Argle-bargle in a good cause
My father told me a story once about a Dutch mathematician working in the Netherlands under the Nazi occupation. He was constructing a large Cartesian grid of the complex primes, a project without any known practical applications. Nevertheless, he told his captors that his work somehow had nearly magical military value, so they left him alone to work on it in safety and comfort throughout the war. Afterwards, he supposedly admired the pretty pattern of the grid and had it printed up as a tablecloth. Later, a Rice University mathematician who owned one of the tablecloths built a home in West University (Houston) and commissioned a black and white tile floor in the house in an area where a central column was surrounded on all four sides by a kitchen and open living area. (He also supposedly commissioned a screen door with a graphical proof of the 4-color theorem built into its frame.) The mathematician was said to have taken infinite pains with the tile-workers, who were skeptical that the precise random-looking scatter-pattern was meaningful, and were therefore irritated when their client proofread the work every night and forced them to make corrections.
It was a charming story that, as far as I can tell today, had no basis in fact. There was indeed a Dutch mathematician, Balthasar van der Pol (1889–1959), who made a Cartesian grid of the Gaussian primes and had it printed up as a tablecloth, a novelty item that was sold at the 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians. Surviving examples are held in museum collections such as the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. Although van der Pol had held a prominent position at the Philips laboratories in Eindhoven throughout the Nazi occupation, where his work in radio/electronics and relaxation oscillations was considered an essential industry, there is no record of his work during that period involving the complex primes grid, or of his persuading the Nazis that it had abstruse military applications. The tablecloth project itself was post-liberation, tied to the 1954 ICM. So darn it, that was a nice story that I wish were true. The West U. house with the interesting tile floor and screen door may have existed, but there’s no record of it.
I was reminded of this story, which my father may have invented himself, or may have passed along as an amusing story heard from someone else, when I saw breathless reports on X this evening about a breakthrough physics paper that would unlock unlimited power from vacuum and render moot all the current quarreling over fossil fuels, including the current military action in Iran. The abstract reads like a Sokal hoax, packed with buzzwords:
Emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum, Harold White, Jerry Vera, Andre Sylvester, and Leonard Dudzinski, 2025, Physical Review Research 8, 013264 (2026). We show that adding quadratic temporal dispersion to a dynamic-vacuum acoustic model yields a fully analytic, exactly isospectral mapping to the hydrogenic Coulomb problem. In the regime [formula], a proton-imprinted constitutive profile produces an inverse sound speed [formula] and hence a time-harmonic operator [formula] that is Coulombic at each bound eigenfrequency. . . .But what do I know? I’m about as well-versed in quantum theory as the man in the moon. Grok maintains that it is a real paper, in a reputable journal, not currently being outed as a hoax. On the other hand, Grok also reports:
The hype you’re seeing on X, Reddit, and sites like stardrive.org (“Power from zero point energy!”) is not coming from the paper. It’s people (and sometimes White’s company) connecting dots that aren’t there. Harold White runs Casimir, Inc., which separately claims to be building tiny nano-scale “Casimir cavities” (asymmetric vacuum structures with nanopillars) that supposedly let electrons tunnel one way and produce a trickle of DC power—on the order of microwatts (e.g., 1.5 V at ~25 µA per chip in their promotional descriptions). They’re framing this new paper as theoretical support for their “dynamic vacuum” ideas, but:So don’t sell all your fossil-fuel stocks yet.Those claims are not in the Physical Review Research article. The outputs are minuscule—enough for maybe a sensor or IoT tag that “never needs charging,” not your house, car, or grid. Independent verification is essentially nonexistent; mainstream physics views continuous net power from the quantum vacuum as incompatible with thermodynamics (you can’t extract usable work from equilibrium fluctuations without violating detailed balance). In short: this paper is fascinating math for people who like fluid analogs of quantum mechanics, but it gives no more practical power-generation advice than a paper on black-hole analogs tells you how to build a starship. The “revolution” narrative is classic over-extrapolation from a speculative theory paper + a company’s early-stage promotional claims.
