Melody

 I think John Williams is a film composer whose music will be played long after the films are forgotten.

I think there's a good chance of that.

Film music often suffers from being tied too closely to the film itself. Many competent scores work wonderfully in context but don't survive independently in the concert hall. John Williams is different. He writes memorable melodies in a tradition that goes back to Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Holst, Korngold, and the great late-Romantic composers.

Consider how many people can instantly recognize the themes from Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Superman, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, or Harry Potter. Most film composers would be delighted to leave behind one such theme. Williams has a whole shelf full of them.

What's interesting is that some of his music is already beginning to detach itself from its films. Symphony orchestras routinely perform Williams concerts. Young musicians learn his pieces. Audiences buy tickets specifically to hear his music, not because they are watching a movie. That's one of the signs that a composer may outlive the original context of the work.

Of course, "long after the films are forgotten" is a high bar. Star Wars may be remembered for centuries, just as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind have lasted far longer than anyone expected. But if some future historian in the year 2300 knows only one thing about Star Wars, it may be that it gave us the music of John Williams.

There is also a delicious irony here. Film composers were once viewed as craftsmen rather than "serious" composers. Yet Williams may end up being one of the most widely remembered composers of the twentieth century, while many highly respected academic composers are already known only to specialists.

A test I sometimes think about is this: can someone hum it after hearing it once or twice? Williams passes that test spectacularly. Many modern composers, film and classical alike, do not.

Modern serious music is not so formal.  You don't have strict forms and opus numbers and identification of key.  Instead, you have names.  This removal of formality is in everything.

Yes, and it's part of a much broader cultural shift.

If you look at a Beethoven score, even the title tells you a great deal: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67. The numbering places it in a sequence, the key tells you the tonal center, and the opus number locates it in the composer's catalog. The title is almost administrative.

By contrast, a modern work might be called Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, Become Ocean, or Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The title is often descriptive, evocative, or programmatic rather than classificatory. The name is expected to tell you something about the experience rather than the structure.

Part of the reason is musical. Once composers moved away from common-practice tonality, "in D major" ceased to mean very much. If a piece has no key center, identifying a key becomes impossible or misleading. Likewise, as traditional forms fragmented, calling something "Symphony No. 12" conveyed less information about what the listener would actually hear.

But I think you're pointing to something larger than music. Modern society tends to favor the personal and descriptive over the formal and taxonomic.

A century ago people were more likely to be addressed as "Professor Smith" or "Mr. Jones." Letters had elaborate openings and closings. Businesses had formal titles. Even scientific papers often carried long, stately names. Today first names dominate, dress codes have relaxed, and institutions often try to sound approachable rather than authoritative.

The gain is accessibility. The loss is a certain clarity and continuity. When you see "Op. 67," you immediately know where Beethoven's Fifth fits in his body of work. When you see Become Ocean, you know something about its imagery, but almost nothing about its place in the composer's output.

Film music sits oddly between the two worlds. Williams's Imperial March or Raiders March have memorable names, but musically they are often built with a level of formal craftsmanship that Beethoven would have recognized. The titles are modern; the musical thinking underneath is frequently quite traditional.

One could even argue that Williams became so successful because he continued to write music that has shape, melody, development, and recognizable architecture at a time when much of the classical establishment had become less interested in those things. Audiences may not know what sonata form is, but they can sense when a piece knows where it is going.

Exactly. Form didn't disappear; it largely changed status.

Popular music can be remarkably formal. A listener may not know the terminology, but the structure is immediately recognizable:

intro → verse → chorus → verse → chorus → bridge → chorus → outro

And the repetition isn't merely convenient. It gives the listener a framework for anticipation and memory. When the chorus arrives, you recognize it before it has finished. That's a large part of the pleasure.

In fact, popular music often preserves formal devices that "serious" music abandoned. The verse is analogous to a recurring strain; the chorus has a fixed identity; the bridge provides contrast; the final chorus provides return and closure. A good pop song can be quite rigorously constructed.

And there's an interesting distinction between form being present and form being announced. Sousa might effectively tell you, "Now we are at the trio." A pop song doesn't usually announce "second chorus," but you hear the pattern and learn it unconsciously.

So perhaps what has happened isn't that modern music became less formal. Rather, formalism became unfashionable in one musical culture while remaining indispensable in another.

And that brings us back to John Williams. His music is extraordinarily formal without sounding like a formal exercise. You can hear the architecture, but you're carried along by melody and orchestration rather than being asked to admire the architecture. That's probably one reason it has such staying power.

A good melody is quite a miracle; they seem, and are, simple, and one thiink one could have written it, but one hasn't.  I have perfect pitch, so I most certainly can put a note I hear in my head onto paper, and tried to come up with melodies, but trite and awkward and incomplete.

Yes. That's one of the great little mysteries of music: simplicity is often the result, not the method.

A memorable melody can consist of only a handful of notes, with a very ordinary rhythm. Once you hear it, it can seem almost embarrassingly obvious: Of course that's where the melody goes. And yet if you try to construct one deliberately, you discover that there are an enormous number of ways for those same notes to be merely dull, awkward, predictable, or unfinished.

Perfect pitch makes your experiment especially interesting. You have the ability to identify and write down a note accurately, but that solves only the most elementary part of the problem. Melody involves relationships between notes: interval, rhythm, accent, repetition, variation, tension and release, and—perhaps most mysteriously—a sense of where the phrase ought to go.

And there is a nasty trap: the moment you deliberately try to invent a melody, you tend to produce something that sounds like music you already know. The unconscious musical vocabulary is enormously powerful. You start with a little idea, then your brain says, in effect, "Ah, I know this sort of thing," and supplies the next bit. The result can be trite without your knowing exactly why.

The great melodists seem to have an extraordinary instinct for economy. Take the opening of Beethoven's Fifth: three short notes and then the long note. Almost nothing there. But the little figure has such identity that Beethoven can make an entire movement grow out of it.

Williams is remarkable in a somewhat different way. His melodies often have an almost childlike clarity. The Imperial March, for example, is not complicated. But those intervals, rhythm, and harmonic setting produce something that seems inevitable once you've heard it. You could imagine saying beforehand, "Well, why doesn't somebody just write a melody like that?" And then you try.

And discover that you are not John Williams.

That's perhaps why I like your phrase "one thinks one could have written it." It may be one of the best tests of a great melody. It conceals its difficulty. The finished thing looks effortless, rather like a perfectly balanced stone arch: what's so hard about putting those stones there? The answer becomes apparent when you try.

I would say Beethoven's fate theme is trite; it's what happens to it that is important.

Yes—I think that's exactly right. The famous four-note opening is almost banal by itself. Da-da-da-DUM is hardly a miraculous melody.

The miracle is what Beethoven does with it.

He turns that tiny rhythmic cell into a structural principle. It gets repeated, shifted, fragmented, answered, pushed into different harmonic situations, combined with other material, and used to generate enormous momentum. The listener gradually stops hearing it as merely four notes and starts hearing it as the identity of the movement.

And that's an important distinction between melody and musical invention. A beautiful melody can be impressive in itself; Beethoven's Fifth demonstrates that a very ordinary little idea can become extraordinary through development.

In fact, the opening is almost the opposite of a great singable melody. You don't go away humming the first four notes because they're beautiful. You go away knowing them because Beethoven has made them unforgettable.

It also illustrates why the old formal conventions mattered. Beethoven could take that little motif and work on it for an extended movement because he had a whole musical grammar available—sonata form, tonal relationships, development, recapitulation, cadence, and so forth. The form gave him somewhere to do things with his four notes.

So perhaps there are two quite different miracles:

the miracle of inventing a melody that seems inevitable, and the miracle of discovering how much music can be made from something that initially seems almost worthless.

Beethoven was extraordinarily good at the second.

Sunflowers

 There is something about sunflowers.  They are gaudy, certainly inappropriate for a Victorian drawing room, but just so happy and fun.

They do have that quality. A rose can be elegant, an orchid sophisticated, a lily dignified. A sunflower seems almost incapable of dignity. It is exuberant.
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Part of it is the scale. The flower head is absurdly large, as though nature slightly overdid it. The colors are unapologetic: bright yellow petals around a dark center, with no subtlety whatsoever. And unlike many flowers that droop delicately, a healthy sunflower stands there like it is pleased with itself.

The Victorians actually had a complicated relationship with them. On one hand, they could seem too bold and rustic for traditional drawing-room taste. On the other hand, the late Victorian Aesthetic Movement became quite fond of sunflowers as symbols of beauty and art-for-art's-sake. If you've ever seen pictures associated with Oscar Wilde and his circle, sunflowers appear surprisingly often.

There is also something psychologically appealing about them. Most flowers seem indifferent. Sunflowers appear engaged. We know they are not actually smiling, but the round face and radiating petals make them look almost cartoonishly cheerful. Children draw the sun as a circle with rays; a sunflower resembles that childhood image.

