I decided to put my old textbooks on amazon today. One sold less than an hour later, McQuarrie's Physical Chemistry. I bought this book fall 2000 for the first physical chemistry class at UC Irvine - it was my first textbook in quantum mechanics. I remember scribing partition functions from the book into MathCAD to calculate the heat capacity of carbon monoxide, learning linear algebra from the math chapters, pondering for hours about the variational principle, gaining an aversion to perturbation theory, all based on material from this one book. I've had the book for eight years, and during the last five it's sat on my shelf largely ignored. Now it's gone.

I've never liked the concept. It just seems to have so little predictive value to say that "Unexpected Things Happen." The evidence it highlights is interesting wrt the semantics / syntax dichotomy though. Think of semantics as searching in sparse spaces and syntax as searching in dense spaces. In that language one could think of Black Swans as semantics breaking events, events which confuse the formalism and force one to abandon a nice dense space for some unbounded sparse search.

We limit ourselves to certain semantic spaces depending on the problem we are solving, from the inside of which many observations may look representable but are in fact not.

Salon on Saturday was quite heated... we spent some time debating the idea of living well as a country without growth. Growth brings better living, sure, but what's so bad about a constant standard of living? There was the assumption that zero growth meant a constant standard of living.

Not true! Because of trade. We live so well today because we trade. No growth = no efficiency improvement = eventually nothing to trade as others outcompete you. For no growth to mean a constant standard of living, you need to be isolationist as well!

Note that this applies to both countries and individuals.