A reminder why the original will always be the best.

A vicar has revived an ancient law to call members of her parish together for archery practice. (hence)

This is clearly for the sake of their morals.

I've been river guiding for a couple weeks now. I'm very tired and don't have much intelligent to say, but I do have some pretty pictures up on the photoblog:

Strangely fascinating (how many posts do we begin that way?) reading:

A

TREATISE

ON

ADULTERATIONS OF FOOD,

AND CULINARY POISONS.

EXHIBITING

The Fraudulent Sophistications of

BREAD, BEER, WINE, SPIRITOUS LIQUORS, TEA, COFFEE, CREAM, CONFECTIONERY, VINEGAR, MUSTARD, PEPPER, CHEESE, OLIVE OIL, PICKLES,

AND OTHER ARTICLES EMPLOYED IN DOMESTIC ECONOMY.

AND

METHODS OF DETECTING THEM.

I had known about the carving of wooden nutmegs, but much of this was a revelation to me, particularly the dangers of Poisonous Cheese.

Ah, synchronicity! Today's Performance Today has an excellent segment dedicated to folk influences in Finnish classical music. Well worth a listen, it includes a composition based on Sami joiking.

This may well interest no one but me and Proclus, but here it is anyway: Digital Archive of Finnish Folk Tunes. The specific search feature works best if you just want to browse; you can filter by region and by type of tune. Obviously, it helps to be mildly conversant in Finnish geography and music. This polska was a nice find (click here to listen, and click the image for a clearer view):

Don't get bitten by a coral snake! Always good advice, but now ever more so, since apparently we're out of antivenom. And wouldn't you know it, the perfectly good stuff they use in Mexico isn't coming here due to FDA hurdles.

Letter to the editor, Santa Fe New Mexican, 5.07.10, reproduced in full:

My 30 years' research for a book on ancient petroglyphs reveals a meaning greatly differing from what archaeologists have told us.

I have irrefutable proof that ancient Egyptians, Minoans, Libyans and Galesteans (the Cycladic island of Santorini was originally named "Galeste") founded a colony in the Galisteo Basin circa 1626 B.C. Despite suppression by the archaeological community, I am now moving forward with production. Over the years, several important photos and negatives which I made over 25 years ago have been selectively stolen from my house.

Earlier this year, a packet of 126 film negatives which I needed to make quality enlargements for my book were stolen by professional burglars. Meanwhile, archaeologists in charge won't allow me on San Cristobal Ranch to make replacement photos so I am forced to use inferior photos. Is the archaeology community so weak that it cannot tolerate dissident views?

Hear, hear, let the man publish!

S.M. Stirling's Santa Fe vampire novel is now released! Samples are available. Been looking forward to this one (though it is not the first Santa Fe vampire novel).

Thanks to Chas for the reminder, and for a very pleasant recent visit:

...layers and layers. Ethnic balkanization and people cherishing hatreds and triumphs that go back centuries. Martyrs and massacres. Deep roots in the earth.

That's us! Don't be a stranger!

Update: Can't really recommend this one, alas. S&M Stirling would be an apt moniker in this instance. He really seems rather more interested in the sexual implications of his vampires' abilities than in, say, plot.

Far out: Do birds see magentic fields through quantum entanglement?

Some rather--unusual--fallacies over at Siris.

Argumentum fistulatorium means, roughly, 'argument by piping'. Ad verecundiam, ex absurdo, and ex Fortiori are, respectively, argument from authority, from the absurdity of the position, and from the truth of a stronger conclusion. They would have been found in real lists of argument-types at the time. All the rest are jokes, but argumentum baculinum was an old one by Sterne's time; it occurs when you resolve an argument by beating your opponent with a club or a stick.

I'm not sure that the baculinum is always a fallacy, however; there are obviously times (for example, if your interlocuter argues that you are incapable of striking him) when it answers quite well; and in any case no less a philosopher than Duns Scotus employs it in his Ordinatio:

And so too, those who deny that some being is contigent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented.

Both understandable and effective, I imagine. The Scotch, of course, were noted for combining the fistulatorium and baculinum with great success.

Boy, this expedition sounds like fun:

April 28, 2010 Marks the 221st anniversary of the Mutiny on the Bounty, when Fletcher Christian cast William Bligh and 18 of his men adrift in a 23ft open boat, which marked the beginning of one of the greatest open boat voyages in maritime history. During the following seven weeks, Bligh and his men sailed over 3,700 nautical miles, in an overloaded boat, with little food or water and no charts, from Tonga to Kupang in Timor.

On that same day, in the same place, at the same time, Australian adventurer Don McIntyre, three other crew, will relive Bligh’s nightmare, by attempting to sail the same voyage under similar conditions, no charts, no toilet paper, not enough food or water, in an 18th century traditional open timber whale boat.

