Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management was influential in turning me against naive market libertarianism. Market can correct for errors, but when that takes the whole global economy down…. (also, hedge fund guys are genuine assholes who don’t give a shit in many cases)
Why ISIS Declared War on Egypt’s Christians. An analogy here is made to Shia in Iraq. The analogy breaks down because the Shia Arabs of Iraq are about half the population. Coptic Christians are closer to 10%. Because Egypt has a large population there are probably more than 5 million Coptic Christians. Mass migrations as occurred with Iraqi Christian can’t work because there are too many of them.
California is getting so much power from solar that wholesale electricity prices are turning negative. Not surprising if you read Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.
Syria intervention: skeptical. The best of intentions….
Postdocs getting a pay raise, but many say it’s not nearly enough. I suspect what’s going to happen is that there will be fewer postdocs and they will get paid more.
To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old.
UC Berkeley Was Warned About Its Star Professor Years Before Sexual Harassment Lawsuit. Searle is rightly famous. His ideas may have merit even if he is a horrible person. And for all the moral panic about sexual assaults on campus between undergraduates, one thing you notice if you are in academia is there are a well known list of creepy professors who you hear about, but who are too famous and powerful to confront unless they really, really, step over the line, or, someone is willing to stake their reputation and career on a take-down.
An updated meta-analysis of the ego depletion effect. A big deal. Probably true.
This thread illustrates that New York City consists of four broad groups of people:
1) The affluent, from young finance professionals to the Upper East Side wealthy.
2) The transient. This includes young artists and creative types who live relatively cheap and have few expenses, and will probably move on as they mature, either into another field that pays better, or, to a region they can afford. It also includes immigrants who are just starting out in this country. By the second and third generation many of their children and grandchildren will be moving out of the city.
3) The permanent poor. See the Bronx.
The dynamic upper limit of human lifespan.
Pizza chains are making a desperate push to avoid posting calories on menus. Have you seen how many calories are in one slice?
Two issues with this blog. First, lots of problems with connecting to the MySQL database. A quick hack is that I wrote a script which checks if the database is down every 5 seconds and restarts it if it’s down. Also, lots of 503 errors, probably because of a caching problem. I’ll fix this, but if you have advice, appreciate.
Also, I’m loading the full archives of my content right now. It might be disorganized, but all of it should be searchable soon(ish).