It seems like there are a variety of simple acts that can throw a wrench into the legibility of one’s digital life in a meaningful way.

Publishing on your own website, especially if you use a protocol like Gemini (a simplified HTTP alternative).

Google had a surprisingly high number of True Believers, so I mostly stayed quiet about my thoughts on the tech industry while I was at work. I had some friends who shared my disillusionment, but techlash hadn’t made its way into the tech industry yet: people seemed to really believe that they were changing the world for the better. Sure, there are a lot of bad startups out there, but the startup I work for is good. Pay no attention to the VCs behind the curtain.Over the past few years, the disillusionment of the public has slowly been seeping into the tech industry.

Significantly, the burden of these accounts was on the effects of blast, burn and destruction. Hersey’s descriptions of radiation sickness in Hiroshima were not mirrored in the United States, where the government consistently minimized its dangers. For the benefit of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in February 1953 the Atomic Energy Commission superimposed the blast radius from the first hydrogen bomb detonated in the Marshall Islands the previous November (‘Ivy Mike’) over a map of Washington DC, and the conceit provoked laugher from members of Congress because the ‘zero point’ was centred on the White House not the Capitol.  The high-yield thermonuclear blast of Castle Bravo on 1 March 1954 was of a different order, and its fallout contaminated thousands of square miles. To illustrate its extent the AEC superimposed the plume over the eastern seaboard of the United States. Had this bomb been detonated over Washington, then Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York would have become uninhabitable. President Eisenhower insisted on the map remaining classified, and when the New York Times splashed across its front page ‘The H-Bomb can wipe out any city’ its map was centred on New York and emphasised physical damage and destruction: I rehearse all this because in her reflections on ‘the age of the world target’ Rey Chow writes of ‘the self-referential function of virtual worlding that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the … target fields.’  Yet, as I have shown, a common – perhaps even the most common – American response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years immediately after the war was precisely the opposite.

For another, this particular epistemological problem is oh-so-familiar to me from my home turf: psychiatry. Y'all: this why the DSM-III happened. The neo-Kraepelineans were like, "Right, this is bullshit. There's no standardized definitions of any psychiatric disorder, so we have no idea if one researcher's paper on 'schizophrenia' has anything to do with the subject population of another researcher's paper on 'schizophrenia'. Scientific research into psychiatric disorders is absolutely hamstrung by this. So step one: we infiltrate and take over the DSM committee. Step two: we give every single disorder in the DSM a formal set of diagnostic criteria. That will solve it!" (Morgan Freeman voice-over: "That did not solve it.")Welcome to nosology, the branch of medical science – and philosophy – concerned with the classification and definition of diseases and other medical conditions.Is it wrong to eat popcorn at a two-hundred car pile up? Nosology, and the history of philosophy and medicine attendent it, is my favorite blood sport. I am so deep into raptly amoral, "Please continue your petty bickering, I find it fascinating" land here, I don't even know how to find my way back.I mean, I would find it utterly fascinating, even if it didn't come served with a big ol' side of schadenfreude pie. Psychiatry has long been the black sheep of medicine for its difficult relationship to nosology, and I've long been of the opinion that psychiatry has been the Identified Patient of the family that is medicine, where all(?) the rest of medicine has been doing that Jungian "shadow" thing and projecting their faults – here, around nosology – on a scapegoat to disown those faults. You motherfuckers have been busted.

As I have ventured to show elsewhere, there are numerous orthodox resources in the Catholic theological and philosophical tradition that can help us renew our theological anthropology such that it is in keeping with both the tradition and the best of human knowledge and experience. The first step forward involves moving from the abstract to the particular as our shared theological and pastoral starting point.

The prioritization of what constitutes human personhood rests in adhering to a vision of a common nature. According to this way of thinking, a singular pattern or form of what it means to be human exists, and everyone conforms to this ideal to a greater or lesser degree. Everyone who shares this common nature is ordered to a singular goal that shapes and informs what is considered appropriate in terms of behaviors or moral actions. This teleological vision of human personhood, which also frequently places the importance of actions over inherent dignity and value of persons, is what leads to the condemnation of LGBTQ folks as “objectively disordered”—it is “objective” because the divinely designed pattern is universal; it is “disordered” because it departs from the singularly envisioned path (in this case, reproduction) guiding ethical action.

“I wish we were,” she tells him. “It’s like waiting to be hung.”“Maybe it is,” he says. “Or maybe it’s a period of grace.” I suppose those are the two ways you can look at a normal life in general as well. We’re all born waiting to be hung and we can either despair over that fact or consider the interim a gift. Every day a last minute reprieve from the governor. I think we all know which one I’m going to personally do but you can do it differently it’s your life buddy.

Suddenly, they were not tiny little plates of food for big prices. They were experiences, knowledge and expertise, presented in such a way that I could have flown if I wasn't anchored to the restaurant floor by a crisp table topped with stacks of cutlery.

How many flowers had the chef tasted to know that the little pink one goes best on asparagus? How many tried and failed attempts had gone into deciding just how much reindeer moss goes well with artichoke? What countries had he visited to learn what goes best with the finger lime? Or, in forests filled with mushrooms of every conceivable type, how had the chef decided to choose hen of the woods for me to enjoy today, right here in Birmingham?

And discussing where our opinions differ is where the real opportunities to grow as a person reside.

As a result of that, the public online discourse is mostly made up of short takes that leave no room for those very important details. If you want to understand someone’s opinion on a topic you need time. Opinions are usually not binary and they can span across a wide spectrum. You need to invest time reading or listening to what they think about and then probably ask follow up questions. That’s not something that usually happens online.

“There are some American institutions that are relatively good at getting people integrated into a community,” he added. For example, “megachurches are one of these cultural responses to residential mobility — they’re big, they don’t take a lot of time, and they get you into a deep community quickly without having to incur a lot of costs.”

Looking at a survey of 16,000 Americans, the authors find that people who want to move but remain at the same address the following year are more likely to disagree that “hard work can help a person get ahead,” even when controlling for a bunch of factors like socioeconomic status, health, age, race, and more. “Wanting to move but being unable to leave leads people to wonder about whether their other efforts in life will be rewarded,” the researchers write.

The paper finds that as residential mobility has gone down, so have “levels of happiness, fairness, and trust among Americans.” How could declining mobility lead to these changes? Buttrick and Oishi explain that moving to a new place severs social bonds, and in a new town, far from home, newcomers are forced to define themselves with “context-free personality traits (i.e., ‘I am hardworking’ or ‘I am intelligent’)” rather than by their relationships to locals like they might in their hometown (i.e., “my sister owns the butcher shop downtown”).

Totems are kind of like spirit animals, but for grown-ups.

For starters, the Indigenous version of the Turing test turned out to be ineffective because we asked too many questions about complex relationships with people and place that would have ended up with Harrison Ford shooting a lot of innocent settlers.

International and industry-wide organisations currently pick and manage what the protocols are, but this governance could potentially be automated.

