Halfway down the Danube

Lint answers 2

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Andrew Reeves, sometimes I backtrack references, or check forward citations. Sometimes I do keyword searches. Sometimes I'll flip through online tables of contents. And sometimes, hell if I know where I got that.

I see there's a swell of interest in Hideyoshi's personal letters.

Okay, the article is available on JSTOR, "An introduction to the private correspondence of Toyotomi Hideyoshi," Adriana Boscaro, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 27, No. 4. (Winter, 1972), pp. 415-421.

They're largely written in kana (syllabary) and not kanji (characters), because they're mainly written for women and children, and this was viewed as the appropriate form at that time. Hideyoshi had some tics of expression, and I gather sometimes used a sort of affectionate pig-Latin. He deeply loved his mother; during the siege of Odawara, he wrote:

"Go to some place and thus amuse yourself -- and please, become young once more. I do beg you to do this."

He wrote letters to his wife and concubines to better navigate those complicated relationships, and for his young son Hideyori, nothing was too good for him: no painful moxabustion treatments, milk to help him grow, only his dad could kiss him on the lips.

The chronology is interesting: during the Korean debacle, Hideyoshi seems to have retreated within himself, writing about playing uribatake ("a pastime invented, so it is said, by Hideyoshi himself. It consisted of pretending to cultivate and then sell cucumbers") and funaasobi ("outings in a boat for the purpose of fishing, drinking and rocking to Nugent writing poetry").

His last personal letter was written to an unknown recipient, beginning "As I am ill and feel lonely, I have taken up the brush," and ending, "This one single letter is worth ten thousand letters written in normal circumstances." Two months later he died.

Syd Webb, it actually seems to be a very late survival of ancient Egyptian religious lore, which was transmitted through Gnostic texts to the hands of those very capable Irish monks. By the time of the Muslim conquest, the discontinuity was nearly complete; I only know of one possible survival of ancient Egyptian religious practice in Muslim Egypt (and not customs delinked from the old pantheon).

Bernard, what makes you think the Spanish solved the fat tails problem? It was a risk pool for ships in convoys under chartered military escort. Pro rata, but other insurance reduced the value you could claim by the amount of coverage. No actuarial tables, no nothing: some guy in Seville came up with the rate for each voyage, and wow did they go up in the seventeenth century.

Mike, whoa, slow down there Tex. The Conway and Kochen is a sweet recent result in quantum mechanics. The really brief version: "if we have free will, then so do elementary particles", and the logically equivalent version: "if elementary particles don't have free will, then neither do we" -- "free will" here meaning, "behavior not determined by the previous history of the universe".

The Derluguian is a review of a smart Marxist take on globalization. The Cucker and Smale does not have immediate psychological correlates. The De Vany and Walls, well:

We discover that box-office revenues are asymptotically Pareto-distributed and have infinite variance. The mean is dominated by rare blockbuster movies that are located in the far right tail. There is no typical movie because box-office revenue outcomes do not converge to an average: revenues diverge over all scales. The studio model of risk management lacks a foundation in theory or evidence, and revenue forecasts have zero precision.

Or, as they quote William Goldman, "nobody knows anything."

Posted by coyu at February 28, 2007 01:46 AM