Move slowly and things brake.

All these books and articles about how to change your life, when for so many people right now the challenge is to keep things roughly the same.

Legendary CS professor Donald Knuth as he stopped reading email in 1990:

”…15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But…my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email...

TAC-2 - Wikipedia

One of my greatest achievements as a kid was to actually break the supposedly indestructible TAC-2

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAC-2

Ah, OK, I see now that LLSPI has an online version, perhaps that is more cost-effective, Legentibus is a bit pricey. My bottle neck isn’t money, though, so for me it’s worth it…

Legentibus | Learn Latin step-by-step by reading and listening Learn Latin by reading and listening from day one, from beginner to advanced: stories, novellas, Familia Romana, and literature from Cicero to Erasmus.

I don’t want to be an enabler here but I’ve had the same thought lately (despise full-time work and full time-family) and I think you should check out Legentibus. Their course is based on LLPSI and seems, IMHO, perfect for false beginners.

legentibus.com

There is no God and Christopher Hitchens is his messenger.

Today's hot take: Lego sets that use half or more non-blocky blocks are no longer Lego sets. They have become model kits.

Oooh, margin notes that also works on mobile! I’ve been fiddling with that for ages. What’s your setup?

What really boggles my mind is that intelligence agencies would buy a something named after a tool of deception.

Wikipedia: ”The stones were an unreliable guide to action […] users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%...

Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years, six senior journalists and news executives sentenced between 6yrs 9mths and 10yrs. All bad enough. And then there are the little details tucked away (but still being reported) in local media that hit really hard like the story of one woman ... 1/

One of my favorite datasets depicts waterways of San Francisco before colonialism drained and paved over many of them. Turns out one of the "lakes" was a copy of a copy of a copy etc etc of an ink spill on a Spanish chart from the 1700s that propagated all the way into a modern .geojson file.

A used bookshop called Maslow's Hierarchy of Reads.

Scale Is Not a System: Learning from China without Mimicry A reply to Kaiser Kuo that weighs China’s achievements against the limits of performance legitimacy and the value of democratic institutions.

This is an interesting article that discusses what it might mean to ”learn from China”

madeinchinajournal.com/2025/11/13/s...

Perhaps best read with Kuo’s original article (which IMHO more reflects US anxieties than ”the West”).

www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...

Cartoon text, two figures: --HISTORICALLY, IT REFERS TO A CEREMONY TO PREDICT THE WEATHER USING A RODENT. BUT NOWADAYS PEOPLE OFTEN USE IT TO MEAN "A TIME LOOP EXPERIENCED BY ONE PERSON." --...WHAT. CAPTION: EASILY OUR WEIRDEST HOLIDAY

Today's XKCD is a good way to explain to anglophone/US folks how the meaning of a chengyu works.

thinking about how for augustine every confession's, like, an accusation...

Finally read "The Great Reckoning" (www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-gr...), and I'm struck by how the worldview the titular reckoning is said to challenge is not one I've ever held or encountered. Despite the subtitle, I learnt a lot more about what Americans tell themselves than I did about China.

“You’ll be visited by three spirits.”

The three spirits:

book title page in gothic print, dano-norwegian and sami facing one another

A bilingual Dano-Norwegian/northern Sámi catechism from 1728, afaik the first printed book in Northern Sámi

Reclaiming Confucius from Autocracy The largest statue of Confucius in the world, in stolid brass, looms 236 feet above the neighboring sprawl of the Nishan Center for World Confucian Studies just outside of Qufu, Shandong Province. …

The Useless Tree is back!

At least for now. I just posted a long piece on my experience last year at the Tenth Nishan Forum on World Civilizations. Come for the politics of Confucian revival, stay for some jabs at Jeffrey Sachs. Good times!

uselesstree.blog/2025/11/22/r...

piccola lezione

la giacca che indossa Liu Jinsong non è quella alla Mao

nota come "abito Zhongshan"

segue per chi fosse interessato
la spiegazione dettagliata del significato della
"giacca alla Mao"

le quattro tasche del vero "abito Zhongshan" simboleggiano le quattro dimensioni del paese 👇

Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi By Damian Flanagan The other day I had the pleasure of attending a very interesting presentation about antique books by an expert in Edo period litera

As one who has spent much time these last few months glaring at texts I can partially decipher but cannot read, I am qualified to recommend this essay.

Edging Toward Japan: What does being literate in Japanese really mean? - The Mainichi share.google/Gw4gLrPrnPyI...

Can we go back to the days when politicians said that they really wanted to help people but it’s very hard and takes time, rather than saying that they want to hurt people and can do it quickly?

Excited to say that my article on horse names in China's ancient postal system has been published with Early China! 🐎✉️🌿 Meet Skittish Fish, Calm at the Carriage, and, my personal fave, Cinnamon Stick, at the link below:
#animalhistory

Finally someone that engages with what it actually means to learn from a Leninist one-party system.

A circular circuit board with various icons and a text in latin along the circumference and multicoloured squares in the centre.

OPHANIM אוֹפַנִּים (Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager) is a 3800 megapixel camera used in the AEgIS αἰγίς high-energy physics project at CERN. In this blog post The Owlet of Minerva tries to pick apart the scientific, biblical Hebrew, medieval European and Buddhist iconography of the instrument.

Back when I studied Chinese I had a French roommate for a while and when I got to a ’le’ or a ’de’ in either language there was a 1 in 10 chance I’d switch over to the other without noticing.

Economists are like medieval scholastics, they produce truth using sophisticated formal methods but completely unrealistic axioms which leads to them to invent epicycle upon epicycle to explain the conjunctions.

A Book: Neon Is Not Dead: The Future of a Hong Kong Icon It's about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Hong Kong’s living light

Very proud to have contributed a few chapters to this book on the past, present, and future of neon in HK. The process showed me how it’s so much more than just sappy sentimentality to mourn HK’s lost lights — and that despite everything… neon’s not dead.

Consider backing our Kickstarter campaign ⬇️

”En ekonom är en person som vet priset på allt men värdet av inget.”

(Mina djupaste ursäkter till Oscar Wilde)