My first programming language was BASIC. I wrote simple math programs, mostly. At first, I wrote them on paper, not having any kind of computer they could work on, and then I would mentally step through them. They were an interesting sort of logic puzzle. I did eventually learn that my grandmother had a children's toy computer with a one-line console that you could enter BASIC programs into and have them run. Later, I got a graphing calculator that used a variant of BASIC as well. Because I tended to get my information from libraries, I didn't realize at the time that BASIC had fallen out of widespread use a few years before I was born. When I found out, I promptly took a bus to the local public library, checked out a book on C++, and tried programming on paper with that, and boy, did that not go well!

It's widely known that Tim Berners-Lee produced the first modern website. However, it's perhaps not as well known that it's still online, and you can go see it here.

2020-12-12

Today, the world has seen about half a century of declining population growth, moving closer to population stability, while adequate nutrition is available to an increasing fraction of the world's population. It was by no means clear, fifty years ago, that things would turn out so well. Between 1965 and 1970, world annual population passed 2%, which is an incredible rate -- it would result in a doubling of population every 35 years. It was in this environment that Paul Ehrlich published his famous 1968 Population Bomb warning that world death rates would increase amidst the starvation of hundreds of millions during the 1970's and 1980's.

Norman Borlaug, among others, ensured that Ehrlich's predictions of doom did not come to pass. This is not to say Borlaug was unsympathetic to Ehrlich's concerns -- Borlaug continued for a long time to express concerns about global population. But his work on dwarf varieties of wheat helped Mexico, Pakistan, India, and the developing world more generally to avoid food shortages.

Since then, Mexican and Indian Total Fertility Rates have fallen to between 2.1 and 2.2 -- about 2.1 being the rate needed for a stable population long-term. And while Pakistan's fertility has not yet stablized, I read that from 2000 to 2020 it has dropped from 5.0 to 3.6, which is significant movement in that direction. The world more broadly has seen a decrease in TFR from 4.96 in the early 1950's to around 2.5 this decade. In other words, the bulk of the fertility changes needed to stabilize world population have already occurred.

2020-11-26

When I was eleven, my grandfather, the late Ronald Henderson, professor of English at Cincinnati Christian University for forty years, had me audit a class in geology. This would have been about 2002. Reuben Bullard was the University's geology professor, a potentially sensitive spot to occupy in a social circle where the age of the earth was considered a theological issue. I never was able to figure out whether he agreed with the scientific consensus on the age of the earth. We learned about how rocks were formed, and their various types, and such, but never once did the age of these rocks come into the picture. He was a gifted man, and looking back I wonder what he really thought.

Prof. Bullard died in 2004, and I had the privilege of taking his last geology class. What I did not fully understand as a child was that he had pioneered the use of geological principles in studying archaeological sites. The prominent archaeologist William Dever wrote in his forward to Bullard's Festschrift, My Father's World:

How did we ever do without a geologist? Or more precisely, a "Geo-archaeologist," for that was the sub-discipline that Reuben created almost single-handedly in Israel (and later in Jordan).

Geo-archaeology is taken for granted today; but when Reuben appeared on the scene in the 1960s no one envisioned it or saw any need for it. Seldom does one individual contribute so much to changing the focus of a discipline, least of all one as traditional as biblical archaeology was back then.

Prof. Bullard was a modest man, and did not give any indication, in that introductory geology course, that he'd had a part in inventing a new subdiscipline. I will always be grateful that I had the chance to study under him.

2020-11-22

Singapore's rapid transition from very poor to very wealthy has not been equalled by any country I know of. But Singapore is a small country, with about six million inhabitants. For a country that has rapidly pulled a very large number of people out of deep poverty, the greatest example in the modern world is China. This nation of 1.4 billion people has a GDP per capita, in current US dollars, of $11,429 as of 2019. This is up from $452 in 1960, which comes to an average annual increase of 5.6%. However, the last ten years after seen a per capita growth rate of just 2.7% on average. (Values calculated from World Bank numbers.)

As China's transformation slows, perhaps the next major story to be told in the elimination of poverty is that of India. India still trails behind China, at about $2,104 of per-capita income as of 2019, up from $82 in 1960. It started behind China and remains behind China -- its growth rate on average the last sixty years has been about the same. But over the last ten years, its growth rate has been more than double China's. If this continues, we will see India catching up, year by year, closer to where China is. This would draw hundreds more millions of people out of poverty and readjust the global balance of power.

2020-11-26

Mao Zedong encouraged Chinese people to have as many children as possible, with the goal of increasing China's military capacity. Of course, high fertility is not sustainable in the long term in the modern world -- resource limits will come up at some point. In the 1970's, the Chinese government began putting downward pressure on births, and in 1979 rolled out the one-child policy. This lasted, with various modifications, loopholes, and exceptions, until 2015, when it was replaced with a two-child policy. The Chinese government is now hoping for birth rates to go up.

