Jorge Luís Borges reads "Del rigor en la ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science) (Via Boing Boing)

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Borges' short stories give lessons in Methodology . "El rigor..." is a perfect response when somebody criticizes a model for being an abstraction of reality. "Funes, the Memorious" explains why it is dangerous to consider all details of reality or history. Abstraction is a necessity.

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905

The Institute for the Study of the Americas is pleased to invite you to the launch of

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil
edited by Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho

Wednesday 22 April at 4.30pm
Venue: Conference Room, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Contact: olga.jiemenz@sas.ac.uk or 020 7862 8871

A little studied aspect of the struggle to abolish slavery in Brazil in the 1880s is the relationship established and maintained between Joaquim Nabuco, the leading Brazilian abolitionist, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The correspondence between Nabuco and Charles Harris Allen, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and other British abolitionists throughout the decade and beyond reveals a partnership consciously sought by Nabuco in order to internationalise the struggle. These letters provide a unique insight into the evolution of Nabuco's thinking on both slavery and abolition and at the same time a running commentary on the slow and (at least until 1887) uncertain progress of the abolitionist cause in Brazil.

Leslie Bethell is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History at the University of London, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

José Murilo de Carvalho is Professor of History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Compre na Amazon aqui (US$30).

Why do we like beer?

Because the guys that couldn't stand alcohol died of dysentery a long ago. This is just one of the things that I've learned in "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World". The logic goes like this: polluted water is a major threat to human beings, so...

"In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to "pure" fluid" was alcohol. Whatever the risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties. Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties... To digest large quantities of (alcohol), you need to be able to boost production of enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases, a trait regulated by a set of genes on chromosome four in human DNA. Many early agrarians lacked that trait, and thus were genetically incapable of "holding their liquor". Consequently, many of them died childless at an early age, either from alcohol abuse or from waterborne diseases... Most of the world's population is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance to alcohol."

BTW, I strongly recommend the book. It provides an amazing account of the role of scientific preconceptions, and it tells the story of the map that started Spatial Analysis. Spoiler: it is a myth that John Snow discovered the source of cholera after drawing his famous map. In fact, he draw it to convince the others that water, and not, miasma was responsible for the spreading of the disease.

London for Economists 2

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has a series of walks for economists through London available for download. The walks have an Econometrics bias, so you will see the place where Reverend Bayes is buried and the birthplace of Prof Pearson. Nevertheless the guides are a must for Economics obsessed minds.

The most expensive cities in the world

Tell me about it.

London for Economists I

Pay a visit to Jeremy Bentham at UCL. Drink a pint in his name here.

Friedman is wrong

There is free lunch. Roughly 3 times a week I have lunch at the Hare-Krishna stall. They park near SOAS and offer their vegan food for free. There is no need to talk nor to listen to their lessons. The food is ok. Mainly carbs and, sometimes, I have to eat real food soon afterwards. But a back of the envelope sum says that I've saved about 400 pounds in year. BTW, I am not the only bloke that relied on Hare-Krishna's services.