He did not want to meet trouble with an empty gun

July 23rd, 2026

The new Little House on the Prairie show opens with Laura drawing back her slingshot while hunting a rabbit — and I immediately thought, wait, would a kid on the frontier have a big rubber band?

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867. Charles Goodyear received his patent for vulcanized rubber in 1844, so rubber had been around for a couple decades, and the term “slingshot” goes back to 1849. Apparently the first “modern” slingshots go back to the 1860s, but I don’t think a girl out on the frontier would have access to cheap, used bicycle inner tubes.

Anyway, the original book definitely does not have her shooting a slingshot.

More jarringly, later in the first episode, Pa goes off without his rifle, and Ma defends Laura from wolves with it. I was confused when she gave a warning shot and then ran the lever to chamber another round, because Pa’s gun in the books is a single-shot, muzzle-loaded, percussion-cap rifle.

In fact, Chapter 3 of Little House in the Big Woods is literally called “The Long Rifle” and describes Pa’s gun in great detail:

Every evening before he began to tell stories, Pa made the bullets for his next day’s hunting. Laura and Mary helped him. They brought the big, long-handled spoon, and the box full of bits of lead, and the bullet-mold. Then while he squatted on the hearth and made the bullets, they sat one on each side of him, and watched.

First he melted the bits of lead in the big spoon held in the coals. When the lead was melted, he poured it carefully from the spoon into the little hole in the bullet-mold. He waited a minute, then he opened the mold, and out dropped a bright new bullet onto the hearth.

The bullet was too hot to touch, but it shone so temptingly that sometimes Laura or Mary could not help touching it. Then they burned their fingers. But they did not say anything, because Pa had told them never to touch a new bullet. If they burned their fingers, that was their own fault; they should have minded him. So they put their fingers in their mouths to cool them, and watched Pa make more bullets.

There would be a shining pile of them on the hearth before Pa stopped. He let them cool, then with his jack-knife he trimmed off the little lumps left by the hole in the mold. He gathered up the tiny shavings of lead and saved them carefully, to melt again the next time he made bullets.

The finished bullets he put into his bullet pouch. This was a little bag which Ma had made beautifully of buckskin, from a buck Pa had shot.

Pa’s rifle obviously does not use modern metallic cartridges. Also, no one was at all concerned about lead poisoning. These are people who would happily coat a wall with lead-based paint if they could.

After the bullets were made, Pa would take his gun down from the wall and clean it. Out in the snowy woods all day, it might have gathered a little dampness, and the inside of the barrel was sure to be dirty from powder smoke.

So Pa would take the ramrod from its place under the gun barrel, and fasten a piece of clean cloth on its end. He stood the butt of the gun in a pan on the hearth and poured boiling water from the tea kettle into the gun barrel. Then quickly he dropped the ramrod in and rubbed it up and down, up and down, while the hot water blackened with powder smoke spurted out through the little hole on which the cap was placed when the gun was loaded.

Pa kept pouring in more water and washing the gun barrel with the cloth on the ramrod until the water ran out clear. Then the gun was clean. The water must always be boiling, so that the heated steel would dry instantly.

Then Pa put a clean, greased rag on the ramrod, and while the gun barrel was still hot he greased it well on the inside. With another clean, greased cloth he rubbed it all over, outside, until every bit of it was oiled and sleek. After that he rubbed and polished the gunstock until the wood of it was bright and shining, too.

The gun is obviously a black-powder muzzle-loader.

Now he was ready to load the gun again, and Laura and Mary must help him. Standing straight and tall, holding the long gun upright on its butt, while Laura and Mary stood on either side of him, Pa said:

“You watch me, now, and tell me if I make a mistake.”

So they watched very carefully, but he never made a mistake.

Laura handed him the smooth, polished cow-horn full of gunpowder. The top of the horn was a little metal cap. Pa filled this cap full of the gun-powder and poured the powder down the barrel of the gun. Then he shook the gun a little, and tapped the barrel, to be sure that all the powder was together in the bottom.

“Where’s my patch box?” he asked then, and Mary gave him the little tin box full of little pieces of greased cloth. Pa laid one of these bits of greasy cloth over the muzzle of the gun, put one of the shiny new bullets on it, and with the ramrod he pushed the bullet and the cloth down the gun barrel.

Then he pounded them tightly against the powder. When he hit them with the ramrod, the ramrod bounced up in the gun barrel, and Pa caught it and thrust it down again. He did this for a long time.

Next he put the ramrod back in its place against the gun barrel. Then taking a box of caps from his pocket, he raised the hammer of the gun and slipped one of the little bright caps over the hollow pin that was under the hammer.

He let the hammer down, slowly and carefully. If it came down quickly—bang!—the gun would go off.

It’s not an old-fashioned flintlock; it’s an up-to-date percussion-cap rifle.

So, what do we do with a freshly loaded rifle?

Now the gun was loaded, and Pa laid it on its hooks over the door.

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. Pa had whittled the hooks out of a green stick with his knife, and had driven their straight ends deep into holes in the log. The hooked ends curved upward and held the gun securely.

