Classics are Fun

A reblog from astinomi's tumblog:

andquitefrankly asked: 13. TRIVIA. GIVE ME ALL THE TRIVIA. please. :)

Ooh! Let’s see, here are some of my favourite bits of classical trivia (I know no other trivia). I should warn you that my idea of amusing trivia is quite… esoteric :’) (A couple of these are a little gruesome)

• Ancient Greek had a pitch accent (i.e. the pitch of the syllable went up or down depending on the accent). This mattered, because once during a performance of a tragedy, an actor got the pitch accent wrong and said ‘weasel’ instead of ‘calm sea’ and we are still laughing about it 2000 years later.
• Once during a battle between Argos and Sparta, the Argive generals told their troops to do whatever the Spartan herald shouted. The Spartan generals figured this out and ordered their troops to attack when the herald shouted ‘have breakfast’
• The tyrant Polycrates of Samos was so lucky in everything that he did that his friend Amasis, king of Egypt, advised him to get rid of the thing he valued the most. This was a golden and emerald ring (?????). Polycrates threw it into the sea. Soon afterwards, it turned up in the belly of a fish that a fisherman had caught and presented to Polycrates. Amasis said, ‘That’s it, you’re too lucky, I’m cutting off our friendship before the gods screw you over.’
• The tyrant Peisistratos of Athens married an aristocratic girl in order to form an alliance with her family, but he thought the family was cursed, so he would only have sex with her ‘not in the customary way’ and I still do not know what this means because my Greek history tutor was the most awkward person ever and would not tell me
• An Ancient Greek word for ‘extravagant dandy’ was ‘someone who is obsessed with fish’
• The Greeks described the sea as ‘wine-dark’
• Socrates didn’t wash 
• Hippocleides doesn’t care
• The great Greek general Pericles was mocked because he allegedly allowed his mistress to boss him around in bed
• It is 100% true that Plato published a serious piece of work criticising Aeschylus for making Achilles top and Patroclus bottom
• This is the what the Greeks came up with to explain intersex people: Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes & Aphrodite, was born a boy but attracted the attentions of a rather obsessive girl who tried to force herself on him. Fortunately for her, they were in a magic spring and she prayed to be joined to him always, so they were joined together in one body that was part male and part female
• In Cyprus, the goddess Aphrodite was represented with both male and female sex organs
• Alexander the Great used to get foreign kings to line up their favourite prostitutes and then he would make a big show of walking along the line and acting disinterested
• Allegedly, Alexander met the cynic philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes said, ‘Get out of my sunlight.’ Alexander said, ‘If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes,’ and Diogenes replied, ‘If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes.’
• The Roman playwright Terence, considered by later writers to be the best example of ‘pure literary Latin’, might have been an African immigrant and is widely thought to have been a slave
• Julius Caesar annoyed the populace of Rome because he used to answer his mail during the races
• Cicero was told to change his name because it meant ‘chickpea’ and he responded that he would make it the most glorious name in Rome
• It is 99.9% likely that it is actually the case that Cicero was not let in on the assassination of Caesar because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut
• Caesar once said, ‘I know I am the most hated man in Rome, because Cicero hates me, and God knows Cicero is easy to please’
• Cicero and his brother Quintus seemingly spent an alarming amount of time chasing Cicero’s secretary around, asking for kisses
• The poet Vergil (Vergilius), for sadly modern-esque reasons, was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (which renders itself quite nicely as something like ‘Virginia’)
• Augustus nagged all his poet friends to write an epic about him, and when Vergil said he would do it, Propertius published a poem saying ‘THANK THE GODS: someone else is doing it - and it’s pretty good btw you should read it when it comes out’
• The poet Ovid was exiled for a ‘poem and a mistake’ and we STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS
• The emperor Augustus was teetotal and lame in one leg
• As part of his propaganda against Augustus, Mark Antony claimed that Augustus singed off his leg hair
• Augustus responded that Mark Antony was a drunken hooligan. Antony wrote a pamphlet defending himself, entitled ‘On the subject of my drunkenness’. To me this is one of the greatest losses of antiquity
• The emperor Tiberius was obsessed with pears and cucumbers
• The emperor Claudius allegedly ordered for his third wife to be executed, then got so drunk that he had to ask why she was not at dinner
• Claudius had a son who died when he threw a pear core in the air, tried to catch it in his mouth and choked
• Augustus complained that Tiberius used words in their strict etymological sense (or used literal equivalents of phrases that were used in a non-etymological sense), and the emperor Hadrian, when reading about this, commented, ‘It sounds like Augustus was not very well educated if he chose his words according to their usage and not their etymology.’
• The emperor Galba is the only Roman male who is explicitly said to have had a sexual preference for adult males (i.e. of his own age) and not boys
• Hadrian and his wife went travelling with Hadrian’s lover Antinous and an aristocratic woman named Julia Balbilla. At a tourist site in Egypt, Julia Balbilla carved a poem in the style of Sappho on a famous statue. One of my history professors said that this suggests Hadrian’s wife was a lesbian and they covered for each other
• The historian Tacitus was a keen hunter. His friend Pliny went hunting one day and sent him a letter, ‘You won’t believe it, Tacitus, I went hunting, and I enjoyed it! I took all my books and I sat in the shade by the nets and it was so peaceful, I got so much done. You should try it!’

