this week i

presented convey-r.org and asdfree.com first thing, at esra, in the land of the rock bottom tulip prices, since february 1637.  in translated politeness, registration desk officer asked do you know your last name?  waterworld (1995) alternate ending: the dutch nation polders on up to the starboard side of that burning sinking oil barge to kindly inquire why everyone's hangry.  we can fight or we can all go eat stroopwafel, they'd say, are saying

rank water the best. isn't it the best? of course it's the best. so long as you don't have too much of it. of all the things in their respective appropriate amounts, i would say water il nummero unico e solo. electric vehicles ought make road runner meep meep noise same way they add the smell to gas

worry for the dawn of indisguishable-from-insects spy cameras & is it still nirvana if you can't stay cool while wearing wrathful beehive like a helmet?

whisper smooch-a-wooch every time i hear a kiss - no trouble yet but my serendipity may not always be. si l'europe est un continent, le quebec aussi 

add albert-heijn-sized oreo ice cream minis to my i'd-happily-take-one-bite-of-this-till-my-dying-day list alongside cold soba and philly cheesesteaks


read ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of europe, 900-1900 by alfred w. crosby.  beringian megafauna destruction left natives bereft of reciprocal cross-species poxes to repel.  smilodon gone, wild pigs shepherded selves, easy colonies' calories.  on veldt, the boer met neither such luck


europeans, to borrow a term from apiculture, have swarmed again and again and have selected their new homes as if each swarm were physically repulsed by the others

even the blackberries were red

the empire of the dandelion

biogeographers have properly designated north america and eurasia, including europe, as different biological provinces or subregions.  after all, nero threw the christians to the lions, not to the cougars

homo sapiens needed, not for the only time in the history of the species, to become either celibate or clever

how many mongol horsemen, fierce and terrible, persevered through the hungriest times of the great khan's campaigns by drinking measured amounts of their horses' blood, enough to keep themselves alive yet not so much as to enfeeble their mounts?

northwest europeans..the world's champion milk digesters

a primitive ironworks, the very first in america, at the site of a norse settlement in newfoundland

the largest expedition to vinland of which we have any record consisted of three vessels and only 65 or 165 people..the fleet that columbus led to the west indies in 1493 consisted of seventeen ships carrying 1,200 to 1,500 men

erik's saga tells us that the dead were often buried without proper services in that land where priests were nearly as rare as trees

madeirans had plumped solidly for monoculture, had chosen to devote themselves utterly to pandering to europe's sweet tooth

we can discern in madeira the basic pattern for plantation colonies for generations to come

 

 


every eden has its snake

"if it had not been for the pestilence," espinosa said, "it would have taken much longer, the people being warlike, stubborn and wary"

at the beginning of the fifteenth century for cheng ho, chief admiral and eunuch of the ming emperor, to despatch to india and all the way to east africa fleets of scores of vessels armed with multitudes of small cannon and manned by thousands of crewmen and passengers.  it is this admiral, rather than, say, bartholomeu dias, who should be credited as the first great figure of the age of exploration.  if political changes and cultural endogeny had not stifled the ambitions of chinese sailors, then it is likely that history's greatest imperialists would have been far easterners, not europeans

the winds of the atlantic and pacific flow in gigantic wind wheels.  in each ocean north of the equator, one airy carousel revolves clockwise, and south of the equator another spins counterclockwise

the low-pressure belt is the detested doldrums, source of so many horror stories of thirst and starvation for those becalmed in their sweaty clasp

in 1487, bartholomeu dias..a nautical moses..had seen the promised ocean but was never to enter it.  he brought home with him two precious bits of knowledge: one, there was a passage to the indian ocean from the atlantic; two, the wind patterns of the south atlantic ocean were, according to his experience, very much like those of the north atlantic, only upside-down

da gama's course - an extravagant exaggeration of dias's course - was and is the most practical route for a sailing ship bound from europe to the indian ocean: south to the cape verdes or thereabouts, then a great curve southwest until nigh the coast of brazil, and then southeast round the cape of good hope.  it was the course of choice, recommended by both the british admirality and the united states hydrographic office, for as long as sails ruled the oceans