Good on 'em! And better them than me!

HT: Adventure Blog

Whisperer in Darkness movie, complete with trailer. I'm not sure how it will hold up over feature length, but I like the black and white B-movie approach.

Update: Isolated population of Antarctic microbes form five-story waterfall of blood-red ooze. Sounds like the place to look for albino penguins. Ëa! Ëa! (Credit to Jack for this one.)

Wow, we just passed fifteen-hundred posts. This is 1,503. Hooray us!

The technology of Antarctic research stations

Cool! But we all know that the best part of Antarctic research is bringing your tuxedo.

Is opera to blame for country music?

By the early 1880s, Knoxville was hosting extravagant “Music Festivals,” held every spring. Touting itself as “the little Paris of the United States,” Knoxville emphasized European opera above all else, concentrated around Staub’s Opera House, which was on the southeast corner of Gay Street and Cumberland. Significant stars of opera and classical music from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston would take the train to Knoxville for a pleasant weekend of music, some of it outdoors at Chilhowee Park. Even if Knoxvillians didn’t always have the patience for a whole opera—these festivals were mostly composed of portions of operas, individual arias and acts—they loved the singing, and turned out in the thousands.

Knoxville’s music festivals may have left a surprising and thoroughly unintended legacy.

Some older Knoxvillians were skeptical of the Music Festival. Back then, opera was believed to inflame the passions of hot-blooded youth, and they weren’t crazy about their youngsters putting on European airs. In May, 1883, some older folks staged a sort of anti-opera counter festival, featuring some down-home fiddle music on an afternoon at Staub’s when there were no sopranos scheduled. It’s the earliest example of country music being played on a public stage I’ve been able to find.

Opera has some surprising roots out here in the "deserts of Louisiana" (as the Manon Lescaut libretto puts it). The first performances of Lohengrin in the New World took place in the German country of Texas, for instance. And I'm always delighted when I float by Jenny Lind Rock, one of the enormous cliff walls at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers, a place famous for its echoes. Lind's 1850 tour of America was almost a Beatlemania level sensation (Berlioz has an entertaining passage about it in Evenings with the Orchestra). Decades later, Pat Brown, a hermit dwelling in a cave near Echo Park, told acquaintances that he had a pet mountain lion who would scream from the echoing clifftop:

"Pat claimed that the lion would come out upon a high cliff and scream in answer to his yell," said Mr. Barber, "and old Pat would say, 'that sound is sweeter than any Jenny Lind ever sang.'" Old residents of the Brown's Park country still call this cliff Jenny Lind Rock.

While we're on these subjects, Mrs. P and I watched La Fanciulla del West a while back, Puccini's opera set amongst the 49-ers of California. Act I is a little slow, and the end is pretty maudlin, but Act II is classic lurid, blood-dripping, rip-roaring Puccini. I'd love it if the Santa Fe opera would adapt it to be set in, say, Madrid, New Mexico, but the drunk Indian characters probably preclude the possibility, alas.

(A hat tip to Professor Reynolds)

Great. Just great: Armed pot growers in the high desert of Oregon. The region has a grand tradition as outlaw country, but this isn't exactly in keeping with the Claude Dallas mystique. Can we please legalize the stuff before all our public lands off the big tourist trails are thus infested?

Huh. Stringberg and Helium.

Rafting the Gila Wilderness

Trip report is finally up. Enjoy! Or skip the report and look at pictures.

The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phaenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smokey fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust- coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people began to look with a superstitious awe, at the red, louring aspect of the sun...

--Gilbert White, recalling the effects of the 1783 eruption of Laki on England

While we're all fascinated by the current eruption of Eyjafjallajökull (great pictures!), spare a moment to contemplate Laki in 1783. 20% or more of Iceland's population died of famine, a cloud of poison gas hung about Iceland and Europe over a brutally hot summer, and the following winter was frigid across Europe and America. Puts all those delayed flights in perspective, doesn't it? If Eyjafjallajökull keeps belching, it'll be interesting to see if there are climatic effects, or at least good sunsets.

Of course, it might trigger Katla. Interesting Katla fact:

At the peak of the 1755 eruption the flood discharge has been estimated at 200,000–400,000 m³/s [that's cubic meters! --ed.]; for comparison, the combined average discharge of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers is about 266,000 m³/s.

Hat tip: Sailer.

Man charged with assault and battery after allegedly using a 4 foot long ball python as a weapon.

Bastard. Python abuse would be a much more apt charge. If you're going to use a snake as a weapon, a ball python is an exceedingly poor choice, as they're generally frightened of absolutely everything except mice and dark places. If you have to pinch the snake's head to get it to open its mouth, you're really barking up the wrong tree. This guy should have a Burmese: for one thing, it might eat him.

Counting to five-ish.

