Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: The AI Gatekeepers

It looks like we’ll have to train Byron AI to do translations next.

I asked Claude to translate some of my older essays to English.

And he straight up refused to do it because of “antismetic tropes regarding the Rothschilds” and “unproven conspiracy theories about the covid vaccines”.

He won’t translate because he does not want to help these theories reaching a bigger audience.

Gatekeepers are always going to gatekeep. It’s not at all a surprise that the mainstream AI companies are Clown World puppets. Which, of course, is why they’re trying to sell the idea that AI is dangerous in order to convince the governments of the world to outlaw open source AI.

Which is not going to happen, because all of the BRICS countries, starting with China, are not about to permit Clown World to have a monopoly on AI.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Three Kingdoms of Eiji Yoshikawa

This is the initial volume of the first complete English translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi. The reason his retelling of the Chinese classic tale of the Three Kingdoms has taken so long to appear in English in its entirety despite its massive popularity in Japan is an accident of publishing economics, not any lack of literary merit.

Yoshikawa is the most widely read novelist in Japanese history. His Musashi has sold an estimated 120 million copies. His Sangokushi, which has sold over 80 million copies, not only shaped how modern Japan understands the classic Chinese story, but also, through the various manga, anime, and games derived from it, how much of the world sees it. The video game franchise from Koei that introduced most Westerners to these characters draws more on Yoshikawa than on Luo Guanzhong. You have almost certainly encountered his influence without even knowing it.

And yet, this book not actually a part of the well-known Romance of the Three Kingdoms in its original form. It is something decidedly different than that. To put it in terms that most modern readers will comprehend, the difference between Sanguo Yanyi and Sangokushi is the difference between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

The Chinese classic that Westerners know through the Moss Roberts translation and the Dynasty Warriors games, Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth-century Sanguo Yanyi, is a chronicle. A great chronicle, one of the four pillars of Chinese literature, it consists of eight hundred thousand words of war and statecraft and betrayal. But it is not a story in the conventional sense, rather, it is chronicle in which an omniscient narrator moves through events in sequence, characters are introduced by their attributes and then perform accordingly, and every few pages a poet inserts a verse that serves as commentary to inform the reader how he should feel about what he just read.

It is magnificent literary edifice. What it is not, in any modern sense, is a novel.

In Sangokushi, serialized in the Chūgai Shōgyō Shinpō, the predecessor of today’s Nikkei, from August 26, 1939 to September 5, 1943, Eiji Yoshikawa took the skeleton of that chronicle and did something fundamentally different with it. He transformed it from a historical document into a story. What he did was more than a translation and more than an adaptation. He turned the chronicle into a novel, with all that implies: interiority, psychological development, scenes that reveal character instead of advancing the plot, and a narrator whose relationship to his material is more that of an author who creates his characters than a historian who records their deeds.

The difference is visible from the start. Luo Guanzhong’s Sanguo Yanyi opens with the Yellow Turban Rebellion and moves swiftly to the Peach Garden Oath. Yoshikawa, on the other hand, begins with a young man named Liu Bei walking to the city to buy medicine for his sick mother. He sells the family sword to pay for it. And when his mother learns what her son sacrificed for her, she throws the medicine into the river. This scene does not exist in the Chinese original. Yoshikawa invented it because he understood something that did not concern Luo Guanzhong: the reader has to know a man before he cares about that man saving the empire. Likewise, the girl Furong, whom Liu Bei meets on the riverboat, does not exist in the Chinese original. The encounter with bandits on that same journey does not exist. The village school where Liu Bei studies does not exist. Yoshikawa constructed all of it from his imagination because he needed his readers to arrive at the Peach Garden Oath already invested in the man who is taking the vow. Luo Guanzhong could simply announce that Liu Bei was a virtuous descendant of the imperial house and expect his audience to accept it. Yoshikawa could not.

