#since its not really science its more just . cultural understandings of astronomy

[oflgtfol]

this is an incredibly low stakes pet peeve but i hate when people refer to the sun as Sol and the moon as Luna as if those are their proper names. no. they are literally called The Sun and The Moon. other languages have their own names for them, and no One language is the correct one.

like i'll admit when i was a fledgling astronomy nerd back in like middle school i was on that sol luna shit but i was looking at it heavily through the lens of science fiction and "aw how lame that they don't have real names." but like, why are we judging things based on how lame they are. our home galaxy is literally called the milky way. it doesn't get any lamer than that. just embrace the lameness.

[booklindworm]

A rant against Karen Traviss' understanding of history and her FAQ answers

Did you base the Mandalorians on the Spartans?

<cite> No. I didn't. </cite> Fair enough.

<cite> I really wish history was taught properly - okay, taught at all - in schools these days, because history is the big storehouse that I plunder for fiction. It breaks my heart to hear from young readers who have no concept even of recent history - the last fifty years - and so can't see the parallels in my books. You don't have to be a historian to read my novels, but you'll get a lot more out of them if you explore history just a little more. Watch a history channel. Read a few books. Visit some museums. Because history is not "then" - it's "now." Everything we experience today is the product of what's happened before. </cite> Yeah, I do to. Please, Ms Traviss, go on, read some books. Might do you some good. And don't just trust the history channels. Their ideas about fact-checking differ wildly.

<cite> But back to Mandos. Not every military society is based on Sparta, strange as that may seem. In fact, the Mandos don't have much in common with the real Spartans at all. </cite> You mean apart from the absolute obsession with the military ["Agoge" by Stephen Hodkinson], fearsome reputation ["A Historical Commentary on Thucydides" by David Cartwright], their general-king ["Sparta" by Marcus Niebuhr Tod], the fact that they practically acted as mercenaries (like Clearch/Κλέαρχος), or the hyper-confidence ("the city is well-fortified that has a wall of men instead of brick" [Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus])...

<cite> A slightly anarchic, non-centralized, fightin' people? Sounded pretty Celtic to me. Since I went down that path, I've learned more about the Celts (especially the Picts), and the more I learn, the more I realise what a dead ringer for Mandos they are. But more of how that happened later... </cite>

The Celtic people are more than one people, more than one culture. Celtic is a language-family! In the last millennium BC nearly every European ethnic group was in some ways Celtic, and they were not one. Later, after the Germanic tribes (also not one people, or a singular group) moved westwards, the Celtic cultures were still counted in the hundreds. Not only Scotland was Celtic! Nearly all of Western Europe was (apart from the Greek and Phoenician settlers on the Mediterranean coasts). The word “Celts” was written down for the first time by Greek authors who later also used the word “Galatians”. The Romans called these people “Gauls”, and this word was used to describe a specific area, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Cévennes and the Rhine: “Gaul”. So the Celts, the Galatians and the Gauls were all part of the same Celtic civilisation. "Celts, a name applied by ancient writers to a population group occupying lands mainly north of the Mediterranean region from Galicia in the west to Galatia in the east [] Their unity is recognizable by common speech and common artistic traditions" [Waldman & Mason 2006] Mirobrigenses qui Celtici cognominantur. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History; example: C(AIUS) PORCIUS SEVERUS MIROBRIGEN(SIS) CELT(ICUS) -> not just one culture "Their tribes and groups eventually ranged from the British Isles and northern Spain to as far east as Transylvania, the Black Sea coasts, and Galatia in Anatolia and were in part absorbed into the Roman Empire as Britons, Gauls, Boii, Galatians, and Celtiberians. Linguistically they survive in the modern Celtic speakers of Ireland, Highland Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, and Brittany." [Celtic Culture: a historical encyclopedia. by John Koch] "[] the individual CELTIC COUNTRIES and their languages, []" James, Simon (1999). The Atlantic Celts – Ancient People Or Modern Invention. University of Wisconsin Press. "All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae live, another in which the Aquitani live, and the third are those who in their own tongue are called Celtae, in our language Galli." [Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico] <= I had to translate that in school. It's tedious political propaganda. Read also the Comentarii and maybe the paper "Caesar's perception of Gallic social structures" that can be found in "Celtic Chiefdom, Celtic State," Cambridge University Press. The Celtic tribes and nations were diverse. They were pretty organized, with an academic system, roads, trade, and laws. They were not anarchic in any way. They were not warriors - they were mostly farmers. The Celts were first and foremost farmers and livestock breeders

The basic economy of the Celts was mixed farming, and, except in times of unrest, single farmsteads were usual. Owing to the wide variations in terrain and climate, cattle raising was more important than cereal cultivation in some regions.

Suetonius addressing his legionaries said "They are not soldiers—they're not even properly equipped. We've beaten them before." [not entirely sure, but I think that was in Tacitus' Annals]

Regarding the Picts, in particular, which part of their history is "anarchic"? Dál Riata? the Kingdom of Alba? Or are you referring to the warriors that inspired the Hadrian's Wall? Because no one really knows in our days who the fuck they were. The Picts’ name first appears in 297 AD. That is later. <cite> Celts are a good fit with the kind of indomitable, you-can't-kill-'em-off vibe of the Mandos. Reviled by Rome as ignorant savages with no culture or science, and only fit for slaughter or conquest, the Celts were in fact much more civilized than Rome even by modern standards. </cite> That's how the Romans looked at pretty much every culture that wasn't Greek, Roman, Phoenician, Egyptian, or from Mesopotamia (read, if you want, anything Roman or Greek about the Skyths, the Huns, Vandals, Garamantes...).

<cite> They also kicked Roman arse on the battlefield, and were very hard to keep in line, so Rome did what all lying, greedy superpowers do when challenged: they demonized and dehumanized the enemy. (They still used them in their army, of course, but that's only to be expected.) </cite> They were hard to keep in line, but they most definitely did not kick Roman arse on the battlefield. Roman arse was kicked along the borders of the Roman Empire, such as the Rhine, the Danube, the Atlas mountains, etc. And mostly by actually badly organized, slightly anarchic groups, such as the Goths or the Huns (BTW the Huns were not a Germanic people, even though early 20th century British propaganda likes to say so). Though they were also decisively stopped by the Parthians. Who were very organized. Ah well. <cite> While Rome was still leaving its unwanted babies to die on rubbish dumps - a perfectly acceptable form of family planning to this "civilisation" - and keeping women as chattels devoid of rights, the barbarian Celts had a long-standing legal system that not only gave women what we would think of as equal rights, but also protected the rights of the elderly, children, and the disabled. They had a road network across Europe and worldwide trade long before the Romans ever got their act together. And their science - well, their astronomical calculations were so sophisticated that it takes computers to do the same stuff today. </cite> See? You even say yourself that they weren't actually anarchic. Also you're not completely right: 1. women (of most Celtic cultures, with one notable exception being the Irish) were not allowed to become druids, e.g. scientists, physicians, priests, or any other kind of academics, so they did not have equal rights. Also, as in other Indo-European systems, the family was patriarchal. 2. the roads they had were more like paths, and did not span the entirety of Europe; the old roads that are still in use are nearly all of them Roman. Had the Celtic inhabitants of Gallia or Britannia built comparable roads, why would the Romans have invested in building a new system on top? 3. world-wide? Yeah, right. They traded with those who traded with others and so were able to trade with most of southern Eurasia and northern Africa, as well as few northern parts (Balticum, Rus), but that's (surprise) not the whole world. 4. most people use computers for those calculations you mention because its easier. It's not necessary. I can do those calculations - give me some time to study astronomy (I'm a math major, not physics) and some pencils and paper. 5. and - I nearly forgot - the kids didn't die. That was a polite fiction. The harsh truth is that most Roman slaves were Romans... <cite> So - not barbarians. Just a threat to the empire, a culture that wouldn't let the Pax Romana roll over it without a fight. (Except the French tribes, who did roll over, and were regarded by the Germanic Celts [...]) </cite> WTF Germanic Celts? What are you smoking, woman? Isn't it enough that you put every culture speaking a language from the Celtic family in one pot and act as if they were one people, now you have to mix in a different language-family as well? Shall we continue that trend? What about the Mongolian Celts, are they, too, proof that the Celts were badass warriors? I think at this point I just lost all leftover trust in your so-called knowledge. <cite> [...] as being as bad as the Romans. Suck on that, Asterix... </cite> Asterix was definitely a Celt, and unlike the British Celts, he was not a citizen of the Roman Empire.

<cite> Broad brush-stroke time; Celts were not a centralized society but more a network of townships and tribes, a loose alliance of clans who had their own internal spats, but when faced with some uppity outsider would come together to drive off the common threat. </cite> They might have tried, but they didn't. The first and only time a Celtic people really managed to drive off some uppity outsider would be 1922 following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921*. The fact that France, Spain, Portugal speak Romance languages and the British (or Irish) Isles nearly uniformly speak English should be proof enough.

*Unless you count Asterix. <cite> You couldn't defeat them by cutting off the head. There was no head to cut off. </cite> You mean unlike Boudica and Vercingetorix. Oh wait. Tacitus, in his Annals, said that Boudica's last fight cost 80,000 Britons and 400 Romans their lives. He was probably exaggerating. But it definitely stopped much of the British resistance in its tracks. <cite> To the centralized, formal, rather bureaucratic Romans, for whom the city of Rome was the focus of the whole empire, this was a big does-not-compute. The Celts were everything they didn't understand. And we fear what we don't understand, and we kill what we fear. </cite> While that is totally true, it's also completely off the mark. The Romans demonized the druids, not every Celt, and they were afraid of what was basically an academic network. That had nothing to do with war. <cite> Anyway, Mandos....once I took a single concept - in this case, the idea of clans that operated on a loose alliance system, like the Celts - the rest grew organically. I didn't plan it out in detail from the start. </cite> That's really obvious. Maybe looking at some numbers and remembering that you weren't planning a small, local, rural, medieval community would have helped, too. I mean lets have a look at, say, Scotland (since you specifically mentioned the Picts): they still have less than 6 mio. people all together, and that's today. Mandalore is a sector. A sector of Outer Space with at least 2000 inhabited planets. How do you think that translates? It doesn't. <cite> I just asked myself what a culture of nomadic warriors would value, how they would need to operate to survive, and it all grew inexorably by logical steps. The fact that Mandos ended up as very much like the Celts is proof that the technique of evolving a character or species - find the niche, then work out what fits it - works every time. It creates something very realistic, because that's how real people and real societies develop. </cite> Celtic people were usually not nomadic! And, once again, non of them were predominantly warriors! It's really hard to be a nomadic farmer. I believe the biggest mistake you made, Ms Traviss, is mixing up the Iron Age (and earlier) tribes that did indeed sack Rome and parts of Greece, and that one day would become the people the Romans conquered. And apart from the Picts they really were conquered. <cite> So all I can say about Mandos and Spartans is that the average Mando would probably tell a Spartan to go and put some clothes on, and stop looking like such a big jessie. </cite>

I'd really like to see a Mando – or anyone – wearing full plate without modern or Star Wars technology in Greece. Happy heatstroke. There is a reason they didn't wear a lot (look up the Battle of Hattîn, where crusaders who didn't wear full helmets and wore chainmail* still suffered badly from heat exhaustion). [Nicolle, David (1993), Hattin 1187: Saladin's Greatest Victory] *chainmail apparently can work like a heatsink CONCLUSION You're wrong. And I felt offended by your FAQ answers. QUESTION You're English. You're from England. A group - a nation - that was historically so warlike and so successful that by now we all speak English. A nation that definitely kicked arse against any Celtic nation trying to go against them (until 1921, and they really tried anyway). A nation that had arguably the largest Empire in history. A nation that still is barbaric and warlike enough that a lost football game has people honestly fearing for their lives.

Also, a Germanic group, since you seem to have trouble keeping language-families and cultures apart. If we were to talk about the family, we could add on the current most aggressively attacking nation (USA) plus the former most aggressively attacking nations (the second and third German Reich), also the people who killed off the Roman Empire for good (the Goths and Visigoth), the original berserkers (the Vikings) and claim at the very least the start of BOTH WORLD WARS. Why did you look further?

Some other sources:

Histoire de la vie privée by Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès, the first book  (about the antiquity) I read it translated, my French is ... bad to non-existent

The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire  (about the Huns) by Alessandro Barbero

If you speak Dutch or German, you might try

Helmut Birkhan: Kelten. Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien

Janssens, Ugo, De Oude Belgen. Geschiedenis, leefgewoontes, mythe en werkelijkheid van de Keltische stammen. Uitgeverij The House of Books

DISCLAIMER

I’m angry and I wrote this down in one session and thus probably made some mistakes. I’m sorry. Or maybe I’m not sorry. I’m still angry. She can’t know who reads her FAQ and at least two of her answers (on her professional website) were offensive to the reader.

[asheasexualvampire]

Fun Times!

Greetings, Internet Beings! Today I shall talk about myself, shocker, and what it is I do for fun! Now, let me be very clear. I have a LOT of free time, and I have always been a giant nerd, even before that was a term. At one point I believe I was referred too as a “bluestocking” which was a woman who read a lot of books. I am a nerd. Lets start here. Firstly, I have a huge fascination with learning, as long as it’s a subject that interests me. I love learning about Japan, ancient China, Greek mythology, any ancient culture really, I love science (so long as there are no hard maths to do, I have trouble with maths) such as geology,and zoology, astronomy... Yeah, I have a large hoard of useless knowledge in my brain. I love to read. Reading is honestly one of my favourite things. I also love films and shows, I’ve been into them since the first silent films. I also love games. Board games and computer games mostly. I’ve been sort of scattered all my life (and my un-life). When I was alive and I had to be a “proper” girl, the things you did for fun was go visiting, have tea, go to balls or on outings in groups, stroll around the parks, or do some sort of hand craft activity. I crochet, embroider and sew. But even then I was a fan of books and ancient things. I used to go to libraries, or to traveling exhibits of antiquities in museums. It was fun, but honestly, we should really give back some of the artifacts that we took, they don’t belong to us. Borrowing them for a short while is fine, stealing them is not. They belong to the cultures that made them or that inherited them. After I was Made, I could do more things, I could go to men’s clubs, play cards or billiards, drive a carriage myself, or ride a horse hell bent for leather down a road. I could go traveling! Women weren’t allowed to travel without a man to accompany them, like your father or husband. Do NOT get me started on the whole “women as property” thing. It’s bollacks now, and it was bollacks then. As entertainment advanced I learned to play different games, board games and cards were still a thing, but there was stuff like golf, baseball, rugby! Not that I’m any good at sports. I’m an artisan and intellectual, not good at physical stuff. Though don’t get me wrong, I love watching a good game of football (not that American bollacks. REAL football). Cars became a thing, as did motorcycles. They’re better than a horse any day and I don’t have to worry about it biting or kicking me. Then they came out with television and I could watch things at home! I hate crowded cinemas. People invariably talk during the film or eat too loud (I’m so glad I don’t have to masticate anymore), rustle bags and things and it just annoys me. Do not get me going about people on their cell phones during the film. Do. Not. And then. The glory. Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG-style games, these are my absolute JAM. I will play D&D until someone passes out. There is no “too much” for me. And then video games. I love those. I play a lot of video games actually. Currently I’m playing a ton of Pillars of Eternity, ARK: Survival Evolved, Stardew Valley, and Starbound. I love Steam. I have a bunch of games. Darkest Dungeon, Don’t Starve, Don’t Starve Together, a bunch of Tomb Raider games, Final Fantasy 8 and 13, Okami, just... So much stuff. I still read constantly. I have a stack of finished library books sitting on the table behind my laptop that need to go back, I still crochet and sew, I still play D&D, I also play Magic the Gathering, I play board games all the time with a group of friends, all of the mortality-challenged sort. Its very hard to play with mortals, they always have questions. Once the plague is past again, we’ll get back together, in the mean time I’ve got my Warcry mini’s to paint (I’m going to run a Daughters of Khaine warband, mostly of Melusai), and I order diamond paintings now and again to keep me busy. This is my idea of fun. I hope it helps you understand me, and hopefully undo some of your odd ideas about vampires. We’re really very ordinary and boring, we just have.. Issues. -Ashe, the Asexual Vampire

[lhs3020b]

I found myself reading some early-period Niven the other night (yes, I know, a habit I should cure myself of). "Bordered in Black" is a story with more than a few issues. This has been floating around in my head since last night, so I figured I might as well dump out all the thoughts here...

