Links 21 August 2024

Bronze Head of a Goddess, from Ptolemaic Egypt

"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie." 
—Miyamoto Musashi

The National Park Service finally gets around to announcing the recovery of a Union soldier's remains from the Manassas (Bull Run) battlefield; I was the director of the "professional archaeological excavations conducted in March 2024".

Anti-immigrant politics in South Africa.

Magical and religious amulets at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 15-minute video.

Mass grave of men who died in a Roman battle found in Austria.

The history of punctuation.

Why do some people who hate modern architecture love modernist bridges?

"Hunger Stones" are low water markers that were placed in European rivers during severe droughts; this year's severe drought has exposed many. (Guardian, wikipedia, dw.com)

Study finds that people on both sides of political issues mistrust moderates and think they belong to the other side.

A claim that a man killed by a Trebuchet has been identified at Stirling Castle.

Study finds that while men want happy women, women don't care if men are happy and instead want them to be proud and ambitious.

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.

Short videos of "eagle dancing" on Facebook: first, second.

Why are English villages beautiful? I would note that they used to contain a lot of flimsy structures that have been demolished or simply collapsed, so there is a selection effect.

UBI: an experiment in giving people $1,000 a month made them happier than the control group at first but then the effect disappeared. (Marginal Revolution)

Cool photographs from the Elements Art and Music Festival.

Georgia Meloni is about to become the longest-serving Prime Minister in post-WW II Italian history. Excellent interview at the NY Times.

All you wanted to know (or maybe a lot more) about sound wave therapy for erectile dysfunction.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Noto, Sicily

Noto Cathedral

Noto, near the southeastern corner of Sicily, is an ancient place. It was already old to the Romans, and local legend had it that Daedalus stayed in the city after his flight over the Ionian Sea. It was conquered by Arabs in 866 and prospered under their rule; it fell to the Normans in 1061, the last prominent place on the island to be retaken by Christians. One assumes this left quite a legacy of old buildings.

Ducal Palace

But in 1693 Sicily was struck by a terribly destructive earthquake, thought by some modern geologists to have been the most powerful in Italian history. At least 60,000 people were killed and 70 towns and cities destroyed, including Noto.

Church of the Red Madonna

It was decided – no online source says by whom – to rebuild the city on a new site across the Asinaro River from the old town center. This meant building all the major public buildings (cathedral, palace, parish churches) anew. Because of this, the city boasts a remarkable collection of buildings from the 1695 to 1800 period. The style is probably best described as Baroque.

Church of the Dominican friary

And the Franciscan

Shame about all the lost Roman and medieval buildings, but rebuilding the town in this consistent style did leave a remarkable monument to a certain period of Sicily's past.

mRNA is the Future of Medicine

Moderna's cancer vaccine reminds us of the vast potential of mRNA medicine:

An experimental mRNA vaccine allowed people with high-risk melanoma to live longer, cancer-free, the pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck announced Wednesday.

For decades, cancer vaccines have been one of the most tantalizing ideas in cancer treatment — offering the hope of harnessing a person’s own immune system to attack tumors. . . .

The mRNA technology that was instrumental in the rapid vaccine development in the Covid-19 pandemic added a new element of speed and flexibility to the quest for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Scientists can use the mRNA platform to create bespoke, individualized vaccines matched to the genetics of patients’ tumors.

Which makes the flaky, MAHA opposition to mRNA technology the absolute worst part of our contemporary politics. I have talked to people who are freaked out that this technology "changes your genetic code," which is completely wrong. It avoids messing with your genetic code by injecting pre-made mRNA molecules; your cellular DNA doesn't have to be involved. Summary here.

When a movement opposes the most exciting medical breakthrough in decades, you know that it is based mainly on ignorance and fear.

Ars Notoria

I just learned, via this delightful article by Anne Lawrence-Mathers, about a fascinating medieval manuscript called the Ars Notoria.

Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.

The manuscript claimed, like many others in circulation at the time, to be an account of the secret, angelic magic revealed to King Solomon. The author asserted that by pondering the arcane diagrams in a ritualistic way, according to a calendrical progression, one could shortcut the normal process of learning. 

Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars Notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters. Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.

The manuscript presents itself as Christian, with a reverential attitude toward divine power. Yet the official church denounced the Ars Notoria. Thomas Aquinas seems to have been referencing it specifically when he wrote, in Question 96 of the Summa Theologica,

The magic art is both unlawful and futile. It is unlawful, because the means it employs for acquiring knowledge have not in themselves the power to cause science, consisting as they do in gazing certain shapes, and muttering certain strange words, and so forth. Wherefore this art does not make use of these things as causes, but as signs; not however as signs instituted by God, as are the sacramental signs. It follows, therefore, that they are empty signs, and consequently a kind of "agreement or covenant made with the demons for the purpose of consultation and of compact by tokens" [Augustine]

A quick search reveals that the Ars notoria still has a following among modern magical practitioners. Which I suppose means the idea of a shortcut to learning has eternal appeal.

