Came across this while investigating the mathematicians R. H. Bing (great story about that name) and Paul Halmos (the end-of-proof symbol borrowed from magazines) in William Dunham‘s Mathematical Universe. Euler Book Prize – annually since 2007 I’ve read the first book…
Author: ruebeckc
Learning about and from VCs
The Mind of Marc Andreessen (The New Yorker) Plenty to learn here, even if sometimes the ‘wisdom’ seems trite. For example, Andreesen says of the dot-com crash, “we were five or six years too early”, but that insight is really nothing…
Venture Capital in the 21st Century
The story about Mark Andreessen, venture capital, and Silicon Valley. Tomorrow’s Advance Man Herbert Allen III (of the investment bank Allen & Company) mentions the American myth by which we presume he means to shed some light on the reality…
Gödel’s Proof
A revised edition of the classic Ernest Nagel and James Newman explanation of Gödel’s insights, and the book that inspired Douglas Hofstadter’s immensely popular Gödel Escher Bach. From Hofstader’s Forward: We now understand that the human mind is fundamentally not…
Marvel-ous stories
Intellectual property is at the root of many of today’s stories. Maybe this explains why the second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is looking so mutant-like. But killing off Wolverine?! Brinksmanship, perhaps. Interesting comparisons to EMI and the Beatles (and…
Short-selling, tried & reported
The good, the bad, and the dangerous … of short selling. First is a piece that sounds like it was inspired by Planet Money’s two-part series. In Praise of Short Sellers (Surowiecki, TheNew Yorker) First, though: In another universe, a…
NECCO stands for …
New England Confectionary Co. Here are two stories about the storied little valentine candy. The first is audio, from Marketplace. On Valentine’s, saying “#LOVE” with candy hearts The second is a nice little stop-action video, from OZY. Don’t mess with…
YouTube gems
From last week’s NYTimes WordPlay blog, two fascinating performances. One live. One semi-live, semi-manufactured. The Beatles in-studio, All You Need Is Love James Brown, It’s a Man’s World
Transmission of financial information across the centuries
Our study serves as the modern counterpart to Koudijs’s (2014a) study on insider trading on eighteenth-century stock exchanges — except, in our case, week-long sailing voyages have been replaced by modern electronic transmission as the conduit for information flows. “How…
A code situation
The two articles aren’t hugely related, except that they share the idea of folks finding problems in the code. Either disabling or vulnabilerizing. Johnny Mnemonic’s Secret Door (Planet Money) Those Who Say Code Doesn’t Matter (blog@ACM) The latter link is…