#notanexpert — Public Fediverse posts

@strypey
To be fair, it hasn't been trained on real-world practical things.
Of course it's dumber than a human on that because the human has the benefit of billions of years of evolution in the real world whereas ChatGPT has only a few years of training on text.
Maybe this will change when robot bodies get good.
#DevilsAdvocate #NotAnExpert
@darkcoffee8

@mlanger Maria I have taken all my vehicles to Les Schwab for years and they have free air pressure checks. Just pull in and they jump right on it. I have never seen them look at what the tires say for recommended pressure, they just seem to know. Never had a problem with their tires or pressures. My guess is that your tire shop probably knows something. Maybe they bounce less with lower pressures because you have a big boat? #NotAnExpert

@mlanger Maria I have taken all my vehicles to Les Schwab for years and they have free air pressure checks. Just pull in and they jump right on it. I have never seen them look at what the tires say for recommended pressure, they just seem to know. Never had a problem with their tires or pressures. My guess is that your tire shop probably knows something. Maybe they bounce less with lower pressures because you have a big boat? #NotAnExpert

A Letter to the Prime Minister’s Office

I woke up to read the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs on the latest foreign attack on Iran. My response is below the fold.

Hello,

I am deeply disappointed by the Prime Minister’s statement on the latest American attack on Iran published on https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/02/28/statement-prime-minister-carney-and-minister-anand-situation-middle-east. It is cowardly and removes any chance that Canada could help negotiate between the two sides.

I have visited Iran, had roommates from Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan, and completed a PhD in ancient Iranian studies. Hostility between the US and Iranian governments goes back to the Islamic Revolution, and both sides have done terrible things. In the past Canada has usually been wise enough to keep its distance.

The US, Israel, Iran, and Pakistan all have shares of blame for “instability and terror throughout the Middle East.” All have lawless, violent regimes with democratic fronts. To call any one country “the principal source of instability and terror” is the stuff of partisan rhetoric not reasoned analysis.

Endorsing the US’s attack and its pretext that Iran seeks to obtain a nuclear weapon aligns us with the aggressor and against the attempts to bind warmaking with laws. This is very dangerous because the only power which threatens Canada’s existence is the United States. I struggle to imagine a scenario where any good comes from this assault. Bombing countries is not a good way to prevent them from developing weapons, or to encourage nonviolent resistance to a brutal government. Canada should stand for human rights and the rule of law but not support either side in this conflict.

sincerely,

Sean Manning

I note without further comment that the US three-letter agencies seem to want Reza Pahlavi to sit on his father’s throne, and that it is not hard to guess what such a regime would look like. And that the two countries attacking Iran both have nuclear weapons, one of which developed them illegally.

(scheduled 27 February 2026)

2025 Year-Ender

Another year is passing, the tenth which I have ended with a blog post. This was a year of transition and activities outside of the history and archaeology I talk about on this blog. So sit down with a mug of something warm (or a glass of something cool for readers in the Antipodes) while I talk about this past year.

What I Wrote

Much of my writing this year was either for volunteer projects which I won’t talk about here, or editing my second book. I finally managed to stick to one post per month beginning in July 2025. I created a small page on My Pleiades Contributions. No magazine articles or academic articles came out this year.

I helped Martin Rundkvist with a question about swords, had a back and forth with Bret Devereaux about the hoplite wars, and traded casuistry with the very polite head of a very bad organization.

Two of my blog posts reached wide audiences: my list of reasons why knowing things is hard, and my warning about academia.edu changing its terms of service in a way that suggests they want chatbots to talk about papers using the voice and face of their users. I got links from Bruce Sterling and Bret Devereaux. My meaty review of Brad DeLong’s book was a flash in the pan, although to my knowledge I am the only reviewer who had the respect to fact-check it. I won’t try to track statistics because the swarms of scrapers feeding chatbots (and my defenses against those scrapers) interfere with the count. The most important statistic is that when I meet someone with similar interests, they have usually heard of and respect my writing. I have a very engaged audience which is very offline.