This may not work. China, by adopting a two-child policy, is still putting more pressure downward on births than Thailand, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, which all have lower rates than China despite allowing people to have as many children as they want. All over the modern world, birth rates have either dropped to below-replacement levels or seem to be headed in that direction. It is unclear if or when this trend will stabilize. China may find that it regrets having artificially pushed rates downward ahead of the natural trend-line. The Chinese workforce has already been shrinking since about 2013. Because any new births will not enter the workforce for about two decades, that means at least two decades of shrinking workforce are already baked in. To turn things around would require a large increase in the number of children over the next two decades, at the same time that adult only children are facing the responsibility of caring alone for two parents and four grandparents. It may turn out to be impossible to get fertility rates up under those conditions. Time will tell.

While I am not personally religious, my family tree goes back into the group known widely as the Christian Churches / Churches of Christ. My parents met each other, and both sets of my grandparents met each other, at the university whose final name was Cincinnati Christian University, and which had previously gone under the names of Cincinnati Bible Seminary and Cincinnati Bible College.

The college was founded in 1924, by the conservative side of a recent denominational split with the group that is now known as the Disciples of Christ. Protestant sects were splitting right and left in those days, and it was on the right that the founders of CCU fell. It grew to occupy an important social position in the Christian Churches as an intellectual center and training-ground for ministers. Opinions vary, but the mid-sixties must have been near its peak influence. You can see an old recruitment video, in which both my grandparents on one side of my family appear, here.

My grandfather, Ronald Henderson, was a professor there from 1961-2001, and through his influence and other family connections the social world of CCU continues to form a background to my family's world. The college eventually shut down in 2019 after facing a long and complex battle with the financial realities of running a traditional religious university in what is increasingly not a traditional religious world.

Cladistics classifies living beings in terms of biological relatedness rather than the categories we intuitively use in English. See, for example, the title of Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist.

Everybody knows about Charles Darwin, and I'm not here to defend his theories. The case for evolution is made ably by Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution is True, and I'd direct anyone curious to read it. There'll be no relitigating a dead controversy here.

What is sometimes not appreciated is that Darwin's theory of natural selection is an outgrowth of Thomas Malthus's theories on the principles of population growth. Thomas Malthus observed that because populations, both human and animal, tend to grow exponentially when unchecked, they will grow until they bump up against resource limits strict enough to make survival difficult. Once limits are in play and survival is difficult, some survive and produce offspring, while others do not. Here it is that Darwin had his crucial insight. If the survivors vary from those who perish in certain traits, and if those traits are heritable, then over time the frequency of these more "fit" traits -- traits suitable to the task of surviving -- will increase throughout a given population.

This provided a mechanism for a population to become better adapted to an environmental niche over time. The mathematics of inheritance would not be worked out by the broader scientific community (despite the forgotten work of Mendel) until the early twentieth century, and the DNA molecule itself wouldn't give up its basic structure in the 1950's. The project of recording the human genetic sequence wouldn't be complete until 2003. But back in 1859, when The Origin of Species was published, the basic implication of Malthus's work was clear. And it was the much-maligned Malthus who got the ball rolling in 1798 with his Essay.

Daniel Dennett is one of the more interesting philosophers alive today. You might enjoy his Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

2020-11-22

I weep for the generation growing up now, as they might go their whole lives without interacting with DOS. Mind you, I'm no child of the DOS era myself -- I was born in 1991, and Microsoft had already released Windows back in 1985. But I did come into this world late enough that DOS was still hanging around -- on an old but still working computer in my grandfather's basement, running the electronic card catalogue at the Cincinnati Public Library, tracking orders at MacDonalds. It was around just enough to make it obvious that GUI's weren't synonymous with operating systems; they were an innovation. They were a choice. And the basic, underlying systems that ran computers were made of something much like text -- the little buttons and menus were just a pretty shell over something more abstract.

I don't really know that today's youth will miss anything necessary by not seeing DOS in day-to-day life. It's possible I'm just being a cranky old geezer and that previous generations would have said similar things about smoke signals, or loud beeping noises, or punch cards, or whatever it was early computers ran on.

2020-11-22

Greek continued to be a language in widespread use in the Eastern Roman Empire well after Greek political power had been superseded by Rome. Latin continued to be the language of scholarship and international relations in Western Europe long after the fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French are all derived from Latin rather than from whatever pre-Latin languages were indigenously spoken in those regions. Some people think that the United States is on its way out as the leading superpower, but even if this is so, it does not mean that English will rapidly give way to some other language.

