Nice essay in the Economist by the ever interesting Scott Galloway.

The story of our time.

As the only child of a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary, I used to think I was self-made. But the truth is that I’m American-made and have benefited from a time and place of unprecedented prosperity, which dampened my failures and bolstered my successes.

To be sure, I work hard. But none of my ventures would have been possible without California’s public-education system, where I went to primary school, university and business school from the 1970s to 1990s for a total of $10,000. I entered as an unremarkable, lower-middle-class kid. I left with credentials, a network and my first startup. Without the generosity of California’s taxpayers, and being born in the right demographic (white, male), I’d probably still be installing shelving—my job until UCLA accepted my second undergrad application.

Link

GLOBAL: What are universities for?
This is a quote from 2009 by Geoffrey Boulton, a former Vice Principal in Edinburgh.

We should be careful not to foist on universities tasks which they may be ill-equipped for and which, if too actively pursued, could damage their ability to deliver what they are uniquely able to deliver in terms of education and innovation. We need only look at banks to see the consequences of excessive and ill-conceived diversification. Let us not follow them. [emphasis added]

The analogy is an arresting one. Not certain how many were listening. The multiversity comes with great costs.

Science is all about finding broad underlying theories that unite apparent differences. It is not a looseleaf book full of facts. But sometimes mere facts are so adamantine that they stop you in your tracks and make you smile or even gasp out loud. Think of Erwin Chargraff and his observation that the ratios of guanine to cytosine and of adenine to thymine are both unity. What limits that placed on the search space for the structure of DNA.

Laying in bed early one morning at the weekend I came across a not so grand fact. I was listening to a Talking Politics podcast in which David Runciman and Helen Thompson were joined by two Irish historians, Niamh Gallagher and Richard Bourke. The topic was the state of the UK union, and Ireland. The discussion meandered in and around some unique characteristics of Irish demography (at least in terms of European states).

Ireland’s population was greater in the mid 1840s that it is now. Perhaps one million souls starved to death in the famine, and maybe two million emigrated in the same decade. The population of eight million was reduced by close to 50%. The population today is just short five million. This much I knew already.

But what made me sit up with surprise was the relative populations of England and Ireland at the time of the Act of Union in 1801. Ireland’s population was about five million whereas England’s was only eight million. So, this pacification was undertaken by a country only slightly larger (in absolute terms).

YMMV, and the discovery of a fact is, in one sense, always personal, but this made me pause the podcast, jump out of bed, and gasp. How much of my inferred world is as mistaken as this example reveals it to be.

At my door this morning. Calm and collected. I didn’t hear any knocking.

On the right stuff

From one of Paul Graham’s essays:

Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

“I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.”

He’s too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn’t.

Quoted by Paul Graham, The Four Quadrants of Conformism.

Smallpox (again): It takes time

The Economist | Broken arrow

Nevertheless smallpox vaccination became near universal. And then in 1977, 177 years after Benjamin Waterhouse, a Harvard professor and correspondent of Jefferson’s, published his pamphlet “A Prospect of Exterminating the Small-pox”, it became obsolete. The disease was wiped out. No other human disease has yet followed it to oblivion, though polio is close. But many death tolls have been slashed.

A man of principle: Nobel got it right

The Economist | Seer of the Anthropocene

Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric scientist, died on January 28.

When in 1995, while running the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, he heard of his Nobel prize, he celebrated with sekt rather than champagne: not because of his modest, Dutch, cycling-to-work frugality, but because of France’s blinkered position on nuclear testing.

Of bacon and eggs, and that wonderful film

Defector Tae Yong-ho: ‘A very small spark could topple Kim Jong Un’ | Financial Times

The former North Korean diplomat on life under the Kims — and how the world should counter the regime.

Pictures of a full English breakfast left Tae mystified. “How could it be possible for just breakfast you have eggs, bacon, milk, butter, cheese, all of these things? We thought it was propaganda.” And after watching Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music he wondered how it was that a country like America, which killed people at random, could also produce such good films. “I started to have other thoughts.”

As for the Sound of Music, at Xmas, I watched it for again for the first time in close to 60 years. Wonderful. Growing up I remember a story in the South Wales Echo about a woman pensioner In Cardiff who saw it every day for well over a year. Eventually, she was given a free pass. But no popcorn or Coca-Cola, I suspect.

