Banned in Turkey

A correspondent from Turkey informs me that he can no longer access my web site. I have no trouble accessing it from the U.S., so my guess is that it has been deliberately blocked by the Turkish authorities.

No idea why. I can't remember ever discussing Armenians, Kurds, or Kemal Ataturk either here or on the web site.

Thoughts on Book Covers

As I mentioned recently, I'm looking for a cover for my third novel. A number of artists are interested, which gets me thinking about what a cover should be.

From the standpoint of the author, the obvious answer is to show a scene from the book, preferably one that is dramatic and has something to with what is happening in the book—fits the theme, or the mood, or illustrates the setting, or ...

An alternative view is that the purpose of the cover is to get someone to look into the book—read the free sample if it's a kindle, read the back of the cover and perhaps the beginning if the book was picked up in a bookstore or library. So what you want is a cover that grabs the browser's attention, whether or not it has anything to do with what is in the book.

That isn't quite right, because the target is not a random browser but a browser who will like the book. What you want is a cover that will selectively appeal to the sort of person who likes the sort of book you have written. The obvious way is to signal genre—a spaceship for sf, a wizard and a unicorn for fantasy, a beautiful woman and a handsome man falling in love for romance. Not all fantasies, science fiction stories, or romances are the same, so ideally you target it more narrowly to signal the particular subcategory.

How does that apply to my current book? Its predecessor, Salamander, was largely about magic. Brothers is set in the same world with some of the same characters and magic  plays a role in the plot, but no longer a central role. That probably eliminates at least one of the scenes I considered—a dramatic one containing four of the secondary characters, two of them engaged in a difficult, important, and striking piece of magical creation.

Another shows two of the central characters at the point when they swear brotherhood. That is central to plot and theme but not particularly dramatic. And since the two characters are both thirteen year old boys, it might signal that Brothers is a children's book—which it isn't, although I hope thirteen-year-olds as well as adults will enjoy it.

The one I have mostly been thinking of involves one of the two boys, is dramatic, is connected to events that are important in the early part of the plot but not central thereafter—and, since it shows one of the boys and his dog, again risks sending a false signal.

Perhaps I should not be thinking in terms of a scene at all. An alternative might be a cover mostly text with sketches of some central characters. Insofar as the book has a theme, it is personal bonds of trust preventing political fragmentation. Two pairs of brothers are central to the plot, one of teenagers and one of adults, a third adult pair is a little less central, all in different ways examples of that theme. Also a brother/sister pair. Would it work to have a cover that is mostly text, frame, and backgrounds, with a sketch of the two boys and, behind them, the two men? All eight?

Perhaps with, at the bottom, the sentence "Bare is brotherless back" to signal the connection to the title. 

All of the sets of siblings are related. Another idea, probably a bad one, is to put a family tree on the cover with sketch portraits of the main characters, with the line linking each important pair of brothers  emphasized.

Comments welcome, especially but not only from Brothers beta readers.

Help Wanted: Getting a Cover for a Novel

I am almost finished with Brothers, my third novel, and since I plan to self-publish I need a cover. My first novel was commercially published; the publisher (Baen) got a cover I liked done by a professional. For my second novel I used something I found online, with the permission of the creator. 

For the third novel I want a custom drawn cover. The question is how to get one.

One possibility is to hire the illustrator who did the cover for my first novel. The argument for that is that he is not only a skilled artist, he is someone who did a good job of designing a cover for that novel. Multiple details that didn't matter were wrong (the women, for instance, should be wearing mail, not plate). But the overall feel was better than anything I could have told him to do. 

The argument against is that doing it that way is expensive, probably more than the total income I will get from the novel—writing novels is not how I support myself.

Another possibility is to find an illustrator online. There are a lot of them on Fiverr and I expect other places. Many are very inexpensive, some as low as five dollars for a book cover; pretty clearly those are using stock images, unlikely to fit what I want. But at least some of them, at a price well above five dollars but well below what the professional would charge, are artists drawing their own art. Typically they offer a range of services at a range of prices. That suggests the possibility of buying something at the low end of their range, which might mean a figure without a background not set up as a book cover, on the assumption that if I don't like it I am out a pretty small sum, if I do like it I pay the additional amount to have it converted into a suitable cover.

Another possibility is to find an illustrator in realspace. In a little over a week I will be attending an sf convention. It will have an art show. I plan to look for works that fit the style I want, note down the artists, and see if any of them would be interested in doing my cover and at what price.

That leaves the problem of deciding what the cover should show. The ideal solution would be an illustrator willing to read the novel and with the ability of the professional to design a cover; that may be hard to find at anything below the professional's price. The more likely solution is that I decide what I want and give the illustrator a verbal description, which the illustrator then converts into cover art.

Do any of my readers have suggestions? That includes general ideas on designing covers or finding an artist. It includes, for any of you who volunteered as beta readers and have read Brothers, suggestions as to what the cover should show. 

