Six Small Things
that make me happy.
Petya kindly invited me to join a chain of posts. I put down my list in google docs about a month ago and then forgot about it. So, here they are.
1. Coffee. Does not matter if the source is an espresso machine, french press or filter coffee maker. I crave the substance and I drink at least a few cups every day.
2. The return of Fake Steve Jobs. The funniest blogger on my side of the internet is back with the familiar tagline “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?”
3. House MD. I count the days (42) to the premiere of season 6. I used to wake up at 4 in the morning to grab the latest episode from the torrent sites.
4. Stumbling upon a film I should have seen a long time ago but did not. The freshest one in this category is Martin Scorsese’s American Boy. The movie was actually never released to the broad public but this did not stop movie buffs to seek, watch and directly lift ideas from it. Certainly everyone reading this can recall Uma Turman snorting heroin and OD-ing in Pulp Fiction. The scene below has almost a one to one correspondence with a story told in American Boy.
I have no problem with the good directors borrow, great directors steal approach.
On another note, if you, for some freakish reason, have not seen Pulp Fiction - Get out of here right now! I will quote Marsellus Wallace about the situation your lack of curiosity for quality cinema entertainment has created.
Yeah, we cool. Two things. Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-To-Be-Living-The-Rest-of-His-Short-Ass-Life-In-Agonizing-Pain Rapist here. It ain’t nobody else’s business. Two: you leave town tonight, right now. And when you’re gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your L.A. privileges. Deal?
5. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. I find it extremely useful in making sense of web content. Check it out.
6. Not playing WoW any more. It is nothing less than triumph of my will power. Let’s see how long it will last…
Paul Krugman Writes:
As I put it, perhaps too glibly, the central bank needed to “credibly promise to be irresponsible.”
This problem will hardly ever exist in any Balkan country. Almost every institution here is expected to act irresponsibly by the public. The full post is here.
Quote of the Day
“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”
On the president-elect and his top economic advisor. The source article is here.
On another note, Larry Summers’ career swings remind me that the greatest setbacks to intellectual development come from the ever increasing push for political correctness. In the impossible task not to offend anyone in any imaginable way, some of the most progressive people choose to burn daring intellectuals in mass media bonfires for challenging noble ideas that rest on false premises. This is wrong. The consequences of persecutions against individuals who only hypothesize things that are at odds with convenient notions go beyond them losing jobs and career prospects - the chilling effect becomes a silent killer of ideas. In Larry Summers’ case, he just suggested an explanation to the current situation in tier 1 academia. He might, or might not have belived that the underrepresentation of women in certain sciences is due to innate differences between the sexes. But those two are facts and linking them does not spell the end of the world. Larry’s idea did not postulate that the most brilliant mathematician alive cannot be a woman but rather that she will most likely be in the company of five men with almost similar abilities at the top.
Emil Artin Says:
Our difficulty is not in the proofs, but in learning what to prove.
The quote is from Chapter 13 of Algebra by Michael Artin (Emil’s son). Naturally (as most of mathematics), it often applies to any area involving reasoning.
On another note, Algebra is by far the best math textbook that I have come across so far.
Warren Buffett Writes:
Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”
in an op-ed piece for the New York Times.
Paul Krugman Writes:
An interesting morning
A funny thing happened to me this morning …
in one of the best posts in the history of blogging.
A Rock Star
Bob Lefsetz writes:
A rock star is not someone who takes the temperature, who gauges the marketplace before he creates his “art”. A rock star is someone who needs to create and is willing to tolerate the haters along with the fans. He’s someone who incites controversy just by existing. That’s what we lost in the dash for cash. Unique voices. I’m not saying we haven’t ended up with some pleasant music, but it just hasn’t hit you in the gut, it’s the aural equivalent of Splenda, it might do the trick, but it’s not the real thing. The real thing grabs your attention, drives down deep into your heart and lodges itself there. A rock star doesn’t follow conventions, doesn’t go disco or add drum machines just because everybody else does. A rock star exists in his own unique space, and if you met him you probably wouldn’t like him. Because he tends to be self-focused to the point of being narcissistic. Because he cares. He needs to get his message out.
While reading it I could not help but think about Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil and Roger Waters’ The Wall. There is no contemporary rock star or band that can fill the shoes of Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd. The music industry is essentially an oligopoly. One has to please a big label to get his songs out to the mainstream audience. So, the responsibility for stopping potential rock stars from making it goes to the big four music companies that are in control of the supply chain for new artists. I have no sympathy for them.
Charles Darwin Says:
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
I found the quote in Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Although I have some misgivings with their paper (hope to elaborate on those in a post this week), the conclusions really ring true.
