Just some links today.  Don't get too excited. 

The artefact we studied, which comes from deposits dated to more than 60,000 years ago, closely resembles thousands of bone arrowheads used by the indigenous San hunter-gatherers from the 18th to the 20th centuries. It was excavated in the 1960s, but its importance was not recognised until recently, owing to confusion surrounding its age.

Recent analysis of a bone fragment in South Africa reveals it was likely part of an arrow, and likely also poisoned, which reveals enormous cognitive versatility among its fabricators, earlier than anyone had heretofore established.  

How to maintain motivation in a pandemic?  Pay attention to intrinsic motivations, rather than extrinsic ones; cultivate those.  

More info on the state of the humanities in higher ed.  “A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences provides data that complicate the picture of the declining disciplines.”  Seriously, it’s not a very clear signal, it’s mostly noise.  (Though this was interesting to me: “An estimated 62% of all humanities faculty members were tenured or on the tenure track in 2017.…In most humanities disciplines, the share of faculty either tenured or on the tenure track was greater than 70%.”)  But if you’re in higher ed humanities, or if you care about them (which imho should be all of us), this may be of interest.   

Interesting trip through a series of anecdotes about John Horton Conway, a famous mathematician.  I don’t pretend to follow all of this, though some of the games seem pretty interesting.  But I’m interested especially in his discussion of the “Monster” group, which is described as “a collection of symmetries of an object that lives most accessibly in 196,883 dimensions.”  That reminds me that most mathematicians are Platonists, believing that the mathematical structures they study are in some absolute sense real and out there; though what exactly the “reality” and “out there-ness” of the mathematical entities consists in, is a matter of less urgent, and often only speculative, interest.  In the humanities these days, and maybe in the culture as a whole, “Platonism” has a bad rap; but I actually think the mathematicians are on to something.  

This is a fascinating study that reports on what archaeology can tell us about how African civilizations managed pandemics throughout history. 

Natalie Carnes, a theologian who’s a friend of mine, on how she has had to think through Augustine’s Confessions anew after struggling with Augustine on mothers and babies for years.  Very much worth your time.  

This is illuminating, about the coronavirus and “viral load.”

Good piece on Karl Jaspers.  ““What we are accustomed to call Karl Jaspers’s philosophy,” wrote the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, “is in fact a description of the acutely and incurably painful human condition.””  and this:

Jaspers strongly denied that there could ever be a definitive, exclusive system of ciphers, but he allowed that a system of thought (religious or otherwise) can itself be a cipher. It’s tempting, today, to view religious systems, in their manifold forms, as just such affirmations of humanity. In the contemporary world, where dogmatic and inhumane voices of all kinds are growing ever louder, Karl Jaspers’s anti-dogmatic voice urgently needs to be heard.

Stay safe everybody.  Stay well.  Be kind to one another, and to yourself.