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Posted by Bret Devereaux

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This week (and next) we’re looking at hoplites, the heavy infantry of the ancient Greek poleis in the (early? mid? late?) Archaic and Classical periods, into the Hellenistic. In particular, I want to outline the major debate, which I have alluded to quite a few times here, that swirls around hoplite warfare and the phalanx. While this is often represented as simply a debate on tactics – the othismos over othismos – as we’re going to see the debate has implications that stretch well beyond battle tactics into questions of the political and social structure of the polis and the place of hoplites in it. Indeed the implications for the nature and development of the polis are almost certainly more important than the implications for hoplite tactics.

I had wanted to roll this out in a single post covering the two ‘schools’ of thought (generally known as ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’) on hoplites, offer a historiography (an account of the debate) and then give my own view on the question, but that has proven rather long and unwieldy, so I’ve opted to break this up. In this part, we’ll lay out the groundwork of how the debate has developed and where it currently stands and then next week we’ll look at the broader implications – which are in many cases, as interesting if not more interesting than the narrow tactical or chronological questions – and my own view of what a profitable synthesis might look like.

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What is a Hoplite?

Before we dive in, we need to clarify some terms and outline periodization or nothing that follows is going to make very much sense.

First we can begin with the very basic question of what is a hoplite?

The term ‘hoplite’ (Greek hoplites (ὁπλίτης), plural hoplitai (ὁπλῖται)) means ‘equipped [man]’ or ‘armored [man],’ from hoplon (ὅπλον), “equipment, tool, weapon.” You will still sometimes hear that hoplon was the name for the hoplite’s shield, but this is not quite right: the shield was an aspis, whereas hopla (the plural of hoplon) is used to describe a hoplite’s full kit. Diodorus offers the etymology of hoplite, “these were earlier called hoplites from the aspides, and then took a new name, peltasts from the pelte [a lighter shield]” which at no point insists that the aspis was called a hoplon (Diod. Sic. 15.44.3).² So while many Greek troops are named for their shields – chalkaspides, argyraspides, peltastai, thureophoroi, etc. (notice all of those –aspides!) – especially in the Hellenistic period when Diodorus is writing (which may be why he makes this guess), hoplites were not one of them: they were not named for their shields but for their whole panoply.

We might thus define a hoplite as a “fully equipped man,” where the equipment in question was generally at a minimum the aspis (a large round double-strap grip shield), a doru (a fairly standard one-handed thrusting spear whose only unusual characteristic is that its spear-butt is unusually developed) and a metal helmet; one certainly gets the sense from the sources that some sort of body armor was also an expectation here (e.g. Hdt. 9.63.2, but it is not clear how often that was realized in practice (frequently, it must be said – but perhaps not always). These men also generally carried swords as backup weapons.

By the time we can see them clearly (in the 400s) these fellows generally fight in a formation the Greeks call a phalanx (φάλαγξ), but we need to issue an immediate caution that φάλαγξ is not a technical term in Greek but rather the equivalent to Latin’s acies in that it just means “battle line.” Consequently Greek authors can and will use it to refer to any clear battle line and it gets used of hoplites, but also pike-wielding sarissa infantry and also Roman legions and also barbarians and also chariots and also elephants at points. The word is actually even more general than this and seems to have at its core the idea of a beam or trunk – it can mean the main mass of something (as opposed to its edges), like the trunk of a tree or a beam of wood, it can mean the finger-bone but also is used for rows of eyelashes. And you can kind of get how, metaphorically, you get from finger-bones in a row or eyelashes in a row or beams or planks (in a row at regular distances) or even just the central mass of a tree to either men lined up neatly or the central mass of an army.³

We’re going to get into the particulars of exactly how we might imagine hoplites fought and how exactly a phalanx of them (keeping in mind you can have a phalanx of other things) might fight as we go along. But those are our key terms: a hoplite is a soldier with a specific ‘full’ or ‘heavy’ equipment set (aspis, spear, sword, helmet, cuirass) and hoplites sometimes fight in a close-order shield-wall infantry formation called a phalanx. I don’t want to go much further than this because what we’re going to see in part two is that some of the fights about hoplites and especially about the phalanx are definitional and I don’t want to load those dice here before we’ve even introduced the debate – better to come at it with relatively few assumptions.

On to periodization. We generally break down this period of Greek antiquity into the following periods:

• The Greek ‘Dark Ages‘ (c. 1100-c. 800) during which we have no written evidence (the writing of the earlier Bronze Age having been lost and the ancient Greek script we know not having been invented) and thus it is very hard for us to talk with much confidence about how warfare worked (except that it wasn’t phalanxes).
• The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-480). Writing returns at the beginning of this, but the Greeks won’t start writing their own history until the Classical period, so our sources mostly view the Archaic as the distant past. This is the period where the polis and hoplites are emerging, though as we’ll see the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of that are core to the debate.
• The Greek Classical Period (480-323). This is the period where the independent Greek poleis are at their height and where ‘hoplite warfare’ is the predominant (but not only) method of warfare. It is also much better documented than the others. It ends with Greek independence being shattered and hoplite armies largely replaced by Macedonian armies (which operate under a different, but related, system of close-order heavy infantry).
• The Hellenistic Period (323-31). There are still some hoplite-armed troops around in this period, but they are increasingly less relevant compared to Hellenistic armies, which we’ve already discussed at length. This period ends when the Romans steamroll everyone and set up a Mediterranean-wide empire.

Obviously we’ll be mostly focused on the Archaic and the Classical, the dividing line between which are the Persian Wars (492-490, 480-479) which are also some of the first relatively clear descriptions of Greek warfare in a high degree of detail and which are generally (some hoplite-heterodox scholars contest this) taken to be our earliest solid descriptions of hoplite warfare. But there’s a challenge here because our main source for the Persian Wars (Herodotus) is writing not in 479 but in the 430s. Meanwhile our understanding of the mechanics of hoplite warfare emerges out of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404; he’s probably writing c. 400) well into the Classical period. So the sources where hoplite warfare becomes explicit (we’ll talk poetry a bit later) are writing about 480 in 430 or about 430 in 400, but a lot of our questions about hoplites relate to how they fought in the Archaic (800-480).

That means – and this is quite important for what follows – hoplite arms and armor emerge in our archaeological record during the Archaic well before we have literary sources offering solid, detailed descriptions of how men using that equipment fought. Much of the hoplite debate thus lives in the Archaic when our evidence is quite thin and often frustratingly ambiguous.

With that out the way, we can get to the debate.

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Fundamentally the debate about hoplites function as a debate between two ‘schools’ of thought, generally termed the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites. Hoplite ‘orthodoxy’ is associated most of all with Victor Davis Hansen, but has other defenders (e.g. Adam Schwartz, Gregory Viggiano), while the ‘heterodox’ school is most associated with Hans van Wees and Peter Krentz, but includes many other current scholars (Fernando Echeverria, Roel Konijnendijk, etc.). But I often think the way we talk about this debate is really hard for non-specialists to get a handle on and it often remains at this level of ‘these folks and those folks.’

But here we want to explain what is actually being disputed, which can be quite hard to get clearly answered in a lot of the flurry of writing on this topic because since the mid-2000s at least, everyone either mostly assumes their (scholarly) readers know the grounds of dispute or that their (public, popular) readers do not need to know and need only be told ‘how it is’ (according to them). Consequently, a lot of modern works present a historiography of the debate (which we’ll do in a simple form in a moment) without actually running down the exact positions of the two camps, which can make it hard for a new reader to get a sense of what we’re even arguing about.

Both the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites consist of a series of connected answers to key questions about hoplites: questions about hoplite equipment, tactics, organization, place in society and both when and how hoplite warfare (as we see it, particularly in Thucydides) developed. These answers are connected, by which I mean that if you answer a given way for, say, questions, A, B, and C, it starts to logically ‘lock in’ answers to later questions. But I would suggest that in fact some of these propositions are only weakly connected – they might suggest paired answers but do not require them and the evidence might well suggest (indeed, I’d argue it does) that on some points, we ought to be ‘mixing and matching’ or ‘splitting the difference’ Indeed, this is, in my view, some of the most fertile ground for productive synthesis: these ‘schools’ do not need to remain ‘pure.’

I think the best way to tackle that complexity is to first, outline in brief the opposing schools of thought, then give a brief historiography (the ‘history of the history’) of how these schools came to be, then take their key contentions apart and see if we can assemble something of that synthesis.

So for our brief outline:

We can state the orthodox position on hoplites, in its simple form with the following propositions:

• The hoplite phalanx emerged early, in the eighth century, at the same time as we see the earliest evidence for the heavy armor that will typify the most wealthy hoplites.
• It rapidly reached a ‘pure’ form, with light troops excluded from the phalanx and combat proceeding as close infantry shock actions (discussed below), such that this form dominated Greek warfare through the Archaic period (c. 750-490BC) and was thus deeply entrenched by the Persian Wars (492-479).
• We can know this in part because hoplite equipment is largely too cumbersome and awkward to be effectively used for other forms of fighting, and thus in particular the strap-gripped dished round shield (the aspis) can only be effectively used for this kind of fighting.
• Hoplites were drawn from a broad ‘yeoman farmer’ middle-class (like Rome’s heavy infantry in the Middle Republic) and thus the bulk of citizens were required to serve as hoplites.
  • (There’s a corollary here that I’ve noted before: that the population of Greek poleis may thus be estimated from the number of hoplites they field.)
• In battle these hoplites fought in an othismos (ὠθισμός, ‘pushing’ ‘jostling’ – we might translate to the English ‘press’⁴ – this is an important word, so mark it), which they understand to be pushing match, where men in the rear ranks use their shields to push the front ranks forward and the two formations shove against each other, with spears and swords confined to auxiliary use in something a lot like a rugby scrum.
• This odd form of combat is in a sense, fundamentally ritual, intended or at least developed out of a need to limit the duration of wars to sharp bursts of violence that fit within the agricultural calendar.
  • In this vision wars are decided by pitched battle (raiding, sieges and such are lesser, secondary or absent), with armies lining up on open plains for a ‘fair fight’ with limited or no effort at ambush, pursuit or trickery, at least until the Peloponnesian War (431-404) if not until the Anabasis of the Ten Thousand (401-399).
  • Thus there is an expectation that victory in a pitched battle entitled the winner to dictate a limited peace to the loser, but that ‘absolute’ war goals were avoided and instead communities might expect to replay the same basic battle multiple times over decades while never seeking to entirely destroy each other.
  • Victor Davis Hanson, of course, has an entire second theory about how this is the foundation of a ‘western way of war’ which is quite poorly constructed, which we won’t cover here.
• That limited, ritualistic style of warfare persisted through the Archaic, but breaks down during the Peloponnesian War (431-404), where we start to see longer wars, more sieges, more mercenaries, more light troops and so on. Thus there is a long, rural ideal form of warfare (the Archaic hoplite phalanx) which is ruptured by the the emergence of more complex, urban polis societies with their greater economic complexity and ability to escalate to more extreme forms of warfare. A sort of ‘fall of man’ but it is the ‘fall of hoplites’ – complete with an Edenic distant past and a worse present.

