De Rigueur

Cooking - I love food. I love cooking. I just don’t do enough of it. I’d like to start amassing some quality kitchenware, and really having a go at building out a repertoire of recipes.  Little glass of vino, stereo on shuffle, onions sizzling away. Bring it.

Yoga - I’ve been saying it for years, but this time I’m serious. Rather than being some fly by night trend watcher, I grew up around yoga practitioners yet somehow never quite took the leap myself. Good for the mind, good for the body, good for Alex.

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Vice Magazine has said it before, and I’ll say it again. No sneakers after 30. That is, unless you’re 50+ and the sneakers in question are a snappy pair of crisp, white, velcro slip-ons. The dapper gentlemen below exemplify sartorial flare.

In a dramatic turn of events, looks like my time in London is up. I love the city, and my nine month stint here working was challenging and fun. Alas, an opportunity came up in the Big Apple that I simply couldn’t turn down. I’m off this Sunday. I’m excited.

Susan Cadogan - Hurt So Good

I wish I could give you this lil’ guy…

Robert Merton. The guy’s a Wall Street Legend - not so much for his trading prowess (he was directly involved in one the financial world’s most spectacular failures), but for his work in pioneering the first viable* options pricing model: Black-Scholes (he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1997, a year before his ill-fated LTCM fund group collapsed, nearly bringing global financial markets grinding to a halt). Along with his colleagues Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, something always bugged me about these guys. There’s a perennial smugness to them, a sense that they have it all figured out - that all the dramatic failures they’ve personally experienced have been statistical aberrations and not due to fundamental oversights in their reasoning.

Michael Lewis (of Liar’s Poker fame) does a great job of spelling that out here. Roger Lowenstein, does equally well in his detailed account of LTCM, When Genius Failed. This sort of false confidence has come under increasing attack by a new group of financial thinkers, including Nassim Taleb, fund manager and author of The Black Swan: The High Impact of the Highly Improbable. I think they have a point…

That said, these guys are undoubtedly, very smart individuals. Despite my distrust of their optimism in a relatively opaque and exceptionally complicated beast of a financial system, they have some interesting insights. Check this Merton interview in Technology Review, a great read…

RM: Yes, they have. Let me give you an extreme example. For certain very specialized hedge funds that do what’s called very high frequency trading, the location of the outsider’s server and the exchange’s server matters.

TR: It’s that tight.

RM: Yes–speed of light. So in fact one of the exchanges used to delay just slightly the information going out from the East Coast to allow a little more parity for those on the West Coast. Today, they rent or auction space for people to put their servers near the exchange server, so the speed of time between exchanges is reduced by that metric. And the number of trades that get offered in this thing is vastly greater than the number of trades that actually get done. So the volume of activity is orders of magnitude greater than the number of trades you would record as the actual volume. The reason I’m taking you into all this is to say that there is no one who can sit and watch those trades directly and apply anything to them. So what do we do? We build computer programs to extend our human skill, and we try to audit what’s going on, but at the end of the day, the computers do the trading. Yes, there can be a dysfunctional aspect to that, but it’s not as if people are setting things on their computers and then going to the Bahamas[.

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Brilliant David Brooks column…true mental discipline, one thing I long to achieve:

The Frozen Gaze

Rocco Mediate’s head swiveled about as he walked up the fairway of the sudden-death hole of the U.S. Open on Monday. Somebody would catch his attention, and his eyes would dart over and he’d wave or make a crack. Tiger Woods’s gaze, on the other hand, remained fixed on the ground, a few feet ahead of his steps. He was, as always, locked in, focused and self-contained.

The fans greeted Mediate with fraternal affection and Woods with reverence. Most were probably rooting for Rocco, but only because Woods, the inevitable victor, has risen above mere human status and become an embodiment of immortal excellence. That frozen gaze of his looks out from airport billboards, TV commercials and the ad pages. And its ubiquity is proof that every age finds the heroes it needs.

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It takes a lot to stay on top; just ask Madonna. And while I know Snoop Dog is a serial innovator, I didn’t realize he quite had this in him. Channeling a synth-heavy 808 State vibe, Snoop rocks it with this retro gem. Welcome to the world of Outkast-esque innovation!