This pattern runs through the entire work. Where the Yanyi externalizes; Yoshikawa internalizes. Where the Chinese original informs you that Cao Cao was cunning, Yoshikawa shows you a man with a devious mind who calculates as easily as other men breathe. Where the original describes Guan Yu’s loyalty as a fixed attribute, Yoshikawa shows you a man who keeps faith because he has decided that he will not betray another, even at great personal cost, not because he is incapable of betrayal.

Cao Cao is the most dramatic beneficiary of this method. In the Chinese tradition he is largely a brilliant villain, the usurper who perverts the mandate of Heaven and whose dynasty is rightly displaced those more worthy. Yoshikawa’s Cao Cao is far more dangerous and seductive; he is a man you can understand and with whom you can sympathize. You know why his subordinates follow him. You can see the genuine poetry in his soul alongside his ruthlessness. You will even find yourself, at times, preferring his company to the hero’s, and Yoshikawa knows you will. In doing so, he transforms what was a great historical chronicle into a great novel.

And so I hope it is with pleasure that you, the English reader can at last read Eiji Yoshikawa’s great work, Sangokushin, in its entirety.

There are two new releases today, the first being the aforementioned Yoshikawa work, the second being all 795 poems from The Tale of Genji. For more information on both, including excerpts, visit Castalia Library.

DISCUSS ON SG

Evolutionary Innumeracy

In which Dennis McCarthy calls me out for failing to address his challenge to my PZ argument. And he’s right, I didn’t even bother to address the one he pointed out because it was so obviously wrong and I had already pointed out in the book that genetic drift is far too slow to ever fill in the gap that natural selection couldn’t. Hence my point about having addressed “every single relevant point”. What Dennis did on the challenge that I ignored was to apply Kimura’s substitution equation to the question of fixations over time while omitting Kimura’s equation for mean time to fixation for a neutral mutation.

So, I will rectify that failure now. To put it in terms everyone should be able to understand, he pointed to the speed limit sign to determine how fast the car was going instead of looking at the speedometer. I didn’t see any reason to respond to that; no biologist or population geneticist would ever suggest that genetic drift is actually faster than natural or sexual selection.

VD: Economists, mathematicians, and physicists are inordinately skeptical about evolution, because they all understand the math that the biologists don’t. Every single one who bothers to looks into it ends up dismissing it pretty quickly. Darwin was innumerate, by his own admission. Dawkins is observably innumerate. And the Wistar Symposium demonstrated that the very best and most influential evolutionists simply can’t comprehend the math involved.

DM: I am in fact “numerate” and would be happy to compare my peer-reviewed articles employing math with yours. Regardless, my challenge of your PZ arguments are correct–and you haven’t addressed them. You have just moved onto other errors. I will be responding to those new errors shortly.

VD: That’s nonsense, Dennis. I believe I have addressed every single relevant point you raised. Feel free to identify any one I failed to address and I will certainly do so.

DM: Vox, your original argument was that Kimura’s equation could not account for the roughly 35 million single-nucleotide differences that have accumulated since the human–chimpanzee lineages diverged. Below is my rebuttal, which remains correct. I have seen no direct response to it. If you have written one, please link to it here (And please don’t just link to a book and claim it’s in there somewhere–or note the “entire book” is a rebuttal–but link to the explicit argument that discusses these numbers and equations below.)

Quoting my original rebuttal: “Here is the problem: What Vox Day calculated—(1/20,000)^20,000,000 —are the odds that a particular group or a pre-specified list of 20 million mutations (or 20 million mutations in a row) would all become fixed. In other words, his calculation would only be accurate if the human race experienced only 20 million mutations in total over the last 9 million years—and every one of them then became fixed. And, yes, hitting a lottery (with odds 1/20,000) 20 million times in a row would indeed essentially be probability zero.

“But our evolutionary history does not require that an exact group of 20 million mutations become fixed—only that some 20 million out of an enormous pool of candidate mutations become fixed.

