Mornings are the perfect time for me to listen to music. My partner is not yet awake, so I don’t want to make too much noise, and my brain has not yet warmed up enough to do anything too demanding. And the first thing I listen to on a Monday morning is the week’s new Discover Weekly playlist.
This week I was lead round in an interesting circle. The first track I liked was ‘Set Me On Fire’ by Birdmask. Read More...
I did my partner a service by changing the painfully slow hard drive in her laptop for a solid state drive. I had made a similar change with my own laptop: installing Windows originally on the hard disk took three or four hours, but with the SSD I was finished in just 15 minutes.
However, her old drive had a capacity of 500 gigabytes whereas the new SSD had only 120. Read More...
A key thesis in The Wealth of Nationsis that exchange is good; it allows for specialisation and hence higher productivity. Adam Smith uses this thesis to discuss at length why cities on a coast or navigable river were richer than those inland. Such cities could trade a lot more because transporting goods over water is much easier than transporting them over land.
This can explain in part why early western civilizations developed around the Mediterranean Sea rather than say, up in the Alps. Read More...
