Things to See in Palazzo Massimo
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art, History of Christianity on November 10, 2025
Mike and Andrea visit Rome this week. Here’s what I think they should see in Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo. Not that I’d try to push my taste on anyone.
The Via Labicana Augustus
The Via Labicana Augustus was discovered in 1910 near the Via Labicana, southeast of Rome. It probably dates to 12 BCE, the year Augustus became Pontifex Maximus, chief priest of Rome.
The statue shows him veiled, performing a sacrifice, wearing the toga pulled over his head in the ritual gesture known as capite velato. Unlike the heroic, idealized Augustus of Prima Porta, this image presents him not as a godlike conqueror but as the pious restorer of Rome’s religious traditions. The face retains a calm, idealized realism – a softened continuation of late Republican verism – while the body’s smooth drapery and composed stance convey dignity and divine favor.
The piece reveals Augustus’s political strategy of merging personal authority with religious legitimacy. By showing himself as priest rather than warrior, he presented his rule as moral renewal and continuity with the Republic’s sacred traditions, rather than naked monarchy.
The Portonaccio Sarcophagus
The Portonaccio Sarcophagus, carved in high relief around 180-190 CE, is one of the most elaborate Roman sarcophagi from the late second century CE. It was discovered in a tomb in 1931 near the ancient Via Tiburtina in the Portonaccio area of Rome.
The front is a dense, chaotic battle scene. Roman soldiers clash with barbarians in a tangle of limbs, shields, and horses. There’s no clear spatial depth, just a frenzied mass of combat, carved almost in relief upon relief. At the center stands the Roman general, larger and calmer than the rest, commanding order amid chaos. His face is idealized, yet individualized; his bare head suggests he may have died before receiving a victory crown.
This style marks a shift from the classical order of earlier art to the expressive, almost abstract energy of late imperial sculpture. It reflects the constant warfare and political instability of the era. It likely commemorated General Aulus Iulius Pompilius, who served under Marcus Aurelius.
Colossal Bust of Gordian III
The colossal marble bust of Gordian III presents a striking – if not bizarre – image of the boy-emperor struggling to embody imperial gravitas. Created around AD 244, it reflects the tension between youthful vulnerability and the formal ideals of Roman authority.
Gordian III came to the throne after a cascade of assassinations during the “Year of the Six Emperors.” The sculptor has rendered him with the smooth, unlined face of an adolescent, but framed by the austere, hieratic composition typical of imperial portraiture – short military haircut, heavy-lidded eyes gazing slightly upward, and a thick neck suggesting strength he did could not have possessed. The result is almost tragic: the image insists on imperial permanence while hinting at fragility.
Stylistically, the bust belongs to the late Severan, early soldier-emperor phase, where portraiture shifts from the individualized realism of the Antonines to a more schematic, abstract treatment of features. The deep drilling of the hair and the intense, static expression anticipate the hard linearity of third-century imperial art.
The Charioteers
The charioteer portrait busts date from the early fourth century CE and depict professional aurigae – chariot racers who were the sports celebrities of late imperial Rome.
These busts show men with distinctive attributes of their trade: short, tightly curled hair, intense gazes, and tunics bound with leather straps across the chest, used to secure their protective harnesses during races. The faces are individualized, confident, and slightly idealized, conveying both athletic vigor and the proud self-awareness of public fame.
They likely commemorated successful drivers from the great Roman circuses, perhaps freedmen who had risen to wealth and status through racing. The style, with its crisp carving and alert expression, reflects late Roman portraiture’s mix of realism and formal abstraction – an art no longer concerned with classical balance, but with projecting charisma and presence.
Republicans
The so-called General from Tivoli (Terme inv. 106513) was found beneath the Temple of Hercules in 1925. Dating to about 70 – 90 BC, he was probably a lieutenant of Sulla. The late-Republican portrait busts (Inv. 112301 and 114759) are famous for their verism – a style emphasizing unidealized realism. Rather than the smooth, youthful perfection of Greek sculpture, Roman patrons in this period wanted faces that looked weathered and unmistakably mortal. Eyes were often sharply undercut and hollowed to give depth and intensity. Cheeks could appear gaunt, lips thin and compressed, necks stringy. The overall effect was one of disciplined austerity and civic virtue – a face hardened by service to the Republic.
The young woman’s elaborate hairstyle (inv. 125591, just above) is a social signal, suggesting she belonged to a wealthy family or wanted to look the part. The combination of a classicizing ideal face with a detailed fashionable hairstyle suggests a woman who wants to present both grace and her social status. That blend of realism and idealization is typical of the late republic.
This was more selective exaggeration than realism. These men were advertising moral qualities: gravitas, virtus, fides. By the time of Caesar, you see a blending of this verism with a hint of idealization, anticipating the smooth, godlike Augustan portraits to come.
Speaking of late Republicans, this marble portrait of an elderly woman with her hair in a bun brings to mind another later Republican – Ronald Reagan.
The Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus
The continuous-frieze sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus shows New Testament scenes on its front; and New and Old Testament scenes on its lid, along with pagan elements. The grape harvest imagery on the lid is ambiguous; it appears on pagan and Christian sarcophagi with identical elements. From left to right on the lid: Jesus nativity scene, sacrifice of Isaac, inscription naming the deceased, image of the deceased as scholar, grape harvest scene.
Carvings on the front of the sarcophagus: Arrest of Peter (Acts 12:3), miracle of water and wine (with possible baptism reference, John 2:1), orant figure, miracle of loaves (Mark 6:30–44, Matt 14:13–21, Luke 9:10–17, John 6:1–14), healing a man born blind (John 9:1), prediction of Peter’s denial (Mark 14:27–31, Matt 26:30–35, Luke 22:31–34, John 13:36–38), resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:1), and supplication of Lazarus’s sister (John 11:32).
The scenes on this sarcophagus include several apparent departures from scriptural miracle stories. Jesus appears in three places as magician, using a wand to perform miracles. He stands above five baskets of bread, a number consistent with most sarcophagi of its age but inconsistent with either of the loaves-and-fish scriptural pairs, where the remaining baskets number seven and twelve (Matthew 4:17, Matthew 15:34). This could have been a choice made by the sculptor for purely artistic reasons. The orant figure in the center is similar to those seen on earlier gravestones, and does not seem to be a scriptural reference. This posture is similar to that of the three youths in the furnace and the common sarcophagus scene of Jesus passing the new law to Peter and Paul (non-scriptural).
The Marcus Claudianus sarcophagus stands out for the prominence of Johannine-only imagery – Lazarus, the man born blind, Cana – scenes that are either uniquely Johannine or given distinct theological weight in that gospel. I don’t think you’ll hear this from anyone but me. I love this sarc for this reason. Compared to the sarcophagi from the Vatican necropolis, whose iconography often centers on synoptic or composite miracle cycles (feeding, healing, Jonah, Daniel, Good Shepherd), this sarc shows a notable shift toward Christological revelation rather than simple miracle narrative.
That shift says to me: mid-4th-century context, when Johannine motifs had become the backbone of Christian funerary theology. By that time, art was turning from generic symbols of deliverance to narratives that expressed Christ as Logos and life-giver, echoing themes prominent in the theological debates of the post-Nicene generation. The Lazarus scene, for example, takes on explicit resurrection connotations, and the healing of the blind man becomes an emblem of illumination through baptism – precisely the kind of allegorical reading developed in the decades after Constantine.
Earlier dating has been given by some scholars. Bunk. That impulse reflects anxiety over the scarcity of securely dated pre-Constantinian Christian monuments in Rome. Stylistically and iconographically, the Claudianus piece sits more naturally with sarcophagi of the 340s-360s: compressed compositions, monumental heads, frontal orant, and a selective, theological rather than narrative use of miracle scenes. And that’s probably more than you wanted to know about a topic I find fascinating because of what it says about modern Catholicism.
Bronze Athletes
The bronze athletes date from the Hellenistic period (second to first century BCE) convey the victory, exhaustion and fleeting nature of athletic glory.
The most famous of them, the Terme Boxer, was discovered on the Quirinal Hill in 1885. He sits slumped, body still powerful but spent, his face swollen and scarred, his hands wrapped in leather thongs. The artist cast every cut and bruise in bronze, even inlaid copper to suggest blood and wounds. Yet his expression is not defeat but endurance – a man who’s given everything to the arena.
Nearby, the Hellenistic Prince (or Terme Ruler), found in the same area, stands upright and nude, the counterpart to the seated boxer. His stance is heroic but weary, his gaze detached. Together the two figures tell both a moral story and a physical one: the the beauty and cost of strength.
