Watch it.

This is why men think about the Roman empire at least once a week.

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The giants of the early days of tech, like Bill Gates and Michael Dell, had one thing in common: they were all autodidacts. These computer-geeks turned billionaires were and still are so much more than just gifted — they are self-learners. Early in their careers, they questioned formal paths to success, learned complex information all by themselves (most of them also dropping out of college) even though the information was still mostly inaccessible.

Today, 20 years after Google was founded, technological advancements have changed everything: access to information has improved immensely, freeing us of institutional education’s monopoly of learning.

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Take a look at the average corporate car park and it will look like a still from a black-and-white movie. The vast majority of cars sold in the United States continue to be grayscale colors: black, white, gray, and silver—and it’s getting worse. According to data from iSeeCars, there’s been a 20% increase in grayscale cars over the past 20 years.

In 2004, grayscale cars made up 60.3% of the new car market, which is an understandable number. Grayscale colors are simple, widely liked, and look good on most cars. However, in 2023, that number jumped to a staggering 80%. And, according to iSeeCars, automakers offer the same number of different colors now as they did in 2004, with an average of 6.7 non-grayscale colors. So it isn’t that automakers are afraid of interesting colors. Customers just don’t seem to want them.

Wall Street Journal.

Why are so many Americans forgoing new vehicles? Used cars are not just a better bargain, they retain designs and features more coveted than their high-tech replacements.

Read it.

Community broadband advocates have scored a major victory in Minnesota as state lawmakers there have repealed the state’s preemption laws that prevented cities and towns in the Land of 10,000 Lakes from providing municipal broadband services.

The new legislation, signed into law yesterday by Gov. Tim Walz, took aim at two statutes that sought to protect large monopoly telecommunications providers from competition.

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Why do we like Tolkien’s stories? This question has puzzled many authors who have dedicated books, studies, and essays to Middle-earth. Even some of the critics who have downplayed the value of the British author, considering him an unserious writer who invented escapist fairy tales for adults, could not suppress their curiosity when The Lord of the Rings trilogy was declared by Waterstones to be the most read novel of the 20th century. “How is this possible?” they wondered. “A storyteller, even if he is an Oxford professor, became the most influential author of the 20th century? Surely Hesse, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, Marquez, and many others were the most read, the most beloved citizens of the Republic of Letters. Why do readers like Tolkien’s stories?”

If you have to ask, you’ll never understand the answer.

Thank you, Justin “Benito” Trudeau.

Wikipedia.

In the year 2017, the United States has fragmented into post-apocalyptic wastelands with a few civilized areas. An ongoing economic crisis has led to the recycling of aging 20th-century mechanical and technological equipment. Society has also become averse to intimacy, as well as both increasingly hypersexualized and bureaucratic. Robotic technology has produced gynoids as substitutes for wives. The declining instances of actual sex among men and women is litigious, with one brothel having lawyers draft up contracts detailing the intended sexual rendezvous.

Only missed it by a couple of years. I blame COVID.

YouTuber hoe_math explains it all to you.

Takes ‘Do I need to draw you a picture?’ to a whole new level.

“What kind of person you are is the choices that you make. We have no way to judge you other than your choices, that’s what we can see.”

We are what we do.

• Not what we think.
• Not what we believe.
• Not what we say.
• Not what we wish.

WHAT WE DO. That is the thing and the whole of the thing.

Jesus knew this and made it quite clear–read Matthew 5: 31 et seq.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The real power of the media is the power to ignore, so noticing what they ignore is a good way to get a sense of what is happening in the regime. Sometimes they ignore something because it has no interest to the rulers and sometimes it is just to prevent anyone from discussing it. There are times when the media gives something a good leaving alone because the regime does not know how to respond.

The Trump verdict may be the last option. We had the usual stuff on the day it happened, but then the story sort of just disappeared. There were a few conservative cucks doing their normal cuckery, but otherwise the conservatives followed the crowd, which laughed and jeered the verdict. The kooks even had to accept that this was not going to be the winner they imagined. As a result, the story just died.

One possible reason is the verdict has created more problems for the regime, as no one has any idea what to do about it. The whole point of the lawfare gambit was to scare away Trump’s support or bully him out of the race. Instead, he has bulled his way forward to the nomination and he has more support than ever. Like Project Ukraine, the prophesies have not come true and there is no plan B.

CNN.

“Cozy” is Voice-of-the-Crust for ‘small’. The home in question is 600 sq. ft., which is about 25×25. That’s a good size for a one-bed apartment, but not what I’d call a ‘home’.