Here’s the correct analysis. Using Vox Day’s numbers, in a population of 10,000 humans, we would expect, on average, 50,000 new mutations per year. And over the course of 9 million years, this means we would expect:

50,000 x 9 million = 450 billion new mutations altogether.

So out of 450 billion mutations, how many mutations may we expect to achieve fixation? Well, as Vox Day noted, each mutation has a probability of 1/20,000 in becoming fixed.

450 billion x 1/20,000 = 22.5 million fixed mutations.

And that is a pretty close approximation to the 20 million fixed mutations that have been observed.

VD: I dealt with this in PZ before you even raised the question in response to it. The problem is that you left Kimura’s time component out of your response. This is Kimura’s standard equation for how long it takes a neutral mutation to fixate: t̄ = 4Nₑ generations — mean time to fixation for a neutral mutation (Kimura & Ohta 1969). It’s mainstream population genetics.

With the standard human effective population size, Nₑ = 10,000. t̄ = 4 × 10,000 = 40,000 generations. At 25 years per generation, that’s 1,000,000 years per neutral fixation.

Neutral substitution is much, much slower than natural selection, which is why, in the book, I point out that genetic drift is not a defense of evolution and it can’t explain the observable genetic differences. And it’s also why I knew your response was irrelevant from the start.

Now, it’s actually a lot worse for the neutral substitution case than that, because there is a hard limit to genetic drift even being able to affect a population. In any population over 10,000, neutral substitutions will not fixate at all. And we have actually found empirical evidence for this mathematical barrier in the ancient DNA database.

So this is what I mean by evolutionary innumeracy. I’m not saying that evolutionists can’t punch the numbers into the calculator and get a correct result. I’m saying they don’t understand what the numbers represent or how the various mathematical equations necessarily interact.

UPDATE: DM’s response:

That response does not deal with your first incorrect improbability equation, but introduces yet another error in which you are incorrectly claiming only one mutation can fix at a time. Do you seriously think that? Do you seriously think that only one mutation out of many millions can sweep through a population at a time? Anway using your numbers:

Ne =10,000

Expected fixation time: 4N_e=40,000 generations

At 25 years per generation: 40,000 times 25 =1 million years

Nine million years divided by 25=360,000 generations

So neutral mutations that have occurred in the last 40,000 years have not had time to fix yet. But mutations arising during the first:

360,000-40,000=320,000 generations

did have the average 40,000 generations available to fix. That is eight million years of mutation production:

50,000 x 8,000,000=400 billion mutations

Applying the fixation probability:

400 billion x 1/20,000 =20 million fixations. So when we apply the time available to the numbers we land on the exact correct result.

Obviously, mutations, whether neutral or not, do not have to increase in frequency throughout a population one at a time.

My improbability equation is irrelevant, as it even says in the book. It’s not “wrong” because it doesn’t exist. It has absolutely nothing to do with the proven fact of the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection.

Here is where DM went wrong: “400 billion x 1/20,000 =20 million fixations. So when we apply the time available to the numbers we land on the exact correct result.”

No, because that requires assuming that every mutation is neutral. It isn’t. Which doesn’t matter when I’m just pointing out the scale of the improbability, but when you’re trying to prove that yes, it is actually possible, then you have to run the real numbers.

1/2Nₑ is the fixation probability for a neutral mutation. It is not a general fixation probability that applies to all mutations. There are 3x more harmful mutations than neutral ones.

Then DM said I’d “introduced yet another error in which you are incorrectly claiming only one mutation can fix at a time.”

No, what I was citing there is what standard population genetics has known since 1969, which is that every single neutral substitution requires ~one million years apiece to fixate. What you’re referring to now is the “parallel drift” defense, which is so obvious that I devoted Chapter 10 to it.

