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If they had a point to make, I might join them. As it is, none of the ones I've spoken to has a coherent picture of the world. So as Anthony indicates, they use a truckload of cliches and slogans (End the Fed!). No program, no detailed list of realisable political objectives, and of course no...

The Occupy-ers have about the same average IQ as the Tea Partiers -- around 85.

Oh, I agree with you. You won't find me saying otherwise. That's why I call this "The Children's Crusade"-- analogous to the crusade that supposedly took place in the 13th century. They are not the people who make revolutions. As one of my socialist friends wrote: And this from another: And...

Meanwhile in London: (source)

Can't stomach Derrida. Foucault is fine, Baudrillard is fine, Debord is fine -- and you might well be au fait with Debord's Society of the Spectacle. An essay on OWS along Debord's lines:

You can tell within a few minutes of conversation what the general intellectual level of a person is -- his vocabulary, the things he talks about (or doesn't). A good HH -- the same caveat again -- will have access to jobs that are either not advertised or exist only as a gleam in an...

If the HH is good, it extends beyond just getting a first interview. He will know what the company is looking for and be able to articulate it to you. He will tell you how to sell yourself better on the things that matter to them, and to downplay other things -- which means your first interview...

You're quoting Lyotard on QN -- surprises abound. I am not alone here.

Good stuff here.

A first hurdle is trying to understand why proofs are necessary in real analysis -- many theorems seem intuitively obvious and it's not clear why they have to be proved (e.g., intermediate value theorem, mean value theorem). Students have to understand that formal proofs are another way of...

I've still got the two volumes (right beside me on the floor). Don't know if they're in print any more. And his book on analysis. And his two books on analytic number theory. Few expositors like him.

Anthony, the key point you're missing is that business itself has asked for a bigger state and more regulation. Start with Michael Perelman's "Railroading Economics." Business doesn't have a problem with rules and regulations. Indeed, big business often welcomes them because complying with them...

You don't know basic US history. The country wasn't the wealthiest in the world in 1876 -- though it was one of the wealthier ones. Top spot was held by Britain. The 50-year period between the end of the Civil War and WW1 was the period when coal and steel production skyrocketed in the US, and...

Steele's book is tougher than Shreve's. Apostol and Royden is not overkill for Steele's book. Steele is meant roughly for 2nd year graduate students in mathematics.

The charts aren't some sort of final word. People are reading into the protests whatever they want to. In reality it seems to be an inchoate, amorphous and inarticulate "movement." Correction: if you ask the protesters, you get in response a babel, a cacophony of voices, with perhaps a few...

Hedges has an interesting book out -- Death of the Liberal Class -- which I'm reading off and on. I didn't like his other one -- Empire of Illusion -- so much.

You are right. Personally I think it's the abuse of language that's to blame (all too common in the USA, alas). It would be better reworded as "Can you demonstrate an abiding interest in finance?" No and no. If the answer to the latter is yes, it's the height of hypocrisy: the reason they're...

I'm not quibbling with anything you've written (I'm not competent to do so in any case). Yet much of what you've written appears to be "meta-principles" -- which are high-level insights for those who already have a degree of mastery. There are analogous high-level insights in mathematics, for...

In Europe they're talking about levying a small transaction tax on trades -- I suspect this will probably kill off algo trading (but I could be mistaken).

One book I like for this is Franek's Memory as a Programming Concept in C and C++.

For some time I've felt there's a pressing need for some title analogous to Dan Stefanica's A Primer for the Math of Financial Engineering -- maybe something like C++ for the Aspiring Quant. Like Stefanica's book, it should be oriented towards those who already know some C++ but want to see the...

On a side note, no-one ever talks about how to acquire programming competence. What does it mean? What should one be able to do? Which books? Which topics? What things in C++, for example, are necessary? Function pointers? Class templates? Mastery of the STL? Chunks of the book Numerical...

Good stuff. The man knows what he's talking about.

I agree if you mean the usual HS calculus. But not if you mean the AP BC exam in calculus. If he stills knows that material, he's going to be bored stiff going through it again. He should start with Calc 3. If he really has to repeat, he should take the toughest Calc 1 or honors sequence around...

More of a marketing man than a technical person. Wozniak I think was the technical one.

