Why Moderns Always Modernize Stories


It’s because they’re Modern.











(From The Revival of Philosophy)






Now let’s look at this through the lens of Modern Philosophy.










It’s because they’re Modern.

Meek is an Interesting Word

Somebody asked me to do a video on the beatitude about meekness, so I’ve been doing some research on the word “meek”. Even though I don’t speak from a place of authority, talking about the beatitudes still carries a lot of responsibility.

The first problem that we have with the word “meek” is that it is not really a modern English word. It’s very rarely used as a character description in novels, and outside of that, pretty much never. So we have to delve back into history and etymology.

The OED defines meek as “Gentle. Courteous. Kind.” It comes from a Scandinavian root. Various Scandinavian languages have an extremely similar word which means, generally, “soft” or “supple”.

Next, we turn to the original Greek:

μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν

To transliterate, for those who don’t read the Greek alphabet:

makarioi hoi praeis, hoti autoi kleronomesousin ten gen.

Much clearer, I’m sure. Bear with me, though, because I will explain. (I’m going to refer to the words in the English transliteration to make it easier to follow.)

The beatitudes generally have two halves. The first half says that someone is blessed, while the second half gives some explanation as to why. This beatitude has this form. Who is blessed is the first three words, “makarioi hoi praeis”. In the original the verb is left understood, but this is usually translated as “blessed are the meek”. The second half, “hoti autoi kleronomesousin ten gen” is commonly translated “for they shall inherit the earth”.

Let’s break the first half down a little more, because both major words in it are very interesting (“hoi” is just an article; basically it’s just “the”). The first word, “makarioi”, can actually be translated in English either as “blessed” or as “happy”, though it should be noted happy in a more full sense than just the pleasant sensation of having recently eaten on a sunny day with no work to do at the moment.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people, or at least a lot of my fellow Americans, want to take “blessed”, not as an adjective, but as a future conditional verb. Basically, they want to take Christ, not as describing what presently is, but as giving rules with rewards that are attached. This doesn’t work even in English, but it’s even more obvious in Greek where makarioi is declined to agree with the subject, “hoi praeis”. Christ it’s telling us what to do and offering rewards. He’s telling us that we’re looking at the world all wrong, and why.

The other part, “hoi praeis”, is what gets translated as “the meek”, though I’ve also seen “the gentle”. It is the noun form of an adjective, “praios” (“πρᾷος”), which (not surprisingly) tends to mean mild or gentle.

Now, to avoid a connotation which modern English has accrued over hundreds of years of character descriptions in novels, it does not mean week, timid, or mousy. The wiktionary entry for praios has some usage examples. If one peruses through them, they are things like asking a god to be gentle, or saying that a king is gentle with his people.

So translating the first half very loosely, we might render the beatitude:

Those who restrain their force have been blessed, for they will inherit the earth.

This expanded version of the beatitude puts it in the group of the beatitudes which refer to something under the control of the people described as “makarios” (blessed, happy). Consider the other groups of people, which are roughly half of beatitudes: “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn”, “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”, “those who are persecuted in the cause of righteousness,” and “you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you falsely on my account”.

I think that this really makes it clear that what is being described is a gift, though a hard-to-understand one. So what do we make of the other beatitudes, the ones under people’s control?

Just as a quick refresher, they are: “the meek”, “the merciful”, “the pure in heart”, and “the peacemakers”. They each have the superficial form of there being a reward for those who do well, but if we look closer, the reward is an intrinsic reward. That is, it is the natural outcome of the action.

So if we look closely at the second half of the meek beatitude, we see that indeed it is connected to the first half: “for they will inherit the earth”. This is often literally the case: those who fight when they don’t have to die when they don’t have to, and leave the world to those who survive them.

Now, I think too much can be made of “the original context”—our Lord was incarnate in a particular time and spoke to particular people, but they were human beings and he was also speaking to all of us. Still, I think it is worth looking at that original context, and how in the ancient world one of the surest paths to glory was conquest. Heroes were, generally, warriors. They were not, as a rule, gentle. Even in more modern contexts where war is mechanized and so individuals get less glory, there are still analogs where fortune favors the bold. We laud sports figures and political figures who crush their enemies in metaphorical, rather than literal, senses.

