#notanexpert — Public Fediverse posts

Just One Thing

I wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler can control the future, but they all have a chance to shape it. Anyone who says that a technology or institution is inevitable is selling something, and anyone who thinks that a wise council or sinister cabal control the world is mistaken.

The reason it is hard to predict the weather is not that we lack data or are not smart enough. It is that weather is a chaotic dynamic system, so tiny differences in the state of the world now become big differences in the state a month from now, and just measuring things changes them. More satellites and microchips and more PhDs in meteorology make slightly better predictions, but they cannot make a prediction for the weather a year in the future which is much more precise than a farmer a hundred years ago consulting an almanac computed by government clerks with pencil and paper and pots of strong coffee.

To accept that the future is something we create together is to accept that nobody and no machine can tell you what will happen next. It is to accept that nobody in a distant city and nothing in the encyclopedia is in charge. But it is also to accept that we all have a role in creating the future, even if what we do does not have the effects we expect.

(scheduled 5 August 2026)

Hmm. #notAnExpert but I don't think i have come across this type of chip before, with an additional solder pad on top.

Thirteen Years an Index Investor

There is an urban legend that a brokerage once found that its best-performing accounts belonged to clients who were dead so could not meddle.1 Financial planners often rely on the theoretical performance of different strategies because actual investors keep putting in money, changing strategies, and taking out money. Skeptics often warn that in practice there are various costs and delays which make the same strategy work differently in real life. Sometimes you take out money to fix your roof just before the market crashes, or put in your whole tax refund just before it booms, or the country with the big investment returns also has big taxes on foreign investors. It occurs to me that I have an account which has followed the same strategy with no new money or withdrawals since 2014.

(This is another post outside the main topic of this blog! If you just want to read about books and swords, my article on ancient spears just appeared with Marine Corps University Press and is open-access!)

On 11 July 2013, I created a Retirement Savings Plan and filled it with $9,468 from my brief career as a programmer. Sometime not long after that I contributed another $1,471 for a total of $10,939 (all sums in this post are rounded to the nearest dollar and in CAD). That was my only contribution after creating the account because graduate students and freelance editors don’t make enough money for RSP contributions and since returning to Canada I work with another financial institution. The purpose of the new account was to switch to index investing after having my retirement fund in a mutual fund that cost about 1.5% a year.

I picked the venerable TD e-series mutual funds as my vehicle. They were launched in 1999 and 2000 as an experiment in online banking. They are only available through self-directed accounts with an online brokerage. Unlike most Canadian mutual funds these have very reasonable fees of around 0.3% a year, and they could be purchased for free and set to automatically reinvest their dividends (a DRIP). They offer funds for Canadian equities, US equities, EAFE equities (a group of 21 countries in Europe and the Pacific Rim plus Israel), and Canadian bonds. Each of those funds contains hundreds of stocks or bonds, allocated based on simple rules like “if a stock makes up 1% of the Canadian stock market, invest 1% of funds in it.” The e-series does not have specialized funds for instruments like real estate investment trusts, and does not have a fund for Emerging Markets (a euphemism for countries where investors are not considered as safe as investors in Paris or Sydney, including some quite wealthy places like South Korea and Brazil). In practice investing in these countries is difficult and expensive, and Canadian stocks often behave similarly to emerging market stocks because Canada produces so many raw materials. While there is a lot of talk about ideal portfolio construction, most workers will be better served by figuring out how to save and invest more.

I rebalanced roughly once a year whenever anything was 10% over its target. For example, if at least 33% of the portfolio was Canadian stocks, I sold them down to 30% and bought something that was below its target percentage. There are two schools of thought on rebalancing. In theory, different types of assets move in different rhythms (are imperfectly correlated) so rebalancing lets you buy low and sell high. Governments often lower interest rates in a stock-market crisis, so people are willing to pay more for existing bonds that pay the old higher rates, and the rise in your bonds offsets the fall in your stocks. However, correlations change, and rebalancing also tends to sell things which tend to have higher yields and buy things which tend to have lower yields. In practice, rebalancing also lets you manage risk. Over a ten-year period stocks usually grow much faster than the other parts of a portfolio, but they can easily lose half their value from one year to the next, so if you don’t sell some of them and buy more stable assets, your portfolio will get riskier and riskier as you have more to lose. Government bonds occasionally lose money if inflation rises, but their values do not swing as wildly unless a country goes bankrupt.

