The Religion of the Samurai

Cover via Amazon

 

The Religion of the Samurai by Kaiten Nukariya is somewhat misnamed in that this book does not really deal with the religious beliefs or practices of Japan’s warrior class. Rather, this is a book about the Buddhist sect known as Zen that many of that class followed. There are many Buddhist sects or denominations practiced in Japan and the Zen Buddhism has had a wide following beyond the Samurai, yet somehow Zen has become especially associated with the Samurai and with Japan generally.

 

Zen Buddhism is part of that branch of Buddhism known as the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) or Northern school, as opposed to the Theravada (Teaching of the Elders) or Southern school of Buddhism. Zen Buddhism is distinguished from other Buddhist sects by the belief in sudden, inspired enlightenment through meditation and personal instruction from a teacher. Zen Buddhist deemphasizes the study of scripture and doctrine, holding that enlightenment cannot be truly described by dead words in books. Even the instructor does not so much teach truths or beliefs as encourage the student to experience enlightenment on his own.

 

The Religion of the Samurai is a short book, only about 160 pages in print, but it covers the subject fairly well. The book was written a century ago, but the basic facts about Zen Buddhism haven’t changed and the book does not seem to be out of date, except for a few expressions here and there. The author begins with a quick and very general survey of both major schools of Buddhism before moving to the beginnings of Zen or Ch’an in China, placing the origins within the Mahayanist context. He goes on to tell of the transmission of Zen to Japan and the sect’s influence on Japanese history and culture.

 

The bulk of this short book is taken up with an attempt to explain the teachings of Zen. I say attempt not because the author is unsuccessful, but because by Zen’s own teachings, it is impossible to fully understand Zen without experiencing it. Still, Mr. Nukariya does an adequate job explaining Zen’s views on the nature of the universe, human nature, good and evil, and Enlightenment and its attainment. There are a few faults, though. The Kindle version of this book is not well formatted and the footnotes are interspersed in the main text. This problem may have been corrected in later versions of the ebook. I also noticed that the author tends to disparage other Buddhist sects; especially those of the Theravada school, which he, along with many other Mahayanists refer to as Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle). This is not really a fault, but it should be noted that Mr. Nukariya was promoting Zen with this book, not providing an unbiased account.

 

 

 

I can recommend this book to anyone wishing for an introduction to this fascinating religion.

 

 

 

Shakespeare the Businessman

William Shakespeare is considered by many to be the finest writer in the English language and perhaps one of the best in any language. His plays have been performed, read, studied and translated into every major language in the four hundred years since he wrote them. Shakespeare’s literary works and influences are well known. Less well known is his personal life and his business affairs. As a recent study from Aberystwyth University has shown, Shakespeare was a ruthless businessman and even a tax evader. I read the story in Yahoo News.

Hoarder, moneylender, tax dodger — it’s not how we usually think of William Shakespeare.

But we should, according to a group of academics who say the Bard was a ruthless businessman who grew wealthy dealing in grain during a time of famine.

Researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales argue that we can’t fully understand Shakespeare unless we study his often-overlooked business savvy.

“Shakespeare the grain-hoarder has been redacted from history so that Shakespeare the creative genius could be born,” the researchers say in a paper due to be delivered at the Hay literary festival in Wales in May.

Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth, said that oversight is the product of “a willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who I think — perhaps through snobbery — cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”

Archer and her colleagues Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley combed through historical archives to uncover details of the playwright’s parallel life as a grain merchant and property owner in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon whose practices sometimes brought him into conflict with the law.

Actually, none of this is much of a surprise to anyone who has read a decent biography of Shakespeare. He was well known, in his time for being a shrewd and wealthy man. We think of Shakespeare as a writer that writes in an archaic language and who only scholars would care to read. In fact, Shakespeare was popular with Elizabethan and Jacobin audiences. He was the Steven Spielberg of his day and audiences flocked to see plays put on by his company. Thus, he became a wealthy man.

