text:
A quote from Lesser Beasts by Mark Essig

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Built in about 2550 bc, the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet tall and comprises some 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 13 billion pounds in aggregate. Archaeologists still argue over whether those stones were moved into place using levers, sledges, or oil-slicked ramps. Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids involved a feat of social engineering just as impressive as the mechanical: Egyptian authorities had to feed a workforce of thousands of people for decades at a time.

The builders of the Great Pyramid called upon the resources of the entire Nile Valley to support this effort. The royal house sent orders to the heads of villages, who in turn sent men to the Giza site, along with grain and livestock to feed them. Workers drank beer, a muddy beverage fermented from grain and consumed more for nutrition than for pleasure. They ate heavy loaves of wheat and barley, supplemented with beef, mutton, and goat. One archaeologist analyzed some 300,000 bones at the pyramid complex and found that nearly all the animals eaten were young and male. This proved that Giza was a provisioned site, with animals raised elsewhere and the juvenile males—not needed for breeding—marched to slaughter at the pyramids.

One village that provided livestock was Kom el-Hisn, located in the Nile delta about seventy-five miles downriver from the temple complex. Villagers at Kom el-Hisn raised cattle but ate very little beef: only the bones of worn-out breeding cows and sick calves have been uncovered there. Instead, the villagers ate pork: for every four cattle bones archaeologists unearthed at Kom el-Hisn, they found one hundred pig bones. It seems that the residents kept herds of pigs that foraged in the Nile delta marshes and scavenged trash on streets. Although Egypt’s rulers demanded cattle from Kom el-Hisn, along with goats and sheep from other settlements, the villagers’ pigs were spared.

The reasons for this had to do with climate and biology. Animals destined for Giza had to walk hundreds of miles through an arid landscape, feeding on grass and leaves along the way. Well suited for such a journey, cows, goats, and sheep were herded to Giza by the thousands. Pigs, however, would not have found the food or shade they needed along the way. The state couldn’t move pigs around, so it ignored them.

This pattern appeared throughout the Near East: officials developed complex food-provisioning systems that depended on the long-distance movement of cows, sheep, and goats. Pigs didn’t fit into such schemes. But despite—or perhaps because of—their lack of usefulness to bureaucrats, pigs didn’t disappear. Instead, they stuck to their original role as scavengers. People on the fringes of society with little or no access to state-supplied food embraced them as a source of meat. Priests and bureaucrats, who dined on lamb and beef, came to despise pigs. Only the poor ate pork.

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For its first 4,000 years, agriculture remained a modest affair. The farmers of the Near East lived in mud-brick huts in villages ranging in size from a few dozen to a few thousand people—places like Kom el-Hisn, which did not change much from one century to the next.

The pace of change picked up about 5500 bc. That’s when people in Mesopotamia—the lands around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Syria and Iraq—developed irrigation agriculture. A thousand years after that, the plow appeared. The first true cities, with tens of thousands of residents and complex social organizations, appeared about 3500 bc. The Mesopotamians invented writing—first pictographs and later the more abstract cuneiform—and built the first monumental temples, called ziggurats, to worship their gods. Across the Red Sea, Egypt got a slightly later start but achieved more lasting success. By about 3000 bc, Egyptian rulers had unified a ribbon of land stretching for six hundred miles along the Nile. Scribes created a hieroglyphic writing system about this same time, and laborers were put to work on pyramids.

Culture depends on agriculture, and in Egypt and Mesopotamia the two flourished together. Both empires emerged from desert landscapes along rivers. No one had settled these areas earlier because there wasn’t enough rain for farming, but irrigation allowed farmers to exploit the rich soil deposited by seasonal floods. That soil produced crops in great abundance, which meant some members of society could give up agricultural work and devote themselves to making crafts (pottery, baskets, bricks, tools, weapons), building temples, keeping records, fighting battles, and serving the gods. “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into,” George Orwell once wrote. “The other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.” Only when farmers grew enough food to fill the bellies of bureaucrats, priests, and soldiers could these elites go about the business of creating what we call civilization.

Mesopotamia and Egypt built centralized economies and strictly controlled the distribution of grains, dairy products, and meat to the population. The city of Puzrish-Dagan, for example, served as an administrative center for Mesopotamia’s Third Dynasty of Ur, which lasted from 2112 to 2004 bc. Surviving records show that the ruling dynasty requisitioned tens of thousands of animals from outlying areas. One archaeologist tabulated the records from this economic center, tracing the flow of more than 10,000 animals that arrived from the provinces and were then distributed throughout the urban center. The temple claimed lambs and kids, and soldiers ate cattle and older sheep. The records make no mention of pigs. As in Egypt, they existed but held no interest to the state.

Villagers in both Mesopotamia and Egypt kept pigs purely on their own initiative. Throughout the Near East, pigs could be found wherever there was water. Towns near natural pig habitats—along the Jordan River, for instance—kept the most pigs because the animals could supplement urban scavenging with foraging in the woods and marshes. Towns in drier areas kept fewer pigs. Nomadic pastoralists, on the move for much of the year, kept none. Archaeologists have plotted on maps the areas that received enough rainfall to allow farming without irrigation. All villages within those areas showed evidence of pig remains. In other words, if it was biologically possible to raise pigs, people raised pigs.

There were variations within this broad pattern. At Tell Halif, a small site on the edge of the Negev desert in what is now southern Israel, the archaeological record shows dramatic swings in the reliance on pork: pigs account for more than 20 percent of animal bones in garbage heaps dating to 3000 bc. That figure plunges to less than 5 percent five hundred years later, rises again to 20 percent by 1500 bc, and finally drops once more to less than 5 percent by 1000 bc. Changes in rainfall levels cannot explain those swings. It seems that the true reason was political: periods of highest pig use correspond with times of weakest state control. Halif was located along a major trade route; when the political situation was stable, the town likely became integrated within a regional economy, and a steady supply of sheep and goats flowed through. When the ruling dynasties descended into chaos—as they did rather frequently—the town had to fend for itself. That’s when the villagers turned to pigs.

The rise of strong states discouraged pig raising in another way as well: by changing the landscape. As populations grew, they put increased pressure on the land. Farmers felled oaks to make way for olive groves and drained marshes to plant crops. The land, often poorly managed, deteriorated from forest to cropland to pastureland to desert, with each successive stage providing less habitat for pigs. By the time desert scrub prevailed, only sheep and goats could survive. As pigs lost habitat, they likely began to raid crops in the field, threatening the food supply and thereby earning a spot on the state’s hit list.

Pigs didn’t fit into the new political and agricultural order. As time marched on, they began to disappear. At many archaeological sites, pig bones remain common up through about 2000 bc, then dwindle away. A thousand years later, few people raised pigs in any quantity.

In a few spots, however, pigs persisted. They remained important for sites like Tell Halif that were on the margins of empire, far from the urban centers. And pigs became crucial to the marginal people living within those urban centers. Careful sifting of debris from streets has turned up shed milk teeth—baby teeth—of piglets, evidence that pigs were living and breeding among the homes of the world’s first great cities. But not everyone in those cities partook in equal measures. Archaeologists tend to find pig bones in the areas of cities where the common people lived. In elite areas, they find more cattle and sheep bones.

Some of the most compelling evidence of this pattern comes from the temple complex at Giza. At the official barracks, temple laborers ate provisioned beef driven there from far-flung villages. Nearby, however, another settlement grew up. This neighborhood, haphazardly constructed, most likely housed those who provided services to temple workers and bureaucrats—grinding wheat, baking bread, brewing beer. These people were not part of the official workforce and therefore did not receive food directly from the rulers. Instead they hunted, foraged, and traded for their food, or they raised it themselves. And what they raised was pigs. Although absent from the residences of official workers, pigs are common in this self-supporting area. Pork offered these common people what we would call food security: a source of meat under their own control.

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Poor people ate pork because it was the only meat they had. The elite refrained from eating it because they had access to other sources of meat. In time, though, the ruling classes began to actively avoid pork. The Greek historian Herodotus, in the fifth century bc, reported that an upper-class Egyptian man, after accidentally brushing against a pig, rushed into the Nile fully clothed to cleanse himself.

By the start of the Iron Age, about 1200 bc, elites in the Near East had begun to see pigs as polluting, a view that arose in part from the habits of urban pigs. Though cities had grown large, sanitation systems had not kept pace. Residents threw garbage into the streets or piled it in heaps outside their doors. This waste included spoiled food, dead animals, and human excrement. Information about ancient sewage disposal is scant; one of the few references is found in Jewish scripture. “You shall have a stick,” Moses tells his people in Deuteronomy, “and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, . . . therefore your camp must be holy, that he may not see anything indecent among you, and turn away from you.”

Evidence suggests that the Lord God saw quite a few indecencies among the Israelites and their neighbors. Sewer systems didn’t exist. A few elite homes and temples had pit latrines, but mostly people practiced what today is known as open defecation: they relieved themselves in fields or streets, and they didn’t bring a stick. This is where pigs enter the picture.