The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

When Pa went into the Big Woods, he always made sure that the bullet pouch was full of bullets, and that the tin patch box and the box of caps were with it in his pockets. The powder horn and a small sharp hatchet hung at his belt and he carried the gun ready loaded on his shoulder.

He always reloaded the gun as soon as he had fired it, for, he said, he did not want to meet trouble with an empty gun.

The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun

Whenever he shot at a wild animal, he had to stop and load the gun—measure the powder, put it in and shake it down, put in the patch and the bullet and pound them down, and then put a fresh cap under the hammer—before he could shoot again. When he shot at a bear or a panther, he must kill it with the first shot. A wounded bear or panther could kill a man before he had time to load his gun again.

But Laura and Mary were never afraid when Pa went alone into the Big Woods. They knew he could always kill bears and panthers with the first shot.

When he shot at a bear or a panther, he must kill it with the first shot.

The famous lever-action, repeating rifle “that won the West” was the Winchester Model 1873, which came out, as you might imagine, in 1873. If Pa bought a brand-new, cutting-edge rifle, in the show, that might explain why they couldn’t afford everything on their shopping list at the general store. A repeater would cost five times as much as Pa’s old muzzle-loader, and the new-fangled ammo wouldn’t’ve been cheap, either.

The opening chapter of Little House in the Big Woods mentions wolves, by the way:

Wolves lived in the Big Woods, and bears, and huge wild cats. Muskrats and mink and otter lived by the streams. Foxes had dens in the hills and deer roamed everywhere.

To the east of the little log house, and to the west, there were miles upon miles of trees, and only a few little log houses scattered far apart in the edge of the Big Woods.

So far as the little girl could see, there was only the one little house where she lived with her Father and Mother, her sister Mary and baby sister Carrie. A wagon track ran before the house, turning and twisting out of sight in the woods where the wild animals lived, but the little girl did not know where it went, nor what might be at the end of it.

The little girl was named Laura and she called her father, Pa, and her mother, Ma. In those days and in that place, children did not say Father and Mother, nor Mamma and Papa, as they do now.

At night, when Laura lay awake in the trundle bed, she listened and could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. Then he came nearer, and howled again.

It was a scary sound. Laura knew that wolves would eat little girls. But she was safe inside the solid log walls. Her father’s gun hung over the door and good old Jack, the brindle bulldog, lay on guard before it. Her father would say,

“Go to sleep, Laura. Jack won’t let the wolves in.” So Laura snuggled under the covers of the trundle bed, close beside Mary, and went to sleep.

One night her father picked her up out of bed and carried her to the window so that she might see the wolves. There were two of them sitting in front of the house. They looked like shaggy dogs. They pointed their noses at the big, bright moon, and howled.

Jack paced up and down before the door, growling. The hair stood up along his back and he showed his sharp, fierce teeth to the wolves. They howled, but they could not get in.

The house was a comfortable house. Upstairs there was a large attic, pleasant to play in when the rain drummed on the roof. Downstairs was the small bedroom, and the big room. The bedroom had a window that closed with a wooden shutter. The big room had two windows with glass in the panes, and it had two doors, a front door and a back door.

All around the house was a crooked rail fence, to keep the bears and the deer away.

In the yard in front of the house were two beautiful big oak trees. Every morning as soon as she was awake Laura ran to look out of the window, and one morning she saw in each of the big trees a dead deer hanging from a branch.

Pa had shot the deer the day before and Laura had been asleep when he brought them home at night and hung them high in the trees so the wolves could not get the meat.

In Little House on the Prairie, the book, they definitely hear wolves, but Pa is with the family, with his gun, when one approaches in the night, and — spoiler alert — it’s not an alpha wolf leading the pack to come eat little Laura.

Posted in Weapons | No Comments »

The UV index is a linear scale

July 22nd, 2026

When I was a kid, we definitely did not check the UV index before going to the pool:

The scale was developed by Canadian scientists in 1992, and then adopted and standardized by the UN’s World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization in 1994.

[…]

The UV index is a linear scale that measures the intensity of UV radiation with respect to sunburn. For example, assuming similar spectral power distributions, radiation with a UV index of 12 is twice as intense as radiation at a UV index of 6. For a wide range of timescales, sunburn in response to controlled UV radiation occurs in proportion to the total number of photons delivered, not varying with the intensity or duration of exposure. Therefore, under similar conditions, a person who develops a sunburn after 30 minutes of exposure to UV index 6 radiation would most likely develop a sunburn of similar severity after 15 minutes of exposure to UV index 12 radiation, since it is twice the intensity but half the duration. This linear scale is unlike other common environmental scales such as decibels or the Richter scale, which are logarithmic (the severity multiplies for each step on the scale, growing exponentially).

An index of 0 corresponds to zero UV radiation, as is essentially the case at night. An index of 10 corresponds roughly to midday summer sunlight in the tropics with a clear sky when the UV index was originally designed; now summertime index values in the tens are common for tropical latitudes, mountainous altitudes, areas with ice/water reflectivity and areas with above-average ozone layer depletion.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Senses Taker would love social media

July 21st, 2026

Phantom Tollbooth by Norton JusterI haven’t read The Phantom Tollbooth since they had us read it in sixth grade. Like A Wrinkle in Time, it’s an elementary school teacher’s idea of science fiction.

