Category: blog

Lately it has become fashionable to disparage intuition in favor of careful statistical analysis. Me, I’m still a fan of intuition.

Self-schooled in finance and unschooled in economics, I was very glad to be sent a link to Hayek’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture.

Consultants, Management

“Lola” is executed with great panache, and loosely relevant to economic affairs today. It’s set in a small town in the boom of 1950s West Germany, and is about contagion, the moral kind.

I am thoroughly tired of Europe, America, Obama, the Republicans, banks central and peripheral, and everyone’s indignation about the above. And of my own indignation too. It’s affecting my quality of life.

Everyone avers that honesty, ethics, morality, art, literature, science, etc. are good, but if you look at the way people behave most of the time, their actions give the lie to their beliefs.

Two movies this week, one new — “Margin Call” — and one old a second time — Alan Pakula’s “Klute.” Both didn’t live up to what I expected or recalled.

Someone directed me to this remark by Larry Page: “DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed making it smaller than any modern operating system like Linux or Windows.”

I have the luxury of not being a regulator, which I think is a very difficult job. I used to be a physicist, and Nature doesn’t care about regulations; she cares about principles.

At Times Square on the evening of Oct 15th it felt as though tidal forces were beginning to pull people apart.

This is an extended version of a review I wrote on Amazon for Lucky Bruce: A Memoir.

Why shouldn’t one regard all mental phenomena as meaningful? Why only some?

A video featuring Derman discussing his new book.

In this country politicians use polls to try to figure out what people want, and then offer it to them in order to get elected.

I went to the NY Film Festival for the first time in years last night and saw David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a movie about the interactions between Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein who was Jung’s mistress, Jung and Freud’s joint patient sequentially, and an eventual analyst herself.

In this article on nightmares in the WSJ, there is the following paragraph:

I came across a very interesting post by Sam Harris about the difficulties of getting paid for being an artist, a writer, or a public intellectual.

The first thing that struck me after I got over my shock at being 10,000 miles from everything I knew was how foreign everyone was. New York was a polyglot city of immigrants.

If God had only had a committee of business writers to help him, I think he could have done a better job.