i have absolutely nothing against gospel. gospel is truth. see nina simone.
"i have a friend in jesus!" + "set me up with the spirit in the sky!" + "i ain't never sinned" + guitar
this video seems to have a touch of irony about it, whatever, play it at my funeral too!
it sounds so psychedelic! i hope heaven is like that.

set me up with the spirit in the sky
i wanna go there when i die
when i die and they lay me to rest
i wanna go to the place that the best

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkOSi_I590

window or aisle?

i've taken aisle on most of my long-haul flights thus far, because after flying long-haul quite a bit, you start to learn that everyone wants the aisle seats because they can easily walk in and out, go to the toilet, be the first out of the plane, etc. when you're a child you don't give a shit about these things. you just want to see the wing tips, or the clouds when you fly over them. of course, on recent flights, i've had the opportunity to get an entire ROW, so I could still sidle up to the window to look below me. I'm starting to recognize the route now. The best times to look out, I feel, are when you're over the Hindu Kush and the deserts of Afghanistan. From the sky, there are no terrorists... and you wonder how there could be... just ripples and ripples of brown ridges.

When you're flying over Poland, too, there seems to be an abundance of land and a patchwork of fields. Also memorable on flights to the western seaboard where I once had the fortune to glance down at what must be Siberia or Alaska. I remember Richard Feynman, who always wanted to go to Tuva. And I wondered about piles and piles of snow. Places I'd never go to, but I've seen from the air.

So I jumped onboard the ryanair flight, and it was a short-haul from bratislava. maybe because it's short haul, i instinctively sidled to the window seat. looking at runway lights always brings me some nostalgia, i'm reminded of pilots and their dashboard controls, and that leads me to a chain to antoine de st-exupery. there's something comforting in respecting occupations which are complicated enough to inspire awe, but tangible enough to preclude alienation. (an awe of someone in financial services, would be a highly second-degree awe for me. a child wouldn't be interested. that's my definition. perhaps if you brought him to the pit, he might be attracted to all the hubbub and noise. The children were also the ones who turned to look at Joshua Bell disguised as a busker). There's also this video by Randy Pausch which talks about childhood dreams, yadda yadda yadda... I resolve to take the window seat more often then.

But I know I'm not really a kid anymore. I know that everytime I dress up hoping to be bumped up to business. Business window seat. Now we're talking.

This application thing is driving me nuts. I've no idea why I put myself through this meat grinder. I think it'll sort itself out... I need to go home soon. Maybe we grew up in La Mancha. Bad days come and go, but you could make them especially cool by listening to the violin and walking over Waterloo bridge after a 6pm Real Analysis class.

just a note on irony... i freeze framed my computer screen and there it was, conversation about acne cream... i am an expert of turning the quotidien into something more, but that's beyond my powers... i think if you've not thought these things through, the temptation for nostalgia and romance can always get the better of you... it's only natural to want to talk about the stars again, with someone else.

Pourquoi me reveiller, o souffle du printemps?
Sur mon front je sens tes caresses.
Et pourtant bien proche est le temps
Des orages et des tristesses.
Demain, dans le vallon, viendra le voyageur,
Se souvenant de ma gloire premiere,
Et ses yeax vainement chercheront ma splendeur:
Ils ne trouveront plus que deuil et que misere!
Helas! Pourquoi me reveiller, o souffle du printemps?

Do we listen?

Joshua Bell plays for free

And then this song by Joni Mitchell

I slept last night in a good hotel
I went shopping today for jewels
The wind rushed around in the dirty town
And the children let out from the schools
I was standing on a noisy corner
Waiting for the walking green
Across the street he stood
And he played real good
On his clarinet, for free

Now me I play for fortunes
And those velvet curtain calls
Ive got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if youre a friend to me
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good, for free

Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never
Been on their t.v.
So they passed his music by
I meant to go over and ask for a song
Maybe put on a harmony...
I heard his refrain
As the signal changed
He was playing real good, for free

what i'm reading during my break

i finally have a chance to take a short break... and this is what i am reading over the next few days:

"The Midnight Disease"

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=688190

Alex got this for me, it's about a neuroscientist drawing on literature to try to understand writer's block, and a condition called "hypergraphia", something bordering on an obsessive need to write.

"Einstein, His Life and Universe"

http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264738

Could have done with a better title. It's terrific and new, and based on now completely opened archives.

MEASURING THE LENGTH OF THE THAMES

would depend on the size of your ruler. the smaller your ruler the greater the length. if you were to think about it, most things have infinite length, if you measured it with the smallest possible ruler. with the smallest possible ruler, nothing is a straight line.