I picked the classic balanced asset allocation of 60% stocks and 40% bonds. This seems to have become popular during the Cold War, as a successor to a naive portfolio of equal parts stocks and bonds. Back then investors relied on feelings and a few decades of returns in the United States. These days we have 125-year serieses of investment returns for many countries and can see that this has usually been a good balance between risk and return. I divided my money four ways:

• 30% Canadian stocks (Fund Code: TDB900, tracks an all-cap index)
• 10% US stocks (Fund Code: TDB902, tracks a large-cap index)
• 20% EAFE stocks (Fund Code: TDB911, tracks a mid- and large-cap index)
• 40% Canadian bonds (Fund Code: TDB909, owns both government and corporate bonds)

These days it is fashionable to invest much heavier in stocks than that, because from 2008 to 2022 interest rates were very low, and because stocks are booming in 2025 and 2026. People always wish they had put more money in whatever is up today, and always forget how badly stocks can do after a decade of rising returns. When I created the account I was about to move to Austria with no immediate source of income, and my income has been low and wobbly since. I also had not yet been invested through a stock-market crisis, and a common error is betting heavily on stocks, then being scared when they inevitably crash and selling them before they recover. Did my caution mean I did not make much money in the stock-market boom from 2013 to 2026 (with one serious crash in 2022 and a dip in 2020)? For much of the time I held this fund, new Government of Canada bonds were paying around 1% interest, so 40% of the account was earning less than inflation.

Performance

The value of the account on 30 June 2026 was $29,239. That is about 2.67 times the money I put in, or 7.86% annual compound interest (my brokerage helpfully calculates the time-weighted rate of return). The Bank of Canada estimates 37.89% inflation from 2013 to July 2026, or 2.5% annual inflation. That 5.3% annual real return (return after inflation) is above-average even for investors in the USA. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund has been compounding at 6.6% nominal growth a year since 1998, and the Canada Pension Plan has been compounding at 8.8% a year since 2016.

The biggest decline was from February to June 2022 when I lost a quarter of my gains. Anyone who owns stocks can expect them to lose half their value for years every decade or two. None of those bad times has happened since 2013 so there is a good chance that another will happen before I turn 50.

It is Not 2013 Any More

Since 2019 the e-series mutual funds have started to transition into wrappers for Exchange-Traded Funds, although several of them still hold some individual securities as well as the ETF. I suspect that this is to avoid triggering taxable events by selling assets, or let people close to retirement finish their careers managing the e-series. Dan Bortolotti has details. It has also become possible to buy many ETFs without paying a $10 to $30 fee. This has caused some investors to move away from the e-series. Even though the mutual-fund structure has many advantages in theory, it has become associated with high costs and active management, while young early adopters moved to the ETF structure. This created a cascade, where ETFs became the default replacement for an expensive actively-managed portfolio, and institutions competing for that market picked the ETF structure not the mutual fund structure. These funds are slightly more expensive than comparable ETFs at about 0.33% a year versus 0.17%. However, it is foolish to muzzle the mouth of the ox that tramples out your grain. Larry Bates’ handy T-Rex score suggests that I paid TD about $1,000 for holding hundreds of investments in 23 countries and 10 provinces for thirteen years, which is about as much money as I lost when I missed a flight to a conference in 2018.2 The cheaper funds would have cost $500 over the same period.

It has also become fashionable to invest much more heavily in the USA than I do. Canadians have the problem that our stock market is not very diverse and prone to booms and busts in commodity prices. About 70% of the TSX is in financial services, energy (often an euphemism for oil and gas), or raw materials. International investments face additional taxes and fees and are affected by changing exchange rates, but someone who just invests in Canada may lose their job and watch their investments crash at the same time. After testing historical returns and finding that having about 25% of your stocks in Canada minimized volatility, someone at Vanguard Canada got the idea that the remaining stocks should be allocated proportionately to the size of various national stock markets.3 Vanguard is an American company and foreigners who follow their theory will put about half their stocks in the US. Since 2018 the one-fund solutions which package Canadian, US, and international stocks and bonds follow Vanguard’s theory.4 In my research and my correspondence with financiers, I have never found an argument for this beyond “cap-weighting is the only portfolio all investors can hold simultaneously; deviating from it requires finding someone to take the other side.”5 2013 was the year of the Snowden revelations and my opinion of the US government and US megacorps has not improved since. As I noted in another blog post, investing heavily in one country also exposes investors to a lot of risk if any one country has a period of bad government, a civil war, goes Communist, freezes foreigners’ assets, is sanctioned, or so on. I would have a few thousand dollars more in the account today if I had invested in equal amounts of Canadian, US, and EAFE stocks which was a common suggestion back then. We will see how it looks in two years.

Some people say that couch potato investors are rare (although they often define the term more strictly than I do).6 I don’t know because I have never met anyone interested in investing or finance in person except my parents. Money has been flooding into index funds over the past twenty years, but much of that money is pensions and endowments. The evidence for this strategy has been piling up since the 1970s like a siege ramp against the pallisade which once ran along Wall Street. Since 2018 the asset-allocation ETFs which follow this strategy have been so popular that five major financial institutions now offer them (Vanguard Canada, iShares / BlackRock, BMO, CIBC, and TD), but Morningstar Canada believes that 81% of money in Canadian funds is still under active management.

