Explaining Toms Sump: A Two-Reservoir Model
Posted by Bill Storage in speleology on October 23, 2026
Bill Storage, Max Elfelt, Nikki Fox. Oct 23, 2026. Draft for public review.
Summary
Toms Sump is a low-airspace section of a cave passage, several hundred feet long. It is a barrier to exploration of the Droughtway region of the cave system under Droop Mountain, WV. It was first traversed in 1980 (4 trips), then revisited in 1986 (1 trip), 2024 (4 trips) and 2025 (1 trip). Other attempts from 1978 to 1981 found Toms to be closed. Scarcity of trips to the region and the absence of measurements before 2025 have prevented building even a crude hydraulic model of Toms.
Data collected in in 2025-2026 shows that Toms Sump is closed when the stream through it carries more than a threshold flow. That flow has two sources: storm water arriving through open conduits within hours, and steady drainage from slow storage in the rock above the cave. One year of logger data (Sep 2025 to Oct 2026) shows that slow storage, not summer storms, decides whether Toms stays closed.
In both 2024 and 2025 the storage was low. In 2024, storms related to Hurricane Helene dropped 7 to 9 inches of rain on the 5.11 sq mile basins that feeds Toms Sump, 100 million cubic feet of water.
The volume of the Droughtway beyond Toms was calculated as 4 million cubic feet based on survey data.
Rane Curl, in the 80s, found caves to have a fractal dimension of about 2.2. By itself, this implies caves have infinite volume, but limestone has a lower cutoff where fractal scaling stops and the micro-porosity isn’t hydraulically connected. Field work following Curl showed that a multiplier in the range of 3 to 8 should be expected.
If we multiply 4 million cubic feet based on survey by 8 for its fractal sponginess, 30 million cu ft of water would be the maximum expected volume for the region downstream of Toms. That’s a third of the calculated water volume dropped by Helene across the surface stream catchment area. Transpiration and aquifer-filling would have to handle the rest.
But twelve days later, Toms was up only about three inches. Preserved footprints from two pre-flood trips that year, water rings on mud banks, and fresh debris showed that water levels in Toms and near-sumps downstream of it had risen no more than 2 to 3 feet above pre-Helene levels. Very little of Helene’s 100 mil cu ft made it to the Drought Way.
Yet we know that in some winters the Droughtway floods to a depth of at least 220 feet above the low point in the Droughtway.
Logger data shows that an October 2025 storm closed Toms for half a day, then it reopened. Subsequent storms closed it for one to six days. Once the storage filled during the low-evapotranspiration season, Toms closed on Nov 18, 2025 and stayed closed through the wet 2026 summer, including a 25-day stretch without a significant storm. A model without slow storage cannot reproduce this unless evapotranspiration is set implausibly low.
The working picture: fast conduits and the fractured Mauch Chunk carry storm water, and a slow, rate-limited store in the Alderson Limestone holds the rest. After a drought the Alderson takes weeks to months to recover, because the dry rock must take up water before recharge reaches the store. It drains through springs at its base onto the Greenville Shale, or, in some places, percolates through the Greenville Shale directly into the Union. Evapotranspiration acts as the seasonal switch. Evidence points to the Alderson as the store (see Hydrogeology).
Background
Why Toms is open or closed when it is has been debated for decades. A common view was that summer floods close it and that it might be open in winter. Previously, no continuous data on it had been recorded, and as far as we know, no one has had data of this kind anywhere in this region.
A related question is now settled. Three years ago we found clear evidence that modern debris (plastic toys) had floated to a spot 190 vertical feet above the terminal siphon. The siphon, about a mile downstream of Toms and roughly 140 feet lower, is under 2 feet in diameter. In many winters inflow exceeds what it can pass, and the cave backs up to about 70 feet above Toms. That backflooding did not happen in winter 2025–26: a logger about 30 feet above Toms stayed dry. So every closure in this record is the other kind, driven by flow through Toms itself.
Toms is a low-airspace passage that acts as a partial constriction, so its level rises with flow. It is 12000 feet from the entrance where the main stream sinks, where rock temperature is about 50 ± 1.5°F. The cave-forming Greenbrier limestones lie beneath the Mauch Chunk, which is sandstone and shale formation with thin limestone beds. The Greenville shale separates the top unit of the Greenbrier, the Alderson Limestone, and the Union and Pickaway Limestones, in which Toms Sump and its feeders lie. Shale beds, including the Greenville, hold up perched water that emerges as springs. Those springs run briefly on the surface, sometimes hidden in alluvium, and then sink again. Over the passages near Toms, though, the Greenville appears to leak (see Hydrogeology). The broad, flat top of Droop Mountain stands 500 feet above the cave entrances.
Flow into Toms Sump includes 5.11 square miles of surface basins.
Fig.1. Toms Sump drainage area
Hydrogeology
| Unit | Thickness | Behavior | Water |
| Mauch Chunk: Droop Sandstone; Lillydale Shale and Glenray Limestone members; Reynolds Limestone | Droop 40–100 ft; Lillydale and Glenray about 250 ft combined; Reynolds 10–15 ft | Generally considered a fast-flow aquifer: high fracture permeability, rapid pressurization, minimal long-term storage. Recovers within a few days of rain after a drought | Soft |
| Alderson Limestone | Thick | Recharge lag of weeks to months. The whole column must saturate before springs at its base flow, so after a drought it takes several weeks of sustained, soaking rain to prime | Hard |
| Greenville Shale | — | Holds up the Alderson springs. Over the passages near Toms there is strong evidence it is not a significant aquitard: Mauch Chunk water percolates through the column to the streams feeding Toms | — |
Five Alderson springs. A main roadside spring is at the base of the Alderson, directly on the Greenville. It nearly dried up in the 2025 drought and did not run full again until after the February 2026 thaw, which is the priming the hydrogeologists describe. Four similar springs in the area are remarkably consistent and non-flashy. Landowners report that two have not dry in the 63 years they relied on them.
The Mauch Chunk storage is relatively small. Most springs on the slopes of flat-topped Droop Mountain dry up considerably in dry years. Use by local residents of the roadside spring is only seen in drought years.
Structure is probably the largest variable. Thrust faults can redirect flow and set how much rock drains to a given outlet in limestone and in sandstone/shale members.
What this means for the model. The slow store is the Alderson, and the linear store describes it best. Its springs drain where the Greenville crops out around Droop Mountain, so there is no sill the water must rise to before they flow. The hydrogeologists’ “column must saturate” is better read as a moisture deficit: after a drought, the dry rock above the water table must take up water before recharge reaches the store. That is a delay on the way in, not a threshold on the way out, and the model’s soil store and intake limit partly represent it. The conduit store also covers fast flow through the Mauch Chunk. The leaky Greenville gives Mauch Chunk water a direct path to Toms, which the model lumps in with its other flows.
