Month: June 2023

Augustus

Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. Adrian Goldsworthy, Yale University Press, 2014. 598 pages.

I’m almost ashamed of my interest in Rome. The more I read about Rome, the more distasteful the Roman story becomes. But Augustus, at least, was in pre-Christian Rome (born 63 BC, died 14 AD), and therefore wasn’t responsible for any of the horrors that the Roman religion brought into the world. Also, by many accounts, he wasn’t that terrible, as Roman emperors go.

It was, strangely enough, the HBO series “Rome” (2005-2007), that made me want to read a biography of Augustus. I had watched this series years ago when it was new, and recently I rewatched some of the episodes. The series is quite good, with an excellent cast. The HBO series is set during the time of Julius Caesar. Young Augustus appears as a teenager. The HBO series presents the teenage Augustus as nerdy, very serious, a touch prudish, and very respectful of Roman traditions. That’s probably accurate.

Our fascination with Roman history seems to be eternal. It’s not hard to see why, since it was in Rome (and Greece) that we find the roots of our culture and our politics. Recent events in Russia are a reminder of that. That is, you’d better have some legions under your command if you want to play Game of Thrones. Without his legions, it seems unlikely that that we’d ever have heard of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and equally unlikely that Prigozhin would be alive today, without his private army.

The era of Augustus’ reign is often called the Pax Romana, because it was an unusually peaceful era in Roman history. But, peaceful or not, I felt vaguely nauseated while reading this book. It would have been a terrible time to live, even if you were a Roman aristocrat who didn’t have to worry about starving to death. If you were a nobody, then disease, starvation, or war might put an end to you. If you were a somebody, then you were vulnerable to all sorts of treachery including murder and assassination. Not to mention that there were many situations in which suicide seemed like the right course.

An episode a day of “Masterpiece Endeavour” helped me keep my sanity while reading about Augustus.

Smoke alarms with better manners?

The typical smoke alarm is a low-tech device designed to be as unbearably irritating as possible. Humidity can trigger them. Few things are more annoying than their low-battery chirp. If a smoke alarm malfunctions, it always will be in the middle of the night. One night last week, around 3 a.m., the smoke alarm on my bedroom ceiling let out one loud chirp, then stopped. The window was open, and there had been rain for three days. No doubt the humidity had caused it. I was not able to go back to sleep that night for fear that it would chirp again. And you can imagine what the cat thought of it.

As I lay awake, plain reasoning convinced me that better smoke alarms ought to be available now. Fifteen years ago, when the original smoke alarms were installed in my house (there are six of them), dumb smoke alarms were the only available type. The next morning, I started Googling for information about smart smoke alarms. It soon became clear that the Google Nest smoke alarms get the best reviews. They cost three or four times as much as ordinary smoke alarms — $119 each at Amazon. The cost of replacing all my smoke alarms would be $714. I was not eager to spend the money, having recently spent a big chunk of money to have the water heater replaced, and another big chunk of money for some roof maintenance.

To spread out the expense, I decided to buy two new Google Nest smoke alarms for now. And then I’ll replace one a month.

Current building code in the U.S. requires smoke alarms in certain rooms (especially bedrooms), and all the smoke alarms in the house must be interlinked so that if one alarm is triggered, all the alarms sound. Each alarm has three wires — the black and white wires for 120-volt power, and a red wire with which the alarms signal each other. The Google Nest alarms come in two types. One type runs on batteries and will work in older houses before hard-wired smoke alarms were required. The other type (which is what I needed) requires 120-volt connections of the type now required by building codes. (These also have three 1.5-volt batteries for backup during power failures.) The Google Nest alarms detect carbon monoxide as well as smoke.

Whether your house is old or new, you can have inter-linked smoke detectors. The Google Nest smoke detectors do not use the red wire. Instead, the smoke detectors communicate with each other by creating their own WIFI network. You use an app (iPhone or Android) to set them up and give them the name of the room they’re in.

So, what about their manners? What I want, of course, is for a smoke alarm to remain silent unless it actually detects smoke. Rather than chirping when the backup batteries are low, the Nest smoke detectors will send you an email. Before an alarm sounds, if a small amount of smoke is detected below the level for a full alarm, a synthesized voice will tell you about it and let you know what room is involved. You can use the app if you have questions about the condition of the smoke alarms. The alarms also have a colored-light scheme that is much more informative than the tiny winking lights on older smoke alarms. A circular light in the center of the smoke alarm will be blue during setup, green when all is well, yellow for an early warning, and red in an emergency. There’s a night-light feature. If you walk underneath the smoke detector in the dark, the light will turn white to light your way to the bathroom.

