Tuesday 7 April 2026 to Tuesday 14 April 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Got to the end of chapter 2, where I’m taking a break. This was about comparative studies and how he’s used them in this work – for modern cultures you can do statistical analyses of factors across a decent sample size. So you can say things like cultures who feed themselves with a hunter/gatherer method don’t have hereditary monarchies with some degree of statistical significance. For early civilisations there aren’t many you can use so he can’t do as much stats. But he argues that if he can categorise his seven examples into a small number of types then the sample is probably large enough (but if they are all different then it definitely isn’t). Also discussed how he’s picking his examples, which are: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Shang Dynasty China, Classic Maya, Late Aztec, Inca, Yoruba/Benin. Basically there have to be both archaeology and historical records available as you can’t tell everything you need from only one source. So for some this means there’s a narrow window between Europeans starting to write about them & Europeans changing their cultures, but for others they wrote themselves so there’s a wider timespan. This requirement meant he hasn’t got a civilisation from the Indian subcontinent (which he’d like to have) because we can’t read the language of the people who lived in the Indus Valley. He’s also picked civilisations where he can argue that the culture has evolved in place with little outside influence.
• “Eyes of the Void” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Sequel to “Shards of Earth”, and picks up pretty much where that one ends and is still reminding me a lot of The Expanse books in flavour.

Podcasts

• The History of China
  The Opium War continues to escalate from the initial skirmishes – first the Chinese bring in reinforcements but they get defeated, then the English reinforcements turn up and are much more effective.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode about the Iran war from about a month ago (I guess I didn’t notice the topic when it came up in the list). The take home then from the guest was that the thing that’s not been particularly noticed is that it’s already spreading regionally, and even tho that is noticed we’re still not talking really about what’s going on in Lebanon.
  • An episode about the actual currently existing AI harms that we should be worried about, using the then recent Grok creating illegal content fiasco as a jumping off point to think about the sorts of things that are already harmful.
  • Weekly Wrap Up. Which obviously covered the Iran war & the cease fire situation, but also covered Kanye West being kept out of the UK.
  • Start the Week – including the Orban defeat, but also more on the Iran war as well as some domestic politics.
• Empire
  
  • episode 4 of the series about Mao, covering the first decade or so post the Communists taking over China right up to just before the Great Leap Forward.
  • an episode I’d missed putting on my playlist a little while ago – covering the historicity of Homer & talking about what we can & cannot glean from it.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Rory Stewart replaced by Dominic Sandbrook this week, so a bit more leaning on history as that’s his thing. All about the Iran war, and recorded after Trump threatened genocide but before the ceasefire. Included some chat about Trump’s mental state, about if he’s fascist or not (Sandbrook still says no but does think other parts of the Trump regime are, like Miller).
  • Q&A, still with Dominic Sandbrook, talked about NATO, the World Cup, amongst other thing.
  • a short extra bit reacting to the news that Orban lost.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a livestream recorded just after the ceasefire was announced, so all about that.
  • More on the Iran war, talking about how fragile the cease fire seems, but suggesting it will hold so long as the Chinese want it to. Also talking about how the Democrats have done well in recent special elections, but mostly because the swing voters who hate everyone are more anti-Republican at the moment as the Republicans are in charge.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • A bit on the Iran war, some on the rise of the Greens and some on the Kanye West fiasco.
  • Mostly covered the Orban defeat, talking about what it means for Hungary but also to Europe & to the far right groups who saw Orban as the leader to imitate.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, but also a bit of a chance for Hannah to plug the series she’s just made for the BBC that we’re actually watching right now (so being a month out of date on these made it dovetail nicely), so a decent chunk of the episode discussing AI psychosis and how we’re all susceptible to at least a mild form of it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An interview with an expert on the Zhuangzi to round off those episodes. Mostly a compare & contrast with Confucianism but also at the end a note on the similarities with Legalism.
• Literature & History
  An episode covering the Hadiths.
• History of England Shedcasts
  Part two of the history of duels, this one covered duels during their heyday and the slow dribbling out of the custom. I hadn’t realised the final death knell was really the First World War, so much death that courting it by duelling people seemed ridiculous.
• The History of England
  An episode tying in with some nationwide project about objects that are quintessentially English, so Crowther & a friend talked about the 10 they’d pick (which included everything from Cadbury’s chocolate to the Putney Debates).
• Journey Through Time
  The downfall of McCarthy, in large part precipitated by the fact he wasn’t good in the new age of TV – his ability to manipulate how the print press reported on him didn’t help when the hearings began to be televised.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Spain.

