A Bit More Detail

• JSTOR Daily examines ch'arki, an Andean food like jerky.


• JSTOR Daily reports on how Peru and Chile contest claims to being the origins of pisco.


• JSTOR Daily explores the X-ray craze of 1896, here.


• JSTOR Daily explores the "lavender scare" of the 1950s that saw dozens of queer men purged from the American government.


• JSTOR Daily looks at how linguists are using Urban Dictionary to study the evolution of language.

• Bad Astronomy notes a new detailed study suggesting that asteroid Hygeia is round. Does this mean it is a dwarf planet?


• The Buzz notes that the Toronto Public Library has a free booklet on the birds of Toronto available at its branches.


• Crooked Timber looks forward to a future, thanks to Trump, without the World Trade Organization.


• D-Brief notes how the kelp forests off California were hurt by unseasonal heat and disease.


• Bruce Dorminey notes an impending collision of supergalactic clusters.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog looks at how judgement can complicate collective action.


• Language Hat looks at the different definitions of the word "mobile".

Language Log looks at the deep influence of the Persian language upon Marathi.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44807

• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how, if anything, climate scientists make conservative claims about their predictions.


• Marginal Revolution wonders if planned power outages are a good way to deal with the threat of wildfires in California.


• The NYR Daily looks at the ethnic cleansing being enabled by Turkey in Kurdish Syria.


• Corey S. Powell at Out There interviews archeologist Arthur Lin about his use of space-based technologies to discovery traces of the past.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the staggering inequality in Chile, driver of the recent protests.


• At Roads and Kingdoms, Anthony Elghossain reports from the scene of the mass protests in Lebanon.


• Drew Rowsome tells how his balcony garden fared this year.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel looks at stellar generations in the universe. (Our sun is a third-generation star.)


• Strange Company looks at the murder of a girl five years old in Indiana in 1898. Was the neighbor boy twelve years old accused of the crime the culprit?


• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine takes a look at social mobility in France.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little considers economic historians and their study of capitalism.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the pro-Russian policies of the Moldova enclave of Gagauzia, and draws recommendations for Ukraine re: the Donbas.

• Anne-Marie Bouchard wrote at Huffington Post Québec on the 9th about the anniversary of the publication in 1948 of Refus global, the artistic manifesto that changed Québec.


• Global News reported on Gimli, Manitoba, as its Islendingadagurinn--the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba--approached.


• The fact that Canada is managing the refugee crisis on its southern border so well is something Canadians should take pride in. CBC has it.


• The introduction of the right to roam to Canada, as suggested at The Conversation, does make some sense to me.


• The beaver, introduced to Patagonia in 1945, has shown itself to be so prolific and ecologically disruptive that Argentina and Chile are planning a massive cull. The National Post reports.

• anthro{dendum} hosts Alexia Maddox's essay on her experience doing ethnographic work on Darknet drug markets.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about how the creative life, contrary to some imaginings, is not self-sustaining. It desperately needs external support--an outside job, perhaps.


• Bruce Dorminey writes about how the climate of Chile, especially the Atacama, is perfect for astronomy.


• JSTOR Daily shares a paper talking about how Alexander Pushkin, the 19th century Russian author, was demonstrably proud of his African ancestry.


• Language Hat links to a new article on rongorongo, the mysterious and undeciphered script of the Rapa Nui of Polynesian Easter Island.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, notes in passing the oddness of restrictions imposed by customs in Chile on taking ordinary books into the country.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a bizarrely parochial article from the New York Times talking down to Los Angeles.


• The Map Room Blog links to some interesting articles, from The New York Times recently and from the Atlantic in 2012, about the art of gerrymandering.


• The NYR Daily looks at the import of the Nunes memo for Trump and Russian-American relations.


• Roads and Kingdoms considers the simple pleasures of a snack featuring canned fish by the beach in Mallorca.