Pigs eat shit. In many villages around the world today, pigs linger around peoples’ usual defecation spots awaiting a meal. Some English pigs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the same habit. In China, archaeologists discovered a terra cotta sculpture, dating to about 200 ad, showing a pig in a sty, with a round, roofed building just above it. The structure was originally identified as a grain silo for storing pig feed, but the model in fact depicted a combination pigsty-outhouse: people sat on an elevated perch and made deposits to the hungry pig below. The practice was widespread—the same Chinese character designates both “pigsty” and “outhouse”—and has survived into the present on Korea’s Cheju Island. In the 1960s more than 90 percent of farmers on the island used a pigsty-privy in their subsistence-farming regimen, and they insisted the arrangement produced the sweetest pork in the world.

The pigsty-privy apparently did not exist in the ancient Near East, but pigs discovered this food source on their own. Tapeworm eggs have been found in fossilized pig feces from ancient Egypt. Since these eggs are produced only by adult tapeworms living in human guts, it appears that human feces formed part of Egyptian pigs’ rations. In Aristophanes’ play Peace, dating to the fifth century bc, a character notes that a “pig or a dog will . . . pounce upon our excrement.”

This particular dining habit did not improve the pig’s reputation. Just as troubling was the pig’s taste for carrion, including human corpses when available. Eating human flesh and eating excrement are nearly universal human taboos, and eating animals that eat those substances carried a transitive taint. “The pig is impure,” a Babylonian text asserted, because it “makes the streets stink . . . [and] besmirches the houses.” An Assyrian text from the 670s bc contains these curses: “May dogs and swine eat your flesh,” and “May dogs and swine drag your corpses to and fro on the squares of Ashur.”

Dogs and pigs had first domesticated themselves by scavenging human waste, but now that role made them pariahs. Filthy animals offended the gods and therefore were excluded from holy places. The people of the Near East practiced many different religions, but all agreed that the key sacrificial animals were sheep, goats, and cattle and that pigs were unclean. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, pigs never appear in religious art. The Harris Papyrus, which describes religious offerings made by King Ramses III, includes a detailed list of every desirable item to be found in Egypt and the lands it had conquered, including plants, fruits, spices, minerals, and meat. Pork does not appear on the list. “The pig is not fit for a temple,” a Babylonian text reads, because it is “an offense to all the gods.” A Hittite text declares, “Neither pig nor dog is ever to cross the threshold” of a temple. If anyone served the gods from a dish contaminated by pigs or dogs, “to that one will the gods give excrement and urine to eat and drink.”

Many people, for many different reasons, rejected pork in the ancient Near East. Largely arid, it was a land of sheep, goats, and cattle. Nomads didn’t keep pigs because they couldn’t herd them through the desert. Villages in very dry areas didn’t keep pigs because the animals needed a reliable source of water. Priests, rulers, and bureaucrats didn’t eat pork because they had access to sheep and goats from the state-focused central distributing system and considered pigs filthy. Pigs remained important in only one place: nonelite areas of cities, where they ate waste and served as a subsistence food supply for people living on the margins.

This was the situation in the Near East around 1200 bc, when a tribe of people known as the Israelites settled in Canaan, west of the Jordan River in Palestine. Like most of their neighbors, the Israelites rejected pork. Unlike those neighbors, the Israelites came to consider pork avoidance a central element of their identity.

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Scriptural dietary rules grew more significant with time. When the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were set down, few people in the Near East were eating pork. Archaeologists find no pig bones at all, or just a scattered few, in settlements from this period. Then, starting in about 300 bc, pig bones begin to appear in great profusion. The Greeks had arrived—and pigs would soon enjoy a renaissance after some nine hundred years of persecution.

Greek rule spelled major changes for the Israelites. The Greek king Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire in 333 bc and taken over all the lands Persia had controlled, including Palestine. Whereas the Persians had worked through local rulers and allowed local peoples to live as they wished, the Greeks forcefully imposed Hellenistic culture on their subjects. In 167 bc the ruler Antiochus IV, a successor to Alexander, invaded Jerusalem and tried to stamp out Judaism, a story recorded in the Books of the Maccabees. The first book relates how Antiochus demanded “that all should be one people, and that each should give up his customs.” Many Jews acquiesced and “sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.” Worst of all, Antiochus ordered the Jews “to defile the sanctuary, . . . to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised.”

In the Second Book of the Maccabees, the invaders force pork into the mouth of Eleazer, an elderly Jewish scribe, but he spits it out. His tormenters, old friends who have gone over to the enemy’s side, bring him aside and quietly tell him they will secretly replace the pork with kosher meat so that he can obey God’s law while pretending to obey Antiochus. Again Eleazer refuses: “Many of the young should suppose that Eleazer in his ninetieth year has gone over to an alien religion,” he says. “For the sake of living a brief moment longer, they should be led astray because of me.” His purpose, he explains, is to leave “a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” So he goes to the rack and is beaten to death over a mouthful of pork.

In the next chapter of the Second Book of the Maccabees, the pork-related punishments continue. A mother and her seven sons are arrested and told they must eat swine’s flesh, but they too refuse. On the king’s orders, a guard cuts out the tongue of one of the brothers, scalps him, and chops off his hands and feet. Then a large pan is heated over a fire, and the king orders his guards to take the brother, “still breathing, and to fry him in the pan,” which they do. After he is dead, they kill another brother in the same way, and then another, until all seven brothers are dead, at which point Antiochus orders the mother slain as well.

Although these episodes occurred hundreds of years after the laws of Leviticus were laid down, they comprise only the second recorded instance of pork eating among the Jews. The first occurs in the book of Isaiah, when God expresses his fury at a few people who have eaten “swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things.” They have done so in secret, hidden away in gardens and graveyards, and their sin is known only to God. It is a matter between the Lord and his people, and God promises to destroy the offenders.

In Maccabees, the situation is public. Infuriated by the Jews’ desire to remain a separate people, Antiochus has outlawed the most visible symbol of their difference: their refusal to share a table with their neighbors. Here eating pork is not simply a matter of ritual purity, of remaining holy in order to keep the temple pure. It has become, instead, the key to cultural identity. The Books of the Maccabees provided a model of what it meant to be Jewish: even in the face of death, a Jew must refuse pork in order to remain true to his people.

Pork eating hadn’t carried much significance as a marker of Jewish identity before the Greek conquest of Persia because most others in the region didn’t eat pork either. Since the Israelites’ return from exile in Egypt, abstaining from pork simply had been one way that they remained pure in order to preserve their relationship with God. Now, however, it also became a way that they drew boundaries between themselves and those they lived among. Indeed, when pork-eating Greeks ruled over the Jews, refusing pork became a key element of what it meant to be Jewish. You are what you eat, the saying goes, but the Jews were what they didn’t eat.

The Jews rebelled against Antiochus and in 142 bc won control of Palestine and reconsecrated the Temple, an event commemorated in the celebration of Chanukah. Their independence lasted less than a century: in 63 bc the Romans conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews once more fell under the rule of pork eaters. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans responded to Jewish pork avoidance not with violence but with puzzlement and feeble jokes. Juvenal, the Roman satirist of the first century ad, noted that in Palestine “a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age” because Jews “do not differentiate between human and pigs’ flesh.” It was said that Caesar Augustus, after hearing that King Herod of Judea had executed one of his own children, joked that he would “rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”

There was a reason Jewish dining habits attracted attention: Romans loved pork with a passion matched by few people before or since. They developed the most sophisticated farming and breeding techniques that the world had ever seen and created elaborate—occasionally obscene—recipes to prepare pork for their lavish feasts. Such ostentatious pork consumption would only reinforce the divisions between Jews and Romans, and it would eventually establish pork as the meat of choice in the religion the Romans would help disseminate throughout Europe: Christianity.

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An enormous pig, belly up, is wheeled into a banquet room in one scene of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon. Trimalchio, the host, accuses the cook of roasting the animal without first gutting it and orders him whipped as punishment. The guests call for mercy, so Trimalchio demands, “Gut it here, now,” whereupon the cook swings an enormous sword and slashes the pig’s belly. The guests recoil in horror, but the steaming mass that pours forth is not the pig’s viscera but cooked meat. “Thrushes, fatted hens, bird gizzards!” one character calls out. “Sausage ropes, tender plucked doves, snails, livers, ham, offal!” The dispute with the cook has been all in fun. The guests applaud, then grab hunks of meat and begin to gorge themselves.

Fellini’s film, released in 1969, stays true to its source material, a work by Petronius written not long after the death of Christ. In depicting Roman dining, Petronius satirized but did not exaggerate: there was no need to embellish the extravagant reality. The dish portrayed in the film, a medley of meats hidden within a whole hog, was known as porcus Troianus, or “Trojan pig,” a nod to another great act of concealment. Petronius also describes a whole roast pig served with hunks of meat carved into the shape of piglets and placed along its belly, “as if at suck, to show it was a sow we had before us.” Another feast featured what appeared to be a goose and a variety of fish, all carved from pork. “I declare my cook made it every bit out of a pig,” the host exclaims. “Give the word, he’ll make you a fish of the paunch, a wood-pigeon of the lard, a turtle-dove of the forehand, and a hen of the hind leg!” Why he should do so is left unexplained.

