a real estate boom

From Chapter 57 of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi:

Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks.

I the middle of a housing bubble, it must be a dreadful feeling to know that all your mortgageaholic neighbours are getting richer by the minute, while you are being held back by your own boorish sense of prudence.

no more books from overseas

At least until the Dollar comes back from its trip into the stratosphere.

pisoteando dioses

Ayer fuimos a la exposición Un Día en Mongolia que se puede ver en el Kiosco Alfonso. La barroca y exuberante imaginería del arte religioso me llamó la atención. Algunas pinturas mostraban una gigantesca criatura de piel negra y ojos furiosos enarbolando una espada en llamas. Al parecer se trataba de un ser legendario defensor de las enseñanzas budistas. Evidenciando una cierta falta de ecumenismo, la criatura pisoteaba los cuerpos postrados de dioses hindúes, los cuales parecían ostensible y comprensiblemente incómodos. Uno de los dioses pisoteados era Ganesha (lo reconocí por la trompa, además hay una figura suya en el restaurante indio que hay cerca de la estación de trenes).

También había expuestos vestimentas e instrumentos tradicionales del chamán, lo que me recuerda que tengo que leer algún día el libro de Mircea Eliade sobre el tema. Un chamán famoso fue Teb-Tengri, que subía y bajaba del cielo en un caballo blanco y disputó a Gengis Khan el control de la horda mongola, pagando el desafío con su vida.

Otra cosa que me llamó la atención fue una especie de cerrojo que usaba como llaves unas láminas metálicas rectangulares de diseño abstracto. Tenían un aspecto incongruentemente moderno, ¡casi parecían tarjetas perforadas! Me gustaría tener un cerrojo parecido.

Por cierto, la biblioteca González Garcés tiene un ejemplar de La Historia Secreta de los Mongoles (editorial Miraguano) con extenso aparato crítico y abundantes anotaciones. Recomendado a los que quieran profundizar en el tema.

they're still there, somewhere

In his book Throwim' Way Leg, naturalist Tim Flannery mentions the resistance of New Guineans to the idea that species may go extinct under the pressure of excessive hunting. When faced with the fact that a certain animal is no more to be found in a certain zone, they simply point in the general direction of a nearby village and say "there are still plenty of them over there" (of course, inhabitants of that village would say the same, pointing in the reverse direction). Alternatively, they explain the absence by saying that the animal only shows itself to very virtuous hunters, who have undertaken exacting and complicated purification ceremonies.

This refusal to consider the possibility of extinction reminds me of Thomas Jefferson. In his Notes on the State of Virginia [1781], he wrote:

The bones of the Mammoth which have been found in America, are as large as those found in the old world. It may be asked, why I insert the Mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? Such is the oeconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. To add to this, the traditionary testimony of the Indians, that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America, would be adding the light of a taper to that of the meridian sun. Those parts still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones.

forty-three interpreters

From Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony:

This light tissue, which crackles under the fingers with the noise of sparks, is the famous yellow linen brought by the merchants from Bactriana. They required no less than forty-three interpreters during their voyage.

"forty-three interpreters". What a wonderful way of conveying distance, spatial as well as cultural!

With modern advances in transportation, the hold products brought from far-away places had on our imagination has waned. What has succeeded it? The thrill of the early adopter. Farness in space substituted by closeness in time as a source of fascination.

Vaguely related:

• The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics.
• This podcast on EconTalk about the book A Splendid Exchange.

Maybe This Explains the Financial Crisis

There is a secret society of seven men that controls the finances of the world. This is known to everyone but the details are not known. There are some who believe that it would be better if one of those seven men were a financier.

—R. A. Lafferty: About a secret crocodile.

we have a certain air

A girl in a pub once said the following to a co-worker of mine:

"I bet I can figure out what are you studying without you telling me. Let me see, let me see... it's Computer Science, isn't it?"

She was right.

Years ago, I was in a supermarket queue waiting my turn to buy fish when, completely out of the blue, an elderly lady addressed me so:

"You are an engineer, aren't you?"

Yeah, I was. But I wasn't doing any particularly engineer-y thing at the moment; I was just looking at fish.

These diviners are sometimes capable of even subtler distinctions, truly astonishing feats of discernment. At a recent company dinner, a guest claimed to be able to sort out the members of the R&D department from among the members of the Engineering department, without any previous knowledge and just by looking at them.

Apparently, she was right most of the time.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

“They wanted to keep their capital base as stable as possible so that the limits they imposed on their trading desks and portfolio managers would be stable.”

One way they did this, Mr. Berman said, was to make sure the computer models looked at several years of trading history instead of just the last few months. The most important models calculate a measure known as Value at Risk — the amount of money you might lose in the worst plausible situation. They try to figure out what that worst case is by looking at how volatile markets have been in the past.

But since the markets were placid for several years (as mortgage bankers busily lent money to anyone with a pulse), the computers were slow to say that risk had increased as defaults started to rise.

It was like a weather forecaster in Houston last weekend talking about the onset of Hurricane Ike by giving the average wind speed for the previous month.

(Saul Hansell at the New York Times' Bits Blog: How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers)

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" [...] I am not able rightly to comprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

(Charles Babbage, quoted in the Wikipedia page for Garbage In, Garbage Out. The original source of the quote is Babbage's Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which can be found at Google Books. Note also that the second reference mentions the survey essay Computer Applications in Particular Industries: Securities [1981].)

inscrutability a plus

The current Connatic is Oman Ursht, sixteenth in the Idite succession: a man of ordinary and undistinguished appearance. In portraits and on public occasions he wears a severe black uniform with a black casque, in order to project an image of inflexible authority, and this is how he is known to the folk of Alastor Cluster. In private Oman Ursht is a calm and reasonable man, who tends to under- rather than over-administrate. He ponders all aspects of his conduct, knowing well that his slightest act a gesture, a word, a symbolic nuance might start off an avalanche of unpredictable consequences: hence his effort to create the image of a man rigid, terse and unemotional.

—Jack Vance: Trullion.

Because of the powerful leverage of the Federal Reserve System, public statements by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board are scrutinized by bankers and investors for clues as to whether "the Fed" is likely to tighten the money supply or ease up. An unguarded statement by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, or a statement that is misnconstrued by financiers, can set off a panic in Wall Street that causes stock prices to plummet. [...] Given such drastic repercussions, which can affect financial markets around the world, Federal Reserve Board chairmen over the years have learned to speak in highly guarded and Delphic terms that often leave listeners puzzled as to what they really mean.

—Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell.

Medieval Spain

• James F. Powers: A society organized for war. The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000-1284.
• Bernard F. Reilly: The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109-1126 .

Both of these books are mentioned in José Luis Villacañas Berlanga's La Formación de los Reinos Hispánicos.

economic podcasts

Here. They have helped me understand a little better the subprime debacle. These ones look good too.

The following book from the Internet Archive also looks interesting:

• Money, Banking And Credit In Mediaeval Bruges [1948]

Edit. And the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.