To be as nuanced as I can about this, I get the desire for everything on the internet to be verified and correct. I have, personally, been tricked by more than a few misleading or factually incorrect posts about Ukraine in the last few days. But I, also, think the further into this conflict we get, the more it’ll become apparent that there is no meaningful way to factcheck this stuff anymore. Platforms like TikTok run on autopilot and have reached a scale in which they cannot be moderated by human beings anymore. There has also been so much content published about the invasion of Ukraine in just the last few days that there’s really no fixing things. And it’ll only get worse and more complicated from here. I’ve known researchers who have talked about an “infopocalypse,” a future event in which there will simply be too much mis- or disinformation online to sort through. Well, I think it’s happening and I think TikTok is ground zero.

The core problem that causes all of this is that there's a leaky pipeline of knowledge from epistemic communities to the outside world. In order for you to discover a piece of knowledge: It has to be interesting enough for someone to think it is worth writing down. It has to be interesting enough that it gets accepted (though if not, it may end up on a random blog post if you're lucky). It has to be interesting or well organised enough that it gets surfaced in a way you can find. It has to be accessible enough for you to be able to find it (e.g. it can't use super technical terms that you'll have no way to ever discover without access to an expert). This pipeline is leaky enough that it would be very surprising if most knowledge produced by an epistemic community were accessible to you. This may not seem like a big deal when you think of communities like mathematics, where most consumers of its contents are also members of the community, but it's a big deal when you consider two things: Everything is like this, including subjects that everyone would benefit from. I read a lot of therapy books for example and I'll bet that there's at least two orders of magnitude more ghost knowledge about therapy than I have access to. Every community is an epistemic community. Many lessons are e.g. learned over and over again inside companies, and are never written down anywhere, or when they are are so defanged that nobody can benefit from them. The pipeline is different, but the problem is the same. Given this, we are surrounded by ghosts: The information that is written down and that we can access is so thin on the ground compared to what's actually out there, it's astonishing that we ever get anything done.

The difference between me and Teach is that Teach hates you and thinks you are contemptible, while I love you and think that you are hilarious.

“The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something; it’s more like rigidity across situations,” Harden, the behavioral geneticist, told me.“So it’s okay to be a little bitchy in your heart, as long as you can turn it off?” I asked her.“People who say they’re never bitchy in their heart are lying,” she said.

Surviving improv made me feel like I could survive anything, as bratty as that must sound to all my ancestors who survived the siege of Leningrad.

I find expressing gratitude unnatural, because Russians believe doing so will provoke the evil eye; our God doesn’t like too much bragging.

One guy shared that he didn’t understand why we were talking about our feelings when kids in China and Russia were learning to make weapons, which I deemed an interesting point, because you’re not allowed to criticize others in anger management.

My vibe is less “yes, and” and more “well, actually.”

Hudson’s findings on the mutability of personality seem to endorse the ancient Buddhist idea of “no-self”—no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering. Similarly, Brian Little writes that people can have “multiple authenticities”—that you can sincerely be a different person in different situations. He proposes that people have the ability to temporarily act out of character by adopting “free traits,” often in the service of an important personal or professional project. If a shy introvert longs to schmooze the bosses at the office holiday party, they can grab a canapé and make the rounds. The more you do this, Little says, the easier it gets.

If you cut open an apple a certain way, the core appears as a tiny star. For Api Etoile apples, however, the star is on the outside. These gleaming red-yellow fruits are curiously flattened, and often they grow out into five points, giving them the shape of rounded stars. These special apples originated in France in the 1600s, and over the centuries, growers commented on their otherworldly look.

There are variations of drop text (currently very rare) that would be useful. For example, clicking on the arrow could rotate it down to only 45 degrees, causing only the first line or two of the section to appear. This would give you a better idea of whether you want to see the whole section. If you do, you click (say) below the arrow to turn it down to 90 degrees. Otherwise you click above it to send it back and hide the section.

If you’re reading this post via email or on the Last Week in AWS website, I’m going to bet you’re not doing it via mutt or w3m respectively; you clicked something in a GUI, or tapped your mobile device’s screen to read these words. If I’m wrong on that and you are in fact reading this on a command line reader, it’s imperative that you not email me about it, Captain EdgeCase.

I think we get into this headspace where we think that the official day is the only day we can make observances on, and that it's super bad to celebrate things on alternate days.  But it makes me wonder why we have so little flexibility in this idea, especially in a world that requires us to be completely inflexible in other ways (like on what days we have to work).I've never been big on timing, even for personal stuff.  I don't care if we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries or holidays 'on the right day.'  For me, it's more about the essence of the holiday.  Sure, it's great to have special things done on your actual birthday, and having people wish you well is part of what makes that day special.  But if we want to go out for dinner or get together with friends, often it's better to do it on the weekend (or even a few weeks away).  And that is perfectly fine with me!  I love that it means we get to relax and enjoy the time, instead of trying to squeeze in a celebration when people have worked all day or have to get up early the next day.

Unlike Putin’s Russia, where opposition figures are poisoned and imprisoned and democracy is a sham, Western nations have real and regular elections in which voters tend to punish governments that oversee reductions to their standard of living. France has a presidential election this year with Russophile candidates from the far right polling at levels that mean they are unlikely to win but could yet cause an upset. In the U.S., this year’s midterm elections offer a first, relatively cost-free opportunity to punish the Biden administration and the Democratic Party before the big one in 2024.For the first time in decades, citizens in the West face the prospect of a threat to the geopolitical order that may require a material sacrifice on our part—not somebody else’s. Do ordinary people have the will, unity, or belief in this order to make that sacrifice? Or are we the shallow and selfish caricatures that Putin imagines, unwilling to bear even a small drop in national wealth or living standards to sustain any kind of pressure on Russia that would act as a deterrent against further aggression?

This act of kissing was so crucial to the legality of the traditional homage ceremony that omitting it threatened to render the pledge null and void. In a 1439 petition to King Henry VI, members of Parliament requested that the kiss be omitted due to the Black Death, an “infirmity most infective,” if the king “desir[es] the health and welfare” of his people and himself. They sought confirmation that even without the kiss to seal the deal, those performing homage could trust that “at your will the homage [would be] of the same force as though they kissed you.” This anxiety centers the kiss as the ultimate mark of legitimacy on the ritualized transaction—without which, Parliament feared, the act of homage would not hold up.

though Thomas Aquinas condoned certain instances, the Council of Vienne tried to condemn kissing a woman as “a mortal sin since nature does not incline one to it”

Indeed, most public kisses involved men kissing other men for reasons that had little or nothing to do with sentiment.

There’s plain evidence of this local pride during the festive period in Ferrara, when another Este treat, pampepato, fills market stalls in the central square. Nuns supposedly invented the spicy cake in 1660, drawing inspiration from a recipe in Messisbugo’s book. They named their creation Pan de Papa (Bread of the Pope), intending the sumptuous rich flavors to reflect the pontiff’s majesty. The inside is filled with almonds, hazelnuts, candied fruit, and spices, and the exterior is coated in dark chocolate.