In cuisine, culture, and mythology, Romans delighted in concealment and disguise, metamorphosis and transformation, and in this they could hardly have been more different from the Jews. The Roman Empire formed a vast, cosmopolitan civilization that embraced and absorbed dozens of cultures. Few identities—whether of meats or of people—remained fixed. Trimalchio, in Satyricon, is a former slave who has won his freedom and then attained great wealth. A man calling himself a Roman citizen might have been born in northern Europe, Africa, or Asia Minor. Jews, by contrast, were dedicated to marrying among themselves, defending their small homeland, and preserving their ancient ways.

The differences between Romans and Jews extended to food. One people defined itself by rejecting pork, the other by embracing it. One called the pig abominable, the other miraculous. One saw the pig as a carrier of pollution, the other as a sign of abundance. Between them, Jews and Romans set the terms that would define the pig throughout the history of the West.

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Pigs were the most common sacrificial animal in both Greece and Rome. They didn’t pollute—they purified. In Greek mythology, after Jason and Medea kill Medea’s brother, the enchantress Circe captures a piglet from “a sow whose dugs yet swelled from the fruit of the womb,” slits its neck, and sprinkles its blood over the hands of the killers to remove the stain of murder. Similarly, a painted vase shows Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet, still dripping blood, over the head of Orestes, who has killed his mother. Priests killed a suckling pig to honor the gods before every public gathering in Athens. Romans killed pigs to seal public agreements, such as contracts and treaties, and to mark important private occasions, such as births and weddings.

Although the pig served as an all-purpose sacrificial animal, it carried a more specific meaning as a symbol of fertility. Demeter, Greek goddess of wheat, was honored with pig sacrifices. With her daughter Persephone—who was condemned to spend a third of each year in Hades—Demeter symbolized the circle of life, of death in winter followed by rebirth in spring. At Thesmophoria, the most widespread festival in ancient Greece, priestesses cast piglets into a pit and later retrieved their rotting carcasses and placed them on the altar of Demeter. The rotted pork was then scattered in the fields to ensure a good harvest. In Greece young pigs were known by the terms khoiros and delphax, both of which also could refer to women’s genitalia, and the Latin porcus carried the same dual meaning. Aristophanes makes some horrifying puns on this double meaning in his playAcharnians, where a starving man disguises his two daughters as pigs and sells them in the market. The scholar Varro noted that Romans “call that part which in girls is the mark of their sex porcus” to indicate that they were “mature enough for marriage.”

The use of pigs as fertility symbols traces back to the region’s first farming communities. Just north of Greece in the Balkans, archaeologists have found early Neolithic statues of pigs studded with grains of wheat and barley. Like a seed germinating in the soil, a sow giving birth to many piglets demonstrated the bounty of nature. Sacrificing pigs honored the gods and ensured that the fields, and the people themselves, would enjoy abundant fertility.

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Most people in the ancient world ate vegetarian diets heavy on grains and beans. This was the cheapest way to feed large populations. Rome was different. Although meat was expensive, Rome was rich, and a sizable class of people had enough money to eat it regularly.

Romans ate beef, lamb, and goat, but they preferred pork. Hippocrates, the Greek physician, proclaimed pork the best of all meats, and his Roman successors agreed. There were more Latin words for pork than for any other meat, and the trade became highly specialized: there were distinct terms for sellers of live pigs (suarii), fresh pork (porcinarius), dried pork (confectorarius), and ham (pernarius). According to the Edict of Diocletian, issued in 301 ad, sow’s udder, sow’s womb, and liver of fig-fattened swine commanded the highest prices of any meat, costing twice as much as lamb. Beef sausages sold for just half the price of pork. After the Punic Wars, the percentage of pig bones in Carthage doubled, just as it had in Jerusalem under Roman occupation: Romans kept eating pork even in arid climates such as North Africa and Palestine, where pigs were more difficult to raise.

The richest source on Roman cuisine, a recipe book known as De re coquinaria, orOn Cooking, confirms this love of swine. Pork dishes far outnumber those made with other meats. The section called “Quadrupeds” contains four recipes for beef and veal, eleven for lamb, and seventeen for suckling pig. Other sections of the book offer recipes for adult sows and boars and nearly all of their parts, including brain, skin, womb, udder, liver, stomach, kidneys, and lungs. Archeology confirms that Romans carved up pigs more carefully and thoroughly than they did other creatures: pig skulls found in Roman dumps contain far more butchery scars than the skulls of sheep and cows, evidence that butchers excised the tongues, cheeks, and brains of pigs but not those of other beasts.

More than half of the dishes in On Cooking are relatively modest—barley soup with onion and ham bone, for example—and within the means of much of the urban population, but others demanded greater resources. Apicius is credited with inventing the technique of overfeeding a sow with figs in order to enlarge the liver, much as geese were stuffed with grain to create foie gras. In Apicius’s recipe, the fig-fattened pig liver is marinated in liquamen—a fermented fish sauce central to Roman cuisine—wrapped in caul fat, and grilled. The recipe for pig paunch starts with this salutary advice: “Carefully empty out a pig’s stomach.” The cook is then instructed to fill the stomach with a mixture of pork, “three brains that have had their sinews removed,” raw eggs, pine nuts, peppercorns, anise, ginger, rue, and other seasonings. Finally, the stomach is tied at both ends—“leaving a little space so that it does not burst during cooking”—boiled, smoked, boiled some more, and then served.

Some of the more elaborate dishes in On Cooking fall under the heading ofellae, which literally means a morsel of food. In one recipe, a skin-on pork belly is scored on the meat side, marinated for days in a blend of liquamen, pepper, cumin, and other spices, and then roasted. The chunks of meat would then be pulled from the skin, sauced, and served, forming bite-sized pieces that a diner could eat by hand while reclining, the preferred posture for Roman feasts. Another of the luxury dishes involves boiling a ham, removing the skin, scoring the flesh, and coating it with honey, a preparation that would not be out of place at Christmas dinner today.

Romans had a taste for blended milk, blood, and flesh that could make even a Gentile shudder. The Roman poet Martial had this to say about a roasted udder of lactating sow: “You would hardly imagine you were eating cooked sows’ teats, so abundantly do they flow and swell with living milk.” (Elsewhere, after a meal, Martial suffers the glutton’s regret and remarks upon “the unsightly skin of an excavated sow’s udder.”) This preference veered into the bizarrely cruel. Some cooks, Plutarch claimed, stomped and kicked the udders of live pregnant sows and thereby “blended together blood and milk and gore,” which was said to make the dish all the more delicious. The womb of this poor sow was eaten as well, with the dish called vulva eiectitia, or “miscarried womb.”

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and statesman, decried such dishes as “monstrosities of luxury,” and he was far from the only critic. Roman rulers passed sumptuary laws limiting the amount that could be spent on meals and forbidding the consumption of items including testicles and cheeks. But the wealthy flouted such rules because the social hierarchy couldn’t function without feasts: feasting provided the only way to learn who had grown richer and who had lost money, who was in the emperor’s favor and who had been cast out. To curtail extravagance was to deny the very reason to feast.

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WageIndicator recognizes more than 1700 different occupations. Its classification of occupations is based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) provided by the International Labour Organization (ILO). WageIndicator follows the latest classification ISCO-08 released in March 2008, amending it whenever a more detailed classification is necessary. ISCO-08 classification is a tool for organizing jobs into a clearly defined set of groups according to the tasks and duties undertaken on the job. ILO classifies occupations into smaller and larger occupation groups (either 4-digit, 3-digit, 2-digit or 1-digit ISCO code). The smallest occupation groups are referenced with a 4-digit ISCO-08 code. At the top level occupations are clustered into 10 major occupation groups described by the 1-digit ISCO-08 code. For example the occupation group Professionals includes the occupations: Biotechnologist, Aircraft engineer, Translator, University professor in social sciences, etc. Each of these occupations is then broken down into more narrowly defined ones, e.g. University professor in social sciences, into sociologist, politologist, and the like. In addition to these ILO-defined groups WageIndicator defines exact occupations with 13-digit ISCO-08 codes, in such a way that the first 1,2,3 or 4 digits of the 13-digit ISCO-08 occupation code exactly match the ILO-defined occupation groups under which a certain occupation falls.

How many observations suffice for a reliable estimate?

On the country level experience suggests that a minimum of 2000 observations is necessary to get reliable estimates to base the first Salary Checks on for a limited number of occupation groups. We provide such wage estimates only when at least two conditions are met: first a minimum of 10 observations and second, these observations must be statistically reliable. WageIndicator uses modern statistical methods to test whether the estimates are statistically meaningful and sufficient to base the wage profiles in a particular country on. This practice means that all estimates are based on 10 observations or more, which are found to be statistically reliable. Ideally there should be enough reliable observations - 10 minimum - for each of the 1700 exact (13-digit ISCO-08 code) occupations. However, if there are already some but not yet 10 observations for a particular occupation, it may be grouped on a higher level of aggregation in accordance with the ISCO-system: i.e. from the 4-digit up to the 1-digit ISCO-08 code, to the level where the two conditions of minimum 10 observations and reliability are fulfilled. However, one should keep in mind that even though statistically tested, all salary indications are always estimates and therefore include an element of uncertainty.

How does data in a Salary Check differ from official national data?

