Good to hear. To me, this means that Jim is back to writing again after a long slowdown; at one of the Q&A sessions, he said that, once he moved into his new house, he has a publishing commitment to finish the last entry for Briefcases, and had to focus on that first. As far as I recall, he estimated a month or two pause to get that finished, then he'd switch back to finishing Peace Talks. So, to me, this means that he's back to a writing schedule that will hopefully be back to his previous pace.

Interesting question. Isn't mortal magic (at least) partially powered by human emotions? Harry frequently discusses that certain areas have residual energy left over from emotional events, though this could be his Third Eye interpreting the past in his peculiar way—I recall that most, if not all, of the times Harry's mentioned this effect were ones where he was using it. Though black magic is outright stated to be affected by negative emotions—it's the reason the Kemmler disciples or Cowl blacked out Chicago in Dead Beat.

If it's true that human emotions provide energy, then the simple increase in numbers indicates that there is more energy. Whether or not this energy is actually useful is another question. I think of it as ambient radio waves; there are plenty that are naturally occurring, but since we started sticking up towers, there are a lot more that do specific things if you tap into them.

In terms of power dilution, I think that's more a side effect of changing beliefs. Hades still has power where he is because they still tell stories about him; ditto Odin. They're not what they once were, but they're still leagues ahead of Harry. Mab apparently sponsored the Brothers Grimm to keep her in the public eye, and Harry speculates that she hooked up Walt Disney later on. But, if power can't be created or destroyed, only changed, that might explain why Odin has an extra mask (in his terms, from the end of Cold Days) in Kringle; he's transferred some of his power into something new.

Here's a tangential, but related question: Bob is a spirit of intellect, right? He grows in power when he knows more. Did he get a power boost when Butters hooked him up to the internet and connected him to what amounts to the collected sum of human knowledge? Is that why he was able to do all of those other things Harry never considered when Butters used him to fight Binder's mooks? Or is that just an expression of Butters thinking outside the box?

We've been discussing the works attributable to the Merlin in another topic, and some of our efforts pinning down the timing in history got thick around this post.

Conclusion I got?  It's possible he started mucking around before the first century BCE, but there is more evidence that he was still around by the 4th century Common Era.

If your attempts to date Merlin's life are accurate (and admittedly my thesis was written on the Crusades, not Imperial Rome, so I have little to contribute and can't really argue with your conclusions), then he most likely spoke Greek and Vulgar Latin, which explains why Latin would be the official language of the White Council (though modern Latin is almost literally nothing like the Latin actually spoken by Rome, and don't even get me started on Church Latin). In other words, even if Merlin was the prisoner in Demonreach, he would probably have spoken to Dresden in Latin, as Dresden's pretty obviously a wizard, but Harry's rudimentary Latin wouldn't be able to decipher it. It would be like a college student who took French trying to translate La Chanson de Roland without a reference guide.

Anyway, the point is that Merlin lived before dictionaries, mass media, the printing press, and the electric light bulb, all of which contributed to the significantly to the evolution of language until we have the homogenized English that the prisoner spoke.

Which is actually more interesting to me, because that means that that prisoner either was placed there relatively recently (within the past, say, two hundred years), or is an entity that has somehow kept up with linguistic evolution despite being in stasis. Could also be like Toot-Toot, who apparently can just decide what language he wants to speak. Hmm. Well, based on the information I have, I don't think I can make a reasonable guess. But it's an interesting question, and fodder for speculation.