Perambulations in Padova

With the pandemic now firmly relegated to the status of The Event, it's time for another travel post.

Truth be told I submitted a couple of abstracts to EAS 2024 just on a general feeling that I probably should try and go to conferences once in a while, rather than any unsated travel-lust. Which meant, as per usual, that I booked all the flights and accommodation later than I probably should, but it all worked out in the end.

As it transpired, this was a really good conference with no less than three full days dedicated to stuff I'm directly interested in, but you can read all about the science highlights over on Little Physicists. Here I'll just do the travel bits. Knowing nothing whatever about Padova except that it was close to Venice (which I missed visiting when I was in Bologna last year), I decided to go the Saturday before and return the following Sunday. That gave me two full days of exploration, or closer to three because I arrived pretty early on the Saturday.

Padova

My flight over was absolutely uneventful. The only annoyance is that there aren't any direct Prague->Padova flights, so I went through Venice and took a bus – an easy 40 minute trip and you buy the ticket from a vending machine. Instantly on leaving the airport the heat made itself very much known, something which was to get worse before it got better. The bus ride itself was forgettable : you don't see anything of Venice itself, the Italian countryside is flat nondescript farmland (the area around Bologna is somehow more picturesque), and the parts of Padova the bus goes through aren't the nicest. Which will unfortunately be something of a running theme here.

Somewhat annoyingly, the left luggage at the train station wasn't open. Nor was the hotel/apartment office that day*, which meant I had to drag my thankfully-not-heavy suitcase and somewhat-heavier backpack around all day. 

* Keys were placed in a deposit box on the street, for which I was sent the code and a series of nice clear pictures explaining exactly where everything was and what to do.

A literal rainbow bridge ! A building nearby had a huge "Pride" banner hanging from the upper floors, so I presume there's a connection.

Part of the historical bits of the University, I think.

One of the main squares, taken on the Sunday morning. On the Saturday it was full of people.

One thing I immediately noticed was the tourist density contrast, which is much higher even than in Prague. That is, there's a distinct tourist route : deviate from it even a little, and the population density crashes. I've a feeling in Padova this might align with the places the locals actually inhabit as well, but what's striking is that the empty parts are really empty. And something about the place deadens the sound, so get away from the main routes and the streets turn silent.

Still, by a little after 2pm, after having explored Padova for a good three hours or so, I was extremely conscious that it really was quite astonishingly, ferociously hot. It was only 31 C but if someone had told me it was 41 I'd have believed them. I'd been consuming liquids all day like it was going out of fashion but quite honestly the heat felt to me to be – and I don't say this lightly, pray remember the name of the blog ! – worse than the tropics. Maybe it was that "baked in" feeling of the heat radiating from the stones, coupled with the humidity, I don't know. But it felt like it was eight billion degrees and humid enough to drown a fish.

Whatever it was, having seen the message that the key would be available "before 3", I went and collected it a little after 2:30. Being close to the train station the area... wasn't the best. It's not that it's run-down, though it's hardly the tourist scene either. It's that there are a lot of large street gangs hanging out there most of the time, and as far as I could tell, this seemed to be the case only in this particular and very small area. The main activity here for the youth of today is to hang out on the steps of the streets. Why this is appealing I've no idea; I imagine conversations going along the lines of "what about going to the cinema bro ?" followed by "nah mate, gotta hang out on the steps cos that is where it is AT !" or suchlike.

So far as I could tell the area isn't actually dangerous in the "seriously don't go there" sense, but it's definitely intimidating. The presence of numerous open shops, little old ladies going about their business, and other people walking around staring at their phones gave me some confidence that random crime isn't something to be overly-concerned about, at least.

Compensation for the scuzzy area came about by way of the hotel itself. This was a sort of apartment/hotel, with individual rooms but with two shared bathrooms and one kitchen. The company's called CleanBNB and it was indeed commendably clean. Even better, the air conditioner was fabulously, gloriously efficient. In less than an hour I'd reduced the indoor temperature from 29 to 21 C. This was bliss, and the pattern for the other days was to retreat here whenever needed.

Or in other words, finally I understand the point of a siesta. 

The first evening I managed to get the external roller shutter stuck and couldn't figure out for the life of me what I'd done, so had to make do with a rather bright interior (the next day, I realised a handle on the shutter itself had got lodged at the top, and I was able to dislodge it). Other than that it was comfortable enough and surprisingly quiet in the night. I tried to avoid arriving back too late, but from what I could see, the street urchins mostly disappear by around 10 pm or so. 

The restaurant scene in Padova is not a patch on Bologna. That first night I even had... a bad lasagne. In Italy. Shock, horror ! Luckily for that place (deep in the tourist zone) they did a mean Cuba Libre. But finding restaurants was a struggle; often I made do with a big lunch and limited myself to snacks in the evening. When I did go out, though, the staff were invariably friendly. Usually I was even offered a student discount ! Alas, that ship has sailed...

I decided that evening that doing Venice the next day would be frankly silly. The heat in Padova was bad enough; in Venice the humidity would surely be even worse and the crowds unbearable. So I decided to do more of Padova instead, now of course sans suitcase. I forced myself to walk at a snail's pace to avoid working up a sweat; this helped quite a lot, but even so, there are limits. Padova is (as long as you avoid the train station) a perfectly nice place to explore, with the need to proceed with all the urgency of a glacier helping to compensate for its small size.

My first glimpse of the old astronomical tower, of which more later.

That day I decided to visit a few of Padova's tourist attractions : the Palazzo della Ragione and the civic museums. The Palazzo is a spectacular medieval hall which claims to be the largest in Europe; Wikipedia claims otherwise but it certainly feels very impressive. It's worth spending a good quarter of an hour or so walking around listening to the audio guide's explanation of the frescos, but you don't need much more than that unless you're an art enthusiast. It's also surprisingly warm inside, unfortunately.

