modern drones is ... ? Yeah, I thought so. Same as a Europran swallow.)

Also from Smithsonian, here is a cool look at Wonder Woman's origins ...




American Duchess talks with Cheyney McKnight on a range of things, including a nuanced look at slaves' clothes in America. The post alone is interesting, but the hour-plus podcast is highly worth the listen. Never say what we wear - what YOU wear - sends no message.

Yet again, researchers have looked to the yucky/bizarre medicine of the ancient past, and found it was not so bizarre after all.

One of the problems with the modern concept of The Dirty, Stupid Past is that we no longer understand the most basic mechanisms of our world. We judge crazy old plant medicine without understanding plants in the slightest, nor allowing for the possibility that what we now call chemistry was for millennia the mere result of observation and implementation. The scientific method was only named in recent centuries; but the need for experimentation and innovation go back as far as humanity itself. Contemporary society considers itself very advanced, but hardly any of us understands the workings of anything we use, from our technology to our environment. Whereas, in times past when people were dependent upon their environment, and had no vast networks of text-bound research or even vast networks of other people's observations and experiences, communities (a) worked together and (b) knew their world intimately. Small as those worlds may seem to us today, the individuals living in them knew them better than we even know our own bodies anymore.

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An uplifting story about a racist incident? Yes, when law enforcement and the mayor back a mother and her family victimized by hate speech. And also yes: the franchise owner has been terminated by Dairy Queen.

“There are, like, 100 pages.”

“I’m deleting Instagram,” 13-year-old Alex said, “because it’s weird.”

Another positive one - the lawyer who rewrote Instagram's Terms of Use in plain English for real users to really understand. I suspect she's way ahead of me here, but this one made me think of Dena Pawling. Also: did YOU know Insta can read your DMs? Yikes.

The other hidden Figures ... his name was Thomas, and he was Assistant US Attorney in Alabama.

It's policy on this blog not to steal images, but this image is simply too important to ask people to bother to click to, and I hope that sharing it here is fair use.

For significantly more, and what this image means, NOW click through. Can Americans even build coalitions anymore?

As obsessed as I am with pattern welded steel swords, it's impossible not to give a nod to The History Blog's look at and links to the even more ancient *bronze* sword unearthed in China - still shining and polished after 2,300 years.

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In tech news, a really interesting aftereffect of virtual reality - the dispiriting re-emergence from god-hood into the real world. Courtesy of The Atlantic.

Oooohhh. Neato technology again - and more queasy questions about it. "What outstanding performances from young actors will we miss in the future" ... ? Vanity Fair takes a look at the looks of ageing actors - and de-ageing actors. Complete with poignant irony.

Ars Technica looks at cooking ten thousand years ago. And no, it wasn't all spitted meat directly over a fire! On the first kitchens in the world, human migratory habits, and a kind of stone soup. Yum!

NPR's All Tech Considered has a look (well, listen) into the world of a child. It is far, FAR creepier than it sounds. On the absolutely horrifying doll listening in on your kid. There is a similar post here, on the gimcracks supposedly wiser grownups voluntarily bring into their homes to harvest their lives for marketers.

Cover-age ... The Caustic Cover Critic has been doing a year-in-review of covers (not of 2016 novels, but of his 2016 reading), and post #3 of 3 provides some truly intriguing TBR offerings. The other review posts are worth a click, but this series for me provided the most thought-provoking descriptions along with their covers. Proof that judging a book by its cover can be a mixed bag; keep an eye out for older books the CCC missed out on thanks to indifferent cover art!

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My spine just tingled a bit, and my heart contracted. I hadn't thought of this, but Stephen Parks may be right. The death that may have changed history.

Question about the post-electoral protests which involve shutting down freeways. Is there any irony in protesters' doing is what Chris Christie's compatriots just got convicted for? Just wondering.

Okay, enough politics-adjacent thoughts for now.

There is a fungus among us! (Yes, this is NOT politics.) Funky (fungi?!) furniture - now there's a design concept. What's next? Welp: "bricks without kilns, leather without cows and silk without spiders" ...

Here's hoping that Gwen Ifill and Leonard Cohen will rest in peace. I was stunned, in particular, to hear of Ms. Ifill's death today, and late to hear of Cohen's passing. He was eighty-two, she only sixty-one.

