Links for February

Shakespeare, infinity, Park Chung Hee

Here are the highlights from the most interesting things I read, watched, and listened to in the last month. First, two announcements:

Applications are now open for the advanced summer school in causal inference in Greece in June, with living legend Jeffrey Wooldridge. I have applied and not yet heard back, so perhaps if enough of my readers apply, I will seem like the sensible choice in comparison (kidding!).

And if you are 16–21, applications are now open for the European Summer Program on Rationality, and for the Program on AI and Reasoning, this summer in Somerset, England. I may stop by.

Blogs

Contrary to common belief, PhDs are, on average, getting shorter.

Incentives are mostly selection effects.

How deep does the permitting reform rabbit hole go?

Molly Mielke on learnings from the larva.

The Congolese space programme:

In the face of doubts by [Kurt] Debus and [Wernher] von Braun, [German aerospace engineer Lutz] Kayser chose in 1975 to set up testing and launch facilities in Shaba, Zaire (now Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Debus and von Braun were concerned about the possibility of Zairian acquisition of missile technology from the facilities. Kayser decided to proceed despite their opposition.

[The] first test was on May 17, 1977, with the second successful launch on May 20, 1978. The third test, 16 days later, failed on June 5, 1978, with Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko watching the launch.

Lessons from six-and-a-half startup failures.

If you live in the UK and are under 24, Entrepreneur First may give you a grant to travel to San Francisco and meet mentors.

Retraction Watch is hiring for a ‘Sleuth in Residence’ to hunt for fraud and methodological sloppiness in published scientific research.

Marshall Allen, the longtime saxophonist for the Sun Ra Arkestra, has released his debut solo album, aged 100 (!). Never let them tell you when to retire – unless the new album is terrible, in which case, maybe you should let them tell you when to retire… Here is Sun Ra Arkestra on NPR Tiny Desk.

Alvaro de Menard on the best and worst books of the last two years. The only one of these I’ve read is The MANIAC, which I thought was great.

One of the strangest integer sequences is the sequence of busy beaver numbers, the nth element of which is the maximum number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can run before halting, if started on an empty tape. It is, by definition, an uncomputable sequence, and grows ridiculously fast (faster, in fact, than any computable function). This is in the news again recently because BusyBeaver(5) has been found.

Ireland has some of the highest minimum apartment standards in the world, and it pays the price for it. I don’t quite understand the model here. According to Ronan Lyons and a coauthor, Irish housing supply is quite elastic with respect to construction costs. But doesn’t the basic YIMBY argument imply that housing supply should be relatively inelastic at any price, because the constraints are mostly regulatory?

To understand Western literature and philosophy, it’s indispensable to read the Bible, but many people don’t know where to start. Here’s the case for starting with the Gospel of Mark.

What Rebecca Lowe has been reading. Read for a balanced take on John Rawls. For the more extreme “Rawls sucks” position, see Michael Huemer. And for the galaxy-brained “Rawls was a necessary step in the dialectic” take, see Joseph Heath.

What it was like to have dinner with Robert Nozick:

I had known many people who had met Nozick. All had described Nozick with terms like “the smartest person they’d ever met.” So, I had a certain picture. I went to dinner expecting to meet the kind of person who needs you to know that he is the smartest person in the room. But he was nothing like that. Far from the kind of arrogance rooted in insecurity that I half expected, what struck me about Nozick was his kindness, quiet grace, and patience. He was a uniquely attentive listener. Incredibly, he had looked up [my wife] Elizabeth’s work in insect biochemistry and had read a couple of her papers. Not only was he curious; he had cutting-edge questions about her work. What blew me away was that he was not showing off. He was not trying to prove anything. He was simply curious and wanted to grab the chance to learn about insect biochemistry (and to make my wife feel visible and welcome). The conversation was not about him at all. Nozick was a giant, but what he wanted us to know was not that he was a giant, but that he was human.

Nozick’s libertarian political philosophy became a sticking point in a legal dispute he had with his landlord:

When Nozick confronted his landlord, Eric Segal, about the illegality of Segal’s rent increases, Segal responded by waving his copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in Nozick’s face and declaring that Nozick had waived his right to complain. Nozick replied that he had done nothing of the kind; if Nozick had, Nozick would have been the first to know. Segal said, so sue me. So Nozick sued him.