The civic museums, I have to say, aren't great unless you speak Italian. Everyone speaks English but the number of explanatory signs in English is very small indeed, often just one small panel in a room of dozens if not hundreds of artifacts. So I'll skip over these entirely, except for the highlight : Giotto's 14th-century masterpiece, the Scrovegni Chapel. The building from the outside is utterly nondescript, easily mistaken for a 20th century church. I asked the guide about this and she wasn't exactly sure, but presumably heavy restoration work (or perhaps more accurately described as reconstruction work) must have been done to the exterior. 

The interior, however, is altogether more impressive. So determined are the Italians to preserve the paintings that you spend 15 minutes in an airlock for reducing the humidity, strictly limiting groups of visitors to 25 at a time. Sensibly they use this time to show you a video describing the history of the chapel and the significance of the paintings. You get 15 minutes inside to look around a take photos, minus the flash, of course.

The Conference

The next day it was time for the conference, in an extremely modern and climate-controlled building*. No frescos, just 1500 astronomers, the usual sort of "look at our cool telescope !" booths and so on. Tea breaks... well, it claimed to be Twining's English Breakfast, but it wasn't my idea of a good cuppa. Delicious biscuits though, and very plentiful. Lunch was mainly a burger van that had set up outside, which was surprisingly decent fast food (and not at all the usual sort of grubby side-of-the-road variety, even if it was hardly healthy).

* Though fortunately it cooled down considerably mid-week, and remained so until the weekend, which was still not as bad as when I arrived.

I shall pass over the science here and skip ahead to the social aspects. The first was a concert with a small orchestra playing (what else ?) The Planets, with visuals shown on a gigantic LED screen, mostly real images with some visualisations and animations. I was much looking forward to this, but my experience was somewhat marred by a couple of... incidents in the day. 

That morning I decided I needed breakfast, and not knowing the conference venue sold croissants, I went into the centre. Going down a side street very close to the tourist region, I made the mistake of answering someone addressing me - well, you never know, often people are just asking directions, and I don't like to fob people off unless I can see this is obviously a discussion I want to avoid.

Well, it was weird. "Can you help me ? I'm looking for something, something for my baby", said the man, proceeding to direct my attention to a small sign he held up, which was of course in Italian. It's hard to think of a more obvious declaration of "I'm trying to scam you" than this, so, "Sorry, no", I immediately said, and walked off. 

This has happened to me hundreds of times over the years and there's nothing unremarkable about it so far, apart from the weirdness of the request and the fact it was 7:15am – not exactly peak scam time ! He called after me, which is still nothing unusual. But he was persistent. When it got to, "Sorry ? Why sorry ?" I started to feel more uncomfortable. When it got to "Hey, boy !" I was not at all happy. And when he then proceeded to call to his friends I was walking past, who then in turn proceeded to call out to me as well, I was positively nervous. I ignored them completely, kept on walking at my usual brisk pace and made straight for the nearest café, which was, fortunately, the very one I was aiming for anyway.

That rather put me on edge for quite a while. It wasn't an empty side street and there were plenty of open shops (it was only just outside the centre at this point), so I doubt anything would happen... but you don't know. Now I'm quite familiar with the rules of social engagement being markedly different, for example, in America than Britain. I mean we Brits are not necessarily unfriendly or untalkative, but we don't stop to chat to complete strangers – that tends to be an immediate sign of a scam to us. But when it's obvious someone is trying to scam you and really starts to press the point home, that's rather unpleasant.

What made it worse was when I went out that evening to the concert, it started raining. So I had to go back for my umbrella, and on this occasion the gang hanging out on the street corner decided to block my path. And that's literally all they did – I simply asked to go through, and they let me. I retrieved said brolly and proceeded without further incident, but it gave the evening a distinct unpleasantness about it. Again, it's just hard to know how to adapt to different social rules : is this just greater exuberance and talkativeness, as with Americans, or a precursor to some sort of threat ?

As it happened, when I got back around 10:30, they'd all gone, perhaps rained off or perhaps just following usual behaviour, I don't know. There were no further such incidents for the rest of the trip, barring the occasional "Ciao" from random passers-by which I stoically ignored.

The concert was very pretty though. The orchestra weren't the Vienna Philharmonic but they were good enough, and the acoustics in the room were great.

The next day was the conference dinner for anyone who could afford the €90 (!) fee, which I wasn't going to shell out. So I'd signed up for the free tour of the astronomical tower instead. This was originally a medieval prison, complete with (so the sign and guides claim) a trapdoor underneath one of the later telescopes, down which prisoners were thrown into the dungeon. It fell into disrepair until the 18th century, whereupon it was converted into an observatory. It's well worth a look around – I would actually have liked more time to read the signs, a luxury not afforded to us as part of the conference

After touring the tower it was time to topple the Tories and I stayed up the whole night watching the election coverage, of which more in a future post. Last time I stayed up all night at a conference I spent the whole time getting drunk; this time I survived the morning on an adrenaline rush from seeing the last fourteen years of corrupt stupidity and no small doses of abject racism all done away with; scantily-clad villainy replaced, I have good reason to hope, with common sense and decency (well, we'll see).

That was the morning. In the afternoon I began to crash, but somehow I made it through. I slept, needless to say, like an especially happy and contented log. I'd been grinning from ear to ear like an idiot all day, but come on.... fourteen years. This was a historic, seismic moment, one I wouldn't have missed for anything.

Venice

That brings the conference socials to a close, but I still had a full day left. After umming and ahhing, I finally decided that Venice was so easily accessible (30 minutes and €5 by train) that I had to at least see it, being able to immediately retreat if it proved necessary.