(Incidentally, given what this story is like, we’re absolutely on Choose Not To Warn rules here. Viewer discretion is advised - there are more than a few problematic elements in this tale!)

The basic idea of the story - essentially, an attempt at a hard-science take on cosmic horror - is the sort of thing that has potential. But, uh, there's everything else that's in it. As I was reading it, I was running at about a thousand raised eyebrows per second. (As one example, there’s an offhand reference to a sports team calling themselves the “Berlin Nazis”, which honestly raises  questions about the basic good sense of anyone living in their world!)

The story also some serious astronomy flubs. Sirius B isn't a blue giant(!). And neither of the Sirius stars are objects that you would expect to find an inhabitable planet in orbit of. The planet in the story has an atmosphere with an unphysical pressure-structure. (In fairness to Niven, apparently he was working with an obsolete theory of planetary atmospheres though it's also one I've never heard of outside of his work, I might add. I’m not 100% convinced that he didn’t just make it up, TBH.) Then there's the issue of the apparent total lack of radioactivity on Sirius B IV. This ... doesn't work. Granted a far lower-than-Earth natural background might be possible, but there's going to be some, even if only from cosmic ray daughter-products.

This is apparently demanded by the plot, so that the local sea-covering alga can never mutate and never evolve. Apparently, random genetic copying-errors just Are Not A Thing in Niven-world - presumably there’s no thermal noise at the molecular level? or no atomic fuzzing due to the Uncertainty Principle? and recombining proteins never just, you know, have an accident? - and All Evolution Demands Radiation, or something. (Actually, in the 1960s, this was a weird sub-trope in supposedly-hard SF. Heinlein did something similar in That Book I Refuse To Name, with an unradioactive planet.)

But, the dubious science isn’t the most problematic aspect of the story.

The titular border around Sirius B IV's largest continent? Like Soylent Green, it’s, uh, people. Quite a lot of them. Living in truly appalling conditions. While the author doesn’t quite come out and say the words - thank goodness - you’re clearly meant to think things like “uncivilised” or “barbarous”. Yeaaaaah.

I suppose in fairness to the author, the desperate social conditions of Sirius B IV are not portrayed as a good thing, and the story also notes that the inhabitants are severely constrained by their material circumstances. Briefly, the population of S B 4 have no physical or material culture - there is no agriculture, they have almost no tools, no domestic animals, nothing. Apparently, not even buildings. There’s nothing to plant, farm or weave with. It’s not even clear if they have fire.

(Though, the story probably takes this further than it really goes - you can make dry walls out of loose rocks, after all. And uh, without clothes, how do the locals cope with winter on S B IV?)

S B IV apparently has only two forms of life - people, and the edible algae that coats all its seas. There's apparently nothing else, not even bacteria. From this, the (Earth) characters in the story develop a theory that S B IV is a farm, run by carnivorous alien absentee-landlords.

Yes, it is a bit of a leap, isn’t it?

The characters advance ... essentially zero evidence for their theory? It seems to be founded mainly in one character's (understandable) personal horror at the extreme privation of S B IV's population. No alien ruins are found, no data-discs are decoded, no signals received. Honestly, I found that the questionable world-building choices undermined the narrative. First of all I can't imagine the human digestive system coping at all with a diet solely of algae. Also, the question of drinking water is never addressed - presumably SB IV’s seas somehow aren’t saline, or something?

The Earth characters’ moral horror has some well-defined limits, however. They make no attempt to communicate with the B IV natives, and do nothing to try to help them - they don't even think to share any water with the dying people that they find. The whole attitude is, well, it's a bit colonial in some ways, really. The closest they get to interacting with the locals is when one of them almost gets eaten(!).

Oh, I forgot to mention the cannibalism, didn’t I? Yeaaaahhhh. Cos there’s nothing even slightly skeevy about that trope, amirite?!

(To be fair to it, the Earth-based character of the story does consider the possibility of doing something to help the unfortunate people on Sirius B IV - though, it’s clear that he’s thinking of a terraforming program run and administered by people from Earth, and there’s no suggestion that native opinions or permissions will be sought at any point. So, uh, we’re back to a whiff or two of colonialism again!)

Also, the story doesn't even touch on the question of how S B IV has a resident human population. If the characters' theory is correct, then surely that's rather important? (This is where having a native voice or two would have strengthened the story - the background of noise at the beach suggests that the natives can speak, and if they were subject to periodic Reaper-like harvests, you’d expect at least an oral tradition about it, particularly since nothing else ever really happens on Sirius B IV. Perhaps there’d also be some folk memories of being forcibly-transplanted from Earth.)

So overall ... hmmm. I don't think I can really recommend this one, either as a reading experience, or as an exploration of ideas. I suppose it’s an OK-ish horror story, in some ways, but it’s very definitely a product of its time

[captainofthefallen]

Earth, moon, Pluto, Deimos?

earth: rivers or seas? RIVERS!! I enjoy the ocean but I’m a whitewater rafting guide. Rivers are wonderful.

moon: do you play any instruments? I do! I technically play the flute, though it’s been a while, I play the saxophone, I know enough about the piano to play a few songs though I cannot sight read on it, and I sing.

Pluto: I’m gonna come back to that one in a second because I’ll probably need to put it under a cut. (edit: tumblr was stupid and put the whole post under the cut. Ugh.)

deimos: if you could go to space, would you? With the caveat that I’m allowed to come back, yes. I love space, I think it’s awesome, I’d love to be able to see the earth from above and the stars with no atmosphere, but unfortunately for me there’s too much stuff on Earth that I like to leave it behind for good.

All right. So.

pluto: is pluto a real planet or fake? I apologize if you didn’t realize you were opening a Can of Worms. I have a Pluto rant, and you have just asked me about it, so here we are.

The short answer: Pluto is a planet and y’all can fight me.

The long answer: I majored in astronomy, specializing in planetary science. I actually wrote a paper on this topic. (Not a scientific study, just a research paper, it was for a science writing class.) There is no scientific reason that Pluto shouldn’t be a planet. I understand the need for the distinction. Pluto was discovered in 1930, and at the time it was closer to a planet than anything else that had been observed, so it was also a planet. (It’s more complicated than that but this is already going to be a Rant I won’t bore you with the details.) However somewhere around the 90s, astronomers started discovering more things like Pluto in the outer solar system. Wonderful! Awesome! More things we didn’t know about in our solar system!

This, however, gave rise to a Problem: are we just going to keep adding these things to our list of planets? What if there are more? What if there are dozens? Hundreds? Are we going to make our schoolchildren memorize 200 planets (this, I believe, is mostly hyperbole, though the number 200 was floated as a guess on how many other dwarf planets might be out there. The solar system is a big place)? Or do we need to start making categories?

We started making categories. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) had a vote in the year 2006 about how to classify Pluto and these new bodies. The vote concerned a) the definition of the term ‘planet’ which hadn’t had incredibly specific parameters up until that point--planets were the round ones that go around the stars, and b) where Pluto and these other bodies would fall in terms of that definition.

The definition is this: In order to be a planet, a body needs to meet three qualifications: It needs to orbit a star. It needs to be massive enough to be spherical. And it needs to have “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” [x]

What does that mean? Excellent question. Pluto fits the first two criteria, as do all the other dwarf planets. The third one is a little more vague, and I’m still decently sure that they just came up with something convenient that would disqualify Pluto and the others, for simplicity’s sake. Essentially, what it means is that a planet needs to be the dominant object in its orbit. There can’t be anything else in its vicinity (in relative terms, since everything in astronomy is fuckin huge) that could compete with it gravitationally. Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt in the outer solar system. There are a lot of other objects in the Kuiper Belt, many of which are in and around Pluto’s orbit. Several of them (in the Kuiper Belt, not necessarily on Pluto’s orbit) are other dwarf planets.

If this sounds vague and confusing, it’s because it is! But wait there’s more. If you actually followed my link to the IAU press release, you will have noticed that there was another resolution, something about “classical planets.” This resolution proposed that, instead of removing Pluto from the category of ‘planet,’ there should be subcategories: ‘classical planets’ and ‘dwarf planets.’ This would allow for the 8 ‘classical planets’ to be taught in schools, known by the public in general, etc., while the dwarf planets could be reserved for nerds like myself to research on their own time, but they would still be planets.

This resolution was rejected. Which I understand, I suppose--the wording is vague, what’s a ‘classical’ planet anyway, what does that mean? But I think the idea is sound and could’ve been workshopped. It makes far more sense to have the broad category of ‘planets,’ and then have ‘dwarf planets’ be a subcategory. What doesn’t make sense is to call a series of objects ‘dwarf planets’ and proceed to tell everyone that ‘dwarf planets’ are not, in fact, planets. I asked my roommate about it when I was writing this paper, and she didn’t even realize that ‘dwarf planet’ wasn’t a subcategory of planet. It isn’t. But it should be. It makes more sense.

As far as the science I’ve interacted with, there’s no reason to even make a distinction. If we discovered a dwarf planet in another solar system we would have no reason to make the distinction. Particularly because it’s almost arbitrary. A Pluto-sized planet in a smaller solar system could very well be gravitationally dominant in its orbit. I understand the need, within our own solar system, to make a distinction, but creating a subcategory of ‘dwarf planet’ and then saying they’re not planets is absolutely ridiculous. (If you want an alternative, I saw a term floated, I believe in Mike Brown’s book How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, of a plutoid. Which would accomplish several things, first of which creating a category for these objects that doesn’t create confusion, if you’re really dead set on them not being planets, second of which paying homage to everyone’s beloved Pluto by naming an entire category after it. But I digress.)

tl;dr: the fact that they named this category of objects ‘dwarf planets’ and yet insist that they are not planets is absolutely ridiculous and makes no sense. I understand what they were trying to achieve, I can even agree with the need, culturally, for another class of objects in this category, but there are way better ways they could’ve accomplished it. Therefore until they fix it: Pluto is a planet. Fight me.

[scifigeneration]

'The Big Bang Theory' finale: Sheldon and Amy's fictional physics parallels real science

by Adilson Motter

The cast made it through 279 episodes. CBS

After 12 successful seasons, “The Big Bang Theory” has finally come to a fulfilling end, concluding its reign as the longest running multicamera sitcom on TV.

If you’re one of the few who haven’t seen the show, this CBS series centers around a group of young scientists defined by essentially every possible stereotype about nerds and geeks. The main character, Sheldon (Jim Parsons), is a theoretical physicist. He is exceptionally intelligent, but also socially unconventional, egocentric, envious and ultra-competitive. His best friend, Leonard (Johnny Galecki), is an experimental physicist who, although more balanced, also shows more fluency with quantum physics than with ordinary social situations.

Their steadfast friends are an aerospace engineer and an astrophysicist. The story revolves around the contrast between their intellect; obsession with comic books, video games, science fiction and fantasy; and struggles with the basics of human interactions, including those with their female counterparts.

Physicist David Saltzberg makes sure the show’s science hits the target. Warner Bros. Studios

Science, especially physics, is a recurring theme in the show and the scientific authenticity and contemporaneity are noteworthy. Part of the credit for that goes to David Saltzberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA who served as a technical adviser for the series.

Even though it is not intended to educate, “The Big Bang Theory” frequently refers to real science. Many science communicators and distinguished scientists have made guest appearances, from Bill Nye to Stephen Hawking. But perhaps nothing is more recurrent in the show than the use of the “scientist” trope as the punchline of joke after joke.

So how would a physicist like me get interested in this show? Not only is it the most popular sitcom on American television, but it’s also a pop culture bridge to science. While it is not the first time science has been represented in mainstream media, “The Big Bang Theory” is currently its most visible representation. In addition, it just happens that the fictional research in the show makes contact with my own real research.

A science-y setting on a popular show

I was first exposed to “The Big Bang Theory” through interactions with people from outside academia, who would often refer to it as soon as they pegged me as a physicist. Reports that their teenage kids loved the show were common.

But what really got my attention was a Guardian article in 2011 that suggested, albeit anecdotally, that the show was helping increase the enrollment of physics majors. Why? Possibly by bringing the attention of a broad audience to the subject or by making physics look cool. Now that I am familiar with the show, I believe “The Big Bang Theory” is to physics what “CSI” was to forensics. It has brought physics, and especially the people doing physics, to a young audience of prospective science students.

As a physics professor and educator, I have a vested interest in attracting and nurturing talents in physics – and even in 2019, television can influence choices people make. While only good physics teaching and mentoring can convert interested students into talented scientists, a TV show like “The Big Bang Theory” can be what gets them into the classroom in the first place.

The show’s somewhat stereotypical image of physicists also has weaknesses, of which the most significant are the use of misogyny as a point of humor and a lack of diversity in the main cast. The perpetuation of stereotypes can reinforce the perception that certain groups don’t belong in physics. An entertainment show is not obligated to mirror real life, but this is a sensitive issue because physics still suffers from a lack of diversity and the dropout rates are high among certain underrepresented groups.

The show underwrites scholarships at UCLA for STEM students, including Kemeka Corry, on set here with actress Mayim Bialik, who herself holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Mike Yarish/©2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Notwithstanding, as the show developed, leading female characters took the stage: an attractive, down-to-earth neighbor, a successful microbiologist, and finally, there was the intelligent, accomplished Amy (Mayim Bialik), a neurobiologist selected through an online dating site as Sheldon’s perfect match. They married in the finale of the 11th season.

The same episode also marks one of the most celebrated moments of the series: Sheldon and Amy’s serendipitous discovery that put them on track for a Nobel Prize in Physics.

A fictional theory worthy of a Nobel

It all starts with groom Sheldon’s difficulty straightening out his bow tie. Amy tells him “I don’t think it is supposed to be even. Sometimes a little asymmetry looks good. In the Renaissance, they called it ‘sprezzatura.‘”

When later he explains to his mom why he’s leaving it a bit off kilter, she says, “Sometimes it’s the imperfect stuff that makes things perfect.” It’s one of the best lines of the entire show, and the one that gave Sheldon the final clue to their scientific breakthrough.

Sheldon: My equations have been trying to describe an imperfect world, and the only way to do that is to introduce imperfection into the underlying theory.

Amy: So, instead of supersymmetry, it would be super asymmetry?!

Sheldon: Super asymmetry! That’s it!!

When the light bulb turns on, Sheldon scribbles out equations in lipstick on a mirror. CBS

The entire last season gravitates around the merits of “super asymmetry” and the threats of a competing group getting credit for it. In reality, no theory with this name exists, but the name was clearly inspired by supersymmetry, which does.

Supersymmetry concerns subatomic particles from which everything else is made. It proposes that every subatomic particle in the current standard model of particle physics has a so-called supersymmetric partner – essentially extra particles that exist in tandem with the already identified ones. This means that the underlying equations would remain unchanged under certain transformations, which has deep predictive implications. Supersymmetry has not yet been proved experimentally.

Now, how plausible is Amy and Sheldon’s super asymmetry as a physical theory? Depending on how you interpret what’s described in the show, it is either not sound or somewhat trivial in the subatomic world. However, it is highly nontrivial for collective behavior, which just happens to be my topic of research.

The real physics of asymmetry

I am an interdisciplinary physicist studying collective behavior in natural and engineered systems. Think of heart cells beating together, a power grid operating as a single system, shoals of fish schooling together, genes in a cell coordinating their activities and so on.

