Category: Misc

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On being grateful

When I was a teenager and complained about something — the food, the weather, being bored — my mother (like many other parents, I suspect) had a response at the ready: “You should be thankful!” she would say — “there are…” and then she would fill in whatever was required — people starving in Africa, people with muscular dystrophy or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, people who couldn’t see or hear or walk, people in prison, etc. Of course, none of this made me feel any better, because I was a callow youth and arrogant enough to think that I deserved whatever I thought I was in need of (better food, more interesting surroundings, etc.) “I’m not going to suddenly feel better because someone I don’t know is worse off!” I remember yelling.

Now that I am older and wiser (definitely the first, and theoretically the latter) I have discovered a better way to feel gratitude for what I have, and that is to periodically lose it and then get it back. The first thing that made me come to this realization was when I got nasal polyps (benign) a few years ago, and as a result gradually lost the ability to breathe through my nose almost entirely. Have you ever thought about breathing through your nose? Probably not. It’s just something you do, you don’t think about it. By the way, did you know that most people only breathe through one nostril at a time, and it alternates automatically without you noticing? I didn’t either, until recently.

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DNA tests reveal the true prevalence of incest

From The Atlantic: “In 1975, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. But widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society. The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.”

When sword fighting with rapiers led to a moral panic in Elizabethan London

From JSTOR Daily: “Rocco Bonetti, founder of a highly controversial sword-fighting school in Elizabethan London, was detested by the local English fencing masters. He was challenged outside his school by a local named Austin Bagger, who not only stabbed him in the hands and feet, but trod on him afterward to show his contempt. Bonetti died of the wounds. At the time, London was swept up in the moral panic surrounding the adoption of the rapier. Long, slender, and razor-sharp, the rapier was usually paired with a second weapon, a small, left-handed parrying dagger, rather than a shield. The dagger evolved into striking, creative forms—sawtoothed blades that could be used to capture and control the opponent’s sword, or “trident” daggers that split into three at the press of a spring.”

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