These bronzes were likely imported to Rome as prized Greek originals or high-quality copies for a wealthy patron’s villa. They embody the Greek ideal of athletic excellence reframed through Roman admiration for the discipline and suffering behind it.
Wall Paintings/Frescoes
The villa wall paintings in Palazzo Massimo form one of the richest surviving narratives of Roman domestic life and taste. Most come from suburban villas around Rome, dating from the late Republic through the early Empire, and they recreate the visual world of elite Roman interiors.
The centerpiece is the set from Livia’s Villa at Prima Porta, discovered in 1863. The walls depict an illusionistic garden in full bloom – fruit trees, flowers, birds, and a soft blue sky.
Other rooms, such as those from the Villa of Farnesina, show mythological scenes, architectural vistas, and richly colored panels framed by columns and imaginary shrines. These follow the Second and Third Styles of Roman wall painting: first creating deep, theatrical perspective, then shifting to flatter, more decorative compositions filled with miniature landscapes and floating figures.
Taken together, the frescoes chart Rome’s transition from the austere republican taste for illusionistic space and Greek motifs to the sophisticated imperial language of myth, luxury, and controlled fantasy.
Cristo Docente
The Cristo Docente (Teaching Christ) clearly shows a youthful, androgynous body with small breasts. This is visual language flowing directly from Greco-Roman conventions of the philosopher, ephebe, or Apollo rather than an ethnographically accurate depiction of any historical Jesus. This one of the earliest depictions of Jesus, and a very rare example of Christian art not associated with burial. I wonder what the Vatican would trade for it.
Early Christian artists weren’t attempting realism; they were translating abstract theological ideas into iconic forms the viewer would recognize. The effeminate traits signal spiritual rather than biological qualities – gentleness, wisdom, eternal youth – while the frontal, often seated or teaching pose evokes authority and composure. In that cultural moment, a physically idealized, effeminate figure would convey the moral and divine authority expected of a teacher or savior without challenging Roman notions of masculinity, which were more flexible in the context of idealized youth and divinity.
The Christian anxiety that arises from this piece crack me up. Modern viewers, steeped in historical or doctrinal literalism, try to read the image literally. That’s a projection: the image is a theological construction, not an ethnographic one. Christian art critics, especially in the early 20th century, bristled at the iconography and tried to brush the thing off as a young girl posing as a scholar, rather than relaxing into the idea that early Christians weren’t like them.
The Discobulus
This discobolus is interesting because it’s a Roman copy of a Greek original (traditionally attributed to Myron, mid-5th century BCE) but reinterpreted in a Roman context. Several points stand out:
Roman taste for idealized athleticism – Unlike the athletes that highlight strain and fatigue, the Discobolus captures frozen, perfect form in mid-action, emphasizing harmony, proportion, and controlled energy. The figure is taut, but serene, a demonstration of mastery over both body and motion.
Technical virtuosity – The sculpture compresses a dynamic twist of the torso and rotation of limbs into a balanced composition. The Massimo copy preserves this elegance while subtly softening the muscular definition compared with Hellenistic copies that exaggerate tension.
Cultural resonance in Rome – Displaying this statue in a Roman villa or public space signaled the moral and civic ideals associated with disciplined youth, athletic virtue, and controlled action—qualities the Roman elite wanted to project.
Roman copy as a lens on reception – we see how Romans interpreted Greek originals, choosing what to preserve, emphasize, or downplay. Unlike more dramatic Hellenistic works, this Discobolus shows restraint, aligning with Roman preferences for clarity, proportion, and intelligibility over theatricality. It’s a visual bridge between Greek athletic ideal and Roman moral-aesthetic ideology.
Bronze from Caligula’s Ships
The bronze fittings come from the two grand ceremonial vessels built in the lake of Lake Nemi, ordered by Gaius Caligula around AD 37-41. By commissioning such a floating palace, Caligula aligned himself with Hellenistic kings and with the mastery of nature. The bronzes speak that language of luxury and sacerdotal authority.
The vessels and their fittings were masterpieces of maritime technology, supported by massive beams, outriggers, twin rudders, and elaborate decoration. The bronze protomes were integrated in the structural and mechanical system of the ship (rudders, beams, mooring rings). Here is the transition from Republic to Imperial ornamentation in full flourish – Roman taste for Hellenistic luxury, combined with native iconography. The bronzes bridge functional object, architectural ornament, and political symbol.
Climbing Taiwan Removable Bolts Review
Posted by Bill Storage in Engineering & Applied Physics on November 6, 2025
Friends and I have been experimenting with removable bolts in muddy caves, and many of us have been concerned about the robustness of the devices. I don’t mean their strength. They’re plenty strong. I mean how well do they hold up in a cave environment – and can we be ensured of a good placement. I just got some new removable bolts from Climbing Taiwan (CT). Compared to the Petzl Pulse design, which have proven to be finicky in caves, they look like they might be better suited for use in cave environments.
I don’t have a cave or a hammer drill on hand right now, so I put a 10mm masonry bit in my handheld driver and drilled holes in a concrete block to test the bolts.
For this testing I wanted to drill the hole barely long enough to fit the bolt in – against the recommendations of the manufacturer. I wanted to experiment with the consequences of crud in the bottom of the hole.
Normally, with 3/8 and 10mm bolts wedge bolts wedge bolts I don’t blow out the holes or brush them underground. I merely withdraw the drill with it rotating slightly and pull the dust out of the hole. I’ve placed hundreds of bolts and have never had a spinner. I torque my 3/8 wedge bolts to 25 foot pounds underground.
Because, for these tests, I am drilling vertically downward and I am using a masonry bit instead of a hammer drill bit, I had to brush the dust out of these holes. I did not use a blow tube. This is really bad bolting hygiene. I wanted to see if I could gum up the works. I am intentionally using these removable bolts wrong, against the advice of the manufacturer, and against good sense.
To simulate the abuse that bolts take underground, I first mixed the concrete dust with water and packed it onto the bolt mechanism. Then I poured the sludge into the hole.
Then I added sand to the mix. I packed on as much sand as I could. I also tried getting sand into the threads at the top of the hanger. This proved no problem for installation or removal. I then pushed sand into the hole to see if I could force the wedge through the sand sludge and back toward the outside of the hole.
For the next simulation of cave mud I combined honey and cornstarch. Wet corn starch is fun to use in these experiments because it is a non-euclidean fluid with some odd properties. I again added sand. I then smeared the cornstarch honey sand combination along the sleeve and the threaded region.
For the next test I got a fresh cylinder of clay- rich mud and added it to the mix. The bolt and the sludge clearly filled the entire hole as is visible by the overflow. I did the same with a mix of plumber’s grease and garden dirt. Again, no problem.
I used a pressure washer to clean them. I took them apart to be sure. Good as new.
The manufacturer says they used 2205 stainless steel for the threaded shaft and 304 for everything else. These are smart choices that reflect sound engineering. 304 is very widely used. It’s machinable and has high ductility. Its ultimate strength is several times higher than its yield strength. It is extremely forgiving and has excellent corrosion resistance. Duplex 2205 is much stronger, much more expensive, and has some trade-offs (like weldability), none of which are at all relevant to this usage.
I tested the components for ferromagnetism. In theory, 304 alloy hangers should not be magnetic. OK, little bit of engineering here. 304 is austenitic; its atoms are arranged in a body-centered cubic structure. But when you cut or beat on austenitic stainless, you can cause some degree of room-temperature phase transformation. A room-temperature crystalline phase change always seemed like magic to me, but it happens. Ancient blacksmiths were similarly amazed. This cold-working causes atoms to jump into a body-centered tetragon pattern called martensite, which is magnetic. It also causes carbon atoms to bunch up a bit, and this can reduce corrosion life.
But these bolts are not intended as permanent anchors. And when I look at the hangers under a scope at 250x, I see maybe a couple of percent martensite. Rough calculation of the life of a 304 bolt in a typical Appalachian cave with no brine and low chlorides yields a range of about 1000 to 20,000 years. If we shift that bolt into its martensitic state, we’d reduce its life in a cave down to maybe 50 to 1,000 years. But that is for full martensite, and I’m seeing only a percent or two. In other words, we can ignore the fact that this hanger is slightly magnetic. The Duplex 2205 threaded shaft (“duplex” because it is part ferrite, part austenite – elongated austenite grains in a ferritic matrix, so it is magnetic), since it isn’t welded or otherwise altered, would have a corrosion life of 2 to 5 times that of 304.
