Quotes to Live By

This daily habit, capturing a piece of morning reading or serendipitous stumbling on wisdom, started on Twitter here and from October 2024 continued here...every day... "ART IS A SPIRITUAL transaction. Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance—often visible to us, but invisible to those around us. Difficult as it is to remember, it is our work that creates the market, not the market that creates our work. Art is an act of faith, and we practice practicing it. Sometimes we are called on pilgrimages on its behalf and, like many pilgrims, we doubt the call even as we answer it. But answer we do.…

Over-hasty Restaurant Servers – An Economist Perspective

More fine dining from Tyler Cowen, here: The ratio of “they want to take it away too soon” to “they take it away too late” seems to me at least five to one.

Herbie Hancock and Bubbles of Spirit

Strolling down a trail into the magical Stern Grove forest in San Francisco, the crankiness of a long drive dissolved into giddy anticipation. I was just minutes away from seeing a greatest-of-all-time in jazz music. Minutes away from being meters away from the eclectic pianist Herbie Hancock, whose wild arc of jazz piano styles from traditional to funk, electronica and fusion all started seven decades ago in the 1950s. The bass of a warm-up DJ thudded through the tall stands of beautiful eucalyptus, with their crisp subtle scent. The mist of a heavy summer fog hung in the trees across branches, gently being pulled in an onshore breeze from the Pacific. My pace accelerated, just as when walking in a crowd in an airport terminal or…

A Fine is a Price

I always say that at least 51%:49% are cynical capitalists, no matter what they might say at the school gate about their do-gooding...the evidence is everywhere, if you watch for it! As the Abstract summarizes: The deterrence hypothesis predicts that the introduction of a penalty that leaves everything else unchanged will reduce the occurrence of the behavior subject to the fine. We present the result of a field study in a group of day-care centers that contradicts this prediction. Parents used to arrive late to collect their children, forcing a teacher to stay after closing time. We introduced a monetary fine for late-coming parents. As a result the number of late-coming parents increased significantly. After the fine was removed no…

Lenses on Language in America, and ‘What Room’?

Hey everybody, What a dramatic week in the US, to put it mildly! As I start to shift from this wonderful year of travels, and the relaxed musings of reflective personal writing in Life Notes, I’m bringing us back to my original aim of sharing a curation of the most interesting things I’ve observed and learnt during the week (yes, still working on brevity!). In weeks to come, you’ll see the content start to shift in reflection of the new career direction I will be announcing :) This has me spending days and nights swilling in fascinating conversations, reading learning to bring a new angle into my past work in the climate, energy and natural resources sectors. And, it was funny this…