Seth Robert's Method of Weight Loss Popularly known as the Shangri-la diet that I found out from Freakonomics. Michael blowhards tried it and reported it to be working. Michael Blowhard is also low-carbing I've kept carbs to a minimum since last year when my last weight loss plan worked but I've been stuck at the same weight of 141 pounds. I've been on this method for 3 weeks and it has been much easier to administer than the economic weight loss plan. I am happy to report that food fantasies have gone away and I'm spending much lesser on food. Now, like any other normal human being, if you put a slice of cake or tart in front of me, I will say no. However, I don't know if I have a difficult piece of work, I would still crave for sweets - my brain fuel. ~ C., my brother, has been asking me why I am all of a sudden concerned about my weight since I've never been concerned how fat I got. Yes, I do get shocked and crossed when kind hearted ladies tell me to eat lesser or go to the gym - not that they are calling me fat, but that to prescribe torture is clearly a sign that the darkest evil has overtaken their good soul and also, I hate being told what to do. I am plumpy my entire life, being fat is me - not an aberration I have to bring in line. So, unlike girls who became fat when they think themselves as thin, I don't bury my body in great swaths of cloth or wear aggressively tight clothing to prove fat is the new sexy. From time to time, an event would come up and I would try to lose weight to get into one of my nicer dresses I use to be able to wear. (Shopping is an annoying activity that I try not to do it if I could.) While, yes I'm trying to fit into the Cheongsam I have for the graduation ceremony, on the other hand, I feel this is not just it. Maybe the Shangri-la method so easily changed my attitudes towards food and myself that I developed the wish to look so different from me to the extent, I hope, I don't recognise myself in the mirror and this different person can do and experience new things and I get to live vicariously through this different person, you know what I mean? Elsewhere What Will the LHC Find? thanks to Elia Diodati (How exciting!) What was the Montauk monster? Ans: Dead raccoon. Race mixing leading to obesity? My take: Sometimes, it's the food you eat. And that Discovery Channel commercial bears to be seen over and over and over and over and over again. Sing-a-long! Elsewhere All the privileged must have prizes via Adrianna on Twitter. The Disadvantages of an Elite Education Shakespear and Neurology Why some Muslim societies demand the wearing of hijabs and why others do not (and why, therefore, hijabs are not appropriate in Ireland) What's In Your Sushi Hut 33 Blog by James Cary It's here. Desire for Intellectuals On Minzhi: why do women, smart women, academic women, tend to experience intellectual admiration as sexual desire?...we so easily get high on reading something incredibly smart - and the intellectual stimulation so naturally and immediately translates into physical sensation - you needn't have seen the person - you simply know that anyone who writes like that can do anything he damn well pleases with you. I won't talk about Miller *(BLUSH!)* since Min Zhi has already said a bit on sexual selection. However, it only strikes me today that men must feel exactly like this in the sight of a stunningly beautiful woman. That the woman can do anything she damn well pleases, clean him out or kill him and he would probably be so high just thinking that she would do something to him. On Mathematics Elia Diodati posts on passion, hard work and a link to Through a Glass Darkly by Steven G. Krantz. Perhaps what people are telling us is that they know that they should understand and appreciate mathematics, but they do not. So instead they are resentful. Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. ~ Galileo Galilei I don't love maths. I have to get through the basic stuff with a lot of work, kicking and screaming. Although I hate maths and find it mysetrious and secretive, my opinion is that maths is the the language to speak with other people in other fields and, it also appears to me that it is completely impossible to attain any in depth understanding of any topic without maths. Utterly impossible. Evolutionary Short Comings Evolution doesn't, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That's why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there's no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we're stuck with them. From Here Treat Staff as if they are volunteers From a call center blog: Many years ago when I was working at American Management Systems, I learned something that I attribute to Tom Peters but that he apparently attributes to Peter Drucker, that is to treat your staff as if they are volunteers. Volunteers, that means unpaid people who show up to work for the benefit of you and your organisation out of the very goodness of their hearts. Elsewhere Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom In some less social species, homosexual behavior is almost unheard of in wild animals but may surface in captivity. Wild koalas, which are mostly solitary, seem to be strictly heterosexual. But in a 2007 study veterinary scientist Clive J. C. Phillips of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues observed 43 instances of