Joe Carlsmith on infinite ethics.

The story of Hitler’s bathtub.

Supply and demand are equally relevant to housing as they are to other goods.

Best of Wikipedia: The ‘Kingslayer Jellyfish’ got its name by killing an American tourist named King. And paleontology legend Paul Olsen, when still a teenager, had a National Landmark designated to protect a fossil site by writing thoughtful and well-researched letters to Richard Nixon.

Updates from Jason Crawford.

Henrikk Karlsson on what curiosity feels like from the inside.

This is not something I would dare pretend to understand, but one of my closest friends has just proved an outstanding conjecture in the theory of random graphs. Chapeau sir!

Another friend has launched a startup to create blockchains which are cryptographically secure against future advances in quantum computing. Imagine being born in rural Ireland, and growing up to work in B2B SaaS at the intersection of crypto, AI, and quantum – truly, the American dream!

Dynomight is offering mentoring. He also rounds up links.

What are the great scientific graveyards of Germany? David Hilbert’s tombstone in Göttingen contains an inscription of his famous “We can know, we must know!” (Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen) declaration about efforts to find a complete and consistent foundation for mathematics.

Scott Alexander’s links for January. Someone is working on a dating app which matches you with people based on your conversation history with Claude. So far there is only a landing page, but I am curious to see whether the topics people ask about are representative enough of their emotions and desire for this to work.

Based on my Claude conversation history, my dream woman is a real number not constructible with a finite number of operations of a Turing machine.

A compilation of syllabi written by great people. I’ll note that Devon recommends Hsieh and Moretti’s 2019 American Economic Journal paper on spatial misallocation, which contains significant errors. If this website would like to commission me to write them a syllabus, I reckon I could take a decent stab at a ‘Modern Ireland’ reading list.

I think I would find more value in an “anti-reading” list – a list of bad books and articles that are commonly recommended by smart people, but which are detested by people with deep expertise in the subject. What are the most harmful ideas in a field I am at risk of being taken in by?

In 2006, the computer scientist Tom Mitchell listed nine open problems in machine learning. Gavin Leech follows up, and concludes that four of the nine have now been solved completely.

If you follow science news, you may have seen the recent announcement from Google of ‘Willow’, a new 105-qubit superconducting chip which there has been much hype about. Scott Aaronson gives a measured reply, and answers questions about topological qubits.

If you are aged 22 or under, you might consider applying to Nautilus, a residency in San Francisco which will pay you to “learn in complete freedom”.

The myth of “they weren’t ever taught”. I hear lots of dubious claims about what people were never taught in school, including from people who went to the same school as me. An alternative explanation is that many students are so low-ability that they can’t even remember what they’ve been taught.

The British government is looking for “world-class technical talent” to come work in 10 Downing Street for 6–12 months. Endorsed by Matt Clifford.

Which blogs are so insightful that they are worth reading the entire back catalogue of?

Applications are now open for Edge Esmeralda, a month-long urbanist experiment in California in May.

“AI philosopher with a penchant for underwater sci fi and evening bike rides seeks a direct communicator who cares about the world and feels a thrill of human triumph at the sight of a cargo ship.”

What Asimov Press would like to publish.

How David MacIver reads maths textbooks.

The eclectic letters of Rachel Edwards. I wish Rachel would write more theatre reviews.

Last month, I blogged about James Cain’s paper about what the basic locations of ethical value should be in an infinitely large universe. Oddly enough, Tim Urban has a blog post about exactly this topic (which he attributes to the wrong source…).

Notable modern novels, sorted by country.

A sentiment I share with James Somers: I should have loved biology;

In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.

Total view count is not a good proxy for the quality of a YouTube video, nor is the total number of likes. Here is a useful app to sort by the more helpful like-to-view ratio.

Someone has compiled Paul Graham’s essays into an ebook.

Toby Ord on the scaling paradox:

[N]ormally we’d consider something that kept requiring such exponentially increasing inputs to see visible progress as proof that things were going badly; that the approach was not successfully scaling.

Kyle Macleod on why Scotland has never had it so good. Mostly I’m impressed that Kyle got the rationalist jargon of ‘steelman’ into The Spectator (although the editor changed it to ‘steel man’). Is there any polling data on what fraction of English people would anonymously vote to kick Scotland out of the union, if given the chance?

