Category Archives: Curiousities

Disses du Jour

This exchange from Institutional Risk Analytics is a bit light on the vitriol, but the observation is acute: The IRA: But speaking of certainty, don’t you believe that it is impossible to give our leaders a pass with respect to the mortgage bubble? How can we look at Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers or Bob Rubin […]

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Diss du Jour

From the New York Times: “I cannot find a single convincing argument that tells me that astrologers won’t do better than economists,” Mr. [Nassim Nicholas] Taleb said last week by telephone from Lebanon, where he was mountain hiking. “The problem is the arrogance of these economists,” he said. “They’re making people rely on theories that […]

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Airlines to Charge Fatties More?

I sincerely doubt this will ever happen (imagine the backlash from groups arguing that excess avoirdupois isn’t a person’s fault and hence shouldn’t be punished) but those who have beenn compressed more than once by an overweight neighbor on a plane might applaud. From Bloomberg: Imagine two scales at the airline ticket counter, one for […]

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NZ man ‘used hedgehog as weapon’

Forgive me, I couldn’t resist this oddity. From the BBC: A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported. Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy. “It hit the victim in the leg, causing […]

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Dolphin Rescues Beached Whales

This is such a good story that I decided it deserved its own slot, rather than being featured in links. Dolphins haven’t been studied as intensively as monkeys, but there is ample anecdotal evidence, and some research, suggesting that they approach humans in intelligence (one philosopher, having surveyed the literature, argued that they are “non-human […]

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