Yup. I realized I was researching, in pretty serious detail, a list of about a dozen topics that started with:
- Metallurgy
- Hyperinflation and more generally currencies
- The history of clothing
- Modern pharmaceutical research, design, and fabrication
I wonder, now that I write this, if the scope’s too huge for me to ever start on a book, and I should just write a draft and figure out the science later by having people in those fields read and laugh at it.
It’s a doozy, though. I’m totally jazzed.
I wish you luck. Currencies alone is a huge topic (and a messed-up one, at that – fiat currencies don’t make any logical sense).
One piece of advice about pharm. research. A lot of people think drug design is rational (IE: I am going to arrange the molecules of the drug to interact with this target). While this is true in some cases (the classic example is gleevac), far more commonly the company discovers the effect of a chemical randomly. The example they taught me in class was of an antiparasitic drug, ivermectin, which was discovered in a soil sample that a Merk company executive randomly brought back from.the green of a golf course in Japan.
Derek, I recommend an amazing book called Mobs, Messiahs and Markets. It covers the subject of investment cycles and human herd behavioral tendencies. Great fodder for a SABR rat as it focuses on facts and analysis versus ‘conventional wisdom’ and it gets into precious metal and hyperinflation territory. The fact that it’s written with a snarky wit is an added bonus.