On the subjects of Boston, its new-ish Seaport District and "Make more land": was it ever under discussion to simply fill in the Fort Point Channel completely? That could have potentially knitted the Seaport development into the city itself.
If I recall correctly, during the "Big Dig" work they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to run the new harbor tunnel road under the channel and deal with the water, and mud, etc. The entire South Bay has already been almost entirely filled in as can be seen on the map at the top of the linked article. Why not just finish it off entirely? Does it serve any actual purpose at this point?
I always feel like a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the Seaport. Sure, it's nice to see the development happening, but it still feels very car-centric and cut off from the rest of the city. Just looking at a satellite image shows that there's a lot more roads and parking than actual buildings. It also feels very disconnected from the city center. Getting into town requires a fairly long walk across one of several windy, car-filled bridges.
That was an interesting note about the FPC. It's something I've wondered about for years ... and proof I didn't read until the very end of the linked article I guess :)
It reminds me of the small vestigial canal in Cambridge, the Broad Canal, that is one of the last remnants of a much larger canal network that ran through East Cambridge. I've always wondered why that last bit hasn't been filled in. It's a man-made canal, so if anything, filling it in would restore the original land. There's an old steel draw bridge spanning the canal that I don't think has actually been opened in 20 years. The bridge is actually a bit of a burden: the state recently did a good job widening the walking/bike bath along the Charles River but there's a pinch point at the bridge because the old pedestrian walk way across the bridge is so tight it can't readily accommodate the bike traffic it gets a lot of now.
There has to be some reason why they've left the bridge. My dad said when he was a kid he remembers barges delivering coal to the power plan that runs along the north side of that canal. It's all gas powered now, but I wonder if it could use coal in an emergency and they've left access to the plant for that reason?
You’re correct. If you listen to what he’s actually saying it’s told from the perspective of Hader and it only shifts when he’s doing an impression of Cruise or Rogan.
As an aside, I feel really weird having completely convinced myself that the original video was deepfaked. It's kind of unnerving given the subject matter.
How is the time of "solar system formation" defined?
Presumably a system slowly forms out of gas and dust but at what point does the accumulating material cross some threshold to where it is considered a new system? Solar ignition?
I found this reference in which the abstract provides this definition: "The age of the Solar System can be defined as the time of formation of the first solid grains in the nebular disc surrounding the proto-Sun"
"The age of the Solar System can be defined as the time of formation of the first solid grains in the nebular disc surrounding the proto-Sun. This age is estimated by dating calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions in meteorites. These inclusions are considered as the earliest formed solids in the solar nebula. Their formation marks the beginning for several long- and short-lived radiogenic clocks that are used to precisely define the timescales of Solar System events, such as the formation and evolution of planetary bodies1,2,3. Here we present the 207Pb–206Pb isotope systematics in a calcium–aluminium-rich inclusion from the Northwest Africa 2364 CV3-group chondritic meteorite, which indicate that the inclusion formed 4,568.2 million years ago."
The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1]
There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later.
To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly something happened.
My family history, for example, have always seemed weird in that regard. Genealogy up until 11-12th century is pretty straightforward and documented, with notable rabbis and doctors, but then it jumps straight to legends and familiar family names from antiquity, without any information from Dark Ages straight out missing from any records. And other old Jewish families I know are very similar: all genealogical information just vanishes for these centuries, even if there are older reliable sources picking up the story from antiquity and beyond.
The only reason for this is that power changed from Romans to tribes in Northern Europe. If you trace genealogies, you'll see that modern families descend from tribal leaders in Northern Europe, and these ancient kings had nothing to do with the old power elites of Rome. Of course, the thing is not so simple, because with the help of Catholic Church there were some marriages arranged between the so-called barbarian rulers and noble families in Rome. So the powerful Roman families still survive in some way, but not in a direct lineage like it was before the fall of Rome.
Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.
The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in.
If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing.
Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold.
Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think the money would be better spent ensuring that doesn't happen in the first place
> It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry.
The ancient patrician families had trouble with going extinct. Their decline started long before the imperial period.
Later European kings had the same problem, sometimes just failing to produce any heir. It only takes a single generation and the family is gone.