I measured hardness at Rockwell C25 – around 90,000 psi – a bit higher than you’d expect for annealed 304, but consistent with the cold working that resulted in the magnetism. Totally inconsequential.
I generally don’t do destructive testing. It’s usually pointless or worse. It’s entertaining to watch gear break, but focusing on ultimate strength just encourages dangerous misconceptions. Safety in climbing gear depends on how forces are distributed, how materials deform, and, mostly, how elasticity affects the system – how energy is absorbed. The inelasticity of a static rope that’s stronger than a dynamic rope can kill you. F=ma and F=kx are not just equations – they are life-and-death considerations.
I like to look at the underlying physics, and highlight what matters in practical use. My goal is to give climbers accurate, responsible insight – not spectacle – and to counter the intuition that ‘stronger = safer.’ This approach is personal to me as well: a close friend died while aid climbing in a cave because he misunderstood these principles. We might honor his memory by helping others understand how stuff works.
Why not break them? The removable-bolt components – bolts and hangers – are made from standard engineering materials, like 304. These materials are mass-produced in sheet and rod form, and have extremely low likelihood of defects. 304 stainless is not a cottage-industry alloy. Producing it requires integrated melt, alloying, and forging infrastructure with tight control of composition and processing. You can’t fake it cheaply. So the global quality variation for 304 is extremely narrow compared to, say, low-alloy steels, bronze, or, unfortunately for cavers, aluminum castings and forgings. Counterfeit carabiners. But that’s another article.
Breaking these bolts on video would add zero real information. Their strength far exceeds what a human body can impose or withstand. What actually matters – the rock quality, technique, and proper installation – is rarely tested or demonstrated on YouTube. If there is concern about a manufacturer’s integrity, destructive testing of one or two bolts is meaningless. Instead, careful microstructural examination and non-destructive testing across a larger sample set provide meaningful insight, without teaching viewers some sort of cargo-cult science. Removable bolts are intended for shear loading only. Think standard aid climbs, not ones like this:
But any real-world usage involves some amount of axial load. Tests on other removable bolts show them to have very high strength in the axial direction. Usually, the rock blows out first.
The fact that the rock usually blows out first points to another advantage of these Climbing Taiwan bolts over the Petzl. In soft rock, bolt length trumps bolt diameter because rock strength dominates. The 3-inch, 10mm diameter CT bolt vs. the 2 and a quarter inch Petzl 12mm. In hard rock, bolt strength dominates, but in hard rock, the breaking strength for both 10 and 12mm far exceed survivability. This is a perfect example of where destructive testing results will lead you to the wrong conclusion.
With a few assumptions, we can easily calculate the relative performance of the Pulse and the CT bolts loaded in shear:
Sleeve / shaft sizes
- Pulse: sleeve Ø = 12.0 mm, shaft Ø = 10.0 mm, embed length = 55 mm
- CT (10 mm): sleeve Ø = 10.0 mm, shaft Ø = 8.0 mm, embed length = 77 mm.
- Material strengths (conservative working numbers)
- Sleeve material 304 stainless, UTS = 520 MPa. Shear strength = 0.6·UTS = 312 MPa.
- Shaft material 2205 duplex, UTS = 860 MPa. Shear strength = 0.6·UTS = 516 MPa.
- Use the shaft shear (2205) as the bolt shear limit.
- Two limiting modes considered, and the lower one governs:
For rock-limited shear:
Rock shear strength × lateral contact area of the sleeve (projected cylindrical area = π·d_sleeve·embed_length). This models shear/punching or interface shear of the sleeve against rock.
For bolt (shaft) shear:
Material shear strength × cross-sectional area of the shaft (π·d^2/4). This models a straight shear through the shaft.
No complex friction, bending, or stress concentrations included. This is a first-order, worst-case shear capacity comparison.
| Rock shear strength | Pulse 12 mm, embed 55 mm | CT 10 mm, embed 77 mm |
| 1000 psi | rock limit 14.30 kN (3,214 lb) bolt limit 40.53 kN (9,111 lb) | rock limit 16.68 kN (3,761 lb) bolt limit 25.94 kN (5,831 lb) |
| 2000 psi | rock limit 28.59 kN (6,428 lb) bolt limit 40.53 kN (9,111 lb) | rock limit 33.36 kN (7,523 lb) bolt limit 25.94 kN (5,831 lb) |
| 4000 psi | rock limit 57.18 kN (12,855 lb) bolt limit 40.53 kN (9,111 lb) | rock limit 66.71 kN (14,998 lb) bolt limit 25.94 kN (5,831 lb) |
To evaluate the sensitivity of this model to assumptions, we can make the following changes, aiming at higher conservatism:
- 2205 duplex shear taken as 0.5·UTS, i.e. 430 MPa.
- A conservative Rock-punching reduction factor of 0.6 applied to the nominal rock shear strength to model local failure modes, stress concentrations, and imperfect contact.
| Rock shear strength | Pulse 12 mm, embed 55 mm | CT 10 mm, embed 77 mm |
| 1000 psi | rock limit 8.58 kN (1,928 lb) bolt limit 33.77 kN (7,592 lb) | rock limit 10.01 kN (2,250 lb) bolt limit 21.61 kN (4,859 lb) |
| 2000 psi | rock limit 17.16 kN (3,857 lb) bolt limit 33.77 kN (7,592 lb) | rock limit 20.01 kN (4,499 lb)bolt limit 21.61 kN (4,859 lb) |
| 4000 psi | rock limit 34.31 kN (7,713 lb) bolt limit 33.77 kN (7,592 lb) | rock limit 40.03 kN (8,999 lb) bolt limit 21.61 kN (4,859 lb) |
This results in lower strength values for both rock and bolt, but the relationships and conclusions still stand. In weak rock, length trumps diameter; in strong rock, bolt strength dominates but both 10 and 12mm strengths are far above survivability. The below chart plots governing capacity vs nominal rock shear to show the crossover points:
So my conclusion that the CT bolts are better designed for cave rock than the Petzl Pulses is not sensitive to assumptions about Rock-punching reduction factor or the relationship between 2205’s ultimate tensile and ultimate shear strength. The CT bolts come out looking like a better design for cave rock (and, of course, neither was designed for use in caves).
It’s also worth noting that the longer 10mm CT bolt removes 10 percent less rock than the shorter 12mm Petzl bolt. So you’re getting about 10% more bolting per battery.
Returning to axial strength. Because the core principle at work in these bolts is lateral expansion under confinement (a radial pressure multiplier from a low-angle taper), we need to control the hole diameter to achieve the needed confinement. These Climbing Taiwan bolts allow you to torque them down – in a sense. This isn’t torquing to achieve tensile preload, as in wedge anchors. It is about mechanically setting the wedge to the local bore diameter. Think of it like calibrating the anchor to the hole. You can expand the sleeve using the handle until you feel firm engagement. That lets you tune for real-world variability in hole diameter, rock roughness, or small flares and cracks. That seems to me the big advantage of this design; it’s more tolerant of the wobbly drilling that sub-optimal cave settings often give us.
Beyond being easier to clean and having superior strength in soft rock compared to the 12mm Petzl Pulse, the cleverness here is in better decoupling hole-fit adjustment from load resistance. I was able to engage the nominally 10mm bolt in a 12mm diameter hole. I’ll still avoid drilling bad holes, but this is very good to know, especially when drilling in confined or awkward places where suddenly the little Milwaukee decides to go on a rotary rampage.
If you have experience with these underground, or have questions or comments, please feel free to add a comment below. Sometimes I miss real engineering.
The Arch of Constantine
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Art on October 31, 2025
This is for Mike and Andrea, on their first visit to Rome.
Some people take up gardening. I dug into the Arch of Constantine. Deep. I’ll admit it, I got a little obsessed. What started as a quick look turned into a full dig through the dust of Roman politics as seen by art historians and classicists, writers with a gift for making the obvious sound profound and the profound impenetrable. Think of a collaboration between poets, lawyers, and a Latin thesaurus. One question led to another, and before I knew it, I was knee-deep in relief panels, inscriptions, and bitter academic feuds from 1903. If this teaser does anything for you, order a pizza and head over to my long version, revised today to incorporate recent scholarship, which is making great strides.
The Arch of Constantine stands just beside the Colosseum, massive and pale against the traffic. It was dedicated in 315 CE to celebrate Emperor Constantine’s victory over his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. On paper it’s a “triumphal arch,” but that’s not quite true. Constantine never held a formal triumph, and the monument itself was assembled partly from spare parts of older imperial projects.