The move to financial concentration: (Andy, any way of magnifying this picture?)

This is one place where perhaps the Left agrees with the Tea Party: that without the modern state, modern corporate capitalism could not exist. They have actually co-evolved, each depending on the other. The most egregious example of this was the bailout of the "too-big-to-fail" financial...

Perhaps because the Eurocrats and European heads of state don't really have any ideas -- they have just wanted to maintain the status quo and hope that a miracle would somehow occur; so they have procrastinated and prevaricated, kicking the can a bit further down the road. Also, Greece is just...

Interesting essay by Ted Rall:

Perceptively written piece by James Meadway.

Not me, pal. You're citing someone else. I do say that many of these protestors don't have a clear idea of who and what they're protesting against other than a vague and inchoate idea that "Wall Street" is responsible for their malaise. Their position is, however, becoming clearer and more...

That's not quite correct. People with advanced credentials in math and physics have a genuine taste for their subjects -- that taste is a sine qua non for earning the credentials. The problem is there are no jobs in their areas -- it's a desert out there for mathematicians and physicists, has...

Interesting article by David Graeber (author of "Debt: The First 5,000 Years") in The Guardian last week. Also the site of "Occupy Together" here.

This is an interesting piece of analysis. One doesn't have to agree with it.

The geographical "Wall Street" is a symbol -- like Madison Avenue is for advertising. As such, the occupation of Wall Street is itself symbolic. It's an open question for me as to how much the protestors know about the institution (finance capital) that they're ostensibly protesting against...

I hope you've seen the film, "V for Vendetta." This YouTube clip goes some way to addressing the complaints of some of my Left friends that the Wall Street occupiers didn't seem to have a clear message, that they seemed to be confused about what they were about.

Maybe some marines stepping in to lend a hand: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/01/semper-fi-marines-coming-to-protect-protesters-on-wall-street/ And V (from "V for Vendetta") explaining the position of the Wall Street occupiers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXpSqce2OdM

Amusing (if somewhat technically incorrect) article in the Daily Mail. If memory serves, Robert Harris wrote the novel Fatherland many years back.

Joel gives good advice, like this here:

The reason for the drop is probably because of a glut of H1B/L1 coders, which has led to depressed wages and a saturated market. I'm not talking of ace coders but run-of-the-mill. Agreed. It depends on how much and how rigorously coding is taught in school. Given the calibre of the average...

Real Berkeley students have better things to do than to write incoherent, misspelt, denigrating and repetitive posts on this forum. The thread was derailed by trolls. The proof is in the pudding. As you say, look at starting salaries and placement rates. They speak for themselves. Baruch is...

Plots within plots within plots.

It's more a discussion of politics and economics -- transplanted to a galactic setting -- than hardcore science fiction. For me, mentats and their training remain of prime interest. I see quant training as the first faltering step on the road to full-fledged mentat training; an excerpt from a...

The Galacian girls do it for pearls, And the Arrakeen for water! But if you desire dames like consuming flames, Try a Caladanin daughter! (Gurney Halleck) (Caladan was the home planet of House Atreides)

Yeah, many (most?) of the newly-minted graduates died repelling the attack -- the attack was led by (if memory serves) some scion of a Great House who got kicked out of the training program. Incidentally, Sardaukar training was quite intense as well -- of every 11 recruits, only 6 would...

The weapons training at Ginaz (Idaho was a Ginaz swordmaster) was phenomenal -- if you could (literally) survive the 8-year training program. However, I would (literally) trade an arm and a leg for mentat training.

The Dune discussion. Who (and what) I like: Piter de Vries (mentat) Bene Gesserit Baron Vladimir Harkonnen Gurney Halleck Suk medicine Mentat training Spice

It seems the ranking of a school does matter; an example from the legal profession:

Has anyone read the Dune prequels that flesh out the story a bit? My favorite character is Baron Harkonnen's twisted mentat (Piter de Vries).

Brezhnev or Khrushchev?

I bought the Bouchaud and Potters book on econophysics some years back. Is "econophysics" a discipline in any real sense or just another academic con game?

Someone might correct me here but I think both the U of California system and the New York colleges -- CCNY, Baruch, Hunter, etc., were either free until the 1970s, or had only nominal fees. I saw an interesting film a few years back -- Arguing the World -- about how a generation of...

