What am I up to now?
December, 2025
Contents
Updates
This is my monthly update – what I’ve been up to, cool things I’ve learned, some book reviews. If you only subscribed for posts about visiting Mozambique or about weird currencies, you can opt out of the monthly posts. Click “Subscribed” to manage your subscription, then under “Notifications”, uncheck the box for “Monthly Updates”.
I’m moving out of Oxford, where I’ve lived since early 2022! This is by far the longest I’ve stayed in one place since high school, and I’m going to miss it.
One of my standard tricks for liking things more is to pretend that I’m doing that thing for the last time. If a Five Guys burger is ever boring me, convincing myself that I’ll never have another usually helps. Now that I’m actually doing a lot of things for the last time (at least, for a year), it’s gratifying to find that fake-last-time and real-last-time both feel pretty special.
I’ve really loved Oxford, and this month I got to do a lot of my favorite things. I hosted a wonderful dinner party at my house with JB. I went and drew stuff at the Ashmolean. I presented some of my work at the CSAE Seminar, and gave a much less official chat to the economic development student working group. I hosted four friends on my couches, and crashed on other friends’ couches in London and Bristol. I baked cookies. I played baseball in 34° weather. I rowed in my first ever sculling race with EMDS, and we won!
It’s sunny California which draws me away from this lovely place of lovely people. I spent four months in Berkeley and San Francisco earlier in the year and I’m very excited to be back. I don’t want to compare two places I’ve loved, but the Bay has so many of my favorite people, great food, beautiful weather, and so much of my favorite nature. Redwoods by themselves would draw me back.
If you like my blog and live in the Bay Area, say hi! I like new people and would love to chat.
Links
A couple of ideas for new infrastructure. First, decentralized zoos:
A decentralised Zoo spread across a city or metro area with 1 or 2 animals each would be better. I can see why this would be impractical from the zookeeper’s perspective and probably increases costs so that it is unprofitable, but one can dream.
Second, in Tyler Cowen’s podcast with Blake Scholl, a new plan for the airport:
You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Relatedly, moving to San Fransisco has me thinking about higher-order effects of self-driving cars. The most important dynamic is that the suburbs become much more valuable. The biggest cost of moving to Mill Valley or Sausalito or Walnut Creek is the commute time, both for work and for seeing your friends. Once self-driving cars become convenient to work in or comfortable to nap in, the benefits of the larger house and proximity to nature grow faster than commute costs. I’m really excited to be moving to San Francisco proper, but the rapid adoption of self-driving cars makes me think my suburb days could be sooner than expected.
Roon on DC (where I grew up) and San Francisco.
I’ve never had much interest in biology, but every once in a while, something weird enough pops up that makes me want to open up a biology textbook:
So if I understand this right, “slave species” is a biology term only used for this ONE SPECIFIC CREATURE OF ALL THE COUNTLESS LIVING ORGANISMS ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET?!
Dynomight’s annual Thanksgiving list is my favorite Thanksgiving-themed blog post. They are grateful:
That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop existing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits as much energy as ~200,000 incandescent lightbulbs but after an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t put out very much energy but keep existing for a long time—a gram of Carbon-14 only puts out the equivalent of 0.0000212 light bulbs but if you start with a gram, you’ll still have 0.999879g after a year—so it isn’t actually that easy to permanently poison the environment with radiation although Cobalt-60 with its medium energy output and medium half-life is unfortunate, medical applications notwithstanding I still wish Cobalt-60 didn’t exist, screw you Cobalt-60. … That if you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you’re in three dimensions, although maybe you could have some kind of jigsaw-shaped digestive tract so your two pieces would only jiggle around or maybe you could use the same orifice for both purposes, remember that if you ever find yourself in two dimensions, I guess.
This was an interesting post about an RFID-adjacent technology which is only used in very specific Department of Energy facilities. It had interesting observations about incentives for accountability:
The military has a lot of firearms, but military procurement is infamously slow and mercurial. Improved weapon accountability is, almost notoriously, not a priority for the US military which has often had stolen weapons go undetected until their later use in crime. The Navy’s interest in RuBee does not seem to have translated to more widespread military applications.
Then you have police departments, probably the largest institutional owners of firearms and a very lucrative market for technology vendors. But here we run into the political hazard: the firearms lobby is very influential on police departments, as are police unions which generally oppose technical accountability measures. Besides, most police departments are fairly cash-poor and are not likely to make a major investment in a firearms inventory system.
That leaves us with institutional security forces. And there is one category of security force that are particularly well-funded, well-equipped, and beholden to highly R&D-driven, almost pedantic standards of performance: the protection forces of atomic energy facilities.
