Links for March

The Long Now, corruption, Bertrand Russell

Here are the most interesting things I read, listened to, and watched this month.

For the last few years, I’ve run a reading group, where we discuss… whatever I am in the mood for. Recently, I’ve been assigning classic papers from the history of science, and in May, we will be reading and discussing A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon. If you’ve never heard of Claude Shannon, please take a moment to bask in the disgust with which the world’s computer scientists regard you. After you are finished with that, if you live near Edinburgh, or would like to visit, on May 10th, email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com, or otherwise get in contact.

And if you are aged 18–22, applications are now open for the Invisible College program from Works in Progress.

Blogs

The Irish government has announced that they are relaxing their restrictive rules on ‘granny flats’. It turns out that 85% of the public are in favour of this change. It’s amazing what a small group of people can achieve when no one cares who takes the credit. ;)

My off-handed comment in last month’s links roundup about ‘anti-reading lists’ received an unexpected amount of attention.

Applications are now open for the Wolfram Summer School. I can’t remember where it was that I overheard the comment about Stephen Wolfram that the only thing bigger than his brain is his ego.

It’s easier than I would have thought to buy Roman coinage.

Why do mortality estimates for the Black Death vary so much?

José Luis Ricón links.

Nicholas Decker on discounting future utility.

In principle, public domain books should be free or almost free, but I find myself still buying paper copies of them because the formatting on online versions like Project Gutenberg is so terrible. A new project, Standard eBooks, is releasing public domain books for free with (they claim) the quality of commercially produced books.

Rest in peace to the blogger Kevin Drum.

On the homogeneity of Beijing and Shanghai.

Stephen Malina links.

A review of David Macaulay’s book about mosque architecture.

A young man used AI to build a nuclear fusor, and now I must weep.

Bentham’s Bulldog has an… extremely weird mix of opinions.

The Economist’s profile of Tyler Cowen. You may not like it, but this is what peak male performance looks like:

My favourite detail was how Tyler’s kitchen has three copies of The Food of Sichuan stacked on top of each other. And some more praise for Tyler.

Getting ill is now forbidden. Forbidden! And, the culture that is Italian driving: “Torchia told Italian TV that . . . the roads [to hospital] were almost ‘more of a risk than any illness’”.

Scott Alexander’s links for February.

Peter McLaughlin on getting off the effective altruism crazy train.

Sam Glover’s case against public intellectuals: “The last thing I would ever want is for someone to think that because I had said something, it was probably true.” Amen!

Claude can now search the internet (in the United States).

Noah Smith on what to read and, more importantly, what not to read, in popular economics:

The second reason [for writing this post] is that I saw this intriguing idea from Sam Enright: “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.”¹

Noah makes the incorrect inference that, because Piketty’s original papers that inspired Capital in the Twenty-First Century are worth reading, that means the book itself is worth reading. Have I actually read it? No, of course not, and neither has anybody else. But an economics professor friend, whose judgement of books correlates with mine at a >0.9 level, made sure I read the papers but strongly advised against reading the book (which he says is a confused and overly verbose mess). See also Matt Rognlie’s important paper showing that most of the observed increase in capital’s share in the United States has been downstream of housing inequality.

Wernher von Braun’s widow (and cousin!) has passed away.

German trains are now less punctual than Britain’s. 28% of Deutsche Bahn’s intercity trains are more than 10 minutes delayed.

If you spend your life walking the world, what do you end up believing about cultural relativism? “[T]here are some cultures I respect and prefer more, and most of those are in Asia and Europe, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

The Éire Accelerationism movement now has a website.

A survey of Imperial China from the 10th to 18th centuries: “To call it a doorstopper of a book is to imply the existence of a very big door”. I learned that the Ming Dynasty was founded by an orphan (!) peasant (!!) Buddhist monk (!!!) from Anhui province, Zhu Yuanzhang, who, from his Wikipedia page, comes across as one of the great live players of the 14th century.

