Proust as the ultimate anti-Bayesian

 Terrific talk by Jean Tirole last night on "The Common Good after Covid" sponsored by the IFS.  It covered a lot of ground in an hour.  Perhaps my favorite bit -- apropos  the lamentable failure to appreciate the arrival of new scientific evidence by the general public -- was this quote from Swann's Way: "The facts do not penetrate the world where our beliefs live."  If this seems too pithy for Proust you can google to find a more elaborated version: 

“The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them; they can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them; and an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the bosom of a family will not make it lose faith in either the clemency of its God or the capacity of its physician.”

Before there was Fortran, there was the Jacquard loom

 In the museum of the history of Lyon there is a beautiful example of a Jacquard loom used in weaving silk at the beginning of the 19th century.  Designs were implemented on punch cards as shown in the photo below and produced the flamboyant  pattern in the next photo.  One can't help but envy the results especially by comparison with the paltry spew of Phillips curve coefficients emanating from my early experiences with Fortran and Hollerith cards.