Assistant Village Idiot

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Secret Medieval Tunnels

In Central Europe there are narrow erdstals estimated to have been carved out between 900-1200AD. We haven't figured out why and Weird Medieval Guys thrive on telling us about this stuff. There are theories, of course, but most are tentative because none cover all the facts.

No theory has yet been able to account for:

   The number and distribution of the erdstall

   The similarities between the many erdstall

   The inconvenience of accessing the erdstall

   The secrecy with which these tunnels were built and guarded

   The complete lack of artefacts found within

Fun stuff. Great site. We don't know why knights in medieval texts fought so many giant snails, either.

Surgery

I have rotator cuff surgery tomorrow. I am not apprehensive, but I am also not all that optimistic. The most likely outcome is mild improvement in range-of-motion after months of rehab. There is some chance of greater recovery, but there is also some chance of none at all.

Yet a hundred years years ago I would just have been a guy with a bad shoulder for the rest of his life, so this isn't terrible, really. Also, it's my left shoulder, which I use less often anyway. There are many things like that these days. Health care is much more expensive now because we can do magic compared to then. Any D&D gamer knows that magic is expensive. My mother died in 2000 of a third diagnosis of cancer and my father a couple of years later because of congestive heart failure. If medicine had been this far along in 1990, both would have probably gotten another decade of life, anyway. As I know the events that occurred until 2010, it's interesting to think of that.

Fanny Brice

Monday, May 11, 2026

Closed Captions

My wife has always relied more on context than on my actual spoken words to read me. This seems unusual for a woman who reads more than anyone you know, but there it is. If I say that dinner will be in half an hour, she will ask ten minutes later if dinner is ready - because she sees me setting the table, and that is the stronger cue for her. As I don't expect this to get any better as her hearing gets worse, it occurred to me that a technology which provided closed captions for all our speech might be useful. Women might object to the discomfort of having the words be below their necks, but fine, have what you want. Having my words be visible as well audible sounds great to me.

I do see immediate problems. It might be considered rude to turn it on or off at "wrong" times according to some artificial standard imposed on us by teenagers who are the first adopters. But still, I see great possibilities here, especially for my ~~audience~~ friends.

Kind Vs Wicked

I had not heard the kind versus wicked distinction between systems A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to priove that any child can become a chess grandmaster through early specialisation. It's a fascinating article, showing that in kind domains, early specialisation works, but in wicked domains (which is most of real life), it stops working after initial success.

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

There is the usual failure to note that the three daughters all shared the genes of the chess-playing father, but I'm used to that by now. I just point it out to refute the constant claim of the environmentalists that all the experts acknowledge the influence of heritability on ability and behavior, and even quote them saying over and over that they do take that into consideration.

They don't.

But the article is still worthwhile for what it is.

The Shadow Cabinet of Soros

Data Republican is a new treasure, who knows how to find information and convey it. The Shadow Cabinet of Soros confirms what conservatives have long asserted with only partial information and intense suspicions. She puts the names, the dates, and the millions of dollars out for everyone to see. For those who suspected that the Biden presidency was mostly Obama III, for foreign policy, at least, here is the data. Politicians and operatives working behind the scenes is nothing new, and not necessarily illegal. But secrecy in such matters is never a good sign. The shadow cabinet of Obama officials oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan, just as one example.

National Security Action launched with approximately seventy people (in 2017, funded entirely by Soros)— sixty advisory council members and ten staff. Its advisory council included Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, William Burns, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Denis McDonough, Alejandro Mayorkas, Wendy Sherman, Wally Adeyemo, Kurt Campbell, Colin Kahl, Kathleen Hicks, and Jon Finer. Tom Donilon — Obama’s former national security advisor — served on the advisory council.

Forty-six of seventy roster members — 65.7% — received Biden administration appointments. Sullivan became National Security Advisor. Blinken became Secretary of State. Burns became CIA Director. Haines became Director of National Intelligence. Power ran USAID. Thomas-Greenfield became UN Ambassador. McDonough ran the VA. Mayorkas ran DHS.

Ioffe found the same wall of opacity: “Nobody — not even the various comms people working for N.S.A. — would tell me who is on the organization’s board or confirm that the group’s funding comes from Soros.”

But Data Republican tracked the numbers.

Unhinged Classics

I could argue with this woman all day, but really, this essay was a lot of fun. 5 "Boring" Classics That Are Actually Unhinged. She starts with Moby Dick.

Why It’s Unhinged:
Ahab isn’t a tragic hero. He’s a cult leader. He manipulates his crew into joining his death wish. He knows the whale will kill him. That’s the point. He wants to die destroying the thing that maimed him.

