What I’ve been doing
1-I was finally able to send some of the preliminary paperwork needed to get our scientific nonprofit properly positioned. The paperwork had to be mailed as physical documents, which means I need to be patient on two counts: (i) time needed to ship the documents; (ii) time needed for the government to process the documents and get back to us.
2-We submitted another preprint to a journal. Another manuscript draft is being prepared to be disseminated as a preprint. I’m really grateful to God for the team we have!
What I need to take care of
1-I made small progress on my thought piece on accelerating behavioral research in Africa. I’ll continue chipping away at as I’m able.
What I’ve been reading
1-Finished reading “City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas“ by Roger Crowley (2013). For some reason, I kept expecting to learn about the Medici family – not knowing that I was mixing up Venice with Florence. Regardless, this was a really interesting book. I thought the story of Venice’s role in the 4th Crusade was really wild and that led me down some rabbit holes about the Church history in the 11th – 14th century A.D. If I have the cognitive bandwidth for it, I might share some more comprehensive notes from this book.
2-While learning about Church history, I came across a short book called The Didache. It was a quick read (about 20 minutes), and many sections felt like a mix of the Sermon on the Mount, the New Testament epistles, and the Wisdom books (e.g., Proverbs). That said, some other sections sounded very foreign to my 21st-century sensibilities, e.g., the discussion about no fasts on Mondays and Thursdays to avoid acting like hypocrites. Interesting.
3-Continued working my way through Myles Munroe’s (2010) Rediscovering the Kingdom
4-Started reading The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth Eisenstein (2012). I’m reading this for the same reason I picked up ‘City of Fortune’ – I want to understand how people from historical times dealt with systemic overhauls that played out in their lifetimes. Just like today where there’s a pre-LLM world and post-LLM one, the sudden availability of books and its attendant explosion of knowledge due to the ubiquity of the printing press fomented societal change in the 15th – 17th centuries. There might be lessons for us from that era.
5-Still re-reading “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World” by Gregory Clark (2007). The interesting idea for this week was the negative correlation between a society’s cleaniness and the living standards of its people during the pre-Industrial era. Pre-1800s European cities were filthy, and Clark argues these unsanitary conditions allowed diseases to spread very easily in these cities, which in turn depleted their populations – consequently improving the living standards of those who survived. In contrast, pre-1800s Asian socities were extremely clean, which reduced the ease with which communicable diseases could spread – leading to an increased population and lower standards of living. I’ve read accounts of European explorers recounting their visits to African communities in the 18th-19th century and remarking on how clean those communities were. I wonder to what extent Clark’s theory about the relationship between cleaniness and living standards would generalize to the African context.