Aren't Canadian universities much more affordable? If I were an American youngster, that's where I'd be looking. If Sarah Palin can jump the border to get free health care in Canada, I don't see why other Americans can't use the Canadian higher education system ....

The Brits -- in their role as Trojan horse -- pushed for rapid enlargement, having in mind a kind of free trade area. The Germans and French were a bit more conservative, having in mind more a community of similar countries. It's really been the political and financial elites that have gone...

It will take place in tandem: that is to say, Greek default will not come out of the blue. The Germans (and perhaps also French) are already preparing to recapitalise their banks. Ultimately I think it is Berlin that calls the shots. The ECB in Frankfurt is just a bunch of bureaucrats who...

We're just starting to have some fun. Latest theory: he got rejected from Baruch and he's been nursing his hatred and resentment ever since: "Just you wait," he silently and tearfully told Baruch, "One day I'm going to get even with you." His reverie was abruptly broken by someone slapping his...

No, everyone can't understand. These aren't typos: you don't know basic English. I doubt any ranking program would accept a bozo like you. I'm not in the picture. My question is: What is your point? You've said the same stupid thing thirty times over: that Andy can't be trusted and the ranking...

How did you ever get into Berkeley? Did they waive the usual literacy requirements? You can't spell, you can't construct a sentence. Someone is paying you $200,000? Then Forrest Gump should command a salary of $1m. It seems to me that you're getting riled by the fact that people will take this...

Not "points": just one point, repeated mindlessly, over and over again: I have a theory that Emalu is not a person but rather a not very complex AI program that repeats the same message again and again, interspersed with random ad hominems. I think such a program could be written in a couple...

I agree. I have faith in the euro.

The austerity measures that seem to be necessary to service the debt also seem to be leading to exactly the same outcome. If they default on the debt, switch to the drachma, there will be some difficult times -- as for Argentina in 2001. But eventually they will recover -- not to a first-tier...

Michael Hudson keeps repeating, "A debt that cannot be paid will not be paid." That debt will either not be paid or only a small fraction of it. Germany and maybe France are already looking at a scenario where Greece has defaulted and they are trying to bolster the balance sheets of their banks...

Greece will leave the common currency (euro). Just a question of time.

To all the people who seem to have a problem with Andy being a graduate of Baruch and Baruch being in fifth place: just pull out Baruch and put it somewhere else. If you like, take it out of the top twenty altogether. End of argument. Is the ranking the final word? No-one ever claimed it was. Is...

This discussion is silly. If he had graduated from CMU, he'd be accused of partiality towards that program; if from Claremont, he'd be accused of putting it in the top 20. He just can't win. And where's the conflict of interest? He graduated from the program years ago. As far as I know, he's not...

Poor quality?

Take these rankings with a pinch of salt. Ultimately you have to decide on what you are going to get out of a particular program and whether your cost-benefit analysis of the program makes it worthwhile -- or whether the cost-benefit analysis of some other program also willing to accept you...

Speaking of all-time greats, Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" (published in 1943) is one of my favorites, and the Archdruid's recent review of the book (and the game described therein) recalls some of the interplay between music (Bach) and math (Godel) in Hofstadter's book: The book is also a...

Geithner is a bozo and Obama an even bigger one for employing him. Seems American policy-makers and politicians are adept at talking at people but haven't acquired the reciprocal skill of careful attentive listening.

They're written for a lay audience that wants to be titillated and doesn't want to put in any serious work. To understand Godel, one would have to put in some work to understand Godel numbering, and understand how that itself was an outgrowth of -- or at least inspired by -- Cantor's diagonal...

I would recommend David Graeber's recently published "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years" for starters. Everyone in finance, or hoping to get into it, should read it.

I found the bits about Godel and Escher interesting but I don't know anything about music so when Hofstadter was discussing Bach's fugues, he lost me. It's not on my list of all-time greats. I think I've still got a copy in the basement downstairs.

But you have to be well-heeled to afford this kind of craftsmanship. The major manufacturing bases allowed for a thriving middle class. As these bases vanished, the middle class has decreased in numbers: one increasingly sees a small rentier and financial elite at one end (able to afford...

Yes, many years back. It created quite a stir about thirty years ago. The theme is self-reference, recursion.

