Context on the prize: fiscal.ie/annual-miriam-hede…

I have a special fondness for niche professional prizes. An honour to be a finalist for Ireland's fiscal policy research award!

New blog post: integer tokenisation, the physics of John Stewart Bell, the Draghi report, Cormac McCarthy's dialogue, the final days of the Qing court, Art Deco in the British Isles, and other things I read or thought about in the last month

For any of you in the greater Boston area, @_fitzwilliam will be hosting a meetup on October 7th. Hope you can make it!

On September 26th in Belfast, @_fitzwilliam will be hosting a meetup about the life and work of the great Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. DM if you'd like to join!

Hundreds of people have now signed our open letter about the state of maths education in Ireland. They include many of Ireland's leading startup founders, maths professors, the author of the most widely used applied maths textbook, our IMO medalists, parents, teachers...

The draft embodies many regrettable trends: insistence on an unworkable political commitment to 40% "continuous" assessment, the veneration of "skills" over actual knowledge, and a shady consultative process that has marginalised real expertise. Link: thefitzwilliam.com/p/leaving…

The government has released its draft mathematics curriculum for the Leaving Certificate, the main qualification that Irish teenagers leave secondary school with. It is astonishingly bad. For @_fitzwilliam, we have written about why:

New blog post: cost-benefit analyses for railway projects, the Dutch Enlightenment, Saint Patrick, Chinese hip hop, spatial cognition, EU reform proposals, alignment faking, and other things I read or thought about in August

More American dynamism throttled by restrictive zoning policies