The Lindy effect, recently popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game, tries to explain the “Test of Time”, or granny’s wisdom. It’s a heuristic to streamline decisionmaking over the long term, and it has predictive qualities. For example, if a business is only a year old, the most likely scenario is that it will last one year more. However, if it does last two years, then the likelihood that it will last an additional two years increases.
To state the hypothesis as it applies to music: If a song or an album has been remembered for 20 years, then it’s more likely to be remembered for another 20 years. If it’s been remembered for 50 years, then it’s probably pretty damn good. If it’s been remembered for centuries, then it’s probably better than you can understand.
If this is true, then it might explain why anyone who has been listening to music for more than a decade has the sense that music was simply better back in the day. It’s not that music is necessarily worse now, on average – we’re in the moment, and it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
What we hear in the daily soundtrack of life, when you’re getting your hair cut, out shopping, something coming from someone’s phone at the other end of the bus, is noise. The quality of this music is going to vary wildly because what is popular doesn’t necessarily correlate to what is good. The signal is the true state of music, which fluctuates, and can come from anywhere from the top of the pop charts to underground niche movements.
What we think of as “good older music” is not representative of the general state of music back then. It might be the case those songs that are remembered, and still played on the radio, TV and movies, happen to be the exceptional outliers. The Lindy effect is about filtering: Time has sifted out the mediocre songs that were popular for arbitrary or non-universal reasons, or were just faddish. If you’re going to go to the trouble of looking back to the 1980s now, what you bring back for us better be good.
And what is considered as great music from decades ago wasn’t necessarily chart material. But in the long term, they have been rediscovered by subsequent generations.
James Smith, “The myth of ‘bad’ modern music”, Being Libertarian, 2019-02-25.
May 26, 2022
QotD: They don’t make good music any more
May 25, 2022
“What is a reasonable general concern?”
In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:
“Canadian Border Sign” by jimmywayne is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
What is a reasonable general concern?
That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.
And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.
Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.
Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.
It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.
A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.
But a general concern? A general preoccupation?
That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.
It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.
How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.
Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.
The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.
That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.
The Spy Game That Killed Yamamoto – WW2 – Spies & Ties 17
World War Two
Published 24 May 2022We’ve already seen the power of signals intelligence. Churchill loves being fed information from MI6’s Ultra. Now it brings a vengeance for his American allies. They manage to bag the scourge of Pearl Harbor, C-in-C of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
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British lack-of-flair in naming things
Ed West wonders why the Brits come up with such boring names for, well, everything:
A detail from the Mapping London Tube Zones map – https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2021/tube-zones/
Back in the 1850s, when London was getting its first proper government, the authorities had a problem with street names – they were just so boring that it was actually confusing.
According to Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City: “In 1853, London had twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters – and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets.”
Bearing in mind how small London was at the time, no more than zone 1 and bits of zone 2, it’s quite impressive that they managed to have so many Victoria Streets. Impressive, and obviously stupid. The Metropolitan Board of Works forced parishes to rename duplicates; but even as the capital expanded, borough councils continued the practice, so that dozens of new Victoria roads and streets were created (many of which have since been changed).
Perhaps it reflects a deeply content and loyal public, but it’s more a testimony to how dull and unimaginative the British are about naming things. And it’s a fine tradition we continue today with the Elizabeth Line.
[…]
Although the new Elizabethans are in many ways the anti-Victorians – declinist, slow to get things built, filled with civilisational self-hatred – in our naming patterns we are recognisably the same people.
A few years back, when Britain launched its biggest ever warship, weighing in at 65,000 tons, they named it HMS Queen Elizabeth. This came after it was decided we needed a new name for our part of Antarctica – with huge originality, they went for “Queen Elizabeth Land”. Even Big Ben was renamed the Queen Elizabeth Tower in 2012.
The Queen, bizarrely, has twenty hospitals named after her, which led to a small revolt when the South Glasgow University Hospital became the latest. Considering how many brilliant scientists Scotland has produced, you might think they could have found someone else. Alexander Fleming, one of the alternatives suggested, grew up not far away in Ayrshire and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.
Edward Jenner, meanwhile, has the Viale Edoardo Jenner in Milan named in his honour, and a town in Pennsylvania. While there is a Jenner Road in Stoke Newington, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was in tribute to the man who discovered vaccinations. That is because, when we honour someone with a street, the British shyly only feature their surname; the only time we follow the continental pattern of including the full name is, bizarrely, with local councillors. The people who run local government in Britain are not against honouring heroes in theory, they just think the real heroes aren’t explorers, scientists or military leaders, but the people who run local government.