Interesting article in the Washington Post.

It's just another stupid American test, another worthless hurdle, another bureaucratic ring of fire to jump through. What's the use of knowing the meaning of a large number of abstruse words if they aren't part of everyday discourse? How many college-educated Americans use words like "dross" in...

The history of capitalism over the last two centuries has been about, inter alia, the substitution of labor by machinery. It was the use of machinery that the Luddites were fighting in England from about 1811 onwards (before mass executions and transportation to Australia snuffed out the...

There were a whole number of things he didn't see, couldn't have seen -- the ecological crisis (including climate change), today's technology, and the financialisation of the economy (he concentrated mostly on the industrial capitalism of his day). But he got some things right: capital's...

But then American labor might have the money to buy these products. It's no good if something that costs $100 on the local market because it's indigenously produced has its manufacture offshored and then sold for $80 on the local market if those who were previously buying it are now out of work...

I've found quite a few commentators (not just Roubini) quoting Marx in the last year or two -- which is interesting because in most cases I don't think they've read his magnum opus (Capital).

I found this recent WSJ interview with Roubini worth watching.

After default, Greece will probably find it difficult to sell even drachma bonds. But eventually they can go back to the pre-euro status quo: running deficits, periodically devaluing the drachma (or more likely allowing the market to do it), and offering premium rates of interest to make up for...

At the risk of digressing, the problem with Social Security is that its coffers have been raided over the years and left with nothing but IOUs. The government has created an artificial SS "crisis" because it doesn't want to honor present SS obligations by redeeming some of those IOUs by...

If they default on their euro debt, who's going to finance their euro deficits if they stay in the Eurozone? (Note: I'm not saying they'll leave the EU -- just the euro currency).

Looks like Greece is on its way out of the euro: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Germany-Readies-Surrender-bloomberg-2533229394.html?x=0

You can be an eloquent speaker with a small vocabulary that includes a high percentage of cuss words. More seriously, using a number of abstruse words is likely to lose your audience: politicians like Bill Clinton know this very well. So he uses a basic voabulary, mixes in personal anecdotes and...

David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" hit the bookshops recently and it's been making waves. It's a riveting read, drenched with novel insight. Graeber used to teach at Yale till he got the boot in 2005 for his political views (he's an anarchist); he since moved to London University...

If one is talking about the elections next year, that's the point: the Republican nominee cannot be any worse than Obama. The Democrats' message is always: "Psst, vote for us -- we're ever so slightly the lesser evil." But even that modest claim is untenable with someone like Obama, who has...

The speech was "empty gestures" -- Obama's metier. Throughout the Western world, the policy of full employment was abandoned many years ago. Capital doesn't want it in any case, as it weakens its hand. It's quite comfortable with high levels of unemployment -- provided the levels don't...

That is the crux of the real argument and remains unaddressed. If employers were actually wavering between hiring or not hiring someone, a reduction in payroll taxes or other financial incentives might conceivably make a difference. But no-one is wavering: employers just don't want to hire with...

BofA is technically insolvent, as I think is Citicorp. It's not just an American thing: the leading French banks are also insolvent.

Some good points you make. Particularly that good coding can't be "taught" in a semester or two. Chess can't be "taught" either, in a semester or two -- just how the pieces move, plus some elementary mating patterns and tactics, some openings, some endgames. But a good teacher can -- over a...

I'm not sure that's the right term for what Rasmus is saying: I think he's pointing out the opposed interests of finance capital and just about everyone else. The volatility and the bleak economic outlook are both stemming from the intransigence of finance capital and its insistence that...

Always a pleasure to read Jack Rasmus.

Yes, but the US has no alternative but to monetise the debt. Even commentators like Pat Buchanan have been saying that the US can no longer afford its system of perpetual war and its 800+ overseas bases. Empire is bankrupting the USA, but so great is the political and institutional inertia and...

Regulation by whom? "Plutocracy" means the rich pull the political strings. That's why neither the USA nor Europe has seen the regulatory framework change in the last three or four years. The attempt has been, rather, to prop it up at the expense of ordinary people. And I'd argue that the...