TV

• Hunt for the Oldest DNA
  A programme about a project that eventually sequenced DNA fragments from a soil/sediment sample that was over 2 million years old and provided an vision of what the ecosystem was at the time. A story of breakthroughs (first this guy had shown that you could get DNA from dirt at all, then subsequently pushed it back beyond the 1 million year old mark), but also it sounded like his insistence on chasing this had driven several PhD students out of science as they’d been assigned the project then failed to get anywhere with it.
• AI Confidential with Hannah Fry
  
  • This episode had a couple of examples of the ways that driverless cars have gone wrong – a crash where a self driving Uber killed a pedestrian whilst it was being tested, and a crash where a Tesla failed to stop at a stop sign, failed to turn a corner and drove straight off the road into a parked car killing one of the occupants. Fry made the point that developing new tech comes with mistakes, but that this class of mistake was avoidable and the companies should bear a significant amount of responsibility for the accidents – in the Uber case the car hadn’t been trained to recognise pedestrians who weren’t on pavements or crosswalks and also didn’t track or take evasive action when it didn’t know what an object was, so how was that remotely ready for real roads. And in the Tesla case it just didn’t do the sorts of things that the advertising said it would, so the logs show it recognised all the things it needed to recognise but didn’t do anything (and the driver was distracted looking for his phone that he’d dropped coz he thought the car capable of driving itself).
  • The final episode used the killing of the United Healthcare CEO as the jumping off point to talk about the use of AI algorithms in healthcare (but with nods to the wider use). The specific one that seems to’ve triggered the murder (or at least that everyone talks about as the thing the United Healthcare do wrong) is there’s an algorithm that United Healthcare use to determine when people get discharged from hospital – and there’s little to no flexibility so if you’re not well enough you get kicked out not well enough (and it’s systematically recommending discharge dates earlier than the patient is well enough). Fry also talked to someone with a startup that lets you select among IVF embryos for the “best” ones by sequencing the whole genome of the embryo then using AI to predict things like disease risks, but also eye colour, height, IQ. He was unconvincingly anti eugenics.
• Art’s Most …
  A series on art presented by Waldemar Januszczak, each episode of which is Art’s Most something, and this first one was Art’s Most Erotic. Covered a pretty wide-ranging selection of explicit art from prehistory through Pompeii, India, Japan, France & England. Some of which was spiritual or about love, some of which was very much not.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Episode 5 was another inland one, in an area between two rivers so nice & fertile for farming – settled mostly by Italians (at least in the places he visited). Most entertaining section wasn’t Italians, it was on an emu farm, where the emu chicks were a bit over-friendly. Nice sounding beef ragu recipe to try.
• The Roman Empire by Train
  This episode covered some of northern Italy (Parma, Turin) and Nimes in France. We’ve been to Turin, about 13 years ago, so it was kinda neat to see bits of the place that we recognised (as well as a bunch of stuff we didn’t as we were there to see the Egyptian Museum).

Music

• “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus” Roxette
• “Scissor Sisters” Scissor Sisters

Talks

• “Coffins as Magical Machines: Visualizing Ancient Egyptian Funerary Texts in 3D” Rita Lucarelli
  This wasn’t quite what I expected – more about the way she’s using 3D models & VR to bring the study of the texts to life, than about the texts themselves. This is in part a pedagogical exercise – involving students in creating the models, so they photograph & measure the object, and add the annotations to the model or translate the texts. All of which makes them engage with the object & all the knowledge we have about it. It’s also a way of bringing all this information to a wider audience (there’s a website https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bookofthedead/ ). And it’s a way of investigating how the texts worked in practice rather than analysing them solely based on looking at the text in isolation.