Syd

Here is a post of mine that contains some of my favourite Pink Floyd songs.

The videos below are a documentary on Syd Barrett and his association with Pink Floyd.

Pink Floyd

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

This is one of my favourite pieces of music and the best that Pink Floyd created.

There were two parts that book ended the album Wish You Were Here.

Here is Part 1 of the original version:



Here is part 2 of the original version:



A link to the live performance at Knebworth in 1990.

Here is a link to the live performance at the Syd Barrett Tribute Concert.

The song was dedicated to Syd Barrett, who was born 6 January 1946 and died 7 July 2006. Barrett was one of the founders of Pink Floyd. He left the band in 1968, " ... as the other members felt they were unable to go on with Syd, due to his erratic behavior, assumed to be caused by his overindulgence in LSD". Source of quote the Pink Floyd Website.

Here is Wikipedia's take on Barrett. A website dedicated to Barrett can be found at this link.

A documentary on Syd and the Pink Floyd can be found at this post.

The full lyrics can be found at this link.


Great Gig in the Sky

Beautiful writing and instrumentation by the band and a truly great vocal by Clare Torry. A high point on The Dark Side of the Moon album

Without a word she tells us about the emotions of love, sex, anger, happines, calmness and acceptance.




Wish You Were Here

This is the title track to a full album tribute to Syd Barrett.



Find the lyrics at this site.

Comfortably Numb

This is taken from The Wall album, thich is about the psychic disintegration of a rock star - probably another reference to Syd Barrett, though also Roger Waters' expeiences played an important part in the development of the album. The video has some confronting images.



Another Brick in the Wall, part 2

For a bit of fun, instead of a direct Pink Floyd video, here is a mashup of with the Bee Gees Stayin Alive



Astronomy domine

There are videos with better sound quality but this one has Syd performing!

Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice

Human Origins

Introduction

As the name indicates, the video below is a quick introduction to Human Origins.



The video is one of about 25 that can be found on this web page (about half way down).

Humans and the Great Apes

Some confused people want to claim that according to evolutionary theory Humans evolved from Chimpanzees. This is not the view of scientists. The diagram below shows the general view of the relationship between the human line and the chimpanzee line. About 6 million years ago there lived a creature part of whose population started to evolve in the direction of chimpanzees and another part of whose pouplation began to evolve in the direction of humans. That creature is the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) of Humans and Chimps. The amount of time ago that the creature lived is estimated by the molecular clock. See also this article, which indicates that 6 million years ago is very likely an upper limit to the time of the LCA, which might well be a million years or so closer to the present.

A major problem is that scientists have found few fossils along the branch leading to Chimpanzees. The hominid line leading to us, on the other hand, currently has about 19 species populating it, as shown by the diagram below. (Click on the diagram for an enlargement, in a new window or tab.)


Another way of graphically viewing the hominid fossils is via this interactive timeline, which contains links to articles on the different species.

The Hominids I won't discuss all of the 20 or so hominid species as that would lead to a very long and tedious post. This link has summaries of the hominids (and it is still fairly long). At the right there are links to the hominid species (mostly links to Wikipedia articles). Sahelanthropus tchadensis Here is a link to a photograph of the fossil cranium. Fossils of this species date probably to almost 7 million years ago. There is considerable debate about this creature.    Some experts, including its discoverers, think that it has remarkably modern features, such as its flat face and indications that it was bipedal. The problem with this is that Sahelanthropus' age makes it comtemporaneous or possibly older than the LCA. It might be that the LCA was much more human like that previously expected. On the other hand, there is some uncertainty about the stratiography of the find, and the fossil might be less than 7 million years old. As well some experts are unconvinced about its modern features - see this link for an such an opinion. More fossil evidence will be required to resolve these issues. The discoverers of Sahelanthropus have many more fossils, some of which might help to clarify the status of the creature, which might include clarification of the nature of the LCA. Here is the website of the discoverers, giving their opinion of the fossil. Orrorin tugenensis Here is a link to a graphic of the Orrin fossils, which are between 6.2 and 5.6 million years old. The discoverers claim that Orrorin was bipedal, and there are indications that this was true, but that issue has not been tied down conclusively. The creature was about the size of a modern Chimpanzee.

