I was looking for anything surprising about Yeovil.

“Folly” is an architectural term which means much the same as the usual term, except constrained to a specific kind of architectural foolishness, instead of the whole range. A ‘folly’ is the thing you have if you make your structure not just mostly functionless and ornamental, but ornamental to a point considered too pointlessly ornamental for even best practice ornamentation. 

Yeovil seems to like follies. Exactly how many of their buildings are overly ornamental is a matter of opinion (complicated by the issue of whether they get credit for all the ones that are underly ornamental) but there are at least four publicly agreed follies nearby. I like this one:

(Rose Tower, Yeovil)

I’m not sure that my investigation into from whence I came yielded much in the way of useful insight. Everyone’s youth has follies. I suppose if you want to recover from those follies, it is helpful to know that some of them are about poor architectural judgment. 

Though I actually pretty much guessed that I needed better architectural judgment when in playing Minecraft recently I nearly finished this tall domed pink tower, with silver streaks circling down it and a wide rounded base—climbing as I built—then stepped away to look at it (see far below). I am not sure what the architectural jargon name is for this kind of foolishness, but there is apparently a world class instance of it very near where I am currently staying:

“Ypsilanti Water Tower in Ypsilanti, Michigan, winner of the “Most Phallic Building contest” (by Dwight Burdette - Own work, CC BY 3.0)

A monument to my own romantic obliviousness perhaps, for which a 25m high stone penis outside my door is arguably apt. 

“…don’t forget from whence you came, and the world’s going to know your name…”

There are only so many times I can hear lines like this before it comes to my attention that I don’t actually know where I literally came from except that it is called ‘Yeovil’ and is somewhere in England. That number is probably in the thousands, but I reached it, and on the off chance it really is good to know from whence one came, I consulted Google.

As far as I can tell it is basically a smallish English city with the usual Englishy things like rows of brick houses and green glens and manors and bureaucrats who are very excited about opening a new parking lot. According to the local historical society, the most exciting things to happen this century are two different football wins and the completion of the ‘Yeo Leisure Park’. The latter sounded interesting, but it turns out to just be another name for what Americans call a very small mall.

This is the kind of place you can live if you have $2M to spend on it:

(Ashington Manor)

(Part 1)

Ok, this is a further effort to remember what S told me happened in history, before the fun is ruined by the various spoilers in popular culture, S enthusiastically trying to educate me, and the powerful combination of those two (S enthusiastically encouraging me to watch 300 with him and play Greek-history-based Civ IV scenarios). The rest of this post is history as I vaguely recall it from some conversations in recent weeks, now with added Civ IV and 300 so probably wrong.

I.

We left off sometime early in Greece’s history (let’s say 450BC), when the Persians were a large and successful military force to the East who had never lost a war. At this time Greece was pretty interesting. The people in Athens and around were a group called something like Iberians, and they had many especially clever people who did things like philosophy and political innovation, of a calibre that gets them remembered today. Greece was a democracy, which I think was unique. 

Sparta (near Athens, to the West) was populated by Spartans, who were terrifying warriors whose main interest in life was being terrifying warriors. Sparta was a very small city relative to others around—it had maybe a few thousand people while other big cities were hundreds of thousands. But everyone was scared of them because each Spartan was such a devastating military asset.

Persia decided to take over Greece, so they sent in a small army, figuring that would be plenty. The Athenians were worried about this, and went to ask the Spartans for help. 

The Spartans agreed that Persia coming to conquer everyone was troubling, and at any other time they would have helped, but they were having an important festival for like a month, so they couldn’t right now. In their defense, work-life balance is hard.

So the other Greeks went and fought off the Persian army themselves. And they won! I think because they had an excellent general or something. But this was pretty surprising to the never-before-defeated Persians. The battle was at Marathon, and when they won, a guy ran as fast as he could back to Athens to give them the good news. He dropped dead from exhaustion upon arrival, because he ran really fast, and Athens was however many miles away a modern marathon is long (26 maybe? —one of those numbers that is vastly bigger than it seems to be possible to run, empirically). For some reason this made people at the time think running that far was a good idea, and so they commemorated his feat by starting the athletic event, the marathon. 

