• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
This is the Dude House, where the chief executive officers of every fraternity in America meet once a year to discuss strategy.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 16, 2019
How Vikings Hunted Themselves Off of Greenland
Even marauding Norsemen can be guilty of entrepreneurial overreach.
Overhunting led to smaller and smaller walruses, until the Viking colony on Greenland became unviable.
WHEN ERIK THE RED LANDED on Greenland in the year 985, he was probably astounded by the residents of his new neighborhood. Heavy-set, gray-skinned, and ivory-tusked, walruses crowded the shores of the world’s largest island.
Erik and his Viking compatriots got right to work, killing the animals in droves and shipping off their precious tusks to mainland Europe. But a few hundred years later, in the 15th century, the Viking colony in Greenland collapsed.
Now, a study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that the insatiable Norse demand for ivory is what may have done the Greenland Vikings in. In a classic tale of devil-may-care capitalism, these Vikings seem to have overplayed their entrepreneurial hand, by selling (and hunting down) so much of their stock that it directly affected their product.
Hefty, tusked, and fierce—yet still no match for Vikings.
“Measurements of the tusk sockets showed that walruses hunted later in the life of the Norse colony tended to be smaller, a classic sign of over-exploitation,” says James Barrett, an archaeologist at Cambridge University and lead author of the paper, in an email. …
Saint Boromir of Sansón was the only saint to have been de-canonized for financial irregularities.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 16, 2019
Prohibition Was a Failed Experiment in Moral Governance
A repealed amendment and generations of Supreme Court rulings have left the constitutional regulation of private behavior in the past. Will it stay there?
A century ago, Prohibition went into effect around the United States, and the evangelical Protestants who had fought for 80 years to make it a reality celebrated. With the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which proscribed “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” across the United States, they had achieved something unparalleled by any movement before or since: They had introduced a new moral decree into the Constitution. In doing so, they believed that they had enshrined Protestant virtue in American life and saved the country from decay—forever.
But the Eighteenth Amendment holds another distinction: It’s the only amendment that’s ever been repealed. The Prohibition era lasted just 13 years, and is now regarded as a cautionary tale for the regulatory state. The restriction of private behavior has outlived the alcohol ban, persisting in state and local governments and finding new life in modern conservative administrations. But the idea of using a constitutional amendment for that restriction, once held up by temperance advocates as a holy grail, has been tarnished and, mostly, left to the past.
The Eighteenth Amendment “was a failed experiment,” says Samuel Freeman, a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Pennsylvania. “They did make an amendment that had to do with a matter of private morality, and it didn’t work.”
Historically, he explains, such matters—including actions that don’t directly harm others, like consensual sexual activity and obscenity—were the province of colonial and local governments. When the union formed, states retained that authority; the Constitution established no overarching national system of criminal or civil law and laid out no moral prescriptions for citizens to follow. “The powers delegated to the proposed Constitution are few and defined,” James Madison emphasized in The Federalist Papers. “[They] will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.” With the introduction of the Bill of Rights, the Framers moved still farther away from moralistic legislation by limiting the areas in which the federal government could restrict the actions of the people it governed. …
Why philosophers could be the ones to tramsform your 2020
Long-dead thinkers from Socrates to Nietzsche are the latest hot property when it comes to self-help books. But can they really make effective gurus, asks Neil Armstrong.
Can a thinker who last plied his trade two millennia ago really help? Does a controversial 19th-Century German scholar make a good life coach? Might the study of Jean-Paul Sartre be the key to a new you?
More like this:
The rise of books you don’t read
A sociopath for our Instagram age
Publishers think the answer to all of these questions is a definitive ‘yes’ – for books positioning philosophers as self-help gurus are the latest trend in publishing.
The ever-burgeoning shelves of self-help books include releases by psychologists, athletes and mystics – but now it’s deep thinkers who are in vogue.
Last autumn saw the publication of Lessons in Stoicism by John Sellars, which aims to show how we can benefit from thinking like the ancient Stoics; and How To Be An Existentialist by Gary Cox, a “genuine self-help book offering clear advice on how to live according to the principles of existentialism formulated by Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and the other great existentialist philosophers”. Then there was How To Teach Philosophy To Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction to the Big Questions in Philosophy by Anthony McGowan, which begins by suggesting that studying philosophy “may empower you to become a better person”, and ends by considering the meaning of life.
