The Devil looks you in the eyes and offers you a bet. Pick a number and if you successfully guess the total he’ll roll on two dice you get to keep your soul. If any other number comes up, you go to burn in eternal hellfire. You call “7” and the Devil rolls the dice.…
From the good Dr Joe who has good taste in wheels.
In a cramped suburban Philadelphia office piled high with file folders and documents, Francis Malofiy grabs a steel-stringed acoustic guitar from the corner and places it on his knee. As the 38-year-old lawyer starts to play, the first few notes sound unmistakably like those in Stairway to Heaven. Or do they? Malofiy claims Led Zeppelin filched the iconic arpeggio from a long-forgotten band named Spirit.…
The Americans have at the centre of their sporting culture three of the most boring games ever invented. A game of gridiron can last some three hours but only around 12 minutes of that is actual playing time, the rest is commercials and replays of the paltry 12 minutes of playing time. Basketball consists of…
Its a slow day for me so when I am bored I tend to begin to generate dodgy charts and tables in excel. I thought I would have a look at the level of margin on the NYSE. Margin is thought to be a barometer of market health both in terms of the perceived willingness…
Abstract Numeracy is defined as the ability to understand and use numerical information. We examined the relationship between numeracy and wealth using a cross-sectional and a longitudinal study. For a sample of approximately 1000 Dutch adults, we found a statistically significant correlation between numeracy and wealth, even after controlling for differences in education, risk preferences,…
As part of a recent discussion in the Mentor Program we looked at the nature of returns and how they can be distributed in the real world which is very different to how you want them to be distributed in your head. For the conversation I posted the graph below which is a series of…
I found this fascinating and it had me drawing bikes on a blank piece of paper. The central issue is that we actually know less about he world than we think we do. These errors abound in simple tasks and in our understanding of the way the world works. It is natural therefore that such…
This question has attracted scientific research for more than a century. In fact, the first empirical study of this issue was published in 1835. Thus, I can offer a confident answer: not quite! At least not if creativity is assessed by productivity or by making original and valuable contributions to fields such as science and…
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century novel, Don Quixote. Published four hundred years ago in Madrid, the book was an immediate success and recognised as one of the classic texts of Western Literature, revered by writers such as Sterne, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Melville. Don Quixote tells the story of…
This is a bit of a Sunday morning tea and toast ramble, so if you have something more important to do like catch up on Housewives of Melbourne aka Slappers of Bleak City or you are you are wondering what happened in the latest episode of My Kitchen Dickheads I suggest you pop off now. I…