Revolution, reaction, and reform in modern China.

On the difference between streaming and truly listening. Contrary to popular belief, income per musician has not been falling.

Six things Britney wishes you knew about her.

Advice on how to assemble your own harem??

Having women compete for your attention, maintaining multiple relationships, the power to say “no”—it pumps up your ego in a way that feels amazing at first but eventually reveals itself to be a bit empty. You end up creating these parallel lives, each relationship its own little universe that never quite achieves escape velocity. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. But it gets old.

Elsewhere, Gwern assembles data on the predictors of romantic success.

Tyler Cowen is asked ‘Why don’t people have more sex?’, and gives the most Tyler response possible: “People want their sex to consist of peaks, rather than seeking to maximize lifetime utility. Tom Schelling once told me this is why he did not listen to Bach more.”

There is currently some attention being paid to prediction markets on papal elections, but note that betting on a papal election is one of the few sins for which you can be officially excommunicated.

Claims from The Economist: Insider trading is rife. And: the Mafia is now mostly elderly men who live in poverty.

The term ‘audience capture’ seems to have been coined by Eric Weinstein, one of the worst-ever examples of that phenomenon.

Microgrants for the revitalisation of London.

What colour are your bits?

I came across a nice piece of history this month: I remember learning about logic gates (NOT, OR, XOR, AND) as a kid, and then having my mind blown when I found out that any computer can be constructed using only a single logic gate – you only need NAND (or equivalently, NOR). This property was proved by none other than Charles Sander Peirce, the pragmatist, logician, and buddy to future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Peirce never published, leaving Henry Sheffer to figure out the same thing 30 years later, and today the symbol representing the NAND operation is called the Sheffer stroke.

The New Yorker on Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. And here is the Leonard Bernstein New York Philharmonic recording.

Your evil twin and where to find them.

The achievement of GPT 4.5 is particularly impressive, given Kant’s third critique???

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Pasadena Game, and other intriguing cases where the expected value of an action is not well-defined.

January’s post mentioned the death of Manmohan Singh. Among his various accomplishments, he assembled a particularly high-quality network of Indian economists and policymakers. Here is Shruti Rajagopalan and others on Singh as a talent scout.

Papers

Frank Ramsey, A Mathematical Theory of Savings. After finishing with the Misak biography, this is the first Ramsey I’ve read from the horse’s mouth. As I understand it, this is the paper that birthed the economics literature on the theory of optimal savings. Ramsey is concerned with the social planner’s problem of how much a nation should save to maximise utility across the generations. Later work which extended this to the context of a competitive economy formed the basis of the ‘Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans’ model, the workhorse of graduate macroeconomics.² The conclusion of this paper is the ‘Ramsey rule’ for saving, which says that society should save up until the point that the marginal utility loss from reduced current consumption exactly equals the marginal utility gain from increased future consumption.

This month, certain philosophical problems related to infinity reminded me of economic models with infinite horizons, like those about optimal savings allocations. Under certain conditions, there can be an optimum solution, in a way that bypasses the possible infinity paradoxes related to the future being unbounded. And alas! Other people have noticed this too.

Jakob Svensson, Eight Questions about Corruption. Another banger from the Journal of Economic Perspectives. A popular idea is that corruption can be reduced by increasing pay for public servants, and this paper discusses a nice historical precedent for this: in the 17th and 18th centuries, Sweden was one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, and Swedish historians generally agree that a drive to increase public sector pay was one of the major factors ending this (p.32).

In corrupt institutions, the flow-through effects of new policies can be quite intriguing: When the Russian police obtained more advanced guns, the main effect was that guns were sold to the mafia at a higher price. And: “To date, little evidence exists that devoting additional resources to the existing legal and financial government monitoring institutions will reduce corruption” (p.35).

Corruption shows up surprisingly little in aggregate statistics about national economies: “To the extent we can measure corruption in a cross-country setting, it does not affect growth” (p. 39). I suppose it could be that reductions in corruption are a level effect which increases GDP in a one-off fashion.

