- “There is something touchingly human in the dispersal of these games—in the vision it evokes of travelers packing for long, hard journeys and remembering to take with them something to kill time, something to satisfy their impulse to play. Anthropologists often regard these old games as novelties, Crist told me, but they can narrate plenty about their era. “Games function socially as a way for people to interact with one another,” he said. “People will play games when they vaguely know each other, to get to know one another.”
Samanth Subramanian on the oldest board game known to us – dates back to around four thousand years ago. Games were, and are, a way to connect socially with people.
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.. - “But even with increasingly powerful computers and more efficient algorithms thrown at the problem, some whole numbers have stubbornly refused to yield any winning tickets. And 33 was an especially stubborn case: Until Booker found his solution, it was one of only two integers left below 100 (excluding the ones for which solutions definitely don’t exist) that still couldn’t be expressed as a sum of three cubes. With 33 out of the way, the only one left is 42.”
The rest of the article, fascinating in its own rights, contains many more excerpt-able quotes. But if you are a fan, as I am, it had to be an excerpt that ended with that sentence!
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.. - “Nine years after giving grants for youth in Uganda to start businesses, those who didn’t receive grants had caught up on income! Nevertheless, “grants had lasting impacts on assets, skilled work, and possibly child health, but had little effect on mortality, fertility, health or education.”
Honestly, there’s no particular reason why I chose to go with this quote in particular. David Evans has done yeoman service in putting together extremely brief summaries of I don’t know how many papers presented at the annual Center for the Study of African Economics (CSAE) conference.
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.. - “Take the example of San Francisco; with nicer streets, even more people might want to move there. That would push up rents by an amount roughly equal to the value created — putting the gains from the higher quality of life into the pockets of landowners. In a normal market economy, those higher rents would then induce more construction and, eventually, a corresponding decline in rents. But San Francisco is a “not in my backyard” locale where the amount of new construction just isn’t that high, for legal and regulatory reasons. Again, as both Ricardo and George realized, the incidence of the benefit falls upon the very scarce factor, namely land.”
What happens when you apply the Ricardian theory of rent to San Francisco? Tyler Cowen provides the answer. Also think about where else, besides land, this argument might apply. Cough *education* cough.
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.. - “As Ansón puts it: “In principle, because of how it started, a tapa is something that you eat with one hand, a cocktail stick, a fork, or a spoon, allowing you to hold a drink in the other. This style of eating creates a kind of harmony between solid and liquid.”
This will, if you are as big a fan of food as I am, take up a lot of your time – but also, it will be worth it. Also, if you are anything like me, it will make you want to go to Spain! A lovely, interactive website about Spanish gastronomy.
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