History of the First Peoples - Charles Mann's 1491

Charles Mann wrote a 2002 article in the Atlantic about the human history of the Americas prior to the European invasion. This article became a 2004 NYT essay and then a well regarded 2006 book.

Most recently this letter to Brad DeLong, published on Brad's blog, is a great advert for the book (emphases mine) ...

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

... Pennington correctly observes that I "barely mentioned the horrible [e]ffects of the wars that went on between the whites and indians." This is because I was writing about demography and demographically they didn't amount to much. By the 18th century, disease had already wiped out 75-95% of the native population of the Americas. Indian warfare, awful as it often was, simply piled on another few percentage points to the mortality count.

... As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

...many European innovations were directly related to the existence of domestic animals. At the time of its construction, the Roman highway system had no direct equivalent in the Americas. Paved roads are obviously a sign of technological development, because you need them for large-scale transportation, right? But it would have been nuts for Indians to have built such roads, because they didn't have wheeled vehicles. And they didn't have wheeled vehicles (except as toys) because they didn't have horses, and they evidently calculated that the small gains in efficiency for human-powered vehicles was not worth the large costs in labor and materials to build highways, especially when rivers were an attractive alternative. (Compared to Europe, much of the Americas is river-rich.) So does this mean that Native America was less developed?

Lauren Tombari asks, "Wouldn´t there be some evidence of the many towns Desoto saw? Would there be ~100 million graves from the 95% death rate?" She will be happy to learn there is lots of evidence of the many towns seen by DeSoto. Although it is inexplicably absent from US history textbooks, there were literally thousands of mound cities and towns in the US Southeast and the Mississippi valley. Many have been destroyed, but my book, 1491, has a map of some of the main sites that remain. About the graves: the answer is no. In epidemics, people generally aren't buried, but left to die where they fall. The vast majority of those skeletons simply vanish. An example of this is the slaughter of the buffalo. We know from abundant historical records that less than 150 years ago hunters killed millions of bison in the Great Plains. Yet if you drive around there now, you don't see heaps of bones. The same, alas, happened to Indians. Of course it didn't happen to every Indian -- and there are many, many known Indian graveyards, so many that the federal government has passed special legislation to protect them.

... In this country, the French, Spanish, Dutch and English made more than 20 attempts to found colonies before the Pilgrims. All but one of them failed. The exception was Jamestown, in which almost 5 out of 6 colonists sent in the first 15 years died -- something that most people would regard as a failure. (St. Augustine, in Florida, was founded before Plimoth, but it was abandoned for years before being resettled, so I would count it as a failure, too.) Then comes the epidemic in New England, and suddenly, beginning with the Pilgrims, almost every English colony survives and thrives.

The thesis, in short, is that the pre-euro population of the Americas was tens of millions of people, perhaps 100 million. A larger population than the Europe of that time.

A possible counter-argument would be to ask why then did Amerindians not have their equivalent of the Euro's embedded bio-weapons? A population of that size should be able to support some very nasty viruses.

The Atlantic article argues that humans disseminated throughout the Americans long before 12,000 BCE, however I think recent gene data supports the 12,000 BCE date for all living descendants of the first people. Animal extinction and canine genomic data may also support the 12,000 BCE date. If 12,000 BCE is in fact the date for entrance to the Americas, that might also argue against such a vast population.

See also: Squanto's story, European rat plagues kill American rats, Mann's 2004 NYT essay, European dog diseases kill American dogs.

Regardless of the original population the euro "conquest" (inheritance, almost) of the Americas is an abject lesson in the awesome power of biological WMDs.

Romney and Mormon theology

Four years ago I wrote about John Krakauer's book on Mormon fundamentalism. I've also visited the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City -- something no tourist should miss.

Between those two primary sources, and a few other readings, I came away thinking that Mormonism is no odder than any other religion, but that it suffers the great disadvantage of being born in the modern world. The Mormon church has only become socially respectable within the past 30 years (really end polygamy, deemphasize the sin of being pigmented), and we know, unfortunately, far more about Smith than Buddha or Christ.

Here's how the Enclyclopedia Brittanica describes Mormon theology:

...The Book of Mormon recounts the history of a family of Israelites that migrated to America centuries before Jesus Christ and were taught by prophets similar to those in the Old Testament. The religion Smith founded originated amid the great fervour of competing Christian revivalist movements in early 19th-century America but departed from them in its proclamation of a new dispensation. Through Smith, God had restored the “true church”—i.e., the primitive Christian church—and had reasserted the true faith from which the various Christian churches had strayed..