One of the biggest aggravations of the old smoke alarms is figuring out what’s wrong when something goes wrong. Who chirped? Why? Which room caused a full-scale false alarm? The Google Nest app stores ten days of history, so that not only can you figure what’s wrong right now, you can also see what happened yesterday when you were out of town.

I’m an Apple guy, and these smoke alarms are not compatible with Apple HomeKit. I understand, though, that there is a bridge application that will allow Apple Home devices and Google Nest devices to communicate with each other. I’ll be looking into that.

My job for today is to install one of the smoke alarms in the basement (where most of my false alarms originate) and one in my bedroom. My bedroom ceiling is twelve feet high, so, for safety, I’ve enlisted a neighbor to help me.

As for the old smoke alarms, I have a sledge hammer, and I plan to use it.

The mendacity of the punditry

Not long ago, I made the claim here that all conservative discourse is derp and always has been derp. You’ll always find a fallacy in conservative discourse. Sometimes the fallacies are the unintentional errors of defective conservative minds, and sometimes they’re sly attempts to deceive us. This is one of the reasons why conservative propaganda is so effective on so many people. Many people just don’t know enough to reason out the fallacies or detect the falsehoods.

Emma Duncan is a columnist for the Times of London who used to work for The Economist. Her column today has the headline “We should cheer the decline of humanities degrees.” (Unfortunately all Times of London content is behind a paywall.) This is provocative. It’s also semi-obnoxious, intended to irk those who value the humanities. But, worse, a claim she makes to defend what she’s saying is wrong, no doubt knowingly wrong. She just thought that most people wouldn’t notice.

She’s certainly right about a few things — that today’s young people have to pay far too much for their educations; that, if they can get a job at all they are paid too little; and that housing costs too much. But — like a true conservative or radical centrist — rather than aiming her fire at unfairness, injustice, and exploitation, she instead celebrates the decline of humanities degrees. That’s the work of a defective mind.

In her fourth paragraph, she writes:

“I suspect that this is a sign of what the historican Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, the tendency of societies to produce more potential members of the elite than the power structure can absorb…. We are overproducing big time. A degree from a decent university is regarded as the entry ticket to the elite in this country, and numbers have rocketed.”

College students are not elites. They are not even “potential members of the elite,” at least, not for a long time, and not unless they were born rich or are extremely lucky. Turchin’s book was released only two days ago. My copy arrived the day it was released, and I have barely started reading it. But Duncan’s attempt at deception was immediately obvious.

Turchin starts this book by defining what elites are. Elites, he writes, on the first page, are power holders. We live in societies in which money equals power. An American, Turchin writes, with a net worth of $1 million to $2 million is in the lowest ranks of the elite. This means only that their lives are not precarious. They can turn down crummy jobs, and they won’t be bankrupted by a medical emergency. One’s net worth would have to be much higher than a measly $2 million to truly be a member of the elite.

Duncan writes that we are overproducing “big time,” and she puts that in the context of young people with college degrees. That is flat out false and is nothing like what Peter Turchin is saying. By overproduction, Turchin means the overproduction of wealth. One of the examples he cites is the American Civil War and the period that followed. Most of the gains from a growing economy went to elites, not to workers (or slaves). The interests of rich industrialists came into conflict with another elite — Southern slaveholders. And yet Duncan lays the blame for elite overproduction not on extreme inequality and unfairness but on poor, in-debt college students who can’t get a start in life!

The term Turchin uses is “popular immiseration.” The problem of college students today is not that they are frustrated elites. Rather, it’s that they are a just one caste in our society that is being immiserated by a system that fleeces the 90 percent at the bottom of society to pump money to the top.

People like Emma Duncan are part of that system.

I will have a review of this book later on.

Update: Sam Mace, on Substack, delivers a seriously good whippin’ to Emma Duncan, calling her article “execrable.”

https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/why-we-need-humanities-a-response

The things we’re about to learn

For those of us who have been saying for years that Trump is going to prison, this is no surprise. The wait has been miserable. But surely it’s safe to assume that the U.S. Department of Justice knows what it’s doing. And no doubt the DOJ has been particularly cautious and meticulous in a case like this one.

Obviously we’ll soon learn a lot from what comes out in court not only in this case but also in the other court cases that Trump is facing. But, just as important, we’re also about to learn a lot about the media and about the punditry.

Any media person who continues to push the notion that Trump will still somehow magically get away with everything, just to keep us anxious and angry, is a media person to whom we should pay no attention ever again. And any pundit who says that these indictments are a dark day for America is a pundit to whom we should never again pay attention. The Trump dark days are past. The dark days in American history were when Trump was in the White House. Today is a grand day in American history. One of the strongest blows ever for equal justice has been struck. We can cheer with our heads held high and with every meaningful principle on our side.

