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benbreen

46,596 karma · joined June 2, 2014

benjaminpbreen.com

email: breen85 [at] gmail [dot] com

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benbreen··on Digitized minutes of Royal Society meetings taken between 1686 and 1711
This is great news. I'm a historian and have gone to the Royal Society archives to read these draft minutes in the past (I was looking for references to experiments involving psychoactive drugs on one research trip, and on another I was researching the Royal Society's run-in with the infamous impostor George Psalmanazar).

Happy to answer questions about the meeting minutes or their historical significance if anyone is interested. Hans Sloane is pretty fascinating in his own right and was recently the subject of a biography: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737334

benbreen··on The Drunkard’s Progress: Alcohol in 19th Century America
All of them roughly map onto the more modern category we typically use for anything involving mixing spirits with something acidic, sweet or bitter: cocktail. "Sling" still survives via an old-timey British cocktail, the Singapore Sling. Says Wikipedia: "a sling was originally a North American drink composed of spirit and water, sweetened and flavored."

As for pepper in rum, I had to look that up too. I suspect that Benjamin Rush would've been referring to something similar to this, because Jamaican rum was so dominant in the British colonies: https://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes/pepper-rum

Edit: Confusingly, this source from the 1780s [1] says "rum, whisky, brandy, gin, stinkibus, bitters, toddy, grog, slings and fifty other liquors, all come under the denomination of spirits." But this is presumably what Rush had in mind because it's direct from his book: "After a while nothing would satisfy him but slings made of equal parts of rum and water, with a little sugar." [2]

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=VyRTvziJuecC&dq=sling%20sp... [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=PnZVb3esMk4C&dq=sling%20sp...

benbreen··on Sacklers Directed Efforts to Mislead Public About OxyContin, Documents Indicate
The quotes are on pages 56 and 59 of the full document linked to by NYT.
benbreen··on The Puzzle of Proto-Elamite (2013)
One example of this that I love: the Papyrus Lansing from Middle Kingdom Egypt, which is maybe the world's oldest surviving example of career advice. It's both jarringly modern (encouraging teenagers to aim for office jobs, basically) and also bizarrely outlandish. One of the points the text gives in favor of being a scribe is that your name will be remembered -- and indeed, we still know the text's author by name: Nebmare-nakht.

"Do you not recall the (fate of) the unskilled man? His name is not known... Be a scribe, and be spared from soldiering! You call and one says: "Here I am." You are safe from torments. Every man seeks to raise himself up. Take note of it!"

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~afutrell/w%20civ%2002/paplansing.h...

benbreen··on The Puzzle of Proto-Elamite (2013)
Interesting! Can you say a little more about the efforts you participated in? I've always been fascinated by this kind of thing.
benbreen··on Catnip Immunity and Alternatives
The main things that come to mind are:

- Encyclopedic scope but enormous attention to detail;

- eclectic and exploratory approach to organization;

- highly individualized prose style;

- significant amount of authorial distance, almost mystery (is the name a pseudonym? where do they live? why are they so interested in catnip anyway? etc);

- no fixed point of completion, everything is constantly being revised;

- subscription-based fundraising model (Patreon is far from new in that regard).

Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is probably the best example I can think of that illustrates what I like about books from that period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Melancholy

Montaigne's Essays and the works of Robert Boyle and Margaret Cavendish are excellent too though, if you're interested.

benbreen··on Catnip Immunity and Alternatives
That's gwern's specialty. I highly recommend browsing around his site if you haven't before. It's the only thing on the internet that reminds me of a 17th century book in terms of structure (and eccentricity!).
benbreen··on Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour.

As I get further into academia I am amazed at the amount of work we do that is uncompensated yet required of us by the antiquated system of prestige that you mentioned in your parent comment. Perhaps it isn't so much that academics are stubbornly committed to an outmoded system, it's that we literally have no time or energy to do anything beyond the bare minimum of meeting that system's constraints.

