Nineteenth-Century American Painting in the Met

John White Alexander, Repose, 1895. 

Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865

Jules Tavernier, Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California, 1878, Detail

John Vanderlyn, Self Portrait, 1800

Thomas Cole, The Titan's Goblet, 1833, and detail.

Charles Loring Elliott, portrait of photographer Mathew B. Brady, 1857

John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1884.

A Perfect Exchange to Sum up the Mood

"Jenni":

The concept of working 40 hours per week for the rest of your life just to afford basic necessities is genuinely insane. 

"The Philosophical American":

What is the alternative, no one ever says.

George W. Bush on George Washington

A barbed Presidents' Day tribute:

Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility. I have studied the corrupting nature of power, and how retaining power for power’s sake has infected politics for generations. Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to. In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to. His life, with all its flaws and achievements, should be studied by all who aspire to leadership. George Washington’s humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics. . . .

The young republic was in crisis. The Articles of Confederation were failing, with the federal government virtually powerless. In 1787 Washington was called back to public life, where he presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was asked to serve because he was a national hero and a unifying figure, trusted by all, and unmatched in his ability to forge consensus. He could be given power because of his character; because everyone knew he would not abuse power.

Out of the Convention emerged a new Constitution and a new office, the presidency. Washington was the obvious choice and twice was unanimously elected – the only president so elected in American history. He accepted the presidency because the office needed him, not because he needed the office. . . .

The question we must all ask is, how did he accomplish these things? By most historian accounts, one of the reasons Washington achieved all of this was by admitting he might not be up to the task. He summoned experts and let debates play out in front of him. . . .

As America’s first president, Washington knew “the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent.” So after two terms in office, with a distrust of long-seated rulers still fresh on America’s soul, Washington chose not to run again for president. And by once again relinquishing power rather than holding on to it, he ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.

Our first leader helped define not only the character of the presidency but the character of the country. Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition. He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.

Whoever actually wrote this, amen to all of it.

What You're Buying this Year

Source: Sandboxx News

While most Americans have been distracted by other political matters, the Pentagon has quietly gone on a missile-buying spree. Spurred by wargames that show US forces running out of key weapons in a week or two of fighting, the Pentagon has done (at least) the following:

• Increased buys of Patriot surface-to-air missiles from 600/year to 2,000/year, and THAAD interceptors (for shooting down ballistic missiles) from 100/year to 500/year, both by 2030.
• Signed five new missile-related contracts with Raytheon, including increasing production of Tomahawk cruise missiles from 90/year to 1,000/year and tripling production of AMRAAM air-to-air missiles and SM-6 surface-to-air missiles.
• Made a billion-dollar direct investment in two companies that make rocket motors to increase production.
• Paid Lockheed-Martin to set up a second production line for the JASM-ER air-launched cruise missiles, with the aim of increasing production from 500/year in 2023 to 2,200/year by 2030. 
• Simultaneously made huge investments in both cheap offensive drones and anti-drone systems.

This on top of our ongoing programs to build two new fighters, the F-47 the Air Force and the FA-XX for the Navy, and our very expensive new B-21 stealth bombers.

I don't blame the Pentagon or the Trump Administration for this; we seem to be in a new era of global war, and they are responding to the threats they see. The waste of war just makes me sad sometimes. 

The Conspiracy End Point

Turning Point USA seems to be in crisis, with several firings, because many staffers believe Candace Owens' accusations that TP had some role in the assassination of their founder, Charlie Kirk.The Bulwark:

Laitsch is just one of several Turning Point staffers who has been fired amid what’s been dubbed a “purge” of employees. While it’s not clear how many have been let go, Owens has played audio on her show of another staffer who claimed to have been fired without explanation. Owens also claimed that a TPUSA executive showed up at a third staffers home to fire her and demand the immediate return of her company devices. A GoFundMe for staffers booted in the “TPUSA Purge” has raised more than $71,000 as of Thursday morning.

It’s hard to say if these firings are being driven by the (very sensible) disapproval of staff talking about their company killing its founder, or paranoia about Owens having credible information about internal TPUSA activities—or both. But clearly, someone within the organization is leaking to Owens. Just this year, the highly controversial podcaster posted videos of Erika Kirk on internal videochats in the wake of Kirk’s assassination that were interpreted on the online right as insufficiently mournful.

