Links 18 September 2026

Carl Gustav Carus, Morning Bells (Old German City in the Morning Light)

What happened to industrial workers as manufacturing work shifted from artisanal handcraft to managing machines? This paper says, not much; what happened was that younger workers stopped going into the old trades and began going into new disciplines. Few workers actually changed jobs.

The World Bonsai Convention, 13-minute video.

Excellent Scott Siskind meditation on Ludd, from ancient Celtic deity to patron of modern Luddites.

The first known battle between naval drones has taken place in the Black Sea.

Roman gold hoard likely buried in 395 AD.

Inscription marking the site of a lightning strike found at Hadrian's villa.

Chinse "micro drama," made for watching on a phone, each episode about two minutes.

Kiaf Seoul, South Korea's biggest art show.

The American obesity rate peaked around 2021 and has been declining ever since.

Discussion of the new evidence on Dark Energy and the expansion of the universe, 15-minute video.

Richard Hanania, "the vibes of the right are genocidal."

Interesting article from Google on AI in science: scientists are using AI a lot, and report significant productivity gains.

Spitalfields Life, In Search of Roman London.

Re-imagining Himalayan Art.

Preserving the art in a Mexican cave that includes many paintings from the colonial period.

Interesting: "I find that hazardous occupations tend to have higher concentrations of conservative workers, even after controlling for several alternative explanations. Further, using longitudinal data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, I find that individuals employed in hazardous occupations tended to become more conservative over time relative to their peers in safer occupations."

A new way to detect scientific fraud: fraudsters often rely on sources hallucinated by LLMs.

Daycare pseudoscience: none of the various claims about how daycare hurts children have stood up to scrutiny.

AI regulation and regulatory capture (Marginal Revolution)

A final burial for cold fusion.

Niko McCarty: "We’ve invented microbes that can eat plastic, detect landmines, and extract rare metals. They’ve been swallowed by a (regulatory) black hole."

The history of women in mining.

The Lucas Museum

The latest big new museum is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which houses the art collection of George Lucas and his wife, Melody Hobson. It looks like a spaceship, but then, what else was it going to look like? The architect was Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, who has done several large museums in China.

Based on the photographs in this NY Times piece, the building has the same problem as others designed around a cool shape: it looks great from a distance, but up close you're just standing next to molded concrete.

Anyway the point of the museum is to display what Lucas calls "narrative art," that is, visual images that tell stories. That includes comic book art (Jim Lee and Scott Williams, Future State: Justice League, 2001)

Book illustrations (Maurice Sendak)

Cover art from fantasy novels, (Julie Bell, The Huntress, 1996)

Stuff that looks like Norman Rockwell, (John Philip Falter, Lunch Counter, 1946, detail)

And historical work (Howard Pyle, Phoenician Traders, 1904)

Of course the museum holds the Lucasfilm archives, including the original art by Ralph McQuarrie, the chief visual designer of the Star Wars universe.

Persusing the museum web site, I mainly get warm feelings. The last big new art museum in Los Angeles, the Broad Museum, seemed to me a product of its patrons' desire to seem really, really cool. With the Lucas Museum I have the sense that this is all stuff the patrons actually like.

I mean, doesn't this classic N.C. Wyeth illustration capture the artistic vision of George Lucas as well as anything? The museum opens September 22.

My Copies of "The Voice from the Darkness" have Arrived

Me, ten days after heart surgery, showing off one of the first printed copies of The Voice from the Darkness. 

I have written about 50 pages of volume II, working title The Red Admiral, but I stalled out and then my wife died, but I will get back to it. I know the whole story because this is my old gaming world that I have been developing since 1980, and I know about not just this generation but their children and grandchildren.

Thinking over this story, there are things I really like about it. I love how the young aristocratic circle came out, both the individual characters and the interactions between them, and I am modifying the story as I first imagined it to give them more time together. I love the city of Calyxia, divided by a rubble wall between a human half and a dark side stalked by monsters. I love the ideas about magic I have been playing with, which I derived from ancient Chinese shamanism. And as always when I write I love some of the minor characters who just spring into my mind, play their small parts and move on.

Here is a question for my readers: would anyone be interested in an audiobook? I could afford to have one made if people would listen.

Today's Place to Daydream About: Cortona, Italy

Cortona is a famous Tuscan town on a hilltop overlooking the Val di Chiana. The place has been occupied since Etruscan times is now a regular part of Tuscan tours.

Remains of the old Etruscan stone walls are still visible in several places.

One of the longest texts in ancient Etruscan, the Cortona Tablet, comes from here; seems to record the settlement of legal dispute.

