Brain Food

Kleptoparasitism, trial by combat, mountain queens, measuring the Black Death, how to choose a proper codename, ancient scrolls, the computational origins of life, and more.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. I am an enthusiastic nerd who enjoys the finer intellectual curiosities of life, so every so often I share with you some of the best things I’ve read or watched or listened to, in the hopes that some of you fellow nerds might enjoy them, too. DISCLAIMER: The Management is not responsible for any bad recommendations. Oh, and please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work, or buy my new book: FLUKE.

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Trial by Combat

In 1817, a man named Abraham Thornton threw a leather gauntlet at the feet of William Ashford, thus invoking an ancient and hallowed right: trial by combat. Ashford’s sister had been murdered, and Ashford believed Thornton was behind the crime. But Thornton wasn’t ready to go through the normal process. He decided not to leave his life in the hands of a mere mortal judge; he would instead let God decide his fate, in a bloody judicial arena.

In the medieval world, it was believed that God would make a righteous man the victor in combat (though it remains unclear to me why, in a world defined by powerful and unjust rulers and grotesquely rigid unfairness, trial by combat was the one regime in which God was seen to always help the righteous).

There was just one snag in Thornton’s plan: by 1817, nobody had engaged in trial by combat in England for nearly two centuries. It was a preposterous demand for 19th century England, a place proud of its modern legal sophistication.

But Thornton had noticed a useful loophole: nobody seemed to have bothered to take trial by combat off the books. It was still there, an option for accused criminals, written out of the rulebook in practice, but not by the letter of the law.

As Amelia Soth explains, the gambit worked out rather well for Thornton. The accuser, Ashford, was a diminutive and weak man. Thornton would inevitably win. So, Ashford refused the challenge and, according to the law, Thornton was the victor—divine will apparently acting through a puny man. As Soth writes: “it was a shocking case: a brutal man liberated by his own brutishness, escaping punishment for one murder by threatening to commit another.”

However, what fascinated me about this article wasn’t just the well-worn faith in divine intervention for the combatants, but the class divide that was embedded in this ancient practice. “Trial by combat evokes all the imagery of medieval romance: jousting knights, flashing swords, noble blood spilled over matters of honor,” Soth writes. “But for the common people, it was a different matter entirely—a spectacle of humiliation. Combatants were forced to shave their heads, dress in leather suits, and wield ridiculous weapons, like iron rods curled into the shape of ram’s horns.”

The most delightful detail enshrined in Soth’s article, though, is the fact that a dead man once won trial by combat on an unexpected technicality. In a late fifteenth century explanation of the case, the chronicler notes that an accused man slated for trial by combat happened to die before the trial took place. Never one to renege on his commitments, he was hoisted over the barrier and plopped into the arena, his lifeless corpse splayed out in—we can only assume—a pose that didn’t suggest a particularly warrior-like vigor. And yet, when the rival champion sought to remove him from the battlefield in a symbol of his de factovictory, he couldn’t. The dead man was too fat; his corpse wouldn’t budge. That meant that, according to the rules, the dead man was deemed victorious.

Going down the trial by combat rabbit hole is one rabbit hole that I heartily recommend. In particular, you might come across this delightful gem of local journalism from the Ipswich Star, published on the 2nd of November, 2002. I cannot improve upon the prose, so I shall quote from it directly:

“JOBLESS mechanic Leon Humphreys shocked magistrates by demanding the right to trial by combat under medieval law when he appeared at a Suffolk court.

Mr Humphreys, 60, made his request after being charged with failing to notify the DVLA that his motorcycle was off the road.

He claimed he was entitled to ask the court to establish his guilt or innocence by allowing him to fight to the death against a champion nominated by the DVLA [the UK equivalent of the DMV].

Humphreys said after the hearing: “I believe the right to trial by combat is still on the statute books. I can ask for it because the new Human Rights law gives ordinary people the right to use the law for their own purposes. I am willing to fight a champion put up by the DVLA if they want to accept my challenge – but they must remember it is a fight to the death. The victor speaks in the name of God and justice so it is a reasonable enough way of sorting the matter out. I know I am in the right so I do not have anything to worry about. I am reasonably fit and not afraid of taking anyone on in a fight.”

Traditionally fights under the trial by combat law used to be settled by combatants wielding swords, lances or staves with iron heads. Former seaman Mr Humphreys said he was unsure which party would have the right to decide on the weapons used if the DVLA accepted his challenge. But he added that he was prepared to fight with Japanese samurai swords, razor sharp Gurkha knives or even heavy blacksmith hammers.

He was taken to court after failing to pay a £25 fine for not notifying the DVLA that his Suzuki 125 cc motorcycle was off the road. But he said: “It is my property and it is my right to do what I like with it”…

A DVLA spokeswoman said: “We have never dealt with a request for trial by combat before. We are looking into the legal issues.”