From the experience gathered since the year 2000 it appears that WageIndicator data are comparable in quality with those from other surveys. However, they offer the additional advantage of becoming available more timely. WageIndicator data are on a half year basis used to calculate and update the online Salary Checks which reflect actual earnings in hundreds of occupations in all countries where WageIndicator has operations. The survey itself is versatile and detailed. Its results can be used to monitor and address significant developments in the labour market as they emerge. However, the survey is not based on a representative sample of the labour force, and therefore no conclusions can be drawn regarding the working population as a whole. In some countries groups in certain wage brackets, or of a certain age, may not visit the Internet as frequently as other groups. This accounts especially for those with very high pay and equally for those who are paid very low. Yet, WageIndicator data is proven to be highly apt for research into the income situation of specific occupational groups in the labor market.

How often are the Salary Check and wages in context updated?

All WageIndicator Salary Checks are updated at least twice a year. The Salary Check is updated more frequently in countries with high inflation rates.  Wages in Context is updated four times a year.

What happens with outdated data?

WageIndicator securely stores its data. The presented indicators are always the latest, having replaced the older batch, based either on fresh data, or by indexing data for which no new input is available. The calculation of Salary Checks is based on uninterrupted series of data collected during the last five years.

Is the wage information in the Salary Check and Wages in Context controlled for inflation?

As the he calculation of the Salary Check is based on data collected from the last five years, it adjusts the wage information for the annual inflation rate using the Consumer Price Index of the IMF database.  If some latest available Wages in Context figure (apart from living wage) is older than 12 months, it is always adjusted for inflation. The living wage is always based on only recent prices data (the last 12 months), there is no need to adjust these prices for inflation if the inflation rate is close to the international average. However, in countries with an exceptionally high inflation rate the inflation adjustment of all living wage estimates, Wages in Context and Salary Check wage estimates are performed on a quarterly basis.

Which period do the data for the Salary Check cover?

Five years.

Are overtime and bonuses included?

WageIndicator adjusts calculations for hours worked. Bonuses are not included in the calculation of salaries.

What about the difference between gross and net wages?

The Salary Checks are calculated based on the gross hourly wage rate, computed from gross earnings and the number of hours worked. However, in some countries the proportion of respondents who report only their net earnings is significant. In these cases other statistical techniques are applied to impute the gross earnings.

Why are questions about personal characteristics included in the survey?

Personal characteristics significantly affect the wages individuals earn. Therefore, knowing these characteristics is essential for the calculation of the statistical rules that assign wages to any occupation and worker’s profile. In fact, these state-of-the-art statistical methods allow WageIndicator to predict wages even for workers‘ profiles which are not present in its data. For example, these techniques allow to predict the wage of a plumber of 33, even if no plumber aged 33 shared his data by completing and submitting the survey.

Why is gender important for wages?

Research shows time and again that men and women earn different wages. While some part of the observed differences can be explained by differences in individual characteristics, such as tenure, another part cannot be explained in this way. The aim of WageIndicator is to provide the most reliable wage information for any specific occupation and worker’s profile. By providing reliable information about empirically observed gender pay differentials WageIndicator contributes to a more transparent and - possibly- equitable labor market.

Why is education important for wages?

The worker’s wage profiles in the WageIndicator dataset are also defined by the level of education. In general the level of education determines the productivity of an individual. More educated individuals may be assigned more complex tasks, more responsibility, or simply use their time at work more efficiently. Differences in educational attainment give rise to wage differentials even within the same occupation and for individuals sharing other characteristics. Therefore controlling for education is crucial for the reliability of WageIndicator data.

Why is tenure important for wages?

In general, more productive workers earn higher wages, and more experienced workers tend to be more productive. The reason is that over the years that they are already working they most probably also learned how to perform their tasks more efficiently. However, one typically observes diminishing returns on work experience over time. For example, workers with 20 years of experience may earn 45% more than workers at the beginning of their career, but only 15% more than workers with 10 years of work experience. The wage profiles in WageIndicator therefore are also defined by tenure.

Why is it important for wages whether the employee has a supervisory position?

In general a supervisory job carries more responsibility which workers in such positions are compensated for. Also, typically the most able and productive workers (next to other characteristics) are selected for supervisory jobs. The information about any supervisory job is important as it co-determines the worker’s profile in the WageIndicator.

What is the meaning of minimum and maximum wages?

The minimum wage is the lowest wage reported in WageIndicator data for a given occupation (Note: this figure is not necessarily identical with the national legal Minimum Wage, where it applies). The maximum wage is the highest wage reported in WageIndicator data for a given occupation. As the applied statistical methods also permit predicting wages outside the sample, it is possible, and correct, that in certain cases the wage predicted by the Salary Check is higher than the reported maximum wage, or lower than the reported minimum wage. For example, if for a given occupation all respondents in the data have between 2 and 12 years of tenure, and the profile entered in the Salary Check involves 28 years of tenure, it is well conceivable that the wage corresponding to this profile is higher than any wage, including the reported maximum wage, observed in the sample.

Is the physical beauty of a person reflected in the Salary Check?

Some researchers explored whether appearance matters in occupations where attractiveness is economically important. They found that the beauty premium does not account for the entire wage premium. In most cases the impact of beauty on wages is overestimated and personal characteristics such as self-confidence, diligence or creativity are neglected. In the current version of the Salary Check physical appearance is not reflected in the wage information.

The Salary Check indicates a far higher/lower salary than my actual one. How come?

The Salary Check predicts the expected wage for a given profile of individual characteristics. It answers the question how much can an individual of given characteristics expect to earn. Clearly, the quality of the prediction depends on the accuracy of information entered into the Salary Check. First of all, it is very important to correctly report one's occupation. WageIndicator recognizes some 1700 occupations and although some of the occupational titles are almost similar, sometimes they differ substantially in the tasks and duties. If the wage information in the Salary Check does not match one's current salary, it is possible that one has not chosen the proper occupation. For example, a logistics worker earns much less than a logistics manager. WageIndicator tries to capture the most important determinants of wages, but clearly, discrepancies between one's actual and predicted wages may be due to factors that are not covered by the Salary Check. To illustrate this point, not all female logistics managers with 13 years of tenure and a university degree earn the same salary. If one's salary is higher than that reported by the Salary Check, congratulations are in place for such outstanding perseverance or talent that is rewarded in the labour market but not known to WageIndicator. Conversely, if one's salary is lower than that predicted, this may mean that one works for a company that pays less, but perhaps offers benefits that compensate for the lower pay, such as free kindergarten on the company's premises, or an especially nice team of co-workers. However, it may also be the case that one is underpaid indeed and might consider looking for another job.

The Salary Check does not give my profession, how come?

Try to refine the occupation search. Currently WageIndicator recognizes some 1700 different occupations and works on scaling up to 5000 occupations, making it a truly encompassing tool. However if one's profession is very specialized and unique within a country it may not have been defined in the WageIndicator yet. In that case, please get in touch to have one's occupation included in the Salary Check as soon as possible. Just to get the idea: WageIndicator registers 20 different specific driver’s occupations. Mail: office@wageindicator.org .

Can the outcome of the Salary Check be used for a pay rise?

The aim of the Salary Check is to provide the most accurate information about the expected wage for a worker in a specific occupation with a given set of individual characteristics. However the calculation of wage information in the Salary Check does not include aspects such as self-confidence, diligence, creativity, work attitude, and the like. These characteristics are part of one's individual human capital and co-determine one's salary. Therefore the wage predictions from the Salary Check have a great informative value but can be only part of one's input in wage bargaining. However, one may certainly try to make one's employer raise their pay, referring to one's occupational peer group as a benchmark.

How is the median wage calculated?

The median wage is the wage in the middle (when observed wages are sorted into ascending order). Because more people earn low wages than big salaries, the wage distribution is not symmetrical. In countries with high income inequality the wage distribution is highly skewed and the median wage is substantially lower than the average wage. Yet, the median wage as an indicator is not sensitive to outlying values and better expresses the situation of an ordinary worker, which most people are.

Related Content

More tests

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There’s Nothing Cheesier Than Egyptian Military Propaganda

Egypt’s autocratic regime likes kitsch

There’s Nothing Cheesier Than Egyptian Military Propaganda There’s Nothing Cheesier Than Egyptian Military Propaganda
It wasn’t exactly a surprise when Egypt’s top general announced he was running for president on March 26. Field Marshal Abdel Fattah El Sisi... There’s Nothing Cheesier Than Egyptian Military Propaganda

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when Egypt’s top general announced he was running for president on March 26. Field Marshal Abdel Fattah El Sisi has been Egypt’s ruling strongman since last July’s popular uprising—and military coup—against former Pres. Mohammed Morsi.

In the meantime, Sisi has developed a canny public image machine promoting everything from kitschy pop music videos to billboards and sweets.

The Sisi mania is despite—or perhaps aided by—a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood. On March 24, an Egyptian court sentenced 524 people to death in “the harshest mass conviction in modern Egyptian history,” described the New York Times.

The military’s Department of Morale Affairs has also spent the past few months promoting cheery stories about the military’s role in post-coup Egypt.

It’s celebrated a new bridge—built by the army—in congested Cairo and the invention of a quack device for curing HIV. The department also regularly circulates positive Sisi stories in the media through regular meetings with TV station managers.