It didn't. I loved it instantly. It's a wonderful little city, for the most part delightfully charming and quaint, peppered with bits of the truly spectacular. Following my favourite strategy of "wandering completely at random", I begin in the less touristy parts. Contrary to what little expectations I had, the canals aren't a gimmick, they're everywhere. A huge fraction of the streets do indeed simply have water instead of roads. There are no cars anywhere : you either take a boat or you walk, those are your only options. Hundreds upon hundreds of adorable little bridges connect the smaller streets, though the numbers of bridges for the larger streets are much lower.

The view immediately from the train station.

Contrary to my expectation, large parts of the city are empty of tourists. And this is a bit silly, because while there may not be anything spectacular in these districts, they're still absolutely charming and a lot of fun to explore.

Even along the main waterfront where you can see the next island over, where you walk past some pretty monumental cathedrals, the number of people was extremely small : a handful along the length of a street, no more than that.

In most cases there's a pavement running alongside the water but not all. Sometimes bridges go directly from building to building. Not all streets connect to each other, making it extremely easy to get lost. I did this quite a few times, but all the streets are short so you can't really get totally bewildered. 

I need not give too many photos of the ungodly number I took because honestly it all looks like this. All of it, everywhere, charming street after charming street. There are a few parks and larger spaces, but not many. And of course in the tourist spots (of which there are plenty) the streets are indeed very busy. Mercifully the sea breeze kept it for the most part to a bearable temperature, though in those parts which were open and exposed to the sun, it soon felt much hotter than the reported 26 C. Again, if you'd told me it was 36, I'd have had no reason to doubt it. 

Still, only parts of the city are truly baking and enormously overcrowded, but by no means all of it all the time. In fact only a few "choke points" have really unusually heavy pedestrian traffic; for the most part, it's no worse than any other popular tourist destination. What helps a good deal is the relaxed, convivial atmosphere of the place. And someone told me that there's no air conditioning in the cafes, but this was simply false. I had a very nice seafood risotto in a random café I wandered into, where I was able to happily decompress and cool down to a bearable temperature, before completing my circuit of the island in the afternoon.

Since I didn't go in any of the museums, I'll wrap this up with a photo-dump. I saw the Bridge of Sighs but I haven't included it here because that was the one thing where I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. The only "sigh" it should elicit is one of confusion that it's especially famous. It's nice enough, but with Venice it's the collective whole rather than any one particular must-see feature that makes the experience worthwhile.

 

Some canals are considerably larger than others. While Venice might not have as many canals as Manchester (reputedly), it certainly has a lot nicer ones.

Some things are clearly just for tourists, as they should be. I even heard a violinist playing the "Just One Cornetto" song, and if I hadn't I'd have been hugely disappointed.

The Arsenal. Definitely a place where I'd like to wander through the museums if I had the time.

By mid-afternoon the heat and 25,000 steps were at last taking their toll on me, and by about 3 (hours later than I expected) I was back on the train to Padova. Venice is somewhere very high indeed on my list of places to visit again. I despise heat and crowds separately and the combination is anathema, but here I will say that a) both of these can largely be avoided, at least a good fraction of the time; b) Venice is so damn nice a place that it compensates for it.

Venice is also famous for having problems of water erosion. And here I want to grab a civic official and throttle them, pointing at the nearest high-speed multi-story yacht and yelling "WELL THERE'S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM MATE !". They may have banned cruise ships, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of speed limit, and giant yachts are still a thing. Even in British canals, which have no more than narrowboats, speeds are limited to prevent bank erosion even though the banks consist of mud and totally uninteresting plants; in historic, beautiful Venice, boats much larger and much faster are common.

The next day, a final few moments of drama. Just before exiting the motorway for the airport we hit gridlock. This was due to a motorbike accident, where I was able to see the driver lying the floor, his head bleeding, but moving and being attended to by other drivers. Bits of bike were scattered all over the road though the bike itself looked largely intact – that driver, I suspect, could have ended up in a far worse state. In complete defiance of the stereotypes the locals had swiftly organised to divert the traffic past the accident. Police and ambulance services hadn't yet arrived.

Finally, my flight to Dusseldorf was delayed, which had me worried about my connecting flight. Needlessly, as it turned out : the Prague gate was almost directly adjacent to the arrival gate from Venice, and in any case the connecting flight was itself delayed. So a short flight later I was back home only half an hour later than planned, and all was well.

A Theory of Human Nature

Prelude

Over on Decoherency, I recently posted a couple of book reviews that have very different takes on what makes people tick. First, Rutger Bregman's largely idiotic Human Kind has it that people are, when you get right down to it, an absolutely lovely bunch of racists and everyone would be much happier living as a monkey in a war-ravaged jungle. The whole notion of private property has led us all down the dark and miserable path of civilisation and everything was pretty much hunky-dory until about 1800 for some reason.

Yes, really. 

Thanks to Bing Image Creator, Bregman's horrific dream can finally be realised.

Secondly, Christopher Browning's incomparably superior and more disturbing Ordinary Men postulates that people can be moulded into committing appalling acts even when they're not raving ideologues, such is the power of group conformity. He doesn't address the grandiose issues that Bregman does, and his much narrower claim ends up being far more watertight as a result.

What I want to do here is essentially expand on Browning's idea and follow it through, such as I can, to a broader conclusion. I already mentioned the basics of this in the Bregman post but I feel this needs a deeper exploration.

---

I claim that the old lunatic witch Maggie Thatcher was exactly wrong : that rather than there being no such thing as society, we are society. 

---

When Bregman set up a choice between humans as essentially nice or nasty, I say he missed the trick that perhaps we aren't hard-wired to be anything, that what we learn is only ever what other people and circumstances teach us, under the limitations of what our brain can handle. Our nature isn't some standard, fixed-from-birth characteristic. The choice between nature-or-nurture is a false one : our nature is our nurture, and we are shaped to an enormous degree by the culture of those around us.