homosexual activity among female koalas living in a same-sex enclosure at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. The captive females shrieked male mating calls and mated with one another, sometimes participating in multiple encounters of up to five koalas. "The behavior in captivity was certainly enhanced in terms of homosexual activity," Phillips says. This bit is unfinished. There is a quote out of Grass's autobiography on war almost making one queer. mistaken identity? A case of mistaken identity? link from Syaffolee I fell out of the habit of reading romance novels. For one, I couldn't identify myself with the heroine, much less self-insert. Second, I couldn't be completely immersed in the romance genre. It feels as though I am reading something imaginary and I feel cheated and sometimes so angry that I feel almost determined to thoroughly destruct the offending book. (In the end, I chucked it in the bin.) All writers try to engage the reader and the reader, for the 100 pages or so, sits in the theatre of the author's mind. To suspect that it is false or trickery spoils the experience. Great writers, like great actors, employ a simple method to prevents this suspicion. They borrow from themselves certain traits to use it on the main character. This mind trick makes the story ring true - the narrator was there and lived to tell the tale. Elsewhere Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom In some less social species, homosexual behavior is almost unheard of in wild animals but may surface in captivity. Wild koalas, which are mostly solitary, seem to be strictly heterosexual. But in a 2007 study veterinary scientist Clive J. C. Phillips of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues observed 43 instances of homosexual activity among female koalas living in a same-sex enclosure at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. The captive females shrieked male mating calls and mated with one another, sometimes participating in multiple encounters of up to five koalas. "The behavior in captivity was certainly enhanced in terms of homosexual activity," Phillips says. Lifestyle choice A good post on job selection by StudyHacks The advice goes like this: Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there. What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle: How much control do I have over my schedule? What's the intensity level of my job? What's the importance of what I do? What's the prestige level? What type of work? Where do I live? What's my social life like? What's my work life balance? What's my family like? How do other people think of me? What am I known for? Female Welfare Not A Whisper campaigns for a good cause and in Glass Castle's current spotlight, there is a v interesting mention about pay and promotion timeline differences for women in Central Police Division. -- After reading Miller's Mating Mind, I am wondering if the objectification of females, and exaggeration between the minds of the females and males which resulted wrong perceptions of capability is an unfortunate by-product of male competition just like humour. Clever Catherine Link thanks to Elia: Prosperity versus individual rights? Human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Singapore The paper is interesting but I don't think it has enough clout it has in forcing the ruling party into changing because it is not persuading the general public to force changes. First, most Singaporean including myself will not feel that our rights are being curtailed because "It Could Be Worse" - hungry, jobless, poor, etc. Change is accepted when something impacts us directly in a negative way. Change is also accepted when we see some other person being affected in a particular way and we think, that is happening to me too. When the change has no impact, a body, anybody will follow Newton's first Law of Motion (a body at rest, stays at rest, etc) and therefore gives the impression that changes are always resisted and has to be sold (which takes too much effort on the part of the change agent) or force down (which is easier) on the populi. In this instance, change is not accepted because most can't see that it is happening. To shout evidence at the top of the lungs will not push for change and in fact, it might backfire by marshaling resistance to change because as a body since we would be stopping to think, and to bring up our experiences to doubt the doubter. That's the reason why whenever there is some criticism of local politicians, somebody always applies the tagline 'You Ungrateful Swine' and perhaps because everyone feels, no, believes us to be guilty, the poor somebody would be furiously shouted down with righteous indignation or plain-vanilla outrage. What Catherine Lim does to try to open up the discussion is ingenious. She says it is okay. I think that is the keyword to encourage reflection. (If I had not mentioned before, if there is a sticker for Catherine Lim is Fabulous, I want one.) Sleepware: pzizz.com I don't have a lot of trouble sleeping most of the time but when on occasions when I'm really excited about something (a trip), or have had a hectic week, or have been reading a lot, I have problems. I downloaded pzizz.com's 20 min sample mp3 last week. It didn't get me into sleep at once (eg, 5 mins). I still took about an hour to drop off, which is my