caesar novus

A last followup: just talking this thru to myself has helped, and i will mention my further direction without burdening with future results. So i have found apparent dazzling symbiosis with aspirin and antihistimine for me. It occurs to me that the 4 hour blissful sweet spot is equal to the duration of the published aspirin dose. My next task is to try to extend it to 5 hours by using coated tablets (and avoiding using bayers new fast acting fine granule aspirin). With a good 5 hour sleep, maybe i can jettison the long acting antihistimine which is expensive with side effects. So a regular antihist boosted with the anti inflammatory and other good effects of aspirin. Of course even aspirin can be overdone and i have sourced cheap coated smaller doses online. Use the minimum or none being an ultimate goal.

To see a really dramatic documentary of an inside the cockpit perspective of facing intimidating aa fire, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40knj0qg_Us&list=FLQgYULq9KCN-zkdBWpRWeRA&index=1&feature=plpp_video which covers the 1982 bombing run of an obsolete vulcan over the well defended runway in the falklands. The crew hardly expects to survive aa, but soon has more to worry about like overcoming being lost or out of fuel. Their success rested on the efforts of an armada of 13 tankers, the crew of one of them getting more decorations than the bomber crew due to side dramas. The forum where i got this video link included really wild schemes to extend hits on runways on argentina mainland, using a lead vulcan that primarily targeted aa. All using quickly improvised equipment, some from junkyards. But the hit of a single bomb of the first mission sent an adaquate warning message.

P.S. an aside on anticoagulance... I just saw a lecture on the stages of shock. One of the last horrible stages is an INTERNAL coagulation of blood. Your confused body guesses you may have had a hand or foot bitten off, and blindly clogs up extremities whether they need it or not. The symptoms are counterintuitive... bleeding from the eyes, ears, all over since the rest of your blood is depleted of natural coagulants. Seen in combat, but it is not from the physical effect of an explosion pressure wave. I forget the latin name for this, but the cure is branded in my brain... you have to jab them with a dose of anticoagulant, which is the opposite of what appears to be needed. Yuk, but maybe salicylic acid to the rescue again.

Long ago a co-worker and I suffering thru cold/flu seasons did a comparison test of a range of anti-histamines. We normally rarely agreed on things, but both decided chlorpheniramine maleate was the champion. Its an old school variety that also makes you drowsy, and I recently started taking some slow release versions to avoid waking up from (I think) irritating construction dust creating breathing problems. It had the strange side effect of trying to extend sleep for the full 12 hours that the dose is supposed to last. Well, thats a drag... but oddly I recently got the opposite effect when by chance combining that pill with aspirin. Very strange, and I haven't discussed it with anyone before now. What does this mean to wake refreshed with only about 4 hours of sleep, and is it a real, healthy sleep? I guess the cycles of sleep put the important part in the first few hours, and high achievement folks like Napoleon lived on short sleeps naturally. I hate to live with some artificial additive, although aspirin is about as natural as you can get. The ancient Greeks used it from willow bark, as did the Cherokee. It is in fruits and vegetables, and according to wikipedia the body even synthesizes it. The active ingredient is salicylic acid which wiki sez has been proposed as vitamin S! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salicylic_acid Weirdly it's the same stuff that is sold to paint on warts to make them drop off. There is also an anti coagulant effect, which is why I experimented with it in the first place. With even athletes getting heart attacks from modern artery clogging diets, I dabbled a bit with the baby aspirin regime to thin the blood. But it bugged me that baby aspirin cost more than the normal adult size pills. The big pills CAN overdo anticoagulance, for instance making a shaving cut (or an ulcer) bleed way too long. So I decided to simply take big aspirin only on days of some slight muscle ache (such as overexercise) anyway. Now I find this dramatic effect, and wonder to milk it or leave it alone. Does it just work for me... does my system yearn for these combined additives due to some imbalance? Not sure, but you have been informed of the potential anyway.

