Joel E Lewis

Wisdom from a chief of police:
Police said Sunday they have “no known suspects” in the case. “We are not looking for any known suspects,” Glynn County Police Chief Matt Doering said. “That doesn’t say that there are no suspects. They’re just not known to us.”
Via Georgia Killings
Translation: we know somebody killed them, so their must [...]

Most people have big problems putting big numbers in perspective, this video should help when it comes to the federal government’s budget

When was the last time our government went through a significant overhaul?  No, I don’t mean when was the last time the people switched but the game stayed the same.  I mean when was the last time the structure really changed?  The best examples that comes to mind would FDR’s terms (each one brought new [...]

When it comes to following the markets, Yahoo beats out the competition.  Yahoo Finance has 21.7 million visitors a month, #1 in the category.  What’s most intersting is the author’s attribution of Yahoo’s success to using psychology to balance information and entertainment, whereas Google is all information, no fun.
It seems unlikely, however, that Google’s new [...]

If you haven’t heard of High Frequency Trading yet, you will soon.  It is changing the way markets work, improving liquidity and price setting, while allowing those few with access to the requisite tools to take a lion share of the profits generated.  For example:
It was July 15, and Intel, the computer chip giant, had [...]

Until very recently, writing was linear out of necessity – one page came after another.  Some books, like House of Leaves (a favorite), try to side step this limitation by throwing content at you.  The straight narration is accompanied by footnotes, and two different commentators have comments ranging from sentences to page’s long in the [...]

A new product called MacroShares allows investors to hedge against changes in the value of their home.  The securities are issued in pairs so that every position is matched by an offsetting bet.  I doubt if this will become a mainstream investment anytime soon, but it could mark the beginning of the move from looking [...]

Today more than two-thirds of Americans own their own homes. Among whites, more than 75% are homeowners today.
Yet the story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It’s not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It’s a different kind of American story, [...]

The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Random House 2007, Hardcover, 366 pages, $9.95

The first thing I learned reading Black Swan, is that Nassim Taleb is highly intelligent, but at least twice as arrogant as he is intelligent.  In the first few chapters alone, it is clear that his self-love is enough to make Narcissus blush.  What is unclear in [...]

A federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday found the toxic substance in every fish tested at nearly 300 streams across the country, a finding that underscores how widespread mercury pollution has become.
The study by the U.S. Geological Survey is the most comprehensive look to date at mercury in the nation’s streams. From 1998 to [...]