Given that the public for-profit publishers are reporting profit margins that put tech companies to shame, I don't really buy the argument that it's the academic community who are holding things back. The perverse incentive here is clearly concentrated on the publisher side, not ours.

I really appreciate that you are taking the time to respond to comments in this thread though, thank you for posting.

benbreen··on Crossing the Sahara in the Fourteenth Century
It's a translated excerpt from a book written in French: "Excerpted from The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages by François-Xavier Fauvelle, translated by Troy Tice, and illustrated by Roland Sárkány. Originally titled Le rhinocéros d’or."
benbreen··on The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
To make it more Borgesian for you, I have been baffled by the fact that the author of Automata Theory, Matthew Simon, has left almost no traces on Google besides this book and one other book called Emergent Computation, which is similarly eccentric. (Browsing it now, I came across a weird quote about Pope Clement and self-flagellation, then it's right back to automata theory again).

Could it be that he wrote under a pen name?

benbreen··on Neil Armstrong Remembered
I see where you're coming from, but personally I really appreciated the depiction of an introverted main character. Also both of his sons were consultants on the film and apparently supplied part of the dialogue and tone for the scene where he talks to them before leaving for Apollo 11 [1], so that part of his relationship to his family, at least, seems pretty accurate to me.

One thing I remain curious about is how serving in the Korean War shaped the psychology of that first crop of astronauts. And I would LOVE to watch a movie with the budget and talent of First Man, but about Yuri Gagarin or Valentina Tereshkova.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/.../first-man-ryan-gosling-clai...

benbreen··on Space Transportation System
Thanks for posting, that's an interesting resource. Table 3.2, laying out projections of community space usage in outer space (including churches!), could be good fodder for future historians writing about the mid-20th century cultural assumptions that structured early space travel.

Also this sentence is fascinating to me: "Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement." I've always thought the Alien movies strike the most realistic tone in this regard, with the Weyland Corp lurking in the background.

benbreen··on The Greatest Use of Life: On William James
You're free to dislike the article, but I figured I'd point out that the author is a professional philosopher, not a journalist. The bio states that he's "professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), and his latest book is Hiking with Nietzsche (2018)."
benbreen··on Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House
OP here - I think disliking Heinlein is probably the norm among SF fans these days. A lot of his stuff hasn't aged well.

That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it.

I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new.

[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-...

benbreen··on A True Story
Your comment got me wondering about how widely Hellenistic cosmological models of the spherical earth circulated. I, like you, assumed it was only known to a small group of scholars like Eratosthenes. But digging around a bit, it seems like any literate person in the Mediterranean basin and Middle East during the time of the early Roman Empire could've been exposed to the idea of a spherical earth, via Aristotle or the Pythagoreans. Or at least so says Wikipedia's (surprisingly good) page for the history of the spherical earth model: "After the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round." [1]

The page documents how this then filtered into Roman and early Muslim astronomical traditions. Granted, since only a small percentage of people in these societies were literate, it was probably true that most people in, say, the Roman or Sasanian empires thought the earth was flat. But given what we know about the ways that premodern books were read (often in public, sometimes to a large groups of people) it seems to me like an open question.

There's also this very interesting aside about the possibility that the Phoenicians also knew the earth was round, perhaps even predating the Greeks: "In The Histories, written 431–425 BC, Herodotus cast doubt on a report of the Sun observed shining from the north. He stated that the phenomenon was observed during a circumnavigation of Africa undertaken by Phoenician explorers employed by Egyptian pharaoh Necho II c. 610–595 BC (The Histories, 4.42) who claimed to have had the Sun on their right when circumnavigating in a clockwise direction. To modern historians, these details confirm the truth of the Phoenicians' report and even open the possibility that the Phoenicians knew about the spherical model. However, nothing certain about their knowledge of geography and navigation has survived."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#History

benbreen··on Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’
Well, maybe not "easily," but I agree. Worth noting that heroin prescriptions have been happening in Switzerland for going on 20 years now, with excellent results.[1]

The article was fantastic reporting by the way. Hard to read, but difficult to put down once you start.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

benbreen··on IQ Matters Less Than You Think
You should write this rant up as a blog post! I'd read it.

