Going Swede

Click on ol’ Frederick Carlsson for some Digitalism, “Taken Away” remix action…

Roche

Unpolished and brilliant

Mira Billote of White Magic

Winter daydream

…what I wouldn’t give

courtesy of Linn Photography…

Mt. Washington

My Spring Tunes

In lieu of any sort of creative direction for this little website, I’m going to just keep posting music until inspiration hits. These are my top two tunes for this gorgeous, Spring-like day…

Someone Great

lovers lane

Naples, 2000

Happy Valentines Day!!!

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The No-Stats All-Star

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly ­reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways.

Michael Lewis in the NYT

Curiosity

Curiosity from Si on Vimeo.

I’m BACK!!!

Muuuahahaha…finally resolved my WordPress issues. Feels good to be back up and running.

Things I’d like to get into in 2008

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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Fashion tips for the 50 and up

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.

London to NYC

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.

Boss track!

Susan Cadogan - Hurt So Good

Robert Merton

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[.

[continued]

mental fortitude

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.

[continued]

Reinvention

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!

I’ve got my eye on you

Offensive, ignorant