I feel embarrassed pointing out what more or less everyone here knows: even if the Chinese wanted to (and they don't), they can't finance US deficits -- they're too big. "Quantitative easing" is a euphemism for the Fed electronically creating money and using the money to buy its own debt. This...

As DD was pointing out, it's power politics, not some "laws of economics" concocted by some economist acting as an apologist for the status quo.

There were fewer MFE programs around (I think there were maybe seven in the USA). Whereas now every major university in the US and UK is busy churning 'em out. Consequently people with master's and doctor's degrees in physics and math who also had some programming experience were often hired and...

You can apply to a few of these and see what kind of response you get. My feeling is that the ad you cited initially looks dodgy: either it's an agency trawling for resumes or if it is authentic, they will get scores, maybe hundreds, of applications, most of which will receive at most a cursory...

This is what I keep hearing on the mass media with no explanation ever given of what constitutes "too much debt." It's used as an excuse to implement austerity measures. Thus the Fed can cheerfully create roughly $13 trillion of new debt -- and mostly nothing is said. But what is the...

Why Complex? It's a beautiful subject and I'm glad I took a couple of courses in it but I don't see the relevance to FE.

Virtually no country in the Western world can balance its books. Germany might be an exception, maybe Switzerland. All have been resorting to forms of deficit financing to keep their sputtering economies going. This idea of economic fundamentals being sound if and only if there no budgetary...

The market is niche and the amount of careful detailed work required to make it a worthwhile book will be great. There's definitely a need for such a book ....

There's definitely a (niche) market for a book like this. But ideally it should also cover the rapid growth of these programs over the last decade, what kind of jobs graduates tend to get, how congruent what is taught is with what is done in the workplace, what the employment and salary stats...

My impression has been that Asian parents push their offspring into math, science, engineering, medicine because they realise they will have scant chance in areas dominated by whites (sales, marketing, maybe soft finance). In areas like science and engineering they'll be hired not because...

It's not going to be blatant: it will be more subtle and insidious. This won't be redneck racism (which is actually easier to deal with). It will be hidden behind polite words, friendly smiles, and operating procedures.If the immigrant culture breeds the work ethos required to succeed at...

Well, he's got a point that Indians and Chinese are hired as techies (engineers, doctors, programmers) and tolerated as such. But they find there's a "glass ceiling" on how far up they can go simply because they're not, well, white. And the limited success they're allowed -- that they're wanted...

Yes, that is a good point: it goes beyond Asians and even includes some Europeans. It can be argued that even today, after a century, Poles, Italians, and Greeks constitute to some extent separate enclaves in the US. In his autobio, Lee Iacoca mentions how Henry Ford II used to introduce him as...

Riveting essay in New York Magazine (albeit published in May):

I hadn't heard of either of the books so I looked them up on Amazon. Having looked them up, I don't feel any enthusiasm for either. If the second course uses MatLab, there are a couple of numerical analysis books based on it that you could use as supplements.

There's quite a bit of overlap, some obvious, some under different names (e.g., quadrature = approximate integration). Your choice should perhaps depend on what programming language each is using. Also I suspect the math dept class will stress theory more (e.g., an iteration actually converging...

Two chatbox AIs engaging in a bit of discussion: http://gizmodo.com/5835312/two-chatbots-face-off-to-discuss-god-unicorns-and-experience-sexual-tension

Not even then.

Not always.

There's a bit of truth in that: some years ago someone wrote a letter to Notices of the AMS complaining that he hadn't been able to get an academic job (despite his PhD) and had been reduced to becoming a wine waiter. There are people with doctorates working as waiters (I understand the job...

I don't know anything about this particular program. The math department people told me the master's courses are taught in Norwegian, so a particular language expertise has to be demonstrated, whereas there's no language requirement for PhD students. So if this course is in the math department...

The play used to be one of the options in GCE 'A' level English Lit, in which connection I read it years ago. I was pointing out to my friend (cited in previous post) that "Coriolanus was an egomaniac , with no social skills whatsoever," to which he replied: Of course one of the differences...

It's a famous saying but I've never seen it in its context (nor have I ever read Santayana).

Interesting article in Der Spiegel:

Able was I ere I saw Elba (attributed to Napoleon, who was banished to Elba).

I have just made an astounding discovery: it is a palindrome (reads the same backwards).

