Random Rankings

I thought I'd rank a few things, in order of best to worst:

Star Wars: 4, 5, 6, 3, 2, 1
Star Trek Series: Next Generation, DS9, Enterprise, Original Series, Voyager, Animated
Noble Gases: Helium, Krypton, Neon, Argon, Xenon, Radon
Kubrick Films: Dr Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, Clockwork Orange, 2001, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and the rest.
TF2 Classes: Demoman, Medic, Scout, Soldier, Heavy, Sniper, Pyro, Engineer, Spy
British Colonies: USA, Australia, India, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand
Queens of England: Elizabeth 1, Victoria, Anne, Mary 1, Elizabeth 2
Whig Presidents of the USA: John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, William Henry Harrison

Lists are often not comprehensive, too much work.

Darwin's 200th

Today is it: the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and roughly the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species. I can't really think of anything to do to celebrate the day, other than the regular stuff that we do at parties. Processes that take multiple generations to become apparent aren't very easy to have a party about.

Darwin Day Soon!

It's only three days til the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the most influential scientists in history. That's right, February 12th is Darwin Day! His work wasn't completely groundbreaking, you could say it was...evolutionary.

In case you're curious, here's a brief list of the scientists that come to mind when I think of the most influential:

Francis Bacon
Albert Einstein
Aristotle
Galileo Galilei
Isaac Newton

These names should mean more to humanity than any number of athletes, actors, writers, or generals. No one has done more to improve the state of man than those that do pure science.

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Now playing: The Beatles - Back In The U.S.S.R.
via FoxyTunes

Wait, I'm A Historian!

Bush has said that "history will be [his] judge". Finally, my History major comes in handy. Bush is the worst President in American history. Even Bush supporters limit their support to the idea that he has prevented any further attacks on the US. This is an eccentric argument to make. After all, I wouldn't brag that my president only suffered the worst defeat in American history once. I'm not claiming that Bush caused 9/11, but his administration was criminally negligent in defence.

Other Presidents have been disasters on single issues, (Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, Hoover in the economy, Harding for his corrupt administration and backdoor deals) but Bush has been reprehensible on every aspect of being president. We've suffered the worst attack on our soil, we've been in a disastrous and voluntary war that was completely mishandled, and we've had an economic collapse that was entirely preventable. The corruption and backdoor dealing of the Bush Administration should make an entire book.

Just to make it clear: I, as a historian, name Bush the worst president in American history.

PS. The World Of Goo soundtrack is online for free. I highly suggest you pick it up.
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Now playing: Kyle Gabler - The Goo Filled Hills
via FoxyTunes

"Democracies Don't Invade Other Democracies"

There's a theory that Democratic governments don't invade other Democracies. You can read the Wikipedia article Here. You can also read about the various wars between democracies in this page. This is a great analysis of the issue. There is a counter-argument for each of the examples, largely claiming that at least one of the parties was not a Democracy. Under the objections in the article, it seems that there aren't many Democracies to go to war in the first place. If you can exclude any nation that uses political officers to ensure that a party retains its power, then I doubt there are any democracies in the world.

Let's look at Nazi Germany. They rose to power in democratic elections, and they went to war. Critics will quickly point out that by 1939, there was no Democracy left. It seems to me that we shouldn't say that "Democracies don't wage war against each other", we should say, "Democracies coincide with peace and stability". After all, if a nation is strong and stable enough to hold together a strong Democracy, you can be assured that most of the motives for war are already satisfied. Instead of Democracy stopping wars, both wars and un-democratic government have similar causes: poverty, corruption, desperation.

But who cares? We are already in favour of Democracy, since it's a superior form of government to any of its known alternatives. People aren't trying to pin the name of Democracy on nations like a talisman to end wars!

The only problem is that people are doing just that. Tony Blair, in an interview about the motivations for invading and occupying Iraq, said again and again that "Democracies don't go to war". He doesn't seem to understand that it's all too easy for an impoverished people -like the Germans of the 1930's- to throw away their Democracy for some perceived security.

PS. Tell me where I quoted Darth Vader in this essay, and you get a point!

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Julius Caesar: No Big Deal?

I don't get why people give Julius Caesar so much credit. The Roman Constitution killed the Republic, not Julius. In the end, Julius ran around killing foreigners, then returned to briefly become dictator before being assassinated.

Augustus Caesar, on the other hand, was an amazing man. Without being seen as a dictator, he took on semi-dictatorial power, and he rewrote the Constitution in such a way as to preserve the nation for either 500 or 1500 years, depending on how you measure it. All this, after winning a three-way civil war without alienating a province enough to cause it to permanently secede.

Genealogy Of Jesus

The author(s) of the bible take a peculiar interest in the ancestors of Jesus. In fact, they're so interested, they write two independent and different genealogies for the same person.

Two interesting pieces of trivia about this:

• Shouldn't a person only have one father? Surely Joseph can have only one father, unless "alternative lifestyles" were popular in the late Roman Republic.
• It's odd that the bible spends so much time describing Joseph's parentage, considering that the modern Christian faith insists that Jesus and Joseph have no biological relationship whatsoever.

