Antietam Iron Works

Took a fun trip to Antietam today, first the iron works and then the battlefield. This is the Antietam furnace as it was rebuilt around 1845. It was probably established in the 1760s and it was used down to about 1880. However, the history of the iron industry in this region is an almost unbelievable tangle of competing ventures, rapid failures, furnaces that kept the same name even after they had been moved several miles, and so on; the pages about this site at both wikipedia and the C&O Canal Trust are wrong. (E.g., it was never called the Frederick Forge.) We spent a lot of time trying to sort this out when we worked up there in 2008-2010, but I would say we were still only about 80 percent certain we had it right.

View into one of the furnaces. In a furnace like this, the iron ore and charcoal were stacked in alternating layers, and when the charcoal burned the molten iron drained out the bottom of the stack and pooled in molds.

View down into a furnace from above.

Sample of the ore kept at the site. The iron ore along the Potomac River here was noted by one of the first European settlers, Finnish/Swedish frontiersman and Indian trader Israel Friend, and the first mining was in a spot called Friend's Ore Bank. The ore was not of high quality but it was plentiful, and it was easy to dig it out of the river bluffs and load into onto boats for transport.

Moss on a retaining wall.

Across the road from the furnace is a complex of mill foundations. These included the mill where waterpower was used to crush the ore before it was loaded into the furnace.

The nearby Antietam Aqueduct, which carried the C&O Canal across Antietam Creek.

A place I never get tired of.

The Giant Filaments in the Galactic Core

MeerKAT radio map of the Milky Way's core. Notice the "vertical" filaments (perpendicular to the galactic plane), which are a couple of light years across and hundreds of light years long. What an image!

Another view.

The filaments seem to be made of synchrotron radiation, which is produced by particles moving at nearly the speed of light through a magnetic field. Nobody knows, though, what gave those particles their energy, since the don't seem to be streaming away from anything.

MeerKAT has also observed these filaments in other galaxies, and more recently other filaments have been discovered that are roughly parallel to the galatic plane ("horizontal").

More: Scientific American, LiveScience.

You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kep out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.

Links 5 December 2025

Roman intaglio showing a grasshopper driving a chariot, 100 BC to 100 AD

AI can steal Crypto.

Scott Siskind, Against The Omnipresent Advantage Argument For Trans Sports.

Hilarious Guardian piece on English Christmas wonderlands gone horribly wrong: "Nana, have we been bad?"

Interesting isolated human population identified in stone age southern Africa, extreme genetic outliers. (News piece, article in Nature)

Article on the Romantasy genre, with statistics and some good observations about the style.

Japanese parliament debates a tax increase to fund more defense spending.

And more Japanese news, protests shut down a developer's plan to build condominiums for foreigners.

New research explores how the bacterial toxin colibactin modifies human DNA, leading to cancer. (Science News, technical article)

One of my minor obsessions is the Battle of Pygmies and Cranes, a very ancient and mysterious bit of Eurasian lore. I just discovered that there is a modern mock epic poem about it by some other enthusiast: "The pygmy-people, and the feather'd train, Mingling in mortal combat on the plain, I sing."

Cartis Yarvin says he was inspired to become a political philosopher by watching YouTube clips that contrasted Nazis in uniform with western "decadence" and "filth." (Twitter/X) Finally, we understand.

Lots in the news about a major study of trait heritability that seems to find that most traits are less heritable than many thought; Scott Siskind goes through it in detail and finds it doesn't convincingly show anything.

The building that houses the Wayback Machine.

A bunch of recent studies have not found that economic inequality has much effect on people's lives: no effect on crime, little effect on subjective well being, etc. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith: "LatinoIslamophobia vs Islamoleftism is the future of American political discourse."

British film about hedgelaying from 1942, 9 minutes. Why was this made in 1942? To get women to do agricultural work? And did you know that in Britain, hedgelaying is a competitive sport?

A short history of zoning. (Twitter/X, Substack)

Very interesting conversation between conservative Catholic Ross Douthat and trans activist Chase Strangio, who has litigated trans cases before the Supreme Court. (NY Times)

Free article from The Atlantic on how many college students are now considered to have "disabilities" that get them perks like special low-distraction testing sites, and extra time.

And another Atlantic "gift article", Jonathan Chait on The Intellectual Vacuity of the National Conservatives.

Nature retracts a study that predicted huge economic impacts from climate change. (NY Times, Retraction Watch, Nature) Ideology and science do not mix well.

From old line conservative George Will, a piece titled A Sickening Moral Swamp of an Administration. With this: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement."

Do western nations owe African nations reparations because of the slave trade? I got this via John McWhorter.

Is this little video about a Chinese guy with a fleet of sword-shaped drones real?

Via Tyler Cowen, advice for men on how to get laid. You're going to see more of this as old fuddy-duddies get increasingly worried that young people aren't having enough sex.

Why did the US Navy cancel its Constellation frigate program? (20-minute video, Newsweeek, Defense News) Many American naval officers are in a state of perpetual rage about the mess in our shipbuilding program.

European militaries are throwing together new anti-drone systems from off-the-shelf components to provide a bridge until projected new high-tech systems become available.

Mental Illness and Crime, Afghan Immigrant Edition

Trump of course wants the shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan immigrant to be about immigration, but all the signs are that it is another sad story about failing mental health. The NY Times:

The emailed plea was urgent and direct: “Rahmanullah needs help.”

