A few minutes back I finished reading Richard McKenzie's Why popcorn costs so much at the movies and other pricing puzzles. Since the book is not available in India, I managed to procure an online pirated version through a friend. And since the book isn't released in India, I didn't feel guilty about reading the pirated version.

Coming to the point ( Read more... )

Back when I was in school, my father brought me two "Hero" pens. One brown and one green. Soon enough, the barrel of the brown pen was broken, and the nib of the green pen followed presently. I put made use of what was later to be called as 'Genetic Algorithms' and continued working. I don't know what I did with the spare cap though. The cap was ( Read more... )

I propose a new business model. Make a seemingly outrageous long-range prediction. It could just be anything, but you might want to stick to the financial world. Once you have decided on the prediction to make, think up of about six possible reasons why this prediction could come true. Given that the prediction in itself is outrageous, it shouldn't ( Read more... )

It seems like.

They decided to extrapolate based on one data point - Tejaswini Sriramesh beating Deve Gowda - or there might be another which I can't recall right now and they came to the wonderful conclusion that the Deve Gowda family will get defeated when faced with women candidates. They even got an astrologer to endorse it. And put up two ( Read more... )

In yesterday's post-match ceremony, Ramiz Raja complimented Rahul Dravid for his excellent captaincy. To which Dravid replied "well, I've done the same thing that I did in the previous games. Nothing special. You are complimenting me only because we won". Honest stuff. Rather than simply taking the credit that was offered to him on a platter, he ( Read more... )

Ok. Nothing unusual about the title of this post. There is intuitively a lot of randomness where the met department is concerned. This post is about an editorial in the Business Standard.

Now, the Indian Met department used a new process for forecasting the monsoons last year. Now, this process yielded good results in the north-east and north-west ( Read more... )

To fear the engineers that is. It seems like TCA Srinivasa Raghavan had an extremely tight deadline with respect to his analysis of the Raghuram Rajan Report. So, instead of taking on the report, he decides to go after the chief author instead. And he doesn't even do a good job of this. He goes after the chief author's educational background ( ( Read more... )

Another amazing insight from fooled by randomness. The essence of this is that if you are a passive investor, the more often you track your portfolio, the more your headache. Suppose you have invested in a portfolio where the expected annual return is R%, and the volatility is V%. The insight is that the more often you track your portfolio, the ( Read more... )

I'm currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by randomness. Have read some fifty pages so far. Like his later book The Black Swan, this too contains totally awesome fundaes. And contrary to reports that I've heard, it's extremely easy reading. Either it's because of my familiarity with derivatives or because I'm just coming off Chaos by ( Read more... )

• Read this article about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Strong fundaes are there in there. Particularly amazing is the fact that he made 97% of his lifetime earnings on "black monday" (oct 19 1987)
  
• I've started reading "Traders, Guns and Money" by Satyajit Das. In the prologue, he talks about this swap ( Read more... )