Borgazzi also prepares the 16th-century desserts, which are no lighter than the savory courses. One of them, torta di tagliatelle, also honors Lucrezia Borgia’s iconic hair. A shortcrust pastry case with almond and honey filling is decorated with delicate strands of crunchy pasta to mimic her golden locks. Borgazzi finishes off the dessert with a healthy dose of almond liqueur that sizzles as it hits the hot pastry.

A dish that features almost ubiquitously on restaurant menus in Ferrara and is also frequently made at home is cappellacci di zucca—pasta parcels stuffed with pumpkin. The name translates as “little hats,” supposedly because their shape resembled peasants’ headgear. The recipe for this dish was first written in 1584 by Giovan Battista Rossetti, a “scalco” or member of a guild of gastronomic servants of the Este court. Today’s recipe replicates Rossetti’s “Tortelli di Zucca con il Butirro” almost exactly. The filling, made from velvety butternut squash purée flavored with pepper and nutmeg, only omits ginger from the original ingredients. The stuffing also contains Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano cheese, eggs, and breadcrumbs. The pasta parcels are served doused in butter and sage or in a meat or tomato sauce. At Ristorante Raccano, they are one of the best sellers.

The origins of many dishes can be traced to the Estes thanks to the recipe book of the great court chef Cristoforo da Messisbugo, who died in 1548. Baker Perdonati explains that Messisbugo invented the coppia for a carnival dinner in 1536. The twisted form was supposedly intended to recall the luscious curls of Lucrezia Borgia, a noblewoman infamous as a femme fatale, whose third husband was Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.

The residents of Ferrara have a penchant for pretending they are still living in the great Este era with reenactments of Renaissance parades and festivals.

With a texture like a soft breadstick, the coppia remains Ferrara’s favorite bread nearly 500 years after its invention. In fact, much of the city’s traditional cuisine is an ode to 16th-century cooking and the tastes of the city’s rulers at the time, the powerful Este dynasty.

To narrow down these lists of trendy names, I used the same measurement as when I looked for the most trendy names of all time. Basically, you look for the greatest relative increase in percentage of all names.

Kylo

Stamps are a major form of currency in the box because virtually everyone needs them, and they are small, concealable and easy to transport in any quantity. The most notable product missing from solitary confinement commissary is tobacco. Going straight from smoking regularly in GP to being isolated and empty-handed in solitary, many prisoners’ first question at the rec pen is, “Who’s got the ‘bacco?’” Accordingly, rolling papers, matches and lighters are valuable as well.

Given that boredom is just as dangerous as hunger in solitary confinement, some of the guys used what they traded to make a confection known as a “box pie.” To prepare a box pie, a prisoner collects the white bread from his meals and pounds the slices together until they resemble the dough of a pie crust. They fill the “crust” with sweets accumulated from dinner trays and press the whole thing flat. Some use apple and banana slices, but desserts such as brownies, cakes and apple crisp are especially sought-after fillings.

For some reason we tend to view the website as the host, and the visitor as the guest, but in practice it is the other way around the way modern websites push most of the computation to the clients. Like guests to a dinner party, we as website owners should respect our hosts, the users,

People in town seem to love it, but are leery of there being more places like it, especially in their neighborhood.“I think it’s awesome — I have friends there, and we go down there to the farmers’ market and walk around,” said John Schram, a co-chair of the neighborhood council in Spokane’s Comstock neighborhood. “That’s just not my vision of what I want for me. My concern is that I move into a neighborhood because of the way that it was designed when I got there, and when somebody else comes in and wants to change that I’m going to be concerned.”He added: “I have nothing against duplexes and triplexes, just not next to my house.”

“The US is woefully behind in this space, and it might need to take a better degree of leadership, and help set the norms for how the technology can be used,” says Russell Wald, director of policy for Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Other elements of the regulations are hazy or open to interpretation, for example provisions that order companies to “uphold mainstream value orientations,” “vigorously disseminate positive energy,” and “prevent or reduce controversies or disputes,” according to a translation by Stanford’s DigiChina project.

Among other things, they prohibit fake accounts, manipulating traffic numbers, and promoting addictive content.

Under the rules, companies will be prohibited from using personal information to offer users different prices for a product or service.

it's a holiday in the US though

Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to help others.

To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences.

Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.

Many of these religious associations evolved into occupational guilds. Most of the Livery Companies of London, for example, began as intercessory societies around this time.

A guild’s members met at least once a year (and in most cases more often) to elect officers, audit accounts, induct new members, debate policies, and amend ordinances. Officers such as aldermen, stewards, deans, and clerks managed the guild’s day to day affairs. Aldermen directed guild activities and supervised lower-ranking officers. Stewards kept guild funds, and their accounts were periodically audited. Deans summoned members to meetings, feasts, and funerals, and in many cases, policed members’ behavior. Clerks kept records. Decisions were usually made by majority vote among the master craftsmen.

Guilds of victuallers bought agricultural commodities, converted them to consumables, and sold finished foodstuffs. Examples included bakers, brewers, and butchers.

They could range in size from the small, informal guilds of maidens or young men, ephemeral and spontaneous organizations that often simply existed in order to meet particular needs such as raising funds for the maintenance of altar lights, to large urban guilds with propertied endowments which provided an array of services and which were often dominated by oligarchs from local government and were in some ways unofficial town councils.

n the pre-Conquest period, guild dedications were often of homegrown or local saints, whereas gradually over time native Anglo-Saxon, or in the west country Celtic, cults gave way to (although they were never replaced entirely by) the veneration of universal ones such as the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the popular eucharistic devotion of Corpus Christi.

The few surviving preConquest guild statutes and regulations show that the desire to venerate a saint or some holy figure or object was a central feature, as were the provision of post mortem services and the appropriate funeral rites. In addition, entrance fees were usually charged, annual meetings and feasts held, while strict behavioural codes for enrolled members were also set out. There were probably many more early guilds than are now documented, but it seems that they grew significantly in numbers in the later middle ages.

In software industry there are so many profiles which relate to diffrent type of personalities. Different planets are responsible for different traits of personality. But one thing which is generally common is logic and Mercury is the planet that represents analytical ability of a person, so generally, persons in software industry have major role of Mercury in their horoscope. If some one is designer then Venus is supposed to be the prominent planets in horoscope of such person. In case of good quality assurance person planet Saturn is working for discipline and standards. Persons involved in coding do have mixed impact of Mercury and Saturn for their skills in programming techniques.

But the hardware which is running the Information processing machine with the technology and is in or through a machine, represented by Saturn, which brings the hardware which is running the Information processing with the technology platform.Saturn is repeated / tireless/ Hardworking / routine / Mass or Huge (Data of millions of people or takes away lots of people work due to automation)

The panel included business owners from every council district except District 5, whose council representative, Debora Juarez, said she no longer goes to Pike Place Market downtown “unless it’s Saturday in broad daylight” because of the “safety issue[s]” there.