Most of what you see wasn’t made for Constantine at all. His builders raided earlier monuments – especially from the reigns of Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius – and grafted those sculptures onto the new structure. Look closely and you can still spot the mismatches. The heads have been recut. A scene that once showed Emperor Hadrian hunting a lion now shows Constantine doing the honors, with a few clumsy adjustments to the drapery. Other panels, taken from Marcus Aurelius’s monuments, show the emperor addressing troops or granting clemency, only now it’s Constantine’s face and Constantine’s name.
These borrowed panels aren’t just decoration. They were carefully chosen to tie Constantine to the “good emperors” of the past, especially Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-king. By mixing their images with his own, Constantine claimed continuity with Rome’s golden age while quietly erasing the messy years between.
The long strip of carving that wraps around the lower part of the arch is the one section made entirely for Constantine’s time. It’s a running narrative of his civil war against Maxentius. Starting on the west side, you can see Constantine setting out from Milan, soldiers marching behind his chariot. Around the corner, he besieges a walled city – probably Verona – and towers over his men, twice their size, a new kind of emperor who commands by sheer presence. The next panel shows the chaotic battle at the Milvian Bridge, where Maxentius’s troops drown in the Tiber while Constantine’s army presses forward. The story ends with Constantine entering Rome and addressing the citizens from a raised platform, a ruler both human and divine.
The figures look stiff and simplified compared to the older reliefs above them, but that’s part of the shift the arch represents. Art was moving away from naturalism toward symbolism. Constantine isn’t shown as an individual man but as an idea: the chosen ruler, the earthly image of divine authority.
That message runs through the inscription carved across the top. It declares that Constantine won instinctu divinitatis – “by divine inspiration.” The phrase is unique; no one had used it before. It’s deliberately vague, as if leaving room for different gods to take the credit. For pagans, it could mean Apollo or Sol Invictus. For Christians, it sounded like the hand of the one God. Either way, it announced a new kind of emperor, one who ruled not just with the favor of the gods but through them.
The Arch of Constantine isn’t simply a monument to a battle. It’s a scrapbook of Rome’s artistic past and a statement of political legitimacy. Read carefully, it is an early sign that the empire was in for religion, hard times, and down-sizing.
Photos and text copyright 2025 by William K Storage
The End of Science Again
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Science, Philosophy of Science on October 24, 2025
Dad says enough of this biblical exegesis and hermeneutics nonsense. He wants more science and history of science for iconoclasts and Kuhnians. I said that if prophetic exegesis was good enough for Isaac Newton – who spent most of his writing life on it – it’s good enough for me. But to keep the family together around the spectroscope, here’s another look at what’s gone terribly wrong with institutional science.
It’s been thirty years since John Horgan wrote The End of Science, arguing that fundamental discovery was nearing its end. He may have overstated the case, but his diagnosis of scientific fatigue struck a nerve. Horgan claimed that major insights – quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang, evolution, the double helix – had already given us a comprehensive map of reality unlikely to change much. Science, he said, had become a victim of its own success, entering a phase of permanent normality, to borrow Thomas Kuhn’s term. Future research, in his view, would merely refine existing paradigms, pose unanswerable questions, or spin speculative theories with no empirical anchor.
Horgan still stands by that thesis. He notes the absence of paradigm-shifting revolutions and a decline in disruptive research. A 2023 Nature study analyzed forty-five million papers and nearly four million patents, finding a sharp drop in genuinely groundbreaking work since the mid-twentieth century. Research increasingly consolidates what’s known rather than breaking new ground. Horgan also raises the philosophical point that some puzzles may simply exceed our cognitive reach – a concern with deep historical roots. Consider consciousness, quantum interpretation, or other problems that might mark the brain’s limits. Perhaps AI will push those limits outward.
Students of History of Science will think of Auguste Comte’s famous claim that we’d never know the composition of the stars. He wasn’t stupid, just cautious. Epistemic humility. He knew collecting samples was impossible. What he couldn’t foresee was spectrometry, where the wavelengths of light a star emits reveal the quantum behavior of its electrons. Comte and his peers could never have imagined that; it was data that forced quantum mechanics upon us.
The same confidence of finality carried into the next generation of physics. In 1874, Philipp von Jolly reportedly advised young Max Planck not to pursue physics, since it was “virtually a finished subject,” with only small refinements left in measurement. That position was understandable: Maxwell’s equations unified electromagnetism, thermodynamics was triumphant, and the Newtonian worldview seemed complete. Only a few inconvenient anomalies remained.
Albert Michelson, in 1894, echoed the sentiment. “Most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established,” he said. Physics had unified light, electricity, magnetism, and heat; the periodic table was filled in; the atom looked tidy. The remaining puzzles – Mercury’s orbit, blackbody radiation – seemed minor, the way dark matter does to some of us now. He was right in one sense: he had interpreted his world as coherently as possible with the evidence he had. Or had he?
Michelson’s remark came after his own 1887 experiment with Morley – the one that failed to detect Earth’s motion through the ether and, in hindsight, cracked the door to relativity. The irony is enormous. He had already performed the experiment that revealed something was deeply wrong, yet he didn’t see it that way. The null result struck him as a puzzle within the old paradigm, not a death blow to it. The idea that the speed of light might be constant for all observers, or that time and space themselves might bend, was too far outside the late-Victorian imagination. Lorentz, FitzGerald, and others kept right on patching the luminiferous ether.
Logicians will recognize the case for pessimistic meta-induction here: past prognosticators have always been wrong about the future, and inductive reasoning says they will be wrong again. Horgan may think his case is different, but I can’t see it. He was partially right, but overconfident about completeness – treating current theories as final, just as Comte, von Jolly, and Michelson once did.
Where Horgan was most right – territory he barely touched – is in seeing that institutions now ensure his prediction. Science stagnates not for lack of mystery but because its structures reward safety over risk. Peer review, grant culture, and the fetish for incrementalism make Kuhnian normal science permanent. Scientific American canned Horgan soon after The End of Science appeared. By the mid-90s, the magazine had already crossed the event horizon of integrity.
While researching his book, Horgan interviewed Edward Witten, already the central figure in the string-theory marketing machine. Witten rejected Kuhn’s model of revolutions, preferring a vision of seamless theoretical progress. No surprise. Horgan seemed wary of Witten’s confidence. He sensed that Witten’s serene belief in an ever-tightening net of theory was itself a symptom of closure.
From a Feyerabendian perspective, the irony is perfect. Paul Feyerabend would say that when a scientific culture begins to prize formal coherence, elegance, and mathematical completeness over empirical confrontation, it stops being revolutionary. In that sense, the Witten attitude itself initiates the decline of discovery.
String theory is the perfect case study: an extraordinary mathematical construct that’s absorbed immense intellectual capital without yielding a falsifiable prediction. To a cynic (or realist), it looks like a priesthood refining its liturgy. The Feyerabendian critique would be that modern science has been rationalized to death, more concerned with internal consistency and social prestige than with the rude encounter between theory and world. Witten’s world has continually expanded a body of coherent claims – they hold together, internally consistent. But science does not run on a coherence model of truth. It demands correspondence. (Coherence vs. correspondence models of truth was a big topic in analytic philosophy in the last century.) By correspondence theory of truth, we mean that theories must survive the test against nature. The creation of coherent ideas means nothing without it. Experience trumps theory, always – the scientific revolution in a nutshell.
Horgan didn’t say – though he should have – that Witten’s aesthetic of mathematical beauty has institutionalized epistemic stasis. The problem isn’t that science has run out of mysteries, as Horgan proposed, but that its practitioners have become too self-conscious, too invested in their architectures to risk tearing them down. Galileo rolls over.
Horgan sensed the paradox but never made it central. His End of Science was sociological and cognitive; a Feyerabendian would call it ideological. Science has become the very orthodoxy it once subverted.
Mark as Midrash
Posted by Bill Storage in Biblical Criticism on October 23, 2025
Some New Testament scholars argue that Gospel Mark synthesizes a Jesus narrative purely from Old Testament passages. On this view, the writer of Mark was not recounting eyewitness memory or even oral history but was constructing a narrative solely using Israel’s scriptures as template and sourcebook. The basic idea is often called scripturalization or midrashic composition, after the rabbinic tradition of midrash halakha, which seeks to uncover deeper meaning in scripture by delving into its gaps.