Data
| Source | Record | What it measures | Notes |
| Toms Sump logger | Sep 11, 2025 – Sep 30, 2026 | Hourly temperature; time-stamped wet/dry (IN/OUT) events | Sensor sits at the go/no-go level, about 1 inch above low water. IN = less than 3–4 inches of airspace |
| Middle logger | Sep 2025 – Sep 2026 | Hourly temperature in cave air | Readings after retrieval (Sep 2026) excluded |
| Entrance logger | Sep 2025 – Jul 26, 2026 | Hourly temperature | Stopped early |
| Weather | Sep 11, 2025 – Sep 30, 2026 | Hourly temperature, precipitation, snowfall | Nearest available source, gridded model output rather than a gauge; likely undercounts local and high-elevation rain |
The wet/dry sensor detects water by conductivity, so very dilute water (< 100 µS/cm conductivity) can read as dry. Snowmelt streams can drop to 10 µS/cm. Brief IN/OUT flicker at each transition, lasting seconds to minutes, was merged into single events. Total precipitation over the year was 41.8 inches at the weather source.
Fig. 2. Toms Sump logger and weather source · daily, Sep 11, 2025 – Sep 30, 2026
Key observations
- Closures got longer through the autumn drought, then became permanent. Storms of about 1 inch closed Toms for 2.8 days on Oct 8 but 5.6 days on Oct 30. On Nov 18, 2025, under a quarter inch of rain closed it, and it stayed closed until the logger was retrieved on Sep 30, 2026. The only break was a doubtful 30-hour dry reading on Feb 20–21, 2026.
- Toms water temperature ranged from 36.6°F to 61.2°F. We had expected a few degrees variation. The Middle logger, in cave air in the Rubber Chicken trunk, ranged only 49.1–50.8°F.
- Storm water arrives in hours. Rain-temperature water reached Toms 3–5 hours after rain began (Sep 27, 2026: rain at 09:00, water up from 50.0 to 53.4°F by 19:00). The level rose 1.5–2.5 hours before the new water arrived: the flood pushes older water ahead of it.
- Snowmelt arrives cold and fast. On Feb 10 the air reached 53°F after three weeks of subzero nights. By the evening of Feb 11, 2026, Toms had dropped from 43.2 to 37.5°F with almost no rain.
- A day/night cycle reaches Toms, but only in late winter and spring. Concern over diurnal fluctuation rose after a perceived increase in early morning water depth in October 2024. Feb–Apr shows a 0.3–0.5°F daily temperature swing, peaking 3–6 hours after the afternoon high. If an associated water level change exists, it is too small to measure. Temperature fluctuation is absent in summer. That fits surface streams feeding the sinks in the wet season, and flow from storage in summer.
- Toms stayed closed through a dry September 2026 with full evapotranspiration. Sep 1–11, 2026 had 0.65 inches of rain, no day above 0.21 inches, and highs of 80–90°F, about 25 days after the last significant storm. In fall 2025, Toms reopened within 0.5–6 days of each storm.
- An Alderson spring tracked the same storage. The road spring, at the base of the Alderson directly on the Greenville Shale, nearly dried up in the 2025 drought and did not run full again until after the February 2026 thaw.
- Large storms in a drought fall pass through quickly. In late September 2024, remnants of Hurricane Helene dropped 7 to 9 inches upstream. Toms was passable 10 days later.
The model
The model tracks water hour by hour through four stores, driven only by the weather record. Toms is predicted closed whenever the total flow reaching it exceeds a threshold.
Fig. 2. Two-route model: storm water reaches Toms through the conduits in hours. Stored water supplies the steady baseflow that keeps it closed for months.
- Snowpack. Precipitation at or below 33°F accumulates as snow and melts in proportion to degrees above freezing.
- Soil. Rain and meltwater fill a soil store, and evapotranspiration (ET) draws it down. Evapotranspiration is estimated from air temperature and day length (Hamon method), scaled by a fitted crop factor and by how wet the soil is. It stops while there is snow on the ground. Water above the soil’s capacity moves on.
- Slow store (Alderson Limestone and epikarst). It accepts soil overflow only up to a maximum rate, about an inch a day in the fits; anything faster goes straight to the conduits. It drains slowly to the cave, at a rate proportional to the water it holds (a linear store). A fill-and-spill variant, which drains only above a set level, was also tested and rejected (see How it was tested).
- Conduits and fast flow. Water that the slow store rejects, anything entering sinks directly and fast fracture flow through the Mauch Chunk all pass through a fast reservoir that drains in hours to days.
Evapotranspiration is the seasonal switch. In the growing season it takes most of the rain before it reaches the slow store. After leaves fall, rain gets through and the store fills, mainly December to March in this record.
The model’s water temperature mixes the two flows: storm water carries the surface temperature, and stored water carries its own temperature. Both are pulled toward 50°F rock temperature more strongly at low flow.
How it was tested
We tested three versions of the model to the hourly IN/OUT record. The doubtful Feb 20–21 reading was left out. A no-storage version, which drops the slow store, was the competing explanation. Each version’s parameters were tuned to best match the record. Accuracy is the average of the share of closed hours and the share of open hours predicted correctly.
| Version | Accuracy | Annual ET it needs | What happens |
| No slow storage, ET free | 97.1% | 15 in (37% of rain) | Fits only with ET far below what Appalachian forests use, and with three parameters pinned at their limits |
| No slow storage, realistic ET | 91.8% | 22 in | Predicts Toms open Sep 1–13, 2026 and in late April–May. Both wrong |
| No slow storage, slow drainage allowed | 98.2% | 31 in | Picks a 29-day drainage time, so it becomes a storage model, and then misses the brief fall closures |
| Linear slow store | 98.3% | 24 in | Reproduces the fall closures and the full 2026 closure |
The two storage versions (linear and fill-and-spill) still won when rainfall was raised 25% to allow for gauge undercatch (98.2–98.5%, with ET at 55–64% of rain). The no-storage version still needed ET at 30% of rain. Temperature, which was not used in fitting, gave a weaker check: a store that delivers water at a fixed 50°F fit worst, and one that keeps a seasonal temperature for 1–3 months fit best.
The fill-and-spill version, in which the store drains only above a set level, was tested because a spring that stays dry until its reservoir fills suggests a dam: water rising to a spillway before anything flows. The data did not need it (98.4% against 98.3% for the linear store), and Droop Mountain gives it no physical basis. The aquitards and the reservoirs above them crop out all the way around the mountain, so perched water drains wherever the water table meets the slope. Nothing holds it back until a sill is reached. The linear store is the preferred model.