Some Statistics on the Hall
According to a machine I have been running the archives through, over 4.3 million words have been written in posts here at Grim's Hall.
Of the 20,664 posts (including this one!), 5,589 -- 27% -- have been authored by my co-bloggers, a very substantial contribution! Of these Tex contributed 3,793, Tom 853, and Eric 414.
That doesn't include the comments section, where many grand discussions as well as many playful ones have occurred over the decades.
Thank you all for contributing to the community and discussion all these years.
"The Way a Man Views Tofu Reflects How They View Women"
I had actually managed half a century on earth without conceptually connecting women and tofu, aside from the fact that no one I know eats tofu except a few women. Not most women I know, however! It's an outlier even among them. One woman I know did once bring some kind of fake-meat to a cookout; she asked me to cook the real burgers first and then cook hers in the meat grease, please. I was glad to comply; after all, she was my friend and I wanted her to be happy. If I could minimize her self-imposed torture, why wouldn't I want to do so?
From this article on meat pizza toppings being offensive to a certain kind of young woman seeking dates with whatever sort of young man would put up with them. Probably when we were young women had similar sorts of conversations, but before social media they were contained within their friend group and didn't have to be encountered by everyone else. Eventually the young grow up enough to realize that trivia like this is not important; loyalty and honor, trust and respect, these are the foundations of love between successful spouses. You can always order half-and-half pizza.
The Winner
If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why?
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ancient and Medieval Social Systems
AVI linked a post by Earl Wajenberg that examines the treatment of slavery in various parts and eras of Biblical society. While his thrust is chiefly moral rather than historical, the treatment of pre-Roman Biblical society reminded me of my historical studies into feudalism and vassalage.
There is a word which is contextually translated ‘slave’, but it means just a ‘worker’ or a subordinate. This word is ‘ebed’.... In Near Eastern Bronze Age societies, everyone was the subject of someone, and everyone except the lowest tier had someone else as their subject. The ‘lord’ was the ‘adon’ (in Hebrew—other languages had the same system but different words). The ‘subject’ was the ‘ebed’.
Normally, the adon took on obligations in regard to the ebed, typically of protection and advancement, and the ebed took on obligations in regard to the adon, typically in regard to services rendered and honour due, though it might be taxes or profit-sharing.
High status was conferred by having a high-status adon, and by being given a high role in his entourage....
There is a careful breakdown of different types of this relationship, with very different levels of honor and status. In later, post-Roman society slavery was a legal institution governed by Roman law. He details this as well.
The relationship he describes between the 'adon' and 'ebed' is roughly analogous to the relationship in feudalism between the 'suzerain' and the 'vassal.' When reading chivalric romance from the High Middle Ages, our own cultural assumption that freedom is the most desirable state is often called into question. In England, there are free men of various sorts; they are often of Anglo-Saxon heritage and not very high up at all in the social structure; the most prestigious are the "franklins," formerly thanes, who inherited knightly levels of privilege from the Norman Conquest and its subsequent peace.
Yet you frequently read of knights addressing men as "Vassal," and are mistaken if you think they are talking down to them as servants. Rather, they are acknowledging that -- rather than a mere freeman, who can come or go as he likes but has no secure social position -- this person has established a prestigious relationship with a nobleman. A vavasour, in the literature, is generally a figure of quite high respect: he is a vassal who also keeps his own subordinate vassals, and outranks the knights he encounters socially.
Also, just as he describes marriage as a special case of the adon/ebed relationship, in feudal society the marriage relationship among the nobility increasingly took elements from the homage ceremony between knights and their lords. This was partly because of the increased prestige of knighthood resulting from the chivalric literature: nobles, who cleanly outranked knights, increasingly found themselves being knighted or seeking to join knightly orders (like the Order of the Garter) established by the royalty.