Links to articles on Hominids    Sahelanthropus tchadensis    Orrorin tugenensis    ArdiPithecus kadaba    Ardipithecus ramidus     Australopithecus anamensis    Australopithecus afarensis     Kenyanthropus platyops    Australopithecus africanus    Australopithecus garhi    Australopithecus sediba    Australopithecus aethiopicus    Australopithecus robustus     Australopithecus boisei     Homo habilis     Homo georgicus     Homo erectus     Homo antecessor     Homo heidelbergensis     Homo neanderthalensis     Homo floresiensis    X-woman

Ardipithecus ramidus A few Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were found in 1990 but the motherload as pictured at right was found in 1994. The fossil was very fragile and took a great deal of expertise, care and time to extract. It also took a great deal of time to preserve, reconstruct and analyse it, and it was not until 2009 that comprehensve papers were published on Ardi. The papers covering the fossil evidence as well as environment that Ardi inhabited and its place in human history can be downloaded from this link. Ardi is about 4.4 million years old. The reconstructed scull is similar to Sahelanthropus tchadensis, and is about the size of a Chimpanzee. The useful summary below is found at this site: Ar. ramidus was quadrupedal in the trees, walking along branches using the palms of their hands, as many monkeys do, (i.e. they weren't hanging from branches or climbing with a vertical torso like modern apes do). It is also claimed by its discoverers that ramidus was bipedal on the ground, though not nearly as well adapted to it as humans are. (This particular claim is being treated cautiously so far; a few important scientists have expressed reservations about it.) The foot of ramidus had a widely divergent big toe for grasping while climbing (like chimps), but lacks the extreme feet flexibility of chimps which allows them to mold their feet around objects. ramidus also has none of the anatomical specializations of chimps for knucklewalking when on the ground. The Ar. ramidus pelvis was very ape-like in the lower pelvis, but had changes in the upper pelvis which made it an effective upright walker. It is more primitive than the pelvis of australopithecines, which were almost fully adapted to bipedality.

Das Rheingold

Yesterday I attended the MET in HD performance of Das Rheingold.

Das Rheingold is the first opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Here is the official trailer for the opera.



What stands out most in the video is the 40 tonne machine that consists of 24 aluminium and fibreglass planks which pivot like see-saws around a central beam. The planks can be moved into many positions for the different scenes in the performance.

The magic begins before a word is sung, as the orchestral prelude conjures up the beginnings of the world at the bottom of the Rhine. The planks, stretched flat on the stage floor, begin to undulate gently, mimicking the music. Suddenly, the planks rise up to reveal the three Rhinemaidens swimming upward in harness, exhaling bubbles as they sing. (Source of quotation.)



Another stunning effect is in the scene when Wotan and Loge descend to the realm of the Nibelheim. The planks become an Escher like bridge, which body doubles of the singers traverse with the assistance of ropes.



The set planks can also be arranged in more variable shapes, as shown in the scene below were the the gods debate the ultimatum given by the giants who stand on raised planks in the background. Note another theatrical effect as Loge the god of fire is surrounded by a nimbus of flame.



In the video below the director Robert LePage explains his philosophy of the staging of opera. As a Wagnerian novice I particularly applaud his awareness of the variety of operatic audiences. He is aware that opera companies have an educational role (for people like me).



Not everyone supports his approach, and some of the reviews were unfavourable. For examples of unfavourable reviews see here, here and particularly here.

For more positive reviews see here, here and here .

For what it is worth, I really enjoyed the staging and the music of this performance.