What it explains
| Observation | Explanation |
| Short closures in the 2025 drought fall | The Alderson was low and contributed little. Storm water passed through the conduits and the fast-draining Mauch Chunk within days |
| Closures lengthening through Oct–Nov 2025 | Leaf-off cut evapotranspiration, so rain began filling the store. Baseflow rose toward the threshold |
| Persistent closure from Nov 18, 2025 | Baseflow crossed the threshold. After that, any small storm kept Toms closed |
| Closed all summer 2026, including a dry September | The Alderson filled over the winter and drained slowly enough to hold flow above the threshold through the growing season |
| Helene, 7 inches in 2024, passable 10 days later | Intake is rate-limited. Rain that arrives faster than the store can absorb it runs off through the conduits |
| Spring dry through fall 2025, full only after the Feb thaw | The spring sits at the base of the Alderson. After the drought, the dry rock had to take up water before recharge reached the store, and the store had to recover before the spring ran full. Winter recharge did that |
| Toms closed for good on Nov 18, three months before the Alderson spring ran full | Probably a handoff. With leaves off, winter flow through the Mauch Chunk and conduits kept Toms closed while the Alderson primed. The Alderson took over the baseflow as evapotranspiration returned |
| No backflooding in winter 2025–26 | After the drought, winter inflow stayed below what the terminal siphon can pass |
| Wide temperature range, cold and warm pulses | Storm and melt water reach Toms within hours, too fast to pick up much heat from the rock |
The common view that summer floods close Toms gets the roles reversed. Summer storms in a dry year close it only briefly. What keeps it closed is a full store, and the store fills mainly in winter.
Limitations and open questions
- One year, one weather source. The weather is not from an on-site gauge. All versions miss the small closures of Sep 25 and Oct 20, 2025, probably because local rain was heavier than recorded. August storms that warmed Toms by 6–8°F registered only 0.3–0.4 inches.
- The model was fit, not predicted. Every version was tuned to this year.
- The storage drainage time is loose. The fits range from about 7 months to 2 years.
- Where the storage is. The data require slow storage. The stratigraphy, five Alderson springs and the hydrogeologists’ accounts point to the Alderson Limestone. The model has a single slow store, so it cannot separate winter flow from the Mauch Chunk from Alderson drainage. That matters because Toms closed for good on Nov 18, three months before the road spring ran full. Storage inside the cave upstream of Toms is unlikely based on the state of the cave as seen on decades of cave trips and the fast response at Toms to rains.
- How spring output depends on storage. Fill-and-spill is ruled out, but the linear store is only the simplest of the physically reasonable choices. Output could instead rise faster than in proportion to the water stored, so that a low store gives only a trickle, as at the road spring in 2025. Or it could stay roughly constant, limited by the outlet, until the store runs low, as the steady Alderson springs suggest. Toms data cannot tell these apart. A discharge record from an Alderson spring, such as the one at the Canadian Hole entrance, could.
- Structure. Small thrust faults can change how much Alderson drains to a given outlet. The Alderson upstream of (and possibly on top of) Toms may not behave like any of the springs we know.
- The Feb 20–21 2026 dry reading. It began during rain, just as a cold pulse arrived, when the model has flow rising toward a peak. A real drop in level is hard to explain. The more likely cause is very dilute water reading as dry: late snowmelt plus rain, after the first melt on Feb 11, 2026 had already flushed out most of the snowpack’s salts. Other cold, dilute pulses did not trigger it. Because air and water read the same at the sensor, temperature alone can’t prove the sensor stayed wet. But two things argue against a real drop in level:
- The temperature runs smoothly through both ends of the dry stretch.
- While the sensor read dry, the logger showed a 3°F daily melt cycle, peaking about 3 hours after a 61°F afternoon outside. Wet melt days show the same size of swing: Feb 16, Feb 27–28 and Mar 5, 2026. A swing that large means fast melt and rain water coming through, so flow was high. A cold pulse also arrived at 8 to 9 AM, an hour after the dry reading began. The level falling below the sensor during that much inflow seems highly unlikely.
Appendix 1: Every wet/dry change, with the logger temperature around it
If air and water differed at the sensor, the temperature would have jumped in the hour the state changes. The step column is the change across that hour; the next two columns show the trend just before and after, for scale.
The Ludovisi Sarcophagus
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art on September 22, 2026
This was my script for a video I just posted on YouTube (Subscribe – more of these are coming). I departed slightly from the script when I narrated, but it is close. The video illustrates all the points made in the text, so I see no point in grabbing a large number of stills from it to include here. Just watch the video; I think it came out well. I uploaded 4K video. You can select resolution with the video settings button to ensure you are getting full res.
The best guess is that the Ludovisi Sarcophagus was made in the third century, probably around AD 260.
We don’t know who the man in the middle is. That, beyond the fact that the thing is an incredible piece of art, is one of the reasons the sarcophagus gets so much attention.
He’s on horseback, bareheaded, no weapon, riding straight into a mass of Roman soldiers and defeated barbarians. Everyone around him is caught up in the violence. Men are falling, fighting, and dying.
And he’s pretty much untouched by it. His right hand is raised, as though he doesn’t even need a sword. He isn’t just another soldier. The whole composition points toward him. So naturally, we want to know who he was.
Answering that is tough. 1800 years has taken its toll on the evidence.
The sarcophagus was discovered in Rome in 1621, in a vineyard outside the Porta San Lorenzo. It was acquired by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi and became part of his remarkable collection of ancient sculpture. Eventually the collection passed into the Museo Nazionale Romano. You can see it in person at the Palazzo Altemps across the street from Piazza Navona.
Once you’ve concluded that the figure must represent somebody important, then you start studying the face. He seems important because an immense amount of precision work went into it. He has a triangular face, a broad cranium and narrow chin, smooth skin, prominent eyebrows, a moustache and a short beard. His hair is arranged in little comma-shaped locks across his forehead.
The hairstyle looks backward. It recalls earlier Roman imperial portraits the Julio-Claudians, Augustus in particular, and Trajan. But its closest parallels, according to modern scholarship, are in what is called the Gallienic revival, the renewed interest in classical styles during the reign of Emperor Gallienus.
That leads most scholars toward the imperial families of the middle of the third century. Two names in particular come up. Herennius Etruscus and his younger brother Hostilianus, the sons of the emperor Trajan Decius.
Herennius was actually killed fighting the Goths in 251. Hostilianus didn’t die in battle. He died of the plague later that year. And there is something particularly interesting about Hostilianus.
Some of those who’ve proposed that this guy is Hostilian see the curious mark on his forehead as a sphragis, a sign associated with the Mithraic mysteries
And that brings us to the curious mark on his forehead. It is a cross-shaped mark, cut deeply into the marble. It has been interpreted as a sphragis, a sign associated with the Mithraic mysteries. But that interpretation has a complicated history I’ll get to later.
Except for the beard, some coin portraits of Hostilian do look strikingly like the one on the sarcophagus.
More recent scholarship has tended to put the Ludovisi Sarcophagus around 260 rather than 251, partly because of the way its figures are organized across the relief and its relationship to other sculpture of the period. We have to accept that the young commander can’t be securely connected with any known emperor or general.
But I’m not sure nine years should have quite the authority that it sometimes gets. A date of around 260 is just an art-historical judgment.
