Category Archives: Life

Vienna Skyline

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A thought on my month in Vienna (in 1987).

A very nice clean safe city full of nice people. However there are two extremely ugly buildings in Vienna. I tried to find a photo googling Vienna skyline but they seem to have been carefully kept off the web. They are huge rectangular towers with no windows. They made me think of miniluv in Oceania circa 1984.

Finally a nice Viennese person explained to me that they were anti aircraft towers from WWII and that, since the weakest material in them was concrete and the rest was steel no one had any idea how to knock them down without smashing all the nice little Viennese buildings near them.

This is a minor problem in city planning. I had an Idea. The towers have plain flat surfaces which are boring. How about painting them white and projecting something on them ? Now this would be very public and unavoidable (as the plain concrete is at the moment). That means that films or something would be innappropriate.

I would advocate taking extremely high quality photos of great works of art and projecting them. Also photos of beautiful Austrian nature would be nice.

The idea is that too much municipal eye time would be monopolised by a mural,l so a changing non controversial photo display would be about right.

The Value of Learning a Second Language

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What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can read things in the original.

When I was in high school adults tried to convince me to try to learn a second language by claiming that it broadens the mind. They failed. Since then I have, more or less, learned Italian. What have I gained ?

My impression is that my mind reminds just about as narrow as it was before.

I asked Elisabetta Addis (the woman to whom I am married) what she gained from learning English. She said it was very useful, because by learning a second living language she learned that there is more than one way to structure concepts, that is that the structure of Italian is not the structure of truth, but is rather just one of many equally valid structures developed for historical reasons. I confessed that I have had the impression that Aristotle was not always totally clear on the distinction between his immense contributions to understanding Greek and to understanding thought and logic and would have confidently claimed that true though was only possible in Greek. I was as usual speaking from ignorance.

Trying to understand my different impression, she suggested that math is, for this purpose, like a second language (she learned English and math beyond a fairly elementary level simultaneously and imagine how fun that was).

I said that I suspect that part of the reason is that no one could possible mistake the structure of English for the structure of truth. Partly, of course, English spelling is totally arbitrary and makes no sense. Also English is not logical because it is part German and part French. For example to find if a claim is true one verifies it. Or steer meat is beef and sheep meat is mutton. That is, since English is a weird hybrid, English is its own second language.

If so, this is important, since the only people who have a choice about learning a second language or not are native English speakers.

My unassisted thoughts on the topic below the fold.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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Paul Samuelson is very smart but not always polite. When praising John Kenneth Galbraith he wrote something like “it would be wonderful to write his obituary” which only meant that it was enjoyable to write a encominium on Galbraith and any other more literal interpretation would be incorrect, funny and amusing to Prof Galbraith. Among Prof. Samuelson’s words of praise were, more or less, the following “he understood that economics is to important to leave up to the economists” Which is my effort to recall a translation of Clemenceau.

So the question is: “If you could write an encominium on a famous person in the mass circulation comments to a post in “A Fistful of Euros” who would you praise?”

The question is not “Does Robert Waldmann count how many comments each post gets and treat the number as a measure of his success ?” However, if anyone would like to post the comments “yes”,”that’s obviious”, “what a twit” or “that’s really the most pathetic form of self gratification I have ever heard of,” I will count them all the same.

So who would I like to praise ? Too keep the list under control I praise only people who died after I was born