Using LLMs to systematically identify life-changing books. The Collected Calvin and Hobbes is, statistically, the greatest book of all time.

Fight me: individual AI use is not bad for the environment. The author also gives advice on the strategies for learning. Now may be a good time to re-read Andy Matuschak on why books don’t work.

Euan Ong on escaping flatland. I think it’s time to turn auto-capitalisation back on.

Oh God, what have I done?

Hoping not to turn this into an Irish poetry blog. But my friend Sam Enright’s most recent links roundup pointed me to Aidan O’Malley’s review of Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960, by Florence Impens. It got me thinking of maybe the most obvious bit of classicism in Irish poetry, Patrick Kavanagh’s great sonnet…

I’ve previously written about coming across “talented engineers with blogs about their eccentric side interests.” The latest discovery is Fernando Borretti; here he is on how he uses Claude (“[A]fter the 3.6 release . . . hallucination is basically solved for major topics”) and spaced repetition for efficient learning.

Why all humans should learn mathematics.

Nabeel Qureshi’s life principles.

22 years ago, Kevin Kelly bet Stewart Brand that, by 2025, over 50% of primatologists would be convinced that bigfoot exists.

Will O’Brien has written about how the concept of a ‘school trip’ is wasted on the young. You can be the change you want to see: construction sites across the UK are offering tours in March, now available for booking.

I used to believe that nuclear fusion had not yet been achieved by humans, but it turns out that the tricky part is sustaining fusion long enough to be useful as an energy source. Dedicated hobbyists can briefly achieve fusion using a fusor. Here is how HudZah built one in his own kitchen. It sounds like there’s a big arbitrage opportunity in the market for deuterium.

Gavin Leech has continued his gig as the effective altruism community’s unofficial obituarist.

Claire Wang gives thoughts on how to be lonely.

What the Institute for Progress, a Washington D.C. think tank, has been up to.

Papers

Peter Vallentyne and Shelly Kagan, Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory. You all know utilitarianism, but what about infinite utilitarianism? To the best of my knowledge, this was the first paper that suggested that the paradoxes of comparing infinite sets are so difficult to avoid that, to compare one world to another, you need to resort to a convoluted solution involving taking the limit of welfare inside an expanding sphere. Sometimes I think that the quality of philosophy papers must follow an inverse U-shaped relationship with the amount that somebody has read. You should read just enough to avoid saying anything completely stupid, but not so much that you realise every logically possible position has already been enumerated and torn to pieces. Another possibility is that you could not read anything and also be dogmatic and overconfident, which I guess is what most people do.

Oliver Kim, Jen-Kuan Wang, Land Reform in Taiwan, 1950–1961: Effects on Agriculture and Structural Change. This is a terrifically exciting paper. The consensus is that one of the key factors in Taiwan’s rapid postwar economic growth was land reform (for example, Joe Studwell in How Asia Works says that land reform to boost agricultural yields was the necessary first stage in the East Asian economic miracle). But the authors here argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong: while one aspect of land reform – distributing formerly Japanese colonial lands to Taiwanese farmers – had positive effects, the effect on yields of subdividing lands owned by large landlords was ambiguous, and may even have been negative. The authors use an instrumental variables strategy, with the instruments being (a) the fraction of land in a certain area which was owned by the Japanese in 1941, and (b) the fraction of land just above or below the 3 hectare threshold for subdivision. The basic intuition for the former is that Japanese lands were cultivated in the same style as land which remained under Taiwanese ownership, so when the Japanese lands were broken up, that was a ‘plausibly exogenous’ source of variation in the area’s degree of reform. And for the latter, the intuition is that this is basically a way of implementing regression discontinuity: if you compare the outcomes for the 2.9 hectare land, to what would have been the 3.1 hectare land, that tells you something about the causal effects of the subdivision (page 13).

Assuming these results hold up, I think this is a great example of causal inference in social science overturning conventional wisdom in history. It also reinforces my frustration with historians for not taking attempts to demonstrate causality more seriously. This is not small potatoes:¹ We are talking about completely changing our main explanation for the success of Taiwan, one of the very few places to escape poverty to become a developed country in the entire 20th century!