The Persians were not permanently discouraged, and returned with a larger military force. Again it seems the Spartans were busy with the same festival, which was unfortunate since they really liked being great warriors so much, and totally would have thrashed the Persians in a moment if they weren’t already fully booked with all these festivities. 

This time 300 Spartans decided to fight though, and went up North to head off the Persian army, joined by another small army of ‘Thespians’ from a place called Thespius or something. This stand was sort of ridiculous seeming, because the Persian army was really, really big. Probably like tens of thousands of troops. However, as depicted in the movie 300, the Spartans were very manly, and very well trained warriors, and they had very cutting edge military technology—for instance the idea of standing close together with your shields so that your shield defends the people next to you. The Thespians (as a society) were very good actors, and inspiration for the modern word ‘thespian’. As far as I know they were not inspiration for fear in the hearts of their enemies, so while there were more of them than Spartans, they do not seem to have been a main factor in this military action. (Though note that Spartans and Thespians alike are now represented to us by actors, presumably because actors are more convincingly warrior-like than actual warriors, so maybe the Thespians were pretty scary, but everyone just assumed they were especially Spartan-seeming Spartans).

A key fact in the Greek side’s favor was that they were defending a narrow gap. So as long as they didn’t get too tired, it would always be however many people fit face to face in the gap, meeting face to face. Plus however many arrows or whatnot could be hurled over the top of the frontline. The Persians said that the number of arrows would be enough to blot out the sun, to which some Spartan, probably the king, who might have been called Peleponides II or something, famously responded that they would then fight in the shade. 

So, the Spartans did astonishingly well, and killed heaps of Persian soldiers, and were eventually defeated not by being worn down by the massive Persian army, but because a Greek traitor showed the Persians a route around that didn’t involve dealing with Spartans.

The Athenians meanwhile had emptied Athens onto a small nearby island, figuring that they couldn’t beat the Persian army, but they might be able to defeat the Persian navy, given that they had a pretty good navy themselves. So they were going to let the Persians take the mainland, but defend this island, and then maybe work their way back again from there. The Persian army did come down into Athens, though weakened by the 300 Spartans, and then by the whole Spartan military when it was done with the festival. But the Athenian navy won the seas, leaving the Persians in Athens without the water-based supply lines that they relied on, back to most of Persia. So having come so far, Persia had to retreat home, and Athens went back to Athens, and all was more or less ok modulo lots of deaths, and Greece remembered ‘that time we beat the Persians’ with fondness for a long time. 

II.

Greece was happy and successful for about a hundred years, roughly between 450-350BC. 

There were lots of famous philosophers, including what we would now think of as scientists. For instance, Democritus invented atoms. Someone, maybe also Democritus, came up with the notion that at a tiny scale something must be random, which also seems impressive (unless its just that someone believed every random thing possible in the ancient past, and we primarily remember the winners). 

One guy (probably called Herodotus) discovered recording history, and he spent a lot of time carefully talking to various people about what had happened in the past and writing it down. Apparently the distinction between true statements and made up statements implicit in this agenda was novel, and some of his interviewees do not seem to have grasped it well. Some of these histories are very interesting, especially if interpreted as non-fiction.

He wrote about Xerxes trying to cross a narrow sea way up North where it was necessary to let the Persian army across. First Xerxes made a bridge out of boats, and everyone was happily jumping boat to boat, but then the wind moved the boats and out of bridge-alignment, so Xerxes whipped the sea into submission and then they continued. 

He wrote about Darius’ ascent to leader via horse neighing contest, described previously.

He wrote about some other things I forget. Oh, one was probably the fate of King Croesus. This story took place earlier, before Persia attacked Greece. Croesus was extremely rich. I think he was the son of King Midas, who at much personal cost had discovered how to turn all kinds of things into gold. Or possibly Croesus had a good economy for some other reason. Anyway, he was worried about the Persians, who were getting to be a big empire to his East, and he had a bunch of money, so like a good rationalist he set out to determine whether any of the oracles around were really oracular. To do this, he did the weirdest thing he could think of —some series of wrapping disgusting things in other things and boiling them in things and eating it. Let’s say he took the heart of a lamb and wrapped it in pig skin and then boiled it and sliced it and wrapped the slices in leaves and then ate the pieces. And then he went to the oracles in turn, and gave them some money, and said “guess what I just did?” Most of them got it wrong, but the Oracle of Delphi was like “you took the heart of a lamb, and wrapped it in pig skin…”, so he gave her money and asked what would happen if he went to war with the Persians. She said that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. He hadn’t heard about cryptic prophesies with double meanings yet, because he was in possibly the first story about them, so he went to war, and this destroyed his great empire. The end.

