Earlier this month we ran a semi-annual general meeting of the Seshat project in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This came about because prior to our own meeting, many of us participated in another workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, and since we were there anyway, we decided to stay in

Comments on Part I tended to take a rather negative view of the argument advanced by Baumard et al. Thus, Gene Anderson questioned whether Confucianism is even a religion. It was certainly a moralistic teaching, but how important a role did supernatural agents play in it is very much

In my previous post I wrote about how the majority of Egyptologists (with a few important exceptions) have avoided using their knowledge to help us figure out how and why early states evolved. While eventually we will remedy this situation with the help of Seshat, and in a very rigoro

Over the last five weeks I have been away from home, and I find that when I am traveling, it’s difficult to get in the mood for blog-writing. The whole point of blogging for me is that it should be relatively effortless. I typically write blogs in the evenings, and almost never during

Seshat: The Global History Databank is a game-changing database construction project that may reveal there is actually one thing war is good for: historical statistics. By publishing free-to-public data on historical societies, Seshat will soon become the world’s largest profess

I’ve been back from our vacation for several days, but have been prostrated with a nasty cold. On one hand it was glorious to enjoy being outside, bask in the sun, and swim in the ocean. But the toll vacations impose is much greater than the actual time spent away. You have to add day

Over the last three days I have been involved in a series of workshops, which we ran right here in Aarhus. The first day was a public workshop on Digital & Computational Humanities – Tools & Thoughts. Participants in the Digital Humanities workshop. Photograph courtesy of Lars

Although publishing in PNAS is a bit of a pain (there are a lot of pesky formatting and other requirements) and expensive (in particular, we had to pay, so that you all could have free access to our article), the redeeming feature of this journal is that they practically guarantee goo

In the previous blog, I asked why some nations are wealthy, stable, and happy, and others are not. Many theories have tried to provide an answer to this question. How do we decide which of the competing theories is true? So far, economists have not done a compelling job addressing thi

When I switched my research interests from biology to social sciences and history, one big adjustment I needed to make was to learn how to deal with heavily ideologized or politicized subjects. Politics, of course, intrudes everywhere (after all, as Aristotle said, humans are politica