Scale, dissent and staying small

How to Think for Yourself

I enjoy Paul Graham’s essays. I don’t always agree with him, but I admire the clarity of his expression. Here, he is talking about the need to promote and protect dissent.

The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups is still an open problem, but there may be solutions.

Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the ancillary benefit that they have better ideas.

Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt the force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions, so that the conventional-minded aren’t as dangerous. The physical separation of Lockheed’s Skunk Works may have had this as a side benefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may not be an unmitigated good.

And he is bang on the nail with regard to universities.

The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing the company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap, compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the average level of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth in staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on universities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that’s not your “core competency” should be augmented by one about outsourcing work done by people who’d ruin your culture as employees.

Sickness is just a business opportunity

‘It needs to change its culture’: is McKinsey losing its mystique? | Financial Times

Moreover, it collected millions of dollars designing and implementing marketing campaigns for three other opioid manufacturers — Johnson & Johnson, Endo Pharmaceuticals and Mallinckrodt — the lawsuits found. One presentation released in court showed it suggesting that “high abuse-risk patients” were an “opportunity” for J&J with a patch based on fentanyl, an opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

Always remember the mantra: if there are not enough sick people about, create some more.

Or not, as the case may be.

Smallpox is the greatest success story in the history of medicine. It once took huge numbers of lives — as many as half a billion people in the 20th century alone — and blinded and disfigured many more.

So writes the distinguished historian of science, Steven Shapin in the LRB (A Pox on the Poor, February 4, 2021). He is reviewing The Great Inoculator: The Untold Story of Daniel Sutton and His Medical Revolution).

In historical times you had a one in three chance of getting smallpox, and, if you got it, the case-fatality was 20%. Some outbreaks, however, had a case-fatality of 50% and, unlike Covid-19, its preferred targets were children.

My exposure to smallpox was (thankfully) limited. My mother told me that there was an outbreak in South Wales and the West of England when I was around five or six. There was widespread vaccination, but kids like me with bad eczema, were spared, with the parent advised to ‘shield’ the child indoors (my sympathies go to my mother). (The risk was from the grandly named, but sometimes fatal, Kaposi’s varicelliform reaction, which was due to the vaccinia virus — not smallpox — running riot on the diseased skin).

As a med student, I remember learning how to distinguish the cutaneous lesions of smallpox from chicken pox. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, but, as a dermatology registrar, seeing the occasional adult with chickenpox who seemed so ill (in comparison with kids), I often had doubts that I had to reason away. Perhaps those stores held by the US and USSR were not so secure…

Before Jenner

Jenner and smallpox vaccination go together in popular accounts, but the history of this particular clinical discovery is much older and richer — at least to me.

As ever, in medicine, and in particular for anything involving the skin, the terminology is confusing. The Latin name for cowpox is Variolae vaccinae, meaning the pox from the cow (vacca). It was Pasteur who subsequently honoured Jenner by deciding that all forms of inoculation be called vaccination.

Edward Jenner took advantage of the already-known fact that whilst milkmaids tended to be afflicted with the far more mild cowpox virus, they rarely suffered from the more serious, smallpox (they are different, but related, viruses). Jenner, in 1796, inoculated an eight-year-old boy with the pus from a milkmaid’s cowpox sore. After being exposed to smallpox material the boy appeared immune, in that he did not suffer adversely when subsequently exposed to smallpox.

Once Jenner’s method was accepted as safe, Acts of Parliament introduced free vaccination n 1840, and vaccination became obligatory in 1853.

I had never been quite certain of the distinction between inoculation and vaccination, but there is history here too. Shapin writes that the term inoculation was borrowed from horticulture — the grafting of a bud (or ‘eye’) to propagate a plant (something I was taught how to do in horticulture lessons when I was aged 11, in school in Cardiff, by Brother Luke, who, I thought so old, he might have been a contemporary of Jenner). Why the name is apt is explained below.

Before vaccination, inoculation was actually meant to give you a direct form of smallpox (this was also referred to as variolation, after variola, the term for smallpox). The source material, again, was from a lesion of somebody with smallpox. The recipient it was hoped would develop a milder version of smallpox. Shapin writes:

The contract with the inoculator was to accept a milder form of the disease, and a lower chance of death, in exchange for a future secured from the naturally occurring disease, which carried a high chance of killing or disfiguring.

