Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Yes, I know this thinky is not about snails/underwear either. I'll get to that, I promise.

You remember the story that was all over the news last week about how a comet/asteroid had blown up 3500 years ago over Tell el-Hamman on the shore of the Dead Sea, destroying the city, and this was covered as the source of the biblical legend of Sodom?

Well, buckle your seatbelts, it's going to get bumpy. The article in question, "A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea" was published in Nature Scientific Reports (*not* Nature itself, as was often misreported). Nature Scientific Reports is Nature's far less prestigious open access counterpart. The article says it's based on fifteen years of annual excavations, which in the world of archaeology is quite a lot: someone must be very well funded.

The owner of the Slacktivist blog noticed this line in the opening section of the article: (the excavation project is) "under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University, Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, NM." Both of those schools are bible colleges. Trinity Southwest is proudly unaccredited. Veritas International is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (ie, an association of bible schools that wanted to be able to say they were accredited).

Trinity started out as an in-person seminary in Oklahoma in the 80's. After moving to New Mexico and becoming a distance learning school, they affiliated with an unnamed overseas "internationally-known Bible college and seminary," then declared themselves a university in the early 90's. Although primarily doing distance learning, they say they offer in person classes as well. However, they have no campus: what physical locations they have are scattered along Journal Center Boulevard in Albuquerque. Their website is pretty minimal. Their library doesn't get a dedicated section on the website and just barely a mention in the student catalog that it exists. They do have their own press, though. And, they offer tours of the Holy Land for $4000 to see the sights, or $5000 if you also want to visit their archaeological dig at Sodom. Stuff they dig up at "Sodom" (aka Tell el-Hamman) goes on display in their very own archaeological museum in Albuquerque.

Veritas was founded as a seminary in 2008, and only decided to call themselves a university in 2017. Veritas's campus, as best I can tell from perusing the catalog, is one building, and their library has all of 4,000 paper books (unsurprisingly, the website gives a lot more emphasis to their digital resources). Library users are asked to bring their own computers, so the library doesn't really have terminals. They offer several doctor of divinity degrees, but just one PhD program: in biblical archaeology.

The websites of both of these schools are at pains to put their best face on and pretend that they are real institutions worthy of the name university despite not actually being anything like that. Trinity's campus is scattered, but there is no map in the student catalog or anywhere on the website showing where things are. While I think they don't actually offer in person classes except in a very minimal way, they do claim to have several physical resources and in person classrooms, and since those are not all in one place, there needs to be a map. But posting it to their site would be too much an admission of just how small and inconsequential they are. In the same vein, their catalog doesn't seem to differentiate between distance learning courses and actual in person classes. I think it's safe to say that they don't have many full time faculty other, perhaps, than a gaggle of distant adjuncts tasked with interacting with the distant learners who have been paying $250-ish per credit hour to support fifteen years of excavations in "Sodom."

Neither school provides basic academic information like the number of instructors or the number of students anywhere I could find. Also, unsurprisingly, neither school's website has a single word to say about COVID that I saw.

But, wait: there is more. The Tell el-Hamman paper has a very long list of authors. Only the last, Phillip J. Silvia, works at Trinity Southwest; all but one of the rest are affiliated with real universities, or else with real research laboratories. What's up with that? Turns out there's a second fly-by-night organization here, the "Comet Research Group." They get called out in the paper's acknowledgements for funding the research (as opposed to the excavations) behind the paper, and Allen West, the second to last author of the paper, is one of the CRG's founders.

The CRG is all about finding evidence that ancient comet/asteroid impacts caused local or global catastrophes. Before the Tell el-Hamman paper, they made a splash a few years ago with a proposal that the Younger Dryas, a thousand year cold snap that happened right at the end of the last ice age, was caused not by a shutdown of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, as is usually thought by ancient climate researchers, but by the impact on Earth of a swarm of cometary fragments, Shoemaker–Levy 9-style, that caused widespread destruction, a nuclear winter that extended the ice age by a thousand years, mass extinctions of megafauna, population collapse of early humans in the Americas, and so forth.

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis has been taken seriously by climate and ice age researchers who investigated its claims and found them mostly without merit. The only thing that seems to have come out of it is that there's a spike in platinum residue in sediment layers that are deemed to mark the start of the YD, in some locations, and that platinum could point to an asteroid or comet impact happening somewhere near the start of the YD... but the layers being pointed to as marking the start of the YD are not all the same age, there is no agreement that these identified layers are all in fact indicators of the start of the YD, the signs being found in those layers that are supposedly evidence of an impact, other than platinum, are all very debatable, and so on.

