Disease
LinkFest 2020-09-17
I haven’t done one of these since March of 2019, but they used to be pretty popular posts, so I’m going to re-introduce the LinkFest format.
Pox populi: Study calculates 18th century syphilis rates for first time
Cities often provide more opportunities for infectious disease to spread, but
The Long View 2006-07-19: The Road to Perdition
I recently read that Tenochtitlán, unlike almost all other pre-modern cities, was a population source instead of a population sink. This was due to a combination of the productivitiy of the floating farms, and a lack of the nasty diseases typical in cultures that have been farming for longer periods
The Long View 2005-08-23: The Perfection of the Species
The image in the header is the image John referenced in his joke about contributing to the state of perpetual surveillance. The man in the image is Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, scourge of the Boers and one of the few generals who thought the Great War would be long.
LinkFest 2016-01-22
Source Criticism is not Credible
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is one of my recent follows on Twitter. Here, Gobry discusses one of the roots of the recent argument between Ross Douthat and members of the Catholic academy: source criticism. One of the most popular theories in the academy is that a hypothetical
The Long View 2003-04-22: Pandemics
This bit about SARS is interesting twelve years later. Influenza is interesting. The official mortality rate went up compared to what John had here, from 5.6% to 9.6% according to the WHO. Unfortunately, better record-keeping doesn't always equal better stats. This number is likely to be
The Long View 2003-04-03: Consider the Alternatives
Here is an interesting one on the Euro and Germany. John felt that Germany couldn't pursue a sane fiscal policy because of the Euro. Twelve years later, this turned out to be very true, but not precisely for the reasons John thought. He did get the overall dynamic