I can think of further things that muddy the picture, like both "taxpayer" groups would be supporting a sizable army regardless of lack of administrators. BTW, prof Gregory Aldrete of University of Wisconsin devoted 3 lectures to comparing them, after 6 lectures on the Han and Romans separately. I still think there may be a lesson to be learned from the differences if I knew more details. For instance you might expect the Han to benefit from more policing, but I believe he said both Romans and Hans frequently died from bandits on internal travel. And the connections to the modern crises is hard to make since "economies" is a recent concept. I was alluding to the dilemma that public sector staffing during a downturn wants to go down to save money, but wants to go up to provide a stimulus (if you can find some genuinely useful task for them). An overstaffed society cannot do a stimulus and an understaffed one cannot do cutbacks, which limits their options.

I heard a talk (imperfectly) about roman vs surprisingly similar han dynasty, and got interested in the claim han had almost a thousand times more administrators for a nearly identical land area and population size at similar points in time. I wondered if the romans suffered from the light staffing, or did that austerity allow the economy to grow more freely or support bread handouts, baths, amphitheaters? I see some comparisons were made in the past here, with a lot of concern about bias for some reason. But it seems an interesting and timely tradeoff to brainstorm. The hans apparently wanted a huge centralized meritocracy to smother any regional attempt at cronyism or whatever. Even today i think chinese central govt fights regional govt corruption. The romans on the other hand were reluctant to expand staff when expanding their borders and allowed cronies, privatized tax collectors, and local puppets to fill the void. Either approach may have their advantages, but if the scale is 1000 fold apart, something must have been carried to the breaking point and made a cautionary tale. A possible connection today is what to do in shrinking economic times... public job cutback (like austerity in greece), or stimulation (like beloved fdr1930s make-work or currently failing us green job training programs). Sicily has a wild middle path: to not let go any of 26000 forest rangers, easily 1000 times their staffing needs on worldwide per tree standards http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/sicily-fact-of-the-day.html Well, i know it wont prove much... but was administration so terrible by the understaffed romans (they did staff up more late in the game) or was it paradisical for the han population supporting 1000x public servants? I want to focus on the concrete benefit/cost they provided to their society, not the fact that juicy jobs became available. Any society could (and does) fund plum jobs that returns no benefit to taxpayers they burden. There was also an interesting comparison of the armies... han had meritocratic professional leaders and conscript soldiers. Romans had politician amateur generals and professional volunteer officers and soldiers. The speaker marveled the roman model in either case worked as well as it did. It was from some teaching company lecture series on ancient civilizations. PS Edit: my 1000x factor was a bit, but not too, high... I checked back with "History Of The Ancient World A Global Perspective" "lect 32. Han And Roman Empires Compared" to find Han estimated at 1 bureaucrat per 450 population vs Roman 1 bureaucrat per 250,000 population. So many Roman provences had only 3 formal administrators, although various informal helpers such as provence-owned clerical slaves.

Andalusian Poems translators Christopher Middleton, Leticia Garza-Falcon http://www.amazon.com/Andalusian-Poems-Christopher-Middleton/dp/0879238879 I was just suffering thru the stoic meditations of the fifth good emperor and could no longer stand his austerity... maybe if he had lived it up a little more, his son wouldnt have turned into a most self indulgent emperor. Anyway i sought from my bookshelf a dose of the opposite, in a book reveling in more sensual pleasures... tastefully and succinctly observing the delights of foods, nature, maidens, and the alhambra. I had heard a sample read over the radio by a translator, and rushed down to his signing event. I bought it without asking for a scribble, but just now noticed it was already pre-signed by both translators. Not a minor issue, as i can see by the elevated multi digit used prices on amazon... this book may end up as a photocopy for me and the original goes bye-bye. Anyway, the book has a large introduction which can be a bit scholarly, but addresses the issue of the original arabic versions from around the year 1000 being lost. They make a case that they actually benefited by going into spanish before english, which sounds less crazy when you see the result. The poems are even visually attractive with the text layout making playful fluid shapes, such as varied line lengths to mimic the outline of the object being praised. Well, its hard for me to articulate how nice this book is, and anyway it is hard to get and quite short for the price. But maybe it can encourage the search for other collections of poems from that bohemian corner of the medieval andalusian world. Believe me, anglo classics of nature or love poetry are hopelessly clunky, fussy, and smarmy in comparison