Shakespeare did not actually make his fortune by writing plays. Except for pirated versions, his plays were not published until after his death. No theater company published their plays because publishing plays did not earn nearly as much money as performing them and they did not want their competitors profiting by their efforts. He made his fortune as a part owner of his theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or later the King’s Men. Shakespeare was not trying to create great art which would last the ages. Writing plays was a matter of business for him.

Is this the face of a hoarder and tax-evader? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Shakespeare led a rather frugal life in London and used most of his earnings to buy property and investments in his home town of

Strafford upon Avon. His wife and children stayed behind as he made his living at London and although he did visit his home, Shakespeare spent much of his life away from his family. Perhaps they felt the living he was able to provide for them was adequate compensation for an absent husband and father. Because Shakespeare was careful with his money, he died a wealthy man, unlike many of his contemporaries in the literary scene, and he was able to give his family a generous inheritance when he died.

I notice that many of the news reports on the Aberystwyth University study are fairly critical of Shakespeare’s business dealings. They shouldn’t be. Shakespeare was trying to do the best he could to get ahead in a hard world.

Archer said the idea of Shakespeare as a hardheaded businessman may not fit with romantic notions of the sensitive artist, but we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. Hoarding grain was his way of ensuring that his family and neighbors would not go hungry if a harvest failed.

“Remembering Shakespeare as a man of hunger makes him much more human, much more understandable, much more complex,” she said.

“He would not have thought of himself first and foremost as a writer. Possibly as an actor — but first and foremost as a good father, a good husband and a good citizen to the people of Stratford.”

After all, a poor, struggling Shakespeare might not have given the world his marvelous plays.

Related articles

• William Shakespeare, Tax Cheat (taxprof.typepad.com)
• Shakespeare the ‘hard-headed businessman’ uncovered (independent.co.uk)
• Shakespeare Was a Ruthless Businessman, Scholars Reveal (dailyfinance.com)
• Study: Shakespeare Was a ‘Ruthless’ Businessman, Hoarded Food (newsfeed.time.com)
• Shakespeare Was A Hoarder! (thecopia.wordpress.com)
• The nasty truth about Shakespeare (theage.com.au)
• William Shakespeare was a tax dodger who hoarded grain during the Little Ice Age, say scholars (csmonitor.com)

Bullies

I do not like bullies.

Neither does Ben Shapiro and neither did his mentor Andrew Breitbart, which is probably why Breitbart devoted his like to exposing the biggest bullies of all the contemporary Left, and why Shapiro continued his work by writing Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Intimidation and Fear Silences Americans.

In Bullies, Ben Shapiro describes in exacting detail how the Left uses bullying tactics to shout down and silence all who oppose them. He tells how Leftist bullies in government, in the media, on the university campus, and elsewhere use their position and power to force their viewpoints on people. He writes how liberal bullies in politics use the nastiest and slimiest personal attacks against conservatives to get their way, and then blame the conservatives for the incivility in politics. Green bullies want you to be poor to save the Earth. Secular bullies want to forbid you from praying in a public space. Race and class bullies want to pit Americans against each other. Anti-patriotic bullies want you to be ashamed of your own country. The entire Left is composed of bullies who want to tell you what to do. If you don’t like it, than sit down and shut up.

Luckily, Ben Shapiro is able to relate these stories of the power hungry, bullying Left with a sense of humor. Otherwise, this book might be painful to read. As it is, he writes with just the right, slightly mocking touch that makes his book actually fun to read. Like all bullies, the Left does not like to be laughed at and maybe more books that are humorous will help to put them in their place.

Ben Shapiro concludes Bullies with a rousing appeal to his readers to pick up Andrew Beitbart’s mantle and continue the fight against the thugs and bullies of the Left. Bullies who are unchallenged only get worse so if we want our descendants to live in a free country, we have no choice but to fight them.

By the way, if there is any doubt that Leftists are nothing but bullies, check out the one-starred reviews of this and other conservative books. There seems to be a clique of people who have nothing better to do, they probably collect unemployment, but to publish nasty reviews of books they have not read. Typical.