How Military Operations Get Their Names

It would presumably add insult to injury if a bereaved family of a fallen soldier learned that their son or daughter had died in Operation SpongeBob SquarePants. A minor insult next to the unimaginable scale of loss, sure, but nonetheless best avoided.

Thus, as every child knows instinctively when building a secret fort or launching a clandestine raid, it is important to come up with the right codename to match the seriousness of any intended operation. However, there is another crucial factor: it is unwise to inadvertently give away the game through the code. From the perspective of the Japanese in late 1941, I think we can agree that “Operation Pearl Harbor Sneak Attack” would have been an unforced error.

This fascinating short article explores the history and strategy of codenames. But most of all, it brings us to this bit of advice from Winston Churchill, a man with plenty of experience on the matter:

1. Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment. . . . They ought not to be names of a frivolous character. . . Names of living people--Ministers and Commanders--should be avoided. . . .

2. ...the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo.”

3. Proper names are good in this field. The heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes, could be used, provided they fall within the rules above.

(If you’re interested in the history of a well-named secret World War II operation involving a corpse carefully jettisoned from a submarine—Operation Mincemeat—then you’re in luck, because it features in this episode of my documentary-style podcast series, Power Corrupts).

Life as “Problem Solving Matter”

This fascinating—but intellectually demanding—Aeon article from David Krakauer and Chris Kempes from the Santa Fe Institute does something rare in a popular essay: it proposes a new way of understanding life.

They argue that humans have been hung up on the origins of life by looking at it from the wrong angle, searching for the chemical soup that can produce the magic that is living matter. They expose the flaw of such logic embedded in that Quixotic quest by imagining an alien that comes down to Earth to try to figure out what chemical substance produces human-built computers. And, as they rightly point out, the alien would get a different answer depending on when they arrived. Would it be vacuum tubes and steel? Titanium and silicon and copper?

The idea that what makes a computer is defined by its chemical components is clearly silly. It’s the analytical processing of information that is essential to understanding computers, not whether the laptop is housed in this or that kind of metal casing.

Similarly, they propose that we should focus on a different interpretation of the origins of life—one that emphasizes the ability of matter to solve problems. If that’s the fundamental difference with nonliving matter, then the question is less about chemistry and more about information theory. They walk the reader through three newly coined hypotheses—the Tron, Golem, and Maupertuis theories—in providing novel ways to consider life’s origins.

This isn’t an article to quickly skim, but stick with it and it’s a rewarding look at how humanity’s relationship to digital information processing is providing us not just with tools to manage our world, but fresh insights into smarter ways to consider where we—and all life—came from.

“If life is problem-solving matter,” they write, “our origins were not a miraculous or rare event governed by chemical constraints but, instead, the outcome of far more universal principles of information and computation. And if life is understood through these principles, then perhaps it has come into existence more often than we previously thought, driven by problems as big as the bang that started our abiotic universe moving 13.8 billion years ago.”

Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards

The Atlantic features stunning images from the 2024 Ocean Photographer of the Year Awards.

My goodness, these photos are unbelievable.

They also appear fine-tuned to appeal to yours truly, as they feature the extraordinary peacock mantis shrimp, which I wrote about in Fluke and here (regarding their extraordinary vision); several octopuses, which I wrote about here; along with a photo of a majestic, enormous animal that tops my bucket list of creatures to see in the wild: a whale shark.

Seriously, take a few minutes and marvel at these images. We are so lucky to live in this extraordinary world.

Kleptoparasitism and Bird Flu

It would be a case of poetic justice if it weren’t so dangerous.

A new strain of avian influenza is ravaging bird populations and it has already been declared a panzootic (a pandemic in the animal kingdom). Now, new research published this month shows one unexpected mechanism behind the rapid transmission of the disease within seabirds, and it’s tied to a practice known as kleptoparasitism, in which birds quite literally steal each other’s lunches.

Certain seabirds, particularly those most devious species of skuas and frigatebirds, will chase down a suitably rotund bird that has just eaten a tasty meal and harass them until they regurgitate their food. At that point, the opportunistic skua or frigatebird thief will gobble up the prey, presumably with a satisfied little smirk.

But wait! The tragic joke is on them! For, you see, it turns out that the regurgitated food is almost always coated in a bountiful dose of saliva, which can harbor an overwhelming viral load if the victim bird has been infected with avian flu.

This is particularly bad news because these seabirds often migrate astonishingly large distances, meaning that they can rapidly transmit the disease across the globe, infecting remote populations.

The only silver lining, I suppose, is that you now have a more precise, scientific phrase to use when some opportunistic jerk steals your food from the break room, as you can now uncharitably label the thief as the office’s resident kleptoparasite.

