I go to my spam folder to make sure no really mail has ended up there, and always marvel at the random names that are attached: Delilah Oaxaca. Giuseppe Pavlov, Amaziah Banks. And that's not even counting the African names.
Further evidence that they are trying to snare people who have no clue, not those who will catch on after they've wasted a few emails.
This is the Hudson Bay explorer John Rae's tomb at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney
It is called the Street with Eight Names. I could only find six on the day I was there: John, Victoria, Dundas, Alfred, South End, and Ness.
I don't think this is Bernard's best writing, but he does cram a lot of information about the real Arthur (and the denial of the real Arthur) into a small space. Again, he is coming from an historical linguist's perspective, which has often been shorted in the historical discussion. Even though he hedges with his "perhaps's" and "possibly's," the rather sudden emergence of boys named Arthur right after the most probable real Arthur of history suggests that people then did not regard him as legendary, but a real leader worthy of emulation and remembrance. The Origin of King Arthur's Name.
Science news stories pop up from time to time telling us that microbes have been discovered that digest plastic or extract rare metals. Yet somehow, we never hear about these again. Are they all fool's gold, false alarms, mountains out of molehills?
No, we don't get to follow up on them because of where they fall in the regulatory chain. Works in Progress: The 1970s Law Holding Back Biotechnology.
Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin therefore took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. The next step could be to place FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But even putting the gene back into its original host, I. sakaiensis, triggers TSCA, ensuring that the reconstituted organism can’t be used.
If you know more about this than I do, feel free. Sometimes Works in Progress leaves out important points.
Here in NH, the ads against both Pappas and Sununu for Senate are unfair and manipulative. My method of spotting who is fighting fair to discern who is closest to the truth is breaking down this year. I have the inertia of liking Sununu a lot because he can do simple math and has been honorable, while disliking Pappas, who is a lightweight. But that's the past, and the negative ads this time around don't have much between them.
Another graph that doesn't quite means what it looks like. The students who regularly used AI might be different than those who do the work more on their own. Put simply, they might not be as smart to begin with.
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At Skara Brae there was a small wet, depressed area in the interior. Water collects there and people had thrown coins into it. There seems to be an internal sense that we have that when you go to an old place or a sacred place that some gift must be given. No one makes us do this, we just do. It is a gift to the ancestors or spirits of a place. It may be a propitiation, but I think it is just an instinct that seems appropriate to many of us. Even saying it brings luck or grants a wish, as with a fountain is not all that different. I've never had the least interest in the custom, but in that setting and reading about ancestor worship and nature spirits all week I suddenly got it for the first time. I still didn't leave a coin, but I had a nice conversation about it with some young men.
I had a quick one at The Bothy, the pub on the back side of the hotel, and watched a man put a single drop of Grand Marnier into his single malt. It sounds like a good idea, but I don't keep that liqueur on hand, so I can't report on that for you.
We debated whether to go out and back on the ferry at all, because it was raining and visibility was poor. But we did want to see a seastack, the Old Man of Hoy, so we hopped aboard. Everything cleared in ten minutes, which is typically quick for Orkney. It was 50-60 degrees 24/7 with occasional rain while we were there, always windy. The sea changed color twice more during our 1 hour trip.
This is Ward Hill. I wish I could capture the mood of this more dramatically, but it is my sons who are the photographers. We saw the seastack at a distance only.
The point of being the Assistant Village Idiot is to learn to not make things overly complicated. I'm still working on that.
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, MD out camping on holiday
"Watson, what do you see?"
"A thousand bright stars Holmes, more than I ever remember seeing."
"What do you conclude from that?"
Watson pauses doubtfully. "That we are but a small part of the universe. It goes on at infinite distance while we on this small sphere are barely noticeable. It is humbling to think that all our wars, governments, literature and accomplishments have no meaning around any of those stars. Why? What do you conclude?"
"That someone has taken our tent."
A woman asking her husband at St. Magnus Cathedral (built in 1137)
"Do you know how old this is?"
"About 5000 years ago...
Uh, maybe it was only 1000."
Up the street at a restaurant, an expensively-dressed couple. He mentions Cambridge rather loudly.
"You have to have fish, because you have been on a long journey."
"But don't you think it has to do with the type of fish? You've said that one should have fish for the digestion after a journey, but I find that's only for Mediterranean fish."
"That could be, they swim differently."
Just up, by Madeleine Kearns at The Free Press: The Bravest Man We Ever Knew. Stunning.
Dovie described his body as “a straitjacket” even in the best of times, yet somehow amid the prison of his circumstances, he relished whatever simple pleasures broke through: a glass of iced tea or Kentucky bourbon, a butterfly landing close enough for him to take a picture. He would frequently text us photos he’d taken while out on strolls. “Exquisite weather today,” he’d say. “I got almost 12 hours of sleep in,” he once texted, after a long stretch of disrupted nights from pain: “Wonderfully rejuvenating.” He adored the many children in his life and would break into huge smiles when sharing videos and pictures of his nieces. His attitude was often like that of the Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, who, from the confines of her Nazi-occupied Dutch ghetto, once wrote: “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.”
Even on Substack, that supposed last bastion of intellectualism, there is a genre of weight struggle reporting that is pure anecdote with forays into generalisations they believe are helpful scientific information. These are always by women, but men figure prominently in the comments right out of the gate, telling their weight-loss story. If anything, the men are even more declarative that their experience is generalisable, implying you are just a shirker who doesn't really want to lose weight if you don't do as they did. I think there is plenty of room for everyone to cram their pre-existing sexual stereotypes into this data. You are all entirely correct, even when you contradict each other.