One factor doesn't seem to me to get mentioned enough in these discussions - call it "agreeability" or "sanguinity." Basically, ability to successfully cope with neuroses and other social/behavioral challenges that seem to be more common among intelligent people.

I put some thought into the people I've met who seemed to me to be the greatest outliers in terms of intellectual achievement. One is a famous writer, another is a classics professor, and another is a math prodigy turned neuroscientist. The commonalities between the three are a combination of 1) high g, 2) obsessive focus, and 3) the aforementioned happiness/agreeability/ability to cope with neuroses. All three of the people I have in mind are neurotic in some ways, but can channel it toward constructive channels. Haven't looked into the research on this but I would be curious if you could recommend any study that addresses this component. I agree that the Gladwellian "just practice a lot" view doesn't seem to hold a lot of weight, but anecdotally it seems to me like raw intellectual ability isn't the determining factor either.

benbreen··on IQ Matters Less Than You Think
Worth noting in this discussion: Einstein never took an IQ test, at least none that historians know of. Pretty much any time I see a claim about a historical figure's IQ, it turns out to be an invented figure made on the basis of a totally unscientific "estimate." The tendency of pop writers about intelligence to use these invented historical IQs as a measuring stick makes me doubt the whole enterprise (though I'm not singling out Gladwell here, whose books I generally like).
benbreen··on The first calculating machine
I think the distinction is that Antikythera was a calendrical device, but couldn't perform multiplication/division etc of a given number like the device described here.
benbreen··on Privateer Holdings Hits the Jackpot with $12B Tilray Stake
My subjective opinion is that cannabis is far more variable in terms of both effects and smell/taste than any alcoholic beverage. Partly because the psychoactive effects come from 100s of discrete compounds rather than just one source (ethanol), but also because there are a ton of aromatics and terpenes in the plant which depend upon dozens of variables -- not just the strain but the ways that you grow, harvest, dry, and consume it. And on top of that, it's being intensively bred and modified at the moment. Intensive genetic modification hasn't happened yet, but I fully expect to see cannabis strains that glow in the dark or contain nicotine (or taste like craft beer) in the years to come.
benbreen··on Privateer Holdings Hits the Jackpot with $12B Tilray Stake
It's a reasonable analogy, but I gather that the regulatory demands are currently much higher for small cannabis producers. A close relative of mine is a small-scale producer and the restrictions, price drop, and delays from the legalization process have been making it hard for them to stay in business. Hopefully it gets worked out soon because I'd love for the ecosystem to end up looking like microbreweries, but I fear that it'll end up being more like other agribusinesses.
benbreen··on “Eat More Onions”: Desperate and massively debatable medical advice from 1918
Indeed. I'm a historian of medicine and sometimes think that premodern healers get a bad rap. Yes, some of the cures you find in medieval or early modern medicine are absurd (like "bleeding until syncope"). But once in awhile you run into something like this, from a 17th century Portuguese physician named Duarte Madeira Arraiz:

"They spread the sickness throughout the world, each army bringing it to its respective country... and it was related by Christopher Columbus of his discoveries in the Occidental Indies to the King of Spain, that in the lands he discovered he encountered many Indian men and women who suffered from the disease of the morbo gallico [syphilis], and so those among the soldiers and men of arms who had communication with the Indian women and with the 'mulheres publicas' of the land easily spread this contagion to the greater part of the Spanish army, and from thence, to the French."