How I Pay for It

Unlike most bloggers I neither have an indulgent professional job nor independent wealth nor a thicket of ads and digital goods to sell. I have a mundane part-time job. My main sources of freelance income in 2024 have dried up so I spent a great deal of time and money this year retraining and obtaining treatment for one of my disabilities. My income was higher than any year since 2018, but lower than in any of my first five years after graduating with a BSc. If any of my gentle readers know anyone who needs an experienced editor of nonfiction, business writing, and marked-up web content please put me in touch with them! (My first profession was software development but that is a hirer’s market right now across most of the world so it would take local networking to get back in to if I choose that path). I tried some teaching and found that I need to retrain my voice for the COVID era. Look out for more on that in 2026.

Writers and artists have had to get serious about making money from their Internet presence because the industries which used to pay them for their skills have been devastated. The Internet ads which paid for the first webcomics and blogs stopped paying long ago. Some very popular things online generate no revenue, and some casual creations make it hand over fist. So if you know of small projects which you value, its very important to support them.

Everything Else

This year I joined three volunteer projects, one international and online, one in BC which was very active, and one in British Columbia where I am still coming onboard. I have not been a board member since my days in Innsbruck so this is a new experience. I helped pick English ivy and other invasive weeds from local sites and started a small garden of strawberries and marigolds and herbs. Strawberries in a sheltered area try to fruit as late as December here although they don’t get very sweet. Next year I will try planting some of the annuals farther apart and try some lavendula in a dry sunny space. Its an Eurasian species but it does well in our current climate and bees like it but deer do not.

In spring and summer I got back into archery with a fibreglass mock-Mongolian from Alibow in China. I had not drawn a bow for many years. I have not been able to connect with either of the local archery clubs but maybe that will be possible in 2026.

I attended the Victoria Gem Show, saw some samples of pigment minerals like orpiment and realgar and malachite, and had a nerdy conversation with a young couple from UBC with some samples of Tuscan marble. I am glad that someone else takes on the risk of storing toxic light-sensitive minerals in unsealed transparent containers. Although I am trying to shrink Mt Tsundoku, I picked up a few used books at the Russell Books warehouse sale in James Bay.

My only sewing project was blanket-stitching the edges of a piece of Italian worsted to make it into a short cloak to wear around the house on cold nights. I have a few shields to gesso and paint this winter.

While time and money for live performances were limited, in December I attended a concert at Alex Goolden Hall. I finally visited Abkhazi Garden built by a Georgian prince and a moneyed British woman after

This year I offended one local friend and one local acquaintance who dropped out of contact. In both cases, we were mostly communicating electronically.

My health and ability to concentrate are not where I wish they were. The world situation is not what I wish it is. Whereas the internet was once a refuge where I could find scholarly and practical people, social media became crazier and more hostile and dogmatic than face-to-face communities. I foresaw the doom which was coming to those sites so I don’t understand why so many people flocked to them. As a highly educated introvert who grew up reading classic American science fiction, reading the news gives me vertigo, because a handful of people with far too much power read the same stories I did but did not get the same messages.

Outside the Abbey Walls

do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

Thomas Merton, OCSO, letter to Jim Forrest, 1966 (source)

My friends who stopped worrying about indoor air quality are not getting as sick as often as last year, but the state of the world and the state of the web are still gloomy. In my view, it is urgent for us in the free world to disconnect from big-spending American institutions, while just as urgently connecting with American people. While we cannot accept the lie that the United States is isolated behind a wall from the outside world and its concerns, trying to work with Amazon or Automattic or the American public-health authorities will just drag us down into darkness. However, trying to talk about these things with a global network interested in books and swords is a distraction from acting close to home.

I wish I knew how to fix the things in our culture that produce podcast-addled premiers. I wish that when the self-indulgent folly of rich people and their flatterers lead to destruction in the depths of the Atlantic or the heights of the atmosphere, nobody else was hurt. And I wish that people would not pay all they had for comforting lies, and not a penny for the painful truth. But I cannot change those things. The task ahead for us in our local communities is to build things which can survive the crash and the death-throes which will follow, and create low-bandwidth means of communication with the other islands of flickering light beneath a starless sky.