With thanks and condolences to their friends and loved ones ...

It seems right and good to close with a reminder - tonight is the supermoon's brightest night! Beautiful photos from around the nation's capitol, with a couple stops in Maryland and Virginia. Does your moon hang low ... ?

Ego Tripping - Nikki Giovanni

Today, I did not want to make the moment I shook her hand about myself. So instead of telling Nikki Giovanni how she had affected me, I said only thank you.

But the first time I ever read Ego Tripping is still indelible, powerful in my experience. You don't forget moments that change you, that elevate your perspective.

I hope it is forgivable, permissible, for me to reprint her work. It is too important to just hope you will click somewhere and read. And so ...

I was born in the Congo
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built
The Sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
That only glows every one hundred years falls
Into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
Drinking nectar with Allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe
To cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is Nefertiti
The tears from my birth pains
Created the Nile
I am a beautiful woman
I gazed on the forest and burned
Out the Sahara desert
With a packet of goat's meat
And a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
So swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son Hannibal an elephant
He gave me Rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son Noah built New/Ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
As we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
Jesus
Men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
The filings from my fingernails are
Semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the Arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
The earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
Across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

I mean...I...can fly
Like a bird in the sky

The line that captured me a generation ago, and holds me to this day is "I am so hip even my errors are correct" ...

As I grow older, though, it is "I cannot be comprehended except by my permission" that comes to mean more and more.

What gets you, in this piece?

Or in any other poem?

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Big data, Black Twitter, and the linguistics of real speakers, not just academic grammar. A fascinating look at questions of legitimacy, linguistic stigmatization, and the beauty and art of language as it is really used. Once again, I am utterly absorbed at the ingenuity of human thinking, in the way we speak, write, communicate. Super extra bonus content: maps! Wonderful, informative maps!

I make one point about this National Geographic article before putting down the link: Egyptian use of cosmetics predates Ptolemaic GREEK ruler Cleopatra, who lived only a little over two thousand years ago, by millennia. Hanging everything Egyptian on the occupying ruling house of Greeks tires me out. (Good lord, can't we at least invoke the immortal beauty of Nefertiti?) BUT anyway - here we have a look at the antibacterial and immuno-building qualities of  ancient Egyptian eye makeup. Extra bonus feature: one more nail in the coffin of the old "EW LEAD MAKEUP - POISON! - HOW GROSS AND STUPID WERE PEOPLE IN THE PAST!?" trope.

In other fascinating ancient-chemical-knowledge news, The History Blog brings us a look at the possible ancient solution to a very modern problem - can First Nations clay help us to manage antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

This is not "new-news" as it were, but I'm struck by the thought of how often writers use so-called brainwashing, and how wholeheartedly it is accepted ... and yet, like the misconceptions we have about dirty, stupid history and so many other things that limit us both as humans and as authors, it's complete horsefeathers. On "The Brainwashed Defense" - from Patty Hearst to Moussaoui.

And finally, I have to admit an almost comically knee-jerk response to this piece. The House of Lords is moving to replace vellum with archival-quality paper for the recording of Acts of Parliament and other government documentation. Given that all my life I have heard the so-called "Dark Ages" referred to (by Brits as much as anybody else) as a period of time during which literacy was constrained to a few lonely monks scratching on animal skins ... and being a foolish American ... my first response was astonishment they were still USING vellum in the first place. My second reaction was mixed; a preservationist question arises, wondering how long other forms of documentation can be expected to last, and a traditionalist strain can see how this is a cultural loss of a kind. But the practical side of me goes back to the "Really? Still using animal skins?" surprise - and, at the end of the day, mine is not to judge. So I end with no firm opinion about this; there are too many ways right now for me to expend my opinion-forming energies. What do you think?

Finally, an interlude. Join Lilac Shoshani at table seven (and one or two other places) for a worthwhile few minutes. Just don't distract her from her writing, please ....

"As soon as we have achieved normality - whatever that is."

Nerdly brownie points to the first reader who nails the reference in today's title.

Normality has been much in the forefront of my conversations and reading for a few months now. An old friend of mine resurfaced after decades, and has had me looking at the state of mental illness in our culture and communities, but also: I'm a writer, and there are a lot of writers who consider being offbeat to be an important part of the identity.