For a number of years, I’ve been working to understand why such systems can exhibit what we call behavioral symmetry – or homogeneity – even though the systems themselves are not symmetric – or homogeneous – at all. For example, your circadian clock can be well synchronized with the 24-hour cycle despite the fact that the individual neurons in the circadian system are quite different from each other. They exhibit the same period only when interacting with each other.

And here is how my research relates to Amy and Sheldon’s hypothetical theory. It’s generally assumed that individual entities are more likely to exhibit the same behavior if they are equal or similar to each other. Imagine lasers pulsing together, birds singing the same notes, and agents trying to reach consensus. My research shows that this assumption is in fact generally false when the entities interact with each other. Being equal doesn’t mean they’ll sync up. Since individual differences are ubiquitous and often unavoidable in real systems, such asymmetry (or imperfection) can be the unexpected source of behavioral symmetry.

There are instances in which the observed behavior of the system can be symmetric only when the system itself is not. My collaborator and I called this effect asymmetry-induced symmetry, but could have referred to it as a form of super asymmetry since it epitomizes the notion that imperfections make things perfect. Asymmetry-induced symmetry exposes scenarios in physical and biophysical systems in which we observe consensus because of – not despite – differences, thus adding a new dimension to the advantage of diversity.

“The Big Bang Theory” ends, but the message from the most gifted couple on television remains: We do live in a “perfectly imperfect universe.”

About The Author:

Adilson Motter is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[tanadrin]

Harpesson

(reposted b/c I apparently deleted the original at some point)

NALEFOR, PARSENOR; IN THE 363RD MILLENIUM SINCE THE EXILE BEGAN

Harpesson sat in the front row of the empty lecture hall and fretted. In her nine years in university, fretting was something she had become quite good at. The familiar, if not quite comfortable sensation of low-level panic. She turned her tablet over nervously in her hands, and sometimes she got up to pace. Then she would sit down again, and smooth her senior scholar’s robes, trying to force herself to relax. But invariably, she would find herself up and pacing again.

It was only the biggest day of her academic career so far, the examination for tesarate, the culmination of three years of postgraduate research on top of the year she had spent on her senior scholarship. If her thesis was found to be a significant contribution to the advancement of her field–History, Technological Archeology, one of the most prestigious departments in the entire university–she would be wearing tesar’s robes before the afternoon. If she failed–well, it wasn’t the end of the world. But it felt like it would be. It wouldn’t be unusual, even. The Sovereign and Unreformed University of Parsenor at Pelehante was hands-down the most prestigious institution in the system, and a history tesarate wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. But she really, really did not want to fail. She dropped her tablet.

“Shit.” The vulgarity hung in the cavernous space of the empty lecture hall. She picked up her tablet and flopped back down in her chair. The choice of venue was not helping her nerves. There was an engineering conference or something taking up all the seminar rooms in the history department, so they’d moved her presentation at the last minute to the biggest and most intimidating room in the pylon. Tall columns rose against the walls, long and narrow arcs of steel that joined in a vaulted ceiling, at a precipitous height, as though to dwarf anybody who had the temerity to stand in the front of the chamber. The entire back wall was a massive delta-shaped window which offered an impressive view of the basaltic plains of Nalefor. Just on the horizon was the low outline of the Expedition Hills, which marked the edge of the Great Crater. It was a striking image, but barren. Nalefor’s atmosphere was tenuous, barely distinguishable from a vacuum, and the surface was scoured by radiation. Not a good place to go for a walk, even in a spacesuit. High above the horizon was the massive disk of Nalefor’s primary, the gas giant Pelehante. Its upper cloud layers were stripes of tan and white, its disk waxing gibbous in the sunlight. Harpesson sighed, and sank even deeper into her chair.

The sound of one of the hall’s side doors opening made her bolt upright. Two tall, gray-haired academics came in. The first was Wunai, chief of the history department. Her specialty was technological archeology, and she looked severe in her dark tesar’s robes. Harpesson felt her palms begin to sweat. The second was the more genial-looking Gunasi Ar, one of the history professors. She wasn’t sure which specialty. There was supposed to be a third, Harpesson knew. They usually got three examiners, one who knew your subject inside and out, one who could see how your understanding of your specialty integrated with your understanding of your general field, and one for any interdisciplinary considerations. Harpesson was worried about that last one. She had had to do some work on diachronic linguistics for her thesis, and she had heard a rumor that the third examiner was going to be —

The door opened and a man strode in. Harpesson’s stomach sank. He looked younger than both Gunasi and Wunai; he had dark hair, almost black, and a smooth, nearly wrinkleless face. In reality, he was by far the oldest person in the room. Harpesson knew him by reputation: he was Yizhad Girvát, a cyborg with excellent facial prostheses, linguistics professor, and notorious hardass. He nodded to Wunai and Gunasi as he came in, but didn’t acknowledge the panicking eulesar in the front row. When the examiners had dispensed with the pro forma small talk, Wunai touched a button on her tablet, causing a bench and three seats to rise from the stage of the lecture hall. The tesars took their places. Harpesson got to her feet unsteadily.

You can do this, Harp, she said to herself. Focus. You know this shit like the back of your hand. Just focus. She took a deep breath, and felt her anxiety fall away. The time for worry was over. A calm confidence took its place.

“Are you ready to start?” Wunai asked. Gunasi flashed a maternal smile. Harpesson cracked her neck.

“Let’s do this,” she said.

Gunasi chuckled. Harpesson had always liked the old Ar most, out of all the history tesars. It was good to have a friend on the board of examiners. She glanced at Girvát. His face was utterly impassive. Well, it could be worse. Maybe.

“Very well.” Wunai touched the interface to start the official record. “Eule Harpesson has indicated she is ready to begin. Therefore, let it be known that the examination of Eule Harpesson for tesarate in history has begun. Eulesar, we have all looked over your thesis. Would you prefer to begin with the presentation, or the questioning?”

“We can start with the questioning, Department Chief,” Harpesson said. Wunai nodded.

“So,” Wunai said. “Your thesis was on the computing technology of the Yunamo diaspora, particularly as it related to astronomy and navigation, yes?” Harpesson nodded. “In your introduction, you make the argument that the Yunamo systems design evinces a lack of distinction between the two functions. Elaborate.”

Harpesson cleared her throat. “Well, ah, I’m really just following Faradign’s appraisal of the functional nature of astronomy in diaspora technology, so far as that goes. He pretty firmly established that in contrary to, you know, system-based societies like Parsenor, astronomy is much more than a scientific or theoretical pursuit. It’s actually intrinsic to survival, and that importance causes it to transcend the normal social dynamics of science.”

“We are aware of Faradign’s work,” Gunasi said. Gently, though, like he just wanted her to get to the point. She could do that.

“Well, Faradign compares it to the engineering-rituals in that respect, as you know, which I think is flawed, since we’re talking about something that, though essentially pragmatic, still operates over the time-frame of millennia, or many millennia. It’s not just ritualized practice, it’s elevated to revelation, or sacred scripture–because there has to be a long-term perspective maintained, and that’s the only cognitive toolkit the diasporas really have at their disposal.” Harpesson could feel herself at risk of a digression – but fuck it, it was an interesting topic, even if it wasn’t directly relevant to her thesis. “So what you see with astronomy in the diaspora is — repeatedly, in completely distinct cultures, ones with no contact at all between them — a kind of religious attitude toward astronomy, but one meshed with the scientific method. It’s a blend of the two, which you don’t find anywhere in system cultures. And the important thing is, navigation is the flip side of the same coin. It’s, like, the priesthood. The initiates to the mysteries of astronomy.” Harpesson continued, giving as quick an overview as she could of the Yunamo sources she was using for that comparison: the personified stars, the myths of the constellations, which shifted and evolved as the stars themselves did in the wake of the Yunamo’s journeys; the astronomer-epics, and the theological differences which had led to the Great Betrayal, and the schismatic Faithless turning aside on the Yunamo’s journey, who eventually made their way to Parsenor, centuries ago, summoned by the faros of Vannecor. For a little extra zest, she even skated quickly over comparable frameworks from some of the other diasporas in Parsenor’s history. Wunai looked pleased at the end. It was Gunasi’s turn to ask a question.

“Talk to me about your methodology, with regard to systems analysis.” Harpesson shifted nervously.

 “Can you get a little more specific, please?” she asked.

“Reconstruction of partially-attested systems, use of abandoned file formats, that sort of thing.”

 Harpesson took a deep breath, then launched into her spiel on programming language cladistics, cross-cultural approaches to programming frameworks, and heritable computer design. This was by far her strongest subject–her parents were both computer scientists, who had passed on their love of obscure systems and ancient file formats to her, and that plus her interest in history had made technological archeology basically the perfect fit for her.

She kept going until she saw that Gunasi had heard more than enough to satisfy, then started wrapping things up. “I mean, in some respects it resembles the study of natural languages” — glance at Girvát, still nothing — ”but of course programming languages are constructed, and systems have to be considered. I suppose they most resemble constructed languages in that respect, but over long periods of time, groups of programming methodologies emerge with common features that you can group into something like metalanguages, which evolve with respect to one another in a way which is conducive to comparative study, like natural languages. Though of course these second-order phenomena are much more unstable over similar time periods, especially compared to natural languages that change very slowly in diaspora societies.” Gunasi sat back, evidently pleased. Harpesson allowed herself a mental fist pump. Girvát’s turn now, though. She braced herself.

“If you don’t mind, te-Gunas and te-Wunai,” Girvát said, “I’m most curious about the plate fragment you describe in chapter seven.”

Harpesson smiled. This was her secret weapon; if this didn’t impress Girvát, the man was unimpressable. “A curious artifact indeed,” she said. “Titanium with a platinum coating, nearly the size of a full-grown adult, and a fragment of a larger piece still. Engraved with a complex millimeter-scale pattern. It comes directly from the private collection of a man whose grandmother was one of the faithless Yunamo. The legends surrounding the plate indicate it once had a practical function, a long time ago; but the sojourners had quite forgotten whatever that function was, long before it reached Parsenor. It looked like an encoding scheme, so I ran a comparison with known Yunamo file formats, and found something likely-looking in the neighborhood of image compression. But the format was a variant, and it took me a few months to write a program capable of reading the data.”

Gunasi nodded. “Very impressive, Eule Harpesson. What did you find?”

Harpesson glanced at Girvát. Still nothing. She plunged onward. “In short, it was part of a star chart, encoded on a metal plate, maybe as a backup in case of catastrophic systems failure, or perhaps as an icon in its own right. So I pulled up astrometrics for various points along the path of the Yunamo diaspora, based on the records of the faithless, and I found this.” She touched a button on her tablet. The window of the lecture hall went opaque, and an image was projected onto it. It was a stylized star chart beside a more realistically rendered starfield. The chart showed each star as a different polygon based on its stellar classification–except for one star near the middle, which was a circle. The same star, barely visible, was circled in the rendering.

“It was confusing, at first,” said Harpesson. “The matching image is incredibly ancient, predating even the oldest of the Yunamo records–that view is what the distant ancestors of the Yunamo would have seen more than ten thousand years ago, roughly coeval with the Gaharrin or the Essemaian diasporas of Parsenor’s own history. There was nothing in the image to indicate why this star was special. Maybe it was obvious to the people who made the file, but not to their descendants. So I combed through the ancillary data, which pointed to a couple other ancient file-fragments on the same system. I found a copy of that in the university archives.” She tapped her tablet again, and a block of text appeared below the other image, with a section highlighted.

“This, te-Girvát, I think is why they asked you to be here. That’s a copy of a copy of a transcription of a file annotation, referencing the star chart, but in a language that antedates the file by a good three or four thousand years. Perhaps the chartmaker could read that language, or perhaps he was copying an older image that included the same note. In any case, I had to do some linguistic detective work. Once I established the language was related to several Yunamo daughter-languages, I was able to reconstructed what it said, I think fairly accurately, based on the vocabulary alone.” She tapped another button, and more text appeared, this time in clear Toltó. She watched Girvát’s face as he read it.

Absolute galactice coordinates 134:577.7 K-class star, 0.78 solar masses Periodic transit interval 16.9 million seconds Approximate radius 5000 km

Girvát’s brow furrowed, and he picked up his tablet and began tapping away at it. Harpesson smiled to herself. It wasn’t much, but it was a reaction. Hopefully the right one. She continued with her presentation, though Girvát seemed only to be half-paying attention. “In any case, the relevancy to that chapter is what the artifact revealed both about file formats and programming languages. The tablet-language — we’re tentatively going with ‘Old Digital Yunamo’ for now — seems to be the lexical basis for a few of the more important high-level Yunamo programming languages, particularly the Latter Astrometric Software group. It seems long after the terminology the languages use had become entirely opaque, these programming languages were maintained to ensure compatability with old navigation equipment. The study also proved illuminating in that–”

Girvát held up his hand. Harpesson froze. “Eule Harpesson,” he said slowly, “did you ever think to ask why the ancient Yunamo felt the need to maintain compatability with old star-charts and navigation equipment, even after they left the region of the galaxy for which those charts had been designed?”

Harpesson shook her head. This could not be going anywhere good.

“Did you examine other archived Yunamo files — logs, records, literature, computer games — to attempt to ascertain the significance of the K-class star the recovered chart marks?”

She shook her head again.

“Did you examine the other archived Yunamo files–logs, records, literature, computer games, personal journals–to attempt to ascertain the significance of the K-class star in question?”

“No,” said Harpesson. “Of course not. That would have been way outside my–”

“Your area of interest?” Girvát asked. Harpesson nodded. “Sometimes, Eule Harpesson, we ought to pursue these things no matter where they lead, even if it takes us ‘way outside’ our area of interest. Did you even discuss this chapter with your thesis advisor?”

Harpesson shook her head. She had done that chapter on her own. It wasn’t like she had a good reason for that, except it was peripheral to the rest of her thesis, and she wanted to surprise te-Ina with it. He had an interest in old star charts. She wished she could fall through the floor. She had no idea why Girvát was giving her the third degree. The other two examiners were staring at him, so clearly she wasn’t the only one. Girvát stood up.

“Eule Harpesson, step forward!”

Wunai opened her mouth to speak, but Girvát just stared at her. Perhaps out of surprise more than anything else, Wunai retreated. Harpesson took a nervous step forward toward the tesars’ bench, then another.

“By my authority as a senior master of this university,” Girvát intoned, ”I hereby declare you te-Harpes within these walls, examined and found proficient in the field of History, Diaspora Studies, and te-Harpes within these walls, examined and found proficient in the field of Science, Astronomy with a Specialization in Exoplanetary Science. I will leave it to the good tesars of your department to determine whether you have qualified as proficient in History, Technological Archeology, but if I may offer my input, te-Wunai, I recommend that te-Harpes be made a tesar thereof immediately.”

Wunai’s mouth hung slightly open, and one eyebrow was raised in surprise; Gunasi had begun to sputter.

“Now hold on a minute, Yizhad,” she said. “Her work is excellent, but we have barely begun our examination – and you are a master of linguistics, not of astronomy or history!”

“According to the ancient regulations of the university, any master may declare a qualified eulesar a master in his or her own subject, or any subject to which the eulesar makes a self-evidently groundbreaking contribution,” said Girvát calmly. “And if you take my advice, Department Chief, not only will you make te-Harpes a tesar of technological archeology, you will make her a professor as well.”

Wunai’s other eyebrow shot up. “We don’t have the funding–”

“Then get the funding, te-Wunai,” said Girvat. “Because te-Harpes has just made the most important contribution to that field, and to a half-dozen others, in the history of this university.”

“You have really got to explain yourself at some point,” said Wunai calmly.

“And we should make our humanities students sit in on astronomy lectures from time to time,” Girvát muttered. He pressed a button on his tablet, and Harpesson’s presentation disappeared from the projection. It was replaced by a diagram of a yellow-orange star, with a band of space around it highlighted in blue.