There is a Roman villa of the Augustan period that survives buried under later rubble, open to tours.

The main piazza is quiet delightful, with its 14-century town hall.

This plain little church has a fresco by Fra Angelico, 

and there is a lovely Annunciation (above) by the same artist in the local museum.

You can climb up to this sixteenth-century church for a better view across the valley.

You can see why several movies have been filmed here, including Under the Tuscan Sun.

As I wait impatiently for my body to recover from surgery, my thoughts go to places like Cortona, where ancient pasts and modern style mingle to create delight.

Drink

Some time Monday, after days in the ICU drinking only water, my nurse brought me a cup of ginger ale over ice. It tasted like heaven, the first real physical pleasure I had experinced since my surgery three days before.

And this set me thinking on what a huge part of human culture is devoted to making good things to drink. We have enormous global cultures built around tea and coffee, Europe's passionate attachment to wine and beer, and in the modern world a riotous explosion of drinks, from sophisticate cocktails to sweet sodas; Coca-Cola is the largest private employer in Africa. 

We humans love a tasty drink.

Links 11 September 2026

Friedrich Kunath, “Storms Never Last”, 2023

Some strange Iron Age carved symbols may be early Norse runes.

A serious paper estimating the economic impact of AI over the next five years.

Remains of a huge Roman wall mosaic found under Trajan's Baths in Rome.

Norwegian archaeology: the Baglers, the Birchlegs, and the body in the well.

Why robotics is hard.

Tyler Cowen interviews Jared Diamond.

Sales of nonfiction books are way down.

An illustrated history of women's underwear.

Some eerily contemporary complaints about San Francisco, from the nineteenth century. People, housing in thriving cities is always expensive. This has probably been true since ancient Uruk.

Ethan Molick asks a couple of AIs to "make a game about imminence."

JD Vance did not like the discussion in the White House about the upcoming Iran war, so he devoted a lot of time and energy to asking military officers, CIA agents, and others about their views. This NY Times story paints Vance as someone who at least understands that war is a serious business.

From Scott Siskind's book review contest, what may actually be the best review I have read of The Tale of Genji, brings home how weird it is.

Meditation seems to help some people, but for others it can be a gateway into a dark realm of brooding and self-torture.

Johns Hopkins, William Osler, and the Founding of Modern American Medicine

Johns Hopkins (1795–1873) was a Maryland-born Quaker from a business family. He got early into the wholesaling business, moving manufactured goods to farm country in western Maryland and Virginia and buying the products of those regions in return. He built up enough capital to be an early investor in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, serving for a while as its Treasurer, and ran a bank that invested in manufacturing companies. By 1847 he had retired.

Then he did something quite remarkable. He bought thirteen acres of land east of Baltimore and set aside his whole fortune of about $7 million to found three new institutions: "Johns Hopkins University", "The Johns Hopkins Hospital", and "Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum." At the time this was the largest charitable bequest in US history. Never one to leave things to chance, Hopkins recruited twelve prominent Maryland men to serve as trustees of the new institutions and wrote detailed instructions for them to follow.

For our purposes the most important instructions governed the hospital. It should "in construction and arrangement, compare favorably with any other institution of like character in this country or in Europe." The trustees should "secure for the service of the Hospital, physicians and surgeons of the highest character and greatest skill." And they should "bear constantly in mind that it is my wish and purpose that the hospital shall ultimately form a part of the Medical School of that university for which I have made ample provision in my will."

And thus was born the modern teaching hospital. I can't find out much about the trustees, but they must have been capable fellows, because they brought Hopkins' vision to life. They recruited those top surgeons by the simple expedient of offering the highest salaries ever paid to doctors, anywhere. One of those who accepted was Canadian physician William Osler (1849-1919).

Osler was another remarkable man, one of the generation of doctors who turned medicine from a mishmash of quackery, Galenism, folk wisdom, and surgical speed into a scientific discipline. He was also, apparently, a great teacher, a man who could take something everyone sort of knew and express it in an unforgettable phrase. Like, "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis."

Before this time, medical school consisted almost entirely of lectures and demonstrations. But Osler thought a more practical approach was needed, and he created one:

Osler, the first chief of the Department of Medicine, is credited with originating the idea of a residency, in which recently graduated physicians receive advanced training in their specialty while treating patients under supervision; then, as now, residents comprise most of the medical staff of the hospital. He also introduced the idea of bringing medical students into actual patient care early in their training; at the time medical school consisted almost entirely of lectures. Osler's contribution to practical education extends to the creation of "grand rounds", the practice of leading physicians discussing the most difficult cases in front of assembled medical students, for the benefit of patients and students. The term "rounds" derives from the circular ward where bedside teaching occurred. He once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching."