My response to this is a certain bewilderment. Where did these people get the idea there is such a thing as normal?

My old friend - let's call him MOFF, because Star Wars is much at the forefront of our culture, too, right now, and y'all know I have this thing for acronyms - suffers anxiety and depression to the tune of actually being on disability. Many Americans are aware just how difficult it is to get disability in our country, so consider the context here. This is someone who has to take a Xanax, just to be on the safe side, in order to complete the task of sending out Christmas cards.

Now, as for me, I deal with that particular piece of stress by simply failing to send cards at all, for something like the last eighteen years. I hate drugs.

But MOFF and I have discussed normality at length, both as a subject of curiosity, and as a problematic goal/desire. It is a great desire of his, to be able to live a "normal" life ...

Interestingly, in he earlier iteration of our friendship, which was a bit more romantic and would make a great story I do not intend to tell y'all, he was often concerned with the same thing. What he considered to be his deviations from the norm were different matters, but the desire was the same; indeed, even the anxiety was there, all the way back then.

And, even then, I'd laugh him off and dismiss him, "Even my MOM knows there's no such thing as normal."

Which is true. My mom, who is as conventional as conventional gets in some ways, has always maintained - and taught me and my brother - that, really, "normal" is not really out there. It's a convenient construct, makes for a good context to tell a story which inevitably deviates, and gives us a sense of stability and reassurance. But, at bottom, "normal" is a sham. Nobody who seems it or claims it can withstand an honest investigation into their utter ordinariness.

So I've never been able to believe in "normal" and I can actually *feel* myself getting insufferable, sometimes, reassuring MOFF that "everyone feels what you do" TO SOME EXTENT or SOMETIMES or whatever palliative I wield at him in any given conversation. But even in those, I know that that is the very problem. What he experiences is multi-track, is unending, and is not something to be "got over" the way most of us have to in order to get on with a day. It's not merely brain chemicals, it's an emotional paralysis which - universal as it may be in moments or situations - is singular in its implacability.

I feel the way he does, sure. For a day, or for that one minute during PMS when I actually enjoy submitting to the weepies - or even for a few months, off and on, when I have to look for a job or am missing Mr. X, or whatever pain I may have to endure.

I've never experienced pain like this - the fear and hope conglomerated, influencing my entire life to the extent of in fact *becoming* the life I have left to lead.

I may not believe in "normal" - but I don't have to live so decidedly outside its apparent existence. I may not believe in "normal" - but I am not denied it, either.



So when writers start talking about how all writers are weird, or how all our work is offbeat - I actually recoil, emotionally.

I am not normal, no. But that's only because normal is a stupid idea to start with.

And my writing ... if it is offbeat at all, it's only in the fact that I wrote about a Frankish king most Americans haven't heard of, or much about at any rate. It's not because my form is innovative, nor my genre exceptional. If anything, the novels I've worked on are "traditional" in the extreme ....



... and here we go down the rabbit hole of whether "traditional" exists either: which I say it does not.



The need to categorize and quantify is so strong in our brains. We need to believe ourselves to be some thing or another, we need to believe others are, we need to think the world has order - in order that we may participate in it, or to rebel against it. We need a PICTURE - to view the landscape, or the people in it, or the acts played out upon it, in some coherent way.

We *need* "normal" - "traditional" ...

I depend on it. So do you. What form you depend upon is the question (and I hope someone will comment upon their framework, their "normal" and "traditional" - especially now, at a time so many experience their presence and absence with such acuteness).


And every one of us knows, there is no such thing.

Just ask my mom.

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Mojourner introduced me to this story first, but The HB did get to it as well. The 6th century warrior's bones, and his remarkable prosthetic.

Far more interesting on The History Blog's part, for my money (or dorky interest) is their piece on the urgent work Virginia Commonwealth University is doing in the field of investigating an analyzing hundred-year-old hams and peanuts. Now that is some seriously cured porcine flesh.

In my usual late-to-the-party way (well, it has been the holidays and I've had some things going on), last week I made the header on Janet Reid's blog at the end of a truly EPIC Week in Review post, with the following gem of wisdom:  And now we know: the etymology for "query" comes from the Latin for "burned at the stakes."