As you might imagine, the heretodox school rejects, or at least substantially revises basically all of these points: In the heterodox school:

• While we start to see hoplite equipment in the eighth century, the hoplite phalanx – the tactical formation which excludes light infantry and cavalry – emerges very late, perhaps as late as the 550s or even the 490s or even – in some extreme arguments – only in the mid-400s.
• There is thus no long period of ‘ideal’ Archaic hoplite warfare, where the system functioned in an ideal form over many generations, but instead hoplite warfare emerges ‘fully formed’ perhaps only moments before we see it in our texts; it is thus ‘new’ in 490 (or perhaps 431!).
• This is in part because hoplite equipment emerged gradually and piecemeal over a long period, with the fully panoply only present around c. 650 and hoplite equipment could be and was used for kinds of warfare other than the hoplite phalanx.
  • Let me pause for a moment to note that in both of these arguments the definition of ‘hoplite phalanx’ is very rigid: a fixed formation composed entirely of hoplites with no light troops intermingled, in close-order with fixed positions for the men. You may note this is a much more rigid definition than just a shield wall and indeed far more rigid than how the Greeks use the word phalanx (φάλαγξ), which they can use to describe almost any close-order heavy infantry formation using shields.
• The hoplite class was much smaller than the orthodox suppose, consisting in the main of ‘rich peasants’ and rentier-elites, rather than ‘yeoman farmers,’ and as such made up a much smaller proportion of the citizen population, perhaps around a quarter or a third of all adult citizen males in the Classical period, rather than nearly all (and even fewer in the Archaic period).
  • Here is some ‘linkage:’ the orthodox position often sees hoplites arising earlier at the same time as the first wave of tyrants in Greece, seen as the product of revolt by the demos (‘the people’) against narrow oligarchies, whereas the heterodox points out the chronology does not work and also hoplites were themselves oligarchic in nature, drawn from well-off farmers, not typical ones.
• The pressing of the othismos was metaphorical: hoplites did not smash together nor did they shove on each other in a rugby scrum, but rather fought at spear’s reach (eis doru), in a series of one-on-one fights, with combatants moving forward to strike or backwards to avoid being struck in a somewhat more fluid (but still organized and fairly rigid) formation. The ‘pressure’ was thus morale pressure, not physical pressure.
  • The heterodox phalanx is thus a looser formation, which is not built for ‘shoving‘ and is meaningfully more flexible on the battlefield.
• Because of the development timeline there was no long period of ‘ritual limited warfare,’ but rather a set of assumptions about ‘proper war’ honored mostly in the breach. Raiding, sieges, pursuit never went away and the troops to perform them – cavalry, light infantry – remained important in Greek polis armies throughout.
  • Consequently, whereas the orthodox view regards wars as fundamentally limited with a tacit agreement that the winner of a pitched battle will be able to dictate a limited peace, the heterodox school sees hoplite warfare as much less limited, especially in the Archaic, with more absolute war goals and a wider set of theories of victory to achieve them.
• Consequently, Thucydides and Xenophon are not so much representing the sudden rupture of an ancient set of military assumptions, but rather perhaps simply the high-water-mark of hoplite dominance and the consequent complaints as the waters recede.

As you can see, both schools weld together chronological assumptions (‘when did the phalanx emerge, how completely and how long did it remain in a position of unique dominance?’), social assumptions (‘who was a hoplite, how rich were they, what were their political roles and political tendencies?’) tactical assumptions (‘how did the phalanx function, how was it shaped by its equipment, what were the role of non-hoplites?’) and strategic assumptions (‘what was the purpose of war among poleis, what did they fight over and what was their overall theory of victory?’).

So if those are the positions, how did we get here and why does the debate seem ‘stalled out?’

Greeks, Germans and an Englishman

This summary I am going to present, I should note, is not by any means original to me but instead draws heavily on the historiographies presented by Roel Konijnendijk (a major hoplite-heterodox scholar) at the opening of his Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018) alongside Donald Kagan and Gregory Viggiano’s (who sit on the hoplite-orthodox side) “The Hoplite Debate” chapter in their Men of Bronze (2013).⁵ This is a much simplified summary, but hopefully useful to see how we got here proceeding in five (perhaps six) phases. This is a historiography; Historiography is the ‘history of the history’ as it were, the history of a historical debate and so the topic of interest if we want to understand why these two schools formed the way they did.

The first phase, ably detailed by Konijnendijk is the phase we might call Prussian Foundations: a number of significant German-language scholars laid out the groundwork on the hoplite phalanx from the mid-to-late 1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, beginning with the work of Wilhelm Rüstow and Hermann Köchly and culminating in the work of Hans Delbrück.⁶ As Konijnendijk notes, these were nearly all military men and that influence permeates their vision of Greek warfare.In particular, they operated from an assumption, perhaps only tenable before the First World War, that the principles of war hadn’t really changed since antiquity and so the basic maxims, organizations and patterns of thinking they used would be readily applicable to polis armies composed primarily of hoplites. This is one of the frequent flaws of pre-1940-or-so scholarship: a failure to recognize the gulf of experience between the past and the present, in part because the gulf wasn’t quite so wide yet so military aristocrats of the 1890s or 1900s could imagine they were no so different from military aristocrats of the 490s or 390s (when in fact they were).

In short these late-18th, early-19th century German thinkers operated by analogy from the warfare they knew in their own past and a result developed a model of hoplite warfare predicted on the patterns of early gunpowder warfare.

The model they had, of course, was late-early-modern gunpowder warfare: rigid, performed in tight ranks with lots of control by command, where the actions of elite light forces and cavalry – high status units – would be rigorously recorded. That model was breaking down in their own day but still informed their sense of what warfare in the past might be like. And their model of hoplite warfare follows on this: tactically rigid, conducted with very tight ranks in pitched battles. Light infantry and cavalry, if not mentioned, must be unmentioned because they were absent, not because they might be politically or socially marginal.

And indeed, we too often jump to imagining close-order heavy infantry as literally ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ in this way, even though that was not how early modern pike squares or medieval shield walls or Roman legions or even hoplites fought. But it was how infantry was taught to fight (even if they didn’t always fight that way) with muskets during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. And one feels in the Prussians some of that same assumption of tight, almost suffocating rigidity seeping in: they assume a standard depth, highly standard equipment, standard units (which they happily call ‘battalions’ and such) and they assume formation drill, because it was utterly standard in their warfare – even when it appears to be entirely absent from their subjects and when a more comparative frame would have told them such drilling was also absent from many other military traditions.

Note that what these historians are producing is a model, a sort of blended, formalized picture of an ideal hoplite battle in the sources – for these scholars had an incredible grasp of the source material – which risks then becoming the straight-jacket into which the sources are then fed. That rigid vision in turn forms the foundation for hoplite orthodoxy.

The next phase is the step into the Anglophone scholarship, which is where the debate will live for the next century; we might term this phase one of English Orthodoxy. The key initial figure here is G.B. Grundy, writing in the 1910s. Grundy takes the phalanx of the German scholarship and if anything interprets it even more rigidly, taking a general mental model and turning it into a ritualistic practice of war, arguing this was grounded in agricultural practice and the need to keep warfare limited for that purpose.⁷ He is also responsible for developing the ‘rugby scrum’ vision of what two phalanxes coming together might look like.

Grundy is also in no small part responsible both for the ‘fall of Man’ vision of hoplite change and for the orthodox interpretation of the othismos as well as developing a social vision for the place of the hoplite. As Konijnendijk notes – and indeed as Victor Davis Hansen has noted⁸ – Grundy doesn’t appear in citations nearly as much as his influence would imply; one is left to assume it is in part because he was a giant racist and no one is quite comfortable admitting that they are still using the historical model he constructed for his racism as the foundation for their assumptions. In particular, Grundy believed that the Greeks were racially predisposed to hoplite warfare and thus that the decline of its rigid customs was ‘racial decay,’ thus introducing this strain of the decline of hoplite warfare as a kind of ‘fall of man’ analogy.⁹

This phase then continues past the 1910s as scholars work out – or at least codify, as many of these conclusions had already occurred in some form among those first German scholars – implications about the connection between hoplites and the emergence of the polis, its structure, the rise of tyranny and such, as well as the supposed close connection between hoplite warfare and hoplite equipment (supposed at this point to have emerged at the same time and relatively quickly together).¹⁰

The othismos over othismos

The next phase we might call the Cracks in the Armor of hoplite orthodoxy because the response to this really begins with Anthony Snodgrass’ work on Greek arms and armor (notably Arms and Armor of the Greeks (1967)), though he was not wholly alone. By the 1950s, the archaeological and representational evidence for the development of Greek arms and armor in the Archaic period had gotten a fair bit better and Snodgrass is the first fellow to pull it all together in a book that is still a valuable reference text for discussing arms and armor. Snodgrass’ greater amount of material (and his frankly far greater mastery of the material) allowed him to demonstrate among other things that hoplite equipment did not appear all at once in the 700s, but rather emerged gradually and piecemeal, with the fully panoply not available until the 650s and even then incompletely adopted. There must then have been lone warriors using this equipment outside of the phalanx before a full formation was developed to accommodate it and so it must be able to be used outside of the rigid phalanx. That observation alone shakes many of the evidentiary pillars of orthodoxy mightily in terms of both chronology and tactics. It also shakes the political and social assumptions, because if hoplite equipment was introduced slowly and in piecemeal fashion, then the traditional aristocrats – the only fellows who could afford it – could have remained an elite warrior class and so the connection between hoplites and the emergence of a broad yeoman political class was weakened.

That movement then set the stage for the Restatement of the Orthodoxy, led by Victor Davis Hansen and his Western Way of War (1989, henceforth WWoW). This book has become so influential that students – and even scholars – often go no further back than it and so one often gets the impression that WWoW was a remarkably original or groundbreaking statement on hoplites, which to a considerable degree it isn’t. What WWoW does is take the method of probing battlefield experience advanced by John Keegan in The Face of Battle (1976) and apply it to a quite doctrinaire hoplite-orthodoxy model. Indeed, VDH notes (xvii) that he is doing this in part to refute the “idea of widespread fluidity in the phalanx,” which is to say Snodgrass and co., though he does not name them.¹¹ In particular, VDH reiterates – without much in the way of new evidence – that hoplite equipment was simply too cumbersome to use in other ways, thus trying to restore the connective tissue between hoplite equipment showing up in the archaeological evidence and the emergence of the phalanx as a fighting formation. In the first edition of WWoW, he essentially called for a new archaeological study to supply that evidence and Eero Jarva answered with Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995), a book that assembles a lot of useful evidence only to – straight-jacketed by WWoW assumptions – sometimes interpret it quite strangely.¹²

To the degree that WWoW is making a new argument, it is an argument not about tactics or the emergence of the phalanx but about agriculture. Whereas previous scholars had argued that what would cause a defender to be willing to meet an attacker in a devastating clash of phalanxes was the threat of agricultural devastation, VDH argues that this threat was very limited: it simply wasn’t possible for these armies to do much devastating. Consequently, hoplites marshaled out not so much to protect fields as for civic pride and ideals, to oppose the insulting notion that an enemy might march uncontested through their lands. For what it is worth, I find Hanson’s view of the impact of agricultural disruption, focused on the impact of burned crops or cut down trees, a bit too capital focused – the viewpoint of a farmer who might always have had recourse to a grocery store and a checking account should a harvest fail. But as we’ve seen, that is not how ancient farmers lived so an army need not destroy farmland to pose a threat, they merely needed to disrupt agricultural activities (and forage off of the locals doing it) to pose a significant economic threat.