usual. Now it takes me about half an hour to drop off, my norm when I am really tired. I shall report back if I drop off to sleep in 5 mins. Best thing is the long fantastical but almost real dreams I get when I use it. Lifehacker and 43folders has more. 106 most unread books From syaffolee who got it from dustbury who got it from fillyjonk who got it from Steph. What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as unread by Library Thing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.... Bold = books I've read Italics = books I've started but haven't finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Anna Karenina Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion Life of Pi: a novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby Dick Ulysses Madame Bovary The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre The Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler's Wife The Iliad Emma The Blind Assassin The Kite Runner Mrs. Dalloway Great Expectations American Gods A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Atlas Shrugged Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books Memoirs of a Geisha Middlesex Quicksilver Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West The Canterbury Tales The Historian: a novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Love in the Time of Cholera Brave New World The Fountainhead Foucault's Pendulum Middlemarch Frankenstein The Count of Monte Cristo Dracula A Clockwork Orange Anansi Boys The Once and Future King The Grapes of Wrath The Poisonwood Bible : a novel 1984 Angels & Demons The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) The Satanic Verses Sense and Sensibility The Picture of Dorian Gray Mansfield Park One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest To the Lighthouse Tess of the D'Urbervilles Oliver Twist Gulliver's Travels Les Miserables The Corrections The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Dune The Prince The Sound and the Fury Angela's Ashes: a memoir The God of Small Things A People's History of the United States: 1492-present Cryptonomicon Neverwhere A Confederacy of Dunces A Short History of Nearly Everything Dubliners The Unbearable Lightness of Being Beloved Slaughterhouse-Five The Scarlet Letter Eats, Shoots & Leaves The Mists of Avalon Oryx and Crake: a novel Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed Cloud Atlas The Confusion Lolita Persuasion Northanger Abbey The Catcher in the Rye On the Road The Hunchback of Notre Dame Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values The Aeneid Watership Down Gravity's Rainbow The Hobbit In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences White Teeth Treasure Island David Copperfield The Three Musketeers My thoughts on this list: Dickens, Dostoevsky, the Brontes, Austen, Woolf I understand - honestly, I find them hard to get through. Atwood, Eco and Tolstoy? That's harsh. Elsewhere High-pitched voices are most attractive -- with a few exceptions Researchers watch brain rewire itself after stroke What happens when you split your brain Fiddling Around With History And everything of ThinkDenkespecially the caption contest Hans van Meegeren I didn't know there was a forger, Han van Meegeren who made a lot of money on fake Vermeers until I read this book review on nytimes and this other article here. Here you can see a collection of his forgeries. Christ at Emmaus Washing of Christ Feet Christ and the Adulteress I couldn't believe they were Vermeers - they were stiff, almost 2D, almost well, ugly. Well, yes, Vermeer is not always wonderful. Pieces I classify as painting-on-a-bad day are Diana and Her Companions, Christ In The House of Martha and Mary and St Praxedis. Perhaps, it is quite close to St Praxedis on the badness scale that it could be mistaken as Vermeer. These pieces seem to be far worse than Vermeer on a bad day. Then, I realised that if they were signed as IVMeer, it is difficult to assert they are forgeries unless there is concrete proof and fairly accurate dating. On the other hand, they are so...ugly. Look at the window and table of Christ at Emmaus and the bread in the Washing of Christ Feet. The light treatment of the window looks harsh and the table as if it's being stopped from floating. The furniture in Vermeer always looks heavy and stuck firmly to the ground. The bread is so unappetizing, unlike the bread in The Milkmaid no wonder Christ doesn't even want it! Big clue there! Or is it only me being hungry again? RMC 2008: Scientific Program Day 2 The Maturity Structure of Corporate Risk Management. The method of deriving the depth of firm hedging and the maturity of hedging for oil trading companies is intelligent and tricky and I love it! An oil company will buy some crude oil futures. Assuming no margins posted, there is no movements in the accounting books. (Simplistic idea because mark to market would occur monthly at least.) At time of book closing, when we have to put it in the balance sheet, we update the prices and include in our books the unrealised gains. Company buys crude at spot and this is registered as inventory. Any realised gain is realised to cash. Once the crude is refined, this is sold off and this is registered as Cost of Goods Sold as the amount of the hedge put in place (crude oil futures). The inventory is reduced. Profits is posted as well