Why would Russians want to buy dollars? If anything, they want to shrink their dollar holdings. The USD is a hot potato which everyone who has a choice wants to divest himself of.

That's not a problem: the same thing occurs in the corrected version according to A: Weaving across a strip of tropical land where the Isthmus of Panama narrows in the shape of a long flattened letter S, the Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

It is A, which is probably the only answer the examiners will accept. But what about D? For example: "It weaves across a strip of tropical land where the Isthmus of Panama narrows in the shape of a long flattened letter S, the Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans." Which is...

You may have a point.

The following sentence contains either a single error or no error at all. If the sentence contains an error, select the one underlined part that must be changed to make the sentence correct. If the sentence contains no error, select choice E. (A) *It weaves* across a strip of tropical land (B)...

A fine book, but like the one by Janich, written for pure math types. The moment you talk about differential 1-forms -- which live in the cotangent space and act as linear functionals on tangent vectors -- you're going to lose just about everyone who isn't a pure mathematician.

Spivak's 5-volume work on differential geometry is a phenomenal work. But instead of his Calculus on Manifolds, I'd recommend Klaus Janich's Vector Analysis (Springer UTM). This is meant for pure math types (which leaves only a set of measure zero among those following this thread), but it's...

To be honest it's a bit too simple, doesn't go very far, and has stripped down analysis as far as it's possible. But it's the kind of book a beginner can work through by himself in a couple of weeks and then be ready to tackle courses based on Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis. or...

Whereas in the old days learning real analysis was akin to a tooth extraction without anaesthetic, today's offerings positively inundate you with novocaine (metaphorically speaking). The latest on offer -- Understanding Real Analysis, by Paul Zorn -- is about as simple and as transparent as it...

Unless, unbeknownst to me, Kleppner and Kolenkow has been reprinted, it's hard to get hold of a copy. Halmos is dated and Curtis is better.

Though it has to be stressed that corruption is not uniquely Indian. At the risk of digressing, here is a 2002 article by Matthew Parris in The Times describing his experience with the "WaBenzi" (Parris I think used to be PPS to Maggie Thatcher and had his own program -- "Weekend World" -- on...

"Lac" (or "lakh") is one hundred thousand; "crore" is ten million.

Yes, some if it translates to other places. Corruption isn't so much a matter of bad moral character by some individuals but built into the institutions of a society. If the country is poor and cannot afford to pay its civil servants and police living wages and you have great income and wealth...

Yep, I'm waiting with bated breath. Discussing the character with a friend of mine, who wrote: And a quote from TS Eliot:

The film Coriolanus should be out soon. It's based on Shakespeare's play of the same name, which was itself based on one of the lives in Plutarch. It looks interesting because I think they've kept the language Shakespearean (while transplanting the story to a modern setting). Film aficionados...

It's a complex matter. One school of thought maintains that in the supposedly post-colonial world, the ostensibly free countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America are still controlled by the West -- only that the instruments of control have become subtler (use of finance, bribing or...

There's some truth to what you say. But I wonder when people are going to stop blaming European colonialism and becoming a bit more introspective. It's been 63 years since India gained independence from Britain. The contours of the Indian state were laid by the Brits, along with the educational...

I don't see any rebuttal. Until 1918, the best Oxbridge graduates used to join the Indian Civil Service. After that, Britain's promise to grant India its independence meant a tapering off of interest. Their best people were governing India. Rebuttal?

Talk about ingratitude. The British set up the railroads, set up the court system, set up the civil service. India was probably better governed under the Brits than it is today, with less bribery, corruption, and incompetence. Asking "what did the Brits ever do for us?" is like asking "what did...

The offence is often imaginary. And redress against arbitrary use of official power is either absent or (deliberately) maddeningly slow. Part of the problem is that the lower echelon of policemen, clerks, etc., are not paid enough to survive on. If the pay was the same for Europeans and North...

No-one pays a bribe willingly: it's because they feel under duress and know that either their work will not get done or take so much time and effort that they resort to paying the bribe as an expedient. It runs all the way from the beat policeman to the cabinet minister: it is endemic. Pay a...

There are any number of books on the subject. Unless you're stranded on a desert island, I don't understand why you would ask such a question. Make your way to some college or university library and find a text that you think will fit the bill. I like Marsden and Tromba but there are scores of...