The young people one presumes are the future leadership of MAGA believe Candace Owens.

Sigh. 

And poor Erika Kirk; first her husband is murdered, and now members of her own organization think she did it. The very definition of "adding insult to injury."

Archaic Torso of Apollo

According to Ethan Molick, this is one of the poems that LLMs recently told him best express their situation..

By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated By Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The most popular choice of the AIs was actuall Borges' The Golem, a poem I have always disliked and which I think fits the situation of an LLM much worse than you might think from the title.

The Strangely Mythic History of Basque Sheep Herders in the American West

Basque shepherds were a real thing in America. The first Basques came to California in the Gold Rush era to pan for nuggets. Some of these folks came, not directly from the Basque country, but from South America, where they had already been living as ranch hands. In California, some of them quickly slid from mining into food production.  Companies, some of them Basque-owned, hired Basque men with herding experience to work on ranches. At first this was mostly cattle, but droughts and a surging demand for wool caused many ranchers to shift to sheep in the Civil War era. In the 1870 to 1900 period Basques seem to have dominated sheep ranching in the Great Basin and were known throughout the west.

Herding sheep across the vast spaces of the dry west was difficult and often lonely, but it did not require education or knowledge of English, and the most and ambitious men could earn good money. Basque herders developed an interesting culture. Their social lives were often rooted in certain Basque-owned boarding houses in towns near to the sheep ranges, such as Boise, Idaho. They liked to carve on trees, usually initials and dates like the example above (from Yosemite National Park), but also directional signs indicating routes and watering places. They also marked their trails with cairns, spawning a still-raging debate among archaeologists over which cairns are Basque and whether this matters. They had a unique way of organizing ranching companies, with new hands signed to two- or three-year contracts that were largely paid in animals, allowing these hands start their own herds after only a couple of contracts.

But Basques were not the only shepherds in the west, nor were they the majority. A lot more were mestizos. Some of these Spanish-speaking folks had lived in the southwest since it was part of Mexico, but they were reinforced by a steady stream of migrants beginning in the late 1800s. Indians such as Navajo and Apache also went big into sheepherding.

In many ways, though, the Basques dominate our imagination of sheep ranching in that time. This myth was most powerful just as actual Basque immigration was tailing off, after 1920. Consider that the 1924 immigration act restricted entry from Spain but made a special exception for Basque herders, because of their "exceptional skill." This unique status was maintained in subsequent immigration laws, including the 1952 Omnibus Immigration Bill, which exempted then from the quotas on the Spanish and the French. These laws were based on a theory that Basques  had some kind of cultural or even racial knowledge that made them great herders. In fact some of the Basques who came to the US under this exemption were sailors or factory workers who had never been near a sheep.

Basques were considered whiter than other Spaniards, and certainly much whiter than Mexicans. This, the theory went, made them harder working, more reliable, and so on. Some folks who believed in Basque superiority connected this to the ancient history of their people and their strange language, which somehow made them even more European than the British or the French.

One reason Basque descendants are not more prominent in the US today is that many of these men returned home. Sheepherding made it difficult to marry or form families, so many saved their money (either as gold or livestock) and eventually sold up and went back to Europe.

Links 13 February 2026

Frankish Pendant, c. 600 AD

Reasoning failures in LLMs, major new paper; summary on Twitter/X: "LLMs reason just enough to sound convincing, but not enough to be reliable."

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Interesting review of a book called How Africa Works, with some nice African success stories.

Sabine Hossenfelder against panic over microplastics, 6-minute video.

The mysterious Sabians of Harran, who may have been practitioners of ancient Mesopotamian paganism who endured into medieval times. (one-hour video, wikipedia, detailed article with illustrations)

Yuval Harari on Big Think, talking about information and civilization in the age of AI.

Why only three countries bother building ships any more, 20-minute video. (Because shipbuilding is hugely capital intensive and they make next to no money.)

The strange episode of Mao's Mango Mania.

Alex Tabarrok has spent decades complaining that the FDA is too restrictive and paternalistic, and he had hopes for improvement under Trump, but now the FDA is refusing to license mRNA vaccines no matter how strong the data supporting them because their leadership just hates mRNA technology.