So in 2026, I will blog once or twice a month, while working on print publications, my day job, and my local volunteering. This is not the world I wish I was in. My efforts to sustain communities and influence their direction have often failed. However, it is what I can do with the resources available to me.

Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

H. Beam Piper, “Day of the Moron” (1951)

(scheduled 27 December 2025)

2025 Year-Ender

Another year is passing, the tenth which I have ended with a blog post. This was a year of transition and activities outside of the history and archaeology I talk about on this blog. So sit down with a mug of something warm (or a glass of something cool for readers in the Antipodes) while I talk about this past year.

What I Wrote

Much of my writing this year was either for volunteer projects which I won’t talk about here, or editing my second book. I finally managed to stick to one post per month beginning in July 2025. I created a small page on My Pleiades Contributions. No magazine articles or academic articles came out this year.

I helped Martin Rundkvist with a question about swords, had a back and forth with Bret Devereaux about the hoplite wars, and traded casuistry with the very polite head of a very bad organization.

People on Mastodon enjoyed my links to Wikipedia’s guide to spotting chatbot slop and the tree of Ténéré in Niger.

Two of my blog posts reached wide audiences: my list of reasons why knowing things is hard, and my warning about academia.edu changing its terms of service in a way that suggests they want chatbots to talk about papers using the voice and face of their users. I got links from Bruce Sterling and Bret Devereaux. My meaty review of Brad DeLong’s book was a flash in the pan, although to my knowledge I am the only reviewer who had the respect to fact-check it. I won’t try to track statistics because the swarms of scrapers feeding chatbots (and my newly built defenses against those scrapers) interfere with the count. The most important statistic is that when I meet someone with similar interests, they have usually heard of and respect my writing. I have a very engaged audience which is very offline.

How I Pay for It

Unlike most bloggers I neither have an indulgent professional job nor independent wealth nor a thicket of ads and digital goods to sell. I have a mundane part-time job. My main sources of freelance income in 2024 have dried up so I spent a great deal of time and money this year retraining and obtaining treatment for one of my disabilities. My income was higher than any year since 2018, but lower than in any of my first five years after graduating with a BSc. If any of my gentle readers know anyone who needs an experienced editor of nonfiction, business writing, and marked-up web content please put me in touch with them! (My first profession was software development but that is a hirer’s market right now across most of the world so it would take local networking to get back in to if I choose that path). I tried some teaching and found that I need to retrain my voice for the COVID era. Look out for more on that in 2026.

Writers and artists have had to get serious about making money from their Internet presence because the industries which used to pay them for their skills have been devastated. The Internet ads which paid for the first webcomics and blogs stopped paying long ago. Some very popular things online generate no revenue, and some casual creations make it hand over fist. So if you know of small projects which you value, its very important to support them.

Everything Else

This year I joined three volunteer projects, one international and online, one in BC which was very active, and one in British Columbia where I am still coming onboard. I have not been a board member since my days in Innsbruck so this is a new experience. I helped pick English ivy and other invasive weeds from local sites and started a small garden of strawberries and marigolds and herbs. Strawberries in a sheltered area try to fruit as late as December here although they don’t get very sweet. Next year I will try planting some of the annuals farther apart and try some lavendula in a dry sunny space. Its an Eurasian species but it does well in our current climate and bees like it but deer do not.

In spring and summer I got back into archery with a fibreglass mock-Mongolian from Alibow in China. I had not drawn a bow for many years. I have not been able to connect with either of the local archery clubs but maybe that will be possible in 2026.

I attended the Victoria Gem Show, saw some samples of pigment minerals like orpiment and realgar and malachite, and had a nerdy conversation with a young couple from UBC with some samples of Tuscan marble. I am glad that someone else takes on the risk of storing toxic light-sensitive minerals in unsealed transparent containers. Although I am trying to shrink Mt Tsundoku, I picked up a few used books at the Russell Books warehouse sale in James Bay.