At the same time, Sisi remains popular and is widely considered a shoe-in to win Egypt’s July 17 presidential election. But it’s very unlikely anyone with a chance of beating him at the polls—if such a candidate even existed—would be allowed to.

Sisi Fetish, a Tumblr blog collecting photographs of the general’s likeness on Egyptian streets, is a case study in the country’s pro-Sisi propaganda. The generalissimo appears on cakes and cookies.

There’s a sober-looking cartoon Sisi. He appears on bling and pajamas. There’s an advertisement for a “Sisy Mix Sandwich.”

Bridesmaids at a wedding are dressed in commando gear and wearing dresses patterned on the Egyptian flag—while flashing posters of the jefe, of course.

Sisi even shows up in pop music videos.

In one video, singer Hassan Abu Saif and personal trainer Bosy Moukhtar Bosey sing that “all the Egyptians love” the general. There are images of anti-Morsi demonstrations intermixed with military parades, parachutists and tank fire.

“We pray that our common president will be Marshal Abdel Fattah El Sisi,” Bosey says.

If there’s one word to describe all of this, it’s kitsch. What is kitsch? The term usually means a tacky and self-congratulatory form of popular art. Examples include tourist souvenirs, Disney cartoons and Dale Earhardt Sr. commemorative plates.

It’s funny, but also corny and overly-emotional. It’s meant to be.

“Kitsch tends to mimic the effects produced by real sensory experiences, presenting highly charged imagery, language, or music that triggers and automatic, and therefore unreflective, emotional reaction,” Whitney Rugg of the University of Chicago wrote.

Egypt’s military kitsch is a jarring combination of the popular and the authoritarian—used to promote a general responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

But the mix of kitsch and military authoritarianism is not as strange as it might appear. It’s a classic combination.

For one, it makes the general into an everyman. He has enormous power, but his face on a cake makes him relateable enough without appearing threatening—at least on the surface. The style serves as a sedative.

“The kitsch vision favors the aesthetic criteria of a submissive mass, joyously receptive in its quest for harmony and sentimentality,” historian Saul Friedländer noted in his study of Nazi kitsch.

Friedländer would go on to note that this quest implied an undercurrent of menace. With Sisi, there’s menace when his face is photoshopped alongside images of roaring lions and bloody war paintings—while riding a suitably ridiculous child’s rocking horse.

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Martin Lees

Teaching Activities

I teach the third year module PX382 Quantum Physics of Atoms and co-ordinate the activities associated with the second year laboratory module PX271 Physics Skills. I also supervise two pairs of final year project students.

Research Interests

I use low temperature magnetic, transport, and thermodynamic measurements to study the properties of highly correlated electron systems. I also use neutron scattering and muon spectroscopy in my work. Systems of interest include superconductors, magnetic oxides, and intermetallic systems.

For more details on the research activities of myself and the other members of the Superconductivity and Magnetism Group please visit our Research pages.

I am a Reader in the Physics Department at the University of Warwick. I have been based at Warwick since 1992.

I previously worked in the CRTBT-CNRS, Grenoble, France with Prof. Robert Tournier and in the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College with Prof. Bryan R. Coles.

Recent Paper Highlights

Martin Lees

Write to

Department of Physics
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Contact Details

+44 (0)24 76 523375
+44 (0)24 76 150897

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We help organisations, agencies and companies with asset rich environments to manage and make more informed decisions about their infrastructure assets.

Yotta is a connected asset management software and services provider. We empower organisations to make better, more informed decisions by ensuring our Customers systems, assets and people are connected, and the data they produce is structured and captured to provide operational insight.

Innovation is at the heart of everything we do and data drives us forward.

We understand our customer’s needs and provide them with revolutionary connected asset management solutions utilising our industry-leading software and consultancy services.

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The world around us is changing, with ever increasing data and connectivity and a need to maximise the value from this. Alloy will future proof organisations allowing connectivity of assets and data types, helping organisations make smarter, better decisions and maximise their efficiency.

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Mayrise offers a complete range of asset management modules across the highways realm, designed to help you manage your asset better. Created with both managers and end users in mind, the modules are designed to help you provide the best service whilst maintaining cost and operational efficiencies.

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The adoption of smart technologies is already part of the core business of government, and the organisational transformation required within local and central government authorities to keep up with the pace of change is significant.

That’s where we come in.  Our software solution Alloy can manage aross the assets type portfolio all in one programme.

We manage smart city technology.

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Yotta have been fully engaged in this process since the beginning and eager to work closely with us to develop innovative solutions to these kinds of highway maintenance challenges.

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Horizons’ high-quality visualisation capabilities make it a great presentation tool. We can use it to engage with all our stakeholders to show how different maintenance options will impact on the future condition of the whole network.

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Critical Illness Insurance

Critical illness insurance is also known as dread disease policy. This is an insurance product whereby the policyholder is entitled to payment by the cover provider if he/she contracts a particular disease. These diseases are highlighted in the insurance policy terms. The policyholder is required to survive for a particular period for the policy to mature. This time is called survival period and it varies from one company to another. Most companies use a survival period of 2 weeks. Most employers currently are insuring their employees with this cover. This employing company contracts an insurance firm to cover for their employees. Employers use this cover to protect their workers from financial constraints in case of sickness. Some employers also use the cover as a means of attracting people to work in their company.

Who requires this cover?

Critical insurance cover is mostly subsribed to by individuals suffering from terminal diseases. In most cases, the compensation is in not in terms of lump sum cash. The cover is instead used to pay for medical bills of the patient. The cover can also be used to pay for decreased income of the affected individual resulting from the inability to work due to sickness. The can also be used to pay for a mortgage in case the policyholder succumbs to the illness.

How does it work?

There are many different types of compensation. A policyholder can be paid a lump sum cash as highlighted in the cover terms. This payment can be made immediately upon diagnosis, and no other payment is made. Alternatively, the insurance provider pays the medical bills.

Covers available

The standard policy is where a policymaker is paid a pre-determined amount by the cover provider. In another form, the cover provider directly pays a healthcare provider money required for treatment of the policyholder. Mostly in this type of cover a policyholder is required to select a few hospitals where he/she wants to be treated in. An alternative cover pays for travel and accommodation expenses of the policyholder when he/she goes to another country for treatment.

Benefits of the cover

A policyholder receives some benefits upon subscription to this cover. They include
1. The policyholder is able to pay for treatment and care.
2. The policyholder can replace income lost during the convalescing period.
3. The policyholder can meet demands of the new lifestyle brought by sickness.


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FREE In Google Play

Why Wildfire Seasons Are Seemingly Getting Worse

By Sean Breslin

October 12 2017 09:45 PM EDT

Two Wildfires Burned At Least 90K Acres, 6,000 Evacuated in Utah

At a Glance

  • Wildfire season is getting longer because of several factors, including climate change.
  • Even when there's an above-average wet season, problems arise when the fresh vegetation dries out.
  • In Northern California, sprawl has forced some to live on the border between wildlands and urban areas.

In just a few days' time, Northern California residents have witnessed an explosion of wildfires that erupted into a full-blown disaster, and it didn't take long at all.

Wineries that stood for decades in Napa Valley were charred and reduced to rubble. More than 30 people died, and some evacuees remarked that they had mere seconds to pack up and flee the fires that advanced on their homes.

If it seems like wildfire seasons are getting worse, there's a reason for that: they are.

(MORE: The Latest on the Northern California Wildfires)

Two women sort through the rubble of a property in Napa, California, on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2017.
(Ray Chavez/San Jose Mercury News via AP)

Study after study after study has shown wildfire seasons are stretching longer and growing more intense, and global warming is one culprit. It's leading to longer, more extreme droughts that dry the land. When the wet season finally arrives, it allows vegetation to bloom. But when the rain goes away and those plants dry out, there's plenty of fuel to allow fires to turn into conflagrations in a matter of hours, in some instances.

"We've always seen pendulums," Eric Sagara, a journalist who has covered numerous wildfires, told Mother Jones. "But the dry periods are getting drier, and wet seasons are getting wetter. During the wet period, plants flourish. Then the dry period comes and dries everything out."

In the case of this week's Northern California wildfires, there are other factors at play. According to Earther, urban sprawl has put more people in wildfire-prone areas, living on the border between the wildlands and the city. That means more opportunities for a cigarette butt to spark an inferno, and more power lines that could cause a catastrophe if they fall.

In the big picture, as average global temperatures skew warmer and warmer, it also provides more time for plants and soil to dry out, which makes wildfire season longer, Mother Jones also said. So even after the wettest rainy season ever recorded in parts of Northern California, once the heat came back, there was still plenty of time to create ideal conditions for explosive wildfires to develop.

And for all facets of these worsening wildfire seasons, we have nobody to blame but ourselves, according to Mike Davis, a journalist who frequently covers topics like fire and the ways land is developed in California.

"Climate change is so dangerous because we've put billions of people and trillions of dollars of property directly into harm’s way," Davis told Mother Jones. "What we're seeing now is the lineage of bad decisions coming around, biting us, and threatening to devour us."

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.


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andersoncooper andersoncooper

490 posts   1,629,012 followers   478 followings

andersoncooper  CNN. 60Minutes. Author of #1 Bestsellers: Dispatches From The Edge. The Rainbow Comes And Goes. For Tickets to AC2 with @bravoandy:

On vacation, hanging out with the sweetest dog.

