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.

Tennis - as I hate the gym, and jog rather inconsistently, I need to find something fun that will keep me physical. Tennis is the game. I played a bit as a kid, but hadn’t picked up a racket in over a decade until last week. I had a blast. Definitely taking lessons when I get to New York.

Saving - I’ve never been a big saver. Scratch that, I’ve never been a saver period. Paycheck to paycheck is no way to live at 27 years old. It has to change.

Gardening - vegetables to be specific. And yes, this one is a bit ambitious, but maybe I can start off slow. What can I grow in a small Manhattan studio? Suggestions?

Travel - a non-party destination to be specific. Too often I find myself going where the action is and coming back from “vacation” more tired than I was before leaving. I need to buck that trend and take a proper trip - Ghana, Maine, Guatemala - and do some  proper exploring.

Susan Cadogan - Hurt So Good

I wish I could give you this lil’ guy…

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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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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