A sculptor in 260 could have been looking at something made in 240. A sculptor in 251 could have been looking at something made a century earlier. A fashion can begin before we notice it, persist after we think it has ended, or simply refuse to fit neatly into the period labels we give it. The main figure’s face could have been carved forty years after the rest of the sarcophagus.
So I don’t think Herennius or Hostilianus can be dismissed simply because somebody has decided the sarcophagus belongs to 260. But I don’t think either can be identified solely from the resemblance.
It may be a portrait of a member of the imperial family. It may be an important military commander. Or we may be looking at a very wealthy Roman aristocrat whose name has disappeared completely. The quality of the sarcophagus tells us that its patron was somebody near the top of Roman society. But that’s about as far as the evidence can take us.
There’s another possibility we can’t rule out. Perhaps the face wasn’t intended to identify the deceased as a particular emperor or general at all. The sculptor may have been making an ideal Roman commander. He is bareheaded, carries no weapon, and yet he’s riding directly into battle.
Diana Kleiner compared him to the invincible general represented by Alexander the Great, particularly the famous mosaic from the House of the Faun at Pompeii, which itself copies a lost Hellenistic painting.
In that reading, the point isn’t that the subject was Alexander. It’s that he was being made to look like the kind of man who could be Alexander. The dead man didn’t necessarily need to have conquered the barbarians. He needed to be shown as the sort of man who would have.
And then there is the X. It doesn’t look to me like the work of the sculptor who carved the face. It could have been made later in antiquity. It could have been made centuries later. We don’t know when the sarcophagus disappeared from view, when it was buried, or what happened to it before it was found in 1621.
So we know roughly when the sarcophagus was carved. We know exactly when it was dug out of the ground, but we can’t date the X at all. We don’t really even know that it wasn’t added after it was dug up. And since we can’t know how long it was around before being buried we can’t rule out that someone in late antiquity added the X to ward off demons. There is evidence of that sort of thing, right up to modern times.
20th century scholars couldn’t let go of a Tertullian quote. He mentions Mithras in a passage attacking pagan religion. He says that the Devil marks his soldiers on their foreheads. That’s all he says.
Tertullian wrote about 200 AD, and he couches the claim with “if I remember Mithras,” not exactly the voice of a man presenting carefully verified ethnography. He is making a rhetorical point: Satan had preemptively counterfeited Christian sacraments in pagan religion.
Historian Franz Cumont, in 1899, interprets Tertullian’s mark as a “brand.”
In 1959, German archaeologist Hilga von Heintze reads Cumont and starts the business about the Ludovisi Sarcophagus “X” being a Mithraic sign.
Beskow, in 1979, dismatles the long-standing academic belief that initiates of Mithras were branded on their foreheads.
Diana Kleiner, in 1992, accepts von Heintze, misses or dismisses Beskow, and claims, without citation, that coin portraits of Hostilian sometimes have an X. Kleiner did not reply to my inquiry about this.
Years ago I asked historian Richard Gordon, a leading scholar of Roman Mithraism. His answer was blunt. No evidence of Mithraic branding, particularly with an X.
That’s an extraordinary little piece of scholarly history. Because we can watch the idea being constructed, and watch counterevidence being ignored. We have zero evidence of such a Mithraic symbol. And the American Numismatic Society database knows of no Hostilian coinage with an X. So we have an argument that is not only circular, but rests on false starts that reinforce one another.
It also shows us just how self-referential academic scholarship can be. Bad scholarship gets cast in stone. People, especially those who must publish or perish, crave certainty. A Richard Feynman quote seems tailor-made: “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning.”
So here the Ludovisi Sarcophagus becomes interesting for other reasons. It tells us something about ourselves.
But there is one more thing I find interesting. In 1621 the sarcophagus entered a world in which ancient sculpture had enormous value. Cardinal Ludovisi was building one of the great collections of antiquities in Rome. It became famous.
There another unidentified Roman head, over in the Capitoline collection, with an X on his forehead. And he looks quite a bit like you know who.
Frontally, they look pretty similar, considering that one is life sized and one is miniature. When I photographed the two heads in profile and put them side by side, I was struck by an uncanny similarity. The Capitoline head has a reworked nose, so I’ve removed that part of the comparison, because the restoration may well have been based on the sarcophagus.
But look at the rest of the face: the forehead, the brow, the eye, the cheek, the mouth, the chin, the overall profile.
The resulting resemblance could then be taken as independent evidence that the two heads represent the same person. But regardless of the date of the Ludovisi “X”, the X’s are not independent evidence, given what we know of the antique market.
The heads are so similar that I wonder if somebody else noticed the resemblance long ago, possibly after the sarcophagus head got its X but before the Capitoline head did.
Max Vegner, writing in 1979, judged the head to have been extensively reworked. I read the surviving evidence as more superficial than he did. I agree that the X was added later, and that the head was polished after the X was added. When the head was polished by a restorer, the X was already there when that happened. Whether five minutes before, or a thousand years before, we cannot say. I disagree that the locks have been extensively reworked to imitate those of the guy on the sarcophagus. Follow them up to the top of the head. The extent of reworking Vegner proposes would make the thing the equivalent of a complete forgery, which it might be. If it is, it is a very good one.
I’m not saying the two heads portray the same man. They may, or the Ludovisi figure may itself be an idealization. It means only that the two faces are similar enough that someone restoring or selling the Capitoline head might have seen an opportunity to associate it with the much more famous Ludovisi portrait.
I’ve shot thirty thousand photos of Roman heads and have spent enough time looking at recut portraits that I am reasonably confident of that judgment. But it’s a judgment. And I’ve convinced museums to change their claims about recarving and revise their placards. But it’s still a judgment.
All this changes the way I look at the two objects, because there are now several histories to consider. There is the history of the Roman man represented by the sarcophagus. There is the history of the Capitoline head. And there is the history of what later people thought and did about the similarity between them.
We form theories, at least some of which are wrong. One might be right.
And some may be wrong in ways that are now very difficult to see, because they have been written down and copied so many times. The sarcophagus is eighteen hundred years old. The X might be 1,000 years old. The interpretation of the X is 130 years old. The confidence with which the interpretation is now 60 years old. Yet when we encounter the thing today, all those layers arrive simultaneously.
RIP Juro Martanovic
Posted by Bill Storage in Uncategorized on September 16, 2026
Jurai. Euro. Jurko. Incomparable.
Always handy on photo sets, and better at modeling than the pros. He reminded us not to pretend it mattered.
Deliberate abandonment of dignity and restraint – full football. Gorgeous.
2002:11:12 23:36:07
false
Remembering Deep-Pocket 9/11 Marxists
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, History of Science on September 10, 2026
A couple of days after the World Trade Center attacks, posters appeared around San Francisco in astounding density. You couldn’t walk fifty feet on Market Street without seeing one. Their message, as I read it, showed some sophisticated Marxist reasoning: 1. American foreign policy produced conditions leading to anti-American terrorism. 2. Our prosperity was dependent upon an unequal global economic system. 3. Americans had moral responsibility for the violence directed against them. 4. Abandon capitalism.