I didn’t know the book’s origin:

Architect Norton Juster was living in his hometown of Brooklyn, after three years in the Navy. In June 1960, he gained a $5,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to write a children’s book about cities. Juster argued that the young baby boomers would soon have responsibility for the cities, and many lived in the suburbs and did not know them. In his proposal, he said he wanted “to stimulate and heighten perception — to help children notice and appreciate the visual world around them — to help excite them and shape their interest in an environment they will eventually reshape.” Beginning with great enthusiasm, he ground to a halt with too many notes and too little progress. He took a weekend break with friends at Fire Island, and came back determined to put aside the cities book and seek inspiration in another writing project.

[…]

Juster shared his house in Brooklyn Heights with cartoonist Jules Feiffer whose bedroom was immediately below, and who could hear him pacing in the night. Feiffer was surprised to learn that his friend’s insomnia was not caused by the cities book, but by a book about a boy. Juster showed Feiffer the draft to date and, unbidden, the artist began sketching illustrations. Feiffer knew Judy Sheftel, who put deals together in the publishing trade and was his future bride. Sheftel got Jason Epstein, an innovative editor at Random House with a deep appreciation for children’s literature, to agree to review the manuscript.

Inside the Box by David EpsteinDavid Epstein thinks about Oliver Burkeman‘s advice (in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals) to “consolidate your caring” whenever he reads The Phantom Tollbooth to his son:

There is a character in the book, dressed like a census taker, called the Senses Taker. He eagerly helps people “find what they’re not looking for,” and in so doing diverts them from their priorities and wastes their limited time. The Senses Taker, I’m sure, would love social media.

Phantom Tollbooth Senses Taker

They made it into a movie, by the way:

Posted in Education, Media | No Comments »

Dozens of Navy professional articles have bemoaned its weakness in mine clearance

July 20th, 2026

The collapse of negotiations between the US and Iran can be traced to a single point of failure, Mark Cancian (a retired Marine colonel) says, the inability of the US military to keep the Strait of Hormuz open in the face of Iranian opposition:

The challenge has been long anticipated. The Navy has been thinking about it for 45 years, ever since it escorted tankers through the Persian Gulf in the 1980s and successfully thwarted Iranian efforts to control traffic. As a junior Marine officer, I participated in amphibious planning exercises to capture islands in the Strait. Yet, when the moment came for the Navy to implement its plans, nothing happened.

[…]

With assured passage through the Strait, the US would not need to allow a reconstruction fund, sanctions relief, or return of frozen assets. Time would be on our side.

Instead, the two sides have resumed strikes against each other and reinstated their respective blockades.

[…]

Much criticism must also fall on the military, particularly the Navy, which has “Keep[ing] the seas open and free” in its mission statement — but has not given senior decisionmakers acceptable options because of historical, glaring gaps in capability that it has not addressed.

Specifically, the service has long ignored mine warfare and instead depends on allies for this capability. Dozens of Navy professional articles have bemoaned its weakness in mine clearance, pointing to previous failures in Korea (1951), the Persian Gulf (1985) and Desert Storm (1990-1991).

[…]

And yet, the last of the Avenger class of mine countermeasure vessels (MCM) has retired, while the replacements (mine clearance modules on LCVs) have been few, delayed and plagued with problems.

[…]

Ultimately, the Navy needs something like in-stride minesweeping capability, the ability to clear a channel in hours or days, not weeks or months. It’s also clear that an implication of current US policy is that the United States must retain some of these capabilities itself and cannot always rely on allies and partners.

The Navy also needs to rediscover its skills at convoy escort. During the world wars, the US Navy was a master at this. Those skills have apparently atrophied. As part of this effort, the Navy needs to test and settle on its doctrine. Traditionally, escorts have sailed with the convoy, providing close-in protection. That worked for the one small convoy that the Navy ran under Project Freedom, but the Navy’s new concept is to create a safe corridor from a distance, without tying warships to particular groups of cargo ships. That sounds great. Will it work?

Finally, the Navy, like the other services, needs to develop mechanisms to counter drones. Firing $5.3 million SM-3s at $30,000 Iranian Shahed drones is not sustainable. Ashore, adding a counter-drone battery is relatively straightforward. Integrating it into a ship’s fire control system is complicated, but necessary.

This is not just a Middle East issue. If Iran succeeds in establishing the principle that neighboring countries can control constricted waterways, other straits worldwide might come under national control, and the whole world would suffer, including the United States.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Consumers begin to view product decisions as expressions of their identity

July 19th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinFreedom and choice have proliferated massively, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box):

Consumer choices alone have multiplied by one hundred million compared to before the Industrial Revolution, an increase that dwarfs the increase in wealth over the same period. Interestingly, when choice sets are large, consumers begin to view product decisions as expressions of their identity, raising the stakes for even trivial decisions. The increase in choice has extended to less easily quantifiable domains, like who to be and how to live. The idea of having too much freedom would have seemed absurd to most people throughout history, but in the last two centuries it has become a central preoccupation for some of humanity’s most profound and influential thinkers.