dead christians, consigned to the deep, sank face upward.  infidels, of which a few had joined in the east indies, sank face downward

on monday, 8 september 1522, the victoria dropped anchor near the quay at seville and fired all her cannon.  the first circumnavigation of the world was completed.  the next day, "we all went in shirts and barefoot, each holding a candle, to visit the shrine of santa maria de la victoria, and that of santa maria de l'antigua

we have an apparent double anomaly, that australia is better suited to some english plants than england is, and that some english plants are better suited to australia than those australian plants were which have given way before english intruders -jospeph dalton hooker, 1853

a twentieth-century reconnaissance of the san joaquin valley revealed that introduced plants "constituted 63 per cent of the herbaceous vegetation in the grassland types, sixty-six per cent in the woodland, and fifty-four per cent in chaparral"

 the epidemiological history of the european colonies beyond the seams of pangaea is like a jigsaw puzzle of 10,000 pieces, of which we have only half - enough to give us an idea of how large the original was and of its major features, but not enough for a neat reassembly

dragooned into the world community

it did not occur to any pakeha for decades and decades that spilling and strewing alien organisms into an ecosystem can be like lighting a candle in order to lessen the gloom in a powder magazine

about fifty chiefs signed or placed their moko (drawings of their distinctive facial tattoos, almost as distinctive as fingerprints) on the treaty by which they surrendered their sovereignty

after 1853, the numbers are relatively dependable, i.e., satisfactory for most historians, if not for demographers

they are strong of heart, for they have begun to build their houses without talking

desperate as a baited stag with the hounds slashing from all sides

a maori newspaper appeared, called te hokioi after a mythical bird never seen but known by its scream

new zealand, a land that had had only one kind of mammal when charlemagne was crowned emperor, and that had only four when cook arrived

the pakeha did not go ashore alone

mammoths, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed tigers, and other nightmarishly huge creatures dominated in the new world..no such mammalian monsters greeted the maori on the beach, but the largest moas were twice as tall as a man and outweighed him by more than double..the fields and forersts of these impoverished lands and islands, when the marinheiros came, were more open to invading fauna than any other in the world.  had they been thickly populated with herds of grazers and browsers and packs of carnivores as they had been when the very first humans arrived, or as, for instance, south africa was when the dutch settled there in the middle of the seventeenth century, the spread and triumph of european livestock, tame and feral, would have been slow and would have required considerably more human intervention than it did

fifty years after the first horses were introduced into south africa, their total was about 900.  a half century after horses were put ashore in the pampa, the total of their numbers swirling across those grasslands was beyond counting

vacated econiches

malaria plasmodia did not become naturalized in north america until the 1680s

the amerindians probably lagged as far behind the europeans in the cultivations of pathogens as they did in metallurgy

nearly every animal and plant food source that crevecoeur mentioned in a positive way in his classic letters from an american farmer (1782) was of european origin, with the passenger pigeon as the outstanding exception 


7/24

this week i

admire nagadi's crested crane.  edv munch did it first but kev mccallister's mom did it best.  pissing pants in solidarity adam sandler's finest moment 

tripped algorithm searching meeting attendees.  is fah-jah-dah-mah-mah-dah still fahk yer mom, or more an interwar insult?  ciao the italiano aloha.  my hemisphere streets smell of marijuana, here of cologne.  these non-peninsulars one & all knife and fork pizza dork, hands for more than talking yk

   