ROCKET MAN RETURNS TO FIND WIFE MUCH OLDER

If the rocket man was travelling at the speed of light,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

How I arrived at this site:

Doing Real Analysis: Thought about Triangle Inequality: Read that article: In Minkowski space Triangle Inequality is reversed: Twin Paradox

i rarely watch the sun rise nowadays. of course the hours are getting shorter, and my house is fully wired up, that, and the tendency to work late mean that i rarely get up in time to see the sun rise.

uncannily, there are these hours i have between 6pm and 2am that are rather strange. usually you work through those hours, get tired enough and hope to sleep and begin a new day... somehow, something sustains me nowadays from 6 - 2... it's as if my day only starts at 2, when singapore wakes up to a new day... true, i don't last long after that... but it's almost as if there is another sunrise waiting in the depths of the night. the hours remind me of the distance but i still feel as if i'm worrying, close by.

and perhaps parents all feel this way when their kids are abroad... they don't talk much about it, for it's become so routine, but somewhere down there, they have a clock stored away for their children. something that just wants to see them again in the morning, to be sure they're there. maybe that is the source of my worry, and the source of my anticipation.

paintings!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Psyche

after the indian summer, it seems like winter is here... technically it's not winter... it's the first winds sweeping in from the arctic... it's this period of chill which is going to force the leaves off the trees.

of course, when the sun sets at 4 every day, what's the difference... you know it could get worst, and frankly, this year, i'm spared the worst of it. surprisingly though, it is affecting me rather more this year, perhaps because of this pile of things to do next to me which keeps me at home.

i hope it will snow in vienna... at least it will be cold but pretty.

and more things to give thanks for, i will be avoiding a good part of the winter this year and sunbathing in southeast asia.

• Don't clutter up your life with other activities;
  just write.
  
• Don't carry out a thorough and comprehensive search of the literature;
  just write.
  
• Don't attempt to make sure that every page you write shows the full extent of your professional skills;
  just write.
  
• Don't write a well-organized, well-integrated, unified dissertation;
  just write.
  
• Don't think profound thoughts that shake the intellectual foundations of the discipline;
  just write.
  
• If you don't have a paper started by the spring of your third year,
  be alarmed.
  
• If you don't have a paper largely drafted by the fall of your fourth year,
  panic.
  
• Have three new ideas a week while you are getting started.
  
• Don't try to game the profession,
  work on what interests you.
  
• Good papers in economics have three characteristics:

  • A viewpoint.
  • A lever.
  • A result.

Her grandfather was a hellfire preacher, but Ms Parton has an empathy for sinners. As a girl, she thought the town hooker in her make-up and stilletos was the prettiest thing she had ever seen. "She was trash," Ms Parton tells interviewers, "And I thought: That's what I want to be when I grow up"

---------------

characters from desolation row
and their relationship to my real analysis teacher... up next

today's darwin award goes to...

True story, princeton grad sends email to his friends at merril lynch, causing it to be circulated
around Wall Street and subsequently getting fired by his bosses after they read it.

============

Message-ID: <812f5c217425d311a83100508b07093003830e@carlyle01>
From: Peter Chung
Subject: LIVING LIKE A KING
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 20:26:21 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
Content-Type: text/plain

So I've been in Korea for about a week and a half now and what can I say, LIFE IS GOOD....

I've got a spanking brand new 2000 sq. foot 3 bedroom apt. with a 200 sq. foot terrace running the entire length of my apartment with a view overlooking Korea's main river and nightline. Why do I need 3 bedrooms? Good question, the main bedroom is for my queen size bed, where CHUNG is going to fuck every hot chick in Korea over the next 2 years (5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go) the second bedroom is for my harem of chickies, and the third bedroom is for all of you fuckers when you come out to visit my ass in Korea.

I go out to Korea's finest clubs, bars and lounges pretty much every other night on the weekdays and everyday on the weekends to (I think in about 2 months, after I learn a little bit of the buyside business I'll probably go out every night on the weekdays). I know I was a stud in NYC but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say that they want to go home with me every night I go out.

I love the buyside, I have bankers calling me everyday with opportunties and they pretty much cater to my every whim - you know (golfing events, lavish dinners, a night out clubbing). The guys I work with are also all chilll - I live in the same apt building as my VP and he drives me around in his Porsche (1 of 3 in all of Korea) to work and when we go out. What can I say,.... live is good,...
CHUNG is KING of his domain here in Seoul

So, all of you fuckers better keep in touch and start making plans to come out and visit my ass ASAP, I'll show you guys an unbelievable time.
My contact info is below.... Oh, by the way, someone's gotta start fedexing me boxes of domes, I
brought out about 40 but I think I'll run out of them by Saturday.....