A theoretically informed article by Prabhat Patnaik in Frontline which looks at Indian corruption in the context of "primitive accumulation":

Excellent article in The Hindu.

Interesting article in the Guardian.

Don't know if anyone's a fan of Zizek here, but here is his analysis.

He will need it for stochastic theory.

Yep, what you say eminently makes sense.

The crucial difference is that with these bubbles, the viability of the underlying financial architecture was not in question. Apprehensions regarding this structure mean the price of gold is going to stay high for the foreseeable future. And maybe go higher.

Well then, for those who are reading this, what -- *delicate cough* -- were the secrets of your training program? Did you overlearn the top ten or fifteen theorems in each area and aim for computational speed in mock exams? For example, in complex analysis, did you overlearn things like Cauchy's...

It may not be sufficient to score one's best: everyone's performance goes up if they've been through some training program and mock exams. Which is what I was assuming. The 88th percentile may reflect your true standing -- i.e., regardless of how much extra effort you put in, you might not reach...

The questions in most of the areas -- set theory, group theory, topology, number theory, linear algebra -- are pretty basic. For example, in group theory if you know the basics like Lagrange's theorem, cosets, ideas about normal subgroups, quotients, symmetries, etc., you should be fine. You do...

The next several decades -- maybe all of the foreseeable future -- will be tumultuous and traumatic. There will be a massive culling of the population, not just in the Third World but also in the First. A number of factors will conspire towards this end. Runaway climate change -- with widespread...

Dunno. Seemed too much hassle for visiting what's really just an enclave in the Baltics so I never bothered. Also, maybe the Soviets constructed their own awful buildings so I don't know how much of the original historic city still remains.

This is all true.

Called "Kaliningrad" now and need a visa from the Russians.

It's a bit of both is the answer. In your particular case, since you're some kind of self-made person, you think everyone can do the same as you. But maybe they cannot: the persistence, drive, ability -- and dare I say it? -- the breaks may not be there. More importantly, if everyone did, there...

For starters, about a century separated Newton and Kant -- so Kant could hardly have been reacting. Secondly, there was no "inductive Aristotelian paradigm that held sway at the time" -- this kind of debate was further back a few centuries. Kant was in any case well-versed in Newtonian physics...

Yep. Doubt there will be any responses, though. It will be a miracle if anyone has read Critique of Pure Reason.

I think Sylvain Raynes is misreading Kant.

Well-written piece by Naomi Klein:

Not just First World -- it's throughout the world. Russia, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan. No jobs for young men. What few there are demand a high skill level for which both a high level of intelligence and years of expensive education are required. Not that training such people could ever be a...

If he can't understand Hull, he won't be able to understand McDonald either. Also, his question about the relationship to M&A and PE suggests an ignorance of what derivatives even are. The poster is either writing frivolously or needs to work through a basic calculus text.

I've never bought into the pious sentiments that "education, education, education" (paraphrasing Slick Willy) is the panacea to social problems. And here is a book -- which I don't yet have -- which argues that it isn't a panacea. I'll order it today from Amazon. With regard to providing some...

Green's theorem in vector analysis and Green's functions are two separate things.

After the drift and stagnation of the John Major years I guess people got taken in by the siren song of "New Labour." And Blair did have nice white gleaming teeth which he displayed in his confident smile. But nothing really changed except the presentation and rhetoric. I think Simon Jenkins(?)...

For those naifs who think the London riots were something: http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/13/nationalists-strike-karachi-markets-closed-9-killed-in-firing-and-grenade-attacks-16-vehicles-burnt-50-arrested-in-police-crackdown.html And it is nothing unusual in Karachi.

There are some smart, law-abiding, educated, and successful black people. But what if viewed in the large there are differences between different ethnic groups? After all, when we say Hungarian Jews are the smartest people around, we're not accused of being racist, but if we say black people...

It's an idle threat, empty barking from Cameron and the Tories. They've got enough brains to know even trying to do it will make the riots of last week look like kisses from a broad.

With the choice you've given me, the USA hands down. England has become unrecognisable from the country I knew as a child. It's more than what I've listed: there's also evisceration of the manufacturing base; growing polarisation between rich and poor; unaffordable housing and transport; the...

