Graphing the history of philosophy « Drunks&Lampposts A close up of ancient and medieval philosophy ending at Descartes and Leibniz If you are interested in this data set you might like my latest post where I use it to make book recommendations. This one came about because I was searching for a data set on horror films (don’t ask) and ended up with one describing the links between philosophers. To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised using gephi It’s an easy process to repeat. It could be done for any area within Wikipedia where the information forms a network. First I’ll show why I think it’s worked as a visualisation. Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. It gets more interesting when we use Gephi to identify communities (or modules) within the network. It has been fairly successful. Simon
Books that should be read before starting a Ph.D. in economics « Mostly Economics Ajay Shah points to some books one should read before starting a PHD in economics: I thought it’s useful to pick a set of books that touch on the great themes of the world, often going into troublesome terrain that the models aren’t very good at, so as to lay a foundation of background knowledge and historical knowledge which can pave the way to usefully assimilating what’s taught in the economics Ph.D. Of course, they should be books that are fun to read and un-putdownable. Here’s my suggested compact checklist of books worth reading. Please do suggest books, and disagree with this list, in the comments to this post. He says one could disagree/add more books on the comments section. Like this: Like Loading...
LRB · Donald MacKenzie · How to Make Money in Microseconds What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different. When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. Little of this has to do directly with human action. The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via ‘matching engines’, computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. Human beings can, and still do, send orders from their computers to the matching engines, but this accounts for less than half of all US share trading.
Great Books Lists: Lists of Classics, Eastern and Western As seen in A Guide to Oriental Classics, Whole Earth magazine, Winter 2002. (A revised version of the article is available at author Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site.) This page: Introduction | Western Canon | Eastern and World Canons | Contemporary Canon | Other Lists of Great Books | My Reading Lists | Indexes to these Great Books Lists Introduction Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) What are the Great Books? Western Canon Eastern and World Canons Approaches to the Asian Classics. Contemporary Canon Other Lists of Great Books Other Lists of Great Books - An annotated bibliography of some other sources of Great Books lists, both in books and on the Web My Reading Lists My Reading Lists (Ancient Near East, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, China, Middle Ages) Indexes to these Great Books Lists
Winter Is Coming | Opinion For a show filled with fire-breathing dragons and Machiavellian politics, Game of Thrones is surprisingly rich with economic metaphors that resemble the world we live in. To start, although the Seven Kingdoms of the Westoros continent, where the saga unfolds, have the social and technological characteristics of medieval Europe, its economy ebbs and flows like the modern business cycle. Seasons on the continent lasts years. For an agrarian society, summer is like an economic boom and winter is like an economic depression. The grumpy old characters often deride the young ones as “summer children,” who have not experienced the hardship of a prolonged winter. The wise Northmen’s motto? And just like the fictional long winter, everyone knows that the economic depression is coming—but no one knows when. The economy of the Seven Kingdoms reached a sorry state during the show. But the fate of the Seven Kingdoms was perhaps sealed before the show’s start. Jonathan Z.
An Original Thinker of Our Time by Cass R. Sunstein Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman Princeton University Press, 740 pp., $39.95 Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. Hirschman is principally known for four remarkable books. Finally, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. The current debate over gun control is a case study in “the rhetoric of reaction.” Hirschman, born in 1915 in Berlin, was an economist by training, and he spent a lot of time reading Adam Smith, but his great intellectual loves were Montaigne (with his advice to “observe, observe perpetually”) and Machiavelli. As Adelman tells the tale, Paris left an indelible mark on Hirschman.
What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? (or, the Infinite Jest ending explained) WARNING: This whole thing is one gigantic spoiler. Only read it if you’ve already tried to figure it out for yourself first. Gately, having relived his bottom, begins to recover from his infection. But at the same time, Hal’s condition deepens. Ever since Hal ate the mold as a child, he’s been a brilliant communicator but unable to feel. (694: “Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny … in fact he’s far more robotic than John Wayne.”) In life he created the Entertainment to draw Hal out (Hal moves outwardly but doesn’t feel inside; victims of the Entertainment feel—something—inside but don’t move outwardly). JOI’s wraith is responsible for the strange disturbances around ETA — tripods in the forest, moving Ortho’s bed, ceiling tiles on the floor. JOI also created DMZ as part of an attempt to undo the effects of Hal’s eating mold as a child (recall: DMZ is a mold that grows on a mold). Well said and eminently plausible. Love this theory.
The Thoreau Poison: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color' “There is something deeply and indefinably interesting in the swinish race,” the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, in 1841, from Brook Farm, the Massachusetts commune where he was helping to care for pigs and other livestock. “They appear the more a mystery, the longer you gaze at them; it seems as if there was an important meaning to them, if you could but find out.” A viewer of Shane Carruth’s new movie “ Upstream Color ” may come away with a similar feeling. In Carruth’s movie, two lovers are mysteriously linked to each other, and to two pigs. My delicate stomach notwithstanding, I was eager to see “Upstream Color.” Carruth’s new movie—once again he writes, directs, scores the music, and acts, and once again he has done it all completely outside the Hollywood system —is about biology the way that “Primer” was about time travel. In “Upstream Color,” the hero is a parasitic worm. Once the Thief has his loot, he leaves the worm to its own devices, still inside of Kris.
A Fine Theorem