How Things Change
This is the UBS Stamford trading floor circa 2008 – apparently it covered an area of 23 basketball courts. And this is the same floor today.
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Is September Really The Worst Month?
The chart below from the website Chart of the Day has been doing the rounds of late. A variation on this chart has also appeared in Bloomberg and has been passed around a variety of news outlets. I am always interested in these sorts of charts and the narrative they are trying to convey. My…
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How the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ Gave Brian Wilson a Nervous Breakdown
When Brian Wilson first heard the Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, he was so astonished by the album that the next morning, he went straight to his piano and started writing “God Only Knows” with his songwriting partner Tony Asher. Wilson knew that Rubber Soul — an album that contained the most mature songwriting from John Lennon,…
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The Monty Hall Problem
Imagine that you’re on a television game show and the host presents you with three closed doors. Behind one of them, sits a sparkling, brand-new Lincoln Continental; behind the other two, are smelly old goats. The host implores you to pick a door, and you select door #1. Then, the host, who is well-aware of…
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Is 2016 the Worst Year in History?
If you listened to the breathless and somewhat hysterical local media then you would think it is but then you would be wrong…… When news of the truck killings in Nice, France, broke last week, I started seeing variations of the same sentiment on Twitter and Facebook: Is this the worst year ever, or what?…
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Hermits and Cranks
How can we tell if someone is a scientific crank? Gardner offers this advice: (1) “First and most important of these traits is that cranks work in almost total isolation from their colleagues.” Cranks typically do not understand how the scientific process operates—that they need to try out their ideas on colleagues, attend conferences and…
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