The new printer can produce objects as large as 96 feet long by 32 feet wide by 18 feet?high and can print up to 500 pounds per hour. Dagher says that the goal is to be able to print 1,000 pounds of material in an hour. At that rate, it could reproduce the BioHome3D in 48 hours, he says.

96′ x 32′ is 3,072 sq.ft. Yet what they ‘bolted together’ is only 600 sq.ft. Hmmmm….

Notice that the walls are 3D-printer horizontal wavicles, which will attract dust like nobody’s business. The first thing people are going to do is plaster that wall flat, or sheet-rock it. So much for the warm-fuzzy-wood vibe.

There are some obstacles to overcome first. “It takes years for codes to change,” says Dagher, referring to building codes that construction companies must meet.

Your tax dollars at work. Good luck getting that past the bureaucrat-and-union-pillared Democrat regime in most urban areas. The reason housing costs are so high in the People’s Republic of Maine is because government employees are restricting the supply of housing through strict zoning and environmental regulations, and union labor are filling their pockets and won’t look kindly on somebody trying to bring in a 3D house printer to ‘take union jobs’.

Will CNN report on it when it all comes a cropper? I think not. (‘Oh, look, MAGA squirrels!”)

Watch: Why 3D Printing Buildings Leads to Problems

Read it.

There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).

The strict definition of ‘farmer’ is someone who works another’s land. We use ‘farmer’ these days for anybody involved in agriculture because the Anglo-Saxon term ‘husbandman’ has fallen out of use.

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Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc.

But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!”

My mother had the same habit.

Jonathan Turley.

Below is my column in the Hill on the most compelling grounds for an appeal in the Trump case after his conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan. There has been considerable criticism of the defense team and its strategy in the case, including some moves that may undermine appellate issues. However, after the instructions became public, I wrote a column that I thought the case was nearly un-winnable, even for those of us who previously saw a chance for a hung jury. Clarence Darrow would likely have lost with those instructions after the errors in the case by Judge Juan Merchan. At that point, it became a legal canned hunt. So the attention will now shift to the appellate courts. While it may be tough going initially in the New York court system for the former president, this case could well end up in the federal system and the United States Supreme Court. The thrill kill environment of last week may then dissipate as these glaring errors are presented in higher courts.

I pick Fauci too. Empty the magazine.

Read it.

I now make a distinction between education and learning. With education someone else decides what they’re going to teach you, and they push it onto you. With learning you get interested in a questions and pull the answer from books, people, videos, and other resources, and the information sticks.

I don’t think there’s much overlap between education and learning. Rarely a student will be interested in what the teacher is teaching (by coincidence or because the teacher is good at generating interest), and when that happens, the information sticks. But most of the time the two are unrelated and the student remembers little.

We’re all told that education and learning are the same—if education is happening, then learning is happening. And students go through years of education. No wonder they think that learning is something to be avoided! They’ve rarely actually experienced it. We all figure out that education (and, incorrectly, learning) is a game where the teacher tries to get you to remember something and you try to do as little work as possible while getting acceptable grades.

…

If you decide to homeschool, the most common question you’ll get from friends is, “What curriculum are you going to follow?” As soon as you use the word “curriculum”, you’ve already lost. You’re doing education, not learning, because the student isn’t pulling information they’re excited about, they’re having your curriculum pushed on them.

“I wouldn’t mind living in a world ruled by software. What I actually live in is a world ruled by crappy software.” — John Derbyshire

Power Line.

For readers still puzzled about exactly how the Trump trial went down and why Alvin Bragg’s case was so convoluted, Brad Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission whose testimony on this point was disallowed by Judge Merchan, offers this primer in two long threads on Twitter/X.

Read it.

Google pours millions into development of their email service called Gmail. Its operating costs are insanely high. Yet, the service is offered free of charge to billions of users.

Gmail is not even a Freemium service. It does not have a paid tier with which it compensates the free tier. Even if it did, we have learned through our own experience here at Migadu that free email services do not work without a catch.

We offered free email services between 2015 and 2020 to more than 200.000 email accounts. The free tier was responsible for more than 80% of our costs, both in infrastructure as well in support. This has led to sunsetting the free tier in October 2020.

On the other hand, Gmail offers its free service to billions of users worldwide. Where is the catch?

TANSTAAFL. If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. (This maxim also applies to the American welfare state. The outcome of getting free stuff from the government is more votes for the Party of Free Stuff, i.e. Democrats–with results as you see them.)