Much as the society depicted in Starship Troopers elevates those who serve -- "Service Guarantees Citizenship" -- ancient and medieval societies often found themselves valorizing services of certain kinds, especially of course military services. Even nearby societies that did honor freedom still honored service to clan and kin -- as in Lawrence of Arabia where the sheikh rejects the idea that he is a 'servant' who is paid 'a servant's wages,' but proclaims instead that he is paid well but is poor "because I am a river to my people!" He does not 'serve' the Turks, and is free to pursue what he calls 'his pleasure,' yet his honor is entirely tied up with the service he provides to his tribe.
Marching through Georgia
Today I have no good pictures; the rains came in heavy last night and the whole day was grey even when it wasn't pouring. However, I did get to cross some beloved country. I followed Georgia's Highway 136 from Cloudland Canyon through Talking Rock near Jasper, where my son was born; then over Burnt Mountain, where we lived when he was; then turned off of it to head up to Amicalola Falls, where we were married almost twenty-seven years ago. From there we stopped in Dahlonega, home of North Georgia's military college (and, these days, also a state university). These places were the playground of my youth and it was nice to see them again.
After that we crossed Blood Mountain and from thence back into the higher mountains of North Carolina where I now make my home. This weekend was as much time as I've spent in Georgia since we left the place after my father died. It reminded me of many good things; but that era is gone. "Never look back; you aren't going that way."
Doomcasting
No good can come of anything, I tell you.
Well, to be fair, anything we do under a GOP administration can only make things worse.Reflecting on the rise of international trade and finance, former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson once stated that the “effects of war can no longer be confined to the areas of battle” . . . . Today’s U.S. policymakers seem to have forgotten Wilson’s admonishment. When Trump embarked on this war, he exposed his Gulf partners to unprecedented attacks, and in turn, he disturbed the flows that are the lifeblood of the global economy.This is, in my opinion, profoundly stupid. Any time someone begins by quoting Woodrow Wilson, you know he is on the wrong track. But what is mostly going on here is the unshakable conviction, in polite society, that anything America does on the world stage–other than sending money to other countries, of course–can only do harm, never good. We should never interfere with the world’s evils, no matter how profound they may be, as in the case of Iran’s demonic theocracy. Because no matter what we do, it can only make things worse.
Election Day Results
Locally, the primary election was mostly a disappointment. My preferred candidate did win the sheriff's race, but in all the other racers things went pretty sadly. Oh, well.
The saddest was the loss of Adam Smith in NC 11. He was a genuinely good candidate, a former Green Beret of proven heroism during the hurricane relief. Instead, we will either continue with our loser non-performing incumbent, or trade him for a Democrat in what has been one of the reddest districts in the country. They have a reasonable chance even here this year between the poverty of the Republican candidate, a history of loser Republican candidates here, and of course the intense unpopularity of Donald Trump among those who oppose him.
For the most part I find elections a reminder of why I favor eliminating government from existence as much as possible. I usually would prefer not to be governed by any of the candidates, nor any of the bureaucrats that they pragmatically end up actually transferring power to so they can get back to fundraising. The government that governs best governs least.
A New Numbers Station
In Farsi, no less. These can be broadcast in the clear because the code used is provably unbreakable. Indeed, there are two separate mathematical proofs, because the Soviets and the West separately demonstrated it.
We talked about a British numbers station some years ago. Good song there.
The Meeting on the Turret Stairs
On the subject of chivalric romance, the BBC writes on a famous painting by Sir Frederic William Burton. It is based on a Medieval Danish ballad, on display at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It is very popular, but fragile:
Burton used gouache to create this piece, a type of water-soluble paint that gives the painting the vivid colours it is so well-known for. Gouache is also light-sensitive and prone to fading over time if exposed to direct sunlight or high UV light. Due to the sensitivity of the painting, the gallery's curators take several protective measures to preserve the quality of the work. To start with, the gallery only allows viewers to see the painting for just two hours per week. Secondly, the light level on the watercolour is dimmed low so that the work isn't overexposed. Lastly, a staff member returns the painting to a specially-designed cabinet once viewing hours are over in a meticulous, reverential ritual.