The warning came nearly two years before Rahmanullah Lakanwal would be named as a suspect in the gunning down of two National Guard troops near the White House on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was enshrined in writing by a volunteer helping to give Mr. Lakanwal a fresh start in America who had become convinced he was unraveling. . . .

In the months after, he sequestered himself inside his darkened bedroom, refused to answer his phone, and even failed to bathe or dress his sons when his wife left to take short breaks from him. He dropped out of the English classes he was supposed to take, did not seek work and stopped paying rent. His family received an eviction notice.

“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year,” the volunteer wrote in a January 2024 email.

The one way I know of that immigrants create more trouble than the native born is that they have a higher rate of serious mental illness. Nobody really knows why; it could be the shock of moving to such a different place, or it could be that the boldness needed to migrate has some connection to mental troubles. Plus, many mental health organizations have reported a big increas in mental problems among immigrants since Trump began his crackdown; to Trump that is probably a feature, not a bug, but it leaves the rest of us struggling with the fallout.

America is simply not capable of helping or monitoring all the crazy people in our midst who might end up posing a threat. I don't see any solution that wouldn't involve spending a lot of money, and I very much doubt that such money could be found in the current political climate.

The Grid and the Future

Tim Latimer:

The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale.

I agree that this is a huge problem. We are rapidly building new electrical generation capacity in the US, mainly in the form of utility-scale solar arrays. But that does no good if the power can't get to users. We have dozens of solar projects that are built but producing no power because they cannot get hooked to the grid, and they can't get hooked to the grid because the utilities are far behind in making the necessary adjustments. This is why some major power users, like Microsoft, are talking about building their own nuclear reactors. 

Building long-distance power lines is just hard. People hate having them built near their houses, and for good reason: they dramatically depress property values. There is also some evidence that they can contribute to cancer; I think this evidence is bad, but it is better than a lot of other medical evidence many people believe in, e.g. harm from vaccines.

I had a small part in the last major US effort to upgrade our transmission network, the new Appalachian backbone that was necessary to stablilize the east coast grid, built in roughly 1995-2015. That took a lot of political capital, including a handshake between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but is showed that we can do it if we put our minds to it. Right now, though, politicians seem to be distracted by other issues.

The technology exists now to bury long-distance power lines, but it is expensive and so far as I know, none have yet been built in the US. But we may have to go that route to reach the grid we need.

"The Raven and the Crown" on Audible

Available here. 

I have long wanted to produce an audio version of The Raven and the Crown, to my mind by far the best thing I have written. Over the years various people have suggested to me that I record it myself. But in my mind I always it heard it read by a woman with a British accent; a man from Virginia would sound all wrong. Last year I explored some of the AI voices available, but they just weren't good enough. 

But then, thanks to the generosity of my family and friends, I was able to hire a professional to make the recording. 

I went into Audible and discovered an amazing system for putting writers and voice actors in touch with each other. You initiate this process by posting a description of your project and a few pages of text for auditioners to read. I did this, went to bed, and woke up to find that 16 people had already posted 4-minute auditions. By the end of the day I had 30 auditions to listen to. I began working my way through them. Most were mediocre, like most of everything. After listening to the same passage 30 times and assigning most of them 2 or 3 stars I was starting to get numb. 

Then I listenened to two wonderful readings by professional English actresses. I assumed that I would not be able to afford them, but I figured I might as well start at the top. So I reached out to the reader I rated the highest, Sarah Kempton, and was astonished that we were able to reach an agreement. As my children told me, voice acting is a brutal business.

The process works like this: you agree on a price, then create a contract within the Audible system. The system specifies all the terms and so on; the enforcement mechanism is that nobody in the audio book business can afford to be blacklisted by Audible. The reader produces a 15-minute segment. If you accept it, you pay half the agreed price in advance. Then the reader begins uploading chapters, which you listen to. 

I loved this. Sarah Kempton's voice is exactly what I imagined when I told people I wanted to hear the story read by a British woman. I was immediately carried away into the world I had made. It took me eight years to write this book, but somehow listening to it in Kempton's voice made it more powerful for me than it ever had been before. I have rarely in my life felt so swept up into a story, and the time I spent listening to each chapter as it came in was by far the best part of many recent days. There were glitches – lines skipped, words misread or mispronounced, etc. But this turned out to be no problem; I just sent Kempton the exact time of the error and she edited the file to fix them. Usually I could  not detect any issue with the audio after amendment, and I am willing to be that no other listener will be able to tell where the changes were made.

My wife asked me if I were following along in the text, and I was at first puzzled by this question. I did not need to. I know what my writing sounds like, and every error jarred in my mind. That, incidentally, is why I am such a bad editor of my own work; I hear too clearly what I meant to write.

Then it was done. I felt sad, because I had loved this process so much. But the end of this process means I can share it with the world.

Kurt Gödel and the Pardon Loophole

Matt Yglesias:

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. . . .  Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. . . and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution. 

Food Banks and Market Methods

Caroline Sutton of Slow Boring explains that an infusion of market methods revitalized how Feeding America distributed donated food to food banks across the nation: 

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1. 

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Prices are information signals, and it is very hard to run an economy without that information. My favorite story about this problem concerns the attempts of the early Soviets to set up a socialist economy. Their economists kept searching for ways to encode and transmit this vital information, including, at one point, a sort of imaginary money much like Feeding America's "shares," but they never did solve the problem and as a result Soviet citizens were a lot poorer than they needed to be.