Heroes and Hamiltonians

It's remarkable how many nerd brain gremlins involving inappropriately extending domain-specific taxonomies are somehow related to dragons.

Wyvern comes from a Middle English word meaning viper (in fact wyvern and viper both come from the same Latin word, vipera). Like a lot of dragony words—drake, wyrm, lindworm, serpent, and of course dragon itself—it is historically vaguely defined. Are we talking about snakes? Lizards? Reptiles generally? Usage varies wildly.

#the bell curve of dragon nerdery where in the middle you're um actuallying people about a specific body plan being a wyvern and not a dragon #and at the top and bottom you're just fucking calling everything a dragon because they're all dragons anyway (via @gaslightgatekeepgodot)

"A Natural History of Dragons" gets into this in great detail. The protagonist is a naturalist (deeply unhinged and delightful not-British aristocrat) and the book series comes up with its own answer for what the important things to define "dragon" are (and argues about it a lot).

I get being sad when a celebrity you like dies, but the "how dare the world take [name here] from us, how could this happen??" thing always annoyed me, for basically this reason.

I taught one of my ranching buddies “it fucken wimdy” and now he says it around his older more established ranching buddies

My mom, a former elementary school teacher, says "Fine, I'll get my own [X], with blackjack. And hookers".

"You're a cis white guy, so the fact that you are kind of effeminate and people think you're gay doesn't actually affect you meaningfully."

I am also reminded about how Sihks were attacked in the wake of 9/11, because bigots were too stupid to tell the difference between them and Muslims (not that it was okay to be bigoted against them either!)

But even without having had to worry about my physical safety (which I never really did), "am I performing masculinity correctly" is a *constant* concern. I'm just so insanely lucky I had parents and grandparents who could not give two shits about this (my mom is the money person, my dad is the cook, my grandma was the aggressive intellectual, my grandfather the caring figure) (although my mom did care about me being seen as too effeminate because the physical safety thing wasn't purely zero).

Yet there are compelling reasons to think that many of Africa’s problems stem from chronic underpopulation. In How Africa Works, a recent book, Joe Studwell, a development economist, concludes that the most important reason for the continent’s relative poverty has been low population density. That, he says, is being righted thanks to several decades of fast growth. By 2030, its population density will finally be where Asia’s was circa 1960. What many see as an alarming population explosion, Studwell regards as “an extremely belated process of demographic normalisation”. The argument deserves a serious hearing. First, just how sparsely populated is Africa? Even today, after decades of growth, its population, at 1.5bn, is roughly the same as India’s despite Africa having nine times the landmass.

Historically it was worse. The population was kept low by poor soil and diseases like malaria. Sleeping sickness killed domestic animals, suppressing crop yields by depriving farmers of labour and manure. The slave trade stripped Africa of more than 15mn of its youngest and fittest people. At the start of the 20th century, the continent’s population was less dense than that of England in 1066. Infectious diseases and low food production also discouraged the formation of cities, the engines of economic growth. In 1900, Mombasa, with 30,000 people, was a huge African city. Africa, wrote Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the late Burkinabé historian, was “prevented from reaching the threshold of demographic concentration which has almost always been one of the preconditions of major qualitative changes in the social, political and economic spheres”. The population only began to normalise in the 20th century when advances in medicine sharply cut mortality rates. As a result, population growth rose from roughly 0.8 per cent in the 1930s to a peak of 2.9 per cent in the 1980s.