My only sewing project was blanket-stitching the edges of a piece of Italian worsted to make it into a short cloak to wear around the house on cold nights. I have a few shields to gesso and paint this winter.

While time and money for live performances were limited, in December I attended a concert at Alex Goolden Hall. I watched The Godfather at Cinecenta with some friends. I finally visited Abkhazi Garden built by a Georgian prince and a moneyed British woman after they got out of internment camps and occupied Paris. I met German librarian Lambert Heller and some interesting but less academic people.

This year I offended one local friend and one local acquaintance who dropped out of contact. In both cases, we were mostly communicating electronically.

My health and ability to concentrate are not where I wish they were. The world situation is not what I wish it is. Whereas the internet was once a refuge where I could find scholarly and practical people, social media became crazier and more hostile and dogmatic than face-to-face communities. I foresaw the doom which was coming to those sites so I don’t understand why so many people flocked to them. As a highly educated introvert who grew up reading classic American science fiction, reading the news gives me vertigo, because a handful of people with far too much power read the same stories I did but did not get the same messages.

Outside the Abbey Walls

do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

Thomas Merton, OCSO, letter to Jim Forrest, 1966 (source)

My friends who stopped worrying about indoor air quality are not getting as sick as often as last year, but the state of the world and the state of the web are still gloomy. In my view, it is urgent for us in the free world to disconnect from big-spending American institutions, while just as urgently connecting with American people. While we cannot accept the lie that the United States is isolated behind a wall from the outside world and its concerns, trying to work with Amazon or Automattic or the American public-health authorities will just drag us down into darkness. However, trying to talk about these things with a global network interested in books and swords is a distraction from acting close to home.

A second friend this year suggested that I should stop worrying about the news and social media. I think he has a point at least as far as US, UK, and corporate social media go. I have met people who don’t know the things I know about the corporate web so have not drawn the conclusions I draw from them, but the people I know tend to be smart people who can learn when they try something and it goes wrong.

I wish I knew how to fix the things in our culture that produce podcast-addled premiers. I wish that when the self-indulgent folly of rich people and their flatterers lead to destruction in the depths of the Atlantic or the heights of the atmosphere, nobody else was hurt. And I wish that people would not pay all they had for comforting lies, and not a penny for the painful truth. But I cannot change those things. The task ahead for us in our local communities is to build things which can survive the crash and the death-throes which will follow, and create low-bandwidth means of communication with the other islands of flickering light beneath a starless sky.

So in 2026, I will blog once or twice a month, while working on print publications, my day job, and my local volunteering. This is not the world I wish I was in. My efforts to sustain communities and influence their direction have often failed. However, it is what I can do with the resources available to me.

Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

H. Beam Piper, “Day of the Moron” (1951)

(scheduled 27 December 2025)

Edit 2025-12-28: edited paragraph beginning “A second friend this year”

Edit 2025-12-29: mention The Godfather

2025 Year-Ender

Another year is passing, the tenth which I have ended with a blog post. This was a year of transition and activities outside of the history and archaeology I talk about on this blog. So sit down with a mug of something warm (or a glass of something cool for readers in the Antipodes) while I talk about this past year.

What I Wrote

Much of my writing this year was either for volunteer projects which I won’t talk about here, or editing my second book. I finally managed to stick to one post per month beginning in July 2025. I created a small page on My Pleiades Contributions. No magazine articles or academic articles came out this year.

I helped Martin Rundkvist with a question about swords, had a back and forth with Bret Devereaux about the hoplite wars, and traded casuistry with the very polite head of a very bad organization.

Two of my blog posts reached wide audiences: my list of reasons why knowing things is hard, and my warning about academia.edu changing its terms of service in a way that suggests they want chatbots to talk about papers using the voice and face of their users. I got links from Bruce Sterling and Bret Devereaux. My meaty review of Brad DeLong’s book was a flash in the pan, although to my knowledge I am the only reviewer who had the respect to fact-check it. I won’t try to track statistics because the swarms of scrapers feeding chatbots (and my defenses against those scrapers) interfere with the count. The most important statistic is that when I meet someone with similar interests, they have usually heard of and respect my writing. I have a very engaged audience which is very offline.