Even on a more simple level, we can only appreciate the power than a man has when he demonstrates it by using it.

And here Christ is saying that those are happy who do not use their power when they don’t have to. And why? Because they inherit the earth. Glory is fleeting, and in the end one can’t actually do very much with it. Those who attain glory by the display of power do not, in putting that power on display, use it to do anything useful. They waste their power for show, rather than using it to build. And having built nothing, they will end up with nothing.

You can see this demonstrated in microcosm in a sport I happen to like: power lifting. It is impressive to see people pick up enormous weights. But what do they do with them once they’ve picked them up? They just put them back down again.

Now, the fact that this is in microcosm means that there can be good justifications for it; building up strength by lifting useless weights can give one the strength to lift useful weights, such as children, furniture, someone else who has fallen down, etc. And weightlifting competitions do serve the useful role of inspiring people to develop their strength; a powerlifting meet is not the same thing as conquering a country. But there is, none the less, a great metaphor for it, if one were to extend the powerlifting competition to being all of life. Happy are those who do not.

Strength vs. Skill

Many years ago, I was studying judo from someone who had done judo since he was a kid and was teaching for fun. He was not a very large man, but he was a very skilled one. One time, he told a very interesting story.

He was in a match with a man who was a body builder or a power lifter or something of that ilk—an immensely, extraordinarily strong man. He got the strong man into an arm bar, which is a hold in which the elbow is braced against something and the arm is being pulled back at the wrist. Normally if a person is in a properly positioned arm bar, this is inescapable and the person holding it could break his arm if he wanted to; this (joint locks) is one of the typical ways of a judo match ending—the person in the joint lock taps out, admitting defeat.

The strong man did not tap out.

He just curled his way out of the arm bar.

That is, his arm—in a very weak position—was so much stronger than my judo teacher’s large core muscles that he was able to overpower them anyway.

Next, my judo teacher pinned him down. In western wrestling, one can win a match by pinning the opponent’s shoulders to the ground for 3 seconds. In judo it’s a little more complicated, but the point which is important to the moment is that you have to pin the opponent such that he can’t escape for 45 seconds. Once he had pinned the strong man, the strong man asked him, “you got me?” My teacher replied, “yeah, I got you.” The strong man asked, “are you sure about that?” “Yes, I’m sure,” my teacher replied.

The strong man then grabbed my teacher by the gi (the stout clothing worn in judo) and floor-pressed him into the air, then set him aside. (Floor pressing is like bench pressing, only the floor keeps your elbows from going low enough to generate maximum power.)

Clearly, this guy was simply far too strong to ever lose by joint locks or pinning. So my teacher won the match by throwing him to the ground (“ippon”).

The moral of the story is not that skill will always beat strength, because clearly it didn’t, two out of three times. The moral of the story is also not that strength will always beat skill, since it didn’t, that final time.

The moral of the story is to know your limits and always stay within them.

It cost 1 billion dollars to tape out 7nm chip




This is what an s-curve looks like.

A Michaelmas Book Sale


“Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden collides with Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter
International in this supernatural thriller that goes straight to Hell!”

Also, the sequel:

“There’s a dragon in the church.”


This weekend the sale prices for War Demons are:
Ebook: $0.99
Paperback: $9.99
Hardcover: $19.99

The sale prices for Vigil are:
Ebook: $0.99
Paperback: $4.99

History Suffers From Academia

Academia has problems. This is an obvious statement, since it is an institution in a fallen world. It is worth looking at these problems in some depth, however, because they affect the various academic disciplines to varying degrees, and I think that History may be hit the hardest.

This occurred to me as I was reading the book A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament by Brant Pitre and John Bergsma. (It’s a massive tome that could be used to bludgeon a waterbuffalo to death, and I’m still in the introductory materials.) In the prefatory materials is an overview of biblical scholarship over the last two centuries, and this includes some theories which went from being novel, to being dominant, to mostly in the rubbish bin in recent times. And this got me thinking about the problems of academia and how they affect history.