There are many ways I could have squeezed slightly more money out of this portfolio. If this were a personal finance blog I would talk about some of them. However, I could manage this portfolio in about an hour a year, and most of the solutions would have taken more time or left some money uninvested. Money sitting in your account as cash drags down your rate of return (since discount brokers are not allowed to practice fractional reserve banking, one of the ways they make money is putting your deposits in a money-market fund or high-interest eSavings account and collecting the interest themselves, much like a supermarket that signs net/90 deals with suppliers, and holds the money it owes them in the money market for 89 days to earn interest before paying the supplier). One of the dirty truths of personal finance is that most people’s most valuable asset is their ability to earn money from labour, so spending time fiddling with your portfolio has to be weighed against spending the same time attending a new event, learning a new skill, or applying for a new job. Finding a new customer for your small business or getting a promotion at work will generally have much higher RoI than squeezing an extra 0.5% a year from your investments, especially if you take some of your new income and put it in index funds and GICs.

If you pick some reasonable asset allocation, find an inexpensive way to hold it, contribute regularly, and follow that strategy for a decade, index investing is very likely to bring a positive return after inflation. After 20 or 30 years it is even more likely. Anyone who can earn enough to save in a country with stable currency and access to international banks can build up some capital. A portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds in e-series mutual funds that you actually contribute to every month and keep invested for decades is a perfectly fine choice.

Further Reading

Dan Bortolotti’s book Reboot Your Portfolio (2021) is an excellent introduction to index investing in Canada. Better at explaining how we know what we know is William J. Bernstein’s The Intelligent Asset Allocator. The Bogleheads in the USA point to resources for people in other countries, their Canadian equivalent is the Financial Wisdom Forum.

(drafted in late May, scheduled 19 July 2026)

1. Norm Rothery points to the Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund (est. 1935) which invests in only 30 US companies and their descendants. It still exists and has been doing just fine even though the US stock market is vastly different. ↩︎
2. https://larrybates.ca/t-rex-score/ I assume 8% annual returns and 0.3% fees on an initial outlay of $11,000 because it makes the final balance work out and 0.33% is the weighted average fee of the four funds today. Before 2019 it was slightly higher. ↩︎
3. XBAL and XGRO, two funds from iShares (BlackRock Canada) claim to have followed this strategy since 2007, but I see claims that they actually rebranded two previous funds which did not follow it. In a Canadian Couch Potato podcast interview Todd Schlanger at Vanguard Canada claims he got the strategy from the Life Strategy Funds at Vanguard US which launched in 1994, but I can’t document their early strategy and William J. Bernstein described them in 2001 as “grossly underweighted in foreign and small stocks.” (The Intelligent Asset Allocator p. 162) He was a 2 parts US stocks to 1 part international type of investor. I want to learn more about the history of these funds, but the most important fact is that the Vanguard asset allocation ETFs were created by internationally-mobile, US-educated financiers with no visible interest in history. People with that background can’t imagine a world where the US is not the center of global finance any more than the pope can imagine becoming a shaman. ↩︎
4. Even Dimensional Fund Advisors who use Fama and French’s Five-Factor Model to invest in specific stocks based on mathematical analysis! One reason they are comfortable with investing very heavily in the US is that the company was founded in Brooklyn by people who studied with Fama in Chicago, and is advised by Kenneth French in New Hampshire. Avantis, their chief competitor, was founded by former DFA staff. ↩︎
5. Victor Haghani and James White, “Concentrating on Concentration,” Elm Wealth, 26 February 2026. Note that they are referring to cap-weighting stocks in the US, and that many investors in the US invest exclusively or mainly there. They don’t address that any one national stock market can and has gone to zero, or everyday Canadian strategies like “cap the size of any one company in your index of Canadian stocks.” I would not advise anyone to try the strategies they reject (moving between stocks to bonds based on daily news, or using an index which weights hundreds of companies equally). Much of their data comes from a working paper which has finally been published. ↩︎
6. Morningstar Canada estimates that 81% of the money in Canadian funds is still under active management, but that might include things like computer-driven funds that buy low-volatility stocks according to strict rules. That is not the same kind of active management as paying someone to use her personal judgement whether to buy or sell Bombardier shares. The Morningstar report is email-protected and Mount Tsundoku is tall. Part of my savings since 2021 are in GEQT, which uses rules to imitate the global stock market while only investing in morally inoffensive companies (no fossil fuels, little surveillance capitalism). ↩︎

@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)

“#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)