Touring ancient monuments

We like to tour castles, and try to imagine what life in them was like. We don't tour the peasant huts; there aren't any left. They'd have been pretty cramped too. Of course, castles might have gotten pretty cramped for space; you don't waste time and stone building fortifications to enclose parks (unless you're building Constantinople). Although maybe you only get crowded when everybody is taking shelter..

Imagine tourists a thousand years from now wandering about what used to be the USA. What would be left that they could tour?

Skyscrapers don't last. Everyday homes would survive as foundations. Metal, pipes, bricks--all gets scavenged and reused. Some of the public buildings, if not stripped for construction material, might have parts of walls and pillars left. And dams. Even if a dam is broken, that's a lot of concrete, and would stay impressive for a long time.

Runways would look pretty ratty, with lots of crumbled stuff and plants growing through it, but should still be mostly visible. Likewise the highways--though I assume a lot of that would be redone and the concrete repurposed. Bridge remnants, where there wasn't a replacement.

Near towns, I'd guess that concrete would get scavenged for coarse building fill, maybe to build town walls.

Some of the stories of our era would survive. Would Cape Canaveral be famous for the legends about space travel or the battle fought there in 2876?

Snakebites

I see that sucking venom out of a snakebite is discouraged (absolutely if you have an injury in your own mouth). This attempt at mitigation is ancient and very widespread, so at a wild guess it helps, despite some of the modern advice. (Sometimes hospitals can ID the snake from venom residue.)

Snake venom varies dramatically. In Africa some herbal treatments seem to be helpful, likewise in Bangladesh, among Amerindians, and so on.

Some of these work:

Ten studies reported statistically significant percentage protection (40-100%) of animals against venom-induced lethality compared with control groups that received no medicinal plant intervention. Sixteen studies reported significant effects (p ≤ 0.05) against venom-induced pathologies compared with the control group; these include hemolytic, histopathologic, necrotic, and anti-enzymatic effects. The plant family Fabaceae has the highest number of studies reporting its efficacy, followed by Annonaceae, Malvaceae, Combretaceae, Sterculiaceae, and Olacaceae. Some African medicinal plants are preclinically effective against venom-induced lethality, hematoxicity, and cytotoxicity. The evidence is extracted from three in vitro studies, nine in vivo studies, and five studies that combined both in vivo and in vitro models. The effective plants belong to the Fabaceae family, followed by Malvaceae, and Annonaceae.

Which is best for what snake might vary considerably. One wonders how this was decided on.

In Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland is a description of how the Snake Society was formed:

It is told that a hunter came upon two snakes fighting each other, and one was swallowing a leaf as an antidote for the bites of the other. The hunter then prepared medicine of the same kind of leaves, which he used with success in treating cases of snakebite. This incident led to the forming of the association.

On page 401:

A practice was found among the Loma similar to that described by practitioners of the snake cult in East Africa. A fine triturated black powder is prepared from the heads of poisonous snakes, charred, with certain herbs, in an iron pot. This contains the snake's venom, undoubtedly modified by the heating and certainly diluted by the charcoal with which it is mixed. Its action is further controlled by the herbs mixed into the compound. These are the same herbs which the leech uses in treating snake bite. This black powder is rubbed into tiny cuts in the skin of a person who wishes to be immunized against snake bite. The first immunizing dose is a small one, the next two are larger; a definite reaction is produced. The leech recognizes that this protection is temporary and that it must be repeated every two or three years. As the heads of several different varieties of snakes are used in the preparation of this powder, the immunizing effect is that of polyvalent vaccination.

This native practice even parallels our toxin-antitoxin immunizations, because he mixes with his toxin the remedy he would use in treating snake bite. The details of this treatment are guarded with great secrecy. Mr. Embree of the Methodist Mission in Monrovia once saw a boy bitten by a very poisonous snake. His comrades expected him to die. He asked them to wait while he went into the bush to get some medicine. They were surprised to see him return, as the medicine for that particular snake bite is known only bv certain big doctors. He admitted that he knew the medicine and begged the others not to tell anyone that he knew the secret, fearing the jealousy of those who were supposed to have a monopoly on the information.

Interesting. I don't know how fresh the plants have to be, and whether one could put together a "spectrum" treatment or whether it ought to be species-specific. As for immunity to snakebite: there are reports of it; species-specific. And reports of snake bite centers:

there are different dens in different cities wherein people who want to have snake bite are allowed to sit in chairs. The person in charge of snakes holds the snake near the head end of snake just distal to lip margin. Initially, he makes the snake to inject minimal bite in little toe or index finger for minimal envenomation, and then, he makes the snake to bite in lip or tongue of individuals according to their wish. The most commonly used snakes were krait, cobra, and green snake. Persons who were bitten, showed jerky movement and left the room within few minutes. From the reports provided orally, six persons lost their life due to such procedure. Many people who use such dens were from high socioeconomic status and well educated. Some of them were youth and college students.