• Drew Rowsome quite approves of this year's gay romance film Sebastian, set here in Toronto.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that, contrary to predictions, most satellite galaxies orbit in the same plane as their hosts. This is a problem for dark matter.
Towleroad notes that some are lobbying Amazon not to locate its HQ2 in a city without human rights protections for LGBT people.

• The Chinese decision to forbid further bitcoin mining within its frontiers makes sense, actually. VICE reports.


• Matt Williams at Universe Today notes that China is planning more than forty space launches in 2018.


• The upcoming Chang'e 4 lunar lander will carry live plants and animals to the surface of the far side of the Moon. Universe Today's Matt Williams reports.


• Nadia Drake at National Geographic points to research suggesting that the rings of Saturn, far from being primordial, may well have formed as recently as less than a hundred million years ago. Catastrophes can still happen, it seems, in the mature solar system.


• Paul M. Sutter at Universe Today talks about the preternaturally clear night sky above the Atacama Desert in Chile. I would love to see this.


• The Inter Press Service notes that clean energy, including renewable sources like solar and wind, have contributed to a sharp fall in electricity prices in Chile.


• Argentina, the Inter Press Service notes, is set to become a major exporter of lithium from its northwestern Jujuy province, perhaps the leading exporter in the world.

• The intricacies of law in Chile are complicating the exploitation of the country's vast lithium reserves. Bloomberg reports.


• Norway is faced with the question of how, or even if, it can ethically exploit its hydrocarbon fuel reserves. Bloomberg reports.


• Can the transformation of carbon dioxide from the air into carbon-neutral stone be an answer to climate change? Quartz reports.

Eventually Easter’s growing population was cutting the forest more rapidly than the forest was regenerating. The people used the land for gardens and the wood for fuel, canoes, and houses--and, of course, for lugging statues. As forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to transport and erect their statues. Life became more uncomfortable-- springs and streams dried up, and wood was no longer available for fires.

People also found it harder to fill their stomachs, as land birds, large sea snails, and many seabirds disappeared. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined and porpoises disappeared from the table. Crop yields also declined, since deforestation allowed the soil to be eroded by rain and wind, dried by the sun, and its nutrients to be leeched from it. Intensified chicken production and cannibalism replaced only part of all those lost foods. Preserved statuettes with sunken cheeks and visible ribs suggest that people were starving.

With the disappearance of food surpluses, Easter Island could no longer feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests who had kept a complex society running. Surviving islanders described to early European visitors how local chaos replaced centralized government and a warrior class took over from the hereditary chiefs. The stone points of spears and daggers, made by the warriors during their heyday in the 1600s and 1700s, still litter the ground of Easter today. By around 1700, the population began to crash toward between one-quarter and one-tenth of its former number. People took to living in caves for protection against their enemies. Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other’s statues, breaking the heads off. By 1864 the last statue had been thrown down and desecrated.

For one thing, they could eat rats. As J.B. MacKinnon reports in his new book, The Once and Future World, archeologists examined ancient garbage heaps on Easter Island looking for discarded bones and found "that 60 percent of the bones came from introduced rats."

So they'd found a meat substitute.

What's more, though the island hadn't much water and its soil wasn't rich, the islanders took stones, broke them into bits, and scattered them onto open fields creating an uneven surface. When wind blew in off the sea, the bumpy rocks produced more turbulent airflow, "releasing mineral nutrients in the rock," J.B. MacKinnon says, which gave the soil just enough of a nutrient boost to support basic vegetables. One tenth of the island had these scattered rock "gardens," and they produced enough food, "to sustain a population density similar to places like Oklahoma, Colorado, Sweden and New Zealand today."

According to MacKinnon, scientists say that Easter Island skeletons from that time show "less malnutrition than people in Europe." When a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggevin, happened by in 1722, he wrote that islanders didn't ask for food. They wanted European hats instead. And, of course, starving folks typically don't have the time or energy to carve and shove 70-ton statues around their island.

[. . .]

