William Dalrymple
This Little World by Nandini Das contains a wonderful gallery of precisely drawn yet constantly surprising Tudor and Stuart portraits, like an album of perfect Hilliard miniatures that dazzle us with their cosmopolitan attitudes and globalised lives. Taking us from Italian renaissance scholars in Oxford to English Jesuits in Goa via a Kentish samurai in 17th-century Edo, this is a perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic and provincial terms. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones achieves a remarkable feat of urban resurrection as he brings Babylon to life and shows us how far Mesopotamia’s greatest metropolis rose above its caricature as the City of Sin and home of the Tower of Babel. Alexander rides again into battle in Alexander: God, King Man, a masterpiece by one of our most brilliant classicists. Edmund Richardson presents his deep research in a rich cornucopia of ancient languages with visual and evocative prose and a talent for gripping narrative. Impossibly colourful and drawing on some extraordinary new sources, this is biography of rare resonance.
1/n
A physical book is a real object, anchored. If you read a particular edition, you remember not only the contents but the object itself: its cover, typography, smell, even where a passage sat on the page.
Books organize themselves in memory by place --the ancient method of loci.
Digital text does not exist.
My IQ piece:
"To do well in life one needs to think independently. And one has to be a lunatic (or a psychologist) to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking."
Edgar Morin (born Nahum) is a smart fellow.
My new library does not have tall bookshelves, intentionally so all books are in easy reach.
Non #Lindy books are ditched except those that can be useful are in a hallway not in the main rooms.
[Same material as Umberto Eco's but shorter]
Nope... Running Will Not Wreck Your Knees
Evolution and Data...
We did not evolve to sit in chairs. We evolved to run... for miles, in the heat, until our prey collapsed. The human body is a distance-running machine, shaped over two million years of natural selection. And most of what people believe about running and joint health is wrong. A thread.
Economics takes a 4+ dimensional problem, models it for convenience as 3D (always missing the consequential dimensions), then analyses it as 2D while confusing the gullible public who interprets it as simple 1D.
Some fields work in theory but not in practice. Some fields work in practice but not theory.
The uniqueness of economics is that it works in neither theory nor practice.
AUTODIDACTS
In the forthcoming "Anti Zionism: A Jewish History" by Benjamin Moser discusses Maxime Rodinson as "the most learned man in France".
Rodinson left school at age 13. He was a complete autodidact. The Fr system then allowed one to just take (hard) exams w/o formal education.
Rodinson managed to teach Arabic at Al Makased, a Sunni religious school, in Lebanon.
In the infamous coin toss, the individual loses while the collective gains.
Forget that this is often illustrated with dollars.
The point is: the act is self-destructive for the individual, yet beneficial for the collective.
It's a nucleation problem: one alone cannot do it, but a few individuals sticking together can access the collective good.
#ErgodicityEconomics
I am preparing for lots of critical/negative comments, but I do think that Bachem from Switzerland at 28x 2026 P/E could be an interesting investment for the "Golden Age of Peptides".
Deep dive here (and on the stack):
https://t.co/sXCJHXHw2a
STANLEY DRUCKENMILLER: “I JUST DON’T CARE WHAT I PAID FOR A STOCK. IT’S ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT.”
“If the reason I bought a stock is no longer the case, I don’t care if I bought it at 60 and it’s 50. I have no emotion whatsoever.”
“There’s resistance at certain prices because a bunch of people bought at 60, it went down, and they’ve been waiting 3 or 4 years for it to get back. Meanwhile they could’ve been in something else going up the whole time.”
His friends and fellow investors say he’s “entirely unemotional.” His response: “Yes. I’m told that’s true.”
Is that the key to his success?
“I think it’s a big part of it. Being open-minded and having humility. The only reason you can change your mind is if you’re not arrogant about a position.”