Equally important for VDH’s own model of thinking here (and his subsequent politics) is his stress on something we might call (he does not) the “yeoman hoplite.” What I mean by that is an assumption that the great strength of numbers of a hoplite army is drawn from a broad freeholding farmer class, composed mostly of men who work on their own quite small farms with fairly limited means. These households, it is assumed, would have made up most of the population (we’ll come back to the implications of this assumption) and so apart from large cities that had an urban poor class (like Athens) or under-developed hinterlands (like Achaea or Aitolia), the hoplites would represent not an elite or a gentry but a sort of ‘middle class’ in the American sense – the big bulk of households with property. This is not an immediately insane assumption – this does seem to be how the Roman army of the Middle Republic was structured – but it is a big assumption which we’ll see challenged in a minute. That said it fits broadly with VDH’s view that the ideal society is something like an ethnically homogeneous agrarian state of citizen-farmer-soldiers (which then shows up in his politics, which we will not deal with here or in the comments).

That said a lot of the influence of WWoW lies in how vividly it evokes the orthodox vision of the experience of hoplite battle and in particular the physical pressing ‘rugby scrum’ that it imagined for the concept of othismos referenced by ancient scholars. One frankly wonders if the nature of othismos would have such a central place in the hoplite debates that followed if it wasn’t such a central, evocative park of VDH’s book, even though as you can see above it is really at best quite a peripheral part of the concept of hoplites.

What then follows, of course , is the grand reaction to hoplite orthodoxy, a sort of Hoplite Reformation working in the groundwork laid in part by Snodgrass (both in his evidence but also his approach – these scholars are using more archaeological and especially representational evidence). Like the 16th century Reformation, the scope of this response to hoplite orthodoxy widened rapidly: what had been largely a chronological dispute between the immediate adoption of the orthodox and the ‘gradualist’ arguments of Snodgrass and others (some of our heterodox folks will end up even more gradualist than he), rapidly expanded into the parallel vision above, with different assumptions on tactics and also critically social role and status.

This substantial expansion of the argument begins with key articles by George Cawkwell (“Orthodoxy and Hoplites” Classical Quarterly 39.2 (1989)) and Peter Krentz (“The Nature of Hoplite Battle” Classical Antiquity 4.1 (1985)), both of which called into question the basic tactical assumptions around the othismos. These arguments get quite technical, but the main thrust, especially for Krentz, was that the evidence, which had always been interpreted within the pre-existing model (what Konijnendijk would call the ‘Prussian’ model) was, in fact, ambiguous. Was there artwork that showed hoplites packed tightly together? Sure, but also artwork that didn’t and both are hard to interpret. Did Thucydides describe a ‘shields-together’ (synaspismos) formation – sure, but there’s no reason to suppose Thucydides’ fifth-century synaspismos worked the same way as Polybius’ second century or Asclepiodotus’ first century understanding of term. Othismos can mean a physical pushing, but it can also be metaphorical, and so on.

In short, Krentz was showing that the orthodox tactical vision was not required by the sources.

However as noted above, hoplite orthodoxy was a complete mental model for hoplite warfare, composed of a bunch of interlocking assumptions, chronological, tactical and social. Thus what the assault on hoplite orthodoxy required as a complete competing model which was in turn supplied by Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), which is at this point the ur-text for hoplite heterodoxy. Notably, where WWoW is a Face of Battle-style experiential book, Myths and Realities is developmental in its focus, because where VDH is proposing an almost eternal, ideal form of hoplite battle, van Wees is suggesting significant development, with the classic form emerging only in the 500s if even then (thus taking an even more gradualist view than Snodgrass).

Van Wees incorporates and expands on Krentz’ vision of a hoplite battle as a “multiplicity of individual combats,” rather than organized shoving: hoplites broke into a run at perhaps 200m but then slowed and did not crash into each other at all. Instead they stopped eis doru (‘at spear’s reach,’ a phrase from Xenophon) pulsing forward and back to stab at enemies or evade blows. Eventually morale pressure – not physical pressure – is what destroys the phalanx’s cohesion and it is these forward ‘pushes’ (into the ‘no man’s land’ of a spear-thrust’s length between the lines) that are the othismoi, ‘presses, pushes’ of our sources.¹³

That style of combat could, in turn, emerge much more gradually. Van Wees argues that we can see the origins of the phalanx as early as Homer (writing c. 750), but in a form so hybridized as to not even remotely resemble the orthodox model. Instead, he argues that cavalry and light infantry – archers, javelin men, etc. – were not excluded from the phalanx to make a single body of close-order heavy infantry until very late (he argues this mostly using Archaic artwork showing hoplites alongside archers and such). Instead this Archaic combat involves sometimes lines and masses of men, but frequently in more fluid combat; van Wees tries to generalize from patterns of warfare recorded in the historical period from highland Papua New Guinea.¹⁴ Cheaper, more lightly armored infantry thus persist quite a lot longer in van Wees’ model, through essentially the whole of the Archaic which, if you are watching closely, obliterates almost entirely the long period of ‘pure’ Archaic hoplite warfare that the orthodox model assumes both in its assumptions about the economic and social role of hoplites and also the ‘fall of Man’ vision of tactical change in the 400s. Instead, the ‘oops, all heavy infantry’ hoplite army, if it ever existed (more on that in a moment) in van Wees’ model is a relatively brief apparition of the 500s which is largely gone by the end of the 400s. The Peloponnesian War is thus not the end of a long tradition of ‘pure’ hoplite battle, but rather just one more episode in the continuous change and evolution of Greek warfare that began at least as early as the mid-8th century.

Van Wees also revisits the social standing of the men that make up hoplites and attacks the ‘yeoman farmer’ vision of VDH. Instead, van Wees crunches the numbers on the wealth requirements for hoplites and notes that while poorer men might serve, it sure seems like the typical man of the hoplite class (those with the wealth to be required to serve) was actually what we might term a ‘rich peasant’ – a landholder not with a tiny 3-7 acre farm but one with 10-15 acres or more, whose household almost certainly included enslaved labor. These might be joined by poorer men with incomplete panoplies (perhaps in the rear ranks) who still desired the social status of one who fights in the infantry-line, but there’s a clear class divide here. The hoplite class is thus not a broad cross-cut of a yeoman-society, but in fact a narrower agricultural elite, perhaps a quarter, third or at most half of the free male population.

To give a sense of what a difference that makes remember that VDH’s model is, in some ways, thinking in terms of – and I should be clear he never frames it this way – as “what if Greek poleis mobilized basically like the Roman Republic.” And the Roman Republic probably kept something on the order of two-thirds of its adult male population (free and non-free) or about 80% of its free adult male population on the muster roles. By contrast, in van Wees’ vision, your typical polis might be mandating service from maybe a third of its free male population. That is an enormous difference in social involvement in this kind of warfare, which has huge implications for how we understand the polis (which we’ll get to later).

The battle lines drawn, the two sides advanced and…

The Stalled othismos

…stalled out.

So to summarize: hoplite orthodoxy initially formed form its Prussian Foundations from the mid-1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, before jumping the language barrier into English Orthodoxy in the 1910s (from which point onward, the debate will remain ‘Anglophone’ – most of the scholars writing on it do so in English) and the implications of hoplite-orthodoxy are worked out from the 1910s to the 1960s. It is as that point that we see the first objections to orthodoxy relating to its chronology (Cracks in the Armor) in the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn triggers Victor Davis Hanson’s Restatement of Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn is answered by the Hoplite Reformation led by Peter Krentz and Hans van Wees (inter alia) which begins as early as the 1980s but really breaks through in the 2000s and represents the preponderance of the scholarship from 2000 to the present.

This brings us to the current phase, which one is tempted to call counter-reformation but really feels like Stagnation.

Hoplite-orthodox replies appeared to van Wees’ model. Notable among these are some of the chapters from Kagan and Viggiano, Men of Bronze (2013), particularly Viggiano’s “The Hoplite Revolution and the Rise of the Polis” and VDH’s “The Hoplite Narrative.” Adam Schwartz also produced a monograph length response, Reinstating the Hoplite (2013) in the same year. Both sets of works, to my mind, suffer from a problem of inflexibility, refusing to give ground in places where the heterodox crowd clearly has a point and instead basically just restating the orthodox position rather than defending it or revising it.¹⁵ That problem – where hoplite-orthodoxy scholars end up mostly just restating old positions – is a product of the fact that hoplite orthodoxy is a 175-year-old thesis that has had its implications thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly) worked out. If one is not prepared to give ground, there is nothing much left to do but to restate the old positions, which certainly isn’t going to convince anyone new.

It is also, I should note, a problem of people. The key hoplite-orthodox figures – VDH most notably – have not trained graduate students and so there is no young-and-hungry up-and-coming generation of hoplite-orthodox scholars to argue with the heterodox (whereas van Wees, along with Krentz and others, have trained another generation of hoplite-heterodox scholars, who now have no interlocutors!).

Meanwhile, on the heterodox side, scholars are left to sort out the implications of their new model, but of course those are the implications of a new model whose acceptance is not universal: if you do not hold the heterodox view on hoplites, then the question of “what does the heterodox view imply for [society/tactics/warfare/training/etc]” is not a very interesting one. That said it is undeniable that the weight of activity since 2000 has been on the side of heterodoxy: these fellows publish more and have more to say, in part because they have a whole new theory to work out and in part because they are still trying to convince everyone else.

Notable in these ‘working out’ efforts are works like F. Echeverria’s “Taktike techne: the neglected element in Classical ‘Hoplite’ Battles'” Ancient Society 41 (2011) and R. Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018), both of which aim to grind away the notion of limited and ritualistic warfare in favor of Greek polities trying to win within the available framework, albeit – as Konijnendijk stresses – with armies composed of largely untrained and undrilled soldiers and amateur generals.¹⁶ Further works by van Wees and Peter Krentz (particularly companion chapters, such as the former in the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Warfare and the later in the Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece) have also continued to flow forth. I should note that what I have offered here is hardly a comprehensive review of either ‘camp’ – I have had to leave key works out for space and this is particularly true for the heterodox side because they have published quite a bit more in the last three decades.

The problem has become, frankly, that without a strong but actually novel restatement of an orthodox – or at least anti-heterodox – hoplite position since 2013, the hoplite-heterodox scholars find themselves with no one to argue against (VDH in particular has essentially declared victory and then quit the field and is so unavailable as an interlocutor), but at the same time, no one has really moved in fifteen years at least. Meanwhile, there is the question of the audience, because of course most ancient historians do not work on hoplites: this debate is relevant to basically anyone working on Greece or Rome (who must thus teach ancient Mediterranean world surveys in which these questions – particularly the social/political ones – matter a lot), but of course very few of those folks work on hoplites.