A quick look at the case for gospel construction focuses on the direct scriptural allusions. Mark is thick with echoes of the OT that are not simply ornamental. Most are structural. Mark’s baptism of Jesus echoes Exodus and Isaiah’s “prepare the way” (Mark 1:2–3 cites Malachi and Isaiah). Jesus’s wilderness temptation scene mirrors Israel’s 40 years in the desert, and also Elijah’s and Moses’s desert experiences. The feeding of the 5,000 resembles Moses feeding Israel with manna and Elisha multiplying loaves. Mark’s transfiguration scene parallels Sinai theophany. Mark includes a bright cloud, divine voice, terrified companions. The Passion Narrative is rich with Psalmic and prophetic motifs (Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Zechariah 13). Curiously, Mark rarely mentions his source material.
Scholars arguing for scripturalization in Mark point to typology and scripted roles. Jesus is cast as a type of multiple OT figures: Moses, David, Elijah, Elisha, Joseph, and especially the Suffering Servant. As they see it, Mark doesn’t merely reference these figures – he constructs scenes that replay their stories. The cleansing of the temple recalls prophetic critiques in Jeremiah and Malachi. The entry into Jerusalem on a colt enacts Zechariah 9:9. The cry of dereliction on the cross (Mark 15:34) is lifted straight from Psalm 22.
They also cite lack of biographical detail. Mark omits nearly everything one would expect in the life of a historical figure. There is no discussion of birth, family lineage, or youth. (If this comes as a surprise, see my deeper analysis here.) Mark takes no interest in Jesus’s appearance, habits, or daily life. Indeed, some suggest that when you remove OT source material, nothing is left of Mark’s Jesus.
Mark’s gospel moves in large, literary strokes – like a passion play or prophetic drama. This line of argument has been advanced by Thomas L. Brodie, who suggests the gospel is “a mosaic of scripture” rather than a biography, and by Randel Helms, who argues in Gospel Fictions that Mark invents Jesus’s deeds by repurposing OT texts.
Counterpoints to the argument claim that Mark used scripture as language, not as a blueprint. The ancient Jewish imagination was steeped in scripture. To narrate meaningfully was to echo scripture. But this doesn’t mean the events were invented wholesale. Modern minds separate “event” from “interpretation.” Ancient writers, including the Greeks (Mark’s author was unquestionably Greek), did not – as is evidenced by The Iliad and the Odyssey. Even if a healing story echoes Elisha, it doesn’t follow that the story was created ex nihilo.
Opponents of scripturalization also cite dissimilarities and non-scriptural details. Some episodes lack clear scriptural antecedents, e.g., the episode with the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7), or Jesus’s use of spittle to heal a blind man. Likewise, Jesus’s family thinking he’s mad (Mark 3:21) and the dullard disciples don’t map onto Jewish scripture. Though, as I argue here, Mark’s narrative role for the disciples might operate as a higher layer on top of any scripturalization.
Many scholars, particularly those with theological perspectives, still maintain that Mark draws on oral traditions – stories shaped by community memory and theology, but not necessarily fabricated from texts. Scripture may provide the interpretive frame, but not always the content.
The same scholars often ask: if Mark is working from scratch using only OT texts, why invent such a flawed and cryptic messiah? Why depict such dense disciples and an abandoned, dying Jesus? This is the “criterion of embarrassment” (still controversial). It suggests Mark didn’t invent everything. If he had, he would have left out the embarrassing stuff. Some material looks like it had to be explained, not devised. I find this unconvincing, because I believe Mark used “embarrassing” moments as a literary device with great skill.
The strongest position may be a middle ground. I find this plausible, purely from a literary perspective, independent of any argument about the historicity of Jesus or any position on Mark’s beliefs or theological agenda. Mark likely used scripture to narrate meaning, not to fabricate events. He may have witnessed the events, heard them second hand, received them in oral tradition, or created them as literature; the text remains silent on this. He does something better than either writing history or inventing fiction, and he deserves credit for keeping us confused. He puts the reader in command. Mark produced a sacred narrative in a form recognizable to his audience – a kind of theological storytelling that blurs the line between reporting and interpreting.
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For those interested in Mark’s use of the OT, Here’s my list. You may know of others.
| Mark Passage | OT Source | Nature of Connection | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:2–3 | Malachi 3:1; Isaiah 40:3 | Direct quotation | Combines two texts to frame John the Baptist as forerunner; sets tone of fulfillment through re-interpretation. |
| 1:11 (Voice from heaven: “You are my beloved Son…”) | Psalm 2:7; Isaiah 42:1 | Allusion | Merges royal and Servant imagery: messianic kingship and chosen Servant. |
| 1:12–13 (Temptation in the wilderness) | Exodus 14–16; 1 Kings 19; Psalm 91 | Typological echo | Jesus relives Israel’s wilderness testing and Elijah’s exile. |
| 2:23–28 (Plucking grain on Sabbath) | 1 Samuel 21:1–6 | Narrative parallel | David’s hunger legitimates violation of ritual law; Jesus invokes same precedent. |
| 4:3–9, 14–20 (Parable of the sower) | Isaiah 6:9–10 | Quotation and thematic link | Hearing but not understanding, reinforcing prophetic pattern of rejection. |
| 4:35–41 (Calming the storm) | Psalm 107:23–30; Jonah 1 | Thematic echo | God stills storm; Jonah and Psalm depict divine power over chaos. |
| 5:1–20 (Gerasene demoniac) | Isaiah 65:1–7 | Imagistic echo | The “tombs” and unclean imagery recall Isaiah’s picture of Israel’s impurity. |
| 6:34 (“Sheep without a shepherd”) | Numbers 27:17; Ezekiel 34:5 | Quotation | Traditional prophetic critique of failed leaders. |
| 6:41; 8:6 (Feeding miracles) | Exodus 16; 2 Kings 4:42–44; Psalm 23 | Typological echo | Moses, Elisha, and the Shepherd provide bread from heaven. |
| 8:31; 9:12; 10:33–34 (Predictions of suffering) | Isaiah 50:6; 52:13–53:12; Psalm 22 | Allusion | The Servant’s suffering and the righteous sufferer of the Psalms form the template. |
| 9:12 (“How is it written… that he should suffer many things?”) | Isaiah 53 (esp. 3, 5, 12) | Indirect reference | Points to the “written” prophecy of the suffering righteous one. |
| 10:45 (“To give his life a ransom for many”) | Isaiah 53:10–12 | Conceptual allusion | “For many” mirrors “he bore the sin of many”; Servant’s life given for others. |
| 14:24 (“Blood of the covenant poured out for many”) | Exodus 24:8; Isaiah 53:12 | Typological + verbal echo | Mosaic covenant language fused with Servant’s self-sacrifice. |
| 14:27 (“I will strike the shepherd…”) | Zechariah 13:7 | Direct quotation | Predicts scattering of disciples as flock. |
| 15:24 (Casting lots for garments) | Psalm 22:18 | Direct quotation | Psalm of the suffering righteous man reframed as prophetic. |
| 15:29–32 (Mockery at the cross) | Psalm 22:7–8; Wisdom 2:13–20 | Thematic echo | Taunts of the righteous sufferer repeated verbatim. |
| 15:33 (Darkness at noon) | Amos 8:9 | Prophetic motif | Cosmic mourning over injustice. |
| 15:34 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) | Psalm 22:1 | Direct quotation | Anchors the Passion in Israel’s lament tradition. |
| 16:5 (Young man in white) | Daniel 10:5–6 | Theophany echo | Heavenly messenger motif. |
Physics for Cold Cavers: NASA vs Hefty and Husky
Posted by Bill Storage in Engineering & Applied Physics on October 21, 2025
In the old days, every caver I knew carried a space blanket. Many still do. They come vacuum-packed in little squares that look like tea bricks, promising to help prevent hypothermia. They were originally marketed as NASA technology – because, in fact, they were. The original Mylar “space blanket” came out of the 1960s U.S. space program, meant to keep satellites and astronauts thermally stable in the vacuum of orbit. They reflected infrared radiation superbly, but only because they were surrounded by nothing. In a cave, you’re surrounded by something – cold, wet air – and that’s a very different problem.
A current ad says:
Reflects up to 90% of body heat to help prevent hypothermia and maintain core temperature during emergencies.
Another says:
Losing body heat in emergencies can quickly lead to hypothermia. Without understanding the science behind thermal protection, you might not use these tools effectively when they’re needed most.