 

reversed hannibal's route till zurich, nightjet to the most reasonable of the disneylands.  due originali: matryoshka ⇒ mummies.  assassin's creed ⇒
 
sic semper since tyrannosaur
by gun or blade, or meteor
 


read how to avoid a climate disaster: the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need by bill gates

what's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little

during the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees celsius lower than it is today.  during the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the arctic circle

i'm a big fan of the late writer david foster wallace.  (i'm preparing for his mammoth novel infinite jest by slowly making my way through everything else he ever wrote)

oil is cheaper than a soft drink..here's the math: a barrel of oil contains 42 gallons; the average price in the second half of 2020 was around $42 per barrel, so that comes to about $1 per gallon.  meanwhile, costco sells 8 liters of soda for $6, a price that amounts to $2.85 a gallon

prices don't reflect the damage they cause

the first model t that rolled off henry ford's production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon.  as i write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon

the definition of a watt already includes "per second" .. tip: whenever you hear "kilowatt," think "house."  "gigawatt," think "city."  a hundred or more gigawatts, think "big country"

nighttime intermittency isn't the hardest problem to deal with.  the seasonal variation between summer and winter is an even bigger hurdle

making steel and cement emits carbon dioxide - not just from burning fossil fuels, but as a result of the chemical reactions that are essential to their creation

cattle in south america emit up to five times more greenhouse gases than ones in north america do, and african cattle emit even more.  if a cow is being raised in north america or europe, it's more likely to be an improved breed that converts feed into milk and meat more efficiently.  it will also get better veterinary care and higher-quality feed, which means it'll produce less methane

 



it's been estimated that if we couldn't make synthetic fertilizer, the world's population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is

there's more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined

we've got a lot of inventing to do

those of us who have done the most to cause this problem should help the rest of the world survive it.  we owe them that much

some critics attack geoengineering as a massive experiment on the planet, though as the proponents of geoengineering point out, we're already running a massive experiment on the planet by emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases

governments can nudge producers and consumers

in the longer term, as we get closer to net-zero emissions, the carbon price could be set at the cost of direct air capture, and the revenues could be used to pay for pulling carbon out of the air

i hope you'll spend more time and energy supporting whatever you're in favor of than opposing whatever you're against

temperatures will not stop rising in texas unless emissions stop rising in india

i'd like to thank the team at knopf.  bob gottlieb's early support for this book helped make it happen

 

7/17 

this week i

point the banana & say, "bang bang, you've just died of silliness."  munich layover felt like the oprah car giveaway, but pretzels.  you want a pretzel?
 

 where are you?
i'm in italy baby
you fly faster than the mosquitos

presented asdfree.com at sae2025.org all the while wondering who might harry s truman my lauren bacall as hurricane fluted columns drape the wall



  
she looks just like our waitress, the same hairstyle
and your grandma

 

read..

(1) colm toibin on robert prevost

a peruvian citizen running things in rome

in chicago, a little-known recently appointed cardinal retweeted another attack on vance's statement: 'j.d. vance is wrong: jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others'  


(2) placebo means "i will please" in latin, and it entered english thanks to chaucer

the single most important aspect was holding the tablet with tweezers, thereby giving the impression that it was somehow too powerful to be touched with bare hands

we know that expensive placebos work better than cheap ones, capsules work better than tablets, and colored capsules work better than white ones.  blues and greens work better as sedatives, while pinks and reds work better as stimulants and painkillers.  (unless you're an italian man: howick notes that blue is stimulating for italian men, perhaps because the italian soccer team wears blue.)  medium-sized placebos are the least effective; it seems that we trust either tiny pills or big ones - the latter because they're more impressive, and the former presumably because tiny capsules must contain powerful drugs

rats that received powerful immunosuppressants with harmless saccharin later suffered a collapse of their immune systems when given saccharin alone

bugiardini ("little liars") 

 

(3) an experimental design based on three broad areas: factorial, recipe, and augmenting designs

the sheer quantity and variation of experimental designs in the r-packages are arguably unmatched by any other programming languages

68% of the total downloads are due to 10 packages

figure 7 shows that the experimentaldesign task view has the lowest average number of contributors among all the 39 cran task views

 