“A K-class star of 0.78 solar masses,” he said, “has about 40% solar luminosity and a surface temperature of about 5,100 Kelvin. Or so a few quick calculations inform me. And an orbital period of 16.9 million seconds puts a putative terrestrial planet right in its sun’s habitable zone.”

Gunasi and Wunai shifted in their seats. “An interesting discovery, te-Girvát,” said Gunasi, “and doubtless a feather in Eule Harpesson’s cap—”

“Te-Harpes,” Girvát interjected.

“Um. Yes, te-Harpes’ cap, but I still don’t see...”

Girvat pressed another button. Harpesson’s presentation reappeared. He scrolled through the transcript of the file annotation, to a point just beyond the one Harpesson translated. “If te-Harpes’ reconstruction is accurate–and it appears to be excellent” – at this, he looked at Harpesson and smiled. He actually smiled. Harpesson felt like she was going to pass out from the shock. She had never seen Girvát smile at anything – “then the word right there, right next to ‘transit’ is ‘diatomic oxygen.’”

Wunai looked like she’d been struck, Gunasi’s face was pale. Harpesson was bewildered, and she had the feeling whatever was happening had completely gotten away from her.

Wunai stood up. “We should be able to locate the star on Parsenor-local charts and make our own telescopic survey. I doubt the transit will be visible from Parsenor, but we still might be able to confirm the presence of planets. I imagine the university will want to send robotic probes first, but if the Yunamo did indeed reach this world... a manned expedition will be inevitable. Peleho only knows what they’ve...” She trailed off, then turned to Harpesson.

“Te-Harpes! No... that won’t do. Senior master Harpesson!”

Harpesson had a sudden sense of vertigo. She was pretty sure she had just set the land speed record for ascent through the university’s academic ranks, and she still had no idea what was going on. She managed a small, quiet “Yes?”

“This is your achievement, however accidental it may be. A great deal will have to be planned and discussed. It may be years before this discovery begins to bear fruit directly. But I think I speak for the entire tesarate of the university when I say this discovery is, first and foremost, your triumph. If you wish to lead a manned expedition – well, I imagine it would require extensive cyberization, at least, and a long period in cold sleep... and other costs. Many diasporas have come to Parsenor, but we have never attempted one of our own.”

Harpesson was shaking her head violently before Wunai finished. “No no no,” she said, “I get sick just on interplanetary shuttles–I don’t... what’s going–”

Wunai turned to Gunasi before she could finish. “Te-Gunas, if you would be so kind as to upgrade te-Harpes’ key and permissions, and show her to her new office” -  Wunai glanced at Harpesson – ”and maybe get a stiff drink in her, too. I need to contact the Provost.”

Girvát held up his tablet. “I’ve already called a meeting of the tesarate for this evening. See if the Provost can’t get in touch with some heads of state while you’re at it.” Wunai nodded, and swept out of the lecture hall.

“Just a moment, te-Harpes,” said Gunasi. “I’ll go and fetch your tesar’s robes.” The old Ar rose, and followed Wunai out.

Harpesson stood in the middle of the room for a long moment, now empty except for her and Girvát, who was calmly typing away on his tablet.

“E-excuse me,” she said. “What’s going on? What’s the big deal? What the... what the hell just happened to me?” She threw her tablet down on the floor. “Oxygen, sure great, it’s rare and hard to extract. Planet full of it, good news! Planet many light years away, bad news!”

Girvát stopped typing, and looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Lifelong habit of theatrics. I forgot you don’t have a planetary science background, and I should have explained.

“Diatomic oxygen is rare in nature. Oxygen is highly reactive, and doesn’t persist long in planetary atmospheres because of its reactivity. There are only a few classes of chemical reaction which are liable to produce large, detectable quantities of it, of the sort you might notice in a planet’s atmosphere, if you were looking very carefully at the spectrum of emissions of the parent star, when the planet passed in front of it. For the Yunamo stargazers to have seen any at all, the planet in question would have had a considerable amount. That was why they took such an interest in that world; why the data about its location in the sky became a sacred icon to their ancestors, and why they focused their entire civilization, for hundreds of generations, on the goal of reaching that distant star. And that was why, even when the faithless of the Yunamo turned aside on their voyage and forgot their purpose, and eventually wound their way to Parsenor, even when they had all but forgotten the promises of their scripture and the rituals of old, the sign of that planet remained embedded in the heart of their archives.

“That world represents everything our species has been seeking since we began to wander among the stars — since Earth was lost to us, long ago. That world is habitable. That world has life.”

[humansofhds]

Edwin Alanís-García, MTS ’19

“Ever since I was little I did nothing but read, and I always think, what’s the point of acquiring knowledge if you’re not going to share it and exchange it or try to dissect it with the help of others.”

Edwin is an MTS ‘19 candidate studying philosophy and religion and a writer of poetry and fiction.

Learning to Know

I’m from a small town about an hour-and-a-half outside of Chicago. It’s part of the suburbs, but it is on the edge, so it's very rural. The road leading up to my parents' house is just off the interstate and it's mostly surrounded by cornfields and soybean fields and farm houses. It’s a small and not very diverse town. Population of about 5,000. When we were growing up it was predominately white—about 99 percent white. Our family was part of the other one percent. But we were all working class, that was the one thing in common.

Both of my parents are from rural Mexico. My dad first came to the U.S. as a kid, as a migrant farm worker, and then as a young man living in New York he learned how to weld. In Mexico my mom worked as a receptionist and as a cashier at a grocery store. My dad's training led him to become a union pipe fitter/welder. It was a grueling and dangerous job, but it was extraordinarily well-paying for an immigrant. That's what enabled our family to live very comfortably.

In coming here, I think my family was trying to leave their old world behind. And it wasn't a bad world they were leaving, at least in comparison to small-town Illinois. But one side effect was that it was very isolating to be in America. Our household is like taking a slice out of rural Northern Mexico and dropping it in the middle of small-town Illinois. We couldn't assimilate well, which I'm rather grateful for despite its drawbacks. There's a trope in many immigrant narratives that the first generation kid has trouble learning English. For me it was the opposite.

I started to teach myself how to read when I was around three years old. No one thought there was anything strange about it. It wasn’t until recently that I realized it was unusual. It eventually became one of the many reasons I've always felt like an outsider. One of my most important memories from elementary school was being asked to sit in the corner during recess because I was the only kid who did our first writing assignment correctly. The teacher had to redo the lesson for everyone else. It wasn’t a punishment, but it sure felt like it.

Even the way I speak, when I tell people where I’m from, they say they can’t hear a Chicago accent. I think it has to do with the way I acquired language, which was mostly through an old dictionary and an encyclopedia set my parents got from a grocery store. There was nothing else to do in our town, so I just stayed inside and read. Evidently that did something—for better and for worse.

Leaving Home

As an undergrad I studied philosophy and psychology. I probably would have been better suited for English, which was surprisingly one of my least favorite subjects in school, along with math. I was definitely more interested in the sciences, especially biology and astronomy. It’s kind of painful to say, but coming to literature wasn’t really my dream, but it feels like where I was rightfully placed. I didn't view language as what I was passionate about and loved. I think my success with it was more a product of a weird background and a disordered mind.

After undergrad I did a few years of grad school in philosophy, but after that I didn’t really know where to go. Job opportunities in my hometown were very bleak. They're still bleak. People kept telling me that I should apply to MFA programs in writing, so I applied and got in to a few schools. I was totally shocked. That moment was the beginning of the biggest shift in my life. Where I went to undergrad was a campus literally surrounded by cornfields. Then suddenly I was living in Brooklyn and going to school in Manhattan.

Emerging from the subway for the first time, I had never seen anything like it—so many people. I have bad anxiety in big groups, so it took a while but eventually I got used to it. Culturally, though, the biggest adjustment was class. The cost of living in New York is astronomical. While I was studying there, maybe 150 students passed through our program and out of those students only about 3-4, including myself, came from a working class or low income background. It was the first time ever in my life I met people who said that they had gone to Ivy League schools for undergrad. I always thought that was something that only happened on TV or in books. I had to learn that there was nothing mythical about it.

Cambridge is the quintessential college town, and I feel very at ease here. Growing up, my world was a dictionary and an encyclopedia set, and now I have access to the world’s largest university library system. I can socialize and have a nightlife if I want, and be socially active, or I can keep to myself and camp out in the library if I need to. It feels like I have more options here to go my own way.

Getting to HDS

There are three things that led me here. The first was my general interest in philosophy, especially epistemology of religion. Ever since I was little I never had faith. I went to church but I didn’t understand why we were going to church. It felt like religion was one of the rare domains in which it's explicitly acceptable to believe in something against the evidence. This isn’t to say that reason and argumentation are not used to defend religion, especially with philosophers like Aquinas and especially with contemporary analytic philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga. They give well-reasoned arguments for religious belief. Even though I don’t agree with them, it's interesting to hear their approach because I'm more in line with that tradition. But what I am fascinated by are the traditions that don’t follow that path, that say there is something other than just evidence and reason, like experience and faith. Views like pragmatism and fideism. I'm not really on board with these views, but I think they say something important about the nature of belief. Not just religious belief, but belief in general.

What brought me here on a more personal level happened when I was doing research for my MFA thesis. I was researching the city of Monterrey in Northern Mexico, the region where most of my family is from, when I found out that the first European colonial settlers there were conversos, or Sephardic Jews who had converted to Christianity. I knew nothing about this history and no one in my family knew about it, either. I wanted to learn more about this vein of Jewish history because after DNA testing it was confirmed that my family has a significant percentage of Sephardic ancestry. So, part of what I am here to study is this hidden history of people navigating multiple worlds: There’s the Jewish thread that's been partially erased throughout history, and the indigenous thread which has been replaced by the more romanticized Aztec/Mayan civilizations, which don't actually seem to be causally connected to the indigenous tribes that existed along the borders. There's a lost story here, and I'm hoping to find out more about it and hopefully write about it.

The final moment that led me here, that pushed me to studying religion and philosophy, was a craft of fiction class at NYU taught by Zadie Smith. Zadie assigned me to give a presentation on Kafka and Kierkegaard; as soon as I started rereading those authors, I realized that I wanted to return to philosophy, but through the study of religion and literature. Zadie was very supportive and encouraging in my decision to come to HDS, as was Chuck Wachtel, my mentor and advisor at NYU. I wouldn't be here without their support.

Bearing Witness

I didn’t think there was anything ethical about the literary world until I had the opportunity to take a poetry workshop with Jorie Graham last semester. The workshop was amazing, and completely changed my outlook on art and language and really everything. I'm slowly getting over my discomfort in regarding myself as poet. I would've quit writing if not for that workshop. I'm now starting to see writing as a moral activity.

I think my most worthwhile poems aren’t the ones that I purposefully sit down to write; they just sort of come. And often it’s through this emotionally charged rant. My workshop saw it as bearing witness. I was pointing out a classed segment of society—the literary world. There's this willful ignorance that's led to the unfortunate political situation that we’re in now, and the fact that I’m even referring to the situation now is in itself problematic because most of the problems that are being discussed now have always been issues. For example, years ago I wrote a novella that took place in an ICE facility near Brownsville, Texas. In the story, the facility was in a gutted former Walmart that had no walls, only chain link fences, and all the prisoners were children. Then two years later ICE actually built this facility.

I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about this story. To me, it's all just about paying attention and seeing certain patterns and adopting an absurdist sensibility. But this led me to realize that if there's a pattern in society that I'm picking up on, then perhaps writing about it becomes a moral imperative. That’s kind of how I see writing poetry and fiction. I'm fascinated with this element of prophecy in fiction. And apocalypse. Jorie stressed that apocalypse actually means an unveiling. Not just an end to things, but a revealing of truths.

I never did anything with the novella because it was actually really bad. My classmates and instructor were phenomenal, but I was too immature of a writer at the time. Now people keep telling me that if I went back to it, rewrote it, it would get published. But that’s just because it’s timely. I don’t know if I feel comfortable doing that. I don’t want to give this false impression that illusions of representation, and bearing witness to the suffering of others, and simply pointing out injustice—that this all somehow absolves writers and publishers from the evils of society. And I think if the publishing world wasn't interested in this topic back then, in a few years it probably won’t be interested in it anymore. But the problem isn't going anywhere. If that’s the case then maybe we have a moral obligation, especially being in a position of privilege, to always and consistently be critical of ourselves and the powers that be, no matter who they are. The suffering that exists on their watch is ultimately suffering that exists on our behalf. We are all complicit in that.

Returning to Society

I would like to apply to PhD programs and see how that pans out. In any case, I would love to teach. That’s one thing that I discovered at NYU—that I love teaching. It doesn’t matter if it’s at a university or a high school. I'd like to mentor young writers. Shout out to the young artists and translators at Still Waters in a Storm in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They taught me how to be a better listener and to pay better attention to the world. That's probably the most important skill for a writer.  

Ever since I was little I did nothing but read, and I always think, what’s the point of acquiring knowledge if you’re not going to share it and exchange it or try to dissect it with the help of others? It reminds me of the prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Zarathustra says that he's meditated alone for so many years that his mind has grown heavy from his thoughts. He needs to return to society to share them. Can't just hide in the library anymore.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian

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Muhammad V.S Genghis Khan (Tony Nguyen G11)

Although it is tough to consider the most influential person between two of the greatest leaders in history which are Muhammad the prophet (PBUH) and Genghis Khan (Temujin Khan), but I would choose prophet Muhammad for the following four impressive influences: personality’s influence, influence on trades plus expansion by creating Islam religion, influence on the Abbasid.

(Picture of Muhammad or PUBH - Peace be upon him)

1.  Personality ‘s influence on many people especially his followers

Muhammad the prophet had created a huge influences to people that made them follow him which are Quraysh generals and most of the majority in Mecca in the beginning of the 7th century due to his characteristic or personality. He had a great character of about seven particular virtues including his kindness to all creature, truthfulness and promise fulfilling, responsibility as a leader, cooperative, charitable, modesty, and merciful. Muhammad was best known for his truthfulness and promise fulfilling which he taught this virtue to all of his follower and in fact, his enemy also recognized him as the truthful and honest person. He was also a good leader which he chose to teach people back from what he had listened from Allah rather than dictate people. For example, before fighting with the non-believers, Ghazwa-e-Khandaq, in March 627, he participated in digging trenches outside Medina which he had lifted the heaviest stone by himself. Muhammad was also a charitable, merciful man that he didn’t refuse to give anything he had to someone if this person asked him and never took revenge for personal matters. Because of these great personality of goodness and morality, he had changed the lives of the illiterate Arabs and had been able to convince great generals from his Quraysh opponent to follow him such as Khalid ibn al-Walid and influenced his popular powerful army, the Mameluke. His character also played a vital role in spreading Islam as he treated alike regardless of their statuses.

(Picture of Khalid ibn al-Walid)

2.       Influence through trades and expansion of territory by creating Islam

The greatest Muhammad’s achievement in influencing people is creating a great and strong foundation for the Islam religion. The most important achievement that he had accomplished was united the whole Arab states and this created a foundation for Islam to develop. The influence of the Islam as known as Muhammad impact influenced trade routes, other societies and other people which accompanied the growth of the Islamic state’s territory in the Sub-Sahara Africa, South Asia, Western Europe.

(Picture of Islamic expansion)

First of all, you need to understand the all of the situation of the Islamic states during the 7th century. The Arab empire in the past was bunch of different separate nomadic tribes which their religion followed polytheism (worshiping many gods). Remember, although tribes or regions may share the same pantheon of gods, they tend to place primary importance on different individual gods.  Consequently, the belief in many gods lends itself very readily to conflicting loyalties and competition in politics. And also, the people under the rule of the nomadic tribes tended to be unsatisfied which there were many slaves. Because of that, if there was one thing that can unite the whole Islamic states during this time, it would be one monotheism religion which is Islam therefore Islam easily influenced so much Muslims and therefore prophet Muhammad had the great impact on the world society since his message constituted a radical protest against the corruption of the Mecca elite by demanding justice.