If anything, I'd attribute family extinctions like this to monogamy. The two standard defenses against a failure of this type are (1) letting a man marry into the family by wedding a family daughter (as opposed to having the daughter marry out into the man's family); and (2) taking more than one wife, which offers dramatically greater opportunity to reproduce.
Well, wealth during that period was determined by military power, not by an International system as we now know. Without a good army there was no way to maintain land ownership, for example. Similarly, slaves could only be maintained by the threat of armies. Therefore, all the fabulous wealth of Roman families declined to practically nothing with the end of the Roman Empire.
Sort of off-topic; what was your overall impression of Wickham's book (or the greater series that his is a part of, if you've read them)? Do you think they're generally humble overviews of their respective periods?
Wickham's book is extremely hard to read - and as a matter of fact, I've never pulled off reading it to the end, even on the 3rd try. The issue is he's extremely meticulous, and goes on ad nauseam on methodology, on what to make of the sources he's referencing, and so forth. This is all extremely interesting, mind you. But the amount of methodological asides is such that you rapidly lose track of where you were in the narrative, and it's easy to go through a chapter without remembering what the first few pages were about, or indeed anything at all.
For the others in the series I've no idea. They've been on my reading list forever.
Is it a sensible expectation though? I would fully expect the richest/powerful to bear the brunt of retaliation as a civilization crumbles. The sins of the father and all that.
Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?
I wanted to make that point when I read this line:
>> But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.
A civilizations worth is always measured by those who might seek to control it. You could have a bunch of people getting on just fine, living out perfectly normal lives. But if there isn't any way for them to produce excess - be that labor output or extraction of natural resources - then they are not seen as valuable and will not be written about.
Do we know, is this because of a change in society, such that it became difficult or less important to track these things? or is it because of a change in the people, for example people of Roman descent mixing with local tribes, like the Franks, and the local tribes didn't have the traditions of tracking the things that would allow us to trace this back?
Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.
> I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories.
Not really, the oldest Scandinavian kings that historians are pretty certain were real people were Harald Fairhair who was king of Norway around 900CE, Gorm the Old who was king of Denmark around 930CE, and Eric the Victorious who was king of Sweden around 970CE.
And the sources we have for the ancient kings were usually continental scholars, monks, bishops, or missionaries, who most probably had an agenda, and an antagonistic view of the pagans up north. And likewise, when the Scandinavians told their history to the weird people from the south, they probably embellished their stories.
...unlike for example Charles Martel and early French dynasties, who were 200 years earlier than the known Scandianavians.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Scandinavia was a completely uncivilized backwater. :-)
That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by the Christian Church. Of course, the ascension of Christianity as a power is also a result of the decline of Rome itself, so it is not like Christianity caused this, but it was a big factor in the cultural destruction that occurred at that time.
"Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe."
? 'Pagan culture' is not some unified set of cultural norms. Rather, it's a broad category of possibly totally unrelated activities. Some of them codified via Rome (but those were adapted to Christianity) and then other, local ones.
The Christians in 300 CE were the most organized group on the continent, which was part of the reason the Emperor adopted Christianity.
An organized group of busy bodies might cause the decline of some thing (i.e. paganism) but certainly not the decline of the written word, education, governance etc. just the opposite.
One might argue that with the failure of Imperial Order, and the onset of tribal wars, it was the monks that carried most of the flame of civilization, which eventually led to the renewal of civil order and the reasonable ability to establish something approach civility.
Which is maybe close to the classical 'dark ages' narrative. Now of course maybe it was not as dark as we thought, but we certainly don't have a lot leftover from that time. Hence the historical narrative.
I am not saying the Christianity lead to the decline of the written word, education, and governance. I am saying that it contributed to the end of oral traditions that were the only form of history known by non-Romanized pagans. It also lead to the destruction of many monuments and collections of books associated to pagan traditions in Rome.
I also don't believe that Christianity had the power to destroy civilization. They were just the result of the decay of economic power of Rome, which lead the people to organize around something other than the traditional government structure. It also had to do with the idea that the old gods were failing to defend Romans, so why not joining this new cult that seems to protect the poor and dispossessed.