It also had a holy-shit fun fact about how the opposition is (possibly (who are we kidding)) being spied on:
VAI heavily references a 2010 DEFCON presentation, for example, that demonstrated detection of RFID tags at a range of 80 miles. One imagines that opportunistic detection by satellite is feasible for a state intelligence agency.
In Portugal, speeding is punished with a red light. If a speed camera detects you going too fast, the traffic light ahead of you turns red, “just long enough for it to feel like a real inconvenience and, more importantly, to give the drivers behind you an opportunity to judge you, curse you, and lob you the odd stink eye.”
“Broadly, there are at least 19,000 privately held companies in the US with at least $100M or more in revenue. That is just a mind-boggling figure to me.”
Tyler Cowen is weirder than you think. No, weirder than that. But this is a relatively normal anecdote. On his first trip to Tokyo in 1992:
I recall wanting to buy a plastic Godzilla toy. I walked around the proper part of town, and kept on asking for Godzilla. I could not figure out why everyone was staring at me like I was an idiot, learning only later that the Japanese say “Gojira.” So in a pique of frustration, I did my best fire-breathing, stomping around, “sound like a gorilla cry run backwards through the tape” imitation of Godzilla. Immediately a Japanese man excitedly grabbed me by the hand, walked me through some complicated market streets, and showed me where I could buy a Godzilla, shouting “Gojira, Gojira, Gojira!” the whole time.
Friend of the blog Jasmine Sun is appearing in a series of debates next week on utopia. If Sam Kriss debates one-tenth as well as he writes, this will be worthwhile.
Reading
Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra (trans. Megan McDowell)
A short, weird Chilean novel, written as a multiple choice test. My first time through, I read it as connected short stories. Zambra has a lot to say about Chilean politics which goes over my head, but the form is interesting enough that this didn’t matter.
On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)
The first two volumes of a seven-novel series, translated from the Danish. It’s interesting in being the least-interesting time-loop story I’ve read. The books are quite good in other ways. For example, the second volume is the best fiction I’ve read about modern fixations on dwindling resources and over-consumption, especially as a replacement for worries about over-population.
The U.S. Navy: A Concise History, Francis Duncan
A very short comprehensive history of the US Navy from 1775 to 2010; that’s an achievement of it’s own. WWII doesn’t start until about 80% of the way through the book. The heftiest part of the book deals with the period between the Spanish-American War (first two-ocean war for us!), the election of Teddy Roosevent (who, like Churchill, was a boat nerd), the Panama Canal (also a Roosevelt thing), and the Big Navy Act of 1916 (when we overreated to the Battle of Jutland).Whenever Jutland comes up, I have to tell people about the trigonometry rooms aboard all of the British and German Dreadnoughts. The ships were so far away that their targets were often over the horizon, and certainly far enough that the spin of the earth would carry the canon shells. Each ship had a room buried deep inside full of trig tables and abacuses. They fed the targeting angles up to the gunnery crews. Trig to save your life.
Duncan, being an historian of the US Navy, really likes the US Navy. But even he is a bit worried that the navy’s getting overconfident. Besides Pearl Harbor and some early battles in WWII (Savo, Tassfaronga), we haven’t lost a naval battle since the War of 1812.
I read this book before I read a few series on Distributed Maritime Operations, the current operations plan for the US Navy. The last section was useful for understanding how important distributed dominance has been for the Navy since WWII. The point Duncan, and other naval thinkers seem to be making, is that if we put every naval asset we had in the South China Sea, then any war for Taiwan would be a joke. Instead, the Navy is our tool of looking like a global superpower, so we’re playing a game where we’re trying to figure out how few boats we could put in the South China Sea before the PLAN has a chance.
Fighting DMO, Dmitry Filipoff
[see notes]
The Accidental President, A.J. Baime
This is a detailed history of the first four months of Harry S. Truman’sThe S stands for … nothing. presidency. It was at its strongest in the minute-by-minute story-telling. For example, the day FDR died, when Truman was told he was about to be sworn in, his daughter Margaret “had been getting ready for a date and was wearing a new party dress” – imagine being the guy stood up because your date’s dad had to get sworn in.
Baime is also good at highlighting the informality of the Truman presidency. Truman was just a chill guy – when he was nominated to the Vice Presidency, his reaction was “By golly! That’s me!”. His work and meeting style also seemed very casual.
The climax of the book is the Potsdam conference where Truman met Churchill and Stalin in newly surrendered Berlin in July 1945. Truman and Churchill make a final stand for free elections and self-determination in Eastern European states. It seems more ideological for Churchill, with some guilt at not helping the Poles more earlier. Truman is much more practical; in his writings and diaries which Baime quotes, he’s already wary of Stalin and the Soviets.