Some people think Mandarin Chinese is the future global language. But there is still little evidence of large numbers of people outside China adopting it. Meanwhile, in China itself hundreds of millions of people have had some kind of sustained exposure to English, even if fluency is less common. Meanwhile, in India, the legal system conducts its business in English, and the use of English is rapidly spreading throughout the country. Pew Research (source) finds that the great bulk of European children are taught English in school (77%).

The internet and globalization more broadly are leading to an incredible consolidation of languages. In a winner-takes all dynamic, a global world pushes people to learn more widely-spoken languages and leave behind less-used languages. A relative of mine is a missionary working to translate the Bible into a language in Papua New Guinea. A few decades ago, when she began, there were about seven hundred speakers. Today, most of the young people in the three villages where the language exists do not speak their parents' language very fluently, but speak a local language based on English. By the time she finishes her project, if she ever does, it is possible that her Bible will be the last, and first, piece of literature ever written in a language to die out over the next few decades.

This story is repeating itself all over the world. Filipino teenagers frequently speak to one another in English, and President Duterte frequently gives speeches in which he veers back and forth between Tagalog and English apparently at random. Somewhere close to two billion people worldwide speak English, about a quarter of the world population. Meanwhile, the Chinese government estimates that 30% of Chinese people still do not speak Mandarin as of 2014.

The future is hard to predict, but English has at this point acquired widespread enough use that I think it will continue to increase in use worldwide for the rest of my life. Even if the United States loses its status as a global leader -- even if every American somehow disappeared -- I think English has acquired enough status as a cornerstone of international relations, business, and the internet that it's too late to stop it from becoming a language spoken, to one degree or another, by almost everyone worldwide. It's a winner-take-all situation where widespread use begets more widespread use, and it looks to me like English has already won the battle for global dominance in principle. The quadrupling of English use still ahead is just two more doublings to go after the approximately eight doublings in English usage that have occurred in the past five centuries.

There are some who say that widespread Spanish-speaking immigration is somehow going to remove English from its status as the language of the United States. This is nonsense. I came to the United States at five with a five-year-old's fluent command of Spanish, and now I don't talk Spanish too well. This is what happens when small children come to the US speaking Spanish. True, some adults never do quite get the hang of English, just as previous generations of Germans, Poles, and Italians didn't all become English-speakers. But their children did, and do. There is no realistic scenario in which huge numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants and their children for multiple generations do not manage to learn English. Any increase in Hispanic immigration, from a language standpoint, is an increase in the number of English-speakers in the United States: if not immediately, then over the following decades.

The world is made of numbers, among other things, and to understand it you've got to understand numbers, among other things. And in the study of living beings, whether you're talking about biology or economics, having a mental grasp on exponential growth is useful. And to start to intuitively grasp exponents, you're going to need to be able to do rough on-the-fly calculations in your head. And to do that, I think the easiest starting point is to get a little bit familiar with powers of two, powers of ten, and the law of 72.

The powers of ten are well-known, and our numerical system is based on them: 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, ...

The powers of two are a bit harder, but you'd do well to memorize at least the first ten and perhaps the first twenty: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and maybe also 2048, 4096, 8192, 16,384, 32,768, 65,536, 131,072, 262,144, 524,288, and 1,048,576. The really critical thing to notice, for mental-math purposes, is that 1000 is about 1024 and 1,000,000 is about 1,048,576. Or, to round things off a bit: 2^10 = 10^3, 2^20 = 10^6, and so on.

This allows you to move back and forth between doublings and powers of ten with a little practice. Thus, 2^23 must equal 2^3 times 2^10 times 2^10, and by substituting 10^3 for 2^10, we can say that 2^23 = 2^3 times 10^6, or eight million. If you're following along with a calculator, you'll notice the errors, but don't worry about them for now.

Likewise, you can do the same thing backwards. For something to multiply by 7 billion, for example, how many times must it double? 7 billion is 7 times 10^9, and thus 7 times 2^30. And since 7 is between 2^2 and 2^3, multiplying something by 7 billion requires between 22 and 23 doublings. So a process by which something doubles once a century will take 2200 years and change to multiply 7-billion-fold.

The next tool is the rule of 72, which is the key to converting to and from percentage changes and doubling. The rule is that, if something grows at x percent per unit of time, then it will take 72 over x units to double. So something that grows 2% per year, like the hourly productivity of workers in technologically leading modern societies, will double every 36 years. That's about three doublings per century, so in the 200 years of modern economic growth, the richest countries will have seen six doublings of productivity, or 64-fold growth over 200 years.

So you can start working out, in your head, the way that relatively small incremental changes add up to the fundamental transformation of the world. Here's another. Suppose one person has a communicable disease, and the number of people with it grows an average of 10% per week. By the law of 72, that's about a doubling every 10 weeks, five doublings a year, and thus ten doublings every two years. Ten doublings is multiplication by one thousand, so it would take a little over six years for the entire world to catch the disease in question.