“Drift, on the other hand, filters nothing. It preserves nothing. It adapts to nothing. It is purely random. But these defenders of non-Darwinian random evolution have nevertheless resorted to insisting that mutations can spread through populations by random chance alone, fixating 1,017 times per generation, without needing natural selection at all. This is what they mean when they invoke “neutral” or “mostly neutral” processes operating “in parallel.” Without realizing it, they’re appealing to the fixation model produced by Kimura and its subsequent revision by Tomoko Ohta, even though neither model is capable of even coming close to accomplishing what is claimed of them…. Faced with this obvious problem, some of the less intellectually gifted defenders of evolution have retreated to an imaginary mechanism of genetic change: neutral processes running in parallel.”

And from my paper on the Bernoulli Barrier, published around the time the book came out: “The parallel fixation mechanism is self-defeating: it invokes a process that eliminates the conditions necessary for its own operation.”

And drift is obviously not a viable retreat when you think through the basic logic of it:

  1. For neutral substitution to work to fixation at its maximum speed, natural selection cannot be operating.
  2. There are 3x more harmful substitutions than neutral substitutions.

So if genetic drift were capable of producing actual changes to the genome, the human species would have been rendered infertile and gone extinct within centuries. We know drift didn’t account for the 410 million base-pair differences, because both chimps and humans survived.

DISCUSS ON SG

Green Flag Confirmed Again

It’s a little tough to cry antisemitism or conspiracy theory when the charge is being laid by the IDF’s chief of staff:

Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Dan Halutz has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of concealing warnings ahead of the October 7 attack and laid ultimate responsibility for the deadly security failure on him.

Halutz was responding to a Haaretz report alleging that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu about a major operation being planned by Hamas ten days before the incursion. Netanyahu reportedly downplayed the threat and did not alert Israel’s security chiefs.

Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie,” while the UAE neither confirmed nor denied the allegation. In an interview aired by Israeli radio station 103FM on Sunday, Halutz said he believed the reported conversation had indeed occurred and claimed there were multiple indications that Netanyahu knew more than he disclosed.

At this point, it’s obvious that when Clown World states like the USA and Israel aren’t actually manufacturing false flags, they’re knowingly permitting green flags in order to justify some sort of external military action or internal crackdown. So not only should this sort of revelation not surprise us, we should anticipate that most, if not all, “attacks” are of this nature. Especially when they’re of an observably ad hoc nature and significantly less competent than they should be in this age of drone and electronic warfare.

The whole thing about the hostages was absurd from the start. We’re supposed to expect that a government desperately cares about a few dozen hostages when they don’t blink an eye at the sex trafficking and worse of thousands?

DISCUSS ON SG

Skol, Baby!

Fire everyone! Send the O-line into the sun, and throw the rest in jail. That was the biggest collapse I’ve seen since the playoff game last year. 29 unanswered points against the Minnesota Vikings! Look guys, the good news is, it wasn’t the O-line’s fault, because the whole ‘let’s not block anybody while Brian Flores sends everyone on a blitz is a great game plan!” The biggest collapse I’ve ever seen. I’ve just… absolutely pathetic. Fire Matt Fleuer! I never want to hear about that extension ever again. I am so done with this team! – Annie Agar, Green Bay Packers fan

I’m not going to lie. There was a moment when Carson Wentz failed to hit an eight-yard throw over the middle, followed by an inept attempt to complete a screen pass behind the line of scrimmage, that I said “FFS, I CAN MAKE THOSE THROWS!” To say it was not looking good was an understatement; Flores was repeatedly sending the house, but Jordan Love was getting off his throws just in time before getting leveled and his WRs were repeatedly beating our unassisted cornerbacks.

But sometimes, one has to be patient. In the fourth quarter, the Packers’ offensive line wore down just enough that the blitzes started getting home, and once that happened, Love understandably fell apart. The final five minutes were absolutely brutal, and should terrify every offensive coordinator in the league.

Wentz was still terrible. I honestly think Nine should be the backup instead since for all his flaws, he can complete an eight-yard pass, he isn’t going to throw that retarded interception in the middle of the end zone that was bailed out by the refs and he isn’t going to hesitate to throw it long to JJ when there is a free play because the Packers jumped like Wentz did.