And if any of you happen to be artists ... . I got the best book cover I've ever had for the third edition of Machinery by a contest on this blog, but that only worked because a lot of the readers of this blog had read and liked that book.

If you are an artist, my current cover idea involves a thirteen year old boy, a very large dog, and a mountain pass. Relevant passage, or the whole novel, available on request.

Health Expenditure: Ignoring the Obvious

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on the pattern of health expenditure and longevity in the U.S. The author's thesis is that both were about the same as in other developed countries until 1980 and that since then  expenditure has grown much faster and longevity more slowly than in other countries. The author runs through a considerable number of possible explanations while ignoring what seems to me the most obvious one.

Medicare and Medicaid were passed in 1965, went into effect in 1966, with expenditure initially small but gradually increasing. Currently, their sum is over a third of all medical expenditure. I am not certain that that is the main cause of the increase in U.S. health care costs, but it fits the timing pretty well.

A health economist writing for the New York Times does not even consider it as one out of his many possible causes.

Another Possible Speaking Trip

Having enjoyed my recent European trip and almost recovered from the jet lag, I am now thinking about another one. I have an invitation to speak in England sometime between October 1 and December 14th. England is a long way from California, so if I go I will want to combine it with other talks in that part of the world. 

Anyone interested?

My Europe Trip: Schedule

My schedule is now definite.

4/13-15 Belgrade: ESFL Feud Law,  
Liberland event Reputational Enforcement 

4/17 Prague Feud Law. Video of the talk 
4/19 Bucharest Market Failure—An Argument Both for and Against Government (my talk starts about 17:31)
4/21 Sofia: Bulgarian Libertarian Society An Economic Analysis of the Market for Law

4/24 Budapest (at Corvinus University) A Positive Account of Rights

4/26 Maastricht: MSFL Population, Climate, and the Problem With Externality Arguments
4/28 Oslo: Capitalist Party in Norway   Market Failure
4/30 Oxford: Oxford Union    Market Failure: An Argument Both for and Against Government

My Europe Trip: Tentative Schedule

It looks as though the schedule for my talks is:

4/14 Belgrade: ESFL
4/17 Prague hosted by Institute of Cryptoanarchy and Paralelní Polis
4/19 Bucharest
4/21 Sofia: Bulgarian Libertarian Society
4/24 Budapest
4/26 Maastricht: MSFL
4/28 Oslo: Capitalist Party in Norway
4/30 Oxford: Oxford Union

I would appreciate it if the people hosting the talks would check that this fits their view of the schedule and let me know if I have anything wrong—coordinating this many talks can get confusing.

I would also like information for each talk on where and when it will be, assuming that's known, and whether it will be open, so that people reading this blog who happen to be in the area can come to any open talks if they wish. Also the identity of the hosting organization if I don't already have that here.

I don't seem to have any detailed information from Ste in Bucharest, so would appreciate an email from him or a comment here with his email address.
(Email received, Bucharest talk definite for the 19th)

Wanted: Beta Readers for a Novel

I have completed a draft of Brothers, my third novel, the sequel to Salamander, and am looking for beta readers. Both books are fantasies of the sort where magic is a science.

Beta readers may, but need not, have read Salamander. I am interested in how well the sequel works both for those who have and those who have not.

My Europe Trip in April

I have been trying to work out the details of my speaking trip next month, complicated by issues of how to get from point A to point B in Europe. The current fixed points are the three weekends:

April 13-15 ESFL Belgrade

April 21 Sofia

April 28th Oslo

I have at least tentative invitations to speak in:

Maastricht, Netherlands

Prague, Czech Republic

Poland

Barcelona

Italy

My first thought was that Maastricht was close to Oslo so I should go there a couple of days before my Oslo talk. A little online research showed me my error--distance in miles, distance in hours, and distance in dollars have only a loose relationship. It is faster and less expensive, as best I can tell, to fly between Maastricht and Warsaw, Maastricht and Barcelona, Maastricht and Rome, ...  than between Maastricht and Oslo.

By my calculations, I have time for four more talks, assuming one day for travel between each pair of talks. It looks as though all of the likely locations other than Maastricht have reasonably good air connections to each other and some of them have tolerable connections to Maastricht.

The next step is for anyone who wants a talk and is willing to pay my expenses–a hotel room plus air fare to their location from whichever of the other locations I end up flying from–to let me know what days would work and what city I would be flying into and out of. I can then calculate a reasonable schedule.

Alfred Marshall on the Use of Mathematics in Economics

I retired at the end of last year and have finally finished clearing out my office. In the process I found a number of interesting things, including a printout of a book on transport economics that I wrote thirty some years ago when teaching a course on the subject but never published and thought was lost.

I also found the original of a passage in a letter by Marshall that I have been misquoting for many years. Here it is.