There’s a funny story about history of the Slavic tribes as it relates to this. Since Slavs didn’t write, the only reason we know their migration pattern into eastern europe and the balkans is by tracking when catholic churches stopped reporting back to HQ.
So at least on that end another reason for the break in history and lineage is that the people are completely different and in fact have no lineage back to Roman times.
Even though centuries later they converted to Christianity and started wondering why they don’t feel as Roman as they should.
Others have reported issues with archaeological and historical evidence from this same period, proposing that up to 700 years of mainstream chronology shouldn't be there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745763
Especially interesting from your link is that all the royal lines of Europe trace their origins to Charlemagne, who according to these alternative chronologies was probably a myth.
As a comment to that article references: it’s certainly a great story, but it makes it seem that this is the catalogue of the library, when in fact it is one of 16 volumes, 14 of which are already known.
The referenced page at The Arnamagnæan Institute stays:
“There were 16 volumes of indices in all; 14 of these are in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, where what remains of Colón’s library is kept. The other two were presumed missing — but now it seems that one of them wound up in the collection of Árni Magnússon.“ [1]
It’s great that this was found (and one is still missing) but perhaps not quite as profound as the article would lead one to believe.
Re-reading this article from The New York Times Magazine, “Recycling Is Garbage” (1996) is really interesting today. It goes over the whole panic that kicked off the recycling movement during that time period.
I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation about 10 years ago. There were a lot of good references and footnotes.
But way into the novel, as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues:
“But, that said, who invited them here? It’s their own doing, f… th… in the f…”, he suddenly said, raising his head.”
But there was no footnote indicating what the redacted text was, which I found odd. I went to various other online translations and all had the phrase redacted in a similar way.
I even found an original Russian version online and even that was redacted. (I don't know a lick of Russian so it took a bit to find it.)
The original text had:
— А и то сказать, кто же их к нам звал? Поделом им, м… и… в г…. — вдруг сказал он, подняв голову.
I asked some of my Russian-speaking colleagues what this was and even they were a bit stumped but after some searching they found the redacted text was
м[ать] и[хъ] в г[узно]
Which they said was some crude old-fashioned way to say to basically screw their mother in the ass.
I recently read 'The Idiot', translated by Ignat Avsey (I enjoyed his 'Karamazov Brothers' translation), and it contained a few similar redactions with no notes as to why. I thought it was maybe just a stylistic device.
It is indeed a common literary device in 19th century Russian lit. Usually with proper names to make them more "anonymous" but contemporary readers would know exactly what was being referenced.
For example, most of the place names in Crime and Punishment are redacted, but it's so clear where everything happens there are walking tours in St Petersburg.
In my copy of Crime and Punishment it has some names (especially place names) where the end notes say it was partially redacted to get the manuscripts past censors. Not necessarily the case for every redaction though.
That is, the censor is some bored middle-class beaurocrat rather than a true believer. So all you need is to give the him plausible deniability so he can turn around to his bosses and say "Hey, he redacted the name, how was I to know he was talking about your mother."
It was not the case at the time. Censors were bright guys, including e.g. great writer Goncharov, or Nikitenko, who hadn't written any novels, but left very thoughtful memoires. On many occasions censors of controversial books were reporting to the tzar personally, or were tzars themselves (e.g. Nikolay I censored Pushkin).
Most 19th century was depressing and stagnant time wrt politics, so books drew immense public interest.
That said, op's example would be automatically censored by the author himself, since this language was unprintable in 1860s.
I don't know about the Dostoevsky's places, always thought it was a traditional trope - places named with the first letter are ubiquitous in Russian novels.
Edit: also, it's worth noting that much censorship was made to make books suitable for morally unstable or easily agitated demographics, like women, so sometimes the motives for a particular edit could be hard to relate from modern relativistic perspective.
Oh, I'm aware of place names and certain people beginning with just the first letter (such as 'Prince S.' in 'The Idiot'), but certain words were blanked out with stars, such as 'B*'. It happened only a handful of times in 'The Idiot', sometimes for a name a occasionally for a place. I don't recall that form of redaction ever appearing in 'The Karamazov Brothers', though.
