On the steps down from Monteverde Vecchio to the Viale Trastevere, an enterprising chemist has created an outdoor billboard. "The best stuff in Rome," it says. I cannot vouch for that, nor for the accuracy of the formulae.
I've always hated a certain word-processing package, because it is is just too complicated and powerful for most people. Would you let a kid play with an automatic assault weapon? 1 And yet people daily do untold harm by their uninformed use of this particular tool. That's just one example though. There are lots of others, in software and in real things, although many of the overcomplicated real things have software at their heart, I suspect.
On the steps down from Monteverde Vecchio to the Viale Trastevere, an enterprising chemist has created an outdoor billboard. "The best stuff in Rome," it says. I cannot vouch for that, nor for the accuracy of the formulae.
As I come up on the first anniversary of my podcast, I look back in conflict. Sure, I made a podcast almost every two weeks, I learned a lot and other people seemed to enjoy them. But so few other people. Despite what some gurus advise, that you should make stuff purely for your own satisfaction, it is also rewarding to have some external validation. I feel I'm not getting enough of that. So in addition to making the podcast, I have to make more people aware of it, and that's tied up in a discussion I've been having with a crowd of clever people over on ADN.
Ask anyone with a passing interest in the history of Italian food about the origins of spaghetti alla carbonara and you'll likely get one of two answers. Coal miners (more properly, charcoal burners) or American GIs adding bacon and eggs to pasta in 1944. The very erudite might cite a mention for pasta with egg and cheese in an 1839 book by Ippolito Cavalcanti.1 Heck, if you had asked me before breakfast this morning, I would probably have cited the charcoal burners. I now know better, thanks to a couple of fascinating pieces by Jeremy Parzen.
I started writing this back in November 2013, and put it aside until I had read the Skidelskys' book. I haven't finished yet, but ...
How strange to hear J.M. Keynes himself on the radio, telling us in his clipped tones how in 100 years time we would be eight times richer than we were then, how we would work a 15-hour week, how "Human beings would be more like the 'lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin'." A little extract of Keynes talking about his essay Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, ended Laurie Taylor's interview with Robert Skidelsky on Thinking Allowed.