Laters,
CHUNG

Peter Chung
The Carlyle Group
Suite 1009, CCMM Bldg.
12, Yoido-dong, Youngdeungpo-ku
Seoul 150-010, Korea
Tel: (822) 2004-8412
Fax: (822) 2004-8440
email: pchung@thecarlylegroup.co.kr

review (version 1) for november issue

It is tough to make predictions, particularly about the future*

*Yogi Berra

The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

What happens out there in the real world? Many times I’ve peered through the iron bars of the small windows at the LSE while sitting through my class in real analysis. In the real world, some of my contemporaries could have discovered “the next Facebook” , or become the best thing to happen to an investment bank since sliced bread. Personally, I would love to sell a million copies of my as-yet unwritten future book, but I may well be serving banana caramel lattés in Starbucks ruminating about how it all went pear-shaped for me since my heady undergraduate days. It all seems a little bit unfair, and you start wondering what you could have done better or differently.

Isn’t it comforting then, that someone comes along and tells you that you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, and that chance has a big part to play in dealing the winners and losers. It’s certainly tempting.

To Nicholas Taleb, much of the world we live in today resembles “Extremistan”. It’s a world in which events of large import and magnitude occur with small, but non-negligible probabilties. It’s a world in which payoffs are highly non-linear and “lumpy”, where a chance alignment of factors makes an author extremely rich but 999 (or more) others very poor. It is a world in which wars happen and we are confronted by our own mortality. These large events are the “Black Swans” which lend their name to the title of the book.

The author’s fixation is with uncertainty, more specifically, those black swans not unlike what former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld once controversially dubbed “unknown unknowns”. This curiosity about rare events and how we react to uncertain events is informed by experiences in Taleb’s own life. Having observed his native Lebanon degenerate into civil war, and having contracted, and recovered, from throat cancer, he is constantly amazed how often people underestimate risk. This was especially marked in his career as a quantitative options trader, where he saw many other traders take comfort in their Gaussian models. People feed of success and the continual feeling of victory as they make profits daily in the stock market, but this is akin to picking up dimes in front of steamrollers. Taleb’s hedge fund, Empirica, adopts a different strategy of being ultraconservative (80% in T-bills) and hyperaggressive (the rest in out-of the-money options). It’s difficult to walk around most of the days of the year slowly bleeding money and making losses, yet on the days where something unexpected occurs, be it the Russian debt default, 9/11 or the recent sub-prime crisis, he makes a killing. It takes some intellectual discipline to go against our instincts and mental biases. Paradoxically, it is courageous to be prudent.

In exploring “Black Swans”, he takes us through a wide range of knowledge, drawing from his polymathic knowledge of fields such as philosophy, economics and biology. While the concepts presented are abstract and theoretical, his informal style and street sense make this read an engaging one peppered with interesting anecdotes and stories. Taleb’s book, to be fair, is not a vast collection of his original ideas. The main mantra of the book, is “don’t be too confident in what you know.” This is certainly nothing new, after all, Socrates said it all those years ago : “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” The title of the reference, is in itself an allusion to the belief that all swans were white, until the discovery of black swans in Australia demonstrated the weakness of induction as a basis of knowledge. It’s strength lies in creating an engaging synthesis of the literature to back up his theory. It introduces you to advances in mathematical finance suggested by the father of fractal geometry, Benoit Mandelbrot, and the theory of science advanced by Karl Popper. It is also a good introduction to those Nobel Prize winning psychologists, Kahnemann and Tversky, who have conducted numerous experiments investigating our heuristics and biases involved in judgement under uncertainty.

“The Black Swan” builds on his previous effort, “Fooled by Randomness”. That book contained several anecdotes of his life as a trader observing how people dealt and made decisions regarding uncertainty. Significantly, it also contained a section on how to deal with the uncertainties in life, with stoicism and good grace. This book builds on the last effort by presenting a more coherent theory with good doses of erudition.

Nassim’s style will polarize readers. He tries to write accessibly, out of memory, and has a conversational prose which is engaging yet at times loose. Less patient readers will not suffer his many digressions. He must have enjoyed writing it, however, for a book preaching epistemic humility, it does make some strong and sweeping statements. While I do agree with much of what he says about too much respect being given to those who have won a “Nobel”, some of the asides smack of having a huge axe to grind.

