This is a review that I just came across from a while back. I like what he says about my long-ago My Life as a…
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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…
Comments closedWhen 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…
Comments closedMother Goddam’s bar in Mandelay Seven planks over the greenish bay Goddam, what kind of establishment that was! Fifteen men waiting for their turn The…
Comments closedIt 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…
Comments closedI have written about this topic more than ten years ago, but today I was reminded again of the immense difference between knowing what to…
Comments closedThe other night I was having dinner with an erstwhile collaborator (academic, not WWII) and we were talking about the relation between psychological time and…
Comments closedBy the symbol ‘>’ I mean ‘is stronger than‘ or ‘can wipe out‘ or ‘dominates‘. Pain > Pleasure Physical pain > Psychic pain Psychic pleasure…
Comments closedI 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.)
Comments closedWhy it?s not funny anymore?
Comments closedThe 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
Comments closedWhen 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.
Comments closedAll our fashions, in those days, were imported from America.
Comments closedSometimes, quite often, Absence is so powerful that it’s a Presence of its own.
Comments closedI 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.
Comments closedHere is a counterintuitive truth I have discovered about the physical world.
Comments closedThe U.S. dollar is an IOU issued by the Treasury and backed by the full faith and credit etc. Which means what?
Comments closedWhen so many smart people disagree, how do they expect anyone to be convinced?
Comments closedEvery day I seem to come across new articles or incidents concerning universities that indicate the increasing strength of t.he tidal forces pulling at them and their denizens
Comments closedThe other day I used the Chase app on my iPhone to deposit a check from my health insurance for $17.32.
Comments closedWhen the era of rationality finally dawned, it became clear to everyone that love doesn?t last.
Comments closedMust one do things as well as one possibly can? If you don’t want to, is that a bug or a feature? And, beyond a certain age, does it matter?
Comments closedI don’t understand money too well, the idea of it, what exactly it is.
Comments closedThe other day while teaching I suddenly briefly felt really ill with a pain in my lower back and then broke out in a copious cold sweat over every part of me; even the hair on my head was as wet as though I’d had a five mile run.
Comments closedAs 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.
Comments closedI have been rereading (and enjoying, for the third time in my life) the book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori.
Comments closedI think I’ve maybe been a closet phenomenologist for the last 30 years, only I didn’t know it.
Comments closedI’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.
Comments closedMy carefully concealed always positive outlook on life is taking a beating these days, and the only pleasures are (i) attacking inconsistencies in other people’s positions and (ii) defending my own right to the same.
Comments closedI 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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