Category Archives: Math and Science

Wolfram Alpha

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wolfram

it was the | was the best | the best of | best of times | of times it |
times it was | it was the | was the worst | the worst of | worst of times

Wolfram Alpha opened its doors today. What’s Wolfram Alpha?

…the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing…

Go Nuts!

In your shorts

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Here’s a pretty good article on asymmetric risk. It provides an entering wedge into understanding the delusional nature of hedge funds. Consider…

Almost, all financial derivatives display asymmetric payoffs. All sold (short) option positions and sold (short) derivatives positions – something that banks, financial institutions, hedge funds and even corporations engage in regularly these days – are negatively skewed bets. These short portfolio positions will produce negative skew for the trader. He will be fooled by the variance (volatility) of the process, as the observed variance (volatility) would be lower than the true variance most of the time. This would mean the more the skewness in the distribution (of the portfolio) the more the variance will be concentrated in a small slice of time and for most part it will generate steady returns. And the trader will think that he is making money, albeit in small proportions but steadily. And then after a while – could be a long wait – the true variance will wipe out all those gains.

Daily Cos

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In honor of the opening of the Presidential campaign…

Daily Cos

[tags]pundits, do the math[/tags]

Zany’s pair o’ Dockers

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Achilles looked at the Tortoise with a mildly deprecatory look and sighed. “Oh bother, dear Tortoise, not again! Do we have to go through this yet another time? Infinite sequences can have finite sums, as the methods of calculus invented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz have … Tortoise … hrrm … I mean … have taught us. What is it with the repetitive answers we geeks have to give over and over again to questions that have already been solved? Will people never learn?”

Follow Zany Jambon on twitter. I do!

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online

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The plains abound with three kinds of partridge,* two of which are as large as hen pheasants. Their destroyer, a small and pretty fox, was also singularly numerous; in the course of the day we could not have seen less than forty or fifty. They were generally near their earths, but the dogs killed one. When we returned to the posta, we found two of the party returned who had been hunting by themselves. They had killed a puma, and had found an ostrich’s nest with twenty-seven eggs in it. Each of these is said to equal in weight eleven hens’ eggs; so that we obtained from this one nest as much food as 297 hens’ eggs would have yielded.

* Two species of Tinamus, and Eudromia elegans of D ‘Orbigny, which can only be called a partridge with regard to its habits.

(Thanks to Emily Davidow for the link.)

[tags]charles darwin, omnivores, carnivores, predators, prey[/tags]

Left brain, right brain

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Here’s a cool link via killogg’s…  left brain/right brain test.

[tags]naked dancer, goes both ways[/tags]