The Week in Meep: Actuarial History, Language, and SUMO!
Please let Ura survive the meat-grinder of the first week of the tournament!
Just a few things entertaining me this week.
Actuarial and Life Insurance History
The podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class had a two-parter on the history of actuarial science and life insurance, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t know.
I decided to look up more on one of the stories, involving the 17th century playwright Robert Howard.
I got this via another old book:
ANNALS,
ANECDOTES AND LEGENDS:
A Chronicle
OF
LIFE ASSURANCE.
BY
JOHN FRANCIS,
AUTHOR OF
“THE HISTORY OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND,” ETC.
Sounds cool to me.
It may be judged that life assurance was in operation by the latter end of the seventeenth century, as a policy was made on the life of Sir Robert Howard, for one year, from the 3rd of September, 1697. On the same day in the following year Sir Robert died, and the merchant refused to pay, on the ground that the policy had expired. Lord Holt, however, ruled, that “‘from the day of the date’ excluded the day itself, and that the underwriter was liable.” This appears the first assurance on a life of which there is positive legal record.
What gets me is how many one-year policies, with the person dying the day after, caused the setting of life insurance regulation and law (in England).
Some of the stories in history, for obvious reasons, influenced writers like Dickens and Trollope. I have written and spoken about the fictional fraudulent life insurance company in Martin Chuzzlewit, by Dickens, in this podcast episode:
It’s one of the reasons Chuzzlewit is my second favorite Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend is my favorite.) Dickens had a great time with business fraud in his fiction. He knew it well.
While I have your attention on actuarial/insurance history, I’ve linked to this before, but I’m linking it again:
Antique Insurance and Actuarial Books
The reason I’m doing this is the owner of the site has added spreadsheets!
I have downloaded some, and yeah, I see that if I wanted to use them, I’d have to go through and do data clean-up, but doing the initial scan and conversion goes a long way.
[rubbing hands]
Recommendation: John McWhorter Language Material
I think I may have mentioned that if I ever went back to grad school for a PhD, it wouldn’t be for the math PhD I failed to get, but perhaps linguistics. I love linguistics.
It’s not just a matter of learning foreign languages, which I do love:
I did Latin and French in high school, and I studied Japanese in college and that’s mainly what I focus on.
But that’s not linguistics. I got into linguistics in college, when I studied aspects of how language worked as well as language policy, yadda yadda. And then… I discovered the Teaching Company. Which became Great Courses. Which is now Wondrium.
(Guys, pick a brand.)
In any case, John McWhorter is known for many things, but as an academic, he is a linguistics researcher, whose specialty is creole languages (if I remember correctly - how pidgins become creoles). But he has done all sorts of things with respect to that.
To keep it simple, I will recommend one book from him and one lecture set with Great Courses/Wondrium.
Book recommendation: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
Often when one gets a “history of the English language”, you get a lot on the Norman Invasion, and a focus on vocabulary, and not as much on grammar. So it is nice to have more on the elusive word “do” and grammatical changes in the language more than vocabulary.
It’s a short book, and doesn’t require much background.
But here’s something even more accessible and more of a “snack”: Language A to Z
With more than 6,000 languages spoken around the world, it’s no wonder that linguistics, the study of language, has a reputation for being complex and inaccessible. But here’s a secret: There’s a lot that’s quirky and intriguing about how human language works—and much of it is downright fun to learn about.
Every day, linguists ponder and try to solve some of the most intriguing scientific, historical, and sociological puzzles behind the inner workings of language—how it emerged, how it evolved, how it’s used, and where it’s going in the future.
What’s the deal with slang like “baby mama” and “LOL”— where does it come from and can it actually be OK to use?
Why don’t English speakers use words like “thou” and “thee” anymore?
What makes “mama” and “papa” the first words spoken by children in many languages?
These and other curious questions (and their surprising answers) are all part of what makes linguistics a field of study that’s anything but dry and dull. But with so many languages and so many potential avenues of exploration, it can often seem daunting to try to understand it. Where does one even start?
It’s a lot of fun, because each lecture is only 15 minutes, and McWhorter notes in one of the lectures that he gets to do something in one of the lectures that he usually doesn’t get to do — he can take advantage of using natural language, which is spoken language.
Yes, he does focus a lot on English and English-related languages, but he can go farther afield by demonstrating languages more distant from English, such as ones incorporating clicks or tones.
That’s one of the things I have not yet attempted — a tonal language. Japanese may be difficult to read, but it is easy to speak. It’s not tonal.
I subscribe to Wondrium (and I own this particular lecture set on CD), but a lot of people can get access to these lectures through their local libraries. Go check it out!
SUMO!!!!
Yes, yes, I have my sumo stats over at Sumo Stats.
I am just letting people who may be interested that the January tournament just started on Sunday.
Multiple YouTube channels cover the matches comprehensively, but if you just want to dip in, I recommend Sumo Prime Time for newbies:
It’s not just a matter of matches, but the whole sumo culture: [with a Brazilian ex-wrestler]
My poor pink prince Ura is getting beat up, which is what I expected:
Well, they can’t punch, but this looked super painful:
A lot of us just want Ura to survive…. Ganbatte!