This week begins with the unfortunate news that I'm starting to wind up Interesting Things. The 50th edition will be the last. 

The remaining issues, including this one, will take a slightly different, disjointed approach: I'm basically emptying my drafts folder, which comprises a mix of half-cooked ideas and short points and links that didn't seem worth 500 words.    

Though Interesting Things will cease to exist, I won't, and if you'd like to be included on any future general life updates, let me know. I'm also on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

This week's short points:

How will our understanding of the brain's limitations be used?
Knowledge of our cognitive limitations seems to be growing, and I'm curious about whether and how that knowledge will change institutional behaviours. Behavioural economics is now mainstream thinking: books like Richard Thaler and Cass Sunnsetin's Nudge, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow are successful to the point of cliche; Thaler and Kahneman both hold Nobel prizes. And political events circa. 2016 gave urgent political salience to the evidence that facts don't necessarily change people's minds, and may in fact strengthen ill-informed beliefs.

Despite the buzz, in a practical sense behavioural economics seems to be the public policy equivalent of blockchains: a much-hyped concept only partially understood by most practitioners, yet widely viewed as transformative even in the absence of any major practical successes.

As more and more systematic deviations from 'rational' cognitive behaviour are uncovered and described, we still don't seem to have widely accepted solutions for how to deal with cognitive limitations, nor agreement on whether we (the media? the state?) should even try. What would such an intervention look like?

You'll never look at numbers the same way again
You might know that a lot of our numerical system originated in the ancient Arabic world, but were you aware of the basis of our numerical characters? (see the image below the email)

On zero
Also worth reading is the history of zero on Wikipedia. Here's a taste: the Greeks didn't use zero for at least 1200 years, during which philosophers spent a lot of time pondering whether nothing could be something. For example, Zeno's paradox — created 500 years before the earliest recorded uses of zero — suggests Achilles could never overtake a tortoise in a race because "in a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead." 

Something else to ponder: is zero an invention, or a discovery? 

* * * 

The origins of numerical characters: