Category Archives: Asides

Finally, a use for a Boris Johnson

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Here’s a thought. Well, two thoughts.

  1. If Boris Johnson does indeed become Prime Minister then his photograph will be permanently on the front page of newspapers. This will be depressing for those of us who cannot stand the sight of the creep.

  2. On the other hand, the no-deal Brexit after which he lusts will result in — among many other things — a national shortage of toilet paper. Resourceful citizens will — like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses — cut up these newspapers into neat squares and hang them on hooks near their toilet bowls. Thus will the citizenry finally discover a use for their new Prime Minister.

Security-theatre dialogue

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From Tyler Cowen:

At Colorado Springs airport, on my way to Denver:

TSA official at security [pre-check, for that matter]: “We have to search your carry-on, it is suspicious that you have so many books.”

They searched every book.

TC: “Thank you, sir!”

I had fewer books in my carry-on than usual.

The heaviest book I had was Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, which is why I had fewer books than usual.

Tyler reads more (and more quickly) than any person I know —with the possible exception of Diane Coyle.

The consolations of ageing

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From The Economist:

Among the compensations of ageing is the right to bore youngsters with stories of the prices of yesteryear. Once upon a time a ticket to the cinema cost just five quid, and a hogshead of mead but a farthing. Of course, savvier youths know how to debunk such tales. Adjust for inflation and many things are cheaper than ever. Since 1950 the real cost of new vehicles has fallen by half, that of new clothing by 75% and that of household appliances by 90%, even as quality has got better. Tumbling prices reflect decades of improvements in technology and productivity. But the effect is not economy-wide. Cars are cheaper, but car maintenance is more expensive, and costs in education and health care have risen roughly fivefold since 1950. Though no mystery, this rise is often misunderstood, with serious economic consequences.

There are as many explanations for the ballooning cost of such services as there are politicians. But as a newly published analysis argues, many common scapegoats simply cannot explain the steady, long-run rise in such prices relative to those elsewhere in the economy. In “Why are the prices so damn high?” Eric Helland of Claremont McKenna College and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University write that quality has improved far too little to account for it. Administrative bloat is not the answer either. In America the share of all education spending that goes on administration has been roughly steady for decades. Health-care spending has risen faster than gdp in rich countries, despite vast differences in the structure of their health-care systems….

Subtle messages

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Hmmm… I found this mong the junk mail in our letterbox. Is someone trying to tell me something? Years ago I remember a comic giving out ‘life tips’. One was: “the last cheque you should ever write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce!”

Happy Bloomsday!

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It’s Bloomsday — June 16 — the day when all the action in James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. For years — since the early 1990s — I’ve celebrated it by giving a lunch in my college at which guests have Gorgonzola sandwiches and drink Burgundy (same as Leopold Bloom did in Davey Byrne’s pub in the novel) and read from the great book. I can’t hold the lunch this year because of coincidental diary conflicts, but the lovely Bronac Ferran, a regular attendee, sent me (as a consolation prize) this photograph she’d taken recently while on a trip to Zurich — the city where Joyce died and is buried together with Nóra, his wife, and Giorgio, their son.

Murray Gell-Mann

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Nice obit of the great (but prickly) physicist in the New York Times. Excerpt:

Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.

In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.

Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

With Dr. Gell-Mann at the forefront, physics took on a Joycean feel. Before long there were up quarks and down quarks, strange quarks and charm quarks, top quarks and bottom quarks, all stuck together with particles called gluons. The funny nomenclature was as much a Gell-Mann inspiration as the mathematics.

Muster Mark must’ve been delighted.

The truth about Ansel Adams

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There’s an interesting interview of the photographer Stephen Shore by another photographer, Alec Soth, in today’s Financial Times. It contains an interesting story about Shore’s first encounter with Ansel Adams:

One of my closest friends at the time was a curator named Weston Naef, and he had a loft in SoHo. He invited me to dinner one night with Ansel Adams. This is in maybe the mid-1970s. Ansel had been, in fact, very helpful to me without my knowing it. Uncommon Places [Shore’s first book] came about because I had a show in ’76 at MoMa and he saw it and came back with his editor at New York Graphic Society, named Tim Hill, and suggested they do a book. That’s how Uncommon Places happened.

Ansel had been drinking before I got there, and while I was there he had six glasses of straight vodka — a prodigious amount of vodka — and at one point he said, “I had a creative hot streak in the ’40s, and since then I’ve been pot-boiling.” And I thought, when I’m 85 that’s not how I want to look back at my life.

Later in the conversation he asks Adams how he managed to do as much work as he had in the 1940s when he had five children. The reply: “I got separated”. I’m reminded of Cyril Connolly’s listing of “the pram in the hall” as one of his Enemies of Promise.

So there is a God, after all

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One of the things that cheered me up no end this weekend was the way Uber’s IPO flopped — at least in comparison with the $120B fantasies of the punters who had invested in it on the assumption that it would be the winner-that-took-all in the market for mobility. The assumption of the company was that it wold be valued at $100B at the IPO, but in fact it wound up at $70B. Which means that a significant number of investors are probably left owning shares that are worth less than they paid for them in more recent funding rounds. Since the Saudi royals are among those investors, it couldn’t have happened to nastier people.