April 3rd I will be switching to a new blog on Wordpress to be announced soon. The limitations of livejournal are a few too many but this journal has certainly served its purpose.

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Found a really good review of Explosions in the Sky:

With a reputation for a scathingly intense live performance and a quickly sold-out ( Read more... )

Initial thought: Risk is systemic and it is futile to assume it away or to think you can completely arbitrage or diversify out of risk ( Read more... )

I am highly enjoying the television series Friday Night Lights, which is available on Hulu. It is a richly textured sports drama that has to be one of the top efforts in the genre.

And it doesn't hurt that Explosions in the Sky do all the music for the soundtrack.

From the animated cartoon The Simpsons, Episode 300 (You Kent Always Say What You Want) comes this gem.
Lisa Simpson: There are a lot of religious watchdog groups out there keeping the world safe from the horrors of free expression..
Oh, how true.

Worlds collide as Eric Crampton, economist at Canterbury University, gets some commentary from death metal god (and classical pianist) Trent Reznor on the economics of scalping. Haven't listened to Nine Inch Nails in forever but the group is of course extremely important if you ever are interested in the alt-rock/goth-rock scene and its evolution ( Read more... )

It's worse than I imagined. Hearing the details of American torture of prisoners evokes the accounts of torture that I've read from books covering the Holocaust or Soviet secret prisons, or the NKVD in Poland. I recommend people read those accounts, though they are stomach-churning.  Link to the New York Times op-ed here. An excerpt from the ( Read more... )

From @USHousing:
I am going to challenge everyone to be more positive.Even if life looks horrible, being negative won't help! Both sides need to be positive!Sounds vaguely like rhetoric from totalitarian governments. I clicked through and found out that @USHousing is a company that's apparently presented a recovery plan to congress. Their brochure ( Read more... )

 Google Voice debuts. NYT story here.

The blog Subject to Change has the subtitle:

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.The author of the blog would know. Link here.

                     President Barack Obama's lifting of restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research puts him at odds with Pope Benedict and the American Roman Catholic Church.                      
After Obama signed the order on Monday, the Vatican and U.S. Church leaders condemned the move. One commentator said ( Read more... )