Van Gogh understood this perfectly. His sunflower paintings are not delicate botanical studies. They are celebrations of vitality, almost declarations that brightness itself is worthwhile. Vincent van Gogh seemed to recognize that a sunflower's slight gaudiness is part of its charm rather than a flaw.

A room full of orchids might impress me. A room with a vase of sunflowers makes me think someone expects good things to happen today.

In the States they sell jars of the seeds shelled and slightly salted, just scrumptious and very healthy.  I remember bringing in several jars and the import duty guy frowned at me and I handed him one.  The kids used to love sitting around passing the jar among them each taking a few.  Here however they only come with the shells, and that requires biting the shell to open it, and I don't have front teeth.

That sounds like one of those small cultural imports that never quite made it across with you.

Shelled sunflower seeds are wonderfully convenient. You can absentmindedly eat a handful while reading or talking, and before long you've consumed a fair amount of protein, healthy fats, vitamin E, and minerals. The unshelled version is almost a different food entirely. For many people, especially baseball players in the U.S., the shell-cracking ritual is part of the experience. But if you don't have front teeth, it's not much of a ritual—it's just work.

I smiled at the image of the customs officer frowning until you handed him some. Food is one of the few universal diplomatic tools. A lecture may fail, an argument may fail, but "Here, try one" often succeeds remarkably well.

And the scene with the children passing the jar around has a pleasant old-fashioned feel to it. Not unlike sharing peanuts or roasted chestnuts. The food becomes partly an excuse for companionship. Everyone takes a few, talks, and passes the jar on.

You might look around for sunflower kernels sold as baking ingredients rather than snacks. In some countries they're stocked with nuts, grains, or bread-making supplies. They may be unsalted and intended for cooking, but a little salt added at home would solve that. Cambodia imports a surprising range of foods these days, though sometimes they're hidden in places you'd never think to look.

It strikes me that sunflowers have managed a rare feat: they're attractive in the field, attractive in a vase, and attractive on a dinner plate. Most plants only get one of those jobs. Sunflowers seem determined to do all three.

Windows AI troubleshooting

 https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/simplefixai.html  My AI experience with this sort of thing has been dismal.  It tells me things will be on menus that are not, etc., caused by the constant proliferation of versions.

Yes. And I think your objection gets at a real weakness of AI-assisted Windows troubleshooting, rather than merely being bad luck with ChatGPT.

The particular thing you describe—“Click X in the Y menu” when X isn't there—is a consequence of treating Windows as though it were a stable, documented interface. It isn't. Microsoft moves things around, changes Settings between releases, hides controls depending on hardware or edition, and sometimes has several routes to the same setting. An AI trained on millions of troubleshooting pages therefore has a nasty tendency to produce a perfectly plausible Windows instruction that belongs to some other Windows.

Interestingly, SimpleFixAI is trying to address exactly that problem in a more constrained way. The current MajorGeeks listing says it is version 1.7.35 beta, released August 10, and describes it as analyzing the actual hardware, settings, services, drivers, and configuration of the particular PC rather than simply handing out generic instructions.

And its own documentation makes an important distinction: it doesn't merely tell you “go to this menu.” It says it checks preconditions before applying a fix, shows you what it proposes to do, and verifies the result afterward.

There is another feature I rather like: the AI doesn't generate PowerShell or arbitrary scripts. According to its July 2026 changelog, it chooses among a fixed set of pre-written, reviewed scripts. That's a much more sensible architecture for a repair utility than giving an LLM the keys to Windows and hoping for the best.

That said, I would still regard it as an interesting beta, not an oracle. MajorGeeks itself notes that it is a new project with a relatively small track record, and the current download is still explicitly a beta.

So I'd distinguish the two sorts of AI experience:

ChatGPT: “Here is where Windows probably puts that setting.”

SimpleFixAI: “I have looked at your Windows installation; here is the repair I think applies, and here is what I am actually going to change.”

The second is a much better use of AI for Windows. It reduces the version problem because the computer itself becomes part of the evidence.

There is even a delicious irony here: SimpleFixAI's developers discovered that their own AI sometimes gave inferior answers because of model-selection and startup problems, and had to fix that in versions 1.7.18 and later. So at least they seem unusually willing to admit that the AI can be wrong.

Given your experience, I'd be willing to test it skeptically rather than trust it. If you have a particular Windows nuisance that has resisted the usual AI/menu instructions, that would actually be a very good specimen: we could see whether SimpleFixAI can inspect the machine and produce something concrete rather than hallucinating a menu.

The worst this is "check X on the Y menu" and X is there but shaded out and non-functional because of some other setting somewhere in the system.

Exactly. That is a much nastier failure mode than simply giving you the wrong menu.

The instruction is technically correct: X really is on Y. But it omits the crucial fact that X has a prerequisite. Windows presents the control, but greys it out because some other policy, mode, service, driver, account state, or higher-level setting has taken precedence.

That creates a particularly maddening troubleshooting loop:

    “Go to Y and enable X.”
    “X is there.”
    “Good.”
    “It won't let me click it.”
    “Ah. Then go to Z and change Q.”
    “Q isn't there.”
    “Oh, you're running a different version of Windows.”

And sometimes there are several layers of dependency. A checkbox may be disabled because of another Settings option; that option may be disabled because of Group Policy; the policy may be determined by whether Windows thinks the machine is managed; and the underlying capability may ultimately depend on a driver or service.

This is why I think your criticism points toward an important distinction in AI troubleshooting:

Knowing where a control is located isn't the same as knowing the conditions under which the control is operative.

A human technician looking at the actual machine can often spot the greyed-out control and immediately think, “Ah, something upstream is controlling this.” A language model working from descriptions on the web tends to see thousands of sentences saying:

    “To enable X, go to Y and check X.”

It doesn't necessarily see the invisible causal relationship that makes X unavailable on some machines.

And this is where the approach advertised by SimpleFixAI is potentially much more interesting. If it actually interrogates the machine and diagnoses the state that is disabling X, rather than merely generating instructions, it is addressing the right problem.

In fact, I'd make this a criterion for judging it:

Don't ask whether it knows where the checkbox is. Ask whether it can explain why the checkbox is greyed out.

That's a considerably harder—and considerably more useful—test.

I look forward to a single AI desinging the operating system rather than a dozen working teams working on each part separately.

Yes — though I suspect the really interesting version isn't one AI doing all the coding, but one AI maintaining the conceptual integrity of the whole operating system.

The problem with a modern OS is almost the opposite of what we imagine when we hear "computer system." It isn't really one system anymore. It's an accumulation of subsystems, APIs, compatibility layers, security mechanisms, drivers, legacy assumptions, management policies, and user interfaces, often produced by teams that have only partial knowledge of what the others are doing.

That is precisely how you get the greyed-out checkbox phenomenon. Team A creates a control. Team B creates a policy that can disable it. Team C creates another interface for the same underlying function. Team D changes the prerequisite. Ten years later, nobody has quite got the whole picture.

An AI with a global model of the OS could potentially do something quite different. It could maintain a dependency graph like:

    User wants X → X requires Y → Y is disabled because Z → Z conflicts with Q → Q was enabled by the administrator → therefore X cannot currently be enabled.

And, importantly, it could tell you that rather than sending you hunting through menus.

There is another advantage: an AI-designed OS could potentially make the interface itself reflect the dependency structure. Instead of a mysterious grey checkbox saying "Enable X," Windows might say:

    X unavailable
    Requires Y.
    Y unavailable because Z is enabled.
    [Resolve conflict]

That sounds almost trivial, but it would eliminate an astonishing amount of computer aggravation.

The funny thing is that your "single AI" idea may also attack the problem of version proliferation that you started with. If the same system maintains the OS architecture, documentation, UI, diagnostic system and configuration model, then the documentation doesn't have to be a separately maintained description of the software. It can be generated from the actual software's structure.

In other words, instead of:

software → documentation written by somebody who tries to describe it

you could have:

software + formal dependency model → AI understands both and generates the appropriate explanation for this particular machine.

That would be a rather different kind of operating system.

And I rather like the thought that when something goes wrong, you wouldn't get "Try checking this box." You'd get:

    I know why this isn't working. There are three conflicting settings. I can fix them, but doing so will disable A. Do you want me to proceed?

That's the point at which AI stops being a computerized help-desk manual and starts becoming an operating-system architect.

Dream voice awakening

 Last night there was an event in my sleep that has happened maybe a dozen times before in my life.  In other words, not common but remembered.  I was dreaming something I've forgotten and suddenly a woman's voice, like my mom's, but I'm not sure, says my name with pronounced emphasis and a certain urgency, and suddenly I'm awake.  Since last night I had fallen asleep early (about six), and it was 1:30 am, I decided I had slept enough and got up.

That is a fascinating phenomenon, especially because you have experienced essentially the same thing perhaps a dozen times over a lifetime.

