Christopher McCandless Is No Longer My Hero
A bit of philosophy to start the day.
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Sovereign Wealth
I do hold a more than passing fascination with the idea of Sovereign Wealth Funds – I find the idea of a nation being a custodian of the wealth of the nation to be intriguing. I am also interested ( read fucken appalled) in how badly managed our resources are. For example in 2021 it…
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A Few Charts To Chat About
Every quarter JP Morgan Chase put out what they call a Guide to the Markets. The report itself is largely noise and is the sort of thing that research departments like to show to clients in an attempt to convince them that they are more than the sum of their convictions and misdemeanours. Generally I…
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Why Cant Monkeys Talk?
Decades ago, while Philip H. Lieberman was soaking in a bathtub and listening to the radio, he heard anthropologist Loren Eiseley ponder an evolutionary puzzle: Why couldn’t monkeys talk? Like us, they’re social primates, intelligent and certainly not quiet. Rhesus macaques grunt, coo, screech and scream. Infant macaques make sounds known as geckers. Despite the grunting and geckering, though, no other…
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A MATH GENIUS BLOOMS LATE AND CONQUERS HIS FIELD
….Huh’s math career began with much less acclaim. A bad score on an elementary school test convinced him that he was not very good at math. As a teenager he dreamed of becoming a poet. He didn’t major in math, and when he finally applied to graduate school, he was rejected by every university save…
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Conundrum Of The Day
I have reflected on the post I wrote last week about the great superannuation rip off in which I compared the returns from investing in an average growth fund with those derived from investing in the index. It struck me over the weekend that the majority of fund managers (read almost all ) are followers…
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50 Smartest Companies
You will note somewhat sadly that not one of them is located locally…. More here – MIT Technology Review
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Paradoxes of Probability and Other Statistical Strangeness
You don’t have to wait long to see a headline proclaiming that some food or behaviour is associated with either an increased or a decreased health risk, or often both. How can it be that seemingly rigorous scientific studies can produce opposite conclusions? Nowadays, researchers can access a wealth of software packages that can readily analyse…
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