Secondly, Islam of the prophet Muhammad influenced the Sub-Sahara Africa area by showing its own advantages to people that made them converted to Islam and effected strongly to the Sub-Sahara trade routes especially slaves. The beginning of trans-Saharan trade, made possible by the domestication of the camel, profoundly influenced the world of sub-Saharan Africa. Gold, salt and slaves began to make their way across the desert.  When Islam came into this area, it didn’t separate religious authority from political authority which kings who converted had more power and authority therefore, Islam was really appealing to leader of the Sub-Sahara Africa and it did not greatly affect the lower classes or traditional gender roles. Furthermore, as Islam was introduced to the people of the Sub-Sahara Africa, the number of slave trades increased. Most of the enslavement under the non-Islam believers were really tough for the Muslims’ slaves so this could be considered a step toward their conversion. Also, Islam influenced slaves by using its own advantages that persons born to slave parents were not automatically slaves which encouraged large amount of slave converted to Islam.  Another fact is that the influenced of Islam made the possession of slaves more important in the barometer of personal wealth.  As many as ten million African slaves were shipped north as part of the trans-Saharan slave trade between 750 and 1500 C.E. In summary, the coming of Islam to Sub-Saharan Africa facilitated the rise of political empires, encouraged conversion to this religion, influenced trade plus wealth, and increased the traffic in slavery.

Thirdly, although Muhammad died in 632 but his influence went on as his Islam religion spread across the South Asia specifically India under the reign of Uthman, the third caliph, which created a huge impact to the people there. Most of the influence changed the perspective of many low rank that led to he conversion to Islam. The lower castes were more inclined to convert because Islam’s stress on equality was more attractive to them. Converts also came from the Buddhists, another group with nothing to gain from the Hindu caste system.  Conversion came primarily from people will little to no influence in society.

Muhammad’s Islam was also a source of influence to the Western Europe when the Muslim conquest expanded to Spain that ended in 732 at the Battle of Tours. Despite the impermanence of the Muslims in Western Europe, it would have several significant effects on European civilization. The Muslims came into contact with ancient Greek thought which they did borrow it.  In science, medicine and geography no civilization had attained the level of learning the Muslim scholars had.  The scientific writings of Aristotle were copied, taught, and preserved by Muslim scholars and eventually transmitted to Medieval European universities. The Greek thought of the Arabs thus exercised a strong influence upon the Christians of Europe in the Middle Ages.

3.       Influence the Abbasid by creating its foundation

Muhammad also created a influential foundation for his own descendants such as the Abbasid caliphate which was preceded by Umayyad caliphate. The religion Islam created by the prophet was also created impacts on this descendant period which was the period when the history took another turn towards advancement or we called the Islamic golden age. Education was spread through opening of institutions, world’s first hospital was established in the city of Baghdad and many more. In the time of ‘khilafat-e-Abbasiya’ Baghdad was like Harvard and Oxford at that time, people from different parts of the world use to send their kids to Baghdad. The infrastructure was laid and in Baghdad alone and there were 60 hospitals. Science, technology, and other fields of knowledge developed rapidly during the golden age of Islam from the 8th to 13th century and beyond. Early Abbasid caliphs embarked on major campaigns seeking scientific and philosophical works from eastern and western worlds which they translated most of the works from Greece into their language by Islam scholars and expanded these works into more achievements. Because of that, Muhammad the prophet had shaped most of the Muslims’ thinking in knowledge fields such as math, science, astronomy and literature especially the Abbasid caliphates which they created a large empire that represented the Islamic golden age in the heart of Baghdad.  

(Picture of the Abbasid dynasty)

4.       The fatal weakness of Genghis Khan:

Genghis Khan did influence people but he just controlled them by using force which his influence would become a short term impact on the people that he had invaded. He could impact their lives but their minds were the one that he didn’t care to control and he did create a rule which people have the freedom of religious and culture. This meant that he did not total influence his conquered people and as his empire fell down, his impact was no longer exist. However, Muhammad’s influence was more powerful than Genghis Khan’s influence. Muhammad himself did influence not only physically on one society but he also made impacts on its mental inside. To be more specific, on one side, Muhammad expanded his Islamic states by conquering other empires such as Byzantium empire and Sassanid empire which the rule of Muhammad affected the lives of many people that had been conquered. On the other side, Muhammad also created Islam which then influenced the thoughts inside of these conquered people. Because of this, Muhammad impacted people by not just using forces but their will to join his side therefore Muhammad got his strong supports and his Islamic states expansion was easier.

(Picture of Genghis Khan)

[teshknowledgenotes]

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY – WILL & ARIEL DURANT NOTES

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY – WILL & ARIEL DURANT NOTES WHY? Ray Dalio always recommends this book and I do enjoy reading about History a lot. NOTES 1) Hesitations To begin with, do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice” Even the historian who thinks to rise above partiality for his country, race, creed or class betrays his secret predilection in his choice of materials, and in the nuances of his adjectives. “The historian always oversimplifies and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.” Again, our conclusion from the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the acceleration of change.

Every year sometimes, in war, every month some new invention, method, or situation compels a fresh adjustment of behaviour and ideas. Furthermore, an element of chance, perhaps of freedom, seems to enter into the conduct of metals and men. We are no longer confident that atoms, much less organisms, will respond in the future as we think they have responded in the past.

Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy, an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment. The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. In philosophy we try to see the part in the light of the whole, in “the philosophy of history” we try to see this moment in the light of the past. We know that in both cases this is a counsel of perfection, total perspective is an optical illusion. We do not know the whole of man’s history, there were probably many civilizations before the Sumerian or the Egyptian, we have just begun to dig! We must operate with partial knowledge and be provisionally content with probabilities in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect. History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patters or logical grooves, it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules, history is baroque. Perhaps within these limits we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.

Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads – astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war. What history has to say about the nature, conduct and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

2) History & The Earth Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade. Egypt was “the gift of the Nile”, and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along their effluent canals. India was the daughter of the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, China owed it’s life and sorrows to the great rivers that (like ourselves) often wandered from their proper beds and fertilized the neighbourhood with their overflow. Italy adorned the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po. Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the Elbe and the Rhine.

The development of the airplane will again alter the map of civilization. Trade routes will follow less and less the rivers and seas, men and goods will be flown more and more directly to their goal. Countries like England & France will lose the commercial advantage of abundant coast lines conveniently indented, countries like Russia, China, and Brazil which were hampered by the excess of their land mass over their coasts, will cancel part of that handicap by taking to the air. Coastal cities will derive less of their wealth from the clumsy business of transferring goods from ship to train or from train to ship. When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact, and only a similar combination can make a culture take form over a thousand natural obstacles. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

3) Biology & History History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. The startled animals scurry away at our coming, the birds scatter, the fish disperse in the brook. Suddenly  we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat. Then all the chronicles and achievements of man fall humbly into the history and perspective of polymorphous life, all our economic competition, our strife for mates, our hunger and love and grief and war, are akin the the seeking, mating, striving and suffering that hide under these fallen trees or leaves, or in the waters, or on the boughs.

Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive. If some of us seem to escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us, but that group itself must meet the tests of survival.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life, peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat on another without qualm, civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition, we co-operate in our group, our family, our community, club, church, party, “race”, or nation, in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals, acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states being ourselves multiplied, are what we are, they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality, she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few, doubtless she looks on approvingly at the upstream race of a thousand sperms to fertilize on ovum. She is more interested in the species than in the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate of civilization culturally high and Natures sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group. Gaul survived against the Germans through the help of Roman legions in Caesar’s days, and through the help of British and American legions in our time. When Rome fell the Franks rushed in from Germany and made Gaul France, if England and America should fall, France, whose population remained almost stationary through the nineteenth century, might again be overrun.

There is a limit to the fertility of the soil, every advance in agricultural technology is sooner or later cancelled by the excess of births over deaths, and meanwhile medicine, sanitation, and charity nullify selection y keeping the unfit alive to multiply their like. To which hope replies: the advances of industry, urbanization, education, and standards of living, in countries that now endanger the world by their fertility, will probably have the same effect there , in reducing the birth rate, as they have had in Europe and North America. Until that equilibrium of production  and reproduction comes it will be a counsel of humanity to disseminate the knowledge and means of contraception. Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power, and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.

4) Race & History

5) Character & History

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological, it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species but mostly by economic, political, intellectual and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom or education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species and to instincts in the individual, they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations however do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses, hence development in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation, the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with organization.

Intellect is a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires, and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it, perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used, but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go though the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely, this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old, out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

6) Morals & History

Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behaviour consistent with its order, security and growth.

Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions. If we divide economic history in to three stages – hunting, agriculture, industry – we may expect that the moral code of one stage will be changed in the next. In the hunting stage a man had to be ready to chase and fight and kill. When he had caught his prey he ate to the cubic capacity of his stomach, being uncertain when he might eat again, insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory, if only in the blood, of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill. Presumably the death rate in men so often risking their lives in the hunt, was higher than in women, some men had to take several women, and every man was expected to help women to frequent pregnancy. Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were once a virtue, i.e. A quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

History does not tell us just when men passed from hunting to agriculture, perhaps in the Neolithic Age, and through the discovery that grain could be sown to add to the spontaneous growth of wild wheat. We may reasonably assume that the new regime demanded new virtues, and changed some old virtues into vices. Industriousness became more vital than bravery, regularity and thrift more profitable than violence, peace more victorious than war. Children were economic assets, birth control was made immoral. On the farm the family was the unit of production under the discipline of the father and the seasons, and paternal authority had a firm economic base. Each normal son matured soon in mind and self-support, at fifteen he understood the physical tasks of life as well as he would understand them at forty, all that he needed was land, a plow, and a willing arm. So he married early, almost as soon as nature wished, he did not fret long under the restraints placed upon premarital relations by the new order of permanent settlements and homes. As for young women, chastity was indispensable, for its loss might bring unprotected motherhood. Monogamy was demanded by the approximate numerical equality of the sexes. For fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorceless monogamy, and the multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and it’s white colonies. It was a stern code, which produced some of the strongest characters in history.

Gradually then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house no men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex, economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later, children no longer were economic assets, marriage was delayed, premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were “emancipated” i.e, industrialized, and contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village, he could hid his sins in the protective anonymity of the city crowd. The progress of science raised the authority of the test tube over that of the crosier, the mechanization of economic production suggests mechanistic materialistic philosophies, education spread religious doubts, morality lost more and more of its supernatural supports. The old agricultural moral code began to die.

Perhaps discipline will be restored in our civilization through the military training required by the challenges of war. The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole, individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases. Sexual license may cure itself through its own excess, our unmoored children may live to see order and modesty become fashionable, clothing will be more stimulating then nudity. Meanwhile much of our moral freedom is good, it is pleasant to be relieved of theological terrors, to enjoy without qualm the pleasures that harm neither others nor ourselves, and to feel the tang of the open air upon our liberated flesh.

7) Religion & History

Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid. It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God. It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich.. For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alternative to despair. Destroy that hope and class was intensified. Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well, when one goes down the other goes up, when religion declines Communism grows.

Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently (for we are merely guessing, or echoing Petronius, who echoed Lucretius) “it was fear that first made the gods” fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, wins, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state. It told the people that the local code of morals and laws had been dictated by the gods.  

Some recusants have doubted that religion ever promoted morality, since immorality has flourished even in ages of religious domination. Certainly sensuality, drunkenness, coarseness, greed, dishonesty, robbery, and violence existed in the Middle Ages, but probably the moral disorder born of half a millennium of barbarian invasion, war, economic devastation, and political disorganization would have been much worse without the moderating effect of the Christian ethic, priestly exhortations, saintly examples, and a calming, unifying ritual. The Roman Catholic Church laboured to reduce slavery, family feuds, and national strife, to extend the intervals of truce and peace, and to replace trial by combat or ordeal with the judgments of established courts. It softened the penalties exacted by Roman or barbarian law, and vastly expanded the scope and organization of charity.

Though the Church served the state, it claimed to stand above all states, as morality should stand above power. It taught en that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty can be a tool of greed and crime. Over all the competing governments of Christendom it promulgated one moral law. Claiming divine origin and spiritual hegemony, the Church offered itself as an international court to which all rulers were to be morally responsible. The Emperor Henry IV recognized this claim by submitting to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa and century later Innocent III raised the authority and prestige of the papacy to a height where it seemed that Gregory’s ideal of a moral superstate had come to fulfillment.

The majestic dream broke under the attacks of nationalism, skepticism and human frailty. The Church was manned with men, who often proved biased, venal or extortionate. France grew in welath and power, and made the papacy her political tool. Kings became strong enough to compel a pope to dissolve the Jesut order which had so devotedly supported the popes. The Church stooped to fraud, as with pious legends, bogus relics, and dubious miracles.

8) Economics & History

History according to Karl Marx is economics in action the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious insitutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities. So the Industrial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals, the liberation of literature from dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the replacement of romanticism by realism in fiction and the economic interpretation of history. The outstanding personalities in these movements were effects, not causes. Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles, economic ambition and the face of Helen "fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars" launched a thousand ships in Ilium, those subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of a phrase.

At the other end of the scale history reports that "the men who can manage money manage all" So the bankers watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid. From the Medici of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg to the Rothschilds of Paris and London and the Morgans of New York, bankers have sat in the councils of governments, financing wars and popes, and occasionally sparking a revolution. Perhaps is is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or paceable partial redistribution. In the view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

9) Socialism & History

The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historic ryhthm in the concentration and dispersion of wealth. The capitalist, of couse, has fulfilled a creative function in history, he has gathered the savings of the people into productive captial by the promise of dividends or interest, he has financed the mechnization of industry and agriculture, and the reationalization of distribution and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before. He has put the liberal gospel of liberty to his use by arguing that business men left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater aubndance of food, homes, comfort and leisure that has ever come from industries managed by politicians, manned by governmental employees, and supposedly immune to the laws of supply and demand. In free enterprise the spur of competition and the zeal and the zest of owernship arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men, nearly every economic ability sooner or later finds its niche and reward in the shuffle of talents and the natural selection of skills, and a basic democracy rules the process insofar as most of the articles to be produced and the services to be rendered are determined by public demand rather than by governmental decree. Meanwhile compeition compels the capitalist to exhaustive labor, and his products to ever rising excellence.

In Egypt under the Ptolemies the state owned the soil and managed agriculture: the peasent was told what land to till, what crops to grow, his harvest was measured and registered by government scribes, was threshed on royal threshing floors, and was conveyed by a living chain of fellaheen into the granaries of the king. The government owned the mines and appropriated the ore. It nationalized the production and sale of oil, salt, papyrus, and textiles. All commerce was controlled and regulated by the state, most retail trade was in the hands of state agents selling state produced goods. Banking was a government monopoly, but its operation might be delegated to private firms. Taxes were laid upon every person, industry, process, product, sale, and legal document. To keep track of taxable transactions and income, the government maintained a swarm of scribes and a complex system of personal and property registration. The revenue of this system made the Ptolemaic the richest state of the time. Great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, and a large proportion of the profits went to developer and adorn the country to finance its cultural life.

China has had several attempts at state socialism. Szuma Ch'ien informs us that to prevent private individuals from "reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting th lower classes into subjection to themselves." The Emporeror Wu Ti nationalized the resources of the soil, extended governmental direction over transport and trade, laid a tax upon incomes, and established public works, including canals that ound the rivers together and irrigated the fields. The state accumulated stockpiles of goods, sole these when prices were rising, bought more when prices were falling thus says Szuma Ch'ien, "the rich merchants and large shopkeepers would be prevented from making big profits, and prices would be regulated in the Empire." For a time we are told China prospered as never before. A combination of "acts of God" with human deviltry put an end to the experiement after the death of the Emperor. Floods alternated with droughts, created tragic shortages, and raised prices beyond control. Businessmen protested that taxes were making them support the lazy and the incompetent. Harrassed by the high cost of living, the poor joined the rich in clamoring for a return to the old ways, and some proposed that the inventor of the new system to be boiled alive. The reforms were one by one rescinded and were almost forgotten when they were revived by a Chinese philosopher king.

