Nobody Understands

This is humbleness, greatness and reality check all rolled into one:

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school - and you think I'm going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No. you're not going to be able to understand it. Why, then am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won't be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. This is because I don't understand it. Nobody does.

This was Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman giving lecture to laypersons in New Zealand on Quantum Electrodynamics, his work for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1965 for physics.

By the way, replace "physics" with "economics" in the above extract and you will not be far off! Only no one as great as Richard Feynman has had the courage to admit it.

Husbands beware! Buddyping is here

I discover more Internet via books. I had blogged about this here => Discovering Internet Through Books

The books I referred to in the above-mentioned post were books on Internet. But to find something new and potentially as powerful as twitter in an economics book, now that is serendipity.

The Logic of Life has a delightful chapter that is a play on 'The World is Flat', called 'The World is Spiky'. In this Tim Harford goes on and on about Buddyping.

Now what is Buddyping?

The idea behind BuddyPing is simple and the execution deceptively simple, making something quite complex appear effortless. Text your location to BuddyPing and it will text you back with the location of your friends (if they’re BuddyPing members) and what they’re doing. When your friends login to the system via text, you get a text if they’re nearby, and they get a text back saying you are nearby. The number of friends is limited to the 5 closest friends and “nearby” in Buddyping terms is 10 miles.

For more information go to BuddyPing: The new wave of MoSoSo

Uh oh! I see a danger already: wives can now keep a tab on their husbands 24 x 7.

Why do I buy books

I always read books twice. If possible within 6 months. I have experienced that re-reading a book within that duration ensures long term memory retention. That is why I need to buy books. So every book that I discuss on this blog has been purchased by me. Some on Amazon but most during trips. Nothing beats reading something interesting while waiting at airports.

Right now I am re-reading Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It has been dubbed "One of the smartest books of all time' by Fortune. I would agree, although I cannot claim any mastery over economics and finance.

The following extracts from the preface of the 2nd edition will tell you what to expect:

"Past events will always look less random that they were (it is called hindsight bias)."

"... we don't have much of a clue in the social "sciences" like economics in spite of the fanfares of experts."

"... the kind of luck in finance is of the kind nobody understands but most operators think they understand ..."

This is just the book I need to read (re-read?) to put the Wall St. happenings in perspective.

Note: The photograph used belongs to Zsuzsanna Kilián. Please go here to see more such photographs.