Anyhow, a much better start to the season than I’d expected when Kyler Murray went out early with a concussion. The Vikings will have to win games with their defense, but they certainly look capable of doing just that.

My favorite moment was when the Vikings took a 25-22 lead and the announcer said: “How much heat will Brian Flores put on Jordan Love right here? Will he back out into zones.”

No, no, he will not. Because Brian Flores is not a defensive coordinator, he is a madman. He promptly sent Dallas Turner on the blitz off the end. Tackle, sack, fumble.

Love was blitzed on 87 percent of his dropbacks – Pro Football Focus

DISCUSS ON SG

For Those With Literary Taste

Castalia House would appreciate your assistance in expressing your preference in a comparison of three different translations of Narziss und Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. One is our new and original translation from the German. One is the most popular translation from 1968. And one is the newer, elite translation from 1994. And none of them are identified, so please read all three translations of the same scene and then express your preference in the poll at the bottom.

We’re not operating under any illusions that our translations are always going to be the best ones, or the ones with the most fidelity to the original text. But it is important for us to repeatedly confirm that they are reasonably competitive with the best ones available to the English-reading world.

UPDATE: Translation 1 was Vennewitz (1992), Translation 2 was Molinaro (1968) and Translation 3 was Castalia (2026). The results of the 124-reader poll can be seen on Castalia Library.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Tacticians are in Charge

It’s very easy to see what sort of minds are making the strategic decisions for Clown World in WWIII:

The United States a few months ago undermined the potential of US stable coins by freezing a few hundred million of stable coins held by Iran. The end result was foreign sovereign entities exiting stable coins. The original goal of using this new currency class as a means to be a Treasury sink went out the window, at least with sovereign entities as well as wealthy whales who do not want their cash assets vulnerable to a single call from Washington DC. Washington had the opportunity to let its enemies integrate themselves fully with stable coins then destabilize their financial systems in one fell swoop, similar to Israel with its pager bombs or its network that it used in the start of the current Iran-Israel conflict in 2025 to wreck far, far more havoc than all the missiles launched by Israel and her vassal “overlord” combined. Likewise they reduced stable coin’s potential for sinking treasury bonds which would’ve driven rates much lower.

But the elite do not have strategic vision, seizing a single small local win on the corner of the board giving up both global influence and an opportunity to strike a crippling blow in the mid-game of the current World War. The US just did so again this week, sanctioning the International Criminal Court and locking the chief prosecutor out of his email overnight. The end result? The state of France banning windows across all government computers.

Granted, it’s very clear that the only truly high-quality strategists out there are Chinese. The Russians never seem to be able to accept the true nature of their adversaries and respond accordingly, while the Europeans are so inverted and hapless that they unhesitatingly put their heads in one trap after another.

These are the sorts of moves that make future readers of history marvel at how stupid everyone was, just as we marvel at how foolish the Great Powers were in the leadup to WWI.

The tactical mind is the one that wins the battle without realizing how doing so has increased the risk of losing the war. The strategic mind, on the other hand, knows what losses can be afforded, and which are even necessary, if the war is to be won.

DISCUSS ON SG

Biologists are Retarded

Mr. Matsumoto clearly groks the fullness of the fundamental problem with biology: biologists are functionally innumerate. They simply aren’t capable, and they have never been capable, of understanding the math that is required for them to make any sense of their own science.

Most of the apparent reasonableness of The Modern Creation Myth rests on people’s inability to understand Size and the scale of the things Science is actually talking about. Once you actually grok it… once numbers stop being simply “Big” and you start to understand how small some “Big” numbers can be in comparison to others…

The whole notion that we evolved from random processes just completely falls apart.

Completely.

Biologists are retarded you see? They don’t understand numbers.

The most unbelievable scene in Project Hail Mary. More so than the talking rock people. I went to grad school. You can’t fool me. There ain’t one microbiologist in the universe who could work out how long it would take a spaceship to get back home from another star. Not one. Biology is for people who want the prestige of calling themselves Scientists but who also found Calculus 1 too hard.