Links for Later 7-28-15

1. Sergei Pugachev, Putin's former banker, is in exile in Nice.
2. The Happy Birthday song may have been public domain all this time, dates to 1922.
3. Amazing photos of the Milky Way over Yellowstone.
4. Donald Trump's rape problem & lawyer problem.
5. Italy's brain drain.
6. Interview with psychedelic researcher James Fadiman on muses, daimons and other non-corporeal entities in mystical experience.

The Greek Job

The Greek finance ministry had a Grexit plan after all, involving hacking their own servers and setting up a system of tax reserve accounts. Perhaps understandably, this has the Greek opposition parties upset; on the other hand, they were also upset that no Grexit planning had taken place.

Transcript of the OMFIF call where this emerged. Audio. Varoufakis comments.

Bonus: Ian Parker did a Yanis Varoufakis profile in The New Yorker:

The government had made contingency plans for a temporary alternative currency, in the form of electronic I.O.U.s. On June 30th, Greece missed a payment to the I.M.F., joining three other countries in arrears: Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Three days later, Klaus Regling, the head of the European Stability Mechanism, which was managing the debt that Greece owed to the countries of the E.U., e-mailed Varoufakis to remind him that, because of the missed I.M.F. payment, the European Financial Stability Facility had the option of asking for immediate repayment of E.U. funds. “I personally owe €142.6 billion,” Varoufakis said. “It’s my name on the contract.” He recalled that his response, delivered with war-weary humor, and some contempt, was a two-word quotation of the King of Sparta: “Molon labe,” or “Come and get it.” On the night of July 3rd, Varoufakis was mobbed as he passed through a crowd of tens of thousands of Greeks, to a final rally for the “no” cause. Walking behind him, I saw a man in his seventies kiss Varoufakis’s shoulder.

Michel Thomas On Resisting The Lure Of Surrender

Michel Thomas, the language teacher, was in his teens when he escaped the Nazis and joined first the French Resistance and then the US Army. In this interview with the BBC, he describes seeing people being loaded onto cattle cars to be taken away to concentration camps. He also describes that he felt at one point when he had been sentenced to death, as if Nature had reached out to embrace him and calm him in preparation for death, and that only by resisting that welcoming embrace was he able to survive.



Previously: Michel Thomas, The Language Master, a documentary about Thomas's teaching methods.

Hello, Pluto

NASA's New Horizons mission passed within a few thousand miles of Pluto this morning.

Family portrait
(via @missambear)

Greek Eurogroup Meeting Link Roundup

1. Yanis Varoufakis gives his first interview since resigning as Finance Minister. “You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway.”
2. Greece and Germany have a long history together.
3. IMF sez, if only someone were willing to buy the Greek banks for billions of euros from the Greek government, no more loans would have been necessary.
4. "An Indecent Proposal From Greece"-John Cassady
5. "Killing The European Project" and "Disaster In Europe"-Paul Krugman
6. Larry Trainor: "Alexis Tsipras pledged to end austerity. And now he is asked to sign up for more. "

7. FT: “They crucified Tsipras in there,” a senior eurozone official who had attended the summit remarked. “Crucified.” European solidarity.

   — Stefanos Livos (@stefivos) July 13, 2015

8. #greece merkel/holland session with tsipras said to resemble 'extensive mental waterboarding' - top official

   — Ian Traynor (@traynorbrussels) July 12, 2015  

Links for Later 7-3-15

1. The new tech entrepreneurs and culture of Iran. I am not sure who is more representative of Iran, them or the hardliners, than I am sure who is more representative of America, us or our hardliners.
2. "Everything is Yours, Everything is Not Yours."
3. How the Greek bailout deal fell apart, or, Finance ministers acting like children. Also, EU politicians campaigning in Greece.
4. How productivity affects demand for manufacturing labor.
5. Faberge fractals by Tom Beddard
6. This bodes ill for the quality of Matt Damon's next movie.
7. Fazal Sheikh's Erasure. Photographs.

Transcript: Startup Geometry Podcast EP 004 with Brad DeLong

Scott: Hello again and welcome to the Startup Geometry Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Gosnell. For more episodes of this series, please visit iTunes or Stitcher and look for a Startup Geometry Podcast. For show notes, please go to bottlerocketscience.net or to windcastlevc.com/podcast.

Today's interview is with Brad DeLong who is the chair of the Economics Department at California, Berkeley and is a senior economist with the Center for Equitable Growth in Washington, DC.

Brad: . . . intelligent swarm of bees masquerading as a human being for purposes of preparing delay for alien invasion. I thought everyone knew that.

Scott: You're perhaps the third person who said that to me this week or at least in my presence.

Brad: Bees?

Scott: Bees, yeah. John Scalzi said that on Twitter yesterday.

Brad: I think Scalzi must be the source of the meaning then.

Scott: It could be.

Brad: He is the person who has the potential reach to do so to get that meaning into people's minds. So have you read his latest?

Scott: I have not, no. Although I've been reading his battles with the Sad Puppies.

Brad: I see. Well, yes.

Scott: And the other puppies.

