Meet Galaxy Cluster SMACS 0723, the first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. You can see a higher-resolution picture here, and I highly recommend you do: zoom in on any dark corner of the image and you’ll see dozens of tiny, granular lights, each one a galaxy. The central cluster appears here as it did about 4.6 billion years ago, first emanating out through deep space around the time Earth was forming. This may look like the kind of galaxy cluster images we’ve been seeing from Hubble for years, but the Webb Telescope really is playing an entirely different game: according to Marina Koren over at The Atlantic, if you reduced a full-resolution Hubble photo to the size of a regular A4 sheet of printer paper, the equivalent Webb photo would be a square sixteen feet long on each side. And that’s not even factoring in the new and improved frequencies and light-bands that Webb can see in! I’ll spare you the cosmic wonder & terror implied by the fact that a tiny patch of sky you could cover from sight with your fingertip contains dozens of galaxies with millions of planets, and just say that we’re in for a golden era of extremely cool screensavers.
Kinky foreplay in the Middle Ages
Dr Eleanor Janega rebuts the idea that Medieval sex was vanilla. As it turns out, this misconception might stem from Church proscriptions against priests asking for details about various peccadilloes and types of sodomy, lest the confessor be tempted to try them. Plus, a chivalric tale of Aristotle engaging in light BDSM—with pictures!
Study Methods that Work
From the Experimental Memory newsletter, Adam Mastroianni asks: why do we forget most stuff, anyway? As a teacher, I’d seen some of the data on learning techniques and effective retention methods, but the links here finally gave me some juicy white papers to follow up on, including this big one from 2013. The authors tested ten different techniques: two were highly effective, three were moderately effective, and five weren’t very effective.
The highly effective methods:
Practice testing (i.e. quizzes)
Distributed practice (spaced repetition, or waiting some time before reviewing)
The moderately effective methods:
Elaborative interrogation (asking lots of high-order Why? and How? questions to tease out causal relationships behind ideas, which are easier to remember than rote facts)
Self-explanation (though I prefer the version popular with programmers, Rubber Ducking)
Interleaved practice (mixing up categories & domains to cover more ground)
And the least effective methods:
Summarization
Highlighting
Keyword Mnemonics
Imagery
Rereading
At their best, these mostly helped students pass their tests, then immediately forget everything. This is a big study, and its results have been replicated many times over, as far as I understand. But if you ask the average teacher (let alone student) what they recommend for studying, how many will reach instinctively for the bottom five? I know I have.
Recycling Culture
The Green New Deal is long dead, but one thing we’ve proven to be pretty good at is recycling our creative works. Over at his Substack, Ted Gioia has the numbers: old music (more than 18 months from its release and/or last placement on the charts) is now 72% of all music streams in the United States, up 14% from last year. Some of this is apparently a wave of Stranger Things nostalgia as Zoomer kids slowly work their way backwards in time. Last year it was Nirvana, now it’s Kate Bush and peak Metallica, and before long it’ll be The Carpenters and Boston riding the swell of post-ironic appreciation driven by good soundtrack placement.
More importantly, as a classics nerd, I’d seen pictures before the Arch of Constantine, built c. 315 to celebrate, well, the Emperor Constantine. What I didn’t know was that Rome was already so far into its intellectual decline in the early 4th century, when the empire had its first empire worth celebrating with a commemorative arch, the engineers had forgotten how to build large triumphal arches. Their solution: pillage earlier, better triumphal arches for Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, then plaster some Constantinean motifs on top and call it a day. Behold the architecture of imperial decline:
Short Links:
Follow-up to the last Bibliophilia post: how actual artists are using AI
Book Review at the Times Literary Supplement for Information: A Historical Companion. Added to my TBR list.
Also in the TLS: Ralph Waldo Emerson briefly met Brigham Young in Utah. Emerson came away impressed, calling Young a “sufficient ruler & perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads”.
Via Marginal Revolution: A new study on narrative examining thousands of films and TV episodes for semantic progression (i.e., how similar one part of a story is to an adjoining part). The most satisfying stories, evidently, start slow with low progression and end high, with lots of transitions and subplots piling up.
Another psych study: another replication study for a spate of articles in the last decade correlating empathy and complex worldviews with reading literary fiction. This one was a study (n = 5,176) asking participants about their reading habits, preferred genres, and moral views. This was only a survey, not an experiment, so it’s hard to figure out causation: do smart, emotionally intelligent people glom onto literary fiction, or does reading Proust actually make you more empathetic? I have my doubts on the latter. The full study is here.
That’s all for this week. I hope to have a shortish Bibliophilia essay up by Sunday night. Happy reading!