Category: Musings memories and observations

Spook Country

Spook Country
I finished reading William Gibson’s Spook Country this week. Took a while to get into it, but the second half of the book had me hooked. Not a whole lot happens in Spook Country, though, as (spoiler alert) this negative commenter on the Powell’s Books site notes. Something else that commenter mentioned was [...]

Emergent Properties

Seeking Alpha published an article of mine touching on this earlier this week, but the tweet below and the chart that follows it illustrate the tl; dr version. Portfolio Armor was designed to help investors hedge, but other uses for it have emerged. One is as a warning flag for investors in securities with high [...]

Anti-Buzz

From William Gibson’s Spook Country, p. 83 of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover:
“Tell me about Node, she suggested. “It doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of industry gossip.”
“No?”
“No.”
He lowered his finger-steeple. “Anti-buzz,” he said. “Definition by absence.”
She waited to see if he’d indicate that he was joking. He didn’t. “That’s ridiculous”.
The smile [...]

The most effective social medium

In a post this fall (“New Features and Things to Come”), I mentioned a few projects that were in the works for Portfolio Armor:
Things to come
A quant on the Portfolio Armor team, a post doctoral fellow at Princeton University, is conducting R&D on the first two features below now. I hope to have [...]

The Trouble with Tapjoy

The Trouble with Tapjoy
Here’s the tl;dr version: if you have a paid app, and are thinking of using Tapjoy’s pay-per-install program to advertise it, don’t. You can get the same result more quickly by taking cash out of your wallet and setting it on fire. The two screen captures below offer an illustration of this. [...]

Camels in Manhattan

Cheryl took this pic at 8:30am today. Presumably, they were there for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

The surprising thing about the Steve Jobs veneration

The most surprising thing about the reactions to Steve Jobs’s passing has been the outpouring of love toward the memory of a man who didn’t do the sorts of things that rich men do when they want to be loved by strangers. Jobs has been treated as something of a secular saint by Apple fans, [...]

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