On some trip, some airport, I think, somewhere, sometime.

So nice to come home and find a warm pup waiting. #Welshspringerspaniel

Sleepy in Seoul... I had a great time in this really cool city! 감사합니다 서울! (I hope i got that right. Thank you #Seoul!)

Frozen mango on a stick.... maybe the best thing ever! Just one of several dozen things i love about #Seoul. Such a cool city! I may have to stop and get another frozen mango popsicle before speaking at the #CNHForum2018 tomorrow.... and maybe one afterwards. Come on NYC where are the frozen mango popsicles?

Happy Birthday @madonna! Thankfully, this photo gives little indication of the absolutely pathetic job i did dancing when she pulled me on stage with her.

Was an honor to have met @arethasings while filling in with @kellyripa. What a life... what a talent... what a contribution she made!

Back when i had a buzz cut.

30 years ago today, my brother, Carter Cooper, died by suicide. He was 23 years old. I miss him, and think about him every day. The shock of his death is as painful today as it was thirty years ago. • THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR COMMENTS, THEY ARE EXTRAORDINARILY MOVING AND MEANINGFUL TO ME. THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR OWN LOSSES AND EXPERIENCES WITH ME.

Tonight on @colbertlateshow @bravoandy and I talk #AC2. (Thanks Andy for the TERRIBLE pic of me!) Come see us in #WashingtonDC 9/29, #LasVegas 10/26; #Philly 11/3, #SanFrancisco 11/30, #LosAngeles12/1. Tickets at

Join me for a brand new interactive news show only on Facebook starting tonight, and on every weekday night, at 6:25pm est. The biggest stories of the day, and YOU get to weigh in. #FullCircle. Link in bio above!

i may look a little grumpy anchoring close to midnight in #Helsinki, BUT I think i am already in love with this city and its people.

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Assembling WebAssembly

We’re pleased to announce that WebKit has a full WebAssembly implementation.

Dynamic Duo

WebAssembly is a no-nonsense sidekick to JavaScript. It isn’t meant to be hand-written; rather, it’s a low-level binary format designed to be a suitable compilation target for existing languages such as C++. The WebAssembly code that the browser sees will already have undergone high-level, language-specific optimizations. This is great because it means implementations don’t have to know about how C++ or other languages are optimized. Running expensive language-specific optimization on the developers’ machines allows WebKit to focus on target-specific optimizations. It also means that we can focus WebAssembly compiler optimizations on fast code delivery and predictable performance.

WebAssembly cannot do everything that JavaScript does. For example, WebAssembly cannot access the DOM except by calling into JavaScript. WebAssembly is meant to be used in conjunction with JavaScript. The JavaScript / WebAssembly dynamic duo work in partnership, allowing JavaScript to stay focused on taking over the world, while WebAssembly accelerates computation-intensive tasks.

JavaScript and its sidekick, cosplaying as 1966 Batman

The web wouldn’t be itself without security and portability. WebAssembly delivers on both fronts. It executes C++ code at near native speed with the same joker-less security guarantees that JavaScript offers. Our implementation supports WebAssembly on x86-64 as well as ARM64 platforms. Portable performance is really where WebAssembly shines: the WebAssembly virtual Instruction Set Architecture was designed to be an ideal compilation target for today’s modern processors.

WebAssembly fits in with the rest of the web platform, as a good sidekick would. It re-uses existing web APIs and exposes a new JavaScript API. WebAssembly has four core concepts: WebAssembly.Module, WebAssembly.Instance, WebAssembly.Memory, and WebAssembly.Table. A module represents code and is similar to a program on disk, whereas an instance is an execution of that program. There can be multiple concurrently executing instances of the same module. Finally, a memory represents an instance’s heap. It is contiguous, bounds-checked, and can be exposed to JavaScript as an ArrayBuffer. All WebAssembly memory operations operate on the instance’s memory. Finally, a table holds handles to WebAssembly functions, allowing indirect calls within an instance to target different functions with the same signature (in C++-speak: virtual functions and function pointers). Interestingly, instances can share the same memory, and tables can call directly across instances which enables dynamic linking.

Because WebAssembly exposes itself as a regular JavaScript object, we were able to reuse some machinery that already existed within WebKit. An interesting example is our reuse of our ECMAScript Module implementation to implement WebAssembly.Instance‘s API. For now it’s an implementation detail—invisible to web developers—but integration with ECMAScript Modules is being discussed. For developers who use modules, interacting between JavaScript and WebAssembly would then be totally seamless. Behind the mask of modules, our heroes’ secret identities wouldn’t be revealed.

To allow sharing of modules between Web Workers and to prepare ourselves for future features like threads, we’ve made our internal representation of WebAssembly code thread-safe. This lets developers postMessage a compiled WebAssembly.Module across workers without requiring re-compilation, copying, or any other redundant work. Our implementation of postMessage for modules is simpler than a riddle: sharing a module between workers involves passing a reference to our internal module representation to the other worker. That worker will run the same machine code as the agent that originally produced the module.

Utility Belt

WebAssembly directly exposes 32- and 64-bit integers as well as 32- and 64-bit floating point numbers. Its instruction set is equally simple:

i32.add i64.add f32.add f64.add i32.wrap/i64 i32.load8_s i32.store8
i32.sub i64.sub f32.sub f64.sub i32.trunc_s/f32 i32.load8_u i32.store16
i32.mul i64.mul f32.mul f64.mul i32.trunc_s/f64 i32.load16_s
i32.div_s i64.div_s f32.div f64.div i32.trunc_u/f32 i32.load16_u i64.store8
i32.div_u i64.div_u f32.abs f64.abs i32.trunc_u/f64 i32.load i64.store16
i32.rem_s i64.rem_s f32.neg f64.neg i32.reinterpret/f32 i64.load8_s i64.store32
i32.rem_u i64.rem_u f32.copysign f64.copysign i64.extend_s/i32 i64.load8_u
i32.and i64.and f32.ceil f64.ceil i64.extend_u/i32 i64.load16_s
i32.or i64.or f32.floor f64.floor i64.trunc_s/f32 i64.load16_u
i32.xor i64.xor f32.trunc f64.trunc i64.trunc_s/f64 i64.load32_s
i32.shl i64.shl f32.nearest f64.nearest i64.trunc_u/f32 i64.load32_u
i32.shr_u i64.shr_u i64.trunc_u/f64 i64.load call
i32.shr_s i64.shr_s f32.sqrt f64.sqrt i64.reinterpret/f64 f32.load call_indirect
i32.rotl i64.rotl f32.min f64.min f64.load
i32.rotr i64.rotr f32.max f64.max
i32.clz i64.clz nop grow_memory
i32.ctz i64.ctz block current_memory
i32.popcnt i64.popcnt f32.demote/f64 loop
i32.eqz i64.eqz f32.convert_s/i32 if get_local
i32.eq i64.eq f32.convert_s/i64 else set_local f32.convert_u/i32 br tee_local
i32.lt_s i64.lt_s f32.convert_u/i64 br_if
i32.le_s i64.le_s f32.reinterpret/i32 br_table get_global
i32.lt_u i64.lt_u f32.eq f64.eq f64.promote/f32 return set_global
i32.le_u i64.le_u f64.convert_s/i32 end
i32.gt_s i64.gt_s f64.convert_s/i64 i32.const
i32.ge_s i64.ge_s f32.le f64.le f64.convert_u/i32 drop i64.const
i32.gt_u i64.gt_u f64.convert_u/i64 select f32.const
i32.ge_u i64.ge_u f64.reinterpret/i64 unreachable f64.const

The instructions are low-level by design, and it is this low-level quality that gives WebAssembly its power. WebAssembly was born as a compilation target, molded by compiler engineers.

WebKit’s WebAssembly implementation, like our JavaScript implementation, uses a tiering system to balance startup costs with throughput. Currently, there are two tiers to the engine: the Build Bytecode Quickly (BBQ) tier and the Optimized Machine-code Generator (OMG) tier. Both rely on the B3 JIT as their low-level optimizer.

WebAssembly modules can easily contain tons of code, some of which isn’t executed more than once or very frequently. This is why we opted to use two tiers: one that generates decent code quickly, and one that generates optimized code only when the engine thinks the code is hot enough to warrant it. BBQ compiles code about 4× as fast as OMG, but produces code that executes roughly 2× as slow as OMG. We use a background thread when compiling functions using the OMG. When OMG compilation finishes, we pause the executing WebAssembly threads and hot-patch the OMG compilation into the module.

WebAssembly being a low-level format—compared to JavaScript being a dynamic language—means that things aren’t as fickle when compiling WebAssembly. For example, WebAssembly statically tells us the types of all values within a function and gives us the signatures of all functions ahead of time.

In order to produce executable code as soon as possible, the BBQ tier omits many of the optimizations possible in the B3 compiler. Additionally, the BBQ tier also uses a linear scan combined register / stack allocation algorithm. This allocates registers about 11× faster than the graph coloring algorithm that B3 usually uses. Avoiding expensive optimization allows WebKit to produce BBQ fast, so that BBQ may be consumed as soon as possible.

