I greatly enjoyed the documentary about Richard Feynman shown on BBC2 TV last night, having already greatly enjoyed the docu-drama about the Feynman Challenger investigation.

Last night’s documentary contained the following particularly choice piece of dialogue:

“Why is your van covered in Feynman Diagrams?”

“Because we’re the Feynmans.”

Good answer.

There is a picture of the Feynmans, next to their van, which I found here, where the picture is slightly bigger.

Does this van still exist, with all the Feynman Diagrams on it?  I hope so.

As has already been reported here, I have been reading Pride and Prejudice on my Google Nexus 4 ultra-mobile computer-with-phone.  And, in Chapter X of this book, I read this:

My highlighted version of that last sentence being:

“As for your Elizabeth’s picture, you must not attempt to have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?”

So, in Jane Austen time, painters “took” pictures.

I thought that was only photographers.  There does seem, does there not?, to be something peculiarly apt about a photographer “taking” a picture.  After all, you could only “take” a picture with one click of a mechanical button, as I just did of my Google Nexus 4 with my Panasonic Lumix FZ150, if the picture was in some basic sense already there for the taking, in its entirety.  “Take” gets across the difference between photoing someone and painting a portrait of them, by which I mean “making” a portrait.

Perhaps this “take” usage, to describe portrait painting, declined when the painters stopped claiming to produce what we now call photographic likenesses, and, under the competitive influence of actual photography, began to “make” pictures of people, the whole point ofand the whole justification of which was that a mere camera could absolutely not “take” such pictures.  Such paintings are made, not taken.  To accuse a painter of “taking” a picture would be to accuse him of adding nothing.

Me at Samizdata, commenting on this, about the bonkersness of North Korea:

No. North Korea is not socialism betrayed. It is socialism done.

Which everyone here knows, but it is worth repeating.

Commenting on that, Perry de Havilland said:

That North Korea is ‘late socialism’ is a meme worth spreading.

Indeed it is.

Duly spread.

A bit.

Various people have been nagging me (a bit) about getting into Twitter, which things like this suit well.  It reminds me (a bit) of when people got contemptuously angry (a bit) because I still didn’t have an email address.

So I finally got around to finishing my review of Think Tank by Madsen Pirie, which is the story, so far, of the Adam Smith Institute.

Ripple: me quoting Madsen Pirie, here.

Another ripple: the ASI quoting me, here.

The ASI seems happy, despite the delay.

LATER: Madsen Pirie quoting me, here.

Nothing like bright sun, from the side, through a Venetian blind, to tell me that my computer screen could use a bit of dusting:

That SQotD comes from here.

David Friedman, no less, has added a comment to this thread, which included something which I like a lot, namely this:

What the anti FR …

i.e. anti fractional reserve banking …

… position argued by Rothbard and some of his supporters claims is that all such contracts are fraudulent, and so should be banned. If so, all insurance contracts should be banned as well, since if all the insured houses happen to burn down in the same year the insurance company won’t have the money to pay off on them.

I’ve never encountered that argument before.  (Which shows how much attention I’e been paying to all this ...)

I intend to make it a Samizdata Quote of the Day.  But for the time being, let it be a mere BrianMicklethwaitDotCom Quote of the Day, because I don’t want to separate out this idea from the comment thread in which it appears, and cause commenters to go to two separate places.  When the thread has expired, then I will post it, and this is me reminding myself to do that.

Separating this notion out here won’t affect anything, especially during this summer relaxation period that I am now indulging in, and which, by the way, I think I will continue for another month.  It is working well.

I find it interesting that a bunch of impeccably free market supporting individuals can’t agree about things like this.  Which I think is one of the big reasons to have markets.  Let the market decide about FR banking, rather than the law.

Tim Cavanaugh, in a dissection of a muddled Keynesian rant by a son of muddled Keynesian J. K. Galbraith:

… facts matter even when you’re ranting.

Via here.

Cavanaugh’s piece ends thus:

I’m just glad to see the economic quacks are starting to fight among themselves.

And they are.  So Cavanaugh has his own facts right.

Yesterday I walked over to Parliament to be part of the Rally Against Debt.  I went because I feared it would be tiny, and because I hoped it might be huge.

In the event it was neither.  The turnout was in the low hundreds, rather than the mere dozens I had feared or the thousands that I had, thinking about it now, hoped for.  Photo it all close up and you could make it look quite big.  Step back fifty yards, and it was cut down to its true size.

I’ll probably be doing a Samizdata posting about it along these lines, Real Soon Now.  In the meantime, what with signs being a current preoccupation here, here are some of the signs as I managed to photo.

These big clutches of photos probably don’t work that well, judging by the comments, but I think this clutch may be different, because each little square gets the message across.  You don’t have to click at all, to get the point, in fact you can get forty points without doing anything except running your eyes over it all.

I was impressed by how many hand-done signs there were.

Should I have been?

Are these signs merely of amateurism, and as such do they mean little?

Or do hand-done signs signify depth of feeling?  And do they therefore count for more than the mass produced sort of signs, which by the way were also present in large numbers.

The one about the Che T-shirts was off message, as were several other signs that I spotted but did not include here.  I include the Che sign because I really like it.

Bloggers, borrow at will.  No need to mention me.  The message is the thing, and anyway, it was the sign-makers who did the real work.

Many other photographers were also present.