Shapin tells us that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when holed up with her husband in Constantinople in 1717, heard stories about how such ‘in-grafting’ was in widespread use by the ‘locals’. She was scarred from smallpox, and therefor she had the procedure carried out on her then five-year-old son. The needle was blunt and rusty, but her son suffering just a few spots and the procedure was judged a success. He was now immune to smallpox.

Not surprisingly, the story goes back further: inoculation was folk medicine practice in Pembrokeshire as early as 1600, and the Chinese had been blowing dried, ground-up smallpox material up the nose for many centuries.

There is capitalism and then there is capitalism.

The London medical establishment were apparently not too impressed with the non-British origin of such scientific advance, nor its apparent simplicity (and hence low cost). So, they made the procedure made much more complicated, with specific diets being required, along with advice on behaviour, and, of course, blood-lettings and laxatives, all in addition to not just a ‘prick’ but a bigger incision (payment by the inch). The physician’s ‘fees’ no doubt rose in parallel. Not a bad business model, until…

There is plenty of room at the bottom.

The London physicians’ ‘add-ons’ put the treatment costs of inoculation out of reach of most of the population, restricting it, for decades, to the ‘medical carriage trade’. Along comes Richard Sutton, a provincial barber-surgeon, with no Latin or Greek, no doubt, who effectively industrialised the whole process, making it both more profitable and cheaper for the customer.

Based in a village near Chelmsford, he inoculated tens of thousands locally. The method was named after him, the Suttonian Method. On one day he inoculated 700 persons. Incisions (favoured by the physicians) were replaced by the simpler prick, and patients were not confined, but instead told to go out in the fresh air (day-case, anybody?). Product differentiation was of course possible:spa-like pampering in local accommodation was available for the top end of the market, with a set of sliding fees depending on the degree of luxury.

Shapin writes:

Splitting the market and niche pricing were aspects of Sutton’s business success, but so too was control of supply. The extended Sutton clan could satisfy a significant chunk of provincial demand, but Daniel also worked out a franchising system, which ‘authorised’ more than fifty partners throughout Britain and abroad to advertise their use of the ‘Suttonian System’ — provided they paid fees for Sutton-compounded purgatives, kicked back a slice of their take, and kept the trade secrets. Control was especially important, since practically, anyone could, and did, set up as an inoculator. The Suttons themselves had become surgeons through apprenticeship, but apothecaries, clergymen, artisans and farmers were inoculating, and sometimes parents inoculated their own children. The profits of the provincial press were considerably boosted as practitioners advertised their skills at inoculation and their keen prices. Daniel went after competitors — including his own father-in-law and a younger brother — with vigour, putting it about that the Suttonian Method depended on a set of closely held secrets, to which only he and his approved partners had access. His competitors sought to winkle out these secrets, occasionally pouncing on Sutton’s patients to quiz them about their experiences.

Sutton admitted that had ‘lost’ five out of forty thousand patients (due to smallpox). He offered a prize of 100 guineas to anybody who could prove he ever lost a patient due to inoculation, or that any patient got smallpox a second time. More confident, and perhaps more generous, than modern Pharma, I think. By 1764, Sutton had an annual income of 6300 guineas — over one million sterling in today’s money.

Perry Anderson · Ever Closer Union? · LRB 7 January 2021

Perry Anderson wrote three articles recently in the LRB on the EU. The first I found hard to get into, but the second and third are terrific. Whether he is right about everything or makes the right calls, I cannot say. But strongly recommended. I will be interested to check out any letters.

The quote below is, about, and in part, from Chris Bickerton who is a regular on Talking Politics podcast. He wields a scalpel more sharply through your eyes than your ears.

Christopher Bickerton’s European Integration, whose anodyne title, shared by dozens of other books, conceals its distinction, which comes in the subtitle that delivers its argument: ‘From Nation-States to Member States’. Everyone has an idea what a nation-state is, and many know that 27 countries (with the UK’s departure) are member states of the European Union. What is the conceptual difference between the two? Bickerton’s definition is succinct. ‘The concept of member state expresses a fundamental change in the political structure of the state, with horizontal ties between national executives taking precedence over vertical ties between governments and their own societies.’ This development first struck him, he explains, at the time of the Irish referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon. ‘When the No result was announced, members of the Irish government expressed a mixture of surprise and embarrassment: surprise as they were unfamiliar with the sentiments prevailing within their own population, and embarrassment because this compromised many of the promises they had made to their peers at previous meetings in Brussels.’ (The description is something of an understatement. Spotted outside a pub in Dublin that evening, Brian Lenihan, minister of finance at the time, was white around the gills.)