Speaking of I-told-ya-so, that pretty fascinating wiki article seems to say about a third of military budget was tied up in not terribly effective german homeland aa... for political rather than military priorities. Surprisingly supportive for allied bomber effectiveness (by just being there), and surprisingly detracting for the weak will of a supposed dictatorship.

Oh, i guess most entire-shell ground impacts came from first-time response to surprise attacks. At pearl they flung many shells up without setting fuses, and similar in more recent beginings of conflict. I only recall one account of someone running thru 88 fallout in a berlin air raid and i think that spent shrapnal was considered more injurous than fatal. I had almost riffed a bit about the most extravagant and maybe wasteful project of ww2... not the bomb, but high flying b29 which actually cost more... to debug the pressure cabin and so on. This must have been partly to fly above aa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_Flak_18/36/37/41 gives max heights and effective heights of various aa, but not the japanese ones. Of course high flights over japan proved a failure, and mainly low night runs were done with b29s.

You might like a new military documentary series called History Exposed which brings newly declassified info to old battles. The one on the 1990 gulf war covers how the iraqi aa guns and missles were blinded by targeting their radar guidence. Some cruise missles only carried radar reflectors and others spewed only carbon fibers that would short out power lines to defensive computers. This plan was hard to sell originally, but led to only blind aa firing. A wild weasel pilot who baits aa radar and tries to kill it gave possibly the most clumsy book talk in history about his memoir at http://www.booktv.org/Program/13904/Viper+Pilot+A+Memoir+of+Air+Combat.aspx Aa kills a lot of folks on the ground... big shells that sometimes failed to burst in the air hit schools and vehicles surrounding pearl harbor. Accounts for a lot of damage falsely attributed to stray bombs even today. At pearl the guns only dialed in when waves of friendly planes came back to land and many were hit by jumpy gunners. In ww2 the allied bombing forced germany to starve the russian front of their most effective anti tank artillery 88 gun. Hordes of guns and gunners twiddled their fingers all over germany for what in most places a rare visit. The allies eventually realized the main value of bombers were as live bait, not only tying up guns but attracting fighters to be eliminated by escorts. The invasion via france was hard enough even though german air force had only recently been neutralized. There is the story of the radio proximity fuse which made it easier for us ships to shoot down japanese plane attacks. Or todays phalanx automated machine gun/cannons that target missles or planes that have gotten within a couple seconds away. The balance shifts back and forth for aa gun effectiveness thru time.

Once the price is out of range for the mainstream market, publishers may as well multiply prices times five or ten to harvest the money from libraries that buy regardless of cost, do they not? So that is an invitation to access pricey books at a lib. Even when you dont have a withdrawal card for the library that may carry it, i find visiting in person isnt as revolting as it used to be. Local university lib used to be a gathering of vagrants in a cloud of bedbugs, inflicting cybercrime via the free pcs. I'm not just stereotyping, but have helped their victims before. Anyway, now they put the free pcs on high tables with no chairs, and only the predators are too lazy to stand, leaving a nice environment for a better class of freeloaders like me to flip some pages nearby...

The Italian justice system has solved the problem of no warning before this and any future quake http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_21829020/italy-convicts-7-scientists-manslaughter-failing-predict-killer Any scientist can now put a recording on their phone saying an earthquake may be imminent, and meanwhile move to Barbados.