And yes, there also is schadenfreude. There, the principles are not our side. Still, I refuse to feel any guilt about taking pleasure in watching them pay for what Trump and the Republican Party have put us through. Now we can look on and laugh as the Republican Party, which brought this on itself, splits right down the middle. And the people who gloated about liberal tears and repeatedly said to us “fuck your feelings” will whine, vent their rage, and come up with new conspiracy theories. But their demoralization is inevitable now, and, politically, that’s where we want them.

I’ve been saving a bottle of champagne for this moment left over from a canceled celebration after the horrible election of November 8, 2016. It’s too late tonight to pop a cork and properly celebrate. So I think I’ll save the champagne for next Tuesday, after Trump appears in court.

The Oxford Murders


Elijah Wood and John Hurt, set in Oxford in 1993

While beating through the bush for something to watch, I came across “The Oxford Murders,” on Hulu. The film was made in 2008. It’s set in Oxford in 1993. A mystery with Elijah Wood, John Hurt, and an Oxford setting? Of course I was going to watch that.

But it’s yet another example of the fringiness of my taste and why you should be skeptical of anything I like. I would have given “The Oxford Murders” at least a 95, but Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 17/33!

I read through some of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews. Apparently many people took the film seriously and thought that the film was trying to be smart. I didn’t see it that way at all. Rather, it was a parody, making fun of people who are smart or who think they’re smart. Much of the humor was based on that. I think that John Hurt also saw it as a parody, and that that would explain his over-the-top performance as an Oxford professor — always declaiming, and usually a bit too loud. Maybe those reviewers haven’t read Sherlock Holmes, as John Hurt clearly has? Elijah Wood was amazing.

I have an Oxford fetish, and this film didn’t disappoint. It’s all there — the pubs, the dining halls, the lecture halls, the library, the bicycles, the Oxford accents, the snark.

It’s a shame that it was only an hour and 50 minutes. I’d watch six seasons of this.

The new and the good as new


Western Electric Model 302 telephone (1937-1955). The receiver, by the way, is a Collins 75A-4 (1955). It uses vacuum tubes — lots of them. Both the telephone and the receiver still work!

It blows my mind how much technological change I’ve seen in my lifetime. I love the old stuff as much as the new.

Today, while I was live-streaming the video from Apple’s annual developer conference at which Apple announced its new “mixed reality” device, I also was cleaning up, and hooking up, a vintage Bell System Western Electric Model 302 telephone that I bought on eBay.

I have lived during a fascinating period in the history of technology. When I was a boy, maybe 10 or 11 years old, we had a Model 302 telephone. I was in my mid-30s when I got my first computer. Ever since then, computers have been an important part of my life. As for Apple’s new mixed-reality device, I’m becoming convinced that it will start a revolution, and, in a few years, devices like this will replace our computers, our laptops, and our televisions. The goal, I’m sure, is to make them small enough to look like glasses, rather than masks that fit over the face. This seems strange until you think about the fact that, ever since television came along, we sit in front of glowing screens. If you think about it, sitting in front of glowing screens is more weird than wearing glasses.

If, like me, you think Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is a goose, it’s amusing that, after spending billions of dollars on his vision of mixed reality, his devices are primitive. Today, Zuckerberg got crushed, unless there’s a market for cheaper and more primitive devices.

With Apple it’s a whole different story. The “Vision Pro,” starting at $3,499, is frightfully expensive. But Apple is just getting started, and it’s clear that there was no cheap way to start if you want to do it right. Now we can see why even our Apple phones have all those processor cores, graphics cores, and neural engines. The engineering base was already in place for the new visionOS operating system that the new devices will use. All the Apple gear, as always, will work together. My guess is that, in a few years, millions of people will use these things. Apple’s intention today, of course, was to kick start development. Things will move very fast from this point on. Let’s hope they get cheaper as they get better.

I don’t recall that Apple’s presentation today mentioned AI at all. But that’s where this is going — realistic avatars in imaginary spaces that we can talk with, much like Star Trek’s Holodeck. It’s spooky. But it’s also very exciting.

As for the Western Electric Model 302 telephone, a great many of them were made. They remain common, and they’re inexpensive on eBay. They’re almost indestructible, and it would be rare to find one that doesn’t still work. Strangely enough, some telephone systems still support pulse dialing, including the device that I wrote about here.

⬆︎ Watch two teenagers try to dial a rotary phone.


⬆︎ Apple’s new Vision Pro


⬆︎ It’s amusing to think about how right-wingers must have hated Tim Cook’s display today of Apple’s wokeness. The Disney CEO also appeared, to say that Disney is already producing stories for the Vision Pro.