Podcasts

Parmita Mishra talks about biology, and Julian Gough puts forward his (extremely speculative!) theory of the universe.

China analysis in the Year of the Dragon.

Anton Howes on how the salt industry shaped Bengal.

A few months ago, I posted a triple obituary of jazz musicians, so it’s heartening to remember that some of the all-time greats are still alive. Here is Justin Richmond interviewing Sonny Rollins, the last surviving member of the Great Day in Harlem:

The Economist on the ‘Dongbei Renaissance’, and cultural exports of the Chinese heartland. And a playlist of favourite music from mainland China.

Dana Gioia on how to love opera.

Anant Sudarshan on the market-oriented solutions to South Asian air pollution.

Two Bajans talk about the Dancehall music genre.

Abortion and crime, revisited.

Sarah Paine and Dwarkesh Patel on the forces that shaped India and Pakistan’s foreign policy in the 20th century, the ‘Bushido’ philosophy of Japanese imperialism, and Mao as a military strategist. I also finally listened to Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano on scaling.

When you listen to the Nixon Tapes, the case for Federal Reserve independence makes itself. PS: The best thing I’ve read on Arthur Burns’s time as Fed chairman is Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.

Joe Boyd on world music, and Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

The Rest is History on the atrocities of the Congo Free State.

Tyler Cowen and Dwarkesh Patel in dialogue about AI and the bottlenecks to economic growth. A few people have asked me whether I am the “Sam” that Tyler uses as a stand-in for a persuasive Irish Tweeter. I’m honestly not entirely sure, but I think it’s Bowman – I don’t remember being in the room at the time. For charity, one day we should run a University Challenge-style trivia matchup between the Anglo-Irish Brigade of Sams and the American League of Matts.

Music

Some albums I listened to seriously for the first time this month:

Gustav Holst, The Planets. An hour-long piece in which each movement represents the personality of a different planet, beginning with Mars, the Bringer of War. I was fortunate enough to hear this performed by the German National Youth Orchestra last month. A snobby classical music friend said he wouldn’t leave his house to listen to it, but I think he’s crazy; it’s worth hearing live just for the stage direction during the Neptune movement, which made both me and my dad cry.

Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different. More than you wanted to know about what Miles Davis was like in bed, I guess?

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 4. Definitely didn’t blow me away. I gather that this is playing with themes from English folk music and pastoral revivalism, which is not something I’ve explored.

John Coltrane, Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. Someone gifted me the vinyl of this album years ago, but, embarrassingly, I had still never listened to it, because I don’t own a record player. This is a 1963 session recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, but the original tape was lost and not rediscovered until 2019. There is something funny about listening to recently unearthed recordings, when most people haven’t even listened to the core canon of the musician in question (I also had this thought about the newly discovered Chopin Waltz). It’s not in the all-time Coltrane pantheon, but it’s a great album: my favourite part is McCoy Tyner’s piano midway through ‘Untitled Original 11386’. And: here is why ‘My Favorite Things’ hypnotises you.

Recommended for some of you: Persian pre-revolutionary psychedelic funk.

The thing I find most challenging about music in the streaming age is having the attention span to listen to entire albums in the intended order, rather than flittering between songs that I mostly already know. I try to use the queue feature as often as possible to queue up entire albums. This is one reason why I wish Spotify would separate out podcasts and music into different apps.

In fact, what I really yearn for is for Spotify to create a rival to the iPod, whose entire functionality is listening to music. I’m always trying to make music more of a deliberate activity, and less of a tool to fill the silence and ignore my own thoughts.

Books

Byung-Kook Kim, Ezra Vogel, The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea. As soon as I found out that Ezra Vogel, author of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China – one of my favourite books of all time – also edited a book about South Korea, I knew I had to read it. It’s a series of collected essays from primarily Korean academics reflecting on Park and his legacy, but I think a regular biography would have been a better format.

Park was one of those curious dictators whose level of despotism shifted significantly over his rule. He overthrew the government with a coup in 1961, then set up an ostensibly democratic-looking regime the following year. After he almost lost the 1971 presidential election to Kim Dae-jung, he and his cronies passed the considerably more authoritarian ‘Yushin’ constitution. For those counting, Park is the reason why South Korea is currently the ‘Sixth Republic’ (although Yoon Suk Yeol seems to be trying his best to increase that number again).