Brad: That's a sad story, or a rabid story, or simply a crazy story. I suppose it's ultimately the craziest because the font and origin of social justice warriorhood and weird gender presentation of self stuff in science fiction is really not so much Joanna Russ who is always way out there or Ursula Le Guin who was an elite taste, but rather Baen Books' Lois McMaster Bujold who has been writing space opera and military science fictions. But it's really about gender relations and similar things for three decades or so now, and winning huge numbers of Hugo Awards doing it.

So it's just that a lot of people who've been reading Lois McMaster Bujold's books from Baen Books have simply not been understanding the authorial intent or indeed authorial execution at all.

Startup Geometry Podcast EP 005: Claudia Azula Altucher



Claudia Azula Altucher is an idea machine; an accomplished yoga practitioner and teacher; and a popular podcaster, author and YouTuber. Today, she brings all of this to the podcast to help you get your life on the move. She'll teach you what you need to do to clean up your life, how to get your idea muscles sweating, and why she should be the next CEO of Twitter. You canfind her online at claudiayoga.com, through her podcasts, which include Ask Altucher and Claudia Yoga, and through the Claudia Yoga YouTube Channel. Her books, including, Become an Idea Machine: Because Ideas Are the Currency of the 21st Century are available through Amazon and, as they say, wherever books are sold. From the book's description:

HOW DO I TRANSFORM MY LIFE? The answer is simple: come up with ten ideas a day. It doesn't matter if they are good or bad the key is to exercise your 'idea muscle', to keep it toned, and in great shape. People say ideas are cheap and execution is everything but that is NOT true. Execution is a consequence, a subset of good, brilliant idea. And good ideas require daily work. Ideas may be easy if we are only coming up with one or two but if you open this book to any of the pages and try to produce more than three, you will feel a burn, scratch your
head, and you will be sweating, and working hard. There is a turning point when you reach idea number 6 for the day, you still have four to go, and your mind muscle is getting a workout. By the time you list those last ideas to make it to ten you will see for yourself what "sweating the idea muscle" means. As you practice the daily idea
generation you become an idea machine. When we become idea machines we are flooded with lots of bad ideas but also with some that are very good. This happens by the sheer force of the number, because we are coming up with 3,650 ideas per year (at ten a day). When you are inspired by an extraordinary idea, all of your thoughts break their chains, you go beyond limitations and your capacity to act expands in every direction. Forces and abilities you did not know you had come to the surface, and you realize you are capable of doing great things. As you practice with the suggested prompts in this book your ideas will get better, you will be a source of great insight for others, people will find you magnetic, and they will want to hang out with you because you have so much to offer. When you practice every day your life will transform, in no more than 180 days, because it has no other evolutionary choice. Life changes for the better when we become the source of positive, insightful, and helpful ideas. Don't believe a word I say. Instead, challenge yourself to try it for the 180 days and see your life transform, in magical ways, in front of your very eyes.

If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.

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The book on organizing your house Claudia mentions is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.

James Salter 1925-2015

Startup Geometry Podcast EP 004: Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong visits Startup Geometry today to talk about economic currents and current economics. He may or may not have confessed to being a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, a historian in disguise as an economist, and/or a Keynesian. He reviews the effects and effectiveness of US economic policies including the 2009 Recovery Act; the Trans-Pacific Partnership; tax, education, infrastructure and other proposals. We discuss the entertainment revolution and the fall of middle class security, and what to do if someone has a bigger yacht than you.

If you enjoy the show & would like to hear more episodes, please download, rate and subscribe through iTunes, as your enthusiasm for the show means a lot. Please comment below if you have suggestions for future episodes.

Note: I have to apologize for referring to Lois McMaster Bujold a "very competent writer" in the podcast. I tend toward understatement when in interview mode. She's a tremendous writer, and I read everything she publishes greedily, as soon as it comes out. I facepalm myself regularly.

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Show Notes

[0.00.36] Brad DeLong is a hyperintelligent swarm of bees in human form, John Scalzi, Lois McMaster Bujold, gender politics in SF, Science fiction and economics as worldbuilding exercise.

[0.05.48] How economists are made. Jay Forrester's world dynamics model, education with Roger Wood, Gregg Erickson, Andrei Schleifer, Larry Summers, being an assistant professor applicant in economics vs. history.

[0.09.25] Trends in the economic profession, economics considered as the Nile delta. Ulrika Malmendier , Stefano DellaVigna, and Raj Chetty as leading researchers at the behavioral, individual scale. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez at the macro, sociological scale.

[0.13.58] Keeping in mind the lessons of the Great Depression. George Osborne and the perpetual budget surplus idea.

[0.16.00] Why is Ricardian Equivalence not a thing? Why should the government invest? What's the benefit to putting off our bills?

[0.21.19] What about tax cuts as stimulus?

[0.23.23] Why transfer payments, tax credits, infrastructure spending, are better than cutting taxes on the rich from either an efficiency and equity standpoint. The effectiveness and politics of the 2009 Recovery Act. Christina Romer, Barack Obama. $600B in stimulus, where we needed $4T. A fire engine intervenes.

[0.29.54] Prospects for improving the situation now. Impact of the social safety net on JK Rowling & entrepreneurs. "You get very few tightrope walkers without a powerful safety net."

