A Serious Man
This is the trailer for the new Coen brothers film. A Serious Man seems to be a darker and deeper trip in paranoia than the excellent Burn After Reading. It will be great. The brothers can do no wrong on screen.
Computer Arbitrage – The Next Level
Arstechnica has a nice piece on the world of high-speed trading.
If you look under the hood of the markets in 2009, you’ll find that the trading floor has been replaced by electronic networks; the frantic, hand-signaling traders have been replaced by computer systems; and all of moves in the trader’s dance—a thousand little tricks and techniques (some legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal) for taking regular advantage of speed, location, and information to generate profits—are executed hundreds of times per second, billions of times per day. And the whole enterprise is mainly powered by the same hardware from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, that Ars readers use for gaming.
I pity the fools with etrade accounts who wake up at odd hours to check on the markets. Few of them will be so late to the trades that they might actually get them right. Still, flash your skeptical smile at the next active amateur trader boasting big returns at a cocktail party.
Аssorted Links
1. It is cats and not mice (as the hitchhiker story would have us believe) that have been manipulating humanity all along
2. A list of ten overhyped books that are just not worth it
3. The Man Who Crashed the World
4. The Messenger lectures of Richard Faynman
Rendez-vous
On an 1976 August morning, French New Wave film maker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro stabilized camera on his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 and raced through the streets of central Paris. Lelouch dubbed over the sound of a Ferrari 275GTB to create the impression for an even higher speed. He did not have permits to stop traffic and film. The director was arrested for endangering public safety shortly after the first screening. C’était un rendez-vous (It was a date) was done in one take without stuntman or special effects. It is nine minutes long.
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream
I am a movie junkie. Take away watching films and I will do anything, no matter how horrible it might be, to get it back. So when I came across The 50 [allegedly] Greatest Trailers of All Time, I had to spend the next 2 hours going through the list. Some of the films that made it there are good, some of them are truly great. Enjoy.
Happy Independence Day
To all my friends in the US and New England in particular - happy Fourth of July. I miss you all and hope to see you again sooner than later. The photo above was taken in the legendary Toast House on this day a few years ago. Cheers!