And the whale? The whale is just... a whale. It’s not evil. It’s not symbolic. It’s an animal that defended itself once, and Ahab has projected his entire existential crisis onto it.

She also has a series on "Wholesome" children's books that traumatised entire generations, includes Charlotte's Web, Watership Down, Black Beauty, and others that you gave to your own children.

This bears some relation to my post years ago on Folk Music Vs Rockers. Which is more traumatising, really?

High Profile Murders

When the boys were younger and were acting up I would sometimes deadpan "LOCAL FATHER GOES BERSERK. SLAYS TWO IN BIZARRE DINNER INCIDENT. Broccoli dispute rumored." It seemed funny at the time. I did not use that with the two Romanian sons or with Kyle who arrived last. My oldest son had daughters, who are gentler creatures and might not have found it funny.

Maybe no one would find it funny now.

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Doggie Peyote

I wondered if dogs stick their heads out the window because of the rush of smells on the breeze. They look like they are having a hallucinatory experience, with so much going on that they can't process it.

That turns out to be the second-most important reason (of five) why they do that. #1 is the breeze itself.

Saturday, May 09, 2026

Next Boxer

I went on a run.of watching Marvin Hagler fights a few years ago, and think I saw them all twice. About two years ago I got into Mike Tyson videos and I think I've seen all of those twice. I've tried to do classics, like Ali and Frazier, or Floyd Paterson, Rocky Marciano, but I don't stay interested for more than a few fights. I can't do the novelty fighters like Butterbean at all, even though I can see they have some talent.

Who does the crowd recommend? No MMA or UFC. Just boxing.

Fox On The Run

Might be my favorite bluegrass tune. There's a lot of versions out there, including one by Mannfred Mann, of all things. This is one of the best. Good solos, and you don't always get a dobro. Very uptempo, which is right for this one.

Faculty Bias

I am pleased that Heterodox Academy is having a go at this. Conservatives make angry claims, while liberals say it's all bosh, but HxA attempts to be disciplined about it: How politically diverse are university faculty? The short version is that faculties do skew liberal pretty reliably, more so in some subjects than others - and you will accurately predict which those are, most of you. However, there are more moderates and apoliticals than is usually reported, and studies showing the greatest divergence are more likely to be underpowered and have the worst percentage of faculty response.

The standard response of "But we are professionals and know how to teach both sides" is not addressed here, but we know the human nature answer already: That is true for some people but others are falsely claiming objectivity because of self-deception or dissembling. That discussion has to follow from the basic data, however, not anticipate it.

Need For Speed

Looking at sports highlights this afternoon, I noticed that everything is faster. Misieroski for the Milwaukee Brewers; UNC lacrosse in the tournament (movement, reflexes, shots - all a little faster than even a few years ago); and T&F has all sorts of records this year, with Cooper Lutkenhaus, Quincy Wilson, and Sam Ruthe still in high school but coming close to world records already.

It's film and coaching. Better equipment is part of it, but breaking down movement to hundredths of a second and a generation's worth of practice putting that knowledge into the relevant motions pays off. Identifying talent and teaching them better habits early is the real deal.

Vexillogy

Scott Alexander takes on what he calls "reddit vexillogy" in his Three Model Organisms For Taste.

If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags:

1. They should be so simple that a child could draw them.

2. No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text

3. The rule of tincture: “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and “colors” were every other color (except black, which is a “fur” and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn’t have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be “color on color”.

Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules.

He dismantles all three with examples of beloved flags which break each rule. The entire discussion on taste, including a previous post of his is worth reading, and all the heraldry discussion is a fine introduction to the topic. But you could head over just for the flags and be happy. Wait until you see the US flag in the style of Venice. We should have those somewhere ceremonial, like every state capitol building, or the Washington Monument.

Thursday, May 07, 2026

Columbia

I received spam from a new place, assuring me that there were CIA documents that Hitler had survived and lived another ten years. The National Enquirer and similar rags reported a hundred different stories of how he was still out there throughout my childhood and well beyond. There were also alien and bigfoot reports as well, and it was a good education to see how people could take marginal evidence - anything that looked unusual, really - and assure you of a particular interpretation. Well, maybe not an education, because a lot of people grew up with the same weeklies at the supermarket but somehow still at least half-believe them. I was with some of my old Jesus Freak friends this week because of a funeral, and my goodness, they still believe rumors about everything. As with other personality characteristics, credulousness seems to be installed at a stable level in all of us, regardless of what education or logic classes we are exposed to. Sumus quod sumus.

This particular website was even more worrisome than usual, though. It assured me that Hitler had lived those ten years in "Columbia." Whether that was the university or the "gem of the ocean" it didn't say.