So it's time to try and justify this. Throughout, I'll also be drawing on Damon Centola's Change, which examines how our beliefs shift in response to those of others, and David Eagleman's Live Wired, which looks at the tremendous (but not unlimited) flexibility of the human brain. To my shame, these are both easily among the best books I've read in the last five years but I haven't got around to blogging them. I've also suggested these ideas in passing before, not only the review of Human Kind, but also here and somewhat more tangentially here, and probably quite a lot of other places too.

Refining the Question

The old nature/nurture question is undeniably an interesting one. What are people really like ? What are our innate abilities and tendencies, and what do we have to learn ? What can we deliberately change about ourselves, and ultimately, how can we most effectively harness this to create the best possible society ?

Well, I'll leave that last one largely unanswered. But at least I can present my case that human nature is heavily dominated, in every important respect, by our changing cultural influences, and we are not fixed to behave in any particular way. Nothing that happens is inevitable and we aren't doomed to perpetual warfare because we're a "shitty species" or any of that cynical, self-defeating nonsense that's perversely popular in some quarters.

One manifestation of this I frequently see is a paranoid belief that everyone has an agenda about everything, that nobody does anything just because they believe it's a good idea. Everyone, the logic goes, is out to manipulate everyone else the whole time. And this is just not true at all, even (especially !) about people and companies who do dumb and unpleasant things.

This is not to say that our innate nature doesn't exist or is of no importance, be that our genetic makeup or other physical/biological factors influencing our development. Hardly. These things undoubtedly do have roles to play, sometimes very important ones. Nor am I saying something along the lines of the stupid wishful-thinking aspirational rhetoric that "you can do anything if you put your mind to it". This is nonsense which sets us up for disappointment when we realise that actually no, we can't all be virtuoso pianists or professional footballers, no matter how hard we try or how many hours we put in : not the proverbial ten thousand, not even a hundred thousand. 

There's no shame in this. Quite the opposite ! If you insist that people haven't succeeded because they haven't tried hard enough, chances are that it's you who's the problem.

Well, on the other hand...

What I'm saying is more that society, not individuals, can be shaped with near-infinite flexibility, and each person living in that society could have had very different roles if they'd lived elsewhere. They weren't destined to become a web designer or a lawyer any more than they were a cave painter or a pyramid-builder. This may sound trivial, and hopefully it is. Which is why we need to go a little deeper. 

Let's begin with one of the most obvious examples of continuous and uncontroversial change : technology. 

They Don't Build Them Like They Used To, Thank Goodness

Consider life in Britain today, in the early 21st century. We have entire fields of industry based around the world wide web. People create art, music, play sports, socialise, all entirely digitally. They invest money in portfolios of digital industries, argue over digital crimes, and beyond the web technology remains omnipresent. Music uses electronic instruments, we make notes on digital tablets, explore virtual worlds, use advanced drugs to treat and cure diseases, have robots perform surgery... technology is everywhere. 

And, crucially, it's very different from what we had even 25 years ago, never mind 50 or more. I remember digital media stored on cassette tapes and played back on analogue black-and-white televisions. Today, I get most of my exercise with immersive virtual reality apps, an experience easily closer to Star Trek's holodeck than the clunky experience of my childhood ZX Spectrum.

I've seen these in museum's for crying out loud... oh GOD I'm fucking old.

This is not a rant against people spending too much time online or some other grumpy-old-man bollocks. Not at all. I like most of these technological marvels (even if I don't care a jot about bloody TikTock) : I remember yearning for experiences which are now routine and it still feels like something wonderous. At least, some of the time. 

Anyway, my point is the change. Whole fields of endeavour are commonplace today that didn't even exist within recent living memory. The idea that someone could be a professional web designer would never have occurred to anyone when I was 10, because such things just didn't exist for normal people. You'd have had more luck betting on a career in Ceefax. 

The Times They Are A-Changing

It's not just technology of course. The further back you go, the more different society becomes in all ways. There are some startling similarities in even the most distant ages to be sure : the fake adverts of ancient peoples as shown in Horrible Histories in jest may well, I suspect, be more accurate than they intended. Even so, options have fundamentally changed. Once, becoming a monk or a scribe was relatively normal. Today they barely exist, alone with knocker-uppers and a host of other lost professions. 

Plato noted that while not everyone might be able to play the flute very well, everyone who had at least some teaching was better than anyone who had none. We learn from each other – that's one of our greatest strengths (a rare moment of insight from Bregman) : genius ideas are slow and rare to develop but propagate rapidly. Consequently, the lived experience of a Victorian, a Roman, a Celt, a hunter-gatherer would all have been radically different. Technology plays a key role here. It's a fundamental part of our existence, not something we do as a sort of glorified side-hobby.

And yet far more crucial still are INFORMATION and RESOURCES. Those, I claim, are the two pillars on which human society is built. Knowledge of how to interact with the world, how to harness what it can provide, is crucial, but it goes the other way too : with more resources at our disposal, more money to fund more powerful telescopes, our beliefs shift – perhaps only minor matters of technical detail in the short-term, but whopping great moral beliefs over longer periods.

A common objection is that despite this, societies continue to act in basically the same ways. This is ludicrous, as any former Soviet bloc nation will readily attest to. Societies have been egalitarian, hierarchical, fundamentalist, rational, despotic, democratic, all in varying degrees (and not always easily distinguished). Are there common themes, pointing to an underlying human nature ? Yes, perhaps, but there are also profound and dramatic differences across cultures throughout history. To say the Aztec were basically similar to the Athenians is profoundly stupid.

Or consider another approach. If we were to take a random person from history and raise them in our society, few would be surprised to see them become a lawyer or a fireman or a checkout assistant. Nobody would expect them to become a Viking or an alchemist because why the hell would they do that ? Society determines how people express themselves, not their genetics. There's simply no way that anything as specific as the desire to become a trireme helmsman could be genetically encoded.

Image credit : me !

