The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

I am periodically given cause to reflect on the bizarre attitudes that quite a lot of science and computer science types have towards financ...

File this in the category of 'Things that lots of people have figured out before me, but I still thought of independently'. I'...

For the last few weeks I have been largely disconnected from the internet. I've been in places or situations without a connection, and w...

Via Hector Lopez comes a story that is full of so much fail it's hard to know where to start. Two teenagers in Sydney somehow manage t...

There are some instances in life where your demand curve slopes upwards - the higher the price, the more you want to buy. Even where this oc...

Tail Risk - doing 120 miles per hour in a Ferrari Sessanta down a fairly narrow English country road. For any English law enforcement off...

So the big economic news of the day is that Greece is going to default , and that the ECB and the IMF are going to bail them out. The first ...

A properly functioning I.E.D. and an improperly functioning I.U.D. can both really mess up your day.

Cuteness in animals is largely a matter of scale. A kitten is cute. A sparrow is also cute. But a kitten is not at all cute if you're a ...

It's rare that a review of a video game is entertaining at all, let alone entertaining if you haven't actually played the game. But ...

You are on a bike, and someone in a car is yelling at you. Here's a classic guide to why they might be doing so .

Take the song ' Ditty ', by one-hit-wonder 'Paperboy'. Let's assume you didn't know when the song was released, watc...

In the spirit of disclosure, I will be wandering abroad for most of July, going wherever the four winds shall take me. As a result, I will h...

The 50 most googled women . Well, that's the title anyway - they actually mean the 50 women that return the most hits on Google, but ped...

Ace of Spades links to this excellent Guardian piece about a guy in a mental institution who is thought to be a psychopath, and the difficu...

[Some dude]: Hey man, you should get a tattoo of an eagle on your shoulder / drink that bottle of vodka / [insert stupid $#** here] [Shylock...

So yesterday I purchased a new bed. Queen size, pillow-top, the works. It's pretty sweet, but that's not important right now. What...

To my mind, one of the most useful functions of the internet is vastly simplifying the search for negative knowledge. How do you verify that...

1. Courtesy of the Greek, comes pictures of the latest rioting in Greece . I had previously described these people as being on strike agai...

There is little doubt in my mind that the X-Men series of movies is far and away the best of the comic book movie adaptions. Not because m...

Ha! (Couldn't find the original source to link to - sorry HumourTouch )

From Peter Gabriel's excellent song, Biko . The subject matter is the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko , beaten to death by...

I remember when I used to enjoy Starbucks coffee cups. They had a series called 'The Way I See It', which would feature interesting ...

One of the things I find interesting about casinos is how they expose people's odd ideas about what makes a good stock purchase. In po...

Popular opinion seems to be incredibly averse to the idea of nuclear waste dumps being located, well, anywhere.  Anywhere near them , at a m...

You learn a lot about trends in popular perceptions of the economy (the corporte zeitgeist, if you will) by looking at what job titles peopl...

So apparently some guy has confessed to killing Tupac. The rap world being what it is, this will no doubt lead to notoriety, record deals a...

I have little enthusiasm for watching professional sport. Partly this is a result of the fact that none of my sports of choice (cricket, Aus...

Apropos nothing, the great Robert Frost. Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the...

SMBC nails the the question of how people keep falling for Trojan Horses. Gold!

Here's a free tip for how to turn any common or garden illegal action into a righteous protest against oppression. Suppose you'r...

Via Jerome Cardinal comes this great Charlie Brooker piece, talking about how the internet makes everyone get a huge sense of entitlement ab...

Sometimes you see a debate where both sides are picking positions that just seem crazy. Like recently in New Zealand. This story is full of...

Mental accounting is the idea that people think about outcomes in terms of particular categories, or mental accounts. You think of the prof...

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been travelling back to the old country. In related nostalgia, is there a better coffee than a flat ...

It is possible to un-wrinkle a suit-jacket by hanging it in the bathroom, turning on the shower, and leaving the steam to remove the creases...

Once, my weight followed a mean-reverting process, something like an AR (1). Then it followed a random walk. Now it seems to follow a ra...

You can learn a lot about how people view things by examining the taxonomy they use to describe them. The reason for this is that people wi...