Log #12

Hello.

I came to Turkey again, and once again I got sick... For some reason, I get sick almost every time I come to Turkey. I suppose it has something to do with the change in climate. In general, I am someone who gets sick very easily anyway. Whether it is a viral or bacterial infection, I seem to be absurdly sensitive to everything. I constantly get fevers, catch the flu, mess up my digestive system, and so on. I will not even get started on the allergies. I have an unbelievably bad allergy to dust mites. I basically have to start every single day with a pill and a nasal spray. I constantly joke to the people around me that at this rate I probably will not make it past sixty.

Today, I started reading Acemoğlu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. I was so bored. I think I understand the message the book is trying to convey, and I largely agree with their thesis. But in terms of writing, I have to say that it is an unbelievably boring book. At the beginning, it almost feels as though you are reading a history textbook, with an enormous amount of detail about the colonization of South America that I genuinely do not think was necessary. If you need page after page of endless facts and historical information just to explain a point, then you are not explaining that point very well. That seems pretty clear to me. Personally, I had already understood where they were going with it from the very first paragraph, and everything afterwards—despite the fact that I actually enjoy reading history—felt almost like torture, because once I understood the point they were trying to make, I just started wishing they would get to it already. This is not really a criticism of the actual content of what is being said. There is just a general structural problem. Unfortunately, the same issue seems to persist throughout much of the book. I often run into this problem with books written by two authors. There could be all sorts of reasons for that, I honestly do not know, but the one thing I do know is that I do not enjoy this kind of format. Since I am a geologist, I do not immediately keep up with developments in other “scientific” fields such as economics. I have basically no sense of what is current in that area. As a result, I only ended up reading this book roughly two years after the Nobel Prize was awarded, largely because of the Nobel itself. Had they not received it, I probably would never have looked at the book in the first place. As a consequence, some of the political events used as examples in the book already feel somewhat outdated by 2026. So having to read through old political events all over again added an entirely separate layer of boredom.

Next week, we are going on a field trip. As part of a mapping camp course I took in 2024, I had made a small website, and inspired by that little project I built two years ago, I spent the last three days vibe coding and actually managed to come up with something pretty nice. I also bought a new geological hammer for the field trip :) Let us see how it goes...