Spring has Officially Arrived

The intersection flycatchers (aka Western Kingbirds) and Mississippi kites have moved into town. I saw the first kite on Saturday. I suspect there was a hawk ball that evening, but I didn’t go out to see. The vultures that roost in one of the older neighborhoods arrived last month, but they tend to come earlier than some other birds. They are not as dependent on insects as are the kingbirds and kites.

Iris and rose. Author photo.

Three times now I’ve stood in my yard, or been driving around town, and watched huge storms blow up to the east or south and march off to rain on, hail on, and generally scare the living daylights out of folks on the wet side of the dry line. We’ve had storms north and south of town, as usual, but nothing really exciting in town. That is, unless you count the simultaneous flash and roar that shook RedQuarters Sunday at 0230 and caused both Jase T. Cat and I to levitate. My patch of the Panhandle has had either instability or moisture, but not both at the same time. *Shrug* We’re used to it. When I worked in Flat State, the other Airport Bums and I would sit on the bench outside the office and watch storms form about 5-10 miles east of the field and drift east.

The warm-season grasses have greened up, and the areas that got rain are looking very good. The burned areas north and east of town are starting to show a few signs of life and regrowth. More rain will help, but it’s a slow process. In the long run, burning keeps down brush and pest species, and improves the health of the land, if rains follow the burn within a reasonable time, and the fuel load wasn’t so high as to glaze the soil (generally not as much of a problem here as farther west). In the short term, people are hurting. The next few years will be hard. Elsewhere, if people have grass and cattle and moisture, things are looking up. If you have not gotten too much moisture, like Houston and other parts of southeast Texas and Louisiana.

I appreciate spring, even though I’m not a fan. I prefer autumn, but I also know that you can’t have harvest and fall colors and such without spring rains and growth and warm weather.

Rosa unknownia var. pink, Julia Child, and Salvia.

Weights and Measures: Prehistoric Edition

The Poles call them “little stone cheeses.” The Germans prefer one long word that translates “small stone balls with a groove carved in them.” The come in many sizes, although most are smaller than large, and can be made from any of a list of kinds of stone. Archaeologists have found them from northern Italy to the Baltic, from Gaul to the western steppes in what is now Beylarus and Ukraine. They are all Late Bronze Age, thus far, and no one knew quite what they were for.

Then someone said, “What if they were weights fo some kind. Not loom weights, but measuring weights?” And someone else, four someones else actually, did a lot of careful tedious work weighing, measuring, and recording the little stone cheeses and running the data through computers. Lo and behold, they probably were weights. Prehistoric metrology for the win!

Doing business without standardized weights and measures is…a challenge. Ask any medieval or early modern merchant. A London pound and a Paris pound and a Florentine pound might be very different weights. Each town with an official market had its measures, some of which were metal bars posted on the wall of the customs/toll/market master’s building. Everyone had to measure his cloth or other goods against the town foot or ell, since it was different from the last place’s official measure.

The same was true in prehistory, once trade became common enough. Metal in particular, but other goods as well, had to be semi standardized in some way that was acceptable. It’s one of those things that we take for granted today, and I mentally slapped my forehead (not physically, since I had students doing work and didn’t want them to think I was criticizing a project or discussion) when I read the paper. Of course there were weights and measures. That a standard had developed, and become accepted, and spread so widely opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Why had developed it, and when? How had it spread, and how quickly? How long had the trade network lasted and the weight unit been accepted as the standard? Who made sure that everything was legal and enforced the rules and prices?

Barry Cunliffe pointed out in his book about trade and civilization in the steppes of Eurasia that once trade begins, it is remembered even after it is interrupted. Trade and exchange were more common than we used to think, and far more extensive. Finding places that didn’t trade is unusual, or means that what went back and forth was something not easily seen in archaeology – furs, bone, wood, textiles, dye-stuffs, hides, slaves, ivory. The absence of the usual bronze and other status goods in parts of the southeastern Baltic raises all sorts of questions about trade, social organization, and so on.

