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2026 Atlanta Braves Are NL East Champs

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Final WinZone chart for 2026. Click to enlarge. 94–68 is a great season. If you tell any baseball fan that their team is going to win 94 ballgames in the regular season, they will be excited. Lots of wins in a game where everybody loses a third of the time at least. So, why am I not excited? The 2026 Atlanta Braves are NL East Champions. Before the season started, I asked Jerry if he thought we could win the division with one starting pitcher. I was only half-joking. We did it. With a 37-year-old Sale and great step-up performances from an aging Martín Pérez, a youthful Grant Holmes and the late July trade pick Tyler Mahle who has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since he came over. But we did it. With injuries and a line-up that only was never better than half hot at any given time. In no small measure, we did it with one of the best bullpens in MLB. We lost some leads this season, but not that many. Still, all this made me more anxious than celebratory. How far can this...
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Neil Young: Second Song

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Oh My God, Second Song . Everybody knows I'm a big Neil Young fan. A Rustie. I haven't commented on his recent music much because the albums have been mixed and not particularly noteworthy. But that changed a week ago today. Second Song sounds like an instant classic. I don't buy CDs anymore. I subscribe to Neil's Archives app and listen to whatever I want off there. I check it semi-regularly and knew Neil was coming out with an album soon with his ad-hoc band, the Chrome Hearts. So, I listened to the album's early teasers in the weeks leading up to its release. Then I got to hear the whole thing. It was on repeat in my mind and on my iPad and in my headphones. Over and over, this carefree but melancholic and vividly lived in feel. Frail and vulnerable. This is the sweet, gentle Neil, one of the best of Neil's many kinds of music. Second Song is, astonishingly, his 50th studio album. Is this the Neil of the 1970's? No. He's 80 now. We get the agi...
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Gaming Longstreet’s Attack

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The start of the Longstreet Attacks scenario. The Confederates are to the right (east), the Federals to the left (west). Both sides have already constructed breastworks which was common by this stage of the war. Wood's division is in column ready to move to the north just as Johnson's division of Hood's Corps attacks Brotherton Field. Longstreet and Rosecrans can be seen in the lower right and left corners, respectively. The game prints the various Rebel corps in a different shade of butternut or gray. The Yankee corps are in differing shades of blue. The battle extends beyond the area captured on this map.  This is a BIG game at a regiment scale. The biggest weakness in the “realism” of board style wargames is that you can see where everybody is on the board. Certain games hide it somewhat but you kind of always know what’s near any given unit of your side. That is an enormous advantage that did not occur historically. Particularly at the time of the Napoleonic Wars or the...
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AI: A Dangerous Vision VI

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] [ Five ] What is intelligence? Not IQ. Not emotional intelligence. For purposes of this discussion, I am talking about the act of cognition and cognitive behavior. Recognizing patterns. Using information. Remembering. Planning. Trying something that fails and trying something else. Learning to work with others to improve cognitive ability. Is it even reasonable to think an AI incident can tell you something about human intelligence? Not is you equate them. Do so and you inherit consciousness, embodiment, childhood, hunger, mortality, every piece of baggage that comes bundled with being a human organism, and the agents don’t have to put up with any of those challenges. Simply compare them don’t equate. Ask which specific cognitive operations showed up and how. Then you have an exercise that is genuinely useful. These agents required certain things. They hit tasks that were flatly impossible and started poking around Artifactory, OpenAI's inte...
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AI: A Dangerous Vision V

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] In 1846, the British Parliament passed more than 250 separate Acts authorizing railroad expansion. Together they proposed 9,500 miles of new track, nearly the size of the entire current UK network, approved in twelve months of pure speculative fever. Capital investment in new rail lines hit something like 6% of British GDP. Then the bottom fell out. Shares dropped 67% from peak. Fortunes got wiped out, entire portfolios gone. Academicians call it the largest technology bubble in history by capital invested relative to the size of the economy. Roughly 90% of the track laid during those maniacal years became permanent infrastructure anyway. The money vanished but the thing it fueled continued. America ran the same play bigger, later. The transcontinental line finished in 1869. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific financing collapsed in September 1873. Bank run. Six-year depression that no one seems to recall anymore. A quarter of American railroads d...
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Noticing

Your brain is always being shaped by something, and if you're not deliberately shaping it, something else already is. That's neurology. The same plasticity that shows up as a larger hippocampus in London cab drivers responds to demand in either direction. When the demand changes, the brain changes with it.  I met a version of this in person on a recent trip to New York, an Uber driver who told me he'd had to learn thousands of streets, avenues and boulevards to pass his own licensing exam. You must score at least an 80 or you fail. He's probably working with a larger hippo too. The organ doesn't consult you before it remodels. It just measures repetition. Whatever you repeat, you become. Whatever you neglect, you lose, usually with little fanfare. Norwegian conscription data shows IQ scores reversing since about 1975, reversing even between brothers raised in the same house, which strongly points away from genetics and toward environmental causes. MIT's study o...
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The Houthis Kick Ass in Yemen

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Almost all of western Yemen is now controlled by the Houthi rebels supported by the IRGC. [ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Note: I reference a lot of people in this post that are important to this situation. Few have ever heard of any of them. You'll have to look them up yourself if you want more details. My focus is obviously on one previously obscure man in particular. His name is Yusuf al-Madani. Almost no one outside Yemen had heard of him a week ago. Then his forces broke through the front, captured the Red Sea port of Mocha , drove down the coast and reached Bab el-Mandeb at the base of the Red Sea. A Houthi-linked estimate put their gains at more than 6,000 square kilometres. More than 2,300 square miles. Nearly the size of Delaware, taken in a few days. It was a classic blitzkrieg in the middle of a missile war. Al-Madani is the most successful ground commander of anything stimulated by Epic Fury so far. The Houthis have never publicly named the commander of the operation. ...
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