What doesn't get traded

Corn appears to have been bred about 7000BC, and spread south: Ecuador 6000BC ± N lower Central America 5600BC, Columbian Andes 4500BC ± N -- New Mexico and Arizona about 2500BC, and to reach beyond the desert took more than 2500 more years.

Seeds are easy to pack, and if you keep them dry they ought to keep a long while. But the "how to grow" them might be a little less portable, if traders weren't usually farmers.

Transfer of knowledge and plants is trivial if the farmers migrate or intermarry along the routes, straightforward if trading travel is part-time or everybody learns a bit of everything, and hard if trading is a specialization, or if the people you trade with aren't really into agriculture on a large scale.

I wonder what the barriers were that slowed corn reaching far into North America. Desert would be one, obviously. Were the deserts and jungles of those eras in the same places as now? I've done a little searching, and so far haven't found systematic climate studies that cover enough of the area to game out which way people might go. If somebody knows, I'm curious. Up and down the coast should be pretty straightforward.

Remote areas having nothing you cared to cart back is another barrier, as are hostiles. Great Lakes copper went east, south to Georgia, north to Alaska--but I don't see references to the SouthWest. Well after Great Lakes copper started being used, South American started smelting their own--and possibly that was easier to get than stuff from the north. But one map on that page shows marine shells being traded across the deserts, so trade wasn't impossible.

Of course, the trade routes may have developed later than the movement of corn growing, which happened pretty early in most places.

I got started down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how trade worked from the Pacific to the Amazon side of the Andes. Incas traded for feathers and skins, and even tried to invade--how old were the trade routes? Would they have been possible for the Caral-Supe, circa 3500BC, 3000 to 4700 years earlier?

Movies

One of the New Years challenges I got was to watch a couple of foreign language movies without subtitles and see if I could figure out what was going on. I picked The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Yamato. True, the former did have slides, which are sort of like subtitles, but I don't read German. I got the gist.

Yamato was a bit harder--I mistook the sweatheart for a sister. The movie follows the lives of several crewmen, proud of their ship, subject to hideous discipline, and getting pounded by American planes.

Perhaps the speech and text told more of the story. IIRC, Yamato didn't run up against much in the way of American aircraft until Sibuyan Sea and Samar (and then Ten-Go, of course). The depiction of Samar (if such it was) leaves out the task force's retreat. Possibly they didn't want to dwell on that part.

Ten-Go was a kamikaze mission for the ship, and here my lack of Japanese hurt: they showed no kamikaze planes--did the characters discuss it? If not, that's a weird omission.

From the purely Japanese PoV, the Americans come across as impersonal and deadly--impersonal until they kill his sweetheart's mother and eventually his sweetheart at Hiroshima. A bit santized...

I suppose I could rewatch with subtitles on, but I won't spend the time. The visual story is one I wanted.

There's a framing story, and I eventually figured out the motives on that one too. Interesting challenge--not one I'd want to try with something like My Dinner With Andre, though.

Taking things for granted

In Zelazny's Lord of Light, Yama says "None sing hymns to breath... But oh to be without it!" I remember having had pneumonia a time or two.

Sometimes looking at a boring ECG can be a delight.

Treaties

It's strange how the debate about Ukraine plays out over at Althouse: so much apology for Putin and running down of Zelensky. The case seems straightforward enough. Russia may claim to have been provoked by threats of Ukraine joining NATO, but that's symmetric: Ukraine looked to join NATO because it was threatened by Russia. In any event, Russia did the invading. Cheer for David, hope Goliath gets his comeupance.

Except that Golaith, though getting badly battered, seems to be winning the slog. If they're willing to spend the men and materiel, it looks like Russia can win.

Ukraine seems to be losing, and there's not a whale of a lot more we can do about that without starting a war between us and Russia. Some of our wonderful tech is already looking a bit obsolete, too.

Can the Europeans save them? Unless they've been building up the armaments and armies while I wasn't looking, then no.

(Is China helping the Russians with materiel? Yes. Are they helping them with deniable harrassment of the European nations by cutting undersea cables? Sure looks like it. When they get their pound of flesh out of Russia for their assistance, will China be stronger?)

Even if we stipulate that Zelensky is on the side of the angels (he certainly has guts!), the Ukrainians are probably best served by cutting their losses. That doesn't mean we wish Putin any good, or Zelensky any bad. It's just bowing to the inevitable.

It doesn't mean a peace treaty would be just. I gather it's a bit clever, though, putting in a kind of indirect guarantee; though not a very firm one.

Perhaps it sticks in people's craws to try to force an unjust peace treaty on a nation, and so they come up with reasons to blame the victim. Or try to look the other way.