The big problem of academia is that its currency is novelty. You can see this in the economic angle of publish or perish, to be sure, but even if publication didn’t affect people’s job prospects and salaries, it would still affect their reputations and standing as scholars. This selective pressure has a selective effect on scholars, very akin to what the same pressure has on scientists. Those who come up with novelty, for whatever reason, will tend to publish more, and will thus receive more academic status. This has generational effects, since new scholars learn from and have to work with old scholars. (For more on that, see Who Works for Bad Scientists?.)

While true and important, and as I say no one takes evolution seriously enough, it’s not what I want to focus on today. Rather, I want to focus on what limits there are inherent in the field to protect against novelty which is novel by being purely fictitious.

The prototypical example of a system which corrects against novelty-through-pure-fiction is science, but this is painting with an overly broad brush. It is not all sciences that do this, but rather experimental sciences. Theoretical physicists can spin theories about 11-dimensional string vibrations until the cows come home, and no one will ever notice that they don’t work because no one can run an experiment on the things.

The fiction-detecting aspect of experimental science only really works the way it’s advertised to in crowded fields of science. That is, it only works in fields of science where people will be doing the same experiments many times, or at least experiments who results depend upon previous results. This is quite true of experimental physics, especially of basic physics such as newtonian mechanics. It gets less true the less crowded the field is. The more low-hanging fruit there is to pick, the more people will spend their time picking it than looking in each other’s baskets.

Biology, and to the degree that it is a sub-field of that, medicine, are good examples of non-dense fields. There are far more questions to ask than there are researchers with funding to try to find answers. There are exceptions for particularly hot topics where at least several researchers will try to ask the same question, but you just don’t find much in the way of people duplicating each other’s experiments to find out if they get the same results.

Worse, in medicine certain types of answers become can make experiments unethical to try to replicate. If a drug shows a statistically significant result in a clinical trial, running such a clinical trial with a placebo group becomes unethical. All is not lost, since new drugs get run against “standard care” (i.e. the already approved drug) as a control group, so if the original drug is really just a placebo that got lucky, a real drug that comes along will prove better than it. There isn’t much of an ethical way of discovering that the drug is actually just a placebo (with side effects), though.

Chemistry may be the best field simply because chemistry is so closely tied to engineering, and the purpose of engineering is to replicate the heck out of whatever experiment was run. That is, engineering replicates findings by putting things into production on industrial scales, and a million LED lights shipped to Home Depot and Lowes and other such stores replicate the findings that Indiium, Gallium, and Nitrogen, when mixed correctly and an electric current is run through them, emit blue light. (Indium Nitride and Gallium Nitride are the semiconductors used in the blue LED.) But this is far and away the best case, and since it is industrial, it is definitionally not academic.

So what is it about the sciences, where there is some limit on fictitious novelty, that provides this limit? It’s that the test is not whether or not it seems plausible to another human being, but whether or not it actually works when one tries it.

This is, largely, not available in history. It is not entirely absent, as there are historical theories which can be disproved or confirmed by subsequent archaeological finds. These are, however, fairly rare. They are extremely rare in ancient history, such as biblical studies.

The particular theory which got me thinking about this was the Documentary Hypothesis, which more-or-less was a theory created by a liberal protestant in the 1800s that the traditional attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses was ahistorical.

What amazing new archaeological evidence was unearthed that gave rise to this theory? Why, none at all. The guy who came up with it looked at the text and spun his theory out of air. He decided to categorize the various lines and paragraphs and stories in the Pentateuch on the basis of which he thought similar and which he thought different, then took these groupings he thought similar and different from other groupings and attributed them to different authors, at different times.

Of course, being a liberal protestant, he decided that the religion started pure and simple and later got corrupted by law and liturgy. This appealed to his prejudices, and also gave him an interpretive framework to pull out of thin air approximate dates for the various authors he also pulled out of thin air.

And this was a huge hit in academia? Why? There are many threads which went into it, of course, but a significant one is that it was novel. It was new, and fresh, and exciting. It produced an enormous amount of work for scholars to do—someone had to go through the Pentateuch line by line and classify every line according to which theoretical author wrote it.

I think even more than being novel, this produced low-hanging fruit. That is, it made for relatively easy work.