The sharp reduction in the number of stops reflects a combination of changes, including SPD’s shrinking ranks, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and new state laws setting stricter standards for when police can use force—including, some officers argue, grabbing someone’s arm to prevent them from walking away from a stop.

A few months ago, I found a great therapist. Recently, she mentioned that one of the connotations of the word sober is “clear-eyed,” able to assess the world as it is. Without alcohol, yes, but also without the chorus of you’re a piece of shit running through my brain, too. In the latter sense, I’m not yet sober. But maybe the drugs will help me get there.

Between 1933 and 1934, Wilson was hospitalized for his alcoholism four times. After his third admission, he got “the belladonna cure,” a treatment made from a compound extracted from the berries of the Atropa belladonna bush. Also known as “deadly nightshade,” belladonna is an extremely toxic hallucinogenic.After taking it, Wilson had a vision of a “chain of drunks” all around the world, helping each other recover. This “spiritual experience” would become the foundation of his sobriety and his belief that a spiritual experience is essential to getting sober. It was also the genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Turning off the News Feed ranking algorithm, the researcher found, led to a worse experience almost across the board.

He thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze. “American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,” he riffs, plus a return to a more fragmented culture. “People going off in a lot of different directions because it doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent, singular vision for music or fashion.” He sees Substacks and podcasts as the new blogs and a move away from Silicon Valley’s interest in optimizing workflow, “which is just so anti-decadence.” Most promisingly, he predicts a return of irony.

After placing the cast-iron pot into the oven, the distinct smell of grape-flavored Gatorade wafted through the apartment. I do not know how if there are words in the human language to describe the emotions I was feeling. We were essentially enveloped in sublimated grape Gatorade, breathing it in, along with the gentle scent of baking bread. You guys should really try doing this.

For this week’s newsletter, I decided to make my own version of no-knead bread by replacing a key ingredient, water, with a classic electrolyte-replenishing, thirst-quenching beverage: Gatorade.

“Dannis,” I said to myself, “It’s about time you learn how to bake bread. It is your Achilles heel, your one true weakness in the kitchen. If the world understood your bread illiteracy, your enemies would slay you with a sharpened baguette.”

Thoughts, also, resist the single linear narrative. They exist as something more like a hyperdimensional cloud of associations.

With the exception of a few communes that required celibacy throughout their existence and did not adopt children, all of the communities we consider contain both adults and children. We may reasonably assume that the tensions that eventually give rise to community fission occur between adults, and hence that the effective functional group size is actually the number of adults. However, the routes by which conflict and stresses arise within communities can be complex. Evidence from primates, for example, suggests that the principal factor precipitating group fission may be stresses arising from female-female competition (Dunbar, 2017, Dunbar et al., n.d). Conflict between families over children, or at least conflict between the interests of one's children versus the interests of the community as a whole, may also be important for humans, and these can often be social (who has the right to discipline whose children). Since almost all analyses of social group size, in humans as well as nonhuman primates and other mammals, focus on total group size, we here simply follow common practice.

The Hutterites split their communities once they are above ~ 150 because, in their experience, this is the limit at which community cohesion can be maintained without the need for formal laws and a police force to maintain discipline (Olsen, 1987). Forge (1972) arrived at a similar conclusion from an analysis of settlement size and structure among New Guinea horticulturalists. He argued that, in these societies, 150 was a key threshold for community size because basic relationships of kinship and affinity were insufficient to maintain social cohesion when a community exceeded this size. It is perhaps relevant that, in natural fertility populations, the community of living descendants of a founding couple five generations back from the current offspring generation (grandparents' grandparents, or about as far back as anyone currently alive will have known personally) is ~ 150, and that no culture has kinship terms that identify relationships beyond this limit (essentially second cousins) (Dàvid-Barrett and Dunbar, 2017, Dunbar, 1995). In effect, natural kinship classifications seem to be mapped onto the typical size of natural communities. T

Plotting community survival against size at foundation (Fig. 1b) allows two important conclusions to be drawn. First, religious communities survived significantly longer than secular ones (on average, 35.6 ± 32.5SD vs 7.7 ± 8.0 years: F1,81 = 35.5, p < 0.001). Second, the two types of community differ in the optima at which duration is maximised. Setting upper bounds to these distributions by quantile regression and then setting the first derivative to zero to find the maxima yields community sizes that maximise longevity of 64.4 and 171.1, respectively, for secular and religious communities (with corresponding mean durations of 15 and 100 years). These values mirror the band and clan levels of hunter-gatherer societies (Table 1). In sum, communities of around 50 or 150 at foundation seem to survive longer than those at other values.

Lehmann, Lee, and Dunbar (2014) give values of 42.8 ± 18.0SD (bands), 127.3 ± 43.8 (clans), 566.6 ± 166.2 (mega-bands) and 1727.9 ± 620.6 (tribes) for 20 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies

We plot the data on a log-scale because they have a strong skew with a long right tail.

Although humans are capable of living in structurally diverse societies, our communities, even in the digital world, have a distinctive layered structure with successive cumulative layer sizes of 15, 50, 150, 500 and 1500

The Bread Lab had been donating whole-wheat baguettes, boules, and other artisan breads to a local food pantry, but found out that the grainy loaves had few takers because they didn’t resemble the soft, sliced sandwich bread that Americans typically eat. “That gave us a challenge,” Jones says. “Could we develop a loaf of bread that’s soft, tastes delicious, is 100% whole wheat, and has no non-food in it?” With Yankellow of King Arthur developing the recipe, the Bread Lab’s Approachable Loaf was born. The bread is meant to be priced at $6 or less to make it affordable for more people. “It looks like a loaf of shitty bread,” Jones says. “But it’s not, and that’s the key.”

An aftereffect of the flight to focus and popularity of niche communities is that the path of least resistance is to focus on elites. After all, we live at a time of unprecedented income inequality, when the top 10 percent own 70 percent of the wealth in America.

In the physical world cash is anonymous, but it has the valuable property that the cost and difficulty of transacting increase strongly with size.

Vitalik Buterin pointed out that lack of decentralization was a security risk in 2017, and this was amply borne out last year when Justin Sun conspired with three exchanges, staking their customers coins to take over the Steem Proof-of-Stake blockchain. Pushing back against the economic forces centralizing these systems is extremely difficult.

This has two philosophical problems:

Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem by Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll concludes that: Bitcoin's annual e-waste generation adds up to 30.7 metric kilotons as of May 2021. This level is comparable to the small IT equipment waste produced by a country such as the Netherlands. That's an average of one whole MacBook Air of e-waste per "economically meaningful" transaction.