[0.32.40] Hillary Clinton's agenda. Zero debt grads, infrastructure broadly defined.

[0.38.20] Costs and benefits, 20th c. vs. 21st c. Losing the secure middle class existence, gaining better entertainment and communication. Who's rich, and what does that mean psychologically? George Romney vs. Mitt Romney. Jann Wenner vs. Paul Allen. Spalding Gray on the Hamptons. The Buddha: "Desire is infinite."

[0.43.00] The end of the fundamental problems (fire, flood, famine, marauding Huns & water buffalo) as we climb the Maslow hierarchy. Noah Smith. The entertainment revolution.

[0.47.30] The trade deals. How the TPP could be improved, and what its flaws are. How to negotiate a trade agreement that's better in its distributional effects.

[0.55.45] One policy recommendation & one personal recommendation for the listeners. Obama's most costly mistake. The R statistical package. Controlling your infinite desires.
Read more from and about Brad DeLong at the Equitablog at the Center for Equitable Growth, or at his blog, DeLong's Grasping Reality, and is readily Google-able.

Why does Obama want the trade deals?

And why these trade deals on these specific terms? His reasoning and negotiating stance are opaque. This is never a good place to be on anything, especially if you are President.

Here's William Finnegan in the New Yorker:

Nearly every constituency in the Democratic Party opposes it; and the more they learn about it, the more they oppose it. And yet their leader, Obama, wants it badly.

But why? Maybe it’s a better agreement—better for the American middle class, for American workers—than it seems in the leaked drafts, where it appears bent to the will of multinational corporations. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense, co-authored a column on Monday in USA Today arguing, in evangelical tones, that the T.P.P. will usher in a glorious new era of American-led prosperity, a “global race to the top” for all parties. Meanwhile, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sees only a race to the bottom. Organized labor, by all accounts, plans to punish any elected Democrat who supports the T.P.P., or even supports fast-track for Obama, in the next campaign. It’s difficult, again, to evaluate the agreement when we can’t see it. And it will be difficult for Congress to do its job if its members can’t study each part of the many-tentacled T.P.P. on its merits, but must simply vote yes or no on the whole shebang. What’s the rush? Is it simply Obama’s wish to make his mark on history and to complete his pivot toward Asia before his time is up? Politicians are often accused of supporting pro-corporate policies to please wealthy backers, looking toward the next campaign. That can’t be Obama’s motive now.

And John Cassidy:

On one of the specific issues Warren raised, about whether the trade deal could be used to undermine the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act, Obama might be right, although we’ll have to take it on trust; the text of the provisional agreement is classified. (When Senator Barbara Boxer went to inspect it in a secure room at the Capitol, a guard told her she couldn’t take notes.) A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries, including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal system. In a recent letter to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.

President Obama hasn’t addressed all of these concerns, and he has also failed to provide much backing for his assertion that the T.P.P. would be beneficial to the middle class. The most widely quoted study of the deal’s likely effect, which was carried out by three economists associated with the pro-free-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics, found that its impact would be modest. By 2025, the study said, the deal would boost over-all U.S. income by about 0.4 per cent of G.D.P. If this is accurate, the new trade deal won’t have much effect either way on American incomes.

But that isn’t the full story. In an important recent paper, Josh Bivens, of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that estimates like the one produced by the Peterson Institute don’t take into account the distributional aspects of trade agreements. The traditional argument for free trade is that it reallocates resources, workers included, to their most productive uses, and that this causes over-all income and output to rise. But this churning process doesn’t only create winners, such as consumers who can buy lower-cost imported goods. It also creates losers, such as the Maytag-plant workers in Illinois and many others who make things that poorer countries can produce more cheaply because they have lower wages.

 

Brad DeLong on the TPP

In this short preview of my interview with economist Brad DeLong, we discuss the economic and social impact of the trade deals currently being negotiated by the US Trade Representative, including the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade Promotion Authority and related bills under consideration in Congress this month.

The full interview will be available next week. Please check back regularly, and please subscribe on iTunes to get all of our episodes.

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Links for Later 6-11-15

1. Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve may help migraine, tinnitus, epilepsy, stroke...
2. The role of the default mode network in creativity. Effect of training on the DMN.
3. Did Nancy Pelosi "misread" the Democratic Caucus on trade and the TPP?
4. Brad DeLong misjudged Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman didn't.
5. On the trail of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor, before the kingdoms of life were separate.
6. Proportional map of the world's languages.
7. The stoners who became the US government's source for guns & ammo.

The Future Is Now, Vol. LXXXVIII: Researchers Grow Rat Limb In A Jar

A team from Massachusetts General Hospital under Harald Ott regrew rat and primate forelimbs ex vivo, and then transplanted it back into a host animal. They did it by removing all of the cells from an amputated arm, reseeding it with appropriate cell types for the various tissues in a bioreactor atop the existing extracellular scaffolding, and then reattaching it.

This is not quite as impressive as growing it up from nothing, but it represents a substantial step forward from existing technology which is capable of doing single or dual cell type tissue growth. This is multiple tissue, structured repopulation and regrowth of tissue. That's huge.