That modern lineage includes seminal thinkers like Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote about the “dizziness of freedom”—the anxiety and responsibility of choosing from endless possibilities—and German-born social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described the urge to “escape from freedom” by seeking structure, either productively through meaningful work or destructively through mindless conformity or blind submission to authority.

[…]

“Anomie” comes from an ancient Greek word that means “ruleless-ness.” French sociologist Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, popularized the term in his book-length investigation of suicide in the late nineteenth century, after several European governments began keeping statistics.

[…]

Unsurprisingly, suicide increased when a nation’s economic fortunes plunged. Surprisingly, it also increased when they soared. Whenever rapid change dislodged social norms and structures, people became more likely to kill themselves. Conversely, when nations came under attack, social norms and community obligations were strengthened, and suicide rates dropped. Researchers have since found that people exposed to war undergo a long-lasting increase in local community involvement and leadership, and in lab experiments demonstrate increased cooperation toward members of their community even years later.

[…]

Anywhere Durkheim looked, in fact, obligation mitigated suicide. People who were married with children were less likely to die by suicide than people who were married without children, who were less likely to die by suicide than people living alone. Durkheim concluded that people require constraints for meaning.

[…]

In the virtual world, Haidt explained, communities are populated by people (or at least avatars) who join easily and, when they don’t like something, quit readily. There are few norms and no social obligations, just a torrent of memes and microdramas played out by a rotating cast. “It’s when you pull away those constraints, that’s what the great rewiring was,” he told me. “It said: Let’s take away all of that real-world anchoring that humans have had since the beginning of the species, just rip it away, and give everyone twenty-five different platforms that will hold them into the virtual world where they can’t possibly develop healthily. It’s not healthy for anyone to have access to everything, everywhere, all the time.”

If the atomized normlessness of virtual life is harmful to development, what, in contrast, is helpful? According to the world’s longest in-depth study of health and happiness: chores.

[…]

Even before total immersion in virtual life became normal, political scientist Robert Putnam famously raised an alarm in his book Bowling Alone that in the US, the constraints of local communities had been steadily dissolving since the 1950s. Civic and community engagement crumbled under the weight of longer commutes, urban and suburban sprawl, and the shift of leisure time from public gatherings to private screens. A 2023 documentary on Putnam’s work is titled Join or Die, in reference to his statement that “your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group, cut in three-quarters by joining two groups.”

[…]

Burkeman describes a fascinating piece of research in Sweden, which found a decline in pharmacies dispensing antidepressants when a large portion of the country was on vacation at the same time—and the effect extended to Swedes who were already retired. “They derived psychological benefits not merely from vacation time,” Burkeman wrote, “but from having the same vacation time as other people.” Burkeman paraphrased Terry Hartig, a scientist who conducted that research: “What people need isn’t greater control over their schedules but rather what he calls ‘the social regulation of time’: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways.”

Conversely, the Soviet Union at one time had a disastrous policy of assigning many different five-day workweeks (four workdays and a one-day weekend) to keep factories operating at all times. It destroyed social ties by desynchronizing colleagues and families.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

At least 50 percent of ambulance services nationwide were being provided by morticians

July 18th, 2026

Randolph Mantooth, known for playing paramedic Johnny Gage on the “Emergency!” TV series in the 1970s, died July 9 at age 80:

Mantooth broke out in 1972 when he was cast in “Emergency!,” which introduced the profession of paramedics to the public. He co-starred with Kevin Tighe in the popular NBC series which ran for six seasons, and performed most of his own stunts.

[…]

He played his “Emergency!” character Johnny Gage on other shows such as “Adam-12,” and remained an advocate for firefighters, paramedics and EMTs throughout his life.

The modern EMS system was instituted and funded in large part by the federal government through the Highway Safety Act of 1966 and the EMS Act of 1973:

In 1910, the American Red Cross began providing first-aid training programs across the country, initiating an organized effort to improve civilian bystander care. During World Wars I and II, further advances were made in EMS, although typically these were not replicated in the civilian setting until much later (Pozner et al., 2004). Following World War II, city EMS activities were for the most part run by municipal hospitals and fire departments. In smaller communities, funeral home hearses often served as ambulances because they were the only vehicle capable of transporting patients quickly in stretchers. With the advent of federal involvement in EMS in the early 1970s and the articulation of standards at the state and regional levels, these EMS providers were gradually replaced by others, including third-service providers, fire departments, rescue squads, and private ambulances (NHTSA, 1996).

By the late 1950s, prehospital emergency care in the United States was still little more than first aid (IOM, 1993). Around that time, however, advances in medical care began to spur the rapid development of modern EMS. While the first recorded use of mouth-to-mouth ventilation had been in 1732, it was not until 1958 that Dr. Peter Safar demonstrated it to be superior to other modes of manual ventilation. In 1960, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was shown to be efficacious. These two clinical advances led to the realization that rapid response of trained community members to cardiac emergencies could improve outcomes. The introduction of CPR and the development of portable external defibrillators in the 1960s provided the foundation for advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) that fueled much of the development of EMS systems in subsequent years.