Socrates was another still-famous philosopher from that time in Greece. His fame was more for his style of clarifying questions than any particular discovery, so he was more like a modern philosopher than a scientist. His student Plato famously wrote a lot about Socrates, making him very much like a modern philosopher. He also wrote about what an ideal republic would be like, in a book that is still well known, though I think mostly famous for being a very early work of political philosophy, rather than for not embodying terrible ideas for how to run a country. His student Aristotle was famous for all sorts of philosophy and science. 

Toward the end of Greece’s golden age, Macedonia (to the North of Athens and Sparta) controlled a lot of Greece, under the reign of Philip. Philip hired Aristotle to teach his son, Alexander. When Alexander became leader, he decided to take over Persia in revenge for the earlier attacks. Persia was still doing well enough that this was an insane plan. But in an astonishing turn of events ascribed sometimes to Alexander’s training in science and philosophy and reason, and sometimes to his biological father being a major god who his extremely creepy mother had an affair with one time, he succeeded in conquering everything as far as India in about a decade. India was probably unappealing because it had elephants and such in it, and he had had about enough anyway. He went back to somewhere near Egypt, and had some other plans (maybe to have a thriving society of reason and peace?) but died of malaria within a decade.

There were some endearing stories about Alexander the Great, during his life. One time a philosopher studying astronomy told him that there were other worlds out in the stars, and he sat down and cried. When asked why, he said that there were so many worlds out there and he hadn’t even conquered one.

He met another philosopher called Diogenes the cynic, who was an early thinker on social status, and had decided to live without any. Appreciating the breadth of status’ infiltration into life, Diogenes forwent all sorts of things that are marks of status, such as sobriety and hygiene. Alexander approached him in the gutter one day with great respect, said he really liked his work, and if he wasn’t busy with being Alexander the Great, he would like to do what Diogenes was doing. Diogenes said no he wouldn’t, or he would do it now. Alexander was like ‘yeah, good point’. 

(Incidentally, to the modern eye this looks like Diogenes had discovered countersignaling. Our best understanding probably agrees with Diogenes: not being a drunkard covered in your own urine is often for status. However, if a person is sufficiently high status that they are unlikely to be considered low status even when pissed on and pissed—for instance because they are also a renowned philosopher—then they can actually mark themselves as higher status by conspicuously setting out to look low status and failing. 

After Alexander the Great died, his empire was divided between four generals, but none of them were especially great, so they didn’t prosper that much. One of them was called Ptolmy, and he was a forebear of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt later. 

III.

That was around 350 BC. Around that time, before about 200BC, the Roman Empire was getting to be a big thing, centered around Rome in Italy. There is a myth about how Rome was founded that involve Romulus and Remus setting out to start a new great city, then having a fight about what to call it, and then Romulus killing Remus, and that is why we have Rome rather than Reme. This was before humanity had discovered ‘picking your battles’. 

Rome was a democracy early on. I’m not sure how this related to Athens being a democracy. There were a bunch of wars, probably just with everyone around the edges. At some point young general Julius Caesar and another more experienced general who had made his money from the first fire department, and another rich guy teamed up to do some military conquest, going off in different directions with a bunch of Roman military. Caesar took Gaul—roughly the region of modern France—which proved him more impressive than expected. He also took lots of other things, like the British Isles, which belonged to the Angles and the Saxons. The rich guy died. I can’t remember what the other general did, except after a while worried that Julius Caesar might take over Rome. Generals weren’t allowed to bring their armies into Rome for this reason. Caesar did, and took it over. 

