There are older kids on our street too. The B___ family – father, mother two teenage boys — live on the farther arm of Woodburn…
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What all of these languages–FORTRAN, C, the UNIX shell sh and its text manipulation tools such as awk, vi and sed–had in common was that…
Comments closedA 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 closedReuters Blog
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 closedFinancial Heists – article in The Guardian
Comments closedIn Cape Town in the mid 1950s there were no high-rise buildings. The Old Mutual in “town” was the largest building, right next to the…
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 have heard people claim that a machine learning program could have figured out, as Newton did, the force relation between two masses and the…
Comments closedI went to see John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, which really was a movie about what it’s like to be transcendently in the…
Comments closedI once wrote a long chapter in my book Models.Behaving.Badly about Spinoza’s theory of the passions (affects) and how to free oneself of bondage to…
Comments closed… is the recitation of sins and the asking for forgiveness. You don’t have to even be religious or a believer to appreciate it. I…
Comments closedIdeal money is a security that has no dimension. Ideal money is atomic, structureless, has no extension but has infinite duration. Ideal money has zero…
Comments closedI read that Apple is falling behind in AI research because it’s cult of secrecy makes it difficult to attract top-level researchers. This resonated with…
Comments closedFrom the New York Times Style Section, Sep 1, 2030 Posted At : September 5, 2010 7:29 PM | Posted By : Emanuel Derman …Despite…
Comments closedLate in life, when his roots should have held him steady, he became unmoored, and it seemed inappropriate. But who determined what was appropriate?
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 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 closedI postulate that you can understand what happened to the NY Times Science section by comparing nbcolympics.com… to bbc.com… vis a vis Olympic reporting.
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 closedWhat the police were doing was practicing tail risk elimination.
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?
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