Perfect Competition

The universe is a free market so communism, embedded liberalism, feudalism, oligopoly, etc arise naturally in a free market. They are short term strategies to gain an upper hand. However the overall force which pits ideologies, countries, and species against each other is survival of the fittest, i.e. free market capitalism.

My opinion is partially inspired by a computational psychology lecture- Since the universe is probabilistic and follows certain laws, any thinking organism that makes rational decisions under a criteria not in alignment with the laws of probability is evolutionarily disadvantaged. Such as this man who foolishly agree to a negative-expectation bet.

It's also partially inspired by a post by Bill Rempel.

And by an essay assignment I'm doing on the Mughal dynasty in India.

Video

This is a test (no audio)

Quant Trading Male/Female Ratio 5:1

Today I talked to Ralph Goldsticker, a managing director of research at Mellon Capital Management and he told me that there are about 5 men to 1 woman in the quant industry. So it's a little better than software development but worse than going the pure business route.

Plasma from the Sun

This video of hot plasma "many times the size of Earth" unfurling from the sun is surreal. I'm not a space guy but that's pretty amazing.

Best Places to Launch a Career

Via Businessweek's amazingly accurate ratings:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/career_launch_2008/index.asp

Try to find the arbitrage opportunities
(i.e. sort by average pay and look for the lowest rank near the top, weight by # of entry level hires)

The only banks with liquidity now are sperm banks

(Seen on Sproul Plaza)

Memory Article

Here's an interesting article on memory: Wired