More relevantly, consider the coronavirus. If one person had it in November 2019, and it doubled its number of hosts every week, to reach all the world, given unconstrained growth, would have taken 22 to 23 weeks. Of course, there are in the real world complications, like mitigation strategies, contact tracing, weather, masks, and vaccines. But a little simple mental math can help give you an intuition for where things are going if something doesn't stop them.

Gary Larson's The Far Side is one of the various curiosities that my grandfather Henderson introduced me to when I was young. He had a book of Gary Larson's comics as part of the his massive personal library. Like many good things, The Far Side has found its way to the internet, where it can be seen here.

There is a provision in law -- I'm not intimately familiar with the details -- that has the effect of causing works produced by the US government to fall into the public domain. The US government, after all, is funded by tax-payers, and copyright is generally intended to protect the financial interests of authors, so there is an argument that the public has already bought the rights to things produced by the federal government.

The result of this is that certain language self-study courses, originally used for government officials, are allowed to circulate freely on the internet. An example is the Hebrew course, which I found very useful back in my Hebrew-studying days. They are not trendy, or beautiful, or complete -- they consist of a text which introduces simple conversations in the language, and a set of tapes, along with instructions on how to study. But if the Hebrew text is any indication, they really do help with grasping the very basics of a language when you're starting.

Wilhelm Gesenius was -- I am probably quoting someone who I can't remember any more verbatim -- the father of biblical Hebrew lexicography. He produced a celebrated grammar of biblical Hebrew in 1813, which continued to go through various editions during his life. Strikingly for such an early academic work in a well-studied field, his Grammar continues to be used in contemporary academic settings despite the publication of a number of other worthy grammars since.

(2020-11-5) I recently started keeping track of my website on GitHub (here), and getting up and running was made easier by a nifty tutorial produced by Meghan Nelson.

In 1888, Robert Gregg invented a nifty way to write things down really, really fast. Even if you don't want to learn the whole system, you could learn the way to write some common words in it. If you find yourself needing to take notes while people talk frequently, it's very helpful. See Wikipedia's article on it, and a sample here.

Judith Rich Harris wrote the groundbreaking The Nurture Assumption, in which she argued, with a great deal of evidence, that heredity is much more important than commonly imagined, and childrearing much less, in explaining personality variations in human beings. Her conclusions were by no means unanimously received without protest, and people continue to argue about these things, but the publication of her book did mark a milestone in the everlasting nature-nurture debate which has raged ever since Galton coined the term.

2020-11-26

My grandfather, Ronald Henderson, passed away in October 2019 after over a decade of struggling with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. He had always been a quiet, modest man, and in the last few years of his life he was even quieter. He was a man who figured out what he wanted to do early, and then simply did it. Immediately upon completing his master's degree, he became a professor of English at what would later be called Cincinnati Christian University in 1961. He continued in that position for forty years, retiring at 65 in 2001. He then spent ten years volunteering to run correspondence courses for the Christian Restoration Association, a related institution, until stepping down from that position as well, just as his dementia was beginning to kick in.

We spent a lot of time together in the last couple of years of his life, and at some point he lost track of who I was, although he recognized that he knew me somehow, and was always glad to see me. He had always been someone who was very careful about picking his battles, someone who didn't welcome any unnecessary conflict, and his mild temperament served him well as a dementia patient. Often, when insisting that we help him stand, well after he was bedridden and unable to do so, he would drop the issue and move on to another topic, not because we convinced him we needed to stay in bed, but just because he wasn't the type to argue. Sometimes he would simply raise his eyebrows skeptically and move on.

He was an early adopter of computers, which he used to continue a journaling practice he had carrried on for decades on paper. His journals were simple. Sometimes he would go for stretches where he would simply write down any small expenses he had come upon ("40 cents, candy"; "60 cents, lunch"), while sometimes he would write down where he went or who he had visited with. Sometimes he would only write a brief paragraph every week or so. But, bit by bit, unspectacular but steady effort adds up.

A few years before he died, he collected up mentions he had made of me as a child up to when I was about nine years old, and handed me about sixty pages of material. It was an extraordinary gift for a young adult to receive, and it's the reason I keep a fitful journal myself. Hopefully someone will find it as interested when I'm eighty as I did when he was.

He carefully worked to encourage my interest in science, literature, and math from a young age. He is probably where I got my enjoyment of finding typos in published books. He complained to me once that after computers began to be used in editing books, he didn't have nearly as many typos to find anymore in books.

One of his greatest superpowers was that he did not feel the need to loudly express his opinions. I was not given any hint, for example, of how he felt about any particular political party or politician outside of one stray comment he once made when his dementia was quite advanced, and even then it was a perfectly reasonable comment about a particularly awful individual.

Although a quiet man, he was married to a very outgoing wife, and together they entertained upward of two thousand guests at their home in Cincinnati, which I know because they kept a list of everyone who ever visited. They fed the hungry, visited the sick, rented out rooms to innumerable people, and frequently had dozens of students over simultaneously to play cards. As a young child, I thought that this is what a professor was: a parental sort of figure who stood at the center of both the intellectual and personal lives of massive numbers of students. It was only later in life that I realized what extraordinary outliers they had been.

His funeral, needless to say, was extremely well-attended. His obituary, which still exists online, gives only the slightest hint of the life he and my grandmother built together. The institution to which he dedicated his entire career closed down suddenly, after his death but before his funeral, which seemed somehow fitting. It may be childish, but some part of my mind would have found it incongrous for Cincinnati Christian University to go on existing in a world without my grandfather. His influence, though, lives on in the minds of hundreds of people who saw a hardworking and very intelligent, but modest man going about his work faithfully and without fanfare.

Even when he no longer knew where he was or who was visiting him, he welcomed his many visitors with a friendly and dignified demeanor that was amazing to watch. As painful as it was to watch a sharp mind like his unravelling until he could no longer speak, it was at the same time inspiring to learn that a human mind could unravel so gracefully. He hung on longer than expected. Put into hospice care with less than six months to live, he continued for about a year.

One guest, probably unused to dealing with advanced dementia, visited shortly after his transfer to hospice, and said something like, "I heard that you were recently transferred to hospice."

A brief expression of surprise flitted across my grandfathers face -- he no longer could remember events for more than a few hours for the most part -- and he said, "Oh, I hadn't realized." His guest looked striken with awkwardness for a moment, and then my grandfather asked him how he was doing and the conversation went on as if he hadn't just learned he was dying.

My grandfather watched the nightly news, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy every day through most of his adult life, but in his last few months he lost interest. The only thing on television he seemed to like was Animal Planet. Once, after he had nearly entirely ceased speaking, he saw something that sparked his interest, turned to me, and said, "Curiosity. Fascinating." Those were the last words he said to me unprompted beyond simple one-word answers to questions and "Hello."

One fairly uneventful evening, I fed him dinner, which he finished, unusually for him -- he usually just ate a little bit of his food toward the end. I did not realize that it would be his last meal; he simply stopped accepting food and liquid and passed away, surrounded by family, about a week later. He died, his university died, coronavirus struck the world, and now Alex Trebeck, whose Jeopardy he had watched so faithfully, is gone as well. It seems, in a way, like an entire era passed away with him.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It is an absolutely fascinating look at meaning and self-reference. I really need to read it again and see if I can understand it next time. For those those who read GEB and, like myself, are left perplexed, there's always his I Am a Strange Loop, which explains some of the underlying ideas in a much clearer format, although missing quite a bit of the entertainment value and mind-bending quality of GEB.

Sam Harris, in Waking Up, takes Hoftstadter to task over a passage in which Hoftstadter dismisses as childish Douglas Harding's musings on "having no head". You can find Harris's defense of headlessness on p. 144 of Waking Up, and Hofstadter's attack on headlessness on pp. 23-33 of Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (Basic Books, 1981).

HyperCard was a really neat program that used to ship on Mac computers, but now it is gone. There's an interesting conspiracy theory about it. Thanks to growing up with a couple 1983 Macs in the house, I got to experience HyperCard before we had the internet in the house. You could make little objects move about, and factor numbers, and produce lists of prime numbers, or what have you. Kids today don't have that chance. Rest in peace, HyperCard.

Perhaps one of the more puzzling and interesting books I've ever read is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Drawing extensively on ancient literature, Jaynes outlines a theory of what consciousness is, where it came from, and how very ancient and more modern people's minds differ. I find it impossible to accept that his theory is correct -- it seems outlandish and difficult to prove -- but it's difficult not to think that Jaynes was on to something.

The English name Jimmy must be derived from Jim. And Jim, in turn, is a nickname for James. In older English, James was spelled Iames, before "J" was invented. That came from the French name Iames. The French name, in turn, was a shortened version of the Vulgar Latin Iacomus. (The -co- just got swallowed up in the shortening, while the -es is just a common way for Old French masculine words to end.) Iacomus, in turn, was a modified version of Iacobus, as it appeared in Late Latin. The Latin term comes from Greek Ἰάκωβος, Iakobos. And that comes from the Hebrew יַעֲקֹב, which is pronounced something like Yaʿakov.

Yaʿakov to "Jimmy" is a long march, but it happens little by little.

