felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
I wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler [ ]
Clausewitz experienced years of intense and bitter conflict, first in the crushing defeat in 1806, then in the grueling retreat into the Russian interior, and finally fighting to Napoleon’s defeat in the Hundred Days. He therefore spent his years of active service grappling with the problem of facing a superior enemy, and sought to [ ]
There is an urban legend that a brokerage once found that its best-performing accounts belonged to clients who were dead so could not meddle. Financial planners often rely on the theoretical performance of different strategies because actual investors keep putting in money, changing strategies, and taking out money. Skeptics often warn that in practice there [ ]
From Facebook. (scheduled 24 July 2026)
I now own an Indian copy of a Greek kopis cleaver (pl. kopides, from the verb koptein to split, hew ), a type of forward-curved sword or long knife used all over the northern Mediterranean from the sixth century BCE to the second century BCE. It was distinguished from straight, two-edged swords like the Scythian akinakes [ ]
A chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day and watches the ad [ ]
In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words disregard and ignore failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long [ ]
I have no blog post today, just one scheduled and three almost complete. My review of the Matthew Amt kopis from Deepeeka in India is complete except for editing and photography (I need a sunny day with no day job). I have a post about Google declaring war on the web, and why now is [ ]
Nobody planned it exactly. The Roman Forum started out as a low boggy spot between the Seven Hills that would serve as a market once they dug a ditch to drain it. That ditch became a vaulted sewer, and a few temples started to be put up on the slopes of the hills, but the [ ]
Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax heart-protector on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No [ ]