Wang Mang was an accomplished scholar a patro of literature, a millionaire who scattered his riches among his friends and the poor. Having seized the throne, he surrounded himself with men trained in letters, science and philosophy. He nationalized the land, divided it into equal tracts among the peasents, and put an end to slavery. Like Wu Ti, he tried to control prices by the accumulation or release of stockpiles. He made loans at low interest to private enterprise. The groups whose profits had been clipped by his legislation unite to plot his fall, they were helped by drought and flood and foreign invasion. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, slew Wang Mang and repealed his legislation. Everything was as before.

A thousand years later Wang An-shih as premier undertook a pervasive governmental domination of the Chinese economy, "The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich" he said. He rescued the peasents from the money lenders by loans at low interest. He encouraged new settlers by advancing them seed and other aid, to be repaid out of hte later yield of their land. He organized great engineering works to control floods and check unemployment. Boards were appointed in every district to regulate wages and prices. Commerce was nationalized. Pensions were provided for the aged, the unemployed and the poor. Education and the examination system (by which admission to governmental office was determined) were reformed. "Pupils three away their textbooks of rhetoric and began to study primers of history, geography and political economy" says a Chinese Historian.

What undermined the experiement? First high taxes, laid upon all to finance a swelling band of governmental employees. Second, conscription of a male in every family to man the armies made necessary by barbarian invasions. Third corruption in the bureaucracy, China like other nations, was faced with a choice between private plunder and public graft. Conservatives led by Wang An-shih's brother argued that human corruptability and incompetence make governmental control of industry impractable, and that the best economy is a liaissez-faire system that relies on the natural impulses of men. The rich, stung by the high taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly of commerce by the government, poured out their resources in a campaign to discredit the new system, to obstruct its enforcement, and bring it to an end. This movement, well organized exerted constant pressure upon the Emperor. When another period of drought and flood was capped by the appearance of a terrifying comet, the Son of Heaven dismissed Wang An-shih, revoked his decrees and called the opposition to power.

10) Government & History 11) History & War 12) Growth & Decay 13) Is Progress Real?

[shirlleycoyle]

The Cosmologist Working to Preserve the Night Sky for the Future

As 2020 draws to a close, Dr. Aparna Venkatesan is struck by how her personal experience of grief—set against a year of collective mourning—has changed something fundamental in her life: the way she looks at the Moon.

Venkatesan, a cosmologist at the University of San Francisco, lost her father in March; a man she described as “my lifelong best friend” and “one of my greatest allies” in a call.

“I think all girls should have a dad like that,” she said.

With international borders locked down in response to the pandemic, Venkatesan was not able to mourn her father alongside his community in India, where she grew up bouncing from city to city as the only child of enterprising parents. But though the wound is deep, she has found solace in the lunar cycle, which she calls her “grief calendar.”

“My father passed at New Moon,” she said. “As somebody who is a pretty rational scientist, the Moon cycles have become enormously important this year for me. Every time there's a New Moon, it’s like: ‘I'm eight lunar cycles past when I lost this beloved friend; I'm nine lunar cycles past.’ It's become huge.”

“The Hindu death rites happen monthly in the first year after they pass away—it's a lunar calendar,” she added. “In a way, that's brought me back to my culture.”

For Venkatesan, the human relationship to the Moon—and to the night sky as a whole—is enriched by the cross-cultural diversity of perspectives on the meaning and value of the expanse beyond Earth. Though she is an expert in the otherworldly phenomena of the early universe, an era that is distant in time and space, Venkatesan also wants to protect our collective bond with the skies close to home.

To the dismay of many astronomers and skywatchers worldwide, the deployment of satellites in mega-constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, creates bright scars across the night sky due to the sunlit glare of the spacecraft. In addition to this light pollution in orbit, the Moon is getting more visitors: NASA hopes to land humans there this decade as part of its Artemis program; China has placed three missions on the lunar surface since 2013, and India and Israel recently attempted Moon landings that ended in crashes.

“By 2025, near-Earth space, the night skies, and the Moon will be permanently altered in my opinion,” Venkatesan said.

This is profoundly troubling to her not only from a scientific point of view, but because she is an ardent defender of marginalized communities, especially Indigenous peoples, whose astronomical traditions are at risk from busier skies. In an article published in Nature Astronomy last month, Venkatesan and her colleagues propose that we need “a radical shift” towards “the view of space as an ancestral global commons that contains the heritage and future of humanity’s scientific and cultural practices.”

For Venkatesan, the idea of space as an ancestral realm has a special relevance this year, as she looks at the New Moon in a new way. But it is also a natural progression of her fascination with, and respect for, the codes and secrets of the universe, which was sparked in childhood.

“I always loved math, as the universal language,” she said. “I also really loved the night skies, despite growing up in extremely congested, polluted, major cities in the tropics.”

As a teenager, Venkatesan applied to Cornell University to pursue her budding love of space, and remembers the suspense as she waited for the response (her acceptance letter was eventually delivered by telegram). The adjustment to life in small-town New York had some initial rough patches—Venkatesan missed her parents, and wished she’d listened more to her mother’s cooking tips—but she cherished the overall experience and her family’s pride when she became the first woman to receive an undergraduate degree in astronomy at the university.

“When my father came to my graduation at Cornell, he cried,” Venkatesan recalled. “He was like: ‘Look, I could spend years in these libraries.’ He loved Cornell's libraries. I had very encouraging parents and I really commend them, given what a conservative society we are.”

Under the guidance of her advisor Steve Squyres, a prolific planetary scientist, Venkatesan spent much of that first degree combing through observations of Venus taken by NASA’s Magellan orbiter, which studied the planet from 1989 to 1994. The work was thrilling, as sometimes she would be the first human ever to behold a part of Venus as new data flowed in on her overnight shifts.

When she arrived at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, she shifted gears to focus on big cosmological questions: When were the first stars born? What is dark matter? What is the precise source of all the elements?

“I was eager to work in cosmology because I had gone to Cornell to do that, but ended up, you know, working on literally the nearest planet,” Venkatesan said. “It was time to go back to the other end of the universe.”

With the help of dedicated mentors like astronomer Jim Truran, who she said taught her an “integrative approach” to cosmology, she learned to appreciate the whole spectrum of evidence about our cosmic origins, from the light of long-dead stars to the elements that make up our bodies.

“There are some lovely puzzles in lithium, calcium, carbon, and titanium that we don't understand, when we look at the element abundances in the oldest stars in our galaxy, or even just in galaxies,” Venkatesan said.

“Look, I'm never going to get tired of looking at ancient light,” she continued. “It is a visceral thrill to say: ‘Oh, my God, when light left this galaxy, cyanobacteria hadn't even begun on Earth or the oceans, or maybe the Earth wasn't even around.’ I'm never gonna get tired of that. But the elements are here, in a very real way. We are the evidence.”

After earning her PhD in Chicago, Venkatesan served as a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for a few years, before becoming the first female professor of physics at the University of San Francisco. Since 2012, she has also participated in the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) collaboration, which involved accompanying students to study at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.

Venkatesan under Arecibo’s dish. Image: Aparna Venkatesan

Like so many people who loved Arecibo, Venkatesan was heartbroken when it collapsed earlier this month after multiple cable malfunctions. She has countless fond memories of the iconic observatory: celebrating the 21st birthday of a student during an observation shift, listening to nocturnal frog calls in the dense misty foliage under the dish, or watching the Southern Cross constellation illuminate the Caribbean skies in the crepuscular hours before dawn.

“The science of working there is just unparalleled and I loved the people of Puerto Rico, both the observatory staff and the people beyond the observatory,” Venkatesan said. “I also really loved the scientists who live there year round. I mean, these people were on-the-ground geniuses: they could listen to the hum of the telescope and tell you which panel or receiver was off.”

“All observatories have this magical mystical side to them—you can't help but feel it, being out under this glowing sky, taking data—but Arecibo had it more than most,” she added.

For Venkatesan, Arecibo is one of many beloved elders that we lost this year. As a busy mother of two teenagers, she is juggling new school and work challenges like so many during the pandemic, but she has managed to find moments to work through the grief by remembering loved ones lost, and cherishing those who remain.

During our call, she talks about many of her mentors and inspirations over the years, heaping praise and gratitude on these bright stars in a dark night. The list includes her parents, her professors, the Moon, Arecibo, and the redwood forests of California.

But an elder that sticks out in particular, at the nadir of 2020, is blues musician Blind Willie Johnson, who suffered racism, poverty, and illness until his death in 1945. Venkatesan has an eclectic musical taste and a passion for singing across genres, but she is particularly keen on Johnson, whose haunting voice reverberates with the transcendent sorrow that shaped his life.

As she often tells her students, Johnson’s song “Dark Was the Night” is on the Voyager Golden Record, a repository of sounds and images from Earth carried by NASA’s twin Voyager probes, which have passed into interstellar space. On this Monday, the winter solstice and the darkest day of a harrowing year, the song has special resonance.

“The blues is so beautiful,” Venkatesan said, “it's actually left the solar system.”

The Cosmologist Working to Preserve the Night Sky for the Future syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ccc-sarahjaneseddon]

Week 1

Important notes

Modern Science does not just provide us with technological fixes, though. Its ideas and assumptions are embedded in very fundamental way in ways we can make sense of the world around us. 

It’s a set of ways we interact with the world - to understand and to change it. It is this humanity at the heart of science that makes understanding its history and its culture so important. Despite the fact that science matters so much for our culture, we often treat it as if it were somehow beyond culture.

Culture gets in the way sometimes, but in the end science always wins. If science exists outside culture like this, then it should not really matter where it happened. 

A century ago, most scientists would have agreed that science progressed by accumulating observations. According to this hypothetico-deductive account, science proceeded by formulating hypotheses based on observation and testing those hypotheses through further experiments.

Science is certainly not unified and continuous body of beliefs. Neither is it captured by a single scientific method. If we want to understand what science is - the different ways knowledge has been produced both now and in the past, and how different peoples and cultures have come to hold the beliefs they have about the natural world. We simply have no choice but to look at history.

This point I have mentioned talks about an example of how knowledge is from t he past, this could be relating to our ancestors and the history of our Tupuna. Knowledge is past through generations and we look back at our past knowledge and continue to use it in todays society. We use our ancestors knowledge.

Clearly, by the light our current knowledge, most of what people in the past thought they knew was false.

Many of its practitioners and their audiences, at least, making knowledge about nature has always been concerned with trying to make visible the otherwise hidden relationships between objects and processes in the natural world. Paying attention to the visuality of science is also a good way of reminding ourselves about its material culture.

Islamic and Christian scientific traditions and practices during this period were deeply intertwined and cannot be understood in isolation. These are followed by chapters on the scientific revolution and science in Enlightenment.  

Enlightenment

At the beginning of the class we talked about the definition of Marama = Refers to light of the moon which means what is illuminated is particularly veiled. Differs from Western concept of “Enlightenment” which privileges what can be seen or observed in relation to knowledge.

Chapters will deal with the rise of experimental culture, the develpment of new ways of encountering nature in the field, and the emergence of new ways of thinking about origins of life. Subsequent chapters will discuss the rise of cosmology and the development of more powerful and systematic ways of mapping the universe, and development of a distint culture of highly technical theoretical speculation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Cosmology was mentions in Tatai Arorangi. Our ancestors used cosmology as a form of knowledge to use the stars as navigation but the origins of the big bang and how it started. Our ancestors shared their knowledge. Western and Māori culture have similar views on the origins of the how we started tracing back to the stars.

Knowledge can circulate between different cultures.

Astrological concepts.

He suggests how sciences such as cosmology developed to serve specific political interests and points to the imperial court as an important location for the circulation of knowledge.

They show how, for example, Islamic court society sought out, adapted, and built upon Greek knowledge and how this new knowledge circulated from both east and west. Dagmar Schaefer’s discussion on science in the pre-modern East also emphasises the extent to which scientific knowledge served the interest of Chinese political elites, and charts the avenues through which knowledge was circulated

Knowledge can be cultural knowledge. This knowledge can be listened to by other cultures and become a knowledge system from culture to culture. For example mentioned above I found it interesting how it was built upon Greek knowledge that was then new knowledge that circulated from both east and west. This shows how knowledge is passed on through cultures and places around the world. 

New media in offering new ways for knowledge to circulate. Henry hi-lights the importance of voyages of Discovery (themselves facilitated by the invention of magnetic compass) In generating new knowledge about the natural world as well as re-discovering of alternatives to Aristotelian philosophy. 

In Aotearoa we had voyages of discovery on the journey our ancestors and tupuna made to get here. Navigational knowledge on voyages was important to know the direction they were heading in to discover Aotearoa. Instead of a magnetic compass our ancestors used the stars to discover and trace where they were going = Astronomical knowledge. 

Reliable knowledge

Scientific experiments were preformed in public and a growing print culture facilitated the circulation of new ideas and discoveries.

During the course of two centuries laborites were transformed from small-scale operation to massive and resource-intensive institutions. The experimental culture of the laboratory, and the authority that came with experiment, came increasingly to rely on the resources of a highly industrialised economy. 

Find ways of turning the untamed spaces where they worked into sites where knowledge could be produced. Peter Bowler’s survey of different attempts over the past two centuries to explain the origins of life charts the ways in some scientists now sought to colonise new intellectual territories and compete with orthodox religion for authority. 

Colonise

I decided to highlight keywords such as colonise, authority and astronomy because we have discussed them in our class discussions. Colonise in this instance is to colonise intellectual fields and to explore. Colonise in a different aspect could be in Aotearoa how the British explored New Zealand and colonised the country.

Further into depth of the universe, discovering and classifying new kinds of celestial objects. During this process the scale of the known universe expanded dramatically and fuelled theoretical speculations about the origins of the cosmos. 

Different views and cultural views on how it started but similar origins of cosmology. This was mentioned in Tatai Aroangi episode. We expand our knowledge and understanding as we learn more and more scientific information on cosmology.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the discipline of theoretical physics, distinct from experiment had emerged.  

As all the captures have emphasised, communication, and circulating knowledge have always been central to what knowledge makers do.

Science is produced by people, and since people are very much the products of culture, so is science they produce.

Astrology. This is a history that emphases the ways in which the search for understanding of the natural world was intertwined with other aspects of human culture.

Francis bacon was quite right when he noted that knowledge is power.

The history of science shows us that the rest of the world was still there, nevertheless, and that science could not take place without its resources, both cultural and material.

This history of science tries to show that science is (and always has been) made by everyone, and therefore belongs to everyone.

Morus, Iwan Rhys (Wales), ed."Introduction". The Oxford illustrated history of science. Oxford University Press, 2017, 1-6.

[ithisatanytime]

If biology isnt your passion, don’t talk shit about darwin or evolution, you dont know what you are talking about. I spend little time criticizing literature, or making assertions about astronomy, or mathematics, because these are not my passion, and i assume for those of you who are passionate about these things, you know more than i do. if something seems wrong to me i will defer to your expertise, but people on the left and the right feel totally comfortable shitting on natural selection without realizing the staggering amount of evidence for it. everyone is entitled to their own thoughts, but they share these views openly, attempt to sway other people on a subject they know little about. Darwin was an actual genius and his theory is beautiful, simple, and correct! ‘

 Now people on the left used darwins theory to attempt to destroy the church in the west, constantly harping on “WE CAME FROM MONKEYS NOT GOD” which is fucking absurd, if you understand evolution you wouldnt sum it up in such a revisionist and frankly, silly way. and if you understood genesis you would realize evolution hardly matters! the idea that genesis in particular was meant to be interpreted strictly literally is new! Christians all the way back to the historian Origen knew better than to take this book and treat it like a straightforward historical document, it is filled with symbolism, that doesn’t make it untrue. let me put it another way. imagine i was a biologist and i wrote a paper titled “SNAKES CANT FUCKING TALK” in which i proved snakes couldn’t fucking talk, because they cant, would that disprove genesis? only if you interpret it strictly literally, this biblical autism (fundamentalism) sprung up as a direct response to bad actors using darwins theory to destroy the church in the west. its new idea and a very bad idea.