When a function has been executed enough times, our WebAssembly runtime decides to optimize that function. Since WebAssembly does not require any type speculations, we only use tiering to conserve compile time. BBQ code contains only the profiling needed to detect when code has executed many times.

We share modules, along with all of their runtime state (like tiering-up from BBQ to OMG) between workers. Since we hot-patch the BBQ code, which might be executing on any number of threads, we need to be sure that each call-site can be concurrently updated to point to the OMG code. In order to avoid checking for new code on each call to a function, like JavaScript does, we track each call-site to every function, both in assembly and indirectly. Whenever the OMG version of a function is finished compiling, it replaces each call-site with a pointer to the code.

One of the most important optimizations in WebAssembly is reducing the overhead on memory accesses while preserving security guarantees. WebAssembly specifies that all memory accesses are performed on a single 32-bit linear memory. We do this by reserving slightly more than 4GiB of virtual address space. This virtual reservation doesn’t occupy physical memory unless accessed. We use the hardware’s page protection mechanism to mark all but the lower pages as non-readable and non-writable. All loads and stores from this 32-bit address space can be performed normally, without explicit bounds checking instructions. If a load or store would be out of bounds, it will trigger a hardware fault that will ultimately result in a POSIX SIGSEGV or a Mach EXC_BAD_ACCESS exception. Our custom signal / Mach exception handlers then ensure the fault originated from a WebAssembly memory operation. If so, we set the instruction pointer to a special code stub that performs a WebAssembly trap and materializes a WebAssembly.RuntimeError in JavaScript. This optimization means that a WebAssembly memory operation typically results in a single load or store instruction. Overall, we measured a 15-20% speedup from this optimization on various WebAssembly benchmarks.

WebAssembly memory signal

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Weekend Winos

Enthusiasts in search of quality libations to enhance weekends.

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Spirits Alley Alameda – Vacation 30 minutes from Home

What a nice surprise!  We had planned a fun brunch with winos from Alameda to explore the island. As the sun started to set, we found ourselves drinking wine with a fabulous view of the SF skyline from the former Naval Air Station on Alameda Point. After 4 hours, we were still laughing and relaxed – it felt as if we were on vacation.  But…I am getting ahead of myself.

We had researched bars and restaurants on Park and Webster. We noticed the Pacific Pinball Museum (yes we have some pinball fans in the group), the historic Alameda Theater, and a rich variety of architecturally diverse homes from Bungalows to Victorians. We never expected to discover the tasting rooms at Spirits Alley (walking distance from Alameda’s Main Street Ferry Station) and the fabulous food that appeared from that little window at Scolari’s at The Point

At first, the huge hangars and old buildings made us wonder what we had gotten ourselves into, then we started seeing names we recognized – Hangar 1 Vodka, Rock Wall Wine Company, Faction Brewing, St. George Spirits, and Building 43 Winery. We were determined to visit all of them.

IMG_9122Well, that was the plan. The reality is that we started at Rock Wall Wine Company and that is where we stayed.  The tasting experience was excellent (5 tastes from an extensive selection + and extra bubbly to start) and you can buy wines by the glass so everyone can have exactly what they want.  That is enough of a good start, but combined with the delicious food from Scolari’s, the comfortable seating area (some of it reserved for adults only), the SF city skyline view and great conversation and laughs with  our group – it was spectacular. Did I mention that each person could buy wine by the glass (in hindsight we should have just opened a few bottles) so everyone could drink exactly what they wanted. During the week, they even have Happy Hour with a 50% discount on select glasses of wine.

There were many medals displayed, no doubt a result of the skill of Winemaker Shauna Rosenblum.  But over the course of 4 hours of fun and relaxation – we were determined to judge for ourselves, and we did!  Some of the standouts came home with us: 2013 Tannat “The Palindrome”, 2015 Sparkling Grenache Rose , 2014 Chardonnay from Sonoma,2012 Le Mur de Roche ( a special treat) and 2015 Zin Nymph.

We will definitely be back to create new experiences at the other tasting rooms we did not get to this time.

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The Sazerac Bar

The Sazerac BarA few of us recently met up in New Orleans – do I need to say more?   Yes!

The whole trip was great, but the time we spent at The Sazerac Bar in The Roosevelt New Orleans Hotel was fantastic!

Truth be told,  we did not specifically plan on going to this bar, but a few of the weekend winos were staying at The Roosevelt Hotel.  We did want to taste the Sazerac drink, a traditional New Orleans cocktail, and this place made it a great experience.

BarThe whole ritual of the two chilled old-fashioned glasses, cognac or rye, bitters, absinthe and the muddled sugar cube is great to watch, and even better to consume.  It is a strong drink and pricey, but worth every penny of it.

The bar is dark and soothing, with comfortable leather couches (we were there at an off-time, so we could sit back and relax). An old-school kind of bar with dark wood,  definitely first-class atmosphere.  You can’t help but feel like you are transported back to a different era.  The service is impeccable and  the mixologists really know their craft.  There is a lot of history here and the servers take pride in making it more than a drink at the hotel bar.

The Official Sazerac Cocktail Recipe (courtesy of The Sazerac Company

1 cube sugar

1½ ounces (35ml) Sazerac Rye Whiskey or Buffalo Trace Bourbon

¼ ounce Herbsaint

3 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters

Lemon peel

Pack an Old-Fashioned glass with ice. In a second Old-Fashioned glass place the sugar cube and add the Peychaud’s Bitters to it, then crush the sugar cube.  Add the Sazerac Rye Whiskey or Buffalo Trace Bourbon to the second glass containing the Peychaud’s Bitters and sugar. Empty the ice from the first glass and coat the glass with the Herbsaint, then discard the remaining Herbsaint. Empty the whiskey/bitters/sugar mixture from the second glass into the first glass and garnish with lemon peel.

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Amarone della Valpolicella – A New Find!

At a recent group dinner, we discovered Amarone.  What a treat!

A couple of weekendwinos had just returned from Italy and were delighted to find that the restaurant we selected offered a great selection of Amarone wines and they were eager to have the group share what they had experienced on their trip.

The wines full name is Amarone della Valpolicella, it is made in the Valpolicella region north of Verona in northern Italy.They use the same blend of grapes as Valpolicella but the grapes for Amarone are laid to rest and partially dried for 3 to 4 months. This approach, called appassimento, results in grapes of an intense flavor and high sugar content,making Amarone a very rich and complex wine with 15% or more alcohol.

IMG_1694The word Amarone translated to English means bitter, this was intentional to differentiate this robust wine from the extremely sweet Recioto also produced in the Veneto wine region.

We were fortunate to enjoy two very good bottles, the Amarone Classico was smoother and of higher quality, but both were perfect with our Italian dinner and embellished many of the stories from recent rips to Italy.

Lake Tahoe 29th Annual Autumn Food and Wine Festival

WoodworkI don’t know if it is the altitude, good friends, wine, beer, sake, cooking demonstrations or the art but….this event is fantastic! We try to get to The Village at Northstar for the Lake Tahoe Autumn Food and Wine Festival every year.  Although we are tempted by many of the events from Friday to Sunday, we always default to The Village Wine & Brew Walk on Saturday from noon to 4 pm. And that’s what we did this year!

With more than 35 wineries, breweries and distilleries participating, we had a full schedule. Luckily the Truckee Sourdough Company and Fab Delights Chocolate Truffles were also participating. Their bread and chocolates are “oh so delicious” and a perfect intermezzo for the libations.  Wine merchants can not sell their wines at the event, this creates a more relaxed and enjoyable experience — the type of experience you’d expect in beautiful North Lake Tahoe.

SilkwoodOnce again, we uncovered some wines that we had not tried before, some that stood out included:

Silkwood Petite Sirah: In its third reincarnation, this small Modesto, CA winery had some very smooth rich wines.  They are proud to point out that they sell their wines in 21 states, Japan and HongKong.  In fact Japan Airlines selected their Syrah as the only American Red Wine to be served in First Class.

LucchesiLucchesi Zinfandel: From their “View Forever Vineyard” in the Sierra Foothills, Mario and Linda Clough produce some delicious wines.  We all agreed to make Grass Valley a destination trip to experience the View Forever Vineyard first hand and relax as we learn more about their collection of wines, their Italian heritage and their family escapades in South America.

Schug Pinot Noir: A family affair with German roots, the winery is located in the Sonoma portion of the Carneros Appelation. What a great family story and the wines are fantastic.  On our list for our next Sonoma adventure – a self-guided tour after learning more about the wines, buy a few bottles of wine, enjoy their picnic tables and the views.

No doubt the 29th annual Lake Tahoe Wine and Food Festival was an adventure we will always remember and now the countdown begins to the 30th annual event.  We’ll be there!

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Escapade to Portland’s Urban Wineries

Portland Urban Wineries – what a treat!

We only had 4 hours of free time in Portland and we were determined to make the most of our search for fantastic Pinot Noirs. That is how we uncovered that although Oregon’s wine country encompasses 16 specific AVAs and spans all the way down to California there are some fantastic urban wineries right in Portland. Oregon produces wine varieties from Albarinho to Zinfandel, which we will gladly return to taste, but that day we sought out the Pinot Noirs.

TesoariaPortland is easy to navigate with its 4 distinct quadrants.  The airport seemed closest to Northeast Portland so we stayed focused to the East of the Willamette River and prioritized those that were open before 4 pm.