The other Roman Senators promptly murdered Caesar, including his friend Brutus (depending on how you want to assign blame for stabbing people who are already thoroughly stabbed). This prompted Caesar to say ‘et tu Brutus?’, which is for some reason really famous.

In spite of Caesar’s murder, the democracy was over for a bit, because it was unclear whether it should go back to the democracy or to the next in line after Caesar, and the latter won. There were some other Caesars, such as Augustus Caesar. There some other Emperors, such as Nero (who was bad and somehow caused Rome to burn) and Caligula (who went crazy and married a horse) and Claudius (who was a nerd and one of the few people in this part of the story not intent on killing everyone around).

At some point Rome had some war with the Carthaginians, who lived across the sea in much of Northern Africa. The Carthaginians were descended from the Phoenicians, who had lived somewhere near Lebanon a thousand years or so earlier, and invented the first alphabet. Usually the war happened across the sea, but a Carthaginian general called Hannibal took a whole lot of Elephants all the way around through Spain and Europe to attack from the North. I remember that this caused surprise, but I forget whether it had further geopolitical implications.

In around 400AD, the climate was cooler and many smaller groups of people living in the Northern parts of Europe tried to move South-Westish to improve their situation. These people spoke strange languages, so their speech was summarized as ‘bar bar’, which was the Roman equivalent of ‘bla bla bla’. So they were called ‘barbarians’. If we had been there, we might have called them ‘blablarians’. 

Gotland is a lovely island in Sweden, that was the original home of the Goths, one successful group of barbarians. They moved to the South and took a chunk of central Europe—roughly Germany. They separated into the Ostrogoths (East Goths) and the Vizigoths (West Goths) and took more things in their respective directions. 

Some other barbarians were the Vandals, who modern vandalism is named after. There were also the Gauls, and the Angles and the Saxons, though I’m not sure how they fared after Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and Britain. And possibly the Celts were considered barbarians. 

The Western part of the Roman Empire including Rome was taken over by barbarians in the 400s and 500s. Constantine was was the last Rome-based Roman emperor. He moved the capital to the Eastern city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Constantinople stood at the point where two land masses nearly touch, dividing two seas (The Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea). So every journey by land or water was funneled through this one point. It was a naturally powerful city. The Empire came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, or as the Eastern Roman Empire, and lasted for another thousand years or so, centered in Constantinople. 

The other night I attempted to stop S from leaving to his room by lying on top of him, intending for this to delay him for about five minutes. Somewhere in the ensuing discussion he realized that I didn’t know anything about the Californian Missions, or actually almost anything else in world history. And he thought I might like history, since it helps organize and make sense of many things about the world (contrary to my impression that it is a whole bunch of unorganized statements about names killing other names and random anecdotes and dates attached to names, which sounded bad for knowledge compression). So he told me about it. It only took about six hours. Here is what I remember of the story (after a few more shorter discussions, but before looking anything up now, so probably false in many ways—I want to see what I remember):

History (of civilizations) can arguably be divided into three eras (or maybe this is just Western civilizations? Definitely something happened in China in all this time, but we didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure if it coincides era-wise). 

The first era stretched from about 4000BC to 1200BC and is fairly hazily understood. It started around when agriculture did. It is hard to know exactly when agriculture started, but we can actually pinpoint where very well, because genetics tells us that many modern agricultural species come from the same tiny part of the world. There are also the ruins of an extremely old city there. 

The writing around these ruins is in a strange pointy looking alphabet that is also used briefly on the front page of EconLog, and was apparently big in this first Era, and it’s sort of surprising that I haven’t come across it. Its letters somewhat correspond to ours and recognizably resemble them, and similarly for some other important alphabets. Wikipedia shows a table of these, and also the words from which the letters were derived. The original letters represent simplified pictures of the words. For instance R is a head. I am pretty sure that I have drawn the letter R as a head on shoulders before, when it needed decoration, which somehow makes me feel closer to my very distant ancestors—that we independently make the same mental connections reminds me that they were people with very specific familiar internal experiences.

There were a bunch of smallish empires (or whatever you call units of political control at that scale) in the general vicinity of Greece and the Middle East. They all sort of fell apart in around 1200 though it’s not entirely clear why. There was a massive volcano eruption which might have caused it. There is also some lasting reference to sea-men appearing, but nobody is sure what that is about. There were also some other things. Anyway, everything sort of fell apart for a bit, and there weren’t large units of political organization.