 

 

Related articles

• Bullies: How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America (frontpagemag.com)
• Ben Shapiro: The Left is the “Biggest Bullying Force in American Life” (townhall.com)
• CPAC 2013: Bullied Conservatives failed to fight back and win 2012 election for GOP (redalertpolitics.com)
• Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro Replaces Karl Rove as CA GOP Convention Keynote (breitbart.com)

Europe in the High Middle Ages

Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan is the third book in the series The Penguin History of Europe. The High Middle Ages is the name given to the period of medieval history from 1000 to 1350. During these years, European civilization reached heights not seen in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire. The political situation in Europe stabilized somewhat, trade increased, cities grew, universities were established and learning flourished. The nations of Europe ceased to be helpless victims of foreign invasion and, through the Crusades even began to project power outside the continent.

 

Although the nations of Europe began to take their modern shape during the high middle ages, political power was extremely decentralized, especially in France, more than in the period immediately before and afterwards. The Papacy became more prominent on the international stage and powerful Popes could even challenge kings and emperors for influence.  It all ended in the middle fourteenth century with a change in climate that caused a decade of famine. Then the horrors of the Black Death struck Europe in 1349. No institution in Europe survived unscathed, and the optimism and vitality of the High Middle Ages was gone. When Europe began to recover from these disasters, it was no longer the Middle Ages, but the Renaissance, and the West was moving in a new direction.

 

William Chester Jordan brings this fascinating period of history to life in his book. Like the other books in The Penguin History of Europe, The High Middle Ages focuses less on a detailed chronology of events and more on a general overview of cultural and historic developments, especially including the political development of the emerging nation states of Europe and their relationship with the Papacy. There is also a lot of information on the intellectual trends of the High Middle Ages as well as a good account of how it all seemed to fall apart in the fourteenth century. Unfortunately, the author breaks of the story in 1350, just as the Black Death is ravaging Europe, leading to a kind of cliffhanger effect. He also doesn’t give much space for the influences of Islamic culture on Europe’s development. Still, I can recommend Europe in the High Middle Ages for anyone who wants to learn more about that fascinating period of history.

 

 

Related articles

• Thoughts on Teaching History in a Scale Up Classroom (Part VI) (mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com)
• Voting is medieval (volokh.com)
• Why Are the ‘Dark Ages’ Stigmatized? (lewrockwell.com)

The Jewish Annotated New Testament

The New Testament was and is a fundamentally Jewish collection of documents. At the time when much of the New Testament was written, most observers still regarded the new religion of Christianity as a Jewish sect. Every book of the New Testament is traditionally attributed to a Jewish writer, with the exception of Luke, Paul’s Gentile companion. All of the major figures of the New Testament, Jesus, his disciples, Paul, were devout Jews, learned in the Jewish Scriptures. The entire New Testament is permeated with Jewish culture and history.

Unfortunately as the Christians and the Jews parted ways and began to have an often antagonistic relationship with each other, this Jewish element to the Christian scriptures came to be somewhat downplayed. It was never forgotten that Jesus and his disciples were Jews, but as the Christian Church became an entirely Gentile institution, the Jewish background to the Gospels were often underappreciated and misunderstood. Yet, without knowledge of this Jewish background to the New Testament, it is impossible to properly understand the context in which Jesus, Paul, and the earliest Church lived and worked. While years of archaeological and historic research have increased our knowledge of the time just before the destruction of the Second Temple, there is much more to learn about the world of the New Testament. A study of the post-Temple rabbinical writings could provide Christians with more insight of the intellectual world in which the early Christians lived and improving relations between the Christian and Jewish communities can allow us, Christians to ask the help of our Jewish brothers in seeking to understand our own scriptures.

