Randomness, “Structure” and Event History

I’m busy with the new semester, so this is going to be a fragment. Also, I haven’t had time to do more translations for my forest work, so its a new interpretation of some old data…Oh well…

Trees in Classical Ritual

It is well-known that ritual runs through essentially all aspects of land management in the Zhou, from partitioning the countryside, to the specification of taxes, to the rules governing use. Less well-known is the fact that trees were often the focal points of these rituals…

Footprint of the Capitals, Part 1

Thanks to some very productive periods at Max Planck in Berlin and at Yale, I’ve had a chance to do some new work. This is building into a chapter where I consider the shifts in wood requisitions in the Ming and Qing. The pocket version of the argument is this: the Ming…

Tracing changes in 16th century forests, in three maps

Having spent six years (or more) researching forests and land rights in Ming-Qing China, it’s strange that I never spent much time with the Huizhou cadasters. Well, I finally pulled them out last December.

Decolonization, the Game

I taught Modern East Asia for the second time this year. Really fun class to teach. The thing that struck me the second time around was how essentially every situation in post-World War II Asia had a wide range of political possibilities, including large groups of moderates and…

A Game that we cannot “Game,” or Algorithms in RL

There is growing concern about the problems that “Big Data” poses to free, democratic society, and rightly so.

There are all kinds of problems caused by bad data, and by the misuse of data. Biases in the data…

Visuals of the Logging Frontier

When writing Fir and Empire, I was taken aback by the stories in Gong Hui 龔輝, Collected Essays on Timber…