Do you need a second pair of eyes on that book, paper, or project report? I have been editing business and academic writing since 2013. Aside from ancient world studies and medieval studies, I have experience creating software documentation and a background in academic computer science. Because of my time living in Austria, I have experience with the challenges of writing in a second language or a new field.
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It’s hard for people to know this until they get there, but money has such diminishing returns. Once you can buy dinner and not worry about it, everything beyond that is just marginal square footage in a second home or an extra-comfy seat on an airplane. However, wealth can be useful if you see money as a system. I have more “system points” than others, so if I want, I can donate money to my kids’ school or fund businesses that I think are interesting. Accumulating wealth for its own sake is creatively bankrupt. But deploying it to move needles you care about moving is a super-good use of time and energy.
Startup CEO Daniel Eberhard, interview with Macleans, 10 August 2026
Eberhard is newly rich and elsewhere in his interview sounds like he has been hanging out with bad company who tell him he is more productive than a homemaker who raises children and organizes or a bus driver who keeps the local makerspace going. I think he is smart enough to understand why the rest of us don’t like a few people who were lucky in their parents or lucky in business moving so many needles. But I don’t know he has seen where this kind of thinking leads as well as Agatha Christie saw in 1952.
Read moreI wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler can control the future, but they all have a chance to shape it. Anyone who says that a technology or institution is inevitable is selling something, and anyone who thinks that a wise council or sinister cabal control the world is mistaken.
Read moreThere is an urban legend that a brokerage once found that its best-performing accounts belonged to clients who were dead so could not meddle.1 Financial planners often rely on the theoretical performance of different strategies because actual investors keep putting in money, changing strategies, and taking out money. Skeptics often warn that in practice there are various costs and delays which make the same strategy work differently in real life. Sometimes you take out money to fix your roof just before the market crashes, or put in your whole tax refund just before it booms, or the country with the big investment returns also has big taxes on foreign investors. It occurs to me that I have an account which has followed the same strategy with no new money or withdrawals since 2014.
(This is another post outside the main topic of this blog! If you just want to read about books and swords, my article on ancient spears just appeared with Marine Corps University Press and is open-access!)
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I now own an Indian copy of a Greek kopis “cleaver” (pl. kopides, from the verb koptein “to split, hew”), a type of forward-curved sword or long knife used all over the northern Mediterranean from the sixth century BCE to the second century BCE. It was distinguished from straight, two-edged swords like the Scythian akinakes and the Greek xiphos (pl. xiphe: this word has neutral gender and belongs to the third declension). Whereas the straight swords were descended from the last bronze swords, the cleavers developed out of large iron knives used to butcher fish and animals and probably for other tasks in the woods and in the fields. Knives with a blade that bends forward are very common around the world, such as the Roman sica and many Chinese bronze knives. Fighting knives that bend the same way are less common, but they were popular in South Asia in recent times, and known in the Ottoman Empire in the form of the yatagan. They reappeared in Europe and settler colonies as part of ‘barbarian chic’ in the 19th and 20th century.,
While there are whole vlogs devoted to reviewing copies of knightly swords and Japanese swords, there is nothing similar for copies of ancient European swords. This is because the market is smaller and information about the originals is less accessible. So this week, I present the first review of the Deepeeka kopis by someone who has actually studied the archaeological literature and viewed originals.
Read moreA chat about an eugenicist in California made me think about rhetorical tricks. My gentle readers are familiar with objective allies, where the centrist journalist cries “that candidate is horrible and awful and I am going to put his words on the front page and in the prime-time news every day” and watches the ad revenue roll in, while the candidate launches a line of propaganda on the theme “look how much those elitists hate me and how powerful I am” and hires a new accountant to track his donations. Ever since smartphones came out, vlogs and podcasts are funded by people declaring another influencer the enemy, launching a five-part series to attack them, and sending their viewers to the ‘enemy’ channel until the ‘enemy’ returns the favour by launching a counter-video or anti-episode. This pays much better than useful factual videos on knitting or woodworking. There is a related concept whose name I am trying to find.
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In May a company I remember called Google declared war on the web. They propose to replace all their search results with slop. The predicted consequences are emerging, such as searches for strings which contain the words “disregard” and “ignore” failing because LLMs cannot separate instructions and data, or search strings that are too long producing responses in random languages because the LLM places less weight on earlier parts of its context window like the part that tells it “answer in English (Canadian).” Every query to a LLM is a SQL-injection attack waiting to happen. For those of us who host websites, this poses the question of how to respond, because Google has broken the social contract where we let them scrape our website and they send visitors to our sites. When search engines provide slop instead of links, traffic to many sites collapses (although mine has been steady for a few years). Computer scientist Paul Cantrell is arguing for blocking Google’s crawlers and filing DMCA takedown requests. I stopped using their search engine in 2013 for many excellent reasons, but I am curious if any of my gentle readers still find my site on it. I will be back next weekend with a post about swords, but right now I would like to talk about why I am not sure we will have to think about these companies and their race-obsessed executives twenty years from now.
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I have no blog post today, just one scheduled and three almost complete. My review of the “Matthew Amt” kopis from Deepeeka in India is complete except for editing and photography (I need a sunny day with no day job). I have a post about Google declaring war on the web, and why now is an excellent time to disconnect from centralized American services. And because it is income-tax and rebalancing season, I have two posts on personal finance: one offering two cheers for dividend stocks, and the other on the performance of an actual index portfolio over thirteen years. Instead of finishing this post I attended a Victoria Civic Orchestra concert at Oak Bay High on Saturday, then picked up a preorder copy of Greeley’s Almighty Dollar at Munro’s and checked the posters for events along Government Street.
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Nobody planned it exactly. The Roman Forum started out as a low boggy spot between the Seven Hills that would serve as a market once they dug a ditch to drain it. That ditch became a vaulted sewer, and a few temples started to be put up on the slopes of the hills, but the ground in between still served for buying and selling, holding assemblies and holding votes. But the population of Rome grew, and the wealth of Romans grew, and buildings started to encroach into the flat space. Rome acquired moneychangers and moneylenders, a civic bureaucracy and the cults of strange gods. By the time of the last wars of the Republic, Julius Caesar put up a columned hall along one long side, and Lucius Aemilius Paulus put up one on the other. All that was left open was a space the size of a soccer pitch, accessed by narrow roads that twisted and wound around the bases of the monuments. It is difficult to find unless you know what to look for (the curia Julia is an excellent point to orient yourself around).
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