What's odd is that the CRG has not responded to the criticism and critique of their hypothesis by the scientific community in the usual way (going back to the drawing board, trying to find new evidence, pruning away some of the more extreme claims in their hypothesis and saying surely we can agree on this part, etc), but rather by refusing to share their samples and data with people who they deem to be "on the other side" of the debate. Much more about that here, and on Mark Boslough's twitter (see below).

The long list of CRG "scientists and members" on their website includes co-authors of papers who have otherwise had nothing to do with the CRG, as well as people who were not asked if they minded being listed as CRG members, and when they found out they'd been so listed, were upset at being included. Very classy.

And finally, one of the co-founders of CRG, Allen West, is not actually an academic, does not actually have an advanced degree, and has in the past, under a different name, been convicted of selling fraudulent water studies to California municipalities despite not being a geologist. So, a con artist passing as an academic and geologist who befriended the other co-founders, became infected with their obsession with cometary impacts, and proceeded to reinvent himself as a cometary impact specialist.

An earlier version of the Tell el-Hamman paper appeared a few years ago. That paper, "The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization" was a conference presentation at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The ASOR (now called American Society of Overseas Research because someone realized their old name was racist, but they still publish a bulletin and hold an annual conference under their old name because, hey, still racists) dates back to 1900, when they were called the American School of Oriental Study and Research in Palestine. In short, they are the big leagues in the small (and sometimes dubious) field of biblical archaeology.

The ASOR presentation was by just 4 authors: Silvia and Steven Collins are both faculty at Trinity Southwest University. Ted Bunch is co-founder of the Comet Research Group, and finally Malcolm Lecompte, odd man out, is an emeritus faculty member at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Lecompte has a website: he does not list the ASOR paper in his vita.

Looking at all that, it seems that the CRG, an organization devoted to proving that comets killed the mammoths and extirpated our distant ancestors 13,000 years ago, is Very Good Friends with a bunch of young earth creationist "archaeologists." But the CRG seems to have a rather Trump/Republican approach to science: declare your dubious findings as proven, then label anyone who disagrees as an enemy and refuse to cooperate with them. So, maybe not such strange bedfellows after all.

There's a lot more about the Tell el-Hamman paper's shoddy research and dubious claims to be found in Mark Boslough's twitter account (Boslough is an *actual* asteroid impact researcher). (Boslough is just one of many who are tearing their hair out over the paper, thanks to Robin Reid for bringing his twitter threads to my attention). Unfortunately Boslough has been posting his thoughts in several short threads, and not always remembering to link them together. Here's a starting point, but you may not always get continuation links (I ended up going to his main feed and scrolling down to find the next thread, but I started at a different point and he may have gone back and fixed things since then).

And this concludes our journey into the realm of fake science getting published in real journals and covered as legitimate.

Eurocentric history tends to be very self-congratulatory. "(European guy) invented (arguably very important technology)," and "(historical change of import) happened because of (thing european or Greco-Roman people did)." It gets very tiresome, especially when the technology in question was actually invented hundreds or thousands of years earlier, far outside of the Euro-Greco-Roman sphere.

Today's example: a thread by Incunabula on Twitter. In James Burke-ian Connections style, he says that "Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓." Sigh. Burke's "Connections" blew my mind when I was eight. Because I was too young to notice how a shallow, facile and simplified, all white, mostly male narrative was being constructed from a far richer and larger history.

Today I'm tackling two of Incunabula's five things: cheese (parchment) and Christianity (the adoption of the codex). My primary source for most of what follows is an online version of "The Birth of the Codex" by Colin Roberts and T C Skeat, supplemented by Wikipedia and lots of blog posts/articles found via google. The online version of Birth of the Codex includes (in green and red text) incomplete edits and updates of the original book

1. "Cheese" (aka, parchment/vellum):
( Read more... )
How much did Christianity's extremely early and wholehearted embrace of codexes have to do with the switch from scrolls to codexes? Not a lot. Christians were a tiny minority in a vast empire until well into the 3rd century. By the time Christianity became a major force in the empire (~300 AD), the switch to codexes was already underway. Clearly the rise of Christianity to the empire's official religion in the 4th century greatly accelerated the transition, but the evidence doesn't point to Christians being the starter of the trend.