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Buzz Aldrin's moon-walking papers. I know this has been making the rounds - every now and then my being a late-adopter of The Latest Thing does, I know, make me late to good parties. But this was too neato-spedito to let go by without linking it.

Babies are the tiniest basic scientists - as if we could not tell by watching the little experimental geniuses. Little physics experiments, in the littlest hands of all!

On the experience of the numinous, with History Girl Caroline Lawrence. Numen is one of those words I've always loved, both for its concept and its sound and the way it feels to speak. This is a nice look at it, and the experience of it.

Agent Oopsy!

"(Q)uivered with gentility" is the dirtiest thing I've read in years that had nothing whatever to do with actual genitals.

Also:  I love Janet Reid.

We Do Get Fooled Again

Lately, shared delusions of different types have been crossing my mind, both on the paths of my own tangential thoughts, and in things I’ve come across to read here and there.  Humans share ineffable bonds, and some of them we’d quite like to eff after all, probably.  We cling together in fear, in arrogance, and – above all – in ignorance.

We also forget and forget and forget, and therefore come to believe the silliest horsefeathers.  Such as, people were dumb and dirty in the past, as I’ve often gone on about.  Such as, we have evolved or changed or become anything new at all under the sun.  We’re very attached to this idea, that what today holds is ever better than yesterday … even as we yearn for yesterday with the sort of jealousy that can pervert itself nastily and become cancerous and violent.

I once sat in a church and listened to a long and angry sermon against evolution, actually, which … ended with a discussion of how we get flu shots because viruses grow and change and we have to conquer them with ever better drugs.  I’m not joking – evolution is wrong, but evolution totally happens.

We do this sort of thing a lot, and it is in sermons and on pulpits, in reaching out to each other and in quoting, being quoted, in rabidly nodding our heads together, that we gain some sense of self – this is someone I agree with, and therefore what I think, what I feel, must be RIGHT in some important way.

“It’s not just me.”

We seek that in almost every level in our lives.  Those studies that show negative posts on social media “infect” related users and breed more of the same, complaint spawning complaint, because it is empirically true that misery loves company to death.  The way almost the whole world finds ways to make major events – especially catastrophes – “about ourselves”, finding ways not just to relate to the imponderable or epochal, but to own it.  9/11 was so powerful in this effect it gave us the story of Tania Head (not even her real name), one of the most famous survivors of the World Trade Center attacks, who happened to live in Spain at the time and was graduating a professional program at the time that brutality happened.  Before that, locally to my world, the Washington sniper drew half the east coast into a noose of fear that occasionally almost smelled like anticipation; living anywhere near those events conferred a sense of almost belonging to that threat, and of its belonging to us.  Anthrax scares in the mail had people psychosomatically ill all over the country, and gave the opportunity for morons or the mentally ill to frighten the wits out of crowds in strange places.

Yet, in this oh-so-enlightened world in which we are susceptible to shared delusions physical, emotional, and in many ways political:  we deeply enjoy looking backward at phenomena like the tarantism or the dancing mania of the middle ages, perhaps born out of plague and upheaval, and play a bit of down-the-nose-peering, to assure ourselves we are superior.  We, who deny – well, evolution, for one; or climate change; or the moon landing; or the HIV virus’ influence and connection to AIDS – love nothing so much as to look upon those who denied Galileo’s toppling of the heliocentric universe as the basest, risible ignorance.

It is intensely reassuring, for a species perpetually under the THREAT of the great unknowns of our lives, to hope, at least, we’ve risen out of some sort of darkness, surpassed ignorance, become *better* than we used to be.  There is a deep cultural, and *perhaps* pan-human need to believe in progress that leads us to look back, not in anger, but in the kind of bigotry that leads us to name entire swaths of time “The Dark Ages” and to peer morbidly at lost ideas of beauty or obsolete heirarchies of worthwhile attainments (or, very sadly, to look across the globe even in the present, presuming other cultures are stuck in the past) to prove to ourselves we are not “barbarians.”