for the sale of goods. TADA! Since the hedging can take place any time but since the futures contract is quarterly, the assumption is that hedging can take place 3/6/2/25 months. Alternatively, the hedging can take place at 3 month and rolled over every three months to reach the desired hedging maturity. Any the hedging activity will show up in the cost and sales using lagged futures prices and where do they show up? COGS. TADA! So, the authors fix numerous stimulus equation to breaking down cost and revenue and the cost or profits relating to hedging using GMM. All the equations whizzed by with a series of question marks in my head. Then, they feed in accounting data and found that there is not a lot of hedging done by the corporations. Institutional Investors, Credit Supply Uncertainty, and the Leverage of the Firm The concept seemed interesting when I scanned the abstract and summary. It seems that the reason for not coming up with bonds is because of supply-side problems not just demand side problems. Then, I came home and lost interest in this paper. I like generalisations, I guess. Now the problem becomes, on one hand, on the other. VIX Option Valuation I came in when the presenter was showing strings and strings and strings of greek letters and furiously daydreamt about lunch. Does she really expect everyone to be able to follow all that in 20 minutes? Predicting Credit Spreads I think he was talking about credit spreads. Yeah. I was trying very hard to follow the talk - really, I did. I was listening and I could recognise the slope, curve and level of spreads in the equation. Then, he went on about riskless factor and somewhere in my mind, brakes were jammed and screeched and I was thinking "WHAT RISKLESS FACTOR?" and that went on until he began to showed some error graphs at the end of the models he made and said, I'm the king of the world. Not literally but the picture of the lion on the thank you slide said it. Risk Assessment and Asset Allocation with Gross Exposure Constraints for Large portfolios I wish I have a pet babelfish because in the middle of his talk he said something like "I will show you the money" and got the portfolio/investment managers incredibly excited. The article is not completed but he seem to have created a particular formula to allocate assets. The troublesome thing with allocation of assets is the with a constraint on the expected return and the ability to hold short positions and he said he has done it. The math looks impossibly brilliant, however. Yeah, it has a lot of greek letters. Footbinding Subtitle: Security of Tyrants Reading old entries of Elia Diodati, I found an entry on bound feet which NotAWhisper wrote about it, calling it a facist beauty standards. My paternal grandma bound her foot when she was young. It was only for a short time, she told us. My grandparents came from well to do families and if there was no war, or communism, or whatever it is that got in between me and the an all-you-can-have buffet style life, we would have been modest gazillionaires and my unborn great-grandchild would have a trust fund the size of Malaysia's GDP. The greek chorus will now sing the folksy ditty 'Such is life'. Yes, about my grandma and her footbinding. She was the second most beautiful woman of their town, the first being her younger sister. Being a rich and good-looking woman meant that you would be married to a rich and good looking man who has a nice job in the Chinese Imperial Court. Would any parent derive a child of such great prospects? Grim as foot binding is, a loving mother would not buck or set the trend for a girl child to not bind her feet: it was still a badge of belonging. I suppose a loving mother would only comfort the child who had to bind her feet, as her own mother did. Do you need 5 mins to rage against the inhumanity as my grandma had raged in childish tantrams, screaming angrily, pushing aside the lolly and the cajoling womenfolk? Did it hurt, I asked, touching her toes gingerly as if it was only yesterday and not fifty or sixty years ago when the bindings were cut. Only for a little while, she said. I did not believe her. It must have hurt like hell. Being rich and good looking has distinct advantages. My grandma was the apple of her father's eye. She was given some education - just a bit, because too much education is bad for women - and she was brought along to Guangzhou and Hong Kong with her father when he travelled. And, I suppose, in between doing business and interacting with others, the bandages were cut. My grandfather, better educated, a son of a magistrate who has in the back of his mind vague scholarly ambitions, also traveling widely thanks to the impending war did not mind the unbound feet - it had lost its symbolism. Luckily for grandma, it hadn't become a burden - her feet retained its delicate smallness, a pretty arch and all ten toes necessary for running from the Japanese. My grandma died when I was fourteen. Perhaps I was her favourite grandchild, no one but I saw her small feet in my peripheral vision when she returned on the day her spirit was to return. Like my grandma, I wear my badge of belonging. Looking nice makes things easier. Also true: I am vain and recognise that I need some assistance to look nice so I put on make up, removed or styled hair as appropriate. Is it a burden? To belong is a burden, and I