So the little stone cheeses are a symbol of a far more complicated world in northern Europe than most of us realize existed in 1500 BC/BCE or so.

Wasn’t It Humid Three Minutes Ago?

Yup. And then the wind shifted from south to southwest, and all the water fled east. Desert air from New and Old Mexico came racing in, chasing clouds and the chance of rain well into Oklahoma and the Low Rolling Plains.

The sky to the west went clear, and the last low clouds burned off as the temperature shot up. Everyone sighed in unison. We’d been dry-lined. Wave any chance of rain good-by.

Behold, the Dry Line. Image Source: https://www.slideserve.com/ehren/weather-instruments

The difference was actually tighter. One side had dew points in the 60s. Fifteen miles to the west the dew point was 18F. No, that is not a typo. The air was that dry. No rain was going to happen in that air mass.

Three hours later, the wind whapped against RedQuarters, and my hands suddenly hurt. How odd. I called up the most recent data from the National Weather Service, and discovered that the dew point had surged back up to the 60s. Oh goody. A sloshing dry line. If we broke the lid (not likely, since the sun had almost set), it would be very exciting and loud out.

The lid? Huh?

That’s the term when there is a temperature inversion aloft. Most of the time, air cools at a set rate as it rises, until you reach the point where clouds form (100% humidity). Then it cools a little more until you reach the stratosphere and meteorology gets different again. However, when there is a warm layer aloft, it is an inversion, aka “the lid.” This brings freezing rain in winter (ick) or stops storms from forming (summer). Any thermal that is strong enough to force through the lid reaches cold air. It’s Katy-bar-the-door time, and massive supercell thunderstorms can result. That wasn’t this particular evening. There wasn’t enough energy in the air for that, so it just got humid.

Sloshing dry lines make forecasting interesting. It also leads to trouble when people relax and start ignoring the sky. The border between wet and dry air rolls back to the west, and storms can form right on top of events, towns, and other things. Big hail, high winds, and other things might drop from the sky, causing big trouble. Or just making a mild mess of evening plans and grumbles about “not fair, sneaking back in like that.”

I generally live west of the Dry Line. So I sit out on the front stoop and watch huge cloud towers and storms form to the east. They go clobber the rest of the state and I sigh and mutter about watering the lawn and quit stealing my rain, darn it.

Not everywhere has such a sharp distinction between moist and dry air.

Whose Was it, Anyway?

Archaeologists find someone long dead (as in, thousands of years) with lots of grave goods, some of which were very old when they were buried with the individual. One of the questions that is arising more and more often for the oldest graves is, “Where they personal goods or office goods?” Did they actually belong to the deceased, or were they group property that belonged to anyone in that office within the clan/tribe/sept/whatever they called it. For a long time, European and American archaeologists tended to assume that goods buried with someone were personal belongings, private property, that the deceased was supposed to take with him or her. Now … we’re not so certain.

Why people bury things with the deceased seemed to (and seems to) vary. If the belief is that the dead take a journey to reach another life or the place of punishment/reward, or to reach the ancestors, then sending the person with food and drink, perhaps spare shoes and things to mend worn clothes makes sense. If a person’s tools and everyday possessions can absorb a bit of the individual’s spirit, then it might be safer for the group to bury/burn those items with the dead, so the spirit doesn’t return looking for them.

Over time, it seems that some people were buried with more (or at least more durable) goods. And with more people, servants, slaves, wives, concubines, warriors to defend the dead person in the after life. The assumption had been, based on classical sources and later accounts, that these gems, chariots, horses, serving tools, jewelry, musical instruments, fancy fabrics and tapestries, and so on, belonged to the individual and so had been sent with him or her into the next world. King Tut’s tomb and Mesopotamian finds are probably some of the things that strongly pushed interpretation of other finds, like the kurgan mound burials of the steppes. Only powerful people could amass all the stuff, so if someone was buried with the stuff, it had to be their personal stuff. And a spirit that didn’t get enough stuff might come back and no one wanted that! Or so a lot of archaeological books, displays, and the like assumed.

