Dan O'Huiginn

Morning Star of Lingao is a huge Chinese web novel, collectively written on forums by 500+ authors. The plot is about a small group reconstructing industrial civilisation from the ground up, with an obsessive focus on the technical details. According to a Wired article:

The writing of it became a phenomenon across Chinese internet forums in the 2010s: Its open source ethos and collaborative methods deeply appealed to China’s burgeoning tech community. Beyond regular meetups among core contributors, Lingao’s creation fostered the formation of China’s “keyboard politics”—online communities where users engage in fierce debates about governance, policy, and national direction under the protection of pseudonyms. These conversations became staging grounds for political arguments that couldn’t happen elsewhere, where amateur policy wonks, military enthusiasts, and armchair strategists honed their worldviews.

It’s several million words, plus an archipelago of fanfic. It’s apparently often excellent on the mechanics of how to build industrial processes, somewhat less polished in literary terms. So for now I think I’ll be just admiring it from a distance.

Isn’t it curious how few last names are insults?

The usual story: surnames came about when bureaucrats needed to identify people who they didn’t know personally.

In a village of 60 people, a single name is enough to tell who’s who. Everybody knows everybody. So even when people share a first name, it’s easy to tell them apart. Is it John the Miller? Or John from Harby? Or John, Peter’s son? Or little John?

It’s just the tax collector who doesn’t know who you’re talking about, and who needs an unambiguous name to write in his ledger. Or perhaps it’s the priest recording a marriage or a death. So John becomes John Miller, or John Harby, or John Peterson, or John Little.

And those are, roughly, the categories of surname which emerge in medieval Europe. Names come from professions, or jobs, or patronymics. Or from that last category (John Little), names based on some physical or personal characteristic of the person. Nicknames, basically.

The thing is that most of the nicknames are positive, or at least neutral. Wise is a common surname; Stupid is not. Strong is common, Weak is not.

If this doesn’t surprise you, you probably weren’t bullied in school.

Or, if you want a less immediate demonstration of the tendency towards cruelty in names, look at Norse “by-names”. These are another forerunner of surnames, but directed towards sagas and story-telling rather than to the tax collector.

And…they are brutal — but brutal in a style pretty close to what you’d expect to find in a modern school. Examples include “foul-fart” and “butter penis”, alongside less startling insults like “foolish” or “bald”. There were laws against derogatory nicknames, usually a reliable sign that something is happening frequently enough to annoy people.

I suppose it’s not hard to imagine villagers toning down their choice of names for the bureaucrats and the priests. Even if Eystein was willing to embrace his nickname “Foul-Fart”, he might have hesitated to tell it to the priest. Or the priest might have hesitated to write it down, and encouraged him to choose again. Or even if it survived into the first generation, perhaps his son managed to get himself re-named.

David Nutt is a British public health expert who made his name by arguing that alcohol is pretty harmful even in comparison to heroin, cocaine or other illegal drugs.
In 2009 he was sacked as a government advisor, more-or-less because he wasn’t willing to rubber-stamp their drug policy. Then he made headlines again in 2010, with a paper that ranked all the drugs and found alcohol to be the worst of the worst.

I’d read the newspapers and nodded along. Respected scientists gather the evidence and find that some legal drugs are worse than illegal ones — fine, I can believe that.

But then I took a look at the underlying study. It is…not good.

The methodology isn’t quite “I asked my mates, and they agreed with me”, but it’s not not that either.

Nutt, after being sacked, went off and set up his own think tank. He called it the “Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs” — though its impartiality wasn’t obvious to everyone. He told the media that he planned to “put together an assessment of drug harms which will challenge some of the aberrations [of UK government drug policy]”.

The Lancet paper is that assessment. The methodology was to assemble the members of the new committee (plus 2 outsiders), and ask them to rank how harmful they thought the drugs were, according to different categories.

So it wasn’t entirely freeform, there was some kind of structure to assemble a consensus view and weight different elements.

But when you come down to it, it’s just aggregating the views of a group of people who likely wouldn’t be in the room if they didn’t share a particular perspective on drugs.

Alejandro Joderowsky’s movie about ‘psychomagic’ his practice of tailor-made quasi-shamanic rituals, is much more sane than I expected.

This documentary – made both by and about Jodorowsky, who is clearly his own favorite subject – shows us a series of Jodorowsky’s ritual treatments, interspersed by clips from his older movies.