Here is a summary of the plot of the opera, taken from this source :

The story begins in the depths of the Rhine river, where the three Rhinemaidens (think "mermaids") are playing in a state of primal state-of-nature innocence. Enter Alberich the Nibelung (dwarf) from a fissure beneath the earth, who spies the three and lusts after them. The Rhinemaidens taunt him and humiliate him for his ugliness and awkwardness. In his rage at being rejected, Alberich steals the Rhinegold from them, having learned that he who is willing to renounce love will thereby gain the ability to forge a ring of power from the gold. The maidens had assumed that no one in his right mind would make such a renunciation, but Alberich is enraged and wants revenge. He disappears with the gold, leaving the bereft maidens to sing a song of loss and grief that will reappear all through the four operas. Alberich forges the ring and makes himself lord over all the Nibelungen.

Meanwhile, Wotan wants a grand castle for the gods to live in as a testament to his greatness. He has contracted with the two giants Fasolt and Fafner to build him the castle. On the advice of the wily Loge, god of fire, Wotan has promised the Giants Freia, goddess of youth and beauty, in return for the building; Loge has assured Wotan that he will find him a way out of the deal. Fasolt and Fafner, having finished the castle, come for their payment. Wotan is stuck; since all his power rests on the treaties inscribed into his spear, he cannot renege on the deal, and the giants make off with the terrified Freia.

Loge, having learned of Alberich's ring, suggests to Wotan that they steal it from Alberich and offer it to the giants as a substitute payment. Wotan agrees, though he secretly plans to keep the ring for himself. The two go down into the earth to Nibelheim where the dwarves live. There Alberich has enslaved the dwarves and forced them to mine him an enormous pile of gold. Wotan and Loge succeed in kidnapping Alberich and take him back to the gods' abode on the mountain top. There they relieve Alberich of the hoard and of the ring. Alberich is as shattered by the loss of his ring as Gollum ever thought of being. He places on the ring a terrible curse, bringing endless misery to all who possess or seek it.

Wotan and Loge offer the giants Alberich's hoard of gold in return for Freia. Fafner accepts, though Fasolt has by now become rather sweet on Freia and wants to keep her. The hoard is piled up, but Fafner wants one last thing: Alberich's ring, now on Wotan's finger. Wotan refuses, the giants threaten to call off the deal and leave with Freia, and in the middle of the hubbub there appears out of the ground Erda ("earth"), goddess of the earth and the world's wisest woman. She warns Wotan to flee the ring's curse, foretells that a death-laden day is coming for the gods, and disappears. Wotan relents and gives the ring to the giants, who immediately fall to arguing about the division of the spoils. Fafner kills Fasolt on the spot, and goes off with the loot.

The problem resolved for the time being, Wotan and the rest of the gods prepare to enter into the new castle, which Wotan dubs "Walhall"--literally, the "hall of the fallen heroes." Fricka, his wife, asks him the meaning of the name, and Wotan says, "If what I'm planning works out, its meaning will become clear to you." The gods enter Valhalla, as the Rhinemaidens sing a mournful song of loss.

The God of the Gaps

In this talk Neil deGrasse Tyson makes the point that some of the most eminent scientists have invoked Intelligent Design, but only in areas of science that they did not understand!



As the Bible is clearly a book of religious ideas (Christians would say religious truths) it is therefore clearly absurd to treat it as a scientific textbook. As Tyson indicated Galileo made the same point more eloquently when he wrote ...

I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: “That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

The source for this quotation is his Letter to Christina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, (at the bottom of the eleventh paragraph - footnote 8).

The eminent ecclesiastic was probably Cesare Baronio.

The Poetry of Science

Mashups

To quote Wikipedia, a mashup is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another.

Here are some that I found on YouTube.

Who would have thought that Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees would go so well together ...



... or AC/DC and the Ghostbusters theme ...



... or The Beetles and Guns N Roses ...