In 1965, the President’s Committee for Traffic Safety published the report Health, Medical Care and Transportation of the Injured. The report recommended a national program to reduce highway deaths and injuries. The following year, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Research Council (NRC) released Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society (NAS/NRC, 1966). That report emphasized that the health care system needed to address injuries, which at the time were the leading cause of death for those aged 1–37. It noted that in most cases, ambulances were inappropriately designed, ill-equipped, and often staffed with inadequately trained personnel. For example, the report called attention to the fact that at least 50 percent of ambulance services nationwide were being provided by morticians.

The report contained a total of 29 recommendations, 11 of which applied directly to prehospital EMS (Delbridge et al., 1998). These included recommendations to (1) develop federal standards for ambulances (design, construction, equipment, supplies, personnel training and supervision); (2) adopt state ambulance regulations; (3) ensure provision of ambulance services applicable to the conditions of the local government; (4) initiate pilot programs to evaluate automotive and helicopter ambulance services in sparsely populated areas; (5) assign radio channels and equipment suitable for voice communications between ambulances and emergency departments (EDs) and other health-related agencies; and (6) develop a single nationwide telephone number for summoning an ambulance. The report also laid out a vision for the establishment of trauma systems as we know them today.

In addition to the momentum that had been provided by the President’s Commission, support for the NAS/NRC report was fueled by surgeons with military experience in Korea and World War II who recognized that the trauma care available to soldiers overseas was better than the care available in local communities. In 1966, Congress passed the Highway Safety Act, which led to the formation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Posted in Media, Policy | 1 Comment »

Clear boundaries liberated them to experiment

July 17th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinDavid Epstein shares (in Inside the Box) the story of a famous playground study:

Teachers were directed to take preschool children to local playgrounds that had no designated boundary, and then to playgrounds that had a clear boundary marked by a fence. At the no-boundary playgrounds, the children clustered around their teacher. At the fenced-in playgrounds, the children felt safe to explore, so they left the teacher and roamed widely. Clear boundaries liberated them to experiment.

Unfortunately, in following up on the suggestions to check out that study, I concluded that it doesn’t exist. I traced the story back to an undergraduate project on public spaces that won a student award. That student is now a professor of landscape architecture, and when I asked him about it, he said that he had (understandably) taken the word of two child psychologists about it back in his college days, but had never been able to find an actual study and regretted perpetuating it.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

She was delirious with an awful fever

July 16th, 2026

By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls WilderIn the fifth book of the Little House series, By the Shores of Silver Lake, Mary Ingalls goes blind due to scarlet fever — but that doesn’t seem to be what really happened:

In the spring of 1879, 14-year-old Mary “was taken suddenly sick with a pain in her head and grew worse quickly. She was delirious with an awful fever. We feared for several days that she would not get well,” Laura wrote. Laura vividly recounted the morning she looked at her sister and saw “one side of her face drawn out of shape.” Their mother Caroline explained Mary had suffered a stroke.

While Mary did slowly regain strength over the following weeks, her vision steadily faded. A doctor delivered the devastating verdict: “The nerves of her eyes had had the worst of the stroke and were dying — nothing could be done.” Charles Ingalls later took Mary to a specialist in Chicago, who confirmed there was no hope of recovery.

[…]

The Pioneer Girl manuscript makes no mention whatsoever of scarlet fever. And in a 1937 letter to her daughter Rose, Laura described Mary’s illness as “spinal meningitis” and “some sort of spinal sickness.” Meanwhile, the pupils’ register at the Iowa College for the Blind, where Mary later studied, listed her cause of blindness plainly as “brain fever.”

After continued analysis, Dr. Tarini published a 2013 study in the journal Pediatrics concluding that the true culprit was almost certainly viral meningoencephalitis — an inflammation of the brain and the membranes surrounding it.

So why blame scarlet fever? Turns out, scarlet fever was a household terror of the era, killing up to 30 percent of the children infected. It was so culturally embedded that it also appeared as a theme in Little Women and Frankenstein.

Posted in Media, Science | No Comments »

He won the highest awards in computer science, psychology, and economics

July 15th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIf David Epstein had to choose a single thinker whose work most influenced Inside the Box, it would be Herbert Simon:

Simon was trained as a political scientist, but a handful of disciplines claim him. He won the highest award in computer science (the Turing Award), and in psychology (Outstanding Lifetime Contributions), and in economics—the Nobel Prize. When a graduate student once asked Simon to explain his mastery of multiple fields, Simon replied that he was actually just fanatically exploring a single topic: how humans make decisions.

The fanaticism began with a class project in 1935, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago writing a term paper on public recreation in Milwaukee.

[…]

The public works department had recently upgraded playgrounds with new equipment and attractive landscaping, and wanted the budget to prioritize maintenance of the beautiful new grounds. The school board, on the other hand, wanted to prioritize hiring staff to lead activities at the playgrounds.