completely understand NotAWhisper when she says the tortured relationship you develop with food (Nod-Nod-NOD-NOD), and sometimes I tell my friends about my dream of eating barrels of rice, cous-cous with almonds and raisins and, and, oh, pillows and pillows of bread, but if I want my life to be easier, I better get on with it because it's the same problem everywhere. No, not beauty - evolution. observe here and maybe here as well. RMC 2008: Scientific Program Day 1 Conferences are simply exhausting activities - too many ideas from the program activities and from talking with other participants and not enough processing power. I'm quite glad the conference is short. Behavioral Heterogeneity in the Option Market The methodology for this paper is very interesting. The author tries to check for the presence of fundamentalists, who believe in a mean reverting conditional volatility, and chartists, who trade on noise. The interesting part of this is that the author considers that the fundamentalists and chartists will switch depending on the perception of profitability of either, even if there is no real profitability improvement (fundamentalists may not be rational agents). The percentage of switching of fundamentalist to chartists is thought of as similar to a time varying behaviour and the GARCH model is applied to estimate the presence. Market Conditions, Default Risk and Credit Spreads Credit spreads sizes were regressed on macroeconomic variables such as growth rate, reccession, investor confidence, systemic risk volatility (which I think systemic jump risk is meant) and the cash flow of the company. ("Specifically, we show that, during economic expansions, firms with high cash flow betas have lower credit spreads, ceteris paribus, than firms with low cash flow betas. This relation reverses during economic recessions.") The discussant was openly critical that the paper is an indirect test of the author's earlier model and was almost dismissive of the paper, saying things like he was impressed with how the author got the difficult to obtain data and that the paper was thoughtful and nice. (?!) Estimating Asset Correlations From Stock Prices or Default Rates: Which Method is Superior? All the hard work in simulation is lost on me but I recalled the answer is (A). The Economic Value of Volatility Timing Using a Range-based Volatility Model The author pitted Engle's return's based DCC (where volatility is measured with day end observation) with his own range based DCC (where volatility is observed as a range over the entire trading day) by estimating the switching cost to achieve a target expected return with a portfolio of bonds, cash and equity. The range DCC was more efficient (costs less) but perhaps that Engle was in the audience (in front of me!), the author said that the difference in cost between the DCC was not great so it could mean that the contribution of range DCC is not very large. Anticipating Correlation Engle introduced three models Factor Arch, Factor Double Arch and Dynamic Conditional Correlations, which is a short cut method he devised to compute vast portfolio correlations. A guy behind me at the coffee break exclaimed to another that he was inspired and has an idea that he would go back to work on and I wondered why he would say it because DCC is not revealed to the world in this conference. I was not excited. When To Sell A Stock, If You Must I tried but failed to find a copy of the paper for this talk. The author walks the audience through his mathematical model what a profitable strategy is as long as there is transaction cost to trading. He was very thorough with his assumptions: investor will hold as long as it is profitable and will sell as long as it is close to the maximum price or when maturity is due. The math bit is hard even though he kept saying it is simple. He arrived at the idea that as long as it is a good stock (measured by a particular index he derived) one should buy and hold until one needs the money because the good stock will provide the investor with income and there is only a 10% error that the price will be more than the maximum and not sold. Information Shocks, Jumps, and Price Discovery -- Evidence from the U.S. Treasury Market Her paper was highly praised by the discussant for incorporating new technology in measuring price jumps and assessing the jumps and tying the jumps back to the news release. However, the stronger finding is that liquidity shocks is better at predicting jumps. Intuitively, the finding is unsurprising as the data tested is the Treasury Bond prices and I would expect news and liquidity shocks to create jumps. I am quite glad for the summary provided by the discussant as I had trouble hearing the author. Tranching and Rating Don't get it but very interesting. It seems that slicing up a credit product into tranches, the seller can make more money than not slicing it up. The key to thinking about this is the deceptiveness of ratings and, I suspect, the inability to correctly value these tranches. Bears reading in full. Nested Simulation in Portfolio Risk Measurement I should have gone to the other one. RMC 2008: Scientific Program Day 1 I lost the freaking post. Stuff off BBC Radio 4 and 7 Peeling the Onion is Book of the week! http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml ISIHAC - I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. My