The Britannica article omits some interesting details. Mormons believe the ancient peoples of America fought a cataclysmic "high tech" (compared to pre-civil war America) battle. The story is no more bizarre than "Noah's Ark", but it's a different story than Christians are accustomed to hearing.

This is why I've been amazed that Romney has been able to run for president within the GOP. Socially and culturally he has a lot in common with Christian fundamentalists, but so do Islamic fundamentalists. Mormonism is no closer to Christianity than is Islam. How does this
ever play within the GOP?

This must annoy people like Christopher Hitchens who struggles in Slate to find a secular justification for asking Romney about the Mormon church ...

Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about his Mormon faith. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

...It ought to be borne in mind that Romney is not a mere rank-and-file Mormon. His family is, and has been for generations, part of the dynastic leadership of the mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith. It is not just legitimate that he be asked about the beliefs that he has not just held, but has caused to be spread and caused to be inculcated into children. It is essential. Here is the most salient reason: Until 1978, the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an officially racist organization. Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978. We need to know how he justified this to himself, and we need to hear his self-criticism, if he should chance to have one...

Hmph. The argument feels week.

It would be interesting to know whether Romney is a racist or not, but we should be able to find that out from the Boston media who knew him as governor of Massachusetts. Otherwise Romney's religion and theology are mostly curiosities for secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists.

For Christian, particularly fundamentalists and evangelicals, the questions are far more important. I'm a bit surprised, but mostly amused, that nobody asks on their behalf.

The cinema beneath the Seine

Today we all feel proud of the French.

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited:

...Klausmann and his crew are connaisseurs of the Parisian underworld. Since the 1990s they have restored crypts, staged readings and plays in monuments at night, and organised rock concerts in quarries. The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since....

Emily thinks they've been reading Neil Gaiman.

So is the spelling "connaisseurs" a clever word play?

The American cellular empire has fallen, let the wars begin

This is what Europeans have had forever:

Verizon Wireless Says ‘Bring Your Own’ Device - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

... Verizon Wireless has stunned the wireless world by announcing that by sometime next year it will open its network to “any apps, any device.” There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”...

The excellent NYT blog post connects this move to the big bandwidth brawl (BBB) over the 700 MHz US spectrum. On a related front T-Mobile announced a month or so ago that their future phones will support VOIP over Wifi.

The American cell phone empire as we've known it has fallen. It was a rotten tree of an empire, it only took one shove from Apple to bring it down.

Now we will see the mother of all bloodless battles. May the struggle be glorious and long.

Nanotechnology made real: inner life of a cell

This one came via a DeLong link. Here you can see the dreams of nanotechnology made real - 20 years ahead of time:

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell | Studio Daily:

... The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students... Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT, the animation illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli....

Everyone needs to watch this. I could make up a story for most of it, but I'd like to hear a technical commentary. DeLong's post apparently had that, but it's missing in action at the moment.

Housing: oh poop

This would be mildly worrying if it weren't written by Larry Summers.

FT.com / Columnists / Lawrence Summers - Wake up to the dangers of a deepening crisis:

....Several streams of data indicate how much more serious the situation is than was clear a few months ago. First, forward-looking indicators suggest that the housing sector may be in free-fall from what felt like the basement levels of a few months ago. Single family home construction may be down over the next year by as much as half from previous peak levels. There are forecasts implied by at least one property derivatives market indicating that nationwide house prices could fall from their previous peaks by as much as 25 per cent over the next several years.

We do not have comparable experiences on which to base predictions about what this will mean for the overall economy, but it is hard to believe declines of anything like this magnitude will not lead to a dramatic slowing in the consumer spending that has driven the economy in recent years.

Second, it is now clear that only a small part of the financial distress that must be worked through has yet been faced. On even the most optimistic estimates, the rate of foreclosure will more than double over the next year as rates reset on subprime mortgages and home values fall. Estimates vary, but there is nearly universal agreement that – if all assets were marked to market valuations – total losses in the American...

Since it is written by Summers it's a cut above mildly worrying.

The dysfunctional print media

I don't read TIME magazine. Good thing, given this story of TIME's fictional coverage of some recent federal legislation ...:

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon

... Klein, of course, never bothered to read the bill and still hasn't (even though he is published by Time to "report on" and opine about this bill). Instead, even now, he says that he has spoken with both Republicans and Democrats, and while Democrats insist that what he wrote was false, "the Republican Committee staff disagrees and says [his] reporting is correct."