If the audience had decisively shifted, we could simply pronounce at this point one side or the other the ‘winner’ (for now, at least) – the way we can say with some certainty that the low-counters ‘won’ the Roman demography debate (or at least the high-counters lost) and that the modernists have, with reservations ‘won’ the Roman economy debate (or at least the hard-primitivists have lost). But my sense is that this shift in the communis opinio (‘the common opinion’) has not really happened in a durable way.

I hesitate to bring up Everett Wheeler here because I know that his often sharp and acerbic writing has left quite a few folks in this debate more than a little sore (and not unjustifiably so), but I think he serves a useful bellwether for how scholars of ancient warfare outside of the two hoplite camps have received the arguments, albeit less vehemently in all cases. As we noted when we chatted Roman strategy, few alive know more about ancient warfare and Wheeler, writing very bluntly, has at times almost played ‘referee’ in these debates.¹⁷ And on the one hand, Wheeler is quick to point out that the heterodox camp has revealed serious deficiencies in the orthodox model: the cumbersome hoplite will not do, the idea that head-on-head no-trickery-or-tactics battles were normal rather than ideal cannot stand, the evidence for the early Archaic is too ambiguous and complex for the simplistic orthodox developmental model and so on.¹⁸ At the same time, Wheeler is venomously dismissive of some of the heterodox methods (particularly van Wees’ reasoning from warfare in Papua New Guinea) and repeatedly notes that the existence of exceptions does not imply the absence of rules pushed for by the heterodox camp when it comes to tactics and trickery.¹⁹ In both cases, he often critiques both camps for being excessively rigid and dogmatic, too secure in their rightness to accept that their opponents might have a point on this or that thing. Of course given the time and effort he has also put into insulting everyone involved, were he to offer a synthesis one cannot imagine it would be greeted with friendly eyes.

To my mind – and I too am essentially a bystander in this argument – the current place the debate has settled is not ideal, because it has not resolved, it has merely stopped. My vague sense is that more than a few academic bystanders are slipping back into orthodox positions mostly out of habit, which is not good because some of those positions really have been quite significantly undermined – a sort of thoughtless ‘counter-reformation of inertia,’ which is not a good outcome given the significance this debate has for how we understand the polis itself.

My own view is that a synthesis is required. This is not my specialty, so I am not going to be the one to write that book, but for the next post, I am going to outline why I think this argument remains significant and the grounds where I think synthesis – a blending of the camps – is possible.

https://acoup.blog/2025/11/14/collections-hoplite-wars-part-i-the-othismos-over-othismos/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-hoplite-wars-part-i-the-othismos-over-othismos

https://acoup.blog/?p=31809

Posted by Wil

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/11/the-cosmic-ballet-goes-on/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9831

A couple nights ago, my sister sent me a picture of the gorgeous aurora over her house in the upper midwest, so I took a picture in my back yard and sent it to her, to share my own view of the phenomena:

We do this every time she can see the aurora. It’s never not funny to both of us. I really love and cherish my sister.

A couple hours went by, and I looked at Bluesky, where I saw that this particular aurora event was a straight up phenomenon that was really blowing the skies up all over the place. The photos people were posting from all over North America, as far south as New Mexico, were all breathtaking.

So I had a silly idea that resulted in some alt text that I am so obnoxiously proud of, not only did I repost my own post yesterday, explicitly for more than five people to see it, I wrote a whole damn blog post so I could post this:

ALT TEXT: An extremely real photograph of the Aurora Borealis, its gossamer shrouds of red and green blown by the solar wind across the skies above Los Angeles. Definitely not a fake if you were wondering. I mean why would anyone even fake something like that? Because he’s like jealous of everyone who gets to see it for real tonight? Pfft! That’s just silly. Go back to enjoying the very real picture of nature’s very real majesty that was just taken in the skies above Los Angeles. Oh and if you go outside to look for yourself you probably won’t see it because it was almost out of science energy and was kind of just vanishing. Good thing there’s a real picture of it from someone who really saw it, to remember it.

I had fun with that, and it made me laugh a lot. Everything is terrible (some things are getting better! He will die soon!) so it’s more important to me than ever that I make time and space to laugh and have fun. One of the ways I have always done that is by allowing myself to be easily amused and entertained.

You made it to the end of another week! Congratulations. I hope you get to spend your weekend with people who love you.

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/11/the-cosmic-ballet-goes-on/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9831

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/huge-channels-or-no-channels-you-pick

I wanted to mention a couple of recent papers about a field that’s had a lot of interest over the last decade: engineered two-dimensional materials. These things are (at their theoretical best) only one layer of atoms or molecules thick, and can have a great many exotic and useful properties. Some of those are still a bit more theoretical than actual, but they range from optical and electronic behavior all the way to sheer physical processes like molecule-scale filtration. For an example of this, albeit not with a true single-molecular-layer filter, see here. Another example which is in use around the world is the “reverse osmosis” technology for desalination plants, where water can be pushed through the membranes but salty ions cannot.

I was writing last month about the Nobel for MOFs, metal-organic frameworks, and there’s a two-dimensional aspect to those, too. Related are “covalent organic frameworks”, which are made up, as the name implies, of nothing but covalently linked groups without the metal-ion-coordination in MOFs. You can think of them as very specialized and very orderly 2D and 3D polymers. Here’s a paper that looks closely at some of the 2D ones to see what happens when they’re exposed to water.

They’re only looking at three different ones with very similar structures. They all form large hexagonal pores (about 3 nm across), but the three have either no functional groups therein, phenols, or methoxys (all in the same positions. but they find that the capillary forces of the bulk water are strong enough to distort the structures greatly. That is, the strong hydrogen-bonding network of the water molecules can pull the frameworks into new arrangements (or just pull them apart!)

Two of the three (the unsubstituted and the OH) basically just collapse irreversibly under the strain, actually. The methoxy-decorated one survives (and can go around for more desorption/absorption cycles) but its crystalline form is altered a bit along the way, so it is still feeling the strain. Calculations suggest that this one actually produces less “sorption pressure” as the water fills its cavities - it’s not that the channels themselves are so much more robust. As the authors put it, “capillary forces and their effects should not be ignored when using 2D COFs in liquid environments”, and they now have the data to prove it.

At the other end of the scale is the material described in this paper. The authors have prepared a 2D polyamide material which is not quite a full-fledged covalent organic framework (it doesn’t have long-range order, from its powder X-ray spectrum). But what it is, is impermeable. Its layers seem to pack in a staggered arrangement with almost no free volume, so instead of having various sized-channels and cavities like most MOFs and COFs, it has so such gaps at all. That makes the permeability of this material extraordinarily low for both solvents and gases - in fact, around ten thousand times lower than the current record holders (!) The material can be formed as thin films with dozens or even hundred of such molecular layers, and the chances of anything getting through are very low indeed.

This goes not only for relatively bulky stuff like (say) sulfur hexafluoride, but also for methane. And for oxygen and nitrogen. And for argon, and even for helium. For hydrogen, its permeability is roughly that of a pristine graphene layer. This obviously can be a very useful material, since there are many applications where you’d want (for example) an oxygen-impermeable barrier that doesn’t degrade. The authors demonstrate this by coating an oxygen- and water-sensitive perovskite sample with just 60nm of this material, and they show that it dramatically extends its lifetime under ambient conditions.

So there you have two very different areas of modern materials science: things with huge channels (that need to be taken care of!) and others with no channels whatsoever! Plenty of uses are waiting for these and for all sorts of materials in between. . .

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/huge-channels-or-no-channels-you-pick

Posted by Grace Ebert

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/andrew-mccarthy-skydiver-sun-image/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465416

After six momentous leaps from a small aircraft, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown completed his mission. Brown is friends with astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and now, also one of his collaborators. Together, the pair created a stunning image that shows the adventurous subject falling in front of the sun.

McCarthy is known for his incredible patience and planning, which has led him to capture an array of striking photos and composites detailing cosmic phenomena. This most recent piece, titled “The Fall of Icarus,” details the roiling, fiery surface of the sun with his friend’s upside-down silhouette. The pair undertook this project this past weekend in Arizona.

Like much of his work, this image is a composite that stitches together a collection of high-resolution captures. McCarthy and Brown had to coordinate the jump and subsequent shots to reveal the latter’s free fall, footage of which they share on Instagram.

“The Fall of Icarus” is available as a limited-edition print in McCarthy’s shop, where you can find more of his work. (via PetaPixel)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Skydiver Appears to Fall from the Sun in a Stunning Image appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/andrew-mccarthy-skydiver-sun-image/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465416

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/east-of-eden-by-john-steinbeck/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64188

Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):

Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.

First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.

There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)

There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.

It’s a great book, all in all. You can get East of Eden here.

This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/east-of-eden-by-john-steinbeck/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64188

Posted by Jimmy Maher

https://www.filfre.net/2025/11/this-week-on-the-analog-antiquarian/

https://www.filfre.net/?p=6566

Chapter 7: The Changing of the Guard

https://www.filfre.net/2025/11/this-week-on-the-analog-antiquarian/

https://www.filfre.net/?p=6566

Posted by Grace Ebert

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/li-songsong-abstract-history-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465384

Li Songsong (previously) has long centered his practice around translating archival imagery, whether it be a portrait printed in a newspaper or still from a film. The Chinese artist is broadly interested in the ways that memories morph over time and how, when we’re reflecting on a moment well in the past, our clarity over the particulars can be hazy.

His new body of work, History Painting, takes a similar technical approach, although rather than interpret a specific scene, Li ventures into the abstract. Wide, impasto layers of oil paint cloak the large-scale canvas, creating a cacophony of color and texture that seems to swell upward while simultaneously pulling downward. As a filmed studio visit shows, the artist works from top down, adding one thick mark atop another in a sort of grid.

Pace Gallery, which represents Li, shares that History Painting reflects more on his relationship to the medium than any specific visual source, although, given his past work, it’s difficult not to try to find definition within the composition. The clustered ridges of paint, for example, might evoke bodies huddled together in mass, their backs to the viewer as they move toward an unknown destination. For Li, these brushstrokes, while abstract, do retain a sense of action and autonomy, and he describes them as “agentive and idiosyncratic” even as they’re covered again and again.

History Painting is on view through December 20 in New York.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Layers Upon Layers Root in History in Li Songsong’s Impasto Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/li-songsong-abstract-history-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465384

It is done. Yay!

They found one large polyp. I'm not worried, because all previous intestinal polyps tested fine afterward. I've been doing GI exams since my 30s, thanks to a decade of diarrhea back then. That long problem was cured thanks to a last-minute choice from a doctor to give me metronidazole before another GI exam. I still celebrate metronidazole day occasionally: 2024, 2022, 2013, and the original prescription date of 2012.

I'm back home thanks to a former landlord (I don't think he's on Dreamwidth?) picking me up at the hospital entrance to drive me home. I've already started eating my usual first post-exam meal of Greek yogurt with dry oats. If that sits well for the next hour or two, then I'll expand to the usual range of stuff. :)

I got about 2 hours of sleep last night, having taken the magnesium citrate at 12:30am for the 6:30am arrival time. Food first, I think, then sleep.