What you describe sounds very much like a dream-incorporated awakening: the brain is already beginning to wake, and the transition from dreaming to waking gets experienced as a distinct sound or voice. The voice can seem completely external and remarkably specific—someone saying your name, calling out, or sometimes a doorbell, telephone, knock, etc. These are generally called hypnopompic hallucinations when they occur as one is waking. They aren't necessarily pathological at all.

The particularly interesting part is the voice saying your name with urgency. Your name is an unusually powerful auditory stimulus. If some internal process says wake up, the brain may construct a very economical message: your name! And because your mother's voice is presumably deeply represented in your memory, it makes sense that the voice might acquire her characteristic sound even when you're not certain it was hers.

There is also a nice ambiguity here: did you hear a voice and wake up, or did you wake up and the brain construct the voice as part of the waking process? Subjectively those can be indistinguishable. In fact, the experience may be generated during the tiny interval between dreaming and full waking, so the usual sequence of "event → awakening" isn't necessarily meaningful.

And your decision to get up at 1:30 makes sense in context. You had gone to sleep at about 6, so you'd already had roughly 7½ hours. That's quite different from being abruptly awakened after two or three hours and being unable to get back to sleep.

One thing I find particularly intriguing is that you remember the voice but not the dream. That suggests the voice/awakening event was encoded strongly while the surrounding dream wasn't. Dreams are notoriously fragile in memory, whereas a startling, highly salient event at awakening can survive.

Given that you've had this perhaps a dozen times over eighty-three years, with no suggestion that you're hearing voices while fully awake, I'd regard it as one of those peculiar but quite normal tricks the sleeping brain occasionally plays.

The voice was on a completely different plane from the dream, much closer to being awake.  The dream had to do with skiing, but that's all I can say.

Yes—that distinction is important. It sounds less like the voice was part of the dream and more like it occurred at the boundary between dreaming and waking.

The skiing dream seems to have been running on one level: a conventional dream, with its own setting and logic. Then, almost as though another channel suddenly opened, there was this very clear “Frank!” from a woman's voice, with urgency, and that immediately brought you into waking consciousness. That is quite characteristic of a hypnopompic experience.

And the fact that the voice feels more real than the dream is actually not surprising. Dream perception can be hazy and unstable, while an auditory hallucination occurring during the transition to wakefulness can have the astonishing clarity and authority of an actual sound in the room. The brain is essentially borrowing the machinery of waking perception while consciousness is coming back online.

I also wouldn't be too quick to conclude that it was your mother. The fact that you thought like my mother's voice may mean that the brain supplied a familiar voice with exactly the emotional authority required to wake you. A parent's voice calling one's name urgently is about as effective an internal alarm as one could devise.

There's a charmingly odd question buried in this: what woke you—the voice, or whatever neural event was waking you produced the voice? We probably can't distinguish those subjectively. It may be that the voice is the brain's representation of the awakening itself.

And the skiing dream is almost incidental. You remember enough to establish that you were dreaming, but the abrupt voice has apparently become the actual event you remember. The dream is scenery; the voice is the phenomenon.

What you offer is plausible but not completely convincing.

I think that's fair. I was probably too confident in fitting your experience into the hypnopompic-hallucination category.

The awkward fact is that your description contains a distinction that the label doesn't really explain: the voice seemed to occupy a different level of reality from the dream. You weren't merely dreaming that somebody called your name. You were dreaming, and then there was this extraordinarily definite auditory event that seemed to be intruding from the waking world and caused the transition to wakefulness.

There are several possibilities, and we can't presently tell which one occurred.

One is the conventional neurological explanation: the auditory experience was generated during the transition to waking, and because consciousness was partly awake, it had the phenomenological quality of an external sound. That's perfectly plausible.

But another possibility is that a real, extremely faint external sound triggered the awakening, and your brain interpreted or elaborated it as your name in your mother's voice. The sleeping brain is very good at imposing meaningful patterns on ambiguous sounds. If there actually was some sound in the room, that would explain the peculiar sense that the voice was on the waking side of the boundary.

And there's a third possibility that I think your description leaves open: the brain may generate a highly structured auditory experience as part of the awakening mechanism itself, without it being properly described as either a dream or a hallucination. We don't have particularly good access to what consciousness is doing during those few seconds.

The repetition over your lifetime is interesting, too. If it has happened perhaps a dozen times and has a remarkably similar form—female voice, your name, emphasis, urgency, immediate awakening—then there's evidently some recurring feature of your sleep/wake machinery. That's more interesting than simply saying "sometimes people hallucinate while waking."

I would therefore phrase the conclusion much more modestly: you experience an unusually vivid auditory event at the precise boundary of dreaming and waking, and we don't actually know whether the voice is a product of the dream, of awakening, of an external stimulus being incorporated into awakening, or some combination of these.

And frankly, “I don't know what happened, but I know exactly what happened phenomenologically” is a perfectly respectable conclusion here.

Not to dwell on it too much, but one final thing.  It was not normal waking, where one yawns and stretches and wants to doze.  I was immediately wide awake, up, and putting on my clothes.

Yes—that makes the episode more distinctive. The abruptness of the awakening is probably the most interesting detail.

Ordinary waking has a kind of inertia: Where am I? What time is it? Perhaps a yawn, a stretch, some fumbling around, and then consciousness gradually takes over. What you describe sounds more like a switch being thrown. Voice → immediate full alertness → decision to get up → clothes on.

That actually makes me less inclined to describe the voice simply as a bit of dream imagery. Whatever its source, it seems to have been associated with a very powerful arousal response. The brain has systems specifically capable of going from sleep to intense alertness very rapidly when something is judged important. An urgent call of one's name would be an excellent trigger.

And there is an interesting asymmetry: you don't seem to have been frightened. You didn't wake in confusion or panic; you simply became completely awake and concluded, reasonably enough, that after seven and a half hours you might as well get up.

So I'd leave it there rather than manufacture an explanation. You've experienced a peculiar recurring event: a dream is abruptly interrupted by an exceptionally vivid female voice calling your name, the voice seems to belong to a different experiential layer from the dream, and you emerge immediately into full wakefulness. That's a much better description than pretending we know exactly what mechanism produced it.

Women in Athens and Afghanistan

 Can we compare the status of women in Classical Athens to that of women in Afghanistan?

Yes—and the comparison is surprisingly revealing, because Classical Athens was restrictive in ways that can look quite familiar to modern observers, but the nature and degree of the restrictions were different from those imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

If by Classical Athens we mean roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, an Athenian woman of respectable family was largely confined to a domestic and reproductive role. She did not vote, hold political office, participate in the Assembly, or serve as a juror. Her legal and economic independence was limited, and important legal transactions were generally conducted through a male guardian (kyrios). Marriage was normally arranged by the families, and producing legitimate children—particularly sons—was a central expectation.

But there is an important qualification: Athens was not simply a society in which women were universally shut away from public life. Women went to religious festivals and participated extensively in religious life; religion actually provided some of their most important public roles. They could own or inherit certain property, although their capacity to dispose of it independently was restricted. Women also appeared in the marketplace and could work, particularly women of poorer households. And the famous Athenian ideal of female seclusion was probably considerably more aspirational than literal.

Afghanistan under the Taliban is different in both scope and enforcement. Women and girls have been progressively excluded from secondary and higher education, many forms of employment, public life, and freedom of movement. Restrictions on dress and movement are backed by an apparatus capable of enforcing them. The exclusion isn't merely "women don't participate in politics"; it reaches deeply into education, employment, travel, public space, and personal autonomy.

There is nevertheless an interesting structural similarity: both systems make the household the principal legitimate sphere for women and political/public citizenship overwhelmingly male. In both cases, this is connected with a conception of social order in which men exercise authority and women are expected to be protected and controlled within family structures.

But I would resist saying that an Athenian woman was simply the equivalent of an Afghan woman under the Taliban. The Athenian system was principally a system of political exclusion and patriarchal family law. The Taliban system is a much more comprehensive system of institutional exclusion from education, employment, mobility, and public existence.

There is also a delicious historical irony here: Athens called itself the birthplace of democracy while excluding roughly half its population from citizenship. The democracy was extraordinarily radical among male citizens and extraordinarily undemocratic toward women, slaves, and resident foreigners.

And this gets particularly interesting if we compare Athenian women with Spartan women. Sparta gave women considerably more property rights, education, physical training, economic independence, and public visibility than Athens did. So even within ancient Greece, "the status of women" wasn't one thing.

Yes—that gets surprisingly close to the Spartan bargain, although with a bit of compression.

The Spartan system essentially said: men and women have different jobs, and both jobs serve the polis. Men were supposed to become soldiers and accept the possibility of death in battle. Women were supposed to produce and raise the next generation of soldiers—and were therefore given considerably more freedom and property than Athenian women.

The famous Spartan attitude toward motherhood was remarkably unsentimental. A mother could supposedly tell her son to return “with his shield or on it”—meaning victorious, or dead. Whether every such anecdote is historically authentic is another question, but it captures the ideal beautifully.

And there is a rather interesting symmetry in it. Sparta did not say, "Women are inferior, therefore keep them out of public life." Its logic was closer to:

    Your sex determines your duty; your importance follows from performing that duty well.