It may do some good for bonding and networking. There is exchange of medical advice which is usually better than nothing but overlooks a great deal.
This one finds she loses weight every time she goes to Europe, which is of course absolute proof that European eating habits and patterns of exercise are better than ours. It must be the cheese. Or the town centers. Or their laid back attitudes. Or less processing and more grocer's markets. Or the medical care! They pay less attention/more attention to everyday complaints, which is the key. The very quickly, all the people who have never had any problem with weight and attribute that to their superior discipline and character (wo)mansplain that to everyone.
I learned long ago - as far back as 2025 - that actual research and evidence are unrecognised, and you are chided for not seeing that these people are just trying to help by sharing their personal experience. They sound exactly like the teachers who insisted that I could have better penmanship or better artistic presentation of my 6th-grade projects if I only cared. Or music/art/gym teachers, same, ignoring neurology. Just try this one weird trick.
There was a special showing of The Tomb of the Eagles as part of the Orkney Archaeology Conference we were attending. We had to walk out on farm roads between the barley fields ripe for harvest, which was fun in itself. It is on the southern coast of South Ronaldsay, looking across at the Scottish mainland. My wife went inside to see the chambered cairn. It is good to have guides, because much of what they point out is not complicated, and you see it instantly when they put your attention on it. The entrance to the cairn faces the water and is up on a hill. The natural features were enhanced to make it look more impressive when viewed from the sea. A good thing to notice, that they were not trying to hide this important place from enemies but displaying it to them as a sign of power and control over the area. The tombs of ancestors were an implied claim to the territory in perpetuity.
Yet from other angles it presents differently, and the current thinking is that it was used for different purposes by different groups, possibly not even related. From the opposite side it looks like the far end of a ritual center where bones of the ancestors were brought. Even the name seems to come from a thousand years later, as the presumed totem animal eagles only arrive at a much later date. There is also a Tomb of the Otters that may be contemporaneous.
They were digging some test trenches off to the side, and the two archaeologists, plus a third one being quoted, agreed with some discussion that in the top picture, the upper find showed possible evidence of human enhancement, the other one showed no such signs, and the trench in the bottom photo showed definite signs of human enhancement of the natural features. They even very nicely pointed out and explained why they thought so. I nodded thoughtfully.
Theodore Dalrymple reviews the 20thC dystopias and their comparisons to reality 25 years ago in City Journal. I remembered the essay, though forgetting it was his. I mentally added a few other dystopias to the discussion, including That Hideous Strength. Rob Henderson linked to this, for which I am grateful.
The totalitarian world Orwell describes in 1984 is thankfully today more a historical curiosity than a serious threat, except in an Islamist version. Yet, many of Orwell's ideas, like those of Huxley, remain pertinent, even though the threat of Stalinism has passed, for Orwell warned us about undesirable trends that arose from the condition of modernity as much as from Stalinism. His fears arose not just from his intuitive grasp of Stalinist states and his knowledge of communist conduct during the Spanish Civil War but from his experiences with the BBC's bureaucracy during World War II, where he witnessed firsthand the potential of the modern mass media to mislead and manipulate.
I had not looked at it this way, but Arcotherium over at Aporia points out that countries sometimes use immigration to avoid change and dynamism rather than create it. Industries don't have to modernise practices and equipment if they can import cheaper labor and keep doing it the old-fashioned way. He mentions American agriculture, but there are worldwide examples and more industries in the US that evade change with immigration. He calls it Mortmain Migration: Immigration as an agent of stasis.
But often the industry changes anyway, and we have a host of new immigrants who do not have other useful schools to adapt to American live, having grown up elsewhere.
Rather than a rational system designed to favor the national interest or any other goal, Western immigration systems are accreted over time by blindly following the local incentive gradients that special interest lobbying creates. For such lobbying to matter, the special interests must have power and influence—which are the province of incumbents, not challengers. And it is declining incumbents (who have long since conquered their niche and ceased to innovate) that focus most organizational attention and resources on lobbying. Hence we should not be surprised to find that much Western immigration is designed to preserve declining incumbents.
Something different from Scott Alexander, who traces an obscure Romano-British Celtic god to...
To half the mythology you've ever heard of, from Lovecraft to Harry Potter to the fictitious leader of the Luddites. And a special guest appearance.
In 1929, an archaeologist digging at the Temple of Nodens had some questions about the etymology of the god’s name, and asked Oxford to send a linguist. Oxford dispatched a young philology professor with an encyclopedic knowledge of European mythology, who spotted a connection that had evaded previous scholars: Nodens appeared to be the same figure as the Irish god-hero Nuada of the Silver Arm. Nuada was king of the Tuatha de Danaan, a race of immortals who sailed from the north on ships that were clouds and made war against the then-inhabitants of Ireland, the Fir Bolg. He fought bravely, wielding his all-powerful Sword of Light, but in the climax of the battle, the Fir Bolg champion cut off his right arm. This caused some temporary trouble (the laws of the time prevented a one-armed man from being king), but his people were skilled at magic and metalworking, so they made him a new arm of silver, hence his epithet. He ruled for some number of centuries, a golden age of crafting and wonder-working, until the Tuatha de Danaan were invaded in turn (this was a theme; our source for these stories is a medieval manuscript called The Book Of Invasions). The new invaders banished Nuada’s people to the hills and forests, where they became the sidhe aka fae aka fairies.