Evolution of Whales

That whales evolved from fully terrestrial (land) animals seems at first sight unlikely, but the evidence for that view is overwhelming. Like many other areas of strong science there are mulitple independent lines of evidence supporting the arguments of the scientists. A good source of information is from the article The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidence , written by Raymond Sutera.

In the case of whales the independent lines of evidence number nine.

1. Paleontological evidence
Scientists have identified a number of fossil creatures that make up the lineage of whale. In chronological order, these include: Sinonyx (60 million years ago), Pakicetus (52 million years ago), Ambulocetus (50 million years ago), Rodhocetus (46-7 million years ago), Basilosaurus (35-45 million years ago), Dorudon (about 40 million years ago).

As Raymond Sutera states:


... we have noted the consistent changes that indicate a series of adaptations from more terrestrial to more aquatic environments as we move from the most ancestral to the most recent species. These changes affect the shape of the skull, the shape of the teeth, the position of the nostrils, the size and structure of both the forelimbs and the hindlimbs, the size and shape of the tail, and the structure of the middle ear as it relates to directional hearing underwater and diving. The paleontological evidence records a history of increasing adaptation to life in the water - not just to any way of life in the water, but to life as lived by contemporary whales.

2. Morphological evidence

Morphology is the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

The study of the form and structure of the creatures described in the previous section further strengthen the view that they were ancestral to modern whales. These structures include: the anatomy of the foot of Basilosaurus allies and the "anvil" of the middle ear of Pakicetus.

3. Molecular biological evidence

Sutera explains how molecular biology can be used to determine evolutionary lineages as follows:

The hypothesis that whales are descended from terrestrial mammals predicts that living whales and closely related living terrestrial mammals should show similarities in their molecular biology roughly in proportion to the recency of their common ancestor. That is, whales should be more similar in their molecular biology to groups of animals with which they share a more recent common ancestor than to other animals that exhibit convergent similarities in morphology, ecology, or behavior.

The chart below summarises the results of such molecular biological studies.



Whales are not only related to the ungulates, they fit right in the middle of that group. This evidence not only supports the view that the ancestors of whales were terrestrial animals but also points to the animals closest to whale ancestors - hippos.

4. Vestigial evidence

Vestigial features are anatomical features that are of no use to a creature, although they take energy to maintain.

Whales have vestigial features that point clearly to their terrestrial origin. Vestigial features of modern whales include: very small pelvic and back leg bones embedded within their bodies, olfactory nerves even though whales have no sense of smell, vestiges of ears designed to hear in air and a vestigial diaphram.

5. Embryological evidence

Sutera notes:

... the embryology of the whale, examined in detail, also provides evidence for its terrestrial ancestry. As embryos no less than as adult animals, whales are junkyards, as it were, of old, discarded features that are of no further use to them. Many whales, while still in the womb, begin to develop body hair. Yet no modern whales retain any body hair after birth, except for some snout hairs and hairs around their blowholes used as sensory bristles in a few species. The fact that whales possess the genes for producing body hair shows that their ancestors had body hair. In other words, their ancestors were ordinary mammals.

6. Geochemical evidence

Like most elements, Oxygen comes in a number of different varieties, called isotopes. See this link for details. As can be seen from the article at the link, fresh water has a slightly higher concentration of lighter oxygen than does sea water. These slightly different isotopic ratios are recorded in the bones of animals, so those that drank fresh water can be differentiated from those that drank sea water. fossil teeth from the earliest whales have lower ratios of heavy oxygen to light oxygen, which shows that those animals drank fresh water. Later fossil whale teeth have higher ratios of heavy oxygen to light oxygen, indicating that they drank salt water. This absolutely reinforces the inference drawn from all the other evidence discussed here: the ancestors of modern whales adapted from terrestrial habitats to saltwater habitats by way of freshwater habitats. (Sutera)

7. Paleoenvironmental evidence

Paleoenvironmental evidence refers to the other fossils found in the same beds as the target fossil type as well as the types of rock bed that the fossils were found in. The whale ancestors that were clearly terrestrial (from their morphology) are also associated with fossils of terrestrial organisms, as well as with terrestrial rock types. The whale ancestors whose morphology shows that they were marine were assiciated with fossils of marine organisma and marine rock types.