Library Porn: Karl Lagerfeld's Shelving Method

 

I had seen the photos of Karl Lagerfeld's enviable library before, so of course I could tell that most of the books are shelved horizontally. What I did not realize until Rain Noe pointed it out over on Core77 is that this is not just an eccentricity. It's an ergonomic hack, so Lagerfeld doesn't have to turn his head to read the titles. Note that in the closeup of the shelves below, all (or at least most) of the titles are turned for easiest reading.

Bonus Karl Lagerfeld item, from his daily schedule:

I never have lunch, but when I do, I ask them to bring it to me in the house. I actually have two houses. This house here, it's only for sleeping and sketching, and I have another house two-and-a-half meters away for lunch and dinner and to see people, and where the cook is and all that. I don't want that here. Even if the place is huge, I want to be alone. If I want something, I call them, and they're next door, they come. The studio is next door, the office is next door. If I have guests and butlers, I don't want them in my house. Everything is next door.

Startup Geometry Podcast EP 003: Adam Swartzbaugh

Adam Swartzbaugh, founder of the Genesis Network, works to defeat human trafficking and help rebuild local networks to help with disaster recovery. He's not only an active social entrepreneur, he's also a rapid language learner, world traveler and multi-sport athlete. He's also the only man I know who's won in hand-to-hand combat with a hawk. In this episode of the Startup Geometry Podcast, I talk with Adam about:

• What made him interested in the problem of human trafficking in Southeast Asia
• How providing educational opportunities in remote locations is the key to interrupting trafficking networks
• How finding a calling changes your motivational & energy levels
• Why attending a highly creative university while doing a highly structured ROTC program made for a powerful combination of experiences
• What adventure sports can do for you

Show links Genesis Network
Brown University International Relations
Providence ROTC
Indian Ocean 2004 tsunami
Haiti 2010 earthquake
Global Rescue

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If you enjoy this podcast series, please subscribe on iTunes. The more people listen, the more episodes we're able to produce.

A Visit to the Top of Shenzhen Tower

Startup Geometry Podcast EP 002: Christoph Rehage

"Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue."

-Werner Herzog.

In this episode, I talk with Christoph Rehage, who filmed himself walking more than 5000km across China over the course of a year. Most of you will be familiar with him from the YouTube video that resulted from the trip:

He's also the author of three books, published in German and Chinese, an avid reader of travel books, collector of fine vodkas, filmmaker, photographer and newspaper columnist. We talk about his early travels, what China looks like beyond Beijing and the big cities, what Germany and China have to teach each other, and how travel improves our lives.

Show links:

ChristophRehage.com, his website.

His books, which I hope will be published in English in the near future:
 

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Links for Later 5-4-15

1. How has Investor-State Dispute Resolution been used after other trade deals?
2. xkcd: Physics vs. Biology
3. The joy of collecting books. Real, paper books.
4. Bruce Hornsby on his many piano-playing incarnations. He's most impressed by Keith Jarrett's improv capabilities, and rightly so.
5. Steve Rogers, Captain America, is almost certainly a liberal Democrat.
6. "Puddleglum in heaven."
7. Twelve hours as a conscript in Greece.
8. Joss Whedon has left Twitter after a number of abusive messages were sent to him to spend more time with his writing.
9. Tesla released a $3,500 battery for houses
10. Ta-Nehisi Coates: Nonviolence as Compliance

Paul Romer

Paul Romer's endogenous growth model (which treats ideas as part of the economic model, rather than something which is set outside of, or "exogenous to", the economic growth process) offers what I think is one of the most useful macro frameworks; however, it seems to have fallen out of favor for some reason.

In this interview with Cloud Yip of iMoney Magazine, he talks about the importance of urbanization, his growth model, and why non-rival, partially excludable goods (like ideas) mean that the primary micro market model to study is that of monopolistic competition (many competitors, differentiated goods, neither price taking nor price setting completely):

Q: So are you not going back to work on growth theory?

Romer: Actually I am writing something about growth theory right now, but it is mostly a commentary on what happened to growth theory. To be honest, I think that a substantial fraction of the work that people are now doing on growth has to be judged a failure from a scientific perspective.

In particular – and I apologize if this relies too much on the jargon of our field — monopolistic competition turns out to be just the tool for understanding the economic ideas. (It also turns out to be the tool for understanding international trade, economic geography, and macroeconomics.) But there has been a series of models that are associated with the University of Chicago – from what some people call the freshwater camp in macroeconomics – that are continuing a fight that George Stigler started in the 1930s to keep monopolistic competition from being used in economics. It is hard to explain to an outsider why a whole group of economists have ended up on the wrong side of scientific progress, resisting the direction that all of modern economic theory is taking, but they are.

In the economics of ideas, we have to be willing to at least consider the possibility that someone could have some control over an idea, hence some monopoly power associated with ideas. This could come from patent or a copyright. It could also come from secrecy.

Then we can ask if it is a good idea or a bad idea to have more intellectual property rights or more protection of ownership of ideas. We know that the answer here is mixed. Sometimes some amount of it can be good, but it can also be harmful if the property rights are too strong or are given to the wrong types of ideas. But if you don’t even allow for the possibility of ex post monopoly rents from the discovery of ideas, you can’t even ask the question.

So it is scientifically unacceptable to have people who say, “We will never, as a matter of principle, consider a model in which there are ever any monopolies. We will dogmatically stick only to models of price-taking competition.” I think this an untenable scientific stance.