Ars Technica.

The battle formations included the “promachoi”—the foremost fighters who formed the first line—and the “plithos,” men that were staying in the rear. The warriors took turns in the first line and then retreated to the rear to rest. Toward the end of the day, the armies disengaged and returned to their camps. The army operations lasted 11 hours each day.

During those 11 hours, a typical warrior in Homeric tales would go through 31 one-versus-one duels, 10 encounters with the enemy on a chariot, two chariot-versus-chariot engagements, and one chariot-versus-warrior-on-ship encounter (a ranged battle where the warrior defended beached ships from charging chariots). The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.

“So, we asked a group of special-armed forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armor to complete this protocol,” says Flouris. The 13 marines who volunteered were trained in historical combat, fitted with sensors that monitored their performance, and fed roughly 4,500 calories worth of goat cheese, roasted meat, olives, bread, water, wine, and other Bronze Age culinary delicacies. And then they had a go at it.

“Sing, goddess, of the sweat of Achilles Peleus’ son….”

Read it.

Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.

So much so that if we were to wind back the clock on evolution and “replay the tape of life,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he doubts “anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

But a new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures.

Why this comes as a surprise puzzles me. Environmental conditions favor certain traits over others; this is the whole basis of the notion of ‘convergent evolution’. Modern epigenetics demonstrates that environmental factors will influence gene expression, and so it takes very little brain to realize that similar environments will promote similar epigenetic changes.

What passes for ‘science’ these days is very weak beer.

NavalNews.

Fincantieri are the folks from whom the U.S. Navy took the design for the new Constellation-class frigates and proceeded to FUBAR it.

There are 50 years’ worth of advances in shipbuilding technology that the U.S. government has resolutely refused to adopt; the poster child for this is the Littoral Combat Ship, which has failed and is failing even as we write, despite Austal being the premier successful builder of high-speed catamaran transports in the world. (The only ships Austal has ever built that have serious problems are the Independence-class LCS, with the Navy pissing in the design process constantly from day 1.)

UPDATE: Shipbuilding 4.0: Using Digital Twins to Enhance Efficiency (MarineLink)

Wait until you see whether he can successfully monetize it….

Read it.

Last year, efforts to pass a school choice bill in the state Legislature were stymied by a coalition of anti-school choice Republicans and Democrats in the Statehouse.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, made the bill to create a K-12 education savings account policy a top priority. Although the Texas Senate passed it, the bill failed in the lower chamber when 21 Texas House Republicans joined with all House Democrats to kill it.

Weeding out the RINOs,
Weeding out the RINOs,
We shall come rejoicing
Weeding out the RINs!

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

How best to govern a diverse population is a part of the subtext of public political debates in America, mostly because no one is permitted to debate the orthodoxy on immigration, so America gets more diverse every day. This is treated as a novelty that only the best minds in the managerial elite can tackle. In reality, humans have been dealing with diversity since the first human settlements. It turns out that there are only five solutions to the problem posed by diversity.

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The federal government has no idea how much real estate Chinese entities own in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture legally is required to track foreign ownership of agricultural land, but underestimates Chinese ownership by at least 50%.

And even though Chinese investments in the U.S. are decreasing overall, China’s purchases of American real estate have grown. What’s more, federal national security capabilities intended to scrutinize these purchases repeatedly have failed to address even the most glaring threats.

The U.S. government approved the Chinese purchase of Smithfield Foods, the largest U.S. pork producer, which included tens of thousands of acres of farmland.

StrategyPage.

The Chinese Navy has 78 submarines but 90 percent of them are conventional diesel-electric designs. China has some nuclear powered attack and SLBM (Sea Launched Ballistic Missile) submarines. In contrast the U.S. Navy has 63 submarines in service, all nuclear powered and 18 of them are Ohio Class SSBNs (Ballistic Missile Carrying submarines). The rest are SSNs (Nuclear powered attack submarines). The United States is in the midst of building over sixty new Virginia class SSNs and preparing to build a new class of SSBNs. The U.S. Navy has established and maintains high standards for officers and sailors on its nuclear subs. Americans submarines remain at sea much longer than Chinese submarines. China is trying to catch up but is finding that serving on submarines is not a popular career choice for Chinese Naval officers. As a result the submarines’ officers are low quality and would rather not be serving on submarines.