How I Pay for It

Unlike most bloggers I neither have an indulgent professional job nor independent wealth nor a thicket of ads and digital goods to sell. I have a mundane part-time job. My main sources of freelance income in 2024 have dried up so I spent a great deal of time and money this year retraining and obtaining treatment for one of my disabilities. My income was higher than any year since 2018, but lower than in any of my first five years after graduating with a BSc. If any of my gentle readers know anyone who needs an experienced editor of nonfiction, business writing, and marked-up web content please put me in touch with them! (My first profession was software development but that is a hirer’s market right now across most of the world so it would take local networking to get back in to if I choose that path). I tried some teaching and found that I need to retrain my voice for the COVID era. Look out for more on that in 2026.

Writers and artists have had to get serious about making money from their Internet presence because the industries which used to pay them for their skills have been devastated. The Internet ads which paid for the first webcomics and blogs stopped paying long ago. Some very popular things online generate no revenue, and some casual creations make it hand over fist. So if you know of small projects which you value, its very important to support them.

Everything Else

This year I joined three volunteer projects, one international and online, one in BC which was very active, and one in British Columbia where I am still coming onboard. I have not been a board member since my days in Innsbruck so this is a new experience. I helped pick English ivy and other invasive weeds from local sites and started a small garden of strawberries and marigolds and herbs. Strawberries in a sheltered area try to fruit as late as December here although they don’t get very sweet. Next year I will try planting some of the annuals farther apart and try some lavendula in a dry sunny space. Its an Eurasian species but it does well in our current climate and bees like it but deer do not.

In spring and summer I got back into archery with a fibreglass mock-Mongolian from Alibow in China. I had not drawn a bow for many years. I have not been able to connect with either of the local archery clubs but maybe that will be possible in 2026.

I attended the Victoria Gem Show, saw some samples of pigment minerals like orpiment and realgar and malachite, and had a nerdy conversation with a young couple from UBC with some samples of Tuscan marble. I am glad that someone else takes on the risk of storing toxic light-sensitive minerals in unsealed transparent containers. Although I am trying to shrink Mt Tsundoku, I picked up a few used books at the Russell Books warehouse sale in James Bay.

My only sewing project was blanket-stitching the edges of a piece of Italian worsted to make it into a short cloak to wear around the house on cold nights. I have a few shields to gesso and paint this winter.

While time and money for live performances were limited, in December I attended a concert at Alex Goolden Hall. I finally visited Abkhazi Garden built by a Georgian prince and a moneyed British woman after

This year I offended one local friend and one local acquaintance who dropped out of contact. In both cases, we were mostly communicating electronically.

My health and ability to concentrate are not where I wish they were. The world situation is not what I wish it is. Whereas the internet was once a refuge where I could find scholarly and practical people, social media became crazier and more hostile and dogmatic than face-to-face communities. I foresaw the doom which was coming to those sites so I don’t understand why so many people flocked to them. As a highly educated introvert who grew up reading classic American science fiction, reading the news gives me vertigo, because a handful of people with far too much power read the same stories I did but did not get the same messages.

Outside the Abbey Walls

do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

Thomas Merton, OCSO, letter to Jim Forrest, 1966 (source)

My friends who stopped worrying about indoor air quality are not getting as sick as often as last year, but the state of the world and the state of the web are still gloomy. In my view, it is urgent for us in the free world to disconnect from big-spending American institutions, while just as urgently connecting with American people. While we cannot accept the lie that the United States is isolated behind a wall from the outside world and its concerns, trying to work with Amazon or Automattic or the American public-health authorities will just drag us down into darkness. However, trying to talk about these things with a global network interested in books and swords is a distraction from acting close to home.