I didn’t realise how central the Korean CIA was to Park’s regime: it was established only a few weeks after his coup, and even played a role in economic planning in the early days. Alas, it would be his downfall, and Park was – spoiler alert – assassinated by the head of the KCIA in 1979.

To me, one of the most interesting themes of Park’s life was his grudging admiration for the Japanese. He started out as a soldier in the Japanese army, and, although he didn’t speak English, he could speak fluent Japanese. People forget that, when Park normalised diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965, it was extremely unpopular, and almost universally opposed by the pro-democracy forces in Korea. But that move opened the door to Japanese war reparations and investment, and is one of the factors which contributed to the Miracle on the Han River.

In any case, I wonder how far you can get in looking at Korean history through the lens of their envy toward Japan at being the dominant intellectual and economic power in East Asia at the time. A great tidbit (p. 238) is that Park even named the Yushin (‘restoration’) constitution after Emperor Meiji’s concept of ‘ishin’.

One also hears a lot about the role of the cooperation of the chaebol (large family-owned conglomerates) in Korean economic growth, but this is often misunderstood. “Park loathed the chaebol” (chapter 3), and at several points imprisoned and prosecuted their leaders. That they nonetheless stayed in Korea and developed (in many cases) into world-leading companies is quite extraordinary.

As always, reading Korean history is made unnecessarily painful by the fact that approximately everybody is called Kim, Park, or Lee. Unless you are especially interested in East Asian industrial policy, I would recommend reading Michael Breen’s books instead of this one, and I was honestly a bit disappointed.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. This was the first Shakespeare I’ve read since school. I enjoyed this much more than I expected, which was greatly enhanced by a discussion event I ran about it with my friend Henry Oliver. It seems that The Merchant of Venice is underrated within the Shakespeare canon; I certainly liked it more than Romeo and Juliet.

I made the mistake of reading the Wordsworth Classics edition. The introduction is one of the most pretentious things I’ve ever read in my life. The editor, Cedric Watts, can’t reference one of his friends without letting us know that he’s a “distinguished” professor at Cambridge University. It’s filled with completely insane statements like:

Certainly our present era [2006], in which intolerance, violence and decadence are matters of everyday report, can hardly claim superiority to Shakespeare’s.

Charles Petzold, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine. Simply amazing – one of my new favourite books of all time. Once in a blue moon, a book lands in your lap pitched at exactly the right level for exactly what you are thinking about, which happened to me here.

The premise of this book is that it explains, literally line by line, all the background you need to read Alan Turing’s 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. ‘On Computable Numbers’ is one of the most important academic papers in any discipline, and is a cornerstone of computer science and logic. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it a foundational document of modern civilisation.

Turing’s name is forever associated with the ‘halting problem’, and I’ve seen some books and articles summarise ‘On Computable Numbers’ as having proved that the halting problem is unsolvable. That’s inaccurate: the halting problem is a later concept due to Martin Davis, and Turing machines in their original formulation by definition cannot halt (see p. 329). It turns out that Turing’s proof that first-order logic is undecidable is equivalent to the unsolvability of the halting problem, but this was not obvious.

There used to be an odd convention of writing ‘Türing machine’, with an umlaut, even though Turing’s name didn’t have one and he wasn’t German. I’m not sure anyone knows for sure how this convention emerged, but there’s a joke that it must be because anything so incomprehensible must be German.

Speaking of the Germans, one of the things that makes Turing’s original paper almost unreadable is that he represents machine states with gothic letters, which I find really difficult to read and write. It turns out that you don’t actually need the gothic letters, because ultra-simplified Turing machines (which have only one state, or can only move one square at a time) are provably equivalent.

You might summarise Turing’s paper as “computers don’t differ in what they can do, only in how fast they can do it” – using an ultra-general definition of ‘computer’ that includes any mechanised algorithm. Remember, this paper was written before computers in the modern sense actually existed. If the Church-Turing thesis is true – and almost everybody² thinks it is – the functions which are computable by Turing machines are the same as the functions which can be computed by any hypothetical series of mechanical manipulations. While certain popular summaries describe the Church-Turing thesis as though it’s an established theorem, it’s actually an unprovable philosophical position. I recall once hearing Daniel Dennett describe Alan Turing as the most important philosopher of the 20th century, which I found to be a baffling claim at the time, but now I’m starting to see it:

Alan Turing had the basic move that we could replace Kant’s question of how it was possible for there to be thought, with an engineering question – let’s think how we can make a thought come into existence.