It helps because many people are happy to grab this deal — which comes out to $3/month over 5 years, or just 33% of what they’d normally pay month-to-month — and we get a quick influx of cash, and some extra cushion in the bank account. The multi-year subscription makes a lot of sense for a product like ours. A personal blog isn’t something most people use every single day, like a TV or music streaming service might be.

The article explains that people who are "intelligent," or just over analytical in nature, end up being less happy. They see through the BS of everyday life and are able to spot the negatives faster than any positives. This is the problem with HN: The community is too smart for its own good. As a 20-something-year-old tech bro, I’m no stranger to this attitude of “I’m smarter than you, so I’m going to pick your ideas apart and tell you exactly why you’re wrong.”

Shown here is an existing coif covered in blackwork embroidery dated to the 16th century in England. Clearly, it is a coif designed to be seen and not hidden under layers of other headdresses.

Many artworks show men wearong coifs and indeed, coifs are generally associated with male clothing. There are some examples of coifs or coif-like hair coverings for women. It was constantly used as a hair covering in bed, or under hats by the working classes and was the commonest daytime headwear base worn by all classes of the community throughout Europe during the 13th century.

Yellow is rarely seen. There is some indication in 14th Century English sumptuary law that prostitutes were required to wear yellow hoods in public. It is unclear if this statute was still in place during the height of the open hood's period, but the association certainly would have still been around. Yellow was also sometimes considered to be a sickly color, and was not popular eve for other garments. Color, same as style, appears to be a matter of choice rather than a dictate of occupation. The later hoods worn by nobles are almost exclusively black.

Hood color also bears mention.  By far, the most common color is red.  This may be simply because red was an easy pigment to procure, but more likely, red is so often shown because it truly was more often worn. 

Quickly, the open hood became a typical headdress style for nearly all women lower than the noble classes, and was so widely used that even lower-ranking ladies in waiting were often depicted wearing an open hood rather than the more formal veils or hats of the upper class.

The first development was the introduction of a small nub, or "tippet" at the crown. The tippet, best seen on the open hood worn by an older woman working a field in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter, circa 1330, stuck up and slightly forward.

Regular hoods worn by men in the second half of the 1300's usually sported a long streamer from the crown, called a liripipe. As fashion trends after the 1350's included elements of elongation, the liripipe stretched further and further down, eventually requiring that it be tuck into the belt to control its length. As the liripipe grew longer, so too did the tippet on women's hood. Eventually, by the 1370's, the tippet was around 5" long and rested flat on the top of the head.

After the 1390's, the tippet had grown long enough that it became impractical, and it was traded for the longer, more fashionable liripipe. For the working class, these longer liripipes could act as a turban-like band that, when wrapped around the head, held the hood in place more securely.

Though women had been depicted wearing hoods since the 13th century, the distinctive open hood did not appear until the early parts of the 14th century.

Important to this point is the understanding that until the end of the century, the hood was not generally preferred among the higher classes. When the upper echelons finally decided to use the hood, it was not the same type of hood we've been looking at. For one, it lacked a liripipe. That means that when we're looking at winged, liripiped open hoods, we're looking primarily at the range of women between laboring peasant and bourgeois housewife.

We're looking here at two working women, each wearing rather typical  outfits for their occupations, and each mostly turned away from the viewer. They both wear black winged open hoods, each with long liripipes. The two collars are very similar- covering most of the shoulders and back, but not longer than necessary to cover any exposed skin. The liripipes are both very long, extending past the waist.

It seems that veils could be made from a variety of fabrics in the middle ages- ranging from fine opaque linens to gauzy barely-there silks. For the poorer woman, thick wool was both a practical and warm option to provide protection from the elements.

One contemporary writer, Robert Mannyng complained about saffron coloured kerchiefs and wimples, as they made it difficult for a man to tell if he was looking at a yellow wimple or yellowed skin, so it must be concluded that coloured veils and wimples were not entirely unknown.

Wimples were also usually worn by widows regardless of their age.

The difference between a wimple and a gorget, is that the wimple encircles the entire head under the veil, whereas a gorget covers the neck alone and was usually draped upwards and tucked into either a headdress or styled hair. The most modest way to wear a wimple was over the chin, not under it, as is generally supposed.

After agriculture itself, textile production was probably the single largest sector of the pre-modern economy, rivaled only by construction.

In any event, and this should be stressed, the clothier or cloth merchant was in both the ancient and medieval world, generally in no real danger of penetrating into the upper levels of the landholding elite military aristocracy which dominated above the local level (there are a few exceptions in medieval England, but they seem to be quite few). Wealthy merchants might become gentlemen or significant local civic figures, but generally no more.

Moreover, while we don’t see much evidence for dedicated ‘grain traders’ in the ancient world (though there is more evidence for such in the Middle Ages), it is clear that in both the ancient and medieval Mediterranean that fabric trading was often the occupation of specialized merchants and clothiers.

The typical estimate, derived from the Diocletian’s Price Edict (and thus dating to the Late Roman Empire, so this is with the system of Roman roads; take those away and things get even worse for land transport) is that the ratio of the cost of land, river and sea transport was roughly 20:4:1, with sea transport thus being four times cheaper than river transport and twenty times cheaper than road transport for bulk goods (like fabric). It should thus be of little surprise that regions involved in major textile production for export were often concentrated either on coasts or on rivers that were navigable to the sea (one may map the regions Pliny lists as major wool and linen exporters to find that they are all accessible by sea). While the sheep themselves may be grazed part of the year up in the uplands far from the coast, one of the great advantages of transhumance is that the sheep may transport themselves under the care of their shepherds to villages and lower pastures not too far from coastal towns which may serve as centers of textile production and major points of sale.

Wool produced in Britain (which was a major production center) would be shipped either as rovings or as undyed ‘broadcloths’ (called ‘whites’) to the Low Countries for dyeing and sale abroad (though there was also quite a lot of cloth dyeing happening in Britain as well).

Dyeworks (and fulleries in the medieval period) tended to be located just outside of urban centers, in part because of the smell (both kinds of work tend to smell quite bad). Because both dyeing and fulling made use of bad smelling mixtures, older scholars often assumed that the workers in these occupations were low status individuals and looked down upon. And while it is true that there does seem to have been some sense that these places were not terribly sanitary, more recent scholarship tends to show little evidence that the people who worked there – particularly the skilled, professional dyers and fullers – were low-status themselves.

Alum was often used; in the Middle Ages it was sourced from Asia Minor and so needed to reach Europe via Mediterranean trade (although Italian sources of alum were found in 1462; it was only produced domestically in England in the 17th century and after). In other cases, as with the use of dyes produced from wood, tannic acid might be used as the mordant.

