Do you need a second pair of eyes on that book, paper, or project report? I have been editing business and academic writing since 2013. Aside from ancient world studies and medieval studies, I have experience creating software documentation and a background in academic computer science. Because of my time living in Austria, I have experience with the challenges of writing in a second language or a new field.
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(The following is outside my usual topics but its an area of my expertise that I have not found anyone else talking about).
Wise investors use diversification to reduce risk. Any one investment might fail for many different reasons, but many different investments are unlikely to fail together. Additionally, what causes one investment to do poorly often causes others to do well. Rising energy prices hurt manufacturing (which buys energy) but not energy companies (which sell it). Rising wages hurt employers with many low-wage employers, but benefit businesses who sell to consumers. Classically, bonds and stocks tend to move in opposite directions under a given type of pressure, so almost all long-term investors will benefit from holding some of both. For most of history opportunities for diversification were limited, and a prudent investor might buy several plots of land, invest in a ship’s cargo, and make some loans to neighbours. In the 20th century, mutual funds allowed small investors to own dozens of different assets for low but significant costs. Today anyone with a bank account in Canada can buy an index fund that holds thousands of different assets around the world for around 0.25% of their investments per year. However, most of these funds lack one important type of diversification.
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After an email exchange, I have learned that some prominent people want to believe that the population of the Americas in 1492 is known closely. Here is why I say it is debated within a factor of 20.
Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones have the following to say in their 1978 Atlas of World Population History:1
The estimate of 1m Amerindians north of the Rio Grande- which breaks down into 0.2m in Canada, 0.05m in Alaska, and 0.75m in the rest of the Continental USA- goes back at least as far as J. Mooney (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 80.7 (1928)); it seems to be generally accepted, though the California school of revisionists has issued a trial balloon in favour of 20m (sic). The present population of 0.6m represents a recovery from the all-time low of 0.5m reached in 1925. … The size of the population of Mexico in 1492 has lately become the subject of much academic argument. … The point at issue is this: was the population of Mexico in 1492 no more than 5m (Rosenblat) or was it more than 30m (Cook and Borah)? Comparisons with other parts of the world at comparable levels of culture leads us to throw in our lot with Rosenblat.
So McEvedy and Jones acknowledge disputes about the pre-Columbian population of the USA and Canada within a factor of 20, and disputes about the population of Mexico within a factor of 6. Their arguments for one end of the range are no more sophisticated than “it seems to be generally accepted” and that if the population of Mexico had been as high as 30 million, then the rate of decline which this implies would be an “improbability.” Most of their numbers for the period 1 to 1500 CE were copied by Angus Maddison whose numbers are very widely used today. But 1978 is a long time ago, so if you prefer you can check a more recent survey.
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In the Kingdom of Khauran, every hundred years a witch shall be born to the royal family. In the United States of America, every ten years Ridley Scott shall borrow unimaginable sums of money to mangle a new period of warfare. This has been foretold and has come to pass although none can foretell whether he will return with an Amarna Age epic where the chariots have exhaust pipes or a science fiction adventure which makes Starship Troopers look like sound military science.1 Making fun of all the things these films get wrong is healthy fun around a gaming table or along a bar, and recently Bret Devereaux entered the genre on his ACOUP blog (part 1) (part 2) (part 3). But as I wrote back in 2016, complaining about bad things is often bad strategy. So this week I will wrote about the things I like about the opening scene in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. That is something I can cover in a short bookandsword post, whereas it takes three long ACOUP posts to cover some of the things that are wrong with the same scene.
Read moreA very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.
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In the past year a number of my academic publications have come out (it often takes years from submitting an article to an academic venue to seeing it in print because almost everyone involved is a volunteer with a demanding day job and no personal assistant to help them organize and focus). This week I would like to talk about them.
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Its hard to understand the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Pagan texts in Aramaic were not selected to be copied and recopied by Christian scribes like Christian scribes copied some pagan Greek and Latin texts, and the heart of the empire fell to Cyrus without a fight. Burning cities can preserve texts painted on or pressed into clay, but archivists under Cyrus and Darius just continued to throw out old documents like they had under Nabopolassar, and so those documents were lost to us. Most surviving documents from the Neo-Babylonian empire are from temple or family archives which stuck to the old script and language, not the archives of the kings or governors which may not have been written on clay anyways. The famous Babylonian chronicles tell us about some events but not the structure of the kingdom or life in the provinces. By the time Greeks like Herodotus and Ctesias were writing, they were as vague on the difference between Assyrians and Babylonians as we are on the difference between upper and lower Egyptians. We know far more about Babylonia in the sixth century BCE than Greece in the sixth century BCE, but not everything (and not much about the rest of the empire). Some teaching in spring made me think of one of the oddest things about this empire.
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In previous posts I talked about how the bows used for war in Europe and Asia in the 15th and 16th century were much stiffer than hunters or target archers use today. They usually had draw weights on the order of 100-150 pounds, so you could draw the bow to full draw length by tying twine to the string, hanging the twine over a pulley, and hanging a 100-150 pound weight off it. Deer hunters in Canada and the USA tend to use draw weights around 40-70 pounds with traditional bows (compound bows with pulleys are another kettle of fish). Some researchers today invoke the heavy bow hypothesis and argue that bows in the ancient world were as stiff as Chinese, Turkish, and English bows 2000 years later. I am not convinced.
In those previous posts I talked about extant bows which can be reproduced and measured (or sometimes plugged into a physics model- there is a whole PhD thesis just on the physics of archery). Anecdotes about famous shots or feats of arms are a little too subtle for me to discuss in a blog post, and the surviving treatises on archery date to the sixth century CE and later so are past the period I focus on. But there is one other type of evidence!
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Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.
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