Meanwhile the recently-published An Ethical Guidebook to the Zombie Apocalypse by Bryan Hall, imagines a Walking Dead-type scenario as a means to introduce the reader to some of the key moral dilemmas explored by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Kant. Then next week comes How to be a Failure and Still Live Well by Beverley Clack, which draws upon philosophy and theology to consider how failure can help you to live a good life. …
4 Accolades That Don’t Really Mean Anything Anymore
We all want money and respect. Money gets you things, and respect tricks people into giving you more money. Respect often comes from awards and other gestures of recognition that say you’re the very best. The thing is, it’s easy to work the system and grab these, even if you don’t deserve it. Especially if you have money. Everything is very broken, is what I’m saying. The smart thing to do is to trust no one. Think about how …
4. The New York Times Bestsellers List Is A Random Sampling And Easily Gamed
Most readers are more likely to buy a book with the “New York Times Bestseller” tag on the cover, because how can a book be bad if a bunch other people already bought it? That’s just common sense. This is the reason there’s now a whole industry built around gaming that list.
Just last year, we learned that the Republican National Committee spent $90,000 on copies of a book by Donald Trump Jr. Sure, $90,000 is a pretty modest grift by the standards of modern politics, so something bigger had to be going on here. Had they bought those copies to push the title to the top of the Times bestsellers list? The answer is complicated. On the one hand, the book sold plenty even without the RNC boost. But on the two hand, the list included a notation that the book had been bulk-purchased. On the three hand, bulk purchases can be entirely legitimate. If you lead a local Don Jr. fan club and buy 100 copies for your 100 members, those are 100 real purchases. You’ll probably order directly from the publisher. And in that case, The New York Times will … not count those purchases. Confused?
That’s because The Times doesn’t tally all purchases, and intentionally doesn’t tell anyone how exactly they put their list together. Mainly, they track sales by sampling a secret selection of a few specific stores. Their list excludes purchases from stores it doesn’t monitor, as well as purchases direct from the publisher, many pre-orders, and even a lot of online sales.
Other exclusions are even stranger, and we only discover them when someone pokes around. Some people thrilled with Don Jr.’s New York Times ranking were less thrilled a year earlier when a book by Jordan Peterson appeared nowhere on the list despite being the fourth-highest-selling book in America. Pressed, The Times explained that they excluded it because the publisher was headquartered in Canada.
And while publicly no one knows which stores The Times samples to compile its list, some companies absolutely know, and for a fee, they’ll strategically buy your book from them. In 2011, the UCLA Health System hired one of these companies and got an otherwise obscure book on healthcare customer service to the top of the list. The week after, with no one juicing the numbers, sales dropped 96%. Doesn’t matter, because their marketing will always be able to boast about it being a #1 bestseller.
So if you have an idea for a YA novel starring yourself as a girl with superpowers in a love triangle, good news! Bestseller status can be yours instantly, for a price. Just don’t get caught. …
Creating a buzz: Turkish beekeepers risk life and limb to make mad honey
History is littered with stories of the psychoactive properties of deli bal, still produced today in the Kaçkar mountains
Hasan Kutluata has been producing mad honey in the mountains above the Black Sea for 30 years.
It is no surprise that a substance powerful enough to take out 1,000 battle-hardened mercenaries of the Roman republic has been the subject of fascination for millennia. Stories cataloguing the delights and the dangers of deli bal, or Turkish “mad honey”, crop up throughout history.
Pompey the Great was admired and feared throughout the ancient world, but an early misadventure with mad honey near the modern-day Black Sea city of Trabzon almost derailed his entire career.
The Roman general was pursuing the army of Mithridates VI in 97BC when in a stroke of military genius the Greco-Persian king ordered his troops to place bowls of the locally produced honey in the path of the advancing Romans. Three detachments of soldiers fell upon it, becoming delirious or fainting as they succumbed to its psychedelic effects. Mithridates’ troops returned to find Pompey’s men incapacitated and proceeded to slaughter the lot of them.