Nicolás Campos, Eduardo Engel, Ronald Fischer, Alexander Galetovic, The Ways of Corruption in Infrastructure: Lessons from the Odebrecht Case. Having previously been the jewel of the Brazilian economy, and widely respected internationally, around a decade ago it was discovered that the construction contractor Odebrecht had paid $786 million in bribes for various forms of government special treatment. The scandal implicated one-third of Brazil’s senators and almost half of their governors. The company was so large that its implosion created a major macroeconomic shock in Latin America, and caused Peru to lose 0.8% of its GDP in a single year (p. 176).

I did a double-take when I saw the authors’ list, but some quick Googling confirmed that the father of statistical hypothesis testing did not come back from the dead to write an essay for the JEP.

(If you are looking for another rabbithole about a breathtakingly large misappropriation of government money, read up on Malaysia’s 1MDB Scandal. The role that Goldman Sachs played in looting the Malaysian state is particularly horrifying.)

Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. Long after he was famous for the Alice in Wonderland books, Lewis Carroll published this monograph in the philosophy journal Mind, in the form of a dialogue between Achilles and a tortoise. I think his point is that, if you require every single intermediate step of an argument to have a justification, and never take foundational truths as given, then logical deduction faces the same infinite regress problem as you get in Zeno’s paradox. So much fun.

Tyler Cowen, What Do We Learn from the Repugnant Conclusion? Quite remarkably, the only coauthor that the great philosopher Derek Parfit ever had was the economics blogger Tyler Cowen. Personally I find Tyler’s academic philosophy work very impressive – see, for example, his 2003 paper on wild animal welfare. For some exegesis, see Peter McLaughlin.

Frank Arntzenius, Utilitarianism, Decision Theory and Eternity. An admirably clear paper on paradoxes for utilitarianism and decision theory arising from infinities. Arntzenius has a fun section about how difficult it is to define seemingly straightforward concepts like a sphere in space that expands uniformly in all directions. While Newtonian physics has a well-defined space and a well-defined time metric, it doesn’t have a well-defined spacetime metric. And while relativity has a well-defined spacetime metric (the Minkowski invariant), it doesn’t have a well-defined space or a well-defined time metric. This means that the concept of a ‘set of points within a certain distance’ of a given point in spacetime is ill-defined in relativistic models (I didn’t know this!). This means that to talk about influence expanding out from a point, you need to resort to an insanely convoluted solution involving the volumes of double hyperboloids.

Lianghua Zhou, A Critical Bibliography of Russell’s Addresses and Lectures in China. A truly Herculean effort to catalogue every lecture Bertrand Russell gave when he lived in China in 1920–21. Russell caught pneumonia so badly while there that he came within a hair’s breadth of dying (the Japanese press even printed obituaries), so the lectures were quite literally almost the death of him. On page 148, the author complains that “It is very difficult to get access to the sources from pre-1949 China” (p.148). I wonder why.

Richard Davis, Bertrand Russell and Ireland. A paper about an even more niche element of Russell’s life. The TL;DR is that Russell had somewhat sophisticated views on the political economy of Home Rule and Irish land distribution – he even once met Parnell! – but, in his later years, he lazily repeated Irish nationalist talking points. I don’t think there’s enough substance here to write a sequel to my Keynes in Dublin piece.

Nick Bostrom, Pascal’s Mugging. I’m not sure if I had ever actually read Bostrom’s original write-up of this popular scenario from online rationality blogs. I wonder if I could ever get away with a footnote like this (p.445): “Related scenarios have recently been discussed informally among various people.”