I was born in 1991, and am seventeen years older than my youngest brother. In some ways we were raised similarly, but there's one major difference. I first had internet access at home when I was sixteen or so, while he has never known a world without the internet present. I am, from his standpoint, a dinosaur.

When I was perhaps ten, we got our first pair of computers, two Macs from 1983 which couldn't connect to the internet or display color, but which worked fine and booted up in a few seconds. Most importantly, they had HyperCard, which me and another brother used to learn some rudimentary programming skills. Later, another computer, also old and unable to connect to the internet, allowed us to start messing around with Visual Basic. Internet connections, for me, came from the library. At fifteen, I started a website, oriented around religious topics. I paid for web hosting by check. I made my files in HTML, first raw and later with a free WYSIWYG editor called CoffeeCup. Because I still didn't have the internet at home, I would take a flash drive to a public library computer, and each time I wanted to update the website I would install a program on the library computer that could handle FTP transfers, send my HTML files off to the internet, and leave them there.

I learned about BASIC and HTML through physical books at public libraries, and would take a bus to get there. To make the money that paid for the web hosting and other things, I would deliver pizza, which I did without a cell phone or GPS. I had a physical map of my hometown, used flashcards to memorize the locations of all the streets, and that was that. None of this would make any sense to people ten years younger.

It is often said that, in 1850 or two thousand years ago or whenever, life expectancy was 28, or 43, or what have you, and that therefore a 25-five-year-old was "old" in those days. This is then used to make some sort of observation about early marriage, or divorce, or life insurance, or some other topic. This line of talking contains one truth and one major misconception, and it revolves around a confusion of the typical with the mathematical average (mean).

Consider the case of a hypothetical society in which half of the people who are born die at two years old of the, say, two-year-old flu, while the other half survive their toldlerhood and die at sixty-eight. We would not say, in a society like that, that a thirty-three-year-old was an old person, with two years left to live. A thirty-three-year-old would still be fairly young. That hypothetical world is in fact very much like how the world was before 1800. While there were significantly higher mortality rates across the lifespan, mortality was concentrated in young children. Once one reached adulthood, a fully normal lifespan was entirely plausible. While the average person may have died around thirty, the typical person didn't die at thirty: they died quite a bit earlier or quite a bit later.

One might be forgiven for thinking that life expectancy is how long a person can expect to live. As a crude approximation, that's right. But life expectancy is a product of current statistics, not a product of an intelligent forecast. Right now, as of 2020, there is a death rate for each age. So many one year-olds die out of the whole population, so many two-year-olds die out of the whole population, and so on.

The statistic we call a life expectancy is based on how long a person currently alive might be expected to live on the assumption that today's numbers stay the same into the future. But for the last two hundred years or so, today's numbers don't usually hold true into the future. Death rates have usually been dropping, which means that life expectancy has usually been an underestimate of how long a person will live.

I am a proud American, and I love my country. Still, I don't like what we do with quotation marks, where commas and other bits that aren't part of the quotation in any logical sense. In the ongoing effort to promote a more perfect union for ourselves and our posterity, I plan on using logical quotation whenever I can get away with it.

Thomas Malthus noticed that, if human population grows exponentially in the presence of sufficient food, no amount of resources can be sufficient for long. Any population with a surplus of food will simply grow until the food becomes scarce enough to constrain population growth. In Malthus' thinking, then, there was no point to any attempt at easing the position of the poor. They would simply reproduce away any surplus one might give them, and then you'd be left with a larger population, as miserable as ever. If you were somehow to double the output of England's farms, human population could easily double in the next twenty-five years and the poor would once again be balancing on the knife's edge of hunger.

Malthus published his Essay in 1798, and if one looks backward, his basic thesis was true for the entire history of humanity up to his time. By and large, humans prior to 1800 or so lived at the subsistence level, at least since the Neolithic revolution, and wherever there was plenty population increased until there was not. Econimists have since filled out the picture with perhaps more variables than Malthus expected, but there was quite a bit of truth to his picture of stagnant living standards. According to Table 1-2 of Angus Maddison's The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, in 1990 international dollars world GDP per capita was $444 in 0 AD. (Ignore the fact that there was no such year; Maddison's book treats it as existing.) By 1000 AD, almost no change had occurred. Food production and population had risen about 15%, but real income was flat at $435. By 1820, a little movement had occurred. Incomes were up to $667.

A Malthusian outlook might than expect population to rise, and population did in fact rise. Taking for a minute the data at Worldometer for convenience, world population roughly doubled between 1804 and 1927. Between 1927 and 1974, it doubled again. Since 1974, it has very nearly doubled again. As an empirical matter, we can say that food production is capable of growing much more quickly than Malthus imagined. And despite the growth in population, income has sky-rocketed. Returning to Maddison's table, it has grown from $667 in 1820 to $5,709 in 1998. A chart from the [World Bank], using a slightly different definition of "dollar", puts global GDP per capita at $5,273 in 1998, rising to $11,429 today. Roughly speaking, income per person has grown nineteen-fold since 1820 despite a great deal of population growth.