There is certainly truth in number 1. Number 2 is arguable and has been argued and assumed true in university education, but remains highly contested. It seems to me less plausible today than it might have 25 years ago. Number 3 is the gut punch. It does not follow from 1 or 2. Number 4 is standard Marxist/Marxian bs.
And by that I mean this is typical Marxist reasoning. You prepare a bunch of academic-sounding whereas and then pull a therefore out of your butt.
Let’s take a detailed look. The language is pure Marx. Alienation, social conflict theory, exploitation.
Seven different posters, as follows:
1. Unprovoked?
2. Fighting alienation with alienated means
3. “Today is a great day for the people of Indochina” – Simone Weil
4. The issue raised by social-conflict theory is ine<…> Members of rich societies consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the p<…>. That is, we maintain our affluent way of life by exploiting the poor of the less-developed countries <…>ning our planet in the process.
5. “The chickens are coming home to roost” – Malcolm X
6. “Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING”
7. “got milk?”
The reasoning, plausible in the premises, asinine in conclusion, entails that understanding why someone like Bin Laden hates you is exactly equivalent to accepting their moral judgment of you.
We can dig into their epistemic machinery.
Their conclusion was completely formed before 9/11 happened. Obviously. These things went up in the hundreds or thousands almost overnight. At what cost? Professionally printed – while feigning low-budget – fully adhesive-backed posters appearing immediately says this wasn’t a few Berkeley students on a Kinko’s binge. Somebody had resources, organization, and a preexisting political network capable of turning an event only a day old into a finished ideological product.
They started with a conclusion, then looked at 9/11 through the available vocabulary of their political worldview. Every road led back to capitalism, imperialism, consumption, alienation, exploitation. The remarkable thing is how little room there is in the seven captions for the actual agency of the attackers.
“Unprovoked?” is standard Marxist catechism. It invites you to supply the answer the poster-maker already knows. The question can mean “Did the United States have a history that helps explain al-Qaeda’s hostility?” That would be a charitable reading, and a legitimate historical question. Or it can mean “Was the United States morally responsible for this attack?” At best, the poster exploits the slippage and the grief.
In San Francisco, 9/11 wasn’t an abstract geopolitical event occurring to people somewhere else. The social distance was extraordinarily small. Many people I worked with knew someone on one of those airplanes or in the towers. I did. The Marxist posters immediately converted an intensely human catastrophe into an illustration of a preexisting theory of global political economy.
“Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING” is a straight-out accusation. The photo supplies the emotional force, the caption tells you who is to bear responsibility.
I have, or probably had, a couple of devout and honest Marxist friends, innocent, somehow able to partition belief from evidence in their minds, the way they assure themselves the Christians do. Beyond them, I see only academic capitalists who lie about following Marx. They lie for their own economic gain, just like Karl Marx did.
Hey, Tithi Bhattacharya, Richard Wolff, Vivek Chibber, David Harvey, and Nancy Fraser. Got Ben and Jerry’s?
Epistemic/epistemological horseshit. Marxists cannot be wrong.
Marxism, as is obvious to anyone who has opened Das Kapital, is immune to disconfirmation. If workers become revolutionary, that’s evidence for the theory. If they don’t, that’s also evidence, because false consciousness, ideology, and bourgeois institutions explain their failure to revolt. The theory has an answer either way.
Americans have a high standard of living and are attacked. That is evidence that capitalism and imperialism generate resentment. The quarter century following is equally accommodated: the system is exploiting people enough to prevent resistance, and American cultural dominance is suppressing awareness.
Poor countries resist: class conflict.
Poor countries don’t resist: alienation and false consciousness.
We see a conceptual system absorbing unexpected observations without allowing the observation to alter the system.
The posters ask: What if the attackers had reasons? They don’t allow: What if those reasons don’t explain the attack so well?
Beyond the epistemological issue of a theory being immune to disconfirmation (Karl Popper’s criterion), we can use another idea from History of Science: explanatory adequacy.
The posters did not ask, even implicitly: “What does 9/11 tell us that we didn’t know yesterday?”
They announced: “9/11 tells us what we already knew.” Of course you did.
Body Belay
Posted by Bill Storage in speleology on August 13, 2026
Body Belay
On July 1st, 1978, Mike Thornhill, Andrea Dakoski and I packed our personal gear and the day’s group gear into Boy Scout Yucca packs, including two aluminum-rung etriers given to me by Woody Stover after his return from Annapurna, a drill kit, a rack of pitons, and one hundred feet of Mammut Dynaflex – purple at a distance, but up close a tiny checkerboard of bright red and deep blue. To my eye, the most beautiful rope ever made. People stared at it. Got lost in it. To my hand, perfect. Supple, no kinks, the ideal spring rate.
It would be our second trip to the only significant infeeder to the 7600-foot-long Rubber Chicken Highway. On our first trip we’d gotten up a little nuisance climb where a small stream drops into the Highway at Station B51. Two hundred feet beyond it was an unclimbable waterfall twenty feet high, the first of what, forty-four years later, became known as the Dilation Domes. We wanted to know what was up there.
On this trip I’d do the climb. I traversed around a deep pool on ledges and climbed six feet on small, downward-sloping ridges. They would have been impossible to climb except for the slight curvature of the dome, which gave me opposing surfaces to bridge against. It was the limit of what I could straddle. That, plus the spray, made hand-drilling a bolt twelve feet off the floor awkward. I came down to rest several times.
I hung one of Woody’s etriers from the bolt and climbed to the second rung, where I could see cracks that might take a piton.
I had learned that Chouinard Knifeblades and the shorter Bugaboos were the only pitons that fit the cracks I encountered in West Virginia. Still, I’d been plagued by college poverty, so I carried other stuff I’d bought along the way.
The taper of the crack in front of me was slightly odd, in my experience. I tested the crack depth with my shortest Knifeblade. It was the right piton. I’d been carrying this Cassin “malleable” piton on my rack for five years. Malleable was what Cassin sold it as. And, sunk cost fallacy, though Woody had given it to me, I needed to use it.
I remember thinking about this climb, that if I were ever to take a fall because a pin popped out on me, this would be the place to do it: overhung, no ledges or spires, clean fall. I did the math. My last piece was four feet down: a Number 4 “Long Thin” Bugaboo, 5/32, bombproof, sitting twelve feet off the floor. An eight-foot fall on paper. But with stretch and whatever slack was out, it would be close. The ground was a pool two or three feet deep with a smooth gravel bottom. If I hit, it wouldn’t be hard.
The belief about malleable pitons was that soft steel would deform to fit the particular shape of the crack. The reality was that soft steel lacked spring. I knew that, at least on paper, but it took a good bit of hammering to set and was fully in the crack.