See also commentary from Gwern. I didn’t follow all of it, but this is the first principled discussion I’ve seen of what discounting function would be most appropriate, if your preferred resolution to the paradox is to say that, when the probabilities we ascribe to unlikely events get sufficiently tiny, we can discount them precisely to zero. Toward the end, he gestures toward the idea that the paradox is solved by taking some kind of Bayesian prior which penalises high Kolmogorov complexity, which sounds like exactly the kind of clever but ultimately implausible idea that appeals to rationalists.

Tjalling Koopmans, Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience. An important midcentury piece of macroeconomic theory which proves that, if preferences obey certain axioms (including continuity), some of them must necessarily exhibit impatience. I struggled to understand most of this, but I think what this paper is doing is extending earlier work on optimal savings and time preferences to the context of an infinite horizon (i.e. where we don’t know how many future time periods there will be). Oddly, despite the author’s clear debt to the great Frank Ramsey, he’s only mentioned once, and his name is misspelt – how did nobody catch this?!

I suspect Koopmans’ 1965 article is more relevant for what I’m interested in, but they build on each other, and right now I’m slogging through.

(I really don’t have time to look into this right now, but in writing the above, I found out that Koopmans made a visit in 1965 to the Soviet Union to learn about how he might apply Leonid Kantorovich’s linear programming methods, which were then being used to centrally plan the Soviet economy. Please don’t tell me I’m going to get sucked in to writing an alternate history fan fiction of Red Plenty about algorithmic optimisation of economic planning in Gary, Indiana…)

Peter McLaughlin, The development of the concept of existential risk. God help me, I’m reading Peter’s master's thesis for fun. I liked this so much that I started hosting a copy on my website. In reading the David Edmonds biography, I had missed that Parfit’s sister, Theodora Ooms, is a researcher on marriage and fertility policy, and her work is cited in Reasons and Persons. Another nice tidbit Peter picked up on is that we know that there was an earlier discussion of the concept of tragedy of the commons in the book that was removed, because Parfit forgot to remove Garrett Hardin from the bibliography. I didn’t realise just how dark a direction Hardin took this in: in the original paper where he introduced the tragedy of the commons, he wrote that governments were putting themselves in such a situation by having a welfare state – and that the only solution is to put an end to the “freedom to breed”!

​​The core theme of this dissertation is that this particular conception of [existential] risk, the future, and extinction did not emerge from concrete reflection on the possibilities of nuclear war or other specific risks. Rather, it came from higher-level and more abstract reflection about a different topic: population.

Another great reflection: Thomas Malthus’s famous doom-and-gloom predictions about population growth were inspired by Leonhard Euler’s modelling of the population of Berlin. And speaking of Malthus, I wonder how many libertarians who worship John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty have ever actually checked what he believed?

Indeed, it was perhaps in the work of Mill (1806–1873) that English Malthusianism reached its intellectual zenith. Mill embraced [David] Ricardo’s vision of stagnation to a ‘stationary state’ as positively utopian: in such a state the population would cease to grow, and since Mill believed that population exceeding production was the root cause of poverty, he predicted that nobody would be poor. As such, rich countries like England should … encourage or enforce birth control through population policy, in order to end growth as soon as possible … in 1859, as Mill was arguing that coercive population policies were ‘not objectionable as violations of liberty’ because of the severe harms of overpopulation

Malthusianism and population concerns are a big part of why Derek Parfit’s thought moved substantially toward consideration of existential risks. And without that shift, there is no Toby Ord. And without Toby Ord, there is no Will MacAskill. And without Will MacAskill, there is no shrimp welfare movement. 🦐

Podcasts

My friend Luke Fehily on Ireland’s innovation ecosystem. The interviewer is Jim O’Shaughnessy from O’Shaughnessy Ventures (“A name so Irish it could only be American!”). Luke’s accent is even more baffling than mine.

Empire on the Northern Irish Troubles.

The Economist on the past and present of bacteriophage research. A winner of the Medical Journalist Association’s podcast episode of the year award – congratulations to all involved.

Ezra Klein on the abundance agenda. Self-recommending.

The Rocky retrospective.