This is your standard science-washing, techno-fetish, physics-theater advertising. Feynman called it cargo-cult science. But even Google Gemini told me:
For a vapor barrier in an emergency, a space blanket is better than a trash bag because it reflects radiant heat.
Premise true, conclusion false – non sequitur, an ancient Roman would say. It seems likely that advertising narratives played a quiet role in Google’s large-model-based AI system’s space-blanket blunder. That’s a topic for another time I guess.
Back to cold reality. At 50 degrees and 100 percent humidity, radiative heat loss is trivial. Radiative transfer at 10–15°C delta T is a rounding error compared to where your heat really goes. What matters is conduction to damp rock and convection to moving air, both of which a shiny sheet does little to stop. Worse, a rectangle of Mylar always leaks. Every fold and corner is a draft path, and soon you’re sitting in a crinkling echo chamber, shivering and reflecting nothing but a bad decision.
The contractor-size trash bag, meanwhile, is an unsung hero of survival. Poke a face hole near the bottom, pull it over your head, and you have a passable poncho that sheds drips instead of channeling them down your collar. You can sit on it, wrap your feet, and trap a pocket of warm, humid air that actually slows heat loss. Let a little moisture vent, and it works for an hour or two without turning clammy.
The space blanket survives mostly on myth – the glamour of NASA and the gleam of techno-hype. The homely trash bag simply works – better than anything near its size will. One was made for space, the other for the world we actually live in. Losing body heat in emergencies can quickly lead to hypothermia. Without getting the basics of thermal protection, you might not pick the best tool.
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For those who need the physics, read on…
Heat leaves the body by three routes: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is direct contact – warm skin meeting cool air, damp limestone, and mud. Convection is moving air stealing that warmed boundary layer and replacing it with fresh, cold air. Warm air is lighter. You warm the nearby air. It rises and sucks in fresh, cooler air. A circulating current arises.
At 50°F in a cave, conduction and convection dominate. The air is dense and wet, which means excellent thermal coupling. Each tiny current of air wicks warmth away far more effectively than dry air would. A trash bag stops that process cold. By trapping a thin layer of air and sealing it from drafts, it cuts off convective loss almost completely. It also slows conductive loss because still air, though not as good as down, is a decent insulator.
Radiation is infrared energy emitted from your skin and clothing into the surroundings. It follows the Stefan–Boltzmann law: power scales with the fourth power of absolute temperature. That sounds dramatic until you run the numbers. Between an 85°F body (skin temperature, roughly, 300° Kelvin) and a 50°F cave wall, the difference is about 27 Kelvin.
q = σ T4 A where q is heat transfer per unit time, T is temperature difference in Kelvins, and A is the radiative area.
Plug it in, and the radiative loss is about one percent of total heat loss – barely measurable compared to what you’re losing through air movement. The “90 percent reflection” claim is technically true in a vacuum, but in a cave or in Yosemite it’s a rounding error dressed up as science.
So the short version: the shiny Mylar sheet reflects an irrelevant component of heat loss while ignoring the main ones. The humble and opaque trash bag attacks the real physics of staying warm. It doesn’t sparkle, it gets the job done.
I’m Only Neurotic When – Engineering Edition
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Engineering & Applied Physics on October 7, 2025
The USB Standard of Suffering
The USB standard was born in the mid-1990s from a consortium of Intel, Microsoft, IBM, DEC, NEC, Nortel, and Compaq. They formed the USB Implementers Forum to create a universal connector. The four pins for power and data were arranged asymmetrically to prevent reverse polarity damage. But the mighty consortium gave us no way to know which side was up.
The Nielsen Norman Group found that users waste ten seconds per insertion. Billions of plugs times thirty years. We could have paved Egypt with pyramids. I’m not neurotic. I just hate death by a thousand USB cuts.
The Dyson Principle
I admire good engineering. I also admire honesty in materials. So naturally, I can’t walk past a Dyson vacuum without gasping. The thing looks like it was styled by H. R. Giger after a head injury. Every surface is ribbed, scooped, or extruded as if someone bred Google Gemini with CAD software, provided the prompt “manifold mania,” and left it running overnight. Its transparent canister resembles an alien lung. There are ducts that lead nowhere, fins that cool nothing, and bright colors that imply importance. It’s all ornamental load path.
To what end? Twice the size and weight of a sensible vacuum, with eight times the polar moment of inertia. (You get the math – of course you do.) You can feel it fighting your every turn, not from friction, but from ego. Every attempt at steering carries the mass distribution of a helicopter rotor. I’m not cleaning a rug, I’m executing a ground test of a manic gyroscope.
Dyson claims it never loses suction. Fine, but I lose patience. It’s a machine designed for showroom admiration, not torque economy. Its real vacuum is philosophical: the absence of restraint. I’m not neurotic. I just believe a vacuum should obey the same physical laws as everything else in my house. I’m told design is where art meets engineering. That may be true, but in Dyson’s case, it’s also where geometry goes to die. There’s form, there’s function, and then there’s what happens when you hire a stylist who dreams in centrifugal-manifold Borg envy.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Physics
No one but Frank Lloyd Wright could have designed these cantilevered concrete roof supports, the tour guide at the Robie House intoned reverently, as though he were describing Moses with a T-square. True – and Mr. Wright couldn’t have either. The man drew poetry in concrete, but concrete does not care for poetry. It likes compression. It hates tension and bending. It’s like trying to make a violin out of breadsticks.
They say Wright’s genius was in making buildings that defied gravity. True in a sense – but only because later generations spent fifty times his budget figuring ways to install steel inside the concrete so gravity and the admirers of his genius wouldn’t notice. We have preserved his vision, yes, but only through subterfuge and eternal rebar vigilance.
Considered the “greatest American architect of all time” by people who can name but one architect, Wright made it culturally acceptable for architects to design expressive, intensely personal museums. The Guggenheim continues to thrill visitors with a unique forum for contemporary art. Until they need the bathroom – a feature more of an afterthought for Frank. Try closing the door in there without standing on the toilet. Paris hotels took a cue.
The Interface Formerly Known as Knob
Somewhere, deep in a design studio with too much brushed aluminum and not enough common sense, a committee decided that what drivers really needed was a touch screen for everything. Because nothing says safety like forcing the operator of a two-ton vehicle to navigate a software menu to adjust the defroster.
My car had a knob once. It stuck out. I could find it. I could turn it without looking. It was a miracle of tactile feedback and simple geometry. Then someone decided that physical controls were “clutter.” Now I have a 12-inch mirror that reflects my fingerprints and shame. To change the volume, I have to tap a glowing icon the size of an aspirin, located precisely where sunlight can erase it. The radio tuner is buried three screens deep, right beside the legal disclaimer that won’t go away until I hit Accept. Every time I start the thing. And the Bluetooth? It won’t connect while the car is moving, as if I might suddenly swerve off the road in a frenzy of unauthorized pairing. Design meets an army of failure-to-warn attorneys.
Human factors used to mean designing for humans. Now it means designing obstacles that test our compliance. I get neurotic when I recall a world where you could change the volume by touch instead of prayer.
Automation Anxiety
But the horror of car automation goes deeper, far beyond its entertainment center. The modern car no longer trusts me. I used to drive. Now I negotiate. Everything’s “smart” except the decisions. I rented one recently – some kind of half-electric pseudopod that smelled of despair and fresh software – and tried to execute a simple three-point turn on a dark mountain road. Halfway through, the dashboard blinked, the transmission clunked, and without warning the thing threw itself into Park and set the emergency brake.
I sat there in the dark, headlamps cutting into trees, wondering what invisible crime I’d committed. No warning lights, no chime, no message – just mutiny. When I pressed the accelerator, nothing. Had it died of fright? Then I remembered: modern problems require modern superstitions. I turned it off and back on again. Reboot – the digital age’s holy rite of exorcism. It worked.
Only later did I learn, through the owner’s manual’s runic footnotes, that the car had seen “an obstacle” in the rear camera and interpreted it as a cliff. In reality it was a clump of weeds. The AI mistook grass for death.
So now, in 2025, the same species that landed on the Moon has produced a vehicle that prevents a three-point turn for my own good. Not progress, merely the illusion of it – technology that promises safety by eliminating the user. I’m not neurotic. I just prefer my machines to ask before saving my life by freezing in place as headlights come around the bend.
The Illusion of Progress
There’s a reason I carry a torque wrench. It’s not to maintain preload. It’s to maintain standards. Torque is truth, expressed in foot-pounds. The world runs on it.