[…]

As he later wrote: “My previous study of economics provided me with a ready hypothesis: Divide the funds so that the next dollar spent for maintenance will produce the same return as the next dollar spent for leaders’ salaries.” But he saw no evidence that anyone actually viewed the decision in that manner. In the end, the school board had more influence over the budget, and so maintenance took a back seat. The organizational structure determined the choice, not some perfect calculus that weighed options for the next dollar.

[…]

“Now I had a new research problem,” he wrote. “How do human beings reason when the conditions for rationality postulated by neoclassical economics are not met?”

[…]

Rather than “maximize,” or make the best choice from all available alternatives, Simon showed that humans must “satisfice”: Consider a limited menu of options and choose one that is “good enough.” He later used computers to simulate the process of real human thought, which led him to co-create the first true AI program in 1956.

[…]

Simon always had the same breakfast (bowl of oatmeal, half grapefruit, black coffee), and lived in the same house for forty-six years. He didn’t agonize over keeping his options open. When he had to make a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes solicited advice, chose, and then remained open to lessons but not to dwelling on regret. “I was never aware that he changed his mind or re-thought options after deciding on something,” Katherine wrote. “Once made, his decision stuck.” Simon knew maximizing was unrealistic, and so he eagerly satisficed, saving anxiety and cognitive bandwidth anywhere he could. He expertly avoided Fredkin’s paradox—the notion that the more similar our options, the less choosing between them matters, but the harder choosing between them is. Thus, we are likely to spend the most energy on the least-important decisions. “The best is enemy of the good,” Simon wrote. One might be tempted to accuse him of a lack of ambition, if not for his trophy case.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The car and the telephone allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion

July 14th, 2026

The car and the telephone, Kulak argues, allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion:

If you look at the orders given to British Captains and Admirals during the Napoleonic wars, these orders were often shockingly cursory. Sometimes only 1-2 sentences would be the whole of the Admiralty’s direction to a ship’s Captain for months at a time.

[…]

These orders were not so simple because the task was simple, but because it was COMPLEX and skilled British Captains needed the greatest of discretion with which to act. They were weeks if not months out from new orders, and the admiralty weeks if not months away from news of occurrences on the other side of the world.

[…]

You see this not only in the royal navy, but also on the American frontier, where Marshalls, Sheriffs, Mayors, and US Army Captains often wielded power to rival knights and dukes in the old world, and ran not inconsiderable risk in doing so.

[…]

What the invention of the Automobile and telephone did was it changed all of that. By increasing the speed of reaction times from days to minutes or hours, and by increasing the speed of communications from days or weeks to seconds, the very nature of authority changed.

Before applying something such as the income tax would be an unfeasibly dangerous proposition. A simple modicum of non-compliance would require tax agents to go out, and even if they went out in force, they’d probably be disappeared very quickly, with the only lead being that they disappeared between Thursday and Sunday and were vaguely going to be present in some area or county. It might take another 4 days after they were noted missing to get someone out there to check on them.

[…]

Whereas before trustworthy, competent, literate, moral Ethically predictable, men who were capable of distant travel, dynamic decision making, and enforcing their decisions with violence were the major limiting factor in the depths of state control that is possible… And such men were inherently prideful and had class interests around their rights as high status free gentlemen and their places of respect within the communities they administered; Former Colonel Washington LED the rebellion against the Crown… Whereas before you had to deal with all of that, Now you could use Anyone.

Indeed the modern state invariably chooses for it’s regulators and inspectors sexually failed women, the disabled, the sexually isolated or despised, and the racially and ethnically outcast. All explicitly BECAUSE they are of the lowest status without the state (what do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means? It mean selecting people for being low status without the state) and will obey basically anything the state demands because, unlike the violent competent men of discretion who could do anything else or go anywhere and assume a leadership role, the DEI bio-slop who fill the government bureaucracy are complete nobodies without their jobs.

[…]

Unlike the earlier generations of lawmen, these infinitely expanding regulators need never actually enforce anything themselves, they need only send messages or “reach out” and if at any point they feel the slightest physical threat, they can call the police who are empowered to make ZERO decisions but are still capable of violence, and of calling in an endless stream of more police officers, tactical teams, and Helicopters should you prove resistant.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 4 Comments »

Do something, not everything

July 13th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn the spring of 2024, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he met up with a group of General Magic alumni to discuss their proto-iPhone:

It had been three decades since they went public—with no revenue—in Silicon Valley’s first “concept IPO.”

[…]

On the day of the IPO, Sony’s investment in General Magic instantly appreciated so much that it was more than they had anticipated making in their five-year business plan for the product. “And then it was gone,” Gruzen said. “For a moment, it was fantastic.”

[…]

Professor Tom Eisenmann, author of Why Startups Fail, rolled in a whiteboard so that the General Magic group and the audience could compile a list of what had gone wrong. The board filled up quickly. Too many partners; too early; too little attention to the limits of available technology; too vague a customer; too much making everything on their own instead of building on others; too little management. One audience member, an entrepreneur and mentor to Harvard and MIT students, described at length how watching the film reminded her of her mentees, whose giant visions often get in the way of accomplishing anything at all. Professor Eisenmann distilled her wisdom on the whiteboard: “Do something, not everything.” Laughter and head nods spread around the room.