The default free software recommendation for cloning a hard disk, Clonezilla, is actively and aggressively user hostile, like many programs from the world of Linux. But it's free, and comes with the special sparkle of being open source, so it gets recommended a lot.

This has led me to have many bouts of swearing and struggling with balky upgrades than I can count. But it seemed all the user-friendly alternatives that I could find were for-pay products that haughtily refused to clone a boot disk unless you forked over tons of money for the pro version.

Now, I have finally, finally found a free trial app that lets you clone a system disk, with no fuss or bother about size, without having to jump through an intricate dance of copying each individual partition and hoping it would still boot when all was done.

Disk Genius is one of those rare birds, a for-pay app where the free version is actually extremely useful and capable. It's almost never recommended for partition wrangling and cloning, because it's marketed as a data recovery app... but what it actually is, is a universal, do-everything tool for dealing with computer storage devices and the data on them, including cloning, partition resizing, and recovering lost data, lost drives, etc. And now, finally, I can tell clonezilla and its user-hating interface to not let the door hit its ass on the way out.
Disk Genius: one of those apps that you wonder where it was hiding from you all these years. A+. Highly recommended.

Another thinky post. This one has been brewing for a while. Unless otherwise indicated, links are open access/not paywalled. (ETA: see comments for some interesting things/extra thoughts that didn't fit in this monster of a post)

I started googling articles about the origins of cities and agriculture due to my disaffection with the opening parts of Karen Armstrong's "Fields of Blood," where she assumes that military violence and structural inequality are necessary ingredients to creating a civilization, and links "civilization" (ie, inequality and warfare) to the invention of agriculture. That didn't sit well with my memory of Catal Huyuk, one of the earliest known cities, 6,000-ish people living in a town on the south coast of Turkey about 9000 years ago. Catal Huyuk had no city wall or other signs of military defences. It also had no temples or palaces, with minimal signs of social inequality. Just a community of thousands of people living in peace, trading obsidian tools for luxury goods from distant communities.

And then more recently I read an article about Gobekli Tepe, the oldest megalithic site yet found. It's a large worship complex in Turkey near the border with Syria that was built starting 11,500 years ago, by people who did not yet have domesticated plants or animals. And that turns the conventional model of the history of cities on its head.

The traditional model of prehistory, which Armstrong hews to, holds that hunter gatherers had extremely low population densities, with bands of 40-ish people occupying a large home range. In places like the fertile crescent, wild precursors to crops provided them with enough food that they could settle down and begin the process of inventing agriculture. That process is supposed to have begun around the end of the ice age, when human-influenced mass extinction of megafauna made big game hunting no longer a viable survival strategy, and when the climate became warmer, wetter, more stable, and generally congenial to the invention of gardening. Farming started out in small communities, and only over time as the total food surplus increased and trade fostered more specialized crafts did hamlets become villages, towns, and cities. But Gobekli Tepe was a fair sized community of (technically) hunter-gatherers existing before plant or animal domestication.

Which made me go pull Jane Jacobs' Economy of Cities off the shelf. Jacobs's book is a pro-urbanist argument that cities are central and primary to the economy of the surrounding lands, contrary to the tendency of urban planners, architects, economists, and other thinkers from the 19th and early 20th century to regard cities as a bad thing, an aberration of capitalist development that should be done away with when creating planned communities. But Jacobs starts the book by arguing that cities existed before agriculture, that it was urban living that created the necessary conditions for the development of agriculture - on the one hand, providing the necessary gathering of minds needed to spur intellectual ferment and technological progress, and on the other, creating a logistical problem of feeding an ever-growing urban population, to which animal husbandry and agriculture were the solutions.

Archaeologists dismissed that part of her book, and urbanists that praise the rest of it tend to glide in embarrassment over the first section. But now we have Gobekli Tepe. A community of hundreds (judging by how much work was required to build the megalithic temples) of settled, non-nomadic people who didn't have domesticated crops or animals.

Exactly how large the community was isn't yet clear - until very recently no houses had been found, and it was thought that people didn't live there full time, but just came together from the surrounding lands to build shrines, worship, and then dispersed to nomadic hunter-gathering again once a shrine was completed. Which makes little sense, of course, but archaeologists are very good at swallowing camels and straining at gnats when those camels and gnats are inconvenient to their preconceived ideas about what early people did and did not do. A few years ago, in the process of constructing a visitor's centre at the site, including a big permanent tent to shelter the excavated megaliths, they finally dug deeply enough to find houses, and the picture changed from a collection of temples in the wilderness to a more sensible one of a town of people who devoted a lot of resources to building worship spaces.