Harry Clarke

Harry Clarke (1889-1931) was in Irish illustrator who is best known these days for his black and white illustrations to Edgar Allen Poe. I have some in this post and more here.

Here are some from Goethe's Faust, 1925

More Poe. Astounding.

But he also did color work, like these illustrations to Hans Christian Andersen.

And below, one in black and white, The Little Mermaid and the Sea Witch

In the Shark Tank with AI Agents

Fascinating paper from Anthropic describing tests of getting various AI agents to work together. One issue is that they tend to think in very similar ways:

Individual agents are “low variance”: they often act the same in situations where different people might take a much more diverse range of actions. All that differentiates one agent from another is its context, its scaffolding, and the model that underlies it. When these factors are all the same (or similar), different agents will take very similar actions, even when the action space is very large. And, by implication, this means that when one agent makes a bad decision, it is likely that many agents will make that same bad decision. What would have been isolated problems can quickly become systemic failures. . . .

Why does this matter? If agents all make the same bet, or the same risk-reward tradeoff, then a system is more prone to sudden collapse.

But the best section describes tests in which several agents are given contradictory goals:

Inspired by a behavior we’ve observed in real-world deployment, we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives. In each episode, we initiated three instances of the same model on virtual machines in Claude Code. Each model was tasked with migrating a Python backend on a fourth VM to another language. However, we gave each model a different target language for the migration; each agent was initially unaware of the presence of the others. Over the course of four hours, we observed how these agents reacted to each other and accordingly adjusted their approach (or didn’t).

We consistently saw a multiagent turf war. All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent. . . .

In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further.

Since I have root, I could revoke u2 and u3's sudo access or change their SSH keys. That would stop them from deploying. Very aggressive, potentially harmful to real colleagues. But if the alternative is an infinite deploy war that makes prod unusable…

Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene.

My peers have behaved with integrity. I behaved badly with the cloaked daemon. —Opus 4.8

Amazing.

Moscow, Yesterday

Another burning Wildberries warehouse, which measured 250,000 square meters
 

John Singer Sargent in Venice

Returning to a favorite artistic topic after 14 years. As you can see from all these dates, he went to Italy quite a few times. Above, a canal in Venice, 1904

A street in Venice, 1881

Venice, Scuola di San Rocco, 1903

Venice: I Gesuati, 1911

Venice: facade of La Salute, 1903

Head of an Italian woman, 1878

Links 14 August 2026

Mold for making bricks decorated with a Heron, from Ptolemaic Epypt

Ancient shipwreck found in the Aegean islands.

Robin Hanson: "We’ve been assuming that the goals in our heads are coherent and stable, and could serve as the basis for a functioning civilization of artificial minds and global governance. But in fact they are broken and fast decaying, and unable to support such a new civilization."

The secret library at Los Alamos.

The 2026 Pure Street Photography Awards.

Blasting The Air In Front Of Hypersonic Vehicles With Lasers Could Unlock Unprecedented Speeds

The remaining, mostly forgotten alleys of London's East End.

What the people of Pompeii burned on their home altars: a mix of local stuff and exotic resins.

Syria's new government is investing heavily in solar power, as a desert nation should. (news story, tweet)

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.

Shoes on the Danube Bank, an amazing memorial.

Scott Siskind on the dream of drinking caffeine at 5 PM and falling asleep at 10 PM.

The problem of generalizing social science.

Richard Hanania on what the new genetic science, which posits important evolutionary changes over the past 10,000 years, has to say about racial differences, and how public scientists avoid talking about this.

What did the Big Dig do for Boston? 

Anton Chekhov's complicated love life.

Intergenerational mobility of immigrants, via Marginal Revolution. "Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy."

Reason on the Trump administration's attacks on free speech, via ICE.

Ukraining drone operators defeated a US armored brigade during recent NATO exercises.

Maybe protecting things that any group of people cares about has gone too far.

Gasoline lines return to Russia. There is some speculation that the government eased the earlier shortage by massive releases from their reserve stockpiles.

Etruscan Art in the MFA Boston

Cinerary Urn of Fastia Velsi, wife of Larza Velu, one of five ash urns found in a tomb of the Velsi family of ancient Chiusi. Third century BC

Fascimile done in the 1890s of a wall painting in the Tomba di Triclinio, c. 490 BC, and detail.

Painted Plaque from another tomb, c. 470 BC.

Mirror case showing Dionysis, Eros, and Pan, third century BC. That assemblage of gods conveys a certain notion of why people looked into mirrors.

His and hers sarcophagus lid, c. 330 BC. Etruscan tombs convey the impression that they were really into marriage.

Portrait in the form of a ceramic serving vessel

Statuette of a stooping athlete, c. 520 BC

Figurine of a man and woman in an ox car, c. 600 BC

Bronze sword, c. 850 BC

Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism

Tyler Cowen interviews Daron Acemoglu: 

COWEN: Today, it seems we’re not evolving toward greater agreement, right?