I don’t think that this critique is going to reignite interest in growth theory. But like I said, when it’s time for interest to come back, somebody have a new take on growth theory, and work in this area will start again. But in the meantime, we have to stop tolerating work that is scientifically unjustifiable.

Q: I thought the endogenous growth model paved a new direction for growth theory to further develop, yet the academic interest in this theory just stopped. And even textbooks just briefly mention the endogenous growth model. What is the problem?

Romer: Well, I think the thing we learn from endogenous growth is something very simple. It is the notion of an idea as a nonrival good. The statement that an idea is a nonrival good is very powerful because what that tells you is the value of an idea is proportional to, or at least scales with, the total number of people who can use it. So it means that scale effects are at the heart of economic activity. This is why globalization is so important, because it is now possible for any idea to be used by everyone.

The Solow model already allows for a non-rival good, but the model also made it nonexcludable – which means that no one could control or own an idea. This turns a nonrival good into a public good. What endogenous growth theory said is that, there are some nonrival goods that can be at least partially excludable. This means that incentives start to matter, both for discovering ideas and for spreading ideas. The people who want to stick with price-taking never want to allow the possibility of that a nonrival good could be even partially excludable. Because of their untenable insistence on price-taking models, they have tried to stop the spread of the key insight from endogenous growth theory. And they have been at least partially successful in doing so.

Once you admit that there are some nonrival goods, globalization becomes much more important than standard theory suggests. And if you allow that some of them are partially excludable, then incentives matter a lot more than standard theory suggests, for better and for worse.

So for example, there is a non-rival idea that a firm can control. They can keep it secret. They can take it to work in a factory in India. If they want to locate in India but there are no gateway cities there, they may go elsewhere in the world. So the policies that make a place like Mumbai so dysfunctional influence growth for the entire country.

What a government can do is influence the incentives for people to bring ideas into a country. One way to think about why Shenzhen was so powerful is that it created incentives for firms to bring ideas into China and combine those ideas with Chinese workers.

You don’t even need a formal model for that. Once you see the underlying idea, sometimes the words and the clarity of thinking are what really matters, not the math. You can use the math to get there, but once you got there, you don’t need that anymore. It is unfortunate that these ideas are not being communicated to students in our textbooks, because these are the exciting ideas.

(via Mark Thoma/Economist's View)

Decision Making in a Nutshell

Justin Fox has a nice review article in the Harvard Business Review which reviews the three major schools of decision-making (decision analysis, heuristics and biases, and "we're not as stupid as we look"). Particularly fascinating, in an inside baseball sort of way, is the bit about how Gerd Gigerenzer "fatigued" Daniel Kahneman with his arguments:

During an academic year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1989–1990, he gave talks at Stanford (which had become Tversky’s academic home) and UC Berkeley (where Kahneman then taught) fiercely criticizing the heuristics-and-biases research program. His complaint was that the work of Kahneman, Tversky, and their followers documented violations of a model, Bayesian decision analysis, that was itself flawed or at best incomplete. Kahneman encouraged the debate at first, Gigerenzer says, but eventually tired of his challenger’s combative approach. The discussion was later committed to print in a series of journal articles, and after reading through the whole exchange, it’s hard not to share Kahneman’s fatigue.

Startup Geometry Podcast, Episode 001: Steven Brust

Welcome to the Startup Geometry podcast, where we talk to the creators, innovators and explorers who make the world what it is.

In this episode, I talk with Steven Brust, author of the Vlad Taltos/Dragaera novels. We talk about his writing process, important influences and future plans. I've been a huge fan of Steven's, ever since his first novel, Jhereg, introduced us to wisecracking assassin Vlad Taltos and his sidekick Loiosh back in 1983.

His latest books are Hawk and The Incrementalists.

You'll notice that I immediately mispronounce his last name (which is pronounced BROOST, though spelled BRUST), despite having pasted a note with the phonetic spelling of his name to the microphone I was using at the time. Podcasting is HARD.

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Show links:
Dreamcafe, Steven Brust's homepage
His Twitter account: @stevenbrust

At the Tor.com site:

• An excerpt from Hawk
• An excerpt from The Incrementalists
• An interview with Jo Walton about the Dragaera books
• A short story set on Dragaera

Fritz Leiber
Michael Moorcock
Roger Zelazny
Skyler White
Emma Bull

The Isaiah Berlin quote I referenced with regard to Incrementalist politics was in an interview with him which was excerpted in The 50 Year Argument, a documentary on the New York Review of Books, where I first saw and heard it. Similar sentiments could be found elsewhere in his work, for example in Crooked Timber, a collection of his essays and lectures.

Links for Later 3-14-15

1. Michael Lewis follows up on Flash Boys. Charles Schwab's sales of its customers' transactions and transaction data to third parties (HFT traders and others) comes up both in the article and the book.
2. Adam Nash of Wealthfront also has a bone to pick with Charles Schwab, citing hidden revenues in Schwab's investment strategy and sweep accounts.
3. Saras Sarasvathy's theory of effectual entrepreneurship gets some thumbs up.
4. Marina Warner's description of the many ways that higher ed is broken (in the UK especially, but a lot of this applies in the US as well).