A town, but not really a town of hunter-gatherers, except technically. They didn't have domesticated animals and the bones of animals found in their kitchen waste show they hunted extensively, but Gobekli Tepe is in the middle of the part of the fertile crescent where agriculture was invented, and it flourished in the immediate pre-agricultural era, when people were perfecting their skills at raising and harvesting edible wild plants.

But first we need to backtrack. The myth of "man the hunter" refuses to die. Early people were not hunter gatherers but gatherer hunters - if they are anything at all like modern non-agricultural peoples, meat from hunting was only 20% of their diet. But because bones don't decay like plants, archaeologists see the evidence of hunting first, and evidence of plant gathering second and only if they use microscopes to examine the dirt adhering to stone tools and containers for tiny fragments of seeds. 19th and early 20th century archaeologists washed their finds, which eliminated the clues needed to verify what plants the people who used those tools had been processing. Archaeological techniques have advanced, and an article from 2010 reports that unwashed grinding stones from diverse sites in Europe showed signs that the owners has used them to process grass seeds and cattail roots, as far back as 30,000 years ago. That's deep in the depths of the last ice age.

We also know that ice age humans were harvesting the wild ancestors of modern domesticated crops. At Ohalo II, a cluster of 23,000 year old huts and hearths on the shore of what is now the Sea of Galilee (back then a single body of water encompassing the Dead Sea, Jordan River, and Sea of Galilee called Lake Lisan), stone sickles were found, as well as remains of wild wheat, barley, and other grains (the site burned, then quickly afterward flooded when the level of the sea rose. Charring followed by anaerobic conditions led to excellent preservation of organic material like plant parts. The site was discovered when a drought temporarily lowered the lake level several meters in the late 80's). Furthermore, a genetic analysis of plant parts found in archaeological sites across the Fertile Crescent indicated that humans had started to select against the genes controlling seed dispersal (genes dealing with the shattering of ripe ears of grain) up to 25,000 years ago for emmer wheat and 32,000 years ago for einkorn wheat.

Which throws the entire "agriculture happened when it did because the ice age was over" meme in the trash heap. Contemporaries of the people hunting mammoths were practising agriculture in the wetter fringes of the harsh desert that filled the middle east during the last glacial maximum. During the LGM, roughly between 31,000 and 16,000 years ago, the entire planet was much colder and much dryer than today (check out the vegetation map, and note that "Extreme desert" means less than 2% plant cover - basically like the dry parts of the Sahara desert today).

But, and a big but: that map is rather coarse grained and doesn't allow for rivers or microclimates. The Nile still existed, at a reduced rate of flow, and the upper Nile backed up behind sand dunes to create lakes in the desert where people lived and fished on the shore. The Tigris and Euphrates also still existed. Lower sea levels meant the Persian Gulf was a dry river valley surrounded by harsh desert. While the homes of the people who lived there are now underwater, the sudden appearance of people (paywalled) to either side of the gulf immediately after the sea level rose suggests that humans made their homes in the bottom of the gulf, then were forced to migrate into the less hospitable surrounding deserts when it became flooded. And in Palestine, the shores of Lake Lisan were fertile enough to support humans despite the entire area being "extreme desert" according to the map.

So, agriculture (in the sense of humans planting and harvesting grains like wheat) got its start not in the fertile Holocene after the ice had melted and the planet warmed up, but during the worst, most brutal parts of the last ice age. Forests were a lot sparser and more limited in extent during the ice age, but I don't doubt that where there were forests, humans were creating forest gardens back then as well.

And at this point we're starting to get far enough back in time to tangle with another mental block archaeologists have, and another extremely racist myth that I was peeved to see Karen Armstrong perpetuating: that "cognitively modern humans" got their start much more recently than anatomically modern humans. Something was lacking, the myth says, in Homo Sapiens before 40-50,000 years ago (Armstrong says 20,000, which is even more ridiculous, since we do have widely accepted and extremely well dated examples of "modern" tools, art, etc from well before then), something mental that suddenly changed, "coincidentally" around the time they started spreading out from Africa. Believers in the myth point to the seeming explosion in the diversity of human tools and artefacts around that time. Sceptics patiently dig up examples of "modern" tools from much older sites, and defend their reality as artefacts, their dating, and their interpretation against vehement attack. Eventually, one hopes, the mental block will be discarded for the racist claptrap that it is, the refusal to see early, mostly African humans as qualified to be counted as "human" in the same way as their descendants who left Africa.

