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… “Live to the point of tears” – Albert Camus Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, author, and journalist, known for his existentialist and absurdist philosophy (although he rejected the existentialist label). Camus received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 for illuminating the human…
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…
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…
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…