My Mom should be famous
My Dad is almost famous
George Orwell
Vaclaw Havel
Nelson Mandela
Martin Luther King Jr
Jorge Luis Borges
Alan Turing ?
Larry Summers needs some praise right now and I won’t lie or anything but he was very patient with me.
Brad DeLong
Andrei Shleifer
Michael Kinsley
Graham Walker has tenure at MIT so he is sortof famous
Reinhart Selton is the most humble noble laureate that I have every met and he actually takes teaching undergraduates seriously.
Omigod I forgot to mention what an absolutely wonderful guy Salvatore Luria is.
I’m an economist so I have to talk about Kenneth Arrow even though I wish I could be a bit original.
Bernard Kouchner really deserves a better fate
John McCain should not be electe president of the USA even if he is an admirable person.
Happy is the nation that needs no heroes. Less happy is the nation full of people like me who didn’t appreciate Jimmy Carter
Why the hell was Andrew Young such a bad “permanent” representative at the UN ?
Paul Kafka is the nicest winner of the LA Times best first novel prize that I know
Many admirable and famous people who I know who are not going to get totally pissed at me for not mentioning them.

Click if you have nothing better to do than to read the actual praise.
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Hepatitis Potato

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I just found out about the potato hepatitis B vaccine in a odd way. Solid info from the BBC “An edible vaccine against the deadly liver disease hepatitis B may have been developed by scientists in the US.

Chunks of genetically modified potato may be enough to give immunity without the need for an injection, they hope. ” However “‘
They have not cracked it yet, but it is very exciting’
Professor Graham Foster, consultant hepatologist at the Queen Mary University of London”

I found out about this at unfogged between a story about a very unfortunate cat and a photoshoped image of Donald Yodafeld. Ah the internet.

I happen to be a fanatical supporter of genetically modified foods and have been for decades (that is since they were an idea not a meal). I consider civil disobedience whenever I drive the two kilometers to Grottaferata (comune anti-transgenico).

The potato does seem a bit hyped (as gently noted by Foster) but vaccine producing plants are likely to be seriously useful.

I would also mention IgA a class of antibodies which is absorbed when eaten. Milk contains IgA which is absorbed by infants. This is one of the important reasons that breast feeding is better than pure bottle feeding even in developed countries with safe drinking water and where people can afford formula.

It seems to me that modifying plants to produce human IgA would have its advantages, since, as mentioned above, IgA is absorbed before it is digested.
Also a vaccine with a hybrid IgA-antigen hybrid protein might work better than simple antigen.

The result of Dr Yasmin Thanavala and colleagues does remind us that genetically modified foods can, in theory, be allergenic even if the unmodified plants are not. It is good to be allergic to hepatitis B, but the principal has been proven (again).

By the way, anyone know whatever happened to golden rice ? I don’t think anyone is actually eating any.

Correction: I was totally wrong when I wrote “I would also mention IgA a class of antibodies which is absorbed when eaten. Milk contains IgA which is absorbed by infants.” Milk does contain IgA but it is not absorbed. The clas of antibodies which is absorbed is IgG not IgA. My father explained this to me. Also, although baby rats definitely absorb IgG, even he is not sure baby people do (different mammels defnitely differ in which proteins they digest and which they absorb). Thus my idea might just be a good way to vaccinate rats.

Sorry

the amateur anthropologist

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20 years ago I had an Idea. Maybe someone who knows something about the field can tell me what is wrong with it in 20 seconds (including maybe someone else had the idea 40 years ago).

This thought was stimulated by reading Structural Anthropology a collection of essays by Claude Levi-Strauss. There are two questions. One is why are some cultures monogynous and others polygynous ? The other is why do the Bororo divide their tiny villages into 3 endogamous clans ?

OK first question. Why in some cultures men can marry more than one woman and in others only one ? One possbile explanation is polygyny occurs when the gender ratio is many women for each man. This can happen if lots of men get killed by other men. So women share husbands or go single wasting their uteruses (the Moll Flanders problem described by Daniel Defoe some time ago).

