Astral Codex Ten

Charles

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Charles

Article

Charles is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 16, 2023 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Alice marries Charles”; “Charles tells the group”; “Charles is still in the car as it plummets off the mountains”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, ACX, Australia.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: August 16, 2023
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences
August 16, 2023 · Original source
They investigate whether spouses of identical twins are correlated; that is, if Alice and Beth are identical twins, and Alice marries Charles and Beth marries Daniel, will Charles and Daniel be similar to each other?
Their summary is “no”, but this table doesn’t look completely negative to me. Given that the Charles→Daniel correlation is the product of three primary correlations - Charles→Alice, Alice→Beth, and Beth→Daniel - this looks pretty respectable to me, though admittedly the identical twins don’t look more strongly correlated than the fraternal ones. Broader questions about interests and talents seem much weaker than the larger factors.
They move on to a more interesting question: are identical twins’ spouses attracted to the other twin? That is, is Charles (Alice’s husband) attracted to Beth? They find that twins’ husbands are attracted to their sister-in-laws slightly more than chance, but twins’ wives are not attracted to their brother-in-laws more, which they explain by men being more driven by physical attraction. But their data are confusing, and as far as I can tell they misprint the table where they present them, so I can’t draw many conclusions beyond that a surprising number of people dislike their spouse’s identical twin or at least aren’t especially attracted to them.
Your Book Review: Silver Age Marvel Comics
August 16, 2024 · Original source
Kirby had apparently told Lee that he was going to incorporate a villain who had been responsible for the crippling of the Professor. Kirby either was not clear to Lee on which villain it was, or Lee did not remember, but the result was when in X-men #9 the X-men and the Avengers team up to defeat an alien named Lucifer, Lee drops in some dialog on the second to last panel where Charles tells the group that the villain, Lucifer, was responsible for the loss of his legs. The panel:
The two-part story featured in X-men #12 and #13 is one of the best X-men of the era. In the two-parter we find the team locked up in the X-mansion trying to prepare for the arrival of the unstoppable Juggernaut. There is a sense of dread that there is nothing the team can do to stop him, only slow him down. While they are waiting for the inevitable, Professor X tells the team his backstory and how the Juggernaut is actually his step brother with an old grudge. The Professor tells his students about how, when he was younger, he used to be an amazing athlete. Kirby draws images of the teenage Professor running track, playing football and winning trophies. But then his stepbrother, Cane (who later becomes the Juggernaut) takes him on a drive through the mountains, drives the car off the cliff and jumps to safety. Charles is still in the car as it plummets off the mountains. His students ask “Was... that how you lost use of your legs, Professor?”. It was clearly intended to be. It would have been a powerful moment.
The monster coming at the team was the same one who crippled their leader. Charles’ origin would have been a loss of the use of his legs by his own brother.
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
12: A while back I wrote a piece saying people needed to be clearer about what their “GET TOUGH” plans for dealing with mentally ill homeless people really meant. Later, Charles Lehman wrote a response describing his plan and arguing why it’s necessary. Most recently, Ozy has written a response to Charles, basically expressing fear that Charles’ plan will unnecessarily commit a bunch of harmless well-functioning people. I bet Charles’ response will be that no, this isn’t what he wants at all, to which my response will be that this is why you need to be clearer about what you mean. That is, I’m sure Charles wants to only commit people who need commitment, and not commit people who don’t, but he hasn’t explained the mechanism by which a fallible court system and medical system will ensure that this actually happens, and those are the kinds of details that I’m most interested in.
Inline links: I wrote a piece saying people needed to be clearer, wrote a response, Ozy has written a response to Charles
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Charles Contact Info: nwa_rationality[period]humid012[a t]silomails[period]com Time: Saturday, April 5th, 2:00 PM Location: Onyx Coffee Lab, NW 2nd Street Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86879QFR+77
Inline links: https://plus.codes/86879QFR+77
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
Inline links: 22, 23
Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin24 Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous25 affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.
Inline links: 24, 25
Then Charles the Mad died. Then Henry the Conqueror died. The new King of England, son of Henry and his newlywed queen, was not yet one year old.