Alex Poersch

Black swan hunter | Patron of the arts

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@NateSilver538 Near 50/50 odds are very good for the Silver Bulletin business model.

[Ben Landau-Taylor @benlandautaylor]

Of course orcs have menus. Restaurants are the tip of the iceberg. Think about it. Mordor sends out gigantic armies with well-drilled formations and excellent discipline, which clearly require a sophisticated logistical operation to keep them fed and supplied, and with a terrific siege train to boot. This means at least the officer class is highly literate, you absolutely cannot use that strategy at that scale otherwise. Any civilization that can produce armies like Mordor’s will necessarily have extremely sophisticated art and culture, and may well be on a trajectory towards decadence. Of course you won’t see most of this by looking at an army in the field—you won’t see the heights of American culture at a forward operating base either—but we do get a few glimpses. We see their monumental architecture at Barad-dur and the Black Gate, which are ornamented in a well-developed style which is clearly distinct from the artistic tradition of Numenor. These are massive undertakings requiring a well-organized workforce, not to mention a tremendous logistic capacity as Gorgoroth is far too barren to supply the laborers so food must have been brought from elsewhere (probably Nurn), and even so the laborers may well have suffered casualties comparable to the Qin Emperor’s levees for building the Great Wall. Mordor’s turn towards decadence is visible in the splendid and impractical armor of commanders with political functions, like the Witch-King of Angmar or the Mouth of Sauron, even if it hasn’t yet reached so far as to affect the dress of purely military field commanders, whose gear is still utilitarian. To produce these sites and artifacts, Mordor must have a large and competent artisan class. They must have an urbanized and highly stratified population. The Nurnen slave plantations are entirely capable of supporting a society like this—compare the latifundia of Rome. In any case we can be confident that the cities of Nurn are on par with the great cities of premodern Earth. Mordor is more than sophisticated enough for restaurants, and wealthy enough, and cosmopolitan to boot—just going by the fragments we see through the lens of war, we can safely assume that Mordor gets the finest spices from the Corsairs of Umbar, expert chefs from the Haradrim, exotic recipes from the Easterlings, and who knows what else. The restaurants must be incredible, and that’s the least of it. Mordor probably has, like, great novelists writing comic adventure stories about an orcish explorer who gets lost among the hobbits. Astounding poets who will make you weep with despair as they describe being trampled by Sauron. Grand and incredibly racist operas about the crimes of the elves.

[Prince Vogelfrei 🐦‍⬛ @PrinceVogel]

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day is 'growlery' (1853, from Charles Dickens): a place you retreat to for the purposes of growling, muttering, and letting off steam.

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@Matthew_Froese I think it's more a control/domination thing. I often see the insect memes associated with living in a pod. Not saying it can't exist on both axes.

[Cody Hill @cody_a_hill]

We built a Diablo Canyon worth of megawatts, almost all since 2020, pretty cool

[Bartley Kives @bkives]

So I tried the thing, with middling results.

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

Over three hundred years ago, Robert Boyle - the father of modern Chemistry - wrote a list of things that he hoped could be achieved through science

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Thanks to Arabism, Syrian students are completely deprived of their Hellenistic contributions (less so in Lebanon). An entire swath of pre-Islamic history has been blotted out.
1000 years of Hellenism erased by the Arabists.
Below is the list of Greek-Levantine thinkers.

[Varguy @varguyart]

Happy Halloween everyone!

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@SouradetS If there isn't a sharp inflection what would be your take away?

[Joel Burgess @JoelBurgess]

Alright, so inspired by @NPurkeypile's bee post yesterday, here is one of my favorite bits of Skyrim oral history - the myth of the treasure fox.

I've told this story before in talks/etc, but I don't think I've shared it with twitter. Here goes.

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@pseudoerasmus do you have any book recommendations to understand the economic development of pre ww1 Germany?

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@DoctorLex Patrick Collison.

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@benserrurier I wonder how droughts would impact pumped storage going forward.

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@nickcammarata I've seen people call them technical brochures but that doesn't sound right to me.

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@PaulSkallas Friday in my 4HL leaving work early to go to a cabin. Pull of the weekend is strong.

[LindyMan @PaulSkallas]

Grilling is Lindy

[Alex Poersch @AlexPoersch]

@Todd_Friesen What do you mean by vaccine efficacy?