I think he was abbreviating/f@c#ifying «морда ишака в говно» in the original Russian. The last word is a very old fashioned term for "shit" and it means "put their face in it" where face is really muzzle of an ass with similar connotation. The Polish translation I read used „pyskiem w g…” so it's more obvious ;)
I noticed they mentioned the speed reduction "Boston, for example, has reduced the city speed limit from 30 miles per hour to 25 mph." Cambridge across the river followed suit soon afterward, but having lived there for decades I can't say I've noticed one iota of difference in the speed cars travel. 25 mph is still ridiculously fast in most of the tight neighborhood streets. Really the speed limit should be reduced even further to 20 mph and even 15 in some areas accompanied by much stricter enforcement. It's not uncommon to see cars hitting 40+ going down some of the straighter roads that emanate out of the major squares.
I am a daily all-weather bike commuter and to be honest have not had a problem with cars. I don't really mind the concept of SOVs- we use one ourselves; it's just that they need to be much more tightly controlled at least in these neighborhoods.
I live in a town here the main street has a posted speed limit of 25 that absolutely nobody obeys and the average speed of traffic is always around 40.
If you take a road with a "natural" speed and try to artificially restrict with a speed limit, unless you are prepared to have officers posted on that road at all times ticketing people will ignore the limit entirely and go the "natural" speed of the road.
I see it all the time, all over, especially since I live in PA where the state thinks its a really sensible idea to keep almost every highway at 55 mph no matter what. When you try to heavily constrain car speed well below the natural speed of the road people simply stop trying to obey the limit at all and go whatever speed they want.
i wish this were more common knowledge. narrowing lanes is among the best ways to slow cars down, if that's the goal.
but in many cases, that goal is missapplied to reduce accidents. accidents are typically not caused by speed, but rather distraction or anger. it hard to enforce attention and mindfulness, so we regulate speed as a (poor) proxy (partially for harm reduction, as speed increases severity of accidents), which directly leads people to wrongly associate speed as the cause of accidents.
it makes sense, for example, to reduce vehicle speeds around schools to reduce harm in case of accidents with small people. but rather than an artificial speed limit that depends on police enforcement, narrow the lanes to 8 feet and people will naturally drive 15-20 mph in those school zones without the added enforcement burden (and use the remaining road space for bike lanes).
Lower speed leads to fewer deaths; at ~18 mph almost no one dies, compared to 80% of pedestrians who are hit at 30 mph die. Your reasoning comes from another angle it might be correct but you can never assume people are attentive in traffic, neither pedestrians nor drivers, that's why you need rules and infrastructure that makes it possible to share the roads.
In California (and I believe many other states), what you describe would be considered a speed trap, and it isn't allowed. Speed limits are supposed to be set by measuring how fast people drive on the roads. If 85% of drivers go 40, then that's the speed limit. If a city/county hasn't surveyed a street recently, then an officer cannot park their vehicle and hand out tickets for speeding (though they can give a ticket if they are driving their vehicle and see someone speeding) - because that could be a speed trap.
In 2016, the speed limit was enforceable on only 19% of streets in Los Angeles due to the speed trap law. The city has made great efforts recently to update their speed surveys, resulting, in most cases, in an increase in speed limits.
The roads are engineered wrong. If you design a road for 40, then set the speed limit at 25, it's not going to work. You have to re-design the road for the 25 MPH speed limit. There are several ways to do this, and they are well known.
Of course cities are chronically underfunded for infrastructure, so this is really hard to do in practice.
The city wide speed limit was irrelevant in both cities to begin with because in 99.99% of places you couldn't get up to that speed or if you could it would be uncomfortable (narrow streets, poor visibility, etc).
Conditions where one can even go 25+ for more than a couple hundred yards are rare and basically limited to main roads in low traffic conditions (i.e. late at night). These roads already had good bike lanes and the one cyclist riding in said lane at 1am is unlikely to be bothered by the one car that's also around going 30-40 in a separate lane (or I'm not at least).
