A couple of days before I was to move from the studio into my old apartment a pipe under the sink burst---in the middle of a Monday night---and several hundred litres of hot water sprayed out. Thank goodness for insurance. The whole place was under 20mm of hot water, except the bathroom where there actually is a drain in the floor but also a small step at the door. New carpet, new kitchen, and $4k of new furniture.

Feeling the need to see people worse off than myself, I watched After the Flood. The Brits do police procedurals well. The interesting part of this story is not the murder or the varied level of guilt across various parties, the coercion and corruption, but that only a small part of the town flooded, a couple of streets. Weird hydrology and dubious drainage.

I read in Joe Walker's erudite podcast interview with Peter Turchin about the science of cliodynamics. Cliodynamics is the mathematical modeling of historical processes, very reminiscent of Asimov's idea behind the Foundation stories. Peter Turchin is to cliodynamics as Daniel Kahneman is to behavioural economics. The podcast is so dense, you pretty much need to read the transcript to take it all in. A tsunami of information.

Within the above podcast, it is noted that some ideas are multiply-developed, as their "time has come", an example being calculus, invented in parallel by Leibnitz and Newton. On the other hand, a very few ideas occur only once, the cited example being monogamy. Monogamy as an idea is known to have been developed in Greco-Roman times. It is believed that it was promulgated because it produced more stable (less rebellious?) society.

I have noted elsewhere that monogamy should be recognised as a dependent variable, something that follows on rather than something that you fix in place. In other words, it happens as a consequence of decisions and effects, and should not be regarded as an idea to which anyone adheres by direction. Evidently, if you are a government, you can independently fix what was previously a dependent variable. I can understand why forcing monogamy leads to stability... the alternative inherently trains the mind to cope with flux. The flux can become a flood. I am mindful of my Ms Ps and Ms Qs here.