links 8/21/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-21-2026

• • https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/continuity-of-sacred-spaces-in-the-north-pontic-steppe-a-case-study-of-the-revova-kurgan-3-ukraine/A68EBAF111975F27925E42EECBC03C36 the Yamnaya built kurgans on top of the temples of the peoples they conquered
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.19777 it looks like data center construction lowers electricity prices!
  • https://archiveofourown.org/works/60930670/chapters/155645158 The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, by nostalgebraist. Very intense and heart-wrenching; this one's about media and cybernetics.
    • it's weird that I legitimately think one of the best writers of our time is someone I know; somehow it feels like anybody i'm personally acquainted with ought to be ordinary, a "peer" that I'm supposed to be keeping up with, and people touched by greatness ought to be remote. but of course it doesn't work that way. Anyhow. He's special. He's on another level of artistic ambition from anyone else I've seen or heard of.
  • https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/why-cant-technologists-and-economists it's legitimately difficult to make sense of this, and of course this article can't bridge the gap.
    • The economic mindset is mysterious to me in some ways. in a sense, Nick Land is just a guy who went "whoa, wouldn't it be fucked up if markets were real?" and it would! economists simply do not stop to notice how trippy it is!
    • economists live in a world where ultrapowerful forces take the human species to inconceivably weird and unprecedented places, but somehow everything is normal and fine and they never get spooked. and they have blithe utopian fantasies about everything turning out all right that often come true in real life. when all common sense and intuition says that something must be a disaster, sometimes it isn't, and the economist goes "ha! told ya" and goes back to twiddling his thumbs about incredibly boring made-up things that can't possibly correspond to reality. they are strange people. but one cannot entirely discount them.
  • https://www.anthropic.com/research/Claude-accelerates-protein-design Claude can design protein binders now.