That last seems to have been one of his favorite lines, since it exists in several slightly different versions of different dates. And since I just witnessed my own doctors bringing students or "fellows" with them on their own rounds, I can confirm that it remains central to the teaching experience of Hopkins. (Sadly I never got to be the subject of discussion; I think I was too boring and simple a case. But the unfortunate person in the shadowed ICU room two doors down got at least two long discussions that I witnessed.)

Johns Hopkins went on to be one of the great institutions of modern medicine, launching whole branches of surgery and being the first place in the Americas to train female doctors, This, you know, is the thing that distinguishes the modern world from all that came before. In our day a man can get filthy rich in business and decide to invest his profits in creating an entirely new class of institution to solve a problem that past ages regarded as just an inevitable part of life.

I believe in a dynamic world where we try to make things better, not a bitter one in which everyone idiotically moans on about how much better things were in the old days. So I celebrate men like Johns Hopkins and William Osler who glimpsed the future and worked in concrete ways to make it real.

Heart Surgery, or, We Live in a Future Utopia

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Well, that was something.

On Friday I arrived at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore at 5 AM and made my way in. By 7:30 I was on the operating table, and by 1:30 I was the proud owner of a new aortic valve and a repaired aorta.

The first 36 hours after surgery were basically torture, the next 36 utter misery. I remember thinking at some point that if I were presented with this choice again I might just buy a gun and end it. I hurt all over, I felt nauseated, I had to contemplate the 11 separate lines, tubes, and wires sprouting from my body, all of which had to be removed over the next few days, each one an experience. Sleep came at me like waves on a beach, dragging me under and then leaving me stranded on wakeful shores at 2 AM or 4 AM. It sucked.

After that improvement was remarkably fast, and by Tuesday I was bored and longing to go home.

I did have some medical hiccoughs. My blood pressure spiked a couple of times, and one night my heart kept going into atrial fibrillation. But it nothing the team at Hopkins couldn't handle using the vast armada of powerful drugs that have at their fingertips.

By dinner time Thursday I was home. I am still profoundly weak and looking at a months-long healing process, but I am home, and safe, and ready to write.

And I think, what an incredible miracle. What an age of wonders I live in, what a thousand-times blessed life I lead, and what is wrong with humanity that even this cornucopia cannot satisfy us?

I am no kind of special person, just a middle class, middle manager with a regular suburban house and ordinary American health insurance. But when my heart was failing I was whisked away to a temple of science where I received a level of care that did not exist 20 years ago.

Think what a miracle a place like Johns Hopkins is, thousands of people of every ethnicity coming together from across the globe to care for other humans. My doctors had names like Aziz, Shibaz, Ta Jung, and Richardson. My nurses were born on three continents. Not long ago a hospital was a monument to gender roles, but now no one bats an eye at a male nurse and doctors will soon be majority female. Everyone I saw was polite, friendly, efficient and, I think, devoted to helping me. 

All of this is only possible because of things about our world that millions of us hate. I see complaints every day from people who hate capitalism because it forces us to work, but if nobody worked, who would have cared for me? (All of you miserable young folks out there, think about becoming a nurse; it's just a two-year degree and if you are smart and unsqueamish you can earn $100,000 a year actually helping other people.) People complain about competition, but it is competition between scientists, surgeons, and medical companies that has produced all these wonders. People complain about inequality, but I don't begrudge my surgical team what they earn; I know the level of effort and ambition it takes to become a heart surgeon at a place like Hopkins, and if paying them a lot gets the top people to pursue those jobs, why not? Yes, our world is unequal, but as I just wrote, that means an ordinary man like me can get surgical care past kings and emperors could not dream of. Is that not a powerful kind of democracy?

All the things we are really good at, from heart surgery to video games to pop music, are that way because those fields are savagely competitive. Because people work at them from a combination of personal ambition, a desire to get rich, and a desire to be where the action is. That means many people fail. So? Is there some system in which we all get to do what we want that doesn't end up a wallow of mediocrity?

The model of a better world is right in front of us, in hospitals like Johns Hopkins. The key is to focus, not on who people are, but on what they can do.

And now to get on with the rest of my life.

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

In February, my wife Lisa died after 34 years of marriage.

And now in September I am facing open heart surgery for aortic valve replacement. I go in tomorrow, September 4.

These things compound, because my wife was a nurse who was always wonderful at taking care of her family when we were sick, and to be facing this without her at my side feels cruel and wrong. I have been missing her lately with the same brutally painful intensity I felt in the weeks after her death.