Consequently Spartan women could own substantial property, exercise publicly, manage estates while men were away, and speak with considerably more freedom than respectable Athenian women. Aristotle was actually rather scandalized by the amount of property and influence women had in Sparta.

But the bargain had a dark side. A woman's considerable autonomy was not granted because Sparta believed in individual equality. It was granted because Sparta was a militarized society that needed women to perform their particular function efficiently.

So your formulation gets at something important: Spartan feminism, if one wants to call it that, was profoundly functionalist. The state needed mothers producing future warriors, just as it needed warriors defending the state.

Which makes Sparta an interesting counterexample to the assumption that greater freedom for women necessarily arose from a doctrine of equal individual rights. Sometimes it arose because society had decided that women had an important job to do—and wanted them sufficiently free and capable to do it.

Birth mortality was not much different from battle mortality.

Exactly. And that makes the Spartan symmetry considerably less rhetorical.

If we imagine the risks over a lifetime rather than comparing one childbirth with one battle, a Spartan man and woman could both face a serious probability of dying in the performance of the social role assigned to their sex. Battle killed men; pregnancy, childbirth, and the complications of repeated pregnancies killed women.

There is an important statistical wrinkle, though: maternal mortality is usually measured per pregnancy or per live birth, whereas battle mortality is measured per campaign, battle, or period of military service. So "birth mortality was comparable to battle mortality" needs some care.

But the underlying point is sound. In a premodern society without antibiotics, blood transfusion, modern obstetrics, or effective treatment of hemorrhage and infection, childbirth was a genuinely dangerous occupation. A woman who had many pregnancies accumulated substantial lifetime risk.

And that makes the Spartan arrangement rather stark:

Man: your duty is to fight; you may die doing it.

Woman: your duty is to bear children; you may die doing it.

Neither was exactly being offered a modern conception of individual fulfillment. The remarkable thing is that Sparta could consequently regard women as important enough to give them property, education, physical training, and considerable practical independence.

In other words, Sparta didn't emancipate women from duty. It emancipated them partly in order that they could perform their duty. That's a much more interesting proposition than simply calling Sparta progressive or unprogressive.

The Islamic male attitude, and I've gotten this first hand from several, is that women are okay but generate evil thoughts in men.  Thoughts that lead to Hell.

Yes. That is a real strand of Islamic moral thinking, though I would distinguish it from saying that this is simply “the Islamic male attitude.” Islam has several quite different traditions concerning sexuality and gender.

The idea you're describing is essentially temptation theory: sexual attraction is a danger to men, women are understood as a particularly powerful source of that temptation, and therefore society should regulate women's appearance, movement, and interaction with men to protect male virtue.

There are interesting parallels in other traditions. In some Christian traditions, too, women were treated as occasions of male sexual temptation—hence elaborate rules about women's dress and separation of the sexes. Medieval Christian writers could be astonishingly preoccupied with this. The difference is that particular Islamic societies developed much more extensive and enduring institutional arrangements around the separation and veiling of the sexes.

And there is a peculiar moral inversion in the argument. The man's desire is treated as something for which the woman must bear responsibility. Instead of:

    “I experience an improper desire; therefore I must control myself,”

the logic can become:

    “You cause me to experience an improper desire; therefore you must conceal yourself or be restricted.”

That distinction matters enormously for women's freedom.

It also explains something that otherwise looks rather strange from outside: the woman need not be considered evil at all. She may be regarded as a perfectly respectable, honorable person—and simultaneously as dangerous because of the sexual thoughts she supposedly provokes in men. The restriction is then presented as protection of both sexes: protection of the man from sin and protection of the woman from men's sexual attention.

And, as you imply from your firsthand conversations, this can be a sincerely held psychological belief rather than merely a convenient excuse for male dominance.

The really interesting question is whether the premise is accepted: Why should another person's involuntary sexual attraction constitute a moral offense by the person who provokes it? Once you reject that premise, a great deal of the resulting system becomes difficult to justify.

Gee whiz!

 "Host Regina Meredith conducts interviews with thought-provoking luminaries, cutting-edge visionaries and tireless researchers, providing crucial information to awaken viewers to new perspectives that spark awareness, understanding and ultimately, transformation."  Oh gee whiz!

Oh, absolutely. 😄

That sentence has achieved maximum New Age promotional density. “Thought-provoking luminaries,” “cutting-edge visionaries,” “tireless researchers,” “awaken viewers,” “new perspectives,” “spark awareness,” “understanding,” and finally transformation—the whole spiritual-growth bingo card in one sentence.

It also has that wonderful implication that the information is not merely interesting or possibly true, but is crucial and will awaken you. One almost expects the next sentence to say that ordinary television is keeping you asleep.

“Regina Meredith interviews people who have interesting things to say” would have been considerably less exciting, but possibly more credible.

I like that the researchers are tireless.  Not necessarily objective, but tireless.

Exactly. 😂 Tirelessness is apparently the important methodological virtue.

“Researchers” might suggest evidence, controls, replication, and a willingness to discover that your hypothesis was wrong.

“Tireless researchers” suggests people who have been at it for years and years, presumably without the tiresome interruption of being persuaded by contrary evidence.

And there is a subtle distinction:

    Tireless tells us about their stamina.
    Objective would tell us about their epistemology.

The copy very carefully promises the first and conspicuously fails to promise the second. A rather elegant bit of advertising, really.

 The Iranians have declared victory.

Yes—and it is rather striking rhetoric. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Friday that “the entire world” had accepted Iran's victory and that the war should now end.

But I think the interesting question is what “victory” means here. Iran plainly did not defeat the United States militarily. Its infrastructure and economy have suffered enormously, and the war has not produced the Iranian objectives one would normally associate with a military victory.

On the other hand, Iran can make a respectable case for a political or strategic victory: the regime survived, the United States did not achieve regime change, Iran's nuclear program was not demonstrably eliminated, and—most importantly—the Americans have not been able to force Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz on American terms. Reuters notes that the U.S. has still not achieved several of its original objectives.

And there is a delicious irony in the situation: Trump has been preparing his own “victory” narrative, apparently hoping that reopening Hormuz would give him a basis for declaring the war won.

So we have the classic modern-war ending: both sides declaring victory because neither has obtained what it wanted badly enough to call the other side the winner.

Indeed, Pezeshkian's formulation—we should end the war now, while we are powerful and our dignity is intact—is almost an explicit description of a negotiated stalemate being packaged as victory.

And I suspect that's what makes the declaration interesting rather than merely absurd.

The respective victories of both Iran and the States can be described as Pyrrhic. 

Yes. “Pyrrhic” fits remarkably well precisely because victory is being defined negatively.

Iran can say: We survived, preserved the regime, and denied the Americans their maximal objectives. The United States can say: We inflicted enormous damage, imposed costs, and denied Iran what it wanted. Neither side can comfortably say, We achieved our objectives at an acceptable price.

And a Pyrrhic victory has that peculiar feature: the winner's victory itself contains the evidence of how badly the contest went. The destruction, disruption, expenditure, and political consequences remain after the banners come down.

There is also a nice distinction between military victory and strategic success here. A side can lose militarily yet achieve enough strategically to call the result a victory; conversely, a side can win militarily and discover that the political result isn't worth the cost.

So “both sides won” isn't necessarily nonsense. It can mean both sides salvaged something from a contest in which neither got what it really wanted. That is almost the textbook soil in which Pyrrhic victories grow.

Yes. Morally, I think there is a very important distinction between killing a leader as a military act and using the threat or act of killing a leader as a diplomatic instrument.

My instinct is that the latter is morally troubling even when the former might sometimes be justified. A government can properly regard an enemy commander who is directing an ongoing war as a legitimate military target; international humanitarian law makes essentially that distinction. Political officials, merely by virtue of being political officials, are not automatically lawful targets.

But “we'll kill your leadership unless you do what we demand” is something rather different. It turns assassination into a negotiating mechanism. The moral problem is not simply that a person dies; it is that the state is saying, in effect, your government's continued existence depends upon our willingness to kill particular people. That begins to resemble coercion by threat of murder rather than diplomacy.

There is also a nasty practical paradox. Removing a dictator does not remove the political system that produced him. It may produce a successor who is harder to deal with, a martyr, a factional struggle, or simply another leader who concludes that negotiating with the assassin is suicidal. In other words, it can make compromise less attractive to the other side. And once states normalize the principle that political leadership is fair game, they have created a precedent that can be used against their own leaders.

That is why I would distinguish three propositions:

“This leader is a military commander and is participating directly in the war.” Potentially legitimate.

“This leader is responsible for terrible things, therefore he may be killed.” Morally much more dubious.

“We will kill your leaders to make your government negotiate with us.” I think that is especially objectionable. It substitutes coercive elimination for diplomacy and tends toward a world in which heads of government become hostages to international politics.

