"Against the Gods"

[fiefoe]

Francis Galton is fun to read about. Keywords to remember him by: Darwin, 'beauty map' of the British Isles, eugenics, fingerprinting, 'vox popuili' on weight of an ox, (which inspired a recent book 'The Wisdom of Crowds').  The best anecdote was how he obtained the body measurements of a striking Hottentot tribe woman from afar with the aid of a sextant -- a triumph of trigonometry and Victorian ingenuity.

Life lessons beyond regression toward the mean: the mean is sometimes not where we expect it to be; uncertainty makes us free.

Other items of note:

• Florence Nightingale was mad about statistics.
• 'Age cannot wither her, nor custom / Stale her infinite variety.' (Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii)  Elsewhere in the book, the author tries to channel Hamlet in saying 'For Jevons, the trouble with economics was in heaven & earth, not in its philosophy'.
  
• 'The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.' (Omar Khayyam)
  
• 'deeper and blinder passions' (Keynes)
  
• Budapest, J. von Neumann's hometown, had the world's earliest underground subway system.