Finally, the cloth would be ‘napped’ (also called ‘raising the nap,’ ‘rowing,’ ‘teasing,’ or polishing), which may have actually been the most labor intensive part of the process. Cloth would be brushed first, to raise the nap (the fuzzy, rough raised surface on woolen cloth), which would then be sheared to leave the cloth smooth. This stage also provided an opportunity for burling (and now you know why the coat factory is in Burlington), the inspection of the cloth and the manual removal of burrs, knots and other defects. Flohr (op. cit.) argues that this stage in the process consumed the bulk of the time and labor of fulling (a point on which J.S. Lee concurs for the Middle Ages)

Various chemicals might be added to aid in the bleaching process. By the early modern period in Europe, we know that alkaline substances, typically lye, were used to aid in the bleaching process and there is some indication that the Romans may have used a sulphur treatment where cloth were stretched over a frame beneath which was burned lump-sulphur, with the sulphur dioxide (SO2) bleaching the fabric (though on this process and its misunderstanding, see Flohr, op. cit. 117-120; this sulphur process seems to have been done in Rome by fullones and sulphuring, like chalking, may have often been an extra treatment to bring out the luster of already bleached garments).

The process, as done in the ancient and medieval world, was generally fairly simple: fabrics were immersed in a solution with a cleaning agent in a large basin and then trampled underfoot by a fuller. The actual act of mechanically treading the cloth underfoot was called ‘tucking’ or ‘walking.’

indeed, loose fitting clothing, with lots of extra fabric, was often how one showed off wealth; lots of pleating, for instance, displayed that one could afford to waste expensive fabric on ornamentation

Utagoe coffeehouse (歌声喫茶, utagoe kissa) refers to the type of coffeehouses that featured the customers' joining in singing songs together, which was very popular in Japan in ca. 1955–1975. Utagoe coffeehouses were usually associated with the leftist movement at that time, called the Utagoe Movement, supported by the labor unions, backed up by the socialist and communist parties.

My shoulder pain is getting really bad. Might be time to ditch my old keyboard and get one of these fancy ergo split keyboards. ErgoDox EZ is crazy expensive but looks repairable/durable and if it lasts nearly 20 years like my current one, I can justify it&#x2026;

It was against this (eerily familiar) background—a “revolt against the modern world,” as the title of Evola’s 1934 book put it—that demagogues emerged so quickly in twentieth-century Europe and managed to exalt national and racial myths as the true source of individual and collective health.

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

W.B. Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the “Ancient Self”

AdvertisementThis new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. The East, and India in particular, turned into a screen on which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about the Indian’s timeless—and feminine—self.

Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.”

Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited.

If there is one line we surely will never hear uttered, even in these times, it is any variant of this statement: “I grant that the Nazis committed excesses, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be said for Fascism.” While there certainly are groupuscules of neo-Nazis around, they do not get a polite reception on campuses, let alone tenure. Watered-down versions of Fascism do not emerge in the manifestos of mainstream political parties in the West.

One recurring experience of modern living is unlocking the old smartphone and catching a glimpse of the future, or possible future, as the increasing pace of digital technology unifies global culture and whisks us ever onward into a world our forebears would have considered magical. A dispiriting aspect of this experience is that the magical new world inevitably looks dumb — not dumb in the sense of trivial or easy, since in most cases these new technologies are lobe-shrivelingly difficult to understand, much less invent, but dumb in the sense of deadening and inert at best, and at worst actively annoying, like the world’s most advanced synthesizer with a hamster running across the keys. This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.

NFTs are an occasion for commerce masquerading as art, just as so many ostensibly meaningful experiences of the 21st century turn out to be occasions to spend money masquerading as life.

It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.

As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.

I see this ~Publishing Feeling~ as somewhat more wholesome than the one I get when someone retweets me or faves a post on Instagram.

My next automatic assumption is that if they were just organized better I might go through them more

It turns out that I am rarely in a position, while writing or thinking, where I want to glance through lots of old notes as a way to figure out what to say or do. Mostly that feels like sifting through stale garbage. 

But it’s also really clear to me that most people take notes about a few kinds of things:

The [[Battle of Seattle]] was the start of a global civil society.

numerous examples in pre-Roman Italy (interesting age seems to have been a factor, with younger individuals more likely to have weaver’s sets, while older individuals were more likely to be buried with a distaff; Lipkin suggests quite plausibly that burial with a distaff and spindle was the clear marker of the mater familias – the female head of house).

Perhaps the single most common compliment given to Roman women on funerary inscriptions was the simple but ubiquitous ‘lanam fecit’ (“she made wool

Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies (though commercial textile production was often done by men in pre-modern societies, something we’ll discuss next week) was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title. (There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete.

Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.

English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold (the English population declined during the period due to the Black Death).

spinning tends to take up around 85% of the labor time of textile production, see below for figures). And textile production was a major activity (indeed, the major activity) for probably around 40% of the population in most pre-modern societies

thread or yarn (the distinction between the two is purpose; any kind of spun fiber is yarn – though the term is often used particularly of wool – while thread is technically yarn intended for sewing, although even in technical writing, often all yarn is called ‘thread’)

Markets in textiles, as we’ll see next week, were a major part of the economies of the pre-modern world and so the commercial production of cloth is something that appears fairly quickly as agrarian societies grow more complex; almost any society with a significant degree of urbanism is producing at least some cloth for the market.

Moreover, it is too often forgotten in Europe that the West African Economic and Monetary Union is in some ways more advanced than the eurozone. For example, in 2008 it introduced a directive establishing a common corporate tax base and obliging each country to apply a tax rate of between 25% and 30%, which the European Union has so far been unable to agree on.

On the basis of the historical elements at my disposal, the ideal society seems to me to be one where everyone would own a few hundred thousand euros, where a few people would perhaps own a few million, but where the higher holdings (several tens or hundreds of millions and a fortiori several billions) would only be temporary and would quickly be brought down by the tax system to more rational and socially more useful levels.

On the other, we would have an integrated system of progressive income tax, social contributions and carbon tax — with an individual carbon card to protect low incomes and responsible behavior and to concentrate efforts on the highest individual emissions, which would be heavily taxed.

In many European countries, particularly in Germany and Sweden, the trade union movement and social democratic parties succeeded in imposing a new division of power on shareholders in the middle of the 20th century, in the form of co-management systems: elected employee representatives have up to half of the seats on the boards of directors of large companies, even without any share in ownership.

Scoured wool would need to be re-oiled after it was dried to lubricate and protect the wool; typically olive oil was used for this purpose (both during the ancient and early modern periods) although J.S. Lee notes (op. cit. 45) that in the earlier parts of the Middle Ages, butter might be used instead in parts of Europe where olive oil was difficult to obtain in quantity.

The most common scouring agent was urine, something that pre-modern communities had in abundance; the ammonia content of urine allows it to break up and wash away the greases in the wool. Alternately, in the ancient period, the soapwort was sometimes used, as soaking its leaves in water could create a form of soap.