Perun on the disaster that was Trump's Greenland power grab, one-hour-video.

NASA reports on an "Earth-like" but very cold planet.

Tyler Cowen on why Americans don't talk about Singapore any more.

But wait! Singapore is having great success controlling mosquitos by releasing sterile males. (Government web site, Twitter/X)

Somebody paid $27.2 million for Michelangelo’s drawing of a foot, $1.15m per square inch. It is a study for the Sistine Chapel, but still. At that price the Sistine Chapel ceiling, roughly 12,000 square feet, would go for $2 billion. A bargain!

Noah Smith on Japan in the Takaichi Era.

The transformation of Sparrows Point in Baltimore from a dying steel mill complex to a logistics hub called TradePoint, 10-minute video.

Paleontologists love fossilized predator vomit.

I have noted here before that the art of ancient cultures in coastal Peru hints at an amazing, Baroque mythology, but we don't have enough information to understand it. Some archaeologists think this relief carving is an importan clue.

An economist uses AI to produce a "decent" paper in three hours. (Twitter/X) Via Marginal Revolution.

The more planetary systems we learn about, the less we understand about how they form.

Static electricity is a minor nuisance to us, but for tiny animals these effects can be very important, e.g., nematodes use static elecricity to fly. (Article, 13-minute video)

Peru's burgeoning blueberry trade, fascinating.

An argument that taxation was a factor in the French Revolution; says that there were more riots etc. in areas with higher taxes.

"Switzerland will hold a referendum in June on whether to cap its population at 10 million until 2050 by limiting immigration." (NY Times, CNN)

Your regular reminder that we know why the number thirteen has long been considered unlucky. I keep posting this link because I see nonsense all over the internet every Friday the 13th, including from people who call themselves academics.

The Russian Navy is in a heap of trouble: humiliated by Ukraine, with no money to repair their aging ships or enough men to crew them. (article 1, article 2, article 3)

The modern defense industrial base: "The Ukrainian company SkyFall now produces 100,000 “Vampire” heavy bomber drones per year, at a unit cost of $8,500."

Americans Think Everyone is Corrupt Because it Can't Be Their Own Fault

Matt Yglesias has a good piece today on why so many Americans think all politicians are "corrupt." For one thing, Americans have a very broad view of "corruption":

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

My views are obviously correct, so everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt!

You see this all over the discourse. E.g., people pushing for more housing construction instead of rent control must be taking money from billionaire developers. (People say this on Twitter/X a thousand times a day.) Or doctors pushing vaccines must be on the take for Big Pharma. To some people the idea that, no, other people actually disagree with you is beyond conception.

The basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites.

To get to one of my own themes, people often blame politicians for not solving problems because they think our problems would not be hard to solve:

Most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

I once had an extended argument with an engineer who insisted that we know how to fix American education and the only reason we haven't is the power of teachers' unions. Even Elon Musk seemed to think for while that we could balance our budget by eliminating "fraud and corruption" from Social Security.

But I would take this even deeper. I think many people see the world as cleanly divided into US the THEM, and since WE are good, all our problems must be caused by THEM.

For a while we were supposed to tell kids about "stranger danger," as if wandering psychos were the biggest threat to their well-being. Actually most children who are sexually abused are abused by people very close to them – parents, step-parents, coaches, teachers – and most children who are murdered are killed by their parents.

Millions of Americans seem to believe that immigrants commit most of our crimes; two white Americans have flat out denied to me that a majority of American felons are white. Many Republicans believe that felons vote for Democrats, but so far as we can tell felons vote just like everyone else of their own sex and race, so a group that is majority white men of course votes for Republicans.

So if our budget is out of balance, it can't be because of good hard-working heritage Americans. It must be because of corrupt Somali refugees or Mexican cartels or so-called allies who won't pay their share or sinister billionaires just back from Epstein Island. The solution is to punish the villains and put good, honest people in charge.

In our time this might be the most dangerous fantasy in the world. 

Art of Ancient Persia at the Met

Cat rhyton, Parthian, 1st century BC

Plate with a hunting scene from the tale of Bahram Gur and Azadeh, Sasanian, ca. 5th century CE, and detail

Belt clasp, Parthian 1st to 2nd century AD

Sassanian sword and scabbard, 7th century AD, detail

Achaemenid plaque with "horned lion-griffons," 5th or 4th century BC.

