Feed"The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford attempts to explain some of the basic principles of economics using a jargon-free language that is easy to understand for the lay person. He provides several examples of these principles at work in our day-to-day life. Peppered with his great sense of humour, this book is an extremely interesting and insightful read.
News Archive for 2008
[2008-08-28] "The Undercover Economist"
[2008-08-17] "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is the seventh book in the "Harry Potter" series by J. K. Rowling. At least as of now, this book is supposed to be the final book in this series. So it was natural for me to wonder before picking it up whether it would provide a closure and a satisfactory resolution for this saga.
[2008-06-02] "Atonement"
I was tempted to read "Atonement" by Ian McEwan after having watched the eponymous film based on the novel. The film was good, but a novel has more space to develop the characters and present their thoughts. The downside of having watched the film based on a novel before having read it is that it constrains your imagination to be based on the scenes and the actors in the film.
[2008-05-22] "Granta 100"
Granta is a quarterly magazine dedicated to new writing. It usually contains a motley collection of fiction, essays, photographs, poems, etc. Granta 100 is a special issue celebrating the 100th edition of this magazine featuring contributions from the likes of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, etc.
[2008-04-29] "The Calculus Wars"
In "The Calculus Wars", Jason Bardi writes about the bitter fight in the beginning of the 18th century between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over the right to be known as the inventor of calculus. Since this episode paints an extremely unflattering picture of the two great men, it is either ignored or only mentioned in passing by most authors writing about the history of mathematics.
[2008-02-10] "The Little Book That Beats the Market"
With a title like "The Little Book That Beats the Market", this book might appear to be peddling nothing more than snake oil to gullible people looking to make money from the stock market. It still merits a look since the author Joel Greenblatt is a respected value investor and a professor, who started and managed the hedge fund Gotham Capital that achieved an average annual return of 40% over more than 20 years.
[2008-01-27] Website Slightly Reorganised
I have once again slightly reorganised this website in order to make it a bit faster to load, a bit easier to use and a lot easier to maintain. Among the major user-visible changes are a website feed, per-post pages, lighter aggregating pages and a website-specific Google search.