 The left is just as bad about darwinism, in fact i would say they are worse. the social sciences (need i say more about this?) has maintained a staunchly antiscience view since a certain tribe flooded in. almost never do they attribute behaviors to instincts developed through natural selection, everything is culture, and humans stopped evolving twenty thousand years ago! the only thing that matters to the left is “we came from monkeys” after that the theory of evolution collects dust. there can exist  no group differences in behaviors despite the glaring physical differences and all average differences in outcomes for individuals belonging to differing groups is a result of racism. end of discussion. Its so stupid that its insulting to someone with even a working knowledge of evolution. 

  Darwin was not an activist, he was a scientist, he was more or less private about his own beliefs regarding faith, I am not trying to imply he was a christian, as far as i know he was not, but these things were peripheral to his passion, which was biology and the scientific method. his theory, more than possibly any other theory acts as a key to understanding a staggering number of mysteries. its a shame to see his theories misapplied and then discarded, and to see people muse about them without taking the time to really understand just what they imply.

[tamboradventure]

The 13 Best Things to See and Do in Taipei

Posted: 5/30/2020 | May 30th, 2020

Taipei, the capital of Taiwan and its most populous city, is the epicenter of tourism for the country (though most people just come for a short layover as it’s a major air hub for Asia).

And while there is plenty to do elsewhere in Taiwan, even if you don’t leave Taipei, you can still find lots of things to see and do in the area to fill close to a week!

I love Taipei. I lived here in 2010 while I taught English and built this website. It was a wonderful experience that helped me grow as a person. A decade later, I finally made it back to the city I loved so much and it was remarkable to see that so much of what I loved was still there: the endless gigantic food markets serving some of the best food in the world, a wild nightlife, spacious parks, interesting and quirky museums, and nearby mountains that call to you with easy and accessible hikes.

Taipei (like Taiwan as a whole) is a hugely underrated destination and I can’t urge you enough to visit. It combines culture, nature, wonderful people, and affordability. I don’t understand why more people don’t visit but make their loss, your gain!

To help you plan your trip, here are my top 13 things to do while in Taipei:  

1. Take a Free Walking Tour

One of the first things I do when I arrive in a new destination is to take a free walking tour. They show you the lay of the land and help you see a place’s highlights while learning a little about its history and culture. Plus, you get access to a local who can answer any and all of your questions.

Like It Formosa offers free daily walking tours around Taipei. Their tours focus more on cultural history than their competitor, Tour Me Away, which also offers free walking tours geared towards the backpacker crowd (Tour Me Away also runs pub crawls).  

2. Visit the National Palace Museum

The National Palace Museum has over 70,000 artifacts from Imperial China, most of which were brought to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War (1929–1947). In addition to the permanent exhibits, there are also rotating exhibits throughout the year as well as a section for children. There are free daily tours in English too. If you can’t get on the tour, get the audio guide. While the descriptions on the artifacts are pretty detailed, the audio tour goes into even more depth and gives you deeper insight into what you are seeing and the time period it is from.

221, Sec 2, Zhi Shan Road, +886 2 2881 2021, npm.gov.tw. Open Sunday–Thursday 8:30am–6:30pm and Friday–Saturday 8:30am–9pm. Admission is 350 NT$ ($11.65 USD) (470 NT$ ($15.65 USD) with an audio guide).  

3. Soak in the Hot Springs

The Beitou Hot Springs area is a popular destination since it’s on the MRT (metro system) and only 30 minutes from downtown. There are lots of resorts, spas, and inns in the area where you can enjoy a dip in a hot spring. Be sure to also visit the Hot Springs Museum (housed in an old bathhouse from 1913), the Xinbeitou Historic Station (a heritage train station from 1916), and Thermal Valley (a sulfurous lake nearby that has walking trails).

Admission to most hot springs starts around 40 NT$ ($1.33 USD) per person, making it a very affordable getaway for anyone looking for some R&R.

Hot Springs Museum: No. 2, Zhongshan Road, +886 2 2893 9981, hotspringmuseum.taipei. Open daily from 9am-5pm. Admission is free.

Xinbeitou Historic Station: 1 Qixing St., +886 2 2891 5558, xbths.taipei. Open Tuesday-Thursday from 10am-6pm and Friday-Sunday from 10am-8:30pm (closed Mondays). Admission is free.  

4. Take a Cooking Class

Taiwan is a foodie’s dream! You got noodle soups, incredible rice dishes, amazing buns, dumplings, scallion pancakes, and so much more. The food in the country is world-class. While cooking classes here are a little pricey, they do take you through the local markets and teach you about local ingredients and how to make some traditional dishes. I always found Taiwanese food intimidating so it was nice to have someone help me understand the local food. It made me more adventurous in the night markets.

Some cooking classes worth checking out are:

Ivy’s Kitchen

CookInn Taiwan

Make My Day Cooking Lab

Expect to pay around 2,000 NT$ ($67 USD) for a class.  

5. Visit the Museums

Taipei has a lot of museums. Given its size, I was surprised by how many actually they had, especially since the city isn’t known as being a center for museums. Here are some of my favorites:

National Taiwan Museum – This is the oldest museum in Taiwan and covers its history from a variety of different scientific perspectives, such as anthropology, earth sciences, zoology, and botany. It’s really basic and best if you go with kids. Admission is 30 NT$ ($1 USD).

Miniatures Museum of Taipei – Opened in 1997, this museum is home to over 200 architectural miniatures, including castles, replica towns and streets, and even a 1/12 scale model of Buckingham Palace. It’s a weird museum but pretty cool. Admission is 180 NT$ ($6 USD).

Museum of Contemporary Arts – I’m not a fan of contemporary art myself, but if you are, then don’t miss this museum. It has a rotating collection of exhibits, so there is always something new on display. Admission is 50 NT$ ($1.66 USD).

Taipei Astronomical Museum – A fun and educational museum with exhibitions on ancient astronomy, technology, telescopes, the solar system, and much more. Admission is 60 NT$ ($2 USD).

Taipei Fine Art Museum – Opened in 1983, this was the first art museum in Taiwan. It’s home to a wide variety of works from both international and Taiwanese artists and hosts rotating exhibitions too. Admission is 30 NT$ ($1 USD).

National 228 Memorial Museum – This museum is dedicated to the tragic events that began on February 28, 1947, when an uprising against the Chinese government started following World War II. Admission is 20 NT$ ($0.67 USD).

  6. Go Hiking

Taipei has plenty of hiking trails just outside town that are easily accessible. There are easy, moderate, and challenging trails, as well as both short and full-day hikes. Here are a few worth checking out:

Xiangshan Trail – An easy 45-minute hike that offers nice views of Taipei. It’s just a 10-minute walk from the Xiangshan MRT station.

Bitoujiao Trail – Located one hour from town by car, this moderate hike takes you along the coast. The trail is in the Ruifeng District 11km east of Jiufen. The hike takes 2-3 hours.

Jinmianshan Trail – An easy 1.5-hour hike in Yangmingshan National Park. The trail starts a 10-minute walk from the Xihu MRT station.

Huang Didian Trail – A challenging ridge hike that takes around five hours. From Muzha Station, board the bus to Huafan University and get off at Huangdi Temple. From there, the trail is 25 minutes away on foot.

Pingxi Crag Trail – A moderate 2-3-hour hike with lots of steep sections. For experienced hikers only. The trail begins just five minutes away from Pingxi station.

  7. Take a Day Trip to Jiufen

Jiufen is one of Taiwan’s most popular tourist destinations. First, because it’s incorrectly believed to be the origin of the film Spirited Away, so people come for that. Second, it’s famous for being a historic gold-mining town with it’s preserved old streets. And, third, it’s famous for its traditional teahouses.

Jiufen is tiny. You can walk around in about 30 minutes. The center of the city and its historic streets and buildings are all preserved as they looked 100 years ago so walking around here is a cool experience. Be sure to come early (like first thing in the morning) to beat the crowds because, by midday, the streets are wall-to-wall people. If you stay the night, you’ll also get the city to yourself once the crowds leave around 4pm.

As a tea lover, this is one of my favorite places in Taiwan because it’s home to some beautiful teahouses in the most stunning settings. It also overlooks a bay in the distance, and there are lots of lookouts.

Some teahouses not to miss are:

Siidcha Tea House

Skyline Tea House

Amei Tea House

Taro of Sweet

Jiufen Tea House

Additionally, there are a few museums highlighting the town’s gold mining past, lots of parks and lookouts, and some nearby hiking trails. (If you want to hike, spend the night as you’ll need the extra time.) Like It Formosa does a free walking tour here too (for this one, you need to sign up in advance because they only do it when people register).

The trip will take around 1-1.5 hours by train and bus. Take the train from Songshan Station (in Taipei) to Ruifang Station. From there you can take a bus straight to Jiufen. Expect to spend around 100 NT$ ($3.33 USD) for your round-trip ticket. There are also tourist buses with organized day trips; these usually cost around 475 NT$ ($16 USD).  

8. See the Temples

Taipei brilliantly mixes the old and the new. Almost 90% of Taiwan identifies as either Buddhist or Taoist, and that is reflected in Taipei’s temples. Here are some of the most popular and ornate temples:

Longshan Temple – Built in 1738, this temple was built to honor the goddess of mercy, Guanyin. There are also statues worshipping 100 other Chinese folk deities here as well. The temple has been damaged or destroyed numerous times by earthquakes or military conflicts, but it is always rebuilt by the locals who still visit and worship at it. No. 211, Guangzhou Street, Wanhua District.

Bao-an Temple – Dalongdong Baoan Temple (Bao-an for short) is a Taiwanese folk religion temple and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It dates to the mid-18th century and is home to two dragon columns that are over two centuries old. It looks particularly amazing lit up at night. No. 61, Hami Street, Datong District.

Confucius Temple – Located near the Bao-an temple, this simple temple is dedicated to the famous philosopher Confucius, whose teachings are part of the cultural backbone of both Taiwan and mainland China. It’s modeled after the original Confucius Temple in Qufu, the hometown of Confucius in mainland China. No. 275, Dalong Street, Datong District.

  9. Enjoy the View from Taipei 101

For the best views in Taipei, visit Taipei 101. Opened in 2004, this was the tallest building in the world until 2010 (when the Burj Khalifa took its place). Standing 508m (1,667 feet) tall, it towers over Taipei.

Even though I hate heights, you can’t visit Taipei without seeing it from the top of this building. There is an observation platform on the 89th floor that is absolutely breathtaking. You can also go up to the 91st floor and step outside if you want to really get your blood pumping (don’t worry, there are bars so you can’t fall).

Additionally, go to Morton’s Steakhouse for happy hour. Not only do they have super cheap drink specials but their patio provides some extraordinary views of Taipei 101 itself.

No. 7, Section 5, Xinyi Road, taipei-101.com.tw/en/observatory. Open daily 11am–9pm. Admission is 600 NT$ ($20 USD).  

10. See the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall

Officially known as Liberty Square, this national monument was built in 1976 in honor of Chiang Kai-shek, former president of the Republic of China. He ruled mainland China from 1928 to 1949, and then in Taiwan from 1949 until his death in 1975.

In addition to his monument, which is over 75m (250 feet) tall, there is also a massive open square where rallies and protests have been held over the years (hence its renaming as Liberty Square). The memorial also houses a library and a museum that documents Chiang Kai-shek’s life and career. It also has exhibits on Taiwan’s history and how the country evolved throughout the years.

No. 21, Zhongshan South Road, Zhongzheng District, +886-2-2343-1100, cksmh.gov.tw. Open daily from 9am-6pm. Admission is free.  

11. Ride the Maokong Gondola

Take a ride on the Maokong Gondola, which was built in 2007, and get some great views of the city and surrounding forests. The route stretches over 4km (2.5 miles) and includes several stations between the Taipei Zoo and Maokong.

Spend some time exploring Maokong as it was once the prime tea-growing area of Taiwan. There are lots of winding footpaths you can wander, teahouses and cafes (the area still produces a lot of tea), and stunning views of Taipei (especially at night when the city is all lit up). It’s a popular spot on the weekend so visit during the week to avoid the crowds.

Stations at Taipei Zoo (2), Zhinan Temple, and Maokong. Open Monday–Friday 9am–9pm (10pm on Fridays), Saturdays 8:30am–10pm, and Sundays 8:30am–9pm. Tickets start at 70 NT$ ($2.33 USD).  

12. Explore the Night Markets

Taipei is home to dozens of night markets — and most of them have tons of delicious food stalls. Here are a few worth checking out:

Shulin Night Market – This is the biggest night market in Taiwan. Opened in 2017, it is home to over 400 vendors and covers a massive 12 acres. It’s full of delicious (and cheap) street food, as well as clothing, electronics, and all sorts of souvenirs and other goods.

Raohe Night Market – The second most popular night market. Be sure to try the black pepper buns while you’re here. There’s also a Michelin-recognized food stall that you shouldn’t miss called Chen Dong Ribs Stewed in Medicinal Herbs.

Tonghua Night Market – This night market is popular with locals, as it has a ton of delicious places to eat. It’s essentially a food market more than anything else. Be sure to try the stinky tofu!

Snake Alley – Located in the former red-light district, it gets its name from the fact that many tourists used to come here to eat snake meat. While I wouldn���t recommend that, there’s a tasty Michelin-recognized stall that’s worth sampling called Hsiao Wang Steamed Minced Pork with Pickles in Broth.

Ningxia Night Market – This is one of the smaller night markets, so it’s easy to explore (though it does get crowded). There are lots of delicious oyster stalls here.

  13. See the National Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall

Sun Yat-sen was a politician, physician, and philosopher, as well as the first president of Taiwan. This memorial was built in 1972 to honor Doctor Sun Yat-sen. He’s considered “the Father of the Nation,” and the memorial hall is home to items from his personal and professional life. He’s one of the few figures beloved in both mainland China and Taiwan, as he was instrumental in the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty.

In addition to the hall’s museumesque displays of Sun’s possessions, it also serves as a meeting place, educational center, and cultural center.

No. 505, Section 4, Ren’ai Road, (02) 27588008 #546, yatsen.gov.tw. Open daily 9am–6pm. Admission is free.

***

From the food to museums to natural beauty, Taipei is a world-class city that I don’t think people appreciate enough. It needs to be on people’s radar more. I loved my time living there and coming back to visit just reminded me how marvelous (and affordable) the city is!

Make visiting Taipei a priority. With so much to see and do, you’re guaranteed to have an outstanding visit.

Book Your Trip to Taipei: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner or Momondo. They are my two favorite search engines because they search websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld. If you want to stay elsewhere, use Booking.com as they consistently return the cheapest rates for guesthouses and cheap hotels. My favorite places to stay in Taipei are:

Star Hostel

Homey Hostel

Flip Flop Hostel

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. I’ve been using World Nomads for ten years. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

World Nomads (for everyone below 70)

Insure My Trip (for those over 70)

Looking for the best companies to save money with? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel! I list all the ones I use to save money when I travel – and I think will help you too!

Looking for more information on visiting Taiwan? For more tips about visiting Taiwan, check out my introduction to Taiwan for more tips on what to see, do, costs, ways to save, and much, much more!

