The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

It seems to me to be a stark reality about human nature that very few (if any) people's lives are actually 'living the dream' wh...

' Random Street View '. All these places I've never been and never will go. Also, it reminds you how despite the fact that if yo...

Have you noticed that when sitting at a dinner table, conversations have centres of gravity? Not as in metaphorical centres of gravity about...

Oh you dear neglected weblog, I have been most remiss in feeding you of late. As the blog equivalent of a tasty but not very nutritious ch...

Here’s an idea for some enterprising engineer (most likely at Google or somewhere else with access to good traffic data) that I’m almost ce...

When I was in Toronto about a month ago, a friend of mine who lives there told me how there's some suggestion that the Buffalo Bills NFL...

Baaaaa. Why do you do the things you do? If you're ever in some trendy cocktail lounge or bar, chances are you'll see some...

From James Mickens, dubbed ' the funniest man in Microsoft Research ', which you might think is a backhanded compliment, but is actu...

I'm back in Oz, hence the drop in recent postings. With punctuality like this in notifying my loyal readers, apparently I shouldn't ...

I've wondered a few times  on these pages about the psychology of married people who begin affairs. As I wrote at the time : As the l...

1. The decision itself can be found here . Have you read it, even if only briefly? Did it occur to you to even search for it? Have you read ...

What happens when the whitest band in history covers the second whitest band in history? A whole metric buttload of awesome, that’s what. ...

AL sent me a link to this story about how Jessica Kerr, lately a model for Victoria’s secret, was apparently punted from said job after sa...

I've come to the conclusion that a large amount of existence of small local bands can be explained by option value. The bands thems...

From Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’ ‘I feel so lucky You wanna hug me, What rhymes with “hug me”?’ Really? You’re rhyming ‘hug me’ wi...

Not many people really understand the idea of reversion to the mean in the context of genetics. If it’s discussed at all, it’s usually in te...

People often make a distinction between asset backed currency, (where each dollar is a claim to some physical good, such as the gold standar...

-Things that make me want to learn computer science - a visual depiction of different sorting algorithms -Genius! -An awesome SMB...

Back when I was in high school, it seemed important to do something cool to get rid of my nerd image. In the fertile logic of the teenage mi...

How might brands work if there's no intellectual property protection? Ordinarily, it's hard to know. Most works are protected...

The Mask The face behind the mask: "Excess ain't rebellion, You're drinking what they're selling. Your self-destr...

You know how sometimes you just don't seem to have any anything to contribute? I mean, I'd seen these billboards about ' No Kill...

We live in an age where people go to enormous lengths to not contemplate mortality – either their own, or anyone else’s, really. In the...

They made a movie called Don John? At last! Someone else read the Chesterton poem and thought it was as awesome as I did, and wanted to mak...

The surest sign cementing my status as a curmudgeon is my annoyance at the creeping spread of TV screens into places that didn't have th...

So Eugene Fama was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with Lars Hansen and Robert Shiller. All of them are thoroughly deser...

File this one under “it’s probably still a bad idea, but it’s not clear exactly why”. The idea of a hedge is to take steps that are (t...

The massive fire engine drove past me down the narrow street, sirens wailing, and turned down towards the parking lot next to the beach. ...

Two days ago, the Feds finally shut down the  Silk Road , the online marketplace for drugs, guns, hitmen and other miscellaneous highly ill...

Apparently the USDA website is shut down  due to the government funding crisis. This prompts two responses from me: 1. Oh no! How will w...

In the world of male hairstyles, hair length functions something like a cross between mercury poisoning and a syphilis infection. Initially ...

From 30,000 feet in the air, the early evening displays a curious inversion of light. The ground beneath me is a dark purplish grey. I somet...

I was having a discussion with Athenios the other day about the Byzantine Empire. Apparently this is a big part of the curriculum at Greek s...