If they try to kick them out of public housing, at the very least there will be rioting. Nor is the threat of such eviction a panacea. The real question is: What do you do with a group of people predisposed to anti-social behavior and who cannot assimilate to the norms of their host society...

My intent is not to incite, provoke, or inflame. But if we can't be honest about what's going on, if we engage in euphemisms like "it was a mix" and "poor parenting was responsible," we're not going to get anywhere. The stats for the USA -- released by the likes of the FBI -- are roughly along...

Don't know if you caught the discussion with Starkey on Newsnight. He pointed out that 80% of gun crime in Britain is coming from blacks. If you look at crime across the board in London, 60% is coming from them; there's no category I know of where they account for less than 55%. The politicians...

At this rate, the government will soon be transporting the rioters to the colonies (like Australia). As they used to do in the old days.

The ever-controversial Pat Buchanan, with his thoughts on the matter. And David Starkey's interesting analysis on BBC2's Newsnight:

Interesting article -- and in The Telegraph, of all places. Strange times we live in when The Telegraph publishes this kind of piece.

Nick Griffin on the riots. My posting the link doesn't constitute an endorsement but he does present an interesting alternative perspective.

Moving away from the race/ethnic angle, here is an insightful essay by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. Coincidentally, I bought his User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation a few weeks back.

Keep in mind that they took a record number of votes in the General Elections last year -- about 500,000 nationally. This will go up. If they can avoid their constant squabbling, present a united front, and ameliorate some of their rougher edges, they will win some seats next time around. At the...

Incidentally, for those who don't know London might I -- with some trepidation -- suggest a film? For Queen and Country, with Denzel Washington, that came out over twenty years ago. It resonates with me.

The TV coverage is biased so as not to make it look like the majority of rioters are black. Of course they've been joined by white underclass opportunists -- but let's not kid ourselves about the ratio. Dominic, you wouldn't know "right-wing" if it hit you in the face. What you are is a...

You're putting me in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the black experience in Britain. The work the immigrants were brought over for -- unskilled and semi-skilled -- has disappeared for well over a generation. Working-class whites have also been affected. What you have is a growing...

At the risk of generalising, almost all young blacks in London belong to some outfit or other. The "suspected" drug dealing bothers me a bit: was it an allegation or for real? And it is true that blacks undergo more arbitrary stopping and searching than the rest of the population. Well, okay...

There's a rumor that Libya has recognised the British rebels and will soon impose a no-fly zone over the UK.

No, not for this reason. Dominic is correct -- this will subside. And perhaps I should qualify my earlier statement: with current policing, London and maybe one or two other multiculti cities (Birmingham? Manchester?) will become difficult to govern. I expect policing methods to become more...

It's interesting the way these things start. In this case -- as in prior cases -- it was heavy-handed policing. That ignites it. But the "it" that gets ignited is smoldering resentment against the status quo, which is just looking for a way to coalesce and assume tangible form. Then this becomes...

The Met is saying they'll use plastic bullets tonight if necessary. I grieve for much that will be lost in the character of London and the methods of policing as these marauding and lawless multicultural elements run riot. The Sikhs in Southall were out yesterday night to prevent an attack on...

Yes, of course it's not political (except in the very vague sense of there being resentment against the London Met and general inchoate resentment at bleak job conditions, austerity programs, and discrimination). The majority of what's happening is mob mentality run riot plus the usual...

The big British cities -- all multicultural -- are becoming ungovernable. Mobs can be dangerous and violent beasts. I don't know what it will take to get things under control.

Anyone here based in London? My mother's house in Hanwell -- which is where I stay when in London -- is a couple of miles away from Ealing Broadway, where there was rioting this night as described in The Guardian: And (to my mind) an insightful blog article:

Maybe. I don't know for sure. Click on my original link: it was last modified in June. The link to orientation doesn't work. No information on the courses to be offered in a few weeks time, or the instructors teaching them. No books in the university bookshop. All rather curious. Perhaps they're...

Not sure but it looks like the U of Minnesota's crud MFM program has bitten the dust. They're not maintaining the site: http://www.math.umn.edu/finmath/

Overheard today by a friend of mine on the NYC subway:

Wolff arguing about what the credit downgrade means:

What do you advise to someone who's stuck with a US passport?