8. Paleobiogeographic evidence

Paleobiogeographic evidence refers to the geographic distribution of fossils. We would expect that the terrestrial ancestors would have a limited geographical range, whilc later marine ancestors, who had the oceans to populate, would have a wider geographic range. The locations of the different whale ancestors follow these expectations.

9. Chronological evidence

Chronological evidence refers to the reason why whales appeared when they did.

Whales are mammals and could not have radiated before the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (which happened 65 million years ago) as the seas at that time were filled with marine reptiles such as the plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and marine crocodile. When these fearsome predators, and many other marine creatures, went extinct there were plenty of environmental niches for whales (and other mammals) to expand into. The transition from terrestrial animals to deep-diving whales with directional underwater hearing took about 10 - 15 million years.

Conclusion

The evidence that whales evolved from terrestrial ancestors is supported by many mutually reinforcing, independent lines of evidence. Any attempt to discredit this conclusion has to deal with all of this independent evidence, which creationists have spectacularly failed to do.

                  ________________________________

There are two types of whale: toothed whales and baleen whales. The evidence shows that baleen whales evolved from toothed whale ancestors about 30 million years ago. Here is an article on a transitional fossil between toothed whales and baleen whales.

                  ________________________________

The five videos below together make up a fascinating documentary on the evolution of whales:

Dawkins on Evolution

The MET live in HD

Even if you don't live in New York you can still "attend" Metropolitan Opera performances. The MET simulcasts performances to cinemas in the US and sends the telecasts around the world, consequently I attend the MET preformances at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, Melbourne.

Here is the trailer for the 2010 - 2011 season:



I can't wait.

Simpsons and Banksy

This is the Couch Gag of a Simpsons episode that recently aried in the US:



It starts off dark and gets darker - Bart dolls stuffed with kitten fur and a chained unicorn used to punch holes in DVDs.

The sting in the tail: the sweatshop is in the basement of 29th Century Fox, the makers of The Simpsons!

It has been claimed that this sequence was inspired by reports that The Simpsons was animated in South Korea.

The opening sequence and couch gag were written by graffiti artist and political activist Banksy, whose tag appears prominently.

Banksy's identity is a closely kept secret. The following video investigates Banksy and attempts to discover who he is:



Banksy's work is edgy, ironic and creative, often with a strong message. This video shows many of Banksy's works ...



... and this link contains many photos ...

This is not the first association of Banksy with The Simpsons as this link shows.

My home town became briefly famous for painting out one of Banksy's works.

Here is a post with an interesting take on Banksy. The site is fun as it satarizes white, citified, liberals, like me.

Animal Camera

More examples here.

Uses and Abuses of History

MARGARET MACMILLAN

Margaret MacMillan was educated at the University of Toronto and at Oxford, where she obtained a B. Phil. in politics and a D. Phil. for a thesis on the British in India between 1880 and 1920. She is the editor of Canada and NATO and the author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the 2003 Governor General's Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice for 2002. Currently, MacMillan lives in Toronto, and is provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto. In 2007, she will become the Warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.

Here is a brief summary of her point of view, that is described in her book:
The Uses and Abuses of History

History is useful when it is used properly: to understand why we and those we must deal with think and react in certain ways. It can offer examples to inform our decisions and guesses about the consequences of our actions. But we should be wary of looking to history for dogmatic lessons.We should distrust those who abuse history when they call on it to justify unreasonable claims to land, for example, or restitution. MacMillan illustrates how dangerous history can be in the hands of nationalistic or religious or ethnic leaders who use it to foster a sense of grievance and a desire for revenge.

