From Tim Knight’s Slope of Hope:

Here’s another YouTube clip, sans music, which says that this is an Asiatic Black Bear. American Black Bears (like this one recently caught in Englewood) have brown snouts.

Also in today’s FT, Craig Venter & Co create the world’s first synthetic life form, “Scientists create synthetic life form with a computer and four bottles of chemicals”.
When I was in high school, a student told a credulous English teacher that scientists had already done this, but of course they hadn’t. The kid was [...]

So says French feeder fund manager Arki Busson in his 20 questions with the FT today. On the old blog last year, I noted that Busson looked like a recent bond villain.

Over on an investing website today, with the stock indexes posting egregious losses, someone posted the sort of pablum one typically hears from long-only, un-hedged money managers, who skim management fees off of big piles of money for a living. I’m not going to link to the fellow’s post, as I don’t mean to attack [...]

When you have the right pedigree and connections. Or when you fail with other people’s money, and you lack remorse. A comment I just lived on Fred Wilson’s blog:
Once you’re in a certain, elite, circle, failure isn’t fatal anymore. This is true in many fields where connections and pedigrees are important and there are high [...]

For a Ph.D. economist, Eric Falkenstein is refreshingly cynical (and funny) about his field. For example, see his latest post, Barry Nalebuff’s Banana. Below the pic of Nalebuff and his banana (borrowed from Falkenstein’s blog) is an excerpt.

I remember in grad school reading some really difficult articles Nalebuff wrote on game theory. He was [...]

Just finished watching Russian Dolls, which was the sequel to The Spanish Apartment. The Spanish Apartment was a funny, entertaining movie. Russian Dolls is neither. I’m surprised it got rated as highly as it did at IMDB.
I’d like to see Cédric Klapisch make a third movie in this series, despite how lame the second [...]