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interesting informating encoding

http://blogsandwikis.bentley.edu/themone…

When I was young… One of my nerdy activities was collecting coins… I aimed at collecting lots of identical coins that merely varied by date and mint mark…

I can still remember the “rare dates” that were much more expensive that other more common coins; 1908, 1921, 1931, 1938, 1958, etc. Do you see a pattern? That’s right; when I was 12 years old I had basically memorized the entire history of US business cycles…

Fascinating!

I know that we already study the Roman economy via the adulteration of their currency over time, but I wonder how much additional information we can glean about their economic history by looking at the quantity of coins minted in various periods…

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 6:06 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “interesting informating encoding”

  1. Ed Flinn Says:
    August 21st, 2009 at 7:36 am

    One serious drawback, I think, is trying to map the number of coins minted then to the number available now. It’s commonly believed that coins minted for Marc Antony are particularly common, but usually in very worn state, because they were underweight and so kept circulating while contemporary Imperial issues were more likely to be hidden away.