Posted by Grace Ebert

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/arghavan-khosravi-sculpture-portraits/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465354

Known for addressing issues of censorship and inequality, Iranian artist Arghavan Khosravi (previously) has long utilized her bold, fragmented works to confront large-scale problems relevant around the world. Her alluring color palettes and delicate motifs catch the eye and are paired with distinct symbols of tension: a chain lock, cords binding body parts, and roiling flames.

While her concerns are global, Khosravi has always considered her practice somewhat of a balm that helps her cope with trying times. And so the inward turn of her latest body of work perhaps ventures farther into this territory as she allows herself to delve deep into a personal and collective subconscious.

The past year has engendered a period of introspection, which the artist translates into a collection of smaller, altar-esque pieces. She refers to them as “intimate constructions where interior space carries its own symbolism. It’s been a way to move inward for a moment, allowing ideas to surface without a predetermined destination.”

Both the subconscious and symbolic have long figured prominently in her work, and recent pieces are similar. Many layer seemingly disparate components into surreal scenes, with recurring imagery of long, flowing hair, bright orbs of light, birds, and patterns from historic Persian architecture and design. Whereas earlier works frequently incorporated windows, doorways, and other portal-like structures, Khosravi’s newer pieces peer outward from inside, inviting the viewer into a new realm.

The artist is in the early stages of preparing for an upcoming solo show at Uffner & Liu in New York next year. Until then, follow her practice on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Radiant Sculptures by Arghavan Khosravi Meditate on Subconscious Terrain appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/arghavan-khosravi-sculpture-portraits/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465354

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/14/a-night-at-the-academy-is/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58260

The band The Academy Is… has been a favorite of the Scalzi family for a while now, and we also have a separate history with the lead singer William Beckett, who did a house concert for Athena’s birthday a while back and also wrote theme songs for a couple of my books (here’s one of them). So when they announced a tour for the 20th anniversary of their album Almost Here, we decided to go ahead and take in the Columbus stop, which was also the first night of the tour. And because we’re bougie AF, we also decided to spring for a VIP package which would let us hang out with the band for a bit backstage.

I think Athena might at one point essay that whole experience, so I won’t go into too much detail at the moment. Suffice to say it was a fabulous time all around. The concert was great, the band meetup was a lot of fun, and we got really excellent seats. Also, the best part of the concert for me was that the band debuted a new song, which means that for the first time in a long time, there is new music from the band. I am all over that; going to see a “20th anniversary” show is nice, but the idea that the group is once again an ongoing concern is even better.

In short, A++, would be bougie all over again. Welcome back, TAI. You were missed, by the Scalzi family, and, by the size of the crowd at the show last night, by a whole bunch of other folks.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/14/a-night-at-the-academy-is/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58260

Posted by cks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/python/MyVenvActivationScript

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/python/MyVenvActivationScript

1. 'Segregated facilities' are no longer explicitly banned in federal contracts

(tags:usa racism )

2. Lupus may be caused by the common Epstein-Barr virus (as well as MS)

(tags:disease virus immune_system )

3. Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, San Francisco, and Phoenix

(tags:automation driving usa )

4. The last-ever US penny was minted today in Philadelphia

(tags:usa money cash )

5. Inside China's Mini PC Production: How Tiny Computers Are Made (a 22 minute factory tour)

(tags:computers video manufacturing )

6. Marble: generating 3D scenes from text and imagery prompts

(tags:3d design ai )

7. GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE (apocalyptically strange looking film, I rather fancy it)

(tags:movies trailer weird video )

8. 5 key points as legal experts grilled by MSPs on indyref2

(tags:scotland independence law )

9. Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World (down 17% in a decade, to less than half)

(tags:religion USA )

10. UK tax calculator showing tax rates and marginal rates under various suggestions by different groups/parties

(tags:tax UK visualisation )

Posted by Tony Finch

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3773097

https://dotat.at/:/D5K72.html

• 2025‑11‑13 - Practical security in production: hardening LLVM’s C++ standard library at Apple and Google.


• https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3773097


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/D5K72


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/D5K72.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/D5K72.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3773097

https://dotat.at/:/D5K72.html

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/investigating-london-near-you.html

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Joan Armatrading
Was musically crusading.
She sang to perfection
Of love and affection.

Evelyn Waugh
Made Brideshead top drawer.
His first name was Arthur
But he chose something smarter.

This Bridge Made Free March 12 1870

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/investigating-london-near-you.html

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/early-black-friday-lego-sales-on-amazon-roundup/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79546

Amazon.com has kicked off their early Black Friday sales with some pretty great deals across LEGO sets. The real big discounts will of course start on Black Friday (28 November 2025), and you’ll get all the deals and massive discounts on the blog as soon as I’m able to share them. In the meantime, LEGO […]

The post Early Black Friday LEGO sales on Amazon roundup appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/early-black-friday-lego-sales-on-amazon-roundup/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79546

Posted by Tony Finch

https://blog.polybdenum.com/2025/11/13/polysubml-is-broken.html

https://dotat.at/:/PSFI3.html

• 2025‑11‑13 - PolySubML is broken.


• https://blog.polybdenum.com/2025/11/13/polysubml-is-broken.html


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/PSFI3


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/PSFI3.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/PSFI3.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://blog.polybdenum.com/2025/11/13/polysubml-is-broken.html

https://dotat.at/:/PSFI3.html

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biochemical-tungsten-really

Here’s another example of biochemistry being weird, one that I had never come across until recently. Did you know that there are enzymes that are dependent on tungsten (of all things?) As far as we know, they aren’t found in higher organisms, but they are scattered across a number of bacteria and archaea. There’s a whole related family of molybdenum-dependent enzymes that I had heard about, but there is indeed a group that can only use tungsten.

Both of these types tend to have similar environments immediately around the metal, with a heterocycle called “molybdopterin” involved in complexing the metal ions themselves (though the two thiols in the structure). Several magnesium ions help to hold things in place. There is even a rare human genetic disorder that traces back to an inability to produce this cofactor, a deficiency with very severe results.

The enzymes that use these metallo-centers are largely oxidoreductases, but the obligate tungsten forms in the bacteria and archaea also include such exotica as acetylene hydratase. These tend to be found in anaerobic organisms, and these reactions are unusual enough to be of potential industrial importance. For example, Clostridium autoethanogenum (as its name implies!) is able to produce ethanol from the unlikely starting material of syngas (a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide), and this is actually being scaled up for large-scale use. And it now turns out that a key enzyme in this pathway is one of the tungsten-dependent variety, reducing acetate to acetaldehyde in a step that you probably would have modeled as thermodynamically unfeasible if you didn’t know the whole system it’s imbedded in (which features a key electron-transport step involving very low-potential electrons of the sort that you don’t usually see in biochemical systems). The immediate reduction to ethanol of the acetaldehyde thus produced (via a nearby alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme) helps keep things moving as well, while other factors are an intracellular pH that’s notably less acidic than the outside medium and a high tolerance for acetate buildup.

Knowing these details is of course important if you’re trying to optimize the bacteria to do your syngas valorization for you, and it’s also something you have to understand if you want to shoot for a cell-free process using only the enzymes. As the paper explains, though, there are still a number of mysteries, especially around the details of the tungsten center’s changing oxidation state and coordination chemistry as the reaction cycle goes along. 

Personally, I’m very happy to find that there might be another biotechnology route to remediating industrial gas emissions, and I’m also pleasantly surprised that tungsten, of all things, is a necessary metal for life in some species. The way that these two subjects intersect is what science is all about - you never could have predicted it!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/biochemical-tungsten-really

Posted by Tony Finch

https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2023-03-20-why-are-sizes-signed.html

https://dotat.at/:/T8B4E.html

• 2025‑11‑12 - Why are sizes signed in the Futhark programming language?


• https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2023-03-20-why-are-sizes-signed.html


• redirect https://dotat.at/:/T8B4E


• blurb https://dotat.at/:/T8B4E.html


• atom entry https://dotat.at/:/T8B4E.atom


• web.archive.org archive.today

https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2023-03-20-why-are-sizes-signed.html

https://dotat.at/:/T8B4E.html

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/13/the-big-idea-theodora-goss-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58247

Reality is both objective and subjective, but what if reality could be fundamentally changed just by enough people thinking about it really hard? Author Theodora Goss is here today not only to present her newest collection of short stories, but to make you question our very reality and what it means for something to be considered “real” in society. Follow along in the Big Idea for Letters from an Imaginary Country, and contemplate reality along the way.

THEODORA GOSS:

One of my favorite writers is Jorge Luis Borges, and one of my favorite stories by Borges is “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I’ll try not to spoil the story too much, but if you haven’t read it and would like to before finding out what I’m going to say about it, don’t look any further. Instead, go find a copy of Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths. Once you’ve read the story (and every other story in the collection—you will inevitably want to read them all), you can come back here.

All right, let’s keep going. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is about a secret society that creates an encyclopedia for an imaginary world named Tlön. Because the encyclopedia describes that world in so much detail, it begins to materialize; objects from Tlön being to appear in our world. Eventually, our world starts to become Tlön—the imaginary world has taken over the real one. This concept inspired two of the stories in my short story collection Letters from an Imaginary Country: “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” and “Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology.” Imaginary anthropology is just one of the imaginary sciences; one can also study imaginary archaeology, imaginary sociology, imaginary biology—and certain fields, such as economics, may always have been imaginary anyway. They are based on the Tlön Hypothesis: that if a group of people imagine something, describe it clearly and in sufficient detail, and get enough other people to believe in it, that thing becomes real. So imaginary archaeologists can imagine and then excavate an ancient civilization. Imaginary biologists can imagine and then locate a new species of animal. Practitioners of imaginary anthropology can imagine and then travel to contemporary human societies—countries like Cimmeria and Pellargonia. Of course, creating these societies can result in unexpected consequences, which is what my stories are about.

On one hand, the Tlön Hypothesis is a fantastical element—of course we can’t create reality just by imagining it. On the other, it’s fundamentally and demonstrably true. We can’t create real reality through imagination, but human beings don’t live most of their lives in real reality—where we find trees and rivers and mountains. As far as we know, other animals spend their lives in that reality. But we human beings spend most of our lives in an imagined reality that includes, and counts as “real,” countries and governments and corporations. I’m drawing here on Yuval Noah Harari’s idea, described in Sapiens, that any human society is largely an “imagined order.” We are born into that order, and its rules and values tell us how to live. We think of that order as “real” because it seems as natural and inevitable to us as trees and rivers and mountains. In the United States, we believe that we have a constitution (not just a piece of paper with writing on it) and that we spend money (not just other pieces of paper with more writing). We have also created a social structure that enforces those rules and values, so that if we steal pieces of paper with one kind of writing (doodles on napkins, for example), no one will care—but if we steal pieces of paper with a different kind of writing (like hundred dollar bills), we will be put in prison.

