The new Carnivalesque, a feast of early modern history, is now up on The Long Eighteenth.
Do check it out, but just in case you don’t I can’t resist pointing specifically to one of its items, that on Mary Mark Ockerbloom’s Live Journal. It is about Phillis Wheatley, the first African American, the first slave, and the third woman in the United States to publish a book of poems.
Over on My London Your London I’ve a review of a fascinating production reworking the medieval ship of fools metaphor for the modern age. Yet Andrew Bovell’s Ship of Fools also keeps one foot in the medieval world – in Basel of 1492 to be precise.
Having a mad day yesterday, and with an allocation of approximately 30 seconds for lunch, I did as I’ve done many times before and grabbed a Snickers bar (on the ground that since it contains peanuts, it contains a marginally larger amount of nutrition than a Mars bar).
But on reading the ingredient list, I’ve made a resolution, not to do this again.
Ingredients: sugar, peanuts, glucose syrup, vegetable fat, skimmed milk powder….
It says elsewhere 24% of 27% is peanuts. So add the sugar and glucose syrup, it must be something over 60% sugars (adding glucose and “sugar”), some 20% vegetable fat.
Yes there is some “chocolate” in there somewhere – cocoa butter and cocoa milk are listed after the skim milk powder.
So I bought some bars in the health store and am going to try to always carry one; of course this takes a special effort, since Snickers bars are everywhere, and health food stores aren’t.
An absolutely fascinating discovery – chimps using purpose-made spears for hunting – and it is mostly the females that do it.
The researchers say spear use in Fongoli is performed almost exclusively by females and youngsters. In spite of the fact that the researchers were concentrating on male behaviour during their study, they saw only one attempt at spear-making by an adult male out of a total of 22 episodes.
“[This] strengthens the case that in all likelihood the origins of technology [in humans] were with females,” says McGrew.
…Pruetz says females and youngsters are forced to innovate to get protein for their diets… “The females and maybe the young males too are basically having to solve problems in a creative way because of competition with adult males,” she says. “That may be by technology, and not by brute strength or force.”
This is a population, in Senegal, that is only just starting to be studied, and is displaying lots of cultural traits not seen in chimps who live in more comfortable circumstances. They also use caves as dwelling places, and have “swimming pools”.
A remarkably sensible and well-though-out piece about the end of privacy – the children growing up on MySpace, YouTube et al.
The one thing missing from this piece is an exploration of the historical and cross-cultural dimensions. Privacy is a very Western concept, and it might come to be a concept thought of as an oddity, one exhibited in a few states of a few centuries.
No, I’m not very comfortable with that concept, but then I’m a child of the 20th-century West (and an only child at that!)
To an LSE Environmental Initiatives Network seminar last night on China. I had meant to get there for a talk on Dongtan, the “zero-carbon” new city that is going to be the size of Bristol and will have the first phase of 30,0000 people living there within little more than three years.
But events being events, I didn’t make that half, but the second half, about the absolutely fascinating China Dialogue website, presented by its editor, Isabel Hilton.
She presented a bit of a dampener on the Dongtan enthusiasm, pointing out that China is continuing to build other cities at phenomenal speed, and not on the Dongtan model.
She said that Dongtan was typical of the top-down environmental model now being applied in China. If you spoke to the senior leadership and read the 11th Five-Year Plan you’d feel good about China’s moves on sustainable development. That plan represented a substantial change in direction from the 10th, which although it set a few environmental targets, all of these were missed and there were no consequences.
The 11th Plan by contrast represents a rebalancing of growth model – the terminology is of working “towards a harmonius society” At the official level that’s fine, and also encouraging is the view on the street. The general view is clearly that the environment needs to be cleaned up.
Where the problem lies is in the middle levels of officialdom. Ms Hilton spoke about Anwei province, which has a huge coal industry that has caused enormous environmental damage about which there is great local concern. But the businessmen who run the companies that run the mines aren’t worried, because of course they don’t live in Anwei province, and the environmental damage doesn’t affect them.
“The ‘development first environment second’ Jiang Zemin model is still held very widely across the country.” For most Chinese, pollution is the price you have to pay for prosperity. Memories of hunger and deprivation are still strong.
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