Scouring could also be useful for wool that was going to be transported; in some cases the lanolin and other impurities might amount for up to 40% of the total weight of the raw wool

The process for this is called retting and changed relatively little during the pre-modern period. The term ‘retting,’ related to the Dutch reten shares the same root as English ‘rot’ and that is essentially what we are going to do: we are going to rot away every fiber that isn’t the bast fibers themselves. The first step is to dry the stalks out, at least to a certain point. Then in the most common form of retting (called ‘water retting’) the partially dried stalks are submerged in stagnant or slow-moving waters (because you do not want too much water-motion action on the flax washing it away). Pliny (NH 19.17) notes the use of weights to hold the stalks down under the water. The water penetrates into the partially dried stalks, causing the pith to expand and rupture the skin of the stalk, which permits bacteria into the stalk. That bacteria then rots away the chemicals which bind the fibers together (this is pectin, located in the cell walls of the plant cells) allowing the fibers to be separated. This process takes around two to three weeks to complete, but has to be carefully controlled and monitored; over-retting will make the bast fibers themselves too weak, while under-retting will make it more difficult to separate the fibers.

The final step is hackling (also spelled heckling), where the bast fibers are combed along a special tool (a hackling board or comb) to remove the last of the extraneous plant matter, leaving just the bast fibers themselves. The hackling board itself is generally a wooden board with several rows of nails (the ‘teeth’) put through it, through the earliest hackles seem to have been made of bone or else a wood board using thorns or thistle as teeth (see Barber (1992), 14 for a reconstruction). The fibers that come out of this process are generally separated into grades; the ‘tow’ fibers are short, loose or broken fibers that come loose from the longer strands of bast during scutching or hackling; these are gathered and spun separately and typically make a lower-quality linen thread when spun. They stand in contrast to the ‘line’ of long bast fiber strands, which after hackling form long wavy coils of fibers called stricks; the small tangles give these fibers coherence and account for part of the strength of high quality linen, once spun.

Once broken up, the pith and other fibers may be separated from the bast using a wooden knife in a process called scutching (the knife is called a scutching knife). By the 1800s, this process was assisted through the use of a swingle, essentially a board stood upright with an opening at the top where the flax could be inserted and held, while the scutcher then strikes with the scutching knife downward against the board.

Of course the other defense that gets offered is that all of this rape is historically correct. And to be clear, that defense gets offered, because George R.R. Martin offers it. And as should surprise no one who has been keeping track of Martin’s dismal record of understanding actual historical societies, that defense is wrong. I am not going to rehearse the reasons it is wrong here, but merely note that we’ve discussed it on this blog, it has been discussed on other blogs, and by other scholars. The idea, advanced by Martin, that the truly stunning amount of rape – most of it not in the context of war – in A Song of Ice and Fire somehow reflects medieval social norms or a true vision of the past or particular cultures is to be rejected.

More confusing to me is why the men are singularly uninvolved in preparing the meat from animals – the deer and rabbits – that are clearly hunted. That’s a skill they would have, since they must regularly hunt well away from the main encampment! I guess manly men don’t field dress hunted animals? [Update: I have subsequently learned that in fact men generally did not field-dress their own hunted kills in the Steppe and possibly also the Great Plains. So mea culpa, this one bit in the show is actually reasonable. Another point, surprisingly, for the Game of Thrones set crew over the books, which don’t include this element.]

On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time. (This ‘saddle jerky’ seems to gross out my students every time we discuss the Steppe logistics system, which amuses me greatly.)

A brief pedantic note: this sort of approach to history, beginning with big, slow changing patterns (what I often call here ‘structures’ – not a term I made up, by any means) like climate, geography, subsistence strategies, culture, etc. is generally associated with what is called the Annales school of history, which is a method of history. This framework is often more interested in La longue durée (lit: ‘the (really) long term’) which is just a fancy French way of saying ‘a focus on the long-term historical structures (like those listed above) instead of short-term events (like wars, rulers, that sort of thing).’ As always, this sort of historical theory is a toolbox, not a dogma; different approaches to answer different questions. But in this case, it is handy because of the way that the basic activities necessary for survival in a given climate form a sort of ‘bounding box’ for cultural possibility.

That speed was important; sheep were generally sheared just once a year and usually in a fairly narrow time window (spring or very early summer; in medieval England this was generally in June and was often accompanied by a rural festival) so getting them all sheared and ready to go before they went up the mountain towards the summer pasture probably did need to be done in fairly short order.

There are interesting variations in what the evidence implies for the gender of those shearing sheep; sheers for sheep are common burial goods in Iron Age Italy, but their gender associations vary by place. In the culturally Gallic regions of North Italy, it seems that shears were assumed to belong to men (based on associated grave goods; that’s a method with some pitfalls, but the consistency of the correlation is still striking), while in Sicily, shears were found in both male and female burials and more often in the latter (but again, based on associated grave goods).

That thought may seem strange to many Americans (for whom transhumance tends to seem very odd) but probably much less strange to readers almost anywhere else (including Europe) who may well have observed the continuing cycles of transhumant pastoralism (now often accomplished by moving the flocks by rail or truck rather than on the hoof) in their own countries.

Transhumance can be either vertical (going up or down hills or mountains) or horizontal (pastures at the same altitude are shifted between, to avoid exhausting the grass and sometimes to bring the herds closer to key markets at the appropriate times). In the settled, agrarian zone, vertical transhumance seems to be the most common by far, so that’s what we’re going to focus on

The coat of a sheep (its fleece) has three kinds of fibers in it: wool, kemp and medullated fibers. Kemp fibers are fairly weak and brittle and won’t accept dye and so are generally undesirable, although some amount of kemp may end up in wool yarn. Likewise, medullated fibers are essentially hair (rather than wool) and lack elasticity.

The exact time of harvest varies based on the use intended for the flax fibers; harvesting the flax later results in stronger, but rougher, fibers. Late-pulled flax is called “yellow” flax (for the same reason that blond hair is called ‘flaxen’ – it’s yellow!) and was used for more work-a-day fabrics and ropes.

Adam Smith noted how essential this restraint is in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If a suddenly successful person has any judgment, he wrote, that man will be highly attuned to his friends’ envy, “and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.”

Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re not in the habit of elevating the practices of friendship,” she says. “But they should be similar to what we do for other relationships.”

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support each other emotionally; offer help if it’s required; try to make each other happy; and keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments.

“I have been with family sociologists who think it’s crazy to think that friends could replace family when you realize you’re in real trouble,” Carstensen told me. “ Yeah, they say, they’ll bring you soup when you have the flu, but they’re unlikely to care for you when you have dementia. But we could reach a point where close friends do quit their jobs to care for you when you have dementia.”

In a book published in the summer of 2020, Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, argued that some friendships are so important that we should consider assigning them the same priority we do our romantic partnerships. They certainly view their own friendship this way; when the two of them went through a rough patch, they went so far as to see a therapist together.I mentioned this to Laura Carstensen. Her first reaction was one of utter bewilderment: “But … it’s the whole idea that friendships are voluntary that makes them positive.”