It was probably true in some cases. But in others, archaeologists found things that didn’t fit. Why would a petite female or a male child be buried with a strong-man’s weapons? A 12-14 year old could not possibly have earned or traded for all the goods found in some of the graves. Not could the small adult woman have used a weapon that long and heavy. (In that case, the remaining bones didn’t show the changes associated with training for swordsmanship, which is another CLUE.) What if … the goods were not for the individual but for the rank? And the burial wasn’t just “send the dead on their way” but “marking our territory and showing the Ancestors that we still honor and respect them and their teachings and guidance.” Not all cultures consider the dead in the same light.

One question that bubbled up in Europe had to do with Neolithic and Chalcolithic blades and pottery being deposited in Late Bronze Age graves. Why was this spear-blade or arrow head here? Why had it been preserved? Some might have been the individual’s accidental find that he or she kept as a novelty. Others might have been associated with ritual power, something known to be ancient and magic-touched. Or it might have been a sign of the Ancestral authority that had been passed down and was now being returned to the Ancestors, or even to the gods? Think of Britain, and the tiny stone hunting points called “elf shot.” They were associated with the Good Folk, and explained certain mysterious aches and pains, or ill-fortune. This is after Christianity had taken strong root. What about pre-Christian places, or still-pagan places? Why not bury a shaman or person-of-power with things of power? Besides, it might be safer for the community not to have magic-touched goods in the hands of those who didn’t know how to channel or control the magic. (When a Comanche medicine-practitioner dies, his or her spirit bundle is immersed in running water to remove the puha before it is disposed of.)

All the neat stuff in those rich graves could well be group goods, sent along to show the other spirits, or the gods, or someone else how strong, rich, and well-connected the group was during the life of the deceased. As well as a bribe to keep him or her dead and his spirit far, far from the living.

Million-Dollar Rain

We finally got the exact kind of rain we needed, where it was needed, when it was needed. Quick, somebody buy a lottery ticket!

Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the rainfall pattern in the region shifted from a more evenly spread moisture to being more seasonal. Spring brings thunderstorms and downpours, occasionally mixed with hail and tornadoes. Or just downpours and thunder, which is great for filling cisterns and rainwater lakes, because it falls fast and runs off almost as fast. That’s late March or early April through late June. It’s not great if you are a wheat grower, because winter wheat needs to be harvested in May-June. Ranchers are pretty happy, because it provides moisture for livestock and the warm-season native grasses. In autumn, September-October, we get another round of heavy rain. Some of the most destructive flooding rains hit in the fall, adding excitement to trying to cross rivers and streams, and urban streets. Winters are variable, but snow is common. A cold, wet winter is ideal for winter wheat, not so great for ranchers.

What everyone really, really wants, unless you are trying to harvest, is a long, slow, gentle rain, the kind we rarely get. Well, this past week we got one, two inches plus over 24 hours, gentle and steady and cold. The cold part wasn’t ideal, or so my joints informed me quietly but firmly. The rainwater lakes slowly expanded and deepened, but very little of the rain actually ran off. Instead, it soaked into the ground, helping the wheat and other crops, putting moisture into the ground for cotton, and bringing new life to the rangeland. It was precisely the kind of moisture that will help the burned ground recover – slow enough to soak in, not so heavy as to wash ash and dirt into the streams, and no flooding. I swear, I could hear a steady quiet sluuuurp from the grasses surrounding St. Angus in the Grass’ campus. No one complained. I don’t think anyone dared to.

The next day brought chilly wind and a grey sunrise. The grey clouds broke apart and drifted away, chased by a north wind. But the next day, oh, the air had a clarity that has become rare. No dust, no ash, no smoke, a clear, gentle blue sky over green grass and blue water … The meadowlarks sang their hearts out, a few hawks circled quietly. The refreshed world looked like the last day of Creation, when the Most High looked out over the world and said, “It is very good.”

The High Plains can be hard. That day? Beauty and gentleness clothed the grasslands in peace and joy, refreshed and clean, ready to grow and perhaps prosper again.

