Re-engineering evolution

At the age of 92, William Shatner has shattered his shoulder upon being thrown from his horse. It's bad enough that he reports his doctors are recommending a "reverse shoulder replacement."

Apparently some bright soul noticed that the arrangement of the ball and socket in the shoulder is a vestigial design that is not the strongest option for an upright biped with a three-dimensional range of motion. If the shoulder is really toast and has to be replaced, it makes more sense for the new joint to have the ball on the torso and the socket on the top of the armbone.

In the new configuration, the center of rotation is moved downward (inferiorly) and inward (medially). The deltoid muscle (the large muscle covering the shoulder) gains a longer lever arm and better mechanical advantage in lifting the arm, while bypassing the often ruined (and irreplaceable) rotator cuff. The ball acts as a mechanical stop to prevent the humerus from sliding upward, converting the deltoid's pull into rotation and elevation rather than just shear forces. This makes for better overhead motion.

For now, at least, the improvement wouldn't be worth the trauma for someone suffering from garden-variety rotator cuff or arthritic trouble. Maybe someday, though, aspiring major-league pitchers will opt for it as a prophylactic upgrade.

Corb Lund's Outlaws

The characters in Corb's songs are a wild variety. Here's three of his outlaws. The first song is about a tragic criminal and one of the darkest songs I know. The second isn't as dark and features a good lesson about how to treat wait staff appropriately, and the third is rather light-hearted for a song about outlaws.

 

Poker Card Shootout

It occurred to me that it's been several years since I posted any evidence that I could hit anything with a revolver myself. Going on a decade, in fact, and it's a perishable skill. I definitely don't shoot as much as I used to way back when, and I'm not as good as I used to be as you can see by comparing this poker card with the one from 2017.

The comparison is imperfect in several respects, since I was using a Vaquero-style fixed-sight Ruger Single Six rather than whatever the Assistant Attorney General was using, but hers probably suffered under greater recoil; and I don't know quite what rules she was shooting under. Tom guessed it was two shot groups, so I fired those. All six on paper, only one really good group and it was a little high. Group two was the closest to dead center; the first of those two got pretty close. Group three drifted a bit. 

Ah, well. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. Not a total embarrassment, at least. 

The Progress in Iran

In spite of the fact that the American news has decided to act as the propaganda arm of the Iranian Islamic Republic, there has been substantial progress in the campaign. My old comrades at The Long War Journal are doing some good work right now capturing the movement. 

Another good source is Richard Fernandez, who blogs less now but runs both an X and Facebook page under his byline "Wretchard the Cat." He noticed what I think is a key development in the shift from an air war to preparation to assist the Iranians in overthrowing their government: 

Israeli drones carried out attacks on several Tehran neighborhoods... Fars says the drones flew over southern and northern districts of Tehran, adding that “several members of the security force and the (volunteer) Basij force stationed at checkpoints were martyred.”

Notice it wasn't attacks on "neighborhoods," as the opening paragraph framed it; it was tightly targeted drone attacks on police and security 'checkpoints,' i.e., the places from which regime loyalists planned to shoot any protesters who emerged as they did in the earlier parts of the winter. 

That's the missing piece in all of this. The Kurds are going to break away in the northwest; the Balochi in the southeast; probably the Azeri. The armored units that the military and IRGC planned to use to suppress such actions will be destroyed if they try to move to engage; they will also be destroyed if they try to stay put. The navy is being sunk; the minelayers are sitting ducks for air power. What remains is a plan to allow the central population in the larger cities to move against the regime. 

Accomplishing that means showing those people that they won't just be shot down like the thousands the regime murdered over the winter protests. This is a good first step at demonstrating that even small checkpoints of regime loyalists are subject to strike, and on small scales that don't risk the lives of innocents who might be gathered to protest them.

If Only You'd Inform on Your Neighbors, Asheville Edition

Not so very long ago during the wild days of 2020 and BLM the Asheville City Council was denying the police department money for body armor. Now, after three unrelated shootings downtown, the mayor and the chief of police issue a joint statement begging the citizenry to please start turning each other in.

Clearly they have mended fences. Asheville began addressing its public order concerns after the post-2020 era got really out of control downtown; then the 2024 hurricane washed away much of what was left of the homeless community there, giving them a chance to catch up. The activists who had so much sway over the council during the BLM moment are quite dismayed to see this new level of cooperation, but the city is a nicer place to visit than once -- especially for women and children. Even my rather fearsome wife found the place unsettling during the days of high disorder. 