One of the problems that a modern Christian who wants to write about scripture is up against is that he’s implicitly competing with twenty centuries of the most brilliant people in the world, because the brilliant people who had interesting things to say about scripture wrote them down, and Christians valued those writings and kept them and passed them on. There is, at present, an astonishing amount of excellent reading material, if one wants it, available from the saints and doctors of the church. What can one say, today, that has not already been said, and better?

Here, a new theory which overturns everything is the savior of the man in the bottom 99.99% of humanity (i.e. one who is not in the top 0.01%) by genius or talent, or whatever metric one wants to use. With everything overturned, there is new, fresh work to be done that most anyone can do, but not one has done before because no one could have done it before.

And who will bite the hand that feeds him? Certainly, the academic is not known for this counter-productive activity any more than any of his fellow men are.

So we get a century of people arguing over imaginary authors that they have not a shred of evidence for, mostly because it’s easier and more fun than real work.

From what I understand, a similar thing happened with Plato. At some point someone decided that most of the Socratic dialogues weren’t written by Plato because… they didn’t sound the same to him. Skip forward by about a century, and scholarly consensus once again becomes that Plato wrote the stuff commonly attributed to him. What did the intervening century have to show for it? A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Oh, and a lot of employed academics.

America’s Sweethearts










Because good stories need to be true to life.

Science Fiction vs. Fantasy












Murder For Revenge


  1. Gaining money or other forms of power
  2. To pave the way for love
  3. Revenge
  4. To gain status that properly belongs to the victim
  5. To protect one’s status

These correspond, roughly, to the deadly sins:

  1. Greed
  2. Lust
  3. Wrath
  4. Envy
  5. Vanity


  1. The murderer is fine with being destroyed in the process
  2. The murderer wishes to suffer no repercussions














Something I find interesting on occasion is to look up the history of television shows. Television is a very young medium. Though the device itself was invented in the 1930s, the Great Depression and the second World War and its attendant economic privations meant that televisions were not widely owned until the late 1940s. Without an audience, not much was made to broadcast to it. It was, therefore, really the early 1950s in which television got its start.

This makes it easy to research, but also makes the chain of influences fairly short.

Dragnet actually started as a radio drama, starring Jack Webb as Detective Joe Friday. In 1951, it became a television show, with much the same cast as the radio drama, though his partner had to be changed out part way through. This show lasted until 1959. It was later revived in 1967, this time in color. This is the version which I think most people are familiar with, that stars Harry Morgon as Detective Bill Gannon alongside Jack Webb reprising his role as Joe Friday. Certainly it’s the version I’m most familiar with. It lasted until 1970.

There were other versions made, but none with Jack Webb since he died in 1982 (at the age of 62). In 1987 there was a comedic movie starring Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks. It’s almost a parody of the original, though it is not a mean-spirited parody and I can testify that it is a lot of fun. In 1989 there was a short-lived series called The New Dragnet, and in 2003 there was an even shorter-lived revival series called LA Dragnet.

Though Dragnet was not able to survive in the modern world of police procedurals, or possibly just it was not able to outlive its star, Jack Webb, it did have an enormous impact on television. Counterfactuals are impossible to state with certainty, but it seems likely that police procedurals would not have the form they have today if Dragnet had never happened.

Episodes of Dragnet, which are (surprisingly) easily found on YouTube, are interesting to watch. The detectives are in the homicide division, so in a very technical sense the cases are murder mysteries. However, they are not detective stories in the sense of Poirot or Agatha Christie. The detectives do a lot of work, of course, but they don’t really do anything particularly clever. They just keep talking to people until they get enough facts to convict the murderer.

What I find curious—given that I’m a huge fan of detective fiction with genius detectives and write some of it myself—is that, bare-bones as Dragnet is, it still satisfies the impulse to see a mystery solved. This is true of modern police procedurals as well. In both cases, they feel somewhat like empty calories—enjoyable while watching but they don’t really have any substance which sticks with one.

This is not true of the great detective stories. Murder on the Orient Express, Have His Carcase, Saint Peter’s Fair—these stories really stick with one. There are interesting ideas in them to chew on long after one’s read them.