The barbarians, of course, merely made the mistake of toppling a few things of their own, which for some reason we enjoy enshrining (from time to time) as pinnacles of human achievement.  Also, they didn’t write a very great deal, so we don’t have Viking Shakespeares to enshrine instead.  The barbarians get their vogue from time to time as well, but by and large “visigoth” didn’t become an insult in a perfectly balanced vaccuum, just for instance.  Or the word barbarian itself, which is an onomotopoeic word making fun of the way a foreign language sounded to a great lot of dead Greeks and Romans who had a few funky habits of their own we occasionally stumble upon in order to make fun of.

We really are not better than ever before.

The consolation to that is:  we actually are not WORSE than ever before, either.  Our power to actually destroy ourselves probably skews the old bargain, to be sure.  But human nature is as a whole is full of the same greedy lot who don’t care about others … and the same breathtakingly beautiful, and the same generally decent, and the same petty individuals we’ve always had amongst ourselves.  The greedy ones regularly wreck the lives of others, the good ones give us hope, and the ones we know best sustain and madden and surround each other.

Stripped of all politics and consequence, human nature is a remarkably unchanging thing, for a dynamic so resilient and innovative and endlessly mercurial.  We fear together, and that makes us either dance together or believe we are sick together.  We are arrogant together, and that is born of fear too.  We are immensely capable and ingenious – remember how we all ooh-ed and ahh-ed at the HUMAN miracle and spectacle of the Chinese olympic opening ceremonies?  Both impressed at the show, and half-afraid of a nation so huge with such control over its people … and so many people to control … ?

WE only constant is change, in a way.  It defines and horrifies us, especially when the changes we have wrought and witnessed don’t go the way we expected, or would like.  It makes such a difference, and it makes none.

Only when we get to the deepest level – the individual – does the inevitability of change seem less a frightening unknown than a limitless potential.

I am still the meat and bones and voice my parents made … and I am nothing I was even just ten years ago, or five, or yesterday.  It’s a hell of a responsibility, and it’s both a swelling and a dangerous pride.  I need reassurance.  But not by dancing through a plague.  Just in the ones I know best.  In sustaining and maddening and being close to them.  And in finding they do the same in return.

What is it like along your evolutionary development?  Did you go from crouching to standing tall, a deep breath filling your chest … ?  With whom do you dance … ?

Looking Into Richard

The saga of the bones of Richard III will not end any time soon, and the latest is a 3D print look at that remarkable spine of his.  The History Blog has an excellent .gif of the bones as they would have been in life (inside the late king), along with some thoughts and good links to further discussion.

This is a use of 3D printing that offers a look (if you will) at tools for both discovery and conservation.  The study of Richard's actual bones must be limited by their age and delicacy - and, of course, the fact of their uniqueness.  As artifacts go, the skeleton of an individual could not be more scarce:  there is only one Richard III.

We've seen mummies taken to pieces and study methods of the past which have damaged and even destroyed human remains and our ancient creations and possessions.  We've seen a hundred means by which the material of history can be lost forever - warfare, natural disaster, the simple accident of losing track of things through centuries.  We've seen false artifacts, hoaxes which sometimes drew into question the value or even the reality of those items of past times which have been misunderstood or subject to the varying value systems of prejudice.

Being able to study Richard's bones thanks to replication opens a wide array of possibilities.  Perhaps not all of them are positive, but this one is a little exciting.  The .gif, to be fair, might ook some folks out as it were.  But for me it's just a neat example of new technology with quite intriguing new uses for an area of study which might not have seemed obvious when 3D printing was developed.  Thanks again to The HB.

Space Seed (Khan Not Included)

I searched a number of articles to link for this story, but UK's Telegraph runs away with it, both for USING the phrase "space seed" - but also because they seem to be the only outlet who's used a photo of one of the actual trees grown from seeds which went into space.

What's the real headline?  If you want to know before you click (and you haven't already heard):  turns out, the spaceborne seeds' trees are now blooming six years earlier than normal terrestrial cherry trees blossom.

Special mention:  I love the early-1960s feel of the "cosmic rays" theory of causation here.  LOVE.

Collection

Just two quickies tonight:

One, a collection of fashion watercolors spanning a very interesting period in costume history, as rendered by the lady who wore and admired these clothes.  As primary sources go, witness testimony in such a form as this is impossible to beat.

Two, the use of asbestos for its fire retardant properties goes back significantly farther than you might think.  In Byzantine wall paintings, for example.  Yep, one more thing we didn't invent in the twentieth century, kids.