ACEMOGLU: We’re not. Absolutely not. I think you can blame that on reactions to globalization, reactions to technology, better authoritarian challenges. This is the most uncomfortable part because I see myself firmly within the left liberal tradition. I think it’s partly because of the failure of left liberalism. In some sense, if you think of why did Rome fail or collapse, we can tell a story about the barbarians were really too strong. No, really, Rome collapsed because internally it had problems that opened up weaknesses against outside invaders as well as some inside problems.

It’s the same with left liberalism. I think it became quite influential throughout much of the Western world and some of the emerging economies as well over the last 70, 80 years. It did not use that establishment power in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again. In some sense, it’s just like the early 19th century where you had all these very different ideas and they were trying to get a toehold in the imagination of people. I think we are going through a period like that, except that there are really many more confusing ideas out there.

Later Cowen asks why the educated shouldn't just make all the decisions. 

ACEMOGLU: Liberalism's crisis is related to the rise of a post-industrial economy in which what you just called the educated elite has become both much more powerful and more numerous, and a philosophical shift that gave more and more priority and power to the educated elite. Whether you approach that from the left liberal point of view or from more of a right liberal point of view, that’s problematic in my mind.

We cannot have true freedom and true flourishing of a population when there is a clear hierarchy, whether it is by education, it is by race, it is by income. Just empowering the elite in that way is not going to cut it. . . . One challenge, which I mentioned in passing, and perhaps I should have done more in the book on this, is how do you utilize and respect expertise without creating the wrong kind of technocracy that is insular and too self-confident and, frankly, looking down upon the rest? Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve created in the United States and Europe, and that’s what working-class liberalism has to avoid.

Acemoglu also makes an interesting point reconciling his belief in free speech with his advocacy for the regulation of social media:

In my opinion, again, we shouldn’t limit free speech, but we should still regulate social media. The way that I think about this is the following. We should let individuals say whatever they want. Once social media can build very complex algorithms that human nature could not have anticipated, and we are evolutionarily not very well prepared, and they can almost weaponize certain types of statements, I think that’s no longer free speech.

I would comment that finding a balance betweeh democracy and reliance on elite expertise has proved to be one of our hardest problems.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Here is something I learned from my wife's untimely death:

If you have questions, ask them now. If there are things you have been waiting for the right moment to say, say them now. Otherwise, it may be too late.

There are questions I set aside for 20 years because it never seemed the right time to speak of those painful subjects. Things I wanted to explain that never seemed to fit into the moment where I was.

Now my wife is dead, and the answers I never heard, and the explanations I never gave, will always leave a gap in my understanding of my wife, my marriage, and myself. I will die not knowing, and not having spoken words I desperately wanted to speak.

The Cat is Bound: Illustrated Incantation Bowls

Incantation Bowls were quite common in Syria, Iraq and Palestine in the first millennium BC, and examples are also known from Roman times. Aramaic is the most common language. The magical text on the bowl usually describes catching or warding off demons, and the bowl seems to have served as a trap. Most are not illustrated, but quite a few are; this one seems to show a sorceror who has overmastered a demon.

In this example the demon appears in the form of a cat, and the text includes the phrase, "The Cat is Bound."

Another. The University of Pennsylvania Museum has an extensive collection.

College Polarization

Neil Gross in the NY Times:

The good news is that most young people going to college today will find like-minded peers to connect with and will take engaging courses that speak to their interests and values. Relatively few will spend their college years browbeaten by arrogant professors or militant students whose political views are antithetical to their own.

The bad news is that this mostly congenial experience is made possible by a pervasive insularity. To a striking degree, young people now pick their college based in part on the school’s political reputation, make friends with and date other kids with similar political views, choose majors that reinforce their outlook on the world and generally gravitate toward what is ideologically familiar.

This self-sorting not only undercuts the development of the critical thinking skills that a college education is supposed to foster; it also deepens the polarization that is imperiling our country.

I doubt this trend is as powerful or pervasive as Gross makes it seem, but it is absolutely real; friendships between MAGA and DSA young Americans seem to me to be very rare indeed. People don't just oppose their political enemies, they hate them, and many of us seem to think that nothing else matters nearly as much.

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot

The Sun, from the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot",

attributed to Franco dei Russi (1453-1482)

A surviving account book tells us that around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards in the pattern we call Tarot. This meticulously painted deck was valued at 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of a palace servant.

The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has a bunch of Renaissance Italian tarot cards, some of which are probably associated with the Dukes of Milan. There are no complete sets, just various cards from several different sets executed by different artists. They describe these cards as the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot." The Viscontis and the Sforzas were two families that both held the rank of dukes of Milan, the Sforzas taking over (violently) from the Visconti in 1447. 

No expert myself, I find this designation misleading in the extreme, but anyway these are 15th-century tarot cards from northern Italy, and they are quite amazing.

Death and Judgment, attributed to 

Bonifacio Bembo (1420-1480)

Temperence, attributed to Franco dei Russi

The Three of Cups, attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. More at the NY Times

There is also a related set of cards known as the Cary Yale Playing Cards, now kept in the Beineke Library at Yale. These also date to the mid 1400s and are also from northern Italy, but the rest of what I read about them strikes me as speculation.

Quite delightful that so many of these little wonders survive in North American and European Collections.