The Science of Us

This series from New York Magazine takes a first-person view of several remarkable people--people like a tetrachromat, a woman with four receptors for color who sees millions of colors more than the average person,  and who has an opinion on that dress; a polyamorous genius; someone with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory; and others.

Here Comes the Sun

Five years of video from NASA's Goddard Solar Observatory. Glorious.
(via boingboing)

Giordano Bruno on Prudence

Prudence is the state of things that leads a person to happiness and bliss in their life, and maintains them there, and ultimately returns great value. In this, children and fools differ from a man, and there are many who, regardless of their age, would reach the end of their course of days without having taken the counsel of maturity; these decrepit old men who have become worn out and unfit with age are the same ones who once tamed and subdued bulls and lions and bears. A prudent man is he who has proper regard for the things that must be done, who meditates upon the present, recollects the past, and provides for the future with forethought; it is not only that which is observable to the eyes which prudence considers, not judging only by what the eyes see or what the ears hear, but thinking over what possibilities and contingencies may truly happen in the future. He comes always by the correct path of nature and the divine, never by the broad path to Perdition, but travelling by the true ways of the past, by that called the hard, steep road by the Pythagoreans, diverting neither to the left or the right. He is prudent, wise and rational, who takes his seat in the stern of his soul, takes his counsel of the Almighty, in which he is preserved, exalts in the good he is able to do for others, and does not fear the murmuring of the fearful, insidious and wicked.

-Lullian Combinatoric Lamps

Section II, Chapter II, Member II 

 

 

From the first English edition of Bruno's commentaries on the works of Ramon Llull, coming out later this month.

Links for Later 2-1-15

1. The Parable of the Talents: How much should we think about how smart we are?
2. Tim Ferriss interviews Arnold Schwarzenegger.
3. Andrew Gelman on cognitive/behavioral economics.
4. Paul Krugman: I See Very Serious Dead People.
5. Xi Jinping's choices for reforming China & the Communist Party.
6. Psychedlics are back as therapeutic tools.

How to Decrease Inequality

The President's proposal to raise the capital gains tax rate to 28% is a good first step on the road to reversing some inequality-favoring policies. Cutting capital gains was meant to increase business investment, but what it's done instead is to provide convenient tax shelter for extremely wealthy individuals and an incentive to take one's compensation in the form of dividends. Here's a good summary of Danny Yagan's paper on the 2003 cap gains tax cut, Paul Krugman on the same. We should not, as a function of government, care how you make your money, so ideally, you would pay one set of progressive rates on the whole of your income, whether you got it as an hourly or annual wage, interest, dividend, or what have you.

Second, there needs to be an ongoing focus on deconcentrating industries generally and inhibitng large scale mergers & acquisitions among market leaders in particular. Why? Because these mergers have a hollowing out effect on the industry so that only very large scale companies remain. They also inhibit competition and internal investment, making inorganic growth more attractive. Access to public capital markets should be fostered instead, making public offerings simpler and less costly.

Third, intellectual property reform needs to move in the direction of weaker IP protection, with tighter restrictions on the length, breadth, and permissible categories of protection. Business process patents should be eliminated entirely, and safe harbor exceptions should be broad and automatically available. There exists a point at which additional protection actually decreases IP value, and I think it's clear we're well past that point. Some good signs are showing up in the new EU draft proposal in this area, but the current round of proposed trade agreements, starting with TPP, are unfortunately steps in the wrong direction.

Lullian Combinatoric Lamps - Giordano Bruno

Chapter VI
Member III

The width of the scale permits many ways of examination: | first, the extension of the meanings of the terms (of which more is said later), that is to say that goodness not only extends to its physical meaning but also to its ethical one (similarly applicable to greatness and the others); second by duplication of them in their concrete and abstract forms, so to speak, goodness and good, greatness and great; third by distinctions of -ivi, -abilis, and -are, for example, bonificativum [the capacity of goodness or to do good], bonificabile [the capacity to receive goodness or to be improvable], bonificare [to improve, reclaim, restore], where ivum signifies the active principal part, abile the passive principal part, and are the copulative principal part, or ivum the principal effective or communicative part, abile the principal receptive or participatory part, and are the principal connective or actual part; fourth, by distinctions of affirmative and negative, additive and subtractive, thus to the extent that one can be said to be taken affirmatively, the other is take negatively, where one is excessive, the other is deficient; fifth, by distinctions of explicit and implicit, because they are in terms not solely contained in their system, but also everything that can be said and imagined through absolute predicates, as is made clear in the Tract Regarding the Multiplication of the Terms; sixth by distinction of proper and appropriated, insofar as some of these have a natural convenience, some by and from themselves [per se & a se, instrinsically], others extrinsically and from others, some I say are from natural substance, some from infusion, some from acquisition.

Magnetic Memory Podcast

Anthony Metivier was good enough to interview me over at Magnetic Memory Method Podcast. We talked about Giordano Bruno, memory palaces, and how you can improve your techniques for learning and memory.

So, if you've enjoyed seeing me burble on in print, now you can get the definitive audio experience as well. Hope you enjoy.

Tatiana Plakhova - Globe

complexitygraphics.com

Best Books of 2014*

The Peripheral William Gibson
Multidimensional shennanigans, in which a possible future outsources work to a possible past, culminating in a series of capers.

