There is an Emacs mode for working with Ruby on Rails (of course). The main project page can be found here. In order to get everything set up, I had to do the following:
Evaluating Bio-Techs
Clinton Chee has posted a list of factors he thinks is important when analyzing Bio-Tech stocks. This list is summarized below:
Rupert Murdoch is NOT a dickhead
OK, so apparently Rupert believes that although Obama made a very racist comment, Obama is not a racist. This is a reaction to the comment Obama made where he said the police - the ones who arrested the black professor who was trying to break in to his own house after losing his keys- were "acting stupidly".
Citizen Journalism, social networking and reputation
Bill Thompson has posted a thoughtful article over at the BBC about the changes that social networking is making to our standards of social interaction. He discusses his own tweeting and live-blogging at conferences, and then talks about the news updates that were tweeted by Tearah Moore during the Fort Hood incident.
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Great Paraprosdokians, Batman!
I saw this thread on Reddit and thought I'd make a list of my favourite Paraprosdokian expressions.
- "If we hit that bullseye the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards."
- "I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong."
- "I'll burn that bridge when I get to it."
Buying in London
We are keen to buy a flat in London. It's amazing how expensive the places over here are though! It's quite depressing the compromises that we are forced to make. The cheapest place in Covent Garden we could buy is listed at £300,000 for a 24 square meter studio.
Funding a start-up company
I've been doing a lot of research into running a start-up recently, and a name that always pops up is Paul Graham. He runs the Y Combinator, an early-stage venture funding company, and has written an extremely informative article on funding your start-up. I love the analogy he gives about how the different stages of financing your company works like gears on a bike; you should get just enough funding that enables you to drive your company to the next stage. This makes a lot of sense to me. Inc magazine also had an interview with him which I enjoyed.
dhclient and resolv.conf
For some reason, when I get onto a client's network and run /sbin/dhclient on my hacked-together-linux notebook, dhclient gets an IP address via DHCP, but doesn't update my /etc/resolv.conf with the local name servers, so names don't get resolved using DNS.
I haven't figured out a fix for this yet, but a temporary work-around is to have a look at the lease in the /var/state/dhcp/dhclient.leases file. You should see a line like "option domain-name-servers 192.168.94.49;". Just put that IP address in the /etc/resolv.conf file (ie "nameserver 192.168.94.49").
How the Market Cap of Financial Firms has changed
The New York Times has a great interactive graphic on How the Giants of Finance Shrunk, then Grew, Under the Financial Crisis. It's really interesting seeing how, if the Market Capitalization of each firm is represented as an area, the each firm shrinks massively during the financial crisis, and now how the firms are rebounding.
Financial models need more complexity?
A post over at the New York Times is arguing that one of the main causes of the financial crisis was inadequate quantitative models - models that tended to understate risk because they failed to provide a realistic model of the way the world works - neither incorporating risks such as a failure of liquidity, nor the complexities of human behaviour.
I certainly agree that the current stable of models which are in widespread use are inadequate given that the competitive market has made the spreads on trades so tight that there is no longer any buffer to cover the many short-falls in the models. Back when vanilla options were an exotic trade, the trader would incorporate plenty of fat in their options trades. Intense competition, a market that has steadily grown over the past 20 years (notwithstanding small glitches), and increased familiarity with the trades has served to camouflage the risks the traders were running in their options books.