You could say I made up the Tlön Hypothesis because it seemed like a cool idea for my story. However, the Tlön Hypothesis is also the basis for human civilization—a society comes into being because we imagine it, and the only way to change that society is to imagine another order for it. (We had better get on that quick, by the way, because our “real” reality is starting to destroy the actual real reality, including trees and rivers and mountains, as well as the animals to whom they are crucially important.)

All of the stories in Letters from an Imaginary Country are, to a certain extent, about how we create the world through telling stories about it, whether those stories are fairy tales or academic papers. They are about the power of language, which I think is our main human superpower—the ability to communicate with one another in complex ways, and to create social structures because we agree on certain things, or wars because we disagree on others. All the great things we have achieved as a species are a function of our ability to communicate, as are all the terrible things we have done throughout human history. Indeed, the idea of human history itself depends on language.

I suppose if I want a reader to get any central idea from my collection, it’s that we have the power to make and remake our world through language (which is why writers, who seem so powerless in our capitalist system, are the first targets of authoritarian regimes). So let’s use language carefully, clearly, well. I’m certainly not the first writer to say this. George Orwell said it in much more specific detail; Ursula K. Le Guin, with much greater eloquence. But it’s worth repeating as many times as we need to hear it.

You might not get that particular point from reading my stories, at least not consciously—after all, I hope they are also fun reads. Feel free to enjoy them without philosophizing too much. But I’m grateful for the opportunity to philosophize here, and to talk about why I wrote them as well as how much I owe to an amazing writer named Borges.

Letters from an Imaginary Country: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/13/the-big-idea-theodora-goss-3/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58247

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/dragons-teeth-tales-from-north-kosovo-by-ian-bancroft/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64185

Second paragraph of third chapter:

War here [Kosovo], of course, did not arrive without warning. It rarely, if ever, does. There were the tell-tale signs. Spikes in nationalistic rhetoric, defiant and threatening in tone, vowing to avenge the humiliation wrought upon their people and prevent further degradation. There was palpable tension and uncertainty, with mounting casualties amongst civilians and police as a game of cat and mouse ensued between the insurgency and security forces; the latter contriving even tougher curtailments of liberty and ultimately life. Regular army exercises meant the call to arms arrived long before the postman delivered the formal conscription notice. Decaying weapons were distributed and fraying uniforms procured. There always seemed to be a deficit of ammunition, at least for those inexperienced in handling weapons. Checkpoints were erected through the usual rudimentary means and identification cards closely scrutinised. There were mass arrests and confessions of terrorist activity forced under duress.

This was sent to me by the author in 2022, but I have only just got around to reading it; and I really regret having left it so long. It’s a well constructed set of anthropological observations about history and society in Northern Kosovo, which remains mainly inhabited by Serbs and under the strong influence of Serbia. But rather than look at the big picture, Bancroft zooms in on particular localities, and particular situations, to colour in the blurry spaces on the map. Kosovo is a complex country, and its history is contested, but in the end its people – including the people of Northern Kosovo – just want to live in peace and prosperity. You can practically smell the macchiato in the cafes.

I was particularly startled to read of the involvement of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the exploitation of the Trepča mines from 1927. I associate him mainly with the spectacular manuscript collection which now resides in Dublin Castle; but of course this collection was assembled as the fruits of exploiting mineral resources in many other countries, and Kosovo was not one of his bigger areas of operation. So it was an unexpected connection between Ireland and Mitrovica.

I suspect I’ll be featuring this in my list of Books You Haven’t Heard Of at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can get Dragon’s Teeth here.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/dragons-teeth-tales-from-north-kosovo-by-ian-bancroft/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=64185

Posted by Joy Machine

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/general-strike-matchbox-show-chicago/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465325

Joy Machine is excited to present General Strike, an exhibition of 70+ matchboxes, opening on November 21 in Chicago.

What does solidarity mean for the artist? Or, what can art do in a time of crisis? The concept of a general strike is appealing to many advocates and activists because, in the face of oppression or inequality, it’s one of the few options available to the general public. General strikes are sometimes thought of as the “people’s veto,” and for the un-unionized among us, are less about joining our colleagues on the picket lines and more a call for solidarity. They ask us to pinpoint our strengths and identify how our skills can best be of use. 

Writing about the need and dream of solidarity, activist and novelist Sarah Schulman describes recognition, risk, and creativity as the essential tools in harnessing “the people power necessary to reach the tipping point that transforms lives and, in the most extreme conditions of brutality, actually saves lives.” For artists, these three tenets–recognition, risk, and creativity–are often already the building blocks of a practice. Discerning eyes and trenchant observations, personal sacrifices and provocative positions, combined with a wealth of imagination, are evident in both the studio and the streets. Artists are in many ways world-builders, helping to illuminate what’s previously gone unnoticed or otherwise been thought impossible.

In General Strike, we witness more than 70 approaches to a singular object: a large, wooden matchbox. Containing purple-tipped matchsticks, these vessels of potential display a wide array of mediums and methodologies offered by artists across North America. While some revel in whimsy, beauty, and the pleasures of life, others direct us toward bold, decisive action. All, in their own ways, speak to an innate impulse to transform something simple into another thing entirely.

Like any crisis, whether tangible or of conscience, what’s required is a variety of responses, the best of which fan the flames of courage and ultimately insist on our shared humanity. The particularities of such approaches–and those stoking their creation–are what make this fight worthwhile, especially when we’re all striking together.

A portion of the proceeds from all work sold in General Strike will be donated to the ACLU. RSVP to the opening reception.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article 70+ Artists Transform Matchboxes for Joy Machine’s ‘General Strike’ appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/general-strike-matchbox-show-chicago/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465325

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/11/13/pythagorean-generalizations/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246677

Here are four theorems that generalize the Pythagorean theorem. Follow the links for more details regarding each equation.

1. Theorem by Apollonius for general triangles.

2. Edsgar Dijkstra’s extension of the Pythagorean theorem for general triangles.

3. A generalization of the Pythagorean theorem to tetrahedra.

4. A unified Pythagorean theorem that covers spherical, plane, and hyperbolic geometry.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/11/13/pythagorean-generalizations/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246677

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/kate-clements-glass-frit-sculptures-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465255

Combining painted panels with delicate planes of kiln-fired glass, Kate Clements explores the nature of fragility. Glass is “a material defined by its capacity to hold tension,” she tells Colossal. “It can break, shatter, or shift at any moment. That awareness of impermanence has long been an undertone throughout my work: a nervous hum beneath the surface.”

Clements works with a granular substance called frit, which she composes into forms like leaves, insects, and birds directly onto a kiln shelf. When fired, these colorful drawings fuse into wafer-thin panels, which she then applies to painted panels or suspends in installations. Often incorporating patterns evocative of wallpaper and motifs that suggest architectural structures or niches, she plays with relationships between rigidity and fluidity and the artificial and the organic.

“The material has become almost an extension of my hand and my body through mark-making and scale,” Clements says, sharing that the process is quite meditative. “It’s about precision and intuition coexisting—knowing how to shape the material and when to let the glass move on its own terms in the kiln.”

The versatility of the medium, balanced with its inherent changeability, continues to fascinate Clements—especially the tension between control and risk. Like any material fired in a kiln, it has the potential to react in surprising ways or transform differently than expected. And once assembled into large-scale works through a process the artist likens to collage, the thin panels appear very delicate, like sugar sculptures, as if they could crumble or break with the slightest touch.

“Earlier pieces leaned into that unease,” Clements says. “I was drawn to the way glass can induce anxiety—the uneasy power of beauty that could, at any instant, turn on its head. That instability felt like a mirror of the world around us: alluring, dangerous, and unpredictable all at once.” More recent works build upon this sensitivity while emphasizing the ethereal qualities of the translucent medium, suspending delicate panels from the ceiling to create more solid, architectural forms.

Clements’ sculpture titled “Acanthus,” reminiscent of a gleaming triumphal arch, is on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in the group exhibition Personal Best through August 9, 2026. New work is also in NOCTURNES, a solo show in the art gallery of Kansas City Community College, which continues through November 14. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Glass Flora and Fauna Flutter in the Delicate Work of Kate Clements appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/kate-clements-glass-frit-sculptures-paintings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=465255

1. GLP-1 Drugs Linked to Dramatically Lower Death Rates in Colon Cancer Patients

(tags:glp cancer GoodNews )

2. The No. 1 country song in the US right now is AI-generated

(tags:music ai )

3. Edinburgh's Argyle House (home of Codebase) is being demolished

(tags:edinburgh architecture )

4. Reminder that if you see a paywall on the web then you can usually get past it with archive.ph (but if you keep using it for the same site, you should support the site)

(tags:archive web paywall )

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/13/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-an-amazon-best-book-of-2025/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58253

It’s both in the Top 20 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2025, and in the general Top 100 Books of the Year as well. Well, cool! I will take that, thank you.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/13/when-the-moon-hits-your-eye-an-amazon-best-book-of-2025/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58253

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/homesick.html

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/homesick.html

Posted by Stilgherrian

https://stilgherrian.com/edict/00255/

https://stilgherrian.com/?p=39112

No one under the age of 25 has ever known a time when there haven’t been humans in space — although to be fair, not many humans. To mark the 25th anniversary of the International Space Station’s inhabitation, and other space news, we chat once more with Dr Alice Gorman aka Dr Space Junk and astrophysicist Rami Mandow.

In this episode we talk about the ISS and other space stations, including China’s Tiangong station. But we also discuss whether we should colonise space, poetry, cutbacks at NASA, and two recent examples of objects arriving from space. Allegedly.

This podcast is available on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, JioSaavn, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, Spotify, and Speaker.

You can also subscribe to the generic podcast feed.