What genetics and/or other innate factors might well bestow are tendencies : personality types, preferences and latent base abilities. If I myself were born in another era, perhaps I might have been a monk* or a scribe, but I think it's far less likely I'd have been a warrior or an athlete. I've never had any inclination towards those activities : reading and writing are my forte, not hacking people with axes or running around after a windsock... wait, that's greyhounds. You get the idea. I don't say those are impossible, just considerably less likely.

* I'd have been a fucking fantastic monk, locked up all day with naught but books to read.

This is why I say culture dominates. It's exemplified brilliantly, like so many things, by SMBC :

To me this alone is the perfect TLDR version of this post. How can anyone say humans are innately good or bad when comparing medieval and modern Sweden ? IT. DOESN'T. MAKE. SENSE.

The Times They Are A-Teaching – Mostly

Of course I have to acknowledge that there are some limitations to this. We are after all creatures of flesh and bone, not ethereal angels able to reconfigure themselves at will. We do have some restrictions – we can't grow antlers just because we want to – but I think it's worth being quite skeptical about any attempts to infer what those precise limits actually are.

For example, female mathematicians were common until men decided that wasn't women's work. People can generally accomplish what they want to achieve, but only if you let them and only if you teach them correctly. What they want in the first place is trickier. Learning styles may well be a myth but learning preferences certainly aren't. Conversely, teach anyone anything badly enough and I guarantee they won't like it. So to say that because we see more of demographic X in profession Y is to entirely miss the point : it doesn't indicate a natural desire or tendency any more than the pyramids suggest a natural Egyptian propensity for bricklaying.

So how far does this go – what sort of limits do we have ? To take a really extreme angle, was Hitler destined to become a leader or a tyrant ? I say no, but was he destined to become a massive cunt ? Yeah, probably, though it's not a clear, cut-and-dried case. Consider also the crazy "fake heiress" lady, whose parents seem pretty despondent and bewildered about why she turned out the way she did. Some people just do their own thing, in spite of environment, just as some historical princes have gone on to become utterly useless and despicable even though they had the finest teachers money could by. Natural tendencies do exist, and dominate nurture in some individuals, but these are the exceptions rather than the norm. 

I thought it was time for a more colourful metaphor, dammit.

Are there some innate tendencies that transcend societal boundaries ? Almost certainly yes. It would seem very strange if, given our obvious biological differences (height, weight, reproductive organs, hormones etc.) there weren't some pre-programmed differences. Sexuality may or may not be one such example, though it's worth noting just how radically different the rules of attraction can be in different cultures : some modern-day tribal people use chalk and feathers to look sexy, or even deliberately scar themselves or lengthen their necks. 

It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the contestants of Love Island would be seen as particularly attractive in all cultures around the world : this is just our Western bias in thinking that we're somehow especially normal. This isn't to say that the different conditions for attraction aren't real – not at all, but they are, in a sense, manufactured. Just like Love Island, then.

And that to me underlines the main point. I'm not seeing any indication that in anything which really matters, culture is anything less than overwhelming against these innate effects. Any genetic differences are utterly irrelevant in the face of the cultural onslaught : look, for example, at how open the ancient Greeks were about homosexuality, and how sexual and gender attitudes have varied so profoundly and radically across geography and time. It may or may not have actually altered the attraction that individuals felt towards each other (though I think it very probably did) but it has certainly altered how they were able to express themselves, which, in the end, is what really matters.

Morals vs. Mathematics

So we can alter our specific beliefs, including morality, almost infinitely. What looks pants-dropping attractive to one person can, to another with a different upbringing, look repugnant. Even so, we surely do have some hard limitations that society can't alter very much, some basic clay that it can mould and shape but never create.

Ordinary Men demonstrates that you can make seemingly normal people into murderers, in the right circumstances (see also this, but also this for how they can become heroes). But it does not follow you can make them into mathematicians. 

Of course, it's also possible to be a murderous mathematician – or indeed much weirder combinations.

My suspicion is that our base abilities are probably innate or set by very early experiences, or both. We cannot increase them, at least not all that much : culture governs how we express them, not what they are. I've speculated a little about my own intelligence limits here (and see also links therein), noting that there can be limits as to how many things we can store in our head at once and how rapidly we can process them.

Nevertheless, today we can become astronauts and airline pilots, jobs which simply didn't exist in previous cultures. Yet there were surely people who had the requisite base natures even thousands of years ago. Culture gives us the particular skills, mental tricks, and factual knowledge needed to fulfil the available options. It shapes our abilities to a huge degree : crucially, the "ordinary men" of Browning's book never did anything like their horrific acts in the German forests of the 1940s ever again.

But if the effects of culture are dominant, they aren't unlimited. Morality, specific factual beliefs, these are nearly 100% due to external knowledge, and these are extremely important. Other things, however, are natural. I just don't think I could ever have become an elite athlete or a great actor or political leader : these things are just not in my nature or temperament. Similarly, specific desires are environmental, but low-level ones perhaps not. For example the base desire to run around as opposed to the higher level enjoyment of running around while playing football. To simply want to run around is a very primal desire, to want to kick a ball with a carefully-defined set of precise rules requires something else.

All skills and preferences can be improved with, and are subject to, training and society, but I think we cannot make genius any more than we can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. We can give genius the best chance to express itself just as we can suppress its abilities to impact anyone (e.g. locking a professor up in a dungeon versus giving them a healthy grant and a team of well-trained postdocs) but there are some things each of us can just never understand* : there's maths I just can't do, will never be able to do no matter how hard I try, even if I was motivated.

* I sometimes wonder if this works in reverse, if there are some things which only make sense if you're sufficiently stupid which clever people will just never be able to comprehend. And stupid people, I'm sad to say, seem to be more easily persuaded by stupid arguments than clever people are by clever ones. This may go a long way to explaining why people in large groups tend to be so damn thick.