Incidentally, the mega-volcano is quite beautiful now. It is the one in the photo you often see of white buildings with domed blue roofs overlooking the sea. Actually there is a massive cliff leading down to the sea, and the sea is actually in the middle of the volcano, which is a terrifying circle big enough to nearly meet the horizon. If we ever want to go to a really pretty place, maybe we will visit.

When things regathered themselves at the start of the second era, some of the new empires roughly corresponded to ones that had been in similar places in the past. For instance, I think Greece did. At any rate, many of their stories came from that earlier time.

Sometime pretty early on in Greece’s history, Persia was a large and militarily successful empire to their East, which had never lost a war. It was run by Cyrus, then Darius, then Xerxes, but I’m not sure which one we were up to when they decided to attack Greece. 

(Darius was not the son of Cyrus, but upon Cyrus’ death apparently he suggested they decide who should be in charge by having a horse race, where the rider of the first horse to neigh got to be ruler, and then he fairly predictably set out to teach his horse to neigh on command, and got leadership. I get the impression that many of these early stories are pretty much made up, though this one at least sounds physically possible.)

Actually, history is long, that’s enough for now. Maybe there’ll be Part II another time, if everyone can hold out on telling me how much I have embarrassed myself so far.

I woke up at 1pm. I lay inside my duvet cover for a moment, pleased that my plan to sleep during optimal sleeping hours was looking so good. (This had been perhaps my hundredth plan to sleep more reasonably, but working out for an entire round of sleeping seemed like a great sign.)

My body hurt. But I heard the rustling of the elusive S moving about the house, and sprung from my bed to see if I might catch a glimpse. As predicted, his door was open to show an empty room, but I also couldn’t see him in the living room or bathroom. Had I just heard him leaving? No—sounds came from the kitchen. I walked in—but just as he must have walked out of the other side. The only life was a lonely cloth door swinging closed. I tried to follow, but he was snapped up again by his room in a moment. And so an exciting morning hunt for my boyfriend in a two bedroom house turned up nothing, and I moved on to the business of getting up. 

Getting up is an area of life that gives me hope for my efforts at going to bed. In my thirtieth year, I finally succeeded at having a morning routine. It is not always the same morning routine. Its basic form has changed over the months, and its details change on a daily basis, to keep it fresh and interesting. But every day it exists in some form, and every day it causes me to do a reasonable set of getting up type things. For instance, I fairly reliably get out of bed, take whatever drugs I have been told to take, put some food near myself which I will then forget to eat for hours, and drink a sip of coffee (before also forgetting about that for hours). 

The answer to my getting up difficulties was the ‘getting up scav hunt’. The basic idea is this: as soon as you wake up enough to roughly remember who you are and what you are doing (at least to your normal level of knowing these things), you start a one hour timer, and open the morning’s scav hunt list. In recent days my list has had twelve items to collect. Today they ranged over hygiene, eating, drinking, taking drugs, perusing social media, and writing a short poem. The scav hunt prize is currently a relaxing bout of computer gaming, for 25 minutes minus twice the number of items missed. 

So, in an epic race against time, I found breakfast, reviewed my todo list, rinsed the places where I used to have wisdom teeth, washed my face, looked at Twitter, and tried and failed to write a poem about something something risks of succumbing to acceptance and normalcy as a substitute for doing anything good (but more poetic). Somewhere in the process, I also put on clothes even though it wasn’t required, and thought about how efforts to be utilitarian in the face of psychological realities might change the psychological realities, and force the equilibrium compromise position to compromise further. Then almost prepared for the day, I relaxed for nineteen minutes by trying to get Minecraft villagers in the mood for procreation by building more apartments near them. I have no idea why this is relaxing. 

It is so late that I am failing at my evening routine, so that is all I have to say on that. The rest of the day was similarly uneventful.

