Category: blog

A few weeks ago I was part of a sort of sociology workshop about economic valuation under uncertainty. There I listened again to Dr Taleb…

It always seemed to me, and recent occurences seem to confirm it, that most algorithmic trading strategies are long volatility but short volatility of volatility.

I was having dinner with someone the other evening who commented that there were many people who didn’t seem talented or industrious when he knew…

According to the Friday June 23 NY Times, “Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher IQ,” about three points higher in the eldest child than in…

Doug Hofstadter’s book about Godel’s theorem, “I am a Strange Loop”, points out that mathematicians before after Hilbert and Russell and Whitehead thought that in…

I keep becoming more aware of contradictions and of the inability of reason to cope with them or reconcile them. On my way to the…

Somewhere I once quoted an observation made by Fischer Black in 1994 about the need for judging traders by their reasoning rather than results. Several…

I used to detest vulgarity, but that was long ago. Now I don’t mind it too much. In the good sense, vulgarity can be the…

When you forget skills or knowledge you once used but then neglected, I’ve noticed that they don’t fade away gradually. Some of the physics or…

I realize it contains lots of inaccuracies and sounds cranky, but I sort of like this article: www.theamericanscholar.org……. I found it on aldaily.com……. The reason…

The epidemic of recent articles in the press about neurolaw and responsibility made me decide to believe in two contradictory ideas: 1. I will treat…

The Brain on the Stand By JEFFREY ROSEN How advances in neuroscience could transform our legal system. � � The extent of that revolution is…

1. From Jim Holt’s review of Michael Frayn’s new book on existence: I like the last parenthetical sentence. “In philosophy, you can be a “realist”…

I’m not a basketball fan and I know next to nothing about it. But I was fascinated by this 1972 photograph of Pete Maravich in…

A few months ago I wrote the following about how to justify working in finance: “Some people have jobs that very clearly benefit humanity: doctors,…

Somewhere I seem to think I once read the line “Karma is the mechanical expiation of sin.” I mentioned it in my book and seemed…

There was an article by Richard Dawkins in last Friday’s WSJ , which was itself a condensed version of an L.A. Times article of Jan…

Many years ago I saw Louis Malle’s movie ‘My Dinner with Andre.’ The whole movie does indeed take place over dinner, more or less in…

There’s an interesting review of Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the latest NY Review of Books, by H. Allen Orr, a professor of biology at…

Some time in the early 1970s Nature magazine had an article about people whose names matched their occupations. There was a famous neurology textbook “Diseases…

I was idly watching bits of ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ on TV the other night. There was one scene where Tom Hanks flies to NYC to…

Carolyn Porco, the Boulder scientist I mentioned two blogs ago who sees science as everyone’s solace for the universe’s apparently dispassionate behavior towards humans and…

There is this sudden rash of books by famous scientists suggesting we extirpate religion from society, starting with Daniel Dennett ‘s “Breaking the Spell: Religion…

Landing at San Francisco Airport recently I saw an Air New Zealand plane. What immediately struck me was the tail logo: so serious, so proud,…

People seem to believe that the ability to talk developed in order to improve communication beyond mere gestures and grunts. But perhaps the ability to…

I spent the last week at Stanford University, about which more later. As I walked through Newark airport to the “Passengers Only” security check, I…