Category: Misc

From Guan Yang in Why Is This Interesting: “The Most Serene Republic of Venice (726-1797) was a major commercial and maritime power. In addition to the famous lagoon city in Northeastern Italy, Venice ruled territories and islands stretching all the way down to Crete. Venice’s head of state was the Doge, or Doxe in Venetian (not the shiba inu based meme, or the related cryptocurrency). The doge was chosen with rules first adopted in 1268 and used, with few changes, until the last election in 1789.

Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.

Neither papal conclave nor the system used to select the president of the United States can hold a candle to this harebrained scheme. So why did the Venetians make it so complicated, and why did the system survive so long? The standard explanation for the complex selection procedure is that it prevented powerful families from applying undue pressure to elect their preferred candidates without majority support. (Being doge was quite costly, and the powers of the office were later curtailed, so some powerful men tried to avoid election, using the same tricks used to get elected.)”

(From Robin Sloan) There’s a great bit from Robert MacFarlane’s book Old Ways, in which he writes that a wise man “told me once about how [Charles] Darwin had constructed a sandy path which looped through the woods and fields around his house at Downe, in Kent. It was while walking this path daily that Darwin did much of his thinking, and he came to refer to it as the “Sandwalk” or the thinking path. Sometimes he would pile a series of flints in a rough cairn at the start of the path, and knock one away with his walking stick after completing each circuit. He came to be able to anticipate, [the wise man] explained, a “three-flint problem” or a “four-flint problem”, reliably quantifying the time it would take to solve an intellectual puzzle in terms of distance walked.”

(via Kottke.org) Market researcher Clotaire Rapaille was interviewed for an episode of Frontline on advertising and marketing back in 2003, and he talked about the differences in how the French and Americans think about cheese:

For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn’t understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.