Photo credit: 1 – Heikki Holstila, 2, 3 – Caitriana Nicholson, 4 – familyfriends754, 6 – Guillaume Paumier, 14 – Ilee_wu

The post The 13 Best Things to See and Do in Taipei appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

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[firstladyoftherenaissance]

Why the “Dark Ages” Weren’t So Dark After All

    The “Dark Ages” is a term commonly used to refer to the time interval between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance. It’s plastered everywhere – from children’s books to that subpar fantasy show you watch because, honestly, at this point you’ll take what you can get. I’m not a huge fan, mostly because it’s very deceiving. As you’ll soon see (or at least I hope), the “Dark” ages are actually a time full of innovation and art. 

   The use of light and dark was already common during the Middle Ages. The “light” was Christ, while the “dark” was heathens and the time before Christ and his teachings. Light was good, and dark was evil. Petrarch, an Italian poet that lived during the 1300s, popularized the idea of “Dark” Ages, but he certainly didn’t invent it. The idea was common long before he wrote it down. He did, however, like many of his contemporaries, believe that classical antiquity (the Romans and the Greeks), were the epitome of greatness. Hence, the 900 or so years between the fall of the Roman Empire (at least, the western part) and the rise of the classical rebirth known as the Renaissance, were littered with ignorance. I think it’s important to note that, although Petrarch is often called a “Renaissance” poet, he considered himself to be a part of these “Dark Ages”. What many of us consider as true “Renaissance” did not happen until at least 150 years later. To give you some context, Petrarch died in 1374, Lorenzo de Medici in 1492, Botticelli in 1510, and Michelangelo in 1564. The apex of the Renaissance was long after Petrarch’s lifetime.

left: Portrait of Petrarch by Altichiero / right: Monty Python’s hilarious yet misleading interpretation of the Middle Ages

   So now you know what some grumpy old white guy thought. Yet does it make sense to still refer to this time period as the “Dark Ages”? Does this outdated term refer to religion, history, culture, or art? It was used to compare the medieval period to the Romans, who were perceived to be better. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the habit of accepting what a dead white guy says just because he has a Wikipedia page, so let’s look at the “Dark Ages” further and see if they truly deserve the name.

    First, I want to break down some of the common misconceptions of the medieval period.

It was a time of ignorance and fear

Little art was being created, and it was usually either very weird or very ugly

Everyone was dying of the plague and, consequently, nothing was really happening

   Let’s start with number 1. I’m sure everyone can recall that one graph that makes its way around Tumblr every once in a while (if not, it’s the one pictured below). Now, don’t get me wrong, the burning of the library in Alexandria was certainly a stain on the history of humanity. Still, let’s look at this graph a little closer. Would you be able to tell me what the line represents? Why does this graph of “scientific advance” only show European events (apart from Egypt)? How did the author get these measurements? If it’s scientific knowledge that includes metallurgy, agriculture, and other technical knowledge (since, last I checked, technology was science), the people of the European Dark Ages would certainly have known more than the Egyptians or Greeks. What does “scientific advance” mean? What qualifications did the author have to make such a graph? Were the “Dark Ages” really a flat line? First of all, let’s establish that the average plebian in Ancient Rome wasn’t walking around with the same knowledge (or access to knowledge) possessed by an upper-class Roman.

What the graph suggests is that, once the Roman Empire, and consequently the patricians, fell, the knowledge they held was “lost”. However, this was a time of massive innovation and scientific growth in non-western societies. The Arabs and the Indians were making crucial discoveries in astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. This is the knowledge that was passed on to Europe during the time period marked as “Renaissance”. The graph makes it look like the knowledge was sucked into a black hole, and during the Renaissance we had to start from scratch, when that absolutely not the case. It’s clear that “Dark Ages” certainly does not refer to any society outside of Europe, which seems to be what most people focus on or consider. But was it really a time of ignorance and fear in Europe as well? Most of the knowledge “lost” after the fall of the Roman Empire was actually preserved in monasteries. You may say, well, it wasn’t available to the public! It was restricted. To which I reply, well, do you think an average, working-class Roman would have just pulled out his library card and checked out some treatise on mathematics?

    The “Dark Ages” were also not uniform throughout Europe. The Byzantine Empire (The Eastern part of the split Roman Empire) was still in full swing. By the time the Byzantine Empire fell, other regions of Europe had become organized enough that the knowledge was able to spread back in. In a sense, it never actually left Europe. It certainly wasn’t lost, and it certainly was not a flat line. Scandinavia also never went into a “slump”, mostly because they were never really that closely affiliated with Rome. The Norse were a major European power which spent a large part of the “Dark Ages” exploring and setting up communication networks. They reached Iceland, Greenland, and the Americas (take that Columbus, no one likes you anyway). The pushed into Russia, down to the Black Sea, sailing down all the way to Constantinople. If anything, it was their Golden Age. And just to put a cherry on top of this plague-ridden dessert, they were also probably the only European society that, by our modern standards, would be considered democratic and feminist.

left: Mihrab, c. 1270, an example of the price and complex beauty of Islamic art / center: mosaic from the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in ravena, displaying the intricacy and luminosity of Byzantine art / right: the Viking Thing (yeah, its actually called a “thing”), a Norse council that displays the somewhat democratic side of Norse society

    What about the fear part? “Dark Ages” is almost synonymous with “plague”. However, the plague we know and love occurred in the High Middle Ages, after the period that most people would point to as the “Dark Ages”. It also continued throughout the Renaissance (Decameron, anyone?). People tend to think the “Dark Ages” is a time full of violence, but weren’t the Romans violent too (even though they did it in a much more systematic and organized way)? Isn’t that what we’re doing right now? There were certainly war zones and killing, but not quite to the extent that Hollywood makes it out to be. If it makes it any better, during the Middle Ages Europeans did not keep slaves, while the Romans most certainly did.

     As for the second point (finally), let’s move on to something I’m quite passionate about–art. Medieval art is mostly famous for its weird snail vs. knight battles and strange depictions of human anatomy. Not many people point to medieval art as their favorite. That’s fine (it’s not my favorite either if I’m being completely honest), but you shouldn’t mistake that for thinking that art was not being created during this period. Apart from beautiful cathedrals and castles, there were two absolutely stunning artistic innovations and styles during this time, stained glass and illuminated manuscripts. The art during this period was religious (cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts), mostly because the church was the one with money, power, and knowledge. I’m going to concentrate on stained glass, but please look into illuminated manuscripts during your own time, and then tell me if you think the “Dark Ages” were really dark.

above: paying homage to my hometown, this is the Bibbia di Borso d’Este, a 15th century illuminated manuscript (a bit later than intended, but you get the point)

    I want to preface this by saying that colored glass was present in Europe before the Middle Ages and was also used in non-Western societies, but for time and argument’s sake, I’m going to stick to the Middle Ages in Europe. One thing people usually get right about this time period is that the vast majority of people were illiterate. How does a priest make sure his flock can understand the church’s teachings? Why, put it everywhere. Literally. Cover the walls with sculpture, draw pictures for every exposed corner, put it on the stained glass, and you’ve got yourself a Gothic cathedral (by the way, the term Gothic was used as an insult by Renaissance scholars, who also perpetrated the idea that these “barbaric” people caused the downfall of human knowledge. Do you really want to take the word of a bunch of old men? I don’t think so). Stained glass was so awe-inspiring that it was called lux nova, or “new light”. To someone who had never seen such a thing before, it must have seemed like heaven itself was lighting up the church. I felt a similar sensation when I visited Sainte-Chapelle. Just to relate back to my original point, the people that created cathedrals so tall that they reached the limits of what stone can bear and decorated them with beautiful stained glass and decoration certainly had some understanding of science and technology.

above: a picture I took when I visited Sainte-Chapelle. The beauty of this chapel is really beyond words, and photographs don’t do it justice. After visiting this room bathed in colored light, I found it impossible to refer to the Middle Ages as “Dark”.

    So now you know that art was certainly being created, the term “Dark Ages” doesn’t actually refer to any place outside of Europe, and even then most European regions were flourishing. No knowledge was lost to humanity, and the term Gothic, or “Dark Ages” were derogatory terms used by Renaissance scholars because they were butt-hurt that the Goths had risen up against an empire that had waged war against them (and other Germanic tribes) for centuries.

[childrenofexcess]

Strange Aeons: Understanding the theme of the 41st Millennium

[I just found this article on Faeit 212 and thought I should share it with tumblr for those that haven’t seen it. It’s quite long for a tumblr text post but worth it.]

“With the imminent release of the next edition of Warhammer 80,000 set to grace the tables of gamers in the next few weeks, it seems an appropriate time to take a step back and cast a contemplative eye over this most unique of sci fi settings. In this short article, I wanted to briefly discuss some of the literary and cultural influences of the 40k universe, and to understand what it is that can be said to really define the setting as we know it. To be sure, to offer an exhaustive analysis of all aspects of Warhammer 40,000 could take up an entire book; after all, we’re speaking here of an IP that’s been shaped by many different creatives and has existed in one form or another for nigh on 30-odd years. Indeed, there’d be a very strong argument to say that nothing can truly be said to ‘define’ Warhammer 40,000; it’s a wild collection of themes, aesthetic styles and ideas jammed into one insane, sprawling pastiche. It’s the heavy metal, post punk and glam rock music waves of the 80’s mixed with the cyberpunk sci-fi films of the 1990s, it’s Hieronymus Bosch meets Dune, it’s a universe that can claim inspiration from sources as vast and diverse as Gothic and Baroque architecture to mecha anime (lookin’ at you, Tau) and the history of the Roman Empire, all filtered through a distinctly British sense of ironic humour. 

Nevertheless, one major unifying thread has been the idea of ‘grimdarkness’, a theme that’s been raised to such a status now that it’s become an adjective, a noun and a moderately popular internet meme.  The question is then what constitutes the idea, and what influences we can find behind it.  As an overarching heading, I’m going to argue that what defines the idea of grimdark isn’t necessarily Warhammer 40,000’s emphasis on conflict, but rather the subtler and more disturbing notion of man’s insignificance in an essentially indifferent universe. If we take a trip back in time and look at the know-legendary Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader[1], we can see that this has been a theme from the very start. Released in 1987, this source and rulebook represented the first iteration of the 40k universe, and though the setting subsequently received numerous additions and revisions to its lore, much of the core structure would remain consistent. It’s as early as Rogue Trader that we get the first iteration of its famous opener, which captured its bleak themes in two short paragraphs;

"For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and the master of a million worlds by the will of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed each day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten. Human blood and human flesh- the stuff which the Imperium is made. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe that you can live today if you dare- for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort of hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed...."

 It’s interesting to trace the number of different inspirations and angles that this tone initially emerged from. One useful place to start is by noting that the creators of Warhammer 40k always saw it as being an offshoot of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, not only in terms of its game mechanics but more importantly in its overall tone. Indeed, in the Rogue Trader book itself it’s boldly stated that 40k wasn’t ‘just a science fiction game, although it’s set in the future … we call it a fantasy game set in the far future … a sort of science fantasy.’ What’s significant about this, however, was that it was fantasy of a sort that was the diametric opposite of conventional[2] genre fare. Warhammer, both in its straight and futuristic guises, was part of the subgenre of ‘dark fantasy’, a reaction against the more mainstream conventions laid down by ‘swords and sorcery’ fiction (associated with the likes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarianseries) as well as the titanic presences of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. In all such works one often commonplace thread was that they created universes that were essentially ordered, knowable and benign, with the most obvious illustration of this being that the concepts of good and evil were frequency depicted as cosmic forces with some sort of objective existence.  Arguably, this stemmed from (amongst other things) a tendency for the early founders of such fiction to use historical myths (such as Norse mythology and the Arthurian tales) as their inspiration, where man’s relationship to the natural world was seen as one of unity rather than alienation and where the protagonists of such tales were heavily idealised.

 Dark fantasy, however, presented a startlingly different perspective in its approach. In place of clear-cut black-and-white morality came only shades of grey, with no benevolent, omnipotent arbitrator to decide right from wrong. Both the characters and the worlds they inhabited became dirtier, more dysfunctional, even downright terrible. If Tolkienesque fiction (generally speaking) took its inspiration from a largely symbolic, even nostalgic, view of history, focusing on the legends of old, then dark fantasy looked at the crueller, actually existing side of the past and humanity. This was the world of plagues, of famines and blighted crops, where people lived short, difficult lives in a world that they little understood and which showed them little mercy. Again, we see these themes as early as Rogue Trader; as it put it, in the world of the 40k universe there exists an;

 ‘almost medieval attitude amongst the human societies. Fear, superstition, self-sacrifice and common acceptance of death are all strongly featured. Technology is present, but it is not central to the way people think. Most common folk see technology as witchcraft- so do the technicians!’

But this emphasis on the petty, unpleasant lives of humans in the 40k setting is only one half of the coin that is the concept of grimdark. For what the 40k universe achieves, which few other fictional settings do, is to emphasise the dark side of scale.  In this regard, one cannot talk of influences on the 40k setting without mentioning the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s presence looms large over the 40k setting, with the most obvious connection being Chaos, though it’s a source of inspiration that works in a number of different ways. On a purely visual level, there’s the ideas of physical mutation and pulpy, tentacled horrors that stories like The Rats in the Walls and The Dunwich Horror introduced, which have been a part of Chaos ever since the days of the Lost and the Damned and Slaves to Darkness sourcebooks. Equally important in this regard was Lovecraft’s frequent emphasis on the dreamlike and surreal quality of the supernatural, which finds a parallel in some of the original illustrations of the artist Ian Miller, whose crowded, twisted nightmare landscapes featured heavily in these publications. (If this seems like mere speculation, it should be noted that Miller was commissioned to illustrate the Panther Horror paperbacks of Lovecraft’s works in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  But I think it does a disservice to both the writer himself and the 40k setting to only consider this angle. For what marked out Lovecraft as one of the seminal horror authors of the Twentieth Century wasn’t necessarily the monsters of his stories themselves (creative though they were) but his pioneering of the concept of ‘cosmic horror’. More of an ethos than a well-worked out philosophy, it might be roughly said that cosmic horror was a sentiment of seeing horror in vastness; the idea of things in this universe being so large, so immeasurable and incomprehensible that our limited human existence is absolutely meaningless by comparison. On one level, this was a sentiment expressed by Lovecraft’s fictional characters (most notably Cthulhu) and finds a parallel in the 40k setting with the Chaos Gods and the C’tan, terrible beings of such power and infinitude that the entirety of mankind is but cattle to them. But at the same time it’s really an attitude to our existence in the world itself. Lovecraft was writing at a time when astronomy and geology were coming into their own (both of which he studied during his teenage years), revealing the full scope of the cosmos in terms of its age and size, and many of his stories express this sense of despair and realising the insignificance of our brief existence by comparison. And it’s this sort of feeling that only something like Warhammer 40,000 can properly capture, presenting us with a galaxy entirely separated from our own both by cycles of eons and by a magnitude which we can scarce imagine, yet without the sort of up-beat positivity that a lot of more mainstream sci fi usually engenders. If things like Star Wars and Star Trek offer space operas offering high adventure, then Warhammer 40,000 offers us a universe where we are but small blips beset on all sides. To round things off, I think that if there’s one specific area that conveys this most of all it’s the Imperium itself, where the scale and indifference of the universe is reflected in mankind’s own social structures. To me, what will always define the Imperium and the grimdarkness of the 41stmillennium are those brief but sinister glimpses we get of the countless citizens and organisations of mankind’s empire; it’s the hunched, shuffling servitors we see in the corners of the artwork, it’s the description of the teaming, polluted hive cities and the administratums manned by millions of nameless scribes. Above all, it’s the idea that moral, social and political values are totally irrelevant in comparison to a galaxy spanning industrial bureaucracy fighting against its own extinction, where only the forces of efficiency and necessity can hold sway. A piece of art that I think conveys this most is John Blanche’s stunning depiction of the Mechanicus on Mars (see above), where in one sprawling picture we get a glimpse of an environment utterly alien to comforting sentiments; an enormous, arcane landscape where people have literally become just cogs in a machine.” [1] Which we can do thanks to the retro-review over on realmofchaos80s.blogspot.co.uk[2] Speaking relatively, that is