Nothing new under the needle

After needles and morphine were deployed in the American civil war, as many as 100,000 veterans were left addicted. In 1895 scientists at Bayer, a German pharmaceutical firm, began selling a strong morphine compound called diamorphine. To market it, they called it “heroin” from the German word meaning heroic.

Article in the Economist on oxycodone dealing with — well not medicine — but business

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Well, words from the past, to remeasure the future. I am on (a sort of) sabbatical for six months. There is a project, about which I will say more later. My writings here will change, too.

De Selby’s numerical calculations

My experience of Irish government state employees at the ‘border’ is that they aim to be the antithesis of ‘hostile’. It is not a bad USP. Passing through Dublin or Cork is an enjoyable experience: “Welcome home Jonathan’, is not the most formal salute; or, in the case of my wife, “Lisa — from Mulfulira—I remember you”. But this aside in the Economist, brings a little of the Flann O’Brien to the party.

In the 1970s, when contraceptives were still banned in the Irish republic, a family-planning campaigner went south with 40,000 condoms in his station wagon; his insistence that they were all “for personal use” was met with good-humoured banter by an Irish police patrol.

The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics. By Diarmaid Ferriter. (reviewed in the economist)

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Quoted in Carel Stolker, ‘Rethinking the Law School’ 

According to a British survey among first‐year law students, the word that best reflects the students’ general attitude is ‘disengaged’. This disengagement is caused particularly by the lack of human connection in almost every educational practice, from teaching methods to our formal assessments. There is extraordinarily little formal human interaction in our first year.

This is a business model. Just not one you would want to emulate. At least Stolker’s home institution, Leiden, has an excuse.

This is from an article in the THE. Catherine Heymans is a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, who works on “dark energy”. She is planning to leave the UK to work in Germany (yes, Brexit). But what caught my eye was this quote describing one of those lightbulb moments (pun intended)

Question: As a physics undergraduate, how did you feel when the theory of dark energy first emerged?

Heymans: ‘It was 9am, and I was sat in a lecture theatre waiting for our lecturer to turn up – he was late. Eventually he ran into the room and said: “We’re not going to be studying high-energy astrophysics today, because the most amazing paper has just been published – you have to see this stuff.” It was new data that showed that the expansion of the universe was getting faster and faster, which could only be explained by extra, unseen “dark energy” in the universe.’

It is an interesting test for whether you believe in the ‘research led teaching’ trope. Or is it: will this be in the exam?

Noting that 1,500 people had travelled to Davos by private jet to hear David Attenborough talk about climate change, he said he was bewildered that no one was talking about raising taxes on the rich.

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No, not that sort of (dermatological scale). Adam Tooze quoted in FT Alphachat (or another link).

In three years China used more cement that the USA in the whole of the 20th century.

And when they say you are a dreamer, a fool, and deluded, I will use a nice inversion by Lincoln Allison:

Of course, you’re assuming that none of this will ever happen. But you assumed that Brexit and Trump would never happen, didn’t you? 

(Smashing things is however easier than building things).

Seen in George Square. I get the Econ101 bit, the 1984 reference, but… And no, I can’t manage crosswords either — although I shared a flat with somebody who, as a student, refused to leave his bed until he had completed the Telegraph crossword. There were studies, and then those other studies.

Not that sort of….