Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Lessons from the past

British History Podcast is excellent, and is now posting episodes on ancient Wales.

Today's episode has this medical related item: why did the plagues tend to hit the Celtic British including Wales instead of the Anglo Saxons? He posits it might be immunity from living on the continent, as opposed to isolation in the Welsh valleys...

It was too late for Justinians' plague, but of course, in the milder areas the plague could have persisted in pockets and broken out again. Or maybe it is because they continued to trade with the Mediterranean areas so disease was introduced from there.

UnivPennMuseum has a lecture of archeology that points out that pottery suggests Mediterranean trade continued into Wales and Cornwall for years after the Anglo Saxon invasion,  despite the idea that Britain remained isolated...but I could be off on the dates, since this episode is about 685 and the UP lecture is about 560...so I'll have to check if trade continued for another century.

Check the maps: Cornwall's tin was known to ancient Greece, and the south coast trade links to Spain and the Mediterranean in contrast to the Anglo Saxon's links to nearby France.

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hotair links to a WAPO article telling us that the scientific data on breakfast recommendations are based on....nothing. No hard data. Or data contaminated by other factors...

So what else is new

I dropped out of a "nurses diet" study, which still publishes data. I realized that most of what I writing down was made up because I simply was too busy to remember everything I ate... so how many population surveys are based on made up input, or the input from self selected obsessive compulsive types?

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Spengler's article on modern education's agnosia of the past. They not only don't know, but they don't know that they don't know.

My daughter had attended a seminar on Mozart’s opera, and we had discussed Tirso’s theological joke beforehand. She called me crestfallen afterwards: most of the students wanted to know why Don Giovanni’s behavior was a problem in the first place. Wasn’t it a lifestyle choice?
we see a similar agnosia in bioethics...

Multiculturalism was supposed to add to the database, but what actually happened was that the database was replaced with intellectual fads.

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I should note that I am slowly working through a book about epidemics in the Philippines in the 19th century....made worse by the independence uprisings. Uh, maybe made worse because they didn't have decent water or sewage? I mean, our town still has open air ditches for sewers...

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