I wish I knew how to fix the things in our culture that produce podcast-addled premiers. I wish that when the self-indulgent folly of rich people and their flatterers lead to destruction in the depths of the Atlantic or the heights of the atmosphere, nobody else was hurt. And I wish that people would not pay all they had for comforting lies, and not a penny for the painful truth. But I cannot change those things. The task ahead for us in our local communities is to build things which can survive the crash and the death-throes which will follow, and create low-bandwidth means of communication with the other islands of flickering light beneath a starless sky.

So in 2026, I will blog once or twice a month, while working on print publications, my day job, and my local volunteering. This is not the world I wish I was in. My efforts to sustain communities and influence their direction have often failed. However, it is what I can do with the resources available to me.

Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

H. Beam Piper, “Day of the Moron” (1951)

(scheduled 27 December 2025)

“#SCOTUS #Justice #ElenaKagan said one could question why #Congress provided such protections when passing #Section230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which has been interpreted by courts to provide wide #immunity from lawsuits when the sites post content from outside parties.

“But she drew laughter when she wondered how far SCOTUS should go in cutting back such protection.

“‘You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet’ #JusticeKagan said.”

#NotAnExpert

“#SCOTUS #Justice #ElenaKagan said one could question why #Congress provided such protections when passing #Section230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which has been interpreted by courts to provide wide #immunity from lawsuits when the sites post content from outside parties.

“But she drew laughter when she wondered how far SCOTUS should go in cutting back such protection.

“‘You know, these are not like the nine greatest experts on the internet’ #JusticeKagan said.”

#NotAnExpert

“#SupremeCourt justices suggested Tues that they might move cautiously in their first examination of the federal #law that protects #internet companies from lawsuits concerning the platforms’ posting of #content from third parties.

By Robert Barnes. @washingtonpost

#NotAnExpert #GonzalezVGoogle #SCOTUS #InternetLaw #Section230 #§230
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/21/google-supreme-court-gonzales-isis/

“#SupremeCourt justices suggested Tues that they might move cautiously in their first examination of the federal #law that protects #internet companies from lawsuits concerning the platforms’ posting of #content from third parties.

By Robert Barnes. @washingtonpost

#NotAnExpert #GonzalezVGoogle #SCOTUS #InternetLaw #Section230 #§230
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/21/google-supreme-court-gonzales-isis/

@MnemosyneSinger

I think I had two separate lists to import, followers and following. #NotAnExpert

@loren the Jabberwock makes a track like that when it drags its vorpal blade through the snow.

#NotAnExpert

@loren the Jabberwock makes a track like that when it drags its vorpal blade through the snow.

#NotAnExpert

@tomkindlon thanks that's really helpful. Tagging for @longcovid #LongCovid as should be helpful for that community too.
(from my personal symptoms and what I've heard from others I sometimes wonder of they are different things at all #NotAnExpert)

@tomkindlon thanks that's really helpful. Tagging for @longcovid #LongCovid as should be helpful for that community too.
(from my personal symptoms and what I've heard from others I sometimes wonder of they are different things at all #NotAnExpert)

It feels weird how small a part of pre-colonial Mesoamerican history the Aztecs are. Azcaptzalco was around nine hundred years old and the Aztec empire was less than a hundred years old when the Spanish arrived, and there were only four kings of Tenochtitlan before the formation of the Aztec Empire, with very short rules. #history #NotAnExpert #aztec #PleaseCorrectMe

It feels weird how small a part of pre-colonial Mesoamerican history the Aztecs are. Azcaptzalco was around nine hundred years old and the Aztec empire was less than a hundred years old when the Spanish arrived, and there were only four kings of Tenochtitlan before the formation of the Aztec Empire, with very short rules. #history #NotAnExpert #aztec #PleaseCorrectMe

@hungry_joe #notanexpert but I guess nothing prevents a brand like Coca-Cola from setting up a #mastodon service of their own. The difference is that no one is forced to go there and their commercial messages won't be on my timeline. Is this right?