Off the Books

This debut novel by the supremely talented Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is a many-layered delight. The superficial first layer—the one that instantly makes it a page-turner—is a rollicking roadtrip story, a journey that is made more intriguing by a central mystery involving a man who jealously guards his suitcase. What is in the suitcase?

But as you read more, it’s clear that the beautiful prose conceals a darker, more complex story—one that is too often forgotten and only rarely graces the headlines. Lest I give any inadvertent spoilers, here’s the teaser from the publisher:

Recent Dartmouth dropout Mei, in search of a new direction in life, drives a limo to make ends meet. Her grandfather convinces her to allow her customers to pay under the table, and before she knows it, she is working as a routine chauffeur for sex workers. Mei does her best to mind her own business, but her knack for discretion soon leads her on a life-changing trip from San Francisco to Syracuse with a new client.

Handsome and reserved, Henry piques Mei’s interest. Toting an enormous black suitcase with him everywhere he goes, he’s more concerned with taking frequent breaks than making good time on the road. When Mei discovers Henry's secret, she has no choice but to confront him. What Henry reveals rocks her to her core and shifts this once casual, transactional road trip to one of moral stakes and dangerous consequences.

Mountain Queen

I love mountain climbing documentaries. They combine stunning cinematography with extraordinary stories of human endurance and vivid illustrations of our species testing its physical and mental limits on the world’s most deadly jagged peaks.

However, I will admit that sometimes they blur together a little bit—there are a lot of documentaries about Mount Everest.

This one, Mountain Queen, stands out from the crowd—and it’s both memorable and moving. It’s the story of Lhakpa Sherpa, who holds the record for most summits (10) of Mount Everest by a woman.

She was born in a cave, never received a formal education, and was effectively told to accept her lowly station in life. She refused, entering a man’s world, and then setting herself apart from much more fortunate, well-funded peers on feat after feat.

But the documentary also showcases her personal struggles—an abusive, murderous partner, for one—as well as the most unbelievable detail: she ended up in the United States as an employee of Whole Foods after accomplishing her record-breaking ascents. Can you imagine going to the grocery store and asking someone to help you find, say, the turnips and it turns out that they have summited Everest more than any woman on the planet?

This was a great film—about a truly great woman.

Doom Scrolling

There is a phenomenon known as the caveman effect. Many of us believe that cavemen lived in caves. Why do we believe that? Because there are tons of paintings within caves made by cavemen, of course.

But what if the cavemen painted 99 percent of their art on trees and only stumbled into a few caves? Well, the trees are long gone, so we’d be none the wiser. The art in the caves survives because caves are protected from the worst elements and the walls don’t quickly disintegrate into a woody pulp.

The caveman effect is a subsidiary of selection bias, specifically known as survivorship bias. What you see isn’t necessarily what there was—and so our view of the past is biased by that which happens to survive.

Here’s the unfortunate bit: it’s not always the case that the most important bits are the ones that survive. Instead, it’s often arbitrary. And given how little of the ancient past survives in written form, any arbitrary skew can badly mislead us into emphasizing unimportant bits while ignoring important features that were lost to time. We’ll never know the full truth. But can we ever regain further glimpses of a seemingly lost history?

Enter this wonderful article. Ostensibly, it’s about the ways in which new technologies are unlocking ancient scrolls in astonishing ways, allowing us to reveal parts of the past that we thought were lost. But the more you read the essay, the more you realize that it is actually a deep dive on how scholars recreate history through the mists of time, from often conflicting snippets of incomplete texts. I was engrossed. If you care about history, I suspect you might be, too.

Measuring the Black Death

Last, but certainly not least, is this essay on how historians recreate death tolls from the Black Death. (Okay, fine, there is a bit of a dark theme in this edition, but morbidity and disease and trials by combat are interesting).

But what I liked about this essay is that it opens up under the hood of history and lets us mere amateurs examine how scholars come up with sweeping claims about death tolls in a calamity of such bewildering scale as, say, a pandemic that is widely believed to have killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe.

These aren’t minor disagreements, either. One 2019 estimate suggested that about 38 percent of the population was wiped out, while one study in 2021 came up with a figure of 51 to 58 percent and another study from that same year went with a figure of 60 percent. That range—from 38 percent to 60 percent of the population—is a pretty big gulf. It’s a difference of tens of millions of people!

I recommend you read for yourself where these disputes come from—and how modern methods are being used to try to re-evaluate such a crucial part of medieval history.

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That’s it for this edition of Brain Food. If you’ve enjoyed my recommendations, please feel free to share them with friends. If you haven’t, my apologies—and I’ll be back shortly with a new essay, beamed into your inbox. If you’d like to support my work and keep me writing for you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for the low, low price of $4/month. I rely exclusively on reader support.