Open Thread, 10/01/2017
Thinking about Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. It’s a good book. I’d recommend it. But a lot of the research highlighted pre-dates the era of the “reproducibility crisis.” That is, some of the positive results just didn’t end up being replicated after this book was written (more ethical behavior if you show […]
Open Thread, 09/24/2017
Reading Harold Marcus’ A History of Ethiopia. So far a little too heavy on diplomatic as opposed to social history. My curiosity was piqued when reading The Fortunes of Africa when the author observed that the geopolitical extend of the modern Ethiopian state was partially a function of a relatively late state expansion in the 19t […]
Open Thread, 9/17/2017
Reading Vietnam: A New History. The author has an apologia/explanation for why he is focusing not just on European colonialism, but the history of what became Vietnam back to the first contacts with Han China (with some perfunctory archaeological passages). This is great in theory, but from what I have read so far we’re going […]
Open Thread, 09/10/2017
Read The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith this weekend. It’s a quick read, and a pretty good concise survey of the religion and its history. Recommended. Next up I think I’ll tackle Martin Meredith’s The Fortunes of Africa. Genomic evidence for population specific selection in Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo linguistic groups in Africa. […]
Open Thread, 9/4/2017
I found the above video through Rod Dreher. It touched me on a visceral level because the baby in the first portion looks strikingly like my youngest. He’s sitting and smiling so much now. Really appreciating his infant-hood, as this is the third time we’re going through this. All I can say in relation to […]
Open Thread, 08/27/2017
I showed my daughter a photo of my maternal grandfather yesterday. He was holding me in his lap. It’s probably about 1981, so he would have been about 85 years old then. I was his first grandchild, as he had a family late in life. He saw a lot of changes in his life. Born […]
Open Thread, 08/20/27
I’ve been off the map for a bit because I’m eclipse chasing. #TotalityOrBust as they say. The whole family has been converging on zone of totality, and now we’re there. Obviously I’m excited. There are lots of things going on in the world. One thing though that I’m beginning to think is that people would […]
Open Thread, 08/13/2017
Busy with kids and life. But perhaps time to read Peter Turchin’s Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. I was skeptical when Peter presented this idea years ago. Less so now. I’m on the eclipse train. The whole family will be chasing it soon. Paul Thompson is on Twitter. If you read […]
Open Thread, 07/06/2017
I know that George R. R Martin has stated that the ending to A Song of Ice and Fire is going to be bittersweet. R. Scott Bakker’s conclusion to the Aspect Emperor tetralogy ends with a bittersour ending. Fair warning. Also, the writing of the last third of The Unholy Consult was good in terms […]
Open Thread, 07/31/2017
Read a bit of The Unholy Consult. People who say George R R Martin’s work is too dark? They need to really read a bit of R. Scott Bakker, and Martin will seem to like someone who sees the world through rose-colored glasses. I’m thinking of reading The Witchwood Crown later because I might need […]
Open Thread, 07/23/2017
Finished The Enigma of Reason. The basic thesis that reasoning is a way to convince people after you’ve already come to a conclusion, that is, rationalization, was already one I shared. That makes sense since one of the coauthors, Dan Sperber, has been influential in the “naturalistic” school of anthropology. If you’ve read books like […]
Open Thread, 07/16/2017
I know that Game of Thrones is premiering tonight, but just wanted to remind readers that R. Scott Bakker’s The Unholy Consult will be out in a week. The author, R. Scott Bakker, has a blog, Three Pound Brain. He has some strange ideas…much of which I can’t make heads or tails of. But that’s […]
Open Thread, 07/09/2017
I’m a sucker for the aesthetics of Norden. Why? I wonder if part of it is that the fringe of Northern Europe is a science fictional setting. The long dark nights during the cold winter, and the twilight during midsummer. The sun may be bright, it never gets too high in the sky. The 13th […]
Open Thread, 7/3/2017
Reading The Enigma of Reason. Pretty good so far. Not incredibly surprising to me so far. To be clear, their argument is somewhat orthogonal to the whole ‘rationality’ debate you may be familiar with from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work (e.g., see Heuristics and Biases). One of the major problems in analysis is that […]
Open Thread, 6/25/2017
I’m beyond the “keto flu.” That was tough. A few months ago I asked a Hindu nationalist friend of mine the best persons who promote the “Out of India Theory.” One name he forwarded to me was Koenraad Elst. Though Elst and I disagree on facts in relation to the issue at hand, a reader […]
Open Thread, 06/18/2017
In the centuries around and before 1000 A.D. there was a “Viking international” of sorts. Harald Hardrada may have died in England trying to become king of that nation, but he served for a time in the Varangian Guards in Constantinople. His connections to Kievan Rus were such that priests in the Eastern Christian tradition […]
Open Thread, 06/12/2017
Every now and then I check Kindle Daily Deals, and I saw the book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. The author is a legitimate professor so I bought it even though the title seemed a little obnoxious (I was really disappointed with the nature of the scholarship in Emmett Scott’s Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: […]
Open Thread, 06/05/2017
Just a plug for Elements of Evolutionary Genetics by Charlesworth & Charlesworth. These are two great evolutionary geneticists, and we’re lucky to have a “core dump” from them on hand. The curious thing is that there is so much science that is tacit and implicit, that the passing of each generation of scholars means that […]
Open Thread, 5/29/2017
The above talk from David Reich is very good. Highly recommended. Chris Wickham’s Medieval Europe is pretty good, though it is very similar to his The Inheritance of Rome and Framing the Early Middle Ages. Rod Dreher finds out it is highly like he has some African ancestry from a slave ancestor. This seems to […]
Open Thread, 05/21/2017
Sorry database was down yesterday. Something weird happened that my scripts couldn’t pick up and I was traveling. Will update the scripts as needed.