Tag: history

New forms of community

2 related articles caught my eye recently. the first one argues that the nuclear family was a mistake, and better configurations are possible:

for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together—and therefore presumably lived together—34 ka ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of 12 pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by 12 pairs of arms.

The second article argues that friendships, not marriage, ought to be at the center of life:

Intimate friendships have not always generated confusion and judgment. The period spanning the 18th to early 20th centuries was the heyday of passionate, devoted same-sex friendships, called “romantic friendships.” Without self-consciousness, American and European women addressed effusive letters to “my love” or “my queen.” Women circulated friendship albums and filled their pages with affectionate verse. In Amy Matilda Cassey’s friendship album, the abolitionist Margaretta Forten inscribed an excerpt of a poem that concludes with the lines “Fair friendship binds the whole celestial frame / For love in Heaven and Friendship are the same.” Authors devised literary plot lines around the adventures and trials of romantic friends. In the 1897 novel Diana Victrix, the character Enid rejects a man’s proposal because her female friend already occupies the space in her life that her suitor covets. In words prefiguring Kami West’s, Enid tells the man that if they married, “you would have to come first. And you could not, for she is first.”

Game of Life at 50

Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the 4-celled block, the 6-celled beehive or the 8-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs. The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest). In 2018, there was a much-celebrated discovery of a special kind of spaceship, the first elementary knightship, named Sir Robin. Made of 100s of cells, it moves 2 cells forward and one sideways every 6 generations.

amazing that 50 years later, people are still discovering new life forms.

Ancient steam engines

The invention of the steam engine is usually ascribed to British engineers of the 17th and 18th centuries. James Watt is best known for inventing an especially efficient type of the engine in 1786, which was applied first to trains and then in the early 19th century to ships. It is much less known that the engine was invented in the 1st century AD by Greek engineers of Alexandria, more than 1.5 ka before Watt. The British Library holds a remarkable collection of Greek manuscripts that describe and illustrate these early steam engines in great detail.