I hung the second etrier. One mantle move and I was done.
Except that the piece of junk popped out as I fully loaded it.
Mike Thornhill, God bless him, saw the fall in progress and performed the body belay perfectly. Thought on his feet, to be precise. It was a short but consequential fall, and the risk of hitting the ground was real. Mike understood that the problem wasn’t the force in the rope. It was the total distance I had to fall before I hit. He jumped backward and leaned way back, his body almost perpendicular to the rope as it went tight.
Mike Thornhill, God bless him, saw the fall in progress and performed the body belay perfectly. He understood that the problem wasn’t the force in the rope, it was the distance I had to fall before I hit. He leaped backward, digging his heels in and throwing his weight low.
I stopped with my feet skimming the water. My carbide lamp flew into the pool. His skid marks stopped inches from the edge.
“Did ya fall?” Mike asked.
We fished the lamp out with a loop of Dynaflex.
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Seven Holes in the Head
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Science on July 21, 2026
Galileo, Order, and the Persistence of Reasoning through Aesthetics
Sunflowers follow the sun across the sky, and the moon controls the tides. Move a magnet over iron filings and the iron responds. You’ve already accepted action at a distance and celestial influence. Why dismiss planetary influence on human disposition outright?
In 1610 Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius, announcing discovery of four moons of Jupiter, which he called the Medicean Stars to flatter his patron. Scholars were divided. A contemporary astronomer, Francesco Sizzi, authored a small treatise in response, Dianoia Astronomica.
No summary of Sizzi’s reasoning does it justice. You need it in his words.
Just as in the microcosm there are seven ‘windows’ in the head (two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth), so in the macrocosm God has placed two beneficent stars, two maleficent stars, two luminaries (sun and moon), and one indifferent. The seven days of the week follow from these. Finally, since ancient times the alchemists had made each of the seven metals correspond to one of the planets; gold to the sun, silver to the moon, copper to Venus, quicksilver to Mercury, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn.
From these and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven metals, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven… Besides, the Jews and other ancient nations as well as modern Europeans, have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have named them from the seven planets; now if we increase the number of planets, this whole system falls to the ground… Moreover, the satellites [of Jupiter] are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.
There’s reasoning for you. Seven planets. Seven holes in the head. Case closed.
Today we know how the sunflower works. We know about phototropism, auxins, differential growth rates. We understand the mechanism. Francesco Sizzi didn’t.
His world system was built on regularities, from which he inferred relationships. He saw a universe whose underlying order could be read from recurring patterns.
For Sizzi, the universe was built upon sevens: seven planets, seven metals, seven days of the week, seven openings in the head. The cosmic order was complete. Galileo’s discovery was disruptive.
For a 16th century investigator of natural phenomena, the burden of proof was on the skeptic of long-held astrological knowledge. One reason astrology hung on so long was that no one came up with a satisfactory account of causation itself. In the 18th century, philosopher David Hume demolished the notion that we directly perceive causal necessity. We still debate what causation ultimately is. Like Sizzi, we observe regularities. We infer causes.
Sizzi was not defending ignorance. He was defending a conception of reality – and giving a nod to Pragmatism, a philosophy that wouldn’t emerge for another 300 years. The cosmos, as he understood it, was a web of correspondences. Harmony was the evidence. Symmetry meant something. The recurrence of patterns across different domains was evidence of a cosmic order. Rejecting those patterns in favor of four pinpoints of light visible only through a novel instrument did not seem rational.
We hold up Galileo as an example of speaking evidence to power. But most of us don’t reason as Galileo did.
We, like Sizzi, are drawn to elegant theories. Modern folk admire symmetry. We take pleasure in explanations that unify diverse phenomena. We find beauty persuasive. Often we discover reasons for believing something only after we have fallen in love with the shape of the idea.
We can’t blame Sizzi for seeking order. But he trusted the order he had already found more than the anomaly staring back at him from the telescope. The uncomfortable possibility is that we are usually closer to Sizzi than to Galileo.
We inherit the results of the scientific revolution, but not always its habits. Given a choice between a beautiful system and an inconvenient observation, the temptation remains as it was in 1610. The telescope has merely changed shape.
Bungee Disaster Reality Apathy
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Uncategorized on June 15, 2026
The viral footage shared under headlines like “Bungee Jumping Horror: Terrifying Safety Lapse Caught On Camera In Brazil” by WION is real, not AI-generated. The incident was verified by law enforcement.
The tragedy involved a 21-year-old woman named Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas. It occurred at the Ponte Esquelética in São Paulo, Brazil.
Legal and news investigations confirmed that in gross negligence the crew responsible for the jump failed to secure the bungee before she went over the edge and died. Men running the bungee jumping activity were arrested.
The footage is surreal due to the total lack of standard safety protocol it shows. AI suspicion is understandable. The footage is captured simultaneously from multiple angles. The announcer badly mispronounces “ravine” and “untethered.” The announcer’s cadence is way off. The reason people are skeptical of the story is that the announcer seems fake.
And she is. This highlights a major trend in how media is being repackaged. The video makes the story seem a hoax because it is cheap corporate automation overlaid on top of real tragedy.
Outlets like WION no longer use human voice actors for quick-turnaround news scripts. They scrape local text (in this case, Brazilian Portuguese news), run it through an auto-translator, and feed it into AI voice generators like ElevenLabs.
The reason there is simultaneous multi-angle footage, which usually screams “staged hoax”, is a heartbreaking byproduct of social-media performative adrenaline culture.
The victim was highly active on social media and had just posted a joking caption to her Instagram stories (“Who was the crazy person who let me jump off a bridge???”). (Indiatimes)
The bridge is a notorious hotspot for social-media thrills.
A spotter looks right at a giant, dead-weight coil of unattached bungee rope and then proceeds to help launch a human being. It defies basic human survival logic. Three operators pick up a human being and hurl her of a bridge without doing a single mechanical check.
On the AI angle, constant exposure to deception should train people to question everything, right? Like how forgeries in art sharpened authentication skills. Instead what is emerging is a kind of collective indifference where distinguishing real from fake seems pointless.
There’s a feedback loop here.
In 2016 Aviv Ovadya predicted we’d see reality apathy. Healthy doubt requires effort, literacy, and motivation. Indifference requires none.
In Chuck Klosterman’s 2019 Reality Apathy, deepfake videos, holograms, and fabricated media are so pervasive that distinguishing reality from fiction is too much work. Two hipsters discuss horrific news while emotionally numb and dismissive.
Reality apathy is here. But what Ovadya and Klosterman didn’t imagine was a time when reality would be packaged to look fake – to lure viewers who are perfectly happy consuming fiction packaged as truth.
When a real human tragedy is edited by an automated script, voiced by a robotic clone, and visually framed to look like click bait, it detaches us from the genuine horror of the event. It forces us to analyze pixels and phonemes rather than contemplate safety, techniques, and criminal neglect.