Still, there's surely a balance even in urban areas between defunding the police and trying to encourage Stasi-like programs to spy into the private lives of citizens. Part of the reason Americans have fled to suburban and rural areas is that you can live much more decently without so many other people around, and without the mechanisms of control that 'public order' entails. Even in the city, there has to be a better way.

Range Day for Ladies

Specifically, Harmeet K. Dhillon and some of her comrades from DOJ. The target shows some fliers at 30 feet; but Dhillon isn't a professional shooter. DOJ has designated shooters. Harmeet Dhillon is Assistant Attorney General. Nobody expects her to have to fire a pistol except under extreme circumstances of self-defense; there are plenty of people whose job is shooting at that department, and in every court where she'll be engaged in litigation.

A lot of people decided to be highly critical. Kerry Slone (of women-focused Second Amendment group called We the Female, which focuses on arming women for self-defense) has strong words for such people, but that's to be expected. What I think she gets to that's central is this point: 

So how do we start to combat this First, is understanding that men and women are naturally biologically and psychologically different.  In relation to firearms, when a man is mocked, it does not typically have the same result that it does for a woman when it comes to firearms. Negative comments towards men when learning how to use a firearm typically makes them want to train more. When a woman is mocked, it makes her even more intimidated and insecure and can lead to her to not continue to grow in capability. 

A couple of framing points first. One, Harmeet is not a fragile flower. I don't know how much she cares about mouthy idiots on social media. 

Two, using a firearm or other weapon effectively is generally more central to mens' self-image than womens'. The fact that mockery of that ability drives men to train harder doesn't mean they aren't as hurt or as embarrassed; it means that they are so embarrassed and hurt by looking foolish in front of the others that they redouble their efforts to get good enough to be respectable. The mockery is meant to encourage this reaction; if a man was really thought too weak or incompetent to improve, the reaction would be much gentler rhetorically but more devastating because it would be a reaction of pity. The humiliation of this is much worse. 

"Not everyone was meant to be a soldier."

That said, I think Ms. Slone is basically correct. As we learned from reading Aristotle, 'equality' rarely means 'exactly the same' when we are talking about ethics or politics. It doesn't have to for the I.3 reason we kept mentioning: equality as a term of mathematics, like a proof from strict logic, doesn't belong in ethics or politics. All the terms in ethics and politics are analogies. The reasoning is analogical, not logical. Treatment doesn't have to be exactly equal, and often shouldn't be, but it does need to be proportionate to be fair. 

With rare exceptions like our own Texan99, who genuinely seems to want to be held to exactly and only the standards men ask of each other, most women don't want 'equal treatment' in the sense of 'exactly the same treatment.' Most women I know would prefer that you were encouraging; that you demonstrate that you care about them and are proud of them; and if you help them improve, you do so in a practical way that highlights that you, too, once were a beginner who had to learn as everyone does.

If you provide them with that, they will be happier and feel more engaged. However, sometimes we have the same problem as Leonidas: the unit is sometimes more important than the individual. 

Not this time. Harmeet is hell on wheels at her actual job. She can get as good at range day as she cares to bother doing, but where she's really doing good for all of us -- especially in the Second Amendment community -- is her real job. I have no doubt that she'll accomplish more over the next few years on this front than I will be able to, to the benefit of us all.

Canada Cowboys

Tom's Corb Lund post, below, reminds me that though we think of "Country" music as associated with Tennessee or Texas, and "Western" music as associated with the American West, Canada has actually produced a few good musicians in those genres recently. Corb has an upbeat sense of humor that a lot of people like; he's also done some more somber pieces, like "Horse Soldier," of course, but in general he conveys a strong mental health buoyed by that aforementioned good humor. 

Another of these Canadian Cowboys, Colter Wall, has just announced that he is taking an indefinite leave from touring to deal with his mental health. He should be praised for taking that kind of thing seriously. It is a matter that has claimed far too many musical talents at too young ages. 

It won't be a surprise, however, if you listen to his music. It has a notably darker tone even where it is playful. 

I like Colter's music as music more than Corb's. There's no doubt, however, that Corb's speaks of a vibrantly healthy mind that one needn't worry about too much. It's an enviable quality; whether or not it is an imitable one is I suppose the focus and business of psychology. Best of luck to Colter Wall in pursuing that project. 

But That's Not All I've Ever Been

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:

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.

So don’t sell all your fossil-fuel stocks yet.

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." 

Cloudland Canyon

A pretty morning to be out in the world. 

Doomcasting

No good can come of anything, I tell you.

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.

Well, to be fair, anything we do under a GOP administration 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.