Of course, this is definitely not a coded plea to the grant agency to support my application.

Trends across all cultures and history may indicate hard-wiring but even here these patterns are difficult to discern with any certainty. We may, for instance, also have innate beliefs rather than abilities, or at least broad personal preferences that shape our more precise beliefs. This can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy, for example in the case of gender : you're only good for raising children, so the thinking goes, so that's all we'll teach you => voila, there go the mathematical talents of half the species due to lack of training ! 

Here I'm especially remembering Live Wired, and even if you see a neurological difference, you can't immediately assume this is the result of nature and not nurture. The brain is far too flexible for that, capable of adapting itself to use different pathways in a matter of mere hours in some cases.

What about measured intelligence though ? For example I.Q. is inherited, but I.Q. tests are, in my view, heavily overrated. They're probably not meaningless, they do indicate something, but they're nowhere near as important as people seem to think (despite innumerable, highly patronising answers on Quora professing that the highest I.Q. people just look down in baffled pity at us dim-bulbs). For example, Richard Feynman's I.Q. was about about the same as mine, and while I can happily declare that I've never molested anyone (unlike Feynman) I also can't claim to have his genius either.

Still, I.Q. tests do raise the issue of the fundamental nature of intelligence. For example, as I mentioned, how many bits of information we can process at once, and how rapidly, are probably determined more by nature than nurture. Nurture instead dictates what sort of problems we can understand, how we express our abilities and preferences. We can learn and share our beliefs for simplifying problems but our base ability levels probably can't be shifted very much, even if they're not fixed completely. So at least from the health-of-the-species perspective there's no point in worrying about whether I.Q. levels are changing (be that upwards or downwards), simply because culture is changing and therefore so will our answers to the questions : it indicates nothing much at all about base ability.

Arguably there's no such thing as a true, singular sort of intelligence : it is fundamentally a merged construct of latent natural ability and social expression. Without latent ability, we can't understand what complicated words or equations mean. But what sort of complicated words we choose to create and use, what sort of mathematical notation we adopt, this, like morality, depends on society.

Summary

This, then, is my take on humanity. We're born with certain natural abilities, preferences and biases. I myself have quite a distinct personality to my sister, and the same seems generally true of all other families, even if they may have more than a passing similarity to each other. Nature definitely has an effect, be that genetics, development in the womb or our very early life, or other biological factors beyond our control.

But after that... our nature is to be whatever our nurture shapes us to be. As evidence for this I cite all of human history. Societies have varied massively, both in their demands of their own members and how they've treated outsiders. Sure, there are common trends here and there, but there are also massive differences that go far beyond any mere "window dressing". Viking society was by no means Egyptian society but with longhouses instead of pyramids : the differences are much more than skin deep and reflect profoundly different world views. Rather than this all being the result of the abstract notion of private property, as Bregman absurdly asserts, it seems much more likely that it's the result of geography, climate, population... a host of factors. Society shapes itself.

The really tricky question, then, is how much agency do we have over this ? Can we choose to be a society of IKEA-loving furniture junkies as opposed to Frenchmen-bashing marauders, or are we trapped by the structural confines of our societal networks ? I don't know. Society always changes, often more rapidly than we give it credit for. Like the old "frog in a jar of milk", perhaps it's only more important that we try to change rather than expecting success. Of course this is a horrible cliché, but it's certainly better than giving up in cynical, nihilistic despair. The lesson of history may not be that the moral arc always bends towards justice, but it certainly doesn't teach us that we're irredeemable either. 

Nightmares At The Museums

I started this year with a wonderful, predictably-brief period in work in which I had nothing much to do. Or rather, because no astronomer of any repute truly ever finds themselves in such a situation, I had nothing that needed to be done with any urgency. I'd just about finished my rewriting-code project that I started right at the beginning of the pandemic (of which more in a future post) so I was able to get on with the actually productive output of writing papers. And on the side, I also managed to completely overhaul my much-neglected website into a far more modern format, with plenty of science content as well as all the art stuff from the old days. 

Do be sure to check that out – unusually for me, I managed to keep everything there pretty concise.

Of the papers I managed to rattle off two, one of which is absolutely done as far as I'm concerned and another needing only a few more paragraphs. Both are, of course, now lying uselessly fallow. Partly this is because they're awaiting comments from colleagues but partly this is because the productive period has been replaced with the more typical too-busy-to-poop period instead. Currently I'm at the tail end of writing a grant (which has a negligible chance of success, yay), reviewing my Master's student's thesis, trying to get my other student to start a project, about to start getting the first's student's mock ALMA proposal turned into an actual proposal, occasionally having bouts of (remote) observing with a 1.4m telescope in Serbia, and about to be hit by a succession of visitors.

I dunno, sometimes I think this post-pandemic world isn't all it's cracked up to be...

Anyway, because this is absolutely perfect timing (read : irony), last week we went on a two-night jaunt to visit the museums of Berlin. Now I've done the major touristy stuff in Berlin before and stopped briefly on trips to the Netherlands many times, but I've never done any of the museums. Shame on me !

I love museums. In fact there's one thing I've wanted to see in Berlin for many years : the recreation of the Babylonian Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum. Literally, this has been in the back of my mind as something I should definitely do for years. Imagine my dismay to discover the Pergamon is "temporarily" closed... for 14 to 20 years.

This scarcely covers it.

Oh well. They'll probably reopen parts of it in 2027 so maybe I won't have to wait the full frickin' TWO DECADES to go and see it.

Fortunately Berlin has plenty of other museums, and it turned out there was one very big thing there I've wanted to see even longer than the Ishtar Gate. But I'll get back to that later.

We travelled up in the morning, had an afternoon for our first museum jaunt, a full day of museum-hiking, and then the following morning for another sneaky museum bout before we had to leave again. So about two full days total. We didn't do any sightseeing as such, so the best I can offer in terms of touristy photos is this little sequence of chance alignments of the TV tower with various buildings.