Could be the explanation, but I would like to talk about another. Levi Strauss was very interested in a very simple mathematical model which pointed out that hunter gatherers typically live in tiny groups (have too to avoid killing off all the game within walking distance). Someone else (really some two else) calculated that these groups were about as small as could be sustained given risk that a generation would be all male or all female and thus the last (he didn’t explain this model very clearly and I didn’t look it up). OK see how much worse this problem is if monogynous. If people live in small groups and are mostly endogamous (must have some flow with other villages/bands to avoide inbreeding but I assume this is pretty low). If each man is allowed to get only one woman pregnant, the number of woman who reproduce each generation is the lesser of the number of woman and the number of men. If each man is allowed to get as many women pregnant as are available then the number of women who reproduce each generation is the number of women. Polygyny might be required in people who live in small mostly endogamous villages to deal with random fluctuations in the sex ratio.
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Sheffield a la mar

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I have to confess to having had a fairly sucky 2004. Most of the causes are personal, and frankly not very interesting. But, as an example, my plan to spend the holiday season in Tunisia was abruptly cancelled because my wife got chicken pox. So, needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to 2005.

The wife got over her pox just a few days before Christmas, leaving us scrambling to find a vacation that both fit our respective work calendars, didn’t cost too much, and wasn’t booked solid. Consequently, I found myself at Zaventem airport at four in the morning on Christmas day fighting a miserable crowd so I could spend a week at Benidorm, Valencia, Spain.

I can’t claim I wasn’t warned. I did know that Benidorm – and the rest of the Costa Blanca – is something of a joke in the Dutch speaking part of Europe. After a week there, I still haven’t been in Spain. As far as I can tell, thanks to daily discount charter service between Sheffield and Alicante, the Costa Blanca is simply a warm, low-tax part of Yorkshire.
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Cheekshake

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Today, la petite Anglaise, one of the weblogs I found out about because it was nominated as best expat blog for the 1st afoe European blog awards, deals with the complexities of interpersonal courtesy in France, partcularly la bise.

La bise is second nature to the French. For a foreigner like myself it is a minefield. First of all, there is the matter of how many kisses you are supposed to bestow. In Paris the norm seems to be two. In certain Parisian suburbs however you are expected to give four (which must be time consuming when you have to take your leave of a party of ten people). In some regions three is the customary number. Many a time I have proffered my cheeks twice, only to find that I was expected to go two full rounds.

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Rock & Roll Rabbis

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Strolling back home from the Christmas Market last night, we noticed bouncy pop music and an enthusiastic crowd in front of the Old Opera House. As we came closer, we could see the musicians, jamming on electric guitar and synthesiser. As rockers, they were (you will pardon the expression, given what follows) a little unorthodox. Oh, the beards would have gone down well back in the hippy days, and the black clothes were pure goth. But those snappy fedoras?
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Wideface.

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… or maybe ‘black paint’? Acouple of days ago, my sister told me she had a topic I could write about on afoe. It had occured to her that all continental names, except Europe, start with an ‘a’, and she wondered why that might be the case. A quick check at wikipedia revealed that her statement is only correct when using a (although perhaps still the most common?) five-continents classification system and when referring to ‘Oceania’ as ‘Australia’. Moreover, there are a number of naming schemes for continents, which, while always featuring a majority of continent-names starting with an ‘A’, also consist of continents beginning with other letters – eg North, and South A-merica.

Despite the wikipedia-induced realization that any continental naming-scheme conspiracy theory was stillborn, I became interested in the etymology of continents, Europe in particular, only remembering that ‘Europa’ was a Phoenician princess Zeus kidnapped by transforming himself into a bull. But it took only a modest amount of further googling to find out that the left-leaning German newspaper taz had also, quite recently, been interested in the subject.
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45% of Britons unaware of the Holocaust?

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In light of the British obsession with all things related to the second world war and, especially, Nazism – the British history curriculum focusing on the NS period of German history has repeatedly been named a prime cause for “Kraut bashing” in the British tabloids – today’s Independent features an interesting article about an opinion poll conducted by the BBC which states that -

[s]ix out of ten people under the age of 35 have never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp that was the scene of the biggest mass murder ever recorded[, and] 45 per cent of British adults did not recognise a name that others might have assumed was synonymous with evil.

Interesting, indeed.