Idle Nutt

The following is an excerpt from a 1863 interview regarding the punishment of slaves in South Carolina.  What Solomon Bradley (a blacksmith) describes is incredibly brutal.  You’ve been warned.

Solomon Bradley:

…the most shocking thing that I have seen was on the plantation of Mr. Farrarby, on the line of the railroad. I went up to his house one morning from my work for drinking water, and heard a woman screaming awfully in the door-yard. On going up to the fence and looking over I saw a woman stretched out, face downwards, on the ground her hands and feet being fastened to stakes. Mr. Farrarby was standing over and striking her with a leather trace belonging to his carriage-harness. As he struck her the flesh of her back and legs was raised in welts and ridges by the force of the blows. Sometimes when the poor thing cried too loud from the pain Farrarby would kick her in the mouth. After he had exhausted himself whipping her he sent to his house for sealing wax and lighted candle and, melting the wax, dropped it upon the woman’s lacerated back. He then got a riding whip and, standing over the woman, picked off the hardened wax by switching at it. Mr. Farrarby’s grown daughters were looking at all this from a window of the house through the blinds. This punishment was so terrible that I was induced to ask what offence the woman had committed and was told by her fellow servants that her only crime was in burning the edges of the waffles that she had cooked for breakfast. The sight of this thing made me wild almost that day. I could not work right and I prayed the Lord to help my people out of their bondage. I felt I could not stand it much longer.

From John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 1977.

(via Futility Closet)

It used to be square with black letters on a white background.

The octagon shape came later - from the idea that greater danger should be signaled with more sides.  That’s why railroad crossing signs are circular (a circle has infinite sides).

The red color came after they were able to make a red reflective material that was durable enough.  Before that, the recommendation was for a yellow stop sign with black letters.

The 2 things I took away from this are:

(1)  Financially, copyright law benefits distributors (publishers, record labels) more than it does creators (writers, artists).

(2)  People often confuse copying (not-so-bad, maybe even good) with plagiarizing (definitely bad).

Overall, very informative.  But I do wonder how creators can realistically make a living if consumers don’t have a legal obligation to pay.

I’m a big fan of the fund-and-release model (like Kickstarter), which many artists are taking advantage of today (the crowd funds the art first, and then the artist goes about creating it, as opposed to the artist creating first, then trying to sell).  Nataly Dawn (of pomplamoose) and Julia Nunes both got funding (a lot!) for their new albums this way.

Ultimately, I think this is a situation of adapt-or-die.  The Internet is a game-changer and the artists who survive are the ones who will come up with or take advantage of fundraising methods that are different from the current dominant model (for musicians, this would be to make their music first and then sell it, whether independently or through a label).

What I don’t think will help their cause in the long-run is to punish people for creating YouTube videos or other mash-ups of their work.

But what do I know.

Science:

Climate shifts were a statistically significant cause of social disturbance, war, migration, epidemics, famine, and nutritional status, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And climate caused famines, economic downturns, and catastrophic human events far more often than did any of the other 14 variables. The most direct way in which extreme climate shifts influence human society is through agriculture, Zhang says; a falling supply of crops will drive up the price of gold and cause inflation. Similarly, epidemics can be exacerbated by famine. And when people are miserable, they are likely to become angry with their governments and each other, resulting in war.

…

Halvard Buhaug, a political scientist at Peace Research Institute Oslo, calls the research “good work with a lot of good data.” But he adds that it was “really surprising” and “unfortunate” that the authors didn’t discuss whether the findings continued to apply in the industrial period, when trade, technological development, and other processes have made societies less sensitive to the climate. It remains unclear, he says, whether this research is relevant for the present day, when humans are facing a period of rapid temperature changes.

…

The claim that this kind of analysis can pin down climate as the root of human history, particularly when the researchers examine long periods at a time, is “pretty hard to swallow for a historian,” says William Atwell, a historian at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. The authors, he says, ignore the effects of religion, trade, and other factors. For instance, during the “Little Ice Age” of 1500 to 1559, North American natives were dying en masse from diseases imported from the Old World, leading partly to the start of the African slave trade which, he argues, affected human history in a major way unrelated to climate shifts. “Not that [the researchers] don’t have interesting things to say,” he says, “but they’re attempting to be too precise” by putting dates and numbers on conflicts.