Episode Links

• 01. Alice Gorman - Wikipedia
  Alice Gorman (born 1964) FSA is an Australian archaeologist, heritage consultant, and lecturer, who is best known for pioneering work in the field of space archaeology and her Space Age Archaeology blog.
• 02. CosmicRami (@cosmicrami.com) — Bluesky
  Astronomer, driving The Dish to study pulsars in my PhD. Also, founded SpaceAustralia.com. Also, love a bit of astrophotography. Also, do everything with my little mate, Max. Also, Ultra-Gay. He/Him.
• 03. Axiom Space Celebrates International Space Station's 25th Anniversary: What's Next? FriendsofNASA.org
  [3 November 2025] "What Comes Next" showcases Axiom Space's "vision to transcend Earth" by building space infrastructure that "drives exploration and fuels a vibrant space economy for the benefit of every human everywhere. Learn more about how we are building what comes next for low-Earth orbit." Axiom Space is building the world’s first commercial space station—Axiom Station:
• 04. International Space Station - Wikipedia
  The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), ESA (Europe), JAXA (Japan), and CSA (Canada). The ISS is the largest space station ever built.
• 05. Axiom Space - Wikipedia
  Axiom Space, Inc., also known as Axiom Space, is an American privately funded space infrastructure developer headquartered in Houston, Texas.
• 06. The 9pm Scruffy Share House in Space with Dr Alice Gorman – Stilgherrian
  [27 November 2024] In this episode we talk about the research Dr Alice Gorman and her colleagues have been doing with the International Space Station
• 07. 25 Years of the International Space Station: What archaeology tells us about living and working in space
  [31 October 2025] We recognized that there had been hardly any research on the social and cultural aspects of life in space. We wanted to show space agencies that were already planning three-year missions to Mars what they were overlooking.
• 08. Philippe Starck - Wikipedia
  Philippe Starck (French pronunciation: [filip staʁk]; born 18 January 1949) is a French industrial architect and designer known for his wide range of designs, including interior design, architecture, household objects, furniture, boats and other vehicles.
• 09. Tiangong space station - Wikipedia
  Tiangong (Chinese: 天宫; pinyin: Tiāngōng; lit. 'Heavenly Palace'), officially the Tiangong space station (Chinese: 天宫空间站; pinyin: Tiāngōng kōngjiānzhàn), is a permanently crewed space station constructed by China and operated by China Manned Space Agency.
• 10. Overview effect - Wikipedia
  The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus". The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.
• 11. Questions up in the air: SA vet's car "struck by a meteorite" - ABC listen
  [28 October 2025] Whyalla vet Andrew Melville-Smith was travelling along the Augusta Highway, 40 kilometres past Port Germein, when he heard an "extremely violent" bang.
• 12. Meteorite Miracle | Whyalla Veterinary Clinic
  [26 October 2025] On the night of 19 October 2025, a Tesla Model Y made history on a remote South Australian highway, surviving a billion-to-one meteorite strike that melted its windscreen and thanks to its cutting-edge Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology the occupants survived.
• 13. SA Museum investigates whether meteorite collided with car on regional highway - ABC News
  [28 October 2025] Scientists are investigating whether an object that smashed and partially melted a man's car windscreen was a meteorite, in what could potentially be a world-first case of a collision with a moving vehicle.
• 14. Mystery ‘Space Junk’ Crashes Near Mine Site In Western Australia | 10 News+ - YouTube
  [20 October 2025] Western Australian police are rushing to determine the origins of what’s believed to be a piece of ‘space junk’ that crashed near a remote mine site in the state. Officers are now working with engineers from the Australian Space Agency to identify where the debris is from. One space archaeologist from Flinders University is theorising the object is linked to a Chinese rocket which launched in September.
• 15. Space junk found near WA mine linked to Chinese rocket launch - ABC News
  [20 October 2025] The burning object was found on Saturday afternoon by workers at a Pilbara mine site, about 30 kilometres east of Newman.
• 16. Approximate ,location of space ju k impact | Google Maps
  The junk from the Chinese launch vehicle landed somewhere along here, within a few kilometres I guess.
• 17. Skylab - Wikipedia
  Skylab was the United States' first space station, launched by NASA,[3] occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974. It was operated by three trios of astronaut crews: Skylab 2, Skylab 3, and Skylab 4.
• 18. Jindalee Operational Radar Network - Wikipedia
  The Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) is an over-the-horizon radar (OHR) network that can monitor air and sea movements across 37,000 square kilometres (14,000 sq mi). It has a normal operating range of 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) to 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi). It is used in the defence of Australia, and can also monitor maritime operations, wave heights and wind directions.
• 19. Ultra-wideband polarimetry of the April 2021 profile change event in PSR J1713+0747 | Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia | Cambridge Core
  [6 October 2025] The millisecond pulsar PSR J1713 + 0747 is a high-priority target for pulsar timing array experiments due to its long-term timing stability, and bright, narrow pulse profile. In April 2021, PSR J1713 + 0747 underwent a significant profile change event, observed by several telescopes worldwide. Using the broad bandwidth and polarimetric fidelity of the Ultra-Wideband Low-frequency receiver on Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, we investigated the long-term spectro-polarimetric behaviour of this profile change in detail.
• 20. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Wikipedia
  Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE FRS FRSE FRAS FInstP (/bɜːrˈnɛl/; born 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967. The discovery eventually earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974; however, she was not one of the prize's recipients.
• 21. An Interview with Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Spaceaustralia
  [21 October 2025] It’s been more than fifty years since the discovery of pulsars by Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who continues to remain as one of astronomy’s most inspiring figures. In this interview with SpaceAustralia.com, she reflects on her remarkable journey - from spotting “a bit of scruff” in 1967 to championing diversity and equity across the global scientific community.
• 22. Dark Matter: Poems Of Space - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation — UK Branch
  For Dark Matter, the third in the Gulbenkian Foundation’s trilogy of poetry and science anthologies, leading poets were commissioned to create new work inspired by their discussions with eminent space scientists... The commissioned works are complemented by the editors’ selection of well-known and lesser-known poems from across the ages.
• 23. Outer Space: 100 Poems
  Edited with Introduction and Notes by Midge Goldberg, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• 24. Jocelyn Bell Burnell reads "Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz by brainpicker | SoundCloud
• 25. Chinese astronauts figure out how to barbecue in space
  [6 November 2025] Astronauts aboard China’s Tiangong space station have successfully grilled chicken wings and steaks in a microgravity environment for the first time. The space barbecue was made possible by a new type of oven that allows smokeless and residue-free cooking in orbit.
• 26. 'Stranded' astronauts aboard Chinese space station are preparing to come home — but no date has been announced | Live Science
  Three astronauts remain stuck on China's Tiangong space station after errant debris struck their return capsule last week. But their return vessel has already arrived, meaning a flight home will come sooner rather than later.
• 27. Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges - Wikipedia
  Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges (also known as Mrs. Hodges, Mrs. Hewlett Hodges, and Mrs. Huelitt Hodges; February 2, 1920 – September 10, 1972) was an American woman known for being the first documented individual to be struck by a meteorite and survive.
• 28. No One Knows What Caused a Massive 1908 Explosion in Siberia | HowStuffWorks
  [26 July 2023] Every day hundreds of meteors, commonly known as shooting stars, can be seen flying across the night sky. Upon entering Earth's atmosphere, friction heats up cosmic debris, causing streaks of light that are visible to the human eye. Most burn up before they ever reach the ground. But if one actually survives the long fall and strikes Earth, it is called a meteorite. Here are some of the more memorable meteor crashes in history.
• 29. NASA closes doors to 15,000 employees as US government shutdown begins | Space
  [1 October 2025] The grinding halt forces NASA and other agencies to scale back nearly all of their day-to-day operations after lawmakers in Washington D.C. failed to pass a government funding bill by the deadline. Only a fraction of NASA's workforce remains on duty, assigned to missions that cannot be paused without risking astronaut safety, critical hardware, or the Trump administration’s highest priorities.
• 30. NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown — and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say | Space
  [3 November 2025] The workforce at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, say this has put groundbreaking missions at risk, and is degrading roadblocks designed to safeguard human lives. Now, under the cloak of a closed U.S. government, nearly half the GSFC campus — the hub of NASA science — is marked for abandonment.
• 31. Goddard Space Flight Center - Wikipedia
  The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately 6.5 miles (10.5 km) northeast of Washington, D.C., in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959, as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC employs about 10,000 civil servants and contractors.
• 32. Trump reverses course to renominate billionaire Musk ally to lead Nasa | Nasa | The Guardian
  [5 November 2025] President withdrew Jared Isaacman’s nomination in May but says on Truth Social he is ‘ideally suited’ for top role.
• 33. Los Angeles, November 2019 - YouTube
  From the movie "Blade Runner", "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, aA chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
• 34. Blade Runner - Wikipedia
  Blade Runner is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• 35. Should humans colonise space? We asked 5 experts
  [20 October 2025] We asked five experts – four of whom said no. It’s not just a question of whether humans try to live in space, but also about how we do it. Here are their detailed answers.
• 36. Val Plumwood - Wikipedia
  Val Plumwood (11 August 1939 – 29 February 2008) was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist known for her work on anthropocentrism. From the 1970s she played a central role in the development of radical ecosophy.
• 37. Making Kin with the Cosmos | Center for Humans & Nature
  As a social anthropologist by training, and a fiction-writer and essayist with an ethnographer’s eye, I [Ceridwen Dovey] am writing about environmental ethics in outer space for the kinds of people who love the exquisite, galvanizing essays and books that have emerged from within the modern nature-writing tradition, and especially for those who have adored works by Nan Shepherd, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Robert Macfarlane.
• 38. Tonga Could Soon Become the First Country to Recognize Whale Rights | Atmos
  [20 October 2025] As Tonga prepares for general elections in November, whale and ocean advocates have been working on a national bill called “Te Mana o te Tohorā,” or “Authority of the Whale”: legal personhood framework to present to the new government. This draft legislation, set to be introduced to Parliament, seeks to grant whales fundamental and legal human rights to exist, thrive, and be healthy. 
• 39. Daniele Hromek
  Dr Danièle Hromek is a Saltwater woman of Budawang/Dhurga/Yuin and Burrier/Dharawal ancestry, with French and Czech heritage. Danièle is a spatial designer and Country-Centred designer. Danièle is the first Indigenous person in Australia to achieve a PhD in built environment and spatial disciplines.

If the links aren’t showing up, try here.

Thank you, Media Freedom Citizenry

The 9pm Edict is supported by the generosity of its listeners. It’d be lovely if you supported is by throwing a few coins into the tip jar.

For this episode it’s again to everyone who supported The 9pm Spring Series 2025 crowdfunding campaign.

CONVERSATION TOPICS: Two people who wish to remain anonymous.

THREE TRIGGER WORDS: Bernard Walsh, Esther Anatolitis, Garth Kidd, Joanna Forbes, Peter Viertel, Peter Wickins, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.

WE WILL, WE WILL JUDGE YOU, part of Another Untitled Music Podcast: Paul Williams, William Anthony.

ONE TRIGGER WORD: Ashley Walsh, Euan Troup, Frank Filippone, Hammy Goonan, Jim Campbell, Kym Yeap, Mark Newton, Michael, Michael Cowley, Mindy Johnson, Miriam Faye, Oliver Townshend, Peter Blakeley, Peter Lieverdink, Ric Hayman, Stephen Collins, Tom Carding, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.

PERSONALISED VIDEO MESSAGE: One person who chooses to remain anonymous.

RECOMMEND A SONG TO US, also part of Another Untitled Music Podcast: Kimberley Heitman, Paris Lord.

PERSONALISED AUDIO MESSAGE: One person who chooses to remain anonymous.

FOOT SOLDIERS FOR MEDIA FREEDOM who gave a SLIGHTLY LESS BASIC TIP: Craig Askings, Daniel O’Connor, deejbah, Gavin C, James Henstridge, Lindsay, Lucas James, Michael Rowe.

MEDIA FREEDOM CITIZENS who contributed a BASIC TIP: None this time again, which is curious.

And another 13 people who chose to have no reward at all, even though some of them were the most generous of all. Thank you all so much. You know who you are.

