Mine were: – Caro's The Power Broker – Koestler's Sleepwalkers – Lewis's The Discarded Image – Massie's Dreadnought – Packenham's Boer War – Rose's Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes – Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033854

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

"The first difficulty in the way of establishing a probability that one course of action will give a better total result than another, lies in the fact that we have to take account of the effects of both throughout an infinite future. We have no certainty but that, if we do one action now, the Universe will, throughout all time, differ in some way from what it would have been, if we had done another; and, if there is such a permanent difference, it is certainly relevant to our calculation.

But it is quite certain that our causal knowledge is utterly insufficient to tell us what different effects will probably result from two different actions, except within a comparatively short space of time; we can certainly only pretend to calculate the effects of actions within what may be called an ‘immediate’ future. No one, when he proceeds upon what he considers a rational consideration of effects, would guide his choice by any forecast that went beyond a few centuries at most; and, in general, we consider that we have acted rationally, if we think we have secured a balance of good within a few years or months or days."

'None of the team was [singular] prepared' and 'None of the team were [plural] prepared' are both correct.

The sentences 'Real Madrid have performed well this year' and 'Real Madrid has performed well this year' are both grammatically acceptable, and probably used roughly the same amount.

A related example is the word 'none' (= 'not one'). Technically it should govern a singular verb (e.g. 'None of the players is good enough') but you'll now see it a lot with a plural verb (e.g. 'None of the players are good enough').

Will I like The Dawn of Everything if I didn't like Harari's Sapiens? (I loved Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years)

Mine were: – Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000) – William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (1991) – John Ma, Polis (2024) – John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (1982)

(Apologies if someone has posted something similar recently. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268570

Points: 117

# Comments: 150

Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s translation): https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

That said, I disagreed with lots of her choices. Odysseus' "I could not do my exercise routine" (8.232) is a particularly egregious rendition of a line in Greek that says nothing more than "There were not sufficient supplies on the ship". There are many other examples.

What might I move on to next?

I think I'm more interested in the real-world applications of systems theory (e.g. how we might go about fixing a massively complicated system like the NHS) than anything purely mathematical, though understand there's probably quite a lot of overlap here.

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33519009

Points: 34

# Comments: 9