Mad honey is still produced in small quantities by beekeepers in the Kaçkar mountains above the Black Sea, the only place in the world other than the foothills of the Himalayas where indigenous species of rhododendrons produce a potent neurotoxin called grayanotoxin. If bees feed on enough rhododendron nectar, the mud-red honey they produce has a sharp scent, bitter taste – and for human consumers, a potential high. …
The Last Vestige of Internet Explorer Dies Today Died Yesterday
Microsoft has been teasing big changes to Microsoft Edge for nearly a year. Two years ago, the company announced that Edge would move to rely on the same Chromium code base as Google’s Chrome. Then came alphas, and betas, and even a build for macOS that I quite liked. The new version of Edge, which kills the ereader but becomes significantly better at reading the web, launches today. And with it, one of the last vestiges of Internet Explorer dies.
Internet Explorer and Edge might not have shared a name but they share the same logo—a shiny blue E that’s come to be a joke for a whole generation of computer users. Until today, Internet Explorer and Edge also shared an engine. All web browsers have one. It’s how they communicate with the internet.
Firefox relies on Gecko, while Safari relies on Webkit. Edge, until today, ran on EdgeHTML, a fork of Trident, the engine behind Internet Explorer.
When Microsoft decided to use EdgeHTML, it made sense. Internet Explorer had once been the biggest web browser around and consequently, lots of web page designers focused their energies on making their sites work for IE. But Chrome had a foothold when Edge launched and Microsoft’s new browser just never gained the popularity it needed. Instead, more and more web page designers focused on making the best looking sites the could—for Chrome.
Chrome uses the Blink engine and the source code originates with the open-source Chromium project. The Edge that launches today will rely on Blink and Chromium too. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
The House Intelligence Committee released a trove of “ridiculously incriminating” evidence provided by Lev Parnas that points to Donald Trump’s direct involvement in Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Debate season is in full swing. Last night, the CNN panel grilled the candidates about their positions on Medicare, climate change, and for some reason, nothing about women’s reproductive rights– but the biggest question of the night was: Why won’t Tom Steyer stop looking at us?
THANKS to TBS and FUll Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the House voting to send the articles of impeachment against President Trump as damning new evidence against Trump’s henchmen emerges.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
遊びたいけど出たくない。Maru wants to play but never goes out.
Fans of Coca-Cola can thank the lost pirate tribes of Scandinavia for pioneering this one crucial discovery.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 16, 2019
FINALLY . . .
Ash From the Taal Eruption Will Stick Around ‘Pretty Much Forever’
Some ash particles will blow or wash away, but others will sealed into the sedimentary record.
The ash muted and mangled the landscape.
OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS, the area around the crater of the Taal volcano, which sits south of Manila on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, has become a more monochromatic world. The volcano belched ash—very fine fragments of volcanic rock, made up of glass and crystals—several miles into the air, CNN reported. When the ash drifted to the ground, it carpeted the usually lush landscape with thick, wet layers of sand-colored or silvery gray powder. The heavy ash fatally submerged horses and cows; it covered roofs and coated statues. It dusted a pineapple farm so thoroughly that the fruit looked spray-painted.
Volcanic ash can spread far and wide. “The higher it goes, the greater extent to which it’s going to travel,” says Michael Manga, a volcanologist and chair of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. The height depends on several factors, including how much energy an eruption has. “More energy is usually caused by more gas and stickier, thicker magma,” says Tracy Gregg, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. (Magma, or molten rock, always holds gas, but in an especially gloopy, thick matrix, pressure builds up and eruptions can be particularly powerful.)
More eruptions could follow.
The distribution of ash also depends on wind speed and strength, says Kristi Wallace, a geologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory—but under certain conditions, it’s nearly boundless. “The biggest volcanic eruptions will distribute material globally,” Manga says. When Mount Pinatubo—another volcano on Luzon—erupted in 1991, the spewing sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and dispersed across the planet, according to the United States Geological Survey. …
The phenomenon that convinced Arther C Clarke he was being contacted by a higher power was actually caused by warring raccoon tribes
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 16, 2018
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? possibly, maybe.