This is a travel blog and I have OCD, so I wanted to start it at the start of the travel, but I am sufficiently confused about how many layers of travel I am undergoing that I just went for my birth. But I also don’t like to skip huge pieces of time, especially whole layers of traveling. So to give you an idea and get to recent times quickly, a non-exhaustive selection of things that happened in the intervening time.

After being born half way through a world trip, I took half of a world trip with my parents, to Tasmania. I am told some minor royalty tried to buy me in Europe, but failed. 

(A very hazy mural of me with my brother on the front of a Chinese restaurant in Tasmania from Google Maps. I’m not totally sure why, though the building was an ice cream shop belonging to my family at the time it was muraled.)

My mother bought a restaurant in a ghost town. I lived in a movie prop ‘house’, there were bats in my bunk bed, I missed so much school that I thought for years that ‘roll call’ was a thing from fiction or in America (I now think it actually happened every morning in my classroom). I abruptly ceased coping with life for several years after being read a horrifying book at school. I was so scared of e.g. the deadly snakes that I would use something like Bayes Theorem to work out e.g. how likely I was to die if there was blood on my leg. A snake killed my dog, and my other dog chased a babysitter with a live snake in its mouth, so the inside view on snake safety genuinely looked bad.

(My childhood home apparently featured in this movie. I have not got around to watching it. I am not sure if it is the one in the picture.)

(Tiger snake in Tasmania)

We moved to town and I looked after my three younger brothers in a house that was about as tidy as you would expect if it were inhabited by three boys in a state of constant war brought up and accompanied by their older sister who also had little actual upbringing to speak of, and a rapidly developing appreciation for ‘tragedy of the commons’. I decided I should give all of my money to the very poor overseas forever, minus anything really necessary to live. I insisted on cycling or walking everywhere, and was very confused about why everyone else in the world continued driving, given that they seemed to fairly universally agree that it was bad. 

A memorial to my grandfather on the waterfront in Devonport, for providing the world with a lot of opiates. Picture from here. 

At school I accidentally joined a wannabe-wiccan-cult, intentionally joined anti-forestry activism, was surprisingly good at academic contests once I went to school enough to know that e.g. decimal points are a common convention, and not a code that you are meant to logically deduce the meaning of from context as part of the problem. I can’t remember whether or not I used to dress in a Viking helmet and flowery blue cape on days that were not assigned for that. I moved to a tent in my family’s (fenced) front garden, and then left home.

(Tasmania is pretty, and relatively safe from global catastrophic risks, but it is not my favorite place to live. Photo by JJ Harrison.)

(A six foot man on one of the biggest trees to be felled in the Styx Valley. I used to know a lot of arguments and statistics about why this shouldn’t happen.) 

I went to university at ANU in Canberra. I figured I would henceforth know an entirely new set of people, so I changed my name to Katja and cut off my hair and decided to make a go of being gregarious. I hadn’t really tried talking to people at school before, so it was not super smooth, but to my delight I relatively quickly mastered causing other people to hang out in my room.

(At university I definitely wore a viking helmet when it wasn’t required—here with my friend Victoria—but that sort of thing is basically required at university. I also wore nothing but shoes and rode my bike up and down the center of campus, which was probably not required at all, especially since I was sober and alone. It felt required though, because on the one hand it seemed like the kind of thing you just can’t do, yet on the other hand I couldn’t see any good causal reason that it would be that bad, so I thought I should really do it and find out what happens if you do things that you just can’t do. What happens is that you do them, like usual things.)

I went to America on holiday, then on a really long holiday, then as a student in Pittsburgh, then as a temporary worker. While studying in Pittsburgh, I went to Berkeley on holiday and then on more holidays and more holidays and took leave from my PhD program and haven’t been back or talked to my advisor about whether I will in a while, so it seems safe to say that I moved to Berkeley at some point. Then while living in Berkeley I visited S near Detroit for a week, and then a longer week, and then stopped buying return tickets, and got around to going home less and less often.. until now I think I just went on a holiday to Berkeley. And I am probably about to move there. Moving to Berkeley was amazing the first time, so I hope if I move there twice without moving away my life will be really very good.

(According to Wikipedia, the city of Westland where I am was so named in order to avoid a nearby city annexing this shopping mall, which is called Westland for some reason. Photo by PeRshGo.)