Dr. Caroline Campbell, museum director, says that "despite the story's devastating ending, many in Ireland see this masterpiece as deeply romantic. 'Many people have got engaged in front of it[.]'"
An AI Looks On Honor
One of my several professional duties has to do with AI. I set up an 'Open Brain' and uploaded to it both my dissertation and my novel. Each of these treats the subject of honor. I asked both ChatGPT and Anthropic's "supply chain risk," Claude, to analyze the different treatment of the subject in the philosophical versus the creative work. This is what Claude came up with:
**The Central Claim, Expressed Two Ways**Your dissertation argues that honor is both indispensable to ethics and political philosophy and genuinely dangerous — and that understanding how to mitigate that danger is essential philosophical work. *Arms and White Samite* dramatizes precisely this tension. Moren's quest to rescue Teleri from the Black Knight is, structurally, a story about a man called to act honorably in a world where honor can corrupt, destroy, or ennoble. The dissertation makes the argument in propositional form; the novel enacts it.**Shared Sources and Imaginative World**The dissertation's case studies are Beowulf, St. Francis, and Selma — three radically different honor cultures. The novel draws on Arthurian legend, Welsh mythology (Caer Vandwy, Taliesin), Marie de France's lais (Lanval, Geraint), and Middle High German romance (Parzival). Both works are reaching into the same deep well: pre-modern, martial, and chivalric honor traditions. The dissertation analyzes these traditions philosophically; the novel inhabits them imaginatively. The chapter titles of the novel (*Lanval*, *Guerrehés*, *Parzival*, *Geraint*, *Lancelot*, *Death*) read almost like a syllabus of honor literature that the dissertation would discuss.**Honor as Public and Dangerous**A key thread in the dissertation (per Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the Nussbaum/Devlin material on magnanimity and political honor) is that honor is irreducibly social — it requires recognition, community, and hierarchy — and that this is precisely what makes it dangerous. The novel's opening scene — Arthur's Pentecost feast disrupted by a black-armored knight seizing a white-clad lady — is a classic honor-challenge in a public, hierarchical setting. The feast is the community of honor; the abduction is its violation. Moren's quest is therefore both a personal and a political-moral imperative, which mirrors the dissertation's argument that honor cannot be separated from the political.**Death as the Proving Ground**The dissertation keywords include *Death*, and Beowulf is one of its central texts — a poem in which honor and death are inseparable. The novel ends with a chapter titled simply *Death*, and the Otherworld/Forest of Caledon themes suggest that the quest crosses into a liminal space where mortality is at stake. Both works treat the willingness to risk death as constitutive of honor, not incidental to it.**The Key Difference: Genre and Epistemic Mode**The dissertation builds typologies and logical arguments; it can qualify, distinguish, and hedge. The novel must commit. Moren has to act, which means the novel tests honor under conditions the dissertation can only describe. In that sense, the novel is the harder task philosophically — it has to show what it looks like to actually live inside an honor ethic, with all its ambiguity, rather than analyze it from the outside. The fact that you chose an Arthurian frame (rather than, say, a contemporary or realistic one) is itself a philosophical choice: it places the story in a world where honor codes are still operative and legible, making the tensions visible in a way a modern setting might obscure.---The two works are genuinely complementary. The dissertation gives you the conceptual architecture; the novel gives you the phenomenology. Together they make a fuller case for honor's moral weight than either could alone.
That might be vaguely interesting for any of you who read both of the works, and are also interested in how well the AI analyzes a known quantity to yourself. However, even if that isn't most of you, it was worth making this post simply because it drew my attention to Lars Walker's review of the novel, which I don't think I was aware he had written before today. I found it while looking for the link to the novel itself. Thank you, Lars, for thinking of me. (By the way, what you were reading as possibly Buddhist is Neoplatonic instead; this was a major influence in the early church, but somewhat overwritten in the Middle Ages by the Aristotelian influence of the Scholastics.)