mind is firmly entrenched in the gutter after listening to a good number of episodes (actually from years 2007 to 1995). Words such as nuts and Neapolitan are no longer innocent when placed together. I also picked up a few series of Rigor Mortis (quite alright), Think The Unthinkable (rather excellent), In The Chair(best bits are only about Kenny the PM) and a few episodes of In The End (frustrating because the episodes were 2-4 and contained more cliff hangers). I hope to get Hut 33 and His Master's Voice some time in the future. ======================= This exchange on usenet reminds me of the time I dubbed music to exchange with friends. Applied Econometrics "When we use non-stationary data in a regression equation, the estimated equation will result in suprious regression leading us to believe (from Fstat and R-squared) that a relationship exist when it doesn’t." Such observations when applied on real life examples are given the term unrequited love. Miss school? Start with a base of library laced with a generous helping of pencil and a small dash of fan. Garnish with typewriter. Find the most uncomfortable wooden chair and fall asleep drooling onto yellow lecture pads. Don't forget to hold a pen onto your sweater to get that nice spreading ink blot when you get up. Need to block out the din next door? http://www.iserenity.com/library/library.htm I found the sounds of a library rather pleasing. Fooled by Randomness http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/jorion.html While reading up on work - in particular Value at Risk - I came across this an article by Nassim Taleb. New Yorker made him calmer and his lifestyle romantic - the kind of romance one associates with Woody Allen films/writing. The line "In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight" is almost like the piece from Woody Allen called "The 20s." On a recent spring morning, the staff of Empirica were concerned with solving a thorny problem, having to do with the square root of n, where n is a given number of random set of observations, and what relation n might have to a speculator's confidence in his estimations. Taleb was up at a whiteboard by the door, his marker squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions. Spitznagel and Pallop looked on intently. Spitznagel is blond and from the Midwest and does yoga: in contrast to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight. Spitznagel would break it up. Pallop is of Thai extraction and is doing a Ph.D. in financial mathematics at Princeton. He has longish black hair, and a slightly quizzical air. "Pallop is very lazy," Taleb will remark, to no one in particular, several times over the course of the day, although this is said with such affection that it suggests that "laziness," in the Talebian nomenclature, is a synonym for genius. Pallop's computer was untouched and he often turned his chair around, so that he faced completely away from his desk. He was reading a book by the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose arguments, he said a bit disappointedly, were "not really quantifiable." The three argued back and forth about the solution. It appeared that Taleb might be wrong, but before the matter could be resolved the markets opened. Taleb returned to his desk and began to bicker with Spitznagel about what exactly would be put on the company boom box. Spitznagel plays the piano and the French horn and has appointed himself the Empirica d.j. He wanted to play Mahler, and Taleb does not like Mahler. "Mahler is not good for volatility," Taleb complained. "Bach is good. St. Matthew's Passion!" Taleb gestured toward Spitznagel, who was wearing a gray woollen turtleneck. "Look at him. He wants to be like von Karajan, like someone who wants to live in a castle. Technically superior to the rest of us. No chitchatting. Top skier. That's Mark!" As Spitznagel rolled his eyes, a man whom Taleb refers to, somewhat mysteriously, as Dr. Wu wandered in. Dr. Wu works for another hedge fund, down the hall, and is said to be brilliant. He is thin and squints through black-rimmed glasses. He was asked his opinion on the square root of n but declined to answer. "Dr. Wu comes here for intellectual kicks and to borrow books and to talk music with Mark," Taleb explained after their visitor had drifted away. He added darkly, "Dr. Wu is a Mahlerian." At Empirica, then, there are no Wall Street Journals to be found. There is very little active trading, because the options that the fund owns are selected by computer. Most of those options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic, and, of course, on most days the market doesn't. So the job of Taleb and his team is to wait and to think. They analyze the company's trading policies, back-test various strategies, and construct ever-more sophisticated computer models of options pricing. Danny, in the corner, occasionally types things into the computer. Pallop looks dreamily off into the distance. Spitznagel takes calls from traders, and toggles back and forth between screens on his computer. Taleb answers e-mails and calls one of the firm's brokers in Chicago, affecting, as he does, the kind of Brooklyn accent that people from Brooklyn would have if they were actually from northern Lebanon: "Howyoudoin?" It is closer to a classroom than to a trading floor. "Pallop, did you