The production of calories, as it turns out, has been a more tractable problem than previously imagined. And we appear to be escaping the Malthusian trap the other side as well: human fertility is falling. In the 1950's and 1960's, TFR (a statistic than approximately captures "children per woman per lifetime") stood at about 5, but has since dropped to below 2.5. According to the Worldometers table, the global population growth rate peaked at 2.09% in 1968-9 and has been dropping since. It now stands at 1.05%, and the UN Projects it to reach zero around 2100.

Malthus was working with the history that existed up to 1798. It would have been very difficult to anticipate that both food production and human reproduction would start growing in ways different from anything ever seen before. And it is possible that Thomas Malthus himself contributed to the human exit from the Malthusian trap. Perhaps, without Malthus' warnings, people would not have embraced agricultural technology and contraception to the extent that they have.

If you want to understand the world, it helps to have an idea of how many people live in all the various places. According to Lawrence Krauss about thirty-five person of his students at Yale think the United States has less than ten million inhabitants. If it's that bad at Yale, it's probably much worse in the general population. So here's a brief rule of thumb, and some suggested best practices.

First, global population: a bit under 8 billion. So any group of 80 million people is about 1% of the world.

First, it's good to have some idea about the big groupings of humans that are around a billion or two people. Two countries: China, and India, each have more than a billion people: about 1.4 billion for both. The entire continent of Africa likewise has about 1.4 billion people. While "Europe" is a little fuzzy to define, it has about 700 million -- so India and China are each about twice the size of Europe by population.

North America has little under 600 million inhabitants -- this includes Mexico and Central America. Meanwhile, South America has about 430 million inhabitants. On the other hand, if you want to divide the Americas into English-speaking countries and Latin America, there's about 370 million Americans and Canadians and 650 million people in Latin America. There's about 600 million people in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Middle East, incidentally, is not where most Muslims live. There are about 1.8 billion Muslims, making that religion just a bit smaller than the 2.3 billion Christians. And the 4.1 million Muslims and Christians, therefore, make up a little over half the world. The next largest groups are Hinduism, with 1.2 billion adherents -- this group is largely but not entirely coterminous with the population of India -- and 500 million Buddhists, about half in China, with the rest elsewhere. All other religions are considerably smaller.

Let's return to countries. After India and China, the largest country is the United States, with 330 million people. For quick mental math, you can round it to 320, which has the advantage of being divisible by 80, which is about how long people in the United States live. So, dividing across ages, we could very roughly guess that are about 4 million one-year-olds, four million two-year-olds, etc. How many high-schoolers? Well, that's a four-year period, so about 16 million. Real numbers will vary, but that should give a rough sense of proportion.

Moving quickly through the next countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Brazil all have between two and three hundred million inhabitants. Bangladesh and Russia have about 170 and 150, respectively. Mexico and Japan are near 125 million. The Philipines, DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Vietnam all have about 100 million, while Iran, Turkey, and Germany are all at about 80. France, the UK, Thailand, Italy, Thailand, South Africa, and Tanzania are all in the ballpark of 60 million.

Everything else is smaller.

Steven Pinker, in addition to his career as a psycholinguist, wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), which chronicles the long-term reduction in violence that has occurred across human history. He followed this up with Enlightenment Now (2018), which follows similar improvements across many other domains. Other books of his include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Sense of Style.

I spent the first sixteen years of my life in a household underneath the income level that the United States government calls "the poverty line". And there was some truth to it -- there was not a whole lot of money floating around the household. And now I live a comfortable middle-class existence, my brothers include a doctor and a lawyer, my three sisters are in college and on the path to bachelors' degrees, and the two boys still under eighteen are both on a promising path themselves. And yet the Powells are by no means an inspirational story of overcoming poverty, because we never really lived with the package of issues commonly known as poverty, at least not for the most part.

Among other things, both of my parents have bachelors degrees, all four grandparents are or were college-educated, two of the grandparents having master's degrees. Before I entered the public school system in the sixth grade, I had learned algebra from my father, learned to do square roots by hand from my grandfather, and done fairly well in a college geology class I audited. My parents were and are happily married throughout my childhood and after, I had access to excellent schooling, and my childhood was free of the evictions, debt collectors, and financial desperation that tend to characterize poverty.

We spoke middle-class English at home -- double negatives and non-standard past tenses were nowhere to be found, and, unlike half of Harvard graduates, every Powell child probably knows that seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth's axis. We can all -- including the one Powell sibling who has frequent psychotic episodes -- walk into a job interview without worrying about making the kinds of subtle class tells that many of our childhood neighbors have to worry about.