Each time, we see somebody in a state of crisis or despair: a woman whose fiance died in front of her, a couple falling out of love, a middle-aged stutterer. Several are troubled by childhood experiences or fraught relations with their parents – appropriately, considering that Jodorowsky defines his psychomagic in relation to Freudian psychiatry.

The difference, we are told in the prologue, is that psychiatry is therapy through talk. Psychomagic is therapy through acts. Acts like being buried alive, symbolically torn apart by birds, drenched in milk, and having plates smashed on your chest. And that’s just the treatment for one person!

The acts tend to be dramatic, physical, intimidating, and well attuned to one person’s situation. They put that person at the center of an elaborate metaphorical production which gives material form to their problem. It’s a production coordinated with the visual flair of a film director: the stutterer sees himself covered head-to-toe in gold paint. The couple glumly drag chains through Paris as they contemplate whether to separate.

Having been materialised, the trauma can now be guided by performing actions on its physical representation. The chains of marriage are buried; the unused wedding dress is cremated. Whatever ‘magic’ there is in psychomagic, it depends on no forces beyond one person’s psychology. It gives the trauma center stage for a while, before providing a route towards catharsis and closure.

That’s not to say that it’s all easy to accept. Jodorowsky definitely gives off creepy vibes at times. Perhaps that is inevitable for an older man reaching such physical and emotional intensity with vulnerable people. But it’s hard not to notice how many rituals involve tearing off somebody’s clothes. And Jodorowsky’s titanium sellf-confidence is not something you imagine stopping in the face of a hesitant ritual subject. There’s also one segment with uncomfortable traces of faith healilng, as a cancer sufferer receives psychic energy from an auditorium of Jodorowsky fans, has unpleasant faith-healer vibes.

One of the most convincing sections is also one of the least elaborate. His patient is a depressed and foul-tempered old woman, somebody who clearly adores ‘Alejandro’ but seems unlikely to buy into any high-intensity shamanic ritual. Jodorowsky’s prescription is a daily walk to the park to look after a tree. For a moment Jodorowsky sheds his showmanship and comes across as a wise, caring old friend.

The Halbstarke were a German subculture in the 50s: rockers with leather jackets, an affection for James Dean, and a grudge against polite society.

photo: Karlheiz Weinberger

The term — literally ‘half-strong’ — fascinates me. It suggests not only the ‘half-grown’ adolescents who were the bulk of the movement, but also their combination of force and impotence. This was a movement of angry misfits, who had no hope or prospects and could be beaten to death by the policea without anyone raising an eyebrow.

photo: Karlheiz Weinberger

It reminds me of a once-famous scene in the 50s biker movie The Wild One, another touchstone for the Halbstarke. Johnny (Marlon Brando) is the rough, intense biker, looming at a society dance with a combination of menace and awkwardness, his fingers absent-mindedly tapping out a rhythm with no relation to the music around him. “Hey Johnny”, one of the girls asks him, “What are you rebelling against?”.

The look Brando gives her combines resignation, calm self-assurance, a wry pity for the carefree people around him. “Whaddayagot?” is his iconic answer, given deadpan, finding a strange kind of peace in his outsider status. It’s immediately treated as a joke, repeated round the room by laughing preppies.

That look seems to encapsulate the rebel-without-a-cause attitude of the halbstarke, no strength within society but something different outside it.

It’s on my mind because former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, alongside too-honestly describing himself as “somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat” used the term “half-vast”

While nothing Donald Trump did after the election, in connection with the lie about the election fraud, none of it is defensible, it’s also a mistake as some people have said including on the committee, the commentators that somehow this was a carefully planned coup d’etat to the constitution.
“That’s not the way Donald Trump does things. It’s rambling from one half-vast idea to another plan that falls through and another comes up.

Even if he was just avoiding saying half-assed , he came up with a wonderfully evocative way to do so. I imagine a half-vast plan not as a medium-sized one, but as a vast plan that is only half there.

What I’ve been reading:

A bleak Twitter thread by Kamil Galeev, taking gangsterism as the natural state of entrepreneurship. With US/European norms as a rare and fragile anomoly:

Hunting for cryptobros sounds like a great hustle for a violent entrepreneur. Still, we don’t see it happening: outspoken cryptobros are alive (=not selected out). Ergo, the high end violent entrepreneurs who would select them out are being selected out. Under-appreciated fact

Transit authorities are narrow-minded in who they listen to, with the US and Northern Europe not really paying attention to examples from beyond those regions.