(4) rerum novarum: encyclical of pope leo xiii on capital and labor

to have nothing to do with men of evil principles, who work upon the people with artful promises of great results, and excite foolish hopes which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss

that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings

to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one's profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine

but the church, with jesus christ as her master and guide, aims higher still

'command the rich of this world... to offer with no stint, to apportion largely.'"(12)  true, no one is commanded to distribute to others that which is required for his own needs and those of his household; nor even to give away what is reasonably required to keep up becomingly his condition in life, "for no one ought to live other than becomingly."(13)  but, when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one's standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over.  "of that which remaineth, give alms"

the church possesses a power peculiarly her own

the greed of possession and the thirst for pleasure-twin plagues, which too often make a man who is void of self-restraint miserable in the midst of abundance

public well-being and private prosperity

the first thing of all to secure is to save the unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.  it is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies

private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable.  the law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners

men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them

woe to him that is alone

 the lying legends of ancient superstition little by little yielded to christian truth 

 

(5) fayum mummy portraits 

encaustic (wax) paintings

 not everyone could afford a mummy portrait

christianity also never banned mummification 

 


7/10

this week i

updated sam hall with a gallows plaque

dead men condemned to walk this plank
(above the starved piranha tank)

if trial just and verdict true,
then feed the beasts without ado
 
(but otherwise, yell not my fault
and garnish wounds with somersault)



read our declaration: a reading of the declaration of independence in defense of equality by danielle allen

another shakespeare sonnet:
that time of year thou mayst in me behold
when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

slow reading.  this too is my patrimony

but i didn't get my answer until i read the declaration of independence with a group of adults struggling to survive

it is not merely those who were alive in 1776 who were members of the candid world: we are too

"unanimity" means "having a single spirit"

to claim the declaration as our own, and to master democratic writing, we first and foremost need to understand that move from principles to facts and then onward to calls for action and, finally, solidarity..solidarity cannot be built without principle

such reluctant revolutionaries were, in adams's words, "all fallen, like grass before the scythe"

i routinely hear from students that the ideals of freedom and equality contradict each other.  the declaration argues the opposite case: that equality is the bedrock of freedom

the concluding pledge of mutuality

human events are going somewhere; they have shape and direction; there is meaning to their sequence

the segregationists picked up the language of the declaration and gave it a vicious little twist

 

 

"we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" give way, as we have seen, to this one: "we hold these truths to be self-evident."  this was a profound change..what does self-evident mean exactly?  it does not mean that the instant you hear a proposition, you recognize it as true.  it means rather that if you look into the proposition, if you entertain it and reflect upon it, you will inevitably come to affirm it

the first three "that's" are all part of a single truth about human beings.  then comes a dash, and we start with a second truth about government.  then comes another dash, and we get a third and final truth about the right to revolution

the fact that people seek their survival, freedom, and happiness and the fact that people seek to build functioning governments turn out to be equivalent

john locke..in his second treatise of civil government..argued that the experience of judging the actions of abusive political leaders is like being a passenger on a ship with a secret destination

first, there is prudence.  people are aware that undoing the whole structure of their lives is a dangerous undertaking, so they are cautious.  they hold off until it looks absolutely necessary.  they recognize that the seriousness of any revolutionary undertaking requires that the causes be weighty and long-lived.  only such causes can justify radical action.  then there is habit.  people do not easily abolish the forms to which they are accustomed.  people invariably get used to things, even things that are damaging to them 

we have followed the arc of the declaration from audacious, even sublime, optimism to grinding pessimism.  the first two sentences painted us as proactive and self-actualizing, yet the third makes us sound like pack animals - donkeys or dray horses - so cautious and calcified that we willingly carry around heavy loads without making a change

god fave the king

the only practice that secures freedom: the engagement of the relevant parties in practices of responsiveness that permit the ongoing recalibration of relations in order to preserve the equal spheres of agency that each wants

the ninth and tenth sentences of the declaration very carefully define the kind of equality that needs to be in play in relations between people in order for freedom to obtain

the declaration kept parliament's name out of its complaints, even when parliament was involved..keep the focus on king george to turn him singly into a symbol of tyranny

o ! ye unborn inhabitants of america ! should this page escape its destin'd conflagration at year's end, and these alphabetical letters remain legible, - when your eyes behold the sun after he has rolled the seasons round for two or three centuries more, you will know that in anno domini 1758, we dream'd of your times 

 

7/3