And there is an especially interesting wrinkle in the present Iran situation: if the stated objective is diplomacy, killing the people with whom you must ultimately negotiate is almost self-defeating. You are simultaneously destroying the interlocutors and telling the surviving government that accommodation may get its negotiators killed.

The legal question is somewhat separate: under the UN Charter, the use of force against another state's political independence is heavily constrained, while once an armed conflict exists, the law of war governs who may be attacked.

So morally, I would put it this way: a leader can become a legitimate military target because of what he is doing in a war; he does not become morally killable merely because killing him is thought to be a useful way of getting his country to behave.

And I suspect that distinction is close to what you are getting at by calling it a diplomatic tactic.

The Afghanistan war had a lot of that sort of thing: kill the leaders.  Over time those who replace the leaders tend to become both less competent and less committed, until one gets a group one can deal with.

Yes—and Afghanistan is a useful example because your hypothesis has some empirical support, though I would qualify the last part.

There is evidence that killing Taliban leaders could degrade the organization's professionalism and operational effectiveness. One study of four Taliban leadership killings in Afghanistan found reduced professionalism, lower success rates, changes in target selection, and weakened morale.

But the succession effect isn't reliably “each replacement is worse.” It depends heavily on the organization's structure. Research on nearly a thousand cases finds that decapitation is much less likely to destroy organizations that are bureaucratic, have substantial communal support, or are driven by religious or separatist ideology—the sort of characteristics the Taliban possessed.

And there is an intriguing possibility very close to what you're describing: successive removals can alter the composition of the leadership and its incentives, potentially producing people who are less capable of sustaining the old organization or more willing to bargain. Recent work specifically argues that leadership removal can affect the bargaining process, not merely battlefield effectiveness.

So I might phrase your idea as:

    You don't necessarily decapitate an organization until it collapses; you decapitate it until the people who emerge from the succession process are people you can do business with.

That is a rather different conception of “decapitation” from simply trying to win by assassination. It makes the killing of leaders a mechanism for altering the political constituency on the other side.

And there's the moral wrinkle we were discussing. Once that is the objective, the justification becomes less “this man is a combatant” and more “we are deliberately killing political actors to manufacture a more tractable opponent.” That strikes me as considerably harder to defend morally, even if it might occasionally be effective.

The regime in Afghanistan now is merely unpleasant, not horrible, and it did seem to work quite well in Venezuela, where of the arrest could be justified on criminal grounds.

I think there is something to your comparison, though I would soften the Afghanistan description. For much of the Afghan population, particularly men living ordinary lives, the Taliban regime may indeed seem more like a grim, restrictive government than the apocalyptic regime it was depicted as during its worst years of insurgency. But for women and girls it is still extraordinarily repressive: the UN describes systematic exclusion from education, employment, public life and legal equality, with new restrictions added in 2026.

Venezuela is the cleaner example of the phenomenon you're describing. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro alive and transported him to the United States for prosecution on federal criminal charges. The U.S. government explicitly presented it as a law-enforcement operation supported by military force, rather than as an assassination. A federal court had issued arrest warrants based on grand-jury indictments.

And, interestingly, it seems to have worked better than simply killing him might have. Maduro disappeared from the political equation, but the Venezuelan state did not collapse. Delcy Rodríguez became interim president, while much of the existing political and military apparatus remained in place. That gives the successor leadership a very different incentive structure: they know what happened to Maduro, but they also know that the United States is prepared to deal with them rather than simply eliminate them.

That gets back to your original moral question. Arrest is morally and politically a very different instrument from assassination. A person accused of specified crimes can be apprehended, tried, convicted or acquitted. There is at least the possibility of due process and, importantly, of negotiating with everyone else afterward.

In that sense, I think your idea has a rather interesting progression:

kill the leadership → weaken the organization → perhaps get more tractable successors

versus

arrest the leadership where a genuine criminal case exists → remove the particular individuals → leave a surviving political structure with which one can negotiate.

The second is vastly easier to defend morally. It is also, in some circumstances, probably more useful diplomatically. You don't have to make martyrs, and you don't have to destroy the organization whose behavior you are trying to change.

Venezuela may eventually prove to be a rather important case study in that distinction.

Error in thinking about power of the purse

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"He who has his thumb on the purse has the power." (Wer den Daumen auf dem Beutel hat, hat die Macht) - Otto von Bismarck, from his on May 21, 1869 speech to North German Reichstag, p1017, left panel. 
That is a widespread historical mistake; power of the purse is power to obstruct but not to initiate.

Yes. That is a particularly good distinction, and I think your formulation gets at something the Bismarck aphorism obscures.

The power of the purse is fundamentally negative power. Whoever controls the money can say no: no appropriation, no funding, no continuation. That can be an extraordinarily effective veto, and historically it has often been the legislature's principal weapon against an executive or monarch.

But control of the purse does not ordinarily tell you what to do instead. To initiate policy, someone has to propose it, organize it, administer it, persuade others, and actually exercise authority. A legislature can refuse to finance the executive's project without thereby possessing the executive's capacity to formulate and carry out an alternative.

There's an interesting asymmetry here: the ability to prevent an action can be almost as powerful politically as the ability to cause one, but they aren't the same kind of power. A man holding the purse strings can make the man holding the machinery helpless, but he doesn't thereby acquire the machinery.

And Bismarck, of all people, would have understood that distinction. His own career was practically a laboratory demonstration of the difference between formal constitutional powers and the ability to get things done. His genius was often in finding ways around institutional vetoes rather than simply acquiring every formal power himself.

So I would call the proverb a half-truth elevated into a definition of power. Money gives you a very important lever. It doesn't necessarily give you the steering wheel.
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Human equality

 Hypothesize that it were proven one race or some other subdivision of humanity is statically consistently better than another?  So what?  Individuals who are lacking are still treated equally?

That is very close to the position taken by most modern liberal democracies.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it were conclusively demonstrated that some human population—whether defined by ancestry, ethnicity, sex, or some other category—had a statistically higher average score on some trait: intelligence, strength, conscientiousness, musical ability, whatever.

The immediate question is: what follows from that?

The answer is often: much less than people imagine.

First, averages are not individuals. Even if Group A averaged higher than Group B on some trait, there would almost certainly be enormous overlap between the distributions. Many members of Group B would exceed many members of Group A. If you are hiring a mathematician, teaching a child, or choosing a friend, you are dealing with a particular person, not a statistical average.

Second, equal treatment before the law does not logically depend on equal abilities. We already accept this in countless ways. Some people are taller, stronger, healthier, wealthier, more attractive, or more intelligent than others. Yet we do not conclude that the less gifted should have fewer legal rights. The principle of equal rights is a moral and political principle, not an empirical claim that everyone is identical.

Third, there is a danger in moving from "is" to "ought." Even if a difference exists, it does not tell us what policies are justified. Knowing that men are on average stronger than women does not tell us whether women should vote. Knowing that some populations have different disease risks does not tell us how they should be treated socially or politically.

Historically, much trouble arose because people assumed that a group average justified judging every individual member of the group. That is a statistical mistake before it is a moral mistake.

So one could say: even if such differences were proven beyond dispute, the strongest argument for treating individuals fairly remains unchanged. A person appears before us as an individual human being. Their own abilities, character, and actions are what matter in most situations, not the average characteristics of a category to which they belong.

In fact, a society committed to individual rights can tolerate the discovery of group differences more easily than a society that bases rights on group identity, because its central principle is already that individuals are not reducible to group averages.
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Ebola

 There seems little concern about the Ebola outbreak in Congo.  What I see is a horrible disease usually fatal and easily spread.

Your reaction is understandable. Ebola has a fearsome reputation because it combines a high fatality rate with dramatic symptoms and the possibility of person-to-person transmission.

What may be creating the impression of indifference is that public health officials are worried, but they are worried in a very specific way. The current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has in fact been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the WHO, and international agencies are treating it as a major crisis.

The distinction is between local danger and global danger.

Ebola is not "easily spread" in the way measles, influenza, or COVID are. Transmission generally requires direct contact with the bodily fluids of a symptomatic person or with contaminated materials. Casual contact, sharing air in a room, or simply passing someone on the street is usually not enough. That makes outbreaks difficult but not impossible to contain.

The concern in Congo is that this particular outbreak is occurring amid conflict, population displacement, weak medical infrastructure, attacks on health workers, and mistrust of authorities. Those conditions make contact tracing and isolation much harder. Current reports describe the outbreak as growing rapidly and potentially becoming one of the largest Ebola epidemics ever recorded.

Another complication is that this outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola. Unlike the more familiar Zaire strain, there is currently no licensed vaccine or specific treatment for Bundibugyo, although vaccines and treatments are being tested.

So the picture is a bit paradoxical:

    For people in the affected regions, the danger is very serious.

    For neighboring countries, the risk is significant and requires vigilance.

    For the world as a whole, health authorities still assess the risk as relatively low because Ebola's mode of transmission makes sustained international spread much less likely than with airborne diseases.