Reading the Dirt

Ah, dirt. Without it, nothing grows aside from lichen. Too much of it and you get loess hills, dust storms, and the inability to build sky-scrapers without some really, really expensive and tricky engineering. Dirt can tell an archaeologist stories, environmental historians likewise, if you know what to look for and where, or what shouldn’t be where.

Dirt is made up of powdered rock, bits of plants and critters, air, and water. The proportions and chemistries of all those lead to classifications of soils based on percentages of sand to loam to clay, how weathered they are, and how much air and water they will hold. If you have sandy clay loam, you can do different things than if you have loamy clay. Dirt often comes in layers, called horizons. The surface in some places is the O horizon, with lots of organic matter (ideally.) Below that comes the A horizon, where you have humus. Here you find most growing plants, decaying plant matter, and moisture. The A horizon is often easy to spot when someone digs a trench because it is clearly different from the layer(s) below it. Darker perhaps, fluffier, has plant roots, more moisture … It depends on where you are and what’s in the dirt.

Depending on the categorization, you might find the E horizon next. This is a layer that has been tapped for nutrients without fresher decaying material or windblown dust (or waterborne silt) mixed in to replenish it. It’s often paler, if it is present.

Lower down you have the B horizon. This lacks layering in some places, and tends to have more clay, if clay is present in the soil chemistry. It looks “empty” because there are almost no tree or plant roots that reach that completely penetrate the layer. It might be relatively dry or wet, depending on local water tables and drought/rainfall patterns. Below that’s the C layer, the substratum, and depending where you are, sub-layers of C until you reach bedrock, if bedrock is present. Most archaeology and history types don’t worry so much about hitting bedrock if we are looking at the recent past. Unless bedrock crops in ways that shaped how people could use the land (i.e. Manhattan Island. There’s a reason all the buildings in the middle are low.)

What can dirt tell us? A lot. Finding people stuff in dirt lets us know that people were in the area (unless you are surveying a flood plain, in which case you might be looking at items from farther upstream). It can tell us about climate. For example, at the Lubbock Lake and Clovis Sites, there is an “archaeological sterile” layer of windblown dust between periods of human and faunal occupation. What happened? It got so dry and so much dirt and sand blew that the critters departed and people followed (moved to the mountains or farther east to river valleys.) Baked, reddened soil could show where a hearth was set, or a major destroyed a structure that was later abandoned, or an ancient lava of pyroclastic flow baked the soil and changed the composition somewhat. The presence or absence of certain plant roots hints at climate and weather pattern shifts, at least on the Great Plains in North America. Finding fresh water snail shells and other signs of there once having been a pond where now are soybean fields provides information about climate and water flow back thousands of years ago.

Sub-horizons and their stories: Creative Commons Fair Use. Original source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/4-These-soil-samples-correspond-to-the-soil-horizons-in-figure-1-3-The-soil-structure_fig8_313753994

Salt crusts in a place once known for agriculture reveals shifts in the groundwater table. Combine that with records of people changing from wheats (low-tolerance for salt) to barley (higher tolerance) to grazing, to abandoning the land, and you get the story of over-irrigation with river water in a hot climate, and a lack of drainage that allowed salts to build up. The drainage problem might be natural (semi-pervious layer close to the surface) or man-made (allowing irrigation water to rest on the soil and evaporate, rather than draining off excess.)

If you find fields under sand, you might see climate change, as can be observed along the Texas-New Mexico border in the Canadian River watershed. Layers of silt where no river now flows? The geology attacked (Sarasvati River), or a river captured another, or people diverted the stream.

Not a Battle? Tollense, Assumptions, and the Past

Back in the late 1996, someone found an arm bone sticking out of a river bank in northeastern Germany. The police were called, and discovered a “mass casualty site” that dated to the Bronze Age. This … wasn’t supposed to be possible. Except over a hundred people and two horses were killed by violence inflicted by unfriendly people. The assumption shifted from “old cemetery” to “battlefield,” and that opened a whole can of worms. Who, back then, could organize that many people on two sides, and some from as far away as the Massif Central in France?

