Information Processing

I came across this nice review article on power law distributions in economic and other contexts. A particularly interesting one is the fol...

The USATF championships were held here again last week and over the weekend. I run on the same track as these guys, only much slower :-) The...

Yes, by the end he had become a freak, perhaps even a monster, a caricature of his younger self. But in 1983, when I was in high school, he ...

Michael Chabon writes in the NY Review of Books. Parents these days are probably the most risk averse, fear driven and statistically innume...

Represent each individual human by their DNA sequence. When aggregated, they cluster into readily identifiable groups. This has been known f...

Below is some (lightly edited) correspondence between Vanderbilt cosmologist Robert Scherrer and myself on topics related to my previous po...

On the subject of personality factors and success in science, here is a provocative essay by UK professor Bruce Charlton . ( PDF version .)...

In the previous post I mentioned my scores on this Big Five personality test. Someone immediately doubted whether I (or any theoretical ph...

I was wandering in the bookstore today and looked through a copy of Geoffrey Miller 's book Spent: Sex, Evolution and Human Behavior . (...

I'd like to recommend this podcast interview with Riccardo Rebonato. Rebonato, the author of the prescient book Plight of the Fortune T...

Below are links to slides, video and audio for the public lecture I gave on the movie Angels and Demons and related topics in high energy p...

At a dinner tonight I ended up seated next to an interesting older professor, a historian of modern SE Asia, probably in his sixties. A Yali...

University rankings are a complicated subject; see this Wikipedia entry for an overview of various methodologies. Two common problems with ...

I finally got a copy of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics . PCM is over 1000 pages of extremely well written, self-contained essays on ...

There's a great profile of Carlos Slim in the New Yorker this week. Slim is one of the richest men in the world and recently took a big ...

I've been fascinated by economist Vernon Smith since participating in paid economics experiments as a student at Caltech. Smith was the...

Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin , by professor...

Another book recommendation. I've never understood the fundamental moral or ethical justification for international law or national sove...

Highly recommended: FT journalist Gillian Tett, a PhD in social anthropology, discusses her book on the financial crisis: Fool's Gold , ...

[Slides, audio and video for the talk here .] Next week I'm giving a public lecture on the science behind the latest Dan Brown blockbust...

A simple test administered to four year olds has impressive predictive power for later life outcomes. Are we talking about an IQ test? No, a...

This is one of the great documentaries of all time -- it's beautiful and tragic and all too real. The entire 2 hours is available on Goo...

A correspondent sent me this graphic from the Financial Times, which lets you see the 20 largest banks in the world by capitalization, and...

If you are attuned to the geek universe, you've probably already heard the rumors about WolframAlpha , the "computational knowledge...

Speaking of interesting conferences, check out this one hour documentary on a recent meeting between Chinese and Western intellectuals. I f...