For this reason, I was pleased and gratified to find the Jewish Annotated New Testament. I am not certain if this work is intended more to teach Jews about Christianity or Christians about Judaism, but I believe that followers of both faiths will get a lot out of it. The Jewish Annotated New Testament is, as the title implies, a translation of the New Testament with annotations of each by made by a Jewish scholar. There are brief essays located at various points in the text explaining concepts raised by the New Testament author in better detail while at the end of the New Testament there is a series of longer essays describing various matters of the historical and religious background of the New Testament. The tone of the annotations and essays is always respectful of Christian sensibilities. The editor, Amy-Jill Levine deserves a lot of credit for putting the whole thing together.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles. The scholarship leans a little more liberal than I would like. I realize that not being Christians, the writers are under no obligation to believe that the New Testament is historically accurate, and, as I have said, the tone is always respectful, yet I feel that they tend to accept too uncritically ideas about the “historical Jesus” or who the true authors of various books might really be. That is a personal quibble and someone less conservative than I am might feel this tendency is a benefit.

The second quibble is more serious and involves only the Kindle edition. Not all of the links to the notes work in the Kindle. The textual links and the links annotations at the beginning of chapters and books are especially unlikely to work. I hope that Amazon will be able to fix this problem as it does detract somewhat from the enjoyment of this book.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

Physicist Chad Orzel talks to his dog. This is not all that unusual. Many pet owners talk to their pets and dogs make particularly good listeners. What might be a little strange is that Professor Orzel talks to his German Sheppard mix Emma about quantum physics. It turns out that dogs have a good intuitive grasp of quantum physics so they are able to have long conversations on quantum physics. In How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, Chad Orzel relates these conversations in which he explains to an eager Emma the basics of quantum physics. Emma interrupts his explanations with just the sort of questions the reader might happen to have. The dog and physicist talk about such topics as the uncertainty principle, virtual particles, quantum tunneling and entanglement.

It’s a fun idea and Chad Orzel does a terrific job explaining physics to the lay reader in the guise of talking to his dog. He seems to have a good feel for how a dog acts and thinks, and I have no trouble imagining that if a dog could talk about physics she would be just as excitable, and as easily distracted by squirrels, bunnies, and treats.

The most important chapter in this book must be the last one, Beware of Evil Squirrels. Here Professor Orzel warns the read of the misuses and outright scams involving quantum physics. There are any number of con artists and New Age frauds who make use of scientific sounding terminology to mislead their victims into believing that one can get free energy from “vacuum energy” or heal oneself of all diseases by imagining oneself to be perfectly healthy. As Orzel explains, despite the many weird and wonderful manifestations of quantum physics, it is not magic, and follows the same sort of rules as anything else in the universe, including the common sense rule that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I found How to Teach Physics to Your Dog to be appealing and informative. I think that some of the explanations were a bit hard to follow but that is perhaps more my fault than the writer’s.

Related articles

• Science Online [Uncertain Principles] (scienceblogs.com)
• Why quantum physics is such an embarrassment to science (washingtonpost.com)
• The Shrinking Proton: Particle Is Smaller Than Thought (livescience.com)

 

Moby Dick

I have been reading Herman Melville‘s classic whale tale lately. Actually I have been listening to the audio book created by Librivox. If you are not familiar with Librivox, it is a library of digital recordings of books read by volunteers. All of the books read are in the public domain and are provided for free. I have thought about volunteering myself, but I imagine that all of the good books are taken by now, and anyway, I don’t have the time.

But, getting back to Moby Dick. I am only about half way through it and I find the story to be exciting. Unfortunately, Melville interrupts the action with long discourses on various aspects of whaling. The information he provides in interesting but it is a little tedious and distracting. I noticed that Victor Hugo did the same sort of thing with Les Miserables. I wonder if that is a regular feature of nineteenth century literature.

I actually don’t think that Captain Ahab is that crazy to want to hunt down and take revenge on the white whale that chewed his leg off. I have sometimes wished that I could hunt and kill every deer in North America for the damage they have done to various cars over the years. It might seem irrational to want revenge against animals acting on instinct, but I am convinced the deer are acting with a malicious purpose. What other explanation could there be for the way they jump out in front of my car.

English: Illustration from an early edition of Moby-Dick (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All the same, I think I am going to have to side with the whale. Considering that Captain Ahab was trying to kill the whale, and had already killed many other whales, perhaps even Moby Dick’s companions, I would say that the whale was acting in self defense. Besides, while I do not usually get overly sentimental about animals or nature, I do not think that I would be willing to kill an animal as majestic and powerful as a whale.