I have friends on Facebook who post videos of hot chicks in low-airspace cave crawlways wearing sleeveless spandex and no elbow pads. 👍
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The Lancellotti Discobolus
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art on June 9, 2026
Engineering meets art history
The Discobolus of Myron is one of the most famous sculptures in the world, despite the fact that it no longer exists.
What you see here are two Roman marble copies of an original Greek bronze, made perhaps four hundred years earlier. As I stand in Palazzo Massimo, looking at the famous Discobolus Lancellotti and the more damaged version to its left, It seems to me that “copy” doesn’t tell the whole story.
How do we know it’s a copy if the original is lost? We don’t. Not really. But a few pieces of evidence support it. Multiple Roman statues survive showing nearly the same composition with variations. Ancient writers, especially Pliny the Elder, mention a famous Discobolus by Myron. From this, scholars infer a lost Greek prototype.
But that inference depends on assumptions. That Roman versions derive from a single famous original. That the literary references correspond to these sculptures. That the similarities are too strong to be coincidence,
and that Roman sculptors were reproducing admired earlier works rather than improvising freely and copying each other.
Reasonable conclusions, but not certain. Classical archaeology, seems to me, often speaks with a certitude that conceals how inferential the whole enterprise is. The “original Myron Discobolus” is a scholarly composite. The original survives as an intellectual reconstruction.
The nearly-complete Discobolus Lancellotti looks so perfect that people instinctively assume it must be the “best” copy. But the fragmentary version beside it in some ways preserves more truthful structural details. In particular, traces of the massive support on the hip show how difficult the pose really was in marble. Bronze could suspend limbs in space. Marble – not as much. The cleaner version partly hides the engineering problem.
The first thing that strikes you about the Discobolus is motion. Or rather, suspended motion. The body is wound tight, almost like a spring under torsion. The torso twists against the hips. The shoulders oppose the legs. We see stored rotational-energy.
But the face remains calm, almost indifferent. Modern athletes grimace and strain. Our culture likes that. Greek classical sculpture often suppresses it. The ideal athlete is not simply powerful. He is self-controlled. Emotionally disciplined. The body may be near maximum exertion, but the face refuses to surrender composure. It feels uncanny to modern viewers. Pliny criticized the lack of facial expression. Cicero wrote that “Myron’s works are not yet very close to the truth.”
The Discobolus doesn’t look like someone throwing a discus. He looks like the idea of controlled effort. I’m guessing that’s what Myron intended. This pose is deeply awkward in marble. The original bronze allowed limbs to extend freely into space. Thin structures are possible in bronze.
Marble is less forgiving. It wants support, and mass underneath the stress points. Roman sculptors adapting Greek bronzes had to add engineering solutions into the composition. Tree trunks, struts, and short connecting bridges. The damaged copy exposes more of that hidden problem. It looks slightly less like a perfect Platonic form and more like a negotiation with gravity.
We are taught to think of these sculptures as serene embodiments of timeless ideals, floating above ordinary technical concerns. But ancient sculptors were also engineers. They had to deal with leverage, fracture points, and concepts like center of mass.
A Roman copyist translating bronze into marble was solving a physics problem, and altering the sculpture in the process.
And we should clarify this idea of Roman copyists. By the imperial period, elite Roman culture was saturated with Greek art, Greek education, Greek teachers, Greek craftsmen. Many sculptors working in Rome were ethnically Greek, culturally Greek, or trained in Greek workshops and traditions. Some even signed their works with Greek names.
So when we say “Roman copy,” don’t imagine a guy in a toga photocopying ancient Greece. He might speak Greek, train in Athens, and sculpt Italian marble for a Roman patron.
“Roman copy of a Greek original” is misleading shorthand. By the imperial period, elite Greco-Roman culture was deeply entangled. Roman aristocrats consumed Greek art as cultural legitimacy. Entire chapters of Greek visual culture survive because wealthy Romans liked decorating their villas.
This all contributes to why art historians argue about copies. Every copy contains interpretation.
From different angles, this composition changes radically. One viewpoint produces clarity and balance. Another produces compressed confusion. Limbs overlap and his body seems almost tangled. Greek sculpture was increasingly designed for controlled viewing angles.
This Discobolus was discovered in 1781 on the Esquiline Hill. It emerged during the great age of aristocratic Roman collecting, when antiquities were prestige objects.
Like other classical sculptures, the Discobolus was recruited into political ideology. It was in the first load of artwork confiscated during Napoleon’s Italian campaign. Nazi aesthetics seized upon these athletic bodies as evidence of racial ideals, despite the obvious inconvenience that the sculpture was Greco-Roman.
Hitler personally admired the Lancellotti Discobolus. Hermann Göring purchased it in 1938 from Prince Lancelotti. It seems every era reinvents antiquity in its own image. The statue somehow survived.
See it in moving pictures:
Whirled War II and Lexical Parsing Errors
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on May 18, 2026
The “World War Eleven” incident is now famous on Fox News, invisible on the New York Times. Evidence of astonishing stupidity? Or a harmless verbal stumble inflated by fascists.
Beyond the matter of Ilhan Omar’s aptitude, it raises a structural issue. What competencies should a representative have just to function as a representative?
In a republic, especially one with public hearings, media immersion and symbolic gestures, representatives are usually expected to embody a certain minimum civic literacy. Not expertise, but enough historical and cultural wits to communicate competently with constituents.
The Second World War is one of the organizing events of modern political consciousness. The UN, NATO, the Cold War, Europe’s borders, the American federal state, and noise about fascism and democracy all orbit around it. If someone genuinely doesn’t know there was no “World War Eleven,” you might naturally wonder where the floor is. It is less the mistake itself than the uncertainty it introduces.
One tradition says representatives should be broadly educated, rhetorically skilled, historically informed, capable of judgment beyond “light and transient causes” as the founders called them. That’s the old republican ideal. Think James Madison. The risk of minimum standards is oligarchy. Once you impose competency filters, who designs the test? Jim Crow era literacy tests famously became tools for exclusion, with test questions like: “In the space below, draw three circles, one inside (engulfed by) the other.”
I love that question because it is a philosophy of language seminar. Ludwig Wittgenstein would enjoy it. Meaning depends on use, shared practice, and cooperative context. Remove the cooperative context and language becomes radically unstable.
Case in point, the phrasing “one inside the other” becomes contradictory when applied to three circles collectively. “The other” grammatically implies a pairwise relationship, not a three-level nesting. Meanwhile “engulfed by” suggests total enclosure, yet only one circle can directly engulf another in a simple nested structure.
With three circles, “one inside the other” breaks down. The construction presupposes a binary relation. English idiomatically uses “the other” when exactly two relevant objects are in play. Once there are three, the grammar can no longer specify an arrangement. And, even if you judge it to mean concentric, you’d need the outer circle be inside the inner, as a literal reading would require. Non-Euclidean space?