First stop TeSoAria,  all the reviews said this was one of the best and they are right. Since it was around 3 pm the tasting room was quiet and we had the luxury of meeting the founder and winemaker John Olson and his chef who was getting ready for the after work crowd.  Yes we were focused on Pinots which we did taste, award wining and it was fantastic, but we also enjoyed the barrel cabernet and merlot blend. John gave us a great overview of wines in Oregon and promised that when we return he would gladly help us plan a 4 day tour not a 4 hour dash.

Coopers HallWith only a few hours to spare and traffic starting to slow things down we dashed off to Coopers Hall which was only 4 blocks aways from Cyril’s at Clay Pigeon Winery.  Great Choices!

Coopers Hall is a great place, they were getting ready for a corporate event that afternoon on the top balcony level but we were always well attended and offered a chance to see all the barrels behind all those wine spouts on the wall. How cool!  The tasting sizes were perfect for our goal of tasting variety.

Less than 2 minutes away we stopped at Cyril’s where we had a delicious cheese plate and a large glass of a very smooth 2012 Clay Pigeon Winery Chehalem Mountains Pinot Noir. The outdoor patio looked like a lot of fun and the logo with the symbol of hands making a shadow puppet of a bird is very clever.

There were so many more wineries we wanted to visit: ENSO, Hip Chicks Do Wine (great name) and others, but we had reached our limit of time as well as consumption in that short time.  No doubt we will plan a more relaxing, 4 day tour with a driver!

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Antique Fair Led to Santa Clara Valley Wine Discovery

GoatHillThe group had the Goat Hill Fair on our “list of places to explore” for some time.  The vintage theme, antiques and hand-made items were primarily of interest to the ladies in the group……. then, we discoverd that there are more than 20 wineries around Morgan Hill and Gilroy so the gents were happy to join.  The Goat Hill Fair outgrew its origins in a real 14 acre goat farm in the Santa Cruz mountains and now takes over the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville, CA for a weekend each May and Novemeber.  With more than 80 vendors participating, there is something for everyone.  These are real antiques and vintage items, and we made the most of our afternoon at the Goat Hill Fair.

We knew we would not be able to visit all 20 wineries, and realized that we knew very little about the Santa Clara Valley Wineries.

FortinoThe website is very informative and reminds us that : “Silicon Valley” – it’s easy to forget this area’s role as California’s first premium wine production region – the Santa Clara Valley. Native Americans named it “the Valley of the Heart’s Delight.” French and Italian immigrants who settled here during the Gold Rush era recognized the rich soils and Mediteranean climate as the perfect New World home for their European grape varietals. And so it begins…

I must confess the decision of what wineries to visit was based on what time the tasting rooms opened, since we were, afterall, on our way to the Goat Hill Fair.  So we started at Fortino Winery, they opened at 11 am and then visited the others around Watsonville Road and Hacker Pass Hwy 152.   Solis Winery, Sarah’s Vineyard, Hecker Pass Winery were within walking distance, and 3 or 4 more were just up the street, but we wisely decided to make a point to return some other time to visit the rest.

The overall experience was fantastic and very realxing. There were no crowds,  people were friendly and very knowleadgeable and the wines were good.  Many of the vineyards are family owned and they mostly produce small lots that they are very proud of.  Unfortunatly our time was limited, but no doubt we will be back!

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Napa Art and Wine

Napa here we come, pack a bag for an overnight trip.  Although Napa is not far from where most of the weekend winos live, a few of us decided to spend the night which requires a little more planning than the usual weekend adventures. First we picked where we would go tasting and everything else (hotel, restaurants, etc.) followed.  Interestingly, there was an art element to each of the winery picks.

NapaPEJU in Rutherford: The Peju Winery Art Gallery had just rotated their exhibit to An Artful Pairing with The Christopher Hill Gallery (through April 23, 2014).  We went to Peju specifically for the Cabernet Franc and it was as good as we remembered or better.  To our surprise, the less expensive wines we tasted were also excellent.  Provence, a red and white blend, is light yet complex and surprisingly good.  One of the winos was so impressed by all the wines, she joined the Peju Club.

Del Dotto Estate Winery and Cave in St.Helena: We were immediately transported to Italy via the architecture, music and the barrel tasting. Our host was very well informed and tasting the difference between a Cabernet Sauvignon from French and American oak barrels side-by-side, straight out of the barrels was a great experience.  The Ca’Nani label made us all smile.  Ca’Nani translates from Italian meaning “House of the Dwarves”, it comes from a Venetian fairy tale from the Grimm brothers in the late 1800’s.  The port with dark chocolate, that we enjoyed after some pizza and prosciutto made on site, was a favorite for most of us.

The Hess Collection Winery and Art Museum:  This was our last stop and in my personal opinion, the art gallery was just as impressive as the wines we tasted.  From 16 different options ranging from Gewurtztraminer to Malbec,  the 2012 Napa Valley Chardonnay and the 2010 Mount Veeder Cabernet Sauvignon were clear winners for all the winos.  At Hess they “support responsible hospitality”  just like our group “supports responsible drinking”.

We stayed at the Napa Valley Lodge in Yountville which had been recommended by many in the group. The rooms, staff, complimentary wine tasting Friday afternoon and breakfast in the morning made us feel right at home (no better compliment than that for a hotel).  After dinner we returned to the room to find the perfect saying on our pillows:  Wine is one of the agreeable and essential ingredients of life –  Julia Child.


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1998 Specimen Set of Canadian Coins

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The Royal Canadian Mint is proud to present the 1998 Specimen Set of Canadian Coins.

The finish on these superb coins is a three-fold combination of brilliant and frosted relief on a lined finish background.

Each coin is in this set has been individually inspected to ensure that it meets the high standards of the Royal Canadian Mint.

This beautiful sets includes the following coins:

2 Dollars; 1 Dollar; 50 cents; 25 cents; 10 cents; 5 cents and 1 cent.

This year's elegant book-style packaging, with removable lens, splendidly complements these fine coins and establishes a new image for the collector sets of the Royal Canadian Mint.

The set is presented in colourful outer box.

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Should I cut out dairy?

Posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Written by Lindzie O'Reilly

We are constantly bombarded with a list of foods that we should include and foods we should avoid. It seems that the newest food trend involves banishing dairy from our diets. With so much information out there, many individuals feel at a loss in terms of what to believe. I don’t blame you!

So really…should I cut out dairy?

Unless you have an allergy or medical condition that requires you to avoid a specific food, I don’t believe that any food should be cut out completely.

So…maybe I should just reduce my intake of dairy?

It’s important to remember that each person is different. What works for your friend, your trainer, or your mom may or may not work for you. Food should be a personal choice, not something you are pressured or guilted into. Going solely on the advice of another person or using an app or a book to tell you what and how much you should eat will get you into trouble. Instead, experiment with a variety of food options to find out what makes you feel best.

While I don’t believe that there are health benefits to cutting out any specific food completely (unless you have an allergy or medical reason), it’s also not great to rely on any single food to make up a certain micro (think vitamins, minerals) or macro (think carbohydrate, fat and protein) need. I wouldn’t want chicken to be your only source of protein, wheat to be your only source of carbohydrate or milk to be your only source of calcium. Aim for variety and flexibility.

But really…what would happen if I cut out dairy?

Food is a personal choice. I believe that you should not cut out any food or food group completely, but instead aim for variety in your diet to ensure you meet your energy and nutrient needs.

That said, if you choose to cut out dairy for taste or ethical reasons, it certainly is possible to still meet your calcium needs. Many grains, nuts, seeds and veggies contain calcium. Most dairy alternatives such as soy milk are fortified with calcium. Below is an example meal plan that would allow you to reach the recommended 1000mg of calcium per day, without even relying on fortified dairy alternatives.

Example Meal Plan

large flake oatmeal (1/2 cup uncooked), chia seeds (2 tbsp), banana + 1 hardboiled egg

Salad with kale (1.5 cups), chopped tomato, cucumber, white beans (3/4 cup), cooked quinoa (3/4 cup) and lemon tahini dressing (2 tbsp) + an apple

Broccoli (1 cup) and hummus (1/4 cup)

Salmon burger (made with 3oz salmon with bones) with a bun and steamed mixed veggies (1 cup) + 2 cookies

almonds (1/4 cup) and 4 figs

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People evacuated in Athol after broken ice jam causes flooding concerns

ATHOL, Mass. (WHDH) — Residents in Athol were evacuated over the weekend after a massive piece of ice broke free from the Millers River, causing concerns about flooding.

Twenty-six people were evacuated from the Morton Meadows complex Saturday morning due to concerns the river could flood.

“There isn’t very much room under that bridge, it was budding up against it. I’m a little concerned,” said Beverly Politano, who had to evacuate. Her house was not affected.

The ice did cause damage across town. On Monday, the Exchange Street Bridge remained closed after ice broke off fasteners to a water main pipe under the bridge. Town Manager Shaun Suhoski said the closure will remain in effect until the state’s Department of Transportation (MassDOT) can inspect and clear the bridge.

Athol Fire Chief John Duguay said residents are advised to stay away from the river because the ice jam remains.

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