By the way, Kahn in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, quotes from Moby Dick as he hunts down Kirk. They changed the locations that Khan names to sound more “science fictionish” but the last words are the same. I imagine that the intent was to present Khan as man obsessed with vengeance, just as Ahab was.

 

Related articles

• “I turn my body from the sun” (Moby-Dick) (biblioklept.org)
• There Are Whales Living Now That Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written (tor.com)
• “Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels” (Moby-Dick) (biblioklept.org)

Rating the Presidents

While shopping at Goodwill yesterday, I came across a book called Presidential Leadership, published by the Wall Street Journal. This book features a collection essays assessing the historical legacy of each of the presidents from George Washington to George W Bush. The writers seem to be conservative commentators, so perhaps the collection has a rightward tilt. Still, I am sure the book will be interesting to read, although I have not had time to do more than skim through the book. Towards the end, after the essays about the presidents are essays about presidential leadership and appendices of various scholars’ attempts to rank the presidents. Since today is President’s Day, I thought I would write a little about the Presidents.

The three Presidents generally ranked the greatest are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George Washington probably wouldn’t be considered much of a president today. He wasn’t an activist executive and he deferred to Congress. He might be considered a do-nothing president by today’s standards. Still, there is no question that he was one of our greatest presidents. He was the first and he had to work without any clear precedents or guidelines. Abraham Lincoln was also one of the greatest. A lesser man might have given upon the Civil War and let the South go. Lincoln had a clarity of vision that eludes most politicians and was willing to sacrifice his popularity and chances of reelection to do the right thing.

I am not sure Roosevelt deserves to be considered one of the greatest presidents. His New Deal policies probably prolonged the Depression. That was not his intent and he does deserve credit for raising the nation’s morale in a difficult time, yet it has become clear that he really didn’t have any idea what he was doing. Roosevelt was an effective war time leader. In general, he picked the right men for doing the job, especially George Marshall as Army Chief of Staff. His only fault in the handling of that war was his trust of Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt seemed to be unaware that Stalin was just as vicious and evil as Hitler and believed that Stalin could be handled like any other politician. In this, Roosevelt may have been badly advised by the members of his administration who were Communists, or Communist sympathizers. To the extent that Roosevelt was unaware of the treacherous leanings of some of his staff, he deserves the blame for the concessions he made at the Yalta Conference. I also believe that Roosevelt did poorly in running for  a third and then fourth term. He reversed the long standing precedent that a president should only serve two terms. It may well have been that Roosevelt felt that no one else could do the job effectively, but the foundation of a republic rests on the concept that no one man is indispensible. In any event, by 1944 Roosevelt was in failing health and must have know he would not have live to finish another term.

The worst presidents are generally regarded to be Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and James Buchanan. These seem to be fair assessments, except for Warren Harding. He did possess remarkably poor judgment in selecting his subordinates, which led to a series of scandals late in his administration, yet Harding ended Woodrow Wilson’s more egregious civil rights violations, released the anti-war protestors and Socialist that Wilson had jailed, and did his best to return the country to normalcy. I kind of suspect that Harding’s low rankings have as much to do with ending “progressive” policies as any thing else.

I think something similar could be said of Ulysses S. Grant. He also exhibited poor judgement in some of his appointments and there were a series of scandals in his administration. Grant, like Harding, tried to return the country to normalcy after the horrendous Civil War and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He fought for the rights of the former slaves and used military action to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. He even believed that the Indians should be treated decently.  I think that the low ranking Grant is usually given reflects the ire of Southern historians who were outraged that anyone should defend the Blacks, not to mention Grant’s key role in winning the Civil War.

John F Kennedy is almost certainly the most overrated president. For all his charisma and sympathy from the intellectual class, he didn’t actually do all that much. He does deserve some credit for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it should be remembered that that crisis would not have arisen at all if he had handled the Bay of Pigs invasion. He ought to have either given the rebels his full support or cancelled the operation entirely. By allowing it to go ahead but withholding air support, he assured its failure and made himself look weak and foolish. Kennedy’s reputation would not have been  so favorable if he had not been assassinated. As it is, his ranking has gone steadily downward over the years.