introspect?" Taleb calls out as he wanders back in from lunch. Pallop is asked what his Ph.D. is about. "Pretty much this," he says, waving a languid hand around the room. "It looks like we will have to write it for him," Taleb chimes in, "because Pollop is very lazy." "As the day came to an end, Taleb and his team turned their attention once again to the problem of the square root of n. Taleb was back at the whiteboard. Spitznagel was looking on. Pallop was idly peeling a banana. Outside, the sun was beginning to settle behind the trees. "You do a conversion to p1 and p2," Taleb said. His marker was once again squeaking across the whiteboard. "We say we have a Gaussian distribution, and you have the market switching from a low-volume regime to a high-volume. P21. P22. You have your igon value." He frowned and stared at his handiwork. The markets were now closed. Empirica had lost money, which meant that somewhere off in the woods of Connecticut Niederhoffer had no doubt made money. That hurt, but if you steeled yourself, and thought about the problem at hand, and kept in mind that someday the market would do something utterly unexpected because in the world we live in something utterly unexpected always happens, then the hurt was not so bad. Taleb eyed his equations on the whiteboard, and arched an eyebrow. It was a very difficult problem. "Where is Dr. Wu? Should we call in Dr. Wu?" His Master's Voice http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/whatson/prog_parse.cgi?FILENAME=20070711/20070711_1830_49700_47991_30 I love Mark Tavener! He has something new! First episode starts today! It's absolutely delicious! How To Be A Genius http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19125691.300-how-to-be-a-genius.html Certainly a clear-eyed analysis shows that "genius" is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study. We should probably shelve the notion of genius as an innate, almost irrepressible gift and speak instead of expertise, talent or even greatness - terms that hint at the work underlying supreme accomplishment. Granted, this isn't as fun, and recognising the work factor is sobering. It is disappointing to realise all your mom's blather about how smart you are doesn't mean jack, and that you have to work demonically regardless. But as something to believe in, genius is not looking so smart. You want to play the big stage, you got to put in the time. All work and no play henceforth! Okay, one play - one makes allowances for King Lear by the RSC. Brain-Based Body Image http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/1861116.htm Professor V. S. Ramachandran: One striking example of this we've seen recently is some work I've done talking to transsexuals; these are people who want sexual reassignment surgery. A typical remark from a transsexual male-to-female would be, 'I feel like a woman trapped in a male body, and this appendage, this penis, doesn't really belong to me and I want to get rid of it and I want to become a woman.' People always thought this was just psychological mumbo-jumbo but there is a significant number of people who experience this, and we started wondering about this and said: why? What's going on in their brain? Now, it turns out that if 'normal people'...and I put it in quotes because it's important to emphasise that there's nothing wrong or abnormal about being a transsexual, it's part of the whole spectrum of human sexuality and sexual behaviour. But it is curious that most normal people who have carcinoma of the penis, which is not rare, and they have an amputation of the penis as a life saving measure, a majority of them, maybe about 80%, 85% of them, experience a phantom penis, including phantom erections. This is well known. Since this chap is saying his penis doesn't belong to him in the first place, what if his penis is amputated because he wants to become a woman, what happens then? The answer is the majority of them don't experience a phantom penis. What's amazing is that your body image, which includes your genitals, is at least in part programmed by genes and your brain is hard-wired to incorporate the genitals as part of your body image. Even more amazing is the observation that women who undergo transgender sexual surgery who acquired an artificial penis, a majority of them since early childhood have experienced a phantom penis. This is absolutely extraordinary because it means that each of us has a brain-based body image which is detailed down to the fine anatomy, including your genitals. If your brain body image does not match...normally your brain body image and your external morphology are synchronised in early development through hormones, through genetic mechanisms. If this gets uncoupled and they aren't in synchrony you end up with a body image that's morphologically male, so they experience a phantom penis. What's amazing is that all these years of culture being raised as a woman, as a girl, and even seeing that they don't have a penis does not correct this body image. This shows that even though your body image is extremely malleable, as we have shown with phantom limbs and mirrors and that sort of thing, it also turns out that there's a strong genetic contribution to your body image. This has, of course, great implications for understanding how your brain represents sexual behaviour and constructs body image.