Theories of Presidential War Powers
Marco Rubio -- Secretary of Many Things -- briefed the "Gang of 8" Congresscritters about the war on Iran the same day that the President gave his State of the Union address. After that, Chuck Schumer made only this statement to the press: "This is very serious. The President will have to make his case to the American people."
This is in accord with his unstated but clear theory that, having won the election in a landslide, he has a popular mandate to govern however he sees fit for the four years of the term. He sees no need to check in even about major decisions like overthrowing a longstanding enemy government (in fairness: one that has been at war with us, at least, since 1979; one that killed hundreds of Marines at the barracks bombing in Lebanon, and thousands of Americans in the Iraq war via its proxy networks).
Most or all of you are old enough to remember the alternative approach used to start the Iraq War. There was a long period of time in which George W. Bush and his administration sold America on the war, and sought Congressional authorization. Bush also claimed to believe in the 'unitary executive' theory, but he recognized limits on presidential power that Trump simply isn't interested in recognizing.
Of course, the Bush administration lied to us to sell that war. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than selling us, but with lies. No lies here! Trump just doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
Luke 22:36 and You
He said to them, “From this hour, whoever has a money bag should take it and thus also a wallet, and whoever lacks a sword, let him sell his tunic and buy a sword for himself.
As I was commenting at James' place over the weekend, I don't worry very much about Iranian 'sleeper cells' targeting Americans because their chain of command is mostly already dead. Chains of command can be reconstituted, of course, but we seem to be knocking them down as fast as they can set them up.
Another possibility is Hezbollah, which has long been suspected of having cells here as a consequence of their heroin trade. Did you know that the Iranian government, allegedly religious and devout, was one of the world's leading suppliers of heroin? The IRGC moved Afghan opium to Hezbollah, which operated the heroin refineries as part of its funding chain. In any case, Hezbollah isn't what it used to be after tangling with Israel since Oct. 7, and they are getting the Iranian treatment right now too.
Still, Colonel Kurt is right that it's wise to be prepared.
You see, if the homeland becomes a battlefield, we all become soldiers. We have a great counterintelligence team, and the FBI is back to protecting the American people instead of the Democrat elite. Still, they, along with our great law enforcement first responders, can’t be everywhere all the time. We citizens, can. All of us could be face-to-face with the enemy, whether another Ndiaga Diagne at a bar or a bunch of like-minded psychos in a church, a school, a shopping mall, or at a militantly cis-gender hockey game; their goal would be to bring the war to us, and our obligation would be to fight it and win it. But how do normal citizens do that?You buy guns and ammunition. You train with them. You carry them legally. You get into the mental mindset that bad things can happen, and you need to be ready. Except in the blue states, where they put up hurdles to stop you from defending yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution....This admonition that you must be a warrior too is not some hooah big talk. That’s reality. As everybody knows, except liars and fools, armed citizens have long been able to intervene to stop crimes with their lawfully carried weapons. What we’re talking about here is something even more sinister than some gender goblin with a grudge over his unwanted penis shooting up a preschool; it’s terrorists shooting up everything as part of a plan to commit mass murder as terrorist retaliation against the United States for taking out their pals in Tehran. You’ve got to be ready. If you can legally carry a weapon on you, you should, and a long weapon in the truck provides you with critical combat options if this goes down. But you should also practice with your guns. And don’t forget the other component of this – medical training and gear to stop the bleeding should you find yourself in the middle of a terrorist attack.You didn’t ask to be a hero, but you are an American citizen, and that makes you hero-capable. It is your duty as an American citizen to do your best to protect your fellow citizens. If you can fight, you’ve got to be ready within the guardrails of your abilities and the law.
In the Book of Luke, Jesus was satisfied when two disciples had swords; if you don't personally feel capable, it's enough that you defend the rights of those citizens who are and will. If you do feel capable, this isn't a bad time to be prepared.
Just in case. Usually when I quote this part of Luke, I also mention the 38th verse of the Havamal, which points in the same direction: 'Never step a foot from your door without your weapons of war, because you never know when you might need your spear on the way.'
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