Most of the foreground buildings here are the Charité hospital, which has an excellent museum we visited on the final day.

Day 1

We began more-or-less at random with the New Museum, which is all about (obviously) ancient history. Although it does have a few quite spectacular pieces, honestly in that regard the museum in Bologna was better (having far more mummies and painted wooden sarcophagi). But Berlin beats Bologna for the weird and unexpected and downright silly stuff, which I find more interesting if undeniably less visually awesome : the ancient Egyptians may have had a death fixation, but they were also capable of being just as daft as the rest of us. 

This fine building is not the New Museum, but some art gallery or other. The New Museum is right next to it, but not nearly as photogenic. Actually it's a piece of history in its own right though, with many of the pillars of the colonnaded entrance being riddled with bullet holes, and some having been replaced entirely.

It becomes easier to understand why this chap was so happy when you look inside his coffin.

I love the snap-action of this toy crocodile. Kids will be kids, even thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt. Literally everyone want a crocodile whose jaws snap, because that's what crocodiles do. It's a perfectly normal toy in a culture that was socially, technologically, economically and religiously alien to the modern world.

There's a more human connection to the ancients when you discover they wanted to make statues of hideously-deformed pig ladies for some reason. As for what's going on with the Angry Bird and whatever the hell the other thing is, I have no idea.

And then in contrast we have these much more realistic miniature pieces. She looks a bit grumpy in the light but I found the stuff like this more impressive, in its way, than some of the larger pieces.

The early start, long bus trip, enormous currywurst lunch, excessive walking and heavy tapas dinner took its toll on me. This wasn't as bad as the hangover-like state I experienced in Bologna/Florence after failing to stay hydrated but I was still more than ready for an early night. I think I'm going to call this excessively first-world problem "mini gout". Or possibly gout bout ?

Day 2

The next day we began with the Natural History Museum.  This houses the 13m-tall Brachiosaurus skeleton (the world's tallest mounted dinosaur) which I've wanted to see since I was knee-high. In the pictures in my childhood books the hall looked rather minimalist, having nothing much in it besides the single Brachiosaurus. But this is 30-odd years later, and now it's rather more crowded, home also to a full-length Diplodocus and Allosaurus as well as several other somewhat lesser-known dinos. I was happy as a clam.

There's a universal tendency to create grandiose buildings and then enclose or otherwise obscure them so they can't be fully appreciated from the street, let alone photographed properly. 

They are, of course, quite a bit smaller than the depictions in Jurassic Park. Even so, when you get close to them you realise they were much bigger than any elephant.

This is apparently some variety of pachycephalosaur and not a dragon skull, though I beg to differ.

The Allosaurus is worth looking at if only for comparison to the next exhibit : a T-Rex. Say that again ? We have a T-Rex. The Allosaurus, on paper, has similar dimensions to a rex... but in fact is nowhere near as impressive. The sheer massiveness of the T-Rex's skull impresses itself on you immediately in way that makes it instantly apparent that the poor little Allosaurus would have lasted about thirty seconds in a bout with rexy. Cardiff has a rex skull as as well, though much smaller and mounted high on the wall so you don't get close to it. This is different, and it felt an awful lot like being next to the skull of Balerion the Dread. 

I'm sorry but the idea that this was a super-scavenger is just obviously a pile of crap. Utter crap.

The full skeleton only makes that even more evident. This thing was truly massive. True, it was once a living, breathing animal, with thoughts and emotions and babies to care for. But all the same, it's so remarkably different to any living creature that it almost has something of the supernaturally monstrous about it, in a way that the herbivorous dinosaurs simply don't (astonishing though they are). The is the sort of thing from which myths are born. Part of the effect of this is probably the result of putting the skeleton in a room which has a high ceiling but is nevertheless only just big enough to accommodate it : it really dominates the space in front of you.

Herbivorous dinosaurs are cool, no doubt about it. But predators actively want things. Sixty five million years ago this thing was stalking the Cretaceous and actively thinking about how to slice its massive jaws with teeth like steak knives into its victims-cum-dinner. And that's just way more interesting than the gigantic reptilian cows that were roving around alongside it.

There's more to the NHM than dinosaurs but they're definitely the highlight (for non-dinosaur exhibits, my favourite remains firmly with London's NHM for the crown of Best Museum Ever). The display of animals preserved in jars is however very impressive indeed, and compared to other such displays (which might be one or two specimens here and there) it is vast. It put me in mind of nothing so much as a Borg cube, except even creepier.

I mean... perhaps it's no wonder some people think science isn't for them when we're keeping stuff like this in the basement... ?

Finally the taxidermy section is worth a visit just for the sheer weirdness of it all. Combine that with the horrible-things-in-jars (of which there are more in this section, including hideously deformed unborn animals) any remake of Night At The Museum set in Berlin could only be a horror. It's all undeniably fascinating, but very strange.

This is surely the jewel in the crown of lifelike poses in taxidermy.

...and then there's this. Not so much Grumpy Cat as Gimpy Cat, and believe me this is his good idea. It's the taxidermic equivalent of the "very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic" painting restoration.

The NHM took the whole morning; it also featured a small section on space and the obligatory minerals collection, both are good but I need not dwell on them here. After lunch we returned to ancient history. We started this time in the Old Museum. This it must be said is noticeably old-school in its presentation and in need of some modernisation. While the New Museum subtly presents you with stories around the exhibits (e.g. their wider place in culture and what they say about society), the Old Museum tends to be more of a collection-dump : here are some artifacts, have a look at them. It isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're a moron. But it could be upgraded in its presentation, just a bit.

The museum is set in a large square, which features this rather nice minimalist fountain.

It clouded over by the time we were done, but this did make for more atmospheric photos. Also it's interesting to note that old museums are in themselves works of art, as much as any of the exhibits they hold.