⬆︎ Speaking of old and elegant, yesterday I took this photo of Lily. She’s 15 years old now. Her coat isn’t as sleek and black as it used to be. But she’s still going strong.

Sardines, well disguised


Pea and sardine burgers with fresh herbs; potato salad with fresh dill

A week or so ago, I mentioned having acquired a dozen tins of nice, clean, Norwegian sardines, skinless and boneless and packed in olive oil. I had the idea of using them in burgers that are partly sardines and partly legumes. They’re good!

Though the garden here has oodles of basil every summer (because I think of basil more as a vegetable than as an herb), I’ve never had such a good supply of fresh herbs as I have this year. I included lots of basil and parsley in the burgers. Because I’m not particularly fond of fishy flavors, I used every sort of compatible strong flavor that I could think of to season the burgers — onions, cumin, garlic powder, Trader Joe’s mushroom umami seasoning, smoked paprika, food yeast, and toasted sesame oil. The peas were frozen. I used an egg as binder. The burgers tasted more like veggie burgers than fish burgers.

Though I do eat eggs and dairy, I eat very little meat. For vegans especially, if they care to extend their range a bit, sardines are a good source of one of the nutrients that vegans can become dangerously deficient in — vitamin B12. Sardines also have lots of iodine, as well as a lipid profile that is as good as it gets. Sardines are low on the food chain. They live on plankton. When sardines come from the cold northern oceans, they’re low on the pollutants that affect some fish higher on the food chain.

Stunning Republican ineptitude


Source: Wikimedia Commons

I suspect, in retrospect, that the extension of the debt ceiling was always going to end the way it ended. I also suspect that the media and the political class were in cahoots and doing their best to make high drama out of nothing, to get the clicks and the attention. But we did learn some things.

The weakness and political stupidity of the Republican Party were on full display. It would be harder to do a better job of looking like a bunch of dangerous idiots if their actual intention was to cause sane and decent human beings to run screaming from Republicans, begging the Democratic Party to save them (which Joe Biden quietly did, where the debt ceiling is concerned). Republicans did at least have the good sense to keep quiet about cutting Social Security and Medicare, but you’ll remember how Republicans stepped right into Biden’s trap back in January during Biden’s State of the Union speech, when he taunted Republicans into claiming that they weren’t out to cut, or privatize, Social Security and Medicare, even though they’ve been trying to do that since 1935 for Social Security and 1965 for Medicare. As usual, only the most radical Republican voices were heard (though Kevin McCarthy, as usual, talked out of both sides of his mouth and smiled for all the cameras). It was clear what the radicals wanted. They wanted to force a default and throw the world economy into turmoil and the U.S. into recession, then blame Democrats for it.

There was more than a little media malpractice, too. After covering the issue like some kind of existential showdown in which Republican radicals had all sorts of imaginary power to crush us all, the legislation sailed through the House (314-117) and the Senate (63-36). Suddenly everyone but Joe Biden looked very silly. What was all that fuss about?

But the circus goes on. The media still pretend that the 2024 election will be another Trump-Biden referendum. That ain’t gonna happen. Trump is going to prison, and before he goes to prison he’s going to have a hard time being in three or four courtrooms at the same time. And would I be the first person to predict that, if a viable Democratic candidate can get up to speed within the next six or eight months, Biden will decide to retire? Even if Trump weren’t going to prison, he’s a loser, and Republicans know it — especially those Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to extend the debt ceiling. Those Republicans know that there aren’t nearly enough MAGA types in the country to win a national election. Trump, you’ll remember, has never gotten a majority, though a lot of foolish people in 2016 threw away their votes (and, by 2020, knew better).

Today’s media economy requires a circus. The media will make a circus out of nothing if they have to. My expectation is that, soon, the biggest and greatest circus in American history will begin — Trump on trial for a long list of crimes, maybe even espionage. The Republican Party will split wide open. If some of those Republicans were sane enough to vote to extend the debt ceiling, they still deserve to go down and stay down, though half crazy is better than completely crazy. No matter how hard the media tries to invent some kind of false balance between Democrats and Republicans, they won’t be able to succeed, with a boring political genius in the White House and a Republican pig circus day after day and month after month. And let’s not forget: Republicans at the national level no longer have enough power to be dangerous, as much as they’d like to be. The debt ceiling made that perfectly clear.

Still, above the stench of everything that has happened in the past few weeks, I think I detect a wee whiff of something clean and healthy. It smells like the first young buds of a return to normality, because chaos isn’t paying off anymore.

Update: President Biden’s address to the nation this evening from the Oval Office was brilliant. If you missed watching it live, you should be able to find it on YouTube.