The causes are also mixed up together. My wife slipped into renewed drug addiction before my eyes, but I did not notice because I was depressed myself and, I think, ignored plain evidence because I did not have the strength to deal with the consequences of calling her out. My doctor first detected my heart murmur two years ago and suggested I see a cardiologist, but I did nothing. Partly this was because I felt fine – still feel mostly, fine, actually – and partly because I did not want to deal with it. If I had gone to a cardiologist two years ago I would have gone into surgery with Lisa at my side, and maybe that would have given her a reason to go on living at least a little longer.

But I did nothing, and now I face surgery and recovery without Lisa, wondering if the kind of life I can have without her is worth the effort and suffering of going through this.

There is one possible bright side, which is that I have had this problem all my life. I was born with a bicuspid (two flaps instead of the usual three) aortic valve, and this may have limited me physically. As the valve grew more stenotic (=calcified), a process that takes years, it may have limited blood flow in ways that messed with my brain. Some people who have had this surgery report feeling healthier afterwards than they have in decades.

Maybe I will be one of them. But I fear the regrets that haunt me will keep the remainder of my life from ever having the depth and breadth of joy that I knew in my good years with Lisa.

Still, there is this, from Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have come to our real journey.

Odds are that I will be back in about two weeks. Thanks to all of you who have supported me and enjoyed my work, and to my many friends. I hope to hear from you again soon.

Links 4 September 2026

Martin Gerlach, Abduction by a Lake Monster, 1900

Noah Smith, Why You Won't Get a Flying Car

William Spaniel says Russia's rumored plan to attack the Baltics, which led the CIA chief to fly to Moscow this week, is the most serious crisis facing NATO since the end of the Cold War. 13-minute video.

Claims about quantum gravity.

Study finds that Google's AI is reducing traffic to wikipedia by about 5 percent.

Ben Pentreath wandering the Orkneys.

DNA study finds that the Upton Lovell Shaman, a goldworker of c. 2000 BC, was female.

My new fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is now for sale on Amazon. And still on Royal Road for free.

Long tweet on the Hugging Face incident, somewhat technical but anti-alarmist.

Remaining, largely ruined structures from California's back-to-the-land movement. I am old enough to remember when this was in full swing and these houses were new.

The ceilings of Iranian mosques.

Here's a distraction for you: twenty of my best art and image posts.

An interesting take on Edgar Allen Poe.

Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond

Despite the cancellation of some datacenters, we are still poised for a datacenter boom.

USDA approves genetically-engineered, blight-resistant chestnut trees for widespread planting, but there are doubts about how well they will survive in the wild.

Americans love stories about art heists.

Slipping through Death's Door

This statue of Carlotta Rota, widow of Federico Dossi, is part of the marble funerary monument of the Dossi-Rampinelli-Spalenza family, located in the Monumental cemetery in Brescia, Italy. The date is usually given as 1856 but there's no way this was finished in one year. The chief sculptor was Giovanni Battista Lombardi.

Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Qin Hui, Nationalism, and the Endurance of Hate

Qin Hui (1091-1155) was a government minister and important political figure of the Southern Song Dynasty. The "Southern Song" is what we call the ongoing Song Dynasty after they had lost northern China to a tribe of steppes nomads called the Jurchen. The leaders of the Jurchen, called in China the Jin Dynasty, were bent on subjugating all of China to their rule, leading to a long conflict we call the Jin-Song Wars.

(Incidentally the need of the technologically more sophisticated Song to fight off the more martial Jin led to major advances in gunpowder weapons, especially rocketry.)

Anyway there was a long period in which China was divided between a Han-ruled half and a barbarian-ruled half. The leadership of the Han-led Song realm was divided between a faction that sought accommodation with the Jurchens, for example by paying tribute, and a faction that wanted to fight to the death.

Qin Hui

Enter Qin Hui. According to a long, nearly contemporary narrative of suspect neutrality, he was captured by the Jin but later returned to the Song court, claiming a miraculous escape. There he became a leader of the peace party, which led his enemies to insist that he was a traitor and that the Jin had allowed his escape.

Yue Fei, from a Song Dynasty Scroll

One of his opponents was a general named Yue Fei, who was, wikipedia informs us, a "national heroic person."  Qin Hui outmaneuvered Yue Fei and negotiated a peace treaty with the Jin that required the Song emperor to accept a subservient status toward the Jurchens.

