A few good links for the weekend:

• Nassim Taleb — Meditations on Extremistan (I will come back to this soon)
• Vukovar (Enter the demon)
• How the Impressionists Became the World’s Favorite Painters, and the Most Misunderstood (in my backyard, will see)
• The joy of clutter

🏀 And we’re back!

This morning on Axios DC:

Metro fixed its fare evasion problem on trains, and now they are focusing on the 70% of bus riders who don’t pay. That eye-popping rate is up from 17% pre-pandemic.

Yowza. There is more at WaPo. Kids and I take the metro bus to school from time to time and I can confirm that:

1. School children in general don’t use their free ride cards. It improves the flow of people and drivers don’t seem to care.
2. More than half of the adults just waltz in as well. That too improves the flow of traffic, and drivers don’t seem to care about that either.

A head-scratcher, that.

Much like the Nobel family tree one could, I suspect, construct a blogging family tree, and Dave Winer would be at the root of it all. Kudos.

Speaking of blogs of old, Joel Topf’s Precious Bodily Fluids has been online since 2007. As most, he went from writing several times per week to every few weeks to not even every month as life moved to Twitter but he just published a new post that includes Neal Stephenson’s treatise on the Hole Hawg and for that alone is worth a shout out.

Fall mood.

The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, two American scientists for their discovery of micro RNA:

The pair began studying gene regulation while they were postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of H. Robert Horvitz, who won his own Nobel Prize in 2002.

And so the Nobel family tree grows.

From The End of the Modern World by Fr. Stephen Freemen:

Modernity is a rhetorical device. The modern world does not produce wonders or even Apple Phones. Those are the work of technology, something with roots in the ancient world (cf. the Antikythera Mechanism). Modernity is simply the place where the myth was invented — not technology.

And from a 2018 blog post comment (↬John Naughton):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes (sic) but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.