How the sausage gets made in Australian immigration policy. The Wikipedia page on Arthur Calwell’s postwar immigration programme is worth a read.

An interview with Andrew Shaw, the only foreigner to ever achieve the master status in classical Chinese jade carving. The jade room, on the third floor of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, is my favourite museum room in the world.

Henry Oliver and James Mariott debate the twenty best English poets.

The incredible life of Edward Luttwak, the man who went to Chairman Mao’s funeral, got drunk late at night with Vladimir Putin, and lives on a cattle ranch in Bolivia. His comedic timing is impeccable:

Americans don't like to study. They would like to go to school to socialize, play games, they don't go to school to learn anything difficult, hence very little mathematics and very little foreign languages. They are willing to sit in classes to dabble and brabble about movies. To read books, less and less. To learn foreign languages? Forget about it … in a vast country full of people, the Central Intelligence Agency should be able to recruit if it wished to. But it doesn't.

By the way, many of them are Mormons. If you drink a beer once a month, they say you're an alcoholic. That's a minor point. The major point is…

Raghuram Rajan on the Indian macroeconomy and his infamous speech about the legacy of Alan Greenspan.

Rebecca Lowe on what freedom would mean in utopia (and other topics).

Why is Australia’s state capacity so high?

From The Economist: the Chinese calligraphy revival.

The Very Bad Wizards discuss C. Thi Nguyen’s work on the concept of value capture. You can read my response to Nguyen on these matters here.

Carl Zimmer on the airborne transmission of disease.

The Rest is History bumper series on the French Revolution.

Some historical background about Joseph Mallord William Turner. I was fortunate enough to see many of Turner’s watercolours in person earlier this year; here is The Rialto, Venice:

One of my idiosyncrasies when visiting museums and art galleries is that, if there is enough space, I like to approach the paintings at different angles and different speeds to see how it affects the aesthetic experience, and to see which structures come into view in which order. I suspect I looked particularly eccentric at this exhibition.

Books

Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. An intellectual history of the concept of existential risk. The author’s central claim is that the concept of existential risk as it is used by people like Nick Bostrom only dates back, essentially, to the invention of the atomic bomb. The book’s main ideas are summarised here. Of course, the concept of apocalypse or human extinction has been around since time immemorial, but prophecies of apocalypse, from the Bible or otherwise, are structurally very different to the modern understanding of existential risk. For example, the concept of the apocalypse has traditionally not been understood as something that is preventable by human action.

There is much good material here: chapter five, about the history of geology and how it affected cultural attitudes (for example, the uniformitarianism vs catastrophism debate) was my favourite. I had no idea that Charles Darwin flatly denied the existence of mass extinction events. Chapter six is bloated; I would have cut its length by half.

‘Existential risk’ is generally understood to mean not just human extinction, but other scenarios in which our potential is permanently derailed. Moynihan also writes about people reckoning for the first time with concepts like wireheading, or other scenarios in which humanity continually stimulates itself instead of reproducing, an idea associated with several members of the Huxley family (most famously Aldous in writing Brave New World.)

Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China. Wow! I had so much fun with this book. Bertrand Russell was a lecturer at the University of Peking from 1920–21, and he wrote this book about his time there and his cultural observations. The 1920s were such an interesting time for China: many Western intellectuals³ were translated into Chinese for the first time during the New Culture Movement, during which there was a brief flowering of progressive ideals. There was even serious discussion given to replacing the Chinese writing system entirely with the Roman alphabet. One of the students Russell lectured to was a young Mao Zedong, and he was even invited to dinner with Sun Yat-sen. He writes:

There is a movement for phonetic writing among the more advanced Chinese reformers; and I think the success of this movement is essential if China is to take her place among the bustling hustling nations which consider that they have a monopoly of all excellence.