Yue was imprisoned, but even there his recognized status as a heroic fighter made him dangerous to his enemies, so Qin Hui arranged for his trial and execution on charges of treason. Love this detail:

When asked by General Han Shizhong what crime Yue had committed, Qin Hui replied, "Though it isn't sure whether there is something that he did to betray the dynasty, maybe there is.” The phrase "maybe there is" (simplified Chinese: 莫须有; traditional Chinese: 莫須有; pinyin: mò xū yǒu) has entered the Chinese language as an expression to refer to fabricated charges.

Qin Hui died not long afterward, still in power.

When a new emperor came to the throne he pardoned his predeccssor's enemies, including Yue Fei, and the general was rapidly enshrined as a Chinese hero. A grand tomb was built for him, and iron statues of Yue Fei, his wife, and two of his subordinates were made to grovel before the tomb. It became traditional for people to spit on the statues and slap their faces.

And there they still are, more or less, since the statues have been stolen and replaced many times; most recently they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, and new ones were installed in 1979. And to this day people still slap them and spit on them.

I find all of this fascinating because of the enduring patterns it represents. Nationalists always see those who compromise with outsiders as traitors and honor those who fought to the death; you see this, for example, in Poland, where noblemen who cooperated with the Russians are today villified, even if they were working effectively within the imperial system to make conditions better in Poland. Stalwart military men are usually the heroes, their enemies backstairs schemers who do them in via slanderous rumor, preferably in alliance with wicked women.

(And in another ancient trope, the emperor who lost northern China to the Jurchens is remembered as having "excessive interest in the arts.")

There is a strain within humanity that prefers brave defeat to effective compromise, that wants things to be clear and simple and hates those who work with subtlety and caution, that villifies softness and venerates bold killers. We deserve to be bold and free and strong and victorious, and we should fight to force others to honor us; those who accept subordination over destruction are traitors and deserve to be spit on for eternity.

Charles de la Fosse, Drawings

Sacrifice of Iphigenia

Charles de la Fosse (1636-1716) was a French artist born in Paris. After studying in Italy he did a lot work at Versailles. His paintings never grabbed be but these drawings are wonderful.

Saint John the Evangelist

Design for a celing

Apollo and Python

Seventeenth-Century English was Great at Insults

A snippet from Scottish nobleman Thomas Urquhart's translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rebelais. Here the cake-bakers of Lerne fulminate against the shepherds in Gargantua’s kingdom: 

prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets.

Theft of the Villena Treasure

The Villena Treasure, one of the most famous hoards from Bronze Age Europe, has been stolen.

The hoard was uncovered by archaeologists in 1963. The style of the bowls in particular was common across Europe in that era, and these look just like bowls bound in Germany. As often happens when amazing archaeological discoveries turn up in out-of-the-way places, local people wanted the collection to remain close to them. So a new museum was built to display the collection and other finds from the area.

But these local museums don't have the security arrangements of a great museum, so they get robbed all the time.

Object of meteoric iron

And now it has happened again. Of course, the Louvre also got robbed recently in a similar smash-and-grab style, so big museums are not entirely safe. But they are much safer than small musuems are.

Links 28 August 2026

Gwen Raverat, "The Magicians Chariot" 1939

Matt Yglesias' history of the "Great Awokening".

On Twitter/X, a story about potential issues with US Treasury bonds. Via Marginal Revolution.

Seventeenth-century papercuts found under the floorboards.

Does the universe evolve in a way analogous to how life on earth evolves?

Sabine Hossenfelder buries commercial quantum computing, 5-minute video.

Short article on the transformation of the Ukrainian military between 2014 and 2022, by Mark Hertling.

People fighting change: "In Tillman's case, neighborhood activists were able to block his project [75 apartments] for years by demanding he perform studies on the historic significance of his laundromat (turns out there wasn't any) and ensure the shadows cast by his project wouldn't stunt the growth of children at a nearby school (they'll be fine)."

Article on an archive of interviews with Black participants in the great migration out of the South, with sample interviews.

Outsiders love the pink dolphins of the Amazon, but some natives hate and fear them.

Dragon and phoenix symbols in ancient Chinese tomb.

Relics of London's St. Paul's from before the Great Fire.

The mad blogger at Old European Culture takes on the snakes of Göbekli Tepe. I think this guy is a monomaniac, but he knows a lot and I often find his takes intriguing.

Polling on people's public vs. private feelings about capitalism. (Marginal Revolution)

Luke Burgis interviews Luke Collison about aesthetics and why our own art is so discouraging. (Twitter/X)

How wyrd, and Anglo-Saxon word for "fate," became our word "weird."

Review of a new biography of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, made me curious about him.

My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road. I am planning to publish this on Amazon for fans of physical books.