MisEntropy

When Guy Fawkes triumphed over Batman

On why it so happens that protests around the world aren't overrun by Batmen :

"According to Housh, the suggestion to use the Fawkes mask as protest gear was almost immediate. But some Anons weren’t convinced that the Fawkes mask was right, so they made a short list of alternatives: a Batman mask, classic masquerade masks, a few others. “Then we called comics and costume shops, all over the world,” Housh says, checking availability and price, and the V mask won out: “It’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s in every city.”

And Alan Moore, writer of 'V for Vendetta', on how Guy Fawkes almost didn't make it past the 80s :

"...it was the strip's artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.

When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference.

To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year (perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer) when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.

It was also the year in which the term "Guy Fawkes Night" seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative 'bonfire night'.

At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn't keep a good symbol down.

What does a bibliotherapist do?

Ella Berthous, a practicing bibliotherapist, explains :

"Bibliotherapy is the art of prescribing fiction for life’s ailments. People come to us and tell us about their issues – be it getting married, getting divorced, having children or needing a career change – and we prescribe books to help them through life’s hurdles. We also talk about reading ailments, such as not being able to concentrate on reading because there are too many other distractions, or being overwhelmed by the number of books in the world."

On why that's effective therapy : 

"When you read fiction, you actually take on the persona of the author and the characters. You effectively live another life through reading a book. And by inhabiting the psyche of another person you are fundamentally changed. It might be temporary, but by living that other life for a short time you can alter your own personality and perceptions."

Where inspiration comes from

From the Nobel lecture of poet and laureate Wislawa Szymborska :

"...inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

Disclosure vs. Anonymity

From a Tim Harford column on a code of ethics for economists :

"Even if disclosure is necessarily imperfect, isn’t it better than nothing? Professor Lant Pritchett of Harvard strongly disagrees, arguing that the entire idea is not only unworkable but actively corrosive. “Disclosure is going in the wrong direction.” What should matter, he says, is the quality of argument, analysis and evidence. “If we really wanted to improve economic science, we’d insist that every article be anonymous, rather than saying, ‘This guy is friends with so and so, and has a consulting gig.’”

What military history can teach us

Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, explains :

"I think first of all it can teach people unpredictability and discontinuity, which is tremendously important. Whatever one’s political persuasion, one of the great problems with history is that people of the left, right and centre believe in inevitability, which is generally of their own values. And one of the interesting things about war is that when two powers go to war, generally both sides think they can win and invariably at least one of them is wrong. In fact generally both of them are wrong because neither of them get out of the war what they want.

To that extent war and military history represent the revenge of the contingent on the determinist. They represent the revenge of the short term on the long term and I think that is very important because the way we think about it is often overly dependent on some kind of inevitability."

Flâneurs and the "gastronomy of the eye"

On route to explaining why cyberflânerie isn't flourshing online, Evgeny Morozov rekindles the joys of real-world flânerie :

"Engaging the history of flânerie may be a good way to start answering these questions. Thanks to the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German critic Walter Benjamin, both of whom viewed the flâneur as an emblem of modernity, his figure (and it was predominantly a “he”) is now firmly associated with 19th-century Paris. The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. “The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,” the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once remarked. The flâneur was not asocial — he needed the crowds to thrive — but he did not blend in, preferring to savor his solitude. And he had all the time in the world: there were reports of flâneurs taking turtles for a walk.

The flâneur wandered in the shopping arcades, but he did not give in to the temptations of consumerism; the arcade was primarily a pathway to a rich sensory experience — and only then a temple of consumption. His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism. Occasionally, he would narrate what he saw — surveying both his private self and the world at large — in the form of short essays for daily newspapers."

Evgeny Morozov uses flânerie to revisit his ideas that the Internet isn't particularly a force for good. But if flâneurs ceased to exist in the real world, why should we expect it to be the opposite online?

He also quotes the German writer Franz Hessel that “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” But, ironically, even while lamenting that Google and Facebook will all but make cyberflânerie impossible - Morozov himself is too definite and defined by his own agenda. Unlike the flâneur who knows not what he cares about, Morozov only knows what he cares about, seemingly uninclined to explore any other ideas or spaces.

It seems what's holding back flânerie is not that our surroundings (offline and online) make it impossible to practice - but that we ourselves lack the self-realisation or the inclination to do so.

What exactly did putting a man on the moon prove?

The Apollo Project was conceived as a mega-showdown in the Cold War, but: 

"Yet it did not escape the notice of critics even at the time that this entailed an irony. The Apollo programme, which was summoned into being in order to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system, succeeded by mobilising vast public resources within a centralised bureaucracy under government direction. In other words, it mimicked aspects of the very command economy it was designed to repudiate."

Why negative ratings trump positive ratings

Tim Harford on how they are not created equal :

"Ebay auctions have been studied by the economist David Reiley and a number of his colleagues. Reiley finds that positive ratings for a seller push up the prices she receives, but that the effect is small and not statistically significant. On the other hand, negative ratings have a much larger and statistically significant effect in depressing prices. This makes sense: sellers might go to some lengths to round up friends (or “sock-puppets” – online aliases that they control) and ask them to post positive ratings. But who bothers to post negative Ebay ratings for the sheer joy of it? Negative ratings are also rarer and so might be regarded as more informative."

What the language you speak says about your savings and health

A fascinating research paper lays out the connections :

"Chen zoomed in on one aspect of language: how we deal with time. Each language organizes and describes the future differently. Linguists call this distinction future-time-reference (FTR, for short). Some languages, like German, have a weak-FTR, which means that the distinction between today and tomorrow isn’t very concrete. In his paper, Chen gives the example that in German, you can say, “It rains tomorrow” whereas in English you have to say, “It will rain tomorrow.” English is a strong-FTR language because there are clear, constant grammatical  distinctions between today and tomorrow.

Analyzing retirement savings’ patterns, along with health habits, Chen found that people who speak weak-FTR languages prepare more thoroughly for the future than people who speak strong-FTR languages. In fact, weak-FTR countries save, on average, 6% more of their GDP every year. They also smoke less, exercise more, and are less likely to be overweight.

Chen also analyzed the data accounting for variables like gender, age, and religion, to isolate language as the primary factor. Even in these analyses, people who spoke weak-FTR languages outperformed their strong-FTR peers."

The link to the paper is here.

How similar is Romneycare to Obamacare?

Jonathan Gruber - architect of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health programme and advisor in the design of Obama administration's health reforms - is best placed to answer this :

"They are very, very similar. You can think of the Affordable Care Act as a more ambitious version of the Massachusetts reform. Both reforms have the same core principles: Non-discrimination in insurance markets, health insurance mandates and subsidies so insurance is affordable. In Massachusetts, we stopped there.

The national bill – the Affordable Care Act – has two additional features. One is it’s paid for and two, it takes on cost controls. Romney’s reform was paid for with funding from the federal treasury. The Affordable Care Act is paid for through offsets in the federal budget. And the Affordable Care Act tackles the increase in costs in a serious way, which the Massachusetts bill didn’t do. So you can think of the Affordable Care Act as the Massachusetts bill-plus."