M1915 Villar Perosa
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Aug 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Villar Perosa is one of the first small machine guns developed and used by a military force. It was designed in Italy and introduced in 1915 as an aircraft weapon, to be used in a flexible mount by an airplane’s observer. The gun consists of two independent firing actions mounted together. Each fires from an open bolt as a rate of 1200-1500 rounds/minute, feeding from a 25 round magazine of 9mm Glisenti cartridges. This allowed the maximum possible volume of fire in an aerial combat situation, where in 1915 ballistic power was not particularly important.
As aircraft armaments improved and synchronized, belt-fed machine guns became practical, the Villar Perosa was quickly made obsolete in aerial use. The Italian military experimented with several applications of the weapon in ground combat, including slings and belt fittings for walking fire, tripods, mounts with integral armor shields, and bicycle mounts. None of these proved particularly successful, as the elements that made the gun well adapted to early aerial use (high rate of fire with a small cartridge) made it relatively ineffective for infantry use.
Ultimately, the best use of the Villar Perosa was to break them up and convert the actions into shoulder-fired submachine guns. Designs to do this were developed by both the Beretta company and Villar Perosa themselves, and in 1918 these guns entered service in the same approximate period as the first German MP-18 submachine guns. Because of this recycling, intact M1915 Villar Perosa guns are quite rare today.
QotD: The “social responsibility” of business
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.
May 24, 2022
History of Rome in 15 Buildings 10. Santa Sabina
toldinstone
Published 2 Oct 2018Through some combination of military disasters, barbarian migrations, social change, and dynastic bad luck, the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century. In this tenth episode of our History of Rome, focused on the church of Santa Sabina, we will consider some of the implications of this crisis.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans. You can find a preview of the book here:
https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…
If you’re so inclined, you can follow me elsewhere on the web:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/santa-sabina/Thanks for watching!
QotD: Portuguese art and creative genius
Then the economy recovered, they got jobs, a lot of them connected to or linked to government and all of that stopped. And of course with the EU there are no illegal stalls. I mean Papiere, bitte and all that.
And somehow, perhaps because the new generation knows they have all sorts of “benefits” and “support” coming to them and have never felt the bite of chaos, the crafts and arts in the stores are either startlingly mundane or bizarre. I’m still rather puzzled by entire “scenes from life” (including one that was an operating room) sculpted with penises instead of humans. I mean … who even buys that? Okay. We know who buys that. But do the German tourists and their nostalgie de la boue think they’re tapping into something uniquely “uninhibited and free”, some kind of wild Portuguese sexuality? Raises eyebrow. The Portuguese have been civilized land long before the Germans traded their furs for a place as Roman soldiers. And sure, the Romans could be startlingly and inappropriately sexual (I call to mind a mural, not out of place in a Roman middle class home that had monkeys copulating with children) but it didn’t mean that the culture was “free”, rather that they had different rules. Frankly, the sixties attempt to erase history has corrupted real art and … well, everything else.
Which is kind of the college student thing. Chaos and free time allows you to be very creative, but then you’re not organized enough to parlay that into a career. (I mean, if they’re destined to be the touristic “warm port” of Europe, perhaps they should consider letting real art flourish. Or even encouraging it. Grants for small businesses and young people. It beats the jobs that don’t exist. Just demand they be actually creative and accomplished, instead of giving grants for art that my kids could do at age two and about as interesting.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
May 23, 2022
Drowning Germans, Burning Jews – WAH 061 – May 22, 1943
World War Two
Published 22 May 2022When Air Marshal Arthur Harris and Reichspropagandaminister Joseph Goebbels agree that a lot of death and destruction is not enough death and destruction, the world is in trouble.
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Inside A Woodturners Woodshop – Old vs. New
Townsends
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QotD: The adoption of Astrology by the Greeks and Romans
This portability is not restricted merely to divination. Herodotus’ suspicion that quite a bit of Greek religion might have come from somewhere else has merit, though Anatolia, not Egypt, appears to be the main source (see: M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon (1999); and for the person already writing this comment, yes I am aware of Bernal’s Black Athena and no I am not convinced, nor are many specialists in the field). The Romans were open about importing gods from Greece and make a clear distinction between gods worshiped in traditional Roman manner and those imported from Greece (a quite small number) and thus whose rituals followed ritus graecus – rituals in Greek fashion.