Maybe there should be a book review section under the ET CETERA area for non Roman books. I'll chuck in a few more non roman comments here though. That was the way Paul Theroux enigmatically described the charge against him in one book. For some reason I feel moved to reduce my charges to match the writeup by somebody in wikipedia. It says he merely protected someone trying to overthrow his host government (still thrown out, as he should have been). And it is traditional for a reviewer to show engagement by nitpicking some facts in the book. I start by disputing his "Pacific" claim that kamakazes attacked pearl harbor, because they were invented later than 1941. Weirder was his comment that prez JFK was torpedoed in ww2 melanesia (starting his rise to fame rebounding from that). JFK was not a victim of normal warfare, but due to his inattention and unreadiness his idling tiny speedboat was expertly rammed by a huge, ungainly Japanese ship. The Kennedys are practically hometown saints for him probably, and for him to simply make up (probably unconsciously) this more heroic version sheds doubt on other of his quite meticulous scribblings. The Third Reich in Power [Audible Audio Edition] by Richard J. Evans (Author), Sean Pratt (Narrator) This book unexpectedly captured my attention as a bedtime listen sometimes. It covers the "peacetime" mid 1930s in sort of a socio-political view. Mostly about the radical changes imposed on work practices, such as for farmers or teachers. Really shocking changes, sometimes for populism reasons that remind you of today, or sometimes to establish totalitarianism. I wonder if the asian communists copied some of these approaches such as militarizing teachers and encouraging students to bully them for straying from party lines. One advantage is Pratt the audio narrator is a gem. Not the usual overly theatrical or else bored drone. Just engaging and matter-of-fact enough. Have you heard some of those Canadian TV documentaries spoiled by zombie narrators? Many documentaries take advantage of Canadian gov't subsidies, and apparently union rules promise narration jobs to bored or even contemptuous (of the Romans or whatever) drudges. Actually this is part of a trilogy. I originally listened to his "3rd reich at war" one in an attempt to get a more neutral view, with the allied accounts being prone to triumphalism. I didn't realize the author had an arguably non neutral background of marxist and feminist analyses. Anyway he started off with a forward saying it was not going to be comprehensive about the atrocities. But as I recall it was nothing but atrocities, especially the more unusual and chaotic ones... just too numbing to dwell on, and why Croatian ones unrelated to Germany or Italy? Then I listened to his "3rd reich comes to power" which was interesting because they trailblazed some of the techniques used today. Like hammering on the undecided demographic, and making ideologically unlikely concessions to entice micro slices. Today under 10% in the US are undecided, so much of the airtime is to address their idiosyncratic concerns. The 1930s saw heavy use of campaigning by airplane and radio, and so on... I forget if he covered much bullying by brownshirts... maybe I dozed off as not much of a politics person. But back to "3rd reich in power". I agree with the Guardian review http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/01/historybooks.features that Evans makes a good case that the 3rd Reich was basically a movement in radical modernism rather than a regression to the old. It pretended to look to the past to entice certain demographics (catholic rituals and symbolism was considered effective and worth emulating). but it introduced an endless line of absolutely whacky "reforms". Many of them had to be retracted when they didn't work, because of the other great goal... getting the economy strong enough for war. Maybe the interest of this for me is how it shows trends recognizable today, taken to extremes that we will thankfully never have to experience. Today at the most extreme "conservatives" are associated with social authoritarianism and economic liberty. "Liberals" at most seek the reverse of social liberty and economic authoritarianism. The oddballs are "libertarians" wanting full liberty. But todays "progressive" movement embraced by Europe and just recently in the US leans to both social and economic authoritarianism, which is close in direction if not magnitude of pre-war 3rd reich as depicted in this book. P.S. for examples of dysfunctional "progressive" mandates, see "Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left" by Alex Berezow http://www.booktv.org/Watch/13939/Science+Left+Behind+FeelGood+Fallacies+and+the+Rise+of+the+AntiScientific+Left.aspx Minor but provable examples are the biofuels mandate that pollute 300 times more, costs more, and starves the worlds poor. Another is the ban on disposable grocery bags whose substitute causes greater net environmental harm and sicken fellow consumers as you pickup their leftover decaying meat juices or dog fleas from their reusable bag deposits.

