Ummagumma

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (2pm Eastern Time) As I write this, Yemen's government is attacking the Houthis along the Red Sea coast. Yemeni troops on the ground. Saudi air power overhead. Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, announced the offensive on television today and called it the battle for the state, until Yemen is liberated from the Houthis. The stated aim is to retake all Houthi-held territory and restore state authority across the whole country. Government forces say they are striking Sanaa and Saada, the Houthi capital and the Houthi heartland. Heavy ground fighting broke out in the Kahboub Mountains, the high ground overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, with government troops and al-Subaiha tribesmen attacking Houthi positions. The Houthis still hold the initiative. In the last 48 hours they took strategic hilltops near Taiz and cut the last supply road between Taiz and Aden. Several outlets report Taiz encircled or close to it. That is Yemen...

Michael Harris II hits a 3-run homer to electrify the crowd in Game Three. Note: Links provide short videos of all the action. [ Read the 2026 Braves season story. ] This year, the Phillies didn’t knock us out. The Braves beat the Phillies in the postseason ( see here ). I don’t think I’ve ever typed that before. Feels great! Game One had us down 3–2 with two outs in the eighth. Michael Harris II kept us alive with an infield single. Ozzie Albies got hit by a pitch. Austin Riley came up against ace reliever Jhoan Duran and hit a three-run homer on the first pitch. We won 5 – 3. After a regular season of .219 and 201 strikeouts, Riley picked an excellent time to contribute. Jerry said he erased “the whole crappy season with one swing.” Hard to disagree. Ta-da! Our nerve-wracking formula worked again. Get some runners aboard, then hit one out. Harris had three hits and scored twice. Albies hit an RBI triple. Yaz drove in a run. Then Riley delivered the big swing. The stadium erupted...

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 thi...

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...

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...

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...