Bickerton again.

With the advent of the European Community, once the Court of Justice had succeeded in effectively, if not formally, constitutionalising it, member states accepted a set of external constraints whose form was radically different. ‘The active subject, namely the people, is not doing the binding…

Now I get this! This is a device used by just so many organisations. They choose the bondage of their own desire (literally, it seems, for some politicians).

Anderson:

Rather, national governments commit to limit their own powers in order to contain the political power of domestic populations. Instead of the people expressing themselves qua constituent power through this constitutional architecture, national governments seek to limit popular power by binding themselves through an external set of rules, procedures and norms.

Perry Anderson · The Breakaway: Goodbye Europe · LRB 21 January 2021

Anderson in the third essay:

Much of​ the anger aroused by Brexit in once Tory circles comes from an acute sense of the anachronism of leading advocates of departure, the ostentatious fogeyism of Rees-Mogg, Bone, Baker and others, defenders of the indefensible in the age of climate change, crowd-sourcing and correct speech. What is the order they uphold? A first-past-the-post electoral system dating back to the 16th century, before most constituencies were even contested, which regularly produces results that bear no resemblance to the divisions of opinion in the country; an unelected upper chamber crammed with flunkies and friends of the two dominant parties; an honours system devised to reward bagmen and sycophants; a Parliament that can be bundled into a poll at a day’s notice; a judiciary capable of covering any administrative enormity. Little wonder its admirers quote Latin statutes from the time of Richard II or Henry VIII in praise of its workings.

The Great Dick Faker

To predict government policy, listen to Boris and wait for the opposite

John Crace writing in the Guardian:

During the biggest national health crisis in 100 years, it’s just our luck to have Johnson in charge. A man pathologically unable to make the right calls at the right time. The prime minister is a narcissistic charlatan. The Great Dick Faker. Someone who can’t bear to be the bearer of bad news or to be proved wrong by people who disagree with him. So he stubbornly ignores the evidence until he becomes overwhelmed by it and public opinion has turned against him. He isn’t just a liability as a leader, his indecision has cost lives. His hubris will only cost him his job.

Incoherence

Frontline UK teams query ability to vaccinate most vulnerable | Financial Times

A comment from Risk Man:

This Government is not capable of coherence.

A necessary and immodest proposal

These dark materials | Books | The Guardian

The great physicist Richard Feynman expressed the methodology of science beautifully: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If [your idea] disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Note the world experience.

But here, another great physicist and thinker says something even more profound for how we think about science.

Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.

Steven Weinberg

Depending on your point of view you can either find this sentiment reassuring or — as in my case — terrifying.

The quality of the stool is not strained…

NIH’s ‘precision nutrition’ bet aims for individualized diets | Science

Well, lets leave the likes of real science and Feynman and Weinberg to one side.

A few posts ago, I talked about the hype that is the claimed discovery of, or facility for, precision medicine. Life is getting more and more messy as the story runs down and out…

The study “has the potential to truly transform the field of nutrition science,” generating new tools, methods, and “a wealth of data to fuel discovery science for years to come,” Griffin Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), said last year at an NIH board meeting where he introduced the project. Ultimately, it might enable nutritionists to tailor diets to an individual’s genes and microbiome.

With a few notable exceptions — usually from long ago — the words nutrition and science should rarely appear in the same sentence. When they do, they are best flushed down the pan.

The Wealth of Nations

China’s hidden crisis

Much of the blame for all this rests with Mao, whose Cultural Revolution was “perhaps the largest intentional destruction of human capital the world has ever seen”.

The story is…

Their team gave an IQ-like test to thousands of rural Chinese toddlers. They found that more than 50% were cognitively delayed and unlikely to reach an IQ of 90 (in a typical population, only 16% score so poorly).

Why?

Half of rural babies are undernourished. Caregivers (often illiterate grandmothers) cram them with rice, noodles and steamed buns, not realising that they also need micronutrients… A third of rural 11- and 12-year-olds have poor vision but no glasses, so struggle to read their schoolbooks.