But it’s a testament to the human craving for the solving of mysteries that even Dragnet, which was told in an almost deliberately un-entertaining style, still makes you want to watch to the end to find out what happens, if you watch the beginning. This may partially be a testament to the power of charisma, though. I can watch Harry Morgan in just about anything.

Calories In vs. Calories Out

When it comes to the subject of losing weight—more specifically, reducing excess fat stores in the body—it’s fairly common to come across somebody who puts it like this:

It’s just calories in versus calories out. Thermodynamics says that if you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll store them as fat. If you take in fewer, you’ll burn fat. So weight loss is very simple: just burn more calories than you take in. That’s it. Anything else is just people trying to kid themselves that here’s a magic bullet.

This represents a confusion one sees in many fields: making no distinction between the cause of something and the mechanism of how the cause makes it happen. It is quite true that when somebody stores fat in their body they require energy to make the fat and they can’t also burn that energy and therefore the amount of energy they took in was higher than the amount of energy which they burned. No one, anywhere, disputes this. It’s also entirely uninteresting to the subject of fat gain or loss in people with excess fat.

(NOTE: when talking about healthy people—typically lean athletes—regulating what little fat they have, this simplification is probably accurate. This post is not talking about how a body builder can force his body to levels of fat which are dangerously low, or how an athlete can cut to a lower weight class. Those will almost certainly have to be achieved by simple calorie restriction because they are manipulating a healthy body into going outside of the homeostasis it wants to maintain for optimal health).

The question which is actually interesting to the subject of fat gain or loss is why the body stores energy as fat. And this is where the people who love to talk about calories-in-calories-out show their reductionist colors. Tthey will tell you that since fat cells are energy storage, if you take in more calories than you burn, you will necessarily store them as fat. But they give no reason for this, while there are excellent reasons to doubt it.

The reason to doubt that extra calories eaten can only go to fat is that the human metabolism is a highly variable thing. Though I should clarify what I mean here because by “metabolism” some people mean “resting metabolism”, while I mean “total metabolism”. Our bodies spend calories on a lot of things—walking, talking, maintaining our temperature, repairing our bodies, and other things. Very few of these things are fixed costs. One possible reaction to being in a cold environment is moving more or just burning energy for heat. Another is feeling cold and putting on a sweater. Those do not use the same number of calories over the course of an hour.

Let’s consider a very analogous system: finances.

If a person makes an additional $1000 per month, it is possible that his bank account will grow by $1000/month. It is also possible that he will start eating at expensive restaurants, and his bank account won’t change at all. On the flip side, a person whose income doesn’t change can decide to stop eating out and can grow his bank account with no additional income, merely by cutting expenses. And could do both: he could decide his bank account isn’t nearly large enough, work a second job to bring in an extra $1000, move to a tiny, unheated apartment, and eat nothing but porridge for his meals so that his bank account swells rapidly.

It’s that last part that’s most interesting to the moment, because it’s what seems to be the case in people who are, shall we say, famine resistant. Because there’s a really fascinating question about people carrying excess fat which is rarely asked: why do they get hungry?

Seriously, why is it that a person with excess fat feels hungry when he has plenty of energy at his ready disposal? That’s not how the body normally works. The human body, when working correctly, tries to maintain a homeostasis. Granted, it’s a homeostasis with more fat than a bodybuilder would like, but the body tends to regulate hunger on the basis of energy availability. Or in other words, normal people usually stop being hungry when their calories in is roughly equal to their calories out.

At this point, a word is necessary about what we might call the balloon theory of hunger. Basically, it is the model of hunger where the stomach is a balloon with pressure sensors and hunger is merely the pressure sensors detecting whether there’s still room in the stomach to fit something without literally bursting it.

There is some minor truth to this, in that the stomach does in fact have sensors in it which detect the degree to which it is stretched, but a few years of living as a human being should be sufficient to show this model as the rubbish that it is. Consider a few counter-examples:

  1. Desert. A person can eat until “they’re so stuffed they can’t eat another bite” then the moment desert comes out they can somehow fit enough additional food to fill a grapefruit.
  2. Exercise makes people hungry. Starting a new exercise routine can make one feel ravenously hungry for days. Exercise does not drastically increase the size of someone’s stomach in the first few days.
  3. Teenage boys can out-eat their parents combined. I did it often as a teenage boy. (I was on the rowing team in high school and relatively lean, too.) Teenage boys do not have stomachs which are larger than their mother’s and father’s stomach’s combined.
  4. Tests show that a stomach can stretch to around the size of an entire human torso before bursting from pressure. They’re incredibly expandable.
  5. People who win hot-dog eating contests do not ordinarily eat that much food to feel full.