The quotations above were taken from this site

Allan Gregg interviewed her about view of history in the video below:



Here is a talk that MacMillan gave to the Lowy Institute. Click on the play button to start, and then the Watch FULL Program button for the whole talk:



Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of her book: The Uses and Abuses of History.

History, and not necessarily the sort that professionalhistorians are doing, is widely popular these days, even in North America where we have tended to look toward the future rather than the past. It can be partly explained by market forces. People are better educated and, particularly in the mature economies, have more leisure time and are retiring from work earlier. Not everyone wants to retire to a compound in the sun and ride adult tricycles for amusement. History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained,and the market has responded with enthusiasm.

Museums and art galleries mount huge shows around historical characters like Peter the Great or on specific periods in history. Around the world, new museums open every year to commemorate moments, often grim ones, from the past. China has museums devoted to Japanese atrocities committed during World War II. Washington, Jerusalem, and Montreal have Holocaust museums. Television has channels devoted entirely to history (often,it must be said, showing a past which seems to be made up largely of battles and the biographies of generals); historic sites are wilting under the tramp of tourists; history movies—think of all the recent ones on Queen Elizabeth I alone—are making money; and the proliferation of popular histories shows that publishers have a good idea of where profits are to be made. Ken Burns’s documentaries, from the classic Civil War series to his one on World War II, are aired repeatedly. In this country, Mark Starowicz’s Canada: A People’s History drew millions of viewers. The Historica Minutes, produced by the privatefoundation Historica, devoted to promoting Canadian history, are so popular among Canadian teenagers that they often do school projects where they make their own.

Many governments now have special departments devoted to commemorating the past. In Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage exhorts Canadians to learn about Canada’s history, culture, and land: “Heritage is our collective treasure, given to us and ours to bequeath to our children.” France, which has had a particularly active Ministry of Culture for decades, declared 1980 the Année du Patrimoine. Locals dressed up to re-enact the great moments of their history. In the following years, the number of heritage sites and monuments on the official list doubled. Scores of new museums—devoted to the wooden shoe, for example, or the chestnut forest—appeared. At the end of the decade, the government set up a special commission to oversee the commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution in 1989.

In France there has been an explosion of re-enactments of the past, festivals, and special months, weeks, and days. The possibilities, of course, are endless: the starts and ends of wars, the births and deaths of famous people, the first publication of a book or the first performance of an opera, a strike, a demonstration, a trial, a revolution, even natural disasters. And the activity is not all government-inspired; much comes from local and volunteer initiatives. Châlonssur- Marne recognized the centenary of the invention of canning. It is not just in France that communities want to revisit their past: Perth, Ontario, had a week of festivities in 1993 to celebrate the giant cheese that it sent to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. As enterprising local governments and businesses have realized, the past is also good for tourism.

It is not just about market forces, though. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do. For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is in part a result of our own biology. We have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies our story. Nineteen million people around the world are now signed up to the online service Friends Reunited, which will put you in touch with long-lost friends from the distant past, even from your earliest school days. If we want to go still further back, and an increasing number of people do, we research our own genealogies. Most national archives now have special sections set aside for patrons who are investigating their family histories. Thanks to the Mormons, who collect parish registers, genealogies, and birth records for their own purposes, Salt Lake City houses an enormous worldwide collection of records. The internet has made it even easier, with dozens of sites where you can search for your ancestors, with more specialized ones dedicated to a single family name. In Canada and the United Kingdom, the popular television shows Who Do You Think You Are? cater to our fascination with celebrities and the hunt for ancestors as they trace back, often with surprising results, the family trees of the famous.