Basic python idioms translated into Rust. I’m feeling a growing sense of inevitability that Rust will be the next language I need to learn, though I’m going to restrain myself for just a little longer.

Alternative names proposed for the New Romantics music scene. I can’t imagine a better label for Boy George than “peacock punk”

In its early stages, the movement was known by many names, including “new dandies”, “romantic rebels”, “peacock punk”, “the now crowd”, “the futurists”, “the cult with no name”[1] and eventually as the “Blitz Kids”. As the scene moved beyond a single club, the media settled on the name New Romantics.[4][26]

¶ Horses used to eat bread

Horse bread, typically a flat, brown bread baked alongside human bread, fueled England’s equine transport system from the Middle Ages up until the early 1800s.

Bread is easier to move and faster to eat than hay, making it ideal for hard-working horses on the move.

¶ Housebuilding in West London is being stopped for a decade until the electricity grid can catch up. The article doesn’t even talk about electric cars, which presumably will make everything worse. non-paywall article local govt. statement

¶ Airplanes’ location reporting systems (ADS-B) include data on their accuracy. You can use that to map GPS jamming

For the past year I’ve been working at AdAstra, calculating the climate change impact of food.

Today, we’re releasing most of that work into the world for free.

Cocoa production, for example, generates over 20 times as much carbon dioxide as it does cocoa powder – mainly because forests are being cut down for cocoa plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

We’ve been tracking exactly how much CO2 it takes to produce cocoa and 10 other crops, across dozens of countries, broken down to the municipality level.

Because not every chocolate bar is equal. Some food companies (but not all!) try to minimize their emissions. They refuse to buy crops crown on deforested land, and they work with farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas impact.

So their products could have a climate impact as much as 90% lower, compared to those from companies which just don’t care.

Our data has been helping them get there, making it possible to avoid buying crops from deforested land, and so remove the financial pressure to destroy ecosystems.

We’ve been selling for many thousands of dollars. Now we’re giving it away as open data, because we want it to be a public baseline for everybody to see and use.

And with our clients we’re going further, mapping out individual farms, looking at biodiversity and water usage.

Create a free account and take a look.

And if any journalists or researchers want a hand making sense of the data – get in touch, I’d be happy to help.

For the past year I’ve been working at AdAstra, calculating the climate change impact of food.

Today, we’re releasing most of that work into the world for free.

Cocoa production, for example, generates over 20 times as much carbon dioxide as it does cocoa powder – mainly because forests are being cut down for cocoa plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

We’ve been tracking exactly how much CO2 it takes to produce cocoa and 10 other crops, across dozens of countries, broken down to the municipality level.

Because not every chocolate bar is equal. Some food companies (but not all!) try to minimize their emissions. They refuse to buy crops crown on deforested land, and they work with farmers to reduce their greenhouse gas impact.

So their products could have a climate impact as much as 90% lower, compared to those from companies which just don’t care.

Our data has been helping them get there, making it possible to avoid buying crops from deforested land, and so remove the financial pressure to destroy ecosystems.

We’ve been selling for many thousands of dollars. Now we’re giving it away as open data, because we want it to be a public baseline for everybody to see and use.

And with our clients we’re going further, mapping out individual farms, looking at biodiversity and water usage.

Create a free account and take a look.

And if any journalists or researchers want a hand making sense of the data – get in touch, I’d be happy to help.

Back in the days when Stephen Pinker wrote books about language, he had a nice section about Latin and Greek plurals in English. Alumnus becomes alumni, cactus becomes cacti, and so on.

But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes we gave up pretending English is Latin (circus, museum). Sometimes it was never a Latin word to begin with (octopus).

or..Elvis. Pinker dug up this newspaper story:

“In Las Vegas, The Flying Elvi sued The Flying Elvises for trademark theft. Both organizations leap from airplanes in Elvis Presley (late period) costumes and dance and pretend to sing upon landing.”

They did indeed. The Flying Elvi lost on grammar but won in court, and their website testily asserts that they are “are the only officially licensed skydive team by Elvis Presley Enterprises®”

As for The Flying Elvises, I found some reminscences on a skydiving forum

I know Paul and his E team [yet another group of skydiving Elvises]. My buddy George and I groundcrewed a couple of his demos here in Vegas after we had quit being Elvis. Paul puts on quite a show with all the pyro , I was impressed.
Im guessing we did at least 75 or 80 demos coast to coast after the movie. I would have to look in my logbook , which I aint gonna do.
It was a ball until we got sued and that really sucked. Cost us 80 grand.