A literal-minded reader, especially one primed to interpret carefully, reasonably concludes the instruction is malformed. It generates referential nonsense. Which circle is “the one”?
Other questions on the test are clearly designed to be obtuse. “In the first circle below write the last letter of the first word beginning with ‘L’.” What? It reveals the enormous gap between practical language use and formal precision. Interestingly, it flunks the ignorant and logicians alike.
I digressed, but I’ll return to philosophy of language in a moment.
The competing democratic ideal – competing with the republican belief that voters should be literate and their representative more so – says representatives should resemble the people, including their imperfections. Technocrats cease to represent ordinary citizens. Credentialed elites speak eloquently while understanding little.
Still, there’s a distinction between being non-elite and being uninformed. Few American warehouse workers think there was a World War Eleven. In ancient Rome, someone publicly fumbling a basic historical reference would have been seen even by illiterates as a fool diminishing the dignity of office.
If you ignore, for the moment, that matter of what should be required legally, there’s the question of what it takes to actually do the representing – to represent a constituency effectively. Representation requires some degree of shared cultural vocabulary. If representatives no longer possess historical references assumed by the public, communication between government and governed is impossible – in the Wittgenstein philosophy of language sense.
So the incident may matter less as evidence that Omar is stupid and more as a symptom of uncertainty about what democratic competence means today. We no longer agree on the minimum cultural equipment expected of public officials, or even whether such expectations are legitimate. Does the community Omar represents know about WW II?
If you’re a CNN libtard, you probably don’t even know about Omar’s WW Eleven utterance. If you’re a Fox fascist, you probably don’t know that she immediately corrected herself:
“The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, it was used to detain and deport German, Japanese, Italian immigrants during World War Eleven. Oh, Two. Sorry.”
If you’re interested in language and semantics, you might still wonder how she could make that goof, even if reading from a prompter, even if she immediately corrected it. Reference to Alien Enemies Act and deportation shows familiarity with the subject matter. Knowing that Italians were also deported exceeds median citizen knowledge. Then WW Eleven. Is the author of the words the same person who performed them? Could someone write out her thoughts about WW II and then have a memory lapse deep enough to read the words as if a stranger wrote them? Could a politician fail to review their speech-writer’s work before delivering it? Does “Sorry” acknowledge a reading error? Or that she “misspoke,” as Newsweek reported it, blaming The AP Style Guide preference for Roman numerals, “which could easily be misread as an 11,” Yahoo says.
“Misreading her notes”? Misreading the Roman numeral “II” as “11” in the context of World War seems roughly as plausible as misreading a stop sign to say “Spot” after having grown up in America. We dyslexic types might misread the letters s-t-o-p, but not on a red octagon. Could someone read aloud so mechanically, so disconnected from meaning, that the act of converting text to speech could block out a commonplace phrase? It’s not a phonological substitution, not a case of semantic familiarity without lexical capacity. No, it’s a visual parsing error that was not caught and prevented by fluency with the subject matter.
France, Italy, the Netherlands and Canada require applicants for citizenship to demonstrate knowledge of national history. No one regards such requirements as equivalent to Jim Crow. Requiring officeholders to meet minimal common-culture standards is hard to dismiss as an unfair standard. Democracy need not require voters to possess deep civic literacy but could plausibly require public officials to possess enough shared knowledge to communicate coherently within the civilization they govern.
Amazon Goes to Brazil
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on September 15, 2026
I’m trying to add a book to my Amazon Seller’s account. Amazon, as you may know, sells books.
It asks me to upload an image of the book. So I upload the images supplied by the publisher. This seems right, almost suspiciously right.
Amazon rejects it.
I read the instructions. They want photos of the front and back cover, the title page, and they want the ASIN number. Maybe a photo of the ASIN number.
“Only real-world images are accepted. Scanned or digital images, or images that have been amended, are not acceptable.”
Ah. I have entered Brazil.
Digital images are not acceptable. Amazon wants me to upload an image, a non-digital one. Am I to shoot with film? No, that would require scanning. Unacceptable.
And “amended” seems a bit bureaucratic here. An amendment ordinarily means a change made to a document, agreement, law, or record. You amend a contract. You don’t amend a photograph. Since 1990, when Photoshop came out, the word has been “edited.”
I think Amazon means it wants an unedited picture.
“Edited” isn’t merely more familiar. It’s semantically better. Does Amazon object to every possible edit? If I photograph the book, crop away my kitchen table, square up the perspective, correct white balance, and save it as a JPEG, have I “amended” the image? Apparently so; they rejected mine.
Photo of real-world object vs. “real-world photo.” It would be a start.
The striking thing is that the problem isn’t simply terrible writing. It’s a failure to model the user’s situation. Someone had a budget.
It’s as though the world’s most sophisticated bureaucracy has hired a clerk who communicates exclusively through fragments of an ISO 9001 manual. Here we, its customers, are given the perspective of its internal compliance system.
I, a seller and customer, encounter it from the perspective of a person thinking: I have a book. The publisher gave me excellent cover art. Amazon wants a picture of the book.
Eventually, I surmised that what they mean is that, for this particular step, they want a photograph of the physical book, not marketing copy. They probably want to know the seller actually possesses a copy, rather than downloading the publisher’s cover art and claiming to have a warehouse full of books somewhere. And no fraudster would think of buying one physical book and shooting an unamended photo.
Proof of physical product? Why not say so.
“Please upload an unedited photo of the physical, paper book. We use this to verify that you possess the physical product. Publisher-supplied cover art can be uploaded later but won’t be accepted at this step. ”
Three sentences. That would transform the entire interaction. “Suddenly “Real-world,” “scanned,” “digital,” and “amended” become intelligible. The seller need not reverse-engineer it from vocabulary created by a particularly inarticulate compliance department.
Amazon is an extraordinarily sophisticated technological enterprise. Somewhere behind this little dialog box are probably image-recognition systems of astonishing complexity, databases containing billions of objects, fraud-detection algorithms, and artificial intelligence capable of doing things that would have looked like science fiction last week.
And yet we have “real world unamended image.”
Oh, and the dropdown box for book category has 100+ unsorted items in it. And if you pick one, it doesn’t stick. All books are category Books/Economics.
It’s very Brazil, which is almost a great movie, available on Amazon.
Terry Gilliam had one terrific idea: what happens when bureaucracy becomes so elaborate that the machinery intended to serve people becomes the thing people have to serve?
Unfortunately, Gilliam had several other ideas he tried to put in the same movie – a Kafkaesque slapstick comedy, a dystopian political satire, a parody of mid-century futurism, and something about terrorism and state violence.
Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have gotten Gilliam’s terrific one exactly right.
Update 9/16:
“the images you provided did not meet our image guidelines it mismatch the author name.”
Update 9/17:
books, humor, publishing, self-publishing, writing
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