Thomas Jefferson is another overrated president. He was an accomplished man, in many ways, but he was not a very good president. His second term was a disaster.

Richard Nixon is an unusual case. By all respects, he should have been a successful president. He got us out of Viet Nam without actually losing the war. He negotiated the SALT agreement with the Soviet Union and opened up relations with China. Nixon was the president who created the EPA and large scale Affirmative Action. Yet, Nixon is often regarded as a failure. This is, of course, because of the Watergate scandal. Watergate was, in itself, not so large a deal as has often been reported, previous presidents have done far worse. The intense and increasing partisanship in American politics caused the scandal to assume an outsized role and ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation. I wouldn’t regard Nixon as a great president, however. He was at least partly to blame for the enmity held against him.

The greatest president you have never heard of is James K. Polk. He may have been the only president to have actually fulfilled all of his campaign promises. He served only a single term but did more than most presidents have in two terms. Polk expanded the territory of the United States by provoking and winning the Mexican War while negotiating a peaceful settlement with Great Britain over the boundaries of the Oregon Territory.

Another great but forgotten president is Grover Cleveland. He was an honest and strong man who fought to keep the government honest. He favored a strong money policy over those who wanted the government to expand the money supply and create inflation, ostensibly to help the cash poor farmers of the West. He also limited government spending.

Presidential reputations change over time, sometimes due to changing ideas about what a president should be, and sometimes because new information about a president is revealed. I have already noted Kennedy’s declining reputation. It seems that the more one looks beyond the myth of Camelot, the tawdrier the whole thing appears. Dwight Eisenhower, on the other hand, has become more respected over the years. Eisenhower was a popular president, but the general feeling has been that he was a rather relaxed chief executive who didn’t do much. As more has been learned about his administration, historians have discovered that he was a very active president indeed. Eisenhower was not much concerned with getting credit for his actions and so was underestimated. Another president whose reputation has improved is Harry S. Truman. Truman is well thought of today, but he was a very unpopular president. He left the office with a job approval rating of 22%, lower that Richard Nixon’s and about the same as George W. Bush’s. Somehow, Truman’s blunt, uncompromising personality looks a lot better in hindsight, and history seems to have vindicated his policies on the Cold War. Perhaps the same will be true of Bush.

There is a lot more that I could say about the presidents. I have barely scratched the surface in rating some of the presidents and here are so many that I haven’t even mentioned. This post is starting to get overly long, however, so I think I will end it here. The presidents do make a fascinating subject and I am sure I will find more to right about.

Related articles

• ‘Most popular U.S. presidents’ are skillful communicators (prdaily.com)
• Looking for Greatness on Presidents Day (abcnews.go.com)
• Presidents Day: Bipartisan Views on Greatness (news.yahoo.com)
• Andrew Jackson: our finest (insane) Presidential athlete (sbnation.com) I definitely should have mentioned Andrew Jackson. He really was insane.

Jurassic Survival Guide

Have you ever wanted to get away from it all? Get away from civilization and all of its stresses and live a more natural life, perhaps on some remote island, untouched by modern society? Unfortunately, such places are rare and getting rare, as the march of technology makes the world ever smaller and more connected. It might seem that truly getting away from it all has become an impossible dream.

What about a trip to the distant past? Way back before the rise of man. In fact, how about a trip all the way back to the age of the dinosaurs. Perhaps the Jurassic period, some 150 million years ago would be just the thing. Of course, you might object that the plants and animals might be very different then. How would anyone know what was safe to eat and how to avoid the more dangerous predators? Well, fear no longer. Dinosaur expert, Dougal Dixon has prepared a survival guide for use for anyone who wants to travel into the Jurassic period. By reading A Survival Guide: Living with Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period, you will become acquainted with the latest research on the plants and animals of the Jurassic period and learn which ones may be of use and which ones best avoided Dixon gives advice on finding the perfect place to locate your prehistoric getaway and how to best make use of the natural resources of the period.