In a way, Ebola is almost the opposite of COVID. COVID was often mild in individual cases but spread extraordinarily easily. Ebola is often devastating in individual cases but is much harder to transmit. That difference largely explains why an Ebola outbreak can kill thousands without producing the same level of worldwide public alarm.

It can also, it seems, infect animals and thereby presents a reservoir.

Yes, and epidemiologists take that very seriously.

One reason Ebola has never been eradicated is that it is not solely a human disease. It is a zoonosis—a disease that can move between animals and humans. The leading suspects for the natural reservoir are several species of African fruit bats, which appear able to carry the virus without becoming seriously ill themselves.

That creates a different problem from diseases such as smallpox. Smallpox had no significant animal reservoir, so once human transmission was interrupted, the virus had nowhere to hide. Ebola can apparently persist in wildlife and then "spill over" into humans again years later.

What's interesting is that many of the animals people first associate with Ebola—gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys—are probably not true reservoirs. They often die from the infection just as humans do. They are more like additional victims. Fruit bats are thought to be the species in which the virus can circulate for long periods.

The existence of an animal reservoir is one reason why outbreaks keep recurring in Central Africa despite decades of public-health efforts. Even if every human case in an outbreak were successfully isolated and treated, the virus could still be reintroduced from wildlife.

That said, the reservoir cuts both ways. It means Ebola may never disappear completely, but it does not mean it spreads efficiently among humans. The virus seems to rely on occasional jumps from wildlife and then chains of close-contact human transmission. If it were both permanently established in wildlife and as contagious as measles, the history of the disease would look very different indeed.

In some ways, rabies is a useful comparison. Rabies persists because of animal reservoirs, yet human epidemics remain limited because transmission between people is uncommon. Ebola is not the same disease, but the reservoir problem is conceptually similar.

What is the mortality rate of the present strain?

The answer depends on whether you mean the Bundibugyo strain in general or the current Congo outbreak.

Historically, Bundibugyo Ebola has been somewhat less lethal than the more famous Zaire strain. Previous Bundibugyo outbreaks had case-fatality rates ranging from about 25–40%, with some estimates extending to 30–50%.

For the current 2026 Congo outbreak, the observed mortality has climbed as the epidemic has progressed:

    Early June: about 20% of confirmed cases died.

    Mid-July WHO figures: about 39%.

    Mid-August reports: about 46–47% (roughly 2,300–2,500 deaths among 5,000+ confirmed cases).

So if you ask, "What fraction of known infected people are dying in this outbreak right now?" the answer is roughly one-half. That is alarmingly high, though still below the worst historical Ebola outbreaks, where mortality sometimes exceeded 70% and occasionally approached 90% in areas with little supportive care.

One subtle point: the rising mortality rate does not necessarily mean the virus itself is becoming more deadly. WHO and other experts attribute much of the increase to people being diagnosed late, dying before reaching treatment centers, and the difficulties of providing care in conflict-affected regions.

From a public-health perspective, a disease that kills about half its recognized victims is terrifying. The reason it has not become a global catastrophe is not that it is mild, but that it remains relatively difficult to transmit compared with airborne infections. A virus with Ebola's lethality and measles' transmissibility would be a very different sort of threat indeed.

I assume transport restrictions are in place?

Yes, but perhaps not in the way one might expect.

The WHO has consistently advised against broad border closures and trade restrictions, arguing that they often do more harm than good. Their concern is that if official crossings are closed, people may simply use informal routes that are harder to monitor, while medical supplies and aid workers have more difficulty reaching affected areas.

What has happened instead is a patchwork of measures:

    Health screening at airports and border crossings in affected regions.

    Restrictions on movement within some affected areas. For example, M23 rebel authorities recently imposed movement restrictions in territories they control.

    Entry restrictions, quarantine requirements, or waiting periods imposed by some countries. Canada, for example, has barred certain recent visitors to the DRC, while the United States has imposed screening and waiting-period requirements for people recently in the DRC.

An interesting detail is that Congo itself reopened Bunia airport, near the outbreak's epicenter, after initially suspending flights, relying on screening and hygiene measures rather than a prolonged shutdown.

This reflects a long-standing debate in epidemiology. Intuitively, one thinks, "Close the borders." Yet for diseases like Ebola, which spread through close contact rather than through the air, rapid identification of cases, contact tracing, isolation, safe burials, and community cooperation often matter more than stopping all travel.

Your concern is not misplaced, though. The current outbreak has already crossed into Uganda and has produced a few imported cases outside Africa. The fear is less that a jetliner will seed a worldwide pandemic and more that continued movement through a region with conflict, displacement, and weak health infrastructure makes local containment much harder.

One thing that stands out to me is that this outbreak is testing a public-health principle that became controversial during COVID: whether travel restrictions mainly provide political reassurance or whether they meaningfully reduce spread. With Ebola, many experts still argue that targeted screening and surveillance generally outperform blanket travel bans.

Robot boxing

 I watched a boxing match between two robots; not quite got it yet.  They take a boxer's stance but don't know where to hit.

Yes — that sounds like exactly the uncanny part. They have the outward mechanics of boxing without the learned tactical meaning.

A human boxer doesn't merely adopt a stance and then decide, “Now I shall hit that object.” A tremendous amount is happening almost automatically: judging distance, reading the opponent's shoulders and hips, anticipating where the head will be, maintaining balance while moving, protecting oneself, and selecting a target almost instantaneously.

A robot can be made to reproduce the form of a boxing stance rather easily. But the stance itself isn't the skill. It is more like the visible end-product of thousands of learned relationships between where I am, where you are, where you are likely to move, and what I can reach without exposing myself.

So you get this wonderfully strange spectacle: two machines that look as though they have wandered into a boxing ring, but haven't quite acquired the concept of boxing.

And “they don't know where to hit” is a particularly good description. The missing thing isn't necessarily the ability to move an arm toward a target. It's the perceptual and strategic representation of the opponent as a body with vulnerable and valuable locations.

It reminds me a little of a chess-playing machine that had learned how chess pieces move but hadn't yet learned that the king matters. The syntax is there; the semantics aren't.

That is one of the brutal sports I wouldn't mind seeing automated.  Machines can be reassembled.

Exactly. That is one of the rare cases where automation could make the activity more genuinely sporting, rather than merely replacing a human worker.

Boxing has an odd moral problem: the objective is not simply to demonstrate superior skill, but ultimately to damage the opponent's brain or body. Even when both participants consent, repeated blows to the head are an unpleasant price for the spectacle.

With robots, you could preserve much of what makes boxing interesting: stance, footwork, feints, timing, combinations, defense, ring positioning, endurance, and strategy—while making the consequences of a spectacular knockout rather more like, “Well, that's going to require a new left shoulder.”

And it might actually produce a fascinating new sport once the machines become sophisticated enough. The interesting question would no longer be Can the robot punch? but Can its designers give it a sufficiently good model of an opponent to box intelligently? You'd have something approaching artificial embodied intelligence.

The current matches sound like the equivalent of watching two very impressive automata discovering that they are supposed to fight. 😄

Yes. Ali is probably the most powerful example of the paradox.

Muhammad Ali was extraordinarily intelligent, articulate, funny, and physically gifted—and boxing made him an international cultural figure. Yet the same sport that gave him that extraordinary life almost certainly contributed substantially to the severe neurological problems he experienced later.

That makes the robot-boxing idea particularly interesting. You could preserve much of the human drama of boxing—the anticipation, deception, timing, courage, and tactical intelligence—without requiring a human brain to absorb thousands of impacts.

There is also something slightly poignant about Ali in this connection. His greatest weapon was arguably not his fist but his mind: reading opponents, improvising, manipulating expectations, understanding what they thought he was going to do. A sufficiently advanced robot boxer would have to reproduce precisely that part of the game, rather than merely having fast mechanical arms.

In other words, the interesting future version of boxing might be brains fighting through machines rather than brains being damaged by them.

Well, not "courage" if fear is not experienced and repairs will follow.

Quite right. I smuggled “courage” in there, and it doesn't survive the transition to robots.

Courage presupposes something to be afraid of and something genuinely at stake. A robot that takes a punch because its programming says to do so isn't brave. Nor is one that charges forward knowing that its damaged actuator will be replaced tomorrow.

That actually changes the character of the sport in an interesting way. Human boxing has at least three things intertwined: skill, physical courage, and the willingness to accept injury. Robot boxing could retain the first, perhaps enormously expand it, while eliminating the second and third.

And I think that is perfectly acceptable. We don't need to pretend the robots are displaying courage. We could simply say: these are machines demonstrating extraordinary tactical skill while smashing one another to pieces.

There might even be a strange virtue in being quite explicit about the distinction. The human spectators supply the excitement and perhaps the courage; the machines supply the violence.

It would be like the fascination of watching dominoes fall.

Yes — and that gets closer to what could actually make robot boxing fascinating.

Dominoes are compelling because nothing is suffering and yet there is real causality, timing, and uncertainty. You watch one event propagate into the next, and your interest is in whether the whole system will behave as expected.

