Monthly Archives: April 2011

Taleb

A bit of a chat with Nassim Taleb – the author of Fooled by Randomness and Black Swans. I have never really been one of Talebs fans since Fooled by Randomness seemed to be a long series of self justifications as to why he couldn’t trade. The central undercurrent of the book seemed to be…

Lucky Bastards

To offer a counterpoint to Talebs notion of luck being the arbiter of all success a piece called what Lucky People do Different

That Equation Made Me Do It

I have written before about how those with the moral of a pox ridden alley cat had tried to blame the Black and Scholes equation for the GFC This very clever little graphic puts that notion to bed. Source – Quant

Money Power And Wall Street

The Yanks do some things well – this sort of PBS doco is one of them PS My first attempt to load it in Chrome didn’t go so well – I had better luck with Firefox.

Because Its Cool

ANZAC Day

Remembering is one thing – doing something is another Soldier On Legacy

For Geeks Only

I noticed this in the footnotes of this article – The Crisis of Big Science In his recent book, The Infinity Puzzle (Basic Books, 2011), Frank Close points out that a mistake of mine was in part responsible for the term “Higgs boson.” In my 1967 paper on the unification of weak and electromagnetic forces, I…

Fact Of The Day

Apple makes up more than 4% of the S&P500 and more than 18% of the Nasdaq 100

Predicting the Improbable

Excellent paper by VoxEU.org on behaviour around what are considered improbable events. Predicting the improbable Claus Bjørn Jørgensen Sigrid Suetens Jean-Robert Tyran 22 April 2011 Japan’s trio of tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear disaster has left the world stunned. As this column points out, even the experts were shocked. But while these events were highly unlikely,…