Consultants

from the WSJ, describing the depressed holiday season:

... said Mary Delk, a director in the retail practice at consulting firm Deloitte LLP. "Retailers went from 'Ho-ho' to 'Uh-oh' to 'Oh-no.'"

That is some valuable management consulting wisdom right there. It would make a fine and witty conclusion to a powerpoint presentation.

Universal Question Solved by Math

I think a universal question is, how the hell did I (insert yourself here) get so lucky to exist on this perfect planet in the middle of a universe otherwise devoid of life? I believe it's the inability to rationally answer questions like this that push people toward religious superstition.

Answer:

Bayes rule tells us the probability of something (A) given that we know something else happened (B):




For example, I ask what is the probability that I am so lucky to exist on this microscopic paradise (A) given that I know I exist on this rare planet (B).

P("Lucky"|"Know") = P("Lucky" && "Know")/P("Know")

But since everyone who was lucky enough to live on Earth knows they exist,
P("Lucky" && "Know") = P("Know")
=> P("Lucky"|"Know") = P("Know")/P("Know") = 1

So as long as you're conscious to know that you have been blessed to live against all odds, it's a trivial conclusion.

Myths of the Financial Crisis

Here is a very interesting, 3 weeks young paper discussing some myths of the financial crises (click). Some I partially disagree with but overall it shoots down many of the conclusions being drawn by news sources from the Ted spread data etc.

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.