In other cases, the foreign practice was modified to fit the culture it arrived in. The Romans adopted the cult of Cybele, an Anatolian goddess, during the dark days of the Second Punic War (the Senate made that decision based on a consultation with the Sibylline books, a written source of oracular prophecy we can talk about another day). Cybele was called Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) in Rome, and it seems made some modifications to her rituals, in particular possibly limiting the role of the Galli (eunuch priests) whose rituals and style seemed decidedly “unRoman” (though I should note that the scholarship here is contested and the issue and evidence complex).
The normal technical term for this kind of religious borrowing is syncretism, and it is a sort of interweaving of religious traditions that polytheisms both ancient and modern are exceptionally capable of. It is simply not hard to add one more god or one more ritual into a religious system that already assumes the existence of innumerable gods.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part III: Polling the Gods”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-08.
May 22, 2022
Axis Prisoners Face French Wrath – WW2 – 195 – May 21 1943
World War Two
Published 21 May 2022The Allies have won the battle for Africa, but now they have nearly 250,000 POWs to care for, and do not have the facilities to do so. The Trident Conference continues in Washington to try and decide the direction of the Allied war effort, but they launch the Dambuster Raids this week in Germany to try and cripple German water power — and thus, industry — with a new type of bomb.
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HMCS Bras D’Or; The world’s fastest warship and the pinnacle of hydrofoil development in Canada
Polyus Studios
Published 3 Feb 2022Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosHMCS Bras D’Or was the pinnacle of over 100 years of hydrofoil development in Canada. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell and ending with the Proteus, hydrofoils held the promise of faster travel over the waves. Unfortunately the technology never found a comfortable fit in either military or civil fleets. It was designed to be an ASW hunter but by the time she was ready, the Navy was settled on using the now familiar Destroyer/Helicopter combos.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Alexander Graham Bell and Casey Baldwin
2:28 The R-100 Massawippi
5:46 The R-103 Baddeck
7:15 The Rx
8:48 Anti-submarine warfare hydrofoil concept
12:24 FHE-400 Bras D’Or
17:23 Testing and refinement
19:25 Cancellation
20:18 Proteus
20:45 ConclusionMusic:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project
“Your Suggestions” – Unicorn Heads#BrasDor #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios
QotD: Surveying Upper Canada
You have just drawn an Ontario Township.
Now, make your grid. The line roads, north and south, should be 100 chains apart (one-and-a-quarter miles), and the east-west sideroads either the same, or different. They needn’t come out evenly; you may leave a fraction on whichever side you didn’t start from. The whole board may have to be tilted at the “front” (baseline) to parallel a lakeshore, or accommodate the “back” of the next Township down. If you’re in the mood, you might want to draw a diagonal road, right through everything.
Congratulations. You may now have a job as one of His Majesty’s surveyors in pioneer Ontario. It’s a much better job than down south of British North America, where the land is somewhat populated already, and everyone seems to have an opinion. Up here, not yet any people in the way. But there is still the difficulty of slashing through the bush. You only draw “concessions” — future roads defining blocks, to be further subdivided into future farmlots. When the people granted land move in, they will be compelled by the guvmint to actually dig those endless, straight, access roads.
This will make the roads more interesting. Where the lines meet an obstacle, you get a little run around it. Or a big one, if the obstacle continues. Intersections don’t quite meet, so you get a jog. Or, you decide to put the jog in the middle of nowhere, instead. There were at least five major surveying systems in Upper Canada (later “Ontario”), and dozens of variations on each one. The line and side roads might be 66 chains apart, or more than twice that, depending on some local magnate’s whim. Or the surveyor may have been drunk that day.
David Warren, “Esquesan”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-04-10.
May 21, 2022
Ukraine & T-72: The death of the tank? | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 20 May 2022Tank Museum Curator David Willey explores the current conflict in Ukraine and the performance of the T-72 tank; putting it into historical context and exploring other times during the last hundred years when the death of the tank has been predicted.
Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
00:00 | Intro
00:40 | Wider context
11:01 | Tanks in HistoryWith thanks to the sources, we’ve used in this film. We’ve tried our best to credit where we’ve been able, but please do comment if you see something we’ve missed.
Credits:
warontherocks.com, autoevolution.com, oryxspioenkop.com, Ed Cumming – Daily Telegraph, mvs.gov.ua., US National Archives, Ukrainian 25th Airborne, army.inform.com.ua, Wikicommons#tankmuseum #Ukraine #DavidWilley