 

Nothing is True, Everything is Possible Peter Pomerantsev Nonfiction that reads like fiction. A postmodern horror story about the changes in Russian society in the 21st century, featuring the PR flacks who run the media and opposition parties for the Kremlin, filmmaking gangsters, architectural historians, entrepreneurs hounded out of their own companies and country, and Vladimir Putin. America is exactly half as crazy as the Russia of this book, in many of the same ways.

Deathless Catherynne M Valente
Fiction that reads like the true history of 20th century Russia. Koschei the Deathless, Tsar of Life, marries Marya Morevna. This is the story of their marriage and their war with the Tsar of Death, set against the rise of communism and two world wars. Luxurious, funny and sad. Any book recommended to me by three people is a must read; this book was recommended by many, many more than three.

Redeployment Phil Klay

Short stories about soldiers in or returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are no protocols or etiquette to govern much of the modern experience of war, resulting in a lot of anxiety, restlessness and improvisation. If these stories are collectively about anything, they're about that.

Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism Jennifer Percy

One day, while driving though rural Indiana, I heard a Pentecostal call-in show in which a listener called to ask for an exorcist, because demons were attacking her house right that minute. The hosts of the show promised to send someone over shortly. Apparently, this sort of thing went on a lot around there. Demon Camp describes that same sort of high-intensity, near hallucinatory religious experience among a group of people for whom PTSD, alcohol or sex addiction are caused by demons and healed by ritual.

 

Afghan Post Adrian Bonenberger
Bonenburger joined the military after graduating from Yale. This memoir in epistolary form describes an education before, during and after his wars. Like Jarhead in the previous generation of war memoirs, it's a search for meaning in experience, and for the meaning of one's experiences that drives the book.

 
The Goldfinch Donna Tartt
This was on everyone's Best List when it came out at the end of last year, and deservedly so. Starts with an art heist and kicks into high gear when Boris shows up. One perfect Tartt novel a decade is about right, but I don't know how she can hold herself back from writing faster.

The Bone Clocks David Mitchell
There's always one of the linked novellas in any Mitchell book that make me want to throw the book across the room. Here, its the fourth section, which focuses on the intrigues of a writer who unknowingly writes books about the supernatural conspiracy underlying the other sections of the book. Holly Sykes and Marinus, however, the two main characters throughout, are full people, and worth the read. It's rare to find characters who change over the course of their life as believably as Holly does, or across their multiple lives, as Marinus does. Also on a lot of Best lists this year.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

Excellent advice on thinking big and building things that matter. Occasionally slips into Randian sermons, but otherwise one of the better books on entrepreneurship that's out there.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty
The most important book on economics in the past year, even if you don't agree with it. The concentration of wealth in the OECD economies will present a huge challenge over the coming decades, and understanding the history of the issue is a good first step to working our way out.

Derek Jarman's Sketchbooks Derek Jarman
Gay punk filmmaker Derek Jarman made movies of astonishing beauty and invention on a microscopic budget, and in the process turned his entire life into art. Here's what the inside of his head looked like.

What Makes This Book So Great Jo Walton
Literary criticism at its best. This book will remind you why you liked all of those science fiction and fantasy books you read as a kid, and how those informed your life & writing. At least, it did this for me.

The Magician's Land Lev Grossman
Brilliant conclusion to the trilogy. Quentin Coldwater grows up at last, and all of the women wronged in the course of the books end up getting justice. Worlds end, worlds are born, and we find out who's the greatest magician alive today, this side of the Neitherlands.

*Read, not necessarily published, in 2014. This post was originally sent out to my mailing list. To subscribe, enter your email in the form located to the right of this page.

Links for Later 11-2-14

1. Judex: "There has been a bird."
2. "What David Fincher doesn't do"
3. The evolution of Robert Bork's Constitutional and jurisprudential theory. 
4. What is the male equivalent of "distaff"?
5. Underdressed for flying in a Speedo and inflatable ducky.
6. Tim Geithner's uncharitable opinions of everyone else during the crash.
7. Vladimir Putin gives a speech. Club Orlov applauds. Everyone else shrugs.
8. Jeff Hawkins: Why neural networks are not the road to strong AI.
9. Josh Seiden: “When you are writing, you are not a samurai. You are a waterfall or some shit”
10. Keynes was right.
11. Syllabus for an Archives, Libraries & Databases class by Shannon Mattern
12. Alchemical processes represented by birds.
13. Sharp waves organize memory/recall & possibly decision-making as well.
14. Would like to know more about this: "cells from [presumably olfactory bulb] used to regrow man's spinal cord."
15. Better headline: "You have chemoreceptors in every cell of your body. Some of these are also part of your sense of smell."

Laurie Anderson - Another Day in America

A Gentle Risk Assessment

Just a reminder: No matter how many people terrorists kill, the current Ebola outbreak will kill a thousand times more. Where should those dollars and our attention be directed? No matter how many people the current Ebola outbreak kills, AIDS will kill a thousand times more. Diabetes will kill a thousand times more. Which one are you most worried about? No matter how many people all three of these diseases will kill, global warming could kill everyone. Where do you put your attention?