Some of these problems would be laughably cheap to fix. A pair of glasses costs $30. Multivitamin pills are a few cents. De-worming tablets cost $2 per child each year. One reason the problems persist is that harmful myths abound. Many rural folk believe that—as a grandmother told this reviewer—glasses are bad for children’s eyesight. Some fret that de-worming pills reduce fertility in girls. A recent study found that 99% of Chinese farmers gave their pigs de-worming drugs, but hardly any did the same for their children.

Read that last sentence again.

Having a thing for snails.

The Economist | The lives of others

Patricia Highsmith had a thing for snails. She admired their self-sufficiency and found it “relaxing” to watch them copulate, delighted by the impossibility of distinguishing male from female. She collected them for decades, keeping hundreds at home and scores in her handbag, which she let loose when bored at dinner parties. Her affection for snails was matched by her ambivalence towards people, whom she often found baffling and kept at a distance. When a literary agent suggested Americans didn’t buy her books because they were “too subtle” and the characters too unlikeable, Highsmith responded: “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone.”

Not having a fling …for rotifers

The Economist | Godzilla the rotifer

Rotifers are famously asexual. The last time members of one group of the animals, the bdelloids, had sex is reckoned by zoologists to have been about 80 million years ago.

Who is cheating who?

Skidmore hopes to push UK government to outlaw essay mills | Times Higher Education (THE)

Former universities minister Chris Skidmore hopes that his private member’s bill on essay mills will prompt the Westminster government to finally take legislative action against contract cheating. Proposing the bill, which would make the operation and advertising of essay mill services illegal in the UK, Mr Skidmore said contract cheating was “a rot that infects the very discipline of learning and has the potential to damage academic integrity beyond repair”.

Hard to argue with, but would the essay mills fool school teachers? I suspect not. There is more than one way to cheat, just as there is more than one agent in any con.

Is that a fact!

The Economist | Betting all the chips

When microchips were invented in 1958, the first significant market for them was inside nuclear missiles. Today about a trillion chips are made a year, or 128 for every person on the planet.

We’re all just naked apes

Letter to the economist from Allan Milne Lees.

As Johnson rightly notes, we humans need regular undemanding social interactions such as small talk to support our well-being (January 2nd). As a primate species that is relatively hairless we are unable to use grooming rituals to establish and maintain social bonds. Chatting about the weather and stock performances is our equivalent of removing salt crystals and lice from each other.

The dermatologists might add that the value of host responses to such infestations, like stock prices, may go up and down in value.

The regulator as Ouroboros

WONKHE

Some lives leave love, others just a trail of utter destruction.

There was much amusement on Wednesday when outgoing OfS chair Michael Barber used his King’s College London Commemoration Oration to wade in on “no platforming”. He said he was willing to believe that the vast majority of controversial speaking engagements do in fact go ahead on campus, but that he would love to see figures — adding, “It’s hardly a job for a regulator but if I were a university administrator or an influence at UUK, I would be collecting the data.”

What he hadn’t clocked is that it is, in fact, a job for a regulator, given the Prevent duty — his regulator, whose most recent figures show that just 0.09 per cent of such events don’t go ahead. When we pointed that out later in the Q&A, adding that the example of a problematic speech code he’d picked from a book was both inaccurate and eighteen years old, Barber offered praise for our work here at Wonkhe but suggested that we may want to “spend less time on the detail”. We can’t imagine why.

Worthy of Wallace and Gromet

How clams fight pollution

The system is nifty. When the molluscs encounter heavy metals, pesticides or other pollutants, they close their shells, explains Piotr Domek of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, who has worked on the project for three decades. To create a natural early-warning system, Mr Domek and his colleagues collect the clams from rivers or reservoirs, and attach a coil and a magnet to their shells. Computers register whether their shells are open or closed by detecting changes in the magnetic field.

Priti Patel will be on the case

In the case of a terrorist attack, an ecological disaster or another contamination of the water supply, the clams will close,” says Mr Domek. This, in turn, will automatically cut off the water supply. The clams, he thinks, are life-savers.

Academics are promoting the wrong kind of rigour | Times Higher Education (THE)

When I was teaching — and I taught a lot towards the end of my paid career — there were many opportunities to talk to medical students off the record. It takes time, and some trust from both parties, but many students know what talking off the record means. To my surprise — yes, I am that paranoid — some of the online feedback they provide is also informative. My favourite, was a comment about specialty X, saying that they were certain that the teaching would have been of a high standard if they had actually had any. If you scour the BMJ online responses for comments from students, you can find similar views.