In short, the theory that being hungry is entirely, or even primarily, about whether your stomach is full is nonsense.

There is also the always-hungry model, which tends to involve some pretend evolutionary biology about humans having evolved in circumstances of constant famine and so we are always hungry in order to pack on as much fat as possible for the next famine which we know is right around the corner.

The main problem with this is that it directly contradicts experience. Americans live in an environment with truly enormous food surpluses always available, and there are plenty of not-fat people who eat until they are not hungry and who nevertheless do not eat the 10,000+ calories that they easily could and this model predicts.

In short, a little bit of experience shows that human beings are not normally ravenous eating machines consuming every calorie that they can get their mouths on.

With these models of human hunger out of the way, the question then comes up and is very pressing: why do fat people get hungry?

It is not the purpose of this post to give the answer to this question. Chief among the reasons why is that there are almost certainly many answers to this question; people’s energy regulation can get screwed up for a variety of unrelated reasons. It is only the purpose to highlight how important finding an answer to this question is for a person who wants to lose excess fat.

(So as to not completely shirk the question, I think that one of the most common is excessive fructose consumption causing insulin insensitivity in the liver, which cascades into general insulin insensitivity, which then disrupts energy regulation, though even that is probably an over-simplification since in general nothing in biology involves just a single hormone. This model, however, at least corresponds well to my own experience of when I gain and lose weight.)

There’s a really good metaphor for the issue in Tom Naughton’s post Toilet Humor: The How vs. Why of Getting Fat. I’m going to give a variant of this metaphor to keep things more pleasant: the kitchen sink.

Suppose that your sink is clogged and filling up with water and about to overflow. It is entirely true that the problem, in an acute sense, is that there is more water going into the sink than coming out of it. If one applied the standard dietary advice to a clogged sink, you would just drastically reduce the flow of water into the sink until the sink was empty.

And it will work if you do that. Cut off the water, and the sink will eventually not be full of water. Evaporation, if nothing else, will see to that.

There’s just one problem: you have the sink for a reason, and that reason is not merely to keep it empty. You want the sink to do work. And the water-in-water-out approach of just cutting off the water in means that your sink can’t do its job. The correct solution to a clogged sink is not to stop washing your dishes. It’s to find out why it’s clogged and clear the clog. Maybe the drain strainer is full. Maybe the pipe is clogged later on. Fixing the problem depends on what the problem is, and there isn’t one problem. But whatever the obstruction in the drain, that’s what you need to fix so that the sink can do its job.

Similarly, a human being almost certainly has things to do besides sitting around not being fat. Many of us are parents. Some of us have jobs. A few of us have friends. Whatever it is, we have more to do than just sitting around not being fat. Just cutting off our food without fixing why we’re hungry when we’ve got excess fat is like just cutting off the water to the sink. Whatever you’ve got to get done in life, you’re going to do a bad job.

Further, people who are constantly hungry tend to be irritable, short-tempered, and lethargic. Even if they manage to fulfill their primary responsibilities well (and they’re probably only doing it passably), they’re going to make life less pleasant for everyone around them. I once had a housemate who was doing a calorie-restricted cut, and I was nearly at the point of begging him to stop because he was just so unpleasant to be around during it.

Interestingly, you can see the same sort of indifference-to-function in sports-medicine vs. regular medicine. If an athlete has a problem where something really hurts when he uses it, the conventional medicine approach is to just stop playing the sport and (I’m exaggerating) get months of bed rest. People into sports medicine know that this is hyper-focusing on a mechanism—in this case, rest—while ignoring that the person is a human being with a life. Sports medicine tries very hard to figure out how to restore athletes to normal function in the context of still living life as an athlete and not considering being wheelchair-bound-but-alive to be an equivalent outcome.

