I came across the chart below this morning which looks at the performance of what you would term large or dominant stocks within an index. What these sorts of charts do is educate you about the history of markets but they also reaffirm that there is nothing new under the sun. As the article that…
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Much has been written about how life will be after we are done with COVID-19 – some of it sensible, some of it mere hyperbole but one of the more thoughtful pieces I have come across is this one by Paul Kedrosky a venture capitalist who jotted down some thoughts in one of his in…
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Charles Darwin is ever with us. A month seldom passes without new books about the man, his life, his work, and his influence—books by scholars for scholars, by scholars for ordinary readers, and by the many unwashed rest of us nonfiction authors who presume to enter the fray, convinced that there’s one more new way…
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In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people (roughly one-quarter of London’s population), in just 18 months. A 24-year-old student from Trinity College, Cambridge was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home. His name was Isaac Newton and his time…
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Whenever I see a report on the spread of coronavirus it is generally accompanied by a variation of the graphic below. Giant red circles encompassing massive areas of the globe. People see this and quite naturally freak out because it appears as if the world is engulfed in a runaway contagion. What is being shown…
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One of the things that scream incompetent is the inability to distinguish between what is a relative figure and what is an absolute figure. You most often see this sort of idiocy in the reporting of the risks associated with various events such as diet or drug interventions. For example, consider this statement – eating…
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Let me start with a general statement – t world is awash with cretins when it comes to any event that doesn’t involve watching reality TV, piss farting around on social media, waxing your genitals and shaving off your eyebrows and then drawing them 3cms higher than they were with a sharpie. There is no…
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Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing. There, he dons a parka and sits in a field with a camera and a piece of foam board, waiting for snow. Specifically, he seeks the sparkliest,…
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Another reason to get your arse off the couch. In the 1990s researchers announced a series of discoveries that would upend a bedrock tenet of neuroscience. For decades the mature brain was understood to be incapable of growing new neurons. Once an individual reached adulthood, the thinking went, the brain began losing neurons rather than…
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