In other words, Klein's GOP source(s) blatantly lied to him about what the bill does and doesn't do in order to manipulate him into uncritically feeding Time's readers the Rush Limbaugh Line -- namely, that Democrats are giving equal rights to Terrorists and preventing the Leader from eavesdropping on foreign Terrorists. And Klein dutifully wrote down what he was told in Time without bothering to find out if it was true and without ever bothering to talk to any of the bill's Democratic proponents. And no Time Editor knew enough or cared enough to bother correcting any of it. And thus, the unfortunate 4 million Americans who read and trust Time now think that the Democrats' FISA bill does the exact opposite of what it actually does.

That is the real story here. That's how our political system works. Scheming GOP operatives feed whispered lies to their favorite, most gullible, most slothful and/or dishonest Beltway journalists...

These stories do make me feel a bit better about the implosion of the print media. There's a lot of rot in that old world.

Unfortunately I suspect TIME is only giving its readers what they want to hear (and the truth is irrelevant). So things won't improve until the audience is upgraded.

The real threat to Microsoft and Apple

I'm not much of a salesman -- except on the rare occasion that I'm selling something I really believe in.

Twice I've made the big sale. One of those times was when I sold a rural school group on moving from the computer lab model to the computer library model -- @ 1992. Using the ultra-portable no hard-drive Apple Newton laptop.

Mercifully the school group came to their senses the next day and the plan died. A few months later the Newton laptop died too. Few now recall its brief existence.

Fifteen years later that original plan is becoming feasible ...

Charlie's Diary: Commoditizing our future

...Well, the OLPC XO-1 is now out, costs $188 in bulk (a chunk of which is attributable to the dollar collapsing in the meantime), and hasn't exactly taken the world by storm — but succeeded in sticking the proverbial cattle prod up Microsoft and Intel's collective arse. For too long, the software and CPU giants had been treating the PC market as a cash cow, with a natural floor on the price of the product; the XO-1 proved that they were overcharging grossly. Intel's reaction was the Classmate reference design, their own purported rival to the XO-1; the Asus Eee is what you get when a large far eastern OEM thinks 'hang on, can we commoditize this and sell it in bulk?' Microsoft, incidentally, failed to make it onto the Eee bandwagon because they wanted $40 for a Windows XP license — on a machine that starts at $250 for the stripped-down version. Mine runs Linux perfectly well, thank you, and comes with the basic stuff you need to be productive; OpenOffice, Thunderbird for email, Firefox as a web browser, and some other gadgets (like Skype and a webcam).

My first calculator cost about $180 in the early 1970s, required a plug, used wires to form numbers, and was bigger than my MacBook. Within 10 years similar machines were being distributed in cereal boxes.

That was commoditization.

I thought the same thing would happen to the Palm, that within 10 years we'd have similar things in our cereal boxes. After all, there were no moving parts.

That didn't happen, because Palm controlled the software and because the market for personal organizers turned out to be much smaller than I'd imagined.

I think Stross is right that we're again on the cusp of true calculator-style commoditization. The trick has been open source software, ruthless competition on the hardware side, the plummeting price of solid state storage and the development of low power designs that can run off commodity batteries (and outlets).

The DRM marketplace will keep proprietary system vendors alive for a while -- only they will be able to partner with media owners. How long, however, can the DRM market resist such a tide of low cost non-DRM compatible hardware?

On the other front, Google's Android reference mobile phone design has its natural home on millions of 2012 cell phones distributed throughout Africa.

Samsara happens.

This is a bad time for both Microsoft and (to a lesser extent) Apple to be demonstrating severe quality and reliability problems. Quality and cost-of-ownership are the most obvious ways Apple can slow the tide long enough to find a way to surf along (Android uses Apple's WebKit for example). If Apple and Microsoft continue to cede that advantage, they'll be obliterated.

Hmm. Microsoft cratering. The US dollar in free fall. Peak oil showing up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. A $400 billion mortgage market collapse. Should be an interesting decade.

Every human base pair mutated

A memorable comment on the effects of large numbers:

If mutations occur at random over the entire sequence of a species' genome, how can a complex organ such as an eye evolve? How can all the mutations that direct the development of that:

... At more than six billion individuals, the human species is now so large that every single base pair of the three billion in the genome is mutated several times, somewhere in the population, every generation. Some of these mutations are so harmful that they're eliminated before their carriers are even born. But the great majority of mutations are harmless (or at least tolerable), and a very few are actually helpful. These enter the population as exceedingly rare alternative versions of the genes in which they occur....

The response to the question doesn't address the hypothesis that clusters of genes may have higher mutation rates as an adaptive response to a novel ecological niche.

They really love me. The splogbots love me.

I'm reasonably sure I have a fairly small readership.

Ok, miniscule.

So it's interesting to note that I have some fan base. Sort of. Splogbots like me. They've like me since mid-2004.