@DrJenGunter I mean I THINK I'm still new here too. This is just what I have read and seen.
#notanexpert
You can also use them as a punchline.

@JupiterQuartz Oooo. Errr. I'd say - if you don't have many followers yet who might be confused by a double post - just redo it with the hashtag.

Blame it on me if anyone complains. :)

#notanexpert

@angelus_04 Depends on your available Ram I think. The more it has to process though the maore likely things can crash. #notanexpert

Quote Dump

As always, citation implies neither approval nor disapproval.

A specialist in early medieval archaeology spells out one big problem with the modern fixation on fitting ancient people into boxes and assigning them distinctive labels:

Before I start, though, I want to address the obvious criticism of the topic, which is that modern scholars work a lot on identities, but did past people care as much? Certainly it can be argued that early medieval people did not say very much about identities, and nor do modern people, outside academia. But they did not say very much about a lot of things that modern scholars obsess over, such as gender, ethnicity, social age, or sometimes even aristocracy or nobility. The only social categories that they wrote much about were ones with precise legal importance, status that had implications for property and legal rights.
…
It is almost certainly the case that the inhabitants of sixth-century northern Gaul did not think of themselves in terms of many – perhaps most – of the categories that I have discussed here, although some of those aspects of their identity were remarked upon and thought of as important. Nevertheless, even if entirely modern in its framing, I think that, if theorised in sophisticated fashion, the concept of identities and their interplay provides a valuable means of analysing past societies and, on that basis, thinking about the present.

– The thinly pseudonymous Historian on the Edge https://edgyhistorian.blogspot.co.at/2016/06/thinking-about-identity-in-early.html

gap

I’m writing about this now because these vulnerabilities illustrate two very important truisms about encryption and the current debate about adding back doors to security products:

1) Cryptography is harder than it looks.
2) Complexity is the worst enemy of security.

These aren’t new truisms. I wrote about the first in 1997 and the second in 1999. I’ve talked about them both in Secrets and Lies (2000) and Practical Cryptography (2003). They’ve been proven true again and again, as security vulnerabilities are discovered in cryptographic system after cryptographic system. They’re both still true today.

– Bruce Schneier, “Cryptography is Harder than it Looks,” https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/cryptography_is.html

The re-enactment world in general, but the Roman one in particular, is very prone to breakaways. I have heard recently of a group of only six breaking in half as egos clash.

– Chris Haines, “History of the Guard,” http://erminestreetguard.co.uk/History%20of%20the%20Guard.htm

That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear. And indeed trolling is said in many ways; for some call ‘troll’ anyone who is abusive on the internet, but this is only the disagreeable person, or in newspaper comments the angry old man. And the one who disagrees loudly on the blog on each occasion is a lover of controversy, or an attention-seeker. And none of these is the troll, or perhaps some are of a mixed type; for there is no art in what they do. (Whether it is possible to troll one’s own blog is unclear; for the one who poses divisive questions seems only to seek controversy, and to do so openly; and this is not trolling but rather a kind of clickbait.)

– Pseudo-Aristotle, On Trolling, Journal of the American Philosophical Association and open-access (preserved in a single manuscript found among the papers of Rachel Barney at the University of Toronto).

I think that the idea that the Greeks from Hesiod to Demosthenes are the alter egos of small-town Anglos, and no other ancient people are, is bad history, but it is also bad tactics:

We offer one last piece of advice to philosophy departments that have not already embraced curricular diversity. For demographic, political and historical reasons, the change to a more multicultural conception of philosophy in the United States seems inevitable. Heed the Stoic adage: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”

– Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversity, Lets Call It What it Really Is,” New York Times

The unpredictable and brutal violence of Game of Thrones is – in my view at least – distinctly modern: it looks more like the casual brutality of Islamic State, for example, than Anglo-Saxon England or Carolingian Francia.

