These were my favorite Amazon US buys of 2023 (referral links). Not exactly a christmas list per se but some stuff can be gift. El Cheapo walkie talkies for kids. In our case signal was lost approximately 250 m away. Our kids loved them (and will love them again once we finally get to that moving box). AA Batteries. Available in fun colors.

Advice I give for people on the JMC. Try to keep good relations with departments that are close (whatever that means in your case) to your parents. Fifteen years ago, I was a effing paratrooper. You could drop me over Karachi at 4am and I could be ready to teach three sections of micro at 7.30 in Punjabi, Pasto or Sindhi. But now I have three school age kids and parents that can't really do fourteen hour flights ...

We just submitted our paper on the rise of Serfdom in Russia (joint work with @Natkhov), and we're very proud of the result. I am going to start here a long thread explaining the paper (I will add little by little as I have time) What we're investigating is the surprising reversal in the dominant land tenure systems in Western and Eastern Europe. In the West, serfdom had largely ended in the 14th and 15th century. Meanwhile in what would become Russia, most land had long been cultivated by free labor.

Ok so I am going to start the Neolithic explainer thread, and then at the end I will give some news. So this is the popular conception of hunter gatherers. Running around in loincloths hunting wooly Mammooths. Fine, though a lot of hunting was actually small game trapping, and actually gathering of plants was a bigger source of calories (though proteins came mostly from hunts).

What are some nonfiction books that explore are not specifically "The Postwar History of Country X", but explore a particular topic through time, and through it you also get an understanding of what it was like to live in country X through that period? Kind of nonfiction Best of Youth for country X, so to speak? Particularly interested in developing countries. I would like to have a few books to assign to students that want to write an extended book report instead of taking the final for my development class.

This is a fun anecdote. The face of the surgeon when the President told him he was shot and only suffered some broken teath and a tear to his tongue.

I think a lot depends if it's an all pay auction, or you actually get to keep what you make.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1553422246793936910

Say you're a house builder. There's a competition where everybody builds a house, and the best one gets $100k prize, should you enter?

One persistent issue in academia is that to even approach the doorstep of an academic career, one must generally be willing and able to move cities multiple times at rather unpredictable times, delay parenting to the mid thirties or beyond, and/or uproot a spouse and kids x times This effectively rules out everybody who needs to support family members, or needs their support, fir either physical or emotional reasons, and will also negatively select against other, less extreme forms of local attachment.

Tomorrow at 9PM LA time, I will be presenting an updated version of my Neolithic paper at the Quantitative History Webinar Series at Hong Kong university. You can register here: asiaglobalinstitute.hku.hk/eventdetail/qu… The four main questions I will try to answer:
1. Why did seven places invent agriculture around the same time?
2. Why wasn't it invented in the previous tens of thousands of years prior?
3. What did the places that invented have in common?
4. Why were farmers shorter than H-Gs?

Costco just put out one of the best mass market olive oils ever, made from DNA-tracked Tuscan olives at $13/L Meanwhile Italian bottlers are selling Spanish and Tunisian oil counting on consumers thinking it's Italian. Let's face it, in this case Costco out-italianed the Italians. They didn't need to do this. No offence, but it's rje US. They could have put far less care into this and they stil would have sold loads.

Two things can simultaneously be true. Most carbonaras that are made would improve with the addition of cream. And yet its addition is always a mistake. To pull off correctly, the carbonara requires achieving a number of rather difficult goals. A creamy sauce requires a the egg to achieve a temperature above 60 C but below 80 C. The pecorino will have its own temperature ranges depending on how aged it is. You need a specific...

I did a couple of mock interviews for people applying to RA/Economicky type stuff, and just a couple of observations: 1. If you find a list of questions floating around, or compile it from your own interview, don't just read it and go "oh yeah I know this one", even if you do know it. Record yourself answering out loud. Watch it. Say it again two more times. Then record yourself answering again.

Fun aside, we are indeed at a pretty important turning point, in terms of the space race. In a few years we will start seeing pictures we've never seen before, like rows of orbital launch vehicles lined up for assembly or awaiting a launch window. Ten years. I am agnostic as to whether this will pay off in the grander scheme of things, but a number of people with mind boggling resources have decided they want to build a bunch of rockets, so whatever else may happen, we're going to be seeing bunches of rockets.

There's a famous story that Feynman tells in one of his memoirs, of the measuring of the charge of the electron (I think, @notanastronomer ?). It's a bit embarrassing. The first pioneering measurement was say 86% of the true value, which is actually quite good. But then the progression went something like 89%, 92%, 95%, 97%, 102%, until finally it converged on the true value. The reason its embarrassing is because you would expect the values to jump on BOTH sides of the actual value, if these were unbiased estimates.

My favored immigration policy for Italy would be something like picking 4 or 5 favored states for a guest worker -> "green card" (no expiry, family) -> citizenship path. It would include overhaul of the school system to accomodate these languages. Each national community would be focused around 4 or 5 cities with schools offering a spectrum of original language-> italian instruction, with the ultimate goal of producing dual fluency.

My space billionaire-skeptical takes will probably not age well. Oh but to have seen us in our prime! This is essentially orthogonal to the merits themselves of private space exploration. Think of how many people say "yes WWII was awful, but we got radar and pressurized aircraft and computers out of it.

Back in my Civ playing days,I thought it would be better if there was no "research" per se, but rather you would discover new technologies randomly, but more likely if you did more of certain activities. In particular say you could build ships object with three levels of quality: basic (does the job but falls apart quicker), medium, and improved. In particular the improved ships would be better than medium, but so expensive as to not be cost effective for most purposes.

I think part of the (anti- vs CRT) divide could be spanned with an analogy with tourist sites. Some places have great natural or historic significance, but have also dangerous features. We don't wipe them off the face of the map, but we do ensure that dangers are clearly marked. Take Columbus. He was clearly a wretched man, as his conduct towards indigenous and Spanish alike proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. He was also an awful navigator who would have died with all his crew if there hadn't happened to be an entire continent at the right place.

I understand the logic of the officer/enlisted division, but it's becoming increasingly at odds with the norms of western society. It overlapped perfectly with society circa 1700, gentry or can write a sentence -> officer, commoners -> enlisted. But we've come a ways since then.

https://twitter.com/MikeObach/status/1414963893273772042

It's possible that the fundamental issue is that a rigid separation between officer and enlisted is simply optimal for warfighting, and medieval/early modern society molded itself on its requirements.

Honest Referee Report:

Let me first restate the abstract in different words to assuage any lingering doubts somebody might have that I didn't in fact read the paper.
The paper in fact fine. Like stuff like this gets published all the time. Worse than this in fact. The paper does not in fact start an entirely new field of human endeavor, nor will it represent the final word in a long standing debate. It will win no scientific prose prizes, nor is it a series of incoherent non sequiturs.

I saw a talk show host in a park here i. Orange playing the drums. It was the red haired guy. He was playing the congas. Little crowd around him.