It's almost as though the author(s) of the bible didn't know that Jesus was born of a god in a literal sense. It's seems they thought he was a "Son of God" in the sense that we owe our loyalty to God as we owe our loyalties to our biological father. After all, he was known to speak in metaphor.

Anyway, for those who believe that Jesus was physically born of a god and a human, where did he get half of his genetic data? Does your omnipotent, Omnipresent Energy Field God have 46 chromosomes?

This would make the idea of Jesus fathering children even more troubling.

Napoleon And Alexander: Foe-Yay

The French had beaten the Russian Army. All that remained was a treaty. For the discussion, the Tsar Alexander and the Emperor Napoleon created a building on a raft floating between the two armies. Both Emperors set out to the raft simultaneously, but Napoleon had naval rowers hurry him across to arrive first. He quickly moved across the hut, and opened Alexander's door as he arrived at the raft.

As the Tsar entered the building, he said to Napoleon, "I hate the British as much as you do." and Napoleon responded, "then we already have peace." Smiling, Alexander said, "then what shall we do for the next fifteen minutes?" Returning the grin, Napoleon simply replied, "I think I have an idea." as he closed the door behind them.

Three minutes later, a more rumpled but still grinning Napoleon emerged from the raft, and called for the treaty negotiators and a physician.

Napoleon

I've been listening to a Napoleon Podcast, distributed by The Podcast Network, Australia's first podcasting company. Anyway, Napoleon is a pretty amazing guy. Few to no people have been so successful in war for so long. Depending on how you count it, Napoleon was batting over .950 for about 20 years.

He is possibly the only person in history to be the recipient of a declaration of war. That is to say, an alliance of nations declared war against a single person. Not the country he ruled, but a war against a single man.

When he suffered his first exile, he returned from Elba and retook France in less than two months, and all without firing a shot. This might also be an event that has never occurred before or since.

If you guys are lucky, I might write some moderately erotic fanfiction featuring him and the Tsar Alexander.

Holes in Ancient History

There's so much we don't know about Ancient History. Do you know how gladiators would say, "Those who are about to die salute you!"? Well, they didn't. Or at least, we don't know if they did. There's one time in history where anyone was reported to have said that, so it's probably more likely that they didn't say it often. If it was a common event, why would it bear mention in an unusual event?

Anyway, there's all sorts of things we have absolutely no idea about. It's frustrating to the serious historian, even if the problem is invisible to the casual eye. To put it in comparison: There's a "mystery" about the assassination of JFK. Some insist that the killer is not John Wilkes Booth. Yet we do know the exact time, down to the second when he died. We know the injuries he suffered, and what gun shot him. That moment in history has had tomes written about it, and so much data that it could fill a small library.

Compare that "mystery" to another historical mystery: We don't know whether King David was a real person. He's the second king of historical Israel, if real, but we just don't know if there is a person that occupied that place and time. I think that puts it into perspective: 99.9999% certainty about a precise moment versus profound ignorance about an entire lifetime


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Now playing: DragonForce - Above The Winter Moonlight
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On (Modern) War

I've been reading Carl Von Clausewitz's On War. It's a tough read, since it's written first as a book about the analysis of war, then about war itself. This means that those looking for Clausewitz's views on war will be initially frustrated. Because of this, I'd only recommend the book to a serious fan of history or war.

The book is essentially the only real attempt to make a universal, comprehensive summation of war. (In comparison, Sun Tzu's Art of War is more like a brief meditation on the subject of war.) I've been wondering why there isn't a modern version today. There is no comprehensive guidebook to modern warfare, so far as I know.

"Modern Warfare" is a difficult term. The most recent war the USA has been involved in is the Korean War. Since then, American troops haven't had the chance to exert their true power. I believe that there will be a return to "traditional" war in this century, (that is, tank movements across a countryside, artillery destruction of whole cities, and two large nations bringing their complete strength to bear against each other) and no one knows how it's going to happen. I can guarantee it won't look a whole lot like World War Two, though.

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Now playing: David Bowie - Space Oddity
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The Armada

I've been reading a book about the Spanish Armada. Interesting fact: the Spanish published every known figure about the fleet. They published the number of ships, guns, soldiers, pounds of food, everything they knew. Since the Armada was held in port by weather for weeks after publication, most of Europe knew the size of the fleet before the first shots were fired. English captains going to the battle carried a list of the enemy's plans.

The book makes it clear that the Armada would have lost anyway, since they had fewer ships, worse technology, bad sailors, and a tactical plan that relied on a miracle. Publishing the plans couldn't have been too big an influence, but Dios Mio, is that ever stupid.

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Now playing: Meat Loaf - Dead Ringer For Love
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Midterm

I have a midterm in less than two hours, and a terrible price to pay for it: I can't play video games for that entire period. I suppose blogging is no more helpful, come to think of it.


PS.
I'm taking a class on the Ancient World, and it makes the movie 300 seem absolutely absurd. Leonidas won't shut up about the slave-holding Persians, ignoring the fact that Spartans became such a great warrior race so that they could more effectively oppress the slave class of Sparta.