This is related to the mental block archaeologists have against admitting that early humans could produce art, such that any obvious examples of art found that date before a certain time frame get ignored, attacked as not actually made by humans, or attacked as not actually as old as proponents think. Which brings me to another book (last one, I promise!), "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" in which Richard Rudgley doesn't address the myth of cognitive modernity directly, but attacks it by attacking the refusal to give legitimacy to artefacts and art that are deemed "too old to actually be art/advanced technology."

So, when did agriculture get its start? It's very hard to say, especially since many of the best sites for gardening during the ice age are now under the ocean. But clearly, it wasn't 12,000 years ago, and it wasn't in response to the extinction of megafauna or the moderating of climate as the glaciers melted.

Even if we restrict ourselves to people who had domesticated plants (the last 12,000 years), at least half of the age of agriculture happened before humans invented inequality, wealth hoarding, and empire building, the violence that Armstrong sees as inseparable from civilization. If we include the long period of gardening plants as they gradually became domesticated (and Gobekli Tepe shows that such gardening was productive enough to support towns of at least a few hundred people engaged in major construction projects), then the age of inequality and brutality that Armstrong equates to civilization has been around for only a quarter of the time in which humans had the ability to build towns and have food surpluses.

Inequality isn't inextricable from civilization, it's just one approach that has violently exterminated all the other approaches it came in contact with throughout history.

I was reading about Machu Picchu and Inca stonework last week, and came across the hoary old colonialist talking point that the Incas did not invent the wheel. Being in a "go down internet rabbit holes" mood, I found myself reading various explanations for why precolumbian Americans, despite having wheeled figurines (see: image here and writeup here and early prototype pottery wheels (the kabal/molde, never scaled those figurines up or broadened their application to transport. Very few of the explanations sat well with me.

( Read more... )Central American pottery wheels were still at the "spin the pot relatively slowly while laying coil" stage when the Spanish arrived. Not all the pieces had come together yet, and thanks to the conquest, they never would.

(extra bits that I found while writing this but that didn't fit are in comments)

Another thinky thought post brought on by a video seeking to answer the question why Europeans enslaved Africans specifically.

And while the video didn't contain any misinformation, it felt a bit incomplete because I've recently read David Graeber's "Debt the first 5000 years," and because of a recent post on the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Blog which talked about slavery in the process of critiquing a world conquest strategy video game

( Read more... )Lastly, have a table from Debt, showing just how miserably poor Europe was compared to essentially everyone else in Eurasia, even when comparing them to nations from centuries or millennia previous. Crappy climate > low agricultural productivity > low population densities > few and small cities > economic backwater.

Copying just one column of data from a table showing population and tax revenue for several ancient and early medieval nations:

Persia 350 BCE, 41 grams of silver per person per year
Egypt 200 BCE, 55 grams,
Rome 1 CE 17 grams,
Rome 150 CE 21 grams,
Byzantium 850 CE 15 grams,
Abbasids, 850 CE 48 grams,
T'ang, 850 CE 43 grams
France 1221 2.4 grams
England 1203 4.6 grams

This post brought to you by my brain refusing to stop chewing on a bit of esoterica that no one outside of Apple pundits gives a flying fuck about.

In the mid 90's, Apple had a near-death experience. The number of people willing to pay a heavy premium for a special nonstandard computer when you could get a much cheaper standard Windows 95 computer that did 95% of what the Mac could do, was plummeting. And yet the company continued to churn out a huge swath of different models of computers, as well as printers, proto PDAs called Newtons, and so on. Losses mounted and Wired published a cover story about the imminent death of the company.

Then in the late 90's Steve Jobs returned to Apple and amputated big chunks of the company, cancelling numerous projects and product lines. He condensed the company's output down to exactly four Mac models, expressed by a famous (in Apple circles at least) graphic:



(ID: four computers in a grid. At the top, labels "consumer" and "professional" and along the side, labels "desktop" and "portable", with a blue CRT imac, a blue powermac, three of the colourful imac laptops, and a dark grey mac laptop)

Now almost immediately this grid acquired some footnotes - the laptops and Imacs started coming in different screen sizes, and once you'd chosen a size you had to choose among low/medium/high end specifications for the processor, etc. But for most of the oughts, Apple made exactly four kinds of macs and it was very easy to tell which one met your needs.