The location of the site. Creative commons fair use. Original source: https://broread.com/2020/10/26/battle-of-tollense-valley-4250-years-ago-was-a-massacre-of-1400-bronze-age-merchants/

The Tollensee in Mecklenberg-Vorpom. Creative Commons Fair use, original source: https://www.vorpommern.de/aktivitaeten-in-vorpommern/aktivurlaub/kanu-fahren/kanuinfo/die-tollense/

Except, what if it wasn’t a battle?

Of course it was a battle. Why else would you have a lot of men’s bodies left in a marshy stream valley with arrow points, stab wounds, skulls cleft open, and other things? That’s battle damage, so obviously someone fought someone else. Some of the men came from hundreds of kilometers away, which means … Well, now it gets more complicated. Why were they in this part of Europe, what were they doing besides fighting, and who organized the two or more groups?

But what if it wasn’t a battle? What if a large group of men and horses, perhaps women as well, were taking goods from here to there, along the only route through a rather rough part of the landscape, and got ambushed and robbed? After all, we know that a lot of trade was in progress in that part of the world, amber and furs from the Baltic going south, tin moving east and west, copper moving all over, beads and silks, olive oil, and other things moving north.

In other words, if someone wanted to get rich quick, attacking a caravan of traders might be the way to do it. It could also be political, so to speak, if the goods were going to be distributed to win support and followers. The route through the Tollense Valley had been improved, with a good ford over the stream that kept people out of the mire and allowed heavier loads to be moved. So you might have had a group of wealthy people, relatively unarmed or lightly armed, on a predictable route, and unable to flee easily from an ambush.

One thing that archaeologists observed is that the “soldiers” in the battle didn’t have the skeletal changes associated with archers, swordsmen, and other people trained for fighting. Instead, they had normal wear for people who carried heavy stuff and walked a lot. No evidence has been found thus far of any social or political organization of the kind that would lead to a true army, let alone two, not in northern Europe at that time. So … the original theory of a battlefield no longer fits what we now know.

Was there fighting? Yes. Was it a battle? Perhaps not. Assumptions don’t always fit the evidence, and vice versa. It will be interesting to see what new develops from further research.

https://www.science.org/content/article/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

Battle of Tollense Valley 4,250 years ago was a massacre of 1,400 Bronze Age merchants 

The Archaeology of Death?

I’d never really thought about what humans did with the dead before concepts like spirits, ghosts, and an afterlife of some kind developed in humans. When did that appear, and how could anyone tell? It turns out, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists found some patterns and survivals of remains that suggest a specific point in time when people stopped treating dead band or tribe members the same way they treated other dead or broken things.

One caveat: what we know depends on what survived. Very little not stone lasts for thousands of years, unless the conditions are exactly right. Absence of evidence might not be evidence of absence, just the law of statistics and survival. Even so, sometimes the dog that doesn’t bark, and the remains and grave goods not found, might tell a story …

Once people began to view the dead as remaining within the culture for some period after death, either as a form of benevolent ancestor, or malevolent dead, true graves begin to appear. Interestingly, that’s also when the signs of fear of the undead, those who have not gone on for some reason, or whose bodies have been inhabited by a malevolent force, also appear. Stones wedged into jaws, stakes in the heart, deliberately broken bones in a skeleton buried under an unusual and large rock … The dead did not remain in their proper place. The idea of the dead remaining as part of the extended clan appears in several ways, including the layered burials of skulls and in some cases full skeletons within dwelling areas, or as boundary markers, showing a claim to the land. Think of Genesis and Exodus, and the “land of his fathers,” idea, and you see how it continued on.

Belief in an afterlife has been claimed for the Neandertal, based on the famous Shanidar Cave finds in the 1960s-70s in Iraq. Later research and excavation has pointed to some problems with this, and highlights an on-going tension within archaeology – do archaeologists see what they want to find? The Solecki’s, the primary excavators of the cave and “graves,” argued that flower pollen and some other things were proof that the Neandertals were peaceful, lived in harmony, and cared for the disabled in their society (perhaps better than modern society at that time did.) Many of their findings have been questioned, including how deliberate the burials were, since rock-falls were a major hazard in the cave even in modern times. What we can be pretty certain of is that with the rise of agriculture and the later Neolithic period, people started treating their dead in ways that were more likely to lead to preservation of the remains (to an extent).