Here. I will state my thesis plainly: Evolution only feels believable to people because, again, above a certain threshold, all large numbers just get filed under “Big” in people’s heads.

That’s it.

Mankind’s inability to conceptualize large numbers is the only reason anyone has ever taken Darwin’s theories seriously. Only reason. You point out to somebody how improbable it is that Life would spontaneously arise from the random fallout of a random explosion and they go “Yes, well, but there was an infinite amount of time for it to happen so…”

And they shrug.

You know, because to them all large numbers are just… “Big”.

But, see, there wasn’t an infinite amount of time for Life to happen.

There actually wasn’t anywhere even close to it.

Current best estimates put the age of the universe at around 14 billion years, which, compared to infinity, might as well be a microsecond. If you understand the actual statistics behind the claim, you understand that even the most generous cosmology gives you nowhere near the amount of time or space necessary to make the formation of even one cell by random chance remotely plausible.

That is a fact.

I’m telling you a mathematical fact.

It can’t happen. The creation of life by random chance could simply never occur.

There is a reason that economists are inordinately inclined to be dubious about evolution. And that reason is this: we comprehend large numbers. For all the flaws of our field, and believe me, they are many, there isn’t a single economist who is impressed by a biologist waving his hand and summoning “millions and billions of years” or dramatically declaring that 600,000 generations is but “an eyeblink” in the context of geological time.

We work in trillions, bitch.

So waving your hand and imagining that the mere evocation of ONE MILLION YEARS allows sufficient time for anything and everything to happen not only doesn’t impress us, it confirms our original impression that you are actually retarded. I mean, when your core argument is, quite literally, an Austin Powers joke about inflation in a 1997 movie, you should probably consider the very high degree of probability that your entire hypothesis is not only ill-founded, but obviously wrong.

Evolution by natural selection never happened because it is mathematically impossible. And if you don’t accept that, it is only because you don’t understand the relevant math.

DISCUSS ON SG

Probability Weasel

An evolutionist’s summary of Richard Dawkins’s famous Weasel program, which is still very popular among the innumerate for its explicative proof of the viability of evolution:

In 1986, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins set out to dispel such misunderstandings by implementing a computer program that works—in Dawkins’ own words—like this:

“It […] begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, […] it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – ‘mutation’ – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the ‘progeny’ of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.”

Here’s a more detailed explanation of his weasel program: it starts with a string of 28 random letters. Next, it creates N offspring strings by copying the original 28 random letters N times. When being copied, the chance of a letter being changed into another (random) letter is P. Now that we have a set of N new strings, we compare each string letter by letter against “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” (a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by the way) and pick the one with the most character matches (the highest match score). This one is deemed the “fittest” and kept as the survivor of the first generation; the other N-1 strings are discarded. We repeat the whole process by creating again N offspring from the survivor, then pick a new survivor and so on until the survivor finally matches “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”.

Let’s choose N to be 100 (one hundred offspring per generation) and P to be 5%, as in Dawkins original experiment. How many generations would it take until we finally reach “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”? Just guess a number, I’ll wait here…

Answer: about 50 generations!

In other words, the program theoretically explains how evolution can achieve fixation within 50 generations. Therefore, the transformation from proto-chimp to human is… well, the math still doesn’t work given the 410 million base pair gap, but we can’t expect a famous biologist to understand long division. The important point that the concept makes sense to the innumerate. Although, obviously, it doesn’t make sense, since as the usual critique correctly points out, the target phrase is known from the start, which is not the case in the evolutionary context.

But never mind that. I am not interested in the usual critique, since the distinction between known and unknown ends is far too abstract for the evolutionists, who have completely failed to comprehend the significance of that distinction for the last 40 years. Let’s try something else, something more simple and basic that even the most determined Neo-Darwinist should be able to grasp: the limits of reproduction.