Russell did not seem bothered by the fact that he was living in a country that, since the death of Yuan Shikai, had been ruled by various regional warlords:

China needs a period of anarchy in order to work out her salvation

My favourite chapters were the earlier ones about Chinese history. Parts of it are definitely racist and orientalist, and I have no idea how accurate they are, but it’s so interesting to see the gears in Russell’s head turn as he tries to understand a new topic. I noticed that, on a few occasions, Russell cites Herbert Giles, the sinologist half-responsible for the Wade-Giles romanisation system for Mandarin Chinese. Wade-Giles is the reason why every name you might recognise looks so different in old books about China, which has long since switched to pinyin.

Chapter nine, on the then-ongoing Washington Conference, is fairly niche. Many of the negotiations and treaties Russell writes about only have short pages on government websites, and presumably, this all would have been a lot more relevant for people reading it in 1922.

The Long Now Foundation, Pace Layers: 02024 Annual Journal. The first edition of Long Now’s new annual journal. The Long Now is a bit of a funny organisation, in that it is concerned with the long-term fate of civilisation, but eschews talking too much about existential risks… or really any specific set of ideas or research programme in particular. Also, this will come across as uncharitable, but it feels like almost everything they do is geared toward flattering rich people and fundraising (for example, with their Bottle Keep system). If you’re planning for an organisation to exist for 10,000 years, perhaps this is optimal.

By far my favourite contribution was an essay about the history of Antarctic exploration. I learned about the remarkable life of John Cleves Symmes Jr, the originator of the Hollow Earth theory. This theory held that there was a 1,000-mile-wide hole in the Earth where the South Pole should be, with another, fertile, Earth on the inside. There was a planned Antarctic expedition to test this theory in the 1820s, backed by several members of Congress, which I think technically means that the first official American government support for an Antarctic voyage was to test whether the Earth is hollow. Even more bizarrely, this incident was likely the inspiration behind Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel (Poe was himself a talented amateur astronomer).⁴

There is also a contribution by friend-of-the-blog Xander Balwit, who writes about the Pantone colour of the year.

But, other than that, I was disappointed. On page 212, Stewart Brand repeats lazy tropes about how “language shapes thought” based on debunked examples (see Pinker’s The Language Instinct). There is editorial weirdness; some of the essays have academic-style citations, but I couldn’t find any bibliography. And there are oddly many summaries of talks. I think Long Now can do better than this.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Winter. The second volume in Knausgaard’s seasons quartet, which I have been accidentally reading in the wrong order. This one is written in the form of a mini-encyclopedia – essays to his unborn daughter of what she should know about the world, and, implicitly, himself. I seem to have a revealed preference for reading multiple-times divorced men reflecting on their failed relationships (see also all the stuff about Bertrand Russell). I hope this is not an omen.

Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872–1921. The first volume of Bertrand Russell’s biography by Ray Monk, who also wrote biographies of Wittgenstein and Oppenheimer.⁵ This was particularly strong on Russell’s relationship with Wittgenstein; I hope that Frank Ramsey figures strongly in volume two. It’s helpful to know how many distortions Russell introduced in his Autobiography. I knew that Bertrand Russell’s grandfather was prime minister, but I didn’t realise quite how much the whiggishness of his family influenced Bertie. Lord John Russell worshiped Charles James Fox, and he easily could have repealed the Corn Laws if Robert Peel hadn’t gotten to it first. Bertrand Russell’s grandfather knew Napoleon, and he lived to hear the Beatles, but somehow he had one of those grand Victorian lives that made it all make sense.

Music

My favourite new albums I discovered this month:

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9. Hearing Mahler’s 2nd symphony (‘The Resurrection’) live was one of the musical highlights of my life. There used to be a superstition among composers that you would die before reaching your tenth symphony; Beethoven, Schubert, Dvořák and Bruckner all died after finishing their ninth. Mahler was sufficiently superstitious that he only called his 9th symphony by its number; what we call ‘Symphony No. 9’ is actually the tenth.⁶ Normally, classical concerts are a few thematically related pieces from different composers put together, but Mahler’s symphonies are so long that they take up the whole concert. Sadly, this was a much weaker night of playing than when I heard No. 2.