What's a splog? Spam blogs, or splogs, are computer generated blogs that pull posts from true blogs and use them to generate new blogs with associated adwords. The business model is parasitic (like Dell's, for example); cloned content is harvested to attract readers, and adwords generate revenues. Splogbots use my full content RSS feeds to harvest posts, then they reuse these and others to create faux blogs. Spolsky described this well in 2005.

I'm sure there's a good biological analogy.

I know about this shady readership because one of my bloglines feeds is a subscription to the results of a Google Blog Search [1]. That canned search finds all blog postings that link into Gordon's Notes. So, if a post of mine links to another post of mine, and the first post is incorporated into a splog, then it shows up as a hit on my standing search.

Google tries hard to filter out splogs (spam blogs) but lately there's been a surge in new hits showing up in my search, and they're all splogs. So for the moment they've slipped past Google's radar.

Ironically, this post may show up in a splog somewhere. So if you're reading this and the blog title is not "Gordon's Notes", you might be reading a splog. (Note Brad DeLong tends to quote entire posts, so if the blog is "Grasping Reality" you're in good hands).

So how do I feel about it?

I don't bother with adwords, so it's not like I'm losing revenue to the parasitic splogs. I do partly write to inject memes into the metamind, so I suppose a splog might help with that. On the other hand, Google used to confuse my blogs with splogs, perhaps because my original posts matched those appearing in the splogs (they seem to have fixed that problem).

So I'm ambivalent, but mostly bemused.

So why do they like me so much? I don't know the business, but a colleague of mine once moved to the Dark Side and started writing splogbots. I wonder sometimes if he used my blogs as an early test case ...

[1] http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=link:http://jfaughnan.blogspot.com&ie=utf-8

Update 11/29/07: I may have been seeing a part of a massive 'SEO poisoing' attack on Google. I think the links are going away now.

Tom Friedman joins David Brooks

Obsidian Wings says it well: "Tom Friedman Has Gone Insane"

Friedman has been pompous and pointless for about seven years, with extended digressions into lunacy.

He seemed to have been chastened for a bit, but his "Obama needs Cheney" meme is proof he's passed the point of no return.

Friedman has now joined David Brooks in my "do not read under any circumstances" category. I'll leave it others to read him and provide me with the summaries as needed.

The subprime mortgage story: a problem of the weak

Most everyone is weak sometime. I'm basically tossing a coin when I choose health care benefits.

Ok, so I don't know anyone who isn't tossing a coin when they choose health care benefits. It's just that some of us know we're gambling while other players are more naive. The truth is the guy at the other end of the table wrote the rules -- he knows the game much better than we can.

When it comes to mortgages things are simpler for us. We're not sub-prime (yet), the products we buy are relatively simple and definitely generic -- there are lots of eyes on our side.

In the sub-prime market the game is trickier and the players have fewer resources than we. Those players get fleeced:

Lost in a Flood of Debt - Bob Herbert - New York Times

... There is some truth to the assertion that a lot of buyers signed up for deals they should have known they couldn’t afford. But it won’t do for the fat cats to fall back on empty phrases like “buyer beware.”

The subprime mortgage frenzy was a shameful, highly-charged phenomenon, motivated by greed and played out on a field of rampant exploitation. The victims deserved more protection than they got. As Paul Leonard, director of the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending, told me this week: “You shouldn’t have a marketplace that’s a ‘buyer beware’ marketplace for the most important financial transaction of most people’s lives.”

It’s not too much to ask that when Americans of modest means put their economic futures on the line, we have regulations in place to see that they are not ripped off...

The players get fleeced, the CEO walks, and some investors win, some lose.

So what ought we to do for the players who get taken, what do we do for the weak?

If you're a social Darwinist or neo-Calvinist this is just one more way that the market eliminates the unfit. If you're Libertarian the strong owe no duty to the weak, and you're probably a social Darwinist as well. If you're conservative there's a good chance you're either a religious neo-Calvinist or de facto social Darwinist -- but there's probably a portion that favors some state protection for the weak.

For neo-Liberals like me then the transiently strong definitely owe a duty to the currently weak. The question is not if something ought to be done, but rather what's the most pragmatic course given the reality of politics, the power of the market, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

Bruce Springsteen. Saying thanks with Magic.

In October of 2004 my wife and I attended Springsteen et al's Vote For Change concert in Saint Paul (Neil Young dropped by.) My hearing hasn't been the same since, but I appreciated the sentiment.

Springsteen worked hard for the Kerry campaign, including writing a very good NYT OpEd.

It didn't work of course, but damn he did try. He didn't have to do any of it.