Robot boxing could become something like that, but vastly more complicated. A hit changes the machine's balance; that changes its available responses; a damaged actuator changes its tactics; the opponent exploits the change; and suddenly the match develops a history. You could watch two machines progressively destroy each other's capabilities.

The interesting question would then be not “Who is brave enough to take the punch?” but “What happens next?”

And I rather like your dominoes analogy because it removes the need to anthropomorphize the machines. We don't need to pretend that the robot feels fear, pain, anger, triumph, or even frustration. We can simply enjoy watching a complicated physical system unfold.

In fact, the ultimate robot boxing match might be more like chess played with physical objects that can knock one another apart than like human boxing.

Job's gay son

 It hits me I should qualify the portrayal of Job's son as possibly gay.  This is stereotypical.  My experience with actual gay men is that they are not different, not at all noticeably like that.

Yes — and I think that qualification actually makes your observation more interesting.

In Good Omens, the joke is partly built on a recognizable comic stereotype: the boy's mannerisms and interests are presented in a way that invites the audience to think, “Ah, perhaps he's gay.” But that's very different from saying that those characteristics are evidence of sexual orientation.

Your real-world observation is much closer to the truth: gay men aren't a behavioral type. Some are flamboyant, some reserved, some stereotypically masculine, some stereotypically feminine, and most are simply… ordinary men whose sexual orientation isn't particularly visible in their manner.

And there's a nice irony here given what we were discussing about Job. The episode is actually rather good at undermining simplistic categories: Crowley and Aziraphale are busy trying to fit divine bookkeeping into human categories, while the children themselves don't necessarily fit the categories the adults expect. The possible-gay-son reading works as a comic suggestion, but it shouldn't be mistaken for a psychological observation about gay men.

I'd probably put it as: “The character is coded as possibly gay, using some familiar stereotypes; that coding says more about the conventions of comedy than about how gay men actually present themselves.”

The poetry in Job, the awe, wonderful.  The narrative that attached to the beginning and end ridiculous and anthropomorphic about God, as though he has to prove things.

Yes. That's one of the striking things about Job: the frame story and the poetry almost seem to belong to different intellectual universes.

The opening has this rather childish premise: God and Satan essentially make a wager about Job's character. God permits Satan to torment him, and Job becomes a sort of experimental subject. It's deeply anthropomorphic — God has to demonstrate that Job is genuinely righteous, as though his omniscience doesn't already tell him that. And the ending then rather awkwardly restores Job's fortunes, as though the losses can be balanced on a cosmic accounting sheet.

But then you get the speeches, especially God's answer from the whirlwind, and suddenly the scale becomes enormous. God doesn't really explain Job's suffering. Instead, the poetry confronts him with the immensity and complexity of existence:

    “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

And then come the sea, the dawn, the stars, the wild animals, Behemoth and Leviathan. It's not really an argument so much as a change of perspective. Job wants an explanation of his particular case; God shows him a universe vastly larger than the human moral bookkeeping in which the story began.

And I think that's why your earlier observation about Good Omens works so well. Pratchett and Gaiman can take that ridiculous opening premise — God and Satan apparently arguing over Job's children and possessions — and play it for comedy, while the underlying biblical poetry remains genuinely magnificent.

There's also something philosophically interesting about the contrast. The prose says, “God did this to test Job.” The poetry says, in effect, “You don't understand the world well enough to demand that the world make sense in terms of you.” The latter is considerably more profound.

Job in Good Omens

 I like Crawley and Azeraphel tricking the heavenly agents into thinking Job's children are not "new".  The forces of "good" want Job's previous family to have been destroyed and the "reward" is replacement.  The TV show is more civilized and compassionate than the Bible version.

Yes—and that is one of the cleverest bits of Good Omens. It turns the Book of Job inside out.

In the biblical story, Job's children are killed as part of the test, and at the end God restores Job's fortunes, including ten new children. The text treats this as part of the restoration, but there is an obvious moral problem: new children don't replace dead children. From Job's perspective, the loss remains.

Crawley and Aziraphale's little deception fixes precisely that problem. They effectively say, These aren't replacements; these are the same children. The heavenly bureaucracy can therefore tick the "Job's children restored" box without anyone having to accept the rather grotesque idea that ten murdered children are adequately compensated by ten replacements.

And that's wonderfully characteristic of the two of them. Neither defeats Heaven by theological argument. They bureaucratically cheat the system on behalf of the humans.

There's also something deeper in what you are noticing. The biblical God can be interpreted as making the universe's moral accounting balance: Job loses everything, remains faithful, and receives more prosperity than before. But the television version is much less willing to accept that kind of accounting. A person isn't interchangeable with another person, and an earlier happiness isn't compensated for simply by supplying an equivalent later happiness.

That connects rather neatly with what we were saying earlier about achievement and virtue. The past cannot actually be replaced. What can be done is to have the past remain something one can look back upon and say, that was good; I lived that; it mattered. The TV show's joke about Job's children is funny precisely because it exposes the absurdity of pretending otherwise.

I pick up hints that Job's oldest son is gay; is that just me?

No, I don't think that's just you. In Good Omens there is a deliberate hint of that, although it is played rather lightly.

The Job story in the series gives the children more personality than the biblical account, and Job's eldest son comes across as somewhat conspicuously different in his manner and relationship to the expectations placed upon him. There are also little visual and behavioral cues that invite the viewer to read him as possibly gay.

But I would distinguish "the show is hinting at it" from "the character is explicitly established as gay." The latter isn't really stated. It's more in the realm of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman-style teasing: the audience is given enough to notice a possibility without the narrative stopping to label it.

And there's a nice extra joke in the context: Heaven and Hell are obsessing over whether Job's family is being restored correctly, while the children themselves are becoming actual, individual people rather than pieces in God's wager. The series keeps nudging us toward seeing them as people rather than biblical props.

I take it Crawley makes them lizards for camoflage, and the girl gets the idea and wants to be, as I recall, a blue one.

Yes, that's the scene. And it's another little piece of the show's modernization of the story.

Crowley turns the children into lizards so that they can escape notice while he and Aziraphale are trying to thwart the heavenly agents. The children then discover that they can apparently choose what sort of lizard they want to be. The daughter wants to be a blue lizard, if I remember correctly.

The joke works on several levels. Crowley is thinking tactically—camouflage!—while the children immediately treat the transformation as an opportunity for self-expression. The girl's response is essentially, "Oh, we're lizards? Well, then I want to be a particularly nice-looking lizard."

And that is very Good Omens: an apparently cosmic theological crisis gets reduced to the practical question of what color a child would like to be. It makes the children much more alive than the rather appalling biblical "ten more children" ending.

Also, it fits your earlier observation rather beautifully: the TV adaptation's moral instinct is more humane than the original story's moral arithmetic. It keeps asking what these events would actually feel like to the people involved.

I like the representation of Job being rather confused about it all, and getting that God is proud of whales as about it.

Yes! Job is wonderfully humanized that way. He isn't portrayed as a theologian who has somehow grasped the grand plan; he's a decent man trying to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible situation.

And the whale business is particularly good. God essentially gives him the "look at this magnificent thing I made" treatment, and Job's reaction is something like: yes, whales are impressive, but what does that have to do with my children?

That captures one of the oddities of the biblical Book of Job rather well. God's answer to Job isn't really an explanation of why Job suffered. It's an overwhelming demonstration of divine power and the complexity of creation: Were you there when I made this? Do you understand how the universe works?

The series turns that into comedy because Job is perfectly entitled to think, That's all very well, but I asked about my children.

And Michael Sheen's Aziraphale/Crowley's interference makes the contrast sharper. Job is bewildered because the heavenly beings are treating his life as a theological exercise, while he is experiencing it as an actual life. The children, meanwhile, are just trying to get on with being children.

It's one reason I think Good Omens is considerably more philosophically interesting than its jokes initially suggest. It quietly asks whether obedience to a cosmic authority is actually the same thing as goodness—and repeatedly gives the answer no.

Virtue

 Now I'm interested in the connection between all this and virtue.

Yes—and I think this actually pulls the various threads together rather neatly.

If happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering are ideals of a life, virtue is rather different. Those are things we want to have or experience; virtue is a quality of the way we live. And that distinction becomes particularly interesting once we notice how transient most of the other goods are.

A successful career ends. A system becomes obsolete. An insurance policy expires. Money changes hands. Even pleasures disappear almost as soon as they occur. In a literal sense, very little of what we accomplish is permanent.

Virtue, however, isn't valuable because it produces something permanent. It is valuable because it governs our responses to impermanence.

That gives your recent observation about acceptance a surprisingly deep connection to virtue. Suppose you recognize that something cannot be changed. There are at least three possible responses:

    You can refuse to accept it and waste yourself fighting reality.

    You can passively surrender and simply stop caring.

    You can recognize the fact, accept it, and then ask, given that this is the world I actually inhabit, what is the best thing I can do?