Because, say the Hawaiian anthropologists, clans and families on Easter Island didn't fall apart. It's true, the island became desolate, emptier. The ecosystem was severely compromised. And yet, say the anthropologists, Easter Islanders didn't disappear. They adjusted. They had no lumber to build canoes to go deep-sea fishing. They had fewer birds to hunt. They didn't have coconuts. But they kept going on rat meat and small helpings of vegetables. They made do.

In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island's population. International protests erupted, escalated by Bishop Florentin-Étienne Jaussen of Tahiti. The slaves were finally freed in autumn, 1863, but by then most of them had already died of tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery. Finally, a dozen islanders managed to return from the horrors of Peru, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island's population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried.

“Fishing isn’t just for making a living, it’s also enjoyable,” said Pedro Pascual, a 70-year-old fisherman who has been taking his small boat out to sea off Chile’s Pacific coast in the early hours of the morning almost every day for the past 50 years, to support his family.

Impish and ebullient, he told IPS that he doesn’t like to eat much fish anymore, although he is aware of its excellent nutritional properties, which make it a key product in terms of boosting global food security. “The thing is, eating what you fish yourself is kind of boring,” he said.

“Sometimes my wife has to go out and buy fish, because I come home without a single fish – I sell all of them, so I don’t have to eat them,” he confessed, in a mischievous tone.

Pascual was born and raised in the beach resort town of Algarrobo, 100 km west of Santiago.

“Artisanal fishers who used to have a quota, a share of extractive fishing activity, were left without rights, and many lost their work.” -- Juan Carlos Quezada

The son, grandson and great-grandson of fishermen, he stressed that fishing is everything for him and his family, as he prepared bait on counters built on the beach, which are used by some 70 local fishers.

Solar power is now the cheapest source of electricity in Chile, according to Deutsche Bank AG.

That conclusion is based on the results of an energy auction in October when renewable projects offered the lowest prices and won contracts to supply 1,200 gigawatt-hours of power, Deutsche Bank analyst Vishal Shah said in a report Tuesday.

That may lead to more than 1 gigawatt of new solar capacity installed in Chile this year, Shah said. It will help the country reach a target set in 2014 by Chile’s government of having 45 percent of its installed electric capacity powered by renewable sources.

Three solar farms offered to sell power for $65 to $68 a megawatt-hour in the auction, Shah said. Two wind farms bid $79 a megawatt-hour, and a solar-thermal plant with storage offered power at $97. Coal power was offered for $85 in the same event.

• Claus Vistesen of Alpha Sources notes that though the stock market might be peaking, we don't know when.


• blogTO warns that Toronto might consider a bid for the 2024 Olympics.


• James Bow thinks about Ex Machina.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly looks forward to her impending visit to Maine.


• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Michael A.G. Michaud looking at modern SETI.


• Crooked Timber finds that even the style of the New York intellectuals of the mid-20th century is lacking.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that a search for superjovians around two nearby brown dwarfs has failed.


• The Dragon's Tales considers the flowing nitrogen ice of Pluto.


• Geocurrents compares Chile's Aysén region to the Pacific Northwest.


• Joe. My. God. shares the new Janet Jackson single, "No Sleeep".


• Language Log looks at misleading similarities between Chinese and Japanese words as written.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money argues that the low-wage southern economy dates back to slavery.


• Marginal Revolution is critical of rent control in Stockholm and observes the negative long-term consequences of serfdom in the former Russian Empire.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes how Jamaica is tearing down illegal electrical connections.


• Savage Minds considers death in the era of Facebook.


• Towleroad looks at how the Taipei city government is petitioning the Taiwanese high court to institute same-sex marriage.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues restrictive zoning hurts the poor.


• Window on Eurasia looks at how Tatarstan bargains with Moscow, looks at Crimean deprivation and quiet resistance, considers Kazakh immigration to Kazakhstan, and argues Russian nationalist radicals might undermine Russia itself.