Category: blog

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.

Capitalism depends on lending and borrowing, and hence on banks.

The hurricane edition of the NY Times contains an article about a new British TV show on the downside of immortality.

I have been reading a column in the Sydney Morning Herald by their Economics Writer Jessica Irvine.

I had thought globalization was a good idea.

Many economic tweets are arguments about statistics.

I said I would try to explain what I mean by sophisticated vulgarity in financial modeling, which I will do by imperfect analogy.