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Category: blog

Marcel Carné

A few weeks ago I watched Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. I had heard of it before but always assumed it had something to do…

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Soft Power

When I was a blue-eyed boy in the early 1950s in Cape Town near the southern tip of Africa, much of the popular music on…

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Happy End

It was many decades ago that I discovered Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenye. I had known, of course, about Bobby Darin’s Mack the Knife, but…

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An eagerness to impart unnecessary information

I find myself increasingly in irritated disagreement with the many neuroscientists and evangelically professional atheists who think that science is everything, that matter is all we have, and that photographic images of chemicals glowing in the brain are equivalent to thoughts and feelings. (I have no problem with their simply disbelieving in God.)

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German models

The good days are here once again for models of the physical world: after a drought of almost fifty years, physicists at CERN have discovered what seems to be the long-awaited Higgs boson

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Dog’s Lives

When I came to write my memoir, the perception of having been a second-class citizen in the early days of quantitative strategies led me to think of the movie My Life as a Dog, and modify Dog to Quant for the title. The subtext was meant to be dogs.

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GULP!

I dislike Mayor Bloomberg telling me I can’t smoke a cigar in Central Park, nudge stuff, and nanny states. And yet I find myself liking the fact that they are going to outlaw 640z sodas in NYC. I am impaled on the horns of a dilemma.

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USD LLC?

The U.S. dollar is an IOU issued by the Treasury and backed by the full faith and credit etc. Which means what?

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The End

When the era of rationality finally dawned, it became clear to everyone that love doesn?t last.

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The best revenge?

As more and more people I know edge into retirement lifestyles, I found myself thinking on vacation about how I’d like to live. I know people who travel nonstop, but that’s not for me.

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The A word

I’m not immune to the charms of conspiracy theories; some things in the world are so messed up that I can see how only a conspiracy could explain them.

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My own private I dunno

I have been reading The Connectome: How The Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, by Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at MIT, and formerly a theoretical physicist.

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