So, in conclusion, the real question when it comes to someone who wants to lose excess fat is not how to get rid of excess fat. It’s how to fix the fact that they’re hungry when they shouldn’t be. If you fix that, then the person will certainly lose excess fat—people who aren’t hungry don’t eat as many calories. But they’ll do it while still being a functional human being.

In short: one should treat the problem, not the symptom. To do that, one must first identify the problem.

The Best Laid Schemes O’ Mice an’ Men Gang Aft Agley

This weekmonthsummer has really not been going the way I hoped it would. I’m going to talk about why that’s OK, but first I want to quote the stanza from which the title comes, because the original poem, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785, is not quoted often enough:

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!

So, the reason for the strike-through up above is that I began this post in, if my memory serves me, July, and I am now finishing it in August. Between various things, mostly family related, as well as an annual trip to visit my parents, and most things have gotten pushed to the side. About the only thing I’ve managed to do which is creative is work on the second chronicle of Brother Thomas, Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral.

On the plus side, I’ve finished the first draft and, as of the time of this writing, have edited the first 100 pages (actually, 99¼, but the word processor is on page 100). It’s going slower than I would like, of course, but that’s something of a theme, lately.

And just to make life more crowded, I’m finally going back to the gym to lift weights 3 times a week. In the long run, it’s very good that I’m doing it, but it means even less time.

And that’s OK.

I’d really like to be a lot more productive on this blog and on my YouTube channel. I’ve got a notepad of videos to do which is up to about 10 items now. It’s a backlog. And I’ve got tons of blog posts to write. I want to finish reviewing the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, I want to review all of the Cadfael novels, and after that, probably the Poirot novels. I want to talk more about mystery writing, I’ve got lots of things to write about theology and philosophy, too.

And, God willing, some day I will.

But it’s that first part that’s really important to keep in mind. It’s our job to do our best; it’s God’s job to figure out whether—and how—we should succeed. Running the world is a big and complex task, and God doesn’t ask of us that we do it. All He asks of us is that we do our best to do what he’s given us to do in the moment.

So, the world frequently doesn’t turn out like we expect. But we can trust that it does turn out for the best.

That’s really all we can ever do: do our best and trust God.

Interesting Video On Why Germany Lost World War II

In an interesting video, TIK talks about Germany’s access to oil and oil supplies and why these dictated its actions during World War II, and why they made its downfall all but certain:

It is said that when it comes to war, amateurs think in terms of tactics and professionals in terms of logistics. This is related to the saying that an army fights on its belly, that is, if it’s not fed, it doesn’t fight.

Feeding and watering an army—both men and horses—has been the concern of generals for thousands of years. (Horses were often relatively self-sustaining, since they eat grass, but they do better on grain if you want them to be constantly working.) Thus tactics like burning crop fields during retreat, so as to starve an invading army.

World War II was in many ways the first truly mechanized war, and thus the problem of logistics expanded into the economic sphere. Machines are produced only by a thriving economy, and machines run only on oil. In order to fight an effective mechanized war, one must have a strong economy and lots of fuel.

This, by the way, has strong social implications outside of war. In order to remain in peace, one must have the strength to defeat attackers. In order to do this in the modern context of mechanized warfare, one must have a high-production modern economy. One doesn’t need to be able to produce the weapons of war oneself, but one must be able to buy them. That requires a modern economy, which requires at least much of modern social organization.

Those who want to bring back the good parts of traditional social organization need to understand this well. Whatever form modern society takes, it must be one that powers a modern economy which can power a modern army. If it’s not, it will be short-lived.

Studies That Test Diets And Compliance

I’ve had good results from using an extremely low-carb (i.e. low carbohydrate) diet to lose weight, so I’m highly skeptical whenever a study shows that they don’t do that. There are studies that show that they do, too, in addition to my experience, so something is going on when one has highly conflicting studies. The only thing to do is to actually dig into the studies.

And the thing one finds with many of the “low carb” diets in such studies is that they are frequently quite high carb. “Low carb” will often be defined as less than 100 grams of carbohydrate per day. People who have success eat well under 50 and frequently less than 20 grams of carbohydrate per day. A diet with 5-10 times as much carbohydrate being tested as a “low carb” diet simply doesn’t tell anyone anything useful.