Achaemenid gold vessel in the shape of a "fantastic leonine creature"

Parthian sculpture of a standing man, 2nd century AD

Detail of a plate showing a king hunting, Sassanian, 6th century AD

What's in a Medieval Arabic Grimoire

Yes, Grimoires were real things. The word just means "grammar" in medieval French, and its use to designate magical texts is not especially old, dating perhaps to the 1600s. But books of magical instruction are ancient and examples survive from Indonesia to Iceland. If, like me, you try to read them without believing that this stuff is going to work, you will likely find them impenetrably obscure and deathly boring. This may have been intentional; all the famous grimoires have introductions explaining that the books' contents are only for adepts who are intellectually and spiritually prepared for the journey.

But YouTubers who talk about arcane religious topic love them, so I have lately been able to learn a great deal about them in a pleasant way. (I recommend Let's Talk Religion.)  The most influential of the medieval Arabic grimoires was the Shams al Ma'arif, or Sun of Knowledge, supposedly written by the Sufi scholar Ahmad al Buni (died 1225). But it was not written by al Buni, any more than the equally famous Picatrix was written by Aristotle. The actual authors of these texts were not keen to draw attention to themselves.

The Shams al Ma'arif has long been considered a cursed book, dangerous to read or even to own. One of the YouTubers I listened to warned his readers when he was about to quote from it, so that any who feared the curse could skip that section. But I have no fear of weird old books, so let's dive in and see what this book, and other like it, actually say.

The first chapters describe how to construct magic squares, that is, squares of numbers that add up to the same sum in any direction. Really. As I have noted here before, this old trick of arithmetic has some kind of hold on the minds of many people.

Then we move onto astrology. This is the real meat of the work, and if you are not prepared for it you will likely be astonished at how much medieval magic is just about ways to leverage astrology. This focus is ancient; our oldest detailed spell books, in Babylonian, are equally focused on astrology. Astral magic is likely another of the Sumerians' legacies to the later western world.

If you ask, where does the power come from that magicians wield, the basic answer is, from the stars and especially the planets. (Actually it derives from the One, which the Muslims equated with God, from which it emanates through a bunch of levels and powers and thus into the mortal world, but in practice you get it from the heavens.)

You leverage this power through correspondences. That is, you find things that are mystically connected to the power you want to draw on, and construct a chain that binds that power into some object. Like this:

To harness the power of Jupiter, which has a protective and fortunate quality, you construct a magic square. Take the letter associated with Jupiter, Dal, which has the numerical value of four. Make a four by four magic square. Then you write the letter itself, Dal, thirty-five times, which is the numerical value of the letter Dal written out as it is pronounced, Dal-Alif-Lam. You can also write various names of God that include that letter, such as al wadoud, “the Loving.” You then inscribe this talismanic symbol when the Moon is in a good and fortunate mansion in the sky, on a parchment or any other object that you can carry with you or hang over your door. You can also write it out with ink, then dissolve the ink in water and drink it. Thus one has harnessed the power Jupiter by using the infinite thread of correspondences, from the sphere of Jupiter to the letter associated with that sphere to the numerical value of that letter to the names of God that include that letter and so on.

Each of the planets is also associated with a metal (Jupiter is tin), so you could add another correspondence by making your object out of that metal.

Notice the emphasis on the names of God, of course an important theme in Islam. The reason al Buni had this magical text foisted on him is likely that he did write a Sufi text about meditation on the names of God, and this text ascribes semi-magical effects to the names and the letters that make them up. This aspect of relatively orthodox Islam was coopted into the ancient system of astral magic as another sort of correspondence.

If you want to do harmful magic, you can, for example use all these correspondences to bind the power of Mars or Saturn (in an unfavorable aspect) to a doll, which you then torture or maim and bury it near the victim's house, or in a place he will surely walk over. 

If you want a woman to love you, you draw on the power of Venus (in a favorable aspect) and somehow channel that power either into an amulet that you wear, or something that you introduce to the victim, e.g., by burying it where she will walk.

The point is to draw on astral power through correspondences and find some way to direct that power toward the desired beneficiary or victim.

Oh my sagely readers, now that you have entered into the house of those that know, go forth and do magic to make the world better.

Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça

Lourenço da Silva de Mendouça was born around 1650 in the Kingdom of Ndongo in what is now Angola.  Lourenço was the grandson of the King of Pongo, known in our sources as either King Hari or Philipe I. Hari/Philipe ruled from 1626 to 1664 over a breakway state that maintained its independence from Ndongo by allying with the Portuguese. As Portuguese allies, the royal family all of course converted to Catholicism. When Philipe I died, he was succeeded by one of his son, Dom João. According to wikipedia, 

Dom João refused the annual tax of 100 slaves demanded by the colonisers, known as baculamento, and declared war against the Portuguese. 

The Portuguese won the war and decided to send the rebel's family into exile in Brazil. They were not enslaved but lived in rather comfortable circumstances; Mendonça studied in a Catholic seminary. But the Brazilian authorities got suspicious of these African nobles, fearing in particular that they might ally with a free nation of maroons known as the Quilombo dos Palmares. (Maroons who disappeared into the jungle were a major feature of colonial Brazil, and some of their communities endured long enough to have their rights to their land recognized by a left-wing government in the 1990s.) So they split up the family, sending Lourenço and some others to Portugal.

Wikipedia again:

Mendonça was sent to the Convent of Vilar de Frades, in Braga, where he studied for three or four years, before moving to Lisbon.

Notice the importance of noble blood in this world. Mendonça may have been an African, but he was a prince (and a Catholic), so nobody expected him to work for a living. 

Lisbon at that time had a significant black population, estimated at 5 to 10 percent, so the Pumbo royals were hardly alone in their situation. Many of Portugal's Africans joined confraternities, lay Catholic organizations officially devoted to chartity but also functioning as social clubs. In about 1681 Mendonça became the procurator general of the Confraternity of Our Lady, Star of the Negroes, a trans-Atlantic group that also existed in Brazil.

During all of these travels, Mendonça seems to have been working on a legal brief accusing Portugal and Spain of a great crime, the Atlantic slave trade. In 1684 he was able to travel to Rome and present his brief to the papal curia. Mendonça's brief was particularly strong on the gruesome tortures the Portuguese regularly inflicted on rebellious slaves. Mendonça's brief helped to convince Pope Innocent XI to issue a letter reiterating previous Papal condemnations against enslaving Christians and cruelty to slaves. He did not, however, condemn slavery itself.

Mendonça died in Rome in 1698.

You Think this is Criticism, but —

NY Times:

Trump Is a Global ‘Wrecking Ball,’ European Security Experts Say

I know Trump supporters who would say, YES!!! The global order is a grotesque disaster and we elected Trmp to wreck it.

Support for Trump is driven precisely by the belief that things are terrible. Calling him a "wrecking ball" only encourages him and his fans.

What is needed is to somehow convince people that things are not bad and don't need wrecking. Assuming that is true does not help.

Government Measures Influence the Timing of Births More than the Total Number

From an excellent, detailed article on recent human fertility, I extract this graph. In 1967 the dictatorship in Romania banned abortion and modern contraception. The result was a birth boom. But the boom was short-lived and a sharp decline soon followed. Comparison with Bulgaria, another communist government with a similar economy, shows that Romanian policy had little impact on completed cohort fertility (the number of babies women have over the course of their lifetimes). Women who had babies in 1968 just had fewer babies later.

This seems to be happening in Hungary now. The government's birth subsidies did encourage women to have babies, but now fertility is falling again and it seems those were just babies women were planning to have at some point down the road.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Lugdunum: Roman Lyons

The Vaise Treasure, buried around AD 260 and excavated in 1992

Lugdunum, modern Lyon, France, was in Roman times the greatest city of northwestern Europe, with a population of about 70,000. It was founded in about 43 BC as a settlement of veterans from Caesar's wars. The spot is such a great one – at the confluence of two significant rivers, perfectly positioned to control overland trade from the Mediterrean to Gaul and Britain – that it ought to have beeen settled a long time before that. Archaeologists, alas, have had a hard time documenting this. There seems to have been a small settlement on a nearby hill, but when people dig in the rest of the Roman city all they find is Roman stuff. Numerous stray artifacts from the Iron Age have turned up, but no little evidence of buildings. One interesting thing that has been found is pits full of animal bones, such as might be left from a great feast. So the reigning theory is that in the Iron Age most of the site was a sort of fair ground where people from north and south met to trade and feast, kept neutral by not allowing anyone to build there.

