I have a sort of interesting question, though perhaps it’s less interesting than I imagine it to be. Given the following two scenarios, which is more likely and why? Scenario 1: In the first case, we have a series of attributes attached to a person, and then we can make arguments (empirical, theoretical) about how …
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I want to talk about dark pools of liquidity, but to do so, I need to first talk about financial markets and how prices work. Bear with me for the background. The dark pools post is coming. Prices in financial markets are not like prices in other kinds of markets. When you buy gas, you …
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I don’t always love 30 Rock, but this week’s episode hit exactly the perfect New York spot (apologies in advance for the advertisement): [sorry, hulu just does not play nice embedded] For people who don’t live in NYC, the joke is about Alec Baldwin having bedbugs and finding himself an outcast, finally reduced to asking …
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Awesome tribute to our first Secretary of the Treasury. Compares favorably to 99 Problems but a Bitch ain’t One: Geek rap is so sexy. h/t James Fallows.
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The Stoakes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns. I can’t decide if I like better a vexation of zombies or an itself of Yahwehs. Or a percussion of giants. Or a nervousness of AIs. Delightful, delightful, delightful.
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November 3, 2009 – 11:29 am
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By Peter
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Posted in Ramble
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First of all, kudos to McClatchy’s news service for running a slew of articles critical of Goldman Sachs during this financial crisis. The firm displays a disastrous combination of connectedness and high prestige on the one hand, and unconscionable financial practices on the other. They are not at all alone, or even the worst, but …
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Gabriel had a thoughtful post about Jay Leno, comparing his programming to NPR and classical music over the past couple decades. I’m much more sympathetic to Grant McCracken’s view of Leno as a failure because he misses the contemporary moment’s desire for specificity and instead provides the blandest of something-for-everyone variety. Though McCracken and Rossman …
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Ok, this is impressive. And I’ve seen Primer three times and still don’t 100% have the timeline worked out.
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November 2, 2009 – 10:14 am
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By Peter
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Posted in Culture
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It’s that time of year again, when I first got freaked out about emergency preparedness by watching 28 Days Later. And it’s the time when I review and renew my emergency go kit. For peace of mind, this is the fanny pack that you can walk out of your house in 10 seconds with. It …
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One of the founders of string theory in physics made the case this week that the Large Hadron Collider will fail to produce/discover the Higgs boson because its very existence is so abhorrent to nature that the attempt to create it sabotages itself. The upshot is that we can expect seemingly strange delays and chronic …
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The current state of the economy, mostly financial, and I’m feeling pretty bleak about it. I’m looking at a few indicators, and I’m not particularly impressed with what I see.
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Shouldn’t there be some kind of Mario Kart sociology meetup again sometime soon? It feels like it’s been a really long time…Let’s get a move on, Scatterplot!
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Here is another one from the series of Volkswagon’s ‘fun theory’ design projects, this one a bottomless garbage can to induce people to throw away trash: The whole shebang is worth noting, for its effects on behavior and its bigger-issue demonstration of the contextualization of rationality. Plus, honestly, it’s a fun video. I don’t know …
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Economic sociologists have long wrestled with the microfoundations of market rationality, and attempted to understand the embeddedness of behavior in the cultural context in which it rests…oh, hell, I just want to post this video of the subway stairs in Stockholm: Have a nice Friday, peoples!
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I have written about the experiment going on at Significant Objects before. They buy things at garage sales and thrift stores, make up stories about the objects, and then sell these objects on eBay, with the stories attached as the objects’ descriptions. The premise is that “the object should — according to our hypothesis — …
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The most unusual part of this unusual story is not that a bee truck overturned and overwhelmed victims and emergency workers with bees. It’s that a similar accident occurred in 2006. WTF, Turkey?
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Fabio, over at orgtheory.net, suggets yet again that Sociology should be more like something else. I am genuinely mystified by these periodic forays into the dissing of the discipline, and my take is generally that: There is a small but persistent category of sociologists who always seem to want sociology to be more like some …
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What does it mean when you start reading articles, posts, threads, and comments that look like the same exact articles, posts, threads, and comments that you already read 5 years ago? Same cited people, same trajectory of argument, same conclusions. It’s not plagiarism, it’s the re-invention of the wheel. Like undergraduates reading Marx for the …
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