The New York Times revisited Robert Kennedy’s assassination this weekend, on the 40th anniversary of his death. A young photographer by the name of Paul Fusco was on-board the train as it carried Kennedy’s body back home, and he was moved to take some snaps of those paying their respects along the way. The photos are amazing…

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terrific little photo essay from VICE: Photographer Bryan Derballa has just finished shooting a film about the lives of surfers in Israel and Gaza called God Went Surfing with the Devil. He’s taken some great photographs during his travels in the region, most of which you can find on his blog. Here are a selected few…

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Roatan, Honduras :: Jellymonster, originally uploaded by fotokat.

I long to travel.

Despite the initial shock of this photo (those arms!), this article made me nostalgic for a mid-western, American Summer.

Riding the Road to Beijing Aboard the USA Local

ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — Just where in the world was the United States Olympic softball team? It should not take eight hours to get here from Visalia, even with a McDonald’s stop in Madera and an out-of-the-way detour through Palo Alto…

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not until November, but the last post got my creative juices flowing…

I’ve said it here before, I’ve got a penchant for the macabre. From Edgar Allen Poe’s American gothic prose to Tim Burton’s dark, melancholy humor, it’s all for me. And if when I say the Brothers Grimm, you think Disney, well then you my friend are missing out. The pair’s original tales are so dark and sinister, they’d hardly be deemed suitable for today’s youth; think Harry Potter with the young protagonist meeting a violent death at the end of the first volume.

On that note, I’ll leave you with some wonderful illustrations from reclusive artist Edward Gorey (and those names, Gorey, Grimm…life imitating art?)

The Gashlycrumb Tidies, continued here.

Check out these surreal images of an electrical storm over Chile’s most recent eruption (if only I could view these from my hobbit hut! - that one’s for you Huntington):

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The Wall Street Journal last week published an informal piece of research ranking the most influential thinkers / authors in the world of business. It came as no surprise to see the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell squeak into the top five, despite being both a relative newcomer and a rather non-traditional choice. You probably know Gladwell from 2002’s The Tipping Point.

I’m currently reading his latest look at business / social cognition, entitled Blink (even better than The Tipping Point, IMHO!). Regardless of whether you’re a fan or not, I’d highly suggest checking out his latest piece in the New Yorker, In The Air:

Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions…

…when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.

You can imagine where it goes from there. It’s a riveting account of the creative, intellectual process both throughout history and today, and it’s pretty inspiring stuff. Enjoy.

Feel like reengaging the internal moral tug-of-war that is the Israeli / Palestinian situation? Here’s some food for thought, from left to right:

Blood and sand

…what followed was a drama of redemptive, liberating settlement on one side and catastrophic dispossession on the other—all of it taking place on a patch of desert land too small for easy division and too imbued with historical and holy claims for rational negotiation. For the Jews in Palestine, Zionism was a movement of national liberation after untold suffering; for the Arabs, Zionism was an intolerable assault by the colonial West against sacred ground and Islam itself. Even now, more than a century later, politicians and scholars alike quickly betray prejudices, passions, and allegiances in the details they select when relating the saga that led to the U.N. Partition Plan, on November 29, 1947, and the war that began just hours later…[continued]

Israel’s 60-Year Test

Sixty years after its birth, Israel continues to test the proposition that reality counts for more than perception.

The Web site eyeontheun.org keeps a running tally of all United Nations resolutions, decisions and reports condemning this or that country for this or that human rights violation (real or alleged). Between January 2003 and March 2008, tiny Israel – its population not half that of metropolitan Cairo’s – was condemned no fewer than 635 times. The runners-up were Sudan at 280, the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 209, and Burma at 183. North Korea was cited a mere 60 times, a third as many as the United States.

Is Israel the world’s foremost abuser of human rights? A considerable segment of world opinion thinks that it is, while an equally considerable segment of elite opinion thinks that, even if it isn’t, its behavior is nonetheless reprehensible by civilized standards…[continued]