Burials, ritual burials to prevent a return of the body or spirit or both, the incorporation of parts of the dead in buildings, apparent veneration of skulls, grave goods even with cremations, all are hints about beliefs in something after death, and elements in the desire or fear of the proximity of the deceased to the living. Francis Pryor has some fascinating speculations about the relationship of the excarnation* site called Seahenge to Stonehenge and other elements on Salisbury Plain. He suggests that both were used, the first to remove the flesh from bones, which were then ritually removed to Salisbury. From there, they were deposited in a grave following a communal feast. Wood was for the living, stone for the dead, the inverted oak tree at Seahenge being where the separation of the dead from the living truly began, a rite finished at Stonehenge or one of the other stone-marked places on the plain. Pryor also makes clear that he is speculating based on archaeology and what we know of comparative anthropology. Timothy Taylor has a different take, but both point out that the “spaces between,” the liminal spaces that are neither water nor land, not earth or air, neither truly living nor perhaps not yet fully dead, were and are considered unsettling and especially dangerous. Thus the near-universal worry about the should-be-dead-but-don’t-act-like-it, aka vampires.

Archaeology provides teasing glimpses into the distant past. We cannot easily reconstruct beliefs without writing, and even then what we see is often official, formalized belief and ritual, not everyday magics and traditions. The modern western separation of the dead – often sterile, no longer part of the community, clinical and distant – is very new. Very few members of western culture worry about the dead returning in some form, or turn the mirrors backward or cover them so that the spirit can leave peacefully, or stop clocks, or stake the suspect dead. Death is final, clinical, the end.

Or is it? The fascination with the occult, the market for Ouiji boards, mediums, and other things, paranormal romances and urban fantasy, Goth music of certain kinds, suggests that perhaps we’re not so far from our ancestors as we’d like to think.

*Excarnation is the practice of exposing the remains of the dead until only bones remain. These might be left to be broken apart by animals and weathering, as the Parsee do with their Towers of Silence, or they might be gathered up and deposited in a certain ritual location as part of the “final death,” as Timothy Taylor phrases it.

Dialects and Accents

The German caught my ear and I surfaced from the book I was reading. It was German, wasn’t it? Or was it Swedish? No, it was German, but a dialect and accent that I had to concentrate 100% to understand. I caught the technical details, but not everything. The speaker described truing the wheels on a train and how they measured the angles and depth of the groove. That I understood, after a few seconds, but his pronunciation and some terms forced me to work.

Then I saw what the program was about: the Gletcherbahn, the glacier train that leads up to Zermatt, in Switzerland. Switzerdeutsch [“SWEETzer-deech”], or Swiss German, is a dialect that is also an official language. Some of the men in the program spoke English, others used Hochdeutsch, and a few spoke Swiss German. Instead of a voice-over, the program had subtitles. It was fun listening to all the different accents and dialects, as well as learning more about the train system and engineering involved. I rode on SwissRail back in the early 1990s, and was favorably impressed. German and Austrian trains are also nice, depending on which train and where. Between my technical German and the images on the screen, I could catch about 80% of what the men discussed without needing the subtitles. However, it took all my concentration, because Swiss German is a very, very different dialect from most forms of German-German.

That got me to thinking about dialects and language drifts. Some dialects in German are almost incomprehensible if you speak a different regional dialect, while others just lead to amusing-for-observers misunderstandings. (One party says, “I’m from Saxony,” while listeners hear “I’m sexy and ready for action.”) Per an old stereotype, Swiss misspell lots of words, because their pronunciation is so different from everyone else’s, and German is spelled phonetically. Isolated areas tend to develop more complicated and individualistic dialects over time, while dialects used over a large region get the edges rubbed off (see High German vs. Dutch). Arabic is an exception, in a way, because different countries are developing mutually unintelligible versions of Arabic, as people who learn Saudi Arabic sometimes discover when no one can understand them (or the audience thinks they are speaking Hebrew, as happened to one Israeli leader who was talking to some Bedouin.) If a language is isolated enough, by geography or culture [see the Hunter clans’ speech], it becomes a separate language within the larger language tree. Old languages like Latin /Romanch are preserved that way, although not without changes and borrowings.