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Copernicus, Darwin, and the Human Psyche

I don't know if it's possible to imagine what it was like for people living around the year 1500. To believe that the Earth is literally the center of the Universe. That the Universe exists, clearly, to entertain we poor Earthlings, and that the stars provide an occasional look into the realm of God himself. Can you imagine what it was like to discover that the Earth was the center of nothing? That humans had absolutely no significance on the cosmic scale? I can't.

Today, we're used to the idea of being a random planet in a boring part of a middling galaxy, so a faith developed today casually accepts this unimportant role. At the time, I imagine that many people's faiths were threatened.

The only other revelation as powerful as that one is the Theory of Evolution. Although various evolutionary theories had been floating around before Darwin's, His was so elegant, so obviously true, that it left little necessity for any Divine figure in a creation story. All evolution needs is a single self-replicating chemical.

Today, people grow up with Evolution coloring all Biology. At the time of Darwin, a lot of the Bible was literal. Since then, Metaphor has replaced basically any part of the Bible that isn't purely theological. Without the knowledge that their sacred texts were "only kidding", it must have been traumatic to find that there was no basis for the idea that species had spontaneously arisen from the Universal Will.

I don't think it's possible to create a psychic shock like that again. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is extremely important to science, and redefines our world view, but few religions explicitly require travel at the speed of light to be possible. Quantum Theory says that a Quantum switch's results don't occur until they are checked. This can lead to some sticky theological issues, (does God wait until the waveform collapses to collect the soul of that poor cat?) but it hardly challenges our assumptions about Quantum switches. After all, we didn't have any assumptions about them. Hell, we still don't know what they are.

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Now playing: Edwin Starr - War [What is it good for]
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Di

I wish I had been born into obscene wealth. Apparently, it gives you a free pass to embarrass your family, waste millions of dollars on clothes, have torrid affairs, and still be universally loved, so long as you give a fraction of the money you don't waste to charity.

I guess I'd have to die early, like James Dean, to maintain my image forever.

Major History

When I tell people that I'm a history major, the most common follow-up is, "and what do you plan to do with that?"

All people with a good knowledge of history have two options:

1. Create a crazy theory where the "progress of human history" will lead to some sort of utopia (or more rarely, a dystopia).

2. Look with a melancholy resignation on world events. (History people know what I'm talking about.)

I'm probably going to stick with option 2. Although our technology may have improved, our society has only "improved" past the Ancient Romans in a few areas, and has actually regressed in others. Unless some mutation in the human strain causes a real change in the course of events, we'll be no better in another 2,000 years.

PS.
The problem with the possibility of a "new" human arising from the current breed is that the current breed is optimized for one function: preventing the growth of things different from it.

Cavemen Don't Exist

Some people say that modern television is bad. I think this is terribly inaccurate. In fact, modern television is unacceptably poor. The fact that someone is turning a commercial which mentions cavemen into a program is the latest symptom of the disease that is modern television.

Anyway, the program seems to think that cavemen are a separate race from us human beings. They are not. In fact, the "cavemen" of this program seem to lack the defining characteristic of cavemen. They do not live in a cave. The writers are probably thinking of Neanderthals, who have two advantages in my mind:

1) Neanderthals are a separate race from us.
2) Neanderthals are real.

See, cavemen are not real in the generally accepted sense of the term. At no point in human history were humans limited to living in caves. Caves have always been a shelter for man, and they remain so today, but never has man been limited to living in caves alone.

So why do we think of cavemen as being a class of historical persons? Because artifacts are perfectly undisturbed in caves. A group of prehistorical men could camp in a cave for a week and we could find that camp today, relatively undisturbed. When prehistoric man left a camp next to a stream, it would quickly be destroyed by wind and water erosion (and a variety of other factors). Since the proof of cave life was so much more preserved, it may have seemed that early man lived there exclusively.

Anyway, I already saw Cavemen when it was called 3rd Rock From the Sun.

"Look! We're from outside your culture, so we're doing something that someone in your culture wouldn't do!"

(laugh track brays)

Rome

I believe that Rome is a truly excellent setting for Role-Playing. Why?

No police force.
Brutal laws that often involve death, but are reasonably understandable.
Bribery works like a charm.
A successful politician's career has no end of violence.
There's no law against carrying weaponry on your person.

It's like a Role-Playing setting already, but better fleshed out, and with more realistic avenues for advancement than, "I killed 2.700 orcs. Now I have a legion of followers who flocked to me for some reason."

Redefining History

The current historical system has an ethno-centrist element that is completely unacceptable in the modern world: The use of AD and BC, which some of the PC police have replaced with CE and BCE. Whether you use AD or CE, everyone knows what event we are supposedly 2007 years after.

I propose a remedy: we choose some random date, then attach two random letters for before and after it.

Here's the new dating system: what is currently 571 AD becomes the year Zero. Any time afterward becomes AM, and any time before is PM. People may get this confused, since the AM and PM are the reverse of our Ante Meridian and Post Meridian, but I don't care.

Washington

George Washington was a great man. I bet you didn't know how great.

Check out this video to find out.

This is a great example of how technology has allowed extremely small press media to exist. The video was probably created by two or three people, for little money.