Sonny Liew, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. If you trained an AI on my personality, and asked it to guess what kind of book I would most enjoy, “graphic novel history of Singapore” might honestly be the output. This book is a modern history of Singapore written by a Malaysian cartoonist, and told through the lens of a fictional cartoonist working around the time of independence. This book was partly financed by the National Arts Council of Singapore, but the grant was revoked – I suppose when they realised how critical it is of Lee Kuan Yew. One area this book is strong on is the culture and politics of the use of different dialects (like Hokkien) in Singapore.

An alternate history cutaway of Lim Chin Siong.

Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. Ah, the philosopher’s economist, and the economist’s philosopher. A deeply researched biography of one of the most important thinkers of the 1920s, which is unlikely to be bettered (the author even has a new theory of the cause of Ramsey’s death). Ramsey died aged 26, and had deeply influenced the thinking of Russell, Keynes, and Wittgenstein while still an undergraduate. He was also, be all accounts, a warm, generous, and kind-hearted man. This book has a great feature, which is that at particularly technical sections, there are cutaways where subject matter experts explain Ramsey’s contribution. I loved the final paragraph, which comes from Ramsey himself:

In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me . . . On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.

Jonathan Clements, Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan. A solid single-volume history of Taiwan. I won’t say more, because I’m working on a much longer piece about my recent trip to Taiwan which draws significantly from this book.

Films

Bertrand Tavernier, Round Midnight. A remarkable film from 1986 set in Paris and starring Dexter Gordon and several other renowned musicians. There is not much of a plot to speak of, and Amazon doesn’t have subtitles – in any language – for this film, so I barely understand what happened in any of the French scenes. I think of the film as more of a series of beautifully-shot vignettes of the golden age of American jazz expats; the contrast with Ryan Gosling’s ridiculous monologues in La La Land speaks for itself. The final scene might be my favourite from any jazz film.

James Mangold, A Complete Unknown. I think you will like this movie if and only if you really love Bob Dylan. I find it hard to get worked up about the transition away from folk music: the albums with electric instruments sound much better to me, and none of my favourite Bob Dylan songs (Isis, Hurricane) are in this film. Monica Barbaro is very strong as Joan Baez. The music biopic genre is consistently disappointing; here is one perspective on why they fail.

Baz Luhrmann, William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. I have not enjoyed any of Baz Luhrmann’s films, but I watched this because Tyler Cowen cited it as one of the best modern Shakespeare adaptations (precisely because it is so weird). The prologue is excellent, and I wish the film had more newscasters speaking in Shakespearean English. But I found significant sections to be unwatchable; I much preferred Tyler’s idea of making Shakespare modern by translating it in Trinidadian Creole, or another Caribbean dialect. I watched this while I was sick, so the whole thing feels like a fever dream in my memory.

Various, The Merchant of Venice (play). I do not go to the theatre enough. This was a very solid production – my only complaint is that the character of Gratiano was made to be too much of an oaf. Casting a black actor to play Shylock worked well. The homosexual subtext between Antonio and Bassanio was also made explicit, which I thought was the right choice. Watching different productions really makes you realise how much of the play is hinging upon the staging of the final scene (this was a more sombre interpretation).

Overall, I would say that my foray back into Shakespeare exceeded my expectations. If another Shakespeare play is being performed near me, I’ll read it in preparation.

From YouTube, Henry Oliver rounds up links. Two very solid performances: Braxton Cook plays alto on Tiny Desk, and Endea Owens plays upright bass with The Cookout.

1. Or small rice paddies, as the case may be.

2. If I understood correctly, in The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose is trying to show that Church-Turing is false, because to create consciousness, the human brain must do something which is theoretically impossible to instantiate in any computer and relies on some kind of quantum weirdness. This is almost certainly false, but he is the one with the Nobel Prize in Physics, so what do I know?