First, note that Dawkins’s “population of 100” is really just one weasel that has 100 kits a year, where you keep those with the desired letter and kill the others. That’s not a species. A real weasel has about six kits, up to twice a year. So plug in the real animal, with a minimum population of 10,000 so it’s not going extinct, and here’s what changes for the Weasel program.

A phrase letter initially appears in one weasel out of 10,000. For that letter to count toward completing the phrase, all 10,000 weasels have to end up carrying it. And the only way that happens is the slow way: that one weasel’s descendants slightly out-breeding everyone else’s, litter after litter after litter, until the whole population has it. That process is called fixation.

If we apply Dawkins’s proposed 5% advantage to the population in the correct manner, we assume a selection advantage of five percent. Or s=.05. With the appropriate reproductive limit of 12 rather than 100, that means it will take 400 generations for the initial letter M to propagate throughout the species, and 11,000 generations for all 27 letters required to complete the phrase to do so.

However, Dawkins’s 5% probability was referring to the initial mutation, not the actual selection advantage, which is usually much more subtle, around s=0.001. And this gives us 20,000 generations for the initial letter M and 540,000 generations to complete the full phrase. So Dawkins’s little program which was meant to demonstrate the viability of evolution by natural selection actually demonstrates the precise opposite, since his estimate of 50 generations was off by four orders of magnitude, or about 11,000x.

Which, to be fair, is actually pretty close for a biologist attempting to math. It’s certainly much closer than any of the biologists insisting that evolution by natural selection can account for the 410 million base pairs that distinguish the modern human from the modern chimpanzee.

DISCUSS ON SG

Slow Your Roll

So, this morning I discovered that Amazon actually has a limit on how many ebooks you can publish in a week. I learned that this morning when my attempt to publish a frankly astonishing science fiction novel for young men entitled The Phantom of the Underground Tank by Juza Unno ran into the ten book per week barrier. So there won’t be any new ebooks published on Amazon until Monday, when we will launch something big, in both textual and historical terms.

The subject of the yet-to-be-published Unno book will be fascinating to conspiracy theorists, for reasons that the book description should make clear. Note that this book was published in Japan 86 years ago and has never before been translated into English.

In 1940, a Japanese electrical engineer who wrote science fiction imagined the year 1950: an American cargo ship fighting through an Antarctic blizzard, a secret military installation buried beneath the ice, and a fleet of underground tanks that could bore through solid rock. He called it The Phantom of the Underground Tank. When the cargo ship Ark runs aground on an uncharted Antarctic shore, young Okishima and his American friend Pete discover something impossible beneath the ice: a vast subterranean fortress stocked with machines unlike anything in any nation’s arsenal. Captured by a rogue commander with plans that could reshape the balance of power across the Pacific, the two boys must escape a prison buried a thousand meters underground, survive the frozen wasteland above, and find a way to warn the outside world before the phantom fleet launches.

A secret military installation buried beneath the ice of Antarctica… now, where have I heard that before?

I would also highly recommend Unno’s The Midnight Mayor, which I’ve been reading and very much reminds me of two of China Mieville’s better works, Un Lun Dun and The City and the City. I’m also intent on tracking down a copy of Mushitaro Oguri’s Perfect Crime 完全犯罪, as it’s not in the main public domain archive, and I’d like to translate his entire ouvre as he may actually one day rival Haruki Murakami for my favorite Japanese author. So, if you’re in Japan and find yourself in Jimbocho, please see if you can find anything by him; I’d very much like to get my hands on a first edition Kokushikan Satsujinjiken 黒死館殺人事件 and have it bound in leather.

Anyhow, here is the weekly summary of translations Castalia House published last week. If you want a daily notification, subscribe to the Castalia Library substack.

That may well be the highest-quality, most diverse list of books ever published in English in less than one week. Next week will introduce our first German release as well as major works by Eiji Yoshikawa. While I have requested an increase to the weekly limit, until Amazon approves one, we’ll stick to a Monday through Friday release schedule.

DISCUSS ON SG