By the end of the oughts, the grid had expanded, without anyone ever actually saying anything about it. The new, unspoken Macintosh product grid looked like this (image thrown together quickly with a meme generator because I was lazy, forgive the small size and low quality)



(ID: six computers in a grid. Columns labeled "consumer | professional | tiny" across the top. Images of an IMac, a Mac Pro, a mac mini in the first row, and a plastic macbook, a macbook pro, and the old rounded corner macbook air in the second row)

It had taken Apple a couple of false starts to get there (the powermac cube, the 12" powerbook), but by the end of the decade they had expanded into a new product category: tiny computers. For a while, the mac mini was the smallest desktop it was possible to buy. For a while, the Macbook Air was the only ultralight laptop with an almost fast enough dual core processor and a full size keyboard.

Ten years later, the grid of six became a grid of five. The entire laptop market had glommed onto thin and light, and the niche, expensive Macbook Air had become Apple's best selling Mac, their new mainstream base model laptop. Apple's Mac Mini hadn't changed in size much, but it was no longer the smallest desktop. The Macbook Air had competitors who were even lighter weight. Finally, Apple's "Consumer" desktops had become powerful enough that lots of professionals were using them, and many consumers were buying the more expensive "pro" laptops. So the categories need a renaming. Instead of consumer and professional, let's call them "mainstream" and "high end", with "small" a better descriptor today than "tiny".



(ID: a grid of six, this time labeled "mainstream, high end, small" across the top. Imac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini in the top row, and Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and a question mark in the bottom row)

The complications and footnotes with this grid are all in the laptop category. While the larger and more expensive Macbook pro has always remained solidly in the "high end", the Macbook air has jumped from "small" to "mainstream" in that it's now the default laptop that most people buy. And the smaller size Macbook Pro is suffering a bit of an identity crisis, as it's split into low end and high end models, distinguished by the number of ports they have. The low end "pro" model seems better suited to being the "mainstream" choice and letting the Air go back to being Apple's "small" laptop.

I bought a G4 Mac Mini, because I thought it might be fun to mess around with classic mac software someday, and I didn't want to get something large that would take up a lot of room, so that meant getting a mini.

Naturally I had to upgrade the spinning hard disk in it, because hard drives suck. After much searching I discovered you can buy mSATA to 2.5" IDE adapters fairly cheaply, which enable you to put a fast SSD into a 2.5" laptop sized IDE case. I got one, got an mSATA drive, and was all set.

I performed the upgrade... and could not get the computer to boot from a CD. I tried cloning the existing OS to the new drive, and could not get the cloned drive to boot. Key combinations that were supposed to force a mac to boot from optical disk failed to work. After weeks of banging my head against this wall, I finally realized that the original drive in the Mini was set as a secondary IDE drive, rather than the default primary drive. Fortunately the adapter had pins for a jumper. I took the jumper off the old drive, put it on the new drive, reassembled the Mini for the 6th or so time, and... it worked perfectly.

Long ago, in the early oughts, I knew about IDE drives and jumper settings, and I knew that you could only have one drive set as primary at a time. But I had utterly forgotten about all that crap in the intervening decade. It doesn't help that most IDE laptops (and the mini is just a headless laptop) had two channels, one for the CD and one for the hard drive, so you didn't have to think about primary/secondary. But Apple made the Mini using the cheapest, most minimal possible combination of parts, which means one channel. Since the optical drive has no jumpers and is always set as primary, the hard disk has to be set as secondary.

None of the instructions I used, neither Apple's tech repair manual nor Ifixit, mentioned that you have to set the new IDE drive to be secondary. I looked online and found exactly zero of the top hits for Mac Mini G4 upgrade mentioned jumpers at all.

I finally checked out some of the DC animated movies. The good ones were quite good. Sadly, neither of the Wonder Woman animated movies released to date were in that category.

Wonder Woman (2009) has a nonsensical villain - Ares is a god, and gods crave worship, so why the heck does he want to exterminate humanity and thus deny him any worshippers? But the real problem is that it oozes frat boy sexism, from a slimy Steve Trevor to an Amazon who turns against her people because she was denied the opportunity to marry and have children (bleah). And Trevor saves Paradise island from being destroyed, because behind every powerful woman there has to be a slimy man without whom the day would not have been saved. 🤬 Best avoided.

Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, on the other hand, is an incoherent mess of a film. The only explanation I can come up with is that DC had the script for a TV miniseries, but then a wild goat got loose, scattered the pages, and ate half of them at random. And rather than print out a new copy, they decided to just film the remaining half of the pages and call it a movie. It feels like a much longer story with all of the connective tissue removed. It never once stops to explain motivations, give characters a second to be themselves, or make much sense at all. Again, best avoided.

On the other hand... All Star Superman is a marvellous film that is just as good as the comic book miniseries it adapts. That's right, a film version that is fully faithful to the original material: something I would never have expected was possible from Warner Brothers.

Finally, Batman Soul of the Dragon is a fun love letter to 70's martial arts movies. Thankfully it makes Richard Dragon (DC's version of Iron Fist/white guy who becomes the world's best kung fu master), into an Asian man, thus reducing, slightly, the orientalist and racist nature of the material it's reworking. If it was all about Batman I'd not like it nearly as much, but he is just one of an ensemble cast of martial artists (and he is the only white person among them) who have to band together to defeat the bad guys. Plus, instead of being the best, Bruce Wayne is explicitly called out as the least skilled among them, which was I thought a nice touch.

So, I came across a post about queer themes in Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's war-era sidekick Etta Candy, and Dr Wertham. Which was so riddled with errors that I just had to write a post of my own (because comments were not enough).

Wonder Woman started out as feminist propaganda. Kinky, queer, bondage-obsessed, with a very different from modern ideas 19th century kind of feminism (women are not equal but different from men and women should be in charge because they will do a better job), but nonetheless, feminist propaganda. The queer kinkiness was filtered and coded of course by being published in comic books for children in the 40's, but it was still undeniably there.

Wonder Woman's sidekicks and Diana Prince's friends were Etta Candy and the girls of Beeta Lambda sorority at Holliday college. They were part of that propaganda message - promoting women's colleges, women's education and independence, and the idea that any woman can be a heroine like Wonder Woman if she puts her mind to it. Etta and her girls were also (coded, filtered) gay or bi characters, modelled on women that Marston's bisexual partners had known in the women's colleges they attended and the women's college sororities they had belonged to.

However, Etta was never Wonder Woman or Diana's girlfriend, even in subtext. From day one, the Wonder Woman comic adopted a genderswapped version of the Superman-Lois Lane dynamic, with Diana infatuated with Steve Trevor, who was infatuated with Wonder Woman.

Marston and his female partners co-created Wonder Woman and co-wrote each story, but sold them under Marston's name. When Marston died, the editors at DC refused to hire his uncredited women co-writers, and instead handed the comic over to Robert Kanigher, a typically sexist man who had no truck with all this feminist stuff.

Kanigher jettisoned the feminist messages that had appeared in every story, jettisoned most of the bondage themes, and jettisoned Etta and her sorority sisters. He kept (and enhanced) the eclectic, magic-meets-sf-meets-mythology-meets-fairy tales setting of Paradise Island, and kept the Diana-Steve-Wonder Woman love triangle. Because the love triangle was boring as fuck, he set a lot of his stories on Paradise Island. Without Etta and company, and without queer women co-writing behind the scenes, the comic became completely heterosexual, despite being often set on an island populated only by women.

Fast forward to 1953, when psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a screed against violence and sexuality in comic books (expanded into a book the following year), which he felt were the root cause of juvenile delinquency and of the sexual irregularities of his child patients. Wertham's primary targets were crime and horror comics, but he did devote a little space to superhero comics like Batman ("a wish dream of two homosexuals living together") and Wonder Woman ("for boys... a frightening image. For girls... a morbid ideal"). Wertham's book states that it's based on seven years of research, which might explain why he called out the Holliday girls in Wonder Woman, as "gay party girls, gay girls" - despite the fact that Holliday college had been dropped from the comics for six years by the time his book was published.

Wertham was successful in virtually exterminating crime and horror comics, but he didn't actually have all that much effect on superhero comics - Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson continued sleeping in twin beds in the same room together long after Wertham, and in the case of Wonder Woman, the censoring of gay themes had already been done several years before he came along.

Sources: Seduction of the Innocent, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (both on my shelf), various comic nerd web sites, and my own personal knowledge from having read tons of Wonder Woman comics, including reprints of dozens from the war years and a few from the post-war, post-Marston era.