The Sabbath Queen Descending

It's a warm, dusty blustery Friday afternoon, and I've got a challah on the go in the kitchen.  We're into that lovely time of year where the days are getting longer, the trees are starting to blossom, and the little critters are starting to pop up all over.  Somebody has turned on the heating system, but it's just getting warmed up.  Nonetheless, you can feel the latent power of the Arava sun, and its inexorable progress towards adventure-movie desert heat.  But for now, we can comfortably sit out on the lawn in our shorts and tee-shirts under the noonday sun, chat and play music, and feel the cool grass under our feet.
Getting back into the swing of school wasn't so hard, and I'm really enjoying the new project.  From Monday to Thursday there was a conference put on by the students at Ben Gurion University Sde Boker campus, where I'll be next year, on mathematical modeling in the social sciences.  For those of you who read the word "mathematical" and felt a pang of anxiety, I'll give you the abstract of the keynote speaker, Peter Turchin, a fairly famous mathematical ecologist who has worked for many years on population dynamics in natural ecosystems:

Most historians and many philosophers believe that a science of history is impossible because history is too complex and historical processes are too different from physical or biological ones. Unlike molecules, for example, people have free wills. I will argue that, on the contrary, it is possible to employ regular scientific approaches in history. Certainly we can study large-scale dynamical processes in history, those that involve large collectives of people and unfold on the time scale of decades and centuries. We can build mathematical models for these processes and they yield novel insights. In some cases they show that ‘predictions’ obtained by informal methods using verbal reasoning can lead us astray.

Even more importantly, it is possible to test model predictions with historical data. With just a little creativity we can obtain quantitative time-series data on a wide variety of economic, social, and political aspects of historical systems. Furthermore, experience so far suggests that history is not simply a “mess,” “one damn thing after another.” There are strong patterns in time-series data. These recurring empirical regularities hint at the operation of some kind of laws of history.

Note the last phrase, the emphasis being mine.  Laws of History!  The words that Turchin actually used in his lectures were something like 'History is one of the last great frontiers to be conquered by mathematical approaches.  Historians are incredibly resistant to mathematical models and quantitative analysis, and I don't know why.  I ask them, do you want good models [based on differential equations] or bad models [based on qualitative verbal assumptions]?  Some of them want bad models, and some of them don't believe history should even include models, since it's just "one damn thing after another"'
  Now, other than being immediately reminded of science fiction author Isaac Asimov's book Foundation, in which "psychohistory" founder Hari Seldon actually completes the project that Turchin sets out to do, my first thought was, yeah, he's going to conquer history like Hitler conquered Russia.  It's not like this project hasn't ever been tried before.  But the pendulum swings back there occasionally, and each time they say: "this time it will be different".  There were some interesting ideas presented, such as a model for how religions spread through societies, using similar models to those of epidemiology (Richard Dawkins would just LOVE that the same mathematical tools that model deadly diseases can be used to model the spread of religions), and using some population dynamics models to try to settle differing accounts of population counts in historical records.  So there is something to quantitative tools.  But I don't see History becoming a "Science" any time soon - sit in class, learn the basic laws of the rise and fall of civilizations, work on famous case studies, and bring a calculator to the exam.  Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyways, I won't bore you with any more details from the conference.

The other great thing that's been going on for the last few days has been a regional cadurregel (football)  tournament held on Ketura, with teams coming in from all the Kibbutzim in the area.  Both Ketura and the Machon had teams, and it has been really fun to train every day and actually get to play some fairly intense games.  Not having played organized soccer since kindergarten (and being North American's generally not in my favor - baseball anyone?....no?), I'm generally a bit lost on the field, but with the help of some decent players we put on a good show and had a ton of fun.
We haven't really gotten much into the PELS stuff yet, so nothing but nice people and good times to report on yet, but this coming week is a history seminar, focusing on 1948, so there should be some interesting discussions.  Also, later this year, around April 20th, there will be a combined Israeli independence day and Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe, what 1948 is known as in the Arab world) day.  So fasten your seat belts.