Balliol Croft, Cambridge
27. ii. 06

My dear Bowley,

     I have not been able to lay my hands on any notes as to Mathematico-economics that would be of any use to you: and I have very indistinct memories of what I used to think on the subject. I never read mathematics now: in fact I have forgotten even how to integrate a good many things.

     But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules—(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate  by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I did often.

     I believe in Newton's Principia Methods, because they carry so much of the ordinary mind with them. Mathematics used in a Fellowship thesis by a man who is not a mathematician by nature—and I have come across a good deal of that—seems to be an unmixed evil. And I think you should do all you can to prevent people from using Mathematics in cases in which the English Language is as short as the Mathematical.....

Which leaves me wondering how much of the economics of the next century went into Marshall's fireplace.

Slandering the Past

I recently attended a Jewish wedding, part of which was the signing of the ketubah. At one point the Rabbi commented that in the old days the ketubah would specify how many chickens and goats the groom was paying the bride's father for his daughter, whereas this modern ketubah stated the promises of bride and groom to each other.

It struck me as an unlikely claim, for at least two reasons. Jewish religious law is an extraordinarily well documented system, perhaps the best documented of all the legal systems I have looked at, with detailed interpretation going back to the Mishnah, written nearly two thousand years ago. In everything I have seen, the ketubah is described as a contract stating the husband's obligations to the wife. The one essential term is the amount that goes to the wife from the husband's property if he dies or divorces her.

Further, under Jewish religious law, parental consent was not required for the marriage of an adult--and a woman became an adult at twelve and a half, provided that she had shown some signs of puberty at least six months earlier. This became an issue during the Middle Ages, when Jewish communal courts tried to impose additional requirements in order to permit parents to prevent their daughters from imprudent marriages but faced difficulties due to the fact that the marriage rules were considered part of religious law (Issur) over which they had no authority.

An additional oddity to the Rabbi's account was the idea of a contract specifying a payment in chickens and goats when, as is clear by reading texts on the religious law, payments were routinely specified in money, sometimes with explanations of exactly what sort of money was to be used. 

My conclusion was that the Rabbi's view of the history of the ketubah fitted a pattern I have seen in other contexts--moderns believing in bogus history that supports their self image of superiority to those ignorant and unreasonable people in the past.  

My favorite example is the Columbus myth, the idea that the people who argued against Columbus were ignorant flat-earthers who thought his ships would sail off the edge. That is almost the precise opposite of the truth. By the time Columbus set off, a spherical Earth had been the accepted scientific view for well over a thousand years. Columbus's contemporaries not only knew that the Earth was round, they knew how big around it was, that having been correctly calculated by Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. 

By the fifteenth century they also had a reasonably accurate estimate of the width of Asia. Subtracting the one number from the other they could calculate the distance from where Columbus was starting to where Columbus claimed to be going and correctly conclude that it was much farther than his ships could go before running out of food and water. The scientific ignorance was on the side of Columbus and those who believed him; he was claiming a much smaller circumference for the Earth and a much larger width of Asia, hence a much shorter distance from Spain to the far end of Asia. We will probably never know whether he believed his own numbers or was deliberately misrepresenting the geographical facts in order to get funding for his trip in the hope that he would find land somewhere between Spain and Japan, as in fact he did.

Another example of the same pattern shows up in discussions of medieval cooking, one of my hobbies. Quite a lot of people believe that medieval cooks overspiced their food in order to hide the taste of spoiled meat. A few minutes of thought should be enough to see the consequences for a cook of routinely giving his employer and the employer's guests food poisoning. Also that, with meat available on the hoof, there was no need to keep it until it spoiled and that it made little sense to save on meat, a local product, at the cost of  spices that had to be transported over thousands of miles. 

I should probably add that, as best I can tell, there is no evidence that medieval food was overspiced at all, only that they used spices in different ways than modern European cuisine. But discovering that would actually require a little effort.

Finally, consider the success of H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax, a wildly implausible story widely believed, at least in part because it made moderns feel superior to their ancestors.

I expect that other readers with historical interests can add other examples.

Anyone want a talk in Europe in April?

I'm planning a speaking trip this April. Since currently it is two weeks and only three or four talks I thought I would see if anyone else was interested. Current plans are:

Students for Liberty, Belgrade, April 13-15
Sofia, Bulgaria, April 21st
Capitalist Party of Norway, Oslo, Norway, April 28th

There is also a possible talk in Italy between Belgrade and Sofia or between Sofia and Norway, details not yet definite.

Talk in Phoenix

I'm going to be speaking on "Market Failure: An Argument For and Against Government" at 11:15 A.M. on Saturday, February 3rd, at the Freedom Summit in Phoenix, Arizona.

In the past I have put up notices like this for speaking trips abroad. Would readers find it useful if I made a general practice of announcing any talk I plan to give? Only the ones that are open admission (this one apparently requires a ticket)?