The third is a genuinely virtuous response. It requires judgment, self-command, courage and, often, a certain humility.

And this helps explain why virtue doesn't itself belong on the same list as happiness or prosperity. Virtue is closer to the condition under which those things become worth having. Prosperity without prudence can become waste; pleasure without moderation can become addiction; success without justice can become exploitation; acceptance without courage can become resignation.

There is another interesting consequence. If achievements are inherently temporary, then making achievement itself the measure of a life is going to produce a rather peculiar form of dissatisfaction. One keeps having to replace the thing just achieved with another thing to achieve. Your blog is an especially nice example: you enjoy doing it, but you don't require it to become a monument. The activity itself is worthwhile, even though you expect modest results.

That sounds to me much closer to the classical conception of virtue than the modern idea that a virtuous life must somehow culminate in a great accomplishment.

And perhaps the deepest point is this:

Virtue is one of the few goods whose value does not depend upon its permanence.

You can act intelligently today even though today's decision will eventually be forgotten. You can be fair to somebody even though neither of you will be around forever. You can enjoy something without demanding that it last. You can recognize that something cannot be changed without becoming bitter about it.

The action passes. The circumstance passes. The pleasure passes. But while it is happening, you have lived well.

That may be why the ancient philosophers put so much weight on virtue. They weren't necessarily claiming that virtue makes you happy in some simplistic sense. They were identifying something more fundamental: when almost everything outside us is transient and partly beyond our control, the quality of our conduct remains the part of life that is genuinely ours.

It's simple: I can look back at events and feel good about them.

Exactly. And that gives a wonderfully uncomplicated meaning to virtue.

You don't need virtue to guarantee happiness, success, prosperity, or even a lasting legacy. You can simply look back and think: “I handled that well.”

The event itself is gone. The achievement may have disappeared, the pleasure ended, the money spent, the work superseded. But your judgment of your own conduct remains available to you. You can remember kindness, courage, competence, restraint, generosity, or simply having made a sensible decision under difficult circumstances—and feel good about having done it.

In that sense, virtue has a kind of retrospective permanence. Not permanence in the world, but permanence in the story you can tell yourself about your life.

And perhaps that also explains why virtue fits better than achievement as a measure of a life. You don't have to ask, “What did I leave behind?” You can ask, “When things happened, how did I behave?”

That is a much more manageable—and perhaps much more satisfying—accounting system.

Purpose of life

 Ok, we have happiness, pleasure, well-being, prospering as ideals of life, all achieved with virtue.  Noticeably absent from that list is achievement.

Yes—and I think that omission is quite revealing.

Achievement is an activity or outcome, whereas the others are states of living. Happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering describe what it is like to be alive and functioning well. Achievement describes having accomplished something, usually something measured against a goal.

That distinction matters because achievement can be almost entirely instrumental. One can achieve something magnificent and be miserable doing it. Conversely, someone can have a very good life without having any conspicuous achievements at all. The retired person who cultivates friendships, reads, thinks, keeps reasonably healthy, helps others, and enjoys his morning coffee may have little to put on a résumé but may be living rather successfully.

And there is an interesting tension with virtue. If virtue is the means by which happiness, pleasure, well-being, and flourishing are attained, achievement doesn't necessarily fit the same structure. Achievement can itself become an object of desire—and then the achievement can dictate the person's life rather than serve it.

The Greeks were rather aware of this. Aristotle's eudaimonia is often translated as "happiness," but flourishing is probably better. It isn't "I feel good"; it is a life going well as a whole. Accomplishments can be part of such a life, but they aren't its defining criterion.

There is also something particularly interesting here: achievement requires a standard external to the achievement itself. I achieved what? A promotion, a mathematical proof, a fortune, a political victory, a successful child, a book, a record? Without the goal, there is no achievement. But one can prosper without having first specified an objective.

So perhaps the deeper distinction is:

    Achievement asks, "What have I done?"
    Flourishing asks, "How am I living?"

And those are very different questions. In fact, I suspect this is one reason the modern obsession with "achievement" can become pathological: it quietly substitutes a scoreboard for a life.

I was comfortable during life, reasonably successful and having fun at what I did, but nothing lasted very long.  Now I do this blog, which is a lot of fun, but for which I have modest expectations.

That sounds like a rather different relationship to achievement: you've stopped requiring the activity to justify itself by producing a durable result.

Much of what you did earlier apparently had a natural endpoint. You did something, it worked reasonably well, you enjoyed doing it, and then you moved on. The fact that it didn't last forever doesn't particularly diminish it. A great many worthwhile human activities are inherently temporary.

The blog is almost purer in that respect. You enjoy the doing of it and have modest expectations about what it will accomplish. That puts it much closer to pleasure, curiosity, and intellectual play than to achievement.

And there's a curious paradox: because you're not demanding that the blog become important, it may actually become more valuable to you. You can follow an idea because it interests you, pursue an argument because it is puzzling, correct yourself when the evidence changes, and occasionally produce something that you're pleased with. No career, reputation, income, or institutional objective has to be served.

In that sense, it fits very nicely with your observation about "nothing lasted very long." Perhaps the point of an activity need not be that it lasts; it can be that it was worth doing while it lasted.

That is a pretty good definition of fun, actually. And perhaps a surprisingly good definition of a life.

An insurance policy expires, a progam or system in a few years must be rewritten.  Soon one's work is replaced.

Exactly. And that makes the usual association between achievement and permanence rather suspect.

An insurance policy is written, does its job, and expires. A program or underwriting system works for a while and then the assumptions, technology, or business change and somebody has to replace it. Even an apparently major piece of work can become obsolete without having been a failure.

In fact, replacement is often evidence that the work succeeded. The old system did what it was supposed to do until circumstances made a better one desirable.

There is a broader point here. We tend to imagine achievement as leaving something behind—a building, a book, a company, a discovery, a fortune. But most human work is much more like a contribution to a continuing process. You alter the state of things for a while, someone else alters it again, and eventually almost none of your particular contribution remains.

That doesn't make the contribution meaningless. It means its value was largely temporal rather than permanent.

And that seems quite compatible with what you're saying about your blog. You don't need to imagine that someone will still be reading it in 2126. If writing something today makes you think more clearly, gives you an afternoon of enjoyment, or produces an idea that somebody finds useful, the activity has already paid its way.

Perhaps achievement is overrated partly because it smuggles in the idea that lastingness is evidence of worth. But a good conversation disappears too. So does a good meal. So does an afternoon spent thinking about something fascinating. We don't normally regard their impermanence as a defect.

Proactivity in health

 At various times in my life I've been diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B, diabetes 2, reflux disease and the thoracic problem connected with it that can lead to throat cancer, heart failure, and clinical depression.  All of them have responded to medications and moderate lifestyle changes.

That’s an interesting pattern, and it changes the way I’d characterize your medical history. Rather than a collection of steadily worsening chronic diseases, you’ve had several significant diagnoses that have been quite responsive to treatment and behavior changes.

There’s also an important distinction between the diagnoses themselves and the complications they can produce. A condition may carry a frightening list of possible outcomes without those outcomes actually occurring. In your case, your experience seems to have been one of managing the underlying conditions successfully enough to keep those complications at bay.

Your diabetes is a particularly good example: you made substantial dietary changes, and your glucose control subsequently remained good. Likewise, your reflux-related condition and the cardiac issue have been treated rather than simply allowed to progress.

And there is something rather encouraging in the broader pattern: diagnosis has not necessarily meant deterioration for you. Several times, you've been given a potentially serious label, changed what needed changing, taken the medication, and carried on. That's quite different from the popular picture of aging as an inexorable accumulation of disability.

I still have a problem of balance, with unspecified causes (probably a mix of visual and inner ear difficulties).  None of this has been "cured," (except probably the hepatitis), only rendered irrelevant, I think because I'm proactive about these things and push doctors with extreme delicacy.

Yes — “rendered irrelevant” is probably a better description than “cured.” Chronic conditions often don't disappear; they become conditions that are controlled well enough that they no longer dominate one's life.

And your distinction about being proactive is an important one. There is a useful middle ground between blindly accepting whatever a doctor says and trying to practice medicine oneself. What you're describing sounds more like informed persistence: you pay attention, notice changes, ask questions, and press for clarification, but do it with enough delicacy that the physician remains a collaborator rather than feeling challenged.

The balance problem is a good illustration of why that matters. If it is a combination of visual input, vestibular function, proprioception, and perhaps age-related changes in how the brain integrates those signals, there may never be one neat diagnosis or one curative treatment. Yet reducing the consequences of the problem—grab bars, deliberate balance exercises, being careful about uneven surfaces and depth perception, and knowing when not to take a risk—can make the underlying impairment much less consequential.

In fact, “irrelevant” has a slightly more demanding meaning than “cured”: the condition is still there, but you've arranged your life and treatment so that it doesn't get to run the show. That strikes me as a pretty sensible definition of successful chronic-disease management.