Series Credits

• The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian via The Freesound Project.
• Edict fanfare by neonaeon, via The Freesound Project.
• Elephant Stamp theme by Joshua Mehlman.

https://stilgherrian.com/edict/00255/

https://stilgherrian.com/?p=39112

Posted by cks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/SmallCrawlersGettingFeedback

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/SmallCrawlersGettingFeedback

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/hackered-again.html

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/11/hackered-again.html

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-10366-tropical-aquarium-now-available/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79544

The biggest LEGO Icons set of 2025, the 4,154-piece 10366 Tropical Aquarium is now available globally via LEGO.com! LEGO fans can build this massive Tropical Marine Aquarium filled with colourful coral, and LEGO fish for their home displays. See below for international pricing and product pages: If you’re planning on purchasing or pre-ordering this set, […]

The post The LEGO 10366 Tropical Aquarium is now available globally, plus Fish Tank Filter GWP appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-10366-tropical-aquarium-now-available/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79544

On August 12, 1971, my 16-year-old self mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission. The publication I hoped would buy that story, my dream market, was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

[...]

...earlier this week, after what by my count were 23 back and forth emails between me and the new owners of F&SF as I attempted to transform that initial boilerplate contract into something acceptable, I had no choice other than to walk away from my dream.

Let me explain why.

But before I do, I want to preface this by making it clear I have nothing but good things to say about editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Her words of praise as she accepted this story moved me greatly, and her perceptive comments and suggested tweaks ably demonstrated her strengths as an editor. It breaks my heart to disappoint her by pulling a story which was intended to appear in the next issue of F&SF. But, alas, I must.

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/review-5009823-fish-tank-filter-fish-food-gwp/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79541

The LEGO Tropical Aquarium launches today, and to entice would-be buyers, LEGO are offering yet another accompanying gift with purchase (GWP), 5009823 Fish Tank Filter & Fish Food. It will be available when you order 10366 Tropical Aquarium from LEGO.com between 13-19 November 2025. Unfortunately I didn’t receive the Tropical Aquarium to review, and to […]

The post Review: 5009823 Fish Tank Filter & Fish Food (GWP) appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/review-5009823-fish-tank-filter-fish-food-gwp/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=79541

Posted by Wil

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/11/you-walk-outside-and-everything-just-says-soon/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9828

There is a massive winter storm barreling toward us right now, expected to arrive in the next 18 or so hours. Yesterday, it was unseasonably warm and stupidly beautiful. Today, it’s eerily calm, under grey skies. The air is so still, it carries the train whistles from all the way across the valley, and every lawnmower in town sounds like it’s next door. You walk outside, and everything just says, soon.¹ Even the corvids and squirrels seem reluctant to come out of the trees, It never rains in Southern California, man. It pours.

This past weekend, though, it was great, and I was grateful for it.

Last Friday, Anne and I celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary. We have both been so busy and overwhelmed for so long, we planned to skip our usual weekend getaway and just go out for a really fancy dinner, instead. So we went to Mozza in Hollywood, where I think Anne discovered that pasta can actually be wonderful and not what her husband struggles to assemble in our kitchen.

We had such a wonderful meal, and such a nice time out, on a Friday night like PEOPLE WHO GO OUT TO DO THINGS! And that would have been enough, but about two weeks ago, Anne said that she was really missing our usual weekend away, and how did I feel about using points to go somewhere close? I admitted that I, too, was feeling sad we weren’t going to have two days of absolutely nothing but Us. Funny how we both really wanted to do this together, but kept talking ourselves out of it because we’d agreed together that we would.

Anyway, she found a place, cashed in some points, and we spent the weekend up in Santa Barbara. It was nothing but long walks, petting dogs, eating incredible food, and prioritizing each other, our relationship, our friendship, and our marriage. Each of us truly is married to our best friend, and even after 26 years (30+ total), we still have all kinds of fun goofing off together. We have consistently done the hard work of being married and being a family, and that investment pays off at like fifty million percent all the time.

It’s just like … it’s such a blessing and so awesome to spend our lives together, and be mom and dad to our kids. We have worked really hard for a good life, and I’m grateful that I’ve worked so hard to heal my PTSD, so I can actually enjoy living it.

And now…

This week’s story dropped earlier today! It is Dissembling Light, by Kel Coleman. It originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue 385.

This is a magical story (meaning that Magic features prominently in the narrative) about a man who holds tremendous knowledge and skill in his heart, and the hopeful apprentice who comes to learn from him. It also makes me wonder what good is knowledge, if its holder doesn’t freely share it?

You can get It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s some links to the more popular services:

• Apple Podcasts
• PocketCast
• Pandora
• iHeart
• Amazon
• or grab the RSS directly from me right here. (Yo! Old school RSS subscribers, I see you and finger your .plan!)

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Today, I recorded two episodes. One of the things we did is the most beautiful, heartbreaking, I-need-a-minute-to-compose-myself story I have read in a long, long time. I’m so excited for you to hear it. It’s also the source of the show’s first official blooper, where you will get to hear me use all my, uh, colorful metaphors in rather creative ways.

I would absolutely love to hear your feedback on the show, if you’re a listener. I feel like we’re doing good work, and putting good art into the world, but I have no idea what the audience thinks if I don’t ask, because we aren’t exactly in a theater together. Although, if I can figure out how to stage one of these stories, I’m into seeing what that would look and sound like. Maybe something cool is there, way off in the mysterious future.

1. Unfortunately, it’s not the soon we are all waiting for ︎

https://wilwheaton.net/2025/11/you-walk-outside-and-everything-just-says-soon/

https://wilwheaton.net/?p=9828

I've lost count of how many times that I've needed to go to the restroom today. I don't even start the chemical preparations until tomorrow. This is just my second day of So Very Much Water with low fiber diet.

Yesterday, on the first day of this regimen, I got through work and ended the shift needing bathroom breaks every 30 minutes. I'm short on sleep now, after needing to get up 4 times last night too. Today, I worked 1.5 hours before giving up. The bathroom recurrence time shrank from 30 minutes to 20 minutes, then 15 minutes. I gave up after 1.5 hours, and I just called it a sick day and logged off.

I'm eating even less today while still drinking So Very Much Water. I switched from pants to robe, making those bathroom trips even easier. *laugh* I do my final cleanse routine on Thursday evening. I show up at 6:30am on Friday morning for the GI exam.

As usual, I'll be glad to eat regular food again as soon as it's done. And stop drinking so much water.

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/12/the-big-idea-stewart-hotston/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58222

Information is the name of the game, and today’s Big Idea has a lot of it! From quantum mechanics to Diet Coke, author Stewart Hotston takes you on a ride through how the galaxy works, and how his new novel, Project Hanuman, came to be.

STEWART HOTSTON:

My fate was sealed in Leicester Square, London when I was six years old and I was taken to see Return of the Jedi. That was the day I fell in love with Space Opera. 

From then on, I was a big fan – going so far as to get my PhD in theoretical physics, before ditching academia for ‘a real job’ as my grandmother declared. Over the years I’ve learned to keep my opinions about science fiction to myself – not least because I realise that pointing at a movie in outrage and screaming ‘that’s not how angular momentum works!’ is fun for exactly no one including me. It really isn’t how angular momentum works though. 

Instead I’m going to enjoy the story, accept the nonsense for dramatic licence and try not to remind anyone that we’re unlikely to ever leave the solar system.

Honestly, most of the time I’m happy someone made some science fiction at all. 

Many of us have some idea of just how weird it would be to be close to a blackhole, and we know that travelling near the speed of light does odd things to our experience of time. 

But beyond that, the universe is far weirder than our wildest tropes. There could be moons made of diamond, there could be planets with atmospheres so dense that if there was life inside them it would exist the same way that animals at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans do – via derivative energy sources rather than directly harvesting their local sun’s energy. 

One of the big ideas I’ve been fascinated by for a long time now is the role of information in mathematics and, more generally, the universe itself. We tend to think of information as something we collate, gather and record. Except it’s entirely possible that information is the foundation stone of the entire edifice that is reality – that information is Real with a capital R. There’s an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called Quantum Information Theory (QIT for short) whose entire thesis can be catchily summed up as the ‘Bit before It’.

What holds my ongoing fascination with QIT is how it suggests that every part of reality right down to the most fundamental components are, actually, bits of information. This might sound very esoteric (and, sure, it is) but some of the biggest problems in physics today focus on the nature of information and how that reflects reality. 

When I say information I don’t mean how much my six pack of caffeine free Diet Coke costs nor even what the words caffeine free Diet Coke signify. If it’s not that then what do we mean when we talk about information? 

When we talk about information in this cosmic context we talk about information as the thing which defines the very nature of reality. Consider a photon: the photon’s state (you could say the very nature of what it is) is encoded into its wavefunction. A wavefunction here is a mathematical expression for the very nature of the photon – describing among other things, its energy, position, chirality and entanglement. You add those things up and you get the photon. It’s not that information comes from describing the photon, it’s that information makes the photon. The information comes first and, according to this way of seeing the universe, is a real thing (it is THE real thing). Information is more real than the stuff you can touch because it’s the reason you can touch stuff in the first place.  

This could feel very philosophical, too much woo-wah to be practical or interesting except to a small coterie of mathematicians, philosophers and physicists. Yet the answer to what information is informs a myriad of real world technologies such as how small we can make computer chips and how fast they can go. It informs subjects such as how birds navigate and how whales detect magnetic fields, and how information is transmitted via mechanisms such as DNA. After all, information is everywhere; information is everything. 

If you put your head in the clouds you could see a world in which you could change the information that makes a photon and turn it into something else. Imagine a civilisation that could manipulate the information that builds reality the way you can edit a story on a word processor.

When I came to write my own space opera after years of not knowing the story I wanted to tell, I realised that a central thing I wanted to achieve was to bring space opera into the present by reflecting some of the most cutting-edge physics. You could say the big idea was to answer this question: what would Iain Banks’ Culture look like if it was founded on what we know now about the universe? 

Which sounds fine, if overly ambitious, until you think about what that means. It means building civilisations that might categorise themselves not by their access to energy (the famous Khardashev scale) but by how easily they can manipulate information. After all, if you could take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and change the information that makes them hydrogen and reprogram the universe to have them as gold…then the amount of energy you have access to becomes pretty irrelevant (as does gold). Indeed you’d look at those who were stuck with mundane matter as technological primitives.  

It’s what Star Trek’s replicators are based on – matter/energy transformation through manipulation of information – after all, you have to know what the information is that expresses hot dogs if you want to turn raw energy into the best hot dog in the galaxy.

If it’s a minor point in Star Trek, for me it’s a major one – what could threaten a civilisation that can turn your laser beams into cotton candy? What would be their struggle if they can access the very fundamental nature of the universe at will? 

The thing is science doesn’t explain everything – and here I’m quoting the most brilliant physicist I ever met, Prof Tom McLeish – it’s the art of being wrong constructively. There’s always more to know and, potentially, always someone else who knows it. I settled here – if human brains are limited in how we encounter the universe and hence how we manage to imagine it, all other types of being will also have this category of limitation – be they AI, life evolved from bacteria or giant sentient stars – our shapes will define our experience of the world. 

Hence, even if the universe really is information as stuff, we are, all of us, made of that stuff. If we could tweak the world by editing the page we’d still be limited in our ambitions, our scope, by the fact we are beings living inside the system.

“Bit before It” might change the very way we build our society, but I’ve become convinced that the ‘It’, the people processing that information, remain at the heart of the story. And that’s the big idea. 

Project Hanuman: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/12/the-big-idea-stewart-hotston/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58222