I had restrained myself from posting the "inside story" from smithsonian magazine... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-the-Controversial-New-Text-About-Jesus-170177076.html?c=y&story=fullstory I dont actually know or care much about the veracity or ultimate meaning of such X-ianity questions, but just wanted to point out it potentially has a strong whiff of contemporary sociopolitics. Karen king is not a random professor but a self described heretical feminist advocate type of historian. Late in that article sez her studies were aimed at teaching us how to live today, which sounds like a bias alert. Here is a snippet from one of her classes...

P.S. i have a plan to defuse these dutch independance tensions in belgium bloodlessly. It is inspired by the last minute idea some 1930s german had in putting a loud festive marching band in front of the line of sinister looking military vehicles coming to occupy austria (maybe done for west czech too)... who among the confused defenders dares to spoil an apparent party? I propose the belgian seperatists call in north korean female troops as mercenaries, marching to a catchy tune : There is probably some eu rule against injury to women, so there will be no resistance. Just my personal preference the result isnt yet another little country (there was a new balkan country split off recently of only about a few city blocks), but merge belgium into netherlands and luxemburg. I think belgium/lux was an artificial buffer state created to shield france/uk/netherlands long ago anyway.

The swiss defense minister doesnt agree, and is stepping up war games to practice machine gunning down hordes of violent euro border-jumpers http://finance.yahoo.com/news/switzerland-prepares-army-euro-zone-131233903.html ... he says adjacent euro countries have downsized their military to the point where they cant even contain worst-case civil unrest. And I remember tony blair being very frustrated getting euro help in containing balkan violence. Of course the above doesnt allege conflict between any eu countries. But that might have been constructive. If the netherlands and luxemburg would attack and carve up the parts of belgium that speak their respective languages, probably all involved would be happier... and geography as a subject (minus belgium) could be taught in one minute less time for future students.

Here is an organization that feeds the stray cats daily within those very ruins according to http://www.romancats.com/index_eng.php (then hit the OUR WORK tab). I dont think that is a good activity in the ruins even though they do seem to sterilize some. At least if they werent fed, some rat and pigeon eradication might be accomplished. I suggest someone sneak in and disguise an ultrasonic siren which drives away critters but is out of human hearing wavelengths.

History still lives, it seems. I hope this means they stop feeding and encouraging stray cats from making that square romes biggest cat toilet... kitty urine must disolve marble. Or maybe the love of cats is what preserves that otherwise neglected square from something worse. I wonder if the spanish and italian research teams will be hit by austerity, and this was a last hurrah of results. Hope for the best...

There is a well known way to do hadrians villa together with tivoli that i can dig up if needed. You take the subway to a major bus hub way to the north. From there get all onward tix and look for the lighted signs for departure gate and time for a bus that goes within maybe 7 blocks of hadrians. Learn the landmarks to look for to get off, and how to walk onward. Often you are reccomended a series of two busses to get closer, but that invites trouble or noshow. When you enter hadrians complex, i would circulate clockwise, but be sure to not miss the museum if it closes early. I went ccw and saw the spacious restful areas first, then couldnt appreciate the cluttered complex stuff at the end due to burnout. Well, i had a terrible flu at the time. There is a minor bus stop a couple blocks to the right of gate that can take you to tivoli. After a long wait i found it was being bypassed and walked to the main road bus stop, not where i came from, but on the direct aproach for tivoli. If you only seek the villa d'este and gardens, that is much lower priority on your time than hadrians. I cant remember why the train didnt look best for returning, but there is a fast bus. For easier shot at seating, join on the stop before rather than after the villa stop. And get off one stop early before the main terminal when most others get off early too... you will see a new major subway stop or endpoint there. Oh, i might spend your last sunday there walking the sites of appian way if you havent already. An annoying thing is they delay opening the appian gates to the quintillus complex til late, so go to the racetrack place which closes early. Also be careful about your last monday when so many sites close. If you end up with a slack day in rome, maybe get off at naples for a day on your return from sicily... there is always more to do there. Trains in sicily can be highly erratic... i remember seeing mine listing at 30 minutes, no HOURS late, all trains thrown into chaos due to ferry strike.