Yet behind the brash exterior of the book one finds heartwarming tales and consolations. That the world is random gives texture to life, and one value Taleb has as a skeptic is introspection. Things are not always going to go our way no matter how much we try, and it is the way we reflect upon, and subsequently deal with the environment around us which will preserve our dignity and give our successes and failures their proper perspective.

You shouldn’t take my word for it. After all, book reviewers are fallible. However, if you do happen to pop by the local bookstore, do take a look at it, for there are serious lessons to be learnt for everyone. For academics and practioners in finance, perhaps we should be less secure in the technical sophistication of our models and develop methods which may be less elegant, but provide a better fit for reality. For the lay person, it will provide a good dose of perspective on how to prepare ourselves for the black swans which will change our life, for better or worse.

The god forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

C.P. Cavafy

i highly recommend the following 3 books:

1. judgement under uncertainty : heuristics and biases (eds. kahnemann et al)

2. fooled by randomness (nassim nicholas taleb)

3. the black swan (nassim nicholas taleb)

i am taking time off to do a review of the field for the magazine and i will post it as soon as i am done. meanwhile, i feel this is a good introduction to cognitive biases and their applicability to economics/finance/life.

now i need to look at myself and wash clean of superstition.

If reading a blog is ever interesting to you, it is when your favorite blogger honestly writes something embarassing for him or her. People tend to hide things that they think are embarassing. But such information tends to be interesting (or even either useful or encouraging) to other people because you don't hear it often.

-masayuki kudamatsu, lse phd student

I have never been a person to follow the 'blogosphere', not in the sense where I have a list of favourite blogs and journals which I follow on a regular basis. I do look at the blogs of my friends, but perhaps when something comes to mind that reminds me of them or i find someone who consistently writes things in an interesting way which is more or less amenable to how i think.

i'm sitting in the lse library now. i could have been out teaching at a secondary school, or back home after packing bags. in any case, here i am in the library, taking a break after looking again and again at my applications. i always experience moments of self-doubt after periods of stress, and here i feel doubt on two levels:

(i.) myself? am i really good enough, especially when you read the stories, or you gather facts about everyone else who is intending to do the same thing you're doing
(ii.) about the choice. if i do do research, is it really something worth doing, or pure self-indulgence?

you could have 2 answers to the questions. one is not to answer the question. self-doubt? it is there to be overcome? self-indulgence? why take yourself so seriously? why believe your actions make a difference in the grand scheme of things anyway, and doesn't self-indulgence guide us all?

it is also possible to be harsh on yourself, and force yourself to answer these questions. after all, we have at the lse economics society managed to invite nicholas taleb, who wrote about black swans and being fooled by randomness, to give a talk. one of his main points is that we attribute too much to directed research and discovery, when the most important things which have changed the world have been achieved through trial and error by doers and failures.

but that's a more difficult question, and it also involves things i don't know the answer to, because i lack experience. anyway, my break at the library involved looking through blogs of how people at lse managed. vinayak was one of the teachers at the LSE (i wasn't under him but i attended his revision classes), teaching econ 102 while an masters student at the LSE... funny, personable, and puts in a fair amount of passion into his teaching. he did his undergraduate degree in india, which as he admits isn't rigorous enough. he was younger than me at the point when he was teaching and taking his masters, due to the fact that i've given 2 years of my life to the nation (and however more they may want and i am prepared to give). it shouldn't be a zero sum game, i did take something, but you can't do calculations for these sorts of things. i digress. maybe i should just buy into ayn rand, read "atlas shrugged" cover to cover and dispense with the social guilt.

but yeah he has passion to burn, effort, dedication, and he's thought of being everything from a stand-up comedian (although probably with jokes a bit too geeky) to a fixed income trader what is economics? no, economics is not about choice. economics is the course you take to signal you are quick enough mathematically and grasp some of the concepts needed to be a fixed income trader. just ask the students graduating this year. philosophically it justifies being in finance, after all, efficient markets mean everyone putting in effort trying to beat the market, thus wonderfully using human computing power to endogenously determine the dollar-euro or dollar pound or what the valuation of a company should be, so that nobody in the UNITED STATES bureau of economic planning (which doesn't exist, by the way) has to do a vast matrix setting exogenously all the above information. so for everyone who thinks financiers or people who work in finance don't produce anything, they produce information! don't dish them, they are deservedly well-paid computers with a large ego and computers which also happen to have a keen sense for human psychology. the computers who win are paid more, so incentives are beautifully aligned (except for the herd mentality bit, which, if we could have computers that didn't have incentives to follow the crowd would be perfect, but then such computers would know nothing about the world at all). no, don't get me wrong, i am not trying to divisive, just getting an image out of my head.