We were, in short, raised in a middle-class family that happened to be poor. When a Raj Chetty or some other social scientist combs through data on social mobility, the Powells will probably be counted as an exceptionally upwardly mobile "poor" family. I suspect that a fair number of the "high-achieving poor", if looked at carefully, are cases like ours. The data on social mobility may exaggerate how easy it is to escape poverty.

This sort of thing is part of why I distrust the tendency in academic publishing to use the term "socio-economic status" when "income" is really meant. Even when we lived in a low-income neighborhood, we were always in some sense tourists in poverty, placed there by religious beliefs that caused my parents to have nine children and to make different career decisions than most mothers and fathers do. We were, in fact, raised in privilege, not compared to the American upper-middle class by any stretch, but definitely in comparison to most children in Cincinnati's Price Hill.

All this is to say, when you talk about poverty, try and think about what you mean. Income is part of it, but so is education, dialect, neighborhood, family structure, and worldview. And it wouldn't hurt to read Hillbilly Elegy.

In middle school and high school, I was what some might call a mathlete, one of the kids who was always running about to school math competitions. Lindsay Lohan introduces the concept here. Back in 2006, I somehow stumbled into being one of six Ohio high schoolers to qualify for the USAMO (source), where I immediately found myself out of my depth and got something like two out of forty-two questions correct. I don't remember the exact figure.

Anyhow, around age 15 I got swept into studying the Hebrew Bible, which I kept picking away at until 21, and mostly left math behind. However, last year I did pick up playing around with math questions again, with Project Euler, which combines math and programming to produce puzzles to solve. If you're a former mathlete who needs a little mental stimulation now and then, you might want to give Project Euler a look. The questions are graduated in difficulty, running from the very first problem, which has been solved by 965,090 users, to some of the latest, with less than 200 users solving.

It is a commonplace claim, and almost entirely true, that Hebrew is read from right to left, while English is read from left to right. But read this: "$5". If you read it as "five dollars", you read the item on the right, then the item on the left. Language rules are made to be broken.

Suppose you take a population and look at, say, a group of people with very high math scores -- perhaps they average at the 95th percentile for the general population. Then look at their children. You'll find that those children tend to score above average in math scores, but not, on average, as high as their parents. A similar phenomenon will be found if you select people with very low math scores -- their children will also tend to have lower math scores than average, but higher than their parents.

The point where this becomes counter-intuitive is that it works in both directions. If you take a group of children whose math scores deviate from the average -- above or below -- their parents will, on average, be closer to the average than their children. If you don't have an understanding of how regression works, you'll misunderstand some things: examples can be found on the Wikipedia page.

Lee Kuan Yew, the first leader of modern Singapore, held various positions in government from 1959 to his death in 2015. In 1960, Singapore's GDP per capita, measured in 2018 US dollars, was $428. Upon his death in 2015, it was $55,646, a 130-fold increase (source). To the best of my knowledge, there is no other country with a growth record exceeding that. A worthwhile read is Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew.

One of the many interesting curiosities that my late grandfather Henderson pointed me towards was book called Worlds in Collision by the extraordinarily eccentric Immanuel Velikovsky, who combined a creative and well-read mind with a fundamental inability to understand how the real world works and produced fascinating attempts at re-writing history. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you might enjoy Worlds in Collision.

With a few very brief exceptions, I spent the first five years of my life in Venezuela, which was a more or less functional country in the early 1990's. It had poverty, it had violence, and it had corruption, but the stores generally had food in them, the water was turned on at least part of the day, and one could walk around Venezuela for ten years through some fairly rough neighborhoods on a regular basis and only have a gun pointed at one twice. My family continues to have friends who live in the slums of Caracas, and the incredibly bleak picture of starvation, hyperinflation, and mass flight from the country that you often see in media outlets is accurate.

The descent into total dysfunction did not happen all at once. One might date it from the time when Hugo Chávez declared an "economic war" on 2010-6-2, or to the accession of Venezuelan President and now dictator Nicolás Maduro in 2013. In any case, the vicious sociopath currently oppressing Venezuela has shown every indication throughout his entire tenure that he is fully prepared to starve people out of the country until Venezuela is emptied or he is dead.

I used to edit quite a bit for Wikipedia, until I got tired of it. In that time, I became familiar with Wikipedia's Policies and Guidelines, known by the shortcut WP:PAG. If you ever wondered how such a massive site maintains a more or less consistent styles and keeps a pretty decent quality, WP:PAG is part of it.

The classic "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" needs no introduction, unless you've never heard of it. You can find it here and in-depth explanations of the jokes here.

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