He comes pretty close to anticipating germ theory here, arguing that syphilis was sexually transmitted and correctly theorizing that it had New World origins and was spread by European colonization. These people weren't dumb.

benbreen··on Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations (2007)
If you go to Google Scholar and search "Tai's model," you can find that this from 1994:

"Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule"

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short

As well as Tai's response: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short

As a fellow academic, it seems to me like Tai wasn't really claiming to have reinvented the wheel here (or maybe I should say the area under the wheel). It looks to me like she took what my psychologist friends call the "Least Publishable Unit" (LPU) too much to heart. She claims, in the response, that she was asked to publish it by some colleagues so that they could cite her in a paper of their own; it's unclear to me why they would need to cite such a thing, but most likely it was just the typical explanation - where you cite your friends at any possible opportunity, even when they recapitulate Isaac Newton ;)

Granted, I think it's a weak rationale, but I suspect it's not so much that no one involved knew calculus; it's more that they wanted to drum up more citations for people inside their field rather than outside. In fact, I see that even the people who wrote in to protest managed to rack up 7 citations.

benbreen··on Insured, but Still Owing $109K for a Heart Attack
Yep, this happened to my wife - she needed a fairly intensive and costly surgery and was told she was in-network and covered. It turned out the person on the phone was wrong and she ended up having to cash out her entire 401k to pay the 20k+ bill. We learned a lesson about the US healthcare system with that one...
benbreen··on Opium or Cucumber? Debunking a Myth About Sumerian Drugs
Author here - fair enough, that sentence was maybe too flippant. I do mention in the caption that bitter cucumber looks more similar. But if the criterion for making the assumption is that some types of cucumber are sometimes round like poppy pods, then I think it's still not at all convincing.
benbreen··on Opium or Cucumber? Debunking a Myth About Sumerian Drugs
That's very helpful and interesting, thank you!
benbreen··on Opium or Cucumber? Debunking a Myth About Sumerian Drugs
Author of the original post here. That sounds super interesting. Out of curiosity, have you come across the phrase in question ("hul gil") in any of the documents you look at? I, too, would love to read about your work if it's public anywhere.
benbreen··on Benzodiazepines: Our Other Prescription Drug Problem
I see how that's true on a legal level, but if we're just talking about social and public health impacts, I don't see why the distinction between prescription and illegal use matters here. A three-fold increase in a category of drugs with major health impacts seems newsworthy to me. After all, the boundaries between legal and illegal use are far from fixed. Methamphetamine was once widely prescribed by physicians for weight loss, for instance (and is indeed still legally available as a prescription medicine) [1].

Presumably we can agree that a world in which prescriptions for methamphetamine have tripled might be a cause for concern, right? It's debatable whether this class of drugs has the same abuse and health risks, but based on my own reading and anecdotal experiences, I think they're pretty comparable.

[1] https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2012/06/from-quacks-to-quaal...

benbreen··on Ask HN: What is going on?
I had a really bright student in one of my classes past year who was a moon landing denialist. She said her best friend, who was a student at Berkeley, had convinced her and was also a flat earther. I was shocked, until I learned that they'd been indoctrinated via r/conspiracy and YouTube. Now I see that stuff as a subset of the problems with social media in general - namely distrust of the media and expert knowledge combined with the creation of insular online communities that can lead into a new kind of groupthink.
benbreen··on Relation between alcohol consumption in midlife and dementia in late life
I was thinking that 1 unit = 1 standard drink but if the study is using the UK definition of units, the 1-14/week range is actually much lower than the average alcohol consumption among the academic/intellectual types I know. To put the 1-14 figure into real world terms, 10 UK units is about equal to a single bottle of 14% ABV wine. And to put that in perspective, on multiple occasions I've witnessed a table of Oxford dons drink the equivalent of 10-20 units over lunch!

Granted, academics and intellectuals in the UK are more likely (in my admittedly anecdotal experience) to be functional alcoholics than elsewhere. But still, if I were trying to estimate the median consumption among the few dozen people I know with advanced degrees, I'd say it'd fall more in the range of 2-3 bottles of wine a week or equivalent amounts of beer, which is well into the "excessive" zone in this study. Unfortunately, I seem to fall into that group as well :(

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