Steve Jarrett explained to the audience that the software engineers were so skilled that they could imagine and build new things literally overnight. “We just kept inventing new ideas, and it kept making the product bigger, and bigger, and bigger.” The CEO, he said, “would just tell a new story every time there was a new idea.”

Jarrett recounted how one of the third-party app developers he managed, Jeff Hawkins, did what they could not—something, not everything. Hawkins had designed an app called Graffiti that could be used on General Magic’s platform. It allowed users to make quick strokes with a stylus that would be recognized as letters and punctuation. “So Jeff called and said, ‘How many devices have you sold?’ ” Jarrett explained. Jarrett shared the disappointing news, to which he recalled Hawkins replying: “Oh my God.” After that, Hawkins and his small team decided to build their own, simpler product. “When he told us that, we said there’s no way. How are you going to compete with Sony and Motorola?” Jarrett recalled. “And he crushed us, because he took this simple iterative approach to solving problems.”

Hawkins took his one tiny component of General Magic’s giant ecosystem and made it the basis of a much simpler device. It started just with functions for a calendar, contacts, a to-do list, a memo pad, and a calculator. That was the PalmPilot, which became a smash hit in the same era.

[…]

“We had too much on our plate,” Stern told me. “If you don’t whittle it down, you’re not gonna make it. And we kept piling it on. Why did we need sixteen partners? We didn’t. But there was all this FOMO.”

Why Startups Fail by Tom EisenmannIn Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann describes six patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures:

Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.

False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.

False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.

Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.

Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.

Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

None of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger

July 12th, 2026

Kulak notes that western powers are playing with fire when they use assassination against non-western powers:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin ( whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List”), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat associated influencers, and other CIA aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment… that somehow never occured to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president… Every elite member of russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind… that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

They have a name for it because it is so incredibly common

July 11th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAfter lauding the brilliance of Dmitri Mendeleev across multiple chapters of Inside the Box, David Epstein admits to keeping something from the reader:

He was not the first person to discover the periodic pattern, nor the second.

Prior to 1860, there were zero periodic tables in history. In nine years following the Karlsruhe conference, where the weights of elements were standardized, there were six. All six arose independently. They differed in appearance, and in details, but all six contained the fundamental insight—that the features of nature’s building blocks change predictably and then reset regularly with increasing weight.

In 1862, a French geologist arranged the elements in a three-dimensional descending spiral, like the stripes on a barber pole. Looking down a vertical column of the spiral showed the pattern. The diagram was complicated, though, so a publisher left it out and the paper was ignored.

In 1863, a British sugar chemist started organizing elements and soon insisted that when elements were ordered by weight their properties reset and repeated every eight places. When he presented his findings in a lecture to the London Chemical Society, he likened it to musical octaves. It was a poetic thought, but led an audience member to treat him like a charlatan and ask if he shouldn’t arrange the elements in alphabetical order instead. He had no academic position, and the Chemical Society declined to publish his work.

In 1864, a prominent English chemist who had attended the Karlsruhe conference drafted a periodic table. He, too, saw the main idea, and unlike the previous two scientists had the professional standing to push it forward. He didn’t, though, perhaps because he considered it merely a classification scheme, and not a law of nature.

In 1867, a Danish immigrant to America and polymath devised a periodic system that looked like a wheel, with elements arranged along spokes radiating out from the center. He was a highly eccentric outsider to chemistry, and the diagram was confusing. His work passed like a ship in the night.

In 1868, a German chemist drafted a periodic table that unlike the others, placed nearly every known element in a system that was both consistent and clear. Like Mendeleev, he was sitting in the room when Stanislao Cannizzaro delivered his argument for standardizing the weights of elements. And, like Mendeleev, he too was writing an intro textbook when he came up with his table. He faced the same constraints as Mendeleev, and produced basically the same table. But a publisher misplaced it and it wasn’t published until years later.

In 1869, Mendeleev published the first version of the table that would eventually hang in every high school science classroom.

[…]

Mendeleev became the “father of the periodic table” because his system was relatively complete, and because his daring predictions of as-yet-undiscovered elements were vindicated. He also wasn’t a chemistry outsider, was only moderately eccentric, made a diagram that was simple to understand, and, to his great fortune, his publisher didn’t lose it or leave it out. Also: Mendeleev really wanted to be known as the discoverer of the periodic law, so he fought for his claim.

Mendeleev won what science historians call a “priority dispute.” They have a name for it because it is so incredibly common.

[…]

Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with the patent office on the same day.

The list of momentous breakthroughs that were independently discovered by multiple people pervades every domain. In astronomy: the discoveries of sunspots and the distance to stars; in math: decimal notation, logarithms, and the principle of least squares (used everywhere from machine learning to medical trials); in chemistry, the discovery of oxygen; in physics, the law of conservation of energy (at least five and arguably twelve co-discoverers); in biology, the theory of infection by microorganisms; and all manner of world-changing practical inventions—photography, the thermometer, the telescope. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, leading to the aptly named Newton–Leibniz calculus controversy. (The Newton–Hooke controversy, meanwhile, was over gravity.) Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection. When a stunned Darwin—who had not yet published his findings—read Wallace’s unpublished manuscript, he wrote to his mentor: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.”