but anyway, he's decided a phd is not for him (he did apply, but too lonely professionally, and sick of student penury), and he's off to do an ODI fellowship in Guyana (ODI is where economists go to do fellowships in developing countries, to work on their institutions). well, he's off doing something now, though chicago economists will contend that guyana doesn't need institutions and government (don't worry, just taking the piss out of them). but chicago economists have a point, government in developing countries tends to be corrupt so having more institutions is not necessarily better, it's the quality.

every year deserving people like him get turned down from schools anyway. no stress. and then matsuyuki kudamatsu (phd, lse) encapsulates what it feels like to be a wastrel spending your parent's money and doing nothing productive for the human economy. he also blogs about loneliness especially when tomoko leaves london (oh, how tragic!)
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kudamats/200408.htm#18
so don't say it's not risky/stressful, i think it is every much as risky.

you may question what it's like to come into class everyday, being enthusiastic, but in the end, teaching a useless subject to a bunch of students who are only using it as a stepping stone for bigger and better things, and you are learning the intellectual masturbations of professors who studied measure theory and topology and needed to use it somewhere (very beautiful though, i must say). well, if i had time, i would write how not all of it is just masturbation and that macro nowdays is not is/lm and dumb graphs but dynamic optimization and learning econs at undergrad is doing like doing chemistry in secondary school. you have to throw it away. a textbook takes 30 years to write, and every subheading was the fruit of a few years' labour. whatever, if you think it is useless.

because i used to think we all could lead singapore, abolish slavery, if you were just to break out of your shell and know the right people... i agree... you could work at making yourself a good person. basics include having a work ethic, some humility, some personability, some sense of responsibility and you would be a good basic person. if you learnt leadership you would give back to society and shape it as you saw fit. i think many people imbued with values aspire to them, though not all achieve it. i wish i were more with people like me (with the same interests and passions, and maybe it would have increased them), but then again, i am also guilty of not really mixing around with the widest variety of people. but i am trying to, and even in this field you do have to talk and get to know people. if i had a bit more arrogance (you'd call it confidence) i would be a banker, but i don't, and it was never an overwhelming dream i had since i was young. just look at the books i read when i was young.

of course, you can't always be young, and maybe that is my failing. but i've tried working in an office earning money for other people and myself and money is nice, but i'll be honest, i'm not poor or hungry or look forward to buying that next car. i look forward to telling stories.

i think there's a tendency for all of us rational, secular people to see waste in society, and we'd like everyone to be productive and create better living standards. i would wonder why people become priests. i still respect priests, even though i don't like religion, because i know people are left behind. rich people want to feel better about themselves, poor people want to know things will get better. the priest isn't going to make these things better, but instrumentally, at that sermon or that congregation, people are with other people they are hopefully comfortable with, and that speech may make someone's Sunday, and get him through to Monday-Friday. of course you can hardly claim that economics is 'soulful' like that, but i've always seen that part of it which is the science of society, and stepping back to see how we all act. i've seen it as storytelling, you call it research, but just walk into one of vinayak's classes and see if your day isn't made. and that is what i call giving a damn.

and that is why i am in the library.

lovemybikelovemybikelovemybike

why do they save all the awesome papers for MRes courses. I'm doing development economics and it seems like a tedious chore of doing empirics on different data sets (and it is!), but I'm doing research for my research outline right now and it seems like the frontier stuff is really pretty neat and interesting.

What Kids in Britain Are Being Taught

There's this insane series called KNTV, which is something like a kids show exploring the lives of 10 great philosophers. The characters are like beavis and butthead, and they have a rock band. pretty cool stuff.

So Einstein, Newton, Darwin... all good stuff... until they come to Nietzsche.

And then they have montages of people blowing themselves up, teaching kids what Nietzsche said about religion, and having a character act like an emo punk rocker representing Nietzsche. They ended the show with a really cheesy rock song with lyrics like "Superman, Superman, Nietzsche's big idea was the Superman". They also took the mickey out of Nietzsche by mentioning that ultimately "he was no superman, just a sorry bloke with no mates who couldn't get any" They also talked about Wagner, and telling kids about not following herd (slave) morality. All very subversive. Apparently, there is a Marx song too.

WTF?!>?