Somewhere along the way, design stopped being about function and started being about feelings. You can’t torque a feeling. You can only overdo it. Hence the rise of things that are technically advanced but spiritually stupid. Faucets that require a firmware update, refrigerators with Twitter accounts. Cars that disable half their features because you didn’t read the EULA while merging onto the interstate.
I’m told this is innovation. No, it’s entropy with a bottomless budget. After the collapse, I expect future archaeologists to find me in a fossilized Subaru, finger frozen an inch from the touchscreen that controlled the wipers.
Until then, I’ll keep my torque wrench, thank you. And I’ll keep muting TikTok’s #lifehacks tag, before another self-certified engineer shows me how to remove stripped screws with a banana. I’m not neurotic. I’ve learned to live with people who do it wrong.
I’m Only Neurotic When You Do It Wrong
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on October 6, 2025
I don’t think of myself as obsessive. I think of myself as correct. Other people confuse those two things because they’ve grown comfortable in a world that tolerates sloppiness. I’m only neurotic when you do it wrong.
In Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick mocks the need for precision. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played by R. Lee Ermey, has a strict regimen for everything from cellular function on up. Kubrick has Hartman tell Private Pyle, “If there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker!” Of course, Hartman hates an infinity of things, but all of them are things we secretly hate too. For those who missed the point, Kubrick has the colonel later tell Joker, “Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God.”
The facets of life lacking due attention to detail are manifold, but since we’ve started with entertainment, let’s stay there. Entertainment budgets dwarf those of most countries. All I’ve ever asked of screenwriters is to hire historical consultants who can spell anachronism. Kubrick is credited with meticulous attention to detail. Hah. He might learn something from Sgt. Hartman. In Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon duel scene, a glance over Lord Bullingdon’s shoulder reveals a map with a decorative picture of a steam train, something not invented for another fifty years. The scene of the Lyndon family finances shows receipts bound by modern staples. Later, someone mentions the Kingdom of Belgium. Oops. Painterly cinematography and candlelit genius, yes – but the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Barry Lyndon is the Dom Pérignon bottle glaring on the desk, half a century out of place.
Soldiers carry a 13-star flag in The Patriot. Troy features zippers. Braveheart wears a kilt. Andy Dufresne hides his tunnel behind a Raquel Welch poster in Shawshank Redemption. Forrest Gump owns Apple stock. Need I go on? All I’ve ever asked of filmmakers is that they get every last detail right. I’m only neurotic when they blow it.
Take song lyrics. These are supposedly the most polished, publicly consumed lines in the English language. Entire industries depend on them. There are producers, mixers, consultants galore – whole marketing teams – and yet no one, apparently, ever said, “Hold on, Jim, that doesn’t make any sense.
Jim Morrison, I mean. Riders on the Storm is moody and hypnotic. On first hearing I settled in for what I knew, even at twelve, was an instant classic. Until he says of the killer: “his brain is squirming like a toad.” Not the brain of a toad, not a brain that toaded. There it was – a mental image of a brain doing a toad impression. The trance was gone. Minds squirm, not toads. Toads hold still, then hop, then hold still again. Rhyming dictionaries existed in 1970. He could have found anything else. Try: “His mind was like a dark abode.” Proofreader? Editor? QA department? Peer review? Fifty years on, I still can’t hear it without reliving my early rock-crooner trauma.
Rocket Man surely ranks near Elton’s John’s best. But clearly Elton is better at composition than at contractor oversight. Bernie Taupin wrote, “And all this science, I don’t understand.” Fair. But then: “It’s just my job, five days a week.” So wait, you don’t understand science, but NASA gave you a five-day schedule and weekends off because of what skill profile? Maybe that explains Challenger and Columbia.
Every Breath You Take by The Police. It’s supposed to be about obsession, but Sting (Sting? – really, Gordon Sumner?) somehow thought “every move you make, every bond you break” sounded romantic. Bond? Who’s out there breaking bonds in daily life? Chemical engineers? Sting later claimed people misunderstood it, but that’s because it’s badly written. If your stalker anthem is being played at weddings, maybe you missed a comma somewhere, Gordon.
“As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti,” sings Toto in Africa. Last I looked, Kilimanjaro was in Tanzania, 200 miles from the Serengeti. Olympus is in Greece. Why not “As sure as the Eiffel Tower rises above the Outback”? The lyricist admitted he wrote it based on National Geographic photos. Translation: “I’m paid to look at pictures, not read the captions.”
“Plasticine porters with looking glass ties,” wrote John Lennon in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Plasticine must have sounded to John like some high-gloss super-polymer. But as the 1960s English-speaking world knew, Plasticine is a children’s modeling clay. Were these porters melting in the sun? No other psychedelic substances available that day? The smell of kindergarten fails to transport me into Lennon’s hallucinatory dream world.
And finally, Take Me Home, Country Roads. This one I take personally. John Denver, already richer than God, sat down to write a love letter to West Virginia and somehow imported the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River from Virginia. Maybe he looked at an atlas once, diagonally. The border between WV and VA is admittedly jagged, but at least try to feign some domain knowledge. Apologists say he meant blue-ridged mountains or west(ern) Virginia – which only makes it worse. The song should have been called Almost Geographically Adjacent to Heaven.
Precision may not make art, but art that ignores precision is just noise with a budget. I don’t need perfection – only coherence, proportion, and the occasional working map. I’m not obsessive. I just want a world where the train on the wall doesn’t leave the station half a century early. I’ve learned to live among the lax, even as they do it all wrong.
The Comet, the Clipboard, and the Knife
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on October 2, 2025
Background: My grandfather saw Comet Halley in 1910, and it was the biggest deal since the Grover Cleveland inaugural bash. We discussed it – the comet, not the inaugural – often in my grade school years. He told me of “comet pills” and kooks who killed themselves fearing cyanogens. Halley would return in 1986, an unimaginably far off date. Then out of nowhere in 1973, Luboš Kohoutek discovered a new comet, an invader from the distant Oort cloud – the flyover states of our solar system – and it was predicted to be the comet of the century. But Comet Kohoutek partied too hard somewhere near Saturn and arrived hungover, barely visible. And when Halley finally neared the sun in 1986, the earth was 180 degrees from it. Halley, like Kohoutek, was a flop. But 1996 brought Comet Hale-Bopp. Now, that was a sight even for urban stargazers. I saw it from Faneuil Hall in Boston and then bright above the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It hung around for a year, its dual tails unforgettable. And as with anything cool, zealots stained its memory by freaking out.
A Sermon by Reverend Willie Storage, Minister of Peculiar Gospel
Brethren, we take our text today from The Book of Cybele, Chapter Knife, Verse Twenty-Three: “And lo, they danced in the street, and cut themselves, and called it joy, and their blood was upon their sandals, and the crowd applauded and took up the practice, for the crowd cannot resist a parade.”
To that we add The Epistle of Origen to the Scissors, Chapter Three, Verse Nine: “If thy member offend thee, clip it off, and if thy reason offend thee, chop that too, for what remains shall be called purity.”
These ancient admonitions are the ancestors of our story today, which begins not in Alexandria, nor the temples of Asia Minor, nor the starving castles of Languedoc, but in California, that golden land where individuality is a brand, rebellion is a style guide, and conformity is called freedom. Once it was Jesus on the clouds, then the Virgin in the sun, then a spaceship hiding behind a comet’s tail.
Thus have the ages spoken, and thus, too, spoke California in the year of our comet, 1997, when Hale-Bopp streaked across the sky like a match-head struck on the dark roof of the world. In Iowa, folk looked up and said, “Well, I’ll be damned – pass the biscuits.” In California, they looked up and said, “It conceals a spaceship,” and thirty-nine of them set their affairs in order, cut their hair to regulation style and length, pulled on black uniforms, laced up their sneakers, “prepared their vehicles for the Great Next Level,” and died at their own hands.
Now, California is the only place on God’s earth where a man can be praised for “finding himself” by joining a committee, and then be congratulated for the originality and bravery of this act. It is the land of artisan individuality in bulk: rows of identically unique coffee shops, each an altar to self-expression with the same distressed wood and imitation Edison bulbs. Rows of identically visionary cults, each one promising your personal path to the universal Next Level. Heaven’s Gate was not a freak accident of California. It was California poured into Grande-size cups and called “Enlightenment.”
