Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 49

The individuation begins as soon as the sound waves conve...

The individuation begins as soon as the sound waves conveying the gunshot traverse the two meters or so between the speakers and the ears of the men. Reaction times differ. The theoretical limit of reaction time in this race, taking into account the time it takes for the sound waves to reach the ears of the sprinters and the time it takes for their brains to process those sound waves and send a signal to their muscles, is 0.1 seconds. The starting blocks each contain Omega-built pressure...

hand me the ritalin

(If the idea of a comic about Spinozism and lycanthropy in eighteenth-century central Europe sounds the least bit interesting, you really need to read Family Man.)

Cosma Shalizi at Three-toed Sloth

Congratulations!

The Last Samurai is now a "New and Noteworthy" book at the [bookstore:] in the [x:] Building! I had to move the new DeLillo book to the bottom "New and Noteworthy" shelf to accomplish the feat, but sacrifices must be made, and if they are someone else's then they are not so painful. Sincerely, The Guerilla Merchandising Department


e-mail from a friend who has been promoted from 'friend' to 'very dear friend' at a stroke

moral hazard cashed out

This objection errs in assuming that the moral hazard problem requires an explicit intention on the part of economic agents to take on more risk and maximise the free lunch available courtesy of the taxpayer. The essential idea which I outlined at the end of this post is as follows: The current regime of explicit and implicit bank creditor protection and regulatory capital requirements means that a highly levered balance sheet invested in "safe" assets with severely negatively skewed payoffs...

let's call the calling off off?

[There:] are many... cases where competition does not restrain monopoly as it is supposed to, but comforts and bolsters it by unburdening it of its more troublesome customers. As a result, one can define an important and too little noticed type of monopoly-tyranny: a limited type, an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy which is the more durable and stifling as it is both unambitious and escapable.

More generally, the performance of near-monopoli...

town and country

The Tories won't have forgotten one of the most amazing facts about the 2005 election. In England they actually beat Labour by 57,000 votes – but ended up with 93 fewer seats. That isn't especially fair, but it should make things interesting.

John Lanchester, LRB blog, on constituency distribution, 'votes in the country worth less than votes in the city', the rest here.

talking points

This kind of interviewing, in my view, is broken. Apart from the pointless rudeness, Kinnock can't possibly answer the question by saying a. proposed tax rises did me in (because Labour today are offering tax rises), b. 1992 was a long time ago, so who cares? and c. I was perceived as a Welsh windbag, which is a different thing from a Scottish miserabilist. Because he can't say those things – which would immediately take on a life of their own and derail the election launch – he has...

i don't want a holiday in the sun

Video clip on the Guardian of Tim Jonze talking about Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols.

Jonze says he once interviewed McLaren, thinking it would be a 15-minute telephone conversation. About an hour in he thought it might be a good idea to try to put his second question.

I happened to deal with McLaren while clearing permissions for The Last Samurai. One of my few good memories, actually, of the business of seeing the book into print.

St T

I think something short-circuits inside a kid when his parents abandon him to a whole lot of other kids.

Rupert Everett, interviewed by Carole Cadwaller in the Observer (Nov 2009)

ego glue

For many years I have worked with children and their families as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Before that however, I worked in the psychiatry of adulthood where the core disorder upon which the chronic hospital wards were established was schizophrenia. It was 'first philosophy* in psychiatry. Beneath its multifarious and often alarming presentations a central feature was though to inhere - a disturbance of the sense of self. Somehow, the self of the schizophrenic had become...