Category: blog

While sleepless and low in Hong Kong at 4 a.m. I’ve seen several newspaper news reports that don’t seem either as dramatically good or bad…

My father knew a man called Mr Gilmour who was an engineer who finally retired somewhere in the late 1960s. In those days you used…

Why do they put ice cubes in urinals? The Indian restaurant I ate in last had about 20 or 30 in each vertical porcelain receptacle,…

1. This scribble is my signature on the electronic credit card signature-reader at Duane Reade pharmacy. The device has a pathetic little screen, deeply scratched…

What is it about the phrase “A Mighty Servant That Never Sleeps” that makes it mildly blasphemous? I think it’s the “mighty” before the “servant”.…

Driving on the Van Wyck the other day, I was drafting a giant tractor-trailer, and on its rear in big letters was the company name,…

I put some of my lecture notes, in casual form, on my website at www.ederman.com…… I’ll add to them as my class progresses.

As I continue to look through applications to graduate programs, I keep running into the general degradation (that’s the right word) of the whole grading…

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking at applications for admission to financial engineering programs. It’s mind-broadening to see how many reasonable students…

I’ve never looked at facebook.com……, though I know what it is, but periodically I get people emailing me with encouragement to join facebook and then…

When you stay at cheap hotels, you get no cotton robe at all, not even a synthetic one. When you stay at good hotels, they…

I heard a talk entitled “Financial Engineering: An Oxymoron” by Jim Grant tonight at our NYQF seminar. It reminded me of something I once wrote…

is the hobgoblin of little minds. (Emerson). Excuse me, but, on a recent trip I went into the mens’ room at the airport. The toilet…

The New York Times on Oct 3 had an article about the miseries of being a graduate student, and how universities were trying to shorten…

Once I visited a doctor who had a sign in the waiting area saying “Do not arrive 15 minutes before your appointment.” I never did.…

In the past couple of months I visited a bunch of fundamentally driven Long/Short Equity hedge funds. It’s not a very profound observation, but one…

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”…