I thought back then I'd buy an album to say thanks. Unfortunately his next album had some nasty SONY DRM features -- it couldn't be ripped.

The other day I saw his newest album on sale at Starbucks: Magic. He's dumped SONY, this one is a plain old CD. So I got to express my thanks - at full price. I like the music too.

Tonight it's $9 on Amazon - a real bargain. #10 in music sales, so not too bad for an old rocker.

Thanks Bruce.

America 2016: how close are we tracking Fallows predictions?

Two and a half years ago Fallows wrote "Countdown to a Meltdown - A look back from the election of 2016". I came across it tonight; it's been a while since I read it.

It's the story of a nation that went off track in June of 2001:

... Before there was 9/11, however, there was June 7, 2001. For our purposes modern economic history began that day.

On June 7 President George W. Bush celebrated his first big legislative victory. Only two weeks earlier his new administration had suffered a terrible political blow, when a Republican senator left the party and gave Democrats a one-vote majority in the Senate. But the administration was nevertheless able to persuade a dozen Democratic senators to vote its way and authorize a tax cut that would decrease federal tax revenues by some $1.35 trillion between then and 2010.

This was presented at the time as a way to avoid the "problem" of paying down the federal debt too fast. According to the administration's forecasts, the government was on the way to running up $5.6 trillion in surpluses over the coming decade. The entire federal debt accumulated between the nation's founding and 2001 totaled only about $3.2 trillion—and for technical reasons at most $2 trillion of that total could be paid off within the next decade.4 Therefore some $3.6 trillion in "unusable" surplus—or about $12,000 for every American—was likely to pile up in the Treasury. The administration proposed to give slightly less than half of that back through tax cuts, saving the rest for Social Security and other obligations.

Congress agreed, and it was this achievement that the president celebrated at the White House signing ceremony on June 7. "We recognize loud and clear the surplus is not the government's money," Bush said at the time. "The surplus is the people's money, and we ought to trust them with their own money."

If the president or anyone else at that ceremony had had perfect foresight, he would have seen that no surpluses of any sort would materialize, either for the government to hoard or for taxpayers to get back. (A year later the budget would show a deficit of $158 billion; a year after that $378 billion.) By the end of Bush's second term the federal debt, rather than having nearly disappeared, as he expected, had tripled. If those in the crowd had had that kind of foresight, they would have called their brokers the next day to unload all their stock holdings. A few hours after Bush signed the tax-cut bill, the Dow Jones industrial average closed at 11,090, a level it has never reached again...

Well, that last part didn't pan out. The Dow is up and down right now, but we were up to 13,000 at one point. Of course if Fallows could really predict the DJIA he woudn't be writing a blog from Beijing. He also predicts economic calamity when with a 40% rise in the spot price of oil sometime around 2010 -- but we've already been through something close to that.

So he's not psychic. On the other hand the plummeting dollar and $400 billion plus housing market collapse happened roughly as predicted -- though we have yet to implement the massive federal trailer parks for families foreclosed from their homes. There's no discussion of global warming, but peak oil makes a brief show.

I hope I remember to take another look in 2009 ...

Quality crisis: software, hardware, publicly traded companies, food, toys and nations

My intuition has a reasonable, but not perfect, track record.

On the one hand I've been pretty good over the years with social and technological evolution. On the other hand I really don't understand why humanity is still in business forty years after the development of fusion weapons. I'm clearly missing something there.

Grains of salt advised. Anyway ...

My intuition is telling me that we have a 21st century "crisis of quality". I think this is related to some of my favorite themes, such as fraud (see esp. 21st century deception) and reputation management. It's demonstrated in the failures of the publicly traded company, our food and imported quality problems, and, I believe, the reelection of George Bush.

It may have its roots in anonymity, transience, and complexity.

Take my last week in the world of software and hardware for example:

• I spend an hour or so playing with Google's vaunted custom search only to discover their newest feature doesn't work.
  
• a trivially obvious bug in iPhoto 7 (iLife '08) destroys 3 family videos
• I discover you can't fully revert from Microsoft's buggy Office 2007 to their less buggy Office 2003
• I give up on my corporate XP box and rebuild, unable even now to say if the problem was hardware or software - or some interaction of flaws in both.
• I discover an emergent bug with IMAP interactions between multiple simultaneous user sessions of OS X Mail.app and Google's GMail implementation.
  

Yes. That's all in one week -- and I don't use either Vista or OS X 10.5.

That's a bad week.

Apple has a quality problem. Microsoft has a quality problem. Google has a quality problem.

The entire human world has a quality problem.

Except I seem to be the only one who's complaining.

Anyone else notice anything?