Cognitive sciences @ McGill - not sure how closely related that course was, but it was in the Philosophy department

@ McGill (last year)

The timing of last night’s total lunar eclipse could have been timed by a competent student of Ptolemy 1800 years ago, +/- 13 minutes (*). A wrong but shrewd model, honed on centuries of good data, can perform very well.

(*) that was my son’s final exam last year in a Babylonian astronomy class.

WaPo not on the list, though. You should have offered to do a special issue on MT for $40m.

John Cochrane…. a fat finger mistake, as his commentary makes clear.

The birth of coinage - c650BC, five consecutive denominations (each half of the one on the left). Lydian coins, 55% gold and 45% silver. The one on the right weighs 0.3g and could probably buy a few sheep. Not quite small change…

And there’s a coin museum next door!

El archivo general de Simancas has joined the 21st c.! Now we can take pictures from our seats without limit

It’s Saturday Oct 16, 1582 and everyone in Naples is shopping for a new calendar (calendario novamente stampato). The Pope thought he could impose a worldwide copyright for the inventor, but the Catholic King told his viceroy to ignore this infringement on his jurisdiction.

still an improvement over smoggy 20th c.

Congress structured the Fed to limit politicization of monetary policy and prevent Presidents from manipulating interest rates. History of the Eccles-Glass battle proves this point, from Gary Richardson and David W. Wilcox https://www.nber.org/papers/w33174

nobody does more brutal fashion reviews than the irish

Breakthrough in payments technology: a Swedish coin weighing 19kg (1648) and a note of same value (1666).

Tango and financial history

Because the conclusions are always stated in the introduction - economists are impatient readers, especially with 50-page papers.

Hi there

Banco de la Nación Argentina: register of illiterate clients (with fingerprints), c1900-02. Several Turks, one Arab, one German.

Ah, so the drawings represent the shops rather than the items. That makes more sense.

Then no need for drawings?

How was the illiterate servant supposed to distinguish un bocal di vino from un bocal de tondo?

Shouldn’t the graph be symmetric around the (0,0) point?