Recent developments in science make it possible to go beyond the printed records. The decoding of DNA means that scientists can now trace an individual’s ancestry back through the mother’s line and can find others with the same genetic makeup. As the databases of informationbuild up, it becomes increasingly possible to see how human beings have migrated over the years. This is important for anyone who wants to go back beyond where the paper trail peters out. It is particularly important for those who never had much of a paper trail to begin with. Those immigrants who came in great waves to the New World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to escape a miserable and uncertain life in Europe often lost all links with their pasts, sometimes indeed even their old names. For the descendants of American slaves, who lacked even the faintest hope of recovering the path their ancestors followed from Africa and not much more chance of finding out what happened to them once they were in the United States, DNA has suddenly opened the door to selfknowledge. A moving program called African American Lives, which was broadcast by PBS in 2006, looked at the DNA of famous black Americans, Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones among them. Sometimes the results are disappointing: Family stories about the great-grandparent who was descended from kings are often just that—stories. Sometimes there are surprises, as when an obscure professor of accounting in Florida found he was descended from Genghis Khan. Perhaps, thought the professor, he owed his administrative skills to his terrifying ancestor.

Our fascination with our own histories can be narcissistic—how much time should we spend gazing at ourselves, after all?—but it also comes from the desire to know more about ourselves and the world in which we happen to live. If we can stand back and see our own histories in a wider perspective, then we see how we are not just the products of particular individuals but of whole societies and cultures. If we are members of certain ethnic groups, we may find that we have inherited views on other ethnic groups, and we may find that others regard us in particular ways. History has shaped our values, our fears, our aspirations, our loves, and our hatreds. When we start to realize that, we begin to understand something of the power of the past.

Even when we think we are striking out in new directions, our models often come from the past. How often have we seen revolutionaries, committed to building new worlds, slip back unconsciously into the habits and ways of those they have replaced? Napoleon came to power as the result of the French Revolution, but the court he set up was modelled on that of the displaced Bourbons. The top Soviet Communists lived within the walls of the Kremlin, as the czars had once done. Stalin looked back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as his predecessors, as, I suspect, Vladimir Putin does today. The Chinese Communists scorned China’s traditional society, but their top leaders chose to live right at the heart of Beijing where the imperial court had once been. Mao Zedong himself withdrew into mysterious seclusion, much as the emperors had done over the centuries.

"Men make their own history," said Karl Marx, "but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

During the Cold War, though, history appeared to have lost much of its old power. The world that came into being after 1945 was divided up between two great alliance systems and two competing ideologies, both of which claimed to represent the future of humanity. American liberal capitalism and Soviet-style Communism were about, so they said, building new societies, perhaps even new human beings. The old conflicts, between Serbs and Croats, Germans and French, or Christians and Muslims, were just that and were consigned, in Trotsky’s memorable phrase, to the dustbin of history. The threat of massive nuclear war, of course, was always present, and from time to time, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, it looked as if the last moment of the planet had come. But it did not, and in the end most of us simply forgot about the danger. Nuclear weapons took on a benign aspect: After all, the balance of terror meant that neither superpower dared attack the other without risking its own destruction. We assumed that the United States and the Soviet Union would remain locked in their conflict, between war and peace, perhaps forever. In the meantime, the developed world enjoyed unparalleled prosperity, and new economic powers, many in Asia, appeared on the scene.

My students used to tell me how lucky I was to be teaching history. Once you have got a period or the events of a war straight, so they assumed, you don’t have to think about them again. It must be so nice, they would say, not to redo your lecture notes. The past, after all, is the past. It cannot be changed. History, they seemed to say, is no more demanding than digging a stone out of the ground. It can be fun to do but not really necessary. What does it matter what happened then? This is now.

When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe, the world enjoyed a brief, much too brief, period of optimism. We failed to recognize that the certainties of the post-1945 years had been replaced by a more complicated international order. Instead we assumed that, as the remaining superpower, the United States would surely become a benevolent hegemon. Societies would benefit from a "peace dividend" because there would be no more need to spend huge amounts on the military. Liberal democracy had triumphed and Marxism itself had gone into the dustbin. History, as Francis Fukuyama put it, had come to an end, and a contented, prosperous, and peaceful world was moving into the next millennium.