From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, July 22
NYT — read the full story
The administration is pouring money into AI while starving the universities that built American science. The Trump Office of Science and Technology Policy, under Michael Kratsios, has shifted federal research dollars toward commercial AI development and away from the foundational work that trains scientists and discovers things with no immediate profit. Basic research—the kind that produces breakthroughs decades later—gets leaner. Marcus Aurelius has the first word today, then Seneca.
The fiscus flows where the princeps points it. Always. You knew this when Hadrian rebuilt the Pantheon but let the Mouseion at Alexandria wither — the engineers had his ear, the scholars only their scrolls. Now the new steward directs the treasury toward the new siege-engine: the calculating machine that promises to aim the catapult without a mathematician's hand.
The schools at Athens, at Rhodes, at Pergamum lose their stipends. The young men who would have sat under a Stoic or a Peripatetic are told: learn the mechanism, not the principle. You saw this at Carnuntum. The quartermaster hired a contractor to forge spearheads by a new method — faster, cheaper than the smith's hammer — and when the barbarian charge came, the new metal shattered.
The principle was the smith's knowledge. The mechanism was only its shadow. The treasury remembers the cheaper spearhead. It forgets the smith until the line breaks.
The treasury remembers the cheaper spearhead. It forgets the smith until the line breaks.
about the result of the presidential campaign. They were more interested in the cause of humanity at large; in developing in the heart of each a desire to come in touch with Nature, with God. At an early stage of the presidential campaign, the party who ran in the “stray horse,” …
division of philosophy is made—into _Physics_, dealing with the universe and its laws, the problems of divine government and teleology; _Logic_, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and _Ethics_, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. T…
also to meet the child, Catalina Martinet, at the Governor’s home, at nine o’clock, after which meeting he would go to the studio of the scientist, Guillermo Gonzales. As the President sped through the beautiful streets of Chihuahua, from the Mexican Annex, to the palatial home o…
_most_ wonderful scientific discovery of this or any other age. I could write on and on and on, telling you about what I remember, but it is of no use to burden you with so much reading. “I will now return to my apartments at the Mexican Annex, at which place I hope to see you pr…
met his fate. CHAPTER VII. THE PRESIDENT SURPRISED. It was the intention of the Presidential party to spend one day and night in Chihuahua, and to leave the following morning before eleven o’clock for Saltillo, where they would spend a few days visiting her large and famous educa…
Lucilius, you ask what I make of this news from across the sea — a ruler's ministers choosing the engine over the inquiry that built it. I think of my villa at Nomentum, the winter I spent there after Corsica, copying Aristotle's Physics by lamplight because the library at Alexandria had burned and no emperor thought to replace it. We called it physica then — the study of nature for its own sake — and we knew ethics without it was blind. The Stoics held that material objects alone exist, but immanent in them a spiritual force: reason, the ruling principle.
You cannot harvest the fruit and expect the tree to keep standing. This Kratsios funds the weapon, not the geometry that aimed it. The universities are not temples; they are the roots. Cut them and the AI they boast of becomes a branch sawn from its own trunk, green for a season, then dust.
I watched Nero pour gold into the Colosseum's sand while the granaries emptied. The pattern is older than Rome. Write to me when the next budget arrives. We shall see what they call progress.
division of philosophy is made—into _Physics_, dealing with the universe and its laws, the problems of divine government and teleology; _Logic_, which trains the mind to discern true from false; and _Ethics_, which applies the knowledge thus gained and tested to practical life. T…
invited. The _Enchiridion_ briefly indicated the techniques which the philosopher should apply in acting well the diverse roles which God might assign to those whom he loves, the Stoic philosophers. From the rules of social conduct to the recommendations of sexual asceticism befo…
the appearances. When the water is moved, the ray also seems to be moved, yet it is not moved. And when then a man is seized with giddiness, it is not the arts and the virtues which are confounded, but the spirit (the nervous power) on which they are impressed; but if the spirit …
the appearances. When the water is moved, the ray also seems to be moved, yet it is not moved. And when then a man is seized with giddiness, it is not the arts and the virtues which are confounded, but the spirit (the nervous power) on which they are impressed; but if the spirit …
is an enormous mass of things without names, which we do not speak of under distinctive names of their own, but by the names of other things transferred to them. We speak of our own foot, of the foot of a couch, of a sail, or of a poem; we apply the word 'dog' to a hound, a fish,…
The story ran in the New York Times. When a ruler's apparatus chooses the machine over the question, the fiscal consequences compound—and so does the institutional rot. That's Old News for today.