Six weeks later

Didn’t keep up with posting here very well, did I. Last six weeks haven’t been too unproductive – got a lot of reading done, picked up a bit of regular translation work (I think), the existing work is going fine. Got around to stuff like getting a credit card and sorting finances out a bit. Didn’t run as much as I should have. Not too bad though.

Let’s revisit the reading list:

Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China. Finished! Recommending this one to anyone who wants a general survey of China’s last four centuries. Or was it five.

Will Hutton’s The Writing on the Wall. Looked at this one again briefly. It’s suffering for being in ebook format, as I’m tending to prefer paper books at the moment.

Spence’s, again,The Gate of Heavenly Peace. Forgot about it. Same goes for:

Jared Diamond’s Collapse.

The Wisdom of Crowds

As for that crop of economics books, I actually read most of them:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
P.J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich
Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

All finished, bar A Random Walk on Wall Street, which I only have in PDF, so . . .

Have also now got a bunch of behavioural economics books I need to read, don’t have the names handy, but including that Nudge one that’s been in the papers.

In Bruges

Just watched this. Thought it was really good. While there weren’t any jaw-dropping twists the plot keeps moving along at a fair clip, the dialogue is fantastic and Colin Farrell’s turn as Father Dougal crossed with Twelve Monkey’s Brad Pitt is classic. Not a classic, but well worth a watch.

The End of History

Well, not the actual end. But I’ve almost finished my book on Chinese history, which is a great achievement, as it’s really long. We’re just about to start the 1980s. Learnt quite a bit today.

Also did some maths – God, but it’s boring – and dealt with some overdue emails. Nothing spectacular, but a productive day.

July 15

Productive day, by recent standards. Finished off a translation and sent it in a day early, which is good. Need to keep up the tempo, as this particular client doesn’t tend to be in a rush and it’s therefore easy to let the agreed one-week turnarounds slip. However I’d be surprised if it isn’t noted when that happens.

Supermarket. Got home. Started reading, noticed I was actually asleep, then threw myself out of the house and down to the library, where I got a solid four hours of reading and maths done. With Chinese history we’re now into the Cultural Revolution – Lin Biao’s just met his end. Maths is dull, but I like it when I get the answers right.

Spent most of the evening upgrading a website, which just meant waiting for thousands of files to FTP their way up and down the Internet, then trying to spot broken things before all the users do. Seems to have worked quite smoothly though.

I probably can’t go to Mars

2050 before we get people on Mars. Given that I’ll be seventy-four by then, my chances of making it to the Red Planet are probably slim.

Current Reading List

Ok, these are the books awaiting me, on order, or in progress.

On China, I have:

Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China. This one I’m about two thirds of the way through and am enjoying it. Very readable, and although of necessity it feels skimpy at times (You tell us Russian pilots used ‘cunning ruses’ Mr Spence, but don’t tell us what they were?) I feel pretty confident I know a hell of a lot more than I did previously.

Will Hutton’s The Writing on the Wall. I should have read this when it came out a few years back. I had a look through the first chapter and so far it seems reasonable.

Spence’s, again,The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution. This one covers the end of the emperors to the start of reform. I got it last year with The Search for Modern China. I may opt to not read this one, will take a look after finishing The Search, and then decide if there’s anything to be gained.

That’s all currently for China, but I’d like to get some more academic or heavyweight stuff once that’s all done. Ideally economics and environment, but I’ve been enjoying the history lately. Was also looking earlier at some ‘China in Africa’ books, but couldn’t figure out the best buy. I should also know more about Chinese literature, and now I think of it, should actually be doing some reading in Chinese or it’ll atrophy.

On economics, or sort of on economics:

Just finished Tony Cleaver’s Economics: The Basics, which was intended to give me a bit more of a academic basis to what I’d got from popular economics texts like Freakonomics, The Armchair Economist and . . .well, actually just those two.

Working through a basic maths for economists textbook, can’t remember which off-hand. I don’t actually need this at all, but giving my brain a bit of a mathematical work-out staves off feelings of mental decline. Until I reach logarithms.

