Information Processing

Speaking of high frequency trading, here's Zero Hedge on the Renaissance vs. Volfbeyn and Belpolsky matter. Related posts here and her...

Whit Stillman wrote and directed the trilogy Metropolitan, Barcelona and Last Days of Disco, three of my favorite movies. It's been 10 ...

No, I'm not on Twitter. I don't need to be immersed in distracting stimulus -- the web is bad enough. My thoughts are already shallo...

Because there is money to be made at this game (estimated in the article to be in excess of $8 billion per year), it is attracting both fina...

Why was the German atomic bomb effort during WWII unsuccessful? Was it because Heisenberg deliberately undermined the project (perhaps becau...

Shocking! I never expected to see 19.19 in my lifetime, but then I expected Michael Johnson's 19.32 WR to last for decades, like Bob Bea...

Richard Posner writes in the Atlantic. Read the whole thing! I doubt academic economists are to blame for the crisis in any direct sense --...

Far behind in second was Tyson Gay, whose 9.71 would be the fastest ever were it not for Bolt. Teammate Asafa Powell (who has run 9.72, thir...

Ever wonder how automated genetic sequencing works? The blog post linked to below gives a detailed description of the Illumina platform, ...

I could really use this mutation. It seems I naturally need 8+ hours of sleep -- very inconvenient! Related posts: All in da gene , mutants...

Readers of this blog have probably noticed that I regularly post about China and globalization . I've devoted much less space to Japa...

My student David Reeb and I were asked to write a short review of our recent work on monsters for the journal Modern Physics Letters. The re...

New paper! Although I'm skeptical about the utility of the anthropic principle (see previous discussion on this blog), I couldn't ...

Anderson Silva, king of the 185 pound division, moves up to 205 to face Forrest Griffin, a former light heavyweight champ. This clip says it...

A friend pointed me to this post by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky , in which he describes his shock at meeting a sample of the technology...

The Making of An Economist Redux by David Colander The paper describes a survey taken by graduate students at seven top-ranking economics ...

The three stages of reaction to a new scientific result: 1. It's wrong 2. It's trivial 3. I did it first I made this up myse...

I've been meaning to discuss the book The Psychology of Mathematical Invention in the Mathematical Field , by Jacques Hadamard . It was ...

You can be a vulture too :-) Free leverage from Uncle Sam! What's not to like? WSJ : ... New York-based fund giant BlackRock is launchi...

I'd be outraged, except I'm sure Mr. Hall is providing far more than $100M of value this year to US taxpayers by making sure that en...

Psychologist Thomas Bouchard , a leader in the field of twin and adoption studies, is retiring from the University of Minnesota. (Some Bouch...

From Googler Mark Chu-Carroll, a post and ensuing 600+ comments on how horrible high school is for some geeks. Mark writes the blog Good Mat...

I love this picture, perhaps because I am slightly hypomanic (see old post below) and associate myself with the smiley ball. How do I know ...