klenwell

The other thing I recall tying those two periods together was enthusiasts saying, in the face of an obvious bubble, "Well, things are different this time."

My glib summation of those two events:

- Dotcom boom deregulated (in the social and technological sense as much as the legal) investing (e.g. the rise of day-trading).

- 2000s housing bubble (pre-GFC) deregulated home-buying (subprime adjustable-rate mortgages).

Perhaps our parting assessment of the ZIRP era will be it cut to the chase and deregulated gambling.

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".

In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."

It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.

I think the killer app will be online meetings. Online socializing really.

I work fully remote and Zoom/Meet works fine for meetings. But I kinda dread things like team happy hour and find you have to keep them structured like a meeting to work with group video calls.

Visuals aren't even the key factor here. It's audio. I find the obstacle to casual socializing is not being able to directionally focus audio so overlapping conversations are possible.

I agree. It is an amazing, quasi-anachronistic novel. Speaking of Utopia, Melville offers his own vision of it in Chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand:

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

It's an odd fish.

E.O. Wilson does a wonderful job in the opening of his book Consilience illustrating the philosophical tension between the Realists (Linnaeans) and Nominalists (Darwinists) that the New Yorker reviewer zeroes in on:

My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.

I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.

Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.

I take it you didn't sniff any deeper. From the text:

Gunnar Broberg’s biography dutifully accompanies Linnaeus every step of the way, trekking through his life for four-hundred-plus pages. These are not, unfortunately, a pleasure to read... The main problem with “The Man Who Loved Nature,” though, is not all the things in it we don’t need to know but all the things we need to know that aren’t in it.

It's a book review.