In the UK, people against 20mph limits often oppose them while claiming that they're never able to get above that speed anyway. Why are they opposing it then? The answer is simple - it's not true and on many streets you're able to drive at 30 or over (if you disregard other people's safety). I would sincerely doubt this was any less the case in the US where traffic lanes even on 'tight' streets seem to be stupidly wide. Many drivers also seem perfectly happy to break the speed limit in their desperate rush to get the back of a queue or to a red traffic light.
It's all very well having cars going at 40mph past you on a bike until the driver of one of them gets distracted or makes a simple mistake and hits you. Then you'll wish they were doing 20!
You can't just slap a 25 sign on a stretch of road where 90% of people feel like 30 is reasonable 90% of the time and expect people to go 25. Without Orwellian enforcement that does not work, not enough people will comply with the new limit. You need to make people actually feel like 25 is the right speed to go. Allowing on street parking on one side (less space for lanes) planting trees on the sidewalk (visually narrower), tuning traffic lights to create congestion , narrower lane markings and all sorts of other things can do that. You can try Orwellian enforcement but that will not fly in any American city (though it may take longer to crash and burn in some cities than others).
In California, you literally can't "slap a 25 sign on a stretch of road where 90% of people feel like 30 is reasonable 90% of the time." That would be a violation of the vehicle code, which states that speeds are determined by the 85th percentile of operating speeds.
As far as "laws CA has that most places don't have" that seems like one of the few reasonable ones. (and I say that as someone who has spent way to much time reading up on traffic and vehicle speed related things). In addition to delivering reasonable speed limits in most places it prevents towns from lowering speed limits in key areas to enable law enforcement rent seeking and probably saves countless hours of arguing over speed limits in local government.
Another perspective is that "speeding leads to increased speed limit."
Generally, many streets are not designed in a context-sensitive way, but instead designed to fit the standards of a limited functional roadway classification system (arterial, collector, local). The passive safety approach of the '60s, as championed by the NHTSA, assumed that crashes are inevitable, and so the safety focus was put on preventing injury after a crash. Thus arterials, for example, have a similar design in which many roadside objects (trees, signs, lights, bollards, etc) were removed, with a "soft landing" on the side. And now we have big wide straight streets that, in their design, encourage us to drive faster.
There are extensive efforts to revise this CA law because of the unintended consequence that it makes roads more dangerous for non-vehicular travelers.
Once thing I've noticed is that for the large majority of US drivers, the speed limit is a very weak signal for how fast they should drive. I think the strongest signals are the driver's perceived safeness and the "flow of traffic", although the 2nd might actually just be a corollary of the 1st. If it "feels safe" to be driving 35mph, then most drivers are going to drive 35mph regardless of the speed limit.
This is the crux of the matter. If people really thought they'd get a speeding ticket, perhaps they wouldn't speed. I live in a big city similar to Boston and I've never seen someone pulled over for speeding though. After all, what are the odds that:
1. A car speeds
2. In front of a cop
3. The cop can safely pursue the speeding vehicle in city traffic
Roads need to be redesigned so that going fast feels dangerous. Until then, there's no way to enforce it enough to actually change driver behavior. The US loves its wide roads that you can feel comfortable doing 80 on... until it starts to build narrow little shared streets people won't slow down.
I believe enforcement of moving violations in the Boston metro is impossible. It is impossible because there is not enough room for an officer in a car to pull a vehicle over while simultaneously keep traffic moving at a reasonable speed. The police have purposely chosen to not enforce moving violations in order to prioritize traffic.
In Chicago they've reduced the speed limit on one of the most frequented bike routes to 20 mph in some areas but its had perceivably no effect. My perception is that cars still average 25 to 35 mph through these areas and I've yet to ever see someone pulled over for speeding.
If I recall correctly, during the "Big Dig" work they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to run the new harbor tunnel road under the channel and deal with the water, and mud, etc. The entire South Bay has already been almost entirely filled in as can be seen on the map at the top of the linked article. Why not just finish it off entirely? Does it serve any actual purpose at this point?
I always feel like a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the Seaport. Sure, it's nice to see the development happening, but it still feels very car-centric and cut off from the rest of the city. Just looking at a satellite image shows that there's a lot more roads and parking than actual buildings. It also feels very disconnected from the city center. Getting into town requires a fairly long walk across one of several windy, car-filled bridges.