That site does look a little superficial. What i have done in the past is just paste the quote into google, which is smart about finding variations instead of needing exact match. I just tried that with a favorite quote from that site, by merely holding my finger on the phrase, and androids dolphin browser presents me a button to web search for it. So given: "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." - Winston Churchill It returns among other things a wikipedia misquote site http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations which claims winston didn't invent it but repeated a common french observation, like from Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929): "Not to be a socialist at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head." And you may go on to find an actual context or pointer to it, of course all needing confirmation, but gives you a sometimes easy start.

These writers surely have a much better understanding of the science than me. But i wonder if they are overlooking a key cultural effect that probably makes the male y chromosome flag wildly understate the diversity of a subjects background. According to my cartoon understanding of it all, the male y is only copied from his father. Females dont carry this chromosome, so the vast majority of his family tree, 99% or so, is totally unknowable in respect to y flags because some great great grandmother was in the chain. So only the fathers fathers fathers... y thingie can be tracked. But wasnt it common that the wife was brought in from outside areas to live with the male family? Thus only a chain of sons keep replicating y chromosomes from the same village, meanwhile those sons other genes suck up diversity via females from the other regions. I know some places have the reverse customs, or some dont have such customs, but i thought the bringing the female to males family was common or even the law that she had to be kidnapped from an enemy tribe for instance... often explained as a method to prevent inbreeding. The other approach with mitochrondrial dna is almost similar in tracing only one extreme branch of the female tree... all of which tracks only a tiny proportion if your ancestors. They hope it is an unbiased statistical sample, but it appears to me not. Just recently i was trying to calm down the hoopla about people trying to cash in on racial benefit programs by claiming their dna test proved 50% heritage in spite of appearing otherwise. The current technology cant approach that, can it?

Roman themes seems to have almost entirely disappeared from popular culture here such as cable tv recently, but locally a huge inflatable roman colloseum has appeared for children at play. So maybe it is in stock for rent at your next function. I dont really know what is done inside because you cant see far inside the arches. There is central structure that could hold slides or a bouncy platform, or maybe a playground. It is sprawling and topped by a thracian warrior i think. Its very popular, but strange that parents cant watch the internal activity hardly at all

Wow, the swedes and poles look insular on that venn diagram too. Swedes only mixed with north german and poles mixed a bit with czechs, in spite of the surrounding activity. We have to be careful because most of these flags come from mutations tens of thousands of years ago when they lived elsewhere i think. The italians only mixed with iberians... not with french, and the north italians only with portugal?! That might account for a slight arab look of south italians? I guess dna transfer is driven by choice of mates rather than a meeting of groups. But environment and epigenetics can cause subdifferentiation. Epigenetics is nondna, quick adapting inheritance written up quite well in wikipedia. The po valley coment brought to mind the book italian neighbors by tim parks, where he speculated their eternal winter fogs changed the nature and look of residents compared to nearby mountain italians. I know that decades of sun exposure can make someone look like a different type, and even occupation can do this. Many pilots carry that hawklike vigilant look from peering at distant features hour after hour. Maybe po residents carry the reverse effects after centuries of living in a white room.

I am only in the middle of the book, but will try to give a more coherent snapshot here. The review link i posted above is hard to beat though, and indicates what i hadnt known... that it was widely received as a highpoint of the authors work and among travelwriters and among the general reading public. Paul Theroux

Wow, here is a followup to the above tepid review. I think that med. book was botched by the writer, and the market may still be open for reflective account of travelling around romes onetime lake. I believe thiat book was a reluctant attempt to cash in on a sure-thing topic in order to pay for his divorce and the new apple of his eye. Contrast that to his previous book during the despair of collapsing marriage and hypochondria about cancer http://www.troyparfitt.com/536 . Wow again, i had Paul Theroux