I read Anthony Everitt’s Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome on Sunday. It’s a pretty conventional biography of Hadrian. Overall, I’d say it’s about the same quality as his work on Augustus (Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor). But, that’ s not saying much I’m afraid. In the end, there’s no substitute for Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars.

Recently, I’ve been reading An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (Silver Anniversary Edition). It’s a fascinating book, with insights on almost every page. Here’s the author’s thoughts on the problems of interpreting observations:

Whenever we observe a state that is both conspicuous and improbable, we are faced with a quandary. Do we believe our observation or do we invoke some special hypothesis?
…
Conservatism is introduced into the scientific investigation by the very assumption that observations must be consistent with present theories. An observation is more likely to be discarded as “erroneous” if it is out of consonance with theory. … The complete substitution of theory for observation is, of course, not scientific. Even worse is going through the motions of observing, but discarding as “spurious” every observation that does not fit theory.
…
This, then, is the problem. Raw, detailed observation of the world is just too rich a diet for science. No two situations are exactly alike unless we make them so. Every license plate we see is a miracle
…
“A statue is a situation which can be recognized if it occurs again.” But no state will ever occur again if we don’t lump many states into one “state.” Thus, in order to learn at all, we must forego some potential discrimination of states, some possibility of learning everything.
…
Science does not, and cannot, deal with miracles. Science deals only with repetitive events. Each science has to have characteristic ways of lumping the states of the systems it observes, in order to generate repetition. How does it lump? Not in arbitrary ways, but in ways determined by its past experience — ways that “work” for that science. Gradually, as the science matures, the “brain” is traded for the “eye,” until it becomes almost impossible to break a scientific paradigm (a traditional way of lumping) with mere empirical observations.

Now, if the issues outlined in the above quote are a problem for the hard sciences, they are a disaster in fuzzier disciplines like history, economics, and politics. They also have implications for business. Most of the time, you will find, that there is no widespread agreement among your co-workers on the state you are facing. And, if you all do agree, it’s probably just that your viewpoints are not really independent, not that you are all correct.

Well, the FTC has just laid down a new policy requiring bloggers to reveal any payment (or free stuff) they receive to blog about any subject. For details, check out this post from Larry. So, here’s my disclosure. I’m ashamed to have to admit that I am so lacking in influence that nobody has ever given me anything, or paid me, to endorse anything. Too bad I’m not Mager.

Today was an extremely irritating day. Here’s a short list of all the things that irritated me today:

• Pervasive smell of popcorn at work. I hate the smell of popcorn, and when somebody makes it at work it’s impossible to avoid. Plus, burning popcorn is the number one cause of false fire alarms at work. Popcorn should be banned!
• Guy in men’s room talking on his phone at urinal throughout his entire “visit.” I have no idea what the guy on the other end of the call thought was going on. To cap it off, cell phone guy didn’t wash his hands on the way out. And, he needed to wash them. The phone was tucked under his shoulder; not held in hand.
• Women on train burbling into her cell phone and giving some poor victim an extended review of the wine tasting she went to last night. Ever since I worked in a wine store in college, I have hated having to listen to idiots go on about “blackberry undertones” and “woody elements.”
• Insane Russian woman in next seat who used the excuse of asking if the train stopped at Palo Alto to launch into a 45 minute monologue on the unfairness of asking her to take an AIDs test before she came to America.
• Old guy sitting next to me who was not only a serial cougher who never covered his mouth, but was also apparently a student of the Larry Craig wide stance school of sitting.
• Lastly, myself, for being too stupid to think of changing out of my work shoes prior to cleaning up fifty pounds of rotting apples from my garden.
• In addition, an honorable mention goes to Mager for tweeting about how pleasant his train ride was during my train ride from hell.

In any event, tomorrow can only get better.

If you want to understand why the stimulus will fail, just read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph entitled Bond Market Calls Fed’s Bluff As World Falls Apart. As Ambrose points out:

The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds – the world’s benchmark cost of capital – has jumped from 2pc to 3pc since Christmas despite efforts to talk the rate down.

The Fed has stepped into the breach, up to a point. It has bought $350bn of commercial paper, and begun to buy $600bn of mortgage bonds. That helps. But still it recoils from buying Treasuries, perhaps fearing that any move to “monetise” Washington’s deficit starts a slippery slope towards an Argentine fate. Or perhaps Bernanke doesn’t believe his own assurances that the Fed can extract itself easily from emergency policies when the cycle turns.

Now, the stimulus is going to add another $800 billion to the borrowings, and who knows how much Geithner’s “Bad Bank” plan will add in addition. Borrowing of that much money is bound to increase interest rates even more. And that increase will directly counter a stimulus bill that is already badly constructed to produce immediate benefits.

I made an English curry with the leftover roast beef from Christmas the other day. It’s important to stress the English part of this recipe: it’s not Indian. As the Wikipedia points out:

Curry powder is a mixture of spices of widely varying composition developed by the British during their colonial rule of India.

The word “Karhee” or “Kadhi” from which “curry” is derived, comes from Southern India and refers to a sauce of any kind. “Curry powder” was developed by the British, who wished to take the taste of Indian food home, without having to utilize fresh spices. As a result “curry powder” in the Western world has a fairly standardized taste, but there are literally millions of curry flavors in India.

My mother used to make this all the time with leftover meat when I was a child, so I thought I would do the same. Here’s the recipe:

Chop up one large onion, and two large apples (peeled and cored). Saute them in a pot in oil with a lot of Madras curry powder. Add a lot of chopped up leftover roast beef, lamb or chicken, and continue to saute until the onions are well done. Add a bunch of water and simmer for 20 minutes, or until you have a thick soup.

Serve over rice with chopped bananas, raisins, peanuts, shredded coconut, and Major Grey’s Chutney on the side.

It will get hotter over time, so if it is spicy when you first make it, it will be spicier tomorrow.

I love sushi, but it has been clear for a long time now that bluefin tuna are being hunted to extinction. The final blow to the tuna seems to have been struck at the recent meetings that have set the tuna fishing quota at an unsustainable level. See Bluefin tuna – magnificent fish too valuable to save for the details.

Which leaves me wondering what I should do? In the past, I’ve tried to assuage my conscience by telling myself that my abstaining from tuna sushi will not make a difference, and that’s certainly correct: the vast majority of tuna is flash frozen and sent to Japan. At this point, though, I think I have passed the point of rationalization. Every time anyone eats blue-fin tuna, they are eating an endangered species. And, I don’t think I can do that anymore.

Question: What does this sign really say?

Answer: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please don’t send any work to be translated” – Read More.

Green Manalishi is my favorite Judas Priest song. It’s actually a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song that they originally recorded on Hell Bent For Leather. Here’s a video of the song from the 1986 tour which I saw in the Worcester Centrum. I still have the shirt.

I used to have a blog on Wordpress.com called Slantwise. I finally moved all the posts from there over to this blog. Here’s my favorite post from Slantwise: On The Web, You Can’t Escape Your Past.