Roman Lugdunum grew rapidly. It got a big boost from Augustus' campaign to conquer Germania, which began in 20 BC. Lugdunum became a major supply hub, and a network of roads was built or improved radiating out from the city in all directions. By 10 BC the city had a major aqueduct and a theater that seated 4,500.

Emperor Claudius – above, on a coin minted in Lugdunum – had a great bridge built across the river, which required sinking the pylons deep through the swampy ground.

One of the most famous objects in the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains is the Sarcophagus with the Triumph of Bacchus, carved around 200 AD and found in 1845.

Bronze statue of Neptune known as the Neptune of Lyon.

Part of the Claudian Table, a large bronze plaque recording a speech Emperor Claudius gave at Lugdunum in 48 AD, found in 1526.

The "swastika mosaic," excavated in 1911 from a grand villa within the city.

Map of the Roman city.

The Circus Mosaic. Wish I were going to this museum today instead of what I have to do.

The Evidence

Americand Sour on Both Parties

Voters are telling pollsters that both parties are "too extreme."

The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Generator

Many electrical technologies – coal, oil, fission, fusion – really just produce heat that is used to boil water, which is then used to drive steam turbines. It is the spinning blades of the turbine that actually generate the electricity. This is a great technology, and we have gotten really good at building steam turbines after 200 years of practice.

But that doesn't make it the best technology for converting heat into electricity.

This brings us to the a new(ish) technology that may turn out to be much more efficient: the supercritical CO2 generator. These are similar to steam turbines but instead of water they use supercritical CO2. "Supercritical" means that the carbon dioxide is heated and compressed (84C, 74 atmospheres) until it turns into a "supercritical" state, sort of a very dense gas that behaves like a liquid. This dense fluid can spin turbine blades more efficiently than steam, and it does not lose energy to the phase transition (liquid to gas) that uses up a lot of energy in a steam engine. Because the CO2 is so much denser, these turbines can be much, much smaller than those using steam:

The 10 MW US$155-million Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) pilot plant was completed in 2023 in San Antonio. It is the size of a desk and can power around 10,000 homes. [top photo]

The US Department of Energy has been funding research in this area for decades. The biggest problem they found was that supercritical CO2 corrodes steel, so that however efficiently it generated power, the system could not be made reliable or stable. Then a decade or so ago Sandia National Laboratory discovered that certain kinds of nickel steel were not degraded by supercritical CO2, and this launched a worldwide spate of experiments and innovations. Recently commercial generators have gone online in both the US and China, with claims that they are up to 50 percent more efficient that steam turbines.

This is the Chinese entry, a recently announced 30 MW system in a steel plant, which is using waste heat to generate power for the grid.

Technological doomsterism is silly. We can generate all the energy we need, without CO2 emissions, whever we decide to do so.

(16-minute video, short article, wikipedia)

The Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet is a brief alchemical text that was included in some of the earliest Arabic treatises on alchemy, such as the Book of the Secret of Creation and the Book of the Secret of Secrets. These texts date to the eighth and nineth centuries. The text (above) was supposed to have been written by the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus. Wikipedia has the whole text in translation; the most famous line is "the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost."

The best thing about this text it is the story of its discovery, which was included in both of those key Arabic manuscripts. The text was supposed to come from an actual emerald tablet that was found in the hand of a corpse lying on the floor of a tomb, in front of a statue of Hermes Trismegistus. In one manuscript this was the tomb of Hermes himself.

Which is the most Dungeons & Dragons story I know from the whole medieval age.

Stained Glass at the Met

Theodosius Arrives at Ephesus, from the Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. Franch, c. 1200 AD

Two Saints, German, 1440-1460, and detail

Valentin Bousch, The Deluge, 1531, and detail

Dirck Vellert, Martyrdom of the Maccabees, c. 1535, and details

The Moneychangers in the Temple, German, 16th century

John La Farge, Peonies Blown in the Wind, and detail, ca. 1880 

John La Farge, Welcome, Window from the Mrs. George T. Bliss House, New York, 1908–9