[…]

The programmable digital computer was independently invented in three countries in a short span. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other and enabled our digital age.

[…]

In 1961, Robert Merton, a pioneer of the sociology of science, wrote that “multiple discovery” (which has itself been multiply discovered over generations) is so ubiquitous that “singletons” should be considered the exceptions.

[…]

The lone genius trope was popularized in nineteenth-century England, when the word “creativity” itself was invented. It was part of an intellectual movement that championed humanity’s power to discover the secrets of nature and turn them into practical gains. It was important for progress but also fed the image of the lone, outside-the-box genius, and dovetailed with the era’s so-called cult of the hero.

[…]

If ever there was a paradigm shift, that was it. And yet, none of the pieces of Darwin’s theory of evolution—selection, adaptation, heritability, the struggle for survival, even random changes that are passed down—were entirely new. Several were reasonably common among naturalists who studied plants and animals. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, believed that all “warm-blooded animals” had a common origin in the distant past.

[…]

Darwin’s breakthrough came from meticulously compiling available but disparate knowledge into a coherent whole in order to answer pressing questions of his time, like “Why does breeding work so well?” and “Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth?” Darwin kept at least 231 scientific pen pals—from conchologists and ornithologists to gardeners—whom he peppered with questions and questionnaires. He cut up their letters and pasted information into his own notebooks. Darwin learned that breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.”

[…]

After he disembarked from the Beagle, Darwin read a popular biography of Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” and considered how order could emerge from competition. As Waller wrote: Darwin’s notebooks “show how deeply he was rooted… in the intellectual trends of the early 1800s.”

Posted in Science | 13 Comments »

The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024

July 10th, 2026

Graduates in aviation maintenance from the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics are in demand, NPR reports, due to a labor shortage:

After shifting their tassels and hugging their parents, they head to a nearby building for one last test.

“Every one of the 54 Maintenance students took their final test graduation day or the morning after,” says Derek Vrabel, the student services coordinator at PIA.

The test isn’t for a class grade. It’s to earn the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certification for mechanics to work on plane airframes and engines. The coveted credential offers a foothold in an industry eager for new hires: Even before putting on their cap and gown in late June, nearly half of the graduates had already locked in new jobs, while others were narrowing down their choices. Options range from small regional airlines to loftier aspirations.

“I do have a couple of interviews next week with a couple of contractors, and SpaceX in Texas,” says class salutatorian Jon Wojcik, from Buffalo, N.Y. “I’d be applying my airframe skills for that, for the assembly of Starship rockets.”

As for how the new graduates did on the series of oral, practical and written exams that make up the test, Vrabel says 47 of them succeeded on their first attempt. He expects the remaining seven to pass in the coming days.

[…]

“There’s a shortage for both pilots and mechanics,” Wojcik says. “All these people are retiring, I think the average age is 57, of mechanics.”

The commercial aviation industry will need to hire 123,000 aviation maintenance technicians in North America through 2044, according to a forecast in Boeing ‘s widely cited Pilot and Technician Outlook. Compare that to nearly 161,000 U.S. jobs in the field as of 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of the awaiting jobs promise good wages. The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024, according to federal data. That’s $30,000 above the median wages for all jobs — quite a leap for a program that takes less than two years to complete and costs about $42,000 at PIA.

[…]

There are about 220 aviation mechanic schools around the country, according to the FAA. They range from specialized schools like PIA to programs at community colleges, which usually cost less, and at universities.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education puts the cost of attending PIA at well above the mid-point for U.S. certificate-level colleges. But the agency’s College Scorecard also reports that, four years after graduating, PIA’s graduates earn a median of $80,825 — more than twice the wages of other certificate-granting colleges.

Posted in Business, Education | No Comments »

Collective intelligence is real

July 9th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinDecades of research on group brainstorming have shown, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), that it basically doesn’t work:

Participants who have valuable insights stay quiet for fear of looking stupid, or the group simply conforms to the speaker who is the most forceful, or who makes the most money. (This last factor is colloquially known as HiPPO: highest-paid person’s opinion.) Participants in a brainstorming session can also be confused by unclear norms that encourage them to say whatever comes to mind but also not to criticize. Group brainstorming works so poorly in terms of generating novel ideas that “brainwriting” works better, in which individuals write down ideas on their own, submit them anonymously, and only then come together as a group to discuss them. Brainwriting improves on brainstorming in part because it sets rules that ensure more voices and ideas are welcomed.

[…]

The psychologists determined, first, that collective intelligence is real: Teams that did well on one task tended to do well on all, and vice versa. Incredibly, obvious factors like group cohesion, motivation, satisfaction, and the average (or maximum) intelligence of members did not predict team intelligence. But a hallmark of the best teams was that they had relatively equal “conversational turn-taking.” As in Google’s Project Aristotle, that can look messy in practice, with interjections, debates, changes of topic, and swerves from an agenda. But those are signs of healthy and inclusive group norms. Conversely, I once worked under an editor who would copy the entire office on emails when he criticized an idea. It had an immense chilling effect on some younger employees.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

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