Mahzad Hojjat, a social-psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, once told me that people may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life. This doesn’t surprise me. I still have sense-memories of how sickened I was when this friend told me I’d been relegated to a lower league—my heart quickening, the blood thumping in my ears.

Were friendships always so fragile? I suspect not. But we now live in an era of radical individual freedoms. All of us may begin at the same starting line as young adults, but as soon as the gun goes off, we’re all running in different directions; there’s little synchrony to our lives. We have kids at different rates (or not at all); we pair off at different rates (or not at all); we move for love, for work, for opportunity and adventure and more affordable real estate and healthier lifestyles and better weather.From the November 2019 issue: Why you never see your friends anymoreYet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians.It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving.

In 2009, the Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst published an attention-grabber of a study that basically showed we replace half of our social network over the course of seven years, a reality we both do and don’t intuit.

And yet the kind of relationships also matters. After all, “we remember the deceased because he was a father” is hardly heroic praise, amounting to little more than congratulating someone for the fact they managed to reproduce. It’s not the fact of our relational existence that matters to us so much as its quality: a loving mum, a supportive dad, a caring husband, a kind sister. We want to be remembered for the charity and sympathy with which we lived in communion. As the poet Philip Larkin put it, “What will survive of us is love.”

Death mercilessly cuts through the moral fog of living. Few people want to be memorialized for the stuff they had or the leisure they enjoyed, in spite of the fact that we spend so much of our time on earth pursuing these things and then talking about then. We want our funeral eulogy to be positive—obviously—but positive about the right things.

“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  I have spoken these words myself many times.  They are echoed in the old words of the Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.”  They might have meant something different in their time and place, but today they can often sound like a posture of self-flagellation, of refusal to believe in our essential goodness. What follows in the story are the words of Jesus: “Do not be afraid.”  Jesus sees Simon’s fear and shame and tells him not to be afraid. Some of us queer Catholics can get stuck in “Depart from me, Lord.”  It’s hard to make it to “Do not be afraid.” It was hard for me to hear the words of Jesus and really believe them.

I was overwhelmed by his mercy, which I had learned was one of God’s names.

Cringan evolved into its current form, cringe, in 16th-century Middle English, when it came to mean “to bend or crouch in embarrassment, servility or fear” (see: Robert Greene’s 1591 pamphlet describing a “fellow courteously making a low cringe”). By the 19th century it had been generalized into the current meaning: “to recoil in embarrassment, shame or fear.”

rhizomyx]] https://twitter.com/rhizomyx/status/1490789320822767626 /

The Self 000 Knowledge Management 100 Personal Management 200 Philosophy & Psychology; Spirituality & Religion Others 300 Social Sciences 400 Communications & Rhetoric; Language & Linguistics Others + Self 500 Natural Sciences 600 Applied Sciences 700 Art & Recreation 800 Literature History of Others & Self 900 History & Biography & Geography

My favorite classification system is Universal Decimal partially because it can do cool shit like the sequence of digits is interrupted by a precise type of punctuation sign which indicates that the expression is a combination of classes rather than a simple class e.g. the colon in 34:32 indicates that there are two distinct notational elements: 34 Law. Jurisprudence and 32 Politics; the closing and opening parentheses and double quotes in the following code 913(574.22)“19”(084.3) indicate four separate notational elements: 913 Regional geography, (574.22) North Kazakhstan (Soltüstik Qazaqstan); “19” 20th century and (084.3) Maps (document form) things can also be coordinated with +, marked as an extension of the first term with /, subgrouped with [], specified that it is inclusive with A/Z, and have other systems introduced via * So searching for “novels about lesbian firefighters in norway from 1960-80 by bisexual authors” is a legit query

Step 1: Divide everything in to ten things Take everything you need to organise and sort it in to, at most, ten large buckets. Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different. Put a label on each bucket. This forces you to group things quite broadly, but that’s the point.

Tagging is very useful but the lack of control and meaning breaks things down fast. “a (controlled term) is worth a thousand tags” as one article put it. Part of my pitch here is to say that i8n organizing your PKB you should favor controlled vocabularies and favor classification systems when you can.

women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again

I know whose side I have to be on.

One of the key facts of what I call “soft totalitarianism” in my recent book is that this ideology is taking power within the structures of liberal democracy. Take Amazon’s decision earlier this year to stop selling books that present transgenderism as a pathology. Amazon has the right to sell, or to not sell, whatever it wants. But Amazon controls so much of the US retail book market that if it decides not to sell books that take a particular moral or political position, then Amazon will have effectively exiled that debate from the public square. No publisher can afford to take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. All of this is happening within liberal democracy, which is one reason why this totalitarianism is treading softly into dominance.

However

If Orban fails to ground Hungarian democracy in Christian thought and practice, then something quite ugly and racist may well arise. I think often about Ross Douthat’s great line: if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.

there’s no doubt that the Orban government is anti-Muslim, and doesn’t want Muslim migrants. I think this is a wise position for a European country to take, given the evidence in other European countries. In the US, we have been able to assimilate Muslim immigrants, but for whatever reasons, that has not been true in Europe.

because he dissents from the woke race ideology

Kids of my generation, even in the Deep South, where I grew up, were taught that what Martin Luther King stood for was true and correct, and in fact profoundly Christian. This is true! I still believe it’s true. But now we are told by the American left that that’s not true, that in fact what the old segregationists believed – in race essentialism – is actually the case. I find this profoundly illiberal, and profoundly anti-Christian.

The idea of giving the invisible “others” so much influence over one’s work and creativity is baffling.

We are now programmed to evaluate our creative work using metrics,

We have all experienced those interactions where friends, colleagues, family members, and lovers got upset because we didn’t like their Facebook entries or Instagram photos fast enough.

Tempted to make a [[YunoHost]] package for [[Agora]].

Consumers can now buy improved heat pumps and induction stoves, which can boil water in nearly half the time as a gas stove.

“The average American likes choice and doesn’t want to be told what kind of fuel to use in their homes,” said Karen Harbert, chief executive of the American Gas Association. “Municipalities cannot take away that choice.”

In November 2019, the California Restaurant Association sued the town of Berkeley to strike down the change in building code. The association in its lawsuit said that “many of these restaurants rely on gas for cooking particular types of food, whether it be flame-seared meats, charred vegetables, or the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok.”

In the Pacific Northwest, a group of gas and pipeline companies put up $1 million to establish another front group called Partnership for Energy Progress.

The concept of everyday cake is upheld by cultures around the world. Cake features prominently in the ritual of English afternoon tea as well as in the Swedish coffee break known as fika. Italians eat cake for breakfast.

A staff of local women prepared and provided not only breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but also two coffee breaks, midmorning and midafternoon. The indisputable star of the latter, café da tarde, was cake, cut into neat squares: bolo de fubá, made with cornmeal, coconut, condensed milk, on one day; dense chocolate frosted in buttercream another; vanilla sponge layered with strawberry jam and vanilla cream the next.