Their leader, Do – once called Marshall Applewhite or something similarly Texan – explained that a spacecraft followed the comet, hiding like a pea under a mattress, ready to transport them to salvation. His co-founder, Ti, had died of cancer, inconveniently, but Do explained it in terms Homer Simpson could grasp: Ti had merely “shed her vehicle.” More like a Hertz than a hearse, and the rental period of his faithful approached its earthly terminus. His flock caught every subtle allusion. Thus did they gather, not as wild-eyed fanatics, but as the most polite of martyrs.
The priests of Cybele danced and bled. Origen of Alexandria may have cut himself off in private, so to speak, as Eusebius explains it. The Cathars starved politely in Languedoc. And the Californians, chased by their own doctrine into a corner of Rancho Santa Fe creativity, bought barbiturates at a neighborhood pharmacy, added a vodka chaser, then followed a color-coded procedure and lay down in rows like corn in a field. Their sacrament was order, procedure, and videotaped cheer. Californians, after all, enjoy their own performances.
Even the ancients were sometimes similarly inclined. Behold a relief from Ostia Antica of a stern priest nimbly handling an egg – proof, some claim, that men have long been anxious about inconvenient appendages, and that Easter’s chocolate bounty has more in common with the castrated ambitions of holy men than with springtime joy. Emperor Claudius, more clever than most, outlawed such celebrations – or tried to.
Brethren, it is not only the comet that inspires folly. Consider Sherry Shriner – a Kent State graduate of journalism and political science – who rose on the Internet just this century, a prophet armed with a megaphone, announcing that alien royalty, shadowy cabals, and cosmic paperwork dictated human destiny, and that obedience was the only path to salvation. She is a recent echo of Applewhite, of Origen, of priests of Cybele, proving that the human appetite for secret knowledge, cosmic favor, and procedural holiness only grows with new technology. Witness online alien reptile doomsday cults.
Now, California is a peculiar land which – to paraphrase Brother Richard Brautigan – draws Kent State grads like a giant Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter. Only there could originality be mass-produced in identical black uniforms, only there could a suicide cult be entirely standardized, only there could obedience to paperwork masquerade as freedom. The Heaven’s Gate crowd prized individuality with the same rigor that the Froot Loops factory prizes the relationship between each loop piece’s color and its flavor. And yet, in this implausible perfection, we glimpse an eternal truth: the human animal will organize itself into committees, assign heavenly responsibilities, and file for its own departure from the body with the same diligence it reserves for parking tickets.
And mark these words, it’s not finished. If the right comet comes again, some new flock will follow it, tidy as ever, clipboard in hand. Perhaps it won’t be a flying saucer but a carbon-neutral ark. Perhaps it will be the end of meat, of plastic, of children. You may call it Extinction Rebellion or Climate Redemption or Earth’s Last Stand. They may chain themselves to the rails and glue themselves to Botticelli or to Newbury Street, fast themselves to death for Mother Goddess Earth. It is a priest of Cybele in Converse high tops.
“And the children of the Earth arose, and they glued themselves to the paintings, and they starved themselves in the streets, saying, ‘We do this that life may continue.’ And a prophet among them said, ‘To save life ye must first abandon it.’”
If you must mutilate something, mutilate your credulity. Cut it down to size. Castrate your certainty. Starve your impulse to join the parade. The body may be foolish, but it has not yet led you into as much trouble as the mind.
Sing it, children.
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The Multidisciplinarian 
Deficient Discipleship in Environmental Science
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Philosophy of Science on October 28, 2025
Bear with me here.
Daniel Oprean’s “Portraits of Deficient Discipleship” (Kairos, 2024) argues that Gospel Matthew 8:18–27 presents three kinds of failed or immature discipleship, each corrected by Jesus’s response.
Oprean reads Matthew 19–20 as discipleship without costs. The “enthusiastic scribe” volunteers to follow Jesus but misunderstands the teacher he’s addressing. His zeal lacks awareness of cost. Jesus’s lament about having “nowhere to lay his head,” Oprean says, reveals that true discipleship entails homelessness, marginalization, and suffering.
As an instance of discipleship without commitment (vv. 21–22), a second disciple hesitates. His request to bury his father provokes Jesus’s radical command: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Oprean takes this as divided loyalty, a failure of commitment even among genuine followers.
Finally comes discipleship without hardships (vv. 23–27). The boat-bound disciples obey but panic in the storm. Their fear shows lack of trust. Jesus rebukes their “little faith.” His calming of the sea becomes a paradigm of faith maturing only through trial.
Across these scenes, Matthew’s Jesus confronts enthusiasm without realism, religiosity without surrender, faith without endurance. Authentic discipleship, Oprean concludes, must include cost, commitment, and hardship.
Oprean’s essay is clear and perfectly conventional evangelical exegesis. The tripartite symmetry – cost, commitment, hardship – works neatly, though it imposes a moral taxonomy on what Matthew presents as narrative tension (a pale echo of Mark’s deeper ironies). Each scene may concern not moral failure but stages of revelation: curiosity, obedience, awe. By moralizing them, Oprean flattens Matthew’s literary dynamism and theological ambiguity for devotional ends.
His dependence on the standard commentators – Gundry, Keener, Bruner – keeps him in the well-worn groove. There’s no attention to Matthew’s redactional strategy, the eschatological charge of “Son of Man” in v. 20, or the symbolic link between the sea miracle and Israel’s deliverance. The piece is descriptive, not interpretive; homiletic rather than analytic. The unsettling portrait of discipleship becomes a sermon outline about piety instead of a crisis in perception.
Fair enough, you say – there’s nothing wrong with devotional writing. True. The problem is devotional writing costumed as analysis and published as scholarship. He isn’t interrogating the text. If he were, he’d ask: Why does Matthew place these episodes together? How does “Son of Man” invoke Danielic or apocalyptic motifs? What does the sea episode reveal about Jesus’s authority over creation itself? Instead, Oprean turns inward, toward exhortation.
It’s an odd hybrid genre – half sermon, half commentary – anchored in evangelical assumptions about the text’s unity and moral purpose. Critical possibilities are excluded from the start. There’s no discussion of redactional intent, no engagement with Second-Temple expectations of the huios tou anthrōpou, no awareness that “stilling the sea” echoes both Genesis and Exodus motifs of creation and deliverance.
This is scholarship only in the confessional sense of “biblical studies,” where the aim is to explain what discipleship should mean according to current theological norms. It’s homiletics, not analysis.
But my quarrel isn’t really with Oprean. He’s the symptom, not the cause. His paper stands for a broader phenomenon – pseudonymous scholarship: writing that borrows the visual grammar of academic work (citations, subheadings, DOIs, statistical jargon) while serving ideological ends.
You can find parallels across the sciences. In the early 2000s, string theory was on the altar. Articles in Foundations of Physics or in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics carried the trappings of rigor but were effectively apologias for the “beauty” of untestable theories. “Mathematical consistency,” we were told, “is experimental evidence.” The logic matches Oprean’s: inward coherence replaces external test.
Climate science has its mirror image in policy-driven venues like Energy & Environment or think-tank white papers formatted as peer-reviewed studies. They reproduce the scaffolding of scholarship while narrowing inquiry to confirm prior skepticism.
The rhetorical pattern is the same:
This month’s Sage journal offers a case that makes Oprean look like Richard Feynman. “Dynamic Effect of Green Financing, Economic Development, Renewable Energy and Trade Facilitation on Environmental Sustainability in Developing and Developed Countries” by Usman Ali et al. exhibits the same performative scholarship. The surface polish of method and technical vocabulary hides an absence of real inquiry.
Written in the formal cadence of econometrics – Dynamic Fixed Effects, GEE, co-integration, Sargan tests – it brandishes its methods as credentials rather than arguments. No model specifications, variable definitions, or theoretical tensions appear. “Dynamic” and “robustness” are prestige words, not analytic ones.
Ali’s paper deploys three grand frameworks – Sustainable Development Theory, Innovation Theory, and the Environmental Kuznets Curve – as if piling them together produced insight. But these models conflict! The EKC’s inverted-U relationship between income and pollution is empirically shaky, and no attempt is made to reconcile contradictions. The gesture is interdisciplinary theater: breadth without synthesis.
At least Oprean’s homiletics are harmless. Ali’s conclusion doubles as policy: developed countries must integrate renewables – “science says so.” It’s a sermon in technocratic garb.
Across these domains, and unfortunately many others, we see the creeping genre of methodological theater: environmental-finance papers that treat regressions as theology; equations and robustness tests as icons of faith. The altar may change – from Galilee to global sustainability – but the liturgy is the same.
“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975
clean energy, energy policy, evangelism, Paul Feyerabend, pseudoscience, religion, science
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