Back in the 1960s-70s, when TV and radio became common, Those Who Know declared that regional accents and dialects were things of the past, quaint, and on their way out. All of us would speak TV Midwestern English (US) or BBC British-English. It hasn’t happened, in part because people keep and shed accents based on need or desire (to fit in? To irritate? To take advantage of someone else’s stereotyping?). Keeping a regional accent and dialect becomes a mark of belonging and pride, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one reason for the strengthening of some dialects is rejection of outside impositions. Like people from the lower South or parts of the inland mid-South (Alabama, Mississippi) who play up the “hick/redneck” accent in order to mess with outsiders of all kinds.

I am Odd in that if I’m not careful, I start to mimic the local accent without realizing it, trying to match my speech pattern to everyone else’s. I caught myself thinking in Lowland Scots when I was in Scotland. I speak German with an Austro-Bavarian accent because of my first instructor, and because it meshes with my natal Midwest-Southern-Texas blend (When I speak in English, the sounds are closer to Midwestern most of the time, but some vowels are more Suthun’, and the vocabulary is Texan-Southern.)

Will American English develop or return to hard-to-follow regional dialects of English? Well, how many of you read and speak fluent Street or Academese (liberal arts or hard science sub-dialects)? The Boston Brahmin accent might be basically dead, but Suthun’ in all its varieties seems to be digging in for the long haul. Southwest Span-glish is pretty common, and baffles new arrivals (although there are so many dialects of Spanish spoken in the Americas that it doesn’t always take much to ensure mutual confusion.)

All of which is great fun until you are trying to communicate critical information. Hochdeutsch, Midwestern English, or BBC-English come into their own, then.

SpaceX, Risks, and Success

So, on Thursday I watched the almost-live (I was late to the party) video of SpaceX’s third heavy rocket launch. The first two were not as successful as hoped, for various reasons. This one did not eat the launchpad, and lasted until reentry, when it broke up over the Indian Ocean. It was still a major success, and as it fell on Pi Day, celebrations included lots of pies (and ice cream, one suspects.)

In addition to the sheer fun of the thing doing so well, what caught my attention was the joyous enthusiasm of the narrators and the staff at Mission Control. Cheers, yells, back slapping, and pure joy erupted with each successful step in the mission. Yeah, it didn’t make it home, but things went so well and they got so much good data that it counts as a major success. Here we see something missing from so many NASA launches and recoveries.

OK, granted, it’s not fair to pick on NASA’s staff, because they have different goals and goal posts to meet. They are not supposed to enthuse wildly on camera. But dang, space has gotten so serious and almost grim! SpaceX is having fun as well as launching payloads and pushing the limits of rocketry. Their definition of success is also different: was anyone hurt? No. Did we learn from this? Yes. That makes the mission a success, even if not the ideal triumph. I’ve missed that, and it’s infectious. Perfection is hoped for, but if no one gets hurt and everyone learns, then it was a victory.

Social media seems to insist on perfection, with filters, “likes,” influencers, and so on. Society pushes for “right on the first try.” SpaceX and their boss don’t care about that. They want to win the long race for the stars, and they have accepted that there will be times the Range Safety Officer has to hit the big red button, or things will go “boom” or not go “boom,” and the mission won’t travel as far or accomplish as much as hoped. But they are learning a lot from those failures, and applying that knowledge. They are not risk averse in the way NASA has to be. They are finding new ways to do things, and know that some new stuff will go “burp,” or let them down.

So a toast to SpaceX and the spirit of adventure. Congratulations, and here’s to the next Starship making the entire round trip!

Oh, and did you know they have a gift shop?