For many students, undergraduate medicine resembles flying in the pre-Covid days: the journey’s end is worth it, but you have put up with all the crap that passing through airport security entails. There is just no other practical way to get from A to B. Getting uptight about it as you pass through may come back to bite you.

I think medicine is worse than many other degrees, but there is plenty of misery to go around. The following is from an article in the Times Higher:

Leaning forward, he takes a deep breath and says: “Well, it’s like we’re running some kind of gauntlet, course after course, semester after semester, one year to the next, working hard, but our real selves are asleep. ‘Get good grades, good internships. Do lots of activities. Build an impressive résumé.’ That’s all we hear. We’re so busy proving ourselves that there’s no time to breathe, let alone think or reflect, and the stuff we have to do for classes mostly feels meaningless — to me, anyway. So we just go to sleep to get through it and hope it’s all worth it when the grind is over.” 

…

But my student wonders out loud why learning in college must be a forced march and not a playful adventure — and I silently wonder the same about the process of tenure and promotion.

Thinking clearly

It is a fun trope to imagine that ability in one domain comes at the cost of another. Scientists are geeks etc. I knew the quote below, but not who had said it. Perhaps technocrats devoted to public service are what we are missing.

We are not a great power and never will be again,” wrote Tizard. “We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.”

A distinguished Whitehall scientist, Henry Tizard, sounding the alarm. Quoted in Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit, by Philip Stephens.

Fast and slow-moving metaphors

Graduate deans ‘must speak up for PhD students’ | Times Higher Education (THE)

“Even today, people applying to graduate school feel obliged to say: “My goal is research”, according to Robert Weisbuch, former president of Drew University in New Jersey. Yet in reality only a small proportion will go on to find a permanent academic position, and failure to acknowledge this often prevents them making the most of their knowledge and talents.

“We teach them to believe they are Lamborghinis,” suggested Leonard Cassuto, professor of English and American studies at Fordham University in New York, “when in fact they are all-terrain vehicles. If you are an all-terrain vehicle and believe you are a Lamborghini, all you are going to do is stay on the racetrack, no matter how much traffic there is on it.”

Just so you know

Why can’t the UK tax year start on January 1? | Financial Times

Our April 5 year-end originates from when people in England were required to pay rents to their landlords quarterly on what were, and still are, known as quarter days; March 25, June 24, September 29 and December 25. The first in the year, known as Lady Day, came to be regarded as the start of the financial year.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered that the old Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar should be replaced by the Gregorian calendar we use today. The old calendar, although reasonably accurate, was slightly too short and had slipped over the years. Much of Europe moved across immediately, but Britain took a little longer — 170 years in fact. By then, our calendar was out of step by 11 days and so it was that after the taxes had been paid on March 25 1752, 11 days were removed from the calendar and the new tax year started on April 5 1752. 

The Long Now: Plant the oaks now for we do not know when we might need them

Political union through science | Nature Physics

Almost 100 years later, in a Europe that had been forced apart by war, 17 nations from around the world came together in Paris on 20 May 1875 to sign what is now known as the Metre Convention. The aim of the convention — in the spirit of Talleyrand’s proposal — appears prominently on the first page, and states that the signatories desired “to assure the international unification and perfection of the metric system” and they undertook “to create and maintain, at their common expense, a scientific and permanent International Bureau of Weights and Measures with its headquarters in Paris”.

Turn of phrase

Moving mountains: the reforms that would push academia to new heights | Times Higher Education (THE)

It remains one of the great ironies of higher education that while most of us in the sector are employed to educate, any professional learning offered to improve our practice leaves us as repulsed and as lost as Jack Nicholson at a women’s studies conference.

I not in love with the gist of the article, all those dilemmas about whether opening doors for colleagues or strangers is micro-aggression or not, but a nice turn of phrase. Personally, I would have thought Nicholson would have gone down well (academically speaking, that is).

Just brilliant!

Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.

Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who contribute greatly to the global eradication of smallpox. Quoted in via Private Eye MD No 1541

I knew another scientist called Brilliant, Murray Brilliant, a melanocyte biologist. Always wondered what it was like being called Brilliant, and how Oscar Wilde might have played with it.

Retirement has its rewards

W.H. Auden imagined “The Fall of Rome” as the moment in which:

“an unimportant clerk/Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK/On a pink official form.”

Quoted here