Because of this China has had a lot of problems with its submarines. Their submarines are poorly designed and built. The crews are often poorly trained and supervised. Back in 2003 this led to an incident where 70 officers and sailors aboard a Chinese submarine suffocated and died. The sub did not sink, it just drifted for weeks until the Chinese Navy searchers found it and all the dead personnel on board. To remedy this situation the Chinese Navy has been ordered to improve crew training and demonstrate the success of that by keeping the subs at sea longer while operating as they would in wartime.

Read it.

Remember all those assurances that the wind always blows somewhere? Not so much on the night of the 27th.

My, what a surprise.

Read it.

During mitosis, condensin activity is thought to interfere with interphase chromatin structures. To investigate genome folding principles in the absence of chromatin loop extrusion, we codepleted condensin I and condensin II, which triggered mitotic chromosome compartmentalization in ways similar to that in interphase. However, two distinct euchromatic compartments, indistinguishable in interphase, emerged upon condensin loss with different interaction preferences and dependencies on H3K27ac. Constitutive heterochromatin gradually self-aggregated and cocompartmentalized with facultative heterochromatin, contrasting with their separation during interphase. Notably, some cis-regulatory element contacts became apparent even in the absence of CTCF/cohesin-mediated structures. Heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) proteins, which are thought to partition constitutive heterochromatin, were absent from mitotic chromosomes, suggesting, surprisingly, that constitutive heterochromatin can self-aggregate without HP1. Indeed, in cells traversing from M to G1 phase in the combined absence of HP1?, HP1? and HP1?, constitutive heterochromatin compartments are normally re-established. In sum, condensin-deficient mitotic chromosomes illuminate forces of genome compartmentalization not identified in interphase cells.

I had suspected as much. Good to see it confirmed.

Politico.

A rocket launched by North Korea to deploy the country’s second spy satellite exploded shortly after liftoff Monday, state media reported, in a setback for leader Kim Jong Un’s hopes to field satellites to monitor the U.S. and South Korea.

Monday’s failed launch came hours after leaders of South Korea, China and Japan met in Seoul in their first trilateral meeting in more than four years. It’s highly unusual for North Korea to take provocative action when China, its major ally and economic pipeline, is engaging in high-level diplomacy in the region.

Gee, what a shame.

Read it.

I am aware of the language of engineering. In simplest strokes: Requirements are written, specifications are formed, something is created, and then inspected for conformity with the specifications and underlying requirements. If they check out, they are signed-off as complete.

This, of course, is a process. It is a closed process, with the goal of emerging with a product. The process works, and it is checkable. So far, so good.

Now comes the fun part: let’s apply Engineering Speak to the biblical account of creation.

God is apparently a Fine Arts major. Hence the lack of Unit Testing and the consequent proliferation of Bugs.

Read it.

Tattoos are trendy, so there’s no talk of “linked”.

Now, the researchers underline the need for more research on the topic.

My, what a surprise. I’m waiting for a writeup where researchers underline a need for less research on the topic (any topic).

Actually, I am encouraged by the thought that Natural Selection might be acting to expunge trailer trash from the gene pool. Go Darwin….

Read it.

“Linked with” means “we can’t find an actual link–causal connection–so we’re making one up”.

Around 8% of human DNA is made up of genetic sequences acquired from ancient viruses. These sequences, known as human endogenous retroviruses (or Hervs), date back hundreds of thousands to millions of years – with some even predating the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Our latest research suggests that some ancient viral DNA sequences in the human genome play a role in susceptibility to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

Hervs represent the remnants of these infections with ancient retroviruses. Retroviruses are viruses that insert a copy of their genetic material into the DNA of the cells they infect. Retroviruses probably infected us on multiple occasions during our evolutionary past. When these infections occurred in sperm or egg cells that generated offspring, the genetic material from these retroviruses was passed on to subsequent generations, becoming a permanent part of our lineage.

[Emphasis added.] All correlation can do is suggest; it can’t link. (Of course, if correlation is all you’ve got, that’s what you go with. But let’s not pretend that it’s actually, you know, a link.)

Read it.

Europe’s farmers are once again taking their demands directly to European Union institutions, with the Dutch Farmers Defense Force (FDF) mobilising for a demonstration in the Belgian capital Monday to defend their industry and way of life. Organisers have predicted approximately 3,000 tractors will make their way to the EU capital for the FDF demonstration. Leading farming unions in France, the Netherlands, and Spain have already pledged their support.

“You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.” — ZMan

ZMan pushes the red pill.

If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.

That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.

Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.