– Philippa Byrne https://theconversation.com/why-medievalists-should-stop-talking-about-game-of-thrones-61044

As the former employee of a software startup on the edge of Chinatown whose primary school was full of students with Chinese grandparents, I should resent this article:

On a grey, rainy morning in mid-March, I flew from Toronto to Victoria, picked up a tiny rental car and drove straight toward this Chinatown. But if I had hoped to gain insight into the experiences of early settlers, I was out of luck. Chinatown’s labyrinth of brick buildings and narrow alleyways – once crowded with tenements and brothels – is now the site of coffee shops and office space for tech startups.

By the mid-20th century, many of the city’s Chinese had moved to Vancouver and across the country, essentially leaving Victoria as a museum, a Chinatown for tourists with street fixtures decorated in red and gold dragons. Only a few hints of the original Chinese remain, like the Chinese public school that was built in 1909 after locals complained that the Chinese children enrolled in regular public schools didn’t belong.

– Ann Hui, “Chop Suey Nation,” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/chop-suey-nation/article30539419/

Massification [the switch from a system where a small minority of the population attends university, to a system where a large minority attends- SM] can widen access to knowledge, skills and credentials. But it cannot widen access to status. Status is a game of “who are the cool kids” where membership must, by definition, be exclusive. Government policy cannot make the cool kids let people into to club. If it tries, the cool kids will change the rules of the game (read Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath’s The Rebel Sell for more on this).

Two things happens in virtually every country where massification occurs. The first is a concomitant increase in graduate education. Partly, that can be justified in the same terms as the expansion of undergraduate education – producing more specialists, more people able to teach others, etc. But often it’s simply an arms race. You have a degree? Bully for you – I have two.

The second is stratification within higher education. As governments (or non-profit private institutions in some countries) expanded the number of institutions to meet rising demand, institutions didn’t all obtain the same level of prestige. So another way the “cool kids” game plays out is that you start to see an increasing concentration of prestige at a very few schools: Todai & Kyoto in Japan; Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan in China; Harvard, MIT and Stanford in the US. It’s now no longer if you go, it’s where you go (if you want any nauseating details on that from the US, I highly recommend Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree). You’d better believe that rich parents then do what they can to make sure it’s their kid and not someone else’s who makes into those institutions.

In Canada, we don’t see this quite as much as in other countries because of a peculiarity of our higher ed system. We don’t have national exams, and we don’t use SATs, which reduces some of the push towards exclusivity. We also are peculiar in the sense that our top institutions are simply gargantuan. The top three institutions in the US accept maybe 0.1% of the incoming undergraduate class; the top three institutions in Canada accept about 10% of the incoming undergraduate population (thanks to Joe Heath and his In Due Course blog for this observation). It simply isn’t as special to be at a top institution. But it’s worth remembering what an outlier that makes us on the international field.

– Alex Usher, “Massification Causes Stratification,” http://higheredstrategy.com/massification-causes-stratification/ (but don’t more egalitarian countries like Canada have more equal access to status than less egalitarian countries like the USA? And don’t decisions that people make and laws and customs that they enact make it easier or harder for groups of old schoolmates to control access to jobs and money, or for some universities to build up massive endowments which often have a lot to do with their status?)

The blog post which Usher cites is also worth quoting, if you have a vague idea that the Ivy League universities are like big Canadian universities only richer and snobbier:

“Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):”

• Princeton: 5,336
• Harvard: 6,658
• Yale: 5,405
• Columbia: 6,068
• Stanford: 7,063
• Chicago: 5,590
• Duke: 6,655
• MIT: 4,503
• UPenn: 9,682
• CIT: 997 [seems to be something called California Institute of Technology, and yes that is less than a thousand undergraduate students!- SM]
• Dartmouth: 4,193

“That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.”

“By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:”

• McGill: 30,000
• UBC: 47,500
• UofT: 67,000

“So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students.”

– Joseph Heath, “The Bottleneck in U.S. Higher Education,” http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/

Edit 2022-06-13: converted to block editor and fixed some of the resulting format issues (others are not fixable, WordPress does not like lists inside blockquotes)

Edit 2026-01-01: more formatting (very long URLS display oddly)