At some point, I need to listen to Wagner’s Ring Cycle live, but I’ve never seen it playing in any city I’ve been in (maybe I’m looking in the wrong places…).

Gabriel Fauré, Requiem. In the great nationalities of classical music, I have not done much to explore the French. I am yet to have any choral music really hit me emotionally the way instrumental music can, so I’d appreciate recommendations on this front.

Ruth Gipps, Cringlemire Garden. My favourite discovery from a recent concert. Gipps was a relatively obscure student of Vaughan Williams, but this piece was delightful.

Edward Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius. A two-part choral work, widely considered one of Elgar’s masterpieces. And: here is David Cameron misidentifying Elgar as the composer of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ – what a fool, eh?!

Gerry Mulligan, Reunion with Chet Baker. I have listened to very little Gerry Mulligan, who was the preeminent baritone saxophonist in jazz. This is wonderful.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Ugetsu. I saw in a YouTube video a jazz trumpeter recommending this album to someone who has never listened to jazz before. It’s a 1963 Birdland recording, so I’m surprised that I’m only hearing it now. Note that it’s Freddie Hubbard, not Lee Morgan, on trumpet. This is all great stuff, but Lee is my guy: probably my second favourite trumpeter ever after Miles.

And Gavin Leech’s favourite music from South Korea. I suggested that Kiha & The Faces be included, but I see that it already has been. Is it possible that the overwhelming success of K-pop has crowded out the success of other Korean genres in the West?

Films

I was too busy this month to watch any new films. :(

Various, Six Nations: Ireland vs France. The only sport I ever watch is Irish rugby. I only managed to catch week five of the Six Nations,⁷ in which Ireland was trounced by what must be one of the greatest French rugby sides of all time.

Ireland has gotten so good at rugby that it’s arguably become less interesting to watch. One of my friends was recently watching the well-oiled machine known as Leinster Rugby absolutely demolish a regional French team in a European tournament, and he told me he was thinking of Mitchell and Webb: Are we the baddies?⁸

Rugby is definitely an exciting game, and I can see why people get so into it. In contrast, football is so low-scoring that I’m baffled anyone can watch it. There is definitely some truth to the adage that, while football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.

PS: I know a lot of Americans read this blog, and they may be pleased to hear that, despite frequent British mockery, the word ‘soccer’ originated in England. Learning this reminded me of that thing linguists sometimes say about how most American accents are rhotic (i.e. pronounce the ‘r’ after vowels) because English accents were primarily rhotic in the 18th century (Albion’s Seed strikes again!). The Americans don’t even realise how quintessentially British they are. God save the King.

1. It’s a shame that the phrase of mine to go most viral was so clunkily worded – at the very least, I should have replaced the second occurrence of ‘people’ with ‘those’. You live and you learn.

2. Per a friend’s recommendation, I’ve started working through the presentation of this in chapter 2 of Advanced Macroeconomics by David Romer, who I have learned is a different person to Paul Romer. Apparently David Cass had finished his PhD at Stanford in the 1960s before he or his advisors noticed how much of his work was independently rediscovering the insights of Ramsey.

3. John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, also lived in China at the same time.

4. Edmond Halley, of Comet fame, was also a supporter of the Hollow Earth theory.

5. If I find the time, I would be interested to see how Monk’s interpretation of Oppenheimer differs from that of the more famous Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin biography, which was adapted into the film Oppenheimer.

6. This is one of the lazier attempts I’ve seen to cheat God.

7. The six are: England, France, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Italy. Interestingly, Northern Irish players compete for the Irish rugby team, unlike in some other sports where they compete for the UK. That means Ireland competes in rugby under a hideous four-province flag, not the Irish tricolour.

8. It was not always like this. Ireland is the winner of the largest number of Wooden Spoon awards for the lowest-scoring rugby team.