The only win Truman was able to get at Potsdam was a Soviet re-committment to entering the war against Japan. I’ve always understood this as a mis-step, as the Americans were very confident that the atomic bomb would win the war before Soviet troops could turn the tide, and the Americans also didn’t want the Soviets to get too far into China before Japan surrendered. I’ve never understood this tension between wanting to limit Soviet gains in the East and requesting their invasion, on the eve of the bombing of Hiroshima. The way to reconcile it is that Truman, and his military staff, were not confident the atomic bomb would end the war promptly. Baime seems to imply the opposite, that Truman was very confident in the bomb, at least after Trinity.
Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder
Snyder defines “the bloodlands” in the introduction, and uses the term throughout: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the westernmost fringe of Russia, from 1933 to 1945, when he counts 14 million non-combatants murdered by the Soviet and Nazi governments. He argues that these murders all come in a single throughline instead of the individual events we know: the Holomodor, the Great Purge, the murder of Polish PoWs, the Shoah. Snyder’s strength is mixing the grand dumb strategy of both Hitler and Stalin with ground-level accounts and experiences of the murdered, starved, and tortured.
The late chapter on Poland, after being re-occupied by the Soviets in 1944 and 1945, was particularly hard after the Truman book. All of the Polish militias and partisans against the Nazis knew what was going to happen once the Soviets arrived, but they kept fighting the Nazis anyway. And once the Soviets did arrive, all of the partisan groups (except for the Communists) were dissolved and eradicated. The Soviets had repeatedly blocked American and British aid to the partisan groups. This must have contributed to our motivation towards world-domination after WWII: no power should so stand in our way again.
Snyder repeatedly hammers in the names of the places of worst atrocity (Babi Yar, Treblinka, Bełżec) while reminding us that the names we do know (Auschwitz, Warsaw, Łódź, Dachau) are the places from which we have the most survivors. This selection problem is extreme: “Only two or three Jews who disembarked at Bełżec survived; about 434,508 did not.”
Big Sur, Jack Keruoac
I had never read anything by Jack Kerouac; I picked this off of PF’s bookshelf in Bristol before we spent a rainy day walking from pub to pub. The coastal descriptions and the long poem at the end were what I read the book for, and were beautifully done. The San Francisco (“Frisco”, as he calls it, and MWG forbids me to call it) scenes were chaotic and not interesting to me. These were the parts most like other Beat writers, and really not for me.
Imperial Spain, John Huxtable Elliott
A good history of Habsburg Spain. I was mostly interested in the story of how Spain lost its massive empire, but the contingencies and cultural quirks which allowed it to gain the empire so quickly was even better. This part mostly focuses on how Ferdinand and Isabella built effective institutions after unifying Castile and Aragon through marriage. These were two very different kingdoms and peoples; it’s interesting to track whether Castile or Aragon has more relative power at any given time. Pizarro and Cortés, for example, were both Castilian. Elliott thinks it’s impossible than an Aragonese could have done what they did.
Elliott is frustrated with how much the Habsburgs fumbled the economic exploitation of the Americas in the 1500s. There was no deliberate mercantilism. Overly protectionist against their own colonies. There’s this great quote in one of Braudel’s books, something like, “To develop a colony in the Americas, it is first necessary to cultivate a province in Europe.” The Castilians just… didn’t do that. There was no deliberate effort to develop their American holdings into an economy which would complement Spain; just pulling more and more silver.
This had the predictable (to economists) effect of devaluaing Habsburg currencies and making Spanish exports non-competitive – both of which happened. But Elliott is skeptical of the price-effect theory. Gold and silver were coming in boatloads, Spanish end-prducts (mostly texttiles) were exported to the Americas, so of course prices are going to go up in Spain. Elliott’s counter arguments are mostly of the form “we don’t have complete data on gold and silver exports to Seville.” The complaints are mostly about noise, but he doesn’t really discuss the variation in flows that we do have.
But, all of Spains economic problems in the 1500s were excerbated by the Habsburgs, and especially Charles I of Spain (Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire) being so thinly spread. The silver of Potosi was his not Spain’s, and that really messed everything up:
In spite of the Emperor’s success in obtaining a regular tax from the Cortes in the form of the servicio, he only managed to raise the Government’s revenues by 50 per cent during the course of his reign, whereas there was a 100 per cent rise in prices during the same period.
A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
I love Eva Ibbotson’s romance novels, but she only wrote a half-dozen of them and they all have the same plot. This plot also happens to be Ibbotson’s own life: Central European woman, often Jewish, flees a revolution to England, where she meets an older academic (usually Cambridge); they fall in love. Sometimes she’s a ballet dancer; sometimes he’s a duke. They’re all great. But because there are only a few of them, I’m rationing them. This was the fourth I’ve read, and it’s just as fun. Her best moments are as funny as Wodehouse.
Previously
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