I have always loved maps, and the mind-shift that occurs when you look at a map centred around a different meridian. Australian maps, which put Australia in the centre of the world and the US in the far right make the cities of the eastern seaboard (Boston, New York, Washington DC) look strangely isolated. The map above, from a Dutch firm of architects, is interesting, although I don’t buy the implicit ‘fortress’ argument. (Via Information is Beautiful)
Over lunch today, I read ad man James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas, from the office’s bookshelf. It’s not really a book; it is literally a technique, spread across forty widely-spaced pages. It boils down to this: do your research, think hard about lots of combinations of possibilities, then distract yourself for a while until you have your eureka moment. That this glorified pamphlet has sold millions of copies certainly tells you a lot about advertising, but not in a good way.
I have just stopped reading The Tiger that Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot – and not because I’d completed it. The book is a primer about the use and abuse of numbers in policy-making and in reporting. While it contained some well-chosen quotations and made some fairly good generic points regarding the appropriate use of large and small numbers, it all seemed fairly obvious. I could imagine this being of value to schoolkids getting to grip with evidence usage in decision-making. For everyone else, it’s rather patronising – “depending on what you’re counting, six can be a really big number” [I paraphrase from memory, I haven’t got the book to hand]. The time I would have spent finishing this book off will now be invested in Marcus de Sautoy’s Finding Moonshine.
“You are not supposed to buy an illegal site,” he said. “This is out-of-the-box thinking.”
That’s Hans Pandeya of Global Gaming Factory, on the decision to purchase filesharing site The Pirate Bay for £4.3m, via BBC News.
My mother, grandmother and aunt are soon to visit Florence. I have been there a couple of times, but aside from bumbling around the main squares and checking out the obvious sights (the Duomo, the Uffizzi, Palazzo/Piazza/Ponte Vecchio and the Boboli Gardens) my main recommendation was to get the train to Sienna – noting the fascist architecture of Firenze station on the way. Surely I must have done something less clichéd in Florence, but I can’t remember it. Does anyone have any good tourist tips that don’t involve nightclubs or bars?
One night last year, for no reason, Helen and I started a game in which words from film titles had to be replaced with types of meat. It has proved to be a game that keeps on giving. So far, the top contenters are:
Any to add? Fish-related words and non-meat substitutes are not allowed (so no The Pike Runner or King Quorn). Films already containing meat references (e.g. Chicken Run, or Jamon, Jamon) are ineligible.
…it is impossible to read this year’s text without coming to the conclusion that microfinance is at a crossroads, and that it might do the industry a power of good if it was able to call a “time-out” to reassess its role. In the popular press, microfinance is still very much the developmental flavour of the month – and even the most battle-hardened aid veteran has to acknowledge its appeal as an alternative to the conventional ‘top down’ model for wasting taxpayers’ money. But… microfinance currently faces serious challenges – challenges that have been exacerbated by the global crisis. Should microfinance institutions shift from their essential social role to a (perhaps) more sustainable profit-seeking model? Can they go on relying (as they have done) on subventions of one sort or another from Western investors? Should they develop into more or less full service financial institutions, and become part of the formal financial sector?
That’s from the CSFI‘s Microfinance Banana Skins 2009, available as a free PDF. My answers would be yes, no, more, and yes, respectively.
On the way to work this morning I finished Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. I enjoyed it hugely. The whole book is about the degenerate, alcoholic atmosphere among ex-pat American journalists in the Puerto Rico of the late 1950s, where every meal is rum, ice and hamburgers, and most days start at noon. Layered beneath this is a much deeper theme of hedonism giving way to a sense of more mature contentment, the aging process that prompts this, and the horror that this adaptation brings with it. To understand and describe this process at 22 was a remarkable achievement for Thompson.
I was disappointed to hear that the film of the novel, scheduled for release in 2010, does not include one of the central characters, Yeamon. The only way to remove Yeamon’s character is to partner the protagonist, Kemp, with Chenault, the wanton Conneticut, from the outset. This would remove much of the storyline, a lot of the simmering tensions and jealousy, and much of the point of the novel. Still, I hope the film works – but I’m glad I got through the novel first.
A work meeting last week reminded me of Frederic Bastiat‘s quip:
The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
Looking the quotation up, I discovered that Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms covered the economic impact of new railways. Can it be mere coincidence that this is what the meeting was about?
Paul Krugman’s Theory of Interstellar Trade (.pdf) may be the best economics paper I have read. Figure II, in particular. Krugman notes that:
It should be noted that while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
He goes on to develop the First Fundamental Theorum of Interstellar Trade:
When trade takes place between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest cost on goods in transit should be calculated by using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frames of the travelling spacecraft.
As promised, this does make sense. What a fascinating paper.