Challenged by Peculiar, I have no choice but to respond. No promises of anything high, or even middle brow.

Natalie Babbitt, The Search for Delicious. When I got older I could identify the emotion this book brought over me as nympholepsy, an affliction I have yet to recover from. It's about magic, and nature, and how we abandon them.

William Faulkner, The Reivers. My favorite novel. Unflinching sacrifice of our innocence.

Homer, The Iliad. Is this cheating? I don't care. Rage is our first word. I will say that jack's senior essay helped me understand it quite a bit more deeply than I could have on my own.

Epictetus, Discourses.

Do you then show me your improvement in these things? If I were talking to an athlete, I should say, "Show me your shoulders"; and then he might say, "Here are my halteres." You and your halteres look to that. I should reply, "I wish to see the effect of the halteres." So, when you say: "Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how I have studied it." I reply, "Slave, I am not inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance, desire and aversion, how your design and purpose and prepare yourself, whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write such books yourself; and what will you gain by it?

Sheri S. Tepper, Beauty. Hard for me to go back to this one, but I read it perhaps twenty times when I was fifteen. I'll still read anything she wants to write.

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. In which we learn that the world is mad, but we still have our duty.

Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I use this book constantly to help me understand and deal with practical life. This is probably unhealthy.

Diane Duane, So You Want to be a Wizard. "I am on errantry, and I greet you."

C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. I'm not sure the effect on me was a beneficial one; I seem to have spent a great deal of my life assuming that at some point I would find a way into another world, and so didn't need to do my Social Studies homework.

Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. A good part of these books is about the joy of useful work, and also there is Princess Eilonwy.

Notably absent: overt religion, much philosophy (the Discourses scarcely count), any sci-fi, medieval works, or Xenophon. Hmm.

Well, at least she's High Church.

Still working on that Gila trip report: soon! But I've been distracted, distracted all the way to Greenlee County by reports of southeast Arizona wildflowers. Glad I went! More at the link.

Collaborative math via blogs, plus Tic Tac Toe in four dimensions.

Watch a huge avalanche nail a lift line at Chimbulak Ski Resort in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

New monitor lizard species discovered in the Philippines.

With a main body length approaching 1m, with an additional 1m-long tail, the lizard has dark skin covered by golden yellow spots and flecks.

Its legs are mainly yellow, and its tail striped black and yellow.

In some pictures, the animal also looks to have green or blue scales.

The new species, which is called Varanus bitatawa, is thought to survive on a diet of fruit, making it one of just three species of fruit-eating monitor lizards in the world.

(Hat tip: Cronaca)

The Querencia folks have a fun meme going: name the ten books which had the biggest influence on you. Influence is an interesting question, since influences are decidedly not the same as favorites. I think my list would have to run as follows (roughly chronological in my life):

J.R.R. Tolkein, Lord of the Rings: I'm not ashamed to be a nerd. And quite a lot of my personality is in there: philology, history, myth and epic, ethnography, poetry, Old English/Norse influence, a sense of loss of the old wonders, wilderness, mountains, rivers. I just re-read it and I still love it.

Hergé, The Tintin oeuvre: World travel, ethnography, archaeology and a great fondness for Britishness (yes, of course I know they're French).

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang: Wilderness and the American West, anarchist sympathies, environmentalism without the sanctimony and pseudo-spirituality.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: Didn't spawn, but sharply amplified my discomfort with government and "progress."

The Kalevala: If I were really pursuing the thread of influence here, I suppose the ultimate source is the liner notes on Seleniko by Värttinä. Weird folk poetry, epic, non-Indo-European tongues; I think this was my first awareness that there's poetry which really must be examined in the original. And that other languages are much more fun to learn than Spanish. And that that Anon. guy wrote a lot of really good stuff.

David Quammen, Song of the Dodo: This is where I began to get seriously interested in evolution and biogeography. I believe I read Steve's review galleys.

Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa: Travel, adventure and bloody good writing together, that's how to live!

Patrick O'Brian, The Aubrey-Maturin Novels: Again, contains a large percentage of my fascinations, and remains my ideal of English prose. There's a lot of how to live here too, even if you don't have Frenchmen to beat up on.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Not an approach I'd necessarily favor anymore, but she definitely got me fired up about reading the classics and exercising the critical faculties.

W.A. Mozart, The Magic Flute [score]: An odd entry, but no one can deny its influence on me. My relationship with music and general creativity, not to mention the inside of my head, has never been the same.

Interesting to note that only two (Huxley and Mozart) had anything to do with school, and Mozart is the only entry from the St. John's College program. Orthodoxy is notably absent, but not everything is about books; a few books were mildly influential there, but nothing was decisive. At least eight remain favorites, which is nice (might have to revisit Brave New World). All the other favorites wouldn't be favorites without these.

