Information Processing

If you ever come to this part of Italy try the wonderful gnocchi -- it's apparently a regional specialty. We had several epic dinners co...

I didn't get to see any of the coverage of the RNC since I'm here in Italy. Regarding Palin, there is a natural instability in dem...

26 hours of travel yesterday (EUG-PDX-FRA-VCE + train) but so far I feel pretty good, even after seminars from 9:30 AM until 6 PM :-) Trento...

His acceptance speech tonight was good, but the best speech of the convention was John Kerry's. See here for more discussion. Never in ...

I can't resist reproducing this quote from John von Neumann, which I think applies well to certain branches of particle theory today. Th...

I'm off soon to the following meeting at ECT : European Center for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics, which is located in the mount...

I usually don't get into detailed physics exposition on this blog, but I thought I would make an exception with regard to the paper 0808...

New paper! Probably too technical to go into here, but it relates to our current inability to directly simulate dense nuclear matter (QCD at...

What did all those medals cost China? Billions of dollars and the effort and sacrifice of countless young athletes , most of whom came nowhe...

19.30 in the 200m, breaking Michael Johnson's record! Two world records, two gold medals. He led by 10m at the finish, and this time the...

9.69 -- and he strolled across the finish line while beating his chest with no one even close! Bolt is 6 foot 5 and only 21 years old. I th...

Scifoo 2008 was tremendous fun. Thanks to all the organizers from Google, Nature and O'Reilly who made it happen. I guess I'm used t...

I'm off to the Googleplex tomorrow for Scifoo 2008, sponsored by Google, Nature and O'Reilly. Here's the Nature web page ; mayb...

William Bernstein at Efficient Frontier noted back in March that dysfunctional credit markets are exhibiting historically anomalous yield s...

Will China's Beijing Olympics performance match their dominance of international science competitions? A reader sends the following info...

Last night's 170 lb title fight had some of the most beautiful judo throws I've ever seen in MMA. We call those "high amplitude...

The article Should You Buy A House Now? runs with the figure below, which pretty much summarizes the situation. They should have printed th...

The New Yorker has a great piece on the resurgent nationalism of young Chinese intellectuals. A couple of weeks later, I met Tang Jie at th...

What will happen to the quants in August 2017? Andrew Lo MIT and AlphaSimplex http://www.nyu.edu/sofie/slides/Lo.ppt Via Barry Ritholtz .

The WSJ has posted some interesting compensation data which can be sorted by college and degree type. The data covers people less than 5 ye...

Mortgage-backed assets with face value of $30.6B were just sold by Merrill for $6.7B. 1) obviously, this reflects huge losses and perhaps fo...

I knew it was too good to be true! As a for-profit company, Skype/EBay eventually had to cave in to spook pressure and allow for eavesdroppi...

John Paulson made $15 billion for his fund ($3.7 billion for himself!) betting against subprime securities last year. Now Bloomberg reports...

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the social effects of gender imbalances. As we know, teenage girls are more likely than boys to...

It's about time! See Calcuated Risk for further discussion. (Note this data covers some regions which are quite far from the bay itself...