News That Stays News

Inside Baseball October 24, 2010

Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t like Black-Scholes, and thinks it helps you understand option traders like a good course in Hamiltonian Mechanics will help you understand carpentry.

Paul David writes about the stock market crash of May 6, 2010.   Most interesting bits, I think: that the most virulent diseases are all spread by non-human vectors (so that they don’t burn themselves out by killing people too fast), and that Schumpeter’s theory was based on the idea that irrational exuberance allows people to coordinate big infrastructure investments, that you could never agree to make if you had to bargain.  Also, the thought that even the expansion in the nineties gave us Youtube (networks could handle more load than they were taking), but all this last one left was huge houses, pathologically far from urban centers.

Also, the subway systems of the world, to scale.  If somebody put the right colors on the different subway lines and made a poster of this, I think I’d buy it.