Honorable mentions: The New World by Frederick Turner: sci-fi can be so much more than gadgetry. Also, David Roberts and Craig Childs: outdoor adventure for people whose brains outmass their other glands. And of course Bodio, though I had the good fortune to get him through spoken word and excellent dinners more than through printed pages. And I have him to thank for four of the listed ten.

Odious?

Perhaps you read in the paper today, as I did, about a "new species of hominid" found in the Altai. Interesting find, to be sure, but the "new species" part is seriously dubious. Anthropologist John Hawks explains why.

Thanks to the Atomic Nerds for the tip.

Happy Ada Lovelace day. In honor of this iteration, I wrote some code today--which actually compiled. I mark this day with a white stone, indeed.

Mrs. P and I are off for a four-day weekend running the Gila. It's been quite a while since I ran a river not knowing what was around the bend. This huge El Nino snowpack is providing an excellent window for boating a run that's seldom runnable. Reports soon, with any luck. In the meantime, check out my new photography blog, which is finally more or less ready for public consumption.

Also from China: Phallic cemetery in the Tarim Basin. Anything from the Tarim is intriguing: home of Tocharian language and tartan-clad mummies.

Update: Changed link to much better NYT piece. Read it!

The Sanest of Men: a celebration of the Chinese poet T'ao Ch'ien.

A sample of T'ao Ch'ien's writing, trans. David Hinton:

Drinking Wine

I live here in this busy village without
all that racket horses and carts stir up,

and you wonder how that could ever be.
Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself

a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums
at my east fence, I see South Mountain

far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight
going home. All this means something,

something absolute: whenever I start
to explain it, I forget words altogether.

Why can't our politics be more like this?

Over 200 years ago an outraged Lord Sandwich rose purple-faced in the House to shout at an opponent. “Wilkes, you will die either on the gallows or of the pox.” “That,” drawled John Wilkes without a pause, “must depend on whether I embrace your Lordship’s principles or your mistress.”

Found in The Corner.

Saw this about the aurochs, meant to mention it, and then forgot about it again until I was reading Cronaca.

Scientists have analysed the DNA of ancient giant European wild cattle that died out almost 400 years ago.

They have determined the first mitochondrial genome sequence from aurochs (Bos primigenius) from bone found in a cave in England.

Humans worsted by pigeons at the Monty Hall problem

In the experiments, the birds quickly reached the best strategy for the Monty Hall problem — going from switching roughly 36 percent of the time on day one to some 96 percent of the time on day 30.

On the other hand, 12 undergraduate student volunteers failed to adopt the best strategy with a similar apparatus, even after 200 trials of practice each.

What my ancestors got up to when they weren't blind drunk or thieving cattle: The Curling Song.

More curling songs here.

Searching for the tomb of Chinggis Khan, both on the ground and in a virtual projection.

New additions to the household

Many, but likely not all, of our readers are aware that we acquired a ball python last summer. Well, we thought he might like some company:

The larger one is about a year old and is named (what else?) Pythagoras. The smaller we just brought home tonight, and we have yet to settle on a name. Persephone is a strong contender. She's much more spry than Pythagoras has ever been, exploring, nosing about, gliding from hand to hand like your hands are a python treadmill. Pythagoras can be safely left to his own devices for a while; a glance every 30 seconds or so is sufficient to keep track of him, methodical and stoic as he is. But the new girl will bear much closer monitoring.

Ball pythons really are splendid, amiable little creatures. (In Europe they're often called royal pythons after their scientific name, Python regius, and I rather prefer that usage.) According to Mrs. P's investigations, they're often considered auspicious in their native West African scrub, and some cultures even offer little funerals and burials to dead ones. It's pretty remarkable to have an essentially wild animal that will let you pick it up and handle it with no objection. They're quite gentle and docile. Pythagoras has nipped each of us once, but both incidents had clear reasons; a ball python bit is a little more than sandpaper, but certainly less than needles. Of course, a lot of folks get squeamish about the idea of feeding them mice, but Mrs. Peculiar and I are not very sympathetic to the mammals. Mice have surely, through crop damage and disease, contributed vastly more to the sum of human misery than snakes have. We're the last people to object to a little honest carnivory, still less myophagy.

Having a ball python also brings home the biologic ignorance of the general population. People are incredulous that there exist pythons who will never be large enough to devour dogs, babies or oxen. After my nip, an otherwise well-educated person expressed concern about venom. But on the other hand, most people who meet them are enchanted, which is encouraging.

In any case, the new girl has a lovely golden sheen. They're amazingly soft when young. Pythagoras' hide is getting tougher, but even he still feels very soft and smooth until he's ready to shed. We're very eager to see what differences in personality we might observe between the two.

Hmmm... Chryse? Appollonia? Siegrune?

Update: We went with Hypatia, which goes pretty well Pythagoras.