I love this one – someone back in Roman times decided that what they wanted, what they'd pay top sesterce for from a sculptor of the utmost quality, was a really realistic statue of a doggy having a good scratch.

Again, it features some spectacular stuff, but I'm going to concentrate on the sillier and more interesting things. It really presents a very full range of antiquities, from the incredible first-rate workmanship that couldn't be improved if it was done by a machine, to the mediocre stuff that I'd guess you'd buy at the ancient equivalent of IKEA, to the... severely questionable stuff you might expect to get at a dodgy seaside souvenir shop. Seriously, who wants some of this ?

People complain about AI-generated hands today, but this mosaic looks a bit unintentionally-Picasso to me.

And now for the absurd : horse riding done wrong, a woman peeing in a pot in exquisite detail, and some phallus lamps. Every Roman home should have one !

I do wonder if ancient historians are a bit desperate sometimes. Faced with the overtly sexual content they often fall into trying to give its analysis as seriousness which might be a little... reaching. Far from assuming it all has some deep mystical symbolism that such imagery is not longer associated with, is it not perhaps more sensible to conclude that actually the ancient Greeks and Romans were in fact considerably sillier and hornier in their artistic leanings ? It just seems a good deal more likely to me than assigning them something deeper to stuff which seems so obviously ridiculous. Methinks there might be some academic self-censoring going on because perish the thought that their subjects might not have been entirely serious the whole time. Much as I don't like the ivory-tower-elitism trope, it doesn't come from nothing.

Especially when you consider that full range of quality of the art. It wasn't that they were exceptionally talented, because ancient peoples also produced a lot of abject crap. It wasn't that they were exceptionally useless either, because they also produced the undeniably beautiful. No, they were just people, and sometimes that means a weird desire to paint pictures of women urinating in jars and make oil lamps shaped like outrageously large phalluses. We need not try and assign anything deeper to this at all. It's just people being people.

I'm not sure where or what this one is but I'm quite sure it's the worst carving I've ever seen. I think we've got some weird selection effects going on with ancient art. We either get the top of the range stuff of the equivalent of drawing dicks on the toilet wall in an age when people had more time to kill.

After this we headed back to complete the New Museum to finish the two floors we didn't manage on the first morning. Here too there was something I've wanted to see for a long time : the golden Wizard's Hat. Half a kilo of gold in a wildly impractical "hat" dating from a thousand years BC, together with an accompanying disc it's believed to be part of an advanced calendar system. With the intricate metalwork and complex, abstract designs, it contradicts the popular notion of the barbarian Celts as the beard-wearing horde of bloodthirsty savages that the Romans depicted them as. Whether they did mathematics in the same way we do today, whether they even conceived of maths as an activity distinct from others... who knows ?

And that sort of thing is far more interesting to me than the museum's prize piece : the famous bust of Nefertiti. You can probably just about see this in the photo on the right, but you're not allowed to take photographs in the exhibit's own hall. This is a large room, a mini-rotunda all of its own, which houses Nefertiti and nothing else. It's an impressive work, but it isn't anything extraordinary to my eyes. It's yet another fine example of Egyptian art, to be sure, but it doesn't say anything about the Egyptian world view or alter our understanding of them as a people.

Day 3

The final day took us to the Charité medical museum. This is pretty interesting though it's not so much my thing. I liked that they seemed to be quite up-front about some of their less laudable moments. They don't shy away from telling you that at times the hospital was overcrowded, understaffed, and underpaid its employees to the extent that they robbed their patients, or that prostitutes brought in for treatment started plying their trade on hospital grounds. 

The modern hospital complex is huge, and the museum occupies just a few floors in one of the smaller buildings.

I didn't take many photos because there's not a lot worth photographing : medical instruments are interesting but not exactly aesthetically designed. But there's one section where you're not allowed to take photographs. This houses another set of things in jars, but they're quite different to what you get in the NHM : they're people. Sometimes parts of people, both normal and suffering from diseases (hilariously, a penis is given the laconic caption, "A normal phallus")... and sometimes whole people. Unborn babies who would, for various reasons, never have survived. We need not dwell on that. I didn't need to see everything in the room and deliberately didn't look at everything at the very end, with the exhibits getting progressively more and more the stuff of nightmares the further into the room you go.

I'm not sure if the museum took the right approach here or not. Not taking photographs : of course this is a sensible restriction, otherwise you risk demeaning the exhibit. And I can see the point of not putting in any titillating warnings about how "those of a nervous disposition should look away now" or suchlike. Their approach of making the exhibits at the start essentially bland and getting progressively more disturbing gives the viewer the chance to opt-out at any point, without any sort of reverse-advertising that would likely only inflame curiosity. But I'm not sure if any of this needs exhibiting to anyone except medical staff. On the other hand, should it be hidden ? Probably not.

Anyway, I'm not easily disturbed by such things, but I was pretty darn disturbed by that. So should you ever find yourself in Berlin, that's my recommendation : by all means see Charité (it's more interesting than you might expect), but you deserve fair warning about the floor where photographs are forbidden. They're banned for a very good reason that despite their honestly monstrous appearance, these were people, or at least people in potentia, and deserve a measure of dignity. 

Personally, I'm far more comfortable with the other-wordly remoteness of the T-Rex, a genuine monster you wouldn't feel guilty about running away from in mortal terror, than real people of the modern era. Even the shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers museum, grotesque though they are, at least have the virtue of being distant in both time and culture. The imagination can run a riot of fantasy about vicious jungle tribesmen or giant reptilian beasts while keeping a measure of detachment : it's fun to imagine such things. But with real people from the immediate past ? No such detachment is possible, and imagination has to give way before sensitivity. It's fascinating, but not for me, thanks.

And then we got on a bus and drove off quite literally into the sunset. But this didn't photograph well, so here's some clouds instead.