But another big problem one sees is studies which test compliance at the same time they test efficacy. That is, the study breaks people up into groups and tells them what to do, but then records what they do as part of the group that they were assigned to. So if someone in the low carb group eats nothing but pasta, his weight performance will count to the low carb diet average in that study.

There are legitimate reasons for this, but they’re all for medical practitioners. Basically, such studies are useful to know how likely, if you prescribe a diet to all of one’s patients, is one to see results. Great for doctors, useless for the rest of us.

The other problem is that we largely already know what compliance with any behavioral change is in human beings: very low. It doesn’t much matter what you’re talking about, people don’t, typically, change for the better.

Where this is really egregious is where people look at these studies and don’t distinguish between the efficacy of the behavioral change and the degree to which the study told us what we already know about human beings: they don’t comply.

Hell, the compliance rates on taking a single pill a day are far from perfect; just look at all the people one knows who forget the pill from time to time. The compliance rate on 2x, 3x, and 4x pills per day is progressively worse, just from simple observation. Who, who has been proscribed taking a pill 3x per day, actually manages to take it 3x per day for all the days of the prescription?

When this comes to bigger stuff like diet and exercise, a simple and only somewhat inaccurate model is that people don’t comply. So a study which measures compliance + some change will mostly show no effect. But that’s uninteresting for people who will actually change.

Consider other areas of life: lifting weights or running. If you did a study to find out if lifting weights makes you stronger in which you also measured compliance, you’d find out that lifting weights doesn’t make you stronger. If you did a studying measuring whether running makes you a better runner, which also measures compliance, you’d find out that running doesn’t make you better at running. Hell, as long as the study is also measuring compliance, you’d find out that practicing piano doesn’t make you play piano better and taking dance lessons doesn’t teach you how to dance. Because in all these studies, the fact that most people stopped lifting weights, running, practicing piano, and never went to the dance lessons would dominate the results.

Or to put it simply, doing something only has an effect if you actually do it. No kidding.

Which is why what we need are studies which also measure compliance and separate people into groups based on compliance. This does introduce problems. Probably the biggest problem is that it will cost a lot of money because it will require really large groups of people. With 90%+ of people non-complying, you need a ten times larger group of people to study, and that costs a lot of money.

The second problem is that this switches out measuring the efficacy of the diet (or whatever) together with compliance for measuring the efficacy of the diet together with whatever preconditions (genetics, preferences, etc) make one likely to actually stick with it.

However, this is clearly a much more useful thing for an individual to measure. If I’m considering lifting weights, I want to know how much stronger I might get if I can stick with it. If I find I can’t stick with it, I don’t really care what it would do, anyway. And I don’t much care why I can stick with it, either.

If it turns out that only 10% of the population can stick with some diet, then I will consider taking my chances on finding out if I’m in the lucky 10%. Weight lifting works that way, to a limited degree. Everyone can get somewhat stronger, but only a fraction of the population can get hugely strong.

But there’s another issue at play, which has to do with motivation: knowing that something will work if I stick to it makes it vastly more likely that I will stick to it. If I actually believe that there is a causal connection between an action and a benefit, it is much easier to keep doing the action until I get the benefit.

Which is yet another reason that studies which measure compliance as well as an effect are worthless: the study participants didn’t know whether sticking to the plan even had any potential benefit.

So, in short, when it comes to studies showing no benefit to something, always check to see whether it’s a study that’s just telling you that human beings rarely change. It’s not completely worthless, but it’s only telling you what you already know.

The First Mary Sue








  1. Main character is a teenage girl.
  2. She’s beautiful and wonderful.
  3. Everyone loves her.
  4. She dies and everyone laments her death.



And it is.

For men.










Real Lawyer Reacts to My Cousin Vinny—And Likes It!

I ran across a really curious video on YouTube where a (putatively real) lawyer examined the movie My Cousin Vinny and talked about how accurate it was. To my great surprise he said that—allowing for parts that were obviously just comedic—it was actually very well done and parts of it could be used for teaching lawyers!

If you’ve never seen it, by the way, I highly recommend the movie My Cousin Vinny. It’s a ton of fun and has a lot of quotable lines.