 

It’s kind of a quirky idea, but honestly, I cannot think of a better way to learn about the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period. A Survival Guide is a lot more fun to read than a book on prehistoric life written in a more regular format. I have to confess that the first chapters, in which Dougal Dixon gives a rather exhaustive survey of the geography of the Jurassic period, are a little slow going, but once he gets into the descriptions of the life forms, the book’s pace picks up.

There is one curious omission, though. I find it hard to imagine that human beings could survive in a world with creatures as large as the Apatosaurus or the Allosaurus without firearms, of maybe even something heavier. Yet, Dixon nowhere mentions guns. I don’t think I would care to have to fight off one of the great theropods armed with nothing more than a spear or an axe and I am not at all sure that a fence of sharpened sticks would be sufficient to ward off migrating sauropods. At the very least, I think it might be useful to learn where their weak spots might be and whether the armor of an ankylosaur is bulletproof.

A Survival Guide by Dougal Dixon is a fun and informative book to read, whether you are a dinosaur novice wanting to learn more, or an expert.

The Asteroid that Killed the Dinosaurs

The hypothesis that an asteroid collision was the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs has been around for several decades now, but recent research has provided new support for the theory.

The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say.

The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors among the dinosaurs are the birds.

Currently, the main suspect behind this catastrophe is a cosmic impact from an asteroid or comet, an idea first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son geologist Walter Alvarez. Scientists later found that signs of this collision seemed evident near the town of Chicxulub (CHEEK-sheh-loob) in Mexico in the form of a gargantuan crater more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) wide. The explosion, likely caused by an object about 6 miles (10 km) across, would have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times more than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

New findings using high-precision radiometric dating analysis of debris kicked up by the impact now suggest the K-T event and the Chicxulub collision happened no more than 33,000 years apart. In radiometric dating, scientists estimate the ages of samples based on the relative proportions of specific radioactive materials within them. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Mass Extinctions]

“We’ve shown the impact and the mass extinction coincided as much as one can possibly demonstrate with existing dating techniques,” researcher Paul Renne, a geochronologist and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, told LiveScience.

“It’s gratifying to see these results, for those of us who’ve been arguing a long time that there was an impact at the time of this mass extinction,” geologist Walter Alvarez at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this study, told LiveScience. “This research is just a tour de force, a demonstration of really skillful geochronology to resolve time that well.”

The fact the impact and mass extinction may have been virtually simultaneous in time supports the idea that the cosmic impact dealt the age of dinosaurs its deathblow.

“The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point,” Renne said. “We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat’s eyebrow, and therefore, the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn’t just the impact.”

The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years.

“When I got started in the field, the error bars on these events were plus or minus a million years,” added paleontologist William Clemens at the University of California at Berkeley, who did not participate in this research. “It’s an exciting time right now, a lot of which we can attribute to the work that Paul and his colleagues are doing in refining the precision of the time scale with which we work.”

I can’t help wondering if there is any chance that some species of dinosaur might have been intelligence, perhaps even civilized. No fossils suggesting such a possibility have ever been uncovered, but given the haphazard way in which fossils are made and preserved, it is doubtful that that we know of even 1% of all the organisms that existed at any given time. If an asteroid were to kill us off, I wonder if any remains of our civilization would be recognizable after 65 million years. Considering that it seems that quite a few asteroids have passed, and will be passing extremely close by, maybe a far future paleontologist will be wondering what happened to the mammals.

By the way, I have been reading The Peshawar Lancers by S. M. Stirling. The book takes place in an alternate history in which an asteroid or comet struck the Earth in 1878, destroying civilization in the Northern hemisphere. One hundred fifty years later, the descendants of the survivors are finally reaching the levels of technology we had around 1920.

Related articles

• Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs: New Evidence (livescience.com)
• Asteroid may have killed dinosaurs quicker than scientists thought (reuters.com)
• AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Finally confirmed: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. “A team of Ame… (pjmedia.com)
• New Evidence Clears Up How Dinosaurs Died (escapistmagazine.com)