Unfinished and needing to be got back to are:

Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Again, a book I should have read when it first came out, or not at all. And

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, who I first came across in the New Yorker. Interesting book, but I suspect I might get more out of it after finishing some more economics reading. That’s not what I stopped reading it though, I just got bored.

I also just ordered a clutch of books on a reading list I found on Greg Mankiw’s site, which is what promoted this little inventory. These are

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
P.J. O’Rourke, Eat the Rich
Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

I have no idea when all these are going to get read. Recreational reading at the moment is, as mentioned, Yiyun Li’s short story collection.

Well . . .

. . . it’s Sunday, it’s allowed to be lazy.

Read some Chinese history – the Hundred Flowers have had their pretty little blossoms lopped off. That’s about it for constructive activity today, I’m afraid. Maybe later . . .

But now, I have the first episode of season four of Weeds to watch. Was a huge fan of Weeds in its first and second seasons when Nancy’s transformation into a drug dealer was plausible, as it was all quite small-scale and incremental. But by season three she’s running hard drugs and hanging out with comedy gangsters, and the strain was showing. Hoping for a return to form, especially as there’s no other good telly till The Shield comes back . . .

Today’s good news is that my torrent program hadn’t, as I’d thought, wiped a whole load of files. This means that I do, rather than don’t, have two movies to watch – In Bruges, which has come highly recommended, and Recount, which I saw mentioned somewhere on the Internet and presumably liked the sound of enough to go and find the torrent. It’s about the recount in Florida in the 200? US elections. I’m sure it’ll be really exciting.

Hayfever no more

Ha! Modern pharmaceuticals work their magic once again, and so far today my eyes haven’t demanded scratching once, and sneezing fits have been kept to a socially-acceptable minimum. And that’s only on the second day of pill-popping. Another week of this and I should have super-fit sinuses. Assuming, that is, that I can remember to keep taking them.

Mmm, Bacon

8.30pm, surely late enough to review the day.

Slept for ten hours last night. Really need to get more active. Rattled through another translation this morning. Again it’ll need quite a bit of reworking – some details on international climate change mechanisms and theories of blah blah blah I’ll need to spend some time looking up. So two translations done but needing edited / patched up and a handful in the ‘to do’ folder.

Also managed another chapter of Chinese history. The KMT are about to scarper for Taiwan, and Mao’s declaring the PRC a done deal. It’s interesting reading through history and thinking about what else might have happened – if the Nationalists had shown more military and economic competence maybe we’d have had a north-south stalemate in China, etc, etc. You can also get a bit more fanciful and wonder if Song QIngling and Albert Einstein met when he visited Shanghai in 1922, and if they fell in love. Because if they did and married in 1925, after Sun Yat-Sen died . . .

Don’t think I did anything else. Meant to finish off those two translations in the afternoon, but . . . didn’t.

Things I read today . . .

Reading about Yiyun Li earlier, I came across her experiences during the year of military training which first year Peking University students were subjected to after 1989. Interesting story.

I had to subscribe to Prospect to get to read the piece – twelve pounds for a years web-only access, which I thought was a bargain. Assuming I read it. But to get my money’s worth for today at least I stuck around and read a few more pieces. The links below may be to subscription-only links I’m afraid.

A round table discussion on avoiding financial hiccups like the one we’re currently experiencing was interesting. I’ve been trying to be more informed on economics lately, and this certainly reduced my levels of ignorance. Linking executive pay to company performance over a five or ten year timescale and including clawback clauses in contracts were new. Article on George Osbourne was also interesting. The Tory party is undergoing quite the rejuvenation at the moment and while I’m no conservative, capital-C or otherwise, Britain’s (or maybe just England and Wales) has been lacking an effective opposition for too long.

A lot of the translation work I do is